#yes I’m gonna be lame and post my own Discord message

[magic-can]

[xingxueyue]

This post aim to EXPOSE ELEX and Mr Love Queen’s Choice Developing Team, of how underhand they are.

You want to play games with me? I will show you what I am capable of.

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PART ONE

For those who remembered, I had made 2 posts previously to highlight of the dissing of the male characters by the players within the Official UK Discord Server for MLQC.

Somehow the Admin came to know of the tumblr post, be it someone purposely alerted her to it, or she chanced upon it by herself, i don’t really care. But she contacted me and asked if I know anything about it. Refer to Pic 7 for the chat. She claimed she wanted to help resolve it but ended up with threatening me, refer to Pic 8.

So what is questionable is, do they have the rights to threaten players who posted the real truth behind the so-called masked server? This is what I want to know. So I sent them a DM through facebook chat, refer to Pic 1 and 2. No reply, nothing? They just read and ignored my messages. What’s next? I emailed the customer service directly and per reply, they asked me to contact facebook admin, refer to Pic 4. If DM-ing them works, I wouldn’t resort to using email. But guess what? Email support ignored my messages too. Oh wow.

Upon no reply up till now, I tried Instagram and Twitter DM too. You’ve got that right, I was ignored by the entire Developing Team and Admins running the social media platform. I even tried contacting them in-game via live customer service chat, waited severe hours, asking a simple question, but nobody would reply me. Double wow.

I was wondering if they decided to bury this shameful act by baiting with a question in their facebook page’s post, refer to Pic 9 and Pic 10. True enough, they first hid my comment from reflecting on the post itself, next they deleted my post. HOW COWARDLY YOU ARE ELEX. Trying to desperately to conceal your ugly doings.

Now, you may think I’m making a fuss over nothing, but let’s put it this way. Isn’t ELEX and Mr Love Queen’s Choice Developing Team confirming that they are allowed to threaten players and blocked them off, buried them under the rag if the wind is not in their favor? Showing how underhand they can get if you’re in their way. They offer no resolution nor solution to Admin’s threatening and tried to cover their shit up. If this can happen to me, this can happen to any other player, anytime, any place. Talk about showing respect all these, taking all the rules and such seriously. Refer to the above attached picture. JOKE ON YOU.

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Part B

I’m gonna summarize this part real quick.

UK Server emphasized on no spoilers from other servers etc. Refer to pic 6 and pic 8. However, members of the Official UK Discord don’t abide at all. Spoilers from all other servers were contributed. Did Admin stepped in to moderate? Nope, nothing. They did nothing. Refer to the above attached picture. So, what happened to your rules on no spoilers on this server? Admin asking member to DM her the pictures instead. Isn’t that contradicting to your rules of no spoilers from other servers? Isn’t this showing that even your own Admin breaks the rule? 

So I sent a DM on the facebook page to question this, and yes, I was once again ignored, refer to Pic 3. Then I proceeded to emailing them about this matter. Again, I was ignored, refer to Pic 5. So you meant to say that, the rules you set can be broken by Admin, but not by members? And eventually everyone can go around breaking them as and when they like? Might as well abolish away the lame rules when you have zero intention to abide right from the very start. 

Then now, you decided to add in spoilers, accepting that spoilers from all servers are allowed. Refer to the above attached picture.  Isn’t that slapping yourself across the face? Contradicting to what you have been affirming all along. 

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Thankfully I don’t need UK Server to survive on, I even uninstalled this trash app. I can already foresee the downhill and doomsday for this UK server, given with such a core team, rotten to the very core itself and with the junk translation that twisted and misled people to the very personality and characteristic of the 4 male character. Oh yes, good luck to all your money. Enjoy being milked by rubbish UK translated app till the very end. After all, it is not my money they milked, it is yours. ;) 😉😏😝

I think that’s ‘nuff said thus far. I had made my points clear. To those who doesn’t like it, who wants to unfollow me, I welcome you to do so. I’m free to do what I want, I have my rights, the same goes to you.

Cheers  XOXO 💋💋 XingXueYue 🌈🌈 

NO FLYING FUCK GIVEN 💖💖 

[lezzybugo3o]

Character Ownership

(Warning: Long Post Ahead)

I’m gonna set up a scenario and I’d like to see your responses to this. It’s kind of important and I’m also trying to prove a point about who a character belongs to and such.

So let’s say there are two friends named Katie and Elizabeth.

Katie is minding her own business when Elizabeth says “Hey, we should make a werewolf boyfriend for my character Tony.”

Of course, Katie agrees because she likes making characters. So she does some thinking and researching. “Okay, let’s make our werewolf boyfriend a blue-colored wolf so he can blend in with night colors... plus it will contrast his hot-tempered personality since I see him as a bold and brash character. Opposites attract and all that.”

“Sure thing, I guess. What should we name him then?”

“Ummm, let me see... I’m not so good with names but I’ll think of one,” admits Katie.

“It’s okay! I got a few suggestions already. There’s Sable, Corbin, and Jodan. I kinda like Corbin to be honest.”

“Hmm, yeah I like Corbin too! Corbin it is!”

So Katie and Elizabeth have fun creating scenarios for Corbin and Tony. But after some time, Elizabeth starts to call Katie from time to time, most likely to chat and geek out about their characters. Granted, Katie has time to spare, but she’s not one to talk on the phone a lot and whenever she gives a text saying “Hey, sorry. I’m eating breakfast rn”, Elizabeth would respond with a text saying “Hurry up and call me when you’re done.”

A couple months later, Katie gets a message from Elizabeth asking if she could join a Discord server that Katie is a part of that deals in making personas for a popular game. Katie says “yes but you have to provide a link to a profile of yours from a social media platform.”

“....Why?”

“It’s a new policy of ours on the server. One of ours friends had a bad experience with someone and we just wanna take precautions.”

“Why should they have to check out my blog just to coddle someone?”

Katie knows that Elizabeth can be difficult from time to time, but already her callous words are bothering her. After some convincing, Elizabeth agrees to give a link to her Instagram and Tumblr, but not without some... questionable words along the lines of  “If I see any of your dumb buddies on my Instagram, I will shove my foot up their ass. I watch my followers comments and likes like a hawk.” She then continues saying “Oh and if I find out you’ve been shipping Corbin with your other buddies’ werewolves on the Monster server, I’ll be super pissed and not talk to you for a long time. Their lame wolves aren’t good enough for him... omg you already did do it didn’t you?”

At this point, Katie had gotten fed up with how Elizabeth had been acting. During the month, she had been working on Corbin, his backstory and even some developments like giving him a human to bond with and two small pups of his own. She had shared the new info with Elizabeth, thinking she would enjoy the new content... instead Elizabeth seemed more concerned that Katie had made Corbin into something different than what SHE was hoping for, it seems. Katie then spoke up, “Okay I have to ask... why are you so possessive over Corbin? And for that matter, why are you so possessive of Jenna?” (Jenna is a werewolfsona of Katie’s that was made when Elizabeth told her she should make a persona of her)

Elizabeth got quiet and then said, “I thought he was made to be Tony’s boyfriend... but I guess not. I don’t wanna be in your server anymore. Unfollow my Tumblr while you’re at it.” Katie, wanting to preserve their friendship, tries to tell Elizabeth, “Corbin may have started out that way, but he grew into more than just a boyfriend character. I love putting him and Tony together, but I also like to multiship. I don’t want our friendship to end because of some ships.” Then Elizabeth continues to text Katie demanding to change Corbin’s name. Katie refused because she liked the name and doesn’t see why she has to change it. Her “friend” would not budge however and kept demanding that she change his name. Whether for her own good or because she wanted the arguing to stop, Katie lied and said “Okay, I’ll change it.”

And that was that... until a few months later. Katie had become a mod for a roleplaying server and at some point, she decided to invite Elizabeth to join the fun... soon enough, she began to regret her decision, remembering her ‘friend’ and her toxic behavior with her.

The deal was sealed when Katie and some friends on the server were bringing up which OCs of theirs they liked from one another. She was also on the phone with Elizabeth at the moment. When friends began to say they really loved Corbin and how Katie portrayed him... Elizabeth made her anger known by saying “You said you changed his name” and began calling Katie a ‘thieving liar’. The others began to tell Elizabeth to stop her behavior being nothing but polite until she herself left the server and hung up on Katie, telling her ‘goodbye’ and ‘how she now has to live with the fact that their friendship was fixed thanks to a lie’....

With all this said, who do you all think Corbin belongs in this situation? Katie or Elizabeth? In all honesty, I would say Katie because she’s the one that developed and designed Corbin into the character he is whereas Elizabeth merely gave name suggestions.

I WISH this was a fake scenario and I WISH I could say this was a funny little story... but truth be told, this was a real story with different names because I don’t want to start a witch hunt. I was Katie in this scenario and Corbin the werewolf? That was my bull shark Zora Seirin. I had a ‘friend’ (Elizabeth in this scenario) who was so damn obsessive over him and what I did with him and Reimi (my Zorasona). It wasn’t until recently that I finally decided to cut ties with that person after all the toxic behavior they put me through and I was pissed to see them act the way they did to my friends as well, calling them and their OCs ‘retarded’ and/or ‘lame’. I put so much love and care into Seirin’s backstory and his development as a character, therefore he’s MY character. Yet my so-called friend had the gall to say that because she named him, he’s hers  but ‘Lezzy lowkey stole him’ (an actual comment she made on our server)

All I can say is that as shitty as this situation was, it gave me the courage to finally block them, unfriend them and basically want nothing more to do with them. It also showed me just how lucky I am to have friends who truly care about me and my safety and it also made me cry seeing how much they grew to love my characters and my ideas.

Hopefully, I can avoid something like this, but if it can’t I know what to do this time. Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope you all have a great one

[fishandchipsandvinegar]

So You Want To Record a Podfic?

So Les Mis Podfic Week ( @lesmispodficweek ) is coming up in June and in order for us to maximize the amount of amazing podfic for this fandom, I thought I’d make a tutorial for anyone out there who thought about making podfic, but then looked and said “well this is rather terrifying” and ran in the other direction.

I’m here to make recording podfic easy peasy lemon squeezy. Mostly so you can make the amazing authors you’re reading for squee with delight.

This post is going to just be about setting up to record podfic, we’ll handle the mess of actually recording and editing later. (and if you’ve been around the block before, I’ve hidden some trade secrets in here for all interested parties)

So to start out you’re going to need 4 things:

A microphone

A free piece of software called Audacity

A super awesome amazing fanfiction to record

A bunch of big blankets and chairs.

Let’s tackle these one by one below the cut. (and we’ll do a summary at the end)

MICROPHONE

Please, for the love of all that is holy, get a microphone.

If you do one thing for me, it will be going outside (scary, I know) and retrieving a microphone. It can be a:

Beautiful, expensive Blue Snowball or Blue Yeti

A cheap, less than $25CAN microphone from Walmart

That USB Microphone that came with your Xbox or Playstation so you could play Rock Band when you were 9

Hell, at worst, use the microphone on your smartphone.

But please, PLEASE do not use your laptop microphone. It sucks. No matter what computer you have, IT IS THE WORST.

“But Amanda, I sound okay on Skype and Discord, do I really need…”

YES. YES YOU DO.

When you record sound using your laptop microphone… it also picks up all those lovely little sounds happening inside your computer that you can’t hear. And it’s nigh impossible to edit them out. I want to hear you reading, not your computer. So PLEASE get some kind of microphone.

Ideally, you want a microphone that has a USB on one end. That’s going to be the easiest way to do this.

“But Amanda! My microphone has a 3.5mm Headphone jack on the end!”

That’s alright. There should be a microphone port on your laptop next to where you plug in your headphones. If there isn’t, record into an app on your smartphone/tablet and then download it to your computer.

“But Amanda! There’s some port on the end that’s not a USB and it’s not a headphone jack…”

Props to you for finding a fancy professional microphone! But, you’re going to need an adapter. Most music stores sell them.

“But Amanda! Can’t I just use the microphone on my headphones?”

You know, I’ve never actually tried this. If anyone can get it to work, please let me know and I'll link how to do it here. (You might be able to record this way using an app on a smartphone/tablet.)

AUDACITY

So now that I made you go spend money on a microphone, I’m damn well NOT going to make you spend money on software. Enter a free, open-source, lovely program called Audacity. Think of Audacity like the cheap grocery stores of the world. Everything is the same (mostly) as the big, fancy, grocery stores, but you get everything for cheaper because the store doesn’t look pretty.

Audacity looks intimidating and terrifying, but we’re here to help. You can make Audacity your bitch.

But first you need to install it. Or… you need to install two parts of it.

The actual program

A piece of extra software that will let you import and export MP3s (called Lame)

There are a dozen tutorials on how to install this software so I’m just going to link them here:

DOWNLOAD AUDACITY HERE: https://www.audacityteam.org/ DOWNLOAD LAME (the software that lets you use MP3s) HERE: https://lame.buanzo.org/#lamewindl

INSTRUCTIONS TO INSTALL BOTH (for WINDOWS): https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/installing_and_updating_audacity_on_windows.html

INSTRUCTIONS TO INSTALL BOTH (for MAC): https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/installing_and_updating_audacity_on_mac_os_x.html

Note: If you also want to work with WMAs, then you may also need to download another piece of software called FFmpeg. The installation instructions above cover that as well.

Okay, now that you installed those, did you restart your computer? Audacity won’t link up the two pieces of software if you don’t. Go do that and come back.

PICKING A FIC

Look, I know that 60k slow burn, fake dating AU owns a small part of your soul. I get it. I’ve been there.

This is not the fic you want to pick for your first podfic. Trust me when I say pick something short.

One-shots in the 3k-5k range are a good first project. It’ll give you more than enough audio to practice your editing skills, and shouldn’t take you much longer than a couple hours to record.

More importantly, it should edit down to something about 30 min. long, which is an easily listenable length for most people.

“But Amanda! I reaaaaaaalllly like this one fic and…”

Live your dreams, kid. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Another thing you have to do is ask the author if you have permission to make a podfic of their work. Some authors don’t like it, and others will be absolutely thrilled. In the case of Les Mis Podfic Week, everyone on the list has granted permission, so you’re good on that front.

BLANKETS AND CHAIRS

Time to get comfy, yo. Put on some PJs. Drag out some pillows. And then box the whole thing in with the best damn blanket barricade fort you’ve ever built.

(has anyone else noticed that Courf just hands Gavroche a gun in this scene? OMG)

And then christen the barricade fort by reciting the recording cardinal rule:

THOU SHALT RECORD GOOD AUDIO.

No amount of editing or fancy software can fix audio that was bad in the first place, so nest yourself into an environment that’s as close to perfect as you can get.

Building a blanket fort is a cheap way to build a (mostly) soundproof space. The blankets are soft and will absorb harsh sounds, but also insulate the space from outside.

You could create a blanket fort one of two ways:

The classic tables, chairs and blankets method

Throwing a comforter over your head while you record

One of these ways looks more like a barricade. Just saying.

If you’re blankets don’t quite reach the ground it’s okay. Just make the side you’re speaking towards longer than the side towards your back (this will also help to ventilate the fort, which will probably get hella warm).

Then climb in your fort, set up your computer and plug in your microphone.

Now sit for a full minute in quiet meditation and just listen.

You’re listening for anything that would interrupt your revolution you would consider loud and annoying while you were making a very important phone call.

Are there windows open? Can you hear the outside world? Close them. We are going to a world of pure imagination, we don’t want the real world.

Is the fan on your computer being unbelievably loud at this, the one time you need it to be quiet? Close some of the things you have open and see if it calms down. If not, move the microphone to the opposite side of your computer from the fan, and pull it as far away from your computer as you can. I like to stick my computer outside the blanket fort and the microphone inside on one of the chairs.

Can you hear other people in the house? Ask them to be quiet while you record, or move to a part of the house where you can’t hear them.

Is the air/heart in your house very loud? Mine is SO LOUD. It’s like a vacuum cleaner, I swear. Turn it off.

Basically, you’re looking to eliminate any sound you have control over.

Now you’re ready to record. We’ll deal with how to do this in another how-to, but some things to consider:

Be very still. Your microphone will pick up you shuffling. Get comfy or pause to shift and then continue reading. You can always cut out the shuffling parts in editing.

Take breaks. Stretch. I like to do this every time there’s a page break.

Bring a drink. Your voice is gonna go wonky with all that chatter. Enjolras is gonna be a word that gets harder and harder to say. Feuilly’s just gonna be hard right from the start.

Watch your microphone cord. If your microphone is handheld, the shifting of the cord as you speak will also be picked up by the microphone.

Consider duct taping handheld microphones to lamps. No, I’m not kidding. Duct tape your microphone to a lamp. Got one of those articulated lamps like in the Pixar logo? Look at that, you’ve basically got a professional microphone stand. AND IT’S ALSO A LAMP.

Don’t read straight into your microphone. Hold it/set it up a couple of inches to the left or right of where you’re speaking towards. This will stop you from popping your P-s and spitting your S-es

NOW LOOK AT YOU!

You’re practically a professional already.

So let’s say the recording cardinal rule together.

Thou shalt record good audio by:

Using a real microphone. NOT YOUR LAPTOP MICROPHONE.

Downloading and installing Audacity. And the extra bit that lets you use MP3s.

Picking a fic to read that’s around 3k.

Building a badass blanket fort and eliminating ambient noise.

If you have any questions or are really stuck on something, you can reach out and message me. Also, if this tutorial was helpful to you, tag me in whatever you make! I want to hear how awesome you sound.

You got this, kid. Now go out there and tell the world’s stories.

(also <3 to @mysunfreckle for helping me format this in a way that was actually readable)