#notebookblog

[pochapal]

What's your biggest criticism about Umineko and Homestuck?

this is....a surprisingly difficult question actually!

for umineko it's hard to know because i'm so early on but two major things i can think of are that the horny battler anime gag stuff detracted from the seriousness of the subject matter in a way that i think did hurt the overall message being conveyed by including such scenes, and i worry that the story will fully stick the landing with all the thematic balls being juggled in the air. particularly i'm hoping that the political stuff, when it really comes into focus, remains as good as the subtext implies.

as for homestuck i think sometimes it choked a little on its own irony poisoning. the whole comedy-catharsis/meat-candy duality is an important plot point and worth thinking about, but i think the further out in postcanon we get the more that this approach weakens homestuck's position. hs^2 and the epilogues are stories that are drastically tonally different from what came before and i think attempts to recapture the flippacy of original homestuck stick out like a sore thumb. like, i don't think postcanon being funny is a problem, but everything is so thematically dense that non-sequitur gags that comment on nothing but themselves feel like dead air. i think postcanon homestuck plays things too safe despite its own mission statement and i get that there's a lot to consider but so far it's been treating its own premise in a very underwhelming way. the origin of this is i guess rooted in hs proper and the way that hussie was making a Forum Guy Poster's Story that accidentally transformed into something more affecting and profound than they ever intended - not that hussie is a bad writer, but this tension between what hussie envisioned homestuck to be and what homestuck itself wanted to become has left some gnarly cracks in the story structure that can become egregious if handled improperly.

[beanieman]

WRITE THE BG3 PARAGRAPH! (Only if you want to ofc)

Well....since you asked I guess I have to. (I have been wanting to write a BG3 paragraph since the game came out.)

BG3 is so good. I've never seen a game have so many choices that have effects on both the story itself and your relationship with your companions. You can a 100 different versions of the same game and it'll feel like a new experience every time. Plus I love how open ended your player character and how you can truly make them your own.

My Tav is an elf bard who can talk herself out of any situation. She's mostly a good person, but every now and then she has a chaotic lapse that throws the party into unimaginable situations. Like when she brought down the entire creche trying to grab a rare weapon that was not supposed to be touched. However, the chaos in her life suits her just fine because she has an entertainer background and honestly she just lives to have fun. Which is partly why she romanced Astarion even though she considered Karlach or Shadowheart for a bit there. (She is a pansexual queen.)

More Undercut

Also, outside of the player character the companions all have such good stories. Every single one of them are so fleshed out and easy to get attached to! Even though my party ended up being Astarion, Shadowheart, and Karlach, I'm still really attached to Gale, Wyll, and Lae'zel even without experiencing their stories fully. Which just means I need to do another playthrough to give them a time to shine.

Also Act 2 has the best writing in any video ever in my very biased opinion. It's fantastic how you're introduced to the shadow curse and then all of your companions stories start coming into focus while you're faced with trying to heal the land and finding the Nightsong. Also also the song that plays when you free the Nightsong?? Cinematic genius. The entire OST is a 10/10 though, including in The House Of Hope. Having one of the main villains give a full Disney performance while you fight him was such a good idea. I don't know who decided to do that but they need a raise.

So if you can't tell I clearly have plenty of thoughts about BG3. I'm going to leave a screenshot of my Tav here because I genuinely love her and kind of want to write something with her as the main character.

[eightyonekilograms]

via @max1461:

#hey here's a question: I am a diehard graph paper head a ride or die graph paper type of bitch. know of any good notebooks that come#in graph paper?

So, I know you say you're committed to graph paper, but just checking: have you given dot grids a fair shake? I actually used to be a graph-paper-only writer, but I eventually tried dot grids and now I hardly ever use anything else. This makes notebook searches a lot easier since basically everyone makes dot grid notebooks now.

But if you're committed to graph paper, I have a couple suggestions:

Rhodia is a classic and respected brand: they are reasonably cheap, and available in many places (you've almost certainly seen them at least one). The one caveat is that they have very sheen-y paper, which is effectively pen-only. I personally can't use them because I'm left-handed and find that my hands smudge the paper since it doesn't dry quickly, but other lefties don't seem to have this problem.

Midori's MD notebooks are one of my new favorites. I'm using one right now for my on-and-off category theory self-study. Also fairly inexpensive, the paper is high-quality and suitable for both pen and pencil, and I love these lay-flat bindings. The one caveat is, it's not quite graph paper: if you zoom in on the pages, you'll see a slight gap between the top of the vertical lines and the horizontal segments. But if this isn't a dealbreaker you for you, these are a great choice.

When I started writing this post, I didn't realize Leuchtturm1917 actually makes graph paper notebooks, but apparently they do! I haven't used their graph paper ones in particular, but of course I've used their other notebooks before and they are always a solid choice so I assume these are as well. Leuchtturm is essentially the non-shitty Moleskine. They're a bit pricier, but good quality and have creature comforts like a table of contents and numbered pages. I don't like their paper quite as much as the Midori and things from my other posts, but that's just me.

[notebookblog-blog]

"I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who's ever lived: I've loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough."

- Young Noah

[pochapal]

I love your analysis, if you haven't already can you give your opinion on Maria's and Beatrice's relationship? (Sorry if my English isn't understandable, it isn't my first language).

i think there are two angles to their relationship. the first is maria's own extreme faith in beatrice as an almost godlike figure who will lift her from her cruel life and bring her to the infinitely more joyous golden land (i think the religious associations with the magic are on purpose).

i also think that the culprit(s) have been using this faith in beatrice on maria's part to turn her into an unbreaking believer of the witch narrative in order to make the crimes more compelling for the rest of the family. there's some evidence that maria and "beatrice" have spoken before the events of the family conference which i think indicates some kind of marinating with maria - you have a servant claiming to be beatrice somehow in a type of rehearsal of the rose garden conversation with the umbrella. if i was to give my gut feeling given what we've seen i think it's likely that before the family conference a lot of maria's belief was coming from stories told by shannon (perhaps under kumasawa's direction?).

so you have maria desperate to believe in anything other than bleak reality and someone who stands to offer her everything she wants in the story of a powerful yet merciful witch who rewards true believers with a kind of paradise. if you tap into this with maria through promises of playing together in the golden land then you're simultaneously bringing joy to an abused child and creating an incredibly useful asset for the murders. as a result maria has enough love and belief for beatrice that she is able to "see" her in a way that makes everything that much more real for everyone else.

the beatrice in maria's head is more of a concept so i don't think we can consider that as a true relationship, but i do wonder about the servant(s) that helped sell the stories to make beatrice "real" to maria. belief in the witch is a great source of joy for maria, but it is also a naked manipulation done to guarantee the slaughter of her family. you have to wonder how someone like shannon or kumasawa felt telling these stories knowing their ultimate purpose.

[beanieman]

If there are no rules, anarchy will ensue. How can we change rules just for your selfish desires?!

-My overdramatic friend every time we play Uno (and Sou, probably)

Shin getting overly philosophical over a game of Uno is so incredibly in character.

[beanieman]

Sorry for being ignorant, but why does everyone refer to Sou as a "poor, wet mew-mew"?

We refer to Shin as that because he has the vibes of a drenched cat that looks pathetic. Basically it's saying that he has the same energy has this picture:

[beanieman]

Some one asked about Nao & Sou complaining about the Yabusames, now I need a fic where the Yabusames wonder whether Nao and Sou like them romantically.

Reko and Alice being confused about Nao and Shin liking them is great because I feel like it could either way.

Alice is generally bad at social cues, and Shin is incapable of communicating like a normal person. He seems like the type to ask Alice out in an incredibly confusing way (Ex: Shin asks Alice to get ice cream with him with the excuse that it's hot outside instead of clarifying he wants a date.). Then they go on what Shin considers a date and what Alice considers hanging out with his crush.

Then Shin overanalyzes everything. Alice could say point blank that he likes him, and it would probably still take Shin a while to comprehend that his feelings are real without any hidden objectives.

Reko seems like the type to get in her head. Even after Nao asks her out I could see her overthinking things in a "She called this a date but what if she misspoke? I don't want to make this weird." type of way.

Then Nao is decently dense. I could see Reko asking her out and her taking it as if they were hanging out as besties. It seems like it would take Reko being very blunt for her to learn they were out as a couple, which I could imagine leading to her gay panicking when she realizes.

All four of them have the potential to be very dense which makes Alishin and Naoreko very funny.

[beanieman]

If Sou, Nagito, Kokichi, Akechi and Byakuya where trapped in a room who would lose their sanity first?

I don't know anything about Akechi or Kokichi so I could be wrong, but my best guess is that Byakuya would get tired of them remarkably quickly.

[eightyonekilograms]

How about dot grid paper, what are you recommendations on that?

I believe all the notebooks in both my original post and the follow-up have dot grid variants, so anything on those lists should be fine.