#added and changed some things to better reflect new info but

[sympetali]

Since it seems like CRWBY is heavily hinting at big Ruby and Jaune moments in the episode tomorrow, I thought I’d share this think piece drabble I decided to write in the middle of the day a few weeks ago (haha undiagnosed adhd, am I right?)

Here’s the thing about Ruby and Jaune: I think they have one of the most interesting dynamics in the series.

They meet in the first few episodes, and they’re immediately sort of bonding about being outsiders. They don’t feel like they belong in this space: Ruby is too young and Jaune literally bluffed his way in. Jaune calls Ruby cute (this is not an inherently romantic reading of their relationship,) and sort of hints at romantic interest in her before he sees Weiss and well… we all know how that goes. Ruby thinks Jaune is kind of a dweeb, but in the affectionate “you’re weird, I like you” sort of way. It’s a very light-hearted first conversation. But beyond those surface level introductory interactions, then we have the fact that these two become the most unlikely team leaders. They both become responsible for three other people, and Ruby points that out to Jaune in one of the most prominent moments for him early on. The others being his work with Pyrrha about accepting help and his confrontation with Cardin which is like, the defining moment for him—one where he puts both Ruby and Pyrrha’s advice to work. And that alone could be very telling about how close they are. But it doesn’t end there.

Something I think that makes these two so intrinsically linked is their very specific shared grief. No one else knew Pyrrha was going to die and no one else had to see Pyrrha die. Jaune knew the minute she kissed him and ran off. Ruby, still just a 16 year old kid, had to see it. And suddenly both of them are feeling this heartache in a way no one else can understand. But they can understand each other. We don’t know if Jaune ever even told anyone about that kiss, but we do know he called out desperately to the others about her going to do something reckless (hats off to Miles Luna for that scene because holy cow,) and Ruby was already barreling headfirst into hero mode. Pyrrha’s death will play in a loop in both of their heads for a long time.

Then we have the span of time that volumes 4-6 take place in. Ruby, with no team of her own, sets off with Jaune, Ren, and Nora. They acknowledge that at this point, things are incredibly different and they’re following Ruby. Jaune takes a backseat in terms of direct leadership, but he’s still a unifying voice. He understands Ren and Nora a bit more, and I think we see that in their battles scenes. But still, Jaune so easily follows Ruby. He believes in her. He doesn’t know what it is exactly they can do at the place they’re in, but he’s ready to figure it out with her. He’s going to keep improving and he’s going to keep supporting her. I think that’s really beautiful. Their like, little reunion at the end of Vol 3 is very sweet to me. It reads very much like a ride or die, I will follow you into the dark sort of situation. Everything these characters know has been completely flipped on its head, but all they can think to do is keep pushing on. Keep moving forward. And it’s clear that at this moment in time, Ruby and Jaune need each other to do that. Yes, Jaune has Ren and Nora but he lost his partner. And we know that that loss has him pushing Ren and Nora away for awhile. He doesn’t know how to grieve with them. He’s afraid. Ruby doesn’t have her team anymore at all. Yang is despondent. Blake is missing. Weiss was forced to go home. She leans on the people she knows she still has, but we have to assume she also feels the absence of Pyrrha in that space. Everything in Team RNJR/JNR is kind of fragile. They want to pick up the pieces and do the next right thing, but it’s also very hard to do so when there’s so much they’re not saying or doing.

Ruby and Jaune have excellent little moments of casual intimacy as well. There’s a real softness between them. And again, this is not necessarily a romantic reading of their connection, but it’s not NOT a romantic reading. Jaune’s double down on his belief in her before the fight against the Nukaleve, his determination to keep her safe from Tyrion, even butting heads with Qrow (another dynamic I love to scream about,) Jaune is always just so steadfast in his faith in her. The same way that past all the teasing, Ruby’s faith in Jaune is a huge part of his confidence as a leader. Their reunion in Argus is my favorite moment between them. He is so relieved to see her alive and she just wants that moment to feel good and light so she reminds him she promised they’d see each other there. And he has to smile. And they share this lovely hug that feels so cozy and safe and like something they both needed. There’s so many important relationships and bonds in this story, but I really do think that outside of the main four, this one is imperative to the narrative. It’s one that we as the audience have literally followed since the beginning. Any way you read the relationship, they are so important to each other and their connection is a driving force in their motivations. They make each other better.

But we’ve reached a point now where these two haven’t had a lot of time with each other since they took on their own challenges in Mantle and Atlas. Not to mention the new and unique position they’re in with Jaune having aged rapidly in the Ever After. We have Ruby at her weakest mentally. She’s lost all hope. She’s feeling the weight of everything she’s learned and she’s seen and she’s done, and she’s gonna have to reckon with Jaune’s decision to mercy kill Penny on top of that? Now, I fully believe that Ruby is typically the kind of person that after an emotional initial reaction, she would sort of step back and be introspective. She would offer that understanding to the best of her ability. It would be hard no matter what, but she would see Jaune, Jaune especially actually, for who he is and why he did that and not focus on the action itself. But again, this isn’t Ruby like we know her. This is Ruby already wrecked by grief and on the cusp of just completely giving up. She might really lose it over this, and her and Jaune could have an incredibly difficult moment. Maybe even a division we see follow them for awhile. But I think that would only add to the emotional impact of their relationship. Again, they are sharing a profound grief that cannot be felt by anyone else. Ruby did everything she could to keep Penny around, and she lost her anyway. And Jaune would have never wanted to do what he did but he put Penny’s wishes first, even if that left him in a much worse state. We all love Penny and we understand her naivety in that request, but it’s hard not to at least think about the quiet cruelty of it. We know Jaune agreed because he wanted to do what he thought was best in that moment, but we as the viewer have to try to see it from all angles. He’s the one who has to live with that decision, not anybody else. And he has to know the way that might affect his relationships with other people, particularly Ruby. They are always balancing on these scales, I think. They’re trying so hard to do the right thing and when either one of them makes a misstep, it’s the other that seems to help move the weight. Now we’re in this precarious position where it could be Jaune’s actions that tip Ruby really far down. And that’s fascinating because it’s so easy to sympathize with both sides. We hurt for Ruby’s loss and we hurt for Jaune’s too. He also loved Penny, but there’s all these other layers. He had to take a life, which isn’t something he ever wanted to do, much less an innocent one: one of somebody he cared for. But also— there’s one other person who once ended a version of Penny’s life. Pyrrha. And I know deep in my bones that that thought crossed his mind. Pyrrha is always with Jaune. Literally and figuratively. What is the sword he carries, and killed Penny with, forged from?

This also draws a new and specific thread from Pyrrha to Ruby and Jaune’s relationship. Ruby knew Pyrrha didn’t mean to kill Penny 1.0. I don’t think she ever even thought about that. But again, Ruby isn’t the same person she was the first time she lost her.

Idk. Much to think about. I love Ruby and Jaune so much, individually and together, and I’m very anxious to see what’s in store for them.

[h-emera]

Guide on making custom coat presets. (Allows for better quality custom coats)

31/08/2023: The guide has been updated to reflect a step I missed - when exporting your custom textures, make sure to select "generate mipmaps", the step is reflected in more detail under the appropriate part. Ctrl+f and enter "mipmaps" to skip to it.

16/10/2023: Updated to add more info re: generating hash ID's.

Okay, I decided to throw this together. There's some things I can't figure out still, but oh well, we're just getting through this as we go.

To clarify what I mean - this is not a stencil or a brush.

This will appear here:

To preface this guide though, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to make it appear as an individual option in-game, so, these are considered SWATCHES of the original coats.

Okay, with that out of the way.

Things you'll need:

Sims 4 Studio

GIMP

Probably Notepad, but it's optional on how easy it is for you to track things.

Guide:

These are the tools we'll be using in S4S.

Start by creating your empty package, once you're done, open up Game File Cruiser:

before you do ANYTHING, make absolutely sure that the search bar below the file list has "EP14" in it, otherwise you will 100% end up editing a cat or a dog coat pattern and that's now what we want, at all.

Add the first horse file to your package

In our case, it's the Lusitano Dapple coat, don't worry, if you're making a breed-specific coat, you can change this later.

Now that it's been added to our package file, it should look like this:

We now have two options, I'll explain this to those who don't care about creating a game-generated thumbnail and want to find it easier.

To make your "test" thumbnail, you'll want to copy the instance ID of the file we just added to our package:

It should look like this, the instance ID should be in 2nd from the top search bar, then, select all and click filter (it just makes life easier than finding the specific file type).

These are the current, in-game CAS thumbnails. We'll add both of them to the package, they're for ponies and adult horses.

Now you can export these two pictures (They need to be saved as .png's), edit them as you'd like and then import them back into the package.

Now, you CAN add up to 5 different pelt layers that can be easily recoloured in-game, however, we'll only be working with two pelt layers in this tutorial, because it's a tutorial and you'll learn how to make more of them anyway.

Click on "Pet Coat Pattern" and then look over the data:

From there, Click on "PetPeltLayers":

The first pelt layer is ALWAYS a solid colour, we'll begin by copying the LayerID (Instance ID) and going back to game file cruiser.

Just like previously, you should keep EP14 in the search bar and just use the instance ID bar to find things, as that's all we'll be doing.

Add the Pet Pelt Layer to your package file, then, copy the "texture key" from the Pet Pelt Layer:

Then find the Texture Key:

This is the solid colour layer, it HAS to be there as this is what will help you edit your base colour. Add this to your package file.

Now, our package file will look like this:

Unfortunately, we're not done, just yet, we'll want to grab at least the second PetPeltLayer:

Just like before, we're going to copy the ID and find the Pet Pelt Layer + the Texture for this layer:

Now, our package file will look like this:

You can now go ahead and close the Game File Cruiser, we won't be using it anymore.

Right now, this is our package file and we need to do some cleanup first.

We'll be opening up the PetPeltLayers once more and we'll remove the last 3 entries:

You should be left with only two entries, as that is what we'll be editing (leaving the other 3 will break the preset).

Now, we'll start generating new hash codes for everything:

Edited 16/10/2023: When generating your hash ID's, please use your creator name ie.: "[YourCreatorName/Blogname]TutorialPetBreedCoatPattern11", this will give you a more unique hash code than hoping to be as descriptive as possible when generating the hashes (in this case instance ID's).

Thanks to Mizore Yukii for this advice, from Creator's Musings discord.

As in my previous guides, be descriptive with what you're typing there and then just change the last number.

The process is annoying and slow, so bear with the images, and follow along.

The TextureKey coloured in red is the 3rd ID you'll generate, it's what links the texture to the Pet Pelt Layer, which links it to the Pattern we're creating. (Sorry for the squished thumbnail, open it in your browser, I was running out of picture space for the rest of the tutorial lol).

And now we repeat this for the second Pet Pelt Layer.

Now, if you want the game to just generate the thumbnail for you, you can skip this step, if you want to make a custom thumbnail, then copy the Pet Coat Pattern Instance ID into the two Thumbnails we've added to our package file:

This is what the package file has to look like at this point.

Now is the relatively easy part, editing the second RLE 2 Image. We won't touch the base, because it's not necessary.

I recommend using the Horse Diffuse Map as a base when you're drawing your pattern. It'll be easier to see what you're doing. You can download it here: Horse Diffuse Map.

Remember, that your pattern HAS to be white, black space is IGNORED by the game and considered a "transparent" layer, so that you can see the layer beneath the you're working on.

This is my quick, and lazy test one I've made, I use a PNG of the Diffuse Map as a base and on a separate layer I draw with white coloured brushes:

You may notice the very straight lines on the diffuse map - make sure to colour OVER them as if you do not, it will appear in-game because those are the seams where the mesh "meets"

Once you're satisfied with your pattern, you can go to export, just make sure that the white pattern is on a separate layer to the diffuse map. At this point you can add a black background underneath the white and export.

All you have to do is export the RLE2 Image you've edited as a DDS image in the L8 format and (edited 31/08/2023) select "Generate mipmaps" otherwise you will experience a glitch in-game where the coat disappears. You can leave the mipmap options as default, it should work correctly.

Then, we're going to import it into our package and save our package:

Remember to not touch the completely white base coat!

Now that this is over, we'll go back to Pet Coat Pattern and edit some settings.

The first three settings is what I recommend changing around. The first setting changes the breed, the second setting changes how the coat pattern is labeled and the third setting changes the colour it's tagged under.

Only change "TagValue" - it will give you a dropdown menu, don't change anything else. The TagValueNumber changes automatically, so don't worry about it.

EDITED TO ADD:

Additionally, don't forget to go into "PetPeltLayer" and change the colours, this is what will show up as "base" colour that you can change in-game. You can change them for every PeltLayerData file you have.

Now, save and go test it out in game:

Bada bing, bada boom we've got our "custom" coat preset.

If I've forgotten anything, let me know. This took me 2 hours to write, so forgive my typos. If anything is unclear, let me know. I ran into a struggle with the picture limit on Tumblr (found out that it's 30, I should move my guides somewhere else, but where?)

[oldfashionedmorphine]

well now i can’t say “nobody asked for this…”

(dear anon, i hope this helps!)

fyi—i spend way too much of my time looking things up for this fic… and this is some of what i saved when it came to outfits/hair and also just some basics info/stuff :)

———————

mike in 2004

hair: styled like johnny depp’s hair in the 90s… he’s kept it shoulder length or longer since 1986—he ditched the bangs at some point in the early 90s! and since he doesn’t dye it, there’s some gray throughout

outfits: white or black t-shirt’s, black jeans, and converse high tops are still his bread-and-butter base. his style is pretty consistent because he’s not a big fan of change—he likes what he likes! it’s just super easy for him to throw something else over a plain t-shirt and walk out the door.

overall: he doesn’t typically keep his face clean-shaven, call it laziness, but sometimes he will wait two weeks or more between picking up a razor. he’s still skinny because he doesn’t always eat right, skipping meals because he gets too distracted with video games, but years of drinking are starting to take a toll and reflect in his skin, at times looking sallow

———————

will in 2004

hair: styled basically like whatever hayden christensen was doing to his hair in 2003/2004, also not a fan of hair dye, and also as he got older there was a bit more wave to his hair

outfits: wears lots of flannels, band/graphic tees, polos, button ups with sweater vests, jeans/corduroy/khaki pants, adidas/saucony jazz/new balance style sneakers—usually laid back but he will also use any excuse to dress it up! wears square-framed tortoiseshell glasses since 2001 (when he had to renew his driver’s license he couldn’t pass the eyesight test—got his eyes checked and sure enough he needed glasses!)—and included that picture of noah wearing glasses cause when i saw it i was like, wow yeah, that’s not too far off, just change the frames and age him 15 years… lol

overall: usually keeps his face free of any stubble, also has a few gray hairs but not as many as mike and he likes to walk or run for exercise to better keep in shape, in the summer he’s been known to pick up a tan, and he has one tattoo—the word “love” written in morse code under the scar from where nancy burnt him with a hot iron [ .-.. --- ...- . ]

———————

holly in 2004

(holly is 24, about the same age as kristen bell so I kinda picture her from veronica mars season 1 but with long hair/dyed like cady heron from “mean girls”—holly watched the movie earlier that year and liked the look!)

outfits: low rise flare jeans, denim jackets, fitted shirts, canvas vans sneakers, low top converse

———————

el in 2004

hair: long, always past her shoulders at least—she doesn’t like cutting it short for obvious reasons—she also dyes it and never skimps on spending money to maintain it and loves adding things like butterfly clips or barrettes with sparkles

outfits: she loves fashion and experimenting with her wardrobe. lots of delicate details and whimsy. a lot of what claire danes and anne hathaway were wearing 2002-2004

what she’s up to: el never went to college, but attends a few business seminars in between all her world travels and eventually invests some of her government hush money into opening a vintage/antique shop in hawkins that her and joyce run together.

el’s exact outfit from ch 8!

———————

outfit inspiration for mike + will in 1999 (aka for ch. 15)

mike: black jeans, ochre yellow striped button down, and of course he would’ve worn his typical converse shoes if he had to physically travel to the house that night, but alas… lol

will: brown dress shoes (normally wears sneakers, but for special occasions he gets fancy), light wash denim with navy turtle neck, plus brown leather jacket

(yes… i purposefully made them wear each others colors 😏)

———————

the mood board i made for nancy + jonathan’s wedding in 1993

(i’ve posted this before but idk how many of you saw it lol)

of course there is more i could add and sadly there’s things i’ve since cleared from my phone like the picture i had saved of a wedding dress i thought nancy would wear… but if there is anything else you’d like to know, i’m always down to talk more about this story! send me a message—you don’t have to stay on anon unless you wanna, but i don’t bite!! ;)

[banannabethchase]

✨Fic Writing Review 2023✨

Tagged by the lovely @aidaronan

Gonna put all this under a cut as it is a doozy. Me? Rambling? It's just as likely as you'd think from the everything about me.

Words and Fics

497,498 words published on ao3 (Jesus fucking Christ - that doesn't even count my ficlets)

101 fics published on AO3

Enough tumblr ficlets that I don't have the spoons to go back and count them all

3 in-progress fics that may or may not be in the yeeted into purgatory sometime soon

3 new fics in permanent purgatory

1 new fic that I killed within 500 words

9 series created/added to

Top 3 by kudos

Hungry Heart - HangMox, AEW

[tie between] Intrigue - HangMoxMatt, AEW and A Convenient Cancellation - HangMox, AEW

I Can't Promise Forever (But I'm Working On It) - HangMox, AEW

(Realizing now that holy cow do my HangMox fics do better than I thought. Also all of those were published before I put my account on lockdown, I think, so that contributes as well.)

Fandom Events in 2023

Threecount Exchange! I mean, it kicked in this year. Everything gets published and finished next year, but still, it counts!

Upcoming Projects

Threecount Exchange fic (no you will not get details mwahaha)

The final installment of the House of Black Magic series, which is also my final square on my Bingo Board

Days 10-31 of the December Prompt Challenge I for some reason made for myself, which includes the finale of a series (I shan't disclose which)

At least 4 more installments in the Matt Experiments universe

The teacher's AU I've been putting off for about a year

Writing reflection

What a frickin' year. I haven't been in a fandom like this since Scorpion which, for those who know, ended poorly for both the whole fandom and me as a person. I was unable to watch the season 4 premiere due to my Dad's death, and then it got cancelled before I could catch up. Jumping back into a fandom head first, after how miserable my last one ended, was scary but incredible.

I beat NaNoWriMo 3 times in one year for the first time since 2016. I wrote two novella length fics and a novel length fic from December 2022 until now. I've made friends with incredible people, learned how to use tumblr in a way that keeps me safe, and learned that I've grown past the person I was when I let other people drive me out of a fandom for writing fic in a way I enjoyed and being autistic. I feel safe in this fandom, not for the lack of drama (lord knows there's plenty of it), but because I've created for myself a space where I know I can trust the people I follow.

I am excited to vault headfirst into 2024. I have no predictions. I have no expectations. I just have hope, and I think that's enough.

But I really do hope I can keep writing, even if it's at a different pace from 2023.

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please do eat glass, I’ve heard it’s good for your gums.

Tagging [please view the rules! I think they are great rules!!! Except the glass thing, don't chew glass. If you don't want to do this, please feel free to ignore completely]: @sarahcakes613, @booboo-eyedbambi, @scissormedaddyass, @rosabellebelieve, @anairbri. As always, if you see this and want to try it, I tagged you :) (And if you don't want to do this, pretend I didn't tag you.)

[kob131]

So some recent new info for SMTV: Vengeance came out along with me seeing a kind of dumb take has lead to wanting to talk about my thoughts on SMT V and my thoughts on Vengeance before release.

SMT V

Gameplay is good. It's the same old SMT stuff with a couple of changes. Magatushi skills are a cool new addition, if centralized due to the immense strength of Omigatiki: Critical. The massive nerf to Charge/Concentrate is pretty annoying, making them kind of useless since they only boost damage by 80%...when attacking twice would deal 100% more damage. And the nerfs to buff/debuff skills in both MP cost increased AND being temporary was too much in my opinion. You were often forced to add another layer of buffs to prevent them from expiring...which would cause a boss (read: Demi-Fiend) to use Dekaja/Dekunda, making it mute anyway.

My real compliant is that the difficulty in the game was pretty low for a mainline SMT game, especially with bosses using Magatushi skills telegraphing a certain attack...which makes it easy to use an item to block/reflect the attack which ends their turn. This rhythm makes it very easy to beat bosses. Hell, a selling point to the Shiva boss fight was that it was actually fairly challenging with the selling point of the Demi-fiend DLC being the final fight's brutality.

Exploration was pretty good too. Lots of space to manuever around demons so you could explore, relics to pick up for money, Mi-mans scattered around to encourage exploration. Even some side quests which were alright.

Visually the game's great. It's something you have to see to know but everything is rendered nicely, the models are all well made, the game's art direction is good if a bit samey due to the post-apocolaypse setting and the attacks are stunning. Same with the sound direction, especially Shiva and Demi-Fiend's boss themes.

The story...is probably the weakest part. It's not bad- Dazai is a reall interesting take on a Law-aligned character, the Chaos route is perhaps at it's most unique, Amanozaku was really cute and funny and seeing Lucifer's true form was absolutely worth it. It's just...Yuzuru and Tao are EXTREMELY underexplored and thus their motivations just aren't given for the most part, Bethal's inner conflict was just pulled at the last minute, Abdiel required you to know her myth to her understand her actions.

And...the true ending's requirements (of helping various demons) go completely against the true ending's details (creating a world without demons). Especially with Miyazu and Khoutsu, who you help then completely fuck over along with Amanozaku.

With SMT V, I really like the gameplay and visuals. But when I think about it, I can't help but also think of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. How that game's visuals were shot with it's release schedule and it ended up looking worse than SMT V...but also how a Pokemon game, a game based on child-like power fantasy, is able to have more fleshed out characters and a more compelling story than an SMT game, a series based on engaging the player with questions of philosophy.

I bring this up because of Vengeance.

SMT V: Vengeance

I think that balancing the level scaling is a good way of showing that you are addressing the complaints people had.

I also think that the Combo Skills added in could give incentive to play with themed teams and I love the look of the demons too. And things like a new difficulty and an increased level cap makes it even more replayable.

However...I dunno about the new story. A new story doesn't necessarily make it better since the original's flaws are still there. And unless time has been taken to smooth out the story- it'll just have recurring issues as well. I don't feel the new story is better or worse- I just hope they gave the writers what they needed this time to make sure it works.

I feel far more skeptical about the new 'unique' skills. I remember the Traits being added to Persona 5, an already very easy game, and they...basically lowered the difficulty even further by adding benefits without drawbacks to a game that already gave the player so much. This was fine then, since Persona wasn't built in a way that needed crushing difficulty. Thematically, tonally and visually- Persona 5 and Royal were suited for easier gameplay.

SMT...isn't. It needs that crushing difficulty to fit with the series' atmosphere, tone and themes. All these elements synergizing together is what makes SMT so special. Hell, it's these same features synergizing that makes Pokemon so special too. Making a Pokemon game too hard to the point of basically forcing the player to use a certain party goes against the whole point of Pokemon. And likewise-making the game so easy that there's no pressure goes against the point of SMT. And giving the player more options without ACCOUNTING for those options will lower the difficulty.

As for Demon Haunts- I don't know if I like them. The whole point of demons is that they're fairly amoral creatures who don't really care about you or their care is fleeting and capricious. It's why you can basically shove them into a blender and make a new, stronger demon with no guilt- the demons' don't really have a bond with you so you can sacrifice them for more power. And you HAVE to do this because a demon that starts at a higher level will almost always be stronger than a demon that leveled up to the point with better stats, better moves and more opportunities. So trying to let the player bond with the demons that they are encouraged to dispose of when the time is right seems counterintuitive. Especially with the true ending to the original game, where you basically DITCH these creatures for humans you've known for far less time.

All in all- I am excited to see what changes have been made. But I'm also concerned that this could be SMT starting to lose its distinct identity. My hope is for a more solid story and more challenging boss fights.

[hydrus]

Version 556

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.zst

I had an ok week. I fixed some bugs and added a system to force-set filetypes.

You will be asked on update if you want to regenerate some animation thumbnails. The popup explains the decision, I recommend 'yes'.

full changelog

forced filetype

The difference between a zip and an Ugoira and a cbz is not perfectly clear cut. I am happy with the current filetype scanner--and there are a couple more improvements this week--but I'm sure there will always be some fuzziness in the difficult cases. This also applies to some clever other situations, like files that secretly store a zip concatenated after a jpeg. You might want that file to be considered something other than hydrus thinks it technically is.

So, on any file selection, you can now hit right-click->manage->force filetype. You can set any file to be seen as any other file. The changes take affect immediately, are reflected in presentation and system:filetype searches, and the files themselves will be renamed on disk (to aid 'open externally'). The original filetype is remembered, and everything is easily undoable through the same dialog.

Also added is 'system:has forced filetype', under the 'system:file properties' entry, if you'd like to find what you have set one way or the other.

This is experimental, and I don't recommend it for the most casual users, but if you are comfortable, have a play with it. I still need to write better error handling for complete nonsense cases (e.g. calling a webm a krita is probably going to raise an error somewhere), but let me know how you get on.

other highlights

I fixed some dodgy numbers in Mr. Bones (deleted file count) and the file history chart (inbox/archive count). If you have had some whack results here, let me know if things are any better! If they aren't, does changing the search to something more specific than 'all my files'/'system:everything' improve things?

Some new boot errors, mostly related to missing database components, are now handled with nicer dialog prompts, and even interactive console prompts serverside.

I _may_ have fixed/relieved the 'program is hung when restored from minimise to system tray' issue, but I am not confident. If you still have this, let me know how things are now. If you still get a hang, more info on what your client was doing during the minimise would help--I just cannot reproduce this problem reliably.

Thanks to a user who figured out all the build script stuff, the Docker package is now Alpine 3.19. The Docker package should have newer libraries and broader file support.

birthday and year summary

The first non-experimental beta of hydrus was released on December 14th, 2011. We are now going on twelve years.

Like many, I had an imperfect 2023. I've no complaints, but IRL problems from 2022 cut into my free time and energy, and I regret that it impacted my hydrus work time. I had hoped to move some larger projects forward this year, but I was mostly treading water with little features and optimisations. That said, looking at the changelog for the year reveals good progress nonetheless, including: multiple duplicate search and filter speed and accuracy improvements, and the 'one file in this search, the other in this search' system; significant Client API expansions, in good part thanks to a user, including the duplicates system, more page inspections, multiple local file domains, and http headers; new sidecar datatypes and string processing tools; improvements to 'related tags' search; much better transparency support, including 'system:has transparency'; more program stability, particularly with mpv; much much faster tag autocomplete results, and faster tag and file search cancelling; the inc/dec rating service; better file timestamp awareness and full editing capability; the SauceNAO-style image search under 'system:similar files'; blurhashes; more and better system predicate parsing, and natural system predicate parsing in the normal file search input; a background database table delete system that relieves huge jobs like 'delete the PTR'; more accurate Mr. Bones and File History, and both windows now taking any search; and multiple new file formats, like HEIF and gzip and Krita, and thumbnails and full rendering for several like PSD and PDF, again in good part thanks to a user, and then most recently the Ugoira and CBZ work.

I'm truly looking forward to the new year, and I plan to keep working and putting out releases every week. I deeply appreciate the feedback and help over the years. Thank you!

next week

I have only one more week in the year before my Christmas holiday, so I'll just do some simple cleanup and little fixes.

[fussyspace]

Those not finished, part 2

At this stage of the competition, we're just meant to read 10-30% of a book and vote yes or no on whether we want to continue/the book should advance. The team's votes are then added together to find the top 10-12, which we then read in full and score.

These are the books I gave a no vote to and didn't finish reading. There are some I finished reading and still voted no to (usually when they were short enough that it wouldn't take long to get to the end).

A no vote doesn't necessarily mean a book is bad. Please also remember that these views are my own and may not reflect the rest of the team.

Arter, Sylas Seabrook

Word count: ~88,100

Cover: It definitely screams 'space'! I can't really tell much about what it will be about from the combination of the title and cover, but I at least get the genre, and it doesn't look like Earth, so that in itself is interesting.

Blurb: 'For a hundred thousand years, Sumatta has reigned as the source of all life on the planet Arter. Arter is a pangean continent whose skies are filled by a constant aurora and whose science is based off of aten, small bits of energy captured by nature which harness the fundamental forces of nature.

'Unel seeks to use aten to connect Arterians through their dreams in hopes of one day allowing Arterians to communicate through the mind directly. Finding the right aten and the right design for his device, the draumr, proves frustrating, and he finds himself relying on the support of his bonded (wife) to complete the project.

'As he discovers the necessary formula and they begin a family, Sumatta brings a message. Sumatta, Guardian of Ages, brings a message of a new age which will change Arter forever and give new meaning to Unel’s hopes for the draumr device.

'This story was 6 years in the making and is the first in a series of books which will take us deeper into the world-building of a universe of universes filled with characters who seek to better themselves, save the worlds the know, and the gods who play amongst them.'

There's a fair amount of information being dropped in the blurb, and while it sounds interesting enough I do wonder if it could have focussed more on the plot without getting bogged down by terminology or explanations. The thought of inventing telepathic/dream communication is intriguing enough to interest me.

Vote to continue at 30%: No

Content: I admit that when I read Arter's blurb, I saw '6 years in the making' and was immediately concerned that this would be a little book with a lot of worldbuilding shoved into it. This was either an irrational fear or, I suspect, brought on by the slightly info-dumpy feeling I got from the blurb itself. In any case, the first chapter played into my fears. While the main character Unel conducted experiments into some kind of telepathy, terminology dropped left, right and centre, and I found myself swimming, with increasing disinterest, through name soup.  Nothing hooked me until his 'bonded' came in trying to 'distract' him. More on that later.

I was confused by the fact that atoms appeared to be solid and visible in this world, which led to a question that I never really had answered to any degree of satisfaction – were the Arterians aliens who just saw things differently to humans? Their appearance was described as human-like, with no features distinguishing them. It often felt like they were just humans on another planet, but because I knew they weren't meant to be, my mind kept substituting the aliens from Strange Planet, but with hair. And boobs. We'll circle back to the boobs later. This was a consistent question that really annoyed me, especially when I encountered suggestions that there were other planets and non-Arterians, but I never got enough information to be able to tell the difference between the two. I even have a sneaking suspicion that one of the characters that appeared later was non-Arterian, but I just didn't know for sure.

I found the next chapter more interesting, as it drifted over to their religion and introduced a pretty neat four-dimensional tree along with its Readers, trained to read the patterns of the (later somewhat phallically described) god that visited via the tree. Still, not much happened, and I found the fact that 'it' was used as the Reader's pronoun incredibly off-putting compared to 'they'. This was coupled with a more widespread issue that sometimes occurred with typos and odd sentence construction.

Now let's circle back to the bonded and the boobs. A significant chunk of early chapters focusses on the relationship between Unel and his bonded (i.e. wife), which hooked into a pretty interesting worldbuilding aspect whereby fertility is controlled by expensive eggs that have to be collected from a certain species on the rare occasion the god rocks up to activate them. It was a brilliant hook for a dystopia, but the book didn't seem to be going in that direction. What we did get to read was a rather cringe-inducing slice of the couple's life, including Unel licking cream of his bonded's nipples and them saying they love each other many, many times.

The women, in general, felt rather sexualised and universally occupied rubbish positions in society. I found this very unusual, given the complete control they have over their own reproduction, which I felt would have improved their lot over human women. I also found it interesting how easy it was to reverse the polarity of the magic sex eggs and make them deadly, which I feel should probably have had more impact on their society.

The book began to get slightly more interesting when stuff started to explode, but at that point it immediately put me in another PoV with a new character I didn't care about, followed by yet another. And what should have felt like a big reveal relating to their god's true nature and intentions was told in two sentences rather nonchalantly when it could have had a much more impactful reveal.

All in all, Arter's setting had a lot of promise, but it didn't have much to hook me and was let down by its vagueness around species, its pacing, and the weakness of its women. As such, I did not keep reading past 30%.

Replika: Sky's Mission, Hugo Bernard

Word count: ~82,200

Cover: Bright and shiny, it suggests something code/tech-related, so that's pretty on brand for what the blurb suggests.

Blurb: 'Reality is an illusion worth fighting for...

'Earth’s ecological collapse is avoided when most of the world population agrees to permanently upload into Replika, a simulated reality maintained by the AI. But the stability of this world is threatened when a group of neuroscientists hack their own brains to interact with Replika in unforeseen and dangerous ways.

'Sky devotes her life to rebuilding the real world left dysfunctional from the massive exodus into Replika. But when she learns her brother, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, is in danger, she must choose which world needs her most. All she wants is to find the brother she loves, but she will unwittingly get entangled in an attempt to redefine the reality of humanity’s future.

'With a strong cast of characters, REPLIKA is a wildly inventive and fast-paced sci-fi adventure that raises profound existential questions about the role of simulated reality in our foreseeable future.'

This comes across a little clunky to me for some reason, but the thought of neuroscientists hacking their brains to cause havoc within a simulated reality sounds pretty cool. I also like the emotional stakes of Sky having to choose whether to go after her brother in there or not.

Vote to continue at 30%: No

Content: This kicked off with an interesting prologue where a fourteen-year-old kid is preparing to go into a different reality – a task for which he must lose all his memories. I was intrigued, and I was miffed on his behalf at this seemingly unfair stipulation, but I was destined not to hear much about that for the next 30% of the book I read.

That 30% kicked of by introducing a bunch of new characters – mostly a woman being tortured for information and a guy working in a virtual pizzeria. It was there that we got our first taste of 'the virt', which isn't the same as Replika, as you can keep your memories and dip in and out of the virt. It seemed like some kind of digital twin/augmented reality/Second Life arrangement. A terrorist attack happened in Paris that was relatively interesting to hear about but brought me no closer to the titular Replika, which felt like it would have featured more heavily in the book from the outset. At this point I wasn't sure what was going on and was fairly certain I was going to forget who all the characters were.

A good part of why I found the going tough and got a bit bored was the fact that I never really got any sense of emotion from the characters. The point mentioned in the blurb – Sky needing to go into Replika to find her brother – sounded like it should have been emotionally huge, and while the text gave me the reasons why it should be huge, I never got the emotional impact of that. The text relies heavily on having the characters' inner monologues tell us stuff, even when that stuff is repeated in dialogue a paragraph later. This is coupled with relatively passive narration that keeps some distance from its third-person perspectives. Technically, there are also a fair few commas that should have been semi-colons or new sentences, and the dialogue sometimes felt a bit stiff.

I stopped reading at 30% because Replika itself still hadn't made an appearance (beyond, if I remember correctly, a brief conversation with its avatar) and I was bored of being told everything. I had formed so little emotional connection to the characters that I didn't even care when one of them got kidnapped. It's a shame, really, because the premise in the blurb sounded great, but it took too long to get to the point and got bogged down in its characters' heads.

Zero Gravity, Elizabeth Pridgen

Word count: ~83,500

Cover: The cover suggests storms, that's for sure, and 'Zero Gravity' is a pretty descriptive title for the plot, so it's clear what you're getting into. It's quite simple, but I like it, and the linear artefacts are interesting. It's a fun font, too, but I have always been a big fan of those Dymo embossing machines, so I am biased. I'm not quite sure what the tagline 'Onward with the future' refers to with regard to the plot, though, as it makes me think of either time travel or forwards progress at a civilisation level.

Blurb: 'The world is in a crisis. Almost all power is lost, the U.S. government has collapsed by a terrorist organization known as The Ravagers and there are unexplained, brief episodes of gravity loss which leads to numerous accidents, casualties and little to no arcas for shelter. Marlowe Benson is one of the few living Americans left in the United States, but has been separated from her partner, Jayden. After being rescued by other remaining survivors, they struggle to not only fight back The Ravagers but to find safety from the horrific gravity loss episodes known as "zero gravity attacks".'

A bit of a clunky blurb, really (after writing this impression, I did find a more up-to-date version on Amazon, so I assume the Goodreads page needs updating), but it sets the initial scene. If there's a whole terrorist organisation, it seems weird that the main character can be one of the few living Americans, unless the terrorists a) aren't American or b) were mostly wiped out by the storms. I'm probably nitpicking, but to me 'few' suggests you'd struggle to bump into people most days, let alone see enough people to have to fight back at anyone. In any case, the titular zero-gravity attacks seem to be a bit of a sidenote here, but the thought of them is interesting.

Vote to continue: No

Content: I would like to say that most of the issues I had with this book were due to the fact that it was submitted as a Word document and I had to reformat the whole thing manually. Unfortunately, they were not. (I would remind authors to please read the rules when submitting. This wasn't the only book we had to convert to the epub stipulated in the rules.)

Before I get into those issues, let's briefly cover the book itself. I admit I didn't get far, so can't comment much on this, but we alternated through a past and present with a few encounters, including the main character being hit by a zero-gravity storm. Here, the name didn't seem to fit – it was enough to make me doubtful, though writing in hindsight and having not noted it down, I can't remember if the storms were caused by zero gravity or simply named such. In any case, the first storm saw the main character able to kick things without pushing off in the opposite direction with equal force and also flipped a car seemingly at random. There didn't seem much logic to it. I didn't find the alternating times worked in this case, and the whole thing felt quite disjointed. While the blurb held some potential for an interesting story, my quibbles with the premise continued. It didn't seem at all believable that the US government had somehow been bumped off with no prior warning or fanfare, not a peep from the army, and with no one having noticed a terrorist threat powerful enough to pull that off to begin with.

What were the book's main issues? Editing. It needed it. Speech tags were incorrectly capitalised, many sentences made little or no sense, characters' body parts were described as doing things rather than the characters themselves, it failed to use the pluperfect when necessary, was overly passive and overused sentence fragments. It also seemed to jump in time, with characters being there one second and gone the next, though I couldn't tell if this was just a formatting issue that had stripped out the scene breaks. And a bizarre one: at one point it called a subway crash genocidal, which seemed a flagrant misuse of the word (unless someone had specifically shoved people from an ethic group on the train and then crashed it, which didn't seem to be the case).

All in all, I couldn't get past the 5% mark before I had to put it down.

[tipsycad147]

Making a Magick Self Care Routine-Daily Witchcraft

Self Care has become a major buzzword on Social Media.Spa Days, Retail Therapy, Coloring Books, you name it. But what if you could use your magick to set up a easy low cost self care routine?

The Magick of Magical Self Care

If you are new to witchcraft, you may be question what magick is and how it works, much less how it can apply to self care. In a nutshell, magick is using the energy inside and around you to manifest positive things in your life. Whether spells, manifestations, wishes, spell jars whatever you choose to use. Each pulls energy and emotions to activate what you want to happen.

But what does this mean when talking about adding it to your self care routine? Self Care and Witchcraft are closely related. Both involve listening to your body, your spirit and your intuition. The main difference is witchcraft adds some extra tools and techniques.

Don’t believe me? Name off the 5 most popular self care suggestions. Got ’em? Bet at least a few include things like: journaling, baths or showers, candles,meditating and going outside. If you’ve been part of the witchcraft scene for more than a week I bet you’ve used all of these at least once over the course of your magick.

Adding Magick to your self care routine involves listening to your body and soul to find out what you need. By adding a self care ritual to your daily/weekly/monthly routine, you invoke deeper physical and spiritual healing and closer connection to the Universe and yourself.

Making a Magick Self Care Routine

The following list is just a few of the ideas you can add to your self care routine. Set it up for as often as you need. A 5 minute break to deal a tarot card or drink some tea is better than no break at all.

But! Be Authentic to yourself. If you don’t like something on the list, don’t do it. Change it to what benefits you. Only you know what you need. Use this to create your own individual path. And don’t make choices out of convenience or to strictly please others. You can’t pour from an empty cup, self care is how to refill that cup.

Work with the Moon Phases

If you don’t have time to make a self care routine everyday, set aside time once a week instead. Coordinating with the moon phases gives you specific actions to focus on depending on the cycle.

Full Moon – Celebrating. Giving Thanks and Gratitude.

Waning Moon -Releasing and Banishing. Going within for Spiritual Growth.

New Moon -Reflection. Setting intentions and goals.

Waxing Moon -Taking inspired actions.

By using these 4 phases, you can work on manifesting new goals, overcoming blockages in your physical, mental or spiritual life or just take time to manifest good energy for yourself.

Schedule out time on or around each moon phases( one day before, the day of or the day after works best). Set up a ritual as simple or as elaborate as you would like. If you like baths, take one. If you want to drink tea and talk to your tarot cards, do it!

Divination

By adding in this small routine every day, it helps you get into the right head space for the day as well as allowing you a glimpse at the possibilities for the day. Doing a reading first thing in the morning while you drink your coffee/tea/ favorite drink helps you to prepare for whatever you may need for the day.

Crystals

What Witchcraft post is complete without some crystals? If you’ve been following along all year then you know I mention crystals a lot. I feel that the energy crystals project helps to influence our energy and increase it. Some of the best crystals for self care, depression and mental health include:

Smoky Quartz

Lepidolite

Rose Quartz

Tiger’s Eye

Hematite

Selenite

Amethyst

Black Tourmaline

Carry these crystals on your person or place them around your home or sacred space. Keep a pouch in your car to boost your energy while commuting to work. Remember to cleanse and charge them frequently for optimal energy.( Check out my Crystals for Beginners post for more info on how to cleanse, charge and use crystals. Find that here.)

If you like to make your self care routine part of your beauty routine, check out the jade or rose quartz facial rollers!

Astrology

I’ve seen people who’ve read their birth charts and it’s mentioned every significant life event that’s happened in the past 5 years! But on that note, if you do read something in your birth-chart you don’t agree with, don’t feel that you’re doomed/destined to do only that. You can change your path at any time.

Energy Work and Spells

This is where the magic really comes in! This is probably the most important one considering most magic is energy work anyways.

To add energy work/ manifestation spells to your routine, Be very clear about what you want to bring into your life. Ask yourself questions like How do you want to feel or want to be? What do you want to have? Visualize yourself as having already achieved these goals or being where you want in life. Add in any required herbs or tools to boost your magic.

This type of visualization is great as a daily reminder and pick me up. Write down 3 things you want in life and leave it where you can see it everyday, preferably multiple times a day. Read over it frequently and visualize these goals as having been achieved.

Hearth and Kitchen Magick

Enchant your favorite tea or coffee with feelings of contentedness and comfort. Add herbs to your lunch, dinner or snack to encourage motivation, success or relaxation. Set up altars in your home that bring you feelings of happiness.Make a healthy hearty meal or your favorite sweet treat. There’s countless ways to use hearth and kitchen magic in your home. Just pick the ones that feel right to you.

Practice Gratitude

This is more about changing your mindset than it is actual gratitude. Use your journal or a note pad, write three things you are grateful for everyday. By looking at things in a positive light, your mindset changes to look at things from the good side.

Kinda like the saying every cloud has a silver lining or you get out of life what you put into it. If you notice yourself making a negative statement, mindset or thought, simply correct yourself to a more positive outlook. This affects the energy around you and will influence it to become more positive as well.

Create a Sacred Space(Or Spaces)

When people have an area to retreat to so they can recharge, or just an area to call their own, it immensely helps to prevent breakdowns, burnouts and shutting down. By creating sacred spaces around your home( or room if you live with parents or roommates) you create an area attuned to you.

When setting up your space, ask yourself these questions. What kind of space relaxes you? What helps you to slow down and just breathe? Is it time to declutter or reorganize my space? Is this personalized the way I want? These will help you decide how and what you want to change about your space.

Check out Pinterest for tons of DIY tutorials for things like plants, decor and inspirations. Keep it as simple or elaborate as you want. If you live in your own home or with people who are open to your magic, feel free to set up cozy spaces in every room! Use an assortment of crystals, plants, wall hangings, incense and candles(if you are able to burn things that is. Not everyone can handle incense smoke or some apartments don’t allow open flames. Check out sage spray and other things like essential diffusers for smoke free alternatives.)

Allow yourself space to Express yourself

One of the biggest weaknesses of hitting creative and emotional burnout is that people don’t take time to express themselves. Adult coloring books are helping with this, allowing people to create just for the sake of creating but there are tons of ways to encourage your inner child to break free.

By indulging in “childish” activities, you allow yourself a freedom to relax and have fun for the sake of having fun. When you are able to access your creative side freely, it increases your magical potential.

A Sample Day

Feel free to adjust your self care to your schedule are needed. Not everyone performs the same magic, works the same schedules or eats the same foods. Your path should fit your life. A day of adding magic and self care to my schedule looks something like this.

Morning

Get up and make coffee. Stir with intentions I want to manifest for the day.

Draw 1-3 tarot cards asking what my message for the day is. Write them down in my journal.

Get dressed for the morning and join my mother for all of our morning outdoor chores.

Open up and feed the chicken. Love on my favorite hens and rooster.

Feed and milk the goats and sheep. Ask one of my deities to watch over them especially as we get close to Lambing time.(Brigid, Freya, Hestia, Demeter and Pan are my normal go tos)

Come back over to the house(we live next door) and Feed the toddler for the morning.

Afternoon

Spend the day cleaning and playing, working on the blog or making products for the store.

While Munchkin is napping, light incense and turn on my preferred playlist for the day. I normally spend her nap time working but try and take at least one day a week to just relax with a movie or a book.

Evenings and Weekends

When Mr. Moose gets home we spend time as a family until its evening and time to close all the animals up for the night again.

Everyone gets baths or showers to clean up. I spend the end of my shower letting the water wash over me and cleanse all the energy and stagnant junk from the day as well as charging up for the next day.

On the weekends I try to spend time with Mr. Moose as well as take some quiet time for myself. I like to water all my plants, reorganize and clean my altar and working on ideas for the next week. I make sourdough bread every weekend that I bless with energy to keep my family strong and healthy. If Mr. Moose and I share a drink I’ll leave some in a shot glass on my altar for the Gods.

Now realize this is just a sample of what I do. Not everyday looks like this, and I don’t always add self care in every single day. But I try to make time at least once a week for a dedicated self care time with small blessings and intentions scattered throughout the day.

When I start having issues with burnout and stress, I drop everything but the essentials from my day and just try to take space to breathe and chill. That’s the upsides of being able to be flexible and customize what you need. Magick and self care is about listening to your spirit, body and intuition for what you need right now. Make sure you listen.

Some Notes about Self Care and Magick in General

I want to make sure you know outright. Self Care and especially Magick are not cures or fix-alls for illnesses, depression, bad jobs etc. They will help immensely if done consistently but these methods and techniques are purely to influence and empower things you are already doing.

But on that note. Don’t stress yourself if you are suffering from a bad episode of depression, health or anxiety. If you struggle to get out of bed on a daily basis, just do what you can until you can baby step back to where you need to be. Seek out medical or physical help if you need it and know you are loved, you are important and you are beautiful.

Make the Most of Your Self Care Routine with a bit of Magick in your Life

I hope you leave here with some ideas you can add into your life as well as ways to help improve it. Self care is important and is one of the most forgotten aspects of being healthy and at your best. Using the magic you already have inside you as well as setting up a consistent routine will help to make sure you get the most out of what you need. Magick on!

[luxremodelscompany]

Great Ideas to Help You Update Your Bathroom in Phoenix Az

Small inexpensive changes can go a long way in making your bathroom more functional and beautiful. These small changes, in many ways, represent you and your personality, so when you add them, all that you’re doing is making your bathroom more personalized to reflect you. It is important to make sure that your bathroom upgrades are completed by trustworthy and professional home renovators.

Here are some ideas to enhance the look and use of your bathroom, without breaking the bank.

Add the “wow” things

Spruce up your bathroom with some “wow” things that you find in online stores, retail stores, or even antique shops. These things can be anything such as an oddly-shaped or intricately-designed mirror, chrome accent shelves to hold a beautiful vase, copper towel bars, beaded boards, wainscoting, paint, or just about anything else that makes your bathroom different from the standard run-off-the-mill designs.

Paint

A fresh coat of paint can add a lot of life when you update your bathroom. In fact, it’s a cost-effective way to update the way your bathroom looks. If your cupboards are stained, sand off the old paint, and apply an updated stain color. Also, smooth out any damages with fillers, apply a coat of primer, and finish off the a topcoat color of your choice. Organize your cabinets

If you’re always looking for something in your bathroom, then it’s time to organize your cabinets. Add pullout shelves to your cabinet to make it easy for you to store all your things in one place. Such shelves also make organizing easy, as you can allot one shelf for related items. A related bonus is that you’ll have better control over your supplies, so you won’t have to buy more of the things that you already have.

Shower finish

Are you bored of staring at the same wall while taking your shower? Well, you don’t have to anymore. Add a few interesting tiles, such as a band of accent tiles, black liner tiles, or multi-colored ones if you want to spice up the bathroom wall, to adjoin the shower and vanity areas. This will update your bathroom with very little expense.

Rustic appeal

To add some rustic appeal to your bathroom, shop for a wooden table at flea markets or antique stores and convert it into a stylish vanity. You can even add some plumbing to the top of the wooden table to mount a faucet. Also, consider adding a water-proof or moisture-proof paint to the table for a longer life. This table will also be handy to keep a vase or even essentials.

Lights

Lighting is an often overlooked aspect of a bathroom, but it’s also the one that can completely change its feel without costing a lot of money for you. While shopping for light fixtures, look for something that’ll add a dramatic touch to your bathroom decor or something that would even give it a layered look.

Countertop

Just spending some money on the countertop can infuse a new breath of life to your bathroom. Choose a countertop that matches the wall colors and the overall theme of your bathroom, to ensure it blends well and gives a new aesthetic appeal.

The above ideas are simple and cost-effective, and at the same time, can greatly alter the way your bathroom looks. If your budget is tight right now and you are looking for some financing options then be sure to check out what we have to offer here at Luxury Remodels Company.

To know more about bathroom remodeling contractors phoenix az please visit the website

Name: Luxury Remodels Company

Address: 8350 E. Evans Rd STE B7 Scottsdale AZ 85260

Call Us Now: 480.550.8774

Email: info@luxremodels.com

[greenplumbboblover]

The Goth Manor - A Resurrective Renovation (Little CC Necessary)

Or well... just a makeover! What better than a makeover to start the new year

About

In the 11 years, I've been playing this game, this was the only house in Sunset Valley I was always a bit too nervous to give it a makeover. Partially, that was of course because of the somewhat complex architecture of the house itself, but also for the fact of accidentally ruining the 'theme' of, what is the trusty Goth Manor we know!

However, in my latest rotational gameplay round, when I got to the house, I just felt that the more I played in it, the more... bland it felt? Especially compared to all the other houses in Sunset Valley that I had prettified (Whether small changes or massively). Thus, the end result!

Download: MTS | Patreon (Free as always)

CC Required:

TS2 to TS3 Fence Pack by CircusWolf

Fancy Alternating Quoin Wall Expansion by cutsocks

The Spectre Mausoleum Roof by simgrassalidale

The Sims 2 Apartment Life Windows by megativity13

DIY Build Set by armielNatural Garden Edgers by HugeLunatic

Greenhouse Build Kit by Shakeshaft

One More Slot Please! by granthes

Cottage living Chair by AroundTheSims

Cottage Living Stove by Around The Sims

Mighty Mansard Redux! by QahneEnchanted Ivy by Murano

(More info under the “keep reading”)

Some of the goals

Initially, I started with some changes that just help regarding gameplay, and initially "quality of life changes". Not sure about you, but Gunther for example, would never cook in the kitchen! Instead, he'd always just start barbequing hotdogs. This meant that my dude had to walk all the way to the fridge to get it... And that's why I decided to create an outdoor kitchen bit  (Also, because in my game they usually have tons of parties). In my save currently, Mortimer is also a teen, and usually when he becomes that, I have him explore some science-y skills. (Handiness, Science and Logic) Whereas as a child I'd have him pursue some creative skills as well as collecting bugs and sometimes gems. Usually, his bedroom is so small that all that stuff just doesn't fit, so it's now quite common in my saves to have him re-purpose the attic to his own (And add some more clutter to it to make it feel like an attic! ) Regarding the idea of the greenhouse, Cornelia happens to have the "perfect garden" lifetime wish, but the house doesn't nearly reflect any signs of her pursuing that. Therefore I felt that adding the tons of plants and 'harvestable plants' (and the greenhouse ) was the right thing to do. That way, she can happily take care of her garden and hopefully pursue her dreams finally! (She sure did in my game!)

Colour Scheme

Regarding the colour scheme, the original house had some interesting colouring going on. While it showed a good "old house is old" theme, it would also not show it as much in other parts of the house.

For example: The master bedroom would be all greyed-colored and old-looking, just like the attic, but the livingroom and the guest room were all fine and somewhat 'new' looking.

That I hoped to fix with coming up with a primary colour scheme for the interior: Green and red, with a touch of various 'aged' woods  (since not all aged woods turn grey!). I also hoped to therefore give a really nice touch of a more 'rustic' parts of the house, but also something you might remember from the Addams family's house (primarily the 1964 one), but with more elements where you notice the house has been around and lived in for a long while. Hence the flower-patterned curtains :p

I also felt that regarding the outside, having a second colour with the white-greyish added a nice touch to the house. A lot of old victorian houses (particularly American victorian houses, usually renovated though), you notice that they usually went with a white and then a touch of whatever-colour-fits. I did feel that going with green just felt like a good move, since it also made it so it wasn't too "popping" with the greenery around it.

Architecture

While I didn't change too much, I was always bothered by the 'front door' (the part with the kitchen). Compared to the rest of the house, it just felt that the devs tried to fix it up a bit but didn't quite know how. So I decided to add, what a lot of victorian houses have, which is a porch!  Might make it a bit more spooky too

Now, you might also wonder while looking upon the images and think: "Why the secret vampire basement?". I'm not sure either But in my save, I wanted to make a secret vampire "bed & breakfast" part, where they could hide from whatever endangerments they face. Because... Sunset Valley doesn't really have many places for them to go, especially compared to Bridgeport.

Additional Info On What comes with the house as well:

The Living room Fireplace is Fireproof, because that's also one of the quirks whenever I play this house, and that's the fact that there is always a fire

In the Greenhouse we have the following Plants: 3x Wolfsbane, 3x Melonaire grapes, 1x Wonderpetal, 1x Forbidden Fruit, 1x Lavender, 2x Ghost Chillies, 2x Pumpkin.

In Mortimers room we have the following pets: Ancient Dragon (Fafnir), Spiny Turtle (Tortimer, sorry I had to :p)

The Fishes in the Conservatory: Octpopus (Aristotle), Deathfish(Teresa), Shark (Manquer Piqures... sorry for my bad french :p), Tragic Clown (Aeschylus, named after a greek tragedian, "the father of tragedian"), Vampire Fish (LaCroix, because I can  , Although to be fair, I almost went with Damsel)

Throughout the house you may find the following flowers (happy plant hunting!): 1x DeathFlower, 1x Cortado Bean, 1x regular Grapes, 1x Life Fruit, 1x Greenleaf, 1x Mandrake, 1x Gralladina Fran, 1x Pumpkin, 1x Mycenas

The following Spawners can be found: 1x Beetle Spawner, 1x Vampires Eye, 1x Crypt Moth, 1x Gem Spawner (Alchemy), 1x Butterfly Spawner Glowy, 2x Fresh water Designators, 1x Fresh Water lake Rare, 1x Fresh Water Lake Uncommon 2, 2x Fresh Water Lake Commons, 1x Insect Spawner (alchemy)

The house comes with 2 magic gnomes in case you haven't noticed in the pictures

Lot Info Size: 60x60 Unfurnished Price: 212,604 Furnished Price: 346,204 Regarding the graveyard, all the graves are exactly the same. So you'll find Gretle, Victor, Simon, Prudence and Lolita in there. I didn't give them a makeover or anything, just moved their graves around Other than that, there are no actual sims included with this download! (If you want the Goths to live in it, do make sure to use the cheat "freerealestate" )

Download: MTS | Patreon

[recurring-polynya]

Do I mind if I ask how you approach writing longer fic? I've always struggled to write anything more than maybe two chapters long and I'm curious if you have a particular method to how you approach such stories.

Thank you so much for this ask! I absolutely love it when people ask me for writing advice because it makes me feel like a Smart Person Who Knows Things.

Before we start, here is one grain of salt to take all of this with: I have a naturally long-form brain. It is very hard for me to write something less than 1k. Short fiction is great, and there is nothing wrong with sticking to short things if that's what your brain likes to do.

So. You have decided to write a story. This is going to focus on "stories". Some people write fic that's more freeform or whatever, I am not going to cover that. What I mean by a story is this:

It starts

Some stuff happens

It ends

It is highly probable that your story contains a change of state, which could be that a villain is defeated, or a goal is reached, but it could also be that character falls in love with another, or someone learns to like broccoli.

I like to start out by completing the sentence, "This is a story where _______". This is basically like coming up with a summary for an ao3 post, except that it doesn't need to be catchy. Lots of different kinds of things could go in that blank! It could literally be what happens: This is a story where Ichigo goes back in time and punches young Aizen in the nose. It could be about what you want to explore: This is a story where Hitsugaya gets a better understanding of his zanpakutou. It could be about the vibe you want to achieve: This is an AU where everyone is in a punk rock band and has cool hair and outfits. The idea of this is to clearly define what you, the author, is interested in writing. Make sure it feels right! Maybe you pick the first one, but when you say it out loud, you say, "You know, I really just want Ichigo to go back in time so he can horse around with young Renji and Rukia and punching Aizen in the nose is just an excuse for that." That may sound dumb, but it's fine, actually! Most people don't read stories strictly for the plot, they read stories for the implications of those plots! Will my favorite two characters kiss? Will there be funny interactions between these two groups of characters? Will there be sick fights? Stories are excuses to have scenes. Sometimes, you will have a story where the interesting sequence of events is the draw, but the point is to know what you're about.

Once you feel happy with your "mission statement", you need to decide the bounds of your story: where it starts and where it ends. It may be easier to start with the end. In some cases, it may be obvious from your mission statement: everyone gets home, a villain is defeated, Kenpachi realizes the meaning of friendship. On the other hand, let's look at that punk rock AU. You've picked a vibe, but you don't really have a natural story arc. It has to have a destination, though, otherwise, it's not really a story, it's a recipe for 3 chapters of an abandoned fanfic. So brainstorm a little: Maybe they get a record deal? Maybe they win a Battle of the Bands? Maybe Byakuya accepts that the band is actually good and tells Rukia he is proud of her. Do not settle for a plot just because it works. Pick something that makes you excited! You're the one who is gonna have to write it!

I said that we needed to pick a beginning point, too, but I'm actually going to skip that for now. The next thing I do is think of all the Big Scenes I want to write, the ones you are hype to write, the ones that pop in your head as you think about the premise. Make a bullet list. They don't need to be in order. The descriptions don't need to be super detailed, but write down anything about it that is important to you. If there's a mood or a snippet of dialogue or a joke you want to make, go ahead and jot that down so you don't forget it later. What you're doing now is putting broad blotches of color on a canvas, filling in space and leaving the detail for later.

Once you are pretty happy with what you have down, try to arrange it in chronological order. Put your end at the end (if it wasn't one of your big scenes, add it now). The next task is figuring out how to traverse your scenes. You've already picked out where you want to spend the majority of your energy. The rest, I regret to tell you, is your slog writing. Now, it often happens that you will find joy in some of these scenes and your best writing may occur there, but that's serendipity. These are the scenes that you are gonna have to make yourself sit down and write, so you honestly want to limit them to just the ones you need.

So how do we do this? Look at the first thing on the list. Can you start there? If so, congrats, that's your beginning. If you can't, what needs to happen to get to there? Where can you start so that you can get to your first fun scene as soon as possible? There. That’s it. You’ve picked your beginning, good job! Now, go through the rest of your list, and add in things that must happen, even if you don’t particularly look forward to writing them. The characters need to travel from geographic point A to point B. Shuuhei needs to say something that Izuru hears and misinterprets. The Central 46 makes a new law. If you have a good idea of how these things happen, go ahead and write them down, but it’s okay if you don’t know yet. Fill in all the blanks so that if you think of each bullet list as a scene, you could read it as a story, start to end. Once you get writing, you might add more scenes, or move things around or whatever, but you should have a thing that functions as a story.

If you struggle with this, an alternative is a story with a very strong structure that is going to guide you though what you have to write.Here are two examples from my own stories Hold On, Hold On (which is only one chapter, but the principle is the same) is structured around the 5 stages of grief. Not Broken, Just Bent takes place over roughly a week, and I just decided what happened every day of the week. See You on the Other Side takes place in the middle of a bunch of canon events, which worked at mile markers.

Congratulations. You’ve just made a rough outline!

Special note for avoiding burnout!: I am a slogger. I will drag myself through the broken glass of an interminable plot to get to a single thirsty scene. That's why, at this stage, I try to look at the ratio of what I want to write to what I must write. It's gonna vary for everyone, but this is a hobby, and if looking at this proto-outline makes you feel deeply tired, maybe this isn't a good story to be devoting your time to! Can you carve it down? Can you chuck two scenes you really want to write and get rid of 80% of the slog? Or maybe you can't! In that case, just write that thirsty scene as a standalone drabble! Or just go work on something else! Maybe in the future, this one will come back to you and you’ll have a fresh idea or a renewed enthusiasm for it.

Another thing I sometimes like to do at this point is to write out some notes about my characters and their motivations and moods. Character A is homesick. Character B is so determined to defeat the enemy that they are having a hard time being sympathetic to Character A. Character C cares for both A and B and is trying to support them both. This is sort of background info that you want to keep in your head as you are writing. Depending on the type of story you are writing, this might actually be the main plot, or it might be happening subtly, but adding to the emotional impact of the story. It’s very easy for me to write these sorts of emotional arcs, but if you struggle with that, you may wish to go ahead and made a more detailed outline for that, too.

Now, it’s time to start writing! I am great at beginnings-- it is very often the case for me that the opening scene was one of my Big Tentpole Scenes. (Before you hate me too much, I make up for this by being double horrible at endings; just let me have this) Usually, I will start at the beginning and write linearly for as long as I can until I get stuck. Then, I will look forward on my outline and do the next chronological scene that I feel like writing. In general, if I sit down to write and there is something I have an urge to write, that trumps everything else. Inspiration is a precious commodity, and you should embrace it when it hits! You can slog any day. I will occasionally hold off writing a scene that I really want to, because I am saving it, like a prize for myself for getting that far. This is a very personal process of figuring out what motivates your brain and then giving your brain what it needs to be its most productive.

Eventually, you will run out of things you are excited to write, but the good news is, you’ve got a bunch of story now! Odds are that what’s left is going to be a lot of those connective tissue scenes, and you’re just going to have to do them, except that now, because you’re connecting two concrete points instead of two abstract points, it will be a lot easier. You can continue running jokes you’ve started. Maybe you invented a cafe in an earlier scene where your characters hang out and you can have them return there. Try to think of ways to make these scenes more fun, both for yourself to write and for your reader to read. 

Around this time, I like to start refining that rough strokes outline into what I will call an “as-built” outline. (This is an engineering term where you update your plans or models for something to reflect any changes that had to be made along the way). This is a great activity to do at times when you feel like you have writers block. I write down every scene I have written as a 2-3 word blurb, in order. I break the scenes into what I think makes logical chapters, and I will do a word count on those prospective chapters and write it down. As you do this, you will realize that maybe you can move a scene from here to there, which will make it 1000% easier to write. Things may be happening too much, or you’ve got the characters eating three times in the same chapter. If you have subplots and dangling threads, this is where you make sure they get closure. I know this sounds very headache-y, but you are so far along in the story at this point that it’s really not-- it’s a way to look at the problems you have left. Use some sort of formatting (I like to bold things I haven’t done and sometimes I put them in red) and it gives you a very visual to-do list.

You specifically mentioned multi-chapter fanfics and I admit that I don’t tend to think in chapters, I tend to think of the story as a whole and just break it up where it feels natural. The as-built outlining I described is very helpful in making sure that my chapters feel balanced. They don’t necessarily need to be the same length, but I like them to have the same amount of stuff in them. One chapter may basically contain one long scene, and other may contain many short ones. I don’t tend to, but you can certainly have a fanfic that varies between short and long chapters, that can actually be an interesting effect. But like I said, I always like to know what I am doing, and so having it mapped out, you can say “welp, this is what I’ve done, how do I feel about that?”

Polynya, you may be saying at this point, do you write the whole fanfic before you post any of it? and I regret to inform you, the answer is yes. A lot of people write as they go, and I have made one attempt at this and I didn’t like it. I don’t like locking myself in, I just need to be able write out of order and go back and change things. Here is the story of a little in love: someone gave me an AU prompt and I got mildly obsessed with it, and wrote 5 snapshots drabbles in that universe, ending with a slight cliffhanger ending. I probably should have stopped there, but I decided to keep going. I wrote out an outline of 5 acts where the first act was detailed to the degree of each chapter being specified. The chapters here were much smaller than I usually make chapters: 1-2k. I wrote act i and ii and it was actually great, and then I hit act iii which required a lot of set up for misunderstandings and a mini romance arc. I couldn’t wing it, but nor could I figure it all out with outlining. I write dialogue in almost sort of an improv “Yes, and...?” style, so until I do it, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, what I did was treat the second half of act iii as a complete story in the process I describe above, wrote the entire rest of it, and then posted it. One might notice that the chapter lengths grew to 3-5k each. I have two more acts to go, and I haven’t decided how I am going to do them yet, but I suspect I will treat each of them as their own mini-stories.

(I will admit that in Heart is a Muscle, I tend toward chapters that are about 10k long, and this is honestly too long, someone should smack me. If you like punchy chapters, 1-2k is good. I think 3-6k is probably an ideal chapter length. Is this how long the chapters are in my latest fanfic? Absolutely not.)

Okay, so there’s one more step, which is quality control. I am habitual re-reader-- I read my fanfics-in-progress over and over and over while I am working on them. I understand that not everyone does this, but I am usually the primary audience for my own writing, and this is the actual fun part for me. Nevertheless, you should re-read your work at least once, to make sure it hangs together.

This is purely optional, but I recommend it: get a writing friend (if you don’t like re-reading your work, I recommend this even more strongly). If you can get a full-service beta reader, that’s great, but if you can’t find someone, or if receiving that level of critique stresses you out, it’s perfectly valid to just find a friend who will read your stuff and a) shower you with compliments, b) reassure you about parts you aren’t sure about (or suggest ways to help) and c) point out any huge problems you missed. When I am writing a long fanfic, it is a huge motivational factor for me to be able to send my beta chapters as I finish them. If you are already an established writer, and you have people who consistently comment on your fic, they might be overjoyed to get a sneak peak at your work.

And that’s it! That’s the way I do it, anyway! Some people are able to sit down and write a very detailed outline and the write it start-to-finish. Good for them, I say! I have tried this and it doesn’t work great for me. I will admit that some of my fics (especially my early ones) I just sat down and banged out whole-cloth like an insane person and they are generally better than the ones I actually plan out, but that’s not a reproducible process.

As one final mechanical note, I usually write in Google Docs, which I can access on multiple devices (I used to write a lot on my phone), has convenient sharing functionality, and I use the ao3 html formatting script add-in. I generally have two documents for a single story-- one is the outline, and any other notes I want to have handy. I’ll usually put a trashcan space at the bottom for scenes that got cut but I don’t want to lose. The other is the fanfic itself.

I hope this is helpful! Please feel free to follow up with other questions and good luck with your writing!

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player. 

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded. 

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

[dontloseyourpants]

Stripped on Stage

A commission I received from @gaystripstories! You can also find him on Twitter here. And you can support him by buying his stories on Amazon here.

I'll out the actual story below the cut. It's about a cocky young Broadway bound hunk who has an embarrassing incident on stage during his big debut. Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!

Before the Show: 

Hey, just wanted to stop by and wish everyone a great show! 

A sea of blank faces stared up at him, but he kept plodding on to get the reaction that he  desired. Walking further into the crowded dressing room, he finally stopped right behind me. 

I miss the camaraderie of being packed down here with everyone… it’s so lonely having  that dressing room upstairs all to myself. I usually just spend time before shows lying on my  couch until first call. 

Looking up, I saw his face forcing itself into what he thought was a genuine smile. For  someone who was apparently a much better actor than our poor little show deserved, he really  had such a hard time hiding his true emotions. 

Roger Stilton had quickly made a name for himself on Broadway. A Julliard grad just  like his rich father, he headed straight to Broadway and began booking any role he wanted. With  leading man good looks, his slicked back dark hair, and a jawline that could cut steel, Roger  actually could have earned his roles without daddy’s donations. 

As I continued looking up at him, I realized two things. First, his blush was much too  heavy for a theater as small as this one. 

Roger, sit down- let me help you out a bit. Quickly standing up in my boxers and  undershirt, I let him plop into my chair before wiping a makeup wipe across that beautiful face.  Here’s a tip when you’re not sure how strong to make your blush- you have to see what it should  be naturally and then add two swipes. 

Quickly taking hold of the bottom of his t-shirt, I ripped it over his head to expose that  chest to the whole room. His perky pecs and six pack abs were to die over, but for some reason,  even with all of that narcissism, he didn’t like showing off his body. 

See- that’s the color you want. 

I saw his eyes connect with his reflection to see the blush covering his cheeks, and I  added a bit of my powder onto his face to match. Grabbing his shirt, he just awkwardly held it in  front of him before walking back out of the room with his parting words flung over his shoulder. 

Well, let me let you get back to getting ready… I just love having a great ensemble behind  me on stage. 

I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. At least not for another week. He’d joined our show  after workshops, and even if I wouldn’t admit it, he was the reason we’d gotten our residency at  our off-Broadway theater. He was already booked for his next role in a few weeks in one of the  larger theaters, but if I had anything to do with it, I wanted to put his name in the news for  another reason. It was time to confirm the second thing that I realized once Roger walked in  here. 

Listen up. Every head turned back towards me this time, but unlike Roger, I could tell  that they wanted to hear what I had to say. I had a couple of decades on all of the younger actors 

around me, and they looked up to me since I’d give them actual advice. We’re a go for tonight.  Raise a hand if you’re in. 

Smiling to myself as I saw every hand quickly raise into the air, I knew that this would be  one show that Roger or the critics in the audience would never forget. I don’t know if Roger  knew that we’d picked up on it, but there was a lot of info that he gave away. He was using us as  a launch pad for some serious acting cred, and we were using him just as much. And for weeks  of workshops and performances, we existed together, but the last month had been different. He’d  starters treating us as disposable ensemble members even if the small cast all had named roles.  So, tonight, on the most important night of his run, we decided to get back at him. Looking up at  the timer on the ceiling above us, I realized that it was almost time for our first phase of the plan. 

Act 1: 

Look at him- if he wasn’t such a huge ass, he could really be the next big thing. Sorry- all I heard you say was huge ass, and I got distracted. 

Playfully slapping Sam on the arm, I kept watching Roger act as we waited for our cue.  Our show was a new take on the classic murder mystery, and each night, Roger dramatically died  on stage. The twist, the reason that we’d made it out of workshops, was that a new killer was  chosen each show. The audience could return night after night and still get a new experience  since we improved a lot and only kept core scenes consistent.  

This was one scene that was always the same, so Roger felt confident enough to ham it up as he looked at the two women in Row 2: The New Yorker and New York Times. They of  course had names, but Roger only knew them as the critics that he needed to impress. And he  truly was acting his ass off… and that was quite a challenge. Those dark gray slacks were barely  

stretched over that ample peach of a bottom, and I was reminded again that I was happy with the  game plan. And as he placed his glass of water back on the table, it was time for round 1.  

Natasha and Joslyn entered from stage left as Sam and I appeared from stage right, and in  a flurry of motion, we began bombarding him with questions.  

Sir, would you like the dinner menu? 

Please. 

Sir, would you like a wine list? 

That’d be delightful. 

Sir, would you like your water glass to be topped off? 

Certainly. 

Bending down, I poured the contents of my pitcher into his glass and across his chest. Oh monsieur, I am so sorry- let’s get you out of those wet clothes immediately. 

Patting him down with the hand towel, Sam walked behind him and began unbuttoning  Roger’s shirt. In utter shock, Roger just sat there staring at the pitcher that I’d laid down in front  of him- the one that looked completely normal. In every other show, a special prop had been  used that only held half a cup of water, but tonight, it looked like I’d grabbed the wrong pitcher  from the props table accidentally.  

There we go- we’ll have this dried and steamed before you even get the dessert menu…  not that it looks like you eat dessert often.  

He tried to cover his exposed chest as we left stage, but the tiny menu couldn’t cover  much. If he pulled it down, he exposed his perky pecs with his dark brown nipples shining under  the harsh lights, and if he pulled it up, you could see the happy trail disappearing into his pants.  As we all stood offstage in one giggling group, we watched the switch flip over in his head. He 

had just made the choice- he could either be embarrassed about being half naked on stage, or he  could continue acting so that the critics would write about how he powered through adverse  conditions. And he chose the second option… at least for now.

Act 2: 

After improving some line about remembering that he had a spare suit in his car, he  quickly walked off stage with his muscular back facing the audience. Once he disappeared into  the curtain, he began quietly yelling for the prop master, but he was nowhere to be found. Also  gone was the random rack of clothes that had been hiding in the wings for decades, so as he  rushed around, Roger only had time to grab someone’s suit coat and walk back on stage. 

Darling! Is it my birthday already? I thought I wouldn’t get my present until tomorrow. 

With her quick change successfully completed unlike her costar, Natasha was in a skin  tight dress and now playing Roger’s girlfriend. Walking circles around him, she began to  massage his tense body, and it seemed to be having an undesired effect on his lower half.  

Can I unwrap my present early?  

I’m so sorry love, but the weirdest thing happened at dinner earlier. I had time to grab a  spot of food before coming here, and then…  

As he began to sit down, the small blazer completely ripped down the middle, and the  ruined fabric fell in two pieces down each arm. Natasha was really hamming it up now as she  jumped up from the prop bed to kneel in front of her blushing boyfriend.  

I was joking before, but what else is about to come off? Did you somehow trade outfits  with a stripper? 

That time in the gym must have really filled out my shoulders.  

Then flex for me, Romeo. Let me see that body that’s all mine.  

Doing as told, Roger stood up and began to flex his muscles as he faced the audience. His  tanned chest seemed to glow under the lights, and I heard the audience getting into it more now.  If there were any repeat customers here, then they knew what normally happened here. Natasha  would have her birthday party, and in the commotion, Roger would meet his demise. But that  always happened fully clothed. 

Roger’s biceps were glistening in sweat, and his trimmed chest hair was as well. He was  breathtakingly gorgeous, and if only he wasn’t so cocky, we would have all adored him. As I saw  that blush spread further across those beautiful cheekbones, I wondered if there was something  more human under there. Just maybe… 

Oh, I just can’t resist anymore- come ravish me!  

With strength that I didn’t know she had, Natasha pulled Roger towards her as they fell  into the throes of passion on top of that bed. The audience was losing it as Natasha’s legs  comically kicked into the air before wrapping around Roger’s ample ass. She was kissing him all  over as Roger tried to break free for his cue. 

Oh honey, that special suit jacket wasn’t the only birthday surprise that I had planned. In  fact…

And this is where everything went so, so right. Roger lunged into a standing position  without even feeling Natasha’s fingers hook into the two small holes that had come undone on  each side of his tearaway pants. I don’t know how he hadn’t noticed earlier that we’d swapped them out before the show, but they’d stayed together right until they were needed.  

In comical slow motion, the back half of his pants fell to the floor as the front stayed  gripped in her hands.  

You got me exactly what I wanted! 

As Natasha jumped to meet him, we all started streaming on stage, holding balloons and  shooting party streamers into the air. The only one that was still was Roger who was somehow so  very, very visible in the middle of all of this chaos. With his pants gone, he was now standing  there in only his shoes, his nylon socks held up with leather garters on those strong calves, and  an impossibly tiny pair of baby blue bikini briefs that were trying their hardest to stretch over his  large frame.  

We all took a cue from the audience and focused on Roger as he stood petrified on stage.  His hands hung limply at his side, too embarrassed to even move them to cover up his impressive  bulge and thick pubes that were showing over the stretched waistband. You could have heard a  pin drop in the eerie quiet before one camera flash went off from the audience followed by  several more. I saw our one underpaid usher try to stop the cameras, but it was too late.  

Finally urged into action as he saw how many photos of him would soon end up online,  Roger finally spun around to try to find his pants, his jacket- just anything to cover himself up  with. Seeing the bed sheet that had been flung into the floor, he reached to grab it, but I was too  quick and stepped onto it to keep him from getting it.  

Standing back up, he had rage in his eyes as he looked at me, and he had no idea that  even more photos were taken now of him. From the back, his tiny briefs had been wedged  between those glorious cheeks, and he was exposing almost every inch of skin that he could.  

It was you- you’re the one that did it! 

He was about five minutes early with that line, but Roger’s embarrassment had finally  taken over his need to impress the critics. That was usually what he said when he discovered who  the killer was right before falling to the ground, but now, he was saying it to me even though  Joslyn was the one who’d dropped the ‘poison’ into his pasta in the previous scene.  

What are you talking about? It’s me- your best friend! 

A best friend wouldn’t do this on the most important night of their life! 

Reaching forward, he grabbed onto my shirt and yanked it apart. Buttons went flying as  my own chest was exposed to the crowd. My mouth was trying to hard not to break into a smirk  behind my trimmed salt and pepper beard as I backed away from Roger. Following me back  under the lights, he just kept going. 

You’ve always been jealous of me- my career, my body, everything! Do you know how  hard I’ve fought for this? Do you?  

He truly believed the words that he was saying even though he’d never had to go to an  open casting call in a crowded building downtown. He’d never had to squeeze into a borrowed  pair of LaDucas and dance for hours just to be told that they’d gone in a different direction. Oh  no, Roger had never felt rejection like that which is what would make what happened next even  sweeter.  

He lunged at me, and we fell in a heap on the floor. The audience, even the return  viewers, probably had no idea that anything had gone wrong. Everything we’d done had been in  character, and only one thing would be able to prove to them that this show had gone off the  rails.  

Roger’s body was gyrating around on top of me, but he never landed a punch. He wasn’t  angry enough for that, but he was too flustered to even know what to do. He couldn’t handle this  humiliation, and he was just lashing out. And then, it all stopped. As we tussled, we both heard  the pop and froze. It could have been anything, but we both knew exactly what it was. 

The Final Bow: 

And the award goes to Roger Stilton! 

The cameras all swung towards him as he tried to duck down into his seat. This is not  how he wanted awards season to go. He had just lost the Best Actor award for his starring role in  Thoroughly Modern Millie, and he was about to go to the bar until he heard his name called  again. Looking up at the big screen, he saw the category that he didn’t even know that he was  nominated for- Best Quick Change.  

With the DramaDesk award in hand, the late-night talk show host who had no business  being here walked on stage. I was sitting on the side in the cheap seats, but I could still see  everything. The last time that I’d seen Roger was when I’d been lying shirtless beneath him. I  watched as he sat motionless in his chair, and he only got up once the screen started playing a  video from that night.  

He was kneeling on top of me, and as we wrestled, the tiny strap on the right side of his bikini briefs popped right off. With his ass aimed right towards the camera, his pendulous cock  fell into view between his legs, and he tried to cover himself unsuccessfully with his hands. As  he moved, the rest of his underwear fell apart and landed on my chest leaving him completely  

naked.  

Standing up, he kept spinning around, turning one way and then the other to hide his  embarrassment. His hands were clasped over his manhood which left that ass completely  exposed. His tight waist made his bubble butt even more impressive, and the untanned skin acted  as a beacon for everyone’s eyes and cameras. I’d watched this scene dozens of times from the  comfort of my own apartment, but as Roger walked on stage to confront the host, I realized that  he probably had tried to forget this ever happened.  

When Audra Macdonald won earlier, she serenaded us with a few bars. Roger, what do  you plan on showing off to this crowd? 

The crowd was going wild, but unlike that fateful night, the crowd was over five times  bigger and full of people that Roger wanted to impress. He tried to put on a fake laugh and grab  the award, but even from this far away, I could see how strong that blush was as the host kept  going.  

No seriously, I think we need you to show it off! What does everyone here think?  

I let my cheer join the crowd as we egged him on, but he still wasn’t budging. And then,  the host looked right at me, and I pinched myself to see if this was all a dream.  

Do we need your old costar to come help out? He knows his way around this stage since  he’s performed here a few times. Come on up! 

The spotlight hit me, and now it was my time to feel a little shy. I’d been a background  dancer here in a few awards show opening numbers, but I’d never been up there individually.  Would my big break come decades later than it should have? 

Stepping on stage, I saw Roger’s heart drop, and my nerves suddenly vanished. He let the  host turn him around, and I realized that he was petrified again.  

Make me change my mind, Roger. Why shouldn’t I expose you again for how you treated  us on that show? 

Tommy, please, don’t do it.  

I could have been nice and joked around with him as we walked offstage to pretend like  this was a planned bit. But, he messed up.  

Roger, you didn’t even learn the names of your costars. My name is David- Tommy  worked the sound board.  

And before he could react, I grabbed onto those tuxedo pants and yanked them to the  ground. The button ripped off easily, and they gave me no resistance before sliding down to his  ankles. He’d learned his lesson from earlier and was wearing a pair of black trunks, but I still had  a little bit of humiliation left to give him. I could and should have stopped there, but I didn’t.  Grabbing onto his waistband, I pulled his undies to the floor and stepped back to let him have the  spotlight all to himself like he desperately wanted.  

His half-naked body was projected onto the big screen again but in real time now. His  ample, untanned ass still jutted out from his athletic body, and as he tried to bend down and grab  his pants, it jiggled with every movement.  

Looking down into the audience, I somehow made eye contact with Jan, the critic that  Roger always referred to as The New Yorker sitting not too far from where I’d been seated. As  she began typing onto her phone, I realized that Roger would get that big headline after all.

[enderspawn]

dream smp asagao au, aka the very specific high school au

also aka the post thats very self indulgent for me and maybe 3 other people.

in short: its a dsmp high school au based on the game asagao academy, where everyone is part of a gaming club and compete against one another in tournaments. more in depth info about the AU/Asagao itself, as well as more info about the plot and roles of the AU itself.

Asagao Academy Basics

So to start, let’s cover the basics: what is Asagao Academy. ….well, an old Youtuber dating sim game (which, despite unfortunately including some fairly questionable CCs, IS still really good and well written and I recommend it) But what is it for AU purposes?

Asagao Academy is a highly elite world-wide boarding school set in Japan for those who are either rich enough to afford it, or those skilled enough to get scholarships. Within the game, there are two main clubs: Normal Boots and Hidden Block. They’re both gaming clubs, and joining is seen as super exclusive since they’re ALSO the most popular people in the school.

The two clubs compete with each other in various tournament events with specific categories. For example: Satch (from NB) and Jimmy (from HB) both compete in the “Tech and Invention” category, where they have to create/invent something related to gaming and have it judged at the event like a science fair. Meanwhile, Jared (from NB) and Wallid (from HB) both compete in “Dance” aka DDR and the person with the highest score wins.

The other categories featured in game include: Puzzle games (like Bejeweled or Tetris), Video Game Trivia, Pinball, Retro Platformers, a three-person fighting game, and 100% completion speedruns. So tldr; the categories can be kind of fiddled with and be whatever you want them to be, because even the original ones are pretty wack.

Also, there’s no rules against competing in multiple categories— in fact, most of the HB members in game do! It’s more about balancing time and practicing for them alongside school and other activities.

The winner of the competition is the team/competitor(s) with the most total wins.

Another thing to note: despite competing as clubs, they’re all actually pretty good friends. It’s all lighthearted and fun in the end, hell the leader of the opposing club even helps the main character join the main club just because he wants a decent challenge.

Speaking of… the main character! Hana Mizuno! I don’t have any current plans to include her in this AU (a la new dating routes), but I wanted to mention her for a few reasons.

For the main reason: her hair. Even as soon as she shows up, Mai (her best friend and roommate, who can break the 4th wall) immediately calls her out for her hair for looking like a main character which as we learn… isn’t an exaggeration. She’s literally a born protagonist, thus being born with naturally pink hair and a tragic backstory. Not only that, but other people are also born protagonists with pink hair as well— she isn’t an exception.

About the AU -- Revolution Era

A few things to note: in this au, when I first drafted it I… wasn’t looking to include 20+ people. I cut a lot of characters, but instead working with the idea that they’re still THERE, they just… don’t compete? Either they aren’t in the club and are just friends with the members, or they’re members who just don’t compete professionally. It’s nothing personal against those CCs and tbh as times goes they may get added more, but for now they’re just in the BG vibin.

It covers a really basic retelling of s1 for most of the planned au. It starts with One Club: the Dream Team. Members include: Dream (sophomore), Sapnap (sophomore), George (junior), Wilbur (junior), Eret (junior), and Fundy (freshman).

For reasons, possibly just as a goof or spite towards their American counterparts, Wilbur declares independence from the Dream Team and makes his OWN gaming club: L’Manberg. He takes Eret (a close friend from his grade) and Fundy (the freshman he immediately adopted) with him, causing the two teams to be 3v3.

But Wilbur’s got a dastardly surprise up his sleeve: TOMMY, HIS YOUNGER BROTHER (bc I am nothing if not a dedicated crimebros stan), AND TUBBO. They’re both too young to actually attend Asagao yet, but theres no age rules in the actual competitions so its fair play. They’re Wilbur’s secret weapon. After all, a 5v3 where the team with the most wins wins the competition? That’s a massive advantage.

… we all know how this goes though don’t we. Wilbur’s day be so fine, then BOOM, Eret betrayal 😔

In this case Eret feels it’s a LITTLE unfair to blindside them like that, plus Dream promised to make him the Leader of the Dream Team and, yknow, that kind of stuff DOES look good on resumes, so…

TLDR; Eret rejoins the Dream Team crew, as well as informing them of Wilbur’s plan with including Tommy and Tubbo and becomes leader. They’re still letting Dream and Co. basically actually do the leading, they don’t care that much, the title is just nice. L’Manberg cusses her out and promises to hold a grudge, but it’s all in good fun. After all, they’re just teens goofing around and playing. The clubs are again 4v4.

Dream tells the L’Manberg club that they can separate, sure… under one condition. They have to win the competition. If they lose, they have to rejoin the Dream Team club.

L’Manberg accepts, but come competition day… they lose. Tommy outright challenges Dream post awards to a speedrun competition for L’Manberg instead. …which Dream professionally competes in, and Tommy DOESN’T.

He loses, but he puts up a good fight despite having little to no actual practice put in, so Dream “grants” L’Manberg their “Independence”. (In this au, instead of being like… weirdly obsessive over Tommy, it’s a lot more “he sees himself in Tommy and wants to support/mentor him” and a “friendly rivalry” kind of deal bc its a damn HIGH SCHOOL AU)

So L’Manberg can be it’s own club! …Next year, when Tommy and Tubbo actually attend, since Wilbur and Fundy aren’t allowed a two person club.

About the AU -- Election Era

SO time skip! Congrats, everything up to now has been BACKSTORY. It’s now the next school year, with two main clubs (I’ve tried to keep them fairly balanced, which is why not all CCs are featured, sorry!)

Dream Team club:

Dream - junior

George - senior

Sapnap - junior

Eret - senior

Punz - junior

BBH - senior

Awesamdude - junior

Ponk - junior

L’Manberg club:

Wilbur - senior

Tommy - freshman

Tubbo - freshman

Fundy - sophomore

Schlatt - senior

Quackity - junior

Niki - sophomore

Jack - sophomore

(Also fun fact! Their grades are loosely based on the CCs actual ages! …Except Fundy, who got Baby-fied to fit the “Wilbur’s Kid” joke, and Eret bc it fit better to be the same age as Wilbur I thought. Oops HEKANDNSN)

So, for whatever Reason (listen this was an au I made in like one night when plagued with brainrot, it’s not all figured out), L’Manberg holds an election. Maybe it’s related to Wilbur wanting L’Manberg to be meaningfully different from Dream Team, maybe it’s a joke, idk!

…. SOMEHOW, Schlatt wins. Which ticks off Wilbur a lot. It’s his damn club, and the whole point was to avoid Americans, tf?? The two start to feud a lot and it threatens to split the club entirely via ppl taking sides. Worse, it means people aren’t practicing for the competition.

All while this is happening, there’s a new intrigue building. Dream catches word of an infamous player in the area, someone known to win entire competitions against teams of people all by HIMSELF. A man with bright bubblegum pink hair called Technoblade. That’s right, literal universe-assigned protagonist Techno. If Dream could enlist him, there’s no doubt in hell they’d be able to beat L’Manberg.

L’Manberg hears of him too and works to try and enlist him as well, so he basically gets courted by both clubs trying to get him to play for them to mixed results. He’s pretty chill vibin by himself, so what’s in it for him? (….I don’t know, remember how this is a WIP au I worked on once?)

Eventually, a teacher named Phil (who’s been the honorary sponsor of the L’Manberg club) gets pissed at Schlatt and Wilbur’s fighting and bans both from competing (aka this AUs version of them dying). Which fucking SUCKS for L’Manberg. They’re now going 6v8 with a wildcard player who’s undeclared on which side he’ll join, if at all.

… honestly, that’s as far as I got. Theoretically, Techno joins L’Manberg to reflect Pogtopia and they win. I never had plans to go into s2 due to its darker theme, but there are definitely changes that could (and might?) be made for the s1 plot just so it flows better.

I already had to shift Wil and Schkatt’s “deaths” to fit, unless I were to have them LITERALLY make a new club. Maybe Schlatt uses his power as Club President to make them work with Dream Team (to the point it basically merges the clubs). Sure, they might be guaranteed to win now but it removes the competition and fun as well as the spirit of OG L’Manberg. So then Wilbur rebels and makes his own club AGAIN, calling it Pogtopia with the intent to get L’Manberg back. Then Techno, intrigued with this group of like 2-3 ppl going against a team of like 13ish people, decides to join them. Idk! Alternative possible plot based more closely on s1 I guess!

I’m gonna add a list of characters in full with their age, their club, and what they compete in (if it’s already brainstormed, most ppl are unknown) below

Character List

dream (DT) - junior - speedrunning

george (DT) - senior - coding/tech and invention

sapnap (DT)- junior -

eret (DT) - senior -

wilbur (LM) - senior - rhythm game/guitar hero-esque

tommy (LM) - freshman - (possibly pick up speed running during election arc?)

tubbo (LM) - freshman - chess

fundy (LM) - sophomore - coding/tech and invention

schlatt (LM) - senior - he never actually declares what he plans to play and then gets banned anyway, aka no game kekw

quackity (LM)- junior - dance

niki (LM) - sophomore -

jack (LM) - sophomore-

punz (DT) - junior -

bbh (DT) - senior -

awesamdude (DT) - junior -

ponk (DT) - junior

technoblade (SOLO) - junior - multiple categories

FINAL BIT

here’s some scraps for ppl who know Asagao already as well as small bits I didn’t bother to write up any further

- Karl, much like Mai, is ALSO aware of the 4th wall and has time travel powers because of it.

- Purpled (undecided if he’s a solo player like Techno or has his own team he competes with that’s not a formal club) plays Literally Bedwars in competitions

- Callahan is the Dream Team club sponsor, Phil is L’Manberg’s club sponsor

- Karlnapity is real and canon bc I say so

- both for balance/laziness, every person only competes in one category. also bc it makes Techno that much more Protagonist-y that he does

- I made this AU in like February man idk I’m just vibin

- Fuck I never even included Ranboo huh

[mybg3notebook]

Gale Summarised Analysis

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in May 2021.

The majority of sources used for this article are in the game itself (this includes my Gale-solo playthroughs as well as a combination of the videos by munmomuu and selphie1999), and the few dev’s notes provided by pjenn. Gale as origin is not taken into account since it’s not finished and has little to none Gale-related content. There will be little datamining content as well since pjenn said the game contained almost no gale-related notes (only in the Weave and in the Revelation scene).

Additional disclaimers about meta-knowledge and interpretations in (post)

The number between brackets [] represents the topic-block related to (this post), which gathers as much evidence as I could get.

We can infer about Gale by analysing what he approves and disapproves of. Sometimes, we can even lightly infer some information from his neutral reactions, but let’s be honest: this way of analysing a char is pretty poor since it leaves everything to speculation. Neutral reactions can only be analysed, in very rare instances, by contrasting the same situation in other contexts, and seeing what other options Gale approves or disapproves of. With these considerations in mind, we can proceed to describe this character.

Disclaimer: this is a meta with my personal interpretation of the character, sticking as much as possible to the facts and leaving little to “desires” or “projections” of what I want him to be. If I do so, I will state it explicitly in the text for the sake of analysis honesty. I want to be clear about what is canon (facts shown in bg3 EA), from what’s personal interpretation with little proof.

Understanding Gale (integrated text)

We are none of us monsters. We are merely hatcheries for monstrous things. So we fight them

---Gale 

Collecting most of the information provided in-game, we know he has a cat, a Library, and writes poetry sometimes. One of the first things that Gale will reveal is that he is a private person. He easily and clearly sets boundaries from the first moment, showing Tav where they stand. The second aspect he makes us aware of is his pragmatic thinking and his preference for diplomatic approaches. A third aspect that stands out on its own: he is a very verbose person, maybe as a result of his academia background in combination with his poetry hobby. He also has a bad posture when talking, but I’m not sure if this is intentional or a bug.

We can assure that Gale certainly is a man of the city [13], and may have a decent social status. It's impossible to say for sure if it's noble or rich or both, or it is just a natural consequence of being a wizard scholar: he is frustrated by the harshness of the camping life, he misses the civilisation of the city which offers well cooked meals, soft beds, and scented baths. Not by chance he is the only companion in the group who would approve of giving Oskar 200 gold to fight “the discomforts of the road” [13]. However, he adapts. Despite the lack of luxuries, he managed to survive in the wilderness.

Gale and his link with magic is unquestionable. Magic is life for Gale, metaphorically and literally speaking since it's magic what allows him to stay alive despite the "orb" in his chest. If we talk about Magic, we have to talk about Mystra and the Weave. The Weave is not only the embodiment of Mystra, it's an extension of Mystra herself. It extends across many planes of existence and is in almost all parts of Faerûn. By dragging power from it, Magic can be performed. 

Mystra, for lore reasons and conjectures that I will discuss in the post "Mystra and her Chosen ones", turned teenager/young adult Gale into one of her Chosen, making their relationship more intimate and granting Gale a deeper access to the Weave. This put Gale into the category of an archwizard. It's clear that Gale was and still is a devotee of Mystra, which could give us a hint of his alignment since she is a neutral good goddess and she expects for her Chosen to align around it.

Gale likes confidence, in others and in himself. He is confident in his looks (he has described himself as a “handsome devil” and answered during the romance/Revelation scene that he knew he was beautiful under the light as well as Tav). But beyond these two lines, qualifying him as a narcissist seems extreme. He is surely very confident about his knowledge, and we see he is not just mere words: his Mind Flayer knowledge is at the the same level of what githyankis know. If we compare how Astarion/Tav struggled with the book of Thay, and then we see how Gale manages it (sadly the scene is not complete yet in EA, and there is almost no datamining info of Gale), we can conclude once more that his knowledge and power of the mind are real (he is, so far, the main companion who allows us to explore the lore of the game in a deeper way during his conversations). We also know it's a bit more complicated to intrude into his mind using the tadpole because he has knowledge and mental tools to protect himself (check the post about the Tadpole inside Gale). He is certainly a very verbose and confident scholar, who knows his limits, and in occasions he seems to dabble into an ego-teasing play as an attempt of levity, displaying his “insufferable side”, as he has described himself (his self-awareness of these traits is remarkable, and it is the reason why I avoid qualifying him as arrogant. Arrogant chars are hardly self-aware of their own bad manners or insufferable traits). But we can see it's usually done as a joke or, with an evil Tav, as an aggressive reaction. For a deep analysis of this aspect, check the post about "Gale Hypotheses- Part 2", section: "Narcissism". 

Based on his approvals and disapprovals, we can see that Gale has a strong preference in avoiding fights, violence, and bloodshed [1]. He will always prefer diplomatic and persuasive approaches [2]. Reasoning is his best weapon, but if the individual we are dealing with can hardly be persuaded, he would approve of a deception or an intimidation as long blood is not spilt. Here is where we see his pragmatism in action, all the time. His primary goal at every moment is to avoid bloodshed. His philosophy could be summed up in the line “the means [as long as they don’t kill gratuitously] hardly matter if the end is worthy”. And for Gale, nothing is more worthy than life [3]. This doesn't cover only the life of innocents he cares about, it includes the life of the most dubious characters as well, such as Rugan or Crusher. Gratuitous death is meaningless for him. During the scene of Nettie we can have a glimpse of his philosophy towards life: he viscerally hates treating life as if it were nothing: 

Gale: How dare she snuff out life with as much thought as snuffing out a bloody candle? […] It's not right to feel the cold breath of death in your neck, then move on as if it was nothing but a soothing breeze. One respects life by fighting for it, and one respects death by fearing it.

Gale: One should never be afraid to live life to the fullest.

Probably the limited amount of life he has due to the "orb" increased his sense of respect for life and its celebration. I personally understand Gale as a character who embodies the perspectives of a seriously ill person, knowing that their life may be short, but they will try to make the best out of it. 

He doesn't only respect life per se, he also cares about its dignity. This can be seen in his explicit rejection to undead existences such as Connor (he explains that it would be merciful to put an end to his undead nightmare), or in his disapprovals of humiliation and torture [9]

 We could suspect that this emphasis in protecting any life comes from the fact that only people who are alive can (sometimes) be forgiven or/and change. This is not explicit, but since he is a character who talks about being better and wiser than his previous self, about acknowledging mistakes, about forgiveness, this interpretation seems reasonable. 

These concepts of kindness and compassion combined with “the mistakes of the youth” are repetitive in his interactions and approvals [5,12]. Of course, they echo in his soul since they are reflections and desires of his own experience. This pattern covers forgiving children in particular [5], and disapproving hard judgements [16], especially on matters whose story is not fully understood by Tav. This means he doesn't like quick judgements when he doesn't know the whole story first. This scenario can be easily seen during Karlach's quest, he reserves his judgment until knowing Karlach's side: There are always two sides to each story.

Gale: I have to say I don't know if agreeing to this hunt was such a wise idea. Who's to say who's the real villain in this tale of devils and masquerades? [...]When we track Karlach down, let's chat before we chop.

Similar concept appears during his Revelation scene, when he encourages and keeps asking Tav to listen to him first before judging. This is also the reason why in his Loss scene he would disapprove if Tav quickly assumes that his loss of Mystra was due to arrogance. Tav judged him without knowing the whole story. However, once Tav knows the whole story, Gale will accept any judgement from them without approval penalties during the Revelation scene.

He approves all actions that imply helping others in hard times and disapproves of them if they were done out of greed [4]. He is an animal lover [6,7]. Being kind to animals and treating them good will increase his approval, while animal cruelty will earn his disapproval. Same goes for humanoids: any display of gratuitous violence that could have been prevented with a trick or a diplomatic approach, any humiliation forced upon others, any torture or situation of slavery, is disapproved [8, 9, 11]. 

In particular, Gale seems to advocate the philosophy of “give others their own medicine”[18] or in other words: poetic justice. We can see this during the Myconid colony; he approves of helping the Myconid to avenge the young killed by the Duergar, adding the comment: “Wicked killers deserve wicked ends”. He is implying to give them a similar, wicked medicine to the Duergars. Another less deadly situation of this kind is shown during the foot situation with Crusher: Gale is the one suggesting “pungent poetic justice” and telling Tav that they should force Crusher to kiss their feet. 

The most iconic scene, however, is during Nettie's, if Tav lies during her interrogation. As a hot-headed reaction, Gale states that he would have poisoned Nettie if this situation would have happened to him. Although, after calming down, he approves of and confirms Tav's actions [if Tav managed to persuade Nettie to give them the antidote]

Gale: A taste of her own medicine is what she deserves! […] But you handled it, and you handled it well. 

 In this scene we also see a pattern: Gale is shown as a fallible human; his most visceral reaction during the first moment is anger and indignation, giving us a hint that he is not so rational when it comes to emotional states. An extremely obvious, human concept. 

The scene of Nettie trying to kill a potential menace (the victim of a MF) reverberated in his consciousness, projecting immediately a fact in his mind: if he ever dares to reveal his "orb" problem, and anyone knows what a danger he represents—no matter how stable it looks—people will want to remove the menace by killing him. 

This is the reason behind his words “It's just that, had it been me... had it been...” Gale knows that this simplistic and common thinking in removing what's dangerous would end up turning into a more destructive tragedy in his case than in any infected victim of the tadpoles. So this combination makes us see, for the first time, an emotional Gale. After some seconds, he cools down and returns to his more rational, diplomatic, and moderate self. What we can read here is that Gale would be very prone to rush decisions or to make mistakes under emotional circumstances. We will learn later that the other mistake he made under emotional stress ended up with the "orb" stuck in his chest. A third mistake was done during the party, once more under the emotional stress of a potential abandonment by Tav due to the true nature of the orb. 

Everything related to the “orb”—which is his most traumatic experience—naturally makes him more emotional and prone to mistakes. To see how truly traumatic the "orb" is in his life we can notice the following patterns during the meeting scene: he speaks about the tadpole in a relaxed, rational way, despite the traumatising experience. He first asks for an archwizard instead of for a cleric, because his priority is the orb. Gale's main fear is not the tadpole, but the orb. If we remember his words after the consumption of the artefacts, we realise he lives in a permanent state of anxiety and raw fear, and probably pain too, given his facial gesticulation when anything interacts with the "orb" (whether artefacts or Tav's hand). His banter with Shadowheart reinforces the concept that he always has a knot in the stomach. When he accepts the deal with Raphael, it seems to be related to the orb, not to the tadpole. The effect of the "orb" has ceased, but the tadpole is still in Gale's head since we still need to roll against a high DC and not only against a 1DC during this scene, so we can assume he still has the tadpole despite Raphael's deal. See the post about "The Tadpole" in Gale for more details.

Gale is a character that represents human experiences deeply related to growing up: mistakes done in the past, and the acceptance of not being forgiven despite the desire of wanting to. This can be easily seen during the conversation of the second tadpole dream, where Gale's mood is foul and we learn that his deepest desire is for Mystra to forgive him, but he also knows it's impossible for that to happen. He detects the lie in this dream because he has accepted that Mystra will never forgive him. Gale is the story of mistakes done during youth with grave consequences, of acknowledging them and trying to make them right, of surviving those mistakes, and depending on the interpretation, he is also the story of an ill dying man, with a gentle vision and deep care for life. 

The great majority of his approvals are based on actions that show kindness and compassion, both reiterative concepts that are so important in his character that they come from his lips when we see the goblin party: 

Gale: The shadow within is spreading like poison, corrupting kindness and compassion. [Only after a tough DC of 15]

In combination with: Gale: I don't know myself anymore. All this... It's not who I am. Around you, I'm not who I want to be. I should leave. 

These lines show how, in a sudden change to an evil path, Gale would start doubting his own morality, explaining that the cause of it is the "orb" itself, corrupting the most core aspects of his personality. This corruption may or may not be lore-related. It's not completely clear what Gale's "orb" truly is. For more details, check the post of the "Orb".

 His constant critical thinking comes from his advocacy to non-conventionality [15]: a true scholar will always explore all the options and hypotheses before reaching a conclusion. Therefore, Gale would approve of any non-conventional way to fix a problem [15] as long as it doesn't potentially cause harm or bloodshed [1,2,3,8,9]. Due to his own background, Gale will always advise to be very careful of the consequences of one’s actions. This can be easily seen when, after encountering the caged goblin Sazza, Gale would advocate to explore the possibility of reaching Gut Priestess to cure the tadpole. However, when Tav helps Sazza to escape, Gale will comment briefly against this action.

Gale: I know I said it's not inconceivable a goblin priestess could help us. And yet... was it really wise to set another goblin free so she can arrange introductions? […] consider the consequences. What if she leads her entire tribe to the grove? Tav: I don't care, I owe this grove no allegiance. Gale: No allegiance, no. Though we don't need to sign its death warrant

Once more we see that Gale is up to using any (unharming) means to get a goal, but not at any cost. He has a clear line he doesn't like to cross: life [3]. Avoiding putting other people's lives in danger is very important for him. We see this concept over and over in most scenes.

He doesn't likerushed decisions, and in that same train of thoughts, he will disapprove any use of unknown magic or tricks when nobody in the group can truly understand how they work [17], for example the tadpoles or Raphael's deal (he is against accepting it quickly, but he will approve of having a more cautious attitude and carefully thinking about it). 

Since the moment we meet him, we can infer he is obsessed with the artefacts. It's obviously understandable: he doesn't want to die, but also, he doesn't want to kill all those that will be caught in the eruption of the orb. For this reason he will insist on the loot in the Temple Ruins despite knowing that grave robbery is not correct. 

Gale: Bad form, isn't it? Grave robbing? […] Let's have a look at the loot. It isn't for your pockets only. 

He keeps pondering life over death: although he respects the dead, he will always value more the living creatures in the present. This is also what pushes Gale to suggest Tav to open Rugan's chest. Stealing from the evil Zhentarins is not something that will weigh on his consciousness too much. Besides, he knows it belongs to a wizard: meaning that the chance for it to contain a powerful artefact is really high. Similar suggestions will be said about the Idol of Silvanus, but talking with him in the camp will show us that he won't approve of taking it, only as a last resort. He keeps pondering the living over a sacred piece of stone, since he knows the druids won't take the stealing very peacefully. Once more we see Gale's respect and care for life, trying to minimise damage as much as the circumstances allow him.

Gale is also a survivalist. He doesn't want to die, he loves celebrating life in its more mundane and small details. He is an emotional character for a wizard, a bit strange since they are usually portrayed as more rational and cold, losing their lives among dusty books. However, Gale has shown in many scenes that he prefers to survive without killing, but if he has to, he will do it, dealing with the weight of it in his consciousness because killing unprovoked affects him (scene in the camp after killing the druids, or the goblin party scene). 

His moral in preventing gratuitous death sometimes will conflict with his own survival, especially if he is by an evil Tav's side. He couldn't accept bloodshed when other peaceful options were available and possible to reach. This is clearly shown during the goblin party, where Gale's consciousness suffers and feels the corruption of the "orb" killing the kindness and the compassion inside him. He accepts that wanting to live is a powerful drive, but he doesn't support this massacre, questioning if all that blood was necessary. A Tav killing the tieflings seems to lose the possibility of pursuing Gale romantically, at least in EA so far. For Gale, survival is important, but the means to do it (when they can cause death) matter too. Life is worth preserving.

 The usual archetype of survivalist tends to be an individualist one who would survive at any cost without remorse because that's the “law of the jungle”, the strongest must survive. However, Gale seems to embody a different concept of survivalist that it's hard to put in words: a sort of communal survivalist, trying to survive in coexistence with his community: he wants his survival to imprint the least harm possible (even though sometimes it would not be possible), trying to help those around him as long as his condition allows it; for example, despite wanting Gut's potential cure for the tadpole, he would disagree in helping Sazza escape because she will lead the goblins to the Grove, no matter the fact that doing this will grant them their introduction to the priestess. 

His list of approval shows that his sense of survival is always pondered with the consequences that it can cause on others (check the post with the "Extensive list of Gale's approvals"). The whole concept of the "orb" has this motivation as well: he wants to live and survive, but he also can't give up because his body would kill many, so he needs to do as much as his moral allows him to keep it in check. If he cannot do it any longer, he promises to minimise the disaster as much as possible by erupting in the deep Underdark or in a desolated corner of Faerûn (and considering his ridiculous list of approvals and disapprovals, we know he is honest in not wanting to kill gratuitously). Gale acknowledges his own mistakes, trying—to the best of his ability—to deal with them without catching others in them. Although all his speeches keep emphasising that he is a mere human, and plans may fail. 

At some point, if he wants to survive “not at any cost”, he will be forced to ask Tav for help during the scene of the stew (available only for medium approval or higher). As a gesture of honesty, Gale will set a boundary before making this request, acknowledging its unfairness but giving Tav the decision to proceed or not. He is not denying to explain the details later, but at the moment he can't speak the “why” of his condition no matter how curious Tav is. Tav will decide whether they can keep their curiosity on the matter. 

We will understand later that this impediment comes as a precaution as well as consequence of his personal trauma with Mystra and the "orb" (See post about "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust"). So, he is very clear about setting the conditions in which this conversation will happen from the beginning. The easiest way for Gale to avoid this whole situation would have been by simply lying, but he opted for an honest approach with clear out-loud reservations, knowing he was asking for more trust than he was allowed to, but the intention behind is more than important. There is a clear, huge contextual detail that we can't miss: this scene doesn't happen because of Gale's whims, he is forced to ask for help since his condition “is not a patient one” and will endanger everyone if not kept at bay. 

This detail where Gale explicitly asks for an exchange of trust is not present if Gale's approval is neutral or lower. In this case, Gale would not care about giving a context to his strange request: he doesn't trust Tav and he doesn't expect to be trusted either, he only wants the artefacts to keep his condition in check for his sake and the sake of others. We can understand this change of attitude depending on the approval as he doesn't want to give any extra explanation to someone he is not interested in building a relationship with. For more details, check the post about "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust".

I personally support the idea that nobody in canon Faerûn is free of racial prejudices since Forgotten Realms lore has been created based strongly on fantasy racism. I've read that WotC wants to move forward and improve this aspect in 5e, but so far what they allowed Larian to do with the Tieflings in BG3 seems to show the contrary. So, since apparently we are going to face fantasy racism anyways, I will try to analyse racial prejudices from all chars. When it comes to Gale, it's a bit far-stretched to point out unjustified racial biases. He has a vague comment about Rashemi that some people may consider a faerunian saying. Personally, I think that line is a bias forced into him to have a particular dynamic with Minsc (the Rashemi “silly” companion -we all can see where Larian seems to go with this). Gale clearly sees tieflings, gnomes, and even goblins as people, and has a cautious attitude towards some githyanki (at least that's what we can infer with Lae'zel when we find her in the cage), but given the githyanki lore it's pretty reasonable to see them as dangerous creature that could kill people on the spot. So far, he seems to have no racial preference either [10]. 

As it was said before, he prefers to avoid killing people, but that doesn't mean he won't do it if his life depends on it. He will prefer persuasive and defusing approaches, but if he needs to kill to defend innocents or his own life, he won't hesitate. So therefore, stories about characters making mistakes or having violent excess in an effort to protect themselves or what they hold dear will be understood by him but hardly approved [19]. He tends more to approve a call out of that excess than approving an excuse for it.

Gale has deep abandonment issues that can be easily seen when he defends Astarion from being handed over to Gandrel. We need to put this in context before going on: for Gale, Astarion represents a danger as a vampire who attacked one of them during their sleep. By the display of meta-knowledge, we know with certainty that their approvals and disapprovals are mostly opposite: What one approves, the other will disapprove and vice versa. Getting rid of Astarion should be something that Gale would approve, however, he doesn't. If we explore his comments we will realise that what Gale disapproves from this situation is Tav's abandonment. After Mystra's abandonment, he knows very well that “Loyalty is such a very rare commodity”, and the few situations in EA in which Tav can display abandonment, resound strongly in Gale. 

Gale is a scholar with a strong balanced rational side. But unlike the trope, he also embraces an emotional side that, so far the info we received in EA, it's the side that makes him prone to mistakes. 

As an amateur poet, Gale loves words. We can obviously notice this in his verbose attitude, but also in the way he carefully uses words. One of his characteristic words is “spectacle”. He has also shown a reiterative—although not always—uneasy use of the word “fun”. Using “fun” as a way to describe the night spent with Gale gives him a slight uneasiness. “That’s a word for it.” He disapproves of using the word “Fun” after the Mayrina/Connor situation, in which scene Gale alludes that “your new company may be a proof of how depraved and twisted you are to see that tragedy as “fun”. Personally I think this is a direct allusion to Astarion, who considers Mayrina's situation as “entertainment”, in the same way he considered as “fun” the show of Arabella's death (two of several instances where he used that word). Gale also doesn’t use the word sex during EA, instead he uses romantic ones such as love-making, intimacy, art of the night/body. In the most technical case: coitus (used only when he is talking about “goblinoid intimacy” in the expression “post-coital snack”). These details are showing not only his poet/romantic side, but also his interpretation of sex from his perspective: sex can only be possible through a connection. We know he doesn’t engage in casual sex with Lae’zel if he is not romanced, and his romance can only potentially start if Tav shares that deep connection with him through the Weave. 

Another detail related to words is that Gale has always used an infection/disease-related vocabulary to explain the “orb” stuck in his chest: infested, taint, shadow spreading 

[…] I failed to control [this chaotic magic]. Instead it infested me. […] This Netherese taint... this orb, for lack of a better word [..] […] the shadow within is spreading like poison, corrupting kindness and compassion. [...]

Gale apparently has a particular way to sense magic. I have no way to check this in-game, but it seems very strange how he immediately identifies magical artifacts without casting Detect Magic. There are some extra scenes as well where he says to taste or smell the magic in some objects. Even his encounter with Shadowheart, besides being considered a flirt, could be also interpreted as him detecting the magic that we saw later in her hand or maybe the dark magic that blocks her memories, since Gale pointed out about a curtain covering her soul: “if the eyes are the mirror to the soul, yours have dark curtains across the mirror” (a very ominous flirting if it’s only a flirt)

This makes me suspect that, if the "orb" is not giving him this skill, it may be a consequence of having been Chosen of Mystra (for more details read the post about "Mystra and her Chosen ones"). If this is the case, he may have hindered remains of theirs powers when it comes to detect magic at will.

Gale has a perception of magic with all the senses: he sniffs and tastes magic. During the mirror scene you have an option related to [Arcana] tag where he “Sniff the mirror, trying to understand the nature of its magic”. A wizard Tav will just “Inspect the mirror”. He also said that he could “taste” the magic in the necromancy book and in the runes of teleportation. 

What we know of his family is little: when he was a kid there was a housekeeper in his life (mentioned only once during the scene of the harpies) and his mother that seemed to have personally raised and cared for him (mentioned twice: in the ruin temple scene, and in his banter with Wyll) 

Tav: Why care about decorum in a long-abandoned tomb? Gale: Because my mother raised a gentleman. Then again, to be alive is to be curious. 

Wyll: Between the orb and the bug you've got more than your fair share of unwelcome passengers. Gale: What can I say. Mother always taught me to be a gracious host.

This post was written in May 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

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Welcome to chapter nine! This one was meant to just be another filler with one of my own AU’s, but Tang just had to be introspective and have a moment of character growth. Hope you enjoy!

EDIT: This chapter has been edited to include some new info dropped on the same day I originally posted this! More info in the End Notes!

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Scattered Cicadas - Chapter Nine: Rocks and Roles

Tang knows how to act. That doesn't mean he likes to play every part.

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Tang liked to think of himself as a decent actor, at least back in the original timeline. He had been part of the theater class in high school and telling stories required a bit of a dramatic flair if you wanted to keep your audience entertained. Convincing Pigsy he was a popular food critic hadn’t been too hard back then.

The many cycles he had been through had certainly helped polish his skill into a genuine talent. That one time where he and everyone else had been professional actors playing the roles of themselves from the original timeline as part of a show had especially allowed him to hone himself to a greater degree than before.

Being stuck jumping through time had practically made it a necessity.

It wasn’t that Tang enjoyed what was essentially lying to his family. It was more for their protection. He had almost broken the “No Interference” rule a few times when he hadn’t properly reacted to events that, while shocking or upsetting to his family, were simply part of his routine by now. He couldn’t allow the repetitive nature of the cycles to make him slip up and potentially cause more harm by being confronted by his lack of surprise or fear.

So he acted. He gasped at all the right moments or screamed in fear when in danger. Every laugh, every sigh of exasperation, every freak out over something related to Wukong was perfectly performed so as to not to raise suspicion. So long as the proper reaction occurred in response to the correct effect, everything went smoothly.

It wasn’t too hard or taxing as he never needed to fake his enjoyment of being around his family. Luckily for him, he also didn’t have to act exactly as he had been in the original timeline, or he may have gone insane from the monotony of it.

The cycles where his background was entirely rewritten were blessings in disguise, really. They were new. Fresh experiences for Tang to have and not have to work as hard to realistically react to.

He treated them like a method acting exercise. The new memories as part of Tang’s new backstory was the motivation for the ‘character’ he was playing. He didn’t have to fully adhere to them, but they certainly helped him play the role provided to him for the cycle.

He still disliked playing the villain however.

It happened a few times before already. The most notable had been when Zhu Bajie was in the role of Sun Wukong as MK’s mentor.

Tang shuddered at the memory of that timeline.

Saying that version of him had been unhinged was severely downplaying the many atrocities he had performed on both himself and others. Committing suicide to erase his name from the books of the dead, killing demons to absorb their lifeforce, and cutting open his own chest to manually insert the gem holding that lifeforce into himself for power were simply the tamer actions he had committed.

He supposed that heartbreak, jealousy, and internalized insecurities could drive even the most benign people to madness so long as they properly justified their actions to themselves.

It had been the first time in quite a while that Tang seriously considered intentionally breaking the interference rule and just running off to live in solitude for the entire cycle. Getting “redeemed” had been one of the most difficult things he had tried to pull off.

Tang dodged a swipe from the Monkey King’s staff as he was brought back into the present.

He was the villain once again this cycle. Luckily though, he was much less of a threat to his family this time around.

He was replacing Red Son as the demon child of Demon Bull King and Princess Iron Fan.

Tang, Son of the Earth.

He wasn’t the only one who was switched around. Pigsy, who went by Bajie, was a human who had become Wukong’s successor. MK was a boar demon who ran the noodle shop. Red Son was a scientist and engineer who frequented the restaurant.

It was almost an opposite reflection of the cycle he had just been musing about.

“You’ll have to do better than that, noodle boy,” Tang taunted as he swung his arms to pull chunks of stone from the ground, his hands and the Earth he controlled both glowing with a golden-yellow light.

He supposed that it made sense for him to have some sort of elemental power if he was this timeline’s Red Son. Earth fit as he had certainly mellowed out over the course of the cycles, becoming more focused and self assured. His original self would have most certainly been associated with air with how flighty he had been.

Tang made sure to keep his full concentration as he attacked Bajie. Earth may be the element of the sturdy, but it had the potential to be much more volatile than fire. It was easy to let loose and cause a catastrophic earthquake. It took precision to control smaller pieces of rock without causing too much collateral damage.

Bajie batted away the earthen projectiles with ease and rushed into an opening Tang had intentionally left. He had to do his best to not rely on the fighting skills he had from previous cycles and use only what his memories knew when playing a villain. Otherwise he’d easily beat the fledgling hero and that certainly would be treated as interfering.

Tang winced as the staff connected with his ribs and sent him flying. He coughed as he pulled himself up, holding his injured side as he glared at the now smirking Bajie.

“How’s that for better!”

“This isn’t over,” Tang cried out dramatically. He activated his powers, this time summoning a whirlwind of sand to teleport away.

Another scene as the villain successfully played out.

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Tang sat in his workshop, calculating the specific size of a rune circle he would need.

It seemed that similarly to how Red Son was a genius that incorporated magic into science, this version of Tang was one who incorporated science into magic. Not a big distinction, but important in how the process worked. It still took an impressive amount of knowledge on both subjects to work them together in the end.

Setting his pen down to take a break, Tang looked around as he stretched. He caught his reflection in a nearby piece of metal machinery he had been fiddling with and examined himself once again.

He didn’t look too different from his human self, his face remaining the same. His hair was now a dark brown with yellow highlights and his glasses were much smaller. The biggest difference were the bull horns sticking out of the side of his head.

He didn’t mind them too much, but having to give up any pull over shirt for button downs was a hassle.

Looking at his horns lead the demon scholar to think about his parents in this timeline.

Demon Bull King and Princess Iron Fan.

Tang frowned as he recalled the less than comforting welcome he had received after returning from his defeat. The disapproving dismissal from his father and scathing taunts from his mother had been demoralizing. It would have hurt more if he hadn't had the years of time jumping behind him.

If this was how Red Son was commonly treated, it was no wonder he worked hard in everything he did just to gain a scrap of approval and praise.

And yet he knew they loved each other. The moments he noticed didn’t happen often, but he could tell that his parents held some affection for him, and he obviously cared for them. He just didn’t understand why they acted so cruelly to one another.

Was it a demon thing? Were they afraid that by showing their love they were showing weakness?

That was certainly possible, but Tang disagreed with the sentiment. He had been through enough cycles to see that love made one stronger. It wasn’t the weakness their enemies thought it was.

Tang was already planning on becoming redeemed in this cycle. It hurt to think his parents would disown him, but what if that didn’t have to happen?

He thought about that one specific cycle and how he had become so twisted. All of it could have been avoided had his past self simply let go of his long held beliefs and went with Bajie.

Now he just had to make two powerful demons do just that.

Tang was an amazing actor.

He also had many years of watching the people around him and knew most of them almost better than they knew themselves.

His current parents were no exception.

He could see the potential for a loving and healthy family, buried just beneath the surface.

It would take some work, but he was sure he could unearth it and polish that potential until it shined.

With renewed energy, Tang pulled out a blank scroll and began planning.

He had a family to save.

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Welcome to what I’m calling the Noodle Swap AU! It is named that way because the only change is that the pairs that make up the two most popular noodle ships (SpicyNoodles and FreeNoodles) swap places!

Shout out to @winterpower98 for their amazing Actor AU and Dad Swap AU mentioned in this chapter! Go check them out!

Yes, yes, I know I’ve basically made Tang here Terra from Teen Titans. Most people would give him Air as an element, but 1) we already have an Air user in Princess Iron Fan and 2) Tang has changed quite a bit since the start of this Time Hopping experience, as he states himself in the chapter.

I do genuinely believe there’s a loving family hidden somewhere underneath all the cruelty the DBK crew throw at each other. It’s already been hinted that Red Son will get a redemption arc in the show, but I want one for his parents too.

That’s all for now! See you in the next chapter!

:IMPORTANT EDIT!!!!:

There's been a few paragraphs changed and added to include the new canon lore for Tang in the Dad Swap AU! Go check out @kitkat1003's absolutely ASTOUNDING work, When the Tide Pulls Away and the Earth Sharpens to Steel! It is INCREDIBLE and if it was finished, you'd absolutely know there would be an entire chapter dedicated to it here.