#I still need to add some stuff to that blog but it's functional

[sims3fiend]

S3SettingsSetter New new version New

I have returned from the grave to do another re-rewrite of Sims 3 Settings Setter! Hopefully the last! The main new features are a pattern detection approach, meaning it should work on any version of the game, and a new platform for some function rewrite optimizations I've done (steam only). Also most importantly includes the ability to set the Streaming settings to throttle lots, reducing stutter dramatically and a patch to make lots load on radius instead of view.

A full write-up below, but here's the main features:

Change "variable" settings ingame: This lets you change things that normally require mods but live ingame, letting you tweak things how you want. This includes things like changing bloom levels, light colors, sunlight brightness, weather (so you can have snow in summer), sunrise times, tweaking shadow distances, etc etc. Highly recommend just playing around to see what can be done. These are now correctly mapped so they should all work correctly.

Change "Config" settings (not ingame): This lets you set any config (graphicsrules.sgr) thing you want, including some that aren't in the original files (idr the name). It also lets you have set presets, and means you can (hopefully) more clearly see what settings you've changed. I will slowly (I've said this before lol) manually add Config and Options settings to the live edit, I haven't found an easy automatic way of doing this unfortunately.

Performance tweaks and notifications: Set notifications for hitting memory thresholds, letting you know before an E12 happens. Improve game performance with tweaks to game code. Uhh, maybe other stuff soon idk

Please note, as this is a new rewrite, this is still a beta. There will probably be bugs, the menu may glitch out, etc. Please also note that some settings may effect things in unexpected ways, if you're not sure what a setting does, maybe try it out in a fresh save first. Generally though, everything is correctly mapped and shouldn't have any lasting negative effects on your game.

BaselinePerformance preset (put into Presets folder and load ingame with File -> Presets). This should reduce stuttering while still being light enough that it wont tank laptop players. Use this instead of my GraphicsRules file please! https://simfileshare.net/download/5333998/

Download: http://www.simfileshare.net/download/5333999/

Source: https://github.com/sims3fiend/Sims3SettingsSetter

\/ More details/blog post/How to use \/

How to use

Installing:

Just like before you 'll need an ASI loader. I recommend dxwrapper but if you're using Smooth Patch that comes with one too. You then just plonk it into your The Sims 3\Game\Bin folder like any other .asi mod and run the game.

Using:

Preset insert to open the UI

The menu should open up, if it doesn't, look in your game directory for hook_log.txt and send it to me x. If you don't have one, chances are your asi loader isn't working correctly.

The settings tab only becomes editable once a game has been loaded (might change this later). These are values that can be edited live ingame and should change something even if that thing isn't immediately obvious.

Most have sliders, the min/max/step are determined by the game itself, but you can set them above/below these values by right clicking

This also lets you "Clear Override" AKA remove it from the ini, or "Reset to Default" which resets it it to default :)

When you've got things how you want, go to file -> save to save them. If you want to make a preset out of them, that's in file too x, presets save things like patches, Config and QoL too, so just be careful. When loading a preset you can chose to Overwrite which basically clears your ini, or merge, which adds that preset on top of your current settings.

Everything else should be pretty easy to figure out idk

What's new/blog

New function approach for live edit

I actually properly looked at the code flow and found a neat vtable that had, essentially, what I was dreaming of when I made the version version of this. The function gives the name, min, max, step and address of incoming variable manager controlled settings, which is rly rly good! A much more sane and easy to develop for approach than the manually mapping out address spaces approach I was taking before!

Patterns

I've tried to use patterns for the most part, this means finding the function and trying to write a "pattern" of bytes that matches both main versions of the game (Steam and EA). This can be pretty tricky as you have to be specific enough that you don't get false positives while being loose enough to get both versions. It seems to work on both EA/Steam version (with the exception of the patches), but please let me know if it doesn't.

Patches

NERD ZONE NERD ZONE SKIP THIS PART

These will primarily be direct naked ASM patches to functions, and I'll probably be keeping them exclusive to the steam version of the game unless there's something that's a substantial improvement, as the EA one has been compiled differently so different instructions are used, meaning I'd have to write two patches. You can probably skip using them for now if I'm being honest, I have a bunch in the works but these mostly suck.

Point intersection patch

Essentially this is a hand written naked ASM patch for the point intersection code TS3 uses, this is used for nav meshing IIRC, and was the first proper one of these I did after seeing it in vtuner. Sadly, It's not really going to be noticeable at all, maybe a second faster load on custom maps, as they bulk call it during load. IIRC non-custom ones also call it during sims moving but I could be wrong as I wrote this aaages ago and didn't keep great notes. It has a lot of stuff in it and does achieve a very substantial boost vs the default function as a result, it's just that the function isn't really a cause of lag (though is on the render thread IIRC so..). It achieves the performance boost by I guess nearly fully rewriting it, I added an early exit, use prefetchnta, switched to SIMD, lddqu, shufps, fast paths… idk these are all words that mean nothing to basically everyone reading this including me but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Target Framerate

Changes what I can only assume is the games framerate target, it seems to interact w/ the frame buffer. I haven't noticed any noticeable difference but give it a go! This one may desync things in theory but I haven't noticed so 🤷 lol actually this makes animations slow down for some reason so I've removed it oops, need to look into this more.

Lot Visibility

Disables the games check for if a lot is in view, instead it should just load based on the radius around the camera. This is a the patch in Stutter Reducerer so if you're using that you don't need this (just enable Lot Throttling under streaming)

LZ Optimization (not released)

This is basically the point intersection but for the games main package decompression (RefPack) implementation. I… am/was a bit of a dunce with this, for whatever reason my original implementation was focused on large reads using AVX,SSE, etc… Now, the issue is… LZ does small (1-4) byte reads… so… I'm in the process of rewriting it once more. Plan to uroll the functions and do idk like MOVZX I think would be huge, simplifying the flow, etc etc.

The performance gain might actually be somewhat noticeable for this as this function is used in gameplay quite a bit. How you might ask? Well, every single lot that is loaded reads and extracts files for every object in that lot every single time it is loaded, in excess of 40mb/s with that being several hundreds of thousands of calls (some files are very small, and refpack also is byte-by-byte). This is all also done on the render thread, so the game has to wait for this to do its thing (and several other functions) before it renders the next frame. Very good very fun.

Multithreading (maybe eventually)

I've tried but no real luck, I've had some "success" but mostly it's been failures. I do have some interesting things I want to look at, especially related to lot loading so we'll see what the future holds. I think some degree of multithreading for the render thread would be incredibly huge.

Other patches

I have like 10 other ones that are not quite ready yet but should help, hopefully I'll just trickle them out but I think waiting until I can get them working properly is probably dumb.

Coming soon:

Stuff that I'm working on I swear I promise!!! It's coming!

UI QoL - There's a lot wrong with it.

"Options" category support. This is tricky as changing these settings directly writes them to the .ini file in documents for some reason

Several patches

A system for automatic performance tweaks like reducing active lots to 0 when loading, then throttle-loading them back once game has loaded, or automatically reducing settings related to object caps, etc.

More live-edit settings. There's a bunch I want to add it's just annoying. Most are static values though but having to find patterns that find them for both versions is rly annoying. Things like RenderSimLODDistances, FogDistances, the Script category…etc. If you have any requests lmk!

The ini file is kinda ugly garbage horrible to look at

Need to figure out why these have min/max/step like, is there some sort of debug ui I'm missing out on? It seems like there is but idk how to trigger it, gunna be pissed if it's something obvious

[my-pjo-stuff]

I was rereading the pjo books to write fanfiction and all. I stumbled on a lot of mischaracterization, you pointed a lot of them, specially about how Rick keeps trying to make big world events include his characters(probably to make it easier to kids and all).

But one thing that always piss me off is how he makes the demigods so one sided, a demigod has to have a specific personality because of their divine heritage, one example I see a lot is Annabeth, specially from the first books.

My question is, how would you change them?

And btw, love your blog, throwing straight facts❤️❤️

Aww thank you so much! And also to be quite frank, I never even thought of that. I was so focused on more glaring writing issues that I completely glossed over that- but now that I give it some thought....Yeah, you're right. You are SO right. And here's what I would do : Starting off with Annabeth since you mentioned her, for her I'd probably bring in more hints towards her being basically raised by Luke. As it stands in the books their relationship is mostly tell-don't-show with the exception of maybe BoTL and TLO. So to counteract that I'd give her more rebellious streaks, and especially make her more skeptical towards the gods. She saw what they did to Luke and Thalia- so having her just blindly follow them seems a bit....weird. You don't need her to be outright resentful ofc, I'd change it towards Annabeth being a "just learn to live with the shitty situation bc we can't change it " instead of a "this is fine actually!" type of character. I'd also include her "ADHD" more, show her actual struggle with classical school stuff. Show that intelligence doesn't equal wisdom, maybe even make her relatively bad in school due to lacking the normal education children her age should have recieved. Clarisse meanwhile I'd actually make smarter. War, as brutal as it is, also included a lot of strategy. Her goal was to make her father proud by victory in battle. So I'd keep her personality and general attitude the same, but make it so that she was also a good battle strategist. She could study historic battles, aswell as have a great amount of knowledge on weapons. Basically make Clarrise that one classmate in high school who was able to list all the tanks of WW2 by full name alongside their functions and other stats, ASWELL as a war history buff. It would keep her original war like personality while showing that Ares kids are very much not stupid. I'd probably try to give Nico some more nerdy aspects back. He still a teen even if he "grew out of it" and it WAS quite a big part of his character when he was first introduced. I'd have him be genuinely passionate about some topic- perhaps a favorite show or even just mythology. Mainly so Nico can have something to actually make him happy and to be excited about instead of just being "emo, dark, angsty Hades kid". Will Solace I'd give literally any kind of characterization before he got it on with Nico. The Aphrodite cabin as a whole would get a LOT of sisterly bonding from me. Like instead of having them be the "catty, dumb, mean girls of camp" make them the tightest-knit cabin. Show them actually bonding and being genuinely protective with each other. Also give Aphrodite some sons. That's all I can rly think about in the moment, feel free to add something if anyone has any ideas!

[bilightningwhumper]

Alright, I'm cranky because I didn't get to write at all today or last night despite having a full on plan and work wasn't as fun in my favorite spot because things were broken and I have to go to bed early, so I can't write as much as I wanted or I'll stay up too late. And now my stubborn Italian streak has been struck, so I'm going to rant for a second.

If anyone gets all passive aggressive about "you need to add a read more/line-break," they're getting an instant block from me. It's especially irritating when someone decides to hide behind anon to do it. Because then that automatically means to me that they're a coward and know they're in the wrong doing what they're doing.

Tumblr has an auto read-more function for long posts. It's not my fault or other posters' fault if we don't line-break. Forgetful or not. Especially when someone is a writer and maybe sometimes we go on too long because we really got in the zone and didn't realize it got lengthy. Not to mention, I've never seen this kind of additude on posts like "color of the sky" or reblog chains/threads/whatever they're called when the post is re-blogged and added onto by multiple people. Maybe it's there, but not as prominant as it's been on writers' posts in my eyes.

If someone is nice about it, that's one thing. But I've seen it get not that way towards myself and other writers without much of an audience or just starting out. Just saw another one tonight and it really peeved me off. Because seriously? You're going to get that picky about how someone else posted, but you're not even going to give them the dignity of 1) being nice about it or 2) going off anon? Even if it is the second, third, or twentieth time of a "reminder", don't be weirdly borderline threatening about it.

Y'all have gotten way too comfortable with being aggressive or passive aggressive towards things you find personally uncomfortable and/or inconvenient. Be nicer or block. It's that simple.

And if someone decides to go off and claim I'm being "ableist", guess what, I'm an Audhder and I'm stubborn as a mule when it comes to "just do it because I said so" attitudes. As in: I ain't doing it if you're just acting like it's a power-grab. Either give an actually good reason or get out of my inbox. Otherwise you're being ableist towards me and how I prefer to do things. That's how that logic feels.

And, also, I do use read-more on longer posts of mine. At first, I didn't know how to do it, and someone kindly let me know. But in the same conversation, they didn't like how I wouldn't do it for *all* my stuff, so I just told them to block me, which they did. Since then, I have my own ruling on what's long enough to justify a cut and what isn't, but it's still something that irritates me when someone else is harassed for not having one.

Anyway, rant over. I'm going to go try and write some more for the February events before my timer for bed goes off so I'm not even more horribly behind than I already am. Just had to get this out or it was going to stew and get worse.

[deusvervewrites]

Do you think you can open Submissions? Like for stuff that dont necessarilly work as asks or have a Question in particular attached but still want to be ' lookee here! *holds gently* '

I.e Fanfics / Fanfic prompts that are longer than most asks , things being multiple paragraphs instead of 1 maybe 2 , or just things you want to show that got sent in asks but you didnt have a response so it stayed unpublished. (Just found it weird some of ask answers are just like a 'well then' from you. As if you didnt have anything to add to the prompt ask but needed SOMETHING written)

I've gotten some pretty long asks in the past; multiple paragraphs long, in fact. I don't know how Tumblr decides when an ask is too long because Tumblr is a functional webbed site, but it's not uncommon on this blog.

As for my short, clipped answers? I am doing that on purpose, usually because I don't consider my AU crossover asks to be their own AUs, something I've noticed previously, and don't want to flood my tags with information that is technically irrelevant to any individual AU in that ask.

[victoriousfidelity]

hello beloveds 🧡 i'm here for a little while (albeit with very spotty wifi) while i'm on this train, and i just wanted to get an update up before i get back to actually writing. i've been very unwell (both mentally and physically) while i've not been posting here. honestly, i'm still doing fairly terribly - but plans made while i was doing better loom on the imminent horizon, so i'm trying to be a functioning person. that includes being back here, although probably in a slightly different capacity to how i've done things previously. i don't have time to update my carrd at the moment, so please take this post as a temporary stand-in when it comes to my updated rules! following: i've gone through and softblocked any archived blogs / blogs that have been inactive for more than a year, along with unfollowing any non-mutuals. you are always welcome to refollow me if you become active again, this is purely a housekeeping thing. threads: i've updated my thread tracker! you can search your username and check the status of any of our threads. i'm slow, but i don't drop things unless you're inactive for a lengthy stretch of time. on that note: i've put any threads which haven't moved in over a year (or which were with blogs i'm no longer following because of the above) onto a separate tab on that sheet - the 'archived ic' tab. if you want to carry anything on which has been moved there, please do! i'll just move it back to the 'ongoing' tab. again, that's primarily a housekeeping thing as my tracker was getting somewhat unwieldy. sideblogs: the sideblogs to this blog - @ofvanaheim, @harmbidder, @tempusetveritas, and @hverfamodir - are all tied to this blog's canon. you need to be mutuals with me here to interact with them. plotting is preferred, particularly if we've not interacted much across my blogs yet. ooc messages: going forwards, i would prefer not to engage heavily over tumblr ims. i'm crap at them, we all know this, i always have been. but especially at the moment when my social battery is pretty much permanently at -50%, i find that little notification of how many unread messages i have on here incredibly stressful. i'd like to stress: this is a me issue. with that said, please add me on discord. i'm lovehurried on there, and while i'm often offline at the moment i find it infinitely easier to regulate what notifications i see / catch up on things when i am up to socialising. either way, please don't expect fast responses from me anywhere right now. it's nothing personal, i'm just trying to pace myself. activity: i'll be around a little this weekend, and then my blogs will be running on a queue while i'm on holiday next week. after i get back, it'll probably be a mix of queued stuff and sporadic straight-to-dash stuff. miscellaneous stuff: do not involve me in drama; i am in my 30s and more than capable of assessing whether someone's behaviour on here warrants me blocking them or not. anon is temporarily off across my blogs; the amount of spam messages coming through was truly insane. tag your content; you are entitled to write whatever you want on your blog, but i'm also entitled to curate my space on here and if people don't start tagging their smut / violent content etc i will be unfollowing them. there we go. right, the wifi on this train is terrible so i'm probably going to lurk on mobile for the rest of it. if i'm not around later tonight then i will be around to get some writing done tomorrow! thank you all for being so patient, understanding, and generally lovely; i know i've been awful at replying to your kind messages while i've been mostly in hiding, but i do see them and i appreciate you so much 🧡

[marshmelman]

I saw what you posted about DNI's and DNI culture as a whole and honestly I really agree! I think there's little need to add a specific function for DNI lists, but the way I personally use them is sorta to let people know my stance on public discourse if that makes sense?

Like you said things like "DNI Transphobes" is redundant and puts a huge target on your back, or "DNI Meanies" like, what does that even mean? Its horribly vague, I never understand it, people have different meanings of what they consider "Mean" or "Rude"

But there's certain discourse that's still fairly split (shipping ethics, system discourse, etc.) and DNI's make it easier for me to let people know what my stance is on that rather than suddenly finding out later and being upset

Like if I put "DNI Endo Systems" people who identify with that or agree will know to leave me alone and that there's a possibility I might post stuff upsetting to them. Of course this also still sorta puts a target on your back but I think with stuff like that people mainly avoid each other and live their lives

I dunno! I just like how you talked about DNI culture and wanted to throw my thoughts in, which of course can be ignored or tossed aside, you simply intrigued me

i realised my reply was kinda long so check under the cut for me to elaborate on DNIs and why i hate em

someone could simply define their stance by inclusion (i'm pro xyz) rather than attempting to define it by exclusion (i'm anti abc). that's one of my most explicit gripes about it: the only function it has that can't be done more effectively in another way is to virtue signal.

if someone wants to make sure people don't see things that will trigger them on a post, then they can put a trigger/content warning on the post instead of making a public statement that they are against the existence of the person that might be triggered.

and in my opinion i think that just calling out what kind of things a person dislikes and kind of expecting the internet to reconfigure itself around their preference (i.e., when people expect others to check through the blogs of everyone they like, reblog, or otherwise interact with a post of to make sure that they're following all of everyone's rules correctly) is an unsustainable way to operate in the internet or in life in general. it goes back to curating one's own experience, yknow? if someone doesn't like certain things or if they're anti certain things, the onus is not on those things to avoid them, it's on them to manage their exposure to those things.

of course, i get that it's way harder to do that on modern day internet because everything got centralized to 2 or 3 social media sites that everyone uses, and especially on a site like this where people write their own tags and a person literally can't block every single phrase and euphemism someone might use to tag something (like agere vs cglre vs cgl vs a/g/e/r/e vs littlespace vs little space vs ....). i completely understand how people got exhausted by the whackamole and took the simpler route of "thing that i don't like, stay away from me." dnis don't exist on a site like reddit because the communities still have some way to define and separate themselves. don't like woodworking? just don't join the woodworking sub and mute it. it's very friendly to user curation. tumblr and twitter are not.

part of my agenda in addressing the existence of dni's in the community with chuchuu is to go more in the way of reddit and just be friendly to user curation instead of shoving everything in everyone's face with a million unmanageable obscure tags for them to have to keep track of. i'm going in strong with group functionality, blocking functionality, filtering on phrases, maybe even official content warnings a person can put on a post like on ao3.

i don't just hate dnis and want everyone to stop using them and suffer. i think they're an actual failing on the part of the social media websites themselves that their own users feel a need to do this because of the limited options. i want to make them functionally obsolete by creating a good website that's user friendly so that we don't need them anymore.

[agirlandherquill]

through the puddles of ink

since it's a new academic year, a new chapter of my life and i thought, since i've been on tumblr for around eight months now that it's about time i properly introduced myself - this would shock the person i was when i first started this blog, but as it's grown so have i, and i think university has indefinitely helped my confidence - so, without further ado, here goes i'll start this properly by explaining the title of this post - through the puddle of ink

ink is important because obviously it is the basis of literature, the foundation of stories and fitting to my blog name, you dip the quill in the ink to write, to forge an adventure that tests the imagination and takes a reader to wonderful places and puddles because let's face it, ink is messy, ink is chaotic, just like me, my characters, and my writing and because through the looking glass is a very iconic title i also watched that movie in the cinema years ago, i took inspiration, and here we are now - this post is a reflection of me, the beautiful nightmares and writing gremlins that co-exist within my brain and a way for me to get to better know my mutuals, anyone and everybody on writeblr!

here comes the scary part - only for me, and my semi-awkward self - introducing myself, i've never been very good at this stuff so bear with me - and have mercy on my nervous soul,

for the longest time i've loved the sort of self-imposed anonymity of this blog, and don't get me wrong i still do adore my blog name but I thought it was about time I properly introduced myself, so, let me just shuffle some papers in the library of my mind, find the right phrasing for this and... (cue angry hitting of the keyboard) hello! my name is Erin and i'm a writer, a lover of chaos, and a semi-functioning tempest somehow existing within society - i love and ramble about lots of different things - books, shows, songs, you name it, i can waffle and sometimes i can waffle well (that is how i am now going to describe my writing, because it feels like it fits so well)

phew, i got that out, that tiny paragraph was a lot of effort (and i've beaten writers block more often than i can count)

this little post might not seem like much, but to me it's a lot, and i'm happy to have made it this far, and i'm so looking forward to continuing to grow alongside this blog and writeblr (i love you all, no seriously)

and now onto some very much needed rambling about my works, because there's a lot the lovely folk of writeblr are yet to know (and it will come, in time, but here's what i can say for now)

Ruin's Reprisal - we all know the tale of this, my oldest, most functioning (cough, using that term loosely) work - well, where to start? well, i'm on the final stage of proofreading, and once that's all done i'm hoping (let's be honest, dreaming,) to have the final draft complete and out in the great wide world come christmas/new year (that is a courageous goal, even for me, but who knows, maybe i can pull it off, just maybe)

A Deal Of Daggers - it's almost time for nanowrimo, which marks two years since the idea for this first came to me, and i cannot wait to spend autumn working on it (not that i am participating in nano properly this year, what with student-life obligations, but i'm going to write what i can) and i've been steadily chipping away with a few chapters already

those are my two main works, and probably the only works i've been focusing on over the last couple of months - and i've fallen completely and wholeheartedly in love with them all over again, as i do, every single time i open the files on scrivener

as far as my tired but over-eager to write brain can think this should be it for everything i wanted to include in this post until the next post (which won't be long, i can guarantee it),

~ Erin, A Girl and Her Quill, or whatever this hellscape would like to call me :)

~ ~ ~

now for the tag list! (i forgot to add it when i posted, oops!)

(p.s if you'd like to be included/notified too, interact with this post :))

@humbly-a-doppelganger @imawholeassmood @frostedlemonwriter @yrndrgn @abditorywriting

@riveriafalll @lead-to-code @casualsuitturtle @floweryprosegarden @joeys-piano

@catwingsathena @godsmostfuckedupgoblin @nothoughtsjustmhaandotherthings @anaisbebe

@drchenquill @leahnardo-da-veggie @tiredpapergirl @pastelpinkhobbies

[kitscodingblog]

Coding Update 7

I'm gonna try to keep this blog updated at least once a week so I make sure I'm always doing SOME sort of coding.

Something something read more.

So the Alien Invasion game is coming along pretty well. I'm learning a lot of tools very quickly. Which also means I'm forgetting a lot of stuff quickly sometimes haha.

So here's some of it. AlienInvasion is basically the whole game stuff, including all the sprites and other key information. It had me do a lot of creating Classes in separate files, then importing them into the main file to keep things clean. Which I get is mostly to keep everything clean and organized.

I'm also, as a full disclosure, mostly just writing the code it wants me to write. So this isn't wholly my own or anything.

Also I have NO idea what sprite group is. I think, if I'm understand it right, it's basically creating a stored group/list thing for the bullets and aliens?

Also there's this. The super().__init__() . I have, literally, no idea why that gets called. It never explained it or made an reference to why its used in the Sprite function. It just said "we call super() so it works properly" and I was like but WHY?? What does it MEAN??

I still don't know.

Also as you can see here, this is everything slimmed down to make the code easier. It had me write out what each of those events do first, under run_game(self), then it was like "we'll refractor this so the code is easier to read." Plus it makes it 100x easier to adjust the code.

I could go into the specifics of them but nah. Just know that they do what they are supposed.

Though while writing the bullet function, it originally let me spawn as many as i wanted as i spammed Spacebar. As I was testing it, I was like "huh.. Those bullets are off screen but I'm pretty sure they still exist. Which means eventually this will be a huge problem." And sure enough, the next part was like "those bullets will add up and slow down everything, so let's fix that." Which means I'm at least thinking about the right things sometimes! Yippie!

So as of right now: I have a moving ship, a bunch of aliens, the ability to shoot up to 3 bullets on screen, and I can close the game. The next part I think is making the aliens move and get blown up!

I did have a hard time doing the on-your-own problem though. It wanted me to create a bunch of stars, like I did the aliens, which worked fine AT FIRST. But then it wanted me to randomly space them, so it looked more like a real night sky.

The problem? If a star spawned outside the borders of the game, my whole thing FROZE. It became completely unresponsive. I also couldn't figure out how to get it to choose a random number for EACH star. It basically chose a random number when loaded and stuck to it.

I ended up looking up the code for how they did it, but i still didn't really understand it. Oh well. I'll go back to it some other time.

I also tried to do an easy Leetcode problem, the famous "two sum" interview question. Basically, it needs to pull numbers from a list to add up to the target sum, then print out their location within the list. so if its two numbers that equal 9, and they are in the list spots 0 and 4, it'll print [0, 4].

I know WHAT it wants me to do, and I know WHAT i want IT to do, but not HOW to do it. Which...made me really frustrated. I think its just cause I don't know how to use sorting algorithms, or any of the search ones. Which is a whole nother beast to manage. I'm honestly not sure how to even APPROACH that. Or where to study it. So I'm putting a pin in it for now.

I think I might learn some of it when I do some of the other projects, but I guess we'll find out. If anyone has any advice to learn that stuff please feel free to send it my way.

I think the other thing is it's gonna start making me think in math terms I don't know or understand. Like I was watching a show about programming and they were talking about uh.. Lambda math or something? and I was like "nope I have no idea what you are referring to." I'm under the impression I might be OKAY without knowing a ton of math, but uhhhh. We'll see I guess?

Anyway, I'll keep you posted. The most important part is ya gurl isn't giving up. We gonna do it to win it!!!

-Kit

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Okay so here’s my thoughts on the staffcon thing.

I still think collapsing reblogs so posts look more like other social media isn’t gonna work as a feature but they will probably roll them back a little and at least add a toggle off for it if they try it and enough people submit feedback. Edit: this is actually less of an issue, most of the discussion is based on a misrepresentation of what’s happening. They’re just making it easier to scroll past long posts. EDIT AGAIN: actually some people already have the initial roll out of the feature and it. Is bad.

I think submitting feedback is a takeaway. There was a pretty clear effort to just remind the user base that there are real humans on the other side of a paycheck having to read and respond to the inputs of every feedback method on the site, which is fair. It’s easy to be an asshole online in any semi anonymous platform and that is something that tumblr culture takes a certain bloodthirsty pleasure in.

And yes, of course, user complaints about issues such as accessibility and the many ongoing glitches and bots and the search function, etc. are valid and do need to be addressed. But at the very least it would be cool if we as users maybe try to cultivate a slightly less pitchforky social norm when submitting feedback about changes to the site. The ceo is not reading every @ to his blog. One of his employees is. The people reading all of the feedback are just people doing their jobs. All jobs suck under capitalism, maybe we could try not to make their jobs actively worse.

Would you be rude to an overworked server in a restaurant? No? Cool also try to not be a dick to the person getting paid to answer customer or user complaints.

Related to that, funding. Many current and former members of staff have been pretty frank about funding in the past. The company is trying to at the very least breakeven, which not a single company who has owned tumblr has managed because the hosting fees for this site are insane due to all of the stuff on it.

If they don’t get it to breakeven they’ll hopefully best case just open source the website which is a method they’ve done in the past. And it would probably work, and then the website would to my understanding be being maintained by users. Now this is where my understanding gets fuzzy so anyone with more knowledge of how this would shake out feel free to chime in. But my understanding is that the source code for the site would be opened up and maintained by the community likely through mostly volunteer work. I would guess largely uncompensated.

So personally I think maybe the vitriolic response to every change they make going forward to try and monetize the site and pay even some of the cost of operation is perhaps a bit overblown, because they’re still trying to find a way to keep paying those people to work on tumblr, and I think people continuing to be paid for the work they do is better than volunteers doing unpaid labor.

I do also think there’s a secret third option for automattic and every other company finding themselves with a worse outlook now the Silicon Valley bubble has started to really burst, and that is for all existing staff members to unionize and then turn the whole thing into a worker coop. Much more stable organizational structures. Worker coops are also one of my favorite short term solutions to many other systemic problems we are currently experiencing.

I do hope this site continues to exist for many years, especially as it is one of the only places on the internet where the culture makes it safer to talk about some of the more permanent and long term solutions to various systemic issues that function within societies. Also funny text posts.

[swarmishstrangers]

Your blog, fics and headcanons always cheer me up! Your art is so neat too. Ive been lurking around here for a bit when I feel like I need my crops watered. Question, can I get headcannon of mallek x reader where the reader is an artist? somehow was able to accept commissions while on Alternia? I feel like the vibe of them just silently drawing and him coding in the background is super cute. What do you think?

AUGRHGAA TYYY!!!! I'm glad you like the art, writing, and headcanons! I've also definitely had the thoughts of Mallek being with an s/o who works a lot on computers for digital art stuff, mainly cause it sounds peaceful af.

Okay, so! Artist is a pretty loose term that could apply to a lot of things, but you specify them drawing here, so I'll go over Mallek x reader, both of them being either a traditional artist or a digital artist.

Traditional Artist:

🎨Starting with the traditional artist! Dunno if any of you consider yourselves to be fairly clean but either way if you were to stay over at his hive a lot and for convenience's sake, leave some of your art stuff at his place..it only adds to the chaos that his hive, "damn girl you live like this?" Idk! I just imagine all sorts of physical stuff traditional artist's use. Different types of paint and paintbrushes, charcoal, watercolors, colored pencils, paper, canvases, etc. Your art stuff adds a whole other thing to look at in his hive and honestly? He's here for it. He thinks art is cool. I mean..he can do tattoos, so of course he'd have some appreciation for a s/o who does artsy stuff. He also like those moments where he finds you just covered in your art supplies. Charcoal all over your arms and even smudged on your face for when you couldn't fight a itch and scratched at it, your hands and fingers smudged with paint or oil pastels...he just finds it incredibly charming.

🎨Oh also on the subject of paint uhh. May or may not be something you're comfortable with using considering that paint on Alternia is made from the blood of trolls. Depends whether or not you can get over that and just pretend it isn't to cope lmao. If you can just. Don't ask Amisia and Chahut about how getting the supplies for your paint went!

🎨Mallek would find it incredibly relaxing to listen to while he's fucking around with his husktops and many monitors. Normally he's one to either sit in quiet with nothing to play or maybe he'll have his playlist quietly playing whatever music or other things to listen to while he works on projects or contact people. Not to say it isn't still quiet while you both do your own things, but that's just the thing. It's quiet, not silent. Mallek finds he works the best when he knows that there's life going on around him. The sounds of his hands rapidly typing on his keyboard, the whirring of his husktop, sometimes you can hear him speak to someone that he's calling. You just further add on with your sounds of living, the sound of pencil sketching onto paper or canvas, the louder or softer sounds of you using oil pastels or charcoal, papers being moved, the adjusting of a canvas. It's all very comfortable to you both.

🎨You're each other's background sounds.

Digital Artist:

🖋️Being a digital artist is also so cool to Mallek, why wouldn't it be? It's tech shit! He can also help you try and traverse the different Alternian art programs. It's pretty new to him too since all he usually uses is the Alternian equivalent to Microsoft paint..and it's not super serious, just doodles, sketches, and shitposts stuff to destress. You got yourself a husktop, Amisia was jumping at the chance to help you look for digital art supplies (such as a tablet and stuff), and Mallek helped you get a hold of art programs for you to try out and decide what you like to use as your primary programs.

🖋️They're pretty much the same as Earth art programs in terms of it's functions. Though of course their interfaces can be different from program to program. Not everything works as it does on Earth? Certain shortcuts or tool locations are moved around or changed but it's pretty easy to figure out if you're experienced in digital art. And if you're stuck or can't figure something out your cool tech savvy matesprit can help you out. Mallek has his moments where he takes a break from what he's working on briefly to watch you draw...he always has to stifle a laugh when he sees you're absolutely struggling over there to do line art, having to undo do your stroke like 50 times before you get it. Like the previous one? He thinks it's cute and charming.

🖋️While you don't add a lot of new things to look at it in his hive, as you're working with more tech, it's still just as nice to listen to in the background he thinks. He can hear your fingers type out messages to friends or clients you're working with, the sound of your pen stroking against the tablet face, your mouse clicking here and then. There may not be as many sounds, but he finds it just as comforting, he likes to listen to the life around him after all.

Commissions:

As for the commission portion, thought it would be fun to get into this separately after talking about the respective art types! Being commissioned as an alien on the planet is certainly. Interesting. Which can be taken positively or otherwise.

Being an alien is your selling point to a lot of trolls online. It's where you got a huge chunk of your followers! Sure, they're very split on genuinely believing you are a real alien and those who think this is some kind of roleplay account or something but follow out of interest. Your commissions gather more interest from those who want a drawing from an alien! Real or not. Lots of odd are fun interactions.

For a traditional artist you could go the route of just, scanning your picture and posting it onto your socials and tag the trolls (or post it to the troll client privately). If you offer a shipement of the physical original drawing Mallek can help you out with getting a drone to drop it off for you so you don't have to go on a wild goose chase to find the troll client in this great wide troll world.

[whumpsday]

Whumpmas in July #2

What are your top three favorite whump tropes?

so i'm gonna add a caveat to this question: my top three favorite whump tropes that i haven't gushed about for previous WIJ prompts. here's those, if you want to take a look:

Whumper-turned-Whumpee

Nonhuman whumpee & Desperate begging whumpee

Immortal whumpee

those are definitely some of my tip-top favorites, but i'll allow something else to take the spotlight for once, lest i repeat myself. these aren't in any particular order.

Tiny Whump

my love of tiny whump is no secret. in fact, i love tiny stuff even outside of whump, which is why i'm also in the giant/tiny community (my blog for that is @smallsday). but since i love g/t and whump, there's no reason not to do both at the same time!

the thing about tiny whump is that it makes everything more terrifying. to someone who's only a few inches tall, even a regular human is a massive threat. this not only creates more unique & creative opportunities for whump, but adds an inherent element of fear into any mixed-size caretaker dynamics. if a tiny whumpee is rescued from some sort of whump situation, they're going to be scared of the (from their perspective) giant who rescued them, too! no matter how kind a caretaker is, there is always an unbalanced power dynamic, and i love seeing characters navigate that.

(the rest of the post is under the keep-reading)

Deprivation of Basic Needs

this is a classic that encompasses so many wonderful types of whump, and i have used it extensively in my main story with Kane's starvation. i'm talking about stuff allll the way at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs.

TAKE IT AWAY! whumpees don't need that stuff! or at least, they don't need more of it than they require to survive. this is why i love immortal whumpees and nonhuman whumpees so much. humans are fragile enough that there's only so much suffering they can endure before ending up dead. and dead is no fun, because then there's no more suffering! an immortal whumpee, or a less-fragile nonhuman whumpee, can reach so much greater heights of deprivation.

this trope comes in many forms. starvation, dehydration, suffocation, and sleep deprivation are the most common, and they're all classics. cold whump and heat whump fulfill similar niches. it's a physical-based trope in general, but you can even get a little more psychological with it and deprive a whumpee of stuff like clothing, hygiene, bedding, shelter, space to move around in, and other things we'd consider basics but aren't necessarily immediately critical to survival. sensory deprivation is also common.

i've also had an idea knocking around in my head about getting more... niche with it, probably in a lab whump setting. there are so many basic needs and bodily functions that a whumper wouldn't be able to deprive a whumpee of under normal circumstances, but if a lab whumper tried really hard, they could get it done--especially if the whumpee possessed some level of immortality. deprive them of the ability to move at all. take away their ability to pee. take away their ability to blink, as their eyes dry up painfully. TAKE AWAY THEIR HEART'S ABILITY TO BEAT, for an immortal whumpee who will remain painfully aware through it all even as their body reacts in utmost panic. in the world of fiction, anything is possible.

Enemy Caretaker

i looooove an enemy caretaker. with known, friendly caretakers, such as friends, family, and partners, there is an element of trust. this lowers the tension, so this tends to be my least favorite kind of caretaker, though i do like it still. with stranger caretakers, there is an element of distrust and suspense. whumpee is still afraid, they can't trust this complete random who's come to their rescue, they need to build up a relationship. i love that!!!

but there is something even better than the stranger caretaker: the enemy. the person whumpee knows hates them, the person whumpee knows they have every reason to fear, especially at their most vulnerable. i'm not talking about "one good-hearted member of the organization responsible for whumpee's torment leaves said organization and rescues them". i'm talking about whumpee's personal enemy. someone they have a storied mutual hatred with. someone who has every reason to leave them for dead or even actively make it worse.

but they don't. they put their history aside and help whumpee, despite everything. and yet! whumpee would still be afraid of them, right? why wouldn't they be? their life is in the hands of someone with a potential grudge. but it all works out, with double that relationship-building needing to be done.

my favorite type of enemy caretaker is a former whumpee put in a position where they're helping their whumper-now-turned-whumpee. i love to see a role reversal like that where the whumpee is now the one with all the power and the whumper gets to be scared. but i love all types of enemy caretakers!

@whumpmasinjuly

[gwydionmisha]

Personal: 1/23/24 PM

I did make kit to the dentist on time, despite exhaustion, my horrible hip joints, and the too many things of it all.

I am still working on setting up Edward and migrating functions. Part of the issue is that Tavy killed Aidan Laptop without warning, so I had to migrate functions fast in whatever way was easiest at the time. I Am reorganizing as I move across to Edward so things are more logical, but they aren't where they are on Klaus. Plus, I realized there are almost none of the extensions I'm going to need on Waterfox for Waterfox's new job, which is doing all the GwydionMisha tumblr stuff. I am needing to set up everything for both main blog and sideblog, add extensions to assorted browsers, customize Xkit rewrittens for both tumblr browsers (I like to be able to flip between tumblrs without logging in and out constantly. it's faster) load standard pages, etc. It is a mess; it's going to be wonderful. In a week or two. Time consuming for right now.

Edward's performing really well now we got him past the enshittification. He's fast and bright. Screen size is smallish like Klaus', but performance is better than my beloved Aidan's was.

Bonus: At some point since I last checked, Xkit Rewritten added an accessibility function that solves a problem I've been having ever since the last catastrophic upgrade. Go Team Xkit!!!

[donnerpartyofone]

I have posted about this multiple times before but since tumblr's search won't cough any of it up, I'm just going to say it again so I can add my new thing to my thought process about trigger warnings:

Years ago a popular true crime blogger posted an ask from someone requesting that she tag for needles. I think she had posted that notorious x-ray of masochistic serial murderer Albert Fish's colon, which is admittedly disturbing, but she very politely declined on the basis that everything she posts tends to be violent and disturbing--you actually SHOULD find her blog upsetting--and users should manage their expectations around that general premise. Additionally, needles do not carry the specific traumatic weight of something like, say, racial violence or child abuse, for which a warning could be in order; needles are everyday objects that one might reasonably encounter in a store or a person's home, or practically anywhere. If you have such an aversion that it really affects your life to see a needle, you might want to pursue treatment and stop using a part of the internet that is essentially a giant random image generator.

My personal take on content/trigger warnings (are those different? If not then why do we have varying tags instead of one universal one to keep the system reliable?) is similar, that they're only important for material that could seriously upend someone's day. Is Thing X something you truly could not have expected where you encountered it? Would you need to leave work or school if you saw Thing X? Would you need to seek assistance or take a medication? Does Thing X cause significant social problems or affect your sense of safety? If not, you don't need a warning. I mean everyone can tag whatever they choose and of course some folks are happy to tag stuff just because someone might find it annoying or unpleasant, but you're not entitled to protection from strangers just to spare you casual discomfort.

One day I got this extremely angry anonymous message in all caps yelling at me for not tagging spiders. I had no idea what the person was talking about, but after a while I realized it had to be about a popular post I'd made years ago showing tarantulas in a Kids In the Hall sketch. This was especially funny to me because at the time I was posting a lot of explicit violence and sexual imagery that someone could reasonably object to, but this person felt that it was my job to help create the illusion of a spiderless world for their benefit. I know arachnaphobia is a real thing but I still think that if you suffer from it then it's your job to look after yourself and not everybody else's job to protect you from remembering that there are spiders.

This is kind of a tangent but I often think about how trypophobia is not technically a phobia because it isn't affecting anybody's ability to lead a normal daily existence. It's just a grossout thing, basically a matter of taste, but people love to try to elevate it to the level of a serious psychological vulnerability for some reason.

I'm thinking about this stuff (again) today because I just saw a post on one of the autism subreddits where someone linked to a scientific paper to answer a specific question, but they said it needed warnings for incidental use of the term "high-functioning" and advised that some people may not wish to read the paper at all so they wouldn't be triggered by it. That term is sometimes used to invalidate or deny care to people who give the outward appearance of less urgent needs, so it is indeed pretty tricky and needs work. But change is only going to come from attention; if you are concerned about the effects of that language then I think it behooves you to know how it is being used so you are able to argue about it and lobby for change. It's hard for me (a "high-functioning" person) to imagine a scenario in which I'm interested in reading about a condition I have, and then I refuse to do so because the phrase "high-functioning" is going to trigger a psychiatric episode so bad that it's better for me to just ignore information about my own health. I think an adult who is usually inclined to educate themselves should be able to handle occasionally seeing troublesome or outdated language.

Put more concisely than above, my criteria for warnings is just: when the questionable item relates to a real, reasonably common traumatic experience that would be unfair to spring on someone who could relate to it, and/or when the content would be legitimately surprising in its context. Like if you're in my corner of tumblr you should expect that you're going to see horror movie stuff, I'm not tagging anything like that unless it's miles over the line I typically draw. But on the other hand I was out at a restaurant one night and this spoiled egomaniac was practically shouting for a long time in graphic detail about episiotomies within earshot of everyone who was trying to eat. Honestly one of the staff should have told her to shut the fuck up. That's not a thing that people should be normally expected to put up with in a public dining situation, even though it regards a medical procedure that is not morally offensive.

It's probably obvious by now that I think that being uncomfortable and even offended, at least to some degree, has an important psychological and social function. It enables you to recognize and react to problems around you. Understanding what makes you uncomfortable is critical; dealing with discomfort builds character; and continuously avoiding everything you don't like keeps you infantile. It's actually not good to live in a world of only your favorite things.

[winwintea]

hi i love ur blog, i just wanna say i love ur smaus too like the characters seem all fleshed out with their own personalities and in comparison to other smaus its a lot easier to differentiate. i was thinking of starting a writing blog so i was just curious as to how you manage to do that? like maybe some tips and tricks you could give?

anyways hope you have a nice day <33

ur literally so sweet omg <33

but sure yes i can give you some tips and pointers if you'd like !!

make like character charts or bullet points down for all the characters.

if you're creative and artistic, draw out like a large ass character relationship chart. i've done one with secure that card and belladonna where i literally just drew arrows to each of the characters plus what the arrows meant.

this is one i made for when i started belladonna! (free from spoilers teehee) but you can see label relationships on it if you want! it makes it more clear, and if you forget a relationship it doesn't seem like ur making something up later in the story.

you can also like just write down bullet points on what you want the characters to be/act like. it's important to write this stuff down otherwise you'll lose it and forget! i won't show u my belladonna one bc it has spoilers on it, but i'll show u a basic one i used for mark lee vs the world. (obviously i conveyed most of these in the profiles but it's still good to update and add onto it when you need to)

2. study mbti or other personality categorizations!

back in 2020 i was SO OBSESSED WITH mbti. it's helped so much with writing and understanding characters on a personal level. whenever i get lost and don't know how to distinguish a personality from another i usally deep dive and watch content or remember what i know about mbti.

now there's obviously the specific 4-letters mbti, the functions mbti, and what the members think their own mbti is. obviously the test itself is dumb, so i don't always listen to what nct thinks their own mbti is or what the internet is. i like to do my own research into the functions and how i perceive the members for help.

this has also helped me a lot because there was for a period of time, where i wasn't sure how to write jeno and some of the members of 127. but studying his mbti really helped me create a personality to him!

here's my dreamie mbti thoughts at the moment if anyone wants them. i can also give my thoughts for any of the others if anyone is interested!

mark: infj. him being extroverted is so forced omg, take one closer look at this man and you can see his more introverted qualities. i'd accept isfj too, but his Ni function IS SOOOO STRONG.

renjun: RENJUN IS SUCH A BIG. "we don't know them personally situation" because i'll literally accept any variation of renjun at all. he knows much more about mbti than anyone else i've seen, especially coupled with the fact that he doesn't want to tell anyone what his mbti is, because he knows how annoying people can get about it. also he precieves himself as an extrovert which is shocking to me, but i feel like in this case i'd just type him as an istj/intp lol.

jeno: istp. i had to turn to pdb for this one lol, which isn't the worst place ever to start, but it also becomes a big ass echo chamber at times. though i relatively agree with istp lmfao.

haechan: enfp/entp. this one is always up in the air, because like jaemin people can't really tell if haechan is an extrovert or introvert. the way i disagree with the entire internet on this one lol. someone tell him to stop taking the fucking test he is definitely not an istp. 💀

jaemin: isfj. his test is pretty accurate i'd say, there's a lot of debate over whether or not jaemin is an extrovert or introvert, but if you actually pay attention to the way he acts when he isn't just around dreamies you can see how his social battery gets used up fairly fairly quickly. (cough cough nct world cought nct world)

chenle: definite entj. as someone who personally is an entj, i see so many entj qualities shine through this man.

jisung: infp. jisung's definitely introverted, but he has so many infp qualities. the patience and attentiveness, his fairness and morality, and deep connection with feelings. SO INFP CODED.

i hate how misinformed the kpop community is about mbti. it makes my blood boil actually. please read into the functions if you have time rather than just taking a test and calling it a day. THANK YOU.

[dreamingofmuses]

New Year's Resolutions: RP Edition

Howdy all, Ash here. I've been having a think while with family this week, and I've decided I'm going to implement some new 'resolutions' to try and help make writing in 2024 be way more successful than in 2023. This will include things from the running of blogs to jobs I really want to get finished. I'm putting them under a read-more to keep the dash nice and clean.

I will say, this has taken me an hour to write up, and I'd recommend you doing likewise if you think there's little ways you want to improve.

-

Overall Running of Blogs

I'm going to experiment a new approach to running the blogs. For this, I'm going to put all active blogs to low-medium activity. In other words, even if I am personally lurking on mobile, I won't be constantly writing things if I'm not able to. (Work is just about to get super busy and I'm anticipating chaos)

A queue/schedule function will be used for all blogs. I intend to dedicate one weekday evening to working without interruption on replies. Taking commutes to the city and family visits into account, this is looking to be a Thursday, which is the only day I am neither travelling to the city nor have a guaranteed family visit. Of course, this may fluctuate, but that's what I'm hoping to work with, assuming those things stay as they are.

However! What all this means is that I am going to tentatively take skullandbowties off hiatus. With that blog being quiet, it should be possible to juggle it better now. Plus, it's officially off-season so the demand for him from new blogs ought to be low. I'm very smart :D

I also plan to update all pinned posts. I am aware some of them are marking a vacation from months ago.

Individual Blog Maintenance

Create "New Here?" posts to add to the pinned posts/info tags. This is going to be a very quick crash course on what to expect from the blog, especially where some characters might diverge from fanon expectations.

FINISH. WILF'S. BIO. It's not actually relevant to anything being written on the blog itself at present, but I really want to flesh out his character and show that he was stuck in stories for years, decades even! The doc has the word count to 4,888 at this precise moment. This is a mix of summary and brainstorm. Since it's getting a 'little' out of hand, I intend to have a 'tldr' at the start that people can read, and then longer versions if they're curious to get the full story. Maybe even have it that they can jump to particular parts but... I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Likewise, Noah's version of Space needs to be finished. This one is going to be a summary, but it's a case of making sure the pieces are in place sufficiently to have parts match canon Space, but also make it clear that there is a lot of differences between canon and what he went through, with his plot entirely spiralling away for 'Part 2'. This is at 5,794 words, and the ending has yet to be ironed out...

(I am going to stop creating needlessly long-winded projects for myself that realistically add nothing of value to my blogs. These two projects are exhausting...)

Theauthorlives is returning to a very small multimuse. Any muses that aren't ones I genuinely enjoy writing are being fully archived, unless they are muses that get no traction but I want to keep the possibility open. Details of that will be shared when I do this.

Redo some muse icons (not all of them!). Though the selection I have for particular sets is a lot, I still feel like I'm missing some expressions or poses. I would like to remake one batch of icons for three characters, and finish iconning a third. Replies seem to be shifting toward iconless, but I like them for asks or IC commentaries.

OOC/Mun Related stuff

Following matters that have happened both online and IRL, I've decided to take a step back from actively engaging with people. My focus will be people that I have been in good communication with for the last twelve months (as well as people I don't talk to frequently but am on friendly terms with) rather than people I feel I have to 'chase' after. Saying that, I'm going to try and not let past experiences meddle with anything in with new writing partners - whether these are brand new to the community or people I've not had the chance to properly interact with prior to this. Just be aware that I might not be super outgoing at first. (This is where setting limits and boundaries is good practice, everyone! Don't sell yourself short, and don't spread yourself out too thinly!)

Which is where I now say I want to send even more asks! Not just memes or sentence starters, but general questions about headcanons or muse opinions. I want to get people thinking more.

My stance on Discord still stands, in that it's solely for OOC stuff, but I'm not giving it out to everyone. However, I have been in two group servers that have little-to-no connection with writing rp threads in them. I would hope that I can fully regain my sense of comfort using Discord as a whole.

Art related

Despite socially stepping back, I still want to keep some semblance of 'community' where my blogs are active so people don't feel isolated. For instance, I want to do something that encourages invasions of ask boxes. That was good fun to watch as the chaos began to spread, and when people are good-humoured to go along with my silly ideas.

I want to have one huge art-related event at some point this year. I'm not entirely what or how to do it, but I think it would be a great excuse to practice something. Portraits, comics, something like that. I'll have a think. (For those who remember, the water gun event was supposed to have an art conclusion but plans for that fell through.)

I want to try and upload drawn responses to heythereneighbor once a week if I can. Obviously, this is depending on how busy it is.

I'd also like to try doodling more on other blogs? But I'm not sure if this is even something people want to see anymore. People might prefer I focus on writing if I have free time instead of doodles or little comics.

... the writing blog. I need to do stuff with that in general. Whoops.

Finally, I want to do what I can to the best of my abilities on a particular day. I've always told people over the years that real life comes before rp, and I still stand by that. Whether I'm around or not every day isn't the end of the world. The communities I write in are a lot slower paced than they were when I started, which is great! I need to remind myself that I don't need to be writing just because I have a bit of free time.

[manonamora-if]

Weekly check in. Some little stuff, some bigger stuff.

Current word count: 23.323 (Ch.5), >8k (Ch.6)

And we're finally back on track with Harcourt, babyyyy. After a month of eh from both me (with the editing) and MelS (writing the next chapter), we both managed to break through our respective blocks.

As of a few days ago, I sent back the edited Chapter 5 to MelS, so he could answer my comments and check the changes. I finally got to read the missing bits (and they are creepy and yucky)... Can't wait to code all of that when it is ready. We definitely need another round of MelS editing the text and me checking it, before I can add that to the file.

Until I get the file back, I'll focus on other projects.

Like...

Yerup... I ended up finishing it. A little binksi with more vibes than story. Click if you dare :P

Making a binksi (or a bitsy/bipsi) had been something on my bucket list for a while now (almost a year actually), and I finally got to make one for realsies!

Honestly, the hardest part in all of this... was making the tiles/sprites in 8x8 pixels ;-; Anyway, the code is freely available on itch and my GitHub.

Fixed some accessibility issues yesterday:

textbox not getting in focus properly

links/buttons not changing state when in focus but not hovered

added image descriptions to pictures in French/English

Also added the logos of Twine and SugarCube when the game loads. Those are clickable too.

I have worked a tad more on the UI/missing elements. But not as much as I should have.

Next week, the final update should be out.

This is what I'll be fixing this month. Officially reopened the code files, stared at it, and cried. It's so bad. It's such a mess...

Not looking forward to it, but it needs fixing! (I've asked the Forum for help too in the commands...)

ALSO, I've decided there will be a hyperlink version of this game. Instead of the commands, click on words. It will be in the same file, and you get to choose at the start.

I’ve finished reviewing the EctoComp entries (except the Spanish-only ones because I suck at Spanish...) and have started reviewing the Bare-Bones Jam entry. An updated version of the reviews have been queues on the IFDB and @manonamora-if-reviews. I will probably go back to the IFComp entries after that (probably after the voting deadline... I've done 40 already...).

-_-

I've made a completely new intro post with all of the place I'm at (if you'd rather not be on Tumblr). It was a long time coming, and now I have clear channels of where I'm posting about stuff. Just need to be consistent...

I've also started migrating old dev logs and posts to my blog, especially the longer ones where I have a lot to say. Since the search function and archive on Tumblr is eh, I get to keep the important ones (not all of them are) in a more organised place. They are still on Tumblr, btw. It's not gone, just copied. It's been nice to revisit old dev logs, and see how far I've come (it's been a long way). It's pretty humbling (especially the typos, omg... I fixed so many of those).

-_-

The IFComp and EctoComp, are always looking for players/voters. If you want to play a few short-ish games, take advantage of that! There is only a few days left for the IFComp and a few weeks for the EctoComp.

The @seedcomp-if is always looking for inspiration (text, images, code, etc…) in this current first round. If you have half-baked ideas or anything, really, come submit something!

Over @neointeractives, ShuffleComp! is looking for playlists and participats :)

-_-

And that's it I think...