#scoping out interest because when I do a long-ish post I usually like to have A Thesis. something to Say

[batsplat]

idc about people being misinformed about silly sports stuff because life's too short BUT there has been one too many things recently where I'm a bit... hm. I feel the rossi/lorenzo garage situation is long enough ago now that the general understanding of this dynamic is... only very loosely correlated to reality... and now it's being discussed a lot and a lot of the takes aren't really... you know. I don't actually care about fact checking because again. who cares. but a lot of the times it's like... the truth is more interesting than this version of events that is being spread around feat. heavy flanderisation I swear...

[blubberquark]

Belated Protector Postmortem

I made the game Protector for the 46th Ludum Dare game jam. I did not make a tumblr post about it during the jam. Don’t think Protector is my best jam game, but what can you expect from a jam game? Hardly a glowing endorsement, I know. Download it from itch.io at this link, or don’t.

With some distance, I think it’s interesting to tell you why I don‘t think Protector is that good... or maybe “good” is not the right word. Some friends and other Ludum Dare entrants had encouraged me (privately) to keep working on it after the jam and fix the bugs. In my opinion, Protector is fine the way it is (for a jam game anyway), but any more work on it will be a waste of time. There will be no post-compo releases of Protector.

If you are just getting started making games, Protector could be a good example of when to stop working on a prototype. But first, let’s do the usual “game jam postmortem“ song and dance.

Game Description

In this moody puzzle-ish platformer, you control an invincible character tasked with guiding a small (and very vincible) dog through the level. You cannot control the dog.

Instead you can pick up and throw a bone, but you can’t carry the bone. When you press the bone throwing button a second time, the dog will chase after the bone.

One the dog is running, you cannot stop it. You also cannot call the dog to return to you. You have to clear the path for the dog before you let it loose.

What Went Right

Scope: I scoped Protector aggressively minimal. I remember feeling a bit under the weather on the first day of the jam, so I decided to take it easy and submit something small. I was okay with submitting a small game in the jam category. I just had this idea I wanted to try out.

There is only one level, and it’s not all that big. I submitted on the morning of the third day, with everything I wanted in the game, without losing any sleep, and with some time to spare.

Theme: The idea was my own take on that last level in Bastion, when the kid carries the battering ram, but as an escort mission. The main character was supposed to be some kind of brute or barbarian loosely inspired by the barbarian class in Diablo II. Obviously you keep a dog alive, because that’s the theme of the jam.

Character Designs: I think nailed it with the brute and dog sprites. The brute is big and faceless, and the dog is small and cute. The proportions of the brute convey that he is strong and slow, and his shield (but no sword) should clue you in about his purpose.

Simple Dog Behaviour: The dog runs and bounces around pretty quickly. Once the dog is running, all bets are off, because you are too slow to catch up. You have to set everything up so the dog won’t kill himself, because he’s not a cat with nine lives. He is a dumb dog.

Any kind of AI or pathfinding would have made the dog less predictable, and the main objective of the game is to keep it alive (that was the theme of the jam), so simple, fast, predictable movement was key. The player has to be able to predict the dog’s path before it starts running.

Level Design: The level is not that big. There is a variety of obstacles and set pieces, and these are all easy for the player character to navigate, but potentially lethal to the dog. In addition to multiple platforming challenges, there are two unique “set pieces” that break up the monotony.

There are five different ways for the dog to die, and the level is constructed to make the player experience each of them once. Some are obvious, like the lightning cloud and the tower that shoots arrows, but the level is designed so that every player dies at least once. After mastering an obstacle once, it should pose no challenge on repeat playthroughs.

What Went Wrong

Controls: The controls are very simple, based on only the four arrow keys, X and C. These can be mapped to the left stick and first two buttons of a gamepad. In walk mode, the two buttons jump and call the dog, and the “up” direction is used to raise the shield.

In throw mode, with the left/right axis controls the throwing angle, and the up/down angle controls the velocity. This control scheme feels too cumbersome. The X key is used for calling the dog and throwing the bone, based on context. This also feels cumbersome, but it makes it less likely for players to accidentally throw or call the dog when they want to jump. I still had to resort to putting the controls on the screen at all times.

For gamepad controls it would have made more sense to use the direction of the left stick for the throwing angle and velocity. For keyboard+mouse controls I could have implemented a mouse-based throwing system like in Gunpoint or a parabola indicator that shows where the bone will land. I could also have gone the other way with a Worms style throwing system in which the throwing velocity is proportional to the time the button was held. As is, the throwing uses the same buttons as platforming, but it doesn’t feel good.

Bone Physics: The bone physics was kind of bouncy and floaty. I implemented my own physics because the bone was the only object in the whole game that needs halfway realistic bouncy collisions. The player and the dog use platformer physics, so there was no need for a physics engine like Box2D, libODE, or pymunk. The bone is modelled like a simple spinning ball. I could have made the bone less bouncy to give the player more control, maybe even cheated by making it less bouncy only in the x-direction. I could also have gone in the other direction and modelled the bone as a rectangle or two balls connected by a line.

Dog Platforming: The dog sometimes gets stuck in a wall or on a ledge. This is bad. I could fix this by making the dog fall down or turn around when this happens, but that would make the problem worse. I’d rather have the dog (or the bone) stuck in a weird position until the player gets it out than having it sit inside a pit in an unwinnable position with believable physics.

The way bone physics and platforming work is very janky, but that is because the obvious fix would have unacceptable gameplay consequences.

Main Gameplay Loop: It goes like this: throw bone - move into position - let dog loose - wait for dog - retrieve bone - throw bone - move into position, and so on. There is no way to call the dog back because that would make certain puzzles too easy, no way to set multiple way points for the dog, no way to ask the dog to fetch the bone back to you, and no way to carry the bone - otherwise you could just walk over and drop the bone there.

The gameplay loop as it stands just doesn’t allow that many puzzles, and changes to the gameplay would make the current puzzles too easy. Adding more content is more or less incompatible with the current gameplay, and changes to the gameplay loop would break the existing balance.

Allowing the player to carry the bone, to use different tools than the shield, to call the dog back would destroy the game design.

What I Learned

Escort missions suck. I already knew that hidden complex systems are not fun, but even indirect interaction based on simple systems is hard to get right. Beyond that, I did not try anything new and outlandish. I just had the idea about the big protector and the little dog.

The most surprising thing was how poorly Protector was rated in the “Mood” category given the relatively high theme score. Having no sound really did me no favours, and neither did the GameBoy screen resolution or the 5-colour palette.

But importantly, despite all the gameplay shortcomings, this still works as a short game. If the game is short enough, it can be carried by novelty, and players will forgive janky controls, even if the controls are part of the game’s main difficulty. I relied on this insight in other jam games, but it does not translate to long-form games.

This is a bit meta, but it is important to understand when a game design does not work. To some degree I think game jams even encourage a kind of toxic positivity towards young people learning to program. By all means, you should encourage people who want to try their hand at game design, and you should not go out of your way to disparage teenagers learning to code or programmers who make programmer art because the graphic design in their enterprise software day job is done in a different department. All too often, instead of “keep it up“, we tell people who are getting started to keep working on their jam games. If a game has load of bugs, on some level it would be nice to have them fixed, and these bugs are an obvious starting point for a post-jam version of the game - but when I see buggy games with experimental gameplay ideas, I don’t always encourage the devs to keep tweaking the mechanics until it works. Some experiments have negative results, and that’s okay.

Some jam entries are great games, successful experiments if you will, but they can’t easily be made into longer games. That’s also okay.

Can We Fix This?

“But hypothetically” you ask me, “how would you turn Protector into a longer game if I hired you to be a game designer?”

Okay. Hypothetically. In this hypothetical world, you pay by the hour, no unpaid overtime, and no bonus based on how well the game sells ;-)

We need a story that glues all the levels together, and the dog platforming would be at most a third of the game. Maybe in some levels you and the dog fight side by side, maybe you explore some of the levels with the dog on a leash, maybe you tie the leash to a post at the level entrance and come back when you have cleared everything.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have through-line that connects different types of gameplay, different set pieces and minigames.

In order to make the platforming and puzzle solving more interesting, you would have a different load-out in different levels. Some platforms are dog-only, and you would throw the bone (or a tennis ball) up there because you can’t reach it yourself. You would need a way to recall the bone (or tennis ball) or a way to recall the dog, maybe a dog whistle. Maybe you just have a limited supply of dog treats per level. Earlier levels just have the bone, and shield, later ones introduce mobility items for the player character, tennis balls, a collar, a leash, dog treats, a dog whistle, and so on.

It would be a fun idea (or a gimmick) to have most of the upgrades be for the dog, but that’s not very fun to actually play.

Another possible problem is if the dog handling becomes an afterthought, or a drag in the player, going back to fetch the dog after the level has been cleared. Escort missions are not held in high regard among players, so this could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

With all these mobility items and larger levels, we would need an improved dog AI. We also could not have the dog fall into a pit of spikes, instead it should refuse to jump into unsafe distances, and somehow communicate to the player. We would also need a way to get the dog back down if it got up the wrong platform, and a way for the player to reset progress to the last check point or re-fill dog treats without creating an exploitable loophole where the player can just walk back and forth to the vending machine and win a level with infinite dog treats.

Oh no, the dog AI sounds complicated now. Complicated hidden systems are not fun, and training AI-powered animals is not that difficult code-wise, but it is difficult to pull off in a way that is fun and legible to the player. I still remember Black&White. Those animals were a gimmick. Somehow we need a way for the dog to communicate things to the player. Can the dog talk? Is there a bark code? Can the dog smell things?

One thing we absolutely must not do is vary the dog AI between levels. Players will have a really hard time as is, because the smarter the dog gets, the easier it becomes to accidentally mis-predict what it will do.

Think about all the parts of this rather comprehensive proposal: Complex AI, some kind of story, different controls, unlockable items, and level/puzzle design that integrates all of the above, all written from scratch or re-written for the bigger game. I’d rather spend the time on something else.

[camomills]

Title: Old Souls Relationships: Sinon/Lisbeth; Sinon & Agil Fandom: Sword Art Online Word Count: 1767 Summary: Sinon realizes she is allowing others to become closer to her, and that scares her. A conversation with an older friend might help assuage her fears. Notes: Made for SAO Pride Week 2020 - Day 1: Small Steps. This is a reworked draft from last year's SAO Pride Week that I turned into some Sinon/Lisbeth, mostly Sinon-centric. I also just really wanted to do something with Agil because I think he's a fun character, and I personally think his wise demeanor makes him a nice character to bounce off the younger cast.Thanks to redbluezero for beta reading!

AO3 Link

-

The smell of coffee has always been one of Shino’s favorites. It reminds her of rainy days spent in the company of a book in her favorite bookshop, staring mindlessly at the steam as she waited until her drink cooled. It’s no wonder Dicey Café became one of her dearest places.

“Here’s your order!”

The company might have something to do with it, too.

“This one’s on the house,” Rika declares as she sets the cup on the counter, then winks.

From behind her, she hears someone clear their throat.

She slowly turns to meet Agil’s gaze, and sure enough, he’s scowling at her. The grip on the glass he’s drying has turned vice-like.

“That one’s on your salary.”

“Agil, c’mon! Let me be cool!”

They bicker for a short minute, Rika being cheeky whereas Agil is composed. The tone of the discussion is more akin to foolish banter between friends than a squabble between a boss and his employee, so Shino allows herself to laugh at it. 

Rika’s shift soon ends and she heads to the ladies’ room to change. As per usual these days, Shino waits for her so they can keep company to one another on the train ride back home. 

*

Yesterday’s commute was much like any other.

The train car shook and rattled against the steel and gravel tracks as the whirls of metal and the passengers’ chatter filled the compartment. The two girls partook in idle chatter, holding onto the same metal pole to keep their balance inside the box car. Shino’s proximity to Rika allowed the girl to filter the blacksmith’s words through the fog of sound.

Shino’s hands scraped against Rika’s on each stop. 

“So, so,” Rika continued telling excitedly, “he destroyed the best sword in my shop! My masterpiece, turned to smithereens.”

Shino let out a horrified gasp in jest.

“Oh, my. I lost my dear Hecate’s scope trying to help him out in BoB. I wonder if we’re liable for some sort of compensation?”

The two nodded in tandem over their two-person class-action lawsuit plans. They broke the comical act when the train stopped at the next station a bit too roughly, bumping them into each other. They couldn’t contain their chuckles at their own silliness.

“Ah, next one’s my stop,” Rika announced.

Shino knew. They’d been sharing this commute for a while. 

“I’ll be seeing you then. Until next time, Rika.”

Shino expected Rika to leave as the train doors opened, but she approached Shino instead. Rika’s arms bundled around Shino’s frame.

It’s a moment that allowed Shino to take note of a small list of Rika Things. Rika is only taller than her by a few inches, but it’s enough that it allowed her chin to rest on Rika’s shoulder slightly. The fake fur on Rika’s coat bristled against Shino’s nose, gentle and irritating— much like Rika herself, she thought. The pressure at the shorter girl’s back where Rika’s slender fingers intertwined was rough, yet fond.

A wave of warmth radiated through Shino’s body. She weakly squeezed Rika back.

“Until next time!” Rika said as she uncoiled her arms from around the other girl. 

She beamed at Shino before hopping through the train doors, waving as she exited at the station. 

That was the first time Rika had ever hugged her. 

Shino’s body wanted to feel elated, but her brain didn’t allow it; the affection in Rika’s gesture got muddled in her spiral of guilty thoughts. Since when did she allow people to get so close? 

Since when did I let myself want that?

The rest of her commute was spent staring out the cart’s window, hoping that the train’s AC would manage to cool down her emotions before long.

**

As the bathroom door slams shut, Agil rests his arms on the counter and leans against it, a hand sitting upon his bald head.

“Can you believe her? I offered her this part-time job because I knew it’d help her with college, but...” He throws his hands out, his fondness for Lis peeking through a smile fighting his scowl. “You know?”

Mm-hmm, Shino nods empathically, as she’s wont to do with Agil. The company that lures her in here, of course, includes both of the bartenders.

She had grown to care for all of her new friends, but she was caught by surprise at how much she related to Agil, of all people. He is the oldest in their merry band of players, by far, and despite that– no, because of that, they got along.

People her age, throughout most of her experience, were uncaring at best and cruel at worst. The adults around her, dry as they could be, served as the closest to good company she had growing up. There’s a bitter taste in her mouth as Shino realizes she’s grown more proficient in talking to adults due to the past cruelty of all the people her age in her life up until very recently. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to wash it down with the sweetness of the cappuccino Rika had mischievously handed her.

Agil, on the other hand, appreciates having a regular other than Asuna with whom he could default to intellectual conversation and wouldn’t call his establishment, ‘a dump’. How did Kirito manage to rope even Silica into it?

As their conversation strays away from Lisbeth’s demeanor, they fall to their more usual topics: Shino asks about how he manages to do latte art so perfectly every time and he asks if she finally reached the fourth chapter of the book he lent to her a couple of days ago. One “final” plea for him to try out Gun Gale, and his unacceptable excuse that he doesn’t have the time.

Mundane topics like that are their speed, but for once,  Shino has something less mundane in her mind. There’s something in that space, with the gentle ambiance music and the calming presence of a wiser friend, that brings her to feel that Agil is the right person, at that time, for those thoughts.

“I think I like Lis,” she professes like a secret she wished wasn’t true. It doesn’t seem to be the meat of what she has to say, judging from the way her jaw clenches.

Agil simply hums. He’d rather talk about latte art.

“Yeah, I figured. I mean, you really started coming here more often once she started working here.” 

He laughs, a wry, good-natured sound, hard to define between his fondness for the girls and his apathy for the topic.

“I mean… yes. But that’s not the point. How do I…”

 Shino gulps. Her gaze turns to the counter in front of her, where her hands lie. She fiddles with her fingers, watching as her thumbs graze each other through their rotations; staring at them without thinking about the words she’s about to say, are the only way she manages to go through it.

“I guess…  I don’t know if I remember how to be around people. Or if it’s... right, for me to be around people?”

She remembers what those hands did; the cold of steel and the heat of gunfire, the maroon of splattered blood and the gray of post office tiles.

Is it okay for a broken person like me…?

Agil would be lying if he said he’s particularly interested in involving himself in the romantic squabbles of teenagers. The other aspect of her plea, though, is something he’s unfortunately familiar with. He ponders, his face a mix of sagely and worried, as the soft thudding of her trembling hands are barely drowned out by the bar’s blues music.

“I was worried, too, back when I had to come back to my life after SAO.”

Shino raises her gaze to Agil’s eyes. 

“I mean, it's not the same thing, but… it’s hard being around people who judge you for what you went through, and trying to make connections when everyone thinks you’re screwed in the head is a pain in the ass. ‘The game where those freaks killed each other.’ ‘The murderer girl’.”

Agil knows what Shino did. Shino told all of them, eventually. 

“But everyone who spent those two years in the flying castle went through a lot of things they shouldn't have had to, and probably did some things they regret. To others. To themselves. I did, Kirito and Asuna did, and so did Rika. We talk about it…” 

His eyes turn to the ladies’ room’s door, where Rika is changing. He decides her past is not his to divulge.

“Uh. I guess all I’m trying to say is that you’re friends with people who get it, because none of us are sure it’ll ever be okay with people. So, we just stick together. I doubt Rika minds… whatever it is you're worried about? I think people like us have little besides each other.”

The last bit sticks with Shino. As she chews on the words once more, she stares at her hands. The weight they carry is impossibly heavy, but if what Agil says is true, then that means others, too, carry the same burden. 

Her trembling ceases.

He pauses. “Or something?” 

He’s not sure how much sense he is making. 

“I’m not sure how much sense I’m making.”

That gets a chuckle out of her, and that’s good enough for him.

*

Rika exits the bathroom, her former bartender-y, formal-ish ponytail from a few minutes ago undone into a mess of brown hair. Her lack of an apron reveals the cute hammer patterns on her graphic shirt.

"Are you two nerds done talking about nerd stuff?" She says, as if not just as much of one.

Agil and Shino roll their eyes.

"Yeah, we’re done with our nerd stuff."

Rika starts sliding her arm into her jacket, then turns to Shino. “Sweet. Are you ready to go then?”

Shino looks at Agil, who simply offers her a friendly wave and a knowing smile.

“Yeah, I think I’m ready.”

*

The two girls walk off together to the train station. The empty night streets give them quiet, with little to focus on other than the sound of boots hitting pavement, the cold breeze, and each other. It’s then when, bashful yet confident, Shino tries to interlock her fingers with Rika’s.

Rika squeezes her hand in return, rough yet fond. 

As Rika wordlessly taps her fingers on Shino’s knuckles, Shino realizes that Agil was right. There’s no way that those hands, fitting so perfectly together, were meant to be apart. Perhaps such heavy hands have no other pairs but each other, and that is fine.

[chibikinesis]

More post-redemption ending ramblings because I have no self control ♥

More from the first visit:

I imagine Sean ends up staying, like... four nights altogether. The first night, and then 3 while his car’s being repaired.

One of those nights, he hears either Jacob or Sarah get up to use the restroom. He opens his eyes when he feels someone pulling the blanket he’s under back over his legs and he smiles. He peeks to find it’s Jake. “Hope you washed your hands.” He jokes. They both chuckle for a few seconds. “Thanks, Jake.” He smiles and nods. “‘Night, Sean.”

Apples. They’ve had some sort of apple dish for each day he’s been staying there. “I’m not complaining, but... what’s with all the apples?” He asks. Sarah explains that just about every time they hit the farmer’s market, one of the vendors always sends them home with a free bag. She usually makes a simple cobbler, fried apples, or homemade applesauce when she and Jake don’t just can them. They’ll often take some of the goodies for said vendor. And probably to their former landlord.

The rest are under a read more because I know myself, and I know this is gonna’ get out of hand.

I already stated it in this short, but Sean helps Sarah clean their chicken coop (and gets to know a bit about their birbs in doing so). He’s a little taken aback when Sarah tells him that’s where their breakfast came from, and that yield is a lot lower in the winter, but the girls worked hard to provide that morning. When Sean finally processes it, he gives them a hearty Good job, ladies. Sean’s just... generally helpful, at least as much as he can be, in those few days.

Jacob and Sarah show him some cooking basics while he’s there, too. Sarah graciously decides she doesn’t have the patience steps down and lets Jake take the driver’s seat. It’s not Sean’s strong suit, but it makes for some entertainment. Jake’s convinced with more time he’ll learn. But for the time being it’s lots of laughter. They all sit around and watch a movie while they eat, and continue to laugh and have a good time. It’s the best night Sean’s had (or allowed himself to have) in a while. Sarah dozes off, and the two of them talk some more. This is when Jake suggests camping sometimes in a few months, when the weather or more agreeable. And sometime during the course of this evening is probably when Sean has his oh no, he’s cute moment.

Which transitions into -

After he takes off in his own direction again, it’s only a few days before Jacob checks in on him. They mostly correspond through messaging, usually multiple times a day, but at each others’ leisure. They do video chat 2 or 3 times a month when everything lines up for both of them and when Sean’s feeling up to it. There’s no pressure to it; Jake doesn’t want him to feel obligated to have mental health talks all the time, either, and treats him as a friend first and foremost, and that eases Sean’s nerves considerably.

Daniel’s very pleased when Sean finally opens up to him about everything, apologizes for the way he shut him out and/or dodged the issues before, and asks if they can try to do this again. Daniel’s more than happy to oblige, and their relationship grows because of it. After not-too-long, they’re back to talking regularly. Sean having not just one, but two healthy outlets helps him immensely.

Daniel, since having been contacted by both Sarah and Jake so they could just casually check in and see how he’s been, messages Jacob to thank him for talking to Sean about everything and inadvertently getting the wheels in motion. They talk in a friendly manner fairly often, but also about Sean’s progress, and it’s not uncommon for Daniel to consult Jacob when he’s at a loss for how to take on certain topics with his brother. But he’s trying.

Lapse about three months, one night (not too far from when they’re tentatively planning their camping trip for), after Sean’s gotten quite used to Jake answering their video calls, they agree to one at ‘eight-ish or later’. Sean is a little jarred when Sarah Lee answers and greets him enthusiastically. “Hope you don’t mind. Jake’ll be here in a couple minutes. He just washed up real fast. I think he was expecting you to call a bit later.” They talk for those few minutes. Sean asks how she’s been, and then how the ladies are doing. She gets a hearty laugh out of it. “You’ll have to come see them again soon!” He’s happy to humor the idea. She gets up when she hears her brother approaching and bades Sean goodbye, just as enthusiastically as she greeted him. Jake fills her vacancy and waves a small hello with an almost nervous half-smile, before he grabs at the towel that’s draped across his shoulders and patted at his still-damp hair. His cheeks are still a little pink from the hot water. This kills the Sean. “Sorry about that. Decided to try to grab a quick shower before you rang. You usually don’t call so early. Everything okay?” He was just a little eager to see your adorable face, Jake. Even if he doesn’t quite realize it yet.

Sean feeling self-conscious for some reason before he heads off towards their place for their camping trip, and giving his beard a proper trim. Too bad he can’t cut that mop of his, too. He heads towards his destination; the game plan is to stay at their place that night, and to leave for camp early the next morning.

Sarah Lee greets him when he gets there. Jake’s at work for a few more hours. She’s pleased to see the bags under his eyes aren’t nearly as noticeable as they were the last time she saw him there, and that she can see more of his face. One thing’s still bugging her, though. She lets him bring in his overnight bag and get settled in before she brings it up though. “You... want a haircut?” He’s skeptical at first. She doesn’t blame him. “Hey, I keep my brother’s mop in check, don’t I?”

Jake comes through the door as she’s about halfway through shaping the top section, hardly paying attention as he shuts and locks the door behind himself. “Looks like Sean’s car outside? Did he make it alright?” He dumps the bag of groceries he had been carrying on the kitchen island and looks up to find them, both looking almost like kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. He goes slack-jawed for a moment. He thought to ask if it was Sean if the tell-tale prosthetic eye and scars didn’t already give it away. Jake breaks out into a relieved, warm smile. “Told you there was still a face under all that hair.” Sarah jokes. But it’s so good to see that face again, especially looking much less haggard than it did the last time Jake had seen it in-person.

Sean grabs a shower after the surprise haircut to rid himself of all the tiny, itchy little hair pieces. He swears he hears at least one more voice join into the chatter while he’s in the bathroom. When he comes out, he finds a very familiar face - and one vaguely familiar one. “Daniel?” His voice breaks through the fog and his little brother makes haste across the room to see him. He’s surprised to see Sean’s face, especially after all of their video calls, and he grabs him up into a warm hug. Sean soon finds out that the other guest is Chris - all grown up - and he feels so much older.

Meanwhile, though he’s really pleased to see all this unfold, Jake is still surprised to see Sean wasn’t lying when he said Daniel outgrew him.

They order pizza that night, and everyone watches a movie, and the house feels so lively and happy, everyone catching up and telling stories and enjoying one anothers’ company. Sean and Sarah Lee and Chris all pass one anothers’ sketchbooks around and validate each other. Sean’s impressed at both of their improvements since the last time he’d seen their works. He praises them for not giving it up.

The night winds down, and the boys retire to an air mattress Jake’s inflated for them, and Sean to his usual spot on the couch. And as usual, Jake makes his rounds to make sure everyone’s cozy enough before retiring to his own bed.

Once they get to the campgrounds, everyone pitches their tents before they set out on any other ventures. It’s a great opportunity for Jake to dust off his camera and take some nice photos. He gets a lot of nice candid shots of everyone, some nice scenic shots, and a few of the wildlife they run into. They make it through about half of the day, and are heading towards an interesting-sounding trail.

Jake’s still in the zone and scoping out nice shots, and he looks ahead at Sean and goodness, what a nice shot that would make; the light is coming through the trees just-so, and good God, he’s smiling for once. A real smile. Jake can’t resist - he calls out to him to catch his attention, and he manages to snag a couple. He looks pleased with himself as he lowers his camera and they exchange looks for a moment before something shifts under him and he loses his footing - a damp pile of leaves, damn it all. His weight shifts awkwardly, and pain surges through him as he rolls his ankle.

Sean doubles back to check on him, and the kids turn to see what the commotion is all about. Jake tries to brush it off, and tough it out, but it’s apparent a hike isn’t a great idea. Sarah pulls out a first aid kit and Sean takes the ace bandage from inside and wraps Jake’s ankle, but it only helps a little. “I’ll take him back to camp so he can ice it and rest.”

“You sure? We can all go back.” Daniel offers. “It’s alright. You guys go have fun. If nothing else we can get a head start on cooking dinner.” Sean chuckles.

A patient, somewhat clumsy trip back to camp, with a few ledges Sean has to help Jake down with his bum ankle, not unlike he had to do with Daniel in years passed. Jake very much having a moment of hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me. Bonus points for a flushed, flustered Jake losing his balance once Sean helps him to the ground, and stumbling into him anyway.

Them finally getting back to camp and Sean making Jake sit and rest while he makes a cold press for him. And gently teasing him, asking, was that shot was worth all that. It’s about an hour before Daniel video calls him to check up. He can see all 3 kids looking concerned, and it makes him smile. He points the phone over at a dejected-looking Jake, sitting in a fold-out chair with his foot elevated and resting on the cooler, his cold press tethered to it with a familiar-looking old green handkerchief. Content he’s doing okay and is in good hands, they go on with their hike.

Sean takes the initiative to start peeling potatoes for dinner. Jake’s clearly not happy with not being able to help, so Sean brings his chair closer. “I guess you can handle potato peeling with a bad ankle. It’s killing you to have someone look after you for a change, isn’t it?” He jokes. He’s not entirely wrong though.

They reminisce on their time back in Humboldt - missing their crew, and reminded of peeling potatoes with Hannah. “It’d be cool to see them all again.”

“I still talk to a couple of them, actually. I didn’t think about writing their contact info down last time you came.” Jake smiles. “Maybe next time we could invite them. Atleast get some of the crew back together, y’know?”

A couple hours later, the kids stroll back into camp. There’s already a fire started and waiting, and Jake’s unfortunate slip-up allowed them to prep dinner quicker. Sarah gives her brother a bit more TLC while Sean, Daniel, and Chris start to cook. They all eat a nice dinner and the three artsy ones end up pulling out their sketchbooks at the picnic table - bouncing ideas off one another and just doodling. 

Sean’s prosthetic starts to bother him, so he goes to the tent to tend to it - he’s glad he brought his eyepatch as a backup. Jake walks in behind him, looking for his bag, and is taken aback when he sees Sean pull the piece of acrylic out of his socket. “Ohhh my goodness-” Jake quickly covers his mouth. It’s somehow more hurtful than it should be to Sean (it feels like a blow to his self esteem - especially coming from Jake), and when it shows on his face, Jake quickly backpedals. He waves his hands dismissively. “N-no, no, it... the eye doesn’t bother me, Sean, that was just a bit... jarring to walk into. I’m sorry.”

His words only somewhat ease Sean’s concerns.

“Is it... bothering you?” Jake asks, leaning a bit closer to get a better look.

“Yeah, I’m still getting used to it. It gets pretty itchy sometimes. And I can’t really give it a proper cleaning out here.” He puts it into what Jake assumes is a special case for it. He reaches into his bag to retrieve a couple of swabs and a bottle of cleaner, before he looks incredibly annoyed with himself. He forgot one thing.  “Ah, shit, I forgot a mirror. It’s not impossible, but... damn it...”

He supposed he could do it blind. He can do it without a mirror, he just prefers to have one. He could go do it in one of the car mirrors - “Do you... want some help?” Jake asks.

It catches Sean off guard, but God, does it surely ease that blow to confidence he’d just taken (which he admits was his own fault). He half-shrugs, but he nods. “Y-yeah, if you want to. It’s kinda’ gross if you’re not used to it.”

“I already told you I don’t mind.” Jake smiles. This, too, kills the Sean. “Do I just soak the swab and... swipe it around in there?”

Sean talks him through cleaning his eye socket, and there’s something so comforting in having him so close and so not-grossed-out by what he’d just seen, or by being the one to swab it out. Jake whines about hoping he cleaned it well enough, and Sean can only laugh. You’re the fussy big brother, I’m sure you did fine. He takes a piece of gauze to dry up the bit of cleaning solution that had trickled its way out and he smiles back at Jake meaningfully. 

Daniel (having been able to see it all unfold because the tent entrance was unzipped and the flaps pulled back) probably yelling something about dropping the makeout session and coming back out by the fire, much to both of their <///< 

Coming back out and seeing all 3 kids smirking at them.

Jake limping around (though not as severely as he was earlier) taking more photos 😂

About a week later, Jake messages Sean to Let me know when your anchor’s deployed for a bit, somewhere I can ship stuff, okay? Got some stuff I want to send to your way :) And him being so happy to hear he’s with Karen again for a bit. 

When Sean gets the package, it’s a nice-sized stack of photos from the camping trip that he’ll be all too exited to show Karen (and to tell her who took them all), some snack type food, and a new hardbound sketchbook, and nice-looking mechanical pencil. It makes his stomach feel warm and fuzzy.

As he tabs through the photos, he checks the back for any notes, finding some in Jake’s hardly-improved scrawl, and it brings a smile to his face. But he gets to one and he’s taken aback for a moment - it feels familiar. It’s a photo of him, and it’s a nice one. Not necessarily from a portrait sort of perspective, but the composition, and the colors, and the lighting, and, hey, it wasn’t particularly unflattering on him, either. Too bad he bit it right after he took it. Sean chuckled, but he still felt bad for Jake that day. He flipped it over to see if there were any notes for him, and he found one that made his cheeks darken.

“This shot actually was worth the twisted ankle :P”

-

And that’s all for tonight! ♥

[yeahyeahbaby]

Finished my first game and game jam!

Link to my game Ahh, Crabs! I realized that I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I would write about finishing my first game and game jam, and what my next plans are.  Get ready for a fucking novel lol. 

I entered the I Can't Draw But Want To Make A Game (Again)  game jam because I wanted to make a game. Before starting the jam, I’d thought about game development and 3D modeling on and off for about a year, but hadn’t started any projects. Last summer, I’d watched BlenderGuru’s series and made a render of a doughnut which was cool and did a few tutorials on the Unity learn site, but I didn’t do anything with those newly developed skills and eventually forgot most of what I’d learned.  I’m currently 24, going to be 25 in August, and I think a lot about how I spend my time, am I on the right path, what do I want out of life, etc. All of the big existential anxiety inducing questions. I work as a front-end web developer, its a great job, but I know that I don’t want to do web development forever.  Anyway, I’d recently started thinking about game development, and wanted to try committing myself again. Game development presents the opportunity for me to create something that combines all of my interests. Art, music, technology, story telling, world building, animation, etc. It’s also appealing to me because being an indie developer means being an entrepreneur. I know that I want a life where I’m my own boss. I want to decide what projects I work on and what takes priority. I want to build a creative life where I can support myself financially from my work.  I thought about how this time could be different from a year ago where I tried to get into game development, but never committed. I started off slow by creating small assets with MagicaVoxel while I tried to come up with ideas. This is when I remembered that game jams were a thing.  I found the game jam (not going to keep typing the name cuz its long as hell lol) on itch.io and was hesitant to enter. I was afraid of starting and committing to something only to let myself down when I didn’t finish.  I’d recently started journaling and was writing about this fear that I had. I realized as I was writing that I was stopping myself from trying something because of fear. That’s when I decided to commit to entering.  The great thing about game jams is that they take place over a set period of time and you’re usually given some kind of parameters. This was EXTREMELY helpful to me because I was able to quickly come up with an idea for the game. I knew that I only had two weeks to finish. Not two full weeks because of course I work full time and have other home chores to do. Plus ya girl likes to relax and watch anime ( I think at the time I was actually reading Hana Yori Dango aka Boys Over Flowers uwu).  So being given a set time period helped me to plan a semi-realistic scope for the game.  So I started to work on the game! I had a lot of fun making silly art and music. Because the mechanics of my game were also SUPER simple, I could easily find tutorials for everything that I wanted to implement. Even with the tutorials, I still had small hiccups as I worked my way around Unity and C#, but I was never stuck for more than a few hours.  Things were going great! And then.... I stopped working on the game.  I think I didn’t work on the game for like 4-5 days?? I got off track because of some personal stuff that I had to deal with. Once it was handled, I didn’t immediately get back to work. I wasn’t really motivated anymore and I was running out of time. I felt like I had wasted time already, I wasn’t going to make the deadline so why FUCKING TRY *sobs*.  BUT! Once again, journaling saved the day again lol.  I was writing about these feelings and saw how stupid I sounded. Why TF am I giving up before the jam ends???? BITCH!!!  So I got back to work.  I think at this point I had like 3-4 days left?? Something like that. I worked my butt off , literally until the deadline. I was rushing like crazy, super determined to finish. I was keeping up with a Trello board of things I wanted to add to the game, but a lot of things had to get cut. For example, the help button, a pause game function, cleaning up the mechanics, also wanted to add some pre-game comics, etc. BUT thankfully I was able to prioritize the absolute must haves to make the game playable and shippable lol.  So, the deadline was 12am CST Friday. 11:59pm CST rolled around. And I’m still waiting for my build so I can upload it. 12am came and it was too late. I didn’t make it. I was literally sobbing. I don’t remember the last time I cried so much. I was just feeling super emotional. I had a long day at work, just spent the last 8 hours crunching to finish my game to submit to the game jam, and even though it was finished, in the moment I felt like a failure because I couldn’t submit it to the jam. I know it may sound silly, like BITCH you did the thing! You made a game! You reached your goal! Buuuut I was still feeling like shit lol.  The build finished and I uploaded it it itch.io. I was sniffling around the discussion board on the jam’s page, feeling sorry for myself, and decided to post a link to my game and let everyone know that Hey! I finished this game but couldn’t submit it in time. pls check it out *sobs* WELL! Many blessings came my way, the creator of the jam was sending unique submission links to people who missed the deadline a little! They saw my post and sent me a submission link. Of course I submitted that hoe so fucking quick lmaooo  A wave of relief washed over my exhausted shriveled body. It was time for celebration and sleep because a bitch had to go to work the next day.  I’m so thankful for this experience. I saw something that I wanted to do, I committed, almost QUIT, BUT PUSHED THROUGH AND REACHED MY GOAL!  I feel so much confidence in myself and my ability to pursue and finish my creative projects, whatever they may be.  SO WHAT’S NEXT BITCH???? Well, thank you for asking uwu I’m going to make another game! This time, not part of a jam so I have to keep myself super accountable. I want to make a game where I can learn and experiment with dialogue, camera movement, art, and sound design. I think I’ve settled on an idea but need to give it some more thought before I commit and reveal the idea.  I’m hoping for about 30-45 minutes of game play?? And I want to work on this project for 6 months, so pretty much the rest of 2020. Might as well keep myself busy while the world burns :/ If anyone is reading this and made it this far, wow, i’m impressed. I wouldn’t have read this much lol I think I’m going to make a youtube video on this topic?? I mean, if I can write a novel about it might as well talk about it on youtube. It can be my first dev-log-ish type video for the yeahyeahbaby channel (that has yet to be created lol) Okay. Bye-bye now. 

[queeragainsthumanity]

I'd like to say you know who you are but you're too self-involved for it to click

Heres a list of things you do that you should really really stop:

1. Fetishizing queer people

2. Appropriating stories, experiences, and language from queer, poc, and fat people when you are cishet, white, and skinny. Actually just stop making stuff up in general thx

3. Infantilizing queer ppl. I don't want to hear how that trans or gay person is "SUCH A SWEETHEART OMG"

4. Changing the scope of your life narrarive to somehow be queer and outcast-y and how you TOTALLY understand what we go through and you basically have been through the same thing. Ie: not believing in bisexuality but now that it's "in" talking about how you've had bi BEST FRIENDS every year growing up??? (If you knew anything about bisexuality you'd realize it's never "in") or working at a summer camp that catered to all types of children and just because there was a one week long trans and gnc group you say you volunteered at a "trans camp"...UMM?? Just stop editing your stories to seem like you're so active in the lgbtq+ community when ??? You literally have the most problematic views of us?

5. Saying that you give off lesbian pheromones and that every lesbian you encounter is attracted to you and hits on you. And don't make up stories about how a lesbian was aggressively flirting with you at a bar?? First off, ew. Secondly, this is problematic because it capitalizes on the predatory narrative assigned to lesbians by the media and is straight up harmful. You are not a poor innocent straight girl being seduced by the big bad gay tm. Lastly, constantly talking about how lesbians are attracted to you does NOT make you a better ally, does NOT make you fit in better with your queer friends, and is NOT okay.

6. Assigning pronouns without permission. That gender-questioning person you worked with? Who said they wanted to be a man but started crying and didn't like when you used he/him/his pronouns? Did they ASK you to use he/him pronouns? No? Don't. Fucking. Assume. You weren't being a proactive ally, you were being presumptuous and shouldn't have made it about you and how confused YOU were about why it upset them. Because ??? Of course???

7. Forcing items usually considered gendered on trans people of the opposite gender. For example, pushing feminine jewelry etc on a trans guy who was obviously super uncomfortable and was trying to say no thank you in 50 different ways. (You know that chat you were so mad about? One of the things we talked about was how to refuse the gift without hurting YOUR feelings.) Or how you were pushing me to try your new make up when I first came out as gnc and found it really dysphoria inducing and despite saying no several times and our other friend who saw how uncomfortable I was ALSO telling you to stop, you kept PUSHING.

8. You considering yourself an ally doesn't make you one. And being an ally doesn't make you an unfalliable. Be accountable. Ie: when you misgendered me OVER AND OVER AND OVER again and instead of just a short sorry and moving on you prattle on about how long you've known me as a GIRL and how hard it is for YOU etc etc etc EVERY SINGLE TIME. Until it wasn't worth it for me to correct you anymore.

9. Thinking of yourself as some-type-of-queer because you're a girl who is also attracted to trans guys. TRANS GUYS ARE GUYS. IF YOU'RE A GIRL WHO LIKES GUYS YOU, MY ONCE FRIEND, ARE STRAIGHT. Don't put masexual in your bio when A. You are attracted to men only and not anyone else who may fall into the larger scope of masculinity. B. That is a term meant for and coined by nonbinary ppl to use. C. It has been explained to you why you shouldn't use it. And D. You agreed to the reasoning and agreed that you weren't masexual. - I have the screenshots-

10. Saying how EASILY you could pass for a guy if you wanted to and how you could just bind and no one would know and rambling on about it for god knows how long when. 1.you're cis. 2. You know I can't fucking bind for long periods of time if at all since my ribs are so fucked and you talking about how easy it would be for you is dysphoria inducing and just ignorant. 3. Binding is fucking hard. You have never binded a day in your life. Stop lying. 4. Saying you could pass as a guy does not make you trans or queer in any way.

11. Refuse to date a trans guy because you're afraid he'll "use you as a crutch while he transitions" That's both ableist *and* transphobic dear.

12. Using the phrase "fully-transitioned". Especially to gatekeep who is trans and who isn't. Once a trans person comes out they're the gender they say they are. Full stop. All trans ppl are trans. Even if we haven't gone on hormones and haven't gotten any surgery. Even if we never do.

13. Sharing pictures of me and my then new girlfriend in discord and talking about how CLOSE the three of us were. Proximity to queerness doesn't make you so. Also don't share people's business without their explicit permission other ppls interesting stories don't make you more interesting.

14. Trying to buy friendships. Gifts don't make your problematic behavior less problematic or harmful. They don't make your actions more excusable.

15. Equating polyamory to cheating. Like I can't even with how at odds I am with your problematic ish.

16. Making queer the cool new thing to be. You want our rainbow flags and camaraderie and stories. You want to be different and special from the "norm". But that's the only part you want. You want to be a convenience queer, cishet except in safe groups where you want to talk about how different and outstanding you are.

You wear us like a jacket you can put on and take off at your leisure. OUR IDENTITY IS NOT AN ADORNMENT. It is a part of us we carry ALL THE TIME. When our clubs are being shot up, when we are called f*ggots in the street, when we are having our rights taken away, when we are politicised and conceptualized as if we aren't even people, when we don't feel at home in our countries or our bodies, when we are being leered at and asked by too-loud-breathing men if they can join us in bed...

I could keep going forever. I'm still in those chats even if I don't have the spoons to talk to anyone, even though I don't feel welcome anymore. I know your stories. I've seen your lies. I could have jumped in so many times and been like "that never happened" or "actually that's my story and that happened to me" but it didn't seem worth it. You were never cheated on (that was me), you've never had 3 jobs (me), no one asked you to be a nsfw instagrammer (that was my gf planning to be one herself) and on and on and on.

This was supposed to be a vague call out post but I've never been subtle a day in my life. You can't contest any of this. I have the screenshots hun so come at me if you want.

I decided tumblr would be the void I'd scream my outrage into.

Also how dare you make the tragedy of someone losing her father about you. How dare you share details about their lives with strangers when she asked us all to keep it private. And how dare you embellish it with made up details to make you seem more interesting. That was the line.

[arofili]

legolas or celebrimbor??

celebrimbor doesn’t have a tumblr, he made that shit. he and narvi are @staff.

(well. they were @staff…)

leg …. pre fellowship

their blog url

green-leaves-in-a-green-forest

(or something equally long and horrendously hyphenated and fake poetic)

the kind of posts they reblog

random shit he finds amusing

like, cat pictures and social justice posts from 2013

no theme at all

i would never follow him

the first person they followed

tauriel

she convinced him to get a tumblr because of the memes

a year later, she regrets this immensely

she matured and has a better blog that she doesn’t even use much

legolas is the exact same.

what kind of theme they’d have

tumblr default theme

what kind of text posts they make at 2am

he will wake up in the middle of the night and post about the dreams he just had, but without any context

“made some chocolate milk with the lady who pulls the sun. tasted like weed. also, that one girl who i thought i had a crush on in 3rd grade was there. awkward.”

“sweating so much!! just ran a marathon with my dad while we were being chased by oliophaunts. the racetrack turned into a river halfway through. we won!!”

he thinks he’s funny

(he’s not.)

leg …… during fellowship

their blog url

he privated his blog for the first part of the journey because he thought it would be safer

after a few weeks he gets bored and starts liveblogging this shit

at that point his url becomes “fellowshipoftheleg”

his blog title is “Eight Idiots And A Gorgeous Elf Save The World”

“Hello! My name is Legolas Greenleaf. I am currently on a quest to save the world. The details are ~secret~ but I needed a place to vent so here we go. My companions are all idiots, except for me. My interests include….”

you know the type of subtitle i’m talking about.

the kind of posts they reblog

he basically stops reblogging and only makes original posts during this period of time

the liveblog

legolas had >300 followers before this, but his posts about his journey start to gain traction

his liveblog is pretty much petty complaints at first

he talks shit about gimli

he cracks “jokes” about boromir

(again. he’s not funny)

he reports on the weird stuff gandalf does

he gushes over the adorable hobbits

(until one day he accidentally bumps into frodo and sam tries to jump him.

he’s a little afraid of them after that.)

he quotes aragorn like there’s no tomorrow

some of these are like, actually deep

most of them sound like stuff from inspirobot

or they’re stupid inside jokes

everyone gets code names, cuz legolas isn’t that stupid

gandalf is “old man”

aragorn is “the bro”

boromir is “angstlord”

the hobbits go through tons of nicknames

“itty bitties”

“curly boys”

tiny monsters

eventually they get their own, but by that point the fellowship has split

gimli is “asshole dwarf”

after a few weeks… he becomes weirdly popular.

his story reads like a trollfic, with stupid plot twists and bizarre anecdotes

this mostly is anecdotes, not the full scope of the quest

he mostly makes text posts, with a few pictures here and there

every now and then he’ll post a snapshot of the fellowship roasting marshmallows

or a selfie of him in lothlorien

or a sneaky pic of him drawing dicks on boromir’s face while he’s asleep

he used to be low-profile, but shit’s gone whack.

he’s gaining hundreds of followers a day

his top post has half a million notes.

he’s a tumblr “cewebrity”

everyone on tumblr thinks this is just a story, not real life

people dig through his old posts looking for clues and foreshadowing

they’re baffled by the dedication the mod of the blog has to building up this “legolas” character

or they’re puzzled by the mod’s decision to turn this shit blog into a dedicated storytelling platform

legolas is bombarded with asks and @ mentions

but like…this bitch don’t actually know how to use this website.

he can make a post and reblog one

but that’s literally it

he’s the kind of blogger who leaves stupid captions on popular posts

he can’t figure out how tags work

he’s never heard of xkit

all his asks go unanswered

he’s only sort of aware of what’s going on

he’s blogging 100% from mobile, which makes it even worse

the Legolas Fandom goes buckwild

there is not enough time in the day to over it all

ship wars.

fan theories.

headcanon drama.

it’s a mess.

and again, legolas has no clue that this is going on.

when he catches feelings for gimli…things get insane.

he writes gushy, cringy, angsty posts about gimli

he posts pics of gimli with flower crowns

he composes bad poetry about gimli

the fan base is infuriated.

they’d all been shipping him with aragorn.

and like, no one in the fellowship has a fucking clue this is happening.

at least, not until they get to 

it’s ironic that Isolated Horseblr User eowyn is the first one to recognize legolas

she finally gets up the courage to ask him about it

“has someone been stealing your selfies, or…?”

he is astonished.

if Leg could, he’d shut down the whole thing

even if eowyn had wanted to help him do that, he’s just in too deep

he’s in this for the long haul.

now, Legolas starts to make shit up.

that’s when his popularity tanks.

he’s getting callouts

he’s everyone’s “problematic fav”

people dig through his blog to find dirt instead of clues

Legolas is more aware of this now, and he pouts for days

then gimli, a Twitter-Only lad, finally sees a masterpost explaining everything

he connects the dots way quicker than anyone else did

and oh fuck.

he’s frantically tweeting–

“wtf do i do??”

“i think i’m the asshole dwarf??”

“but he’s like in love with the asshole dwarf now??”

“oh my god, my crush likes me back??”

“has he been liveblogging EVERYTHING??”

eventually he deletes it all and decides to confront legolas

the leg boy caves under pressure and spills the beans.

they figure their personal shit out

of course, aragorn knew everything all along.

at least, that’s what he says

gimli takes over the liveblog for a day and everyone goes nuts.

together, he and leg decide that they’ve got to end this fake-ish story

even though they don’t know the ending of the real one.

for someone who’s never used it before, gimli picks up tumblr etiquette quickly

and on mobile. that’s a whole nother level of perseverance.

he starts streamlining shit, collecting information, making use of fan masterposts

he ties all the loose ends together

with a little bit of help from legolas to make it suitably weird, they close the story strong with a bang and a kiss.

aragorn finds their version of events…amusing.

after the real dust settles and the news stories about the Real Quest hit the press…

now legolas is a Real Actual Celebrity

his fans new and old start to see…similarities between the two stories

plagiarism?

insider info?

conspiracy?

coincidence?

no one can decide.

leg ………… post fellowship

their blog url

Legolas has three blogs now.

“fellowshipoftheleg” is kept as an archive. he doesn’t post there anymore.

he has a secret personal blog, “greenwood-gossip”, that he just posts random shit on like before.

and finally he has a Real Life Famous Person Tumblr Blog, “legolasgreenleaf”

the kind of posts they reblog

with the help of gimli and tauriel, he figures out how to actually use this website.

like most celeb blogs this one doesn’t post much

but he does reblog edits of himself and of his friends

every time he’s asked about fellowshipoftheleg he answers that he is not responsible for it and has no idea about it and would you all please stop asking about it.

the first person they followed

aragorn’s new Famous Person account.

this blog is deactivated after two months because he never uses it.

what kind of theme they’d have

something that should be really classy but with awkward shades of green

like, it had potential but again…legolas has a terrible eye for design

what kind of text posts they make at 2am

he doesn’t usually make original posts

but sometimes he’ll complain about gimli’s weird habits

and once - just once - he confessed that he was the one who ran that liveblog all those years ago

he deleted the post an hour later, but there were screenshots.

legolas is the Ultimate Troll.

[tom-wilson]

the Long Awaited (???) dhGate.com Jersey review-ish..

So I just realized that I kinda promised a review after I actually ordered and received my jersey. For all those who wanted a review and all the anons who expressed interest. So here goes...

I ended up getting Tom’s home jersey (I know, big surprise there Jess) and was pleasantly surprised with what I received. I was worried about wonky stitches, awkward or skewed patches, or any other obvious (to a jersey noob like me, anyway) imperfections. 

Granted there may be something that I cannot see or something that if put side-by-side, you would see a difference. But next to the jerseys that my family has and judging by pictures (even though that’s usually no good, so why bother?), I can’t see anything embarrassing or obvious about it. So, if you’re like me then I would recommend trying the site out and ordering a jersey or two. 

A couple of the main complaints with the site...

1) *elitist prick voice* the jerseys won’t be completely authentic, you know that right?!??

Honestly, the only true authentic jersey is the one that soaks up the sweat on Tom’s back. Soooooo...you and I are in the same boat buddy. But I know what you mean and as a poor college graduate/ hockey fan, as much as I would love to have the real deal it’s not in the cards right now. I still wanna show my love for my boys in #ALLCAPS, so until the planets all align under the house of Aquarius or whatevs this will have to do. And you know what? It does a great job of being a jersey and is more than worth the price I’ve paid. So if there are imperfections and a color is off by a shade or two, I’m fine with it. As long as I can show my team pride, then I’m good.

2) SLAVE LABOR!!!!!!! hurdurrrrrrrrrr!!!dangerous site!!!derrrrrrrrr

From what I can gather the site is pretty safe. Granted it’s not Amazon or another such American company but it’s not the butt of all evil the some of y’all made it out to be. I did research the company itself and found no ties to slave labor or other any criminal activity anywhere. It’s just a China-based wholesale website that is a bit unknown to those of us in the US. Some other companies *cough*H&M*cough*ASOS*cough*Levi’s*cough* have some explaining to do, however in regards to their practices. 

In conclusion, this site isn’t perfect but for me, it doesn’t have to be 100% perfect. I’m not saying that I wouldn't or don’t want an authentic feeling jersey or that I wouldn’t want to support the NHL, that’s not the case. For someone who is getting back into watching hockey, becoming a fan all over again this jersey does it’s job and does it well. 

If you’re like me, and just starting to get into the game (and maybe you have a few hundred players you love too), go ahead and peruse the selection on the site and shop around. 

And before I finish this off, I’ll leave you guys with some tips/ things to think about while you shop on dhgate.com...

Scope out a few different sellers/ posts to make sure you’re getting the best deal: check the reviews and transactions and make sure you feel comfortable with each. 

Try to look for 100+ transactions and high ratings when weighing out your options.

Each post should have a size chart (at least, all the posts that I viewed, did) for you to refer to

You may have to forfeit your favorite player or take a gamble on the jersey. What I mean is, that the MOST popular players will have a higher number of transactions and better reviews simply because they are popular so more people will be interested in purchasing their jerseys. For example, there are still posts/ sellers selling John Carlson jerseys but his jersey will not have as many reviews (or reviews at all) on the transaction as an Ovi jersey would. So buying his jersey is doable but more of a gamble because of the lack of reviews and lack of people buying it. Less assurance that it will be the right product.

Double and triple check the options for your jersey. Most seller’s posts will have options for you to select. (these options will not have any bearing on the price) These options include, but are not limited to, sizes (men’s, women’s, youth), patch options (championship/ finals/ playoffs, team specific, NHL 100 years), home vs. away vs. Winter Classic etc...

Finally look at more than one post and be ready to weigh your options. Don’t immediately go to the cheapest post, remember to look at the reviews and transactions and the options offered to make sure (as you would with an Amazon order) you are 1000% comfortable with ordering.

Hope this helps!

~Jess

[basket-of-radiants]

(Opinions on jasnah and if she's like.... a good person)

Whether she’s a good person or not is up to you my friend! Jasnah follows a much more utilitarianist set of ethics than most of the other characters. I usually tend to think that’s a good trait for authority figures, so long as they’re genuine about their beliefs. Sometimes the moral implications of the action itself are less important than the impact of said action.

Typically it is the more antagonist-ish characters who follow “greater good” policies, such as Amaram and Taravangian (although I still have no idea what he’s doing,) but I would be wary of dismissing that line of thinking altogether. There’s honestly nothing wrong with focusing on the wider scope and consequences of one’s decisions, and in fact, I would consider that admirable. After all, Jasnah is a reigning monarch who does have to consider sacrifice and what that means. Wartime ethics are a bitch and tough calls are going to have to be made. I’m not defending it outright; this line of thinking becomes very dangerous when you give yourself license to do anything and commit whatever atrocities you like in the name of the greater good. There’s no objective way to determine at what point you’re doing more harm than good, though.

For me, the question of Jasnah isn’t whether I agree with her values or not, it’s about whether or not I trust her to recognize when she’s going too far.

There are a lot of reasons not to trust her. She’s not the most empathetic person ever (although I do think she’s more emotionally driven than she or anyone else would care to admit) and I wouldn’t exactly call her kind. She’s a goal-oriented person, very driven and focused, so I could see her caring less about what’s right along the way than about getting her results. (She did swear “journey before destination” though, so I should probably believe in her more there.) Her stubbornness is also an issue; I don’t think she’s the type to ignore new evidence because it doesn’t fit her worldview perse, but she is definitely resistant.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Yes, she suggested that all the parshmen be destroyed. If that upset you or made you uncomfortable, you’re not wrong to feel that way. If that pissed you off and made you dislike Jasnah as a person, you’re not wrong to feel that way. I personally don’t find hers a defensible position. I obviously feel very different about all this, but as long as I’m writing this as a focus on Jasnah’s character, I guess I should do my best to explain. I always feel like I have to note that Alethi values are very very different from mine, and Dalinar and the others had already been waging genocide war on the parshendi for years. Compared to vengeance, I would call survival of humanity a somewhat more worthy cause. And Jasnah did have reasons for her opinions. Whether or not Jasnah cared at all about the common singers, her view was that were they to engage the Fused, all of the others would end up just becoming bodies for them. If that’s the case then there’s nothing that could be done for the common singers anyway, unless they were willing to just let the Fused win and not fight back. (Side note, the Fused provide a lot of other interesting dilemmas in of themselves about tactics and morals.) The only solution other than fighting back is negotiating. While I do expect to see more of that in the future, I can understand why at the time Jasnah was skeptical about that as an option. After all of her research, after having seen Dalinar’s visions, she had a particular idea of what Voidbringers were.

I want to address the singers first and just say that I really don’t believe that Jasnah is still interested in killing them. Yes, advocating for that at that meeting was a really shitty thing, but going forward I expect different from her. She seemed just as shaken as anyone to learn that the singers had been the original natives of Roshar, and while there was probably too much going on at the time for us to watch fully how she reacted, I assume she took a lot of time afterwards to reexamine her worldviews. If you’ll remember from Way of Kings, philosophy and the study of ethics is deeply important to Jasnah. Given all the information she has now, I don’t think she would be able to justify throwing away the singers for the sake of the humans anymore.

If she can view the singers as people as well and accept them into her bigger picture, I’d think I’d be able to trust her. She’s painstakingly careful and analytical, and I would like to think she would never make a major decision without fully thinking it through. In the past, from what I can tell, she hasn’t especially prioritized any one group over others (except for her immediate family,) she’s mostly been interested in understanding and furthering society and scholarship overall, and as such is respected everywhere. If the singers can be part of that, who knows?

More broadly than that, there’s a reason I have faith in Jasnah’s utilitarianism significantly more than I’d have for someone else’s, such as Amaram’s. I’ve mentioned “the greater good” a lot in this post, but Jasnah genuinely seems less concerned with that than she seems concerned with “doing the right thing.” She doesn’t take actions and justify them with her philosophy, she deeply examines her philosophy and then lets it inform her actions. I’m not as worried that she’ll get so caught up in her own workings she’ll lose sight of the right thing.

Just some more stuff on her as a person, people talk a lot about the scene with her and Renarin, and I haven’t. I don’t think it singlehandedly redeems her, nor do I think that if she had killed Renarin it would have singlehandedly condemned her. The scene is a demonstration, however, that she does allow her humanity to inform her actions. Not just in that scene, throughout the series she has shown that she cares about other people more than she’s willing to show. She’s shown to be forgiving, to welcome legitimate arguments against her, and to have faith that people will do what’s right of their own accords.

So! Still not going to answer if she’s a good person or not, but I’m definitely willing to give her a chance. I predict that she’ll make a lot of hard calls along the way that will leave a bad taste in my mouth. I can tell you with certainty that other characters have already done the same. Whatever happens, I do believe she’s trying to do good. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

[sol1056]

There's mary sue protags but are their mary sue villians

Well, if you look at it in terms of symptoms, there’s a lot of overlap between antagonists (villains) and mary-sue-like protagonists (what I call coddled characters). There are several ways you might end up with this impression: story structure, characterization, and writerly manipulation.

There’s a lot more moving parts than I’m going into here, but hopefully this will make sense. Let me know if it doesn’t. Medium-length, so behind a cut.

the try/fail cycle

This is usually the long middle stretch of a story, where our hero tries this, it doesn’t work, so they try that, and that doesn’t work, either. They keep going through setbacks but learning each time until eventually they can bring it all together and win. 

Here’s how that try/fail cycle looks across a lot of fiction:

protagonist at status quoantagonist acts - protagonist reacts, failsantagonist acts again- protagonist reacts, failsantagonist acts again- protagonist reacts and wins

You can probably see the biggest problem: the protagonists aren’t just reactionary. They’re downright passive. The antagonist has agency – is pushing the story – all over the place, while the protagonists are flailing along behind.

(Keep in mind when done right, the try/fail can be hugely satisfying to readers, as we get to see the protagonist struggle and learn.)

One hallmark of a coddled character is they push the story forward, often to the detriment of other characters: they get the brilliant ideas, they have all the knowledge and skills, they get the moments of awesome. The result is their ‘fail’ is softer because their ‘try’ wasn’t as difficult. 

Another hallmark is where the character wins – even at points they should be failing. It’s a sign the writer likes the character too much, and doesn’t want them losing all the time. (Actually, you should: it’s part of the ramping up required to defeat a worthwhile antagonist.) 

That means the protagonist is getting a try/succeed cycle – which is pretty much the antagonist’s role. After all, if an antagonist is worth defeating, then they need to win frequently and show they’re a formidable obstacle.

So you could say the ‘mary sue’ label is being applied in the wrong direction: that too-active, try/succeed makes for a bad protagonist (mary sue), but at the same time, it also makes for a good antagonist. 

deep characterization

If I can loosely define ‘mary-sue-like’ as: a character who warps the story into being All About Them… then antagonists are already kind of mary-sue-ish by definition. They usually provoke the inciting incident (that breaks the status quo and begins the story), they frequently hold most (or all) of the cards, they’re constantly acting, and for a chunk of the story, everything is focused on ‘what is the villain doing/planning’. 

Which means it’s awfully easy for a writer to get caught up in creating an antagonist that’s interesting enough to power at story that’s (at least in function) All About Them. Except the story should be about the protagonists. I mean, that’s why they’re the heroes, right? They’re our focus, our entry-point into the story. If they’re not contributing anything, then just make the antagonist the hero of their own story and ditch the protagonists.

(Which incidentally, I have at least two published friends who did exactly that, in the course of their early drafts. The now-protagonists began as really interesting antagonists.)

This is also where motivation comes into play. There is honestly little more boring than a villain whose only motivation is to ‘do bad things’. (This is actually why I always found, and still found, Zarkon pretty boring. His motivation has never amounted to much more than ‘I am the emperor, therefore I conquer’.) The only thing more boring is a hero whose motivation is only ‘do the right thing’. 

When a character is mostly reactive (as protagonists can end up being if they’re not proactive about their try/fail cycles), then the attention gets poured on the antagonist, instead. They’re the ones acting, after all: why are they acting? Why now? How did they get here? What do they want out of this? 

If the writer can’t control the scope (and our attention), the antagonist’s characterization will unfold, growing more complicated as the story digs into those questions. A protagonists’ scenes will feel flat, in contrast, and the story will only come ‘alive’ when the antagonist is on the page, because they’re the ones with an explorable mystery, they’re pushing things, making things happen. 

manipulation for sympathy

When a writer (for whatever reason) just likes one character the most – finds them more intriguing (aka the interesting villain syndrome), resonates with them, has significant personal investment in them, whatever – there’s a tendency to unconsciously tilt the story so that character keeps the reader’s sympathy. 

The easiest (and cheapest) way to invoke sympathy lies in trauma. I’ve got a post in the works on backstories, but a characterization that lies in a complicated emotional backstory can be a neon sign the writer wants to evoke audience sympathy. It’s the ‘he’s not evil, it’s because his parents abused him’ or the ‘she’s justified, she was the victim of rape’ or whatever cheap shot is supposed to make the readers love (or at least excuse) this character as uncritically as the writer does. 

Once a writer goes down that path, it’s really hard to pull back without significant rewrites. If the other characters also fall into line, changing their own actions to react/consider the coddled character, then we’re moving deeper into MS-like territory. That character is literally warping the story to be All About Them. If the other characters do not fall into line, however, it’ll divide the audience as they pick sides in the character battle royale. 

Take Keith’s departure from the team, in VLD. Viewers who resonate with Keith will see the team’s rejection as unwarranted or simply cruel, and are likely to want the team to suffer consequences for their actions, not Keith. But viewers who don’t resonate with Keith will want him to suffer the consequences of any fallout, instead.  

Throw that onto the larger scope of protagonist-vs-antagonist. If audience sympathy is tilted towards the Misunderstood Antagonist, viewers are going to find the final try/succeed resolution (in the protagonist’s favor) as horribly unjust. They’re going to rethink/retcon for their favored character to avoid what feels like unfair consequences. 

In other words, sometimes mary-sue-ness is created between the writer and the audience. The writer has set up strong manipulation to tilt audience sympathy, and the audience’s reaction is to warp their interpretation of the story around that one character (or against it, as the case may be). And if it’s the antagonist who got that strong sympathy – and you as the viewer don’t resonate with the antagonist – then you’re more likely to see the antagonist as a mary sue.  

[traciedemars]

Fees & Costs of Buying a Home Upcoming Free (& non-promotional) Home Buyer Classes:   ...we also have home seller classes available.  Link on left on website page Saturday, January 26th, from 11am-2pm (ish) ​       Vancouver YMCA, conference room       11324 NE 51st Circle, Vancouver WA (corner of SR500 & Gher Road/112th Ave). Saturday, February 2nd, from 9am-12pm (ish)       Marshall Community Center, conference room       1009 E. McLoughlin Blvd, Vancouver WA (kitty corner from Clark College) Saturday, February 16th, from 12pm-3pm (ish) ​       Vancouver YMCA, conference room       11324 NE 51st Circle, Vancouver WA (corner of SR500 & Gher Road/112th Ave If these class dates and/or times don't work for you, please let us know.  We understand that you have lives, and families, and work.  We will work something out that works better with your schedule.  Just let us know....                                                        Remember...with reservation...we will throw in lunch, or dinner!  :-D ~~~~~~~~~ Happy 2019~  Now that we are 2 weeks into the new year we can start to get a 'feel' for what this year is going to bring us..right?  ....or not...  It's definitely been a mild winter, so I guess we know that, right?  Let's be honest though....there's lots more winter to come, so it could change, and there's still plenty of this year to go as well.    Last fall was pretty slow in the real estate world, and we saw plenty of price reductions.  This winter was also pretty slow as well....  have we reached the plateau?  Have we reached that 'magic' place where the crazy sellers market balances out? This spring will tell the tale...  Spring is typically the 'busy time' of the year as people get their income tax refunds back.  Tax refunds are used a lot for down payment & closing costs by buyers, so that is when the market gets crazy.  People who are selling their home, now that they have a buyer, go out and look for a new home for themselves.  Spring is crazy...  this year though?  Well, first we have to see if people will get refunds, and then...  well, the good news is that we are seeing a lot of new homes on the market. I have 3 that recently came on the market, and 2 more hitting by the end of the month.  I have spoken with a lot of my agent friends and they're also getting a bunch of calls of people wanting to sell this spring.  So, now we wait to see what will happen with the tax refunds and, of course, interest rates. Interest rates follow the market...market goes down, and so does interest rates. Market goes up, and so does interest rates.  I certainly hoping that the market has reached that seller/buyer balance.  We saw that nice balance in 2014 & 2015.  Real estate typically runs on a 10 year cycle of highs and lows....with a couple of years balance in the middle. Don't forget though that the only things in life that are consistent are death and taxes, so my crystal ball is not to be trusted.     While showing homes, we go over lots of 'little' things that otherwise people don't think about.  Some of these items are the 'hidden' costs of buying a home....those things that you weren't planning on, but probably should be.    Not too long ago, I was on one of the facebook swap/free/sale sites, and I was reading how some people were upset with the home buying process and the 'hidden' fees they weren't told about.  It is true that there are a LOT of fees and other expenses involved with buying a home.  The point of these blogs, and of course, the home buyer classes is to give folks this information.  There shouldn't be anything 'hidden' about the home buying process.  As you know, I am a big fan of not sugarcoating anything....I believe that an ugly truth is better than a pretty lie every day of the week.  You might not always like what I have to say (and that is ok), but I am not going to hold anything back from you on the off chance you might not ask me to help you buy, or sell, your home.  Personally I don't just want to hear about the 'good' things about a loan, or process....I want to hear it all...the good, the bad, and the ugly, so that I can make the best decision for me and my family based on the pros and the cons....not just the good.  So....yes, I am not going to just agree with what you read on the internet, or saw on HGTV, or heard from your direct and personal circle....I am going to give you the pros and cons because this is YOUR home buying (or selling) adventure, and YOU need to make the decisions.  My job is to help you find, and have, all the information I can get you so that you can make those choices based on a full picture....not just half of one.     That all being said, let's talk about the fees you can expect and some ones you might not.  I am not including down payment, or closing costs as part of this.  That will be an email in the upcoming week(s).  These are mainly fees associated with buying a home.  If you are thinking about selling a home, or know someone who is, there are some fees you need to be aware of as well.  I will post that on my facebook page at:  Tracie DeMars Real Estate, or you can contact me.  I am, as always, happy to help! So what fees can you  expect?  There are three fees that will be needed upfront.   Earnest Money....earnest money is typically about $1000- $3000, but the more expensive the home means the more earnest money you will need.   Some banks (& builders) can request 1%-3% of the purchase price for earnest money.  With a bank owned property the bank will want a cashiers check.  With a regular sale, a personal check is fine.  The earnest money is deliverable upon acceptance of the offer, and not when the offer is written.  The earnest money is always made out to the title company and is refundable based upon the 4 legal reasons to back out. Inspection...the inspection is ordered after the offer is accepted.  Remember that the inspection cost is approximately $400- $500, and is non-refundable. You, as the buyer, will hire the inspector and they work for you.  You have 10 calendar days to have the inspection done, and respond to the seller.  Don't wait until the last minute!  Both you, as the buyer, and your buyers agent should be at the home inspection.  A typical inspection is about 2-3 hours long.  Make sure the fee includes the dry rot and pest report....  We talked about home inspections a couple of weeks/months ago, but let me know if you need it again....or... hit up the Facebook page:  Tracie DeMars Real Estate.  It should be there.    Appraisal...the appraisal is ordered by the lender, and the lender will put in the order for the appraisal.  An appraiser comes out to the home to verify the homes value for the bank.  The bank will only lend the dollar amount that the appraiser says the home is worth.  An average appraisal costs about $600 -/+ dollars, and is paid for by the buyer.  This is another non-refundable fee.  Neither you, nor your agent, will be present at the appraisal.  With the new laws that took effect a couple years ago, neither agent, nor anyone involved in the sale are supposed to have contact with the appraiser for fear we might 'taint' the appraisal, or affect the numbers.   If you are buying a home with a well then there may an additional fee for the well testing.  You don't have to do that, but as a real estate agent, I would definitely advise you to do it.  Some other inspections that a buyer can have done (at their cost) are a sewer scope & a radon test.  A sewer scope is where they send a camera down the toilet to make sure the sewer lines are open, and a radon test is a company checks for radon levels in the home.  This is always a good idea if you are considering a home with a basement, daylight basement, or a split level home.  The radon test can take 3-5 days.  Again, these inspections are at a buyers expense. These are the only fees a buyer should see before closing.  Being told another fee?  Call, text, or email me... Other fees? Changing out locks...I always advise my clients to change out the locks of their new homes.  Why?  Well, even if the sellers give you all the keys they have...there is not guarantee that there isn't more keys running around somewhere.  I used to change out my house locks every couple of years because my kids were always losing keys.  Finally....last year... I went and purchased the the house locks that have the key pad.  It is awesome!!  I don't worry about lost keys anymore.  Every family member has a code, and what is the best is that I can add and delete codes as needed.  So...go away for a couple of days, and have a house sitter?  Give them a code,and when you get back you simply delete the code. I tell you....worth it!   Mailbox key...yes, legally you are not supposed to copy the mailbox key, but a lot of people do.  Mail is not something you want to mess with.  Take your HUD form down to the post office, and have them re-key the box, and get a new key.  Cost is about $100, but for peace of mind...that isn't much.  When you are changing out locks, talk with the locksmith... she/he may be able to help with this as well.   Paint...you will probably want to paint some, or all, the rooms of your new home.  Each gallon of paint runs about $25.  Paint is the easiest thing you can do to make the home 'yours', and it's fun!  Paint can change the entire feel of a room, or home.  Personally, I am a fan of semi-gloss.  I like the shine to it, and most importantly, it cleans up easy....with kids and big dogs, this is my go-to. Minor repairs...during the home inspection the inspector will probably point out repairs that the home may need.  Some of these repairs may be cosmetic repairs that will be part of your 'honey-do list'  with your new home.  Remember that, at the home inspection, we are looking for any repairs that will affect the safety of the home, or occupants...or anything that may need a contractor to repair.  The 'big' areas that we usually see repairs for are roofs, attic spaces, crawlspaces, and siding.  These are the places that usually get called out during the repair process for a licensed contractor to come in  Remember that home inspectors are licensed for home inspections.  It is during this period that we will request a second opinion by a licensed contractor...who can give a better, more thorough inspection/repair for the item that the inspector called out.  All homes have some repairs that will need to be done by the (new) homeowner....it is part of being a homeowner.  Don't forget that the worst thing a homeowner can do is to defer maintenance.  If you need help with that, give me a call or email... I always have a 'guy' that you can call for help.  Anytime you need work done around the home that you can't do, give me a holler...I know people.   I tease, but it is true.  I know excellent contractors that will usually give you a better deal because I refer them out.  I refer them out because they do a good job...and give better deals.  Just like in Real Estate... referrals are the name of the game.  :-) Lawn supplies...did you come from an apartment?  Well, most likely now you have a yard.  You will need a lawnmower to start with.  There will be other lawn equipment that will follow...weed eaters, trimmers, wheel barrels, shovels, and a myriad other things that come with having a yard.   Appliances...don't forget that washer, dryer, and fridges don't come with the home.  If you don't already have these appliances then you may also be purchasing a washer, dryer, and/or a fridge. Just please, please, please wait until AFTER you get keys for the home before you go purchase these things. Curtains/Blinds...if your new home doesn't already have some then this may be on your 'to buy' list.  Sometimes even if your home does have some, you may want new ones.  Honestly, I have had very good luck with curtains at places like Target, or Fred Meyer, or even Wal-Mart.  I think I've gotten all my curtains from Target.  They have blinds as well. House Cleaner/Carpet Cleaner...when a home is vacant you know exactly what you're going to be walking into when your buyers agent (hopefully me LOL) gives you keys, but... when the home is owner occupied, you don't.  Yes, you can and will do a walk thru of the home before closing, but it will still be occupied.  In many cases, when the home is owner occupied the (soon to be) previous owner doesn't vacate the property until day of closing, or sometimes even a couple of days after closing.  With cases like this, you really don't know what condition the home will be upon closing.  We have to have faith that the (soon to be) previous owner will leave the home in a clean condition, but sometimes...well, sometimes, they don't.  Also, one persons idea of clean is not another persons idea of 'clean'.  :-)  Many times, whether the home is vacant or owner occupied, a buyer will book a professional carpet cleaning, or house cleaning after closing....simply for peace of mind.   Insurance...wait..you already have insurance, don't you?  Well...yes, you have mortgage insurance, title insurance, and homeowners insurance, but what about earthquake insurance?  You don't...  When I purchased my home my homeowners insurance included earthquake insurance.  About 10 years ago though we received a letter that no longer would homeowners insurance include earthquake insurance....why?  Because we live in the #1 high danger area for earthquakes.  Because of that earthquake insurance must now be purchased separately.  So, AFTER you buy your home, call your insurance company and add on earthquake insurance.  Cost isn't too much, but it is important....just in case.   Toilet Seats  Yeah, I know you probably didn't think of that, but really....if it were me, I would change out the toilet seats when you buy your new home.  Why? Well, since now you are thinking about it....I'm sure you can see why.  LOL  Toilet seats are not expensive, and really...having new seats just makes you feel better!  :-D     As always....this is just a quick overview.... again...and I can't say this enough...please remember that your agent is NOT a salesperson, and should not be acting like one.  Real Estate is not really about houses, it is about relationships.  Your agent, and your lender work for YOU.  You drive the bus...we are merely GPS to help you get to your goals.  Like the classes, this weekly blog email is to help you with your home adventure.  The goal is to be informative and non-promotional.  :-)  We are, however, hoping you will call and want us to help with your adventure.   If you have any questions about this, or something you have heard...or if you would like me to help you with your home adventure, please call, email,  text, or facebook me anytime.  I am, as always, happy to help! Thank you again for your business and your referrals!!  ...and thank you for referring these classes to your friends, family, and co-workers.   .   ..disclaimer...if you have already purchased a home, or would no longer like to receive these emails, please let me know and I will be happy to remove you from any further mailings... Information is power,  and as always...May the odds be ever in your favor out there....  If you are looking for a real estate agent, I would love to be able to help you.  If you have any questions, or comments please get a hold of me anytime.  You can call, text, email, or even facebook me.  Please remember that while I mean these emails/blogs to be helpful, and educational, I am still hoping that you will call, or email me as I would be honored to help you with your home buying, or home selling adventure.   Upcoming Topics: Delayed Possession... What is this & what does it mean to you Interest Rates (information from Chris Berg,Cardinal Financial) What do I need to buy a home, Hiring a Realtor...questions to ask, What if I don't have a Down Payment? .....  &....What does an Agent do for me? Debt to Income Ratios....What is this? Last Week:  Winter Time & Buying (or not) Buying a Home Have a great day, and I will talk to you soon,   ;-D   Tracie DeMars   Real Estate broker   Re/Max - Van Mall   360/ 903-3504 cell   360/ 882-3600 fax   www.traciedemars.com   traciedemars@aol.com       “Interested in free and non promotional home education classes?  Go to www.freehomebuyerclasses.com for local upcoming home buyer and home SELLER classes, or facebook: Tracie DeMars Real Estate for my home buyer education blog.” "Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."       - Shel Silverstein, American poet, cartoonist and composer, (1930 - 1999).

[russellolacher]

Start Your Social Media Customer Service Strategy Here https://ift.tt/1jxl24K http://bit.ly/2PvofGa

STRATEGY (strat·e·gy) /ˈstradəjē/ noun “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.”

Over the years, many a branded platform has been launched, with little to no long-term social media customer service strategy… or even a short-term one. It’s been very much about “getting out there” rather than dedicating the time and resources to make it successful.  The digital world is littered with social media accounts that died a slow death, posted with little consistency or intent, misrepresented their brand or ignored the very customers they promise to serve. Don’t be a case study of how to do it badly.

To get it right – REALLY right – serious and thoughtful conversations need to happen before a single account is acquired or a social handle is created.

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few organizations (public and private) approach me about improving their social media accounts or discussing what is needed to build a business case to launch new ones. In all these conversations, regardless of how good the ideas were or the passion behind them to be on social, it’s important to ask yourself a series of questions that you may not have answers to right away.

To help get an idea of scope, I’ve put together some of the questions I usually ask, broken down into the 5 Ws and one H. (There are more that will come up organically, but this can help you start thinking strategically).

WHY?

Why do you want to be on social media to serve your customers? And why is social media the right platform for that goal?

What does success look like for your customer service efforts? Why is social media the tool/platform to get you there?

Does another communication platform better serve those goals? (I’ve heard many pitches where a regular newsletter to a curated distribution list would be far more effective. Make sure it’s the right tool for the job.)

WHO?

This can be split into two categories: Audience and In-house.

Audience:

Who are they?

What do they use to communicate?

Is there a hashtag already associated with this community? (If there is: use it. If there isn’t: start one).

If your customers are already on social media, is it a big enough community or just three people talking to each other?

What language or tone do they use?

What are their interests?

How can you serve them with value?

How will you manage your interactions and connection with your audience (spoiler: CRM) so you can be there at every step of the relationship?

In-House:

Who is going to run your social media account? (please don’t say “our younger staff” just cause they’re younger than you).

Do they have communications training? Social media training? Customer service training?

Do they keep up to date on the latest trends in social?

Would you be comfortable with these employees speaking on behalf of the organization to media? (because that’s what they’d be doing on social media)

Is your organization able to support professional development to keep them up to date on the changing social media landscape?

WHAT?

What are you going to post? Your content or others? Both? Do you have have enough content to share or the capacity to create more?

Is your brand content information your audience wants and will find value in? A social media strategy is only half the battle. You also need content to share and discuss with the public, whether starting a content marketing strategy (blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics) or using existing information from you and your stakeholders.

Do you have enough content to fill a day? For example, if you can’t tweet seven times a day on various or variations of topics (not including retweets and responding to others) or come up with 30 ideas for videos or blog posts, you don’t know your topic well enough to start creating customer-centric content or being an authority on it on social.

WHERE?

Where will you spend your time posting and engaging with the public?

Where is your audience?

Do you understand the differences of communicating (tone, frequency, length, timing, etc.) of each platform?

Do you have the creator skills necessary for morphing content into different variations based on the platforms and media (audio, video, text, graphic)?

WHEN?

Are you prepared to meet your customers expectations on accessibility? Social media customer service is a 24/7 existence… to your customers. Regardless of the fact your staff and you might not be working beyond Monday to Friday, 9-5(ish), your customers will want to engage with you when they want to engage with you. Especially during an emergency (big or small).

Are you prepared to be timely when you engage? When responding to customers, they are looking for an answer right away and don’t care about your approval process.

HOW?

How will your social media customer service team integrate into the larger organization? To be effective as a social customer care service, it’s vital to be plugged into your company to know what’s coming, what’s a current or trending issue and to share your insights to other teams.

How will you foster change management and get buy-in from every level? This is extremely important for a couple of reasons. First, your front-line staff (those traditionally answer phone calls and emails) are AMAZING sources for learning what your customers are asking for and concerned about, which should inspire what you share. Second, your subject matter experts in the organization need to trust that you’ll represent their knowledge properly while you need them to respond to your questions quickly so you can answer the customer’s questions. And lastly, your Executive need to have the confidence in you to publicly represent the business with minimal approvals (aka if you must get all your tweets approved, that’s a huge barrier to quickly serve your audience).

How will you scale success? If your social customer service grows in value as a resource for your audience, the engagement and work will grow. You’ll need to be prepared for that growth.

How will you know you’re successful? What metrics will you establish, track and analyze to make sure you grow in the right direction and are making the best strategic decisions moving forward?

These are all important questions to consider in making sure you’re on the right track. It will only help you better serve your customers and your organization because the benefits of a strong social customer care strategy can have huge, positive impacts to your business and brand.

What other questions do you think need to be asked to fuel your social media customer service strategy?

  The post Start Your Social Media Customer Service Strategy Here appeared first on Russel Lolacher.

from Russel Lolacher http://bit.ly/2PvofGa via IFTTT

[topicprinter]

Disclaimer i am a programmer. Coding is definitly required.I recently read the post about "idea to startup in 5 hours" and figured i could reflect on it with something "bigger".The IdeaI always carry plenty of ideas around and get them out whenever bored to rethink them until they stick. This one idea started as a way to big thing for a single person. Basically offering a subset of Mailgun as sole dev seems not plausible. Especially not for a MVP.It took at least 2 months (maybe thinking about it once every 2 weeks for a few minutes) until i scoped to idea down the my personal core problem and identify a way i (and hopefully others) would want to use this product.This is IMO the most important phase. Think ideas dead. If they are still interesting after months you may are onto something. Also scope them down to a MVP that still already is a sellable product.The idea itself is not revolutionary. I can name you at least 10 services that offer a similar functionality and plenty of people already got it for free when they buy domains. However there is no dead simple optimized solution for everyone else.The TestingI hate testing for demand with common ways like landing pages and collecting Emails. So i did not do that.But at first i made a few posts on reddit and similar and asked about if people think they could need my idea. The general answer was either nothing or no.What i did then is to identify my competitors and figure out how much traffic they are getting for the specific problem i solve. I also identified blog posts that tackle this specific problem, where i noticed that every single solution is both complicated and expensive or simply not production ready. However all blog posts had a serious amount of comments, seems its something people need or want.There was also plenty of testing on the software side. Its about sending emails after all and needs plenty of infrastructure working together in a smooth way. However this is technical and not part of this post.The CreationAs good developer i developed some very lazy habbits. I cloned my Rails starter template, throw in a Bootswatch theme and replaced the brand color with a dark blue/violette ish one to shout out how professional we are. That setup, i started to put my idea into code.In the development process i hit corners and unsolved questions every so often. Sometimes instead of trying to solve them until i get a headache i would just move away and ignore the project for a week or two. In my experience these problems often solve themself over time as long as you implemented the initial thought seed into your head.If i ever saw myself doing something overly complicated in code or UX i took a step back and went to my down-scoping again until i had something clean and simple.This took about 4 months all in all. However i lived in at least 3 different cities over 2 countries in that time, so there have been plenty of periods without coding at all.The "MVP"I call it MVP because in my mind it is that. However for the customer i want it to appear like a finished product. Sometimes people say MVP when they just collect emails, sometimes a MVP is a technical prototype, however my MVPs are actual minimal products.My SaaS did one single thing. Forwarding emails. Like when you own a domain it will forward all emails to that domain to your normal inbox (like Gmail or Hotmail). However it did this one thing great, it is faster than the competition and way easier to use (mostly as there is no other functionality)To underline the point of a solo "side" project i put emphasis on personality. Next to the "professional" appearance i added personal details, stories and opinions to make it look more "real" and "human". I would also answers to emails with my personal email.Marketing "Plan"Honestly i dont like Marketing. Well i do, but i hate doing it. I always try to find the most minimal low efford way to get around that. Sounds stupid but it sometimes works for me.First i focused on my branding. As mentioned above i tried to make it look professional, i tried to reflect this in some of the marketing texts as well. As i do email transaction and people love privacy i made a big point about the privacy we offer as well. Hosting in Switzerland is basically part of the marketing strategie.The LaunchLike anyone these days i launched on Reddit, Product Hunt, Hacker News, ... However i did not get positive feedback, or barely any feedback at all. At this point i realized that my target audience is kind of hard to specify, domain owners yes, but more domain hoarders or sideproject hoarders. So i tried targetting more to them, again no real response.I went back to the blog articles i mentioned above and either wrote a comment or asked the blogger to include my service (which is still the majority of my traffic these days btw)Very slow growth started to appear after these comments.The Feedback loopOnce customers were here first feedback started to come in. Honestly i implemented most of it, but also because my initial customers really just wanted small additions that really made sense without cluttering the UX.This also build trust to some of my initial customers.The GrowthHowever while it never blow off there have been a few first registrations from all this. And it never stopped anymore. First i would get a registration per week, then per day and now its more like 2-3 per day.Every customer is a paying customer and right now after less than a year i have about 500 of them. Growing daily. The site never was not profitable after the first 2 weeks. I never spent anything on ads either.It doesnt pay a lot of my bills yet, but we are getting there. Also the now regular buying offers are flattering for my ego :)The TakeawaysYour idea does not have to be sexy or new. People really need unsexy things every single day. Plus with the right mind set, your idea can be sexy for you even thoughts its boring :)Just do it. And dont let anyone get you down. I was not able to find a single person that would say build it so they can use it, however once it was build more and more people realized the usefulness. I was very certain this would work, we all know this can be a wrong feeling tho so be prepared to throw it away and start from scratch.Give it time. Things usually dont blow of from day one. My first project that literally exploded in traffic still only made $30 the first month, after half a year we were already close $1000 and after a year i declared it as my main income. Normal projects, especially "boring" ones will never explode, but they'll grow naturally.Dont overthing it. Right now i am in the process of rewriting the SaaS. All the wrong decissions i made in my initial MVP can now be removed and replaced. I can copy paste a lot and generally know the application well enough that writing from scratch isnt really a pain anymore.As always scratch your own itch. I found it awesome to login to my own product to solve a issue i had for years now. This does not only help the keep passionate and motivated, but also helps to identify issues and missing features as i am one of my core customers.This is essentially what i wanted to tell. I hope this can inspire some people to just do their thing and stop worrying so much about everything from Marketing over Growth Metrics to Validation.The link is not included as i hate this self promoting posts that obviously are just in for the backlinks. But for the curious its about email forwarding and has a .io domain, if you google it like that you'll find it.Questions welcome.

[chaj]

via www.gregreda.com

Every so often, data scientists who are thinking about going off on their own will email me with questions about my year of freelancing (2015). In my most recent response, I was a little more detailed than usual, so I figured it'd make sense as a blog post too.

If my response comes across as negative, that's certainly not the intention -- being straight-forward about my experience is.

I learned a lot, it just wasn't for me. Working by yourself on short(ish)-term things can get old.

How was your year of freelancing?

Generally, it was good and I learned a lot.

My reason for setting out on my own was really about scratching an itch I've always had (and I suspect many of us have) - can I strike it out on my own?

The freedom was really nice and if you're able to find the work, you can likely work less than you would full-time while making more money. That said, it's certainly not for everyone.

Why'd you stop?

I didn't find it very rewarding in a non-monetary sense.

Freelancing/consulting doesn't really give you the luxury of thinking long-term about something like a product company does. Typically, a client hires you to do something, you do it, and then you're gone.

Thinking long-term and deeply through all the ways data / data science can be impactful upon a business or product is something I really enjoy -- "ohh, we can build a recommendations engine with this ... the search results we're displaying to the user here aren't great -- we can use this data to improve them, etc." I definitely enjoy a more of a slant towards data scientist + product manager than I do data scientist + software engineer.

As an individual freelancer, landing this sort of "feature" work is very hard because:

You're one person and typically these are not small projects. You only have so much capacity (24 hours/day), so it'd take more time for you to do it than it would a team.

Companies often want these things to be a "core competency" in that they do not want someone to build Big Important Thing and disappear. They are risk-averse.

You didn't strike out on your own to build Big Important Thing and then really just maintain that thing for one client in perpetuity (which would likely happen if the company allowed you to build it) -- you started freelancing because you (presumably) wanted some variety.

Companies often have a Thing In Mind they want you to do -- or, they want to "buy" your time for some period (e.g. 80 hours over the next three months at $/hour -- a retainer).

When they have a Thing In Mind, it is much more likely to be dirty work that they do not feel is the best use of their existing team's time than it is to be something they need you, the consultant, for.

When on retainer, I found the experience to be similar, except it can be a bunch of ad-hoc tasks that come up ("can you pull this data for me") that you didn't know would be the case when you signed the contract.

This is all a long way of saying, in my experience, a non-trivial portion of you has to be ok with being a mercenary -- do the thing you're being paid to do and not worry about the rest.

I struggled with that internally and thus did not find the work very stimulating -- I like buying into something, giving it my all, and thinking about the various directions it can be taken.

Tips or lessons learned?

So many, but here are a few:

Keep It Simple, Stupid

This isn't specific to freelancing per se, but it was something freelancing emphasized.

I think data scientists (generally) have a bad habit of latching onto specific words a stakeholder says, while ignoring the other words in the request.1 For example:

"What's the optimal number of leads that a rep should get? We want to get directionally better."

As data scientists, we hear "optimal number" and we start thinking about doing complex math and building models. We end up ignoring the most important part: "We want to get directionally better" -- our stakeholder is telling us "we don't know much about this right now -- help!"

We need to start simple -- maybe some basic exploratory work + charts -- and surface that back to our stakeholder, giving them the opportunity to say "cool, this is all I needed" or "this is good, but keep going." We need to allow our stakeholder to choose incremental progress and we should not assume they need the more complex (and time-intensive) solution.

Try to get systems access before the project begins

This probably isn't a high priority for the systems team at your client. Thus, if the process of getting you access to things (databases, vpn, etc.) starts the same day the project is set to start, the first day or two will wind up being a waste of time.

Productized consulting

Nail down exactly what you do or create. Have a fixed price for doing it. Don't deviate from that. Turn your "consulting" into a product.

For example, you'll build a churn model for $XX. My brother's company is a good example of this.

Try not to sell hours. Which leads me to ...

Don't bill hourly

Tracking hours sucks and also limits your margin. Try to sell daily or weekly rates (or productized consulting).

Better yet, if you have a well defined scope (ideal, but sometimes hard) and you know the amount of time the project will take you, then set a price on the project. The risk here is the project taking longer than you anticipated and now you're really just doing free work.

I was fearful of underestimating the amount of time something would take me, so I billed hourly. It wasn't fun though. Additionally, all of my clients ended up being retainers.

My biggest fears involve health insurance. Do you have any good resources?

Not really. I just used healthcare.gov and went with a BCBS PPO because I'm pretty risk-averse.

In the data science pipeline, where did your services fall (e.g. Databases > Data Cleaning > Business Intelligence > Advanced Analytics)? Did you do everything?

This was something I should have been better about -- I never really established what my services were. My thesis in going freelance was more about feeling there was a gap in the data consulting market.

My belief was that there was (in 2015 ... and probably still is) a population of companies trying to figure out how to utilize their data, who are not interested in bringing on a consulting firm ($$$), and don't necessarily know if they need a data scientist full-time yet. I felt uniquely positioned to fill that gap due to being GrubHub's first data hire and also having prior consulting experience (PwC, Datascope).

For the reasons mentioned in the second question, I'd classify most of the work I ended up doing as Business Intelligence, along with some product/marketing analytics work -- instrumentation, how to think about using the data, etc -- but never in a "building data-driven features/products" sense. No machine learning or similar.

I have a longer post about this in the works.

[russellolacher]

Start Your Social Media Customer Service Strategy Here https://ift.tt/1jxl24K

STRATEGY (strat·e·gy) /ˈstradəjē/ noun “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim.”

Over the years, many a branded platform has been launched, with little to no long-term social media customer service strategy… or even a short-term one. It’s been very much about “getting out there” rather than dedicating the time and resources to make it successful.  The digital world is littered with social media accounts that died a slow death, posted with little consistency or intent, misrepresented their brand or ignored the very customers they promise to serve. Don’t be a case study of how to do it badly.

To get it right – REALLY right – serious and thoughtful conversations need to happen before a single account is acquired or a social handle is created.

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few organizations (public and private) approach me about improving their social media accounts or discussing what is needed to build a business case to launch new ones. In all these conversations, regardless of how good the ideas were or the passion behind them to be on social, it’s important to ask yourself a series of questions that you may not have answers to right away.

To help get an idea of scope, I’ve put together some of the questions I usually ask, broken down into the 5 Ws and one H. (There are more that will come up organically, but this can help you start thinking strategically).

WHY?

Why do you want to be on social media to serve your customers? And why is social media the right platform for that goal?

What does success look like for your customer service efforts? Why is social media the tool/platform to get you there?

Does another communication platform better serve those goals? (I’ve heard many pitches where a regular newsletter to a curated distribution list would be far more effective. Make sure it’s the right tool for the job.)

WHO?

This can be split into two categories: Audience and In-house.

Audience:

Who are they?

What do they use to communicate?

Is there a hashtag already associated with this community? (If there is: use it. If there isn’t: start one).

If your customers are already on social media, is it a big enough community or just three people talking to each other?

What language or tone do they use?

What are their interests?

How can you serve them with value?

How will you manage your interactions and connection with your audience (spoiler: CRM) so you can be there at every step of the relationship?

In-House:

Who is going to run your social media account? (please don’t say “our younger staff” just cause they’re younger than you).

Do they have communications training? Social media training? Customer service training?

Do they keep up to date on the latest trends in social?

Would you be comfortable with these employees speaking on behalf of the organization to media? (because that’s what they’d be doing on social media)

Is your organization able to support professional development to keep them up to date on the changing social media landscape?

WHAT?

What are you going to post? Your content or others? Both? Do you have have enough content to share or the capacity to create more?

Is your brand content information your audience wants and will find value in? A social media strategy is only half the battle. You also need content to share and discuss with the public, whether starting a content marketing strategy (blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics) or using existing information from you and your stakeholders.

Do you have enough content to fill a day? For example, if you can’t tweet seven times a day on various or variations of topics (not including retweets and responding to others) or come up with 30 ideas for videos or blog posts, you don’t know your topic well enough to start creating customer-centric content or being an authority on it on social.

WHERE?

Where will you spend your time posting and engaging with the public?

Where is your audience?

Do you understand the differences of communicating (tone, frequency, length, timing, etc.) of each platform?

Do you have the creator skills necessary for morphing content into different variations based on the platforms and media (audio, video, text, graphic)?

WHEN?

Are you prepared to meet your customers expectations on accessibility? Social media customer service is a 24/7 existence… to your customers. Regardless of the fact your staff and you might not be working beyond Monday to Friday, 9-5(ish), your customers will want to engage with you when they want to engage with you. Especially during an emergency (big or small).

Are you prepared to be timely when you engage? When responding to customers, they are looking for an answer right away and don’t care about your approval process.

HOW?

How will your social media customer service team integrate into the larger organization? To be effective as a social customer care service, it’s vital to be plugged into your company to know what’s coming, what’s a current or trending issue and to share your insights to other teams.

How will you foster change management and get buy-in from every level? This is extremely important for a couple of reasons. First, your front-line staff (those traditionally answer phone calls and emails) are AMAZING sources for learning what your customers are asking for and concerned about, which should inspire what you share. Second, your subject matter experts in the organization need to trust that you’ll represent their knowledge properly while you need them to respond to your questions quickly so you can answer the customer’s questions. And lastly, your Executive need to have the confidence in you to publicly represent the business with minimal approvals (aka if you must get all your tweets approved, that’s a huge barrier to quickly serve your audience).

How will you scale success? If your social customer service grows in value as a resource for your audience, the engagement and work will grow. You’ll need to be prepared for that growth.

How will you know you’re successful? What metrics will you establish, track and analyze to make sure you grow in the right direction and are making the best strategic decisions moving forward?

These are all important questions to consider in making sure you’re on the right track. It will only help you better serve your customers and your organization because the benefits of a strong social customer care strategy can have huge, positive impacts to your business and brand.

What other questions do you think need to be asked to fuel your social media customer service strategy?

  The post Start Your Social Media Customer Service Strategy Here appeared first on Russel Lolacher.

from Russel Lolacher http://bit.ly/2PvofGa via IFTTT