#romancing the process

[alisheaburgess]

Dev Diaries: End of Day 8- I've learned some things...

Dev Diaries, Masterlist

Start of Day

I learned some things about myself!

When I was taking the JavaScript courses the other day, I was really struggling to understand why, and therefore what, we were learning.

I kept thinking that I was either just too burnt out (a possibility) or just not able to understand it in general. The last one seems drastic but it went through my mind. The instructors were doing a lot to make the courses digestible and still I was struggling.

Then today, I was taking the HTML courses and it suddenly hit me what was wrong!

After I took the first HTML course back in week one, I mentioned that HTML and CSS just kinda made sense to me. I was thinking that maybe it was from my blogging experience. After today, I think that's true.

The one thing the JavaScript courses never did is explain why we were doing the things we were. There wasn't a real world example for me to tack it to.

So!

I will take some time this next week to check for videos on YouTube to show me what JavaScript is really used for. C# made more sense to me because I had an idea of what I was using it for. The first few times I saw it was talking about game dev stuff. I knew why we were doing the things because they were showing what was happening to the game itself.

I need a Homebase to trace it to and get oriented. Otherwise I'm just trying to store all the info and I don't have a system to put it into...so it's either not in one and just chaos, or it's copied into about 7 lol. That's it's own special chaos.

If this works and I get a better understanding of JS, then I'll go back and re-watch those courses to make sure I really grasp it.

I did get a small combo of HTML and CSS today. Most of today was planning and gauging how much time I want to spend and doing what. 😋

I'm trying not to edit these too much because I want to keep it as real as possible.

[kelogsloops]

Another little sketchbook piece, experimenting with low light and a glow effect. Been loving these light-focussed works lately!

🎵 Blue Wednesday - Cascadia ft. Dillan Witherow

#brbchasingdreams

prints | tutorials

[urfriendlywriter]

20 angsty romance prompts part 2

(feel free to use <33 tag me when yall writeeee)

crying in your lover's arms

^ face buried in their chest, while their heart breaks at your every sob :(

"i wish i loved you less." but it is spat at the other person angrily, immediately being regretted after the words leave their mouth.

watching them cry and not knowing what to do (ouch-)

"why do you love me when you know i can't- shouldn't love you back?"

"you messed me up, you fcked me over and what- how dare i? how dare fckn you!"

"i am sorry. i am so so.. so.. sorry. please.. let me go."

"don't you dare do this to me- No! No, no, no, no- nono, hey, please!!"

"... why can't.. anybody see--that... I'm tired?... " (if written write, this wud traumatize me)

"I'm done waiting for you, [name]."

them literally on their knees, "please, please--just please trust me! Why is it so hard for you to believe me once?"

^ "how many times do i have to get hurt by trusting you!!?"

"i am not sorry that i don't love you. I'm sorry that you don't love yourself."

"i loved you, believe me. i did. then you turned into someone else, someone... scary."

"WHY DO YOU HAVE TO KEEP HURTING ME? why--why am i the one.. always losing everything..?"

"listen to me-" "No, no!" "my dear, i swear, that isn't what i meant." "oh yeah? i don't think so. you were pretty loud and clear back there."

"so.. you're just going to.. give up on me." "that is NOT what i meant-" "you're not willing to fight for me either. i think it's pretty clear, [name]."

hands trembling while holding their pale, bloodied face, "k-keep your eyes open, for fucks sake! PLEASE-please please, talk to me."

"promise me you'll be okay, and that you'll keep living. moving on, even without me." "only if you do the same." (this happened irl yall)

"you saved me then killed me all over again."

[theaftersundown]

*writes two paragraphs after months of literally nothing and it took three hours*

[me-writes-prompts]

-:"I can't stop loving you." Angsty romance prompts for your otp:-

(This prompt list...... AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. tag me if you write these ☠️)

By @me-writes-prompts

"It's not you...it's me. I can't stop loving you."

"If I knew loving someone would hurt so much, I still would've loved you."

"I'm tired of being the only one who loves you. I need you to love yourself first." oof

"This is not the version of you I fell in love with. And honestly, I've forgotten the real you." T-T

"Is it so hard to believe I've stopped loving you?"

"I can't live without you. I can't love without you. I need you, by my side, always did and always will." "You'll be okay. I know you will."

"It's not okay to just leave me here, after telling me you love me back." "We can't- we'll never be together."

"So you choose them over me? After all we've been through together, you choose them?" (AZIRACROW MY HEARTTTTTTT)

"I'm forbidden to love you. I'm forbidden to be with you. So, what am I to do if not fall on my knees and beg for you to stay?" (bear with me here AHHHH)

"It's truly funny...how you can't choose who you want to be in love with. I didn't choose to be in love with you. It just happened, and I wish it didn't."

Walking in rain to their house just to find that they're no longer there.

"You can't go. You cannot leave me here. You promised we'll be together forever." (No words)

Playing the song they always sang together to, and just crying.

"It'll never be the same between us. We'll never be the same."

"Your silence speaks more than you ever have. And, I'm not sure why it took so long for me to notice."

"You've drifted so far away from my side that I can no longer reach for your hand and guide you back to me." SOB OMG DID I JUST WRITE THAT

"I can no longer recognize you. And that's not even the saddest part. It's the fact that you no longer make any attempt to make me understand you."

[st-hedge]

I can’t believe they’d managed to animate kusuriuri’s insane character design and then decided to make it even more insane. The most character ever

[includedisco]

Importance of writing the self-indulgent story that you do want to write in exactly the way you want to write it

You won't find anything weird about being your own story's biggest fan. You wrote it in a way that's exactly what you envision the characters being. So you'll click on that thing without reservation or shame, enjoy the hell out of it and pat yourself on the back each time.

Your own story will be your absolute favorite in the world because it'll be perfect for YOU.

Why wait impatiently and frustratedly for a different author to write your fantasy for you? And no DON'T you dare say it's because that other writer is better than you.

No writer is perfect. We can all learn, improve and get better. If you have an idea in your mind, go learn how to bring it to life. Ask other authors, read other books/fanfics, watch videos on writing tips etc.

But stay away from AI. That shit is unforgivable.

Loving one's own work as a writer is tough but once you do get there, I believe that's the true meaning of self love for a writer.

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[hajihiko]

[cj-etc]

Forbidden Romance Prompts

Sneaking out of an event/party to be together

Holding hands under the table at meals, hoping nobody catches on

Secret glances in public/out with friends

Finding excuses to see each other (group project, work meeting, car troubles, etc.)

Texting/writing letters to one another and having to hide their responses

Seeing each other in public and having to ignore each other/stay apart, as much as it hurts

Secret meeting spots

Being discovered and begging to keep things quiet

Fake enemies

Planning to run away together (you would never do it)

Kissing in the car

Small gifts

Why is it forbidden?

[heylittleriotact]

No wonder Emmrich.exe stopped working when Rook asks if the tea in the memorial garden at the end of their outing was set up to impress them.

Death-man brought Rook to this place to try and help them sort through some of the feelings they need to confront in order to healthily mourn the death of someone who presumably meant a great deal to them.

The “light refreshment” was waiting at the end as a deliberate part of Emmrich’s care as a death professional. When I was in funerals we had coffee, tea, and freshly baked cookies waiting for every family that came in for arrangements, visitations, services, or after-care meetings: they’re comforting little gestures that people tend to really lean into during a difficult time.

So yeah. Given the circumstances and the reason for the outing to begin with, it would be a lot like someone showing up at the funeral home to make arrangements for their mum, looking at my spread of coffee and cookies and being like “Ooooh… are you hitting on me? 👀”

I would have had the exact same reaction Emmrich did lmao

[alisheaburgess]

Dev Diaries: Day 8...We Back!!!

Dev Diaries, Masterlist

Romancing the Process...coming soon

June 4, 2023

The Day number will just be a log number as I may not do Dev stuff every day. I'll be including the dates though.

Now that I have a month to take classes, I'm going to be a bit more strategic with what I'm taking and when. I want to get the most out of this 😊

For the Dev side, I'm going to finish up the bigger courses that I wasn't able to get into before. They will mainly be HTML and CSS. There are a couple of them that have intros to Python and the like. I have already had a little bit of Python in other courses, so I'm kinda looking forward to that one and more C# 😁 that's the one I'll be learning for my game dev stuff.

For the Diaries though...

I'm thinking about having a separate Design Diary (non-web design) and Doodle Diary because I'm also going to be working on those. I mainly want to so I can find things easier later but also... so I remember what all I'm doing now 😂😋

I am starting Romancing the Process! Which is just a diary of all the crazy stuff I'm learning, trying, and just my story as I experience it. I think it's gonna be fun (for me at least lol)

My goal for this month is to be as job ready as I possibly can be! I'm going to be purging my belongings as well in case I need to move. This will trick my brain into cleaning which is useful even if I don't move 😅 I'll be going over this more in Romancing the Process. I am trying to get a balance of input (learning) and output (creating). This is gonna be so much fun!!!!

Weekly DevPlan:

Courses to Tackle for the Week (starts Monday, today is bonus)

Improve UX Prototyping

HTML

CSS

Soft Dev

Full-stack Dev

1 Class at a time! 😊

The prototyping course is introductions to a bunch of tools you can use. It's kinda boring to start but then I turn into a child when they start the actual prototyping part 😂🤣 It's so much fun and I can't wait to get to play...I mean...use them.

I won't be doing each of these every day. They are in order of importance. I want to get the first three done this week. The bottom two be the least important and can take all month if need be lol

I've already done a prototyping course but it's super close to being completely done. I've almost exhausted their library of UX stuff 😅🥰 This is the last fuller course they have for it. After that it's just shorter courses that I plan to filter in.

Let's Go!!!

[questionable-idea]

Writing the middle of a romance story without a beginning yet. They're cute together but I got no fucking clue how they met

[macaronirats]

Quick prorev Frank sketch because uhh. You know why

[firelise]

I think the other thing i love about Conclave is some of my favorite poets and writers are queer people who are/have been profoundly devoutly religious like the moment i found out benjamin alire sáenz went to monastery and was on track to becoming a priest before becoming a writer I was just like "Aha! That's what it fucking was, that's where this philosophical torturous burden and deep empathy for others I'm feeling from your work comes from" deeply intellectually curious devout clergymen are such interesting people, its delicious, you cant get that shit from anywhere else

[mayasaura]

To be clear, I do ship Marcille and Falin!! I just ship them as.... complicated, you know? They have dyke drama. Marcille is deluding herself that Falin hasn't grown up and she's not going to age, and she's not going to die no matter what Marcille does, and Marcille isn't going to have to live most of her life having lost her. Meanwhile poor Falin would like a step by step written explanation of how to convince her very good elf friend that she is an adult, and has some potentially adult feelings about getting wet and naked and crawling into bed together