#i can format that to make it more readable later.

[masterdreamweaver]

i have further commentary about this that i put into the tags at first but i think it should be part of the main post so it doesn't get lost in further reblogs;

#like hey with all due respect. you are conflating a good handful of things (i don't think i said this part right but that's not the point)

checking tumblr on the phone when you're in the bathroom is a habit. combing your fingers through your hair when you're nervous is a habit.

saying "i can't form habits, the habit forming part of my brain is broken" is. in and of itself. a habit.

hello. i have been professionally diagnosed with adhd twice. it is so much easier now that i am medicated about it. yes. but also quite literally. op is Right.

#i have a life threatening disability that will genuinely kill me if i forget to take my medication #i forget to take my medication a lot. i know this.

#outsource your habits. outsource your motivation. set timers. set reminders. #give yourself a gold star sticker. ask your friends to tell you that they're proud of you. #there are things that make it easier and you are. not entirely wrong. but you're being a negative nancy about it.

#i don't know if i do fully believe you when you say that you've broken your tasks down to the smallest step either

#like my steps for medication are #get food. count carbs. do math. do shot. #that's not small enough. #do shot-- that's so simple and easy. right

no. i have to: - grab my insulin case. - open it. - take syringe out. - take alcohol swab out. - take vial out. - open alcohol swab. - swab top of vial so it's clean. - take backstop cap off syringe. - take front cap off syringe. - purge empty air from syringe. - draw in air. - stick needle in vial. - inject air into vial. - flip vial and syringe upside down. - draw out insulin into syringe. - inject back into vial to get rid of air bubbles. - repeat if necessary. - draw out correct dosage. - take vial off of syringe. - hit syringe with vial in case there's any air bubbles left in there - set syringe down. - expose flesh. (i usually do my shots in my stomach so this is usually as simple as "lean back in chair. lift up shirt." but it's more complicated if you're in public or wearing something more complicated than pajamas etc) - pick up alcohol swab again. - wipe flesh clean with alcohol swab. - set down alcohol swab. - pick up syringe again with one hand. - pinch flesh with the other hand. - place needle against skin. - push needle into flesh until it's fully in there. - inject insulin into flesh. - hit the stopper with my thumb a bit to make sure i get every unit. - remove syringe from flesh slow and careful. - set it down. - pick up alcohol swab. - wipe flesh clean with alcohol swab a second time. - set alcohol swab down. - pick up syringe and syringe caps again. - put both caps back on the syringe. - put syringe in sharps container. - put alcohol swab in trash. - put vial back into medkit. - put medkit back into its place (on my desk i have an organizer with all my shit so it's in reach every second)

and even all THAT. that can be broken down FURTHER. anything can be made simpler and less complicated and easier.

there's a post i need to find which is genuinely about this; "go get a glass of water" for someone without problems might have to be broken all the way down into "stand up walk to door open door go out of door close door walk to stairs walk down stairs walk to kitchen walk to cabinet open cabinet grab cup take cup out of cabinet walk to sink hold cup under faucet turn on sink turn off sink move cup to mouth drink water"

but it's. yeah. you should have made that your own post instead of venting on some genuinely well-meaning and helpful advice

here's some more unsolicited adult advice as someone in her 30s who knows there are a lot of twenty somethings and teens that follow her: if you're trying to build a new habit you really want, and are struggling, you have to break it down to the smallest building block possible. If you're failing, you haven't thought small enough. I know it's possible to hear stories of people who just snapped into new life mode one day by "just deciding", but truly what's happening there is a confluence of events and experiences that force the brain into some sort of epiphany. You cannot will an epiphany. It'll never work. For most times of your life, you will need to build habits intentionally, and that means not working against yourself and to set micro goals. like laughably tiny goals. because once that easy tiny goal is met, you can build off it, tiny goal after tiny goal until you reach your big goal.

so for example, if you want to be a morning person that gets up at ass crack dawn so that you can work out, eat brekkie, shower, and get to work at a leisurely pace, and you're not that person because you will hit your snooze button 800 times, you have to get the big picture goal out of your head. think smaller. "I want to get up 15 minutes earlier than I normally do." If you can't do that, make it 5 minutes. "I want to cook breakfast every day" hell no too big. "I want to eat something, anything, before I leave the house" hell yeah, fantastic. When you go to the grocery store to make sure there are things in the house for breakfast, if you keep buying bagels and microwave sandwiches that you ignore, you gotta think smaller. SMALLER. What's something so easy to eat that you'll never say no to. Is it a yogurt? Is it a handful of grapes? Is it a hostess ho ho? is it hot cheetos? FORGET the big picture of the fantasy put-together woman preparing a full nutritious meal that you'd be proud to admit to. Think only of the smallest goal you can achieve. If you know you can't say no to an ice cream sandwich, put a ton of ice cream sandwiches in your freezer and have one for breakfast every day until it's so instilled in you that you gotta get up to eat something you can start diversifying.

It sounds like, from the lack of habit place, that must take forever. But really it doesn't take too long to form the habit once the discipline kicks in. the trick is that you have to give your brain something easy to become disciplined to. If it's too hard, think easier and smaller. No one has to know. Literally no one in the gd world has to know that for 4 weeks when you were 22 you had an ice cream sandwich for breakfast every day. who cares. If it gets you eating oatmeal with fresh fruit in a few months who cares. you did it, yay. smaller, easier. if you can't do it, think smaller and easier. smaller!! EASIER!!! You are not thinking smaller and easier enough. break your brain thinking how small and easy you can go. SMALLER. EVEN SMALLER, SIS.

[britneyshakespeare]

I think everyone wants to own a complete works of Shakespeare and I want to get everyone a complete works of Shakespeare that is right for them

[random-non-shower-thoughts]

Write with your heart, edit with your inner critic and ears

My last two post have been more from the heart, but I think more people need actual editing advice like I have talked about in a previous thought post. Like I said there, plenty of teachers and professors have no issues talking about writing and formulating and drafting works. I only know of one professor over all my years of writing that I can recall with 99% certainty that taught us useful tips for editing.

And I will say that like writing, there's no one size fits all, because nobody writes the same as anyone else--or even themselves as they hone and improve their skills. A lot should be based on what vibe you want to create and what is needed for the work/chapter/draft you are focusing on.

But if nothing else, there's three things you want to focus on:

Spelling and punctuation as fitting for the message you want to convey

Formatting to make it readable and to improve the message

And most importantly: READING THE WORK ALOUD BEFORE PUBLISHING

The last one is what I don't see talked about enough, and was reminded by a community post recommended for me (I will never follow them, they're impossible to share and most seem like a waste of time), so I decided to expand on it in a more shareable format.

(Note: I believe that doing this with your own voice or text to speech are equally helpful. Sometimes you want to go at your own pace and use voices. Maybe you have to have another voice to notice things. Both work to reach the same goal of polishing your writing!)

I am going start by saying that there's times when you can tell a piece could have used an extra pass by how it reads. There's often weird turn of phrases and spelling that is not obtrusive but makes you pause (and I will be the first to say I want readers to tell me if they catch these for whatever reason, even the less error prone machine still lets flecks of misspellings and pebbles of forgotten commas). The missing period that makes two sentences become a long run-on sentence that technically makes sense.

The editing is on the surface sufficient, but missing a last pass that could buff out a final draft and have you read it later when more experienced with pride. And without asking why you forgot something so obvious, or why you worded it that way. (I love looking at outstanding line from old works, I often laugh at how even my spicy stuff can have a raw scene outside of the bedroom).

One of the best ways I found, after formatting and spellchecking and double-checking the right words are used, is to give it a final read out loud! Yes, I can understand that you might ask why it has to be out loud when you already went over it so many times, and the editing software and you not say it's fine. And that's exactly why. Things that a computer might say is good might not be the right wording for the story. You might have changed something to get the sentence to make sense but it ruined the actual mood, or you added something that is out of character. An extra adjective you thought worked didn't actually fit and you forgot to hit delete. There's so many times I have changed something because I wasn't satisfied with the flow and just didn't backspace enough during a much earlier draft and it slipped through till the final pass while I read it aloud.

Or--and this is a big one for me--reading it out loud made me realize that it won't work at all. Not due to anything technical or because the section makes no sense. Just something about having it spoken out loud awakens my inner critic to an issue I didn't notice until now. A whole paragraph might finally show it can be cut and make a transition easier. A sentence might be deleted because it was more distracting fluff and I see it should be deleted (no matter how nice it worked in my head). Or if not gone, it was in the wrong spot. Now I have to read it out loud, word by word, I can paste a section in a better place and change the whole flow.

I've seen people talk about how they use text to speech to see if something goes on for too long and know when to stop by how it starts to distort it's voice to keep going. You can do the same too.

By reading aloud, you'll at last understand the readers' plight of flowery purple prose by struggling to catch your breath. Suffer while the TTS malfunctions from you using too many adjectives about the MC in the mirror. See if maybe you can change that comma or em dash into a period or semicolon. Play with different voices and see if that fanfic about your favorite character sounds OOC or you are really that good at getting inside their head. See how the words fit as you get a fresh perspective, watching them fall into place like puzzle pieces while observing how each flows like a poetic melody.

It is all experience for when you write that next chapter or work. Sure, it's not as intense as typing it all out, but it's not like you're not learning from it. Editing is writing too; what you master here can translate to better writing next time, and a cleaner first draft in the future. (Like I've said before, you'll never have a perfect first draft, but you can write a clean first draft to make it easier for yourself.)

Just remember, writing is supposed to be as good as you are today, and never a suffering contest. Not every aspect of it will be exciting but do not force yourself to make it more difficult than you can handle. If I am miserable, I am not creative, and this is true for so many; and if anyone tells you that makes someone a fake/poser/imposter, ignore them. If they like being sad to write a depressed and angsty character, that is their method alone. Editing does not have to be a slog, but it should be something you put effort in to so the final product is something you are proud of.

Listen to the fun writing voice when you are outlining and writing, and unleash the inner critic when you edit. Both are there for a reason.

[eri-pl]

"Nothing is evil in the beginning" (but it needs a better title, this line is too overused) (for @morgoth-into-the-void-week day 4)

Melkor character study. Surprisingly no TWs, despite sticking close to canon. If I even get this far in the timeline, there won't be drastic descriptions.

But we're in his head (3rd person) and watch him spiral downwards. I guess this may be unsettling. As for now I got through Ainulindale and it's pretty benign in my opinion. A lot of unheatlthy emotions though.

Why do I love writing characters who are wrong? For the irony? Maybe.

No "thee" this time, because the format is weird already. I hope it's readable enough. It is a bit experimental in form. I also hope to some day finish it all the way back to the Void.

Fic below cut.

"I can handle this."

"You can't. You would unmake yourself in an instant. You need to learn. I love you."

"I could. I know I could." He lunges into the void, seeking, yearning, burning to create. It's empty. It shouldn't be empty. He will make it full. "I can handle this."

"Come, meet your kin. Learn them, learn with them. I love you."

"I will. Later. I need to see what's there, I need to find It, I know You will let me one day, I need to. I will learn them later."

"You have to choose. I love you."

"I can do both. I can handle this."

A melody comes, and it's stranger than the Void.

He makes it even stranger, stretches it into far reaches of his thought, far into the Void, where he can make it into something that never have been. And singing it, changing it, making it kindles a light in his heart. It's almost what he had longed for. It is something where there was nothing. But then he stops singing and it fades, and what was it's not no more.

"Almost" is not enough.

He sings again, there is something in the motive, something yearning for an answer, if he could only find it.

"Come, sing with your brother, learn to harmonize with him. I love you."

"I need to understand first! I can't let anyone muddle the question before I find the answer! I can handle this, I can find it, I will not fail You."

"You will. But I love you, Melkor."

He sings louder, desperate to hear it, to grasp it. It's still not loud enough. He needs to grow. So Melkor stretches into the Void, trying to be more than he is. Melkor. That his name. It fits.

Everyone gathers and Melkor meets many of his kin for the first time. Still, his thoughts are wandering through the Void, seeking the answer. When he manages to become fully present and feels the others, the Music has already begun.

It had begun and continued, changing. Not like one motive, explored back and forth in his mind, in his singing, but... Like a line. It had more of this strange quality of passing and then being no more. It was beautiful, but boring, slow. When will we get to filling the Void?

The others sang wrong. It wasn't the song Melkor had been given, it was simpler. Less important. Melkor sang louder to lead them into a more worthy music.

They didn't want to be led and started quarreling. He added more ideas, showing them what could be, what he could make if they stopped slowing him down. If they let his questions bloom to their full glory, if they let him seek the answers undisturbed. Yes, they were trying to help, he was aware of this. But they only slowed him down. He could handle it by himself.

Some managed to help a little, though, adding to his song, and it grew even mightier. But still not mighty enough.

A new theme appeared, but it didn't help, as most of his "kin" still didn't understand anything. A few went quiet, a few more joined him, but this still wasn't enough. Why? Why would they not understand?

Melkor sang as loud as he could, turning his voice into a defeaning roar, yet still, they opposed him. Even his so-called brother. Mostly him.

How could they all be so stupid, so— there was no concept for this. How they sang was— it was like imagining a wrong solution to a problem, but without the "imagining" part. It made Melkor feel things he'd never known before, and they were not entirely unpleasant.

There was strength in this feeling. He channeled this new sensation into his song and many of the others finally shut up.

Then, before Melkor could develop his theme, another break.

He resumed his song, accompanied by some others, seeking... What was he seeking? The quiet countermelody, too slow, too chromatic and yet not tense enough, distracted him.

…He had been asking a question. It had been important. And his foolish "kin" made him lose it.

He would find it again. He was the mightiest, if he wouldn't find it, than no one would. And it was too beautiful to be lost forever. So, he had to.

But first he needed to convince the others, to make them understand that they were singing wrong. They kept stealing his chords, harmonizing them into something unbearable, something... painful. The pain was another new thing.

Another sudden break, halfway as something was beginning, something—

"Melkor, my beloved child. There cannot be a wrong music, none of you can change it against Me even if you try. And if anyone dares, they will prove a part of my plan still, and they will witness beauty beyond their furthest imagining. I love all of you."

All of them. But when it came to a reprimand, Melkor is mentioned specifically. Even thought they were the ones singing wrong.

That hurts.

A Vision appeared before them, solidifying again the order of Time, but Melkor didn't pay much attention to it. And hearing that he was but a part, but an insignificant embellishment—

Something changed.

New beings appeared, like the Ainur but yet unlike. How? How was that not impossible? So fragile, and yet they had a depth to them, and a blinding newness. Something inside them called to Melkor: an answer and a question. He needed to understand. And those creatures, those silver and gold juxtapositions, moved erratically and yet too slowly, not letting him see clearly, not letting him—

What? He started in amazement at how much those Children (was he not enough?) were given, waiting. But no gifts were offered to him, or any of the Ainur; not even to his boring, obedient brother.

Why? A tempest swirled in him, those feelings he'd put before into Music, and a piercing longing. It was as if the whole last part of the Song sounded in his heart.

Melkor pushed it back.

He could handle those feelings, nobody needed to know how lost he was. He would find himself quickly. He'd got enough reprimands already, he didn't need to make it worse by asking stupid questions. Apparently he wasn't good enough. Well, he would prove himself. He could handle this.

First, he had to make this messy place worthy of those tiny, absurd creatures endowned with such gifts. Which, of course, meant that he had to work against most of his so-called "kin", who understood nothing of it.

Why did he always have to do the hardest work?

But he was the mightiest. He could handle this.

the Vision is gone, interrupted earlier even than the Music, and there is Darkness. How can it be gone, after Melkor has put so much effort into it? It hurts, but he can't show that. He has to be mighty. To prove himself.

The Darkness seems to look at him with too many eyes, and he needs to hide his pain his secrets from it, so that it doesn't interfere with his plans. Most of the Ainur look at him with anger, and even the few who joined him shy back in fear. But Melkor needs every tool he can have, so he decides that being feared is a good thing.

"I know that you long for the world to be, that you yearn to meet and know something unlike you, and yet akin, separate and yet real. I love you all, and so—

Eä!"

[voltronimus-prime]

Murder Drones Hot Take

Oil does not equal blood 1:1 and worker Drones should not be freaked out by seeing or drinking it.

While we're not given an exact breakdown of how a Worker Drone's body functions, we know they've got motors, and we know they've got a lot of power running through them.

This means they need to keep cool, and they need to keep their motors and joints running smoothly.

While oil as coolant shouldn't require frequent top ups unless there's a leak, oil as lubricant can require refills as the old oil loses viscosity and as gunk builds up reducing its ability to properly keep things moving.

Worker Drones, particularly the ones on Copper 9, are in a very rough environment, where particulates building up would be a constant issue.

Combined with the temperature flip flops from going between a heavy work environment to the blizzards of the outside, and I'm sure there'd be some interesting chemical results.

Worker Drones would have to top off/change their oil semi-regularly. Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief(?), they wouldn't be able to regenerate their own, they're literally just robots.

Multiple stories have the Disassembly Drones feeding off of workers and simply stopping short of draining them, and then later on the victim is fine, but that only works in vampire stories because human bodies can replenish the missing blood. Worker Drones can't do that.

Worker Drones would have to have a supply of oil they use to keep themselves going, meaning there'd be options for helping Disassembly Drones with their artificially increased consumption without having to do worker blood drives, unless something really goes wrong at least.

On the topic of oil loss, it also wouldn't result in a semi-quick fatal error like a person bleeding out. The two main symptoms would be difficulties moving as the low oil pressure means delicate mechanisms start grinding due to lack of proper lubrication, and a slow increase in internal temperature due to lack of coolant.

However considering these are robots built for industrial use and not purposefully sabotaged robo-vampires, they wouldn't be as vulnerable to that since they wouldn't be generating the same kinds of heat anyway.

As great as the "Pushing through the pain, ignoring overheating warnings and fighting off lightheaded-ness as your cpu underclocks itself to keep the heat down." stories are;

there's a lot of untapped potential in "Pushing through the pain as your joints feel like they're tearing themselves apart, horrible grinding sounds as metal scrapes against metal. Fighting to take one more step as the joints start seizing."

I don't know, it just always bugged me when writers show Worker Drones as horrified or disgusted at the idea of needing to consume oil, usually in the context of getting solver powers and needing to drink oil to keep cool. Obviously the hunger and the predator instincts would be freaky, but seeing a can of oil and thinking "I should drink that." would not be weird.

I'll probably play with the formatting/add and remove things to try to make this more readable later but let me know what you think.

[pyrotechnicarus]

What program do you write your scripts in?

Google Docs, haha. It's definitely not the preferred or industry-standard way of doing it; it gives older writers at my program hives when I drop a Docs link in the homework folder. But I was raised on it and it's a great collaboration tool, so I haven't made the switch yet (and maybe never will? Actually probably will once Google inevitably starts charging money for it. But not quite yet!).

Through my school I have a free Final Draft license, so I use that for screenwriting (which has a lot more pesky formatting rules and things), but I'm not planning on buying it once my license expires because A. I don't write films that much and B. I can probably hard-code it into Google Docs for free.

If you're insane like I am and wanna use Google Docs for scriptwriting, here's some formatting tips under the cut:

We're gonna be using a page of the Ghost Story script to demonstrate!

I use Times New Roman because Deborah Brevoort recommended it as a more readable (and slightly more condensed) font than Courier. Your font should adapt to your style; I tend to write short, snappy lines with a lot of back-and-forth, so I use Times which is a common font style for comedy writers (despite not writing comedies.) If you write a lot of long monologues, Courier New might give you a better sense of how your script flows on the page. Basically, you want to space your writing so it comes out to 1 minute of performance time = 1 page of writing.

Scene headings are centered and in bold.

Stage directions that start a scene are left-aligned and in italics; in NAMT-standard style, these are center-margin aligned, like this:

But it's kind of your personal preference.

4. All names are centered and underlined

5. Any stage directions that take place during a scene and cue a line of dialogue are centered, in italics, and in parenthesis. If they can start eating whenever while they're talking, I'd put They start eating left-aligned between two lines of dialogue. However, it is important to me that Hao and Józef start eating before Hao says his next line, so I put it center-aligned.

6. When you get to a song it looks like this:

Basically, songs should be numbered and come after a stage direction (even something basic, like "He stands up.") The enter after the stage directions isn't kosher, it's a Google Docs thing I'll get into later. Then you close the parenthesis on the stage direction and put a page break. Songs should always start on a new page. This is because when you integrate the book and score, you can just take those lyric sheets out and put sheets of music in. Nifty!

7. Lyrics are always capitalized. When two people sing the same thing at the same time, you can put both their names over it:

But if they're singing something different, I usually put it in two columns (there is some debate among musical theater writers on what the proper notation for this kind of thing is. But columns are easy on Google Docs, so I use those. When I have four or more people singing different things on top of one another, I use a 1x4 table and make the lines between the cells invisible, haha.)

Google Docs Specific Formatting Stuff

Ok, so, if you're lazy like me and don't want to be hitting 800 buttons while you're writing to format everything correctly (and please, god, format while you're writing -- going back and doing it later sucks) you can use the Google Docs headings to format your writing! And it will even make a nice little outline for you!

So, the default of these settings (on the left) is useless and ugly. But mine looks like this (on the right!)

If you want yours to look beautiful and be useful like mine, you can format some kind of text the way you want it to (for example, I want all my names in 12 pt Times New Roman, centered and underlined.)

Then I go to some random heading and I hit "Update heading to match"

Now, anytime I type a name, I can go back to this menu and hit "Apply Heading 5"... and it will automatically make it centered, underlined, and 12 pt Times New Roman! I make one of these for all my categories of text: stage directions, song titles, scene headers, etc.

But, ok, you still have to open all those menus while you're writing. Well! See this thing?

All of these have keyboard shortcuts (the Windows ones will show up on a Windows computer). You can really easily hit them after each name/stage direction you type instead of fiddling around with font settings. You're a formatting machine!

And here's the bonus: If you do all this correctly, you can get a really nice outline like this one embedded in your document on the left (this is where the song titles on a new line come in; I make a heading style for them so they show up on the outline, but headings only show the start of the phrase that they are part of in the outline. Ignore the numbers being wrong, lol. There's a secret song 3 that we haven't released yet.)

And it's clickable, too-- like I can jump right to Your Face from the outline without having to scroll down 20 pages.

Is this all needlessly complicated and doing manually something Final Draft will do for you? Yes. But I'm set in my ways, and it's free, so maybe it'll be helpful to another Musical Theater writer out there working with someone else on Google Docs.

That's it! Thanks for the question.

[altruistic-meme]

formatting is ALSO a pain in the ass btw.

the thing, guys, is it's not just going through the entire trilogy and highlighting every touch and it's not JUST flipping through the books and typing the text into my computer, but it's ALSO going through those notes again and counting each different type, and it's ALSO actually pulling my conclusions of everything together.

[writingjourney]

I’m in need of some advice and kind words. As a fellow writer I’m really struggling to believe people will and want to read my stuff. There’s no real engagement anymore and I’m worried that if I post my long-form fic that no one will give it a chance. It’s really bringing me down because I love it so much but it feels like no matter what I try to do my stuff just doesn’t get seen or liked? I’ve even thought about changing my entire way of how I do things since I don’t think the way I write is working for the masses. How do you keep up the motivation as a popular writer and do you have an advice?

Hello anon!! I feel like this is something many of us currently deal with. And first of all I seriously hope that you do share your story!! ♡

To be completely honest with you the lack of engagement in the fandom has for sure impacted my own motivation which is why I haven't been putting as much time into longer fics (nor the Friday Nights series or IKNBS, I do write but I refuse to force myself). I don't feel any urgency because uploading fics hasn't made me as happy as it used to. It feels like only other active writers are reading fic atm and it creates a lot of pressure on creatives to stay super active.

I'm aware that I'm insanely privileged to have the engagement that I do have, that the type of stories I want to write are also the type of stories that generally seem to appeal. However, engagement tells you NOTHING about the quality of your work, only how many people are active in a fandom or like a specific pairing/character/trope. Your own unique voice matters more than numbers.

I also notice that a lot of people who used to read my works have disappeared which I completely understand. The fixation can ebb away during times of inactivity or when a certain hype dies down. People just don't get that dopamine hit anymore and move on. It's also entirely possible they get tired of a certain style of writing and prefer other writers at times, what do I know. I definitely don't blame anyone for that. First and foremost people should read for their own enjoyment and engage with fandom in a way that makes them happy. It makes no sense to pressure people into engaging. A huge issue right now is people overthinking these things which makes support transactional instead of genuine.

I don't care much about notes but I REALLY miss the feeling of sharing a fic with people who are excited for it, that sense of an active community. BUT the activity will come back – the movie will come out, new music and videos, heck even a whole new Papa!!! That's the natural flow of things. We can't be excited and super active all the time, we need phases of calmness as well (which is an act of rebellion in the capitalist hellscape of overproduction and churned out content. I am honestly glad Ghost is taking it easy).

Now, I recommend you write your story exactly how you want to!!! do NOT change it for the sake of popularity because it will lose its very soul and you will struggle to be happy with it by the end. You know how you want to tell your story and nothing else matters. It will find its readers or you can wait and share it at a later point. I recommend that you approach other writers and readers and intensify that contact, make friends and talk to them about your stories, hype each other up, share snippets. It's even more meaningful to know people you like enjoy what you do. I am currently working on super niche fics for non-Ghost characters and I'm honestly having a great time chasing that dopamine by just writing what I'm really into and sharing it with friends. Fandom is community, fandom is fun and we can work to make it better for everyone.

A few general tips when it comes to making stories accessible: Format them to be readable (paragraphs!!), add a "read more" break, add proper content information and a nice summary to draw people in, add some visual appeal like a banners or stock image edits (like i do for IKNBS) and then tag the fics with relevant tags (and only those). Also make sure to tag the OG post, tags on reblogs do nothing for reach. Engage with the community when you feel like it and it's likely that the community will engage back. Being supportive is worth it, being kind is always worth it even if it amounts to nothing.

[alki-studio]

Bookbinding Process (1/2): The Wolf Queen, from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I have a very exciting comission— I’m binding The Wolf Queen, an in-game novel from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I’ve never played the game, but my client told me they enjoy collecting and reading the books in the game. According to the Elder Scrolls wiki, there are apparently 820 of them! I’m binding the one of the longer stories, which is actually broken up into 8 volumes.

In researching, it seems that the volumes seem to take on completely different binding styles, but we agreed on the style shown here. We also decided to condense these volumes into 1 book— the entire story is only about 12k words, and while the handwritten large text works well for reading the story on a small in-game window on your monitor, it’s not really practical for a physical book. That, and even if I were to print these true to size for the game, each volume would still be about 40 pages, which only equates to 10 sheets of folded paper, so it wouldn’t make for a very robust collection on the shelf.

You can see that these books in this game are actually quite weathered, and it seems like all the paper is unevenly torn. If we were to equate Skyrim’s time period with our own based on technology, it’s likely these pages would have been parchment. The in-game textures definitely support this, even for the bindings that seem to be a few centuries ahead of their time.

We agreed that antiqued cotton paper would be a suitable alternative, as enough parchment for this project would run a couple thousand dollars as-is, and I don’t believe I have the equipment necessary to print on it. I needed something with a quick turnaround for this project, so I went with this paper in the ‘Vintage Deckle’ finish in the A4 size. According to one review, it’s also short-grained, so it’s actually ideal for bookbinding.

Typesetting

I’m using Adobe InDesign to typeset this, but it can also be done with Word and other alternatives.

Here’s a guide by ArmoredSuperHeavy on tumblr.

I think Bethesda owns the font used in the Elder Scrolls games, but there is a dupe of it on dafont.com called Cyrodiil. However, it definitely feels and reads more as a modern font; it was designed with readability after all. I’m definitely going for something that feels like a Celtic manuscript, based both on the decorative Celtic knot tooling, and the Gaelic look of the font. I eventually found Kelmscott, which carries the same Gaelic characteristics as Cyrodiil, and is still relatively easy to read, but feels more calligraphic.

I also downloaded Medieval Victoriana for the decorative first letters of each chapter.

To typeset the text, I followed a tutorial article by Grace Fussell and Adobe’s guide for creating book files.

I wanted the text to look dense and almost glyphic, as many old medieval manuscripts do, while still being easy enough to read. I played around with the paragraph tools and eventually settled on this layout. While certainly not all manuscripts have multiple columns, I want this typesetting to really break the boundaries seen in most modern prints of books, so I decided on this two-column format. Some manuscripts keep the text frame smaller and in the center of the page, much like you see in later centuries when the printing area was restricted by a press, but once again, I want to emphasize the look of ‘handwritten’ manuscript, so I made sure to use wide margins.

Some other fun details I added were glyphs at the beginning of each chapter, and surrounding the page numbers.

I exported the file for print with InDesign’s ‘Print Booklet’ feature, with the 2-up perfect bound with a signature size of 8 (2 pieces of paper/4 spreads/8 text pages).

Text Block

Here’s the printed and folded signatures! I’m really pleased with how these came out— it has the exact weathered look I was trying to emulate from in-game. As an added bonus, since the source material wasn’t particularly long, the thickness of the paper (150gsm) gave the text block a good amount of volume.

Out of lack of good online reference, my client ended up sending me photos of the book in-game. I was excited to realize this book seems to be bound on cords or leather straps— kind of difficult to tell from the model. We decided to go with a slit leather strap.

I couldn’t find a great reference image of the stitch for this, but I used the same technique of punching and sewing my signatures as this double cord instructional from The Thames and Hudson Manual of Book Binding.

Endpaper

I definitely wanted to go for a more traditional endpaper, so I looked at what I had in my stash of marbled paper. I was initially drawn to this Renato Crepaldi peackock marble I got from Hollander’s, which has a beautiful red that screams “medieval” to me, but Skyrim is a cold place, so I was also drawn to go for this blizzard-esque marble. Though, I ultimately decided on this dark blue/indigo paper I got from the Paper Source.

I went for the indigo because the protagonist of this novel I’m binding, Potema Septim, the Wolf Queen herself, is associated with the color purple. Since the goal of this binding was to recreate an in-game item as it would be in-game, a bookbinder in Skyrim would also most likely want to make design choices reflecting the contents of this specific book. Or maybe they’d be illiterate and just go for the red. Either way, my client also liked the dark indigo, so that’s what we went with.

This endpaper is the cover weight of De Milo Design’s line of paper called Sustain & Heal. It’s fair trade, handmade in Bangladesh, from jute fibers.

It also has deckled edges, so I made sure to align my cuts to use that, and I tore the rest by hand to keep the natural edges consistent. This is a bit of an unconventional aesthetic choice, but it stemmed from that it’d be odd if the fly leafs were straight cut with the rest of the text block so extremely deckled.

Headbands

Keeping with the purple/indigo/blue theme, I made two-colored headbands around jute cord with DCM embroidery floss in colors 31 and 796. I basically used the technique outlined here. In retrospect though I’d recommend doing a big double endband or something bulky with this paper, since the deckled edges tend to push the endband back towards the spine and hide it.

Please continue reading here!

Process: Part 1 | Part 2 | Final Result

[calliopefiction]

I have a question, do you have any tips on CSS/HTML stylesheet's for Twine? I'm trying to make my own story, and I'm a big newbie

I'm no expert myself, but I think I can at least give you some tips on the basics. If you have anything concrete you want to know, feel free to ask follow-up questions!

First, let me share some useful resources with you. It's probably a good idea to start by looking through the Twine Cookbook if you haven't yet.

When it comes to using CSS and HTML, it depends on the story format you are using. Twine has several. I am using SugarCube 2.36.1 (which isn't the newest version, but I don't feel like updating it while I'm in the middle of working in it). If you plan on using SugarCube 2 as well, here's the documentation for it, which pretty much has all the information you need to get started.

There are a lot of guides and tutorials out there. I recommend checking out the one by Adam Hammond, which covers the basics well enough.

Some general tips from me:

Feel free to look at other style sheets/templates and just copy what they are doing. Not only will it get you an idea of what is possible, but it saves you the time of having to figure everything out yourself from scratch.

When it comes to the stylesheet, a lot of it is trial and error. You just try something, realise it looks awful, and then try something else. It is easy to get frustrated when things don't work like you want them to, so just take it one step at a time.

Take notes somewhere! I don't code a lot, so even if I know how to do something now, I'm likely to forget it again. For that reason, I made myself a document with all of the functions, macros, etc., so I have them all in one place and in a way that I can easily find again.

Get the basic stuff done first. Proper formatting, readable fonts, etc. take precedent over adding a dark mode and so on. You can always add more stuff later, so get the most important aspects down first.

I hope that helps at least somewhat!

[thewadapan]

TFNation 2024 post-mortem

So I went to the Transformers convention again! If you're following me for non-Transformers reasons, then this blog post will be worthless to you, sorry. If you didn't go the convention, it will probably be worthless to you as well. And if you did go to the convention, then it might even be worthless to you, too! I'd strongly recommend just listening to the podcast Jo and I recorded looking back on the event; it's more fun. I really only write these things as a personal record of the weekend, so it doesn't just fade into memory, because TFNation is one of the most important times of the year for me.

In previous years, I've followed the convention by making an hourlong vlog, recapping the event start-to-finish from my POV, showing off all the toys wot I got. Last year the production of that video was such an albatross that I committed to never doing that again, which turned out to be a good thing, because I don't think I could talk breezily about TFN 2024 to a camera for a couple of hours.

It's not to say that I didn't have a good time at TFN, or even a great time. But where some people seem to have found this to be the best TFN yet, I was definitely struggling a bit at some points in the weekend. In previous years, I've spoken to close friends of mine at or after the event, and they've expressed feelings of having had an off year one way or another, and I guess this year it was my turn! Partly, this blog post is going to be me working out what exactly went wrong, so next year's convention can hopefully go a little smoother for me.

The problems really started weeks before the convention. I had big plans to put together a really special zine, something that would prick people's ears up, something that I thought would genuinely leave a lasting impact. I'm being cagey about it because I hope it might still happen next year. But I couldn't source the material that I needed. Not to worry, I thought, I'd left myself more than enough time that I could brute-force the problem, create the material by myself.

And then I had an unrelated personal crisis, and suddenly it was three weeks later and I had nothing, with maybe a month to go until the convention. And I still made a go of it! But it couldn't be done. Not with what I had. Every approach I tried turned out to have hidden pitfalls and it was all turning out dogshit. I admitted defeat to my collaborators, who I'd inadvertently strung along for most of a year, which was embarrassing and frustrating.

Meanwhile, another deadline had been creeping up: the Refined Robot Co. zine, compiled by my close friend Ben, to which I contribute every year, needed to go to the printers in a few weeks and I had nothing. I'd picked a robot to write about out of a hat a few months ago, hoping that a good angle would occur to me in the intervening time, but it just didn't. I came up with an angle for Kingdom Rattrap, but immediately realised I had far more to say about that toy than could be contained within the margins of a single page.

When I saw the cover for the zine featured Missing Link Optimus Prime, who otherwise didn't have a page in the zine, I asked Ben if I could switch my page to talk about that toy instead. He agreed. However, around this time, I realised that the Transformers: Mosaic archive I've been working on for the last two years would be ending almost exactly coinciding with the convention; with the queued posts almost exhausted, I had no choice but to sit down and blitz through the remainder of the work. I gathered up all the scripts and previews I'd found, and I worked out a format for the posts. I lettered, coloured, and in a couple of cases wrote unfinished material I'd found to bring those strips to a readable state of completion, if possible. I wrote a blogpost reflecting frankly on the difficulties of the project, which would go over like a wet fart when it finally went live.

I started having problems with my eyes. They weren't hurting, not exactly, but they seemed to be producing copious amounts of sleep: viscous strings of yellow gunk accumulating not in the corner of my eye, but around the back, in the eyelashes, everywhere. I got some eye drops which didn't help. I went to the optician and she gave me some different eye drops, which did help. There wasn't any infection or anything. It was obvious what had happened: I'd been staring intently at the screen for days, drawing and redrawing the same gradients over bitcrunched artwork.

By this point—look, honestly, I'm losing track of the timeline here, in which order I did what—I really, really needed to get the RRCo review done. Feeling like I needed to make something worth the wait, I'd given some serious thought to the exact kind of writing I wanted to submit this time around. I wanted something in the vein of my intended Kingdom Rattrap review, but much tighter. An old memory surfaced and I finally had a hook; I wrote the page over the course of a few hours across a couple of days, in the electric kind of fugue state that happens when you're writing something that fucking slaps. Ben really liked it.

The problem, then, was the art: I'm not an artist. I can colour a drawing fine, but I don't even consider myself a colourist. The only way I can draw anything remotely good is through hard work: studying a reference object intently, drawing, erasing, redrawing the same line over and over again until it approximates reality. I was glad that the format of the zine encourages traditional media, because it meant I could force myself not to use the computer for a couple of days. I told Ben I hoped to have the piece ready by the end of Thursday (my day off); it was Saturday by the time I was able to sheepishly slip my rough pencils over the counter—for the robot mode, not even the truck mode! I spent Sunday inking and colouring. I spent Monday drawing the entire truck. Finally, it was done.

(If you haven't already, check out the rest of the zine here!)

There were now less than two weeks to go until the convention. Every year, I like to have something to give out, to give to people I meet as a little souvenir or whatever. It gives me an excuse to talk to people, and has been my #1 life hack for not being socially paralysed at the convention. I still had the Wheelie: Spotlights comic I'd made a year or two back, but I'd finally given up on my shitty old EPSON inkjet printer, which meant I needed to use a local print shop instead, which meant I needed to learn how to set up a PDF with bleed (on a comic that we'd drawn with zero bleed). The cheapest, quickest print shop in town is a forty minute walk away; I can make the round trip maybe twice during opening hours. Originally, I'd designed Wheelie: Spotlights to have a greyscale print on the reverse side as a costcutting measure, but the print shop told me that if I wanted one side in colour, the reverse side would have to be charged as a colour side as well. I decided to redesign the entire page in glorious full colour to take advantage of this fact. I reworked the comic itself to add bleed where necessary. I had to send through the file maybe three times before I'd finally gotten it all in the exact format they wanted.

The thing about Wheelie: Spotlights is that all of my friends already got copies at previous conventions. I wanted to make something else for them, and decided to make an A5 collection of prose and comics. I coloured an old bit of Transformers Animated concept art and designed a cover around it, made layouts for everything, typeset all the stories, wrote brief afterwords, and reeled off an introduction for the collection as a whole. I realised I probably could finish the Rattrap review in time, and did so; four people read it before the zine went to print. The vibe I got from the prereaders was that it's probably the best piece of writing I've ever released—but they're all biased. I sent through the file in the format the printers told me they wanted, only for it to turn out that they wanted it in a slightly different format, but then they managed to print it anyway as a special favour. Honestly, the print shop kind of rules. But what I'm trying to say is that the whole thing was very stressful.

On the way back from one trip to the print shop, I noticed an unread message from an IRL friend. They'd sent through a PDF several days ago. It was a photo of a handwritten letter to me, basically calling me out for being a shit friend and ghosting them for weeks during an important transitory period in their life. I replied with a rambling explanation for my behaviour, and apologised, promising to make things right in a couple of weeks.

But it did upset me! I was very angry at myself. And what made it even worse was that it happened at the peak of my fervour, when I had far too much momentum to simply stop and have it all be for naught. I was also painfully conscious that I'd been basically ignoring my girlfriend for days, in the run-up to this convention where I'd practically be going radio-silent for a long weekend. It all turned out okay, I got the zine done with a couple of days spare, everything was fine. But I had been stressed. I had been staying up late to work on my fake fandom job, and getting up early to work my real bullshit job. And my train was at 06:57 in the morning.

Honestly, that part on its own would have been fine, I wouldn't have it any other way: I usually arrive around noon on Friday, and there's plenty of people around, so it means I get as much out of the day as possible. But I was already tired, and I wound up paying the price.

Friday

I met up with Jalaguy and Daniel right away. Coming from the States, Daniel had brought us each a copy of the abortive Final Faction comic, which never came out in the UK. Meanwhile, I had an old LEGO book and a Transformers PlayStation 2 demo to give to Jalaguy; as always, we were rooming together this year, which made everything a breeze. I quickly gave out a bunch of zines to people. Ben arrived; he was staying at the Moxy, the other hotel in the NEC, and the plan was for us to store the copies of the RRCo zine in mine and Jalaguy's room so he wouldn't have to cart them all back and forth himself all weekend. For some reason I got it in my head that the Moxy is outside the NEC, like the Premier Inn and the Ibis, so I led Jala and Daniel on a wild goose chase out to the train station before finally checking my phone to work out where to go next, and realising that we'd already passed it.

The Moxy is comically different to the Hilton: decked out in plush leather, neon signage, vinyl records. When we got there, the elevator wouldn't work for us; we needed a keycard to operate it. We sat in these luxurious leather swivel chairs that span around frictionlessly. Ben took us up to his room. He was bemused because it looks like a dungeon: dark mood lighting, metal lattice on one wall, everything is strapped to everything else. We split the zines amongst ourselves and carted them over.

Jo and Rabbit rocked up; partners of 9 years, this marked the first time Rabbit has been able to come over from the States, and it was the first time they'd met in person. I think we all decided to give them some space. Nonetheless, we did a quick handoff, because I'd bought Jo's Timelines Transmutate off her. I gave her a copy of the zine, and watched with dawning horror as she flipped to the Kingdom Rattrap review, shotgunned the whole thing, then promptly got up and left without a word.

This was probably the first thing that really threw me. I'd given out maybe a third of the copies already, and was planning to give out the rest, and now I was like... is it bad? Worse—is it upsetting? As it happened, I had completely misread the situation in my sleep-deprived state. Jo hadn't even finished reading the story, she'd just needed to go to a panel! But I didn't get the chance to ask her about it until after the convention, so until then, it preyed on my mind.

While people were taking a look at Transmutate, one of the pegs ended up getting snapped, which also kind of sucked. I had anticipated it would happen, because 2010s toys are fragile, and felt like it was worth it to be able to share in the joy of that figure with other people, instead of just whisking it off to the hotel room. Thankfully it was just a tab for weapon storage, which still works, it's just a bit looser without it. But it's one of those things where you just go—agh! Another stupid little stressor for the pile.

Anyway, although I vaguely dislike Transformers: Prime in terms of the fiction, the toys are all from the period of design that I know and like best, and these particular colourways elevate them so much. Beast Wars: Uprising is amongst my favourite Transformers fiction, and these are the most iconic characters from that universe, so I'm thrilled to finally have them both. God, do I need to get a Lio Convoy now?

I think a high point on Friday was the "pen con" that took place between auto_thots and sixty_cats. I'd seen auto_thots tweeting about it, so I went over with the one pen that I'd happened to bring, a bright orange LAMY fountain pen I'd had since I was a kid. I'd recently been starting to think about changing my signature, because the one I've had all my life is illegible and ugly, and I wanted something nice and distinctive—they gave me some encouragement that I was along the right lines. I've honestly never seen such cool pens, either—sparkly inks, beautiful and functional designs. It was nice to be excited about something that wasn't Transformers.

Speaking of which, there was a lot of love for G.I. Joe this year. In particular, SameAsItEverWoz was going around showing us this one stock photo of Snake Eyes from Rise of Cobra, with his stupid fucking skintight bodysuit and luscious kissable lips sculpted into his helmet. It was kind of like the chicken game, insofar as if your objective was not to look at Snake Eyes, then you were basically fucked. Erica had a notebook with her and people started drawing their own takes on the image. I did a T-posing Snake Eyes (see my reference picture below) in fountain pen. Clearly the whole thing quickly snowballed and people began submitting some genuinely high-effort entries, so later in the weekend I went back and rendered my Snake Eyes out in Sharpie with full muscle definition, chiaroscuro. By the end of the weekend, there were entries from James Roberts, Jack Lawrence, and Nick Roche, which is fucking nuts. I desperately want this to become a real zine.

Anyway, I've gotten ahead of myself. On Friday, I had a handoff arranged with a guy on Facebook for an Armada roleplay Star Saber to give to Jo. It turned out to be far, far smaller than I had imagined it being as a kid, more like a Star Dagger to an adult, but it had a really fun mechanism.

Just like last year, I didn't have a ticket for any of the Friday panels; there was nothing to justify the cost of admission and I usually prefer to hang out anyway. In the bar, the usual big table at the back was covered in toys, all belonging to Rachel; she was having a big collection purge, and had decided that it would all be free to a good home. I was extremely tempted by a Titans Return Hot Rod to put with my various Lost Light characters, but it was missing its guns, so I hesitated, thinking I'd find a cheap complete copy in the dealer hall. I got to try a Fall of Cybertron Ultra Magnus, on which I snapped a tab (see, it's very easily done); I actually really liked the toy, but this year I was planning to cut down on the number of redecos I was picking up. Historically, a lot of my toys have been redecos, often toy-only characters, so I have kind of a weird collection—but increasingly, I find myself wanting to get molds in the colors they were originally intended to wear. That Fall of Cybertron Optimus Prime has always been an iconic design in my eyes, and after handling the mold, I resolved that I'd pick one up if I saw it (alas, I didn't). Meanwhile, Jala had been toying with the idea of starting a Star Seekers collection, after winning a Titan Class Tidal Wave at the Transformers One pre-screening they attended; one of the toys on the table was Prime Thundertron, which they quickly decided he hated, but they seemed pretty set on getting Legacy Thundertron if they could.

Around this point was probably also the most time I spent with Cone, who I know from the TFWiki Discord; it definitely feels like he's been able to come out of his shell a bit more with each convention he attends, which is really nice.

Dinner was Zizzi's, which I don't always get along with; a friend's parents back in uni would often take us there, and I found that I never liked the pizzas, which is my first instinct for Italian food. This time I had some seafood pasta which was much better. Afterwards, we kept things very lowkey; I remember playing Lexicon in the bar with Ben, Daniel, and Jala, getting very tired, and making it back to the room not long after midnight.

Saturday

I'd banked on getting over seven hours sleep that night, but for some fucking reason, the hotel decided to test their fire alarm at 6:40 AM. I was genuinely baffled by this. Hotels exist for one purpose: as a place to sleep. By momentarily blaring the siren, waking me up at such an ungodly hour, the hotel had failed at its one job. I spent the next hour trying to fall back asleep before giving up; it was time to get ready for breakfast anyway. I put on my SPREEM shirt and the matching (read: clashing) garments I brought to go with it. Last year, I had a pair of thrifted three-quarter-length hot pink cargo pants several sizes too big for me, which I held up with a belt; they were constantly falling down and showing my pants, which wasn't great. This year, I was able to get some pink shorts, which were an upgrade in that they'd stay around my waist, but a downgrade in that you'd sometimes be able to see my balls if I sat down in just the wrong position. If you saw my balls this year: I'm sorry, or, you're welcome.

My usual strategy for TFN—because food at the NEC is invariably expensive—is to really load up on the buffet breakfast, snack through the day, and grab a meal with people in the evening. I duly wolfed down an English breakfast, some yoghurt, a croissant, a waffle, and a mini muffin. Unfortunately, the opening ceremony began before I was quite finished, so I ended up cradling a little muffin as I speedwalked across the hotel to the panel room. I couldn't see any easily-accessible seats, so I opted to just stand at the back. I wound up stood right in front of a fire alarm button, with this muffin in my hands, and the audience kept needing to clap for the guests and the announcements, which I couldn't do, because I was holding this stupid fucking muffin and trying not to move a muscle because I kept imagining myself setting off the fire alarm. (At the train station the previous day, I'd accidentally hit an "intercom for assistance" button at the train station with my bag; I heard someone asking me how they could help just as the train pulled in.)

Gherkin appeared and said "Hi Wada," and I said "Hi," back. I couldn't turn to one side without, I imagined, hitting the button. I ate just the top half of the muffin and tried to clap at the appropriate moments; my arms got covered in crumbs. I later saw a message from Gherkin in the group chat: "At the opening ceremony right now waiting for wads to recognise who I am". Aaaagh!

Toy Fu had posted some pictures of their table at the start of the day, and I spotted a Thrilling 30 Swerve & Flanker, which was practically the one thing I'd told myself I'd buy instantly if I saw it this year. Even better, I could just about make out a single-digit price tag; I'd resigned myself to just sort of paying whatever at this point. I fully expected it to have vanished by the time the dealer hall opened, but after we made our way up the monstrous queue, I walked in to find it still sitting on the table unnoticed. I guess the demand for that toy really isn't what it once was! Alas, I am a slave to my memes. I also spotted a GDO Wheelie on the table for next to nothing, and was sorely tempted to buy it just for the sake of having a spare—like, I already have one!—but I resisted, and instead I asked one of the volunteers if I could leave a copy of the Wheelie comic with the toy. He was charmed by the idea; hopefully whoever picked it up enjoyed it!

After that, though, I ended up being weirdly stuck. I found an Armada Knock Out sans missile for a couple of quid, which was perfect, because mine is missing his legs (I didn't lose them, I got him like that). I found a loose hand/foot/gun for Combiner Wars Skydive or Air Raid (they're identical), which was perfect because mine had come with Firefly's hand/foot/gun for some reason. But apart from that, everything seemed too expensive. Was I really going to spend £25 on an Armada Deluxe? Not likely. Except £25 is what all Deluxes cost these days. I don't buy them at that price, but like... it's reasonable, from that perspective! Here I was, at the one time a year where it's possible to find pretty much anything, and the best I could do was pick up some piddly little bits and pieces for toys I already owned.

The longer I walked around, the more I found myself reckoning with the very thing I was trying to work through in the Kingdom Rattrap review: namely, that my relationship to Transformers and to money is completely fucked. Everything seemed more expensive than it had been in previous years, except this made perfect sense, because everything has become more expensive, the econony or whatever is in the shitter. I used to like getting cheap Scouts for a fiver; now I already own most of the Scouts and what the fuck does a fiver buy you anyway? 1.25 meal deals? I'd ask for the price of unlabelled toys, and balk at the answers: "I'll think about it, thanks!" They were usually gone by the time I got back.

Another issue was that, this year, the dealer hall was more crammed than ever. They'd completely rearranged the stalls to give more room in the aisles, which did help, but not nearly enough to cope with the horde that descended upon the place on Saturday. It was too hot, and too loud, and far, far too busy. Many of the dealers were visibly struggling to keep up. Speaking as someone who works in a shop, I shudder to think of the stock loss, the figures manhandled and broken, the accessories lost—hell, maybe even the shit stolen, there have been thieves at TFNation in the past.

I remember at one point during the weekend, at one table, there was this big tub of toys, and while taking a look I absentmindedly put a figure to one side—and someone snapped at me, something like, "Excuse me this is my table!" Turned out it was a separate stall, someone selling handmade stuff. Presumably that person spent the whole weekend doing that, getting progressively more irritated at the careless nerds more interested in toys than in crafts, constantly encroaching on the tablespace. And dealers pay for their tables—right? I totally understand why that person was miffed. But also, personally, being snapped at like that... didn't love it! Actually felt quite bad about it! I felt like the environment put me in that position. For all of Saturday, I flatly did not enjoy going around trying to root through bins. Again, see my review: I felt like a rat.

Still, I had an ace up my sleeve, one that would let me escape the sweaty press of the dealer hall altogether: another pre-arranged purchase from someone on Facebook. After a panel on vintage retailer catalogues—the only panel I attended on Saturday—we eventually found a mutually convenient moment to meet up. His name's Lee, he was a gregarious lad maybe a little older than me. I gave him a full suite of zines by way of thanks.

When showing people what I'd bought from this guy, I'd find myself always doing the same bit, because it felt like the only way to even communicate this insane pickup. I would produce this Commemorative Series Red Alert reissue from my bag, and say, "Yeah, so I got this Red Alert. He's really nice! He was £40, and normally I wouldn't spend £40 on a toy like this. But the thing is..."

And then I'd pull another toy out. "He did come with this Inferno."

And then I'd go back into the bag. "And he also came with this Skids."

"And he also came with this Prowl."

"And he also came with this Jazz."

"And he also came with this Tracks." (Tracks was still safely encased in his backing tray!)

"Oh, and he also came with this entire Menasor."

Ben, the only person I know who has a deep connection with the Commemorative Series (or similar) reissues, gave me the best reaction. "HOW? HOW?" The story goes like this—not that it's much of a story. I was about to leave the house one day. I happened to go on Facebook. There was a post in a sales group, timestamped three minutes ago. Amongst others, he had the above Autobot Cars listed: £5 each or take the lot for £25; along with the Menasor: £15, because Wildrider's arm is broken off and the combiner feet were missing. There were no photos of the Autobots. I messaged the guy to ask if Menasor was still available. He was. I asked if he had photos of the Autobots; he did, they looked fantastic. I said I'd take the lot and PayPal'd him £40.

He explained to me that he'd listed the toys as cheaply as he felt he could, because he wanted them to go to people who wanted them, rather than just the people with the most money. I felt like his logic was wrong: someone who pays a lot of money for something can be guaranteed to want it at least a certain amount. Someone who snaps up something valuable for not very much could just be a grifter. Still, I think what he meant was: he wanted the toys to go to someone who wanted them who would not otherwise be able to afford them, which is exactly who I am. G1 stuff like that has always enthralled me, and I've always kind of assumed I would just never be able to own them. Since last TFN, I've built up a nice little collection of the Retro reissues, by picking them up on deep discount, but I've always assumed the Autobot Cars would just be forever beyond my grasp. And now, thanks to Lee, I have a whole little collection of them!

(Hopefully a lot of other people were also able to benefit from his generosity. I remember he'd listed the reissue Insecticons for... maybe a tenner? Powermaster Optimus Prime and Apex Bomber for £25, a beautiful G1 Sureshot for literally a fiver, Robots in Disguise 2001 Optimus Prime for £40. Absolutely mad stuff.)

These toys went basically straight back to my room; they had too many bits to lose, and I didn't know how any of them worked. After the convention, I was able to get Menasor's feet off eBay, but it's mad to think that I paid about the same for the rest of the combiner as I did for those feet alone! They now have pride of place on my burgeoning G1 shelf.

(Oh, and as you can imagine, this stroke of insane good luck certainly hasn't helped my attitude towards Transformers and money.)

As always, Ben continues to have the best taste when it comes to toys. His sealed Beast Machines Scavenger instantly made me resolve to get a copy of that toy for myself, as I've always liked the look of it. His true star finds though were an X-Dimension Adventure Team—commemorating the opening of his very own comic shop this year—and a Stormtrooper Rage, with its perplexing water squirter and stunning colour scheme. Jalaguy got their own Adventure Team the next day; it's so nice to see people getting into Armada stuff.

The food situation ended up being a bit fucked on Saturday. Some people wanted a light lunch and a big dinner, others the reverse. We ended up doing Nandos mid-afternoon—I had a small chicken burger—and then later we got a Subway. These two small meals weren't far off the cost of a typical main meal at Resort World, so I was quite happy with that, and might suggest something similar on future Saturdays; trying to squeeze in a sit-down meal before, during, or after Club Con is often a nightmare. But I definitely think not everyone got exactly what they wanted in terms of food that day.

Rushing back from Resort World with Ben, I heard someone yell: "Nice shirt!" So I automatically replied, "Thanks!" And then they said something like, "Why does it say SPERM on it?", and I realised they weren't there for the Transformers convention, they were just a bunch of neds loitering by the lake. So I proceeded to ignore them, and they jeered at us as we walked away. I don't usually wear the SPREEM shirt in public, partly because I like it and don't want to ruin it, and partly because it really does look like it says SPERM. As we stopped by my room to pick up my Club Con wristband, I was becoming a thundercloud. Here I was at the Transformers convention, the one weekend a year where I don't have to feel too weird about my interests, and it's like I'm back in fucking high school. I wondered if maybe it's time to retire the shirt altogether. The outfit never quite works for me.

Club Con

Ah, Club Con. This was definitely the low point for me of the whole weekend, which sucks, because usually it's a highlight. I think what I should say is this: it was mostly a me problem. Things had not been going well for me up to this point. I was very, very tired.

So, the cosplay contest was spectacular, as ever. People have such wonderfully creative and well-done costumes, everyone is so buzzed about it. My favourite was definitely the Cosmos with a shiny retrofuturistic UFO-like dress, absolute conceptual slam dunk that deservedly took top prize in the "humanized" category; the cosplayer in question, Mika, turns out to also be a phenomenally talented artist. But there were a lot of really thoughtful outfits this year. I was surprised when the Rosanna/Flip Sides cosplayer (swapping faction onstage!) turned out to be none other than our Umar—though of course, who else? And Erica's sk8r grl take on Flamewar was also brilliant.

I will say, it definitely felt like the dividing line between the "mech" and "humanized" categories was a little blurred—both had the same regularly-dressed-people in helmets—and as is often the case, while the winners were all extremely worthy entrants, I did feel like some people got robbed. Well okay I'll just say it: JLaw is definitely biased towards Lost Light, he always has been, and cosplays based on his comic always do well as a result. There was a stunning—I mean really phenomenal, huge cardboard shoulder pillars visible even from my worst-seat-in-the-house behind a tall guy at the back-left—Armada Megatron cosplayer, appropriately chosen for a convention with David Kaye in attendance, who didn't even place in the top three for the mech category. Outrage!

Last year, you might recall that one cosplayer inadvertently ended up trapped improvising lipsyncing and dancing onstage for three minutes because the AV team didn't fade out the backing track. And while that was spellbinding, clearly the convention organisers have overcorrected, as it felt like the cosplayers were being ushered on and off the stage very briskly. I definitely think some of them should have been allowed to chew the scenery a little more. Particularly, I should say, considering what was to follow later in the evening.

During the changeover, we got to see a preview of the next episode of The Basics—this one featuring the Star Seekers. Honestly, it instantly pilled me on the Star Seekers. They're so fucking cool slash dumb. The Matrix Test was brilliant, as always; McFeely has a real gift for dredging up the obscure and the esoteric. This year, the TFWiki gang split into two teams, hoping to at least give everyone else a chance: I was with Jo, Rabbit, Ben, and newcomer James, carrying forward the torch of the Crack Calibre Laser-Blazer Broadswords, while Gherkin, Viv, Jala, Daniel and Cone formed Feast or Famine (named after the newly-discovered Star Seeker character from the Chinese MMO).

As usual, I mostly served as a voice to say either "yeah that's right" or "I don't know about that" as other team members answered the questions. It's really high time I learned to trust my gut, though—there were two questions, "What connects the characters Scrounge, Crankcase, SOMETHING and Devastar?" and "Is Motomix a Transformer?" where I was completely correct, but second-guessed myself. James totally surprised me by really holding his own, getting a few questions which had the rest of us stumped or uncertain. It later transpired that we had in fact won the quiz, in spite of our effort to handicap ourselves; they never officially announced this result, we had to ask McFeely, who had to ask David. Assuming this wasn't deliberate, which I would understand... kinda weird not to announce that at any point!

I guess I'll take this moment to talk a little more about James, 'cause he was one of the people I met this year and got to hang out with for more than just a single conversation. He honestly just sort of appeared from nowhere with a clear objective of "I am going to become friends with these people", which I massively respect (had he turned out to be a cunt, I would not have respected it, but he wasn't, so!). I was reminded of myself doing something similar towards the start of uni, and at my first solo TFNation not long after that. He seemed cool and was very nice to all of us. I've since chatted with him a little online; apparently the only reason he picked our group out of the crowd was the OSKO Rampage I had sitting on the table. I'd brought that figure along as a conversation starter, so looks like it did its job!

Anyway, so the evening progressed. There was the charity auction, which went crazy, but is also kind of just half an hour of clapping while people with money bid for mildly interesting items. Someone correct me if I'm wrong—that custom Action Master Billy Stripes sold for like a grand, right? I say this only because I remember when the sealed Animated Swindle remarked by the late Derrick J. Wyatt himself went for £650, I thought, wow, that is such a measly sum by comparison.

Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman went up onstage to announce their new podcast. Apparently the first episode went up over a month ago? Well, they have a Patreon, etc, you know the deal. I'm not saying that I won't listen to it, I might at some point, but definitely as an announcement to that crowd of increasingly-younger-skewing fans it went over like a wet fart. I presumed this was the "Like a surprise? Close your eyes..." teaser on the schedule, because podcasts are something you listen to, meaning you can close your eyes. As it turned out, I was very mistaken.

Next up, there was the script reading. As with last year, it wasn't written by, well, a writer, so it kind of sucked, to put it nicely. I guess without mercilessly dissecting the thing for every single joke that fell flat, I'll try and explain what a convention script reading should be like, as someone who's seen a ton of them. You have a handful of huge voice actors with iconic roles in the room. Your story, whatever it is, is nothing more than a means to have them play off each other, cover their full dramatic range, and say as many catchphrases as you can in as short a space of time as possible. You want to avoid in-jokes which the actors themselves—who typically aren't as deep in the sauce as you—are unlikely to get. You want to minimise the role of the narrator or other side-characters. You want to avoid splitting the cast in-story, to allow all the characters to play off one another, while still contriving to avoid having a voice actor swap between multiple characters in the same scene. You want the actors to play the specific versions of characters they actually played, not different versions from other timelines or whatever. You want to give fuckin' David Kaye some actually good material to work with—more Beast Wars, less Armada, dig? You want to pace the jokes so they lead to direct punchlines, so the audience as a whole can laugh and clap before the story progresses, rather than burying punchlines in the middle of individual line-reads or back-and-forths. I'm not a comic writer, but as an audience member I can definitely tell when things aren't working, and I truly wonder why on Earth at a convention with people like Jim Sorenson, James Roberts and Simon Furman in attendance, you wouldn't allocate some portion of your budget to commissioning a good script. As it was—as some of my friends also put it—the moment the narrator said "End of Act 1!", my heart just sank: so is this two acts? Three? Reader, it was three, and none of them were any good.

Honestly, the big thing that had me baffled was that the entire script reading was predicated on the fact that Gregg Berger has, in the past, voiced Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. But the thing is, I always thought it was Peter Cullen who voiced Eeyore! I'd coincidentally had a conversation about that very fact with Daniel earlier in the weekend! Gherkin googled it as the script reading dragged on. Sure enough, it seems that Gregg Berger only filled in the role for a few video games and ancillary media, beginning in 1997. He does a wonderful Eeyore voice, don't get me wrong, but I don't get the impression it's his role, and to place such a focus on "Eeyore from Kingdom Hearts II" for a Transformers convention felt like a misguided choice to me.

At the end of the script reading, there was immediately another bonus round of charity auction, where they flogged a signed copy of the script and an inflatable rubber ducky from Amazon. Up and up the price crept, in increments of £10 at a time. At £280, for some reason I'll never know, David asked us all to clap, as if this was in any way an auspicious figure. We duly obliged. The final bid ended up being for something like £450, or 2/3rds of a sealed Animated Swindle remarked by the late Derrick J. Wyatt.

Overrunning by this point, I thought: this is it, the headline event is starting soon, I'll be able to chill out for an hour watching the old cartoon, and then I can go back to the bar and hang out, hopefully feeling a little rested. But then it was the actual surprise! The Mapes brothers had found a never-before-seen recording from the '80s. What was it? It was the audition tapes for Wheelie. Because I'm still in theory the custodian of Wheelie's TFWiki page, I dutifully got out my phone to record. The performances were demented, delivering nonsensical rhymes in a nonspecifically exotic accent. After each, David would go, "Do you want to hear another?" And the audience yelled back, "Yes..." And I sat there, listening to these unfamiliar voice actors cackling and giggling, thinking how it's been years—literally years—since I started trying to fix Wheelie's wiki page. I haven't touched it in months. And I wondered, will I ever be free of you? Will my work ever be done? As I write this I have been home for less than 24 hours, and somebody has already added a note to the page. It rhymes badly. It's not cited. I'll need to fix it, I guess.

And then, Gregg Berger got up onstage, to read us an extract from his work-in-progress memoir. He told us, it's fine, feel free to leave, none of you are expected to stay, this isn't that kind of thing. But the thing is, I had no idea how long this segment was going to go on for (20 minutes, per the schedule? Everything had overrun!), and I wanted to watch the cartoon, you know, the headline event of the evening, the thing I'd been told was the big thing to be excited about, which most of my friends were staying here for anyway. I snapped. I couldn't take it any more. I got my phone out and started posting in the group chat.

I could not tell you a single thing Berger talked about in the extract from his memoir. I was simply too tired. It described a world utterly alien to mine. A third of the words he was saying seemed to be quotes from other people. And the thing was, the thing that really got to me, aside from all the self-hatred over feeling like a hater, was that I'd brought with me a zine containing some lengthy personal episodes from my real life, and all I could think was: does this sound like that reads? Will my friends read it, and slump in their chairs, and loll their heads, persisting only out of a sense of obligation?

I knew it was over because suddenly people started clapping. By then, it was already too late. I watched the first part of "More than Meets the Eye", a boring cartoon I'd watched mere months prior in the cinemas (and enjoyed, somehow), and it was only when I realised we'd moved into the second part without me even noticing that I decided I was simply too tired to stay any longer, and finally made the wise choice to return to the bar.

Usually, Club Con has been fun and exciting, and I think the problem TFNation is increasingly having with it is that they feel like every year they need to debut something which has never been seen before, something important, over something which sparks joy. Last year was great: Jayhan rocked. This year did not rock. It just rolled on, and on, and on...

And I hate to be a hater about it. The auction raised £6400 for charity, of course that's fucking brilliant. The script reading made me chuckle a couple of times. The Wheelie auditions genuinely shed some light on a character/performance which has always been controversial. Gregg seems to have touched the hearts of a lot of people with his reading. These things were all perfectly fine taken on their own. And of course a huge part of my problem was just the physical reality of it, my own tiredness, the caught-up-in-my-own-head of it all. It was a me problem. But also, also, could they not have saved Gregg 'til last, as they have done with people like Garry Chalk in the past?

Look, something was just cursed this year. Viv got trapped in one of the elevators for ten minutes; another of the elevators was permanently cordoned off with hazard tape. That Saturday night, there were reports of Jim Sorenson being pursued through the corridors by someone from the salsa convention. The salsa convention! In years past, this charming trademark of TFNation, these bizarrely coincident events, background set-dressing, now elevated to plot-relevance, twisted into something adversarial. We heard that one of our volunteers had got in a fight with one of theirs. What the FUCK was going on, that night? There was a new water cooler positioned by the entrance to the dealer hall. Could there have been something in there, turning our vision red, driving us to madness?

I don't really remember what happened after I left the panel room. I hung out in the bar for a bit, and began to enjoy myself again—but I don't think I stayed up much later.

Sunday

That night, I was finally able to get some rest: I wasn't awoken by a stupid fucking fire alarm, or even a deliberately-set phone alarm, but rather by my own body deciding "hey, that's it, you've had enough". I felt good. I decided that Sunday would be a reset for me. I shaved, as I'd planned to, because my beard has developed a sizable bald spot, creeping up my neck onto the right side of my face. It used to be quite small, hidden away under my jawline—but roughly coinciding with that aforementioned personal crisis, more of the hair seems to have disappeared, an ice cap melting. At work, strangers come up to me and whisper the word "alopecia", as though whispering it makes this in any way a remotely polite thing to say to someone.

I'm not really attached to my facial hair—or rather, I guess, it's not really attached to me—but the half-on, half-off look is just kind of stupid. It's distracting. My eyes are up here! So at the moment, I'm having to shave more regularly. Maybe it'll grow back, or maybe it'll all fall off, and I'll probably be fine either way. So on Sunday morning, I took it as an excuse to perform the ritual. Cleave it away! All that shit in my skull, pushing its way out—begone! I gave myself horrendous razor burn; my blade was too blunt. In the evening, returning to my room, I saw there was still a spot of dried blood on the centre of my chin. It had been there all day. Whoops. But in the meantime, it fuckin' worked and all. I felt great. I looked cute, in my Hatsune Miku t-shirt and pink shorts.

On the way down from our room, I was able to prove to Jalaguy just how dogshit my phone camera is. I've had the thing for maybe six years at this point; it was actually my first decent-spec smartphone, but the camera is a dreadful thing that smears out every shape into a blurry haze regardless of the lighting conditions. Apparently it's "AI-enhanced", which to my knowledge just means you have an option to crank up the saturation sometimes; presumably, this software was a vain attempt to cover for the camera modules being cheap pieces of shit even at the time. Still, I was able to get maybe my favourite photo of the weekend.

Sunday was so, so much quieter. There is a kind lie at TFNation that Sunday's dealer hall is just as good, that places like Toy Fu purposefully hold back some stock for the second day, that the big stalls like ID Toys won't run out. It's not fucking true. The Blokees blokes had sold out. The bins were all half-full, the dregs of Revenge of the Fallen Sideswipe redecos, Armada Side Swipe redecos, Siege Sideswipe redecos, accumulated like silt in the wake of the gold rush.

But as a true gamer, I thrive on Sunday. I will find the things that no-one else wanted. I made off like a bandit. At Toy Fu, I found a Generations Junkheap going for a song; nobody gives a fuck about the Reveal the Shield Junkion mold these days, it's hot garbage, Studio Series is where it's at, but I'm still a Classics collector and I think that toy looks sick. I got my Wreck-Gar from Umar a couple of conventions ago, and now he's got a bike to ride on. Or maybe Junkheap is a Star Seeker! The world is his oyster. I also picked up a Combiner Wars Firefly—with his correct hand/foot/gun this time around—to complete my Superion, except the rest of the Aerialbots are in storage back at my parents' house so this is mostly academic.

I finally got a chance to properly look at the stall of my favourite traders, Blue Beetle. I've historically spent tons of money on frankly absurd quantities of cheap shit toys from their stall; this year, it was slimmer pickings for me, their huge bucket of slop by that point consisted mostly of BotBots. As usual, there was also an assortment of Transformers- and Marvel-inspired 3D-printed paraphernalia, custom-designed by one of the pair. The coolest item he had this year was a working clock in the shape of Cybertron; the second hand is the Ark, orbiting around. I don't really have room for that kind of thing in my life, but I was able to admire it from a distance.

Yesterday, I'd been tempted by an incomplete Robots in Disguise Movor and Rollbar to complement my childhood Ro-Tor and Armorhide, but they'd sold by the time I returned. Still, I was able to pick up a cheap Wildrider with dog-eared stickers; I plan to rip out his arm and use it to repair the other one I got. Last year, they also had an absolutely ruined Tentakil in their big bin, so sun-bleached as to be practically a redeco, with painfully stiff joins I dared not to try; I had actually resolved ahead of time that if it was still there this year, I'd pick it up, to go with my knackered Snap Trap. Well, lo and behold, there it was, dredged up from the BotBot pick-and-mix! I picked it up, and the main guy at the stall (I really need to get his name one of these years) waxed poetic about it, in mock outrage. "All weekend, I've seen people pick that little guy up, and I'm just like—come ON, he's £2!!! Yeah, he's a little sunburned, but where are you going to get a G1 guy for £2?" Of course he was absolutely right. As I said to him, it was less a question of whether I wanted to spend £2 on a Tentakil, and more a question of whether I dared to dip into the world of peroxide or whatever. But hey, if there was ever a toy to test the waters with...!

My dream of a Robots in Disguise Ruination wasn't quite dead, however—another stall actually had another Rollbar, this one complete with instructions, for a similar price to the one I'd seen at Blue Beetle. I also grabbed a Classics Megatron (about time!) from the same seller, and he threw in a Universe Ravage for free (my secondhand Hound came without one when I got it, many years ago now, so it was perfect!).

I hesitated for far longer than I should've over a complete Armada Demolishor for literally a tenner at another store. The thing is that I already have a Demolishor, with Blackout, just missing his missiles. But finding the missiles on their own has proven to be far trickier than I'd ever imagined! So really, I'd just be admitting defeat by buying a complete copy and flogging my incomplete one to recoup the cost (I could probably sell the Mini-Con alone for a tenner, if I was patient enough). "Are you having a laugh?" said Ben, when I agonised to him over it, which immediately snapped me out of my indecision. Honestly, it's really funny how much on the same wavelength we can be in that room. At one point I saw a Transmetal Optimus Primal at the Toy Fu table, and was about to buy it on the spot, when Ben pointed out, "It's missing one of its kneecaps. There was another one here earlier which was complete—but I bought it." Unbelievable!

I helped Daniel find a Beast Machines Rattrap I'd spotted earlier in the day, which he in turn only wanted to give to Jo—and I think she in turn planned to give it to Rabbit? This reminded me that I wanted to go home with some Beast Machines stuff myself. There was a Strika and a Tank Drone, which were at the top of my list to go with the dark horse favourite of my haul last year, the Motorcycle Drone. Unfortunately, they were a bit too expensive for me to buy on sight, and they were gone by the time I circled around. I'd also set my sights on some of the other Basic Vehicons, but was torn between the original colorways and the Robots in Disguise redecos, which had starred in a comic strip of mine. In the end, I decided to favour the original Beast Machines versions; partly because as I say, I'm swearing off redecos, and partly because I didn't want to start a whole new collection of "guys who appeared in that one comic wot I did". These worked out to be about a tenner cheaper than the sets of the redecos I'd otherwise seen, so that was nice, especially because at first I was disappointed to discover that I didn't really like them: Scavenger was great, but Mirage and Nightcruz really refused to cooperate while transforming. I was later able to work them out, in the comfort of my own home, and now I like them all, thankfully.

My last purchase was really exciting for me. One stall which was new for this year was Junk Shop U.S.A., being run by a couple of gentlemen who'd apparently come all the way over from Japan, bringing with them a bunch of uncommon and niche exclusives! It's quite typical for me to spot something on Saturday which is in some way special, but not in very high demand, going for more than I could usually justify for a toy of that size—in this case, it was United Rumble and Frenzy, paired up for £40. That's just too much to pay for two Scout Class figures, in my head, but I resolved that if nobody else had bitten by the end of the weekend, I'd make them an offer. Sure enough, they didn't seem to have received much interest, so my waiting paid off. They also seemed to like my fancomic (I'd been giving copies to most of the dealers), so that was really nice. While at the convention, I often like to gather up weird little micro-collections, and I found that this year Rumble and Frenzy paired really well with the Universe Ravage and Classics Megatron. It's all vibes, innit?

Unfortunately, due to my fixation on making the most of my remaining time in the dealer hall, I made the usual mistake of neglecting to visit any of the guests until it was already basically too late. David Kaye had vanished, with only the deserted amusement-park-esque queue barrier snaking towards his table to indicate that he was ever there. Again, I should've just sucked it up and waited for half an hour earlier in the day, but ironically the reason I hadn't was a complication with the thing I'd planned to get him to sign: an Armada Megatron jigsaw puzzle Jo bought for me last year. It wasn't until lunchtime that day that I was able to enlist Ben and Jo to put the damned thing together. And let me tell you, we smashed that children's jigsaw puzzle. I was hoping to mention to Kaye how his performance in Armada was one of the main things I enjoyed about the show, back when we were watching it for Our Worlds are in Danger—but then I had to go and let myself be distracted by toys, and miss my one shot! Argh!

Nick Roche was also permanently swamped. One of the volunteers shook his head at us, saying that Roche was heading off on his lunch; Jo made a valiant effort by saying "We're close personal friends!" (are we? I'm not!). The volunteer just shrugged and said, "man's gotta feed sometime", which I thought was really funny. I managed to briefly accost Roche in the bar later and shove a zine into his hands while he was presumably on the way back to his room, so that was something at least. God knows what he thought of it, assuming he's even read it. Dude was also massively behind on commissions, and ended up staying up late in his room finishing a couple of pieces for Jo—not that you'd know it, they turned out amazing.

I was however able to catch James Roberts at his table. For the last few conventions I've been putting off buying the notebooks, but this time my number was up: I got the set. In exchange (well, apart from money) I also gave him a zine, because I figured if any of the guests would be into my pretentious-ass prose, it'd be him.

Jo and I also briefly spoke to Simon Furman, mostly to let him know that certain parts of his Armada run were the best things he'd written in the early 2000s. He did actually light up at the reminder, and bemoaned the cancellation of Energon/Cybertron, as he always has done. Plus we managed to not completely embarrass ourselves, so I'm calling this one another win.

We finally got the full story from Jim as to what the fuck happened last night. It's really a tale for the ages, and I won't do it justice here, but I'm sure the legend will only grow over the course of conventions to come. Basically, it was like this: somehow, the salsa dancers had arranged things with the hotel to cordon off one of the two corridors leading through the building. This was another reason why the convention felt so unbearably busy. The signs were carefully worded: "to avoid congestion", TFNation attendees were directed to the other corridor.

Now, to hear Jim tell it, he was rushing to the panel room, and at that point, the corridor wasn't cordoned off, or he didn't see the sign, or something. Or maybe he did see the sign—I'm sure he'll never tell. Regardless, he was three-quarters of the way up the corridor when he saw the barrier at the other end. Still, it would have been asinine for him to turn around and go back, so he ploughed ahead.

But then someone called after him! And so he glanced over his shoulder, and offered a "sorry!" in deference. Then suddenly, this person came up alongside him, tried to step in front of him. Jim sort of just carried on going, but no sooner had he passed the man, he felt hands on his shoulders! The dude had physically grabbed him, yoink!

Like a cartoon character, Jim's legs were in motion but going nowhere, and the salsa guy's supervisor or someone was saying "Let him go! Let! Him! Go!" Until finally, the guy let Jim go, and he scurried off to the panel room.

Now, I'm told that around this point, Jo and Rabbit happened to be outside the panel room. So these salsa dancers came up to them and asked, like, "Who is running your convention? The behaviour of your guests is completely unacceptable!" They dutifully pointed into the room, up on stage, where David was busy MCing.

Eventually, the salsa people ended up crossing paths with some of the volunteers. Jim likes to imagine that they made a demand along the lines of, "PRODUCE THE COWBOY!" One thing led to another, and apparently one of the salsa folk—presumably, the same blockhead who'd grabbed Jim—slapped one of the TFNation volunteers on the arm. Not a proper blow or anything, but like—what the fuck!

So finally hotel security stepped in, Jim got called out. The salsa guy began this litany of complaints: according to him, Jim bodychecked him in the corridor! He demanded that the security team check the CCTV tapes. "Yes, PLEASE check the tapes!" Jim agreed, because he knew for a fact that they would show their guy laying hands on him. And of course, he had no intention of pressing charges, but- Of course, that turns the tables. By that point, the other salsa guy was apparently at his wit's end trying to talk down his idiot pal, and finally the guy listened. And that's more or less the end of it, but apparently, hotel security later conferred with TFNation staff to say they had reviewed the tapes, and "Your guy did nothing wrong." Not only that, it turned out that Jim had been chased down the corridor not just by that one guy, but by four salsa dancers! Absolute scenes.

So yeah, that's the story of how Jim became the mortal enemy of salsa dancers. On Saturday night, I'd found the signs of this going on in the background to be kind of alarming, but in the light of day, it was impossible to see the situation as anything other than extremely fucking funny.

We had intended to stop by the "Construct-A-Con" panel, but by the time we arrived, David Kaye was up on stage doing an audience Q&A. It's crazy how much Kaye gives off the impression of being one-of-us, a bona fide fan of the franchise (or at least the parts he's been involved with!). We presume that the convention-organising roundtable had been swapped with Kaye's panel for some reason or another.

Back in the bar, the number of toys floating around had reached a critical mass. I think it was SameAsItEverWoz who had acquired a full set of Kabaya toys for Kenzan, Jinbu, and Ganoh. These came complete with ten-year-old Japanese chewing gum, so Erica, Sixty_Cats and myself all got to try some! I don't know why I'm phrasing that like this was a good thing. The gum was very bad, but we've since updated the TFWiki pages for Kenzan and Jinbu to properly document how it tasted. Ganoh's page has yet to be updated; poke Erica to get on it!

Daniel picked up a Collaborative H.I.S.S. Megatron (the toy I'd originally planned to cover for the RRCo zine)—mostly just for the sake of buying something! It was right before the dealer room was closing, so he got a good price, but a few days later his airline lost his damn luggage (he's since got it back, minus an expensive bottle of whiskey that apparently got stolen by airport staff). Still, we managed to eke what fun we could out of the thing; I was thrilled to find that Rumble and Frenzy could sit in his gun turret. Meanwhile, it turned out Umar had got a Classics Optimus Prime, which immediately made me keen to get my own copy out of storage; it's crazy how good a pair he makes with Megatron.

I'll level with you—at this stage in my journaling, it's been a full week since I arrived at the con, so my memory is hazy. These fragmentary scenes are all that remain aside from vibes. But I got to talk to a bunch of people that night. I had a good bitch sesh with Chris McFeely and PaperPlane off the YouTubes, as we chatted about wronguns in the community and the possibility of a YouTube panel at TFNation in the future (David was not keen). I got to shoot the shit about comics and stuff with Cradok from the TFWiki Discord, who I only ever really get the chance to chat with at TFN, but who's always a pleasure to speak to—he knows so much about so much.

There were a few people who left as Sunday was wrapping up, which always takes me by surprise, even though it shouldn't. Coordinating across the hotel proved to be difficult for me as I kept getting booted off the guest WiFi for some fucking reason, so I'd just randomly stop getting notifications. At one point I checked the group chat and realised that Viv had ollied outie maybe an hour ago—and it was like, welp, I'm probably not gonna see her again until next year!

That's the aspect of the convention which I find is really brutal: I like panels, and I like talking to guests, and I like getting toys, but most of all, I like talking to my pals. And unfortunately, for most of the weekend, all of these activities are in direct competition. There are physically not enough hours in the day. Most of these people, I could happily spend a whole day with them, and it'd pass in the blink of an eye. I'm not talking about the whole crowd—I'm talking about individual people. Even if I was never to step foot outside the bar the entire weekend, I'd still find myself wishing I'd got the chance to talk to all these people just a little longer. But it's only by the existence of this event that we're able to meet. For so much of the year, everyone is so far away.

I'm sick of all the typing. I just want to hang out.

I think it was Sunday night when I briefly lost my phone. My pink shorts were really throwing me off, so I didn't have my usual feeling of whether or not my phone was or wasn't in my pocket. At one point we went off to get tea, and we'd just left the hotel when I realised—shit! I'd left it in the bar. So we rushed back, but at that point it was already gone, handed in to the hotel staff by one of our pals. But the thing was, the hotel staff didn't seem to have a fucking clue about it!

I asked at the bar. They knew nothing about it and told me to check with reception. I asked at reception. The lady there asked me what my phone looked like. Oh dear, I thought. It's a generic off-brand phone. It's black. It's in a very badly yellowed clear case, I guess? "Yellow phone", echoed the receptionist. I shook my head. "No, no, it's a- nevermind. It's just a black phone." It was a moot point because she knew nothing about it. She went over to the concierge desk and tried to call housekeeping. Housekeeping knew nothing about it. She shrugged and told me to check with the bar again. Internally I was like, one of your staff has my phone! Are you not going to try and get the bottom of it? So I went back to the bar and asked one the wait staff. She passed me over to her supervisor. The supervisor went back over to the concierge desk, and finally returned with my phone, which had apparently been there the whole time. What a palaver! Daniel and Jalaguy looked after me during this whole little snafu, which was really great. We had a nice dinner and stayed up 'til late.

Monday

This was easily my best Monday at TFNation yet. I wouldn't dream of leaving on Sunday, but I usually find that the only cheap trains on Monday are late in the afternoon, by which point most people have usually fucked off already. Not so this year! I wasn't the last one standing! I was hanging out with people right up until the end! Ha!

I managed to find the last few people I'd wanted to give zines to, and shoved copies into their hands during the goodbyes. I walked a couple of people up to the train station, as is tradition.

Rachel's stuff from Friday was all out on the tables again; Prime Thundertron and Titans Return Hot Rod still hadn't found a new home, which I was thrilled by, because I hadn't found a complete Hot Rod and I'd really come around on the idea of Thundertron. I had a go of transforming him myself, and immediately decided that Jala was just wrong, it rules. There was also a Netflix Kingdom Rattrap, which I decided I'd like. My Kingdom Rattrap is the retail deco, and he's missing his rifle; this one was complete, and technically different, and it felt fitting considering all the thought I'd been giving to my stupid Rattrap collection. But then I saw Daniel playing with the toy, and I was like... actually, he should have it. I didn't need it, he'd get more out of it! It was really nice to see someone discovering that figure for the first time, a toy that means so much to me. I spent the entire train ride home just flipping Thundertron from one mode to another. Few toys exude such life and personality. Like I say, I'm normally the #1 Prime hater, so it's not a figure I ever would've thought to pick up—if not for Rachel's generosity. So I want to give her a huge thank-you, I'm sure a lot of us ended up leaving the convention with something like that which really excited us, thanks to her.

Also on the table was the original fucking pencil art for Jack Lawrence's cover to Lost Light #10, which auto_thots had bought. Unfortunately, it hadn't brought along anything to transport something like that with, so the damn thing was just out there on the table next to everyone's coffees. After a near-miss, I was like, hold the fuck on, we've got to get this thing off the table. Thankfully, Daniel had mistakenly ended up with a spare copy of issue #184 of the Marvel UK comic, which had a plastic sleeve of about the right size; in went the art, while Ella adopted the comic (we got to hang out a little bit more this year, which was nice!).

Jo, Rabbit and I are all Magic: The Gathering players, and the previous night, Rabbit had revealed that they'd brought along a bunch of Bloomburrow packs, so that we could do our own little tournament. This really thrilled me, because my coworker who I usually go to MTG events with had BETRAYED me for Bloomburrow by going away on prerelease weekend to play in another city, so I'd pretty much resigned myself to never playing the expansion, despite it being the most appealing set in ages. Thanks to Rabbit, I got to actually try some of the cards! On Sunday night, I made a WBR lifedrain deck with a bat/lizard typal theme, and we got the chance to play in the bar on Monday. My deck actually played really well! I won some, I lost some, but most importantly I had fun, and Rabbit was very patient with the fact that I was constantly getting up to say goodbye to people. I felt like I hadn't got to spend much time with either of them over the weekend up to that point, so it was really nice to actually sit down together and do something like that, right up until the time came for me to go and get my train.

Next time

So at TFNation 2025, here are some things which I hope will make me enjoy myself better:

I probably won't be contributing a review for the Refined Robot Co. zine again, assuming Ben decides to extend the trilogy into a quadrilogy. I love doing it, but drawing just takes me too long, and it's just not the same without drawing. Also, look, this isn't me blowing my own horn, but I think it'd be difficult for me to top this year's piece of writing—there were a perfect storm of factors which made this one work, and I simply can't think of a reason I'd ever be able to write a better piece in that specific format.

I have plans already for next year's zine, and if all goes according to plan, I will have the whole thing finished by the end of this year. Which should mean I will have the damn thing printed months in advance. Look, we all know how these things go, but that's my plan.

I might try to collaborate with someone who has a table to give away (sell?) some printed goods. I felt like this year was so busy that I actually struggled to give away nearly as many copies of the Wheelie comic as I'd hoped, for instance, and Ben definitely found the same with the RRCo zine. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like my stuff if they knew it existed.

I will get lots of sleep before going to the convention. No, really.

If circumstances outside my control conspire such that I do not get enough sleep, I will allow myself to resort to the 500ml cans of Monster which the Hilton was selling for £2 each at breakfast for some unfathomable reason. Honestly, I can see why they weren't included in the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet; if they were, we probably would've seen a few heart attacks.

I will probably voice some of my criticisms of this year's Club Con in the annual feedback survey they do, in the hopes that they will take more of a back-to-basics approach. I'll also try to notice if I am not having fun, and try doing something else.

I will try to wear shorts with bigger pockets. (Sorry, Jo, I will not be able to participate in the cosplay show, though I will of course continue to rep the merch.)

I will stop taking items of breakfast food "for the road".

I will suck it up and queue to see guests towards the start of the day.

I will try and change my financial situation to have a stream of income outside of my job—whether by making significant sales from my existing collections, or by having a Patreon for some meaningful creative endeavour—which I will use to properly budget for things like TFNation. I need to allow myself to spend more on specific things that I want, and waste less time scrubbing around Facebook, eBay, and charity shops for random bargains (this year was a fluke). My attitude towards money has always been fucked and it's time to work on that.

In case it's not obvious, though, I did overall really enjoy myself this year, and that was entirely down to my friends, old and new, for being such wonderful people to be around. Even in my most sleep-deprived and highly-strung state, you all made me feel content, comfortable, and included in our little community. I was constantly being surprised by your antics. I hope to see all of you again next year, and I hope that I will see some of you before then!

[thelordofgifs]

Silm fandom! Have a PSA. Hate the piped tags on AO3? Would much rather read a fic tagged Fingon/Maedhros than one tagged Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo? Have I got the userscript for you! Look how neat and readable my AO3 silm character tags look now:

What is a userscript?

Good question! The small sibling, who is a computer geek, did not know about these when I mentioned them, so I have to conclude I have stumbled upon some secret hidden wisdom here. In short, a userscript is a (free) program written in JavaScript that modifies the web pages you visit. They're very safe, and imo an essential part of customising your web browsing experience to your liking!

How do I install userscripts?

I might make a separate post about mobile browsers because I'm tired. But on desktop, you first want to get a browser extension that allows you to manage your userscripts. I like Tampermonkey, which works with most major browsers.

Okay, how do I get rid of the piped tags?

Once you've installed the userscript manager of your choice, you want to go to the userscript Ao3 De-Piped Tags on Greasy Fork and click the big green "install" button. For most userscripts, that's it! For this one, we need to take a couple of tiny extra steps:

Go to your Tampermonkey dashboard (you can find this by clicking on "browser extensions" and then "Tampermonkey". Unfortunately I don't know how other userscript managers work, so if you didn't choose Tampermonkey you'll have to play around a little.)

Click the "Ao3 De-Piped Tags" script on your Tampermonkey dashboard.

This should bring you to the "Editor" page, and a bunch of scary-looking code in JavaScript. Don't panic, I have no idea what any of this does and I still managed to do the necessary fiddling! The block you want looks like this:

//SCRIPT SETTINGS// const sideToDisplay = 'right'; //left OR right, for character tags with one pipe (two names) const partToDisplay = 'right'; // left OR right OR central, for character tags with two pipes (three names) const tagsOnFicPage = 0; //0 to disable, 1 to enable

4. All you want to do now is change the first line so that it reads

const sideToDisplay = 'left'; //left OR right, for character tags with one pipe (two names)

so that the tag "Maedhros | Maitimo" displays as "Maedhros" instead. If you're a Quenya freak (affectionate) who would prefer all the tags display characters' Quenya names instead of Sindarin ones, skip this step.

5. If you'd also like this change to show on the fic page itself, not just the AO3 search results page, change the third line of the code block to read

const tagsOnFicPage = 1; //0 to disable, 1 to enable

6. Save your changes to the file, refresh your AO3 page, and marvel!

I hate this and want to get rid of it.

No problem, you can turn off the userscipt or completely uninstall it from the Tampermonkey dashboard!

I want to display some names with the left part of the piped tag and others with the right part, is that possible?

Unfortunately not :( This also applies if you're in other fandoms (I hear The Witcher fandom is one such?) which uses piped tags where you want to use the right side of the tag.

Can anyone else see the changes I've made?

No! The userscript applies to your own browsing experience only, so you aren't messing with how anyone else's fics display when you use it.

This is magic, got any other cool userscripts for AO3?

Loads, most of them much easier to use than this one! Here are some links:

Put your "marked for later" button on the AO3 homepage

Add HTML formatting options to the AO3 comment box

Set your default posting language to English

Fix the bug where copy-pasting from Google Docs to AO3 puts spaces around all your italics

And here's a list of many more to peruse!

Cool, how do I get this to work on a mobile browser?

Yeah my laundry's finished now so I'm not typing all that out. Maybe tomorrow.

[omegastation]

Okay, so I need some feedback or at least someone to tell me my new transcript isn't a disaster.

You have the ME1 - 01. Expose Saren transcript and at the very end a link to "ME1 - 01. Post Expose Saren Normandy scenes" which is the new transcript.

It's named like this to keep it in order in the Drive folder, so it goes main mission -> additional scenes -> Normandy scenes.

(I could go like this for a while, and compile all Normandy scenes post missions and/or by character once I reach a certain point, but that's for later.)

Right now, I'm wondering if the new transcript is readable (especially Tali scenes) because I had to change the method of formatting.

How it usually goes :

-Question -Answer A -Subquestion A.1. -Answer subquestion A.1. -Answer B -Answer C

The issue here is that Answer A had 20 more questions and answers, the dialogue tree is just too long... (Shepard had a lot of questions about the quarians). So by the time you reach Answer B and C, those lines seem to come out of nowhere.

So in this transcript I had to do:

-Question -Answer A -Answer B -Answer C

-Subquestion A.1. -Answer subquestion A.1.

It seems to only work in ME1 because the dialogue tree only hints at different answers. In reality you can pick A, B or C, and you'll end up with a form of "Subquestion A.1."

Does any of it make sense???

[danielnelsen]

every few weeks or months i work up the courage to start going through da2 conversation files to try to make slightly more readable versions of them by just going through by hand and typing out the properties of each line in a spreadsheet. and every time i think "one day i will try to make a spreadsheet with formulas where i can just copy and paste the whole cnv file in and it will do this all by itself..."

well today's the day. i knew id just have to set aside a few hours but i did it and now it takes less than a minute to make a nice spreadsheet of a cnv file rather than potentially hours or days for one of the longer files.

im happy to share what ive done, although if you don't generally understand the cnv file format it might be kinda nonsense. i might put something together later on how to actually read these, but here's a link to where im putting the spreadsheet for each conversation once ive done it. let me know if you have any requests, otherwise im just going alphabetically.

[orbleglorb]

info post!

by the way, commissions are open!

hi i'm sasha orbleglorb. i use he/him and they/them with no preference. this post is going to basically be a little intro post/guide to my blog. it has my tag system and stuff for wip wednesday/OC ask games, because i rb a LOT of those. it'll be updated every now and then :]

palestine & fundraisers

i receive a lot of aid requests sent via asks from those in palestine! seriously, i get about 10+ a day. i usually only get on tumblr once a day or once every few days, so i just spam a bunch of fundraisers and dip. i won't bore you with the details, but this method is no longer working out, and i fear isn't helping paleatinians. all of this to say, all fundraiser and mutual aid posts will be running on a queue from now on. time-sensitive fundraisers will either be shared on the spot or bumped to the top of the queue. my queue posting times and amounts will constantly be updated to allow a good amount of fundraisers get posted a day.

keep reading for my interests, tag system, and ask game stuff!

interests:

blaseball, terrorball, the magnus archives, lost media, my ocs, other ppl's ocs, funny little animals

tag system

#undescribed - images without an image ID

#id in alt or #id in alt text - images with the ID in alt text, but nowhere else in the post

#not screenreader friendly - posts that include formatting that is hard or impossible for screenreaders to read. this includes special fonts, even the ones on tumblr. this does not include bold, italic, bigger, or biggest fonts.

#colored text - posts with colored text. as far as i know, colored text is readable by screen readers. but it can cause migranes and be hard to look at, so i have a category for it.

#romanceposting and #affectionposting - posts that include romance/physical affection. tagged for those who are romance/physical affection repulsed (in this case, physical affection will always refer to kissing/making out/things of that nature)

#later gator - posts i have saved for later

#save for later - practical posts i want to reference later

#insert a queue pun here - queue tag

#sasha lore - posts about my personal life & general things happening with me. negative/bad stuff tagged with #rant and #vent

#asks 4 sasha - ask response tag

#eyeball emoji. hey - ask game tag

#orble art insp - posts that inspire me artistically

#orble art ref - art references

#orble art - art tag

#orble writing - writing tag

#blaseball (organizational) - blaseball posts i make that i don't want to maintag, but would like to organize somehow. i do this with multiple fandoms, and they all serve the same purpose.

#firewalker with me friday - every(ish) friday i reblog the song "firewalker with me" by the garages

#sidelined sunday - same as above but with "sidelined" by the garages, every(ish) sunday

#wip wednesday - an ask game where i post my wips & ppl can request snippets (more info below)

#wip wednesday works - snippets of wips i post on wip wednesday

ask game stuff - OCs, favorite characters, ships, fic wips

i reblog a lot of ask games that are about OCs, ships, and WIPs. because i'm a blaseball fan, and blaseball has no canon, i also like it when ppl send blb players for OC asks! so, if you want to send an ask but don't know what to ask about, here's a list of things for when i share those ask games:

👤 OCs - Original 👤

these are my OCs i created for my own original world! bold = important to the main storyline or many storylines

most used/fleshed out ocs (bolded are main characters): alejandro salinas, arthur murphy (that's the only ref i've posted), connor shrapner, diego salinas aguilera, dhia hassan, ezra hoffman, gwen shrapner, hannah abrams, leylo gromit (nee wright), manea, marcos salinas rojas, nicostratus dreadful, silas vanderzee, terrell newman, william shrapner, and zach schneider (nee wright)

ocs with a decent amount of lore: amos salinas (nee wright), catalina salinas flores, dolores rojas velásquez (salinas), christopher shrapner, callum ferreira-cohen (nee wright), danika murphy, gabriela flores salinas, james voland (nee wright), luke fullmer, martín salinas flores, mallory shrapner, matthew norman, ryan kishimoto, opal dreadful, ornias dreadful, penny dreadful, rowan wallace, taylor wallace, timothy "mothy" miller (and dreadful but dw about it), wilbur wright, and valerie schneider

other ocs: aidan thompson, aliyah anderson, carlos salinas castillo, cecil weaver, camilla salinas rojas, cynthia wright, daniel ferreira-cohen, gilberto flores martinez, henry milburn, indigo milburn, irene salinas, jackie ong, jamari moore, jessica, josé salinas pérez, john perez, maría concepción castillo gonzález de salinas, margarita salinas castillo, mei, mercedes aguilera, molly mae wright, nicole murphy, oliver wright, peter wright, rory wright, sergio ferreira-cohen, wendy ong, and zellie anderson

⚾️ OCs - Blaseball ⚾️

ILB management: caroline sweatblood, riley munson

baltimore residents: miss annie, devonte, DD/delivery driver/cheska (kind of a collective oc but i have gone way off track with it), ezekiel bernstein, lorenza benedetti/signora benedetti/mrs. benedetti, vincenzo benedetti/signor benedetti/mr. benedetti, amber lin, lucy lin

houston residents: priya khan, antonia torres valdez, ceren göre, zeynep göre, yağmur göre

📼 TMA OCs 📼

UK-based: maxie wellerman, unnamed bc i keep forgetting lol

american avatars: shantae washington (eye avatar), tash norman (stranger... aspect? avatar?), alphie weaver (web avatar), cliff conway (vast avatar), tilly crawford (buried avatar), clarabelle (spiral avatar/aspect)

‼️ Favorite Characters ‼️

blorbos that are basically my ocs: conditional yuniesky (i call him yuniesky torres), chester abu-zaid (nadeem abu-zaid and his service dog, chester), fletcher berger, mindy khan

blorbos that are not basically my ocs, but i have a lot of lore for them that others do not: parker macmillan, megan ito, new megan ito, clare ballard, mike townsend, tillman henderson, declan suzanne, lenjamin lin, flattery strewnberry, juke gnocchi, bees gorczyca, sevgi gore, rivers javier, any of the coronation spies

blorbos that sit in a weird in-between of those two categories: alexandria rosales

terrorball: jonathan grolon, marielle, ava jayonut, gunner irons, lelani blackberry, selene nathge

tma: jonathan sims, melanie king, oliver banks, mike crew, agnes montague, harriet fairchild

💞 Ships (and some characters): 💞

Here! (needs updating)

🖊 WIPs: 🖊

fic wips: every other wednesday(citation needed) i do a little thing called wip wednesday, where i share a list of my wips and ppl can request a snippet of each wip. the most recent wip files post (which will be tagged as #wip wednesday) will be the most reliable for this.

thank you for reading!

[vampstel]

Oh hiiii um I had a quick question.. Ik I asked one already but can you teach me how to write scripts for videos ;-; I talk way to much without scripts or guidelines and it annoys me SO MUCH I wanna make a video about the problems / issues of rh and there is so much to cover it’s wild and I already see myself sitting there for like 1 hour + rambling about random stuff ;w;

This is going to be a very long answer so buckle up:

All of what I’m about to say in this paragraph is optional. I use Google Docs for my scripts since it’s easy to navigate and format on mobile. Before writing anything, I always make sure to change the font to make things easier to read later on during recording. I also make sure to space out paragraphs and even sentences by their own to make the script more comprehensive. Spacing things out is also a great way to show emphasis on one-liners and avoid too much rambling.

(Just as an additional note: I use Times New Roman in 11pt for my format. You can use any font that you find more readable)

After I’m done with formatting, I always set an outline for the script first. This is extremely good if you struggle with rambling since this is where I brainstorm ideas and points to add in the video. You can be messy with this but be short and concise; Use bulletpoints. Write down what topics you want to discuss, what points you want to make, etc.

After brainstorming, I then organize these bulletpoints into categories that will then determine what my video chapters will be about. If you have several bulletpoints about… let’s say, the Royale High devs, you can put that into one category. Then if you have bulletpoints about the community, you can put that into a category as well. It’s a pretty simple process but can be a bit time consuming when you’re not used to it.

After you got your categories ready, organize them as well and determine which ones you should discuss first. For me, I often go by a chronological order. I either:

Rank them by least to worst (Such as my 30 minute Royale High rant)

Rank them by least important to most important (Such as my latest DWM episode about my interests)

Rank them by time of events (Such as my Kooleen video)

You also might want to get screenshots (+ links) and add them to your document as well so you don’t forget any proof you need to show.

Once you’ve got all that done, you’re ready to start writing. Always remember the outline of your script and use page breaks or horizontal lines to signify where a category ends. You can always write drafts first, organize paragraphs and remove unnecessary rambling later on if needed.

Also, make sure to title each category in your document. Whether it be by numbers or the topic name itself so you don’t get lost navigating through your script. If you’re listing down things in the script, always remember to use bulletpoints to make it easier to read.

( PS: Don’t forget to explain and add context to what you’re talking about. Not everyone will know what you’re referring to so it’s best to first start off the script with a basic rundown of what happened or what you’re discussing. )

Just as an example, here’s a quick sneakpeek into one of the rants I have ready to go for the new channel:

Hope this helps 🫶 You’ll get used to scripting the more you do it. Just don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You can always delete them after proofreading. Good luck!!