#Roundtable

[tylermileslockett]

This merlin character design from King Arthur comes from a personal project I was exploring a few years ago. I was exploring Merlin as more of a druid priest style character design. I still plan to do King Arthur some day, and Have more art from that project ill share in the future. What culture/myth/fairytales would you like to see me do?

Each week I’ll be revealing some of my many images from my past. Hope you enjoy them! Xoxo

[duckprintspress]

Roundtable: Words to Young Writers

Today (April 10th) is Encourage a Young Writer Day, which struck us as the perfect time for our not-so-young writers to offer some sage wisdom in the form of a roundtable! We asked our contributors, “What would you tell young writers to encourage them to keep writing?” The contributors to this roundtable are: Anima Nightmate, boneturtle, Linnea Peterson, May Barros, theirprofoundbond, Rascal Hartley, Sebastian Marie, Shadaras, Shannon, Tris Lawrence, Nina Waters, Maggie Page and an anonymous contributor.

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Sebastian Marie: No matter how weird or strange or absolutely ‘I’m the only one who could possibly enjoy this’ your work feels like, there is Always a contingent of beautiful weirdos out there who will adore it. And you will find them if you keep writing. So keep writing.

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Nina Waters: It’s okay to take breaks. You don’t need to harm yourself mentally or physically to be a writer. There won’t always be room in your life for writing, and forgiving yourself for the times when you don’t write is critical to finding the energy to go back to it. You can’t punish yourself into doing something you love.

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May Barros: No one else has your voice. Your stories are unique because they are yours, so don’t get discouraged by how other people tackle their process, find what works for you.

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Rascal Hartley: Have fun with it! Don’t worry about some fabled “audience”—your audience is you. The rest will follow.

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Maggie Page: Echoing similar sentiments, a couple of things that would have been good for me to hear when I was younger might help others:

A strict writing schedule does not work for everyone. Using timers, word count goals of different amounts, timed challenges, and other tools is great. Even if it takes using multiple motivators at once or a rotating array of methods—whatever works for you is great. Don’t beat yourself up if finding the right process is a struggle. Like unforth said, breaks are not the enemy.

If a topic feels meaningful to you, it will feel meaningful to others even if other voices have told similar stories before. And meaning can be found in lots of places. Writing to convey something beautiful, something humorous, something fun, and all the possibilities you can think of is no less worthy than the Dead Serious and Significant stuff a teacher might have told you that you should be writing.

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Anima Nightmate:

Don’t feel like you have to write your work in the order it’ll be read. If you’re that kind of writer, that’s great! But plenty of us write the scenes that come into our heads and then work out where they go in the larger plot, then write connections between them. No-one needs to care how you got there to enjoy the results!

Having said that, enjoy the process of writing, of uncovering what your brain is bringing into the world. Marvel at the worlds and people you can piece together.

I would also tell them this quote by Jenny Elder Moke: Y’all stop calling your first drafts garbage. Garbage is what you throw out when you’re done with the meal. What you have there is a grocery run – a collection of items that will eventually make a cohesive meal once you figure out which flavors go together.

So the proper terminology is “omg please read this grocery fire of a WIP and tell me how to fix it”

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Shadaras: Thinking specifically about young writers: You don’t need to be the best writer, or the fastest writer, or even the writer with the best spelling/grammar/vocabulary. Write at your own pace! Write with the words that work for you! Don’t worry too much about if it’s “proper” English (or whatever language you want to write in). So long as you’re using written words to share your ideas, you’re a writer.

Plus, you don’t need to do this alone! Maybe you write best when you’re talking everything over with your best friend. Maybe you need someone else helping you with spelling and grammar. Maybe you want to narrate your story while someone else (or a text-to-speech program) writes it down for you. All of those are great ways of writing! Find friends to write with! Share your ideas, brainstorm together, have fun being excited about each other’s words and worlds!

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Anonymous: A lot of things have been covered already, so onto more niche topics:

If you’re worried about how to add deep, meaningful themes to your story, set that worry aside for the second draft. In my experience, trying to add deep, meaningful themes to your writing from the start tends to be much harder than writing something you personally thought was funny or interesting, and then seeing what themes you can bring out in draft 2. As a general rule, if you care enough about an idea to write it down, you’ll find that it already contains meaningful themes. You’ll just need to polish them and make them more obvious in the second draft.

Spite is your friend. If you’re mad about something, you can channel that rage into writing and end up with something that is both dripping with emotion (because you were full of spite) and really well-articulated and well-reasoned (because you must explain your spite to the reader and get them on your side).

Editing is so important. It’s hard, time-consuming, and really annoying, but it is key to your continued growth as a writer—and, perhaps more importantly, to your ability to present your ideas in a way that makes other people as obsessed with them as you are.

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Linnea Peterson:

Have fun with it! The first several things you write won’t be published, so don’t agonize about quality at first, and don’t listen to the writers who talk about how they hate writing and only like having written, or how the only thing more miserable than writing is not writing. You can stop if you’re not having fun.

The best skill in a young writer is perseverance. Take the breaks you need, but know that coming back to writing again and again is the biggest part of eventual success—having the most beautiful prose or the wittiest dialogue only gets a person so far if they never finish anything or if they quit writing altogether.

Write things that you enjoy writing, or that you find cathartic to write, or that you’re proud to be writing. That can be fanfiction, short stories, poetry, music, comics, essays, etc. You don’t have to specifically be a novelist to be serious, and skills you build in one realm can inform your work in other realms.

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Shannon:

Try different mediums! When I was starting out I was convinced I was only going to write longform prose. But I am also full of poetry and stage/screenplays and I never would have known that if I hadn’t tried! If you like writing, give yourself the space to experiment with all the different kinds of writing there are.

Cultivate a writing group or buddy if you can. This is something I struggled to do in the pre-internet era but it really opened up my world once I found my people—from book recommendations to group writing exercises or just a cheerleader, having folks who love your work are so crucial at every stage, but especially when you’re new. Try to find writers who will grow with you.

Celebrate the wins. Finish a draft? Win! Finish a tough chapter? Win! Figure out something you’ve been struggling with? Win!

Also—read widely. This advice from John Waters was for filmmakers but it applies to writers too. Just swap out films for books/short stories/poems/whatever beautiful thing you are writing.

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Tris Lawrence:

Learning how to write can be like learning how to cook. There are a lot of recipes out there with “how things should be done” and you can try those out and figure out what works for you. But the more practice you get doing things the way other people do, the more tools you’ll have in your toolbox, and the better you’ll be able to figure out what feels/tastes right to you.

It’s okay if it’s not perfect on the first try. It’s okay if you feel like you need to completely rewrite it. It’s okay if you think it IS ready to roll after one draft. All of these are excellent ways of being.

Take joy in your words, and remember, every word you write—whether you keep it or throw it out—is another step on your journey. Roll around in the words, and fall in love with them. Because writing is a journey, as long or as short a one as you want to take, and there can always be someplace new to go, and something new to learn. Be open to the changes, and have a blast on the way.

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theirprofoundbond: Your first draft doesn’t have to be “crappy,” nor do you need to hate it. Editing as you go and creating something you love is as valid a writing process as getting down a really rough first draft you don’t love and then rewriting it until you do. Whatever actually helps you get the words down, do that. Whatever stops you from getting the words down, don’t do that.

(This advice brought to you by: When I was writing my first story, I didn’t have as much fun with it as I could have. I thought I was doing something wrong because I was editing as I went, and because I really liked what I was producing. I questioned myself the whole time, but I should’ve been embracing what seemed to be working for me!)

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boneturtle: Just keep writing.

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What advice would you give to young writers?

[jgroffdaily]

A clip from the Hollywood Reporter Roundtable.

[buunyheaven]

why am I so in love with buff people who like to kill

[foldbaron]

Critical Role will be hosting two roundtables to discuss production on Season 3 of Legend Of Vox Machina starting next Tuesday!

We will discuss Episodes 1-6 of Season 3 on October 15th at 7pm Pacific / 10pm Eastern on Beacon, YouTube, and Twitch. The roundtable for Episodes 7-12 will be on October 29th at 7pm Pacific / 10pm Eastern!

[starrieisdelusional]

Leon doesn’t know what he did in the past life to deserve all of this suffering, destiny must found it funny.

Lancelot: LEON!! LEON LOK WAHT I KAN DO (starts gurgling beer)

Leon: Sir Lancelot…I would advice you to stop what your doing as it can lead to serious problem like- (Lancelot starts choking) oh dear…Sir Gwaine, please! Stop undressing!! And don’t take off your pants!!! And… (muttering) why is this candle floating…? (gasp) MERLIN!! STOP DOING WHATEVER IT IS YOU’RE DOING!!

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MerlinkTober 2024

Day 9: Rising sun

Sir Leon, the long suffering, i never find it unfunny lmao. This was fun, probably one of my favorite piece from this saga just cause of how chaotic everyone is

Other Prompts of Merlinktober 2024

[adamdforever]

Hello 😏

[fanhackers]

Platforms and Fan Experiences

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about platforms and the way in which they influence fan experiences. As a consistent lurker, I have been on Tumblr for more than a decade, and more recently on Twitter for the past few months, and have been reflecting on my experiences of fandom on both platforms.

In a roundtable discussion published in a tumblr book: platform and cultures, speakers Flourish Klink, Rukmini Pande, Zina Hutton, Lori Morimoto and Allison McCracken discuss the ways in which Tumblr is a very visual platform:

Klink: Tumblr fandoms tend to be much more visual than other fandoms. I often find that this  is the most difficult part of Tumblr for people who are not familiar with it. The visual languages in play on Tumblr are as meaningful and complex as any slang or textual interactions on Twitter… Klink, Flourish, Rukmini Pande, Zina Hutton, Lori Morimoto, and Allison McCracken. “A Roundtable Discussion about the Cultures of Fandom on Tumblr.” In A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures, edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch, 167–80. University of Michigan Press, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11537055.23.

I find this particularly interesting—and also ironic, in some ways—given that to me, as both a lurker, and a Fandom Old, the draw of Tumblr is that, while it may be a visual platform, it is not necessarily a visible platform, particularly in comparison to Twitter. There’s little chance of the celebrity you’re writing RPF about coming across your racy post or interacting with you directly.

In the same discussion, they go on to talk about the ways in which Tumblr’s visual culture has often led to progressive politics and practices, like race/genderbending.

Hutton: …One of my favorite things about being on Tumblr is seeing the way that members of the fandoms I’ve been in— primarily the DC and Marvel fandoms—reimagine their favorite characters as characters of color and give them queer and gender identities that match theirs. You can see photosets reimagining the Batman family group as more visibly diverse, and fancasts ( fans re-casting roles with actors of their choosing) of Marvel superheroes where they’re portrayed as women of color. And these fancasts generally push back against the idea of whiteness as a perpetual default. Klink, Flourish, Rukmini Pande, Zina Hutton, Lori Morimoto, and Allison McCracken. “A Roundtable Discussion about the Cultures of Fandom on Tumblr.” In A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures, edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch, 167–80. University of Michigan Press, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11537055.23.

While Hutton also points out the ways in which a lot of it can turn into clickbait activism, later on in the discussion, without truly engaging with what it means to racebend a character beyond simply making a visual edit, it’s Pande’s comment about interacting with white fans that echoes my own experience:

Pande: When I first came on Tumblr for instance, I mainly followed people I knew from LiveJournal and “Big Name Fans” whose writing I had followed in previous fandoms. This resulted in my Dashboard being filled with almost exclusively white-dude content. In retrospect this is not surprising, but the visual-ness of Tumblr made it particularly apparent, especially post-Racefail at a moment in fandom in 2009–10, when POC fans had started becoming more vocal about this whiteness. Klink, Flourish, Rukmini Pande, Zina Hutton, Lori Morimoto, and Allison McCracken. “A Roundtable Discussion about the Cultures of Fandom on Tumblr.” In A Tumblr Book: Platform and Cultures, edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch, 167–80. University of Michigan Press, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11537055.23.

As a PoC fan myself from the Global South, particularly one that does more lurking than posting, I often find that Tumblr does not always have the kind of linguistic inclusivity or even fandom inclusivity I am looking for. Perhaps it’s that I am a lurker, or perhaps I am not looking in the right spaces. Whatever the reason, I find Twitter has more of that inclusivity; whether I am looking for a fellow Hindi-soap opera fan, or a Supernatural fan, I can find both. And depending on which platform I choose, the content I make/consume differs—not just in form, but also in language and meaning.

What do you think? How has your platform shaped your fandom experience?

[sturmovik]

Elden Ring: my new player experience so far

I finally picked up Elden Ring on sale after all these years. I knew it would be difficult for me as a casual gamer who's never played a FromSoft game before but I've been itching to try it out for years now. Here's what's happened to me so far:

(some early game spoilers btw. for those who want to visualize, my Tarnished is a Vagabond Knight that kinda looks like Saoirse Ronan)

The First Hour:

I struggled hard with the PC controls. Eventually managed to limp my way into a cave where I killed an angry dog man after dying to it like 3 times (skill issue + i'm not comfy with the controls yet). Only after all that did I rest at a grace site outdoors. That's when Melina appeared and said "You suck. Here's a horse."

Wandering:

I spend some time going around aimlessly, killing whatever small fry I run into to get my level up as much as possible. I was feeling confident so I decided to challenge the Tree Sentinel. I was most comfortable using the halberd and I read he drops a good one. As expected, I died multiple times. Eventually, Renna appeared and said "You suck. Here, use summons" (i still couldnt beat the tree sentinel)

WTF:

For the next 2 or so hours I accomplish nothing except killing more small mobs. At one of the ruin sites I massacre some unarmed... people(?) and then deal with some giant rats. A player message said the chest was a trap but I love Frieren and I know she wouldn't let that silly message stop her.

It was a teleport trap to some godsforsaken mine in a hellish death zone. Surprisingly I only died 3 times before I successfully escaped. During those three attempts I followed a phantom I saw jumping up so I also jumped up and followed that path upward (i'm in a mine, and the exits to mines are upwards duh), managing to juke the big monsters and kill one of the smaller ones that got in my way. I made it to a gate which I assumed was the escape/entrance route. I did it. Now I can get away on Torrent with some runes to spare!

To my horror, the gate opened to an isolated chamber, and a health bar appeared on screen with the words "FALLINGSTAR BEAST." I could only watch helplessly while my character was locked in an animation pushing the gate open to meet certain death. Fuck it, we ball. (there's no happy ending here, I suck at this game lol)

Turns out all I had to do was run downstairs a bit to get away.

The Erdtree:

I think there was grace in the mine but I didn't use it because I wanted to see where I ended up. I surveyed the red hellscape before me, and thought, "yeah this sucks I'm going back Limgrave." I mounted Torrent and began taking the scenic route back to greener pastures.

That's when I noticed that the Erdtree was much closer than before. So I decided to go for it. Let's head to the big tree and become Elden Lord! We fell off a cliff and died.

At this point, I have accomplished nothing but the multiplication of my own pain and suffering. Waking at the nearest site of grace, Melina appeared once again and spoke thus: "You're an idiot. Welcome to the Roundtable."

-- In summary, I feel like one of those absolute loser main characters in a fantasy/isekai anime that's stuck killing rats in some ungodly corner of the world trying to build up skills and power to eventually kill God. Idk if I'll ever get there because so far I am horrible at learning attack patterns and can't seem to time movement/dodging to save my life but so far the journey has been hilarious and I want to keep going.

(decided to post here cuz r/EldenRing automatically deletes this there. I read the rules and dont seem to be breaking any of them, even tagged spoilers and all. so fuck 'em. wassup tumblr)

[duchessofostergotlands]

I enjoy the Awards season round tables but I'm watching the women's one from this year and I don't know if I can stomach all the cliches and Hollywood speak.

[tomkatonline]

I like this guy a very normal amount and definitely haven’t had his song on repeat for the past week

[duckprintspress]

Roundtable: Tips for Podficcing

Press author and editor Shea Sullivan is looking to begin podficcing, so she asked the Duck Prints Press server for advice from those with experience. Several members of DPP have done podficcing in the past, so we were able to provide some guidance – and we thought, if Shea was interested, others might be interested too! Hence, we turned our chat into a roundtable blog post, with permission from everyone involved of course.

(Side note, we’re working with some press-involved folks who have experience in narration and podficcing to record audiobooks of some of our stores – we’re hoping to unroll the first couple to our Patreon backers soon – so be on the lookout!)

boneturtle: I’ll always recommend Audacity (https://www.audacityteam.org/) for recording and editing because it’s free, dead simple, and produces high-level results

Shannon: Audacity is very straightforward so seconding that! I made some podfics on there. I’ve used GarageBand (https://garagebandonpc.com/download) too and I liked it a little better for multiple layered tracks, but that’s personal preference more than anything else.

Nina Waters: I used Audacity for mine, too

boneturtle: When I was recording podfics, I went into my closet and then pulled the heavy down blanket from my bed over the clothing rack and went under that like a tent to muffle any outside noise – you may not need to do that if you’re not recording in a big city but it definitely saved me so much heartache in editing.

Another thing that you probably already know is to record several seconds of silence before you start talking so you can use that as the baseline for the noise-reduction filter. And if you mess up and have to repeat something, give yourself an awkwardly long pause before you repeat the line so it’s easy to find the spot you have to cut and paste when editing.

Nina Waters: !hen I made a mistake, I’d tap the microphone, which meant when I looked at the audio there’d be a big spike wherever there was a mistake, also made it really easy to spot and cut.

Hermit: We turned the closet in the smallest room into a “cloffice” for my BF, and part of that was installing a lot of sound proofing. Doesn’t stop outside soumds, but kills the reverb and the panels we installed were cheap on amazon (we installed them using Command strips so we can take them down later if needed).

The long record before you start is super useful if you want to add “silence” too. Like “oh, I should have let this pregnant pause be longer.” You can copy from that baseline and add it where needed.

boneturtle: The main thing the silence helps with is giving you room around the mistake to trim and insert the audio you actually want, so even with a signal noise, I’d still do a few seconds of silence before restarting

Hermit: Good headphones will let you properly hear interference and random noises

Obviously, this roundtable alone won’t be enough to get you started making your own podfic, as we don’t get into the nuts-and-bolts of every aspect of the process. If you want to learn more about podficcing, here are some resources:

AO3 bookmark collection of 23 guides to podficcing by Dr_Fumbles_McStupid

Extensive podfic resource index by Ravin

A Beginner’s Guide to Making Podfic by EmilianaDarling (Tumblr)

More tips, tricks, and guides can be found on Tumblr, LiveJournal, and YouTube.

Good luck!

[jgroffdaily]

Before we dive into your shows, can you talk about a person who provided you with the tools to perform eight shows a week, at the level at which you are doing it, without losing your mind or body?

JONATHAN GROFF Our choreographer, Shannon Lewis, is a prolific Broadway dancer, but Just in Time was her choreographic debut. I’ve never really danced before this, and she was, “I got you.” She gave me 10 weeks of dance lessons, three times a week, before the first day of rehearsal. She taught me this thirty-minute physical warm-up of five different songs that she has on a playlist, and I do it every day before doing the show.

[gvawood]

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