#there's a lot of deviations planned

[takadanobaba]

I saw you using my head cannons as a little inspirations >: 3

thank you!

Honestly you're super amazing and keep doing what you're doing you're doing the train Gods' work

Ah, yes! Thank you for writing that post!! It really helped in giving us inspiration for what the mod would be like!

And thank you again, I hope you like it when it's ready for release!

[bisexualcherdegre]

D:BH Rarepairsweek 7 | @dbhrarepairs

Day 7 - Chloe/North | Good Luck, Babe! ~ Chappell Roan

[hepbaestus]

I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing and so I thought I'd share a paragraph of my fireflies fic :)

[mortifying-macaroni]

So I saw that other anonymous post saying that your Fanfic was really good. And I decided to take a bit of time to open it up in a new tab and have a look at it. I gotta say that I'm really liking it so far. I've actually kept reading through into the 3rd chapter, which for me and just how exhausting I find reading to be is a seriously big compliment. Especially with the added fact that I've never actually played through the mod this story is based upon. So the fact your story can keep me engaged despite those two factors is a seriously big acclaim And man. I can sympathise with Gretchen. That feeling of alienation from humanity, feeling held back by your past and even being disgusted by those ties to your past? Feeling like pretending to be something she's not is holding her back? I can sympathise with all those feelings. So I'm going to enjoy reading the rest of this! This is fantastic!

ANON!!! The way you brightened my morning is so unreal! I stg you've just amped my energy by infinity!!!! I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I'm not exaggerating 😭🖤 I want to thank you just as much as the previous anon for giving this fanfic a chance. Ngl I might have squealed a bit like an idiot when you mentioned how you kept going despite those two factors. Tbh, while writing, I had the impression that the style and structure might be too exhausting for some people, but I let it be since I'm 9 chaps deep anyways, so I'm beyond glad that my writing kept you engaged thus far!

As for CQM itself, I absolutely recommend giving the Sabbat route a spin and it offers replayability to those who want to come back after finishing their first run. The mod does an astounding job at portraying the Sabbat as more of an organization rather than a mere rodeo of shovelheads (the mod uses an older version of the Unofficial Patch, so if you're going to switch from the 'up to date' vanilla game to cqm, you will notice some differences, but nothing to be alarmed by).

Aw, I'm sorry you get the feeling of alienation and trust me when I say that you're not alone. No matter how often we think it's impossible, there's always someone out there who shares the exact same sentiment of what you're going through. You're never truly alone in this. And Gretchen, although self isolated, still has a few memories tied to her past that keep crawling back, however they're not too common, but they still linger since there's no way to just wipe them out like it's nothing. Her humanity's descent is going to be a little intense, but it'll, at least, help her find comfort in discovering a sense of belonging somewhere, even if the bunch she's hanging with isn't exactly the morally healthiest.

I want to thank you again and again for taking the time to read my brainrot baby! Hope it'll continue to be an engaging ride for you 🖤 and if not, that's completely fine, love. I'm still immensely glad you picked it up regardless! You're truly a dear and I appreciate you and your kind words so much!!!

[allsnarker]

lookin at what i've seen for s2 of earth.spark with wild fearful eyes. pls dont do this to me u gave me hope and now ur taking it away. scared. please let it be a bait and switch.

[thisbuildinghasfeelings]

I've seen some people concerned/upset assuming that Lone Star won't be addressing any of the trauma that Carlos' experience in 4x04 would undoubtedly cause. It looks like Carlos is going to be in the next episode, but it also appears unlikely that they will be getting into his trauma, at least not in great detail, considering that there will be a lot of other things going on in the episode. If they don't get into it in 4x06, it could possibly still come up in a later episode...but then again, it also might not. I know this show doesn't handle trauma realistically...and I don't mean that as a criticism. If the show did handle trauma realistically, it would be nothing but that. Think of all the traumatic experiences that characters have gone through! Every episode would need to be characters processing their trauma and dealing with after effects.

When the show does address a character's trauma, it's typically a single episode kind of thing, like Judd's therapy, the aftermath of Paul's heart issues, Grace's recovery after the accident, etc. If they choose to give us that, I'd be perfectly happy to see an episode of Carlos dealing with trauma, but I'm not really looking for more than that. I don't need them to make an entire arc out of it now. When I think of the things I want to see out of our precious Carlos screen time, coping with 4x04 trauma is actually pretty low on that list. If anything, I'd much prefer to see him dealing with the trauma from his past and his relationship with his parents. I think that would fit in better with the journey he's been going on this season, too. Ideally, I would like some acknowledgement of Carlos dealing with the aftermath of his ordeal (even if it's just a line or two). However, even if we don't get that, I don't think I'll really be bothered by it. I'd be perfectly happy to just move on to other things.

[kayzero]

If you've been writing Junpei with those plans at mind at the core of it for the entire fic and he's been hitting That hard through all his scenes in the fic then like I would think you can be pretty confident it's gonna work, looking from the outside. Cause if you've got one endgoal in mind with how you're writing him then how he is everywhere else is gonna end up being connected to that endpoint pretty naturally just through knowing that's where you want him to end up, I'd say, so I think if he was gonna feel wrong after some reveal he Already would feel off. and he absolutely does not i fucking love him

I do get a scenario if it's like You've reasoned why he would do something maybe out of the ordinary really convincingly to yourself but being nervous about whether that's gonna come through believably to other people reading it without your mental context on the decision i just had that exact thing happen w the fic i just posted lol

(also the aoi/carlos Cold fragment made me fucking like. bluescreen in real life by the way.)

<3

[alteredphoenix]

Maybe this is an age thing, or maybe this is a thing where I'm faintly aware of putting the dots together and finally clicking that realization into place over time, but I think the more I read manga, the more I realize how little patience I now have for stories that just drag on and on and on. Like, get to the point already.

I don't know about the other genres, but this is especially prevalent in shounen manga where you have a cast of Loads of Loads of Characters to juggle and work with where half of them may or may not have been made to fill up an editorial quota (hi, MHA!) and you have to use what you can - and what your editor and the popularity numbers say - to push your story forward, and the characters that do get used either get a hard course-correct through their arc depending on how reader interactions plus sales numbers go or have their plots dropped and adjusted to fit accordingly to said reader interactions and sales numbers plus what your editor says and how you the mangaka have to respond accordingly because you wrote yourself into a corner and need to figure a way out of it so you can continue said story forward. The other half languishes and gets phased out if they're not integral to the main plot; and if they are, they're just to fill in time for That Big Showdown between the MC and the Main Antagonist. Especially if it's in the final arc and it's set against the backdrop of a war, and it will take ages to get through every single character that's personally partaking in it until the manga gets around to That Big Showdown.

When that happens, there's a part of me that wonders why the mangaka doesn't take a page out of Stephen King's book and wipe out half the cast so the story can cut down on the bloat that's affecting both the characters and the story. That's probably not feasible because ultimately popularity sells and marketing is king, but the manga industry is brutally cutthroat and unless a mangaka is a drawing machine like Mashima Hiro most of them aren't going to manage to get through the weekly and biweekly schedules unscathed without suffering a plethora of physical and mental health issues.

I don't know. I think this is more of a matter of realizing that not every story needs to be Hajime no Ippo and Detective Conan levels of long - not unless you as the writer intend to have a large cast, have a long story to write around with them in mind, and have a plan to adjust accordingly as a last resort before diving in, especially if there are war arc(s) involved, whether or not they're labeled as the final arc.

[charles-snippy]

>burnt out from trying to write a thesis

>really wants to write a romac fic

[vsagis]

@rosecoloredmuses

A raised fist freezes seconds before it can fall down onto the other’s face; the sight Izuku is the witness of making his mind to go blank for a few precious moments. A heartbeat— then another, and the only thought quivering under his skull is a very simple question.

“What the fuck?”

Is this a quirk, or some trick— but there isn’t really anyone who would want to trick him like this. Is it a bad dream then? No, he has already felt pain from the blows he took, so it seems like it’s reality. However it’s possible. “How can you look just like me—” And why hasn’t he noticed sooner? They’re even wearing identical damned masks.

[townpostin]

Shops in Mangal Tower Basement Repurposed for Parking

Basement of Mangal Tower in Kadma Converted to Parking Lot Following Court Directive Jamshedpur witnessed a significant change as the basement of Mangal Tower in Kadma, previously filled with shops and warehouses, was converted into a parking lot per a Jharkhand High Court directive. JAMSHEDPUR – The basement of Mangal Tower in Kadma has been converted into a parking lot as per the directive of…

[geddy-leesbian]

I'm usually so bad at Actually Planning what I write and also Actually Sticking To The Very Few Plans I Do Make so I'm so proud of what I'm doing with Any Killer,,,, some little details from chapter 4 are very important, but they'll going to be completely forgotten for several chapters before becoming relevant again

And I will Actually Stick To The Plans because I've focused on working on those plot threads before the middle stuff and they're by far the most time consuming part of the process for this fic. I am lazy and therefore will stick to the plan because doing anything else would be Lots!! Of WORK!!!

[teruthecreator]

being autistic is like “okay i’m going to plan out every second of this very stressful day and insert as many nice things as possible to mitigate the stress”

[blacktabbygames]

Slay the Princess Concept Art

We shared a bunch of concept art on Twitter today. Sharing it here, too, where you can find it all in one post. Post contains spoilers, so proceed with caution (or just play the game already if you haven't 😉)

Going to start with the first piece of concept art Abby drew for the game.

In the earliest stages of development, we toyed around with the concept of there being multiple "end game" forms of the Princess.

The initial outline, rather than being tied together by an overarching metanarrative, structured a full playthrough as a 5-6 chapter long, self-contained journey down a single route, determined by your decisions in chapter 1. Here's an alternative late-game form:

The idea of deviating end-game forms didn't lost for very long, though. As we explored the game's themes more deeply, it made the most sense for there to be a singular "true" form.

If your reality is shaped by subjectivity and perception, then the "truth" has to be what's left when that subjectivity is swept away. the Shifting Mound's final design feels like that initial truth for the Princess, though there's also another truth if you push back against her and press on into the final cabin.

We really liked this "void" design, and I played around with the idea of it being an intermediary to the final form. The "void" Princess would be what you saw upon encountering the final Princess without understanding your own truth, but once you had that understanding, you would see her as the Shifting Mound, as depicted in the game.

That gave way to the intermediary design of the SM being a sea of disembodied limbs, and we also took parts of both designs and incorporated them into the protagonist (particularly the wings.) You can see the eyes and feathers for this void form in the ending card of the original trailer below:

You can see extremely early concept art for the spectre (top), nightmare (top-right), stranger (left), beast (bottom) and ??? (right) as well!

The eyes became a motif in the Nightmare route (Paranoid's manifestation of the fear of being watched), but I also like to think of them as a part of The Long Quiet's truth. You are space and emptiness, but you're also that which observes those things, and it's your perceptions that give the Shifting Mound shape.

Anyways, on the note of the original original concepts for the game, the Princess was initially going to remain human for several loops before taking on more monstrous forms. Some concepts of that are below. Had to get Abby to tone down some of the more horrifically cartoonish designs because they creeped me out and I didn't want to romance them in a video game.

We had to hold our cards close to our chest in the non-metanarrative early drafts, which is part of why, even in the first demo, the cabin doesn't really change much in chapter 2. More room to subtly play with the concept of transformation over time.

There were a lot of reasons we moved in a different direction for the full release. The branching was unmanageably large to write, and the game felt like a slog to write.

Using an overarching narrative as a framing mechanism in the final version gave us a lot more freedom to explore wildly divergent ideas within routes while still driving the player towards the originally planned finale.

Anyways, now we've got some concept art for individual princesses. There's a lot more than this lying around somewhere, but it's all in sketchbooks, and we'll probably wait until we make an art book to show it off.

First is the tower, who really didn't change much at all. (She got a little thicker, I guess. All of the Princesses did)

Not a lot to say about her, other than the fact that we knew we wanted a set piece where she gets so big that the trees and cabin orbit around her.

The stranger went through many many redesigns over the course of development. Here, she was a "princess skin" filled with a hive of sentient bugs. The script wasn't working for me, though, so instead she became a peak behind the curtains without the necessary context to know her.

A lot of people ask how these earlier drafts of the Stranger route would have played out, and the answer is I can't tell you, because I couldn't figure out something worth writing.

The writing process for individual routes didn't really start with outlines or plot beats. Rather, the routes started from a theme and a relationship dynamic, and I organically found their outcomes by exploring actions within those themes, and then seeing if those passed Abby's editor brain.

Neither of us found actions we wanted to explore with those versions of the Stranger, at least actions that weren't a beat-by-beat retelling of chapter 1, which contained way too much variation to put on a single chapter 2 route.

If each princess examines a relationship formed by perception and first impressions, the Stranger examines one that's fundamentally unknowable. One where you've seen too much, too quickly.

An insect hive-mind pretending to be a person seemed like a good starting point, but it was too difficult to write any interactions that didn't immediately feel knowable, if still strange. So the final version of the Stranger was designed in such a way where her unknowability makes interacting with her on a human level fundamentally impossible, and you don't get to have a real conversation with her unless you satisfy extremely specific criteria.

Anyways next up is the razor's final form. We decided she needed more swords.

Hearts became an accidental motif very quickly in the development process, too. (The fact that it is only strikes to the heart that fell her in the demo was accidental, but it felt poetic so we extended it to the rest of the game.)

So on top of adding more swords, we made her heart visible. This is something we did with the fury as well, as a way of showing their emotional (and physical) vulnerability.

Here's an early version of the Adversary and what would eventually become the Eye of the Needle, back when she was still called the Fury. Originally her hair was going to be fire (as seen on the right), but it didn't feel right in its execution.

She's hit the gym since this concept art. Good for her :)

And we're going to end with the Beast, who at this point was called the Adversary. I think this was before the Witch was added? The Beast was originally designed to be a Questing Beast who lurked in the shadows, where you'd only see glimpses of her, and where each glimpse would make her appear to be a different animal. This was too difficult to execute, though we gave her a more chimera-like appearance in the final game.

This design was from when we still has the Voice of the Obsessed, and the route was going to be a more feral mirror of what eventually became the Adversary, but it felt too thematically similar while being less interesting, so we moved in the direction of making the Beast about consumption as a form of love.

Anyways, that's all we've got for you right now. Hope this was fun!

[hitracks]

Can we see a c! Wilbur design maybe? (If you're chill w/ it) Or Technoblade and Philza?

I’m planning on doing a whole separate ref for Wil at some point so I will do both Blade and Philza for you… im really really normal about Techno like really serious I promise you. ( <- lying through his fucking teeth. ) LOTTTTS OF DESIGN PARTICULARS WITH HIM. I deviate a lot from his skin ( for one I get way too engrossed with drawing animals so humanoid it is. ) but I make his outfit more errr. Flashy…? Also southern inspo all over this bitch. as a southern man myself I am forced to give him ( modest ) matador esque pants and a bolo …. I think putting him in that is hilarious cause the closest things piglins have to bulls are fucking hoglins LMFAO. Imagine him in a Nether rodeo … terrifying … Away from design in general I love his character sooo much. I think its important to keep his funny nerd qualities when designing him. Like techno is a beast with technical skills and combat but if you ask him to sit in a room with more than about 3 people he starts sweating. Make him a little loser guys … hes got like one friend total and lives in the middle of nowhere in the snow as a Nether mob. Nothing normal about him. No bitches and no gains …

PHIL …. ghh … I have an unpopular take on him because i dont find him very fatherly. Hes more like an estranged uncle who dgaf about his kids. Shanks from one piece if you will. As much as I like his dynamics, for his character I feel like people are constantly glossing over the fact he isolates himself on purpose away from everything and everyone so he doesn’t have to deal with it … Him and Techno are so close because 1) They’re both crazy fucking good at everything and 2) Neither of them WANT to interact with others outside of themselves usually. Techno most often times only talks to people for his own personal gain or when he has no choice … Philza just get dragged into everything cause Wilbur is like a damn blight on the world. IDK! I wish people made him more aloof or terrifying because the concept of him is so genuinely freaky like hes got spies everywhere all the time and could or could not be immortal or some sort of biblical creature like THATS SCARY!!! I tried to mess around with him being green and the Minecraft equivalent of souls ( exp drop when you die ) being the same shade-ish …. Hes just some eldritch horror to me. Not explainable by mere words…

[schraubd]

In the Image of God

A recent study found that Jews are the demographic group most accepting of trans individuals in the United States.

When certain Christians assert a religious freedom right to discriminate against trans individuals -- particularly, a right to misgender them -- their argument typically proceeds something along these lines:

1. They believe every individual is created in the image of God.

2. Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

3. In particular, a person's sex/gender is inalterably assigned by God from conception.

4. They are forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

Therefore, they say, they are religiously obligated to refer to people by their chromosomal sex, regardless of how they identify or publicly present. This religious duty, in turn, is used to press against rules and policies which require respectful treatment of trans individuals (including refraining from deliberately misgendering them, deadnaming them, and so on).

What's interesting about this framework is that a lot of it actually resonates with how I view the relationship of my Jewish faith and trans individuals -- with some crucial alterations. To wit:

1. I believe every individual is create in the image of God.

2.  Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

4. I am forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

The major distinction, of course, comes in prong 3:

3. A person's sex/gender is not necessarily or inalterably assigned by God from conception, but rather can be part of a person's own process of discovering who they are. Where such self-discovery leads to a person to conclude they are trans, non-binary, or any other identity that departs from the sex they were assigned at birth, they are not deviating from God's plan. They are uncovering their authentic self as God has created them.

The result of this process is part of God's image. Those who refuse to accept it are not cleaving to God's image, they are rejecting it.

God's process of creation is not, in my understanding of Judaism, a set-and-forget sort of deal. It is not a matter of passively being puppeteered by a divine hand. It something we do together -- we are partners in creation. To deny the results of that partnership is, for me, a denial of God's plan and practice just as much as it is for adherents of other religious views who adhere to a more static and calcified notion of the role of the divine.

And so for me, and I suspect for many Jews, the religious freedom obligation pushes in the other direction. Many conservative states have, or are considering, laws which require (at least in certain contexts) non-recognition of trans identity. For Jews (and others) who share my religious precepts, these laws would force me to deny -- to bear false witness to -- a key attribute of how God created some of my peers. I do not believe -- and this is a deep, fundamental commitment -- that God's "image" of trans persons was for them to be locked in a body or sex or gender identity that clearly is not authentically theirs. When they find their full self, they are equally finding God's image of themselves.

Consistent with my lengthily expressed feelings on the subject, I suspect that what's good for the goose will not be good for the gander. Despite the clear parallel, liberal Jews who assert religious liberty rights to be exempted from laws seeking to enforce by state mandate a transphobic agenda will not meet with the same success enjoyed by their Christian peers.

Nonetheless, there is value in promoting this sort of framework, and in unashamedly asserting Jewish independence from hegemonic conservative Christian notions of true religiosity. It is not woven into "religion" that God's image requires rejection of trans individuals' full selves. That is a choice, an interpretation of some religions or of some who call themselves religious. Other religions, other religious persons, have a different interpretation of how to respect and dignify the facet of God that is in every one of us.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/vlsH4T2