#why did i want to ctrl + s every time i made progress on this post?

[lenteur]

random thoughts about strong girl nam soon, episode four

(read more because i always get carried away lol and this post might contain spoilers)

watching two episodes in a row. what happened to mal who couldn't get the motivation to watch even one episode for months?

Interesting how the mother pretends nam soon is six. She wants to pretend she never lost her and it's only the continuation of her childhood.

The chief of the diu team tasting the drug, even though he knew what effect it had on people. This makes no sense at all. He has experience in such cases and yet he still put it in his mouth. And what is that excuse? It's such a weak excuse. I think the writers wanted to k*ll him from the get go but didn't know how. This is weird.

The reunion with all her family members... we all shed some tears. She only remembers her dad because he was the last person she saw before being lost in mongolia.

Even super humans are humans. The mother feeling guilty for not protecting her daughter and feeling useless.

The bond she has with her mongolian parents is so strong. She still thinks about them and lets them know how she's doing.

I wonder if there will be a nam soon / hwang ja confrontation. I'd love that because the former thinks with her heart and emotions and the latter is manipulative and thinks with her brain to obtain what she desires. They're polar opposites.

The grandmother is so iconic. The way she makes me laugh every time. She's so funny. Her little song while dislocating the cow and breaking its bones by her bare hands is a feat of strength. And everyone is amazed, including me.

The ceo of doogo has an ambiguous aura to me because on one hand he seems haughty and looks like he has disdain for everyone other than him. But on the other hand, he doesn't have the charisma of a villain. He kind of looks almost transparent to me. Maybe because we haven't seen a lot of him in these four episodes?

honestly i've tried to understand what doogo's "official" activity was and i lack sleep so i'm not sure but they're kind of like a korean amaz*n? if i'm not mistaken (don't take my word for it though)

As expected the effect of the drugs are seen on the chief of the diu team. I really can't believe he went and put some of the drug in his mouth. Nonsense!

the bells ringing when nam soon said she'll protect hee sik. It's the little details that make this love story so cute

i think we all wanted to be nam soon at one moment in our lives. It feels so good to see her tell everyone what she thinks without hiding under excuses or anything like that.

It's the look of pure awe when kang hee sik sees nam soon's new look for me <3

The way she wants to be where hee sik is because he will make her a better person <3 he's the only person that has been there for her ever since she landed in korea. he also proved her that he is a good person

i just can't with the grandma. She's just so funny! every time i see her i want to laugh. Wait that came out wrong. She's just so fun and i really enjoy every single moment she's had so far in the show

let's go love story between grandma and barista!!!

so far, nam soon is the worst undercover employee of all time.

i think hee sik has a role towards nam soon that he doesn't seem to be ready to handle. Seeing as nam soon is very oblivious to a lot of things, hee sik should have talked to her in more detail about the undercover mission. Because, at this rate, she'll get outed in no time.

what a relief that nam soon could get revenge on the airdnd scammer, even if she didn't get her money back

preview of the next episode seems really promising. Nam soon will confront both hwa ja and doogo's ceo.

A good episode

i'll give this one a 8/10

[loquaciousquark]

hey! love your writing and hearing about your process. you have mentioned that you need to write out a full fic first, rather than writing and posting chapter by chapter. what is your process for editing those longfics? i finished the first draft of my first longfic and the idea of editing it seems incredibly overwhelming. do you have any recommendations?

thank you kindly, anon! this is a difficult question to answer because I have no actual writing...training, I guess, is the word? I was a biomedical sciences major and I have never taken a creative writing class in my life, so I haven’t the foggiest idea if what I do breaks every Prime Tenet of Proper Writing ever, so take everything here with a grain of salt.

Because the thing is: I hate editing. HATE it, loathe it with every atom and sinew of my body. It is by far my least favorite part of the writing process, and because of that I go to great lengths to avoid it as much as humanly possible.

I’ve talked before about how I outline, I think, but basically, I outline all my long pieces heavily to get as much right on the first pass as I can so that I can not have to do major edits. Drafts, likewise, don’t really exist for me; 95% of what I write on the first pass gets published in that form with only minor changes. I strongly suspect this is an artifact of me being an architect rather than a gardener in my writing; I can’t remember the last time I scrapped a whole scene (or even a major part of a scene) because of how heavily I outline first and how strict I am with myself in sticking to that outline. Probably the vampire AU, honestly, because of Jade--but more on that later.

Here’s an example of what some of my outlining looks like:

Like, sometimes I’ll do proper numerals and such, but more often than not it’s just paragraph descriptions of the major things that should happen in each chapter, and if there’s some phrase or idea that I really want to use, I’ll just jot down a few specific phrases right there in the document.

This does a few things for me, but the biggest is that it gives me a solid bird’s-eye view of the thing I’m trying to write. If I don’t know them already, what are the themes I want to emphasize? What are the plot threads that run throughout? If I have “introduce Gilchrist the evil baker” in chapter one, this helps give me the reminders to make sure Gilchrist has appropriate follow-through in each subsequent chapter and isn’t completely forgotten by the side-plot I accidentally  brought up in chapter three and loved way more than Gilchrist’s unleavened muffins.

And this is not to say that I build the entire lattice out of iron from the start so that there’s no room to grow. Even in this fic I’ve just finished, I was telling @eponymous-rose as I was working on the epilogue (which I hadn’t intended to have) that I wasn’t sure what it was going to be about, but that I could feel it was needed; and it wasn’t until I was writing the epilogue’s last few lines that I realized both why it was important regarding the overall themes of the fic as well as regarding the characters’ individual narratives, even though I hadn’t planned for it in the outline.

This process is also why I tend to write the whole fic before ever posting a single word. If I realize in chapter nine that I completely forgot Gilchrist the baker existed until I made an inadvertent reference to a crooked croissant, there’s not a darned thing I can do about it if chapters one through eight are already posted. And because I also have major personal hangups about making public mistakes, I would much prefer to write in private, fix my boo-boos before anyone else sees them, and THEN post, rather than getting a half-dozen comments wondering if this was all a secret patisserie plot all along.

The other thing I’ll add here is how important my betas are to me and how I write. I am by nature an incredibly impatient person--I’m the one shopping at 8:30pm at Hobby Lobby and then working on a spraypaint project in the backyard at midnight by phone flashlight because I refuse to wait until the next day--so this has always been a little hard for me. However, being able to give the whole fic at once to a beta and say here, this is it, and letting them read the whole thing at once--this is so invaluable to me in picking out things I’ve forgotten, scenes that didn’t translate well from my head to my page, or plot points that might be weaker than I first thought and need shoring in multiple places throughout the plot.

@jadesabre301 has been my beta for...years. Middle school? Twenty years, maybe? And by now we know enough of each other’s writing to know where the pitfalls are, how each person needs to be checked. I tend to forget side characters exist when I have a huge cast; Jade is always there to remind me they exist and to bring them back in (see Sebastian’s chapter in Ever Rise for a perfect example; that chapter didn’t exist before she told me to let him be alive again). I tend to overuse certain phrases and metaphors, and I’ll sometimes have characters repeat the same action several times in a scene without realizing (see Invicta, where I had three separate people cross their arms in less than 500 words before she called me on it).

Jade also has a marvelous ability to look at a work’s overall structure and point out which sections are strong and which sections are weak and need a little tweaking before they’re published. (Again, because I hate editing, the bones are usually sound enough that I can make these changes with only a few paragraphs or sentences here and there; and when Jade tells me to cut some line altogether I rarely save it, because if it didn’t make her cut here I know it’s not worth the saving anywhere.)

Example!

And because she also knows me very well, she is also very kind to point out the things she likes throughout her edits, which is just as invaluable a skill in an editor and I hope she realizes how important it has been to me over the years.

And because this is quickly getting much longer than I’d ever intended, I will close with the last thing that has helped me with my own editing when I’m (alas) forced to do it: I know what my problems are, if that makes sense. Not just the structural issues above, but repeating phrases and words to the point of distraction, hammering metaphors into the ground when a lighter touch would do them better service, and significantly overusing emdashes & semicolons. (Based on @eponymous-rose‘s beta/grammar check of this most recent fic, 43 of 350 or so emdashes died, and more will again when I get a chance to look over it once more.)

So when I’ve gone through it enough that I’m happy with the characterization and the plot threads and themes, as set out by the original outline I spent too much time on, then I go through and do one or two passes on word choice. To be quite honest, I do a Find search through the document for words I know I overused, then look at each usage and make sure they’re not too close to each other. Example--I did a search for “hard” on this last fic, and found I’d used it four times in the same paragraph. All in different ways--his eyes were hard, his grip hardened, he had a hard set to his shoulders, etc--but too much! So knowing the words (and issues in general) I tend towards and looking through to excise some of them specifically helps a lot in the editing I am willing to do.

SO!

To summarize: how do I edit my longfic? As little as possible!

heavy outlining prior to writing to make sure I have themes and plot threads properly established and mapped out throughout the piece

sticking closely to my outline throughout the writing process

sending only completed fics to beta so that they can read the whole thing at once and more easily pick out flaws in structure, theme, or character progression

ctrl-f words/phrases I know I most frequently overuse to cut the unnecessary ones (I’ll sometimes run the fic through something like this site to check phrase frequency for anything that might have slipped through)

and when all else fails, I set the whole thing aside for a week (again, I am impatient--longer would probably be better) and then come back and try to read it with fresh eyes

I hope this has at least been moderately helpful? Again, I’d like to emphasize that I have no idea what I’m doing, and this is hardly foolproof, but it’s worked for me so far, and hopefully at least a small part of it will be helpful to you. Thank you for asking!

[90dayableton]

90 Days of Ableton: Day 0 & 1

I downloaded Ableton in the late evening on May 10th, so I’m going to call May 11th, my first full day with the software, Day 1.

May 10th was Day 0.

I did spend a couple hours on Day 0 trying to get comfortable with the program. I’ve never used a full DAW before - I’ve only noodled around with free web apps like Soundation.

So I had a basic sense of how to add instruments or channels, how to create and edit clips, and how to create notes with the draw mode/pen tool.

I decided to start by making something slow & chill.

I had a basic structure already in mind:

Start with one nice chord pattern with a little texture, a few passing notes, to make it interesting: 2, 4, or 8 measures long, as an introduction. Play it by itself.

Then, after 2-4 measures, layer it with beats.

Then layer it with more filled-out chords.

Then layer it with melodic lines. Make the melody another repeating loop, 2-4 measures long.

After the melody plays a couple times, start to tweak things. Change some of the moving notes, make sequences go up instead of down, or down instead of up.

Then add a few more percussive elements, transitions, and little instrumental call-outs to give it some life.

Every 2-4 measures, add a new instrument or effect without breaking the underlying pattern. Familiar foundation + novelty = brain takes interest.

Once the pattern repeats enough that you get tired of it, it’s time for a B section!

Now start removing instruments. Allow the more recent elements to play, or play with variations, and switch up the basic loops you started with. (i.e. change the bassline, change the chords, change the beats - you want complementary, but different.)

Preserve some elements, change others. Keep it on a 2, 4, or 8 measure cycle. You want new things to happen every 2 measures.

Re-introduce elements you haven’t heard in a while on top of new ones for a satisfying climax.

As for an outro? I basically just let the B section play out, and then I went back to the chords from the intro but I gave them to a different instrument, and I silenced everything else...dropped out the bass, the percussion, everything except a little ambiance. It worked, even though it was abrupt.

By the end of Day 1, I felt I had something cohesive and more-or-less “finished,” though it was very unrefined.

I lowered some of the track volumes (bass, shamisen, soft horn, bottle blower) but not all of them (I’m writing this from the perspective of Day 3 so now I know that the mixer in the red is something to correct), I didn’t do any panning, I didn’t double any instruments. I didn’t do anything with gates or envelopes or pitch shifting.

It’s basically a compilation of sounds and a nice tune but it’s not edited, mastered, or mixed in any significant way.

What I Started With:

Ableton Live 10 Trial (free)

a pretty chord riff: mine was inspired by an old j-rock song ain’t afraid to die by dir en grey

(I figured out the exact notes of the chords (I have a good ear but I do not have perfect pitch, people) with this synthesia video breakdown of the song.)

a few general ideas for how to structure it (listed above)

a few general ideas for organizing my workstation

basic background in music performance/theory (I know that not all aspiring music producers may have this, and I am lucky to; but it’s also likely that many musicians are drawn to this work)

What I Learned:

ONE. I’m not sure why the basic template, when you open a new live set, is two Midi tracks and two Audio tracks. The first habit I started was deleting one Midi and one Audio track, silencing the two remaining, and using them as temporary storage tracks to hold midi & audio samples/clips that I wanted to use but hadn’t assigned to an instrument. Nobody told me to do that. It just made sense to me and maybe in the future I’ll find out that it’s actually a bad idea, but it works right now.

TWO. The basic trial version of Ableton supposedly doesn’t have as much extra content (sounds, samples, instruments) as the full one, but it’s still pretty loaded. [Disclaimer: Nobody is paying me to say this.] A really huge amount of time was just taken up with me sorting through all the stuff that came pre-installed, listening to samples, and selecting what might sound good in the context of my own song. (HOWEVER - I did want more orchestral instrument options. Not enough brass and winds, and the strings could definitely be improved...)

THREE. It’s really easy to get distracted by other cool sounds. I ended up saving a bunch of specific samples to my user library (or creating a new live set to play around with it a little bit) because hearing certain unrelated sounds inevitably triggered new musical ideas that weren’t appropriate for the current composition.

FOUR. If I didn’t have a specific idea for a song in my head (which I did), it would have been so much harder and taken so much longer to create something cohesive. Going in with 1. a basic chord progression and 2. a couple basic melodic “cues” that I lifted from the lead vocals in the original song made it MUCH easier to fill in everything else around it. I deliberately took inspiration from another song because I wanted to focus on creating something pretty that would teach me how to use the software without getting too bogged down in composition.

FIVE. It was easy to get distracted and to flounder until I “landed” on exactly the sound I needed, or the sound I didn’t know I needed until I heard it. Example: I didn’t plan out a shamisen track, but once I saw the shamisen instrument in my library, I knew I was gonna have a good time with it. Or the chimes. As soon as I heard the chimes, I knew exactly where to put them and I didn’t swerve.

SIX. One of the most time-consuming things was just locking in the actual notes. I was used to the draw tool in another program that streamlined drawing notes, but I felt like it was clunkier and slower-going in Ableton because there were so many more refined options.

As a result, I learned/realized that I could use my computer keyboard in lieu of a Midi keyboard (which I don’t own), so I ended up composing that way. When there were tempo or rhythmic issues, I fixed them by ear, manually re-positioning notes...(I can only assume there’s a shortcut I don’t know about yet because if it’s not clear I’m a total noob) and zooming in closer for more refined adjustments.

SEVEN. Zooming! I learned a few basic keyboard shortcuts which helped SO much. On a PC:

ctrl+alt gives you a grabby hand and if you hold those down while you click with the mouse you can move all around the track without accidentally clicking or highlighting or deleting anything

ctrl + mouse scroll wheel (or + / - buttons) lets you zoom in and out, in the track itself and in the midi note editor.

EIGHT. One of those “learning by doing” things - day 0 & 1 were just immersing myself in the system and figuring out how to actually do the thing I needed. Some of my early questions:

why is my master track mixer red when everything else is green? (answer: you need to lower individual track volumes well below 0, like at least -8 to -12.)

how do I make the display go left-right with a timeline instead of up-down? (answer: tab button to switch between views)

how do I make this note sound less harsh? (answer: probably has something to do with the velocity? and/or the attack?)

how do I make this sound linger instead of clip off suddenly? (answer: hold the note until the end of the phrase, or lengthen the clip to draw it out - yeah I’m not touching reverb yet)

how do I lengthen or shorten clips? (answer: there’s a function with ctrl + E to slice something if you want to chop it up, but otherwise just grabbing it by the edge and dragging left or right will work. note this is for the clip...not the music/notes.)

how do I make the instrument panel come up and how do I hear it and how do I use my keyboard as a midi controller?

answer:

Select your instrument from the library sidebar and drag it to the place under the other tracks where it says “drop files and devices here”

Then, double click on that track

This should create a new “clip” which you can expand or move around to a different place in the timeline.

There’s a little keyboard along the left side of the “midi clip editor” which pops up at the bottom of the screen when you create a new clip. Click the headphone icon above the keyboard (which lets you hear yourself play it) AND press the M button on your keyboard to turn the Computer Midi Keyboard on and off. (You should see it light up in the top right corner, near the CPU load meter.)

Then, you should be able to use your keyboard to play notes - a s d f g h j k as the basic notes of the c major scale (i.e. white keys from C - C; easy to remember since f and g correspond to actual F and G) and W E T Y U as black keys.

To actually record what you’re playing, hit the record button. Personally I recommend setting the metronome (upper left corner) to count off one bar before the recording starts.

I will share my finished “song” from the end of Day One, but before I do, in the next post I’m going to break down what happened on Day Two to show you how I improved even further upon my work.

Then you can hear the two side by side, really proving how much progress one person can make in a single day!

[rpgmgames]

March's Featured Game: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass

DEVELOPER(S): Kasey ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace   GENRE: RPG, Exploration, Comedy WARNINGS:  Blood SUMMARY: Jimmy dreams of the most fantastic things. He dreams of big yellow fields of sunflowers. He dreams of living woodwinds and talking mice. He dreams of his mom. He dreams of his dad. He dreams of all the video games he's played with his uncle. He dreams of his brother standing beside him like a ten-foot giant. Sometimes he has nightmares, too. Jimmy's about to go on the adventure of his lifetime - and no one's going to know about it but him.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself!  *Howdy! My name's Kasey, and I'm the lone dude working on Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. You might also know me as Housekeeping on rpgmaker.net. I've been working with RPG Maker seriously for about six/seven years now, I think. I was also the developer of A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky, The God of Crawling Eyes, and The Heart Pumps Clay; I was also one of the developers that worked on Born Under the Rain (I mainly did the script and the music on it). Before that I played with RPG Maker on and off for years; I even made a 5-10 hour game on the Playstation version of RPG Maker in high school, which is clear and indisputable proof that I was the most popular guy in school. I also have played guitar for fourteen years, have an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing, and if you put a dog in front of me I will pet it until it gets tired of me.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Kasey: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is about a lot of stuff, but I think that what it's most about is depicting what it's like to be a shy, introverted kid. It's also about success and the pressure Americans put on themselves to be successful, the importance of empathy, imagination, video games, fear, family, etc. Basically, these are all things important in childhood, so I think that's the umbrella theme that works best. For Jimmy's subject matter, I was inspired by several things, so it's hard to pin it down. But, in a more practical sense, I'd been wanting to move forward and make a commercial project since I first started seriously working with RPG Maker, but I always thought that I would have to find a team. So, I think what inspired me the most to actually get on this path by myself was seeing in-development screenshots of Lisa. I said, "Hey, this guy's doing everything by himself, and his art style might be simplistic, but it looks great, so why can't you do that?"

How long have you been working on your project? *Kasey: I've been working on Jimmy for about two-and-a-half years. Before that, I was working on a shorter version of this game for a half a year or so, so let's call it an even three.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Kasey: Oh yeah! Earthbound is the first and most obvious influence; there's some tonal similarities, but I mainly used it as visual inspiration. I was also inspired by Yume Nikki's approach to using setting as a form of characterization; that opened up a whole new world of storytelling for me, which is pretty exciting. Jimmy essentially has a "class system" in that he can imagine different monsters and change his abilities; this was heavily influenced by Final Fantasy 5's class system. The field actions are somewhere between Breath of Fire and Lufia 2/Wild Arms's tools; they give Jimmy new ways to interact with the environment, including solving some basic puzzles, but the game isn't puzzle-heavy like Lufia 2.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?   *Kasey: Yeah; in a game this size, you run into all sorts of things. I think the biggest challenges for me tend to be with drawing. I've got a lot of experience writing, composing, and eventing, but I'm a middling-to-poor artist, so I've had a major learning curve there. There's not much of a story towards overcoming my artistic deficiencies; I just keep at it. The cool thing is that I can see some clear progress from when I started, and that keeps me on task.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Kasey: Here's a boring answer: basically, no, my initial concept is the same. Well, that's not entirely true; like I mentioned earlier, Jimmy was originally a much shorter game that wasn't going to be commercial (it was also drawn with crayons and looked like garbage), but, once I committed to making a full-length RPG, it's been the same. This is probably because this isn't my first rodeo, so I knew what I could do and planned within the boundaries of the engine.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? *Kasey: I am...utterly alone. Boohoohoohoohoo!

What was the best part of developing the game? *Kasey: I like writing/eventing scenes the most, which sucks, because it's a relatively short part of the process, and it's one of the last things I do.

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Kasey: There are things I learned--mainly about drawing--that I would have liked to know when I first started. Like, I wish that I would have known what saturation was; yeah, that's how clueless I was. My early work was super saturated and is an eyesore; I had to go back and lower the saturation a bit. I would have liked to know I could hold ctrl when using the select tool in Graphics Gale and push the arrow keys to test to make sure that tiles looped correctly. I would have liked to know that you can create a picture file that's the same size as the resolution of your game, place images on that, and use the x/y coordinates to determine where your pictures using the move/show picture commands will end up. That's the kind of stuff I wish I knew--would have saved me so much time early on.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game's universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Kasey: It's going to be a standalone game. I have a very rough idea for another game in the same universe, but I've got a lifetime of ideas, so I would need a very good reason (inspirationally) to pursue that.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Kasey: I just want to see people enjoying it!

Is there something you're afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game?  *Kasey: Yeah: I'm scared to death of marketing. That's why I've been dragging my feet on getting a promotional video together (don't worry, I'll get to it this summer). I'm afraid I won't be able to reach enough people and not many people will play it. I'm afraid that the coolest thing I've ever done will be overlooked.

Question from last month's featured dev: Which character from your game do you relate to the most? Why? *Kasey: This is an easy one: Jimmy. I'm still a fairly quiet adult when I'm with a large group of people, but when I was a kid, I was so, so shy. I remember when I was a kid at church camp (don't laugh, I'm from Texas; this was inescapable), we were doing some exercise in compliments, and the camp counselor said that I was quiet, but he could tell that "the wheels were always turning," and I think that was a pretty accurate description of me--now to a degree, but especially then--and that's what I'm trying to depict with Jimmy--all those wheels.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Kasey: The best advice I can give you is to get into every aspect of game development. Make a short project--maybe an hour or so--and do EVERYTHING. Make all the graphics, make all the music, experiment with every single eventing command, make little puzzles, change the window skin--do it all. Some of it's going to feel like cleaning the gutters, but you're going to get so much perspective. Even if you end up working on a team later where all you do is draw character cut-ins, you'll at least know to an extent what your other team members are going through, and that's IMPORTANT. Also, play lots of games with a critical eye; think about why things are engaging and how they could be improved. Culture is built off of itself, so learn from the past and make it better.

We mods would like to thank Kasey for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved! 

Remember to check out Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum