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queenshelby · 4 years

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Foreigner – Peaky Blinder Fanfic

PART TWO – GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

Featuring: Tommy Shelby x Reader

Warning: SMUT

Words: 5093

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Business Meeting

It was a long night for Tommy. But, as usual, he woke up early to attend business matters and liaise with Arthur and Polly about how to handle the recent interference by agent Cooper, an investigator of the Crown, with the latest shipment of heroin from the Chinese.

Abrahama Gold was arrested in the process and Tommy had to plan his next move. It was unclear to Tommy how agent Cooper got wind of the shipment. Someone must have informed him, but who? Police in Birmingham are on Tommy’s payroll and Tommy has recently taken out his competitor. There was no one Tommy could think of who had a vested interest in informing agent Cooper of the shipment.

Of course, shipments often got interfered with but generally the interferers were gangs or business men who wanted to take the profits from the sale of the products themselves. Being ratted out to the Crown as unusual.

As Tommy and Polly were arguing on how to deal with the situation, there was a knock on the door of Tommy’s office.

‘Finn, come in’ Tommy said as he saw Finn glancing through the small glass window beside his office door.

‘You wanted to see me Tommy’ Finn said.

‘Yes’ Tommy said as he lit himself a cigarette. ‘Sit down’ he added.

Finn sat down without speaking a word, waiting for Tommy to continue.

‘The woman you drove back to her residence last night…where was she staying?’ Tommy asked, following which Finn told him that you were staying at the Renaissance Hotel.

‘Tommy, I don’t think now is the right time to discuss your fancy for yet another woman who you will get bored off in a few weeks’ Polly said angrily as she already heard from the barmaid at the Garrison about the mysterious young woman who Tommy had bandaged up last night.

‘Are you talking about the girl you sat with last night?’ Arthur asked as a slight chuckle escaped him. ‘You don’t think she is a bit young for you brother? She is 25 at the most’ Arthur added with laughter.

‘Fuck off Arthur’ Tommy said firmly, before carrying on.

‘Something seemed off about her. I believe that she is looking for connections to export alcohol and drugs to America which, I think, is interesting considering that Esme Bortelli’s men are also staying at the Renaissance Hotel and are in town to discuss business of some sort. I did my research on Esme and it turns out that Esme’s affiliate is Manfred Conner, the father of Lucas Conner.’ Tommy added.

‘The 16-year-old boy who Arthur shot 8 years ago? Do you think that there is connection between that woman at the Garrison last night and the tip off?’ Polly asked.

‘I don’t think she made the tip off Polly. But, I also don’t think that our friend Manfred is here to advance Esme’s business interests. Something seems off.’ Tommy said.

‘Also, there were two men at the Garrison last night asking questions. I believe that they were after Arthur and I think that Manfred sent them’ Tommy added.

‘Where are the men now?’ Arthur asked

‘They are held by Abrahama’s men at the old steel factory. Go and make them talk and send them back to Conner with a message’ Tommy instructed.

‘Do you think we set up a meeting with Giovanni Sabini first? He might have some sort of connection’ Polly asked.

‘Not yet’ Tommy responded. ‘I will talk to the girl first. She must be an affiliate of Bortelli or Conner. I might be able to get to her and see what Conner’s plan is and whether he is looking after Esme’s business interests or not’ Tommy said, causing Polly to roll her eyes.

‘Of course…Thomas Shelby. You will talk to her…’ Polly said with laughter.

‘I am willing to go further than talking if it benefits our operations Polly’ Tommy said.

‘I see your tactics have not changed when it comes to dealing with women in this business’ Polly said. ‘So, your plan is to manipulate her into trusting you to get your way?’ Polly added.

‘I might try, depending on the circumstances’ Tommy responded.

‘That may have worked with Jesse Eden, but with this woman, it may be a much more dangerous game that you are playing Tommy. If she is related to Bortelli and you screw with her, you may find yourself at war with the West Coast Mafia’ Polly said concerned.

‘Not if we struck the right deal with Bortelli’ Tommy said before taking a pause. ‘Unfortunately, we will need her for this as I do not trust Manfred Conner and his men’ Tommy said.

‘Be careful Tommy’ Polly said.

‘Always’ Tommy grinned before ending the business meeting and engaging Lizzy to track you down in order to get more information about what he might be dealing with.

Meeting Again

Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult for Lizzy to find you as your father got the hotel staff to keep close tabs on you after last night’s adventure.

Thus, just after you sat down and ordered dinner at the hotel’s bar, you heard a familiar voice from behind you.

‘Good evening Y/N’ the voice said.

‘Good evening sir, what a pleasant surprise’ you responded as you turned around and noticed the same man you met last night standing behind you.

Without asking for your approval and with great confidence and a touch of arrogance, the man sat down across from you.

‘How is your knee?’ he asked as the waitress brought him a glass of whiskey.

‘It’s much better, thank you…Did you just order this?’ you asked surprised as you did not notice him speak with the waitress.

‘I don’t have to, I am regular’ the man responded.

‘Right’ you smiled. ‘So, you are here to have dinner, on your own?’ you asked.

‘No, I already ate. I am here to help you Y/N’ the man said as he lit himself a cigarette.

‘Help me? With what?’ you asked surprised.

‘Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, whatever you need. Of course, it comes at a price’ the man said calmly but yet determined.

You werent sure whether he was fishing for information after last night or whether he knew that you were here on behalf of your aunt to struck a deal with Thomas Shelby.

‘Listen, Mr…?’ you responded as you did not know his name and, before you could continue with your sentence, the man responded ‘Shelby’.

‘Shelby? As in Thomas Shelby?’ you asked surprised. You heard of Thomas Shelby on many occasions but never imagined him to be anything like the man sitting right in front of you. You had always imagined him to be an old man who smelled like cigar smoke and who looked somewhat scary, almost rough and aggressive.

‘Yes, Thomas Shelby’ Tommy said. ‘So, either you really didn’t know who I was or you have something to hide. Which one is it Y/N?’ Tommy added.

‘I really had no idea. I am so sorry’ you responded.

‘Alright, I believe you. You seem like a trustworthy young woman’ Tommy said.

‘Well thank you Mr Shelby, but I have to go’ you said with a haste as you grabbed your bag. You were intimidated by Tommy and worried that you might find yourself in trouble real soon if you continue talking to him without first speaking to your aunt.

‘Y/N’ Tommy said as he stood up from his chair just as you were about to leave the table.

‘Yes, Mr Shelby?’ you responded while turning around briefly.

‘Let me know when you are ready talk business and give my regards to Esme when you speak to her’ Tommy said as he gave you a card with his office address and telephone connection.

You knew exactly that he was playing you. It was obvious. But you didn’t know why and what his end game was. Your father and aunt Esme had warned you about him on numerous occasions. He was a gambling man and he was calculated and dangerous.

Important Call

As you returned to your hotel room, you were looking for your father to discuss what had just happened. But, he wasn’t there.

He left you a note saying that he had business to attend to. This was rather frustrating for you as he had not discussed any business matters with you since you had arrived in Birmingham. This was contrary to aunt Esme’s instructions. After all, you are the one looking after the finances and laundering of the profits.

Since your father was preoccupied with what appeared to be his own matters, you didn’t waste any time and called aunt Esme to tell her who you had met and to seek further instructions.

Her instructions were simple. She told you to see Thomas Shelby as he had suggested. She also became suspicious about your father’s behaviour after you explained the situation and told you not to get your father involved until the deal is done.

You didn’t like going behind your father’s back but yet you felt as though you had to protect him. He has been hot headed lately and not has not been smart when it came to business matters.

You, on the other hand, took after your mother. You were level headed. You despised violence and believed that all conflicts could be negotiated. Your aunt always used to tell you that you should become a politician as you had excellent negotiation skills. In the same vein, she believed that you can stand up against Thomas Shelby and negotiate the deal with him on her behalf. She trusted you and you respected her wishes.

Business Negotiations

Just as aunt Esme had instructed you, the following day, you attended Thomas Shelby’s office to discuss a deal between his family and yours.

‘Mr Shelby, there is a woman here for you. She said she wants to talk about a business opportunity with you’ Tommy’s receptionist said.

‘Send her in Amy, thank you’ Tommy said, knowing that it would be you.

‘I didn’t expect to see you so soon Y/N. Please sit’ Tommy said as he poured a glass of whisky and handed it to you.

You were nervous and intimidated. Your hands were shaking as you held onto the glass of whiskey. He was handsome and kind but yet you were afraid of him in a way.

‘Now what do you need Y/N?’ Tommy asked.

‘Distribution of alcohol, cocaine and heroin to Atlanta’ you said.

‘I already have a supply chain to Atlanta. But you already know this’ Tommy said. ‘So, what is in it for me other than trouble with my current supplier?’ he asked.

‘15% of the profits and we take the losses for any product ceased’ you said, causing Tommy to laugh.

‘No’ Tommy said firmly as he starred into your eyes. He was standing right in front of you. So close and so intimidating.

‘You are in the wrong business Love’ he added with a chuckle since you didn’t respond to his firm ‘no’. He clearly did not take you seriously.

You built up all of your courage and stood up, right in front of Tommy, and firmly put your glass onto his desk.

‘With all due respect Mr Shelby, I know for a fact that this is more than Sabini offers you’ you said as you looked into his hypnotising blue eyes.

A strange sensation overcame Tommy. Something he hadn’t felt before. It was a feeling of warmth and coldness at the same time as you stood in front of him with all that confidence you had inside of you. He certainly did not expect this.

‘You would know that Sabini is paying more than you just offered me. Unless, of course, you have been sloppy when doing research’ Tommy said as he gently moved some of your hair out of your face and behind your ear.

‘Yes, but how many shipments did you lose in Atlanta since taking over. I count two so far and the losses were excessive’ you said nervously as you could feel Tommy’s warm breath on your neck.

‘40%, you take the losses in Atlanta and I will deal with Sabini’ Tommy whispered into your ear while his hand was still running over your neck gently. His warm breath besides your ear sent shivers down your neck and you wanted nothing more than for him to kiss you.

But Tommy knew exactly what he was doing and it became clear to you that he wasn’t going to give you what you wanted. What you didn’t know was that he was still playing you and his strategy was working.

‘I cannot agree to this Mr Shelby’ you answered nervously as you moved your head, hoping to catch Tommy’s lips with yours.

‘Well, that is too bad’ Tommy said just before he pulled away from you. ‘You will need to come back with a better offer’ he said as he walked around the table and sat down on his chair.

‘Thank you for your time Mr Shelby’ you said nervously as you grabbed your bag from the desk. You bit your lip as your legs were still shaking nervously before walking towards the door.

‘I hope to see you soon Y/N’ Tommy said as you left his office.

It took you some time to collect your thoughts after the meeting. It was intense and your mind was racing with all sorts of things, not just business. ‘What was this man doing to you?’ you thought to yourself.

The Charity Gala

The following day, your father was invited by Thomas Shelby to attend a charity event. It was obvious that Thomas wanted to talk business and he wanted to do so in a public place.

The invitation was sent days ago, just as you arrived at the Renaissance Hotel. Tommy knew Esme’s men were in town and he had a good guess about what they wanted. But, Thomas Shelby doesn’t take any risks. Him and your father had history.

You were concerned that Tommy would speak with your father about having met you and the deal on the table. Therefore, you decided to attend the event as well, despite your father’s wishes against it.

As you walked down the stairs in the lobby, you saw Tommy greeting your father.

‘Mr Conner, it is a pleasure to meet you again’ Tommy said as he shook your father’s hand.

‘I can’t say that the pleasure is on my side’ your father responded without any attempt to introduce you to Tommy. It was rather awkward and you could not help yourself but stare at Tommy.

Fortunately for you, Tommy could sense the awkwardness and was determined to end it.

‘Is this your business partner?’ Tommy asked your father as he gazed over to you.

‘She is my daughter’ your father said, just as you interrupted.

‘I am representing my aunt Esme’s business interests. I am in charge of finances’ you explained as you shook Tommy’s hand, pretending that you haven’t met him before.

‘Pleasure to meet you Miss or Mrs…?’ Tommy played along.

‘Miss. Y/N Conner’ you responded before you went on to ask ‘Do you dance Mr Shelby?’

‘I do’ Tommy said as he offered you his hand and guided you towards the dancefloor, leaving your father speechless.

You imagined that your father would have been rather annoyed to see you walk off with Thomas Shelby, but you really needed to speak with Tommy, alone.

‘Thank you for playing along’ you whispered into Tommy’s ear as you began to dance.

‘Pleasure’ Tommy responded as he was leading the dance.

‘You did not mention that Manfred Connor is your father’ Tommy said as the dancefloor began to fill up.

‘I didn’t think that it was relevant. My aunt authorised me to negotiate with you. My father will only be involved when the deal is being put in action’ you responded, causing Tommy to chuckle.

‘I think that your father has a mind of his own. You and your aunt should be careful’ Tommy said.

‘What do you mean?’ you asked concerned.

‘You do not need to concern yourself with this tonight Y/N’ Tommy said in response.

‘Well, I have spoken to my aunt, she is agreeable to 25%’ you said, causing Tommy to laugh.

‘You know I will not agree to 25%’ Tommy said.

‘I told her that but I have an offer you cannot refuse Mr Shelby’ you whispered back just as the music stopped.

‘Meet me at Room 1801 in 30 minutes and we can discuss’ Tommy said as he walked you back to your father.

‘Thank you for the dance, Miss Conner. Please excuse me’ Tommy said as your father requested a meeting with Tommy.

You were still unsure whether Tommy was still playing you or whether he was genuinely interested in making a deal. Or perhaps, was he interested in something else you wondered.

A Business Meeting of a different kind

Half an hour later, just as agreed, you walked up to Room 1801.

The door to the room was open. You entered but Tommy was not there. ‘He must not be known to be punctual’ you thought.

It was rather awkward, discussing business matters on your own with a man like this.

The room you were in was quite obviously designated for meetings of this kind. Unlike other hotel rooms, this room had a large table and a drink cart with an assortment of top shelf whiskeys and snacks.

There were stacks of papers on one of the side boards and, most interestingly, there was no bed in this room.

You poured yourself a glass of whiskey and sat down at the table until, not long, Tommy entered the room.

‘My apologies Y/N, I was held up’ Tommy said.

‘With my father?’ you asked.

‘He desperately wanted to know where I am holding the men he sent after me a few days ago’ Tommy said.

‘Sent after you, why?’ you asked.

‘I am yet to figure this out’ Tommy said.

‘You aren’t going to take me hostage, are you?’ you chuckled.

‘You have nothing to worry about Y/N’ Tommy said with some laughter. ‘I am here to talk business. I respect you and your aunt but, unfortunately, I wasn’t left with much of a choice other than to deal with Sabini a few months ago’ Tommy said as he poured himself a drink.

When you looked at him sip on his whiskey, your lips tingled and your mind wandered to delicious places.

While you hardly knew him, you knew that kissing him would be like heaven and sin combined. You wanted to kiss those lips and feel his body pressed against yours, and the closer he got as you spoke, you thought it may happen.

‘So, what is this offer I cannot refuse?’ Tommy said as he stood right in front of you.

‘We can offer you exclusive distribution to the West Coast, not just Atlanta’ you said as you bit your lip.

‘At 40%?’ Tommy asked, causing you to shake your head nervously.

‘That’s a shame. What else can you offer me?’ he asked.

‘Uhm’ you said quietly as you were lost for words.

Within moments, the space between you closed as Tommy leaned in and pressed his body against yours.

‘That is my offer Mr Shelby, exclusive distribution at 25%’ you said with a shaky voice.

‘I will think about it’ Tommy whispered into your ear just before he gently kissed your neck while sliding a hand between the buttons on your shirt. You loved the way he made you feel…sexy, powerful and desired.

As Tommy continued to kiss your neck, you gasped as his hand brushed your skin.

‘You have 24 hours to consider this offer Mrs Shelby’ you said with a gasp as you tilted your head back into him, reaching a hand up, grabbing the back of his neck to pull his mouth down onto your skin once more.

‘Call me Tommy’ he chuckled as he could feel how much you wanted him.

He unbuttoned your blouse skillfully, reaching under your bra to run his finger along the smooth skin of your breast, and gripping a nipple between his thumb and forefinger. He rubbed it gently, stimulating your desire.

You haven’t been with any man like him before and moaned as he teased you.

Tommy’s mouth left a trail of fire as he brushed your hair aside, and moved his lips to your shoulder, while reaching down to the hem of your skirt.

After hiking the skirt up around your waist, Tommy slid his hand down your thigh. His touch sent your pulse into overdrive.

‘Tommy’ you said quietly as you were overpowered by his touch. You knew this was a terrible idea and Tommy could sense your concerns in the tone of your voice.

‘Do you want me to stop Y/N?’ Tommy asked as his hand paused, causing you to bite your lips and shake your head.

You have only been with one man before and Tommy was sensing your lack of experience and slowed down.

His lips slowly moved from your neck and shoulders to your mouth while his hand was still beneath your skirt on the outside of your thigh.

His lips tasted like sweet whiskey and his kisses were gentle and slow.

Your heart was pounding and Tommy could feel your sense of apprehension.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to stop?’ he asked again quietly, causing you take shake your head again and respond with a quite ‘no’.

‘Alright’ he said gently as he slipped his hand to the inside of your thigh. With a gentle moan you arched your back as he slid a finger under your panty and into the soft folds of your skin.

‘Tommy’ you moaned as your spread your legs wider and grabbed his hand, pressing his finger deeper into you.

‘You are so wet’ Tommy whispered into your ear as his fingers went in and out of your entrance slowly.

‘God, I want you Tommy’ you whispered as his erection was pushing against you.

Tommy slid in another finger, opening you up. His rhythm was skilled and your legs were beginning to weaken in anticipation.

‘Don’t…not yet’ Tommy whispered as he could feel your walls tightening around his fingers. You were so close.

Tommy removed his fingers from your entrance and pushed down your panties until they dropped to the floor.

When Tommy looked at you the way he did in that moment, you felt wanted and confident.

You skillfully lifted the toe of your heel and kicked your panties aside, while unbuckling Tommy’s belt.

But in that moment, Tommy backed off. It was like he was in a trance and had changed his mind all of a sudden.

‘What’s wrong?’ you asked surprised.

‘Y/N, perhaps this is a bad idea’ Tommy said with guilt. He knew that what he was doing was calculated, but he felt an attraction towards you which made him uncomfortable. This attraction changed the entire dynamic of this game for him. He had an intense desire to be with you and this was something he didn’t expect. It was almost like he was losing control in the moment.

‘Are you not attracted to me?’ you asked as an uncomfortable hot flush rushed over your neck and spine.

‘I am, but it doesn’t make it right Y/N, you are like what, 23, 24 at the most, and we may soon be in business together’ Tommy said.

’22 actually and, so what? You have never slept with any of your female acquaintances before? I find this hard to believe’ you laughed.

‘Not with an acquaintance 15 years younger than me, no’ Tommy said.

‘It’s sex Tommy, not marriage…’ you laughed before pulling him closer towards you.

‘I want you, please, just this once’ you whispered into his ear while your hands returned to his belt and trousers. ‘Despite, this may relieve some of the tension between us, don’t you think?’ you continued.

‘Fuck’ Tommy said with a deep voice and, without any warning, Tommy lifted your leg around him and leaned in, pressing your back against the wall. After pulling your bra down, he leaned down and sucked the taut skin of your nipple, flicking it with his tongue, as you reached for his cock greedily, wrapping your hand around its shaft.

At the same time, Tommy returned his fingers to your inside, pumping them in and out gently.

‘Are you sure this is what you want Y/N?’ Tommy asked in between quiet moans.

‘I am sure’ you whispered as you were stroking his hard cock.

Tommy removed his fingers from inside you, brought them up to your mouth, and ran them along your lower lip, watching with lustful eyes as you licked his fingers, tasting yourself.

‘I need you inside of me’ you begged with your hand still around him, running the tip of his cock against the inside of your thigh.

Tommy’s eyes burned as your moist heat made him grow harder in your grasp, and you began to ache, waiting for the moment you dreamed about since the night you met him.

Finally, Tommy lined himself up with your entrance.

As he entered you, a bolt of electricity shot through your body which erased all rational thought, filling your head with visions of only of them.

Locking eyes, he guided himself into you, filling you completely with his first penetration. The desire you felt at that moment was overpowering, and you opened your legs as wide as they would go, taking him in hungrily.

‘How does that feel?’ Tommy asked with one hand on your hip and the other reaching for your hand, pinning it above your head.

But, you couldn’t speak and only responded with a nod. He took your breath away and you were too caught up in the exquisite pleasure of finally having him.

As he began to move, your bodies fell into sync. It felt insanely good.

His movements started of gently, giving you plenty of time to adjust. After all, he could tell that you hadn’t had much experience.

As he was thrusting into you, his lips wandered down your neck while quiet moans escaped him. You tried hard to stay quiet yourself but the sensations you were experiencing were way to intense.

‘Tommy, fuck’ you moaned loudly, causing Tommy to grin. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the loudness of the sounds that you were making.

Removing his hand that had held yours firm above your head, Tommy reached for your other leg and pulled it around him, cupping your round buttocks in his hands, bringing you down onto him faster.

As he was thrusting into you harder, you closed your eyes, feeling him fill you and enjoying the warmth that was building as he hit your pleasure spot over and over.

‘God, you feel good’ Tommy huffed as his breath was growing labored and beads of sweat formed on his temples.

At this moment, you could tell that his desire for you was real. He enjoyed every moment of being inside of you.

It wasn’t long until you begged Tommy to go even harder before reaching for his lower lip with your mouth, pulling it between your teeth.

Tommy complied, bending his knees, slamming into you with more force.

‘Oh god Tommy’ you moaned loudly as your body was tensing up.

Tommy could tell that you were trying to hold back on your orgasm. The sensation was quite unfamiliar to you and you did not know what to expect. Your ex never got you to this point and you were completely overwhelmed by the pleasure running through your body.

‘Let go’ Tommy whispered into your ear while pushing into you as your sweat covered bodies stuck together.

‘No’ you responded in between laboured breaths as you bit your lip.

‘Do it for me’ Tommy ordered, after which you leaned in for his mouth with your own, and kissed him deeply while you swiveled your hips in coordination with his while your tongues dancing with one another.

Once your mouths parted, Tommy looked deep into your eyes. His eyes were full of fire as he slid his finger between the slick slit between your legs, encouraging your building orgasm with his fingers.

His thrusts became harder and deeper while his fingers began to move faster.

You knew that the exquisite moment of your climax was seconds away and closed your eyes.

As you turned your head to the side, your lips parted and you cried out Tommy’s name louder than before while your body began to shake with each powerful release.

As your orgasm washed over you, Tommy was getting closer to his own release. Hearing the sounds you were making were sending him over the edge within seconds. With one loud moan, Tommy released and his body was shaking as he filled you with his warm cum.

Just as he came inside of you, you exchanged more passionate kisses before your lips slowly drifted apart.

‘Are you alright?’ Tommy asked softly once his breathing slowed.

‘Never been better’ you responded as you leaned your forehead to his, breathing him in one last time, before sliding one leg down, placing a foot gingerly on the floor, and then the other.

’24 hours Tommy’ you said as grabbed your panties from the floor. You could feel his warm cum dripping out of you as you put them back on, but it didn’t bother you. To the contrary, you loved the feeling of it.

‘You better get back downstairs before someone really thinks that I kidnapped you’ Tommy said as he handed you your blouse.

‘Good idea’ you responded as you pressed your lips onto Tommy’s quickly one more time.

‘This was a once off Y/N’ Tommy said.

‘I know, that’s why I stole this last kiss’ you responded with a smile. ‘Give me five-minute head start, would you?’ you added as you pinned up your hair and walked towards the door.

Tommy nodded. He was left speechless, which wasn’t something that had happened often.

Was it him who had a hold of you, or was it you who had a hold of him?

To be continued….

#cillian murphy #cillian murphy smut #Cillian Murphy x Reader #Tommy Shelby #tommy shelby smut #tommy shelby x reader #tommy shelby imagine #Peaky Blinders #peaky blinder imagine #peaky blinders fanfic #peaky blinders smut #thomas shelby #thomas shelby smut #thomas shelby x reader

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vintagesimstress · 4 years

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III. Meshing a (vintage) dress

(Previous: II. Learning to mesh)

Now that you know how to get around in Blender, you can finally put your newly acquired skills into action and mesh your first dress. I just hope you did your homework and really made your donuts - otherwise you might find it very difficult to understand what's going on in this part! I'll assume that you've watched and practised it all, so I won't explain the basic yet again. I will be writing the shortkeys in brackets though – there are way too many of them to remember them all after just a couple of videos.

So, let's get it started... But where?

As usually, there's no one proper answer to this question. Generally speaking, creators' approaches to meshing can be divided into 3 categories:

Combining parts of different EA meshes into a new mesh – a.k.a. frankenmeshing.

For sure you've seen frankenmeshed CC many times, even though you might not have realised it. Let's say EA releases a new DLC which includes a top with some cool, never-seen-before sleeves. Let's say there's a dress in game which you think would look great with those new sleeves instead of the boring old ones. In such case you can simply export both meshes in S4S, open one of them in Blender and append the other one (more on it later). A bit of deleting & merging of vertices and voilà! The mesh is ready. Most of the time you don't even have to worry about uv-1 and weights (again, more on it later... LOTS on it later).

Mesh editing

That's pretty self-explanatory, isn't it? This method is what most tutorials try to teach you. Look for a piece which resembles the most what you'd like to make. Export the mesh and make the necessary adjustments. Depending on how much you edited, you might have to mess with uv-1 and weights a little bit, but usually it shouldn't be too problematic.

Making a mesh from scratch

As far as I know without having ever used Marvellous Designer, this is what MD creators do: 'sew' their mesh completely from scratch and then import it to Blender. Such a mesh doesn't carry any of the vital information – uv-maps, weights, bones, anything - so all of those have to be manually assigned to it. This, obviously, significantly increases the workload and can be very tricky to do; however, this meshing method gives you almost unlimited freedom. If you don't limit yourself to editing existing stuff, you can make pretty much ANYTHING.

As you can see, all of those methods have their pros and cons - and they're all equally valuable as long as they help you achieve your goal. The method which I like the most and which I'm going to show you lands somewhere between no. 2 and 3: I use an existing top and make it into a dress. This way I have lots of creative freedom, but also reduce the unnecessary workload (yes, in most cases meshing a top from scratch would be totally unnecessary).

Enough theory, let's go grab that top!

Open S4S. Choose the “Create 3D mesh” option under “CAS” menu and then click that “CAS” button. You will see the list of all CAS items in your game.

NOTE: If you DON'T see the list, that probably means S4S didn't manage to find your TS4 files. You have to open the 'Settings' tab and manually change the 'Sims 4 Path' and 'Sims 4 Documents'. And if you're already there, make sure your Blender path is correct as well!

As you can see, there are many categories you can choose from at the top to narrow down your search. I need a top for adult females, so that's what I'm going to select. My favourite starting point is that simple BG top – it's skin-tight (meaning: the texture is only printed on top of the body, not really meshed, which makes it perfect for any future edits) almost everywhere, except for the breast area: there it's nicely stretched, just like it should be in case of my dress. If I wanted to make a dress with a deep décolletage, like an evening or ball gown, I'd type 'nude' in the search bar and select that naked female Barbie top instead.

The swatch doesn't matter. Select any of them and then click 'next'. I chose the red one, just because I like the colour:

What you're doing now is cloning a BG item and creating a new package. Name it whatever you want and save it in some 'Tutorial' folder or so. It doesn't really matter, as soon you won't need it anymore – we're here only for the mesh.

Once you've done it, a new window will appear. This is your new package with all the information it carries. We'll delve into details later – for now, as I said, we only need the mesh. Go to the 'Meshes' tab and click the 'Export mesh' button (make sure NOT to change the level of detail by accident!). Save it in your Tutorial folder as whatever (e.g. mesh_1).

You can close S4S now – we won't need it for a loooong time. Open your newly exported Blender file instead. This is what you should see:

NOTE: It won't make any sense to you right now, but check if you see the 'S4Studio CAS Tools' on the right side! If they're not there, it means your Blender and S4S are not properly connected and you'll run into problems later. Go back to S4S settings and assign the correct Blender path!

I'd suggest you immediately change the perspective to Ortho (num 5) and hide those sidebars on the right (n) and left (t) of the main window. Better, right?

Make sure your cursor is in the main window! If the shortkeys aren't working, it's probably because the cursor is in the wrong place.

When you go into edit mode (tab), you might notice one very important detail: body parts are also parts of the mesh. If you delete them, they won't appear on your sim either. Our top includes hands and neck only – the rest of what you can see is visible only in Blender. A good way to check if your mesh isn't missing anything is clicking that little plus next to 'rig' and then 'closing' all those little eyes next to all the listed body parts. Now your model will look a bit different:

Of course, missing some of those body parts is not a problem. A dress shouldn't include head or feet – those are separate categories. We can toggle feet, both heads and teeth visible again. What we lack is a bottom, i.e. legs – but luckily, we don't have to worry about it, as they'll be hidden under the skirt anyway. I will explain how to add legs (or any other missing body parts) to the mesh at one point, but a bit later – for now let's say we don't need them.

There are two methods of meshing a skirt that I'd like to show you, and they both start with the same basic steps:

1. Just after exporting, your mesh is cut wherever its uv map was cut, which might lead to some problems. Better select all your vertices (a), press w and choose 'remove doubles' from the list. Almost 300 vertices got merged!

2. Turn on the X-ray. Make sure you're in the front view (num 1) and then select (b) all the vertices below the waistline. Press X or del and choose 'vertices'. Kaboom!

3. Select (b) the lowest remaining row of vertices.

4. Extrude those vertices down (e, z) until the point to which your dress should reach. If you're using a reference picture, that's one of those moments when you should take a close look at it.

5. Scale (s) those extruded vertices until the bottom of your dress is as wide as it should be. If you're using a picture, pay attention to the proportion of the bottom of the dress vs shoulders – that's usually the best reference point you can get. Mine should be quite a bit wider than the shoulders, so I got this:

6. Turn the camera around and check how it looks from other viewpoints. I can see that my skirt is kind of asymmetrical, and not in a good way: flat at the back, going too far to the front. Let's go to the side view (num 3) and move those vertices back a bit (g, y). Much better!

7. I still don't like that flatness at the back. Let's go to the top view (num 7) and select only the central vertex on the back. Now, do you remember what you did to get that icing on the donut? Proportional editing? That's what I'm going to use. I'll turn it on only for connected vertices (alt + o) and then move that central vertex back (g, y).

NOTE: If your whole mesh is moving when you're trying to use proportional editing, scroll your mouse wheel until you see a white circle on the screen. The smaller the circle, the smaller the area affected by your edits. By default it's very big, that's why everything is moving!

8. Once again look around and make sure the basic shape of your skirt mesh is correct. Save, e.g. as mesh_2 (ctrl + shift + s).

Did you make it till the end? Congratulations! I'm sorry it got so long and I hope you could follow everything (also, please tell me if something isn't clear, I'll try to add explanations). Of course we're not done with our meshing adventures; the skirt still needs lots of tuning, but we'll deal with it next time. Now we all deserve a good rest :).

(Next: III a. Method I: Loop, Sculpt, Cut)

#tutorial #meshing

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nighttimepixels · 5 years

Note

Heyhey Night! I have a buncha questions after seeing all your animations and they're just so cool so! I hope this is ok!! Can u animate normally too, or only pixel? Not that that's bad, just wondering! What's ur preferred kinda animation? Do u prefer lipflaps or lipsyncs? What's the hardest part of the animation process?? What's ur favorite?? Any part u don't like? What's a thing people don't see that u put a lotta time into? Do u have a fave animation u've done? Thank u btw for all ur art!!

Oh stars, okay, yeah- I’m happy to answer all these!! I’ll break them up so it’s easier to read X) And awww geez thank you so much for your support, sweet anon! It really makes my day when people say they like anything I’ve made, and stars knows it’s all the more true with the sweet sweet time sink that is animation (´•̥̥̥\\ヮ\\•̥̥̥` )

I’ll also put this under a cut since it gets a bit long :)

Can u animate normally too, or only pixel?

This one cracks me up a little, don’t worry about it XD I totally can! In fact I enjoy it a lot - and... gods, animation software is a nightmare and a half, to be honest. That’s the biggest hurdle.

I do just straight up love pixel art and the aesthetic I can achieve with it, but I do at times miss ‘normal’ (non pixel?) animation, heh. Especially sound-syncing! I do all my pixel art in Asesprite which imo is the best pixel art program, not to mention made by an actual pixel artist - buuuut it doesn’t have a sound file option. Which makes sense! Er, frankly, most pixel artists wouldn’t... use it to animate like I do? More for games, or for looping gifs? So I can’t complain much, it makes a lot of sense that it’s a low dev priority.

Now, when it comes to other animation programs... I’ve tried a lot. Unfortunately, the ones that are preferable for the feel I like are either way out of budget (stares at TVPaint in the distance) or... well, have too high a learning curve for my single-person workflow, really. (OpenToonz, sigh...) And a lot of the free programs are good for getting a start in animation, but once you get to a certain point you really feel the limitations (whether it’s workflow, sound import, exports, trying to make something more finished than a rough...).

Then... there’s animation programs I just don’t like, and a lot of those are angled towards bone-style animations (nothing wrong with those, they just don’t fit my style? and are too much time investment for a single artist to output more quickly...), or are, well, freakin’ Adobe Animate.

I... gods, I do not like Animate (formerly Flash). And I made a whole 2 minute+ animation in it a couple years ago! (It’s very rough and bad and doesn’t make sense, pfff, not gonna link it XD) It’s... clunky, and vector oriented, and freaking lines don’t go where I want them too, and it tries to predict too much?? It’s hard to put to words, gah. For me, my animation style would be much more... raster oriented. Flow, hand drawn inbetweens, yaddayadda. Animate’s great for... plenty of things, but not for that kind of animation. There are far better animators than I who make it work with freakin’ aplomb though! So really, it’s just my taste, haha.

.... Er, that got long! I’ll cut off more rambling about animation software and tl;dr boil it down to “I love animating period, but turnaround is something I have to keep in mind as a freelancer, as well as budget, and my current focus is pixel animations for a number of reasons.” X)

What's ur preferred kinda animation?

I’m not exactly sure what this one means! Between pixel and non-pixel? Er, they both have their pros and cons, so I couldn’t say! But if I have to break down my current animations into categories, I’d say I have cutscenes, loop environments, and the broad game-like animations...

The first would be something like this animation feat. teasing Edge, the second would be something like this one with skesgo’s Starlan and Cinnamon, and the third is... everything else! From headsprite loops to ‘small’ characters running and so on.

Honestly, they’re all a lot of fun for different reasons! Cutscenes are generally the most challenging, but they give me the chance to push my limits and try and pull off something cool, whether I’m having to conserve frames (to keep the cost of a commission down) or whether I’m going more all out (which is a pricey commission, or a fun personal project, lol).

Loop environments are their own challenge - it may not look like it, but I put a lot of thought into how to make them look as natural as possible! From timing of talking characters, to where to place a blink, to exactly how many frames it’ll take to ‘soften’ a motion (so people aren’t just snapping between major poses) and so on - it takes... a lot of time to animate even simple scenes well, so I do a lot of mental math on how I can keep things affordable when someone approaches me for a commission. And frankly, I totally undercharge;; but I do my best!

Game-like animations are just fun. They range, they’re silly, to intense (I’ve animated fight animations before for game concepts), to indulgent, and beyond! Headsprites are always a delight, especially if I get to push the expression X) and I love tiny things (I mean... I am a pixel artist...) so getting to make lil tiny babs even just walking can be fun - and also, a lot more time consuming than you might thing, esp if you wanna make it smooth, like this lil Frisk I did last month or so:

Do u prefer lipflaps or lipsyncs?

oTL

B... both??

Okay, lipsyncing basically is very time consuming. AND, I freakin’ love it. I love puzzles, and when it boils down to it, that’s what super fun & expressive lip syncing is (some Ghibli animations are the heckin’ best for this)...

and, I’m a pixel artist, without sound-syncing capabilities in her main art program oTL Yeah, I can export frames and line them up and check but... gods, it’s so time consuming. I’ve tried it out of desperation - but for even five seconds of sound (sayyyyy a lil Vine...) that’s hours upon hours of transferring back and forth just to check.

So even though I love lipsyncs, they’re too time-consuming (and ergo, if I’m being commissioned, often too expensive) to do often! Someday I’d like to get back to doing them more often, but for now, practically I stick to/’prefer’, in the loosest terms, to do lipflaps. For the layman, this is that ‘two frame’ (maybe three) open-closed style of animating mouths- however, I’m working on ways to keep that style, but make it more expressive! It depends on the project - and in commissions, I’ll pretty much always prioritize giving the client a little more body animation than mouth animation, unless it’d really fit what they’ve requested.

What's the hardest part of the animation process??

.... damn, this is a tough one! Sometimes I’d say it’s the initial concept work - but it depends on what I have to work with. Sometimes that parts a breeze - and honestly freeing, bc I can take the time to try and push what I’ll do with it!

Roughing is one of my favorite parts, tbh. It can be tricky, sure, but getting to go from keyframes to in-betweens & smears to adding the flairs of secondary motion (think hair swishing, or coats flaring, etc) is so exciting and satisfying.

From there it’s all refining, and tweaking...

Hm. Honestly, the hardest is probably the initial cleanup and lining. It’s cool to see it come together, but it feels so much slower, and it can drag - and then you find bits that actually don’t translate well from the rough stage, so you have to go back and rework, and oof it can just drag in this phase, heh. Plus, I’m always tempted to add more frames, but it’s not always realistic - I’m a perfectionist, to say the least, so I’m constantly having to leash myself back so I don’t turn a project into a half-a-year undertaking, pff.

What's ur favorite??

Probably gave myself away talking about the roughing stage X) It’s just loose and fun and free! But seeing it all come together is also damn satisfying too, so that’s not to say I don’t like the refining portions either...

Outside of that, I also really like the beginning of the color stage! .... Before having to translate shadows/highlights to each and every frame *shudders*. That gets tedious, but it’s so critical! Anyways, though, I heckin’ love colors. I always have a rough palette in mind at the start of the process, but I go ham and play with it as a little break and a true test when I get to actual slap together a full frame with full color, highlights/shadows included! It’s exciting, like a preview of the finished product, basically :D

Any part u don't like?

Heh, by the time I get to shadows/highlights, I tend to be getting impatient, I suppose. It’s not that I don’t like it - I definitely highly value it, and if it was the only thing I was working on in an animation that’d be different, but as a one-woman team I’m just raring to be done at that point; it’s very nearly the last thing I do, after all, so it’s a struggle to focus. X)

I suppose one that always gets me is more complicated backgrounds. It’s a work in progress, as I’m getting better and finding the fun in them for sure! But I’m still not where I want to be in translating ‘background concept’ to ‘finished background’ - it feels more stiff than my animations, I guess. So it’s a frustrating part... but hey, it’s part of it! And learning to embrace the challenge is a big help.

... I just always have to make sure I have a big cup of coffee and a good jam playlist going when I sit down to do ‘em, in the meantime.(=▿= ||||)

What's a thing people don't see that u put a lotta time into?

Definitely the coloring. This goes for both backgrounds and the animated characters themselves. It’s... never as simple as it looks? It’s time consuming, and while some parts of frames can be copy-pasted, I also put subtle work into the animations that mean that some pixels are off so it ends up being marginally faster to just recolor, but then there’s shadows, and working in pixels means that if I miss one then there’s a flickering pixel mid-animation, and sometimes there’s an unconnected line and then you bucket fill the whole damn thing, and gods know I’ve got colored lines so I have to be exacting with keeping the same ratios highlighted vs darker in shifting frames...

*deep breath*

... Yeah, basically the coloring is super time consuming. And balancing bg coloring with animated elements in the image itself is a whole extra challenge on top of that. For 99% of my animations, I can damn near guarantee I’ve spent at least twice as much time coloring it as I have animating it.

Do u have a fave animation u've done?

*looks at my goblin hoard of animations in horror like I’ve been asked to choose a favorite child*

... Stars above, I can’t choose! I love them all, and at this point a good portion of them are commissions- it wouldn’t feel right to choose!

*...carefully covers the hoard’s metaphorical ears*

... also, that said, I can admit a soft spot for any of them that involve humor. I tend to get to do extremely expressive faces and action there, even if I have to ration the frames, so it turns out really fun X)

And though rough and I’ve definitely done stuff I’m more proud of, I still crack up at this one I did a while back of the nonsense ‘ass’ joke between Red & Stretch... their faces were too much fun XD I’ve gotten waybetter since then though, Big Oof, I see so many things I can fix; might go back and redo it someday.

Honestly, though, I just freakin’ love animating! They all have their ups and downs andI always put a lot of love into them and find a way to have fun with it and try to push any emotion/theme (when applicable). I like to think it shows, but idk, that’s something I have to leave up to you guys X)

#night answers #about animating #phew there were a lot-!#thanks so much for your interest #hope these answers made sense! :D #Anonymous

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screechthemighty · 5 years

Note

For the sake of science (and fanfic purposes) I would like to ask about the planet Apex Legends is set on. What are the seasons like? How long is each year? What is it called?

@datonerandom-ginger OKAY SO TRUE STORY I had a massively long answer typed upand then I ACCIDENTALLY CLICKED OUT OF MY WINDOW, CAN I GET AN F IN THE CHAT,LADS….so here’s me attempting to reconstruct what i was saying before I lostall my work. I’m putting it under a cut because it’s gonna be a longass answer,and also dividing the answer up into “canon lore” and “my ownheadcanons.”

Part the First: Canon Lore

So I can answer two of your questions with the canonlore—“which planet” and “what are the seasons like”. This is all primarilybased off Wattson’s lore, but I actually think that the games take place onSolace. She’s listed as being from there and her dad references the planetmultiple times in his letter to her, and since their lives are so entertwinedwith the games, it makes the most sense that the games would take place on thesame planet. He also references the fact that it’s always summer on Solace twodifferent times, so based on that I’d say that it’s probably a very temperateor maybe even tropical kind of place? (Or at least, the inhabited parts are,but more on that in the second part.) So that’s two things we know for sure. Ican’t use any canon lore to answer your question about year length, but thatleads me into the second part…

Part the Second: ShitI Made Up

Honestly, I’m lazy, so for the sake of ease when I’m writingscience fiction I tend to borrow from Star Wars and say that there’s a “GalacticStandard Time” that everyone uses so that the various human settlers are all onthe same time frame, regardless of the actuallength of days/months/years on their planet. So in terms of plotting out atimeline, I just use a standard 12-month Gregorian Earth Calendar. There IS definitelyroom to have fun with how the planet’s actual rotation around its sun dictatesthe days/months/years and how that aligns and misaligns with the earthcalendar, but I haven’t thought about it that deeply tbh. (Again, I’m lazy.)

I also said “the inhabited parts are this climate” in Partthe First because realistically, mostinhabitable planets probably aren’t going to have a single climate (at least,not if they’re Earth-like), and I like to headcanon that a lot of the planetsin the Frontier aren’t fully inhabited? You’ll probably get 2 to 3 medium-sizedcountries worth of people settling down in the most hospitable parts, maybesometimes branching out for the sake of resource acquisition, but even ifhumanity has been on the Frontier for decades, I feel like there wouldn’t be somany people out there that we’d have multiple planets with Earth’s population. Especially not since there was multiple wars with the IMC happening outthere. France and the UK lost an entire generation to WWI. I can’t imagine whatthe death toll is like from the Titan Wars and the Frontier Wars.

(That actually reminds me of another headcanon post I needto write but it’s unrelated to this so I’ll put that thought in its own post.)

Basically, what I’m getting at is that it’s entirelypossible that there are parts of Solace that are less warm? But everyone livesin the warm parts, so that’s the climates you’d have to worry about. And also, to be fair, no one really gives a shit about scientific accuracy in soft sci-fi like this, so no one’s gonna care THAT MUCH.

Two headcanons that are unrelated to your questions but thatI want to share: first, I like to imagine that the inhabited part of Solace isjust like, Hawaii but on a larger scale, so everyone lives on these islands andthere’s a lot of boat travel. It would also make Gibraltr having visible tiesto his culture as a Polynesian man even cooler (though IF I MAY GO ON A TANGENT,there should be WAY MORE Polynesian people in science fiction, because if spaceis like the ocean, who better to go to space? Than people who have beennavigating the sea by the stars for generations?? I’m right about this).

Second, I also feel like a lot of Solace’s economy is probablycentered around the games? I think of it as being like, that small town thathas some MAJOR tourist attraction like a resort or a football stadium orsomething, so they pour a lot of time and energy into that one thing. They’relike a banana republic where their one export is death.

Anyways, hope this helps!

#asks #apex legends #wow this answer is like over seven hundred words I am so sorry #datonerandom ginger #Asks

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annakie · 5 years

Text

Continued Notes on a Blog Cleanup

I started doing this a couple of weeks ago, I’m still doing it even though I’ve now passed the place I was trying to get to to find a thing awhile ago.

But now I’m in March of 2013, closing in on two years of blog cleaned up.

I’m on page 1811 of 2968 (working backwards) with 15 posts per page. My guesstimates are that since I started posting the blog cleanup I’ve generated about 100 posts, that’s probably a little on the low side, but it’s a workable number. When I started I had 3021 pages of blog, so adding in about 7 more pages worth of blogs since then, that means I’ve deleted about 60 pages worth of my bog, or somewhere around 900 posts.

Sounds about right.

Anyway, here’s a bunch more thoughts on tumblr in general, this blog cleanup, and a Doctor Who Nostalgia Rewatch.

What’s crazy is that about 1/3rd of my entire blog was done in the first 18 months of its creation. It’s now over 8 years old, but I hit the 2000th page back around November 2012, when the blog was made in May, 2011.

I’m just now getting to the point in the blog where I kept a pretty full and steady queue in the first few months of 2013, so things move faster now instead of like 100 posts per day untagged like the early days. And I didn’t post at all for most of the last couple of months of 2017 and early 2018 so, there’s a few-months gap there, eventually. But I figure... why stop the nostalgia tour now. Mostly because I’m finding things I want to organize better. I’m also finding a lot of edits or personal posts I made and didn’t tag properly in the time period I’m covering right now.

When all this is done, I’ll probably do a mass blog export again, now that I’m happier with the contents. Tumblr ain’t gonna be around forever, y’all.

Still, deleting a lot of stuff. Posts are being deleted for

Being out of date, like “Hey this game is on sale, go buy it!” or “SIGN THIS PETITION AGAINST CISPA!” or “The new season of Parks and Rec starts September 23rd" (of 2013 or whatever).

Sometimes for being a reblog of a thing that I only marginally ever cared about and no longer do at all.

Things that have now been proven false, or false alarms, or things we no longer have to worry about for whatever reason.

“Hoooo boy it’s 2019 and now THAT sure turned out to be a bad take!” (”Guys, this new show called House of Cards is on! It stars the AMAZING KEVIN SPACEY, I LOVE HIM!” OK that wasn’t verbatim but close, and Yikes.)

Still, the cringiest of the cringe. But there’s a lot less of that now, which is nice. I at some point over the beginning of 2013 started doing a lot more tagging of my own posts so the tags are a much nicer place to look than some of the terrible other-people’s tags. Although I’m still only tagging at like 60 - 70% of the time.

Observations:

What takes the longest is adding tags to posts. So for the most part tags are only getting added to things I made. About 45% of which are personal posts, and about 45% of which are mass effect creations posts, so far. About 10% are things I think I may want to find again someday, though a lot of those things are being put in the “reblogging really old stuff” queue.

The blog is like, 30% Doctor Who, 40% Mass Effect and 30% Psych/Elementary/Leverage/Misc now. It’s better.

I JUST started getting really to the part where I contributed a little more to the ME/DW fandoms besides yelling at hate-taggers. Still. Mid-2013 me is still doing that on occasion. Although now it’s sometimes about Kaidan Alenko instead of just Martha Jones. I’m still kind of torn about how I feel about all that now. I’d say that it’s funny how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of it on tumblr these days. Now it feels like we all have more important things to fight about. Also, tumblr is, you know, on life support.

It feels like my blog liked and watched Supernatural longer than I did in reality? It felt like a short flirtation to me, there continues to be supernatural content on my blog for over a year now. Pretty sure I stopped watching mid-season 9 so maybe that’ll stop soon. Still, way less than the general population of tumblr it felt like at the time.

People with names like 221BTardisImpala really were the worst about tagging their hate and other stupid stuff.

I’d somehow forgotten about that terrible, gross post twisting Kaidan into an “abuser” for stupid stuff like “He brought a bottle of alcohol (you know, the one Shepard bought him?) to Shepard’s quarters!” and “He did a bad thing at 17!” (and clearly the person we are at 17 is the same person he was at 34.) and and just the most asinine reasoning applied, and tagged. The whole “I gotta tear down characters other people like to make my fave the REAL WINNER” is just... ugh. I got back to that post and honestly, am still thinking I should have deleted the whole thing.

I’ve picked another few tags on controversial characters that I love like Jacob Taylor and scrolled through, and like I posted earlier about Martha Jones, hate tagging in general seems to just... not happen that much anymore, even after scrolling back a year or two in those tags. That makes tumblr a nicer place to be. I know we still see the occasional like, shitty shakarian shipper in the Kaidan Alenko tag (and again, that is a very small % of overall shakarian shippers) but it’s nothing like what it used to be.

It won’t be long until the WTNV explosion happens on tumblr, or maybe it had already started at this point. It took me a few months to catch on. And then I’m gonna listen to it and love it, and ask for rec’s for more podcasts, then I’m gonna get into Thrilling Adventure Hour and the blog is gonna become a much more positive place. Looking forward to getting to all that.

Does anyone know if there’s a theme or script that lets you add tags from your dash or main blog page without editing a post? I’d go back and do this again to tag some more good reblogged posts, I think. I’d probably have also deleted more stuff if I could have done it from my blog without going into editing. :p

Seriously though, tumblr feels like such a different place now. It’s... quieter. It feels almost like empty nest syndrome around here. Or maybe I’m just curating my own experience so much better. But again, when I do go look at other people’s blogs from posts I’ve reblogged, like almost none of them are still active. Although it’s also surprising the number that died just like, in the last year.

Another interesting thing has been... watching the rise and fall of a personal friendship through the first few years of the blog. Back then there were a few people who I was really close to, mostly online. I can feel the main friendship I had with that person slipping away as their life changed significantly starting the previous few months from where I am in that blog. And honestly, I did my own part of leaving them behind when I gained a whole new group of close friends from TAH. We’re still like, facebook friends, but it’s a reminder of how fluid online friendships can be.

Doctor Who Rewatch Thoughts:

I am going to catch up on my blog before I run out of Doctor Who to watch, I think. Considering things are starting to take a lot less “grooming” now on the cleanup.

I’m now about to embark on Silence in the Library. Am I ready to see River Song die again? No. I am not. This will be the first time I watch these episodes in years, probably since Matt Smith was around? Definitely since The Husbands of River Song. This... will be difficult.

Hoo boy Voyage of the Damned was bad, I’d forgotten how bad. Not Fear Her bad but, pretty bad. Though I was amused that there was a character named Foon. For some reason that word had always triggered something in my mind when they called the world that on Hello From the Magic Tavern and now I know why.

Martha Jones, still awesome in Season 4. Donna Noble shines brightly. Although I’d forgotten how much weaker the first half of her season is than the very good second half.

That was the first time I’d watched The Fires of Pompeii since Capaldi took over. Funnily, I felt like his character got more Twelve-Like as the episode went on somehow. The long scene between just Ten and Capladi’s character was neat to watch in retrospective.

#personal post tag thingy #notes on a blog cleanup

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famouspolicecoffee-blog · 5 years

Text

Neverland

I suppose something else that I need to discuss in a more general way and not within a story is my relationship with the world of drugs. This relationship is something that I really can’t explain, you see I feel I am the only person that managed to enter this world without taking drugs, but let’s start from the beginning. Since I was a young little girl, 13 onwards, I was fashioned but this world, this mysterious world that everyone spoke about but nobody really knew nothing about. I would see those typical American tv series with these teenagers making use of these substances, partying and just enjoying life and youth. These individuals were so intriguing, they were nothing similar to my friends or people I knew. You see in Italy drugs are not as popular or easily found as in the UK or other parts of the world. Of course, you can find weed everywhere you want, as you can walk on a street and find someone ready to sell, but hard drugs, like coke or MD, are more difficult to find, more expensive and in general not safe. This meant that while growing up as an Italian teenager my curiosity and fascination with this world continued to grow, but my understanding of it stayed the same. The only drug that I could try was Weed, and around 18 years I old I started smoking more or less regularly ( so I guess I lied somewhat at the start, I do smoke weed). It was very easy for me to start, not simply because in Italy weed is not really regulated but also because some of my classmates were dealers or very close friends to dealers. This meant that I didn’t even need to go out and find for someone willing to sell, I just needed to text a friend and I would get decent weed for a decent price. I suppose these classmates were my first gap in the world I always wanted to explore. The nights where I used to go out with them were the first ones were I felt in a tv show. We never really did something extraordinary or weird, we simply smoke joints and drunk on the streets of Rome. The most exciting outing was when we went to the beach for an all-nighter, with loud Italian rap playing as background. The reason why I felt almost special during these nights was the fact that these mean looking guys were allowing me to see a glimpse of their softer side and this was exactly what I loved about the tv shows I used to watch. In these shows, you would always see these guys doing drugs and wanting to look so strong and independent to the outside world, but then behind closed doors, they were simply little kids that were afraid of the world and of losing what they really cared of. I used to see my classmates exactly like that, in front of the professors they acted like these confident young boys that did not want to listen to anyone, but in front of me, they were little boys that did not know where to start in order to grow up and were terrified of the real world. I used to be class representative and one with the best grades so they would often come to me asking for help to study or to speak to a professor, and this was how our friendships started. I would spend hours trying to help them understand economics, maths, and English, and they would spend hours trying to make me relax (the main reason why I would always get weed whenever I wanted). During these long hours of studying I not only I managed to teach them something, I was so proud of myself when they would actually get more than 5 on something, but I also started to create a real relationship with them. I started to see how sweet and caring they could really be if you are just patient and caring with them too. This made me even more curious about the world of drugs, I wanted to meet more of these individuals that would use drugs in order to escape. I wanted to see what not everyone could. Furthermore, it was always fun hanging out with them so I started to even wonder how bad can this world be? I always more convinced that it was actually a particular world, not as scary as everyone was making it to be. This though was during high school and in Italy, where the only drug you would really speak of with no fear or with some knowledge was Weed. There were a couple of people that were rumoured of doing coke, but it was a huge secret and nothing much was ever said and it was not the norm. I really got expose to the world of drugs, as in the fullest, in my second year of university. My university is in Rotterdam, the city were most of the drugs in Europe are exported from, so let’s just say that weed is for sure not the only drug found on the right street. This easy accesses to hard drugs really creates a different attitude towards the all thing. But let me first introduce how I entered this world and then I’ll try and describe the attitude that I discovered. My first year in university was a very a clam year, I didn’t really meet too many new people nor went out that often. It was the end of a very rough period of my life and I didn’t have much will to go out and get drunk in order to meet new people, but towards the end of it I started to meet more people and in specifics one group of individuals. This group very easily started to become my main group of friends, they were a bunch of guys that came from different Mediterranean countries and just reminded me of home. One of the first nights were I felt part of the group was spent on top of a rooftop with beers and weed speaking about politics while watching Rotterdam at the bottom of our feets. This was also the group that introduced me to the real world of drugs, to the real wonder of it and most importantly to the real ugliness of it. At the start I didn’t really see much, I knew they were taking hard drugs and going to raves but I never really went with them, I would just hear stories, fantastic stories. After a year or so I started to go out with them, meaning I started to go places that played hard techno and staying up until 8 in the morning. The more I went out with them the more I saw. I saw these clubs full of darkness and loud music that were withholding a huge group of people just getting lost into their passions and minds. It was amazing to see, you would just look around and you wouldn’t see two people on the same mind level and I was in love. But I wasn’t only in love with the vibes during the events, the pre-drinks and the afters were also something I would cherish. During a pre-drink you would find everyone so hyped up ready to party and just having fun, while during an after you would just see these individuals slowly coming down from their high and that’s just something impossible to describe. During an after you manage to feel the vibe of calmness of an ending but also the happiness and energy of a concert. The problem was the more I was going out the more I was losing contact with my own reality, with the reality I grew up with. I started going to parties with the knowledge that coke, MD, or ecstasy will be there and that was normal. I started to get used to the vision of my friends just sniffing a line or two before and after going out, to the point where my phone was often used as a surface, since I knew it was one of the few that did not have cracks on. I remember the first time I saw of one of my friends doing coke, I was shocked and almost honoured that he would do it in front of me. The first lines I saw being done were something that I wanted to observe and gave me an aura of curiosity, now I simply look away as it was normal, nothing special to see. When growing up one of my biggest curiosity was how these drugs looked like, so the first times I actually saw coke or MD I was fashioned, I couldn’t believe I was actually touching it. Now I just look at it as it was water, something really common. This transition started towards the end of my second year and third year. Matter of fact, my third year was the one where I really entered the bunny hole. During the summer between my second and third year I went to my first big rave and actually tried ecstasy. It was an experience I would never forget, and in so many ways one of the best nights of my life. I won’t spend to much time speaking of it since I’m sure it will be one all story too, but in short that was the night were I entered the abyss. After that night, not only I experienced my first proper come down ( again not going into details) but also from that night onwards everything became more normal to me. After sometime this allowed me to take off the mask of greatness around the world of drugs. I started to realise that actually there were negative aspects into, and that it was not all fun and games. I started to notice how my friends would actually change behaviour, or almost characters. I started to notice how bad they were the day after and just how empty they would be. The pre-drinks became not only a place where to get existed, but also an excuse to escape responsibilities and the real world with something too powerful; and the after were just a place where you would see how really sad and broken people were. I started to see my friends in conditions that weren't funny anymore but scary, and if we were in public, embarrassing. Seeing one of your close friend so fucked up that he isn’t able to pee or stand by himself is not something I would recommend to anyone. And being confronted by your crush in a kitchen when he is on coke and saying some of the most strong words you ever heard is for sure something I would not wish to my worst enemy. Although, the worst thing is not viewing all of this or handling people out of their minds. No, the worst thing of all of this, the thing that makes you really understand that you entered this world and can’t really exist it, is the fact that you start not to worry about your passed out friend on the couch, you start to handle drugs as they were candies, you start to have this world as the norm and not an exception. Of course, I am not saying that if I see one of my friends out of it I would just leave them be, but I would not rush to their side in a heartbeat and this scares me. Why? Because what if one of these times it’s actually serious? What if they are having an overdose and we realise too late because we are used to seeing people fucked up? This is the main reason why I want out of this world, because the scare of having a friend dying of overdose became something real in my worries, and not something that could only see in a tv show. And honestly, I do not want to see one of my friends dying while they are trying to escape their adulthood. I still understand the fascination of this world, and some of my best memories are done while discovering the depths of it, but as Wendy decided to leave Neverland and Peter Pan to become an adult I decided to leave this world behind but with the hope of having Peter Pan and the lost boys with me.

#neverland #drugs #coke #my story #personal rant #rant #party #text post #my diary

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corishadowfang · 6 years

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WIP Prep Tag Game

Tagged by @siarven--thanks for the tag!

Rules: Answer the questions, then tag as many people as there are questions (or as many as you can).

I debated back and forth about which WIP I’d do, but since I’m going to be entering the rewriting/editing phase soon, I thought I’d do it for On my Heart!

FIRST LOOK

1. Describe your novel in 1-2 sentences (elevator pitch)

A boy named Aiden is temporarily turned into a dragon by his Familiar, Kiru, in order to save his life--something that’s both incredibly illegal and incredibly dangerous. Now on the run, he enlists the help of a former police officer and a hermit with an unusual amount of knowledge about dragons to help prove he’s not the monster everyone thinks he is.

2. How long do you plan for your novel to be? (Is it a novella, single book, book series, etc.)

I’ve planned the story so that it’ll fit into a single book! Right now it’s approximately 250 pages, but after rewrites I think it’s going to be closer to 400 pages. (I ended up rushing through a lot of things to finish this draft, so...lots of additions are needed.)

3. What is your novel’s aesthetic?

It’s very...blue. This is probably because Kiru’s--and by extension, Aiden’s--primary color theme is blue. Most of the time when I imagine scenery there’s a mix of monochrome and blue-tinted colors with a couple muted colors thrown in.

4. What other stories inspire your novel?

The two most notable are the Fate series and Brave Story. Fate was actually one of the things that initially inspired the story (more accurately, it was a question that came up while I was playing Fate/Stay Night), and Brave Story has a nice mix of fantastical grounded by more relatable problems that I’d really like to emulate.

5. Share 3+ images that give a feel for your novel

They’re not neatly organized or anything, but there they are.

MAIN CHARACTER

6. Who is your protagonist?

The primary character the story follows is Aiden Cooley. He’s a sarcastic, adorkable child who really isn’t cut out for the nonsense he’s being put through.

7. Who is their closest ally?

Technically speaking, that would be these three:

Kiru, Aiden’s Familiar, who is something of a trouble-maker but cares deeply for Aiden

Gertrude, a very morally gray woman who would probably be really helpful if anyone could figure out what her motives are

And Jackie, an amputee who helps Aiden out of a combination of pity and worry that turning him in could actually cause bigger problems than helping him out.

8. Who is their enemy?

I joke that it’s himself, but that’s actually not entirely wrong. One of the biggest problems for Aiden is that he tends to sabotage himself, whether by accident or on purpose.

As far as outside problems go, though, the most immediate ‘enemy’ would be the police. They’re not really ‘bad guys,’ but they’re the major antagonists considering the position Aiden’s been put in. The wider-scope antagonist would probably be society at large, though it takes a while for this to dawn on Aiden.

9. What do they want more than anything?

He’d really, really like to just go back home and, you know…not be arrested. (He had other worries before the story’s start, and they get to be addressed throughout the course of the story, but this has quickly become his immediate concern.)

10. Why can’t they have it?

To give a really brief explanation about how some of the workings of the world: Familiars a readily-available for purchase, and, while all of them have the ability to turn their owners into dragons (should the owners so choose), the act has been outlawed both due to the fact that this would normally kill a user, and because dragons running rampant in the streets would generally cause a lot of panic. Aiden not only transforms into a dragon (albeit against his will), but is completely unharmed by the transformation. Basically, this means that even if he somehow manages to not be arrested, nothing’s going to be the same for him ever again.

11. What do they wrongly believe about themselves?

He tends to have very low self-esteem. To explain a little, he talks to his Familiar a lot because Kiru has higher artificial intelligence than most Familiars. However, most kids outgrow this habit by, like…ten, and since Kiru can’t actually talk to anyone but Aiden, the rest of his peers all think he’s pretty weird. This has kind of seeped into his psyche over the years, to the point where he agrees and assumes that no one would actually be interested in being around him and Kiru. He’s mostly convinced himself that he might be able to live a quiet, uneventful life where no one has to be disturbed by his ‘oddities,’ even though he wouldn’t be entirely happy doing so.

12. Draw your protagonist! (Or share a description)

OH GOSH. Okay, so, this picture is pretty old, but here’s a rough idea of what Aiden looks like:

PLOT POINTS

13. What is the internal conflict?

I’ve obviously already explained some of it for Aiden; there’s a lot about him learning how to move forward after an event that has drastically changed his life and how to find a ‘new normal,’ and also kind of learning to accept himself.

For Kiru, a lot of the conflict relates to his own sense of self. How much of him was created by Aiden as coping mechanism, and how much is himself? What kind of role does he really play in a world ruled by humans?

For Gertrude, a lot has to do with her own past failings…though I won’t say too much on that.

Jackie’s arc actually parallels and ties with Aiden’s. They complement each other, since Jackie has already started to learn how to find a ‘new normal’ after a life-changing event (the loss of her leg), and slowly helps Aiden come to terms with the situation through her own experiences. On a more personal note, her views on Familiars and the people who use them are challenged constantly through working with someone who’s so close to them.

14. What is the external conflict?

The biggest conflict revolves around both evading the police and figuring out a way to get Aiden out of a situation where there are no real easy answers. On a less important note, trying to understand why Aiden wasn’t affected by his transformation is a constant current in the background, and factors into some key areas of the story.

15. What is the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist?

The only remaining support system he has turning their backs on him would probably be pretty bad.

16. What secret will be revealed that changes the course of the story?

That’s spoilers.

17. Do you know how it ends?

That’s…actually a good question. I’ve finished the draft, so I know how that ends, and originally that was the ending I’d always envisioned for the story. However, I know this draft’s going to need a lot of edits and rewriting, so there’s a very strong possibility that a new ending will appear that works better. So, we’ll see if it stays the same or not!

BITS AND BOBS

18. What is the theme?

A pretty major over-arching theme is what you do when you’re in a situation where there are no good answers—where there is no clear-cut right and wrong, and you just have to try your best to pick the right option. This isn’t just present with the main characters, either; the police officers—especially Chief Harris, who hates this whole situation—and Aiden’s parents have plenty of their own struggles trying to figure out the right thing to do.

A smaller theme, though, is the subject of humanity—what makes us human, and, to use a trope name, “What measure is a non-human?”

19. What is a recurring symbol?

…Dragons, I guess? Or water, maybe, because it plays such a heavy metaphorical role in the story.

20. Where is the story set? (Share a description!)

On a large scale, it’s set in an alternate version of Earth where dragons and humans once coincided. The two races ended up fighting, and humans eventually drove dragons to extinction. A couple decades later, humans decided to try and make the power of dragons their own. This eventually led to them creating Familiars, which would bestow the power of dragons on humans (with the idea that they’d be less likely to turn on their own kind). Unfortunately, the dragon transformation was pretty fault due to the fact that it forces a person’s body to change and grow in unnatural ways. Familiars are still used in every-day life, though—and they’ve been given extra abilities to compensate for the fact that they can’t really be used for their original purpose.

On a smaller scale, the story takes place in the city of Provenance, aka “The Birthplace of Familiars.” It’s a medium-sized city that sits along the bank of a river and used to be the fishing village of White Water. Since the creation of Familiars and Familiar Co. (the primary Familiar manufacturing company), it’s started relying more and more on tourism and Familiar-based exports. Provenance is kind of this weird mix of historical, tourist trap, and modern city with a lot of weird legends and out-of-the-way places.

21. Do you have any images or scenes in your mind already?

Originally there were several scenes I had in mind, but as for this upcoming draft…I actually don’t? I might once I get through with editing, but right now there’s nothing major.

22. What excited you about this story?

So you can probably guess from the theme question, but I really like exploring difficult topics and morally-ambiguous situations in fiction. A lot of times it’s how I personally work out solutions to those problems (at least on a personal level), and exploring those themes can actually be pretty fun!

But I also really love the characters and their interactions. They’re basically one big messed up family and I love them.

23. Tell us about your usual writing method!

Honestly, it’s nothing very exciting. I usually pick out a song to listen to on repeat—most of the time it has some relation to the story, but other times it’s just one that I like a lot. Then I’ll set it going and start writing. I usually have a goal in mind. So, for example, “Get to the end of this part,” “finish this chapter,” or “write this many pages.” Basically this just makes sure that I actually make a decent amount of progress on it. And that’s…basically it? Sometimes to get myself inspired I’ll read world-building or analysis posts, but that’s not every time; it just kind of depends on my mood.

This was a lot of fun! Now to tag people...

I’ll tag @paladin-andric, @touchingmadness, @moonbow-ink, @diwrites, @sleepy-and-anxious, @fatal-blow, @focusdumbass, @thatsmybluefondue, @junglefae, @feathersandfortunes, @roselinproductions, @forlornraven, @aureliobooks, @maple-writes, @jess---writes, @aleshirewrites, @ad-drew, @nepeinthe, @novelier, @spacebrick3, @infinitelyblankpage, @insertpenname-here, @theta-lee, and anyone else who wants to do this! (No pressure if you don’t, of course; this one’s pretty long.)

#tag game #wip prep tag game #on my heart

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nic-mharta · 6 years

Link

In fact, the Great Falls Tribune has about 32 questions related to this Change.org shitpost, which I would like to answer:

1) How dare you? The anonymity of the internet -- people dare lots of things from behind a keyboard.

2) Does Montana keep the nuclear missiles or what? Why would you want to? They’re a terrible liability with huge disposal costs, and the fissionables aren’t suited to fuel a Candu reactor. Ship them to Mar-a-Lago, pointy-end first if necessary.

3) Are you trying to hurt our feelings, man? See answer to #1)

4) What do Americans do about the other $20 trillion in national debt? $1 trillion would only cover a year's federal deficit (projected to be $985 billion in 2019). Once you’re part of Canada, what do you care that what Americans due about the rest of their debt. Just make sure to transfer your mutual funds when you transfer your citizenship.

5) Does Canada have an extra trillion? Well, no. That does put a wrinkle in the plan. But apparently we had a spare 4.5 billion lying around that Trudeau-the-younger couldn’t find anything better to do with than spend it on a pipeline that’s going nowhere, so who knows what he could scrape up if challenged?

6) Would Montana still be named Montana or would we be Southern Alberta? Better Saskatchewan? Canada doesn’t do the whole North/South Dakota/Carolina thyang. All our provinces actually get their own name. I mean, we did do Upper/Lower Canada, but that was pre-confederation. I’d stick with Montana if I were you: it’s a pretty, distinctive moniker.

7) Does the universal healthcare start right away or is there a waiting period? Pretty much right away -- even if you’re just a temporary resident staying for more than 180 days. Which explains why we have so many sick Americans wanting to come stay for more than 180 days.

8) Do you think Justin Trudeau like LIKES us, guys? Justin likes EVERYONE!

9) Can we take Yellowstone National Park with us? Oh, we hope so!

10) Why not Alaska? It's not even touching the other states! On a BOGO basis? Sure! We’ll take Alaska too!

11) Would Montanans have to start saying "sorry" constantly or would there be allowances made for us as former Americans? Sorry, that was probably a rude question. Sorry! No, first you have to start caring when you inconvenience or embarrass someone else. We understand that that’s going to be quite the learning curve.

12) Canadian football, really? I can see that would be a challenge: having to control a field that’s 52% larger, move the ball an extra 5 yards, and do it all in only three downs. But your players really aren’t wusses: I’m sure they can rise to the challenge.

13) July 1 vs. July 4 for a national holiday, sure whatever. But Thanksgiving in October?! Um, yeah ... it’s a HARVEST thanksgiving. Think of a crop that’s still waiting to be harvested by the third week in November, in MONTANA (let alone north of the 49th. We didn’t have a civil war, so we didn’t have to create a holiday to give thanks for the end of a civil war.

14) Can we get a special exemption from the Queen of England, or, to be specific, Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom, Canada and Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith? Or if we lead the provinces in revolt against the British 1776 style, does Ottawa move West? So, you’re close to understanding this. Elizabeth is Queen of Canada AS WELL AS being Queen of England. It’s like when you’re working a second job: nobody cares what your day job is, as long as you go on appointing tolerable Governors General and continuing to function as Colonel-in-Chief to the Armed Forces. So you’re exempt from the Queen of England, but pretty much stuck with the Queen of Canada. We don’t do the 1776-style thing; I think you’d have noticed that sometime in the last 243 years.

15) Is $10,626 an acre fair? Like some of those acres have skyscrapers. Ok, one of those acres does. And 1 million of those acres are Glacier National Park. It does seem a bit high, doesn’t it. The average price per acre in Montana is $2111. Maybe Justin doesn’t have to scrape together quite so much!

16) Do we build a wall against North Dakota? Or pile snow there in a Game of Thrones situation? No, building walls is an apparently American obsession, so once you’re Canadian you can stop worrying about that. Although as near as we can tell, not much progress is being made on the American wall, either.

17) Would we have to drop our speed limits to match the achingly slow pace of Canadian travel? Because that might be a dealbreaker... I get that, I do. But 110kph is less than 2mph below 70mph, and we all drive well over that. You WOULD have to learn metric though.

18) How do we sign up for our share of the maple syrup supply? Costco membership, $58/year, plus $13 per litre. I know, metric again.

19) Bilingual, blah, blah. Do we have to learn French? No, most of us haven’t bothered.

20) Does the "eh?" thing happen naturally or would we have to practice? Happens naturally, but don’t expect to sound like Bob and Doug MacKenzie. We don’t sound like them, either.

21) Who negotiates the trade agreement with Idaho to keep us in potatoes for our poutine? You can get your potatoes from Prince Edward Island.

22) What line comes after "O Canada!" in the national anthem? And then all the other lines? Just keep singing “O Canada” and “We stand on guard for thee” at random. They change the words every few years by act of parliament so no-one is sure which version is current, and anyway the person next to you is singing in French, so no-one will notice that you’re faking it.

23) Could Montana be Baja Alberta? Monterio? See #6: “Montana” has such a nice ring to it.

24) How about Canada becomes North Montana? See #6: besides, it would be confusing.

25) How much to take North Dakota, too? You’d pay us to take North Dakota?

26) Montanans keep their guns, right? Well, the legal ones: non-automatic longarms and registered pistols We’re cool with guns; it’s mainly just irresponsible gun-owners that get curtailed.

27) Just, "woo, legal marijuana!" I know, right?

28) Would this help the Missoula Curling Club get dedicated ice? I’m pretty sure there’s something in the Constitution Act about a right to dedicated curling ice. Hell, small towns that aren’t big enough to be incorporated, still have a curling rink.

29) What's the offer for California instead? Pretty sure we’re not interested in importing California: we’d rather export snowbirds.

30) Would Mexico pay for Texas? With or without the Texans included?

31) Are we talking a trillion Canadian or American dollars? Canadian. Duh.

32) Do Canadians say "Mountie up" instead of "Cowboy up"? Nope.

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jeffpennymusic · 6 years

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A Game Dev’s Guide To Audio Files

This is going to be a pretty basic breakdown of considerations a game developer might need to make when choosing file formats for their project. There are going to be countless other formats and factors that are beyond the scope of this post, but I just wanted to write something to get you started. Consider this a primer for the non-audio professional.

How does compression affect the audio file? When working on a game, one of the biggest concerns is the size of your assets and unfortunately, audio can be a big problem in that regard. That is why the file format you choose can make a big difference. How compressed an audio file is, is going to be a huge factor in determining it’s size. There are lossy compressed files such as .mp3, and .ogg, where there is a loss of sound quality and size. There are lossless compressed files such as .flac, where the file is compressed but doesn’t lose any quality when played back. Then there are uncompressed, lossless files such as .wav or .aiff. There are also many other factors that can determine file size such as sample rate, bit rate, bit depth and amount of compression but we aren’t going to worry about those in this post. The general rule of thumb for how to choose a file format is often how necessary the trade-off in quality is and how far you can compress it without it sounding bad. For example, a main piece of music that plays prominently behind your featured gameplay moment is probably something you don’t want to lower the quality of. However, the little blip that plays when you make a menu selection might be a prime moment to cut back on file size.

How should I deliver my files?

.Wav files are far and away my favorite type of file for quality. They are usable pretty much universally, and they can store metadata and other useful audio info, but are absolutely huge files. If you really need something to be super high quality for whatever reason and don’t mind taking up lots of space this is the way to go. That universality is also a huge plus for them because many game engines can compress them internally. For instance, if you add a .wav file to Unity, the engine can actually convert it for you as well as giving you a number of options to try and save some memory. So if you don’t mind them taking up large amounts of room in your project directory, they give you by far the most flexibility without eating up space in your build. For compression, my preferred file format is .ogg. While this one isn’t universally played by the programs you might listen to music on, pretty much all game engines I’ve heard about can read this file type. While it is compressed, so some quality has to be lost, it has a great trade-off between the amount of loss and size. It also scales very well in terms of different amounts of compression. If you ever need to edit an .ogg file, or export your audio as one without doing it in engine, check out Audacity. It is far and away the best free audio editing software you will ever find. Why not .mp3?

You might be tempted to just use this file type since it is by far the one you are most likely to have heard of before. After all, when it came to .wav’s I mentioned how important universality is, so why isn’t that the case here? Well, there are two main reasons. As I hinted at in my description of .ogg, not all compression is created equal. .Mp3′s generally lose more quality at a higher file size than .ogg. However, for game developers, that isn’t even the biggest concern. Looping. Looping audio is something you find ALL over games, and .mp3 files are not set up for it. The way they are encoded, no matter how perfectly your sound should loop, an .mp3 file will always have a tiny bit of empty space at the beginning which will create a pop sound when it starts again. There are tools that can eliminate this problem if you REALLY need to, but honestly, they aren’t worth the hassle. Just be aware that this is likely the reason your .mp3 loop doesn’t sound quite right. Some people might give you a third reason against .mp3, namely licensing issues. Up until a couple of years ago, you actually needed permission to use this file type in your game, but that is no longer the case. I still wanted to include it just in case you still ever hear this point come up.

Stereo or mono?

Another common way to save file space is to choose whether your audio needs to be stereo or mono. For those who don’t know, stereo files have different left and right audio channels, meaning you are potentially hearing different things on different sides of you. For something like music this is great because it can really give the feeling of being surrounded by sound. In mono, all your channels are producing the same exact signal. So while this might not be ideal for a fully envolping sound, something that is coming from a small point might not need a stereo file. That GUI click probably doesn’t need to be particularly wide sounding.

As I mentioned, this is just a small portion of the considerations you might need to take when creating your game. If you want to learn more, there are plenty of resources out there, or you can always ask me to go a bit more in depth about a certain topic. But hopefully, this post will get you thinking about your audio files and headed down a productive path for your game!

Anything you thought was missing from this post? Let me know and I’ll update it. Anything you think is untrue, or too confusing? I’d love to make the post reflect that. I am posting this to help those of you who have asked me this question, as well as to better understand and learn from it myself. So please, start a discussion! If there are any other topics you’d like to see me cover, feel free to suggest them as well.

#game dev #indie dev #game audio #resources

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sepiadice · 6 years

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Tales of Genius Ch. 3: Blossomforth Brides Pt. 1

(1/26/2019)

I’ve been wanting to get to this session for years. Literal years. Since the overly dramatic high school group, when I first introduced and used North Fort in a Pathfinder session, then reiterated on for years after, always dying to do this campaign.

What feels like a decade later,[1] we finally reach Blossomforth.

Shorter session this time. Limited player availability, late start, arguments over the difficulty dice in magic, my usual distraction making dinner.[2] The usual.

Hopefully I can coordinate sessions more often, since we actually stopped two-thirds of the way through my plans.

I’ll have to actually figure out what happens next. Dang.

CAST

Eli Roberts: (Played by Lyons) Child of Clio. Doctor, travelling to write a medical text akin to Gray’s Anatomy. He’s an Intellectual! Older gentleman, hits on women to fluster the GM.

Olivia Grayson: (Played by Maddie) Child of Thalia. Apprentice to Eli. Believes her Squirrel-raccoon companion is her boyfriend reincarnated. Murdered a dude, stole his clothes.

Fromthe: (Played by Jose) Child of Calliope. Military veteran and current mercenary. Also has some mercantile ambitions. Doing fine.

Jean De Ferrero: (Played by Anthony) Child of Terpsichore. Travelling con artist. Took aforementioned murder victim’s gun.

So we pick up where we left off last time: standing outside the Soldier’s Rest Mayor’s office, Eli with a letter. I had an idea for what they encounter if they backtracked to North Fort,[3] if they stay,[4] and of course if they actually move forward.

This is why it’s handy to be loose with session planning: gives you extra room to think up threads for other locations if the party goes rogue and wants to go back or over there. If you intend to mostly wing it, you can write out a couple sentence-long ‘this is a possibility’ suggestions, and be prepared to improv if you get called on it!

But the players tend to be good at minding my overly obvious plot threads. Maybe in an overly meta way. I have to learn subtlety.

Anyways, the party reviews the plot, and figures out how to advance. Namely, by going south to the nearest train station in Blossomforth.

They get a wagon ride and arrive about a half day later, in the evening.

Blossomforth is an agricultural town well regarded for its Strawberry Wine, which is exported even beyond the borders of Astree. Small town, traditional, and because I’d watched a Let’s Play of Night in the Woods, there’s a subtle undercurrent of the younger folks moving away and the older folks being afraid of the town fading away.

Eli happens to know someone in the town whose son he saved.[5] William lets Eli and pals stay at his home, noting his son moved to Taffyport and works at a factory.

Which is the first canon mention of Taffyport.

Unfortunately, due to winter, the trains aren’t running up to Blossomforth just yet. That’ll have to wait until after the Forest Bride Festival.

You see, every year, a little before spring, the town gathers to prepare for planting season and celebrate surviving winter. They open a barrel of Strawberry Wine prepared during the last Harvest Festival, dance, sing, play booth games, send a maiden into the woods for an ancient ritual, feast. That sort of stuff.

The party joke about human sacrifices. William gets uncomfortable. After some needling from Dr. Roberts, William comes clean:

The titular Forest Brides are supposed to come back. Historically, they do! Bring in a bottle of wine and food, supposedly talk to the local deity,[6] then come home.

The last two never came back. So the town’s divided. Be Tevye and continue tradition, or maybe stop losing girls to the woods... Forest? I’m not clear on that.

Anyways, Olivia hears forest and wants to go that way. We really need to examine why she’s learning medicine from Eli if she hates people so much.

The party manages to talk her into waiting for morning.

The next morning, she immediately heads towards the woods. The rest of the party follow. So I move a character from town to the woods so I can do the plot.

This is Ms. Marian Shepherd. In another, more elf-inhabited universe, the niece she shares a name with is often called Trix.[7] Marian’s trying to get a pair of town guards to let her into the woods to investigate. Both Eli and Jean try to flirt, but Ms. Shepherd is more concerned about one of her pupils, Maryanne Diane, being this year’s Bride. Olivia hides amongst the trees.

Fromthe is businesslike, so she mostly deals with him.

She says they’d need to get permission from the town council, and agrees to take the party to them.

Olivia senses magic. There’s a lot of magic. Unfamiliar magic yet similar to what the party sensed in the mines they’d come from.

The party goes to where the festival preparations are happening and meet with the town council, who Eli decides he knows. I compromise, but mostly ignore the personalities he ascribes. We have Briggs, Sarah, and the third member who never got a name.[13] The party try to negotiate permission to investigate, mostly to Briggs.

Briggs is initially hesitant, but slowly comes around. The first Bride to go missing was his granddaughter, Ashley, but it’s not impossible she used the chance to run away and find a new life elsewhere. Fading town subplot, after all.

Councilwoman Sarah is opposed and doesn’t particularly like Eli, and tradition demands no trespass in the woods. Argue argue.

The third councilman, who most falsely assume is senile, speaks up and gives permission. As he’s the oldest person in a town that operates on a Town Elder system of governance, it’s the final word.

Briggs gives them a permission slip.

They invite Ms. Shepherd along, but she concedes she has nothing to offer, and was only trying to get into the woods so someone would be looking into things. Now someone is.

Into the woods.

The party follows the source of the odd magic, and eventually come upon a woman sitting on a boulder, eating a Corned Beef Sandwich with extra mayonnaise.[8] She introduces herself as Isabelle.

Oh, and Isabelle is wearing the same robes as the man Olivia murdered in the mine, and a rabbit skull mask. She also does not like seeing Olivia wearing the cloak and snake skull mask she looted, and demands to be allowed to burn it.

Olivia refuses, and after the party try to convince her to give the items up, Jean just grabs the mask, and eventually Olivia agrees to give up the cloak.

Turns out she’s here for the same reason as the party, more or less, and as they walk deeper into the forest, she provides some exposition.

She’s a Dark Shepherd, a secret society dedicated to maintaining cosmic balance and the traditions of Deep Magic, sometimes called dark magic or blood magic and the like. But it’s not really a morality thing, don’t worry.

The guy killed in the mines, however, belonged to a splinter group: the Feral Oaths. They think covering the land in iron and the growth of industry is bad and should be undone to return to the old ways.

She also says that, while deeply tragic, killing the giant snake in the mines may have been necessary, and doesn’t condemn the group. And while the loss of life is always sad, the man Olivia murdered[9] was a Feral Oath, so screw him.

They reach a clearing in the center of the forest. There’s a serene pond with a small island in the center with a tree on it. Isabelle takes a moment, concludes she doesn’t actually know if there’s a proper ceremony nor how to perform it, so she just sits.

A massive deer emerges.[10] The tree, as it turns out, is part of an antler. He’s really big.

He speaks. Probably in the mortals’ minds for the time being, but I didn’t specify that since I needed to get to a dramatic hanger.

So he’s been lonely. No one came last winter. Or the winter before that.

Which means the brides haven’t reached their destinations.

Huh.

Thus ends the session.

This is actually a little earlier than I planned, so I’ll have to figure out how to fill out the next session. I already have the general path Eli’s following, and I have schemes prepared for Fromthe and Olivia. I need to figure out something for Jean De Ferrero.[11] Probably should just talk to the player. Like a reasonable GM.

Lessons learned: nothing concrete comes to mind! I’m feeling more comfortable behind the screen, even though I still feel an amount of inadequacy. And I still need to confront my anxieties about my voice and speech impediment[12] before I can shift into a podcast project, but practice is always important. And hopefully a group that can lend gentle criticism and maybe argue about the magic rules less.

I think a good background thing is that it’s okay to have sidequests and plans that need to be triggered like a video game, and not to close options because the players didn’t jump on them. Narrative time is flexible, things can get moved, cooperate with players and grant them the chance to do what they feel is pressing and/or fun in the moment without sacrificing story or investment.

Until next time, may your dice make things interesting.

[1] Can’t be bothered to do the math. Write up should be on this blog.| [2] Everytime I tell myself ‘Next time, casserole’. Then I make something with curry. [3] Fun fact: in North Fort, I had a vague concept for what would happen if they decided to screw the catacombs/mine, and instead try going North to ask for help. Also an explanation the North Fort mayor would give for not trying this himself. [4] Both events could still trigger. Heh heh. [5] Lyons has picked up on my willingness to accept things that circumvent minor problems or non-issues. Would’ve let them grab an inn, but it doesn’t actually matter. He also names everyone because I’m garbage at names and haven’t enacted any solutions to said garbage. [6] Who isn’t a wolf that resides in wheat, and don’t you suggest I wear my inspiration blatantly on my sleeve! [7] Original, Pathfinder plan was this was a retired Trix, but things shifted, and Ms. Shepherd doesn’t have the right personality. [8] She needs the calories. [9] There were some lies about what happened, since he didn’t get a shot off, or really provide any characterization himself. [10] I decided to reference Princess Mononoke moments before I utilized it. So add it to the list of things I blatantly rip off. [11] Maybe he can found a confection company? [12] This has been occurring more often at work than the table, but still. [13] Lyons said third council-guy is name Lysander. I don’t recall this happening, so it’s a footnote of dubious canon now.

#sepiadiegms #genesys #tales of genius

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langley44langley-blog · 6 years

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Elderly Activity Designer Job.

Apple is lead-in another pattern, this moment in exactly how mobile phone individuals spend their funds. I presume Apple's lawful group did a very good work of communicating their information, yet I likewise presume people in United States simply with ease know that Apple did transform points, they altered it along with the apple iphone as well as they modified this with the ipad tablet," he said. This looks like way too many people that are actually blessed sufficient to become economically successful automatically become douches. The utmost goal, inning accordance with Shron, is for providers to build a predictive design that is actually personalized. The export allows you crack the divisions and also subject matters of your chart into separate slides in the order you yearn for, which means you can brainstorm a discussion in MindManager then utilize the export to develop slides all set for style in PowerPoint. So I consulted with psychologist Elizabeth Phillips to discover only exactly how our food tastes happen. Beware, however, psychologists have found that fantasising about future effectiveness is really bad for inspiration This appears that getting a taste of the future in the present moment lowers the disk to accomplish this. Imaginations additionally fail to flag up the troubles our experts're most likely to encounter on the way to our targets. Unreal time, extremely simplistic auto mechanics, no true motivation to advance and also remove on apple ipad air and mini. As cross-disciplinary providers make up a larger and larger part of advancement, technology will become the only district of company R&D divisions (find self-driving cars). February: Apple includes a 3rd offering to its own iPod nano line-- a $149 1GB version Also, the company cuts prices on its own 512MB and 1GB shuffles to $69 as well as $99, specifically. Unless you're specific you will accomplish the ideal reaction, save your wit for a phone or video recording telephone call, where it's much easier to determine meaning and also mood. Ariely believes that by asking clients to construct their very own home furniture, they adopt an unreasonable love of the household furniture they built, just like the guinea pig did in the origami experiments. Task MK-ULTRA, or even MKULTRA, was http://colore-delasante.info for a covert CIA mind-control as well as chemical interrogation research study program, operated due to the Office from Scientific Intellect. You cease choosing tips at arbitrary when you become sufficiently professional in the state from the art. Given that Zite examines web content for buzz" (the amount of opportunities something is shared, whether it's been liked" through others, and so on) you're mosting likely to find yourself with a lot of list-style posts. How simple that is to strongly believe getting that future and also those results is my motivation. Certainly the sell price reflects no major check out sales - either that or even phones have actually talked straight out. Steve Jobs was actually impressive at understanding the what, and layout is actually important here. http://colore-delasante.info are going to disclose if you're not able to deal with worry and if you require a health care therapy without the necessity for any psychological encourage. Fortunately a little but specialized team from Chinese ecotourism trailblazers is emerging which are figured out to translate general public interest in attributes in to truly low-impact trip. Psychologists and also coordinators have at times made use of the amount of time takes flight" sensation to their perk. Sadly this will provide the APple ipad tablet a monopoly yet it are going to deserve it due to the fact that completion outcome will certainly be large boosts in examination scores and also know-how recognition costs that will certainly create junior's head inflate along with iPad benefits. Your outfit, behavior, body movement, as well as individual hygiene is going to all be critiqued by guests while you're pacing the log cabin, and recruiters will certainly be actually performing the same.

Inning accordance with an SEC filing submitted on Tuesday, there's a seven-figure income in this for him: the submission specifies Nadella's yearly wages as $1.2 m. You may combine a Psychological science level along with other degrees/diplomas/certificates to make your own self extra marketable, yet you have to make sure you recognize just what you like carrying out as well as there is a requirement for the task posture. Relay utilizes Apple's mapping records, however gives a means to graph a course to several places off a solitary chart. Since Google introduced the X project this summertime, the Venture Loon Google+ page has actually been actually running a set of remarkable brief videos addressing much of the technological as well as mental problems in creating an untethered network drifting openly in the stratospheric winds Those online videos have actually dealt with whatever coming from balloon spacing to analyzing wind information, and on Friday Google.com posted an interesting entrance concerning the antenna concept from the Crazy network. For answers to these and also various other inquiries, HuffPost Scientific research talked with Dr. Priscilla Dass-Brailsford, a psychologist at Georgetown University as well as the Chicago Institution from Professional Psychological science that specializes in ethnocultural and also community brutality, concerning the scientific research from racial prejudice. A number of these instructors educate mindfulness at technician startups," she incorporates, taking note that people of the team, Kelly Boys, was the past supervisor of Google's mindfulness course, contacted Search Inside Yourself (SIY). Though psychological science can be liked for several of the a level ... any degree, but you likely won't possess any type of kind of notable benefits over various other popular majors like background or English. Ok however seriously, practically any sort of work may be obtained through nearly any level acquired off a liberal crafts learning regardless of primary. Actually playing Seabeard promptly evokes evaluations to Creature Crossing as well as in some concerns its own a very ready comparison. This will demand the elderly professional to recognize MMOs, online organisation versions as well as individual psychological science. Reviews is an essential part of finding out when that comes to practically every little thing, and knowing how to use both good as well as unfavorable conditioning is actually critical for game advancement.

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bobbynolanios88 · 6 years

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Atari CEO interview — 2019 will bring more

Atari CEO Frederic Chesnais recently told us how Rollercoaster Tycoon Touch helped bring back Atari, which, when Chesnais took it over in 2013, had $34 million in debut and a paltry $1 million in revenue.

Now, Atari reports that it has no debt, and it recently closed 2018 with good revenue growth (27 percent for the last six months) and strong operating income (up 87 percent in the last six months).

I talked with Chesnais about what he foresees in the year ahead. Atari plans to get back into the hardware business with the 2019 launch of the Atari VCS home console. And Atari is making games again — from original titles like Days of Doom to classic remakes, such as Tempest 4000.

Chesnais said Atari is in better shape than it has been in the past because of the success of its Rollercoaster Tycoon simulation games, including Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic, which launched in 2017. And the company has organized itself into four divisions: Atari Games, Atari Casino, Atari VCS (the console division), and Atari Partners.

Atari has $9.3 million in cash, the copmany reported. It has $3 million in preorders for the Atari VCS, and it recently sold off Alone in the Dark and Act of War to THQ Nordic. The company also recently entered into a blockchain partnership with Animoca Brands, which will partner on blockchain versions of RollerCoaster Tycoon Touch and Goon Squad.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Atari CEO Fred Chesnais.

Image Credit: Atari

GamesBeat: You had some earnings news to talk about.

Fred Chesnais: Right, for the six months ending at the end of September. Just a few words about the numbers and what they show. The numbers are very simple. Revenue has grown 27 percent, at a profit margin of 20 percent of revenue. We’re profitable. It’s almost a doubling of income from operations. We’re generating cash. I think, no matter how the markets react, the numbers are pretty good.

What they show is a couple of key messages. Our biggest division, Atari Games, is still the bulk of our business. It takes time to reboot a company. Two years from bankruptcy, two years to redeem the debt. Now, we’re really rebooting. The games are still the core of the company, and they show very good performance. That’s the first message. We have a strong Atari Games division, covering both games and licensing. That’s software and the exploitation of software.

Our second business unit, online casino, is getting started. I think sometimes people don’t understand what we’re doing there, but for the moment, it’s licensing our properties for real-money casino games. These types of businesses, which are regulated, take a bit more time, but once you’re in business and have good games rolling — we’re applying for casino licenses online. We’re not doing anything physical. But even so, that takes time to build. We’re in a pretty good spot right now. I’d expect that second business unit to start delivering next year.

The third area, of course, is the console. These numbers do not include any numbers for the console. The money we’ve raised, we’ve just kept that on the balance sheet, and we’ve kept working on the product. These numbers don’t include any impact of the Indiegogo campaign or anything else related to the console. The console will start hitting in the next fiscal year and in subsequent years.

Above: Atari’s Lunar Battle.

Image Credit: Atari

GamesBeat: Was Atari VCS contributor Rob Wyatt still working on it? I know he was going to, and then, he had a skydiving accident and broke his leg a while ago.

Chesnais: We have a very solid team diving into the project. I haven’t checked on Rob because I’ve been working on casino games. Michael Arzt, the head of Atari VCS, is really in charge of that one.

In a nutshell, though, we have very strong numbers. Games is doing well as the core of the business. Casino is starting to grow. The console, we haven’t announced any significant updates. The team will be working on something after CES to provide an update. CES is not contributing anything to the [profit and loss] at the moment. We hope it will be a strong pocket of growth for us.

GamesBeat: You have this deal with Animoca to do blockchain-based games.

Chesnais: Right. That was announced two days ago. I just gave an interview on that one to explain what we’re trying to do. Let me try to summarize it. I think blockchain is here to stay. It’s here to stay in many businesses — finance, identity, and also in gaming. In gaming, it’s going to have a significant impact not only through games like CryptoKitties, but it’s also going to have an impact on developers. Everyone will create assets in the industry, and, with blockchain, you’ll be able to tag and identify and trace every asset.

Let’s say I create a one-minute song track or an environment or an animation or a character, an avatar. With blockchain, you’ll be able to tag that asset, identify it, and trace it. Especially with things like music, animation, or characters, if it’s used along the way by one game or two games, if it’s sold five or 10 or a million times, we’ll be able to trace it. As far as protecting creations, it’s going to be very interesting. That’s one of the applications of blockchain.

Inside games, we’ll see that as networks grow, we’ll have more opportunities to play with things we’ve never before understood. What we’re doing with Animoca, we’re creating a game using blockchain not only to have fun and try to make money but also to try to understand and find new ways of how blockchain will impact our business and how we can use it to have more fun — and also more protection. It’s about those two uses of blockchain.

I’m happy to work with Animoca. For the moment, what we have in mind is something like, you create a coaster, you blend it with another coaster, and then, you can share it or swap it or sell it and build your collection of coasters. That’s one of the applications we’re working on. But the broader picture behind this — how can we use blockchain in our business? Let’s start with a simple game, but everybody knows we’re going to find something that’s both fun and more useful for the future. That’s why we’re doing it.

Blockchain is here to stay. It’s the revolution for the next 20 years. Peer-to-peer decentralized ledgers, that’s going to affect a lot of industries. We don’t want to be the last one to wake up. We want to be among the first to work on it and think about how this can affect our organization.

Above: Atari’s Goon Squad will become a blockchain game.

Image Credit: Atari

GamesBeat: Are there any other things in 2019 that are becoming more clear to you, as we come to the end of this year?

Chesnais: For our casino business, in the U.S., we’re only doing licensing of our properties to Scientific Games. We’re not an operator. In Europe, our second area, where it’s legal — France is a monopoly, so there’s no way we can operate there — for the last two years we’ve licensed our properties, but we’re going through the process of going direct in Europe and establishing operations to sell or export three types of games: scratch games, slot machines, and lotteries.

Our third area for that business — since we’re not going to Asia, not even for licensing — is Africa, which is very promising. Lots of things have changed. There are not many competitors. We’re in the process of acquiring the regulatory licenses to operate online casinos in East and West Africa. Here, we’re going to go direct. That’s my goal for next year, especially with lotteries on the phone, in key countries. For smaller countries, we’re working on licenses right now. It’s working quite well. I should be able to tell you more around GDC.

I know the numbers. I know what people are doing. I know most of the operators in the area. The numbers I’m seeing — we’ve not made any cash for the moment, but we’ve met the test in Europe. We know how the games are doing. We’re planning to over-deliver in 2019. It’s a very interesting business, but people don’t necessarily understand it in the U.S.

GamesBeat: Do you have anything on your radar for CES?

Chesnais: We’ll have the team there, but we go to CES basically through our licensees — like the ones doing the Atari Pong table. They’ll have a big booth present. Most of our licensees are there. But we’re not doing anything direct for the moment. We’ll see in 2020.

Above: The Atari VCS home console is coming in 2019.

Image Credit: Atari

GamesBeat: As far as the games market overall, does anything stand out to you as an interesting opportunity or something to worry about?

Chesnais: Again, because we’re rebooting, we’re doing our own games. Our simulation games have an audience that’s very stable. It’s growing. They’re loyal. We’re not subject to changes like the big waves of Fortnite versus Call of Duty versus Battlefield. To me, what’s going on right now — it’s more important for us to remain in the casual field and try not to get into racing or bigger games.

We could do it. We could raise the money to do another game. For the moment, our strategy is still that we have a lot of things to do in simulation and strategy games. We know how to do these games. When I see what’s going on in other categories, I feel like we should keep investing in what we know the best. Of course, I keep an eye on what’s going on elsewhere, but strategy, simulation, and casual are where we’re strong. We don’t want to add a new core area. We’re going to stay with what we do best.

What I’m seeing in many areas is very volatile. This is almost the only industry, along with the movies, where you can have a new entrant becoming the king in, what, maybe two years? That’s pretty cool.

Above: Tempest 4000 is part of the Atari comeback plan.

Image Credit: Atari

GamesBeat: The Chinese government apparently started approving mobile games again. The agencies are starting to greenlight things that have been held up for months. Overnight, you have a better picture for mobile games.

Chesnais: On November 30, we released our own game, Rollercoaster Tycoon, in China. We made it to number 47 in the app stores over there. I can send you the screenshots from AppAnnie. That’s really an achievement for us. We don’t trumpet things like this too much because you can never be sure about your approvals. We’re just going to keep working.

I feel like we got approved in part because it’s Rollercoaster Tycoon. It’s a simulation game. It has no message whatsoever other than, “Build something funny and have fun.” We’re working through a Shanghai-based studio. They’re big fans of the brand, and they were instrumental in pushing the game in China.

GamesBeat: Do you foresee doing a lot more in China over time?

Chesnais: I’m keeping my fingers crossed — but yes. We have two other simulation games — a transportation game and a city-building game — and our Chinese partner is looking into it. We hope to be able to have Chinese versions of those submitted to the Chinese authorities. They’re fun, casual, easy to play games. So far, we’ve had success with Rollercoaster Tycoon, and we look forward to more.

It’s more than just translation, just swapping Chinese for English. Our studio there has put in a lot of effort to create a Chinese version of the game. We’ve changed up a lot of assets to create a Chinese game made by Chinese people using the core game mechanics of Rollercoaster Tycoon. We’re also launching a Korean version. That’s being finalized for the end of January.

The future is promising. We’ll keep working. We’ve got our heads down on the VCS. There’s always a lot to do in these challenging and volatile times.

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#IFTTT #Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

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