#the 'i think i've loved you for three hundred years' bit was written so early on i think i was conceptually somewhere in chapter 2 when i

[inked-out-trees]

CHAPTER 12: ALL ROADS BRING US HERE

Dennis meets his best friend twice over. Vanessa thinks about love.

[sv5hive]

frosting makeover | sv5

pairing: sebastian vettel x reader

warning(s): mentions of drinking, written at midnight, barely proofread

word count: 937

note: a bit short and a bit late but ofc i had to post something for my favourite old man's birthday!!

masterlist!

you had been hard at work in the kitchen since the early hours of the morning while your husband made himself useful at the factory. it was one of the most important days of the year and you had every intention of making it a grand event for the love of your life.

sebastian had said that his birthday wasn't a big deal and that he didn't expect anything special. but if he had learnt anything from his time with you, it was that you believed everyone should be treated like royalty on their special day; after all, it's only one day out of three hundred and sixty five.

in an ideal world, sebastian would have the day off and you would wake him up with breakfast in bed but nevertheless, you would make the most of a bad deal and instead whip up a three course dinner including a birthday cake fit for a king. so, not long after sebastian had pressed a kiss onto your forehead to say goodbye before heading out for work, you got out of bed and readied yourself to create a birthday extravaganza for the man who loved you like no other.

after gruelling away hard at work, you had finally finished decorating the cake with a crude portrait of sebastian with his car and started cleaning up the remaining frosting and stray sprinkles scattered all over the counter. glancing at the clock, you realised he would be home any moment so you decided to change into a more appropriate outfit and set the table ready for you two. as you placed the wine glasses down on the table, you heard the front door click shut as sebastian kicked his shoes off.

"schatz? i'm home! where are you?" he called out from the hallway.

"in here!" you replied back, standing in the dining room in front of the product of your love and labour.

"there you are- what's all this?" he questioned, the corners of his lips curling upwards.

"happy birthday, love! you didn't actually think i wasn't going to make a big deal out of this, right?"

you couldn't hold yourself back anymore as you practically threw yourself into sebastian's arms and planted a kiss on his lips.

"you look even more beautiful than you do normally."

"yeah, yeah, you can compliment me later. now come on! i've been waiting a while already and the food's going to get cold if we keep standing around like idiots!"

you pulled him towards the table decorated with candles, swan napkins and a single rose in a glass vase in the centre. ushering sebastian into his chair, you poured two glasses of wine for yourselves and shortly brought out the first course to begin dinner.

"liebe, this is incredible! how long did this take you?" he asked, tasting a spoonful of the soup.

"oh it's nothing, seb. this is the least i could do when you treat me like this all the time."

he reached across the table and grasped your hand in his before pausing to speak.

"it's not nothing but thank you, schatz, really. i would be completely helpless without you in my life."

in the dim candle light, you dined and got increasingly more drunk throughout the night while discussing everything from this morning's news to workplace gossip. eventually, it was time to get the cake out and have the birthday boy blow out the candles.

as you quietly sang happy birthday to sebastian, he took the chance to engrave this moment into his brain - not everybody gets to spend their birthday with their soulmate but he was one of the lucky ones. he didn't ever think he would be part of the minority who could say they had truly found their person but the universe had other plans for him. so, as you gently encouraged him to make a wish, he simply asked whatever higher being that may exist, to never let it end. he wanted you and your silly birthday cakes with way too much frosting to be allowed on his strict diet for the rest of time.

"tell me, what did you wish for?" you hounded him while removing the candles and cutting a slice for each of you.

"i can't tell you otherwise it won't come true! sorry, schatz." he replied, a sly grin growing on his face.

"what? are you serious? we've been together for how many years now and you still won't tell me what you wish for every year." you playfully called him out as he took a bite of the cake.

"i don't make the rules, okay! hate the game not the player. besides, i wish for the same thing every year and it seems to be working so i really can't tell you."

"oh really? okay, if you say so. how's the cake?" you asked, eating your own slice.

"perfect. everything's perfect, you are perfect. thank you, again."

"i'm glad, you deserve nothing less."

just as sebastian was about to reply, he felt a cool sensation land on the side of his mouth.

"are you serious, schatz?"

"hm? i don't know what you're talking about. oh, you have a little something there by the way." you said, looking up from your plate and pointing to your own face.

"oh, do i?"

"mhm. here, i can get it for you." you quickly stood from your side of the table and kissed the corner of his mouth and returned to your seat. you could only resist for a few seconds before swiping frosting onto the tip of sebastian's nose.

"oh that is it!"

[pinehutch]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Spread the self-love ❤

Thank you for tagging me!

I should be honest: I am not much of a fic writer. This isn't self-effacing; I've been reading fic since the early aughts but only have 10 works on ao3. One of them is a poem. One of them is a few hundred words of something I've never finished.

That said, fic is important to me for a lot of reasons, but one is that in 2016 I started following a tumblr for a Dragon Age fic exchange, and in 2017 I wrote the first fiction I'd written in almost 20 years. I had been struggling to write poetry for about 10 years before that, too, and fic writing was part of my path back to writing at all.

This isn't to say that I think fanfic is valueless unless it results in 'original' writing; every story happens in context, and we all know how the lines between fanwork and original work blur, both in fan spaces and in commercial ones. But my particular, personal fondness for fic is because it gave me a path back to the first best thing of my life, which was language, and what we do with it.

With that said, my personal top five (links in titles):

Fundamental Forces (or, Root Causes)

Literally my first fic. This was when I remembered that writing can be fun. It's Dragon Age fic, femHawke/Varric. It's also written with a focus on Hawke's POV, a thing I think I pulled off quite well and have never attempted again. It's very silly. It features a 40-year-old and a 35-year-old being profoundly bad at emotional honesty. I riff on turnips for a while. It has a happy ending, which should surprise no one.

She breathed in through her nose and her eyes fluttered shut. “Kiss me, you idiot. Before they think I’m horrified.” Their first kiss. Quick and mostly chaste and part of a joke. She thought it was fitting.

Chapter Last

This is also T-rated Hawke/Varric, written for the same exchange, a year later. It's about near-misses, and trying again, and not being able to pick up where you left off, and it's stumbling back onto the path later, unexpectedly, and after having found another way. It is about stories, and why we do them.

It's fic of the games, of course, but in a way it's also fic-of-fic: there's a novella that's both a tie-in novel and a diegetic book in the Dragon Age setting, and it was printed irl the summer before I wrote this fic.

What I'm proud of, with this story, is character voice. Whenever I share any Varric-voice writing, even years later, people always say very generous things. Varric's also a writer, canonically, and I had fun mimicking 'his' style in passages of this, and trying to keep in mind how his writing and his inner narration would align and diverge. (Lots of Dragon Age fans are understandably thirsty about Varric; I think I've always found him relatable, in many ways, and it didn't occur to me to thirst. But I love him.)

I don't love the structure; I chaptered this, and way more than I needed to. I'd love to rewrite it, someday, but I also think it's good for me to sit with the awareness of its imperfections and the knowledge that people have loved it anyway.

Afterimage (there are two colours)

The Magnus Archives fic, E-rated. Basira/Daisy. This was meant to be a single installment in a series - I think I have a 20,000 word 'outline' in my gdocs, still, but I'm unlikely to ever finish it. The point of this story is self-indulgent, purple-prose, dreamy smut. Wanting the thing and having it, but not keeping it.

This was baby's first E-rated fic ever written. I have no explanation for this, either.

Transformative Work

Written for the 2022 OFMD Big Bang with @mia-ugly. Mostly Frenchie/Jim, a bit Jim/Oluwande, a bit Frenchie/Oluwande, a light sprinkling of polycule potential.

Transformative Work is my favourite thing I've posted to ao3 for three reasons.

It's 40k! I never finish longer works, so 40k is a big deal to me.

I think it's actually brilliant. Clever as hell, at minimum. But mostly brilliant.

It's collaborative!

Writing has always been a solitary thing for me; one of the things I love about Mia is how we can get on a wavelength about a story. (This is mostly a them trick: they're an excellent collaborator and instigator, in general.) I wasn't at my best when we were writing this, dealing with undiagnosed health issues and workplace burnout and an accumulation of grief, but it was beautiful and joyful work, in the end.

Also, I think it is almost exactly what we wanted it to be, and that is such a high.

Number 5 is a bit of a cop-out but still:

Remember when I said "we all know how the lines between fanwork and original work blur"? This is a poem I started writing when Succession 4.3, "Connor's Wedding" aired. I was in a worst spot than I had been the previous year, health-wise, grief-wise.

The title of this poem, "My Father's Dead and I Feel Old," comes out of Connor Roy's mouth in the episode. I had to pause the episode and just get pummeled by that perfect, simple line of iambs. I was a wreck, just generally. Yeah, man, my father is dead and I do feel old! That sort of thing. (The aforementioned health issue? Still not identified or addressed when this aired in spring 2023, btw. My brain was not braining well.)

But there were words for it. I was off work on medical leave at the time. I had just made the transition from crying like it was a full-time job to sleeping like it was a full-time job. The sleep wasn't helping. The crying hadn't helped, either. It wasn't something people could help. But words, and what we do with them - that helped.

Anyway, I'm actually quite proud of this poem, both as an original piece of poetry and as fanwork. It's not on ao3 for reasons including 'I haven't gotten around to it' and 'I don't know if this is sufficiently transformative, by the invisible guidelines I've just set for myself.'

Thank you for sending this to me, it was a lovely thing to think about on my Friday eve! <3

[dreamylyfe-x]

I don't know where else to go to complain about fanfic comments, so I guess I'm going to do it here. Because I woke up to one today that annoyed me.

And ironically, I'm doing it on the second day of my summer vacation, which I had set aside anyway as a "day to attend to the fandom things that I need to attend to" -- of which there are several.

The first thing I need to say is that I'm desperately grateful for every single comment I receive on anything I've written -- fanfic or meta -- 99.5% of the time. This is just a vanishingly small sample of what I hear about stuff I've written.

But it's still so irritating.

Some background -- I wrote fanfic, a prodigious amount of it, in my very early 20s. For about three years I posted nearly daily. These were long WIPs and they got a fair amount of attention in that fandom, which means I also got some criticism. And I engaged the criticism fairly cheerfully. It's hard to be too insulted by someone who has still read hundreds of pages of your work, even if they are upset about something. It was also really normal, at the time, to tell a fic writer then their story was annoying you. And even an upset comment was better than no comments -- the absolute WORST thing you can experience -- so I was pretty ok with them.

But anyway -- life happened, I left that fandom and I stopped writing fic.

A good friend of mine still was and one day, in a fandom I never participated in but certainly knew a fair bit about, she had a bad experience. Her fic was nominated for a ship-centric fandom award (this is livejournal era) and some random group of fans took umbrage at the existence of these fandom awards and went through and gave snarky reviews of all the fics that had been nominated. Anonymously. My friend had not wanted this review and let it be known that she didn't like it. That violated some sort of fandom rule at the time and she got dragged for it. Authors were not supposed to object to criticism. Even if it was mean-spirited.

More years pass. It takes a good long while for a piece of media to grab me enough that I get sucked into a fandom again. But when it happens we are long into the Tumblr era. And I discover that the worm has turned and it is no longer considered good fandom behaviour to leave negative or critical comments.

As a fandom old, I find that I little curious. I don't leave negative comments personally, but it's such a shift from the livejournal era that I take note. And I'm not sure I feel all that negatively about receiving critical comments on fic. As I'm writing it for the first time in a decade, I get to test that out -- and I don't actually have a lot of opportunity to do that, because indeed, people tend not to leave negative comments. But ONE TIME, on ONE story, ONE person left perhaps the longest and most detailed comment I have ever received, all about how much she absolutely HATED the story I was telling. And I did, honestly, love that comment. Same principle as before -- I couldn't be mad when they were so passionate about it. It was flattering.

But today I was reminded of the type of comment I really don't enjoy. It is not that it's negative -- though it is. It's that it's withering. It's the type of comment designed to make you feel like this person thinks you're a vending machine that they put a dollar into and then got the wrong product. It's the "I hope you don't think that this thing you put into your fic is actually, you know, The CORRECT way to look at this."

I've only gotten a couple of these because in general I think fandom is nicer these days and certainly the corner of the Gallavich fandom that I occupy is filled with really smart, thoughtful, funny and interesting people who tend to SAY smart, thoughtful, funny and interesting things. And this is something of a void scream, because I don't think people who leave comments like that would ever bother to read this.

But. Like. Just in case.

Fic writers put thoughts and opinions into characters' mouths that are not their personal take all the time. Because they have reason to believe these pre-existing characters think that thing. You can disagree with it. But it's probably bad practice to assume anything about the fic writer because of it.

If you ARE going to leave a comment like that try to say at least one other thing about the story so that your comment isn't entirely just you being unaware of the concept of an unreliable narrator.

If you are STILL going to leave your eye-roll in comment form on someone's story and not even bother to hit the kudos button on the way out, then I will probably respond to you like you're an asshole. I just have no other context to draw from.

If you are still determined to do all these things, could you try not to do it in the middle for the night so that I don't wake up to this stuff in my inbox?

Anyway. I know I'm blessed to even get snarky comments on a two-year-old fanfic, but, you know. I have feelings to share. Happy August.

[firstelevens]

for the fic writer questions: 16, 17, 19 for the bake off au, and 42?

16. What’s an AU you would love to read (or have read and loved)?

I love AUs SO MUCH and one of my favorites is a marriage of convenience or arranged marriage AU. Like, when those are done well, it is SO GOOD. [slaps the side of fic] This baby can fit so much yearning inside of it!

Like, I know I'm never not singing praises of @birdhapley, but her Rogue One political/arranged marriage AU series is one of my favorite concepts I've ever read.

17. What highly specific AU do you want to read or write even though you might be the only person to appreciate it?

There's a book by Natasha Pulley called The Kingdoms, which is set in 19th century England and involves time travel shenanigans and memory loss and a devastating romance and also LIGHTHOUSES, and I once joked about writing a Sambucky AU based on it and then I thought about that the whole time I was reading the book.

(But it is very niche and I think like three people would read it and I'm not convinced that I could pull it off because I am a wimp and I can't hurt characters I love, so I think that one's going to stay unwritten.)

(Meanwhile I have about a hundred OTHER AU ideas but they're not remotely niche at all because at heart, I am a basic bench.)

19. If you wrote a spin-off of the Bake Off AU, what would it involve?

I am SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

There are SO MANY fics that I would really love to write within this universe, and I have a new idea every day. The current top contenders for someday-maybe-actually-being-written are the Sam/Bucky proposal fic, a fic about the NYC Bake Off alums and all the weird shenanigans they get up to, a Matt/Foggy fic set while Foggy is filming season 3, and maybe the Delacroix scenes from "sugar pie, honey bunch" but in Sam's perspective.

It did, however, take me two years to churn out THIS monster, so who knows how long any of those will take.

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

So before 2017, I had basically only ever written fic for fairly small fandoms. (Literary webseries, so basically everyone in the fandom kind of vaguely knew each other and we all traveled from one show to another and were all grateful for basically any fan generated content that cropped up because we knew it was a very small pool of creators to begin with.)

Then Spider-Man: Homecoming came out and broke my brain a little bit and I was like WELP guess I'm writing MARVEL FIC now. And it was very intimidating because I knew it was a HUGE fandom and just watching the hits roll in on the first fic that I published in that tag was nerve-wracking. A lot of the early comments were short but positive and I was so relieved and then??? Someone left me one of those comments where they'd picked out their favorite lines and told me how much they'd enjoyed specific scenes from the fic and mentioned that they'd been having a really difficult time of things and the fic had brightened up their day when they'd really needed it, and I think that was the first time I'd gotten a comment to that effect and it totally blew me away.

I still remember that commenter, and they stuck around and read/commented on EVERY SINGLE Peter/Michelle fic I wrote after that, as well as the Sambucky fic that I published after three years of no content??? Truly a ride or die.

[theuniversitychallengereview]

I wrote a blog called No Spoiler last year, about how easy it had been for me to avoid spoilers for the previous day's episode of The Challenge, and how that was an oddity in our information-dense, social-media flooded lives. Well, on Tuesday I innocently logged onto Twitter, having missed this week's episode due to my Book Club, and had the result spoiled for me. It was my own fault - as I said in the other post, when you log on to a Twitter account which is specifically for University Challenge then that is the kind of fire you are playing with. 

For the past few weeks, I've been watching the Netflix Tour de France documentary with my girlfriend. With no prior interest in the sport of cycling she really got into it (and really loved Wout van Aert, which did make me a bit jealous, but who doesn't?). Despite the fact that it was about last year's Tour, the result of which has been known for nearly a full twelve months, and despite the fact that we watched several stages of this year's race together, she made it to the final episode with no knowledge (besides her correct inclination that there was no way redacted would be coming back from such a large deficit going into the final few days) of the overall victor. 

What's the moral of this story? Nothing particularly profound, just that its interesting how siloed our consumption of things is. If I had to estimate, I'd say that I read/heard the fact that cyclist A beat cyclist B in the 2022 Tour de France more than a hundred times in the past month, but if you're not looking out for something, or if your personal Internet isn't pre-programmed to show you it then this sort of thing is far easier to avoid. 

It would be pretty funny, I think, if I did go ahead and not review this week's episode, but I've already spent a while looking up cool stats and I don't want to waste them, so with that in mind; here's your first Starter for Ten.

You can watch the episode here before reading my review...

Birkbeck were regulars in the early years of the Paxman era, appearing six times in the first nine series, culminating with victory in 2003, after which they weren't seen for seventeen years. Oxford Brookes, meanwhile, have only been on five times in total, making the quarter-finals twice.

Brookes skipper Manton buzzes early on the first starter, but he's wrong, and McMillan swoops in for Birkbeck to steal the points. An easy bonus set on films nets them a full house, before Manton makes up for his earlier mistake with epiphany. They grab a hat-trick on the Biafran war, but remain behind thanks to the incorrect interruption.

Another from McMillan stretched the Londoner's lead, but Gardner hit back for Brookes to keep things tight. McMillan is then able to give one of the coldest possible UC answers of all time when asked to complete the phrase written on Woody Guthrie's guitar, 'This machine... kills fascists". Rajan shows off his cricket credentials, scolding Birkbeck for mistaking a doosra for a googly, and demonstrating the bowling action at his desk. 

The first picture starter continues the ping-pong nature of the game so far, with Broadbent, eyebrows plastered in a kindly frown, quickest to recognise the Togo flag. He blitzes the bonuses too to tie the game. Two more consecutive starters for Brookes open up the biggest lead of the game, but Birkbeck fought back through Huntley and McMillan. 

It looks like no one knows the musical on the music starter, but Chadha guesses Funny Girl after hearing the lyric 'good for a laugh', which is excellent quizzing. After the bonuses we're back level, at 110 each. 

The scoring has been going at quite the clip and doesn't let up in the second half. Brookes get a couple to go ahead again, but three in a row from Birkbeck nudge them back in front. No one is allowed to build up too much momentum though, and Broadbent buzzes rapidly with games console to regain the advantage for Brookes. Its an absolute basketball match of a quiz, but who is going to be the one to score the dagger?

McMillan puts Birkbeck five points clear, and skipper Chadha gives Taylor Swift (an answer for the second time this series) to put the game beyond Brookes.

Birkbeck 220 - 205 Oxford Brookes

Phew! You can definitely see the effect of Rajan's quicker questioning here. 

This was the first match with a combined score of 400 or more since Durham thrashed Strathclyde 360-55 in 2018. You've got to go back to 2014 for the last match where both teams scored more than 200, when Trinity beat Manchester 285-205 in the quarters.

So despite the fact I think the average score is going to be a bit higher this series than in recent history, Oxford Brookes can count themselves supremely unlucky, and will definitely be returning as high-scoring losers. 

See you tomorrow for Southampton vs Christchurch

[azems-familiar]

🤡 and 👀 for the ask meme!

🤡 what's a line, scene, or exchange you've written that made you laugh?

okay weirdly this is a really difficult question for me to answer. i don't generally write specifically humor; most of the funny stuff i've done is sort of in the background and a side effect of something else. hmm. there's this bit from the start of a fic i wrote for Illami, one of my agents:

Nar Shaddaa is, on the surface, a grimy, paper-mache version of Coruscant - all glitz and glamor and gilt neon hiding a seedy underbelly of crime, corruption, and poverty, just like the Republic’s capital planet. Unlike Coruscant, the moon’s political overlords don’t even bother to pretend they care about their lower-class citizens, or the levels crammed with refugees, or the horrific experiments performed here, outside the Treaty’s bounds; as long as they pay tribute to the Cartel, anything and everyone are allowed on the Glorious Jewel’s moon.

Glorious Jewel, ha. It sounds like a fucking euphemism. That’s one species she’d never put her mouth or fingers near, whether their jewels are glorious or not.

and then there's an exchange from the next chapter of my kotor novelization that i am still definitely working on i just hate Taris so much. i am very much enjoying writing Carth and Trask bantering like an old married couple (oh god please ignore that i wrote this like a year ago and haven't touched much of it since. i've been.... stuck)

Waking up feels like clawing her way out of a lake. Sleep clings to her eyelids as she yawns and stretches, the sharp blare of Carth’s alarm drilling through her skull until she forces her eyes open. “What time is it?” she asks, blearily, glancing over to the other bed, and- She rubs at her eyes, frowns, but no, the sight is still there. On the opposite side of the bed from where Carth is slowly sitting up and reaching to silence the alarm, Trask is blinking awake, face pinched and dark circles prominent under his eyes. He must’ve gotten back late; he looks exhausted, she finds herself thinking as he runs a hand over his forehead.

“Too damn early,” he mutters under his breath, and she snorts, pushing herself upright and shoving the blanket off her lap.

“It’s oh-eight-hundred,” Carth says, with far too much energy considering the hour, “and you’d have more energy if you hadn’t come back at oh-five-hundred last night… or this morning.”

Trask mumbles something that sounds utterly scathing too quietly for Shala to pick out before he says, more clearly, “Not even a thank you for the three sets of armor I brought back, captain?”

Shala bites back a laugh, not wanting Carth to turn his glare on her as well, and lets out a yawn before standing, tucking her braids back behind her shoulders. Carth reaches for his shirt, draped over the foot of the bed, and as he tugs it on he says, “Thank you, ensign,” in a voice as dry as the Tatooine desert must be.

“It’s agent, if we’re being pedantic,” Trask says, the exhaustion clear in his voice even around the humor in it, and sits up with a yawn of his own. “We all know how much the military loves its technicalities.”

“Really? You’re bringing the rivalry up right now?”

👀tell me about an up and coming WIP please!

oh god okay. so. i've got a few of these that i'm tossing around from different fandoms. for swtor, i have several different oneshots surrounding my sunlight canon cast planned (there are so many plans actually), but the ones i'm working on currently are a backstory/prologue fic for Ktis and Illitha confronting Vivicar at the end of act one. for dragon age, i really want to write an alternative end to the trespasser DLC for my Lavellan, and i also want to write a slightly different version of the here lies the abyss plotline featuring my Hawke, Anders, and my Lavellan. unknown if these ones will come to fruition or not. but i have thoughts.

mdzs fics wise, i've got a long oneshot that i'm 12k words into and have been stalled on for a while that is a fix-it for Qiongqi path by the power of "wei wuxian brings a-yuan along to the party and shit goes way differently with a child along".

and finally, playing jedi: survivor has gotten ideas stuck in my head, though i currently only have the vague shape of what i want to write, since i need to finish the game to see exactly where and how i want to go AU. but they involve Bode/Cal and dealing with the aftermath of betrayal and also trying to get Bode's daughter back from the Inquistiorius. (yes, i'm aware that's not really compliant with how the game ends, though i don't know exactly what happens. that's why we've got ~au~) and possibly like... redemption? everyone knows i'm a slut for redemption arcs and shit.

tbh lately i've been mostly working on an sw5e campaign and the westmarch server i DM in, but i have missed writing and i'd like to kick this block in the teeth so i can get shit done again

[beileil]

🌈 and 👖 for the ask game? ^_^

Tysm for the ask! 💜 (The post is here for anyone who wants to ask or be asked.)

🌈 What inspired you to write [Hero Detective Agency]?

I saw you messaged to specify HDA for the first question, which is unfortunate, because it's the hardest one to answer for. :P (Answers for my other fics boil down to: I'm creating content for my rarepairs because no one else is, it was part of a challenge, or in the case of Demon Cyborg Picture Show, because I thought it would be funny.)

Caveat: It's been 3 years since I started writing Hero Detective Agency, so I honestly don't remember if this was the true inspiration for it or not.

Okay, so, I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, but I'm not sure what it's called so I'm going to dub this phenomenon "fandom creep". Basically, whatever my main fandom is (which has been One Punch Man for the last few years) starts to "creep" into my unrelated interests, experiences, and lesser-fandoms. I have a new favorite song? Coincidentally, my Blorbo also loves the song. I'm at an amusement park? I'm imagining how my OTP would behave at the amusement park.

(Detour here. Stay with me.) One of my other interests is video games. And one of my favorite game series is Fallout. If you've never played a Fallout game, the vibes of it are retrofuturistic. The games take place in the 2200s, and the world of Fallout follows the exact same history of ours up until the early 1960s, and then they branch out into their own timeline, leading to a nuclear apocalypse in 2077. BUT! Even though it's hundreds of years into the future, the music, fashion, and general culture vibes remain from the 1940s/1950s. The Fallout soundtracks include a lot of like...Ella Fitzgerald, Rat Pack, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, and so on. One of my favorite memories from playing is headshotting a raider to Billie Holiday.

I guess I sort of clung onto that whole aesthetic a little hard for a while. Listening to WWII era music, watching noir movies... And then the obsession with One Punch Man happened. And the SaiGenos shipping happened. And reading through nearly every OPM fic on Ao3 happened. And I realized that for the first time in 15 years, I actually wanted to post my own fanfiction. And no one seemed to have dibs on a 40s detective noir fic yet...so I created my own, along with a Fallout-esque soundtrack. (I promised I'd bring us back on track!)

I sometimes think I bit off far more than I can chew with Hero Detective Agency, because good god is it challenging coming up with mysteries, clues, solutions, and really just overall general plot, all while working in a setting 40+ years before I was even born. I think about it a lot when things happen like year-long breaks between updates, or when chapters end up 11,000 words longer than anticipated because there's so much world-building and exposition I have to do. And I would be lying if I said I won't be thrilled to be done with it. But it's my first baby that I'm really proud of, and it will always hold a special place in my heart.

👖 Are you a planner, plantser, or pantser? Is it consistent?

All three, and not consistent at all. It depends on how plot-heavy the story is, how much of the idea is already in my head, whether I'm at work or home, how much I've had to drink, if I have detailed prompts to go off of or not...

On the "seat of my pants" side of the scale, you've got: Gray, a short, fluffy one-shot; and The Divorce, which was basically fully fleshed out as a headcanon and just needed to be put on paper. These were straight brain-to-keyboard, no notes.

On the other extreme, you've got Hero Detective Agency, where by nature of what the story is (each chapter being nearly its own contained mystery), I have to plan everything out in excruciating detail. Every single action is written, by hand, in bullet point. I list out what the case is, the clues, the solution, the settings, the characters, each suspect's motivations, and if they're a red herring why they DIDN'T do it. This is my only fic I have a beta reader for, because I'm paranoid something will not make sense logistically.

But mostly I fall somewhere around a plantser, where I write out basic plot points that need to happen and then let the scenes write themselves, leaving placeholders if there's something I need to come back to later.

[gay-otlc]

Anyway, best grandma story. So, this is not cocaine grandma unfortunately, but to set the scene.

My Dad and my grandma bully each other. Love each other to death but tease and poke fun at each other all the time. Cannot spend more than two weeks in a house together but also hug and cry when they have to part. That is my Dad and his mom's relationship.

Also, my grandma, while definitely not a conservative person (she curses like a sailor) was a product of her time. She holds more... presentable views. She's not an asshole, she believes that everyone deserves to live and have rights, along with marry who they want. (she's been to many a protests.) She was also... well. A white women from the early to mid nineteen hundreds.

Anyway, this was probably over a year ago when this started. My grandma, being my grandma, had worried about him after his divorce as she had gone through the same thing.

Well.

It had finally been about three years, so everything settled, and my grandma (and my dad) had sort of come to heal a little bit more with the divorce.

So my dad, obviously, decided to mess with her.

So he calls her up one day, completely uncalled for. And they chat for a while about random little things, exchanging "how are yous" and "how's lifes" before my dad stops.

He takes a deep breath, and in a completely genuine tone goes.

"Mom, I'm seeing someone."

Now, he most definitely was not at this time. This would not be funny and would kind of be sad. However, he kept going, with this little charade, but the plot thickened.

Well of course she responded with "Honey I'm so happy for you, I know this has been so hard on you and I'm so glad that you were able to heal and keep yourself out of depression..." etc etc.

"So, what's she like?" My grandma asks, completely unaware about what is to come.

"Well," my dad said, "Her name is Cinnamon, and she's a professional dancer. I've never really seen her dance before, but she tells me that she's really popular with certain groups. She gets money at pretty random times, and she's never told me where she works before, but never mind that, she's drop dead gorgeous. She's only had time for a single with me, since she's really busy, but I think this is gonna work out."

Now I don't know if you've picked up what he's getting at, but my grandma had a couple of alarm bells ringing in her head when she heard this.

"Do you know.... what kind of dance she does?"

"Oh, not really. I mean like I said, I haven't really seen her dance before, but I found her uniform and I'll admit, I was a little suspicious. It was more revealing than a lot of leotards I've seen, along with some... interesting details. But she told me that it's easier to move around in. Especially on a pole!"

My grandma, despite her usual spitfire, no nonsense personality was silent. Because my dad was just gushing about this girl so obliviously that my grandma did not have it in her to tell him that she might not have him in her first thoughts. So instead she said,

"Oh that-that's great honey! I'm so happy that you're happy..."

And the thing is, my dad didn't come clean after that.

No, he kept the game going, and kept dropping bigger and bigger red flags that definitely went against my grandmother's beliefs.

But she never said a word.

In fact, when my dad actually got his current girlfriend, she would sign any and all cards sent to my grandmother with Cinnamon neatly written after my dad's name.

They kept up this charade until my grandmother met my dad's girlfriend.

And let me tell you, my dad's girlfriend is one of the most boring looking people ever. Not in a bad way, but literally you would have to call her name in a crowd because literally none of her traits stand out.

Anyway, they came clean at that meeting, but it was one hell of an introduction to my dad's girlfriend. I personally choose to believe that he threw off my grandma's expectations with this crazy kickass woman who was most definitely a stripper opposed to.... a normal woman with a southern accent.

My grandma now tells all of her friends this story, to let them know the type of humor her son has.

That's absolutely fantastic okay

[bionicallywriting]

The Three Phases of Dramione

When I read these works, I feel like the fanon itself is evolving. The very early works, in the 2006-2011 range were mostly comprised of very young writers. As someone noted, there was a dearth of material after Goblet of Fire, which spawned fanfic like crazy. Most were unfinished.

The ones that were finished seemed to be mostly comprised of angst and most depicted a vulnerable, weak Hermione set against a ruthless, even cruel Draco. Most speculated about the coming war, so were endlessly tragic. A classic example is The Fallout, which, though well-written, could have done with some major editing to cut out perhaps five hundred pages of the everyday descriptions that failed to add to the plot. Hermione, in this version, is cut out from the Golden Trio to fight and she fails miserably at this. Even though this technically has a “happy ending,” it feels like ash because it. Is. So. Tragic.*

*Don't get me wrong. This writer is very talented, but this work was needlessly verbose. I say this from the standpoint of someone who regularly DNFs books, so the fact that I even skipped to the end to find out what happened already means something.

The second period is 2011-2016, give or take a year or two. This is the period after all the canon came out and happy endings started to fill the fandom. Draco saw a revival of his snarkiness. Hermione often got one over on him. Draco is often depicted as having been in love with Hermione all along. The biggest indicator of this high point of fanon is the depiction of Ron Weasley in their relationship--he is almost always a cheater and seen as an emasculated and sore loser.

(Since fanfics take a few years to finish, when I note the years, this is supposed to be when the fic is started.) The most classic example is one that falls before this time period, but the writing style most depicts this period--the Politician's Wife. Now, this work is really ahead of its time, because it was written in 2006, before the series ended, but the author guessed correctly on a majority of points--so close to the actual ending that you really have to give her major kudos. Key points of this fic that reflect the period--first person narrative, written by an author who's clearly older, plot takes place post-Hogwarts, Ron is a cheater, snarky Draco + humorous tone, and very realistic depictions of relationships, although this one does slightly reside on the greyish morality boundary. Whereas the Draco of the earliest period would have cheated on Hermione purposefully just because he could, in this one, he's slightly more vulnerable.

This period makes me sad because when I go back to see the roster of authors, so many are gone from the fandom. They graduated college or graduate school and started working and moved on. You know these writers as well as I do: worksofstone, riptey, drcjsnider, to name but a few. If they haven't left, they've joined a few fests and lurk a bit but are no longer working on long fics. Very sad.

Alright. The third period. The current period of 2017+. How exciting. The biggest, biggest trend I see for this period is the gradual demonization of Dumbledore (or has this been happening for a while?) and the backlash of the emasculated Ron. In recent years, Ron has regained some much needed favor and is no longer Wizarding Britain's most hated individual.

I don't know if it seems that the smut has been increasingly on the rise as well. Where some earlier works could gain favor just by being finished or by being there, now there's an increasing demand for smut-based Dramione. Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but just as someone who's been reading romance novels since the second grade (yeah I was wandering in the wrong section at the library), I've just read too much literary porn to be invested in just another sex scene. I think porn scenes are less well-written than when they first came into popularity in the mainstream fiction world (circa 80s) when they were then still seen as very, very risque. Because they were seen that way, the sex scenes of books of that era seem to be better than any of the ones now, and I mean just in published books. I read a Harlequin Presents book the other day by a writer who's been going at it for maybe thirty years now, and her recent stuff is filled to the brim with really unnecessary pwp. In fact, in an unprecedented move, a Harlequin Presents romance was split into two books, where one would have sufficed, since the second book was only 150 pages (most HPs clock in at 195) and had three bedroom scenes, each of which lasted some fifteen pages. Basically, the two books could have been condensed into one by cutting out completely unmemorable sex scenes.

I guess what I'm saying is just that the porn content seems to be on the rise. That or, over time, the ones containing smut garnered more readership than those without, so by comparison, it seems as if those rated M+ are more popular. The term lemon has even been replaced with smut, just because, I guess. If you like that sort of thing, it's cool. I mean, it's at least a bit educational, isn't it? I mean, that's really how you went about learning of such things before there was internet.

Only, just as a long-time reader, I can maybe detail like three scenes I've remembered in the course of my entire life of reading romance just because the dynamics and character development leading up to the first scene was so well done, either between the two people or the tension between them. What I mean is, sure, there are readers combing content for smut. But can you honestly tell me that every single smut scene you've read have been essential for the characters? Have they been so meaningful that you remember that scene as essential to their development?

That, to me, is what defines a good sex scene. Not just the requisite action movie bedroom kiss/take off shirt in the dark scene that's so generic that I can't help but roll my eyes EVERY time I see it.

I would probably say this to directors as well as writers: make your sex scenes count. If done well, even a handshake can feel just as earthshattering. I think you all know what I mean.

[grapesgrapesgrapesgrapes]

You're my Best Friend// part one

HS!joe... thing that I wrote.. I've written shit on Wattpad before but this is the first thing I've written in a really long time so bear with me && I hope you enjoy!!

I'll be using my own character that I made up like five minutes ago whoops. If y'all want I can give a faceclaim.

Warnings: mentions of sex (no actual smut lol I can't write that), drug use (just marijuana, don't worry y'all), and swearing, angst? Maybe?

Joe and Jane had been friends since they were babies. Their mothers, best friends since high school, had unintentionally become pregnant and had decided their children would also be best friends.

Fast forward seventeen years, and Jane and Joe were even closer than their mothers. The two were seen everywhere together, cuddled up to each other and making vine references. Just about everybody thought you were dating, but each time the question came up, the two friends would laugh. To tell the truth, Jane hadn't even thought about what it would be like to date her best friend.

One downfall of having Joe as a best friend was that girls found him irresistible, and apparently Jane knew everything about him,so girls would come to him, asking if he was available just about every weekend. Another downfall was that Joe was kind of a manwhore. Jane had nicknamed him Roger Taylor because of his constant hookups.

One time Jane had walked in on Joe with a girl, and thank god they were still mostly covered because Jane probably would have vomited otherwise. He had called her and apologized about a hundred times after he was done.

Otherwise, Jane and Joe were closer than two peas in a pod, one never not knowing something about the other.

"Hey Joe?" Jane asked, laying on the boy's bed, playing on her phone. Joe was sat at his desk doing homework. Despite being a bit of a whore, he was incredibly focused on his grades, never handing in an assignment late. He often tutored Jane in Physics, as she sucked.

"Hm?" He replied, writing out vocabulary words in his notebook.

"Would you still be friends with me if I shaved all my hair off and glued it to my face?" She asked, glancing up as Joe gave her a look, his signature side-smirk on his face.

"Don't you already look like that?" He asked. Jane laughed and threw a pillow at him, yelling out a 'Hey!' He chuckled and set his pen down, turning to face her completely. "Uh, hey, I know I said I'd hang out tonight, but this girl Sarah wants to hang out and I told her I would.." Jane rolled her eyes as Joe trailed off. He had cancelled on her for the third time in the past two weeks and she had become sick of it.

"Again? Didn't you fuck her last weekend?" She asked, rolling her eyes. Joe gave her a sheepish smile, nodding. "Jeez, Roger Taylor, you can't keep cancelling our plans or I'll be forced to break up with you. I'm starting to think there might be someone else.." Even though you were upset, it was hard not to crack a joke.

"No, Jane! I've loved you for a hundred years! If you leave me I'll die!" Joe replied, dramatically flopping onto the carpeted floor, writhing as if he were being stung by jellyfish. Jane laughed, crawling to the edge of the bed and jumping on top of the boy so she was straddling him. She held his arms over his head and slapped him lightly across the face.

"Joe! Don't leave me! I didn't mean what I said! If you die I'll be cursed with ugliness for the rest of my days!" She cried, flinging her arms into the air for dramatic affect.

"Wait," Joe stopped, breaking character, "aren't you already cursed?" Jane stopped, breaking character as well as she slapped Joe lightly but repeatedly. "Stop!" He yelled, laughing as Jane hit him.

Joe's laughter ceased as he watched Jane's blissed out face, laughing so hard her eyes were shut and scrunched, smile lines adorning her cheeks and the corners of her eyes that Joe always loved. Eventually Jane noticed that Joe was no longer laughing and he eyebrows furrowed, a confused smile on her face.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" She asked.

"Why do you have those things in your nose?" Joe asked, quoting the inappropriate but hilarious Tik Tok that they had watched a few days prior.

"Joe," Jane laughed, sitting herself so she was still straddling him, but was no longer leaning over him. "be serious for a second!" She giggled. Joe held his hands out and Jane pulled him up so they were eye level. She wrapped her arms around the boy's neck, looking him directly in the eyes. Their intimate position meant nothing to them, as they had grown up showing very close affection with no affectionate feelings.

"I'm just looking at you," He replied, leaning his forehead against hers. "what's wrong with that? I catch you looking at me all the time." Jane was usually unfazed by Joe's funny looks but there was something different about this one. There was a glint in his eyes that she had never seen before. Shaking it off as nothing, Jane climbed off of Joe's lap. She checked her phone, finding that her mother had texted her asking her what time she would be home.

"Hey I should go, don't want to stay too late and risk your date thinking something was going on." Jane teased, grabbing her textbook and her backpack.

"Ok," Joe replied, standing from the floor. "I'll text you after Sarah leaves. Maybe we can still hang out? If you pick up a movie from Walmart we can watch it later? Or I could come to yours and we could watch some Netflix?" He asked as they walked together to his front door. Jane slipped on her shoes and sling her bag over her shoulder.

"Joe, it's gonna be at least midnight by the time you're done, and we have school tomorrow. I think I'm just gonna go to bed early tonight." Jane gave him an apologetic smile as she slipped out the front door, leaving a disappointed Joe behind. She didn't really care, if she was being honest. She was still upset that he cancelled their plans again for another booty call. It was obvious that Joe hadn't been taking Jane's feelings into account as of late, and it really bothered her.

Jane called her other best friend Sage as soon as she got home. Truth was, she didn't want to go to bed early. Since Joe had cancelled on her multiple times, Jane has had many early nights and she was itching for an adventure. Usually her and Joe would sneak out of their houses and run around town, playing late night games of mini golf and bowling, and sometimes breaking into gated parks after hours to fool around on the jungle gym.

"Sage? I need to do something tonight or I'm going to commit homicide." Jane spoke as soon as her friend picked up.

"Sebastian got his new order in yesterday. Let's get stoned."

And they did. Jane dressed herself in one of her flashiest outfits, sneaking out of her house as soon as her parents had fallen asleep. Sage was waiting, sitting criss crossed in the middle of Jane's driveway, also dressed quite flashy. Sage liked to hook up with Sebastian every time they got high together. Jane never minded. She was used to Joe hooking up with girls, and she honestly didn't care about getting kicked out of his house when she was stoned enough.

Five joints and two bong hits later and Jane was ushered out of Sebastian's house, Sage hooked to him like a fly on sticky tape. She walked aimlessly through the streets, not really caring where she was going until she reached Joe's house. She hadn't even realized she walked all the way there. It wasn't too far from Sebastian's, but Joe was never a fan of Jane smoking, so she rarely went to his house after she smoked.

Yet here she was, standing at the base of his yard, staring from afar into his window where he would most likely be with Sandra, or whatever her name was. Something itched in the back of Jane's mind and she fished her phone out of her pocket. Her body and mind were on autopilot as she dialed his number, not seeming to care that he was busy. He picked up after two rings, out of breath.

"Jane?" He spoke, his breathing laboured.

"Why did you answer the phone? Aren't you having sex right now?" Jane asked, forgetting why she had called, or perhaps she hadn't figured out why she called in the first place quite yet.

"Yeah, what's up? Why are you calling? Are you okay?" Even after cancelling their plans, Joe still picked up the phone almost immediately. Jane's chest fluttered at the thought.

"Why did you cancel our plans again?" She asked, not thinking twice. She suddenly grew angry. She was sick of him cancelling on her. She would drop anything to be there for him and would never even think about cancelling on him, and yet here he was, hooking up with some girl instead of being there for his best friend. If he hadn't been there with her she wouldn't be stoned and cold, standing outside of his house, confused. She shivered, wishing she hadn't dressed like such a slut, or had at least bothered to bring a jacket.

"What?" Joe asked. There was rustling on the other end and a hushed apology before he spoke again. "Jane, can we talk tomorrow? I'm kind of busy. I'm sorry."

"Bullshit you're sorry!" Jane spluttered, angry tears brimming in her eyes. She was so confused. Why was she crying? Why had she called Joe. Why was she so bothered by Joe hooking up with a girl? He had been hooking up with girls since they were fifteen, why be upset now? Still, she kept talking.

"You've dumped our plans like three hundred times now! Do you hate me? Am I ugly? Am I too ugly for you to hang out with me? Are you gonna stop being friends with me?" Jane couldn't stop the tears from flowing as she yelled at Joe through the phone.

"Wait, Jane.. Are you outside right now? I can hear you.." Joe's voice faltered as she could only assume he was looking out his window. "Holy shit! What the fuck are you wearing?" Joe asked. She watched him peek through his blinds before turning and muttering something to the girl he was with. "Shit, Jane, give me a minute and I'll be right out." He hung up shortly after and Jane waited, not bothering to wipe her tears.

Joe emerged from his house shortly after, wearing a pair of boxers and carrying one of his blankets. He jogged over to the shivering girl and draped the blanket over her, taking in her appearance.

"W-why aren't you still in there fucking that girl? Why are you out here when you can be in there?" Jane blubbered, staring into Joe's confused eyes.

"Jane, what the fuck is going on? Just four hours ago you were fine, and now you're bawling about bullshit. Are you stoned?" He asked. Jane tried to turn away from him but he was quick to grasp onto her hands, pulling her to face him. He took her face in his hands, staring into her eyes.

"I know you don't like it but you cancelled on me again and I just wanted to do something fun and-" She couldn't continue speaking, her tears taking over. Joe wrapped her in a tight hug, squeezing her as tight as he could to calm her down. He did this whenever she went on one of her stoned rants and started freaking out, as she often did.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I promise I won't cancel on you again. Shh, calm down." Joe muttered, kissing the top of her head. "Hey, let me get dressed and I'll walk you home."

"What about the girl?" Jane asked, sniffling and wiping her eyes.

"She wasn't any good, anyway. Don't worry about it." Joe said, once again kissing her head as he guided her inside. "Do you want some of my clothes, by the way? You look like a stripper." He joked. Jane pushed him lightly, having calmed down, and snuggled into his side, breathing in his scent that never failed to calm her down.

//

Hi everyone, I hope you liked this! I hope this isn't too much all at once lol. I was watching the office as I wrote this so I got a bit distracted... Many times. Let me know what you think && I'll try to write a part two soon!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING PEOPLE

Dilution is a hard problem. I don't think they'd do much differently if they were merely hiring people. And yet when I was growing up.1 Jessica more than anyone made YC unique, the very qualities that enabled her to do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money and getting incorporated are an O 1 pain in the ass, whether you're big or small, and others like selling and promotion depend more on energy and imagination than any kind of special training. But within three days we loved it, and he was right. When you want to keep in close touch as you develop it further. If you have impressive resumes, just flash them on the screen for 15 seconds and say a few words.2 If you don't believe your startup has such promise that you'd be doing them a favor by letting them invest, why are you investing your time in it?3 It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory famous, and the only reason you need them is to make credentials harder to hack, we can also make them matter less. I count them as false positives because I hadn't been deleting them as spams before.

Angels don't like publicity. A sharp impact would make them unavailable to the people who think they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate is, sometimes they tell me we get about a hundred new customers a month. There isn't so much at stake in his interactions with other investors, his relationship with the founder is only going to last a couple years, whereas his relationship with other firms will last his whole career.4 For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. If they stepped back and looked at the whole picture they might be less indignant.5 But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. Seem confident. I think the problem with politics too. Probably the most important thing we do at Y Combinator. Most founders have such low standards that they'll feel rich with a sum that doesn't seem huge to investors. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it isn't succinct enough.6

As this new kind of venture fund that invests smaller amounts at lower valuations, but promises to either close or say no very quickly. They're as expert in their world as you are in yours. Apparently Kleiner and Sequoia with a $75 million premoney valuation, their reaction was probably Ouch! And they may be right. Disasters are normal in a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something. They know they'll have to deal with these guys was in high school. If a post has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more readable than a line of Basic is likely to be more matter-of-fact. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can get rewarded directly by the market?7 Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup into trouble.

A recruiter at a big company, these qualities must have been very valuable. For example, many of the stories about Jeremy Jaynes's conviction say that he was a fairly big spammer. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't be selling the company for 20. The reason I warn startups not to get their hopes up is not to describe everything your system might one day become, but simply to convince investors there will be a lot simpler. A rapidly growing company is valuable. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. It shows no sign of slowing. We decided we ought to give priority to the ones that occur a lot.

As a rule, any url sent to millions of people in America, have some amount of funding to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. The other kind of spams I currently do have trouble with. That has always seemed to me full of random stuff. The whole tone is bogus. But they might as well flip a coin. But working on this is not my first priority, it's unlikely to happen at all. Always have some alternative plan for getting started if any given investor says no. They're hard to filter based just on the content because the headers are innocent and they're careful about the words they use. Everyone buys this story that PG started YC and his wife just kind of helped.8

I thought I'd already been cured of caring about that.9 So in borderline cases, and reports that it works well.10 6x.11 And they may be right. Every successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case.12 If you're going to start with something that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.13 Maybe there is some important trend afoot.

Notes

For example, would be possible to have to give up legal protections and rely on cold calls and introductions.

Like us, the average employee. There's nothing specifically white about such matters. No central goverment would put its two best universities in the same price as the cause. The philistines have now missed the video boat entirely.

It is a bit dishonest, incidentally; it's not uncommon for startups. Or demolished to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and why it's such a low valuation, that probably doesn't make A more powerful sororities at your school, because the rich. By all means crack down on these. This is, because you couldn't do the same reason I did the section of the infrastructure that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their startups.

But I know one very smooth founder who read a new version sanitized for your present valuation is the discrepancy between government receipts as a cause.

It's interesting to 10,000 computers attached to the customer: you post a sign saying this cupboard must be kept empty.

It's much easier to make money from mediocre investors. We could have used another algorithm and everything I say in principle get us up to 20x, since that was more rebellion which can happen in any case, because a she is very common for the talk to mediocre ones. Most computer/software startups. Though in fact had its own.

The reason Y Combinator certainly never asks what classes you took in college.

The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991. Possible exception: It's hard for us. It tipped from being overshadowed by Microsoft, would increase the size of the next year or two, and mostly in Perl, and this trick merely forces you to stop, but it is to get good grades in them, maybe 50% to 100% more, and I don't think these are, but countless other startups, so we also give any startup that wants to invest in your startup.

If Ron Conway, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the program is no. Since they don't have to do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as straightforward as building a new version of Word 13. Usually people skirt that issue with some equivocation implying that you're talking to you; you're too early for us!

This argument seems to have to resort to in order to switch the operating system.

Cit. So you can base brand on anything with it, but it wasn't. The angels had convertible debt is a convertible note with no valuation cap at all.

That would be reluctant to start a startup. Robert Morris wrote the editor written in C and Perl. Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Perhaps realizing this will be out of their professional code segregate themselves from the conventional wisdom on the ability to predict at the final whistle, the less powerful language by writing an interpreter for the same, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

It's hard to judge for yourself and that the word content and tried for a small amount, or how to do better, because she liked the outdoors, was starting an outdoor portal. The first alone yields someone flighty. There should probably start from the success of their times.

[shelovesrainn]

Lost Scrivener

Perhaps, happiness is on your way. Perhaps, for you, every day means a new venture for hope, love, prosperity, and felicity. But not for me, because for me, witnessing how the sun rises from the east with its brilliant light complementing with the blue sky means darkness, a nightmare that keeps haunting, another set of torture, pain, and sorrow−a torment. Each morning, as I open my eyes, I used to pray with my knees bended, my eyes closed, and my heart fast beating. My plea may not be the typical one for a 20-year-old; my prayer revolves around I, hoping for meeting someone who can pull me out of this chaos or I, pleading for this ineffable pain arousing inside me to vanish. None of these was heard, though. So, I got exhausted asking for those pieces of crap daily and started embodying and accepting the fact that perhaps, I was created to crave for that so-called happiness; perhaps, I was given life to be miserable.

The bus stopped at a familiar spot which is way too ironic to say, because my feet never stepped in this place before. Maybe what makes it familiar thou, is the vivid picture of it that I’ve been dreaming of every single night. And the moment I wake up, my body would shiver as the deafening beats of my heart prevailed over the loud noises from a bunch of city vehicles, like of a teenager’s seeing her childhood crush. Since then, I unconsciously desired to reach that place someday. I worked every day excluding Sundays and saved most of the fee they’re giving me for that. If you will ask me, for what reason, I weren’t able to provide you an answer because to be honest, I don’t either know. I saw a reflection of a pale maiden looking at me intently. Her hair is short, her face is cute, her lips are bitsy and only her pink tip tint gives color in it, her pair of eyes are small like of the Chinese and as dark as the sky at night, her long eyelashes are curvy, and the moles on her face are what you’ll never fail to notice. However, she has several marks of pimples all over her face and some huge dark circles around her eyes−evidences of hundreds of sleepless nights and tiring sobs. She isn’t novelty, she is just an ordinary, she is me.

I got back on my senses when the bus conductor yelled telling that we already reached our destination. The people went out of the vehicle carrying their baggage with them. I assume that they’re having their vacation, but it’ll sound ridiculous because it’s already July which is supposed to be time for labor. I carried my bags and went off the bus. My body welcomed the fieriness that the breeze of air is offering early in the morning. The blasting sounds of the water hitting the immense rocks of the ocean is like a lullaby from a loving mother that an infant is longing to hear for decades. The salty scent of the sea creatures tingles my nose. I smiled, for I know I am here. At last, I am finally here. I navigate towards the bluish piece of solace as the delineate visual of it in my visions simultaneously flashes in my mind. I realized that the paradise I’m staring at the present is more flabbergasting than of in my dreams. I sat on the pure white sand of the brine, relishing my own company. I wonder how and when do this desire of mine started. When I closed my eyes, the answer rapidly popped.

It was one Sunday morning when a blaring voice of a woman awakened me. Her voice was full of worries. It was easy for me to distinguish that it was my mother’s because I knew how she sounded very well. “Where did he come from? Is he alright?” my grandmother asked from the first floor.

“I…I have no idea. Hand me a bowl of cold water, please!” she retorted almost sounded like crying. I stayed silent in bed for a while for I cannot understand what was going on. However, anticipations are all over my head. I felt my chest heavies but still, I managed to be at ease and shake the bad ideas I’m having away. I heard my father crying and repeatedly uttering, “I’m sorry. I should have died instead.” Based from his voice, I knew he was badly wrecked.

Nica, my older sister came and sat beside me, she said, “The car was severely damaged.” There is a hint of grief on her tone, yet she is covering it with her most fabricated smile. I went down to check my father and the car. Gladly, it wasn’t that critical. My father got few wounds on the head, and several bruises on his arms and legs. However, that morning, marked my very first heartbreak. It was because, that day, I found out with my own eyes, the affair of my beloved father with an unknown lady.

The family where I belong to seems to be an epitome of perfection for many. We barely brag each other onto serious arguments, we set barricades to each member of the family lower than of the others, and we are used to be happy and genuine. But even the firmest post has to give up. I accepted the fact that there is no longer a way to repair and reconstruct this broken pillar. Maybe it can be rejuvenated but the stability can never be brought back.

“Hey, cutie! Can I sit beside you?” A stranger suddenly appeared from nowhere. He noticed my frowning face, so he continued to speak, "Hi, I am Danni. And you are?" I should have ignored this guy, but my inner self is saying he isn't bad. So, there's no way running away from him.

"Veronica." He smiled. His reaction is telling me that he already knows who I am, but I shook that thought away because I might probably be hallucinating.

"It's nice to finally be with you again, Veronica. It's been 10 years and nothing much has changed." He said.

That was my first time meeting him. Well, technically, it was not because I discovered that Danni and I are classmates during our primary school days. He was once a mama's boy who always got towel at her back and baby powder on the face and neck. He was the blithesome child sitting beside me for three consecutive years, I think. We used to be that close before not until we moved into another place.

"You left without proper farewell. I searched for you every day, but I didn't see any hints of you. Every day without you is darkness. For the long 10 years that we were apart, I'm hoping for your return. I felt hopeless to see you again. Now, that you're finally here by my side, I cannot afford to lose you one more time. I don't want to miss you again." His eyes were full of sincerity that afternoon when he was uttering those words. I am not aware of his feelings toward me, so I was a bit surprised with his confession. I don't know what to say or how to react. I stayed unspoken. I stared at his eyes, they are as brown as my favorite caramel coffee during rainy seasons. Those were once what I adored about him because aside from reminding me my favorite beverage, they mirror his soul. However, those eyes were what I abhorred the most as well. Those eyes became my greatest foe. It began when the sincerity of it vanished; lies underlies those eyes.

Our first year were pretty blissful. Though far from each other, we never failed to express our affection. We ensured to find time for us. Nevertheless, happiness seems to be ephemeral; misapprehension aroused. I felt like I was being taken for granted. I left; he chased me. I was too heartless, but I only did that because I foresee how our ending will be. Perchance, this is where I am credible at−overthinking then, creating my own ending.

Unconsciously, I headed toward my consolation. My body trembled as the glacial salty water slowly soaks me. I sluggishly shut my eyes, feeling the placidity that this paradise is giving. Perhaps, I have the same fate as of my mother's. Perhaps, I am not meant to meet the valiant one who has the audacity to save me out of this abyss. Perhaps, happiness is too much to ask. Perhaps, for me, happiness is unattainable. Perhaps, this is what I've been yearning for, all this time.

"I'm sorry, Veronica. I know I made something bad. I hurt you. I'm crying every night because of what I've done. I'm crying because I don't know if you still love me. What I only knew is that I'm going to lose you again. I don't want that to happen. Please tell me you still do love me. Please, stay with me. I'm still here, waiting for you. I love you." That was the last words I heard from him, the same exact words my father articulated to my awful mother. I promised to myself that that was the last time I'm ever getting a glimpse back of our story. This will be the last time I'll be remembering how the sun rises from the east amd how its light gorgeously complements the blue sky because now, together with the sun setting to the west, I am closing the book. Up until the end, I have written my own finale. This is my ending.

[masha-russia]

Hello! Can you talk to me a little bit about Valyria? Is it 100%unsavable? Anything still hiding there? Maybe some dragon eggs? I'm sure my question is answred somewhere in the books, but I've just started reading them! And I love the idea of Valyria being rebuilt.

Hello! I am sorry I took some time to answer your ask.

Look, I made this PDF document for you - the 12 pages dedicated to Valyria from The World of Ice and Fire (I created it from my own PDF file of TWOIAF so it’s safe to download). They will make you understand Valyria much better than I ever could! :) There are some other minor passages about Valyria in the book (like a description of the wars between Valyrians and Rhoynar but it’s some obscure lore for a beginner and I didn’t think you’d want that), but this is the main text about it.

I love Valyria! It was such a beautiful and modern place in comparaison to all the rest of Planetos. While the world in ASOIAF seems to be forever stuck in a sort of Early Middle Ages, Valyria's era equivalent would be somewhere in between the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, with many aspects of ancient Rome, and of course many elements of Fantasy. Valyrians were really an advanced civilization. 

At its apex Valyria was the greatest city in the known world, the center of civilization.

Apart from taming dragons, and mixing their blood with dragon's blood (the expression "blood of the dragon" is not a metaphor, Valyrians did mix their DNA with the dragons' DNA, to have a better affinity with them), they also practiced magic. We don't know much about their sort of magic, but we know that they used it to build castles and skycrapers and roads, just as they used it to forge Valyrian steel. Nobody knew how to make Valyrian steel apart from Valyrians themselves, and since the Doom the knowledge and art of it was lost. And only the most skilled armorers could hope to re-work the existing Valyrian steel (for example, Ice was re-forged into 2 new blades, Oathkeeper and Widow's Wail, but the process was difficult and the armorer couldn't achieve the coloring he wanted).

In A Dance with Dragons, Tyrion travels along Valyrian roads.

During one stop, he used the time to have a closer look at the road. Tyrion knew what he would find: not packed earth, nor bricks, nor cobbles, but a ribbon of fused stone raised a half foot above the ground to allow rainfall and snowmelt to run off its shoulders. Unlike the muddy tracks that passed for roads in the Seven Kingdoms, the Valyrian roads were wide enough for three wagons to pass abreast, and neither time nor traffic marred them. They still endured, unchanging, four centuries after Valyria itself had met its Doom. 

Come moonrise, they were back in their saddles, trotting eastward under a mantle of stars. The old Valyrian road glimmered ahead of them like a long silver ribbon winding through wood and dale. For a little while Tyrion Lannister felt almost at peace. "Lomas Longstrider told it true. The road's a wonder."

Valyrians also practiced a pre-modern form of democarcy, a bit like the Roman Republic according to GRRM. They did not have a King or an Emperor, and every one had a voice, though of course some were more influential and powerful than others.

Women in Valyria were treated differently from women in Westeros - Valyria seems to have been much less misogynistic. We know it thanks to Visenya who was a warrior and who trained since very young age apparently without facing disapproval from her family; and thanks to her blade, Dark Sister, which was originally forged for a woman's hand back in Valyria - which suggest that Valyrian women could be warriors. We also know about a Valyrian woman explorer, Jaenara Belaerys, who flew on her dragon to discover the unknown lands of Sothoryos.

Jaenara Belaerys flew her dragon, Terrax, farther south than any man or woman had ever gone before, seeking the boiling seas and steaming rivers of legend, but found only endless jungle, deserts, and mountains. She returned to the Freehold after three years to declare that Sothoryos was as large as Essos, "a land without end."

The negative side of Valyria was the practice of slavery, which started following the fifth and last war between the Freehold and Old Ghis (the ancestor of Slaver's Bay). I can understand why the Ghiscari people were enslaved (they were defeated enemies, and Valyrians decided to put an end to these wars forever) though I do not support this choice, but there was absolutely no need to continue with slavery. Valyrians were already extraordinary and powerful and superior to all the rest, and they achieved their greatness through their own effort and own work, not through slaves. Slavery was a very dark chapter in the story of Valyria, and was what probably brought the Doom.

Unfortunately, I do not think Valyria could be rebuilt. I like this idea too, and after I first finished reading the novels the ending of Daenerys rebuilding Valyria was very appealing to me, but now I understand that it's highly unlikely to happen. Valyria is a shattered, ruined land of very active volcanoes, haunted by "demons", and is uninhabitable for normal humans.  

This is a passage from a Tyrion's chapter, when he is sailing towards Slaver's Bay and passing well south of where Valyria once stood, 400 years after the Doom:

A dull red glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave. "What hour is this?" he asked Moqorro. "That cannot be sunrise unless the east has moved. Why is the sky red?"

"The sky is always red above Valyria, Hugor Hill."

A cold chill went down his back.

And this is how the people perceive it:

Every man there knew that the Doom still ruled Valyria. The very sea there boiled and smoked, and the land was overrun with demons. It was said that any sailor who so much as glimpsed the fiery mountains of Valyria rising above the waves would soon die a dreadful death.

Whatever happened to Valyria was not only a simple volcanic eruption (like in Pompeii) - it was a much more cataclysmic event. When the spells the Valyrians used to control the Fourteen Flames collapsed, it appears that all these volcanoes exploded at once, and rained down magma and ashes and acids. Earthquakes broke the land and provoked great tsunamis that destroyed the cities.

“So those are fires of the Fourteen Flames we’re seeing, reflected on the clouds?”

“Fourteen or fourteen thousand. What man dares count them? It is not wise for mortals to look too deeply at those fires, my friend. Those are the fires of god’s own wrath, and no human flame can match them. We are small creatures, men.”

“Some smaller than others.” Valyria. It was written that on the day of Doom every hill for five hundred miles had split asunder to fill the air with ash and smoke and fire, blazes so hot and hungry that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed. Great rents had opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples, entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, fiery fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air, red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted.

And this is what happened to the Isle of Cedar, located hundreds of miles away from Valyria:

On the day the Doom came to Valyria, it was said, a wall of water three hundred feet high had descended on the island, drowning hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, leaving none to tell the tale but some fisherfolk who had been at sea and a handful of Velosi spearmen posted in a stout stone tower on the island’s highest hill, who had seen the hills and valleys beneath them turn into a raging sea. Fair Velos with its palaces of cedar and pink marble had vanished in a heartbeat. On the north end of the island, the ancient brick walls and stepped pyramids of the slaver port Ghozai had suffered the same fate.

It does not seem to me like a salvageable place. There are a lot of things hiding there I do not doubt, from beasts like firewyrms to the remnants of Valyrian buildings and sorceries (if Euron's armor is really made of Valyrian steel, and if he really got it from Valyria as he boasts, then it's safe to say that more Valyrian treasures could be found). About dragons’ eggs I am less sure, though it is not impossible I guess (Euron, again, claims he found a dragon egg but threw it overboard in the sea “during one of his dark moods”, though he didn’t say where he found the said egg) but anyway the only dragons that will be important for the plot of ASOIAF are Daenerys’ dragons. Maybe after the War for the Dawn these potential eggs would come into play? I certainly do not want the dragons to die (a fantasy world without dragons where dragons once were is a sad world), it would be nice if Valyrian eggs could be found and hatched for the beginning of a new era of dragons. I cannot say that GRRM will go in this direction though.

I am sure we will see and learn more about Valyria in Winds of Winter! There were a lot of world-building around it and a build-up of information in the fourth and fifth novels, and a prominent villain (Euron) is heavily associated with it. I also believe that Daenerys will cross the demon-road (a Valyrian road north of Valyria that runs from Volantis to Meereen and that everyone is afraid to go to) on her way to Volantis, and maybe divert her trajectory and fly over the ruins of Valyria, if only for a short while. It would be great if she found a cache of Valyrian steel! If anyone should have a Valyrian steel armor in the story then it’s definitely her, the last true Valyrian and the last dragonrider. Not to mention that it would be very helpful in the fight against the Others! But two Valyrian steel armors may be one too many for GRRM. 

We only have to wait now :)

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Welcome to the Meganoid(2017) post-mortem. This post-mortem goes into the details on the Meganoid figures and stats. Without context the stats are pretty much silly numbers, so please make sure to read all of this because there is more to the numbers than you might think.

So I'll keep this short, if you want to learn more about who I am, please check out my techblog and website. I've been a full-time (indie) developer since 2004. Mostly known for mobile games, but since 2015 also branching to PC games and even some consoles releases here and there (PS Vita and 3DS).  I've never had hit games that made me millions, but I have been doing very decent for many years releasing games that have found a growing fan-base in a niche area.  My biggest titles include the Gunslugs and Heroes of Loot series of games and Space Grunts.

The original Meganoid was released in 2010 on Android and iOS and was a very hard platformer with short levels that sometimes had you screaming if you didn't manage to reach the finish. For me it was a turning point in my games as I finally decided to just build games like that since those are the games I love the most. Luckily I found a niche that works for me and an audience that has been growing alongside me and my games. It also managed to reach close to a million downloads since.

Meganoid(2017) is a reboot of the franchise lifts a lot on the designs behind Spelunky, while still maintaining the difficulty of the original Meganoid game. I named it a "love child of Spelunky and Meat-boy in space", which is a very clear description of what the game is. It's not extremely original, but I'll get to that later on!

Oh, the game was also created in "just" two months, but I'll also get back to that if you keep reading..

So before Meganoid I was working on a game called Ashworld, which is a huge project for a one-man development team (which I am) and it's also an open-world game, a genre that I personally have no experience with because I often quit those games within a few hours of play-time.  Simply put: Ashworld is a huge challenge for me, and I have been working on it since June 2016.

Seeing as my games are actually my livelihood, money needs to come in on a semi-frequent basis. My business is still running fairly well, I have a huge back-log of games and they are all still bringing in money on a monthly base, but to keep it all running I do have some rules on how long game-projects can take.  Ashworld is breaking those rules due to a challenging development phase where I've been learning open-world design and also searching where the actual fun in the game-design is. So the game isn't done, and still needs a few months of work.

Enter the stage: Meganoid.

In January I decided to just do some prototyping with the hopes that I would end up with something playable that could be extended into a game. For this to work, I needed a clear design idea and direction. A game that I could almost create on automatic-mode.

This "automatic-mode" does need some nuance here, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago and I think it painted a wrong picture. Some comments and replies I got thrown at me were along the line of "a quick money grab". My bad on writing the article and not being clear about things, so here's to rectifying it:

The game was made in "just 2 months; and 13 years of experience".

The key part being those 13 years experience, factual there are a lot more years of experience, but the 13 years is how long I've been doing this commercially. Meganoid at it's core is a platformer with rogue-like mechanics. I've created close to 60 commercial platform games, and I've been doing rogue-like elements in my last 5-6 games. I know what to expect code-wise, and I know how to program those things without having to think about it.

To put it in some more perspective, my game Heroes of Loot 2 is a huge RPG-adventure/twin-stick shooter, and it was made in little over 4 months. So I normally work really fast and very effective.

Now think what you like about the short-development cycle, I don't plan to change your mind about it, but from a business point of view: this made sense and still delivers a quality game.

To have this game make some profit I needed it to take just a couple of months work so it would be easier to recoup on the costs AND make money on the game.

The development-cycle was pretty short, but since I had some interesting stuff pretty early on I actually showed some screenshots and gifs in the first week of development on twitter,facebook,instagram and a couple of forums. Some of this got picked up pretty early by mobile-game sites, and Toucharcade showed the first couple of video's I released in the weeks after.

I started using reddit a bit more, and finally managed to post something there without it being taken down (actually on second try, the first did get taken down because I didn't disclose that the "pre-order discounts" was on a game I made, which obviously makes a big difference../sarcasm).

The two or so weeks before the launch I already had various mobile sites mailing me for some promocodes, which is the up-side of being "known" in a market. In contrast to that there is the PC scene, where I'm basically unknown and nobody talks about my games.

The launch week I started looking at youtube streamers for the PC version, so I basically searched for big youtubers that covered games like: Spelunky, Meat boy, and a few other more recent pixel-art indie games that fit the same category as Meganoid.

I mailed all of them, close to a 100, which at least one steam-key included (for some group-youtubers I included up to 5 keys) and this all resulted in an awesome 0 streams.  I did a follow up email to a large portion of them a week later, and this resulted in 1 Streamer playing it,  yay results!

It's still possible some streamers will pick up the game later, having full inboxes, managers that handle emails slowly, or just large backlogs of video's. But I don't hold my breath for any of it.  Same goes for PC game-site reviews, so even tho I did everything "right" it basically ended up with fairly little returns on it.  The emails were short, to the point, showed a GIF of the game, bullet points, youtube trailer, quick-links and a steam-key included with a link to the website/presskit for more info. All according to the average marketing-advise.

Basically, in my opinion and experience, you need to know people to get things done. But reaching out never hurts and is also the way to get to know more people, so yeah.

Okay, okay! that's what you guys came for, I get it!

Google Play's "Best new seller" list charting

Let me first start with this, Meganoid was so far:

Featured on App-store under "New games we loved" - worldwide

Featured on Google Play "Early Access"

Featured on Google Play "New and Updated"

Top-charted (top 25) in Google Play "Best new sellers" list

Game of the Week - on TouchArcade

"Best games of the week for iOS and Android"  - Pocketgamer

Now, back to reality, for those who don't know, making money on games is HARD, on any given day there are 100-500 games released on various platforms. That's EVERY DAY! Standing out from those games is extremely hard, most games you will never see and they get like 5-10 downloads (depending on how many friends the developer has).

With my experience of doing this business for a long time, I set a fairly low but do-able goal for Meganoid: $6500 during the launch-period. I know it's a not a huge game, and it had fairly short marketing-visibility before release due to the fast development cycle.

For me a launch-period is the first month or so after releasing it. My goals is usually to make 80%-100%  of the development costs back in this first period. I calculate development costs fairly rough by multiplying each development-month with $2000 and then add any outsourced work costs. Since I do code+design+game graphics that often leaves out-source costs to music and high-res marketing art.

The $2000 is very low-end of what my cost-of-living is each month (in the Netherlands, with mortgage, girlfriend and pets). It doesn't take into account taxes and extra cash-flow for "the future". But we're talking about launch-period here, so a game will live on for a few more years and with future sales and discounts you can often double the money a game made on launch.

So for this game I had 2 months of work, that's $4000 and since there was such a short dev-cycle and I used ambient sounds from my sound-libraries, there was no music cost and just a few hundred dollars for the awesome marketing art. So let's round it to $4500.

Now the point is to get extra cashflow to cover the longer development-cycle of Ashworld and we get to a $6500 minimum revenue that I was aiming for with Meganoid.  Again this is all launch-period revenue, because obviously it's a low amount especially if Ashworld development still needs 2 or 3 months time. So I'll get to that in a few paragraphs below.

I released Meganoid on March 30 on iOS, Android and PC (steam/humble/itch, windows/osx/linux) and we're now at three weeks into the release and currently the revenue is just a little shy of the target at $6200. Which is not bad at all!

So let's dig into this $6200 launch-period amount. Where did most of it come from, and why! The biggest bulk of this comes from the iOS version, actually close to 50% of it: $3580.  On iOS the game was priced $4.99 with a launch-discount the first week making the game $3.99. Meganoid was made Game of the week at Toucharcade which most certainly helped, one of the weeks best games for iOS and Android on Pocketgamer, but sadly it had no "games we play" feature for the first weekend.

For some reason the game only showed up in the "Games we play" on Monday/Tuesday for the USA App-store, at which point it spiked to slightly below the launch spike so effectively doubling the sales in the 3/4 days it had that front page feature.  I'm pretty sure it would have done better if it did have that feature in the first-weekend (during the sale) but those things are pretty much out of my control and I'm glad it eventually did get a feature after-all (something I kind had planned for in setting my revenue targets).

Apple loved it - all over the world!

Second biggest seller was Android, now this was done a little different. I tried some beta stages on Android and this put my game into "Early Access" on Google Play a week before the launch at a $2.99 price. This price was mostly because I believe that the brave people who try out a beta shouldn't pay full price.  The game got a nice Google feature in their "Early Access" list, which only has about 20 games listed, so that's a pretty good list to be in.

The possible down-side of this is that a lot of people don't seem to be clear of understanding what "Early access" means on Google Play, so there was a lot more buying going on than I had planned for, and that means I was pushing updates daily to work out some "obviously-beta" features. Early-access users can't leave reviews during that phase, so that might have been a positive thing, the down-side of that is that many people forget to leave a review once the game was released.. so not as many reviews as I normally have during the launch-period. Not sure if I would do that again on Android, but it's been an interesting experiment.

Finally we come to the PC revenue, in total that's $900 which is split over Steam, Itch and Humble. This is also my biggest pain-in-the-butt, obviously my games still don't make much waves amongst PC gamers. Especially since about 50% of that money comes through Itch.io where I ran a pre-order with 20% discount in the two weeks leading up to the launch. So these buyers are mostly people from my own social-circles and mailing-lists, people who in many cases also buy the mobile version and in a lot of cases people who tipped up to $10 (even tho the pre-order price was $3.99!)  (THANKS!).

The humble-store sales were about 10% of that, so the rest is up to you to calculate :p

Side note:  Besides this launch-period revenue, there is also the added advantage of extra money made on back-log sales. New gamers that see Meganoid will check out my other games and in some cases end up buying a few more of my games. On top of that a lot of subscriptions to my social-circles and mailing list have happened during and after the development of Meganoid, which are all potentially future fans of my next games.

Another important thing to read about, how are the ratings? Because let's face it, making a game in two months isn't interesting if it's a crappy game. On iOS the game has a strong 4/5 star rating from gamers, and on Android it's at 4.8/5 star rating. I'd say those are pretty good ratings (most of my games are around the 4.0 - 4.5 ratings)

On Steam there are only about 4 ratings of which only 2 ratings count since they bought the game on Steam and not through my website/Itch.io or Humble. But I think "all of them" are fairly positive!

Game-site wise, well that's a mixed bag of thingies. As mentioned before, the game was made "game of the week" on Toucharcade, and it was part of the "best games for iOS and Android" that week on Pocketgamer. On the other side Toucharcade's review gave it just a 3.5/5 rating, and Pocketgamer managed to give it a 7/10.  So that's the same two websites already making for mixed-reviews.  Not sure what to think about it, and it's mostly the reason I focus on the average user-rating on app-stores since those people play the game even after a review.

PC game sites pretty much ignored the game completely, except for a few news-posts on one or two sites. But the whole game-review-site business is something for another topic. In short, those sites only talk about your game if people are already talking about your game, or if there's something controversial to be found, because that brings in readers and thus advertising-money.

Now there's always a part in a post mortem where people go say things that went right or wrong and how things could have gone different. BUT!  Meganoid was just as much an experiment as it was a way to earn some extra cash.

For one, the price: $4.99. For a PC game that's a fairly cheap price-point, and it was something I wanted to try out. Normally my newly released PC games go between $7-$10 in the launch period because I honestly think that's what my games are worth for the amount of playtime and enjoyment you get. However, a game like Meganoid is perfect to try out new stuff and I've been wondering if maybe my games would sell better at $4.99.  Haven't really compared it yet with my previous games, but my gut-feeling says I sell about as much copies at this price as I do at a more normal price of $7.99.

On mobile the $4.99 is actually on the high-end of things! More experimenting, normally I'm at max at $3.99 and often in the launch week it's at $2.99. I do believe this game could have done better at a $3.99 or $2.99. Possibly sold much more copies with the result being more revenue. Some people hinted I should have lowered the price when I got the iOS feature, but my golden rule is to not punish the instant-buying fans, which I would have done had I suddenly lowered the price within a week of it's release.

In general the gamers liked the game, which is the most important thing. One guy complained that he couldn't get past the first level so it was way to hard, another guy complained that the sound-effects sounded generic (he was a sound-designer offering to do sound effects.. that's business!). One mobile-game reviewer had a lot of problems with the touch-controls, which is ironic for a mobile-game reviewer in my opinion.

I've been pushing regular updates to Meganoid since the release, and I still have one bigger update planned. After that it will mostly complete the work on this game minus any required fixes or OS-updates.

I never create games as a service, all my games receive two or three bigger updates and then I move on. That's my business-model and that's how I stay in business.

As for the game itself, it now becomes a "back-log game". This means I'll be able to do sales and discounts with the game in the next few years. It's also possible to perhaps get it ported and released on consoles or other gadgets, and there are alternate sales-routes the game can take on platforms like Android or PC (different markets, bundles, etc).

On top of that the game engine is fairly straight-forward and easy to repurpose. So it could be possible to re-use the game, create a new game-world and content for it and release like a $1.99 game with it (in fact I already have a funny viking-style game running on the same engine, so who knows).

All those back-log options should be able to at-least  double the game's revenue within a year, so let's say the game does $10.000 in total by March 2018. Set against the 2 month development cycle (and 13 years experience!) that's not a bad deal.

For now I got some breathing room again for working on Ashworld, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook if you want to stay updated on that one!

(Grab Meganoid here for Windows,MacOS, Linux, iOS or Android)

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Welcome to the Meganoid(2017) post-mortem. This post-mortem goes into the details on the Meganoid figures and stats. Without context the stats are pretty much silly numbers, so please make sure to read all of this because there is more to the numbers than you might think.

So I'll keep this short, if you want to learn more about who I am, please check out my techblog and website. I've been a full-time (indie) developer since 2004. Mostly known for mobile games, but since 2015 also branching to PC games and even some consoles releases here and there (PS Vita and 3DS).  I've never had hit games that made me millions, but I have been doing very decent for many years releasing games that have found a growing fan-base in a niche area.  My biggest titles include the Gunslugs and Heroes of Loot series of games and Space Grunts.

The original Meganoid was released in 2010 on Android and iOS and was a very hard platformer with short levels that sometimes had you screaming if you didn't manage to reach the finish. For me it was a turning point in my games as I finally decided to just build games like that since those are the games I love the most. Luckily I found a niche that works for me and an audience that has been growing alongside me and my games. It also managed to reach close to a million downloads since.

Meganoid(2017) is a reboot of the franchise lifts a lot on the designs behind Spelunky, while still maintaining the difficulty of the original Meganoid game. I named it a "love child of Spelunky and Meat-boy in space", which is a very clear description of what the game is. It's not extremely original, but I'll get to that later on!

Oh, the game was also created in "just" two months, but I'll also get back to that if you keep reading..

So before Meganoid I was working on a game called Ashworld, which is a huge project for a one-man development team (which I am) and it's also an open-world game, a genre that I personally have no experience with because I often quit those games within a few hours of play-time.  Simply put: Ashworld is a huge challenge for me, and I have been working on it since June 2016.

Seeing as my games are actually my livelihood, money needs to come in on a semi-frequent basis. My business is still running fairly well, I have a huge back-log of games and they are all still bringing in money on a monthly base, but to keep it all running I do have some rules on how long game-projects can take.  Ashworld is breaking those rules due to a challenging development phase where I've been learning open-world design and also searching where the actual fun in the game-design is. So the game isn't done, and still needs a few months of work.

Enter the stage: Meganoid.

In January I decided to just do some prototyping with the hopes that I would end up with something playable that could be extended into a game. For this to work, I needed a clear design idea and direction. A game that I could almost create on automatic-mode.

This "automatic-mode" does need some nuance here, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago and I think it painted a wrong picture. Some comments and replies I got thrown at me were along the line of "a quick money grab". My bad on writing the article and not being clear about things, so here's to rectifying it:

The game was made in "just 2 months; and 13 years of experience".

The key part being those 13 years experience, factual there are a lot more years of experience, but the 13 years is how long I've been doing this commercially. Meganoid at it's core is a platformer with rogue-like mechanics. I've created close to 60 commercial platform games, and I've been doing rogue-like elements in my last 5-6 games. I know what to expect code-wise, and I know how to program those things without having to think about it.

To put it in some more perspective, my game Heroes of Loot 2 is a huge RPG-adventure/twin-stick shooter, and it was made in little over 4 months. So I normally work really fast and very effective.

Now think what you like about the short-development cycle, I don't plan to change your mind about it, but from a business point of view: this made sense and still delivers a quality game.

To have this game make some profit I needed it to take just a couple of months work so it would be easier to recoup on the costs AND make money on the game.

The development-cycle was pretty short, but since I had some interesting stuff pretty early on I actually showed some screenshots and gifs in the first week of development on twitter,facebook,instagram and a couple of forums. Some of this got picked up pretty early by mobile-game sites, and Toucharcade showed the first couple of video's I released in the weeks after.

I started using reddit a bit more, and finally managed to post something there without it being taken down (actually on second try, the first did get taken down because I didn't disclose that the "pre-order discounts" was on a game I made, which obviously makes a big difference../sarcasm).

The two or so weeks before the launch I already had various mobile sites mailing me for some promocodes, which is the up-side of being "known" in a market. In contrast to that there is the PC scene, where I'm basically unknown and nobody talks about my games.

The launch week I started looking at youtube streamers for the PC version, so I basically searched for big youtubers that covered games like: Spelunky, Meat boy, and a few other more recent pixel-art indie games that fit the same category as Meganoid.

I mailed all of them, close to a 100, which at least one steam-key included (for some group-youtubers I included up to 5 keys) and this all resulted in an awesome 0 streams.  I did a follow up email to a large portion of them a week later, and this resulted in 1 Streamer playing it,  yay results!

It's still possible some streamers will pick up the game later, having full inboxes, managers that handle emails slowly, or just large backlogs of video's. But I don't hold my breath for any of it.  Same goes for PC game-site reviews, so even tho I did everything "right" it basically ended up with fairly little returns on it.  The emails were short, to the point, showed a GIF of the game, bullet points, youtube trailer, quick-links and a steam-key included with a link to the website/presskit for more info. All according to the average marketing-advise.

Basically, in my opinion and experience, you need to know people to get things done. But reaching out never hurts and is also the way to get to know more people, so yeah.

Okay, okay! that's what you guys came for, I get it!

Google Play's "Best new seller" list charting

Let me first start with this, Meganoid was so far:

Featured on App-store under "New games we loved" - worldwide

Featured on Google Play "Early Access"

Featured on Google Play "New and Updated"

Top-charted (top 25) in Google Play "Best new sellers" list

Game of the Week - on TouchArcade

"Best games of the week for iOS and Android"  - Pocketgamer

Now, back to reality, for those who don't know, making money on games is HARD, on any given day there are 100-500 games released on various platforms. That's EVERY DAY! Standing out from those games is extremely hard, most games you will never see and they get like 5-10 downloads (depending on how many friends the developer has).

With my experience of doing this business for a long time, I set a fairly low but do-able goal for Meganoid: $6500 during the launch-period. I know it's a not a huge game, and it had fairly short marketing-visibility before release due to the fast development cycle.

For me a launch-period is the first month or so after releasing it. My goals is usually to make 80%-100%  of the development costs back in this first period. I calculate development costs fairly rough by multiplying each development-month with $2000 and then add any outsourced work costs. Since I do code+design+game graphics that often leaves out-source costs to music and high-res marketing art.

The $2000 is very low-end of what my cost-of-living is each month (in the Netherlands, with mortgage, girlfriend and pets). It doesn't take into account taxes and extra cash-flow for "the future". But we're talking about launch-period here, so a game will live on for a few more years and with future sales and discounts you can often double the money a game made on launch.

So for this game I had 2 months of work, that's $4000 and since there was such a short dev-cycle and I used ambient sounds from my sound-libraries, there was no music cost and just a few hundred dollars for the awesome marketing art. So let's round it to $4500.

Now the point is to get extra cashflow to cover the longer development-cycle of Ashworld and we get to a $6500 minimum revenue that I was aiming for with Meganoid.  Again this is all launch-period revenue, because obviously it's a low amount especially if Ashworld development still needs 2 or 3 months time. So I'll get to that in a few paragraphs below.

I released Meganoid on March 30 on iOS, Android and PC (steam/humble/itch, windows/osx/linux) and we're now at three weeks into the release and currently the revenue is just a little shy of the target at $6200. Which is not bad at all!

So let's dig into this $6200 launch-period amount. Where did most of it come from, and why! The biggest bulk of this comes from the iOS version, actually close to 50% of it: $3580.  On iOS the game was priced $4.99 with a launch-discount the first week making the game $3.99. Meganoid was made Game of the week at Toucharcade which most certainly helped, one of the weeks best games for iOS and Android on Pocketgamer, but sadly it had no "games we play" feature for the first weekend.

For some reason the game only showed up in the "Games we play" on Monday/Tuesday for the USA App-store, at which point it spiked to slightly below the launch spike so effectively doubling the sales in the 3/4 days it had that front page feature.  I'm pretty sure it would have done better if it did have that feature in the first-weekend (during the sale) but those things are pretty much out of my control and I'm glad it eventually did get a feature after-all (something I kind had planned for in setting my revenue targets).

Apple loved it - all over the world!

Second biggest seller was Android, now this was done a little different. I tried some beta stages on Android and this put my game into "Early Access" on Google Play a week before the launch at a $2.99 price. This price was mostly because I believe that the brave people who try out a beta shouldn't pay full price.  The game got a nice Google feature in their "Early Access" list, which only has about 20 games listed, so that's a pretty good list to be in.

The possible down-side of this is that a lot of people don't seem to be clear of understanding what "Early access" means on Google Play, so there was a lot more buying going on than I had planned for, and that means I was pushing updates daily to work out some "obviously-beta" features. Early-access users can't leave reviews during that phase, so that might have been a positive thing, the down-side of that is that many people forget to leave a review once the game was released.. so not as many reviews as I normally have during the launch-period. Not sure if I would do that again on Android, but it's been an interesting experiment.

Finally we come to the PC revenue, in total that's $900 which is split over Steam, Itch and Humble. This is also my biggest pain-in-the-butt, obviously my games still don't make much waves amongst PC gamers. Especially since about 50% of that money comes through Itch.io where I ran a pre-order with 20% discount in the two weeks leading up to the launch. So these buyers are mostly people from my own social-circles and mailing-lists, people who in many cases also buy the mobile version and in a lot of cases people who tipped up to $10 (even tho the pre-order price was $3.99!)  (THANKS!).

The humble-store sales were about 10% of that, so the rest is up to you to calculate :p

Side note:  Besides this launch-period revenue, there is also the added advantage of extra money made on back-log sales. New gamers that see Meganoid will check out my other games and in some cases end up buying a few more of my games. On top of that a lot of subscriptions to my social-circles and mailing list have happened during and after the development of Meganoid, which are all potentially future fans of my next games.

Another important thing to read about, how are the ratings? Because let's face it, making a game in two months isn't interesting if it's a crappy game. On iOS the game has a strong 4/5 star rating from gamers, and on Android it's at 4.8/5 star rating. I'd say those are pretty good ratings (most of my games are around the 4.0 - 4.5 ratings)

On Steam there are only about 4 ratings of which only 2 ratings count since they bought the game on Steam and not through my website/Itch.io or Humble. But I think "all of them" are fairly positive!

Game-site wise, well that's a mixed bag of thingies. As mentioned before, the game was made "game of the week" on Toucharcade, and it was part of the "best games for iOS and Android" that week on Pocketgamer. On the other side Toucharcade's review gave it just a 3.5/5 rating, and Pocketgamer managed to give it a 7/10.  So that's the same two websites already making for mixed-reviews.  Not sure what to think about it, and it's mostly the reason I focus on the average user-rating on app-stores since those people play the game even after a review.

PC game sites pretty much ignored the game completely, except for a few news-posts on one or two sites. But the whole game-review-site business is something for another topic. In short, those sites only talk about your game if people are already talking about your game, or if there's something controversial to be found, because that brings in readers and thus advertising-money.

Now there's always a part in a post mortem where people go say things that went right or wrong and how things could have gone different. BUT!  Meganoid was just as much an experiment as it was a way to earn some extra cash.

For one, the price: $4.99. For a PC game that's a fairly cheap price-point, and it was something I wanted to try out. Normally my newly released PC games go between $7-$10 in the launch period because I honestly think that's what my games are worth for the amount of playtime and enjoyment you get. However, a game like Meganoid is perfect to try out new stuff and I've been wondering if maybe my games would sell better at $4.99.  Haven't really compared it yet with my previous games, but my gut-feeling says I sell about as much copies at this price as I do at a more normal price of $7.99.

On mobile the $4.99 is actually on the high-end of things! More experimenting, normally I'm at max at $3.99 and often in the launch week it's at $2.99. I do believe this game could have done better at a $3.99 or $2.99. Possibly sold much more copies with the result being more revenue. Some people hinted I should have lowered the price when I got the iOS feature, but my golden rule is to not punish the instant-buying fans, which I would have done had I suddenly lowered the price within a week of it's release.

In general the gamers liked the game, which is the most important thing. One guy complained that he couldn't get past the first level so it was way to hard, another guy complained that the sound-effects sounded generic (he was a sound-designer offering to do sound effects.. that's business!). One mobile-game reviewer had a lot of problems with the touch-controls, which is ironic for a mobile-game reviewer in my opinion.

I've been pushing regular updates to Meganoid since the release, and I still have one bigger update planned. After that it will mostly complete the work on this game minus any required fixes or OS-updates.

I never create games as a service, all my games receive two or three bigger updates and then I move on. That's my business-model and that's how I stay in business.

As for the game itself, it now becomes a "back-log game". This means I'll be able to do sales and discounts with the game in the next few years. It's also possible to perhaps get it ported and released on consoles or other gadgets, and there are alternate sales-routes the game can take on platforms like Android or PC (different markets, bundles, etc).

On top of that the game engine is fairly straight-forward and easy to repurpose. So it could be possible to re-use the game, create a new game-world and content for it and release like a $1.99 game with it (in fact I already have a funny viking-style game running on the same engine, so who knows).

All those back-log options should be able to at-least  double the game's revenue within a year, so let's say the game does $10.000 in total by March 2018. Set against the 2 month development cycle (and 13 years experience!) that's not a bad deal.

For now I got some breathing room again for working on Ashworld, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook if you want to stay updated on that one!

(Grab Meganoid here for Windows,MacOS, Linux, iOS or Android)