#also i made this template myself for those of you wondering

[dunderella]

2022's art summary!! worked on a bunch of things this year, and i'm currently prepping my next project! hoping to have it ready for Vancaf, but even if not done by then i'm happy to finally have something of my own to work on again (something that's not day job or freelance related at least) (❁´◡`❁)!!!!

[crescencestudio]

Devlog #35 | 09.26.23

Hi everyone!

Hope the beginning of Fall has been kind to you all <3 To be Frank, it has not been Kind to me LMFAO. But I'll get into that, so let's dive in yippee!

Before I do, someone liked this post recently, which was such a throwback. It was before the full demo was out and everything!! I was so young and full of life. I'm going to sprinkle some comparison shots of the new assets with the old ones to break up the text and also walk down memory lane with me! (Full GUI not shown as I'm still waiting on the assets)

Chapter Cards (Left: After | Right: Before)

The "Progress"

I'm going to structure this devlog a little differently from the usual template. The main reason being, for those of you who didn't see, I have not been feeling Myself recently.

This month I found myself all out of sorts. While I felt like I was making progress and doing so much everyday read: fighting for my life, when I looked back on things at the end of this month, I didn't feel like I really did much.

On a higher level, I finished fulfilling Kickstarter physical rewards, opened a Kofi shop of the remaining merch, edited Druk's route and continued writing Etza's route, updated assets and code for the updated demo, and then general commission stuff (BGs from Vui, soundtracks from Peter, etc.).

But overall, Alaris felt largely like it was kinda sitting at around the same spot as it did when I entered this month. Which made me a little sad! I had wanted to make So Much Progress on Alaris because next month I won't be able to work on it really. Then, I realized I haven't taken a break from game development since I started it two years ago HA!!!

The Real Progress

Development for me has been back-to-back. Chapter releases every 1-2 months during my first half year of development, Full Demo release shortly after, Kickstarter shortly after, Full Game Development shortly after. When I was feeling burnt out from Alaris, I made intertwine. Then I was Heavily Involved in the development of two games shortly after.

All of this on top of my IRL responsibilities, which include a job, PhD school, and well, functioning as a normal human occasionally.

And then here we are at the end of September 2023, and I'm wondering why even though I creatively want to work on Alaris, I find my brain literally just getting too tired to think.

Etza CG (Left: After | Right: Before)

I think ever since the Kickstarter, I've put a lot of pressure on myself to consistently put out LOTS of updates for each monthly devlog. I don't want people to think I'm not working on things or I'm not committed to delivering after giving me their hard earned money. But now, with two years under my belt, I'm realizing that is... HMM maybe too high of a standard to put on myself for my first game ever. There are many much more seasoned developers than me who don't put that pressure on themselves (which is Good and Healthy).

So this month, I debated scrounging around and gathering all my crumbs to give you all a devlog that you'll be satisfied with. But I decided ultimately that wouldn't be good for me and would honestly not be the most transparent way to present the current process of things.

And so. Here I am. Head in my Hands. Letting you all know that while I'm not "burnt out," I am.... only human LOL (one human at that). And so some months, like this one, will just not have much progress to report. Not because I'm not working on it or any other deeper reason. But because it's physically impossible and unreasonable for me to be continuously pushing out a steady stream of content.

In-Game Sprites & BGs (Left: After | Right: Before)

Next month, I'lll be taking a vacation. It's actually my first Big, Official one in a Long Time! I'm very excited for it. And while I did initially think about working on Alaris while I was traveling on trains or things like that, I decided to respect my own need to be a Human and just take a break for once in my life. I don't even want to say I Might work on things, because that sentiment alone will pressure me to make some progress. So yes. Next month, there will be no devlog or updates. But please rest assured, I am "working on Alaris" by letting myself just Exist and Rest Up!

Not an Alaris screenshot but it is market research that deserves to be included because I played House in Fata Morgana recently and it was Phenomenal!

Thank you all for understanding and your continued support. I'm extremely appreciative to have such a kind and patient community. Hope you all have a wonderful October filled with Fall Treats, and I'll see you in November! <3

[remturtle]

My Yuusona is finally complete! (Click for better quality)

( SD done by the amazing @wysteriadelights )

Template made by @unfinished-projects-galore ! They have a lot of other templates too, which I’ll (hopefully) be using in the future^^

Other characters included:

Luan - belongs to @v-anrouge

Aru - belongs to @wysteriadelights

For those of you who are wondering:

I used to go by @/remturtle and @/remmupom. I deactivated the initial blog after experiencing burn out while also struggling with a severe decline in mental health, which in hindsight had formed from the anxiety of having a reasonably sized following and receiving the occasional threat, hate rant or revolting message by some anons. for obvious reasons I never responded to these directly.

I then moved over to @/remmupom (which I believe is still active at this time) but I no longer have access to it after a certain incident. (Of which I will not go into detail about) and have since moved here.

I do still have brainstorms, drafts and designs for and of old twst AUs I had made but I won’t be pressuring myself to share or get back into them unless I feel like it. Though you can still ask about a few of them! I just don’t do so much writing anymore.

As a final note: this new blog is not solely dedicated to twisted wonderland, I have other interests to fall back on in case of burn out now.

If there are any previous mutuals of mine who would like to re-connect just shoot me a message^^ (especially if we talked on discord, as I have had to make a new account there as well.)

[theneighborhoodwatch]

Hi! Gonna start off and say that I love the work you're doing with the Welcome Home neocities website! It's perfectly stylized for the project/puppet show and I can see the work you're putting into it.

I'd love to learn how to make my own neocities website (for fun? For a personal project??), so I was wondering if you could provide some tips and/or pointers for a first-timer.

Thank you!

HAHA well first of all i'm flattered that someone would think i'm skilled enough to be giving pointers in the first place. i still consider myself a novice when it comes to web design (for example, if you're wondering why every page on welcome to welcome home has its own CSS, it's because CSS is Way harder for me to wrap my head around than HTML) so i can't give any Super advanced tips, but i can at least write about what's helped me so far:

GUIDES. neocities has its own tutorial and list of HTML/CSS resources, but user-made guides are your best friend when it comes to figuring out where to go from there. a.n. lucas and pauli kohberger both have really good guides for beginners, but for the more advanced stuff, i found myself referencing the resources on solaria's webspace and sadgrl.online the most. w3schools is also very helpful when it comes to answering more specific questions like "how do i use two different fonts on the same page?" (and probably more.) if all else fails, then usually just googling "how to (x) in HTML" or "how to (x) in CSS" will yield at least one useful result. for making your website more accessible, there's the accessible net directory and this masterpost by foxpunk on tumblr.

it sounds obvious, but it helps to have a solid idea of what kind of site you want to build before you actually dive in, and then snoop around on neocities to get an idea of how other users approach the same topic. for example, i got the idea to start a welcome home wiki on neocities after being reminded of the 8:11 wiki on the same site, and then i spent a couple days just looking up stuff like "wiki" or "fansite" on neocities and then clicking on any page that caught my attention to study it.

layouts! there's no shame in using a premade one, and you can even learn more about HTML/CSS in real time just by messing around with the base code before implementing any intentional changes. sadgrl.online's layout builder is a VERY popular choice, since you can already do a lot with the basic options it offers and it's easy to further customize once you have it set up on your page; it's what i used to make welcome to welcome home. sadgrl.online's webmaster links also feature a bunch of other options under the "layouts" tag, and if none of those work for you, then you can even find something just by looking up template/templates/layout/layouts/HTML/CSS on neocities itself.

side note: if you're reading this and you want to make a wiki then you can also use this wikitable code. it came out after i had already established the Look of welcome to welcome home, so i probably won't implement it any time soon, but i TOTALLY WOULD HAVE if it was around when i first set the site up.

you can scale images up or down using percentage, with 100% being the image's default size. i don't know how helpful or acceptable that is, but i use it a lot.

don't feel pressured to get everything done at once, even if you expect people to be visiting your site frequently. usually if you just slap on an "under construction" gif or even just write "hey this site is still under construction" then people will understand. i don't think i've ever seen anyone get super huffy about slow updates on neocities, anyway.

EDIT: OH. GRAPHICS. i mention all of these on welcome to welcome home's front page but i Also wanted to note them here: betty's graphics and websets by lynn both have HUGE collections of background tiles and other graphics that work especially well if you're going for that old web charm. i also like to use this mirror of patterncooler for backgrounds bc of the customization options. you can also make your own background tile and then use a seamless tile maker like this if all else fails.

EDIT 2: ALSO. obviously. do not be like me and use discord or any other chat client as a filehost, no matter how promising it looks, because one day you WILL get a very nasty surprise when the request signature on those urls expire and the images are no longer accessible on other sites. there are a myriad of other filehosts out there, but personally i recommend file garden (and also donating to file garden if you can, even if only for a couple months. i know i said that just yesterday, but if it gets more folks to subscribe then i'm gonna keep saying it.)

[13eyond13]

Hii for the fandom ask game I'm shooting two of your questions right back at you because when you asked me them they made me immediately wonder about your answers, 23 and 25! Also: 1, 8, and 16!

omg thank you for so many asks!

23. The fandom you're curious about because of a mutual:

@stvlti posting on my dash about the new Scott Pilgrim anime got me curious enough to start watching it recently! I read those comics back in college and thought they were pretty great, as was the Edgar Wright movie. And the anime seems like a very good adaptation of it so far. Can't explain how funny it is as a Canadian to see Canada as the setting for an anime, either... I just feel like we have such a bland normie country to set things in, hahaha

I'm also getting very curious about a ton of different manga thanks to the recs I've received on my blog recently! (X)

25. A piece of advice for taking care of yourself in fandom spaces:

HMMM.

I think the main thing I get people asking me about here sometimes is how to make more friends in the fandom, especially when you're new and don't know anybody. I think the main bits of advice I have on that front is:

(1) I SWEAR YOU AREN'T BEING SNUBBED/INTENTIONALLY IGNORED, YOU'RE PROBABLY JUST NOT ON OTHER PEOPLE'S RADARS AT ALL

So follow a bunch of other bloggers in that fandom and interact with their blogs first! Like their posts, send them polite/friendly asks looking for their takes (this is especially easy to do when people reblog ask memes), and be brave enough not to go on anon when you do it so they can see your lovely face and actually potentially make a connection with you! Most people LOVE getting asks and are flattered when somebody else asks for their thoughts. If you're genuine with your interest it shouldn't take long for other people to start taking interest in you back.

Which leads to my second point of:

(2) MAKE SURE YOU ACTUALLY ARE POSTING THINGS ON YOUR BLOG ON A SEMI-REGULAR BASIS! People will probably click on your blog once you start interacting with them, and they will most likely only follow you back if you actually have stuff on your blog that shows your interests/personality/the kinds of things they can expect you to be posting on their dash! You can easily stock up a bunch of posts into a queue if you're worried about spamming the dash or don't want to be online 24/7 too, so it will keep your blog active without you actually having to be there all the time.

ALSO DO NOT HAVE TOO MUCH SHAME TO LITERALLY ASK YOUR FOLLOWERS TO SEND YOU ASKS. Reblog fandom ask memes, it's a great way to give people a template of questions to bug you nicely with, and answering one ask often leads to receiving another ask!

(3) DO YOUR OWN THING WHETHER OR NOT ANYBODY IS CONSTANTLY PATTING YOU ON THE BACK. First and foremost I'm usually making myself laugh here on my blog and hoarding all of these posts for myself, so even when I'm not getting constant feedback from others I'm still having a good time and posting on the regular! I'm SUPER glad that other people get something out of it too, but I think when it comes to blogging you should treat your blog like your own personal little kingdom where you are making the rules, and other people can follow or unfollow as they please.

And finally:

(4) YOU WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE A FOLLOWER OR TWO, BUT SO DO I AND SO DOES EVERYBODY ELSE. Try not to obsessively check your follower count or to take it as a huge calamity if your count goes down instead of up once in a while! It WILL eventually go back up again, and you genuinely have no idea why it dropped most of the time (it probably wasn't anything majorly personal - maybe somebody just is no longer in your fandom, maybe Tumblr is clearing out some porn bots, maybe a follower is deactivating their blog - or maybe you DID post something that somebody didn't like, but that's ok, it's probably better if they aren't following you anymore anyways!) And you should ALSO block/unfollow people freely if they're really making your blogging experience uncomfortable - at the end of the day you don't really know them and they don't really know you, and you will both probably move on and forget about it not too far down the road.

1. List 3 positive things about your current fandom(s):

(1) Genuinely extremely chill and cozy, and almost always has been in my experience!

(2) People have the best sense of humour here. IDK I think I took it for granted that all fandoms were like that but anytime I venture into other ones I find myself being a bit disappointed that people just aren't as funny in general a lot of the time

(3) OMG thank you everybody for all the delicious fanfic and fanart, and for continuing to still make it steadily even in 2023

8. You hope more people will come to appreciate ___ (a ship, a trope, an episode, etc.):

I'm gonna advocate for a ship I don't even have a ton of personal investment in and say meronia! God, stop sleeping on this pairing already and/or acting like it's way more problematic than it actually is, you silly ancient fandom you (no, they are not basically related, they simply went to the same school in their childhood for a bit). These two definitely deserve to have their relationship a bit better explored!

16. A tiny detail in canon that you want more people to appreciate:

Watari had an entire-ass family of his own, apparently!

Isn't that weird to think about? There is actually SO MUCH unanswered stuff about how his relationship with L actually was set up, especially if you are just going by the original manga serial and aren't using the one-shots or the anime or LABB novel to flesh out L's backstory or any Wammy's lore. And sometimes I think it might be neat to see people exploring it in totally different ways that would still be 100% plausible based on what little we know!

[ask meme]

[mamuzzy]

Okay, my temporary-brainfuckery is over, I'm kind of hyped now about the new year and can look back at 2023 with much more contentment. So I jumped on the train of doing Art Summary too :))) (template HERE)

Yeah, what the fuck did I do in the first half of the year... honestly, I don't remember. No, really, I can't remember...

My sketchbook can be dated back to 2021 with some old Touken Ranbu and merfolk sketches, but I don't remember actually opening it this year until june...

...and guys, I actually have only a few pages left to fill!!!! I kind of proud of myself. Joining into TCW fandom really did wonders with my creativity and productivity.

I'll get sappy with this probably, but the existence of this blog, a filled up sketchbook in my hand is the very proof that I exist. When bdick fucks me in the brain, I can't remember having these wonderful memories of creating but when my mind clears from the fog, I come up here, looking at my little fortress, looking at my silly doodles, I don't feel that I have to build up everything from the start, and I actually managed to create a safe-place for myself that welcomes me back when I return from those dark places. My art maybe not visually pleasing, my anatomy is shit, but they are mine and most importantly THEY EXIST.

❀ My artistic plans for the future in this blog... ❀ ❀ To continue creating: daily doodles. Not sure about uploading it daily but maybe making compilations from my sketchbook from time-to-time. I'm expecting to have a more relaxed job time-wise, also I'm on a medication now due to my migraines, maybe I won't spend half of my year sleeping just escape from the pain. ❀ Creating character bios for my OC's. ❀ Participating in events/doing challenges: The whole concept is scary for me because deadlines are stressing me out, and I'm a slow artist.

❀ One of the self-made challenge: Redraw my sketchbook from 2012-2014. I probably mentioned that I've found it some time ago and actually chickened out from uploading them because most of the sketches in them are quite... hmm... bpd related without me knowing I had bpd back then (also i don't want them to hide under cut because then what's the point of uploading???). But it would be interesting to redesign them and make a comparison post about it.

❀ be more authentic with my art: my original plan with this blog was to use art to heal myself, and while drawing funny stuff is great, I still believe I'm self-censoring myself both in art and both in personal posts just like I'm masking in real life and it's. fucking. exhausting. My mental fuckery is a part of my life, part of me.

❀ Writing short stories: TCW, TBB, RepComm, million ideas in my head.

❀ Getting started on my Deadshot story: A multichaptered longfic starting from Umbara arc (I wrote ARC again), following the canon events but will deviate at some points.

❀ Getting started on my urban fantasy Coruscant Guard Story.

I could go on but I don't want to set unrealistic and unachievable goals either. YEAR JUST STARTED AND IT'S ALMOST OVER!!!

Thank you for hanging out with me in 2023, thank you for giving me a chance with those prompt-games and requests. I love you guys.

[somnambulant-seraphim]

i was wondering where you get your patterns from? (or if you make them yourself, how do you do that?)

Hi! :) I'm not quite sure which specific patterns you mean, but I do make up most them myself, or I look up inspiration online and make changes or add my own designs onto them. 

If you want, this pattern here is a good template for how to make a frog. It shows how all the pieces work togther well and you can always edit the body shape in any way you want. 

https://www.lilblueboo.com/2011/07/a-stuffed-frog-prince-a-tutorial-and-download.html

My creative process isn’t the most planned out or precise. I kinda just wing it for a lot of my projects until they work out. For crafts that I haven’t made before and I know will be a little more complicated, I’ll often draw and cut out pattern pieces on newspaper and use those to trace onto the fabric. 

Images from online are also a good source as well, even if they aren’t an exact pattern, I’ve often simply just looked at photos to figure out how things were built, and used that to help with the pieces of my projects. 

Anyway, that’s about it I think. Thanks for the ask! \(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)人(●’◡’●)/ 

⋆｡°✩｡°ஐ Have a good rest of your day or night!! ⋆｡°✩｡°ஐ

[elfwreck]

Hello, finding a lot of interesting posts on your blog and hope you are doing well! Anyway, i had some questions about fanlore and was wondering if i could ask you or get pointed to someone else. Mostly about like, what to post, like notoriety, if that changes based on if it's the "right" vs. the "wrong" type of fandom to be associated with fanlore. And also some stuff about adding or quoting stuff you're involved in but that's less of a big deal and more fiddly.

Adding stuff you're involved in is fine. Just be aware that other people might edit later, and if there are controversies, that might include editing in ways that don't put your participation in a good light. We encourage people to add stuff they know, and in fandom, that's often "stuff I'm directly involved in." The biggest issue here is privacy - we've got some complicated rules about maintaining privacy; we discourage connecting people's usernames with real names unless it's directly relevant (and sometimes not even then). And sometimes we separate usernames on one platform from usernames on another one. (If you have permission from the people involved, then multiple names are fine.)

Post EVERYTHING we want it ALL anYtHinG iS GoOd. Don't care how good the language is. We have a regular editor whose native language is not English and she translates with Google Translate and posts that way and someone goes through later and cleans up the phrasing AND WE LOVE THIS.

We don't have a "notability" standard like Wikipedia. We don't have a "citation needed" thing, although info without sources may wind up being rephrased into "some fans claim that..." instead of phrased like an absolute fact.

If you and two friends made an 8-page zine that you printed on the school printer and handed out to about 12 people... that's worth a Fanlore page. If you planned to make a zine, and had a name and a template and two volunteer artists and a theme and you got some comments, but it never happened... that is also worth a page.

There's some weirdness around "what kind of fandom do we cover?" Theoretically, anything is welcome; in practice, we're not covering mainstream sports fandoms (y'know, the guys who dress up in blue & yellow facepaint and wear giant foam fingers) and we're edging around classic sci-fi convention-ish literary fandom. (We have some of that. But we're not trying to recreate or override Fancyclopedia's work.) We're also not trying to overlap tvtropes, which gets more complicated to sort out, because we do cover a lot of the same topics, but we have a different focus for them.

For myself, I'd love to see

More video game fandom coverage, esp related to mods, controversies/dramas, and the screaming that happens every time a company releases a remake on a new platform for more than the original. Also speedrunning info.

More conventions, especially media-fandom/fanfic-ish conventions

Fannish trends on TikTok

Cosplay. Lots of cosplay. We are missing so much info on the history & trends of cosplay.

Pages for modern zines and pages for the processes involved in making them. (When I got into fandom, there were no "interest check/ mod applications/ contributor applications" etc. phases.)

Everything that's going on in Discord OMG we are missing SO DAMN MUCH FANDOM that is only happening in closed communities that you can't even search the names of and they're all gonna fuckin' VANISH when Discord does some weird fannish purge thing.

Updating older/early pages with new info for those fandoms, or new ways their common tropes connect to new fandoms.

Also, we always need submissions and voting on the Featured Article Nominations. Anyone can suggest. Anyone can vote.

...as you might be able to tell, I can talk about this AT LENGTH IN GREAT DETAIL.

[manonamora-if]

This week has been... something. I know I've done a lot, but I am not really happy myself. I keep getting distracted (I need to stay away from YouTube) and it's been frustrating.

Current Progress: - English word count: 32.147 (+202)* - French: ?. - Recode: 0% *may go down.

I didn't make as much progress as I would have hoped. The second run to catch the last of the mistakes (still needed, I already found some) tired me more than I thought it would. I am about half-way done with that (can't wait).

I really want to be done with this project for real. I know I still have the translation and to recode, but bleh... I don't know why I thought I'd be done in like... a week. I should have looked into my file before making that end of the year schedule.

Buuuuuut....

I took a much needed break from writing and coded something again. It was nice to do something completely different. This was not even the template I've been wanting to do for ages.

Lil background on this one:

There was an interesting discussion on the Forum about Unstyled Twine Games entries in this year IFComp (aka using the base UI only) and biases towards visuals in the comp entries. It boiled down to: there's an unfair (and probably unconscious) negative bias against unstyled Twine games compared to non-customised games created in other formats. [you should check the discussion, it was interesting]

Anyways, the topic came up in the Twine Discord and we wondered how difficult it would be to make the different Base UI in the other formats (ex: Chapbook in Harlowe, Harlowe in SugarCube, etc...). A lil bit of HTML and CSS magic is all that you need apparently.

THE POINT of this whole story is:

I have a new template out! A One Page Portrait Template (mobile support included). Simple and sleek, reminiscent of the Chapbook basic UI (because it is almost just that). Including 3 themes, font change (incl. Open Dyslexic), and the basic macros like the last one. No external Macros were included. There's also a menu :D

Bringing me to my last item of the week: Chapter 2 is complete. MelS managed to break those missing scenes and make it work! The first round of edits is also complete and I am just waiting for him to send me back the file with all the needed changes before I can code it!

In the meantime, I am fixing a few issues with the code I do have, preparing the code for Chapter 2 and adding the missing assets.

There's like a shit ton on my plate with all I've been wanting to do. EC's update this month is just not happening. I only have one round ready without its ending instead of 3. Even CRWL's progress has been super slow.

Guess what my brain wants to do: participate in the EctoComp (but the French one) this year. With a DL happening in 8 days.

Guess what my brain has done: planned out everything, from the concept to the gameplay, the characters and the actions...

I really shouldn't... but that 4h hour to write/code is so temping... [Bad brain!]

Some TTTT points:

I've been getting a few more reviews for TTTT which is very lovely! That pesky cache bug is still happening. This is such a bummer. I don't know where it could come from or how to fix it (it's not a one browser/extension problem) I hope a post-comp update with extra content could fix that? I've been told that the longer that problematic array is the less probable the bug would happen?

I am very grateful everyone took the time to write a review (positive or negative), give my advices/pointers, and play the game, even if I don't agree with everything written. Some have been A LOT to process, even if they were expected (I knew when I uploaded the game that those would come up). So I made a sheet with all comments points (positive/neutral/negative) to help me make the game even better!

I'm still planning a post-comp post to let everything out :P

[cavernsofdarkness]

Hi! I really love your cyberpunk screenshots!

-What reshade presets do you use in you cyberpunk screenshots?

-Do you know where can I find the cyberpunk dialogues template that you've used on this post https://www.tumblr.com/cavernsofdarkness/687178468069408768/%E2%B1%A1%C3%B8-%C5%82%C3%B8-lizzies-bar-after-the-last-few-weeks-e ?

-Also, do you have some advice for someone who want to start storytelling a cyberpunk story in the sims?

Sorry for all this questions and have a wonderful day!!

Hi! *waves*

I've made a post here going over and linking the presets that I use. Like I mentioned there, I do edit in addition to using reshade. Also, when it comes to using the SSR shader (the one that gives all those nice reflections), I take the same picture twice (once with the shader on and once with it off or at a lower setting) and then layer them over each other in editing that way I can erase what I want and control where I want the reflections to be.

Unfortunately those weren't templates. I took an actual screenshot from Cyberpunk 2077 and cut out what I could of the HUD details and then color-picked and recreated the rest from scratch to the best of my ability. I myself have been looking for cyberpunk templates and assets, so if you come across any let me know.

I think this applies to any genre of storytelling/worldbuilding but, do some research and familiarize yourself with the hallmarks of the setting you're trying to portray. In the case of cyberpunk I would suggest reading through the Cyberpunk wiki; this includes all of the lore from the ttrpg and video game universe. Take a look at what the societal structure is like, what kind of factions exist, what kind of technology is used and the type of language that is used. You can use this as inspiration for your own ideas. (You can also check out 'Deus Ex' and 'Mirror's Edge')

Additionally, just search 'cyberpunk', 'cyberpunk 2077', and 'cyberpunk art' on tumblr/pinterest/google and scroll through the images. Often I am inspired by images, scenes, or types of characters that I then find a way to work into my own world. You don't have to have some grand, overarching plot from day one; just start with a character or two, decide who they are within the context of the world and do some slice of life stuff. The more you flesh out those characters the more the world around them will also reveal itself to you and potentially the story that you wish to tell.

I don't mind at all! I quite enjoy when people ask me things about my game/stories, and I'd love to see some more cyberpunk/sci-fi/futuristic content from the simblr community!

[undeadorion]

I’m 38 years old. I’m on my....5th? attempt at college. And for the first time EVER, not only am I taking EXTENSIVE notes in class but I’m trying to work out a weekly schedule?!!?! 

Ignore people who tell you to just DO a thing. Find whatever tools it takes to make it happen. 

Writing it all out in plain ink just turns into mush when I look over it. Typing it out is too rigid. Trying to do things pretty and aesthetic takes a lot of time and space. The paper I like most is usually super expensive the writing lines are super tiny for my giant meaty hands. And the good pens make my hand cramp. Then I’d lose which ever notebook I was using, or get bored of it. So everything was scattered. 

I kept trying apps, but the tools all too often sucked. There wasn’t enough variety. Or there was too much. Or they poorly emulated real tools. Or the canvas was too small or too low res. And I still had the same problem of paper in that things were a jumbled mess and I could never find anything. And for a long time, even the best apps that processed handwriting didn’t understand my scribbles. 

Then I started to wonder if anyone had made a digital bujo app. When I started a few years ago, there wasn’t. But maybe now? I didn’t find anything specific, but I found tons of general digital notebook apps of all sorts. I tested out a bunch and eventually settled on GoodNotes. The tools were a bit limited, but you could use any color, it had a solid highlighter option. And the best thing of all....you could import any paper or template you wanted. And anything handwritten was SEARCHABLE!

I went a little nuts trying out different designs. Started trying to design a whole journal. Then I made a dot grid paper based on the Dracula UI theme I use elsewhere. And it was like something unlocked in my brain, but the door would only open a crack. but I was suddenly taking notes for every class. In great detail. Something I haven’t been able to do. Ever. Not in high school. Not in several years of college. 

Then I remembered a notebook that looked super charming, the hobonichi techno cousin. I could never afford a $60 notebook, so I set out to create a highly modified version for myself.

Once I got all the details sorted it was like I shoved that door fully open. 

The moral of this long winded lesson? Do whatever it takes to overcome your block. Especially if that block is executive dysfunction. Even if it’s a way to maintain the novelty factor, do whatever it takes. Even if it seems counter-intuitive or unconventional. A distraction that takes over a whole day could lead to just what you need. Just go for it. 

Also, yes. Those notes reference a fucking T1 line in the year 2022. Because my teacher thinks it’s 2004, apparently. 

[naturally-recklessly]

What advice would you give to a new RPer? What does your URL mean?  How involved are you in your rp community?  What do you do when you get writer’s block? What has made you completely lose your chill? 

⨳ — MUNDAY

1. What advice would you give to a new RPer ?  My best advice would be to just have fun ! To truly experiment around your blog —write all sorts of plots that bring you joy, post little things about your muse(s) (be it edits, headcanons, playlists, etc...) or even customize a template that really fits your muse. Just never feel pressured to do things only because the majority of people are also doing them — what matters is if you enjoy them ! Otherwise, you might find yourself burned out pretty quickly. Speaking of which, whenever you feel like writing is more of a chore than something that brings you pleasure, by all means take a break — the rp partners that truly value you will understand. And last but not least, never be afraid to communicate and reach out ! As an introvert, I know this is better said than done, but trust me that for the most part, you'll only end up regretting the times you didn't. 😊

2. What does your URL mean?  Back when I started this blog in 2019, I only had two muses — Nana (an OC heavily inspired by Ai Yazawa's manga and its respective anime, which was and still is very dear to me), and Rupert (a canon muse from the movie "Sex Doll", who was so mysterious in his source material that I had to rely on headcanons to build his backstory 😆). So the url and blog's name was a direct reference to them & their personalities — Naturally Nana, Recklessly Rupert.

3. How involved are you in your rp community?  I'd say that at the moment I'm not too involved in the rp community — I only rp on this blog and keep a small circle with meaningful interactions (mostly because I've recently came back from a hiatus and I'm taking baby steps before venturing any further 😆). But speaking of meaningful interactions, I'm the kind of partner that gets super invested in our muses' little universes and absolutely loves to create edits/moodboards & playlists for them ! I also run a memes and resources blog for the rpc — Mimi's Memes — which has been somewhat inactive lately, but I do plan on starting to create things again. 😊

4. What do you do when you get writer’s block?  Most of the time, I just take a break and try to entertain myself with other activities. More often than not, inspiration will come, sparkled by a scene from a movie/series or some lyrics from a song. 😊 Speaking of which, I find it really helpful to write listening to some music ! I've got a few songs that I associate with the muses (mine and/or my partner's) or the scene I'm working on, and it really helps setting the mood and getting those replies flowing !

5. What has made you completely lose your chill?  I must say that in all these years, I've been lucky enough to avoid any unnecessary drama and toxicity, and therefore my experience has been mostly positive. So thankfully I don't really have anything to comment on this topic. 🙏

( Thank you so much for sending these, @niragixpsych ! I wish you a wonderful week ! 💖 )

[thedisneychef]

Where to Buy Recipe Cards: Tips and Options

Looking for the perfect recipe cards to get your kitchen organized? It can be a daunting task trying to find the right ones. But don't worry, I'm here to help! In this article, I'll walk you through all of the best places to buy recipe cards so that you can find what you need. From online stores and specialty shops, to thrift stores and beyond – there are plenty of great options available. Let's get started! Online Stores I love making recipe cards for myself, and I’ve bought them from online stores many times. There are plenty of great places to buy them - some of which even offer DIY printing options so you can customize your own designs with printable templates! One website in particular that I recommend is Zazzle. They have a huge range of different styles available, from traditional cookbook-style recipes to cute cartoon illustrations. You can also upload your own images or artwork if you want something unique, and they provide helpful tools for designing your own recipe cards. Plus, the price is right too – it’s usually cheaper than buying pre-made cards at a store. If you're looking for an easy way to make beautiful recipe cards yourself, then Zazzle should be your first stop! Their customizable templates let you create exactly what you need without any fuss. And don't forget about their affordable prices; you'll definitely get value for money here. Specialty Shops Searching for the perfect recipe cards can be a daunting task. However, specialty shops are often overlooked as a great source of unique and interesting finds! These stores have carefully curated products that cater to those looking for something special when it comes to cooking. From finding recipes for specialty dishes utilizing rare ingredients to having an endless supply of exotic spices, these specialty stores will help you find exactly what you’re looking for in your culinary journey. Not only do they offer high quality items, but their staff tend to be knowledgeable about the various types of cookware and other kitchen utensils available. It's worth taking time out of your day to visit one of these hidden gems - you never know what kind of delicious surprises await! Thrift Stores Moving away from specialty shops, thrift stores are a great way to get recipe cards. Thrifting is an eco-friendly way of second hand shopping and it can be really exciting hunting for vintage finds! You never know what you might find when browsing through the racks in a thrift store - that includes looking for recipe cards! Even if you don't find any recipe cards, there's always something interesting waiting to be discovered. Thrift stores offer amazing bargains on all sorts of items including books, clothing and kitchen accessories like recipe cards. The best part about shopping at these places is that they're usually very inexpensive compared to retail prices. Plus, by buying used products we’re helping reduce our environmental footprint as well as supporting local businesses. So next time your search for recipe cards takes you beyond specialty shops, try visiting your nearest thrift store instead! Who knows what treasures await? With so many incredible deals to choose from, you’ll surely have fun while finding everything you need! Supermarkets I'm looking to buy some recipe cards, and I'm wondering which type of supermarket I should visit. I'm familiar with big chain stores, but I'm also curious to know if there are any specialty stores that carry them. I'm sure there are some great tips out there for shopping in a supermarket, and I'd love to hear them! Finally, I'm hoping to find a store that offers the best selection so I can get the recipe cards I need. Types Of Grocery Stores Hey everyone! Are you looking for an ideal place to buy all the ingredients and supplies you need to make your favorite recipes? Well, there are so many different types of supermarkets that it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you. One type of grocery store worth considering if you’re looking to save money is a bulk-buying supermarket. These stores offer items in large quantities with discounted prices, making them great for families or those who like to cook in advance and freeze their meals. It’s also a great way to compare prices between brands and check out what works best for you budget wise. No matter where you choose to shop, take time to read labels carefully before buying anything - this will help ensure that you get the freshest products at the best possible price. Happy shopping! Supermarket Shopping Tips Now that you know where to shop, let’s talk about how to get the most out of your shopping trip. Meal planning can help save time and money in the long run - it's important to think ahead and plan meals for the week so that you don't overspend or end up with too much food. And when buying groceries, be sure to practice portion control so that nothing goes bad before you have a chance to use it all up. Look at expiration dates and make sure not to buy perishable items if they won't be used within a week or two. Finally, take advantage of discounts whenever possible - many stores offer weekly specials on certain products, so be sure to check those out! Homemade Recipes I love crafting homemade recipes. They're an enjoyable and cost-effective way to make delicious meals without breaking the bank. Plus, they allow me to get creative with ingredients and flavors I wouldn't usually think of combining. The best part is that many DIY recipes don't require expensive or hard-to-find ingredients; all you need are some basic pantry staples and a few fresh items. With a little imagination, you can create budget friendly dishes that really wow your family and friends! Most importantly, it's fun to put my own spin on classic recipes by adding unique flavor combinations—and experimenting in the kitchen always leads to exciting new discoveries. So why not try out something new? You may surprise yourself with what tasty results you can come up with! Frequently Asked Questions What Is The Best Way To Store Recipe Cards? Organizing your recipes and meal planning can be a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be! The best way to store recipe cards is in an easily accessible file box or folder. You can purchase these at most office supply stores or online retailers like Amazon. To ensure that you always know where they are, try color-coding the folders according to type of food (e.g., red for Italian dishes) or grouping them by main ingredients (e.g., proteins). This will make finding what you need much quicker and easier! How Can I Customize My Recipe Cards? Customizing your own recipe cards is a great way to get organized and make meal planning easier! You don't have to buy expensive pre-made cards, either - there are plenty of DIY customizing options you can use. For example, if you're handy with a craft knife or scissors, you could cut out shapes from different colors of card stock paper and glue them together in whatever design you like. It's also possible to print pictures or words directly onto the cards using an inkjet printer. Finally, you could even create unique dividers for each type of dish by punching holes in the edges of the cards and attaching string through them. With just these few steps, your recipe organization will be complete! Are There Any Discounts Or Special Offers For Buying Recipe Cards? If you're looking for budget friendly options to buy recipe cards, consider DIY options. There are often discounts and special offers available if you shop around online or in stores. You could even go the extra mile by making your own customized recipe cards with materials from a craft store. Whichever route you take, it's possible to find recipe cards that fit your budget! Are There Any Eco-Friendly Options For Recipe Cards? If you're looking for eco-friendly options when it comes to recipe cards, there are plenty of great choices. You can find a wide selection of cards made from recycled materials or green products like bamboo and hemp paper. Not only are these better for the environment, but they also look and feel great when writing your favorite recipes! Plus, many companies offer discounts or special offers if you buy in bulk, so you'll save money while doing your part to help protect Mother Earth. Are There Any Digital Options For Storing Recipe Cards? Are you looking for a digital solution to store your recipe cards? DIY printing and customizable templates are great options! With these tools, you can easily make recipe cards that reflect your unique style. You can also access them anytime, anywhere - no need to worry about losing or misplacing paper cards again. Plus, there's the added bonus of being eco-friendly by reducing paper waste. So why not give it a try? Conclusion Storing recipes is an important part of meal preparation. Recipe cards are a great way to keep all your favourite meals organized and safe from harm. With so many options available, it's easy to find the perfect recipe card solution for you. Whether you're looking for something that can be customized or prefer eco-friendly materials, there is something out there for everyone. Plus, with special offers and discounts available, finding quality recipe cards doesn't have to break the bank. So don't wait any longer - get started on organizing your kitchen today! Read the full article

[cassiaslair]

How did you learn to make all your pretty graphics? Was there tutorials you followed? Just curious!

i am so happy you think my work is pretty AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

but honestly?? it was just a lot of trial and error!!

like omg look at this icon border i made for myself almost 2 years ago

AN ACTUAL DISASTER LMFAOOOO. THE THOUGHT PROCESS WAS DEFINITELY THERE BUT THE EXECUTION? FLAWED. i remember being so proud of this but like, i've come so far! it's a lot of practice, and it's a lot of just understanding how photoshop and its tools work, really! and if you have a lot of good resources on hand, those are so instrumental in making things come together.

there are a lot of wonderful free resources on deviantart, but i've also purchased a lot of things from places like creativemarket or etsy. then, it's just experimenting with how you piece them together, whether it's a border or a promo banner or headcanon banner, anything! you start figuring out what looks good but also aligns with your taste, and sometimes it's editing tedious little individual things one by one and putting those together like a puzzle!

maybe one of these days i might stream the process, the next time i get a creative kick and i can show people what i personally do!

something that helped me with my like, poster / flyer / promo designs though was being a media manager for FFXIV rp night clubs in game! i didn't actually design anything by hand myself, since i purchased a license to a site with flyer templates, but by studying the layers or effects and stuff and how the individual assets came together to make a whole cohesive design, i was able to learn a lot! seeing like, things that look like they'd be cluttered also just made me more confident in having more cluttered things in my work, and sometimes it can be difficult to blend them together, but again, trial and error!

it also helps that i'm friends with so many talented people who i can bounce ideas off of or get feedback and suggestions on something i'm working on!!!

if you have any particular questions or need tutorials on something, i'll do my best to help!!

[yuikomorii]

Could you make that ship meme too? You can choose whatever ship you like most! 💖

//To be frank, I had no clue what a “ship meme” was before seeing the template but…that was surprisingly fun!(despite the fact that I spent almost 2 hours on it)

They genuinely look so cute in those pictures and their signature colors go very well together, I love their aesthetic a lot!💕

I’m going to clarify some things in case people were wondering why I chose them that way:

I truly feel like Yui can be an introvert but she also got some extroverted characteristics .She’s really talkative, gets energetic easily and likes being surrounded by others most of the time. The thing is, she dislikes being the centre of attention and crowded spaces(big mood lol).

I remember some certain scenes in Reiji’s MB route and Ruki’s CL one, where Yui seems afraid of bugs, yet I doubt she’d react as badly as Laito xD.

I think it’s obvious that neither of them knows how to drive . Honestly, I wouldn’t trust Yui or Ayato as my driver because she’s such a klutz and he wouldn’t respect the road signs so…no safety :”)

In Lost Eden, it was confirmed that Ayato knows actually how to cook (when he made Takoyaki for Yui) but the taste… it wasn’t really good.

I wouldn’t really say that Yui dislikes PDA, she rather gets flustered by it and I would do the same since that attracts stares from strangers (・・;)

We all know that Ayato is really overprotective but so is Yui sometimes, for the reason that according to her, Ayato is very delicate and she’s almost always very gentle with him because of that. Furthermore, she is always ready to defend him when other characters try to tear him down.

Horny level: In an official Rejet poll, it was revealed that Ayato is the most hormonal Diaboy(*pretends to be shocked*) but Yui is just slightly less hormonal than him, based on the things she told him or thought in Heaven Scenarios, Good Endings and throughout his routes. I should probably STOP reminding myself about that but I simply can’t forget the fact that her “ideal” death was being sucked and screwed by him(>_<)

Awkwardness level:Yui has never been in a relationship before, so I can understand why she’s awkward occasionally .They're really comfortable with each other, however Yui may be a little cringe at times (*coughs* poem scene *coughs*). Not that it bothers me; moments like this make me laugh JSJDJ.

Jealousy level: I strongly doubt (normal) Yui would go yandere because of that but she definitely gets jealous easily. I remember that HDB scene, where she saw Ayato with another girl and her chest started aching even if that was one of the earliest chapters. And well…it’s as clear as crystal that Ayato gets very jealous.

I intended to explain all of my choices at first, but some of them were evident, so I didn't see the sense in doing so. Anyway, I hope this satisfies everyone who requested the ship meme <3

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.