#I have absolutely NO MORE POLLS scheduled. I haven't been able to schedule in a little while | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hellsite-hall-of-fame · 1 year

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listen... listen. i'd love just as much as anybody to get to make a fool of myself in person with all my fellow fools, as opposed to making a collective fool of ourselves online. I just don't know if we have the brainpower to organize it. The first dashcon, as far as i know, was a logistical disaster. I know there's a spreadsheet side of tumblr, and... *shudder* a business side (I checked) but are they willing to help? are we willing to accept their help?

More issues to consider: With the cost of living and travel and the very decentralized tumblr userbase, on what continent would dashcon 2.0 be held? would there need to be online signups? payments? a website? who would create and oversee those things?

What if we tried to have a number of smaller cons for different regions? Only around 600 folks have answered 100% YES on your poll - How many users need to show up before we have folks from enough major communities to feel like a true tumblr party? How do we guarantee those numbers? What about major blogs? do we just hope they show up or pay them to sign autographs? is it a multi-day affair, like dashcon tried to be, or do we aim low?

There is so much that goes into an event like this- transit, trucking, storage, space, sign-ups, accounting, licensing, begging, scheduling, convincing, emailing, hiring, firing, decorating, ordering, packing... I haven't even gotten to the tip of the iceberg meme.

Do we hire planners and event companies, or are we too embarrassed to ask? How does everyone work around their day jobs and careers? Who is organizing dashcon 2.0, and what is their stake in it? How do we not repeat the mistakes of those who came before us?

Anyway, if you're gonna do it, I want to help. let's talk.

hmm alright I have thoughts

because I agree, I don’t know if we have the brainpower or money to organize it. my sincere hope with posting about a hypothetical dashcon has been that some super determined millionaire would be like “hey here- have this money and here’s a bunch of connections I have to people to help you organize this”…..so basically lots and lots of wishful thinking lmao.

while the business side of tumblr does seem terrifying, we might have to accept their help if they’re willing.

all of the logistics you mentioned are very very true things that I imagine the original dashcon creators didn’t fully take into account (or i’d assume as much based on the chaos that ensued lol)

as for location, yeahhh that’s the definite hard part. in my head, I keep seeing this as like a vidcon (which is terrible because it wouldn’t be as big but idk) which is held in California. but idk how feasible that is for the average Tumblr base. and that does definitely cut down the amount of people that would be able or willing to come so idk.

and I also imagine having like panels and possibly meet and greets or something with major blog owners, but idk if we’d just beg them to come or find a way to pay them.

As for the whole last paragraph- aaaaah I have absolutely no idea.

i’m definitely not going to spearhead organizing such an event (mostly because I don’t want my real name associated with it in case it goes to shit again lmaoo) but if someone else had more resources to do so, I would absolutely be willing to help.

and if anyone sees this and has conference-planning experience and wants to help make a bunch of wishful Tumblr users dreams come true…. please let me know and i’d love to help!

#this is such a well thought out ask though anon #sorry I don’t have more experience or confidence to create such an event #my dad might…. but i’m definitely NOT asking him lmao #so we must suffer I guess #hellsite hall of fame #ask #the hellsite answers #anonymous #dashcon #dashcon 2 #dashcon 2.0 #hellsite hall of fame curator’s bullshit

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outeremissary · 2 months

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Actually good gameplay/bad story vs. bad gameplay/good story poll has me thinking a lot about "bad gameplay." I feel like that's often treated as a really binary thing, but like. How many games out there is this subject often hotly contested on? How many older games, how many cult classics? I feel like for every game with "bad gameplay" there's at least one person defending the impact it has on the experience and atmosphere of the game. I've seen someone get heated about the idea of making inventory limits in older RPGs more lax when porting the games to modern systems because it removes stakes from the game to be able to carry More Items. You lose an edge of puzzle and of wilderness survival. The inventory management question is one that often pops up in discussions around horror games as well- what's a badly designed inventory and what's one that's frustrating intentionally? Or one that's excusable by the limits of its age? Is clunky combat bad in a combat heavy action game, or can it push the game's genre to suggest something else atmospherically? I really enjoy defenses of gameplay that's "bad" or "obsolete." I haven't been playing Dragon's Dogma 2 and have no way to judge one way or another, but I have heard it called unfriendly, backwards, and bad by detractors and unfriendly, backwards, and good by defenders. It's so fascinating where people draw the line and what criteria they use to determine what's passing and failing. And then when there are whole mechanics people love or hate too! I was looking at escort mission discourse just today. Conversation where on the one hand some people believe there's no way at all to attain a theoretically possible good implementation of an escort mission, while other people see even the most player unfriendly implementations as a challenge of player skill rather than a failure of design.

I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, I just felt that the more I thought about it the more interesting it was because of the ways that gameplay could be interpreted through age, technical implementation, genre, and player tolerance in ways very distinct from how story and writing are judged. I think "good gameplay" as a concept is often positioned as gameplay which is snappy, clean, and accessible (accessibility exception carved out for games that sell themselves as Hard Games) with precise and technically well crafted controls, but I've seen so many cases for good gameplay being the absolute fucking opposite if it produces an interesting play experience. And you could say "oh, that's determined by the intent of the creators," but do you always have a way to know their intent? And how many games come together actually according to plan, with no schedule slippage and everything implemented exactly according to vision?

To use an example near and dear to me- yeah, I'm not leaving the Kingmaker in the tags after all- a part of Kingmaker's gameplay loop is kingdom management. You're exploring, fighting, and interacting with the world, but you're also coming to rule it through the kingdom, and this has to be balanced as a part of this loop just like all the other pieces. Kingdom management feeds back into the other pieces of the game- it gives mechanical benefits, it opens up new interactions, and when you explore it backfills the empty space you leave behind with something new, the kingdom, which can be further transformed. It also fills a different kind of empty space, the temporal space between chapters, and gives you meaningful choices to make when the plot isn't at a fever pitch by making it so that how you use your time has stakes beyond what exploration and quests provide. Kingdom management is also timer dependent and RNG heavy as fuck, and at points can feel very unfair even if I'd argue it seldom ever traps you and never traps you without an actual reason. It's also situated in a genre, the RPG, where RNG is seen as an acceptable and even expected part of gameplay systems. For me, kingdom management enhances the experience of the game and is an extremely worthwhile addition to the gameplay which plays in enjoyable ways off of other aspects of the gameplay. It's a part of a memorable and fun play experience. But so many people fucking hate kingdom management and see it as not just something they dislike, but something which is Bad in design and implementation. It's positioned as disruptive, unwieldy, player unfriendly, overwhelming, and arbitrary. And I see the case for all of those points. And I don't think there's any final way to objectively settle whether it's Good or Bad, and that ultimately what it gives to the game very much comes down to player preferences and playstyle. How you interact with a game gives these systems their meanings and impacts.

I don't really have a conclusion to this. It's just kind of word vomit getting the thoughts out of my head. ^^;; But I don't know. I think it's something really interesting, the fact that there's not necessarily an objective way of seeing gameplay as good or bad the same way that there's not an objective way to see a story. I answered that poll "bad gameplay and good story," but when I think about the games that make me choose that, it's not like they're unplayable even if sometimes I truly hate the experience of playing them. I think that their gameplay gives them meaning, specificity, and staying power in my mind for how I experienced the game because of this gameplay in a way that games with "good" gameplay can't always provide.

#I feel like I'd get kicked out of game theory 101 for going into this without concretely defining and exploring what 'gameplay' is #forgive me... I am an amateur #rambling #my friend had to listen to me rant this out live on discord.#long post #oops??

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mayakern · 2 years

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Since you're doing regular drops now, will you possibly be doing small drops of the less popular designs? I haven't seen any polls for design drops which I thought would of come up by now so I feel like I may have missed a change in how some things work? I've done my best to keep up! If I'm blind and missed it you can just ignore this part of my question and I'll get to trying to search for the answer on my own. My next question is if you'd do a small drop of the Luna Moth skirts? Ive seen a few asks about them but they were always just kinda referred to the polls and if people wanted them. And also, if you ever intend to do the minis/skater style skirts again? Again I'm sure I've just missed some updates but I appreciate you taking the time to read. Incredible work as always, I wish you the absolute best with your business!

some of this has been addressed, some hasn’t!

i run the design surveys not on a schedule and not for every merch order, but as needed. the biggest need for them was for preorders, which we are no longer doing.

the other need was for stuff like choosing which color variants of patterns would return. that is a pretty infrequent occurrence so while i’ll probably do that again, it won’t be for a while. and by a while i would say that color variant polls will probably happen, at most, once per year.

over all, merch production happens much more slowly than y’all probably realize. from placing an order with a manufacturer to listing skirts in the store, it’s usually a 2-3 month process and that doesn’t include the design process beforehand.

that’s also only the timeline for when we have things squared away with our manufacturer. the last two orders we placed with our manu were very small by our standards (about a third of a normal order size, about a tenth of what we ordered for march preorders) because we were hoping to iron out quality control with our manufacturer so we could keep working with them.

unfortunately that’s just not going to happen because while the first of those two orders was good, the second one has 92% defective rate which is… ridiculous. we haven’t listed those skirts yet but will be doing so in the upcoming weeks. the good news is that they’re print defects, not the awful fabric defects, and so most can be sold for $5-10 off so we won’t be selling at a loss. the bad news is this is the nail in the coffin for that manu. i’ve never even heard of a defect rate that abysmal.

and while we do have some promising leads for new manus, getting samples and ironing out product chains takes time and money and it’s not something you can rush. it can take months or years to get production started, especially with a new manu, especially if it’s a new product. luckily i don’t think it will take years to start production on the skirts again as they’re a relatively simple item, but we do have to start as simply as possible so as to decrease the number of variables we have to account for.

what that’s looked like so far was us discontinuing (for now) the miniskirts. in part because our old factory fucked them up so bad for march preorders, in part because we are a really small team and it’s hard to keep up with the volume of orders. the midi skirts are the best sellers and my personal favorites so that’s our priority, but i’m hoping after we’ve got things squared away with our new manufacturer(s) and can hire more people on our end that we can bring minis back.

the bad news is that all these defects have been incredibly expensive on our end and it has slowed our trajectory for being able to hire new people, which really sucks. but it’s really important to us for us to expand slowly and sustainably and to never put ourselves or our employees at risk of instability. we don’t ever want to worry about not being able to afford payroll.

now about the moth skirt specifically: there is good and bad news here. the good news is one of our promising leads uses a 2 color printing technique that the moth skirt would be perfect for. the bad news is they have a really high minimum order per design (about the equivalent of what we would usually order for three designs combined, or maybe two really popular designs) and the moth design was incredibly unpopular and did not sell well.

i never expected it to sell as well as the bee skirt, which is was made to be a companion to, but it performed absolutely abysmally. and the thing is, it’s not that it lacked votes. iirc it made it top ten or top twelve, high enough that we included it in preorders, but when it came time for people to purchase barely anyone bought it. this same thing actually happened with my monstera design as well.

with us losing money on all the defects this year, we have to be extra careful and not make a huge order of a design that doesn’t sell well. it could literally bankrupt us.

anyway we’re doing our best to plug along but it’s been an incredibly stressful year

also i know this has been incredibly long but it’s my hope in explaining WHY we do things that people have a better understanding of our process and what we can and can’t do.

#ask #store #faq

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katrinawritesthings · 2 years

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Hey also!!

yes hello it’s me finally remembering to promote my patreon here on tungle dot net!! i post on the last day of every month and i am also!! making a change to one of my tiers!!

💙 for $2 a month!! this is the one i'm changing lol. originally it was when i had a schedule and was posting four fics every month and on patreon i would post a couple of paragraphs from each one but you just got to see them early which. honestly. was not really worth the $2 lmfao. but then my arms stopped working and i couldn't post as often so i changed it to each month i would post a big excerpt of old wips that i know i'm never going to finish or write more for. things like not royal au and therapy au and tentacle au and piercings au and body swap au and demon au. very interesting if you do not mind getting cockblocked by knowing there's never going to be more of them lol

but my chronic pain has sucked so bad for so long that i literally ran out of shit to post lmfao so

for $2 a month!! new and improved!! i will be posting two polls every month : ) one will be for you to choose which two fics i take from my googledoc and get all set up into a draft post

and the second will be for you to choose which 1 or 2 fics i will post that month!! 1 or 2 depending on whether or not i have any requests done at the time because i always like to post those as soon as possible. more likely than not it's going to be two

i do have like. a lot of fics in my docs and in my drafts and i'm not going to make a poll with like 20 options every month lmfao but there will still be good and varied choices. You can choose multiple options and the top two will be the winners and i'm thinking i'll leave each poll open until it's time to post the first thing of the month

The first poll will open on September 30th and will be to choose what gets posted in October :-)

💙 for $3 a month you get the polls and wips of everything i've worked on that month. not really much to explain for this one lmao i just take between like 3-8 paragraphs of whatever things i've written that month and edit them and post them. usually it's like 4 or 5 different fics?? sometimes i go absolutely buckwild and write more

💙 for $4 a month you get the polls and the wips and also sfw and nsfw aus like you know. au where they're mermaids or whatever. but more elaborate lmfao. i write at 10-point font and for the sfw things i usually aim for 3 pages and for the nsfw things 2 pages. and sometimes i get really invested in one au in particular so i usually split those into parts and add them onto the normal amount

a lot of them are completely new stuff that i haven't written and sometimes i turn them into actual fics that get posted here eventually. there are some definite bangers like single dads au and mafia au and fallen angel au and final fantasy 10 au. others are like extra things that i've thought about for fics i've already posted like fairy pet au and biker au. currently i'm working on multiple parts for final fantasy xiii au and taekey we got married au. very fun

💙 the reason i started my patreon in the first place was so i could save up monie to go to brain therapy and then physical therapy and so far it has paid for that and i have been able to save up for future appointments whenever the plague ends and because of that i've been able to keep writing fics for fun and me time without getting turbo anxious about it so even if you just show up for one month and speedread four years all at once and then dip i will still appreciate you giving me your monie : )

#patreon tag

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