#it takes me about a day or so to format every pdf and another day or two to do a cover so

[irregularcollapse]

17 and 19 for the writer asks! (I know 17 is so general -- it's like writing?? discuss -- but I'm super interested in your editing process, especially for longer fics)

thanks soooo much hehehe love these

17. talk about your writing and editing process

lmao writing? discuss. SO alright process. i approach writing long fics the same way i approach writing original fiction, there's just a lot less pre-prep because the characters etc. are already defined, so anything i plan will largely be plot, theme and structure-based. i focus on story beats and what the flow of events is. i don't worry too much initially about separating things into chapters, because this sort of happens naturally once i've figured out where the different arcs are within the whole journey.

it also often works out that particular things take longer to tell in the writing than i intended in the planning - for example, i had it loosely in my head (not on paper) that i would get to Laurent's introduction in ASTTE in chapter 2, but then in the writing, i needed more time to destabilise Damen's mental state and put him under the Comte's thumb, to make it really clear why he doesn't just go "fuck this" and try to leave as soon as Laurent starts insulting him.

i mostly write chronologically, but i will write ahead if specific inspiration strikes and i need to make sure i get it down correctly, which then becomes a matter of filling in the gap between what follows the chronology and the future scene i've written. this can also be helpful for keeping on track, because you've got in mind where the character will be, and the concern becomes getting them there.

editing! it's not a perfect system, but i do my best with what i've got. i send any new writing to my beta reader so we can chat about what works/what doesn't, and any typos/errors she finds she'll note for me as well. i make those edits as soon as we've talked about them. i also generally re-read what i wrote the day before, when i sit down to write, and may make some edits then.

i do edit fic differently to original work. with original work, i'd write a whole draft and then do a series of full edits. with fic, i prefer to do a sort of rolling edit, particularly if i reach a writing block. i'll go back and reread everything from the start, in a different format to the one i'm writing in; for original work, i'd print it out and write on it, but with fic, i export as a pdf or epub and annotate via highlights and comments. this is a dual proofread and edit read: the former looks for technical errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation), while the latter looks for style, coherence, and cohesion.

another key part of the edit read is reading it aloud. you'll be so surprised by how much you catch when you're forced to slow down and look at every word: typos, awkward sentences, unintentional repetition, clunky phrasing, dialogue that just doesn't roll off the tongue - it's honestly my #1 piece of editing advice, no matter what you're writing. read aloud.

i do this multiple times while working on a longer piece, and will also do a cursory proofread before posting each chapter. things still get missed! i found a typo in EIAT the other day, and another mistake that seemed quite glaring to me and i couldn't figure out how i didn't notice it before. but, people are fallible. two individuals reading a 200k+ word piece of writing are bound to miss some stuff, and that's just how it is - especially when you've already read something so many times.

i think what a lot of readers forget about fic in comparison to published books is that published books will have had multiple rounds of multiple people reading them: alpha and beta readers, test readers, proofreaders, agents, editors, the author themselves, etc. etc.

meticulous editing takes time and people, and while i do put in the time, it's only me (and a friend who has a very busy life in her own right) and a metric fucktonne of words. so this is my soapbox moment to say, i wish we could all extend more grace to hobby writers who have typos or other innocuous errors in their work.

19. the most interesting topic you’ve researched for a fic

LUCKY FOR YOU, i answered this here so you don't have to put up with any more of my rambling lmao

(questions from this writer ask game!!)

#asks #ask game #my writing #if you do have any specific questions about writing or process! #for real send them any time! #i love to talk about this kind of stuff

[villapaitapeli]

Some lesser known idol/music franchises

A list of some lesser known music franchises I follow. Not really a proper recommendation/introduction post rather than just some personal thoughts. Also I haven’t properly ‘gotten into’ many of these, just listened to the songs... maybe one day when I have time 💪😔

Akroglam

A neat little audio drama project with a futuristic setting and chill music. Finished in early 2022 and no longer releasing new content. Found out about it thanks to the collab with Denonbu, which is funny since roughly half a year later one had died a hero and the other lived long enough to become a villain (eneftees). I only followed it for the ~6 months before it ended, but it’ll stick with me for a long time thanks to the story, aesthetics, girls and especially the music being so good. I listen to every single one of the original songs (yes, the have covers too which are good as well) regularly, and my most listened ones are Angraecum, Ilusion and True Colors. I honestly can’t recommend this project enough, the whole story and (almost) all of the songs are on their yt channel in full length so do check it out if you’re even a little bit interested. The early chapters have English subtitles too.

Burns Skool

I found out about this one thanks to Taichi You (Chacha in t7s and also has a role in Akroglam!) tweeting about it. I honestly haven’t delved too deep into the story or characters, but from what I’ve gathered it’s elementary school boys making hype music. It’s really nice to listen to boyish female vocals every once in a while, and I was happy to find Fairouz Ai in the cast in addition to aforementioned Taichi. My favorite song so far is probably Gradation Age.

Junketsu Surfinia

A girls love idol project that I found out about thanks to none other than Akina. Currently a very modest sized project and you can kind of hear it in the production of some of the songs, but I really hope it finds its audience and has a chance to grow. The songs are available for purchase on their Booth store even for overseas customers, which was a nice surprise for someone who’s used to jumping through hoops to buy JP releases. The song (Lide On, Akina’s solo of course) even came with a pdf with English translated lyrics.

Charms!!

Another project that releases its story on their yt channel, this time in a more VN/social game -ish form. I’ve read/watched/listened to the earliest chapters and found the setting interesting and the characters very wholesome and cute, so I was a bit disappointed to see they had chosen a pretty safe direction with the songs when they began releasing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that or that the songs are bad or anything, in fact I think the production values are good and have found a handful to listen to (Kesshite karenu hana and  Goodnight Honey for example). Most of it so far just isn’t my cup of tea, but I’ll keep following the project as I really like the format and do think the quality is good.

Idol Bu Show

My most recent discovery. Haven’t really had time to check out the characters or story and all I know it’s apparently about Sengoku-era warlords producing their own idol units, which sounds just the right amount of wacky. I skimmed through the discography and somehow it felt very 00′s overall, in a good sense. The songs also have a lot of traditional Japanese elements as can be expected from the setting. The one song stuck in my head is however eurobeat (Brave Call ! ~& Just Now We come!~). There’s apparently an anime movie/PV of some sort floating around, so maybe I should check that out first if I plan to delve deeper.

LiveRevolt

Apparently this project ended after a lot of drama and setbacks, which is very unfortunate since the early songs especially are really good (my favorites are Aoku Nare and Set Fire). I regret not being able to follow the project when it was still active, since I do like its wilder take on idols. Maybe I’ll check out the manga which apparently has scanlations to ease my pain.

Denonbu

First of all, pirate eveything dnnb until scamco has pulled back the shady eneftee business it’s still attempting with this franchise. Now I obviously wouldn’t be this mad if this hadn’t been such an extremely promising project. During its first year it singlehandedly killed all my hype for a certain other dj girl project just by doing everything from music to character design to interacting with the fanbase better. The second year started off well with consistently good releases and promising lore, until they dropped the ball by jumping on a dying money laundering scam and now I really don’t know how to feel about this project. Guess I’m following the releases but refuse to give them any money and hope they’ll eventually snap out of it. Anyways, if I started listing every dnnb track I like it’d give me a carpal tunnel syndrome due to the discography being all around fantastic, so just go listen to Akina kill it on Itadaki Babel.

8 Beat Story

People always wonder how t7s has lasted so long despite not being profitable but for me 8bs will always be the real miracle. The game itself was outdated even at the time of the release (imagine the earliest version of llsif you can but somehow even clunkier), and nowadays it’s half dead with only a handful of events per year, but somehow still running. However, they keep releasing music, holding lives and continuing the story, which are the most crucial parts of the project, so I’m not worried for its future for now. Being such a small project gives it freedom to do basically whatever they want with the content, which has resulted in pretty ambitious or even crazy stories, and refreshing discography. I also can’t help but respect its occasional unapologetic edginess, mostly carried by the rival unit 2_wEI (Despair is a banger). The main idols also have a nice variety of songs, and I like the gimmick of mixing the 8 girls in different units depending on the song, with no set sub-units. Some of my favorites are BoyFriend, Count It Down and Genjimonogatari.

#mryyy #I was a bit hesistant to add dnnb since it's pretty well known already but at least I got to blow off some steam lol #also I kinda wanted to talk about IP and selepro but since they have TV anime and all they're popular enough in my book #also sorry for d*dj slander I don't hate it or anything I just happen to prefer the direction dnnb took

[sneasedtomeetyou]

Ingo and I have been talking about how his journals have been used as vital records of day to day Hisuian life and I realized I have a lot of PDF versions of the documents saved to my computer. The information is available if you know where to look, but I thought it could be fun for me to post excerpts of it that I still have access to. If you wanna see the kind of stuff I had to go off of for most of my life, feel free to have a read!

I might post more in the future, or I might simply boost other sources of it, we will see what format is ultimately preferred.

"It would seem that once again, the kindness of the Pearl Clan has left me indebted to them. In response to my often expressed worry that I will once again lose my memories, Warden Yūgao* has provided me with this journal. Having something concrete to record my memories in alleviates much of my worry, and will also be a good chance to practice this unfamiliar language. I am to write whatever I consider important to remember, and so I will begin with what is most important.

My name is Ingo, though the Pearl Clan has given me another name, Nobori. It is still somewhat odd to answer to this name, but my clan shows an unusual reluctance to call me by my given name that I have yet to understand. Aside from this, I know very little. My memories begin a few months ago, though they are rather disjointed, due to a head injury I received. I was brought to the Pearl Clan settlement by Lady Sneasler, and they cared for me until I was well enough to properly join them. Somehow, this feels familiar, to be Nobori of the Pearl Clan- such a clear allegiance to an organization simply feels correct to me. While initially, I could not speak with many of my clanmates, some of them do speak Galarian, which would seem to be my native language, though somehow this feels incorrect. Regardless, it is the language I spoke until I managed to learn enough Hisuy-itak to speak with those who are not traders, Wardens or the Clan Leader.

It would take too many pages to detail every day of my life in Hisui up until this point, so instead, I will begin with today. My skill in handling Pokemon and natural ability to understand them has made me highly in demand as a hunter, and so today I went with a party to Avalugg's Legacy, in hopes of catching some Swinub for our dinner..."

[The journal entry continues for several pages, describing a successful hunt, the cooking of the meal, and the meal itself.]

*[This is the Hisuian name of the Warden known as Calaba.]

#nobori's journal #collab posting #subwaywardeningo #lore

[carlageddon]

Any one else giving WarhammerPlus a go?

So I signed up to WarhammerPlus for a couple of months to see if it’s any good... 

...well that’s a bit of a lie... I signed up for WarhammerPlus in the hopes of winning “all their Paints & Tools” 

So bearing in mind, I still have fond memories of painting back in ‘94. We had about 8 different colours to choose from... a little different to the variety (and quality) we have now.

However, it’s now 14th of February and I’m not feeling the love... because I don’t think I won? I’ve tried tweeting the fine folks at Warhammer but I just get ignored. 

Any way, whilst I have it I’ve been trying to remember to use it as it does seem to have both “Great”, “Could be better” and “Would be good if I had any friends” stuff on there.

 The entire way it’s structured is a bit bad. There are three parts to it from what I can tell, each scattered into their own separate areas.

Warhammer TV. 

 This is their video section of the subscription. They have some excellent cartoons. Hammer & Bolter seems to be great at telling different stories from different factions of the 40K universe.

Some tutorials explaining how to play their games (outside of HeroQuest, I’ve never actually ever played a Games Workshop game. Doesn’t help I have no one to play with). A lot of these look like Games that take an entire day to play.

Then they have other stuff like the Citadel Colour Masterclass, which tries to help you with Painting tutorials... they make it all look so easy.

It would be nice if you could have an APP on the LG store that allows you to watch it direct on the TV, however, you can just stream it to your TV from you App on your phone or tablet I guess.

Warhammer 40,000 “THE APP”.

 This looks like it will be good if you play the 40K. As it’s got all the stats and rules for each army and character. So would be useful to bring each one up on a tablet, rather than rifling through a Codex each and every move. 

(Don’t get me wrong.. I love Warhammer Codex Books... I’ve just started collecting them. I don’t play the game (would like to) I just like the books and the pretty pictures inside) also... I still prefer the 90s Space Wolves heroes.

Warhammer Vault.

This. This is where, I think it really falls on it’s ass.

The idea of having White Dwarf issues, in PDF format, you can view online is a fantastic idea. Not only are we getting the newer ones, but we also have access to the older 2005 and upwards (they really need to do the ones from the mid 90s though). I would quite happy pay the £5 a month for the White Dwarfs and their back catalog. 

HOWEVER. I like most people am not going to sit and read a PDF magazine, on my computer. (OK it’s useful for scrolling through and looking at the pretty pictures). When you run this on a tablet it is slow (if it loads at all). I’ve tried this on multiple brands of tablets and it’s awful. Trying to load an entire magazine as a embedded PDF in a browser. Would the better solution not be for them to have their own PDF viewing app? or integrate with Amazon Kindle? or something better than a browser. 

It makes me so frustrated, do the people that put this together, not go home and test it for themselves? Hire me. I’ll tell you how to run your company I know little about...

It looks like the Paints have gone through several releases since I used them in the mid 90s. Also yes. I am a fan of Space Wolves..

Other than Warhammer-Vault rarely works very well on a tablet. It is a brilliant idea. I hope they do manage to sort their own PDF reader App out - at the very least, an offline mode. 

Oh yeah - there was one more thing. If you subscribe for a year, you get the choice of a ‘free’ miniature : 

Currently you can get Azrakh the Annihilator for Warhammer 40K or Mobyllorr Darkfang for Warhammer Fantasy Warhammer Age of Sigmar. But you have to wait a full year (and pay the £60) before you’ll see it. By then I’m hoping my painting will of improved enough to risk putting brush to figure. That’s another thing... at some point between the mid-90s and 2022, it stopped being Warhammer Fantasy, and is now called “Age of Sigmar”. Now back in my day. We didn’t call the store Warhammer, we called it Games Workshop, and a pound coin was called a golden queen. There were only 4 days in a week, back then we didn’t call them a day, we called them a quarter moon turn...

..end of ramblings...

#Warhammer #WarhammerPlus #WarhammerTV #WarhammerVault #Warhammer40K #WhiteDwarf

[kerlonquestions]

Transfer evernote to macjournal

The very thing we use to run our computer every day. I think it’s a long term solution that is platform neutral and vastly extensible. It allows me to refer to my notes, do my writing, create new ideas, synthesize old ones and not wrestle with an application while I’m doing it. Now I’m using a system that is stable, and sustainable, and scalable one that seems to fall into the background while I work one that is as future proof as can be. I was dependent on one or another of these applications to make sense of it all, which was kind of where I’d been all along. So, now, while my data format was standardized, thanks to Journler and DT, and, as such, much more usable, the whole process was still not stable, not at least for any time horizon of more than a year of two, since everything was still in someone else’s app. You had to conform your dates, workflow, ideas, cataloging, to their app’s functionality. In their own way each of these apps was lacking, but as a group hey all demanded attention to their own set of quirks that their programers thought of as features. I’ve written about these attempts, and my struggles with DEVONThink, elsewhere. (see my Dating DEVONThink post about this) But DT further refined my file formats and got me to add tags to files in a common data set rather than categorizing by topic into groups.Īlong the way I played with Evernote, MacJournal, SoHo Notes, Mori, EagleFiler and Yohimbo. DT ultimately showed itself to be both constricting and superfluous. When I outgrew Journler (and you always outgrow these packages, always, eventually, each and every one, no mater what the developer says about capacity and growth potential when you sign on) I transitioned to a beast of an application called DEVONThink. From the transition I got a fairly fixed TXT/RTF/RTFD/HTML set of documents, augmented with some PDFs, various image and audio files. Primarily the import to Journler standardized all my file formats. Journler allowed me to think of my infobase as a structured whole, rather than as disparate segments, and it prompted me to habitualize the process of capturing and synthesizing the random bits of data flowing past my writing desk every day. Surveying the field I adopted two, Journler and DEVONThink, after I demoed a dozen more (and did this all, probably, while I should have been writing).įirst, I poured all my notes into Journler, a fabulous but sadly abandoned gem of a program. IT Architects like to call collections like this, “unstructured infobases” and there are lots of programs around – variously called information managers, PIMs, or Everything Buckets �� to help manage them. I scrounged up the old data folders, consolidated them and began the search for a system to manage it all. Making sense of it changed from deferrable issue to current todo because someone told me that note taking, journaling they called it, and, crucially, retrieving said notes so they could actually be used, was a key skill for a writer. All of a sudden this hoard of electronic chaff became a mineable resource. But I carefully saved them all ‘cause I was sure that someday, somehow, I’d use them. There were text files, doc files, files with extensions I had forgotten from applications I’d forgotten – all kinds of electronic exotica. There were emails from Outlook, emails from Lotus Notes, stuff from an HP95LX, an HP200LX and a number of Palms. There were files from an outliner app called Think Tank, and others from an outliner called Outliner. There was text in Lotus 123 files, and Excel spreadsheets. The result was a pile of notes that collected then collapsed into a mish-mash of various file types, in different formats, with incompatible structures, all strewn about various locations on multiple generations of mediums.įor example, in my notes folders I had files produced by AmiPro, WordStar, WordPerfect, Commence, Ecco Pro, and Word. Technology over this time period has been about as fickle as a saloon girl after a roundup, so I’ve used almost every type of system that’s been rolled out since the green screen VAX I played with in 1983. Then came the revolution, and before too long I got with the program, moved on to the electronics, and started typing up all kinds of stuff in all kinds of applications. And I was born long before these cool PC/Mac thing’ies became ubiquitous, so my earliest notes were written on the best technology of the day: paper. I’ve been keeping notes and journals for as long as I can remember.

#Transfer evernote to macjournal

[fishfingersandscarves]

in honor of Sansûkh (by @determamfidd) ‘s ending i’m making printed volumes of the fic! each volume is 10 chapters with an original cover by me ^^) if you want to get one for yourself here’s the link   link to vol. 2  link to vol. 3

detail :)

#my art #fishfingersandscarves #sansûkh #sansukh #tolkien #lotr #the hobbit #fotr #thorin oakenshield #bilbo baggins #gimli son of gloin #gimli #legolas #legolas greenleaf #fic rec #determamfidd #cover #illustration #i'm sorta working as i go #it takes me about a day or so to format every pdf and another day or two to do a cover so

[jenner-benjamin]

Everything that I’ve wanted to say but haven’t had the confidence to until now

‘Everything that I’ve wanted to say but haven’t had the confidence to until now’ publication.

The ethos of this module has been to discover creative ways in which I can connect with my audience. Since the cancellation of this year’s end of degree show I have been conflicted at the prospect of a digital showcase and have been researching ways in which my work can be received in the physical sense. In a world where we scroll past artwork and give thoughtless ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs ups’, I wanted the reception of my work to be more considered and thoughtful and make my audience slow down for just a moment.

For months I had thought about making a publication at the end of the year that would consolidate my third year work in the form of a newspaper. My interest in the newspaper as an object was peaked by Guy Bigland’s workshop where he explained that the newspaper was a dying medium. I think this resonated because of the research I have carried out with handwriting falling under this same seemingly antiquated umbrella. On reflection, I felt that the newspaper carried with it connotations of either formality and seriousness or gossip and celebrity culture. These associations are difficult for audiences to disassociate with, despite what the actual subject matter of the publication may be, and so I decided to rethink my ideas of how to present this collection of works. I think because this publication is taking the place of an exhibition I had ideas of it needing to be grand and formal, when in essence this would detract from what the work is actually about.

I had samples from The Newspaper Club sent to me in the post which gave further insight in to how my publication might look. One such sample was of a zine, which I began to think might be more appropriate for what it was I was trying to say. The paper quality is of the same standard as a newspaper, so the audience reception would be similar to how they might approach this traditional form of relaying information. However the size is smaller, and as a result is much more intimate. 

The works found in the publication are a personal account of the pandemic. This includes the relentless lockdowns and periods of isolation, the loneliness that ensued as a result of these, the dire predicament of working in the hospitality industry throughout the whole ordeal and my feelings towards this, and finally the rare moments of quiet in between the anxiety, and how my creative practice has been a constant crux right from the beginning of the pandemic.

I feel that experiencing this work in a tangible way is paramount to reading the emotive content it offers. Contemporary society is oversaturated with digital media across a great many platforms and I did not want my story to get lost in a split second of someone’s screen time. Social media and virtual showcases will be used to share the work but these will only communicate so far. The publication will undoubtedly exist on multiple platforms, but I would like it to predominantly be experienced in the physical. 

‘Everything that I’ve wanted to say but haven’t had the confidence to until now’ is how I described this collection of drawings, prints, poetry and performances in a presentation that I gave earlier in the year. I noted it down as I really felt that it rung true to where I currently stood, not only as an artist but within myself as well. 

‘Everything that I’ve wanted to say but haven’t had the confidence to until now’ publication front cover - monoprint on paper.

The format of the zine itself communicates various aspects of my practice. It is divided in to two sections, Side A and Side B, a reference to cassette tapes. Dividing the publication in to chapters alludes to the sense of narrative that is present in all aspects of work. Side A addresses the negative moments of the pandemic and Side B has a much lighter tone. At the beginning of each section is a playlist, a reference to the layout of my sketchbooks. At the beginning of each sketchbook I begin a playlist that is personal to that book. When I reflect on past sketchbooks I know how I was feeling and what I was thinking by looking through the playlist. Side A is comprised of songs that I listened to when I was feeling down, and Side B was during the times I felt more optimistic and motivated. I have also made a QR code for each playlist so that the reader can further interact with the zine and listen to what I was listening to when when making the works that they are flicking through. QR codes are also very topical at the moment as they have become a part of our every day life, from checking in to locations with the NHS Test and Trace app to reading and ordering from a menu at a pub or restaurant. The inclusion of the QR code adds another dimension to the publication that combines traditional ideas with contemporary purposes. 

‘Side A’ playlist - monoprint on paper.

The zine contains a narrative of asemic works that respond to the current global crisis, some of these responses address the days where I struggled within myself and became outward reflections of inner feelings, and some respond to the hierarchical dynamic that became apparent in the hospitality industry. A few of the asemic works have been paired with poems that I have written in the last year. I chose to appropriate these as monoprints, a nod to the work I made before I rejoined the course (and have continued to explore throughout),  a further reminder of how far I have come and how much work has progressed. 

Side B offers works from my performative explorations, where I began to utilise my practice to cope with and overcome my lockdown struggles. The first of which is from the ‘Exhale’ performances and the second from the ‘Letter of Resignation’ performances. I wanted to include screenshots from the videos so there was a feeling of animation and movement as the reader journeys though the pages, but did not want the appearance of these to distract from the aesthetic of the publication. Therefore I printed these on the offset lithography press. The finished prints almost look like mid-20th Century American high school year book portraits - adding to the traditional tone I was hoping to achieve. 

Screenshot from the ‘Exhale’ drawing performance - offset lithography on paper.

I understood that in order for the publication to be assessed and meet the criteria for the newly adopted blended learning approach to teaching that I would have to decide upon a method of digitising the zine somehow. I thought that scanning in each individual page or submitting it as a .pdf document would completely undermine what I was intending to achieve, and so I collaborated with filmmakers, Tom Crane and Lianna Denwood who documented the zine in their own creative voice. I gave Tom and Lianna a copy of the zine and allowed them to produce a short narrative that highlights the quiet tone of the book. They included fragments of songs from the playlists that give prominence to how the audience might engage with the QR code playlists, in effect the soundtrack is both narrational and instructional.    

I am incredibly proud of this piece of work. It is my largest edition to date, sitting at 150 copies. I intend to circulate these amongst my audience as invitations to a moment of reflection and poignant human think time, away from internet instantaneity. I am unsure as to the reception that the publication will meet, but it would be my hope there are moments in the pages that encourage the reader to consider and muse on.

#practice #publication #zine #narrative #lithography #asemic #asemic art #asemic writing #poetry #visual poetry #vispo #qr #cassette #performance #performance art #printmaking #masters #mamdp

[adam-t-cox]

Traditional Publishing Overview

So, you've finished your manuscript, its all polished up and ready for... what exactly? If you're anything like me after the first 24 hours of elation wear off you'll be asking yourself, "What the $&*! do I do now?”

I've been considering starting this blog for a while but didn't want to do it until I’d finished publishing my own work. Now that I have, I’m amazed at just how much work an author still has left once they’ve finished their manuscript. I’ll be sharing whatever knowledge I gained during my journey in a series of posts in the hopes that fellow first-time authors might be able to save some time and effort during this extremely complicated and often demoralizing process.

So first off: Congratulations! Finishing a manuscript is no small feat and should be celebrated. After you’re done celebrating, the first thing you’ll want to consider for the next leg of your journey is what type of publishing method you want to pursue for your book.

Let’s start by talking about traditional publishing. For most authors, this is the path we think of when we picture our books on the shelves of an Indigo, Coles, or Barnes & Noble. But how does this process work and how long does it take?

First let’s outline the process itself:

1.      Query letters to Literary Agents/Agencies

2.      Rejections/Revisions/Offers of Representation/Acceptance

3.      Waiting…

4.      Agent finds a publisher

5.      Further revisions or changes requested by editor at publishing house

6.      Revisions are approved and work begins on formatting and cover design

7.      Book scheduled for release.*

*There may be additional edits or work requested during the formatting and design process before the book’s initial release. But from what I’ve heard its usually minor stuff.

 Now I’ll be going into more detail on the steps that I have experience with in later posts, but I’ll give you the quick version here. Basically, in traditional publishing very, and I mean VERY few publishers will accept unsolicited manuscripts directly from authors. I can count on one hand the amount I’ve found in Canada, and I never found one in the US. All the ones I found in Canada dealt with children’s literature or non-fiction titles, so they were a no go for me. Which means you need a literary agent to pitch your book to publishers for you.

The agent or agency has their reputation to throw around and likely already has a good working relationship built with the publishing houses they’ll be pitching to. So not having one makes it essentially impossible for you to do anything with your manuscript. Now, this may seem unfair, and feel like someone is intentionally setting up barriers to keep you out. That’s because essentially they are, and for a completely understandable reason.

You are an unproven writer; no one knows if you’re the next Stephen King or Terry Pratchett yet. For every great or even good writer out there, there’s hundreds of not-so-great ones, and you’re all competing to have your voices heard. The publishing houses have enough work on their plates without filtering through this noise on a daily basis. Hence the role of the Literary agent. A liaison between the author and the publisher, with the goal of publishing your work in a way that satisfies everyone involved, while also getting the two of you paid.

So first you have to write a query letter to agents. Which is a topic that will require its own post to explain in enough detail. You will probably craft a handful at a time and wait for responses to filter in before sending more out. You will get rejections, and a lot of them, it happens to everyone. Don’t let it discourage you, you wrote an entire manuscript after all, we already know you can work past disappointments and move on.

Now, if you’re lucky enough to get the hallowed ‘offer of representation’, you will probably be thinking, “Amazing! My book will be published in a month.” but just hold on a second. It’s still going to be a while before you get there. There are likely going to be requests for edits from the editor at the publishing house. Which, if you’ve already signed the paperwork, are mandatory and may not be negotiable at all if you want your book to see the light of day. Then there’s the formatting work, cover designing, and figuring out where in their lineup of book releases your title will end up.

All in all, based on my own experiences, and from what I’ve heard from a few others, this process could take anywhere from 1.5 to 4 years to complete.

“Up to 4 years?!” I hear you yell at your phone or computer screen. Yes, it could easily take that long. Finding a literary agent alone could take 1-2 years, especially if you are working full or part-time while pursuing this. Also, you are likely a first-time writer, and the publishing house is taking a gamble that your title will sell. It’s not guaranteed income for them like the sequel to a best seller from a well-known author would be.

So why bother doing it if its going to take so long?

Well, there are LOTS of benefits from publishing your book through a publishing house and using a literary agent. Here are some of the biggest ones that made me try this method first:

1.      If you do well, they do well:

There is a real incentive for the people you will be working alongside to help you better your product, your writing, and give you advice. These are people who have worked in the industry for many years and have extensive knowledge of what works, and what doesn’t. That is incredibly valuable.

2.      Professional Editors:

By now you’ve edited your own work about 1000 times right? Well guess what, there’s still mistakes. Trust me … I know. A good editor at a publishing house can really help polish your manuscript, improving the overall reading experience of your readers. Also, they are great at finding the plot holes you are still blind to.

3.      You don’t have to focus on managing your book:

This is probably the biggest boon that traditional publishing will give you as a writer vs. self publishing. Especially if you already have more books in the series or your next stand-alone ready on the back burner. Once they approve any edits they request, everything else is pretty much hands off for you. Sure, you might get an email or a call about some aspect they want to go over with you (Cover design, formatting, maybe another small edit.) but for the most part you’re done until its time for the release and your shameless promotion of your book to anyone and everyone. This means no late nights formatting each individual release of your book (ePub, PDF, Paperback, Hardcover, KPF, Apple Books, etc.), no hunting for artists or cover designers, and no extensive marketing campaigns to manage after release. Just you and your computer, working on your next big thing. This will save you so much time it’s not even funny.

 There are of course other reasons why traditional publishing may be right for you, but these were the big ones that made me pursue it. Personally, even though it didn’t work out for me with my book, I still think it’s worth a shot for most authors. And for the record I still plan to pursue acquiring a literary agent for my future projects.

But with that I think I’ll call this overview done and like I said, I’ll be going into more detail in later posts, so stay tuned.

Have a good one,

-Adam

P.S. The next post in this series will be about the steps involved in self-publishing and some of its biggest advantages.

#writer #writersofinstagram #writers on tumblr #writing #writing advice #publishing #publish #how to publish your book #first time author #how to #manuscript #what do i do now #writing help #blog post

[cannibalisticapple]

Okay, so I have some thoughts on Kurikuri’s decision to delete a large number of her fan fics, and on fan fiction as a whole.

For those who don’t know, Kurikuri (@letaizawarest) is a popular fan fiction author with numerous popular Erasermic fics, along with other fandoms. Around the end of May/start of June she deleted a large number of her stories, specifically those that featured either police, or those set in the My Hero Academia universe where they work as Pro Heroes.

To quote her post:

as you may have noticed, roughly half of the fics on my ao3 have been deleted.

i’ve deleted all my fics about police officers. also, after some thought, i also deleted my non-AU bnha fics, because although they might not be “cops” in name, they are law enforcement. i do not want to be a part of the system that glorifies the police. 


at the moment i haven’t deleted other profession AUs and high school era fics, but i will continue to reflect on their relation to the source material. even if you enjoyed the deleted fics, please do not circulate them in other formats (PDFs, EPUBs, etc). 


i also encourage other writers to think about cop fic they’ve written. while it may be fun and escapist for you, it still encourages the idea that antiblack and killer cops are just “bad apples” and that good cops exist. let’s dismantle that system of thought.

I have some very, very mixed feelings on this.

To start: I respect her reasoning, but I don’t agree with it. I fully agree that it’s not just a bunch of “bad apples”, there’s a serious issue with the system and how the police operate in the United States. I’ve always been bothered by how the police let other officers get away with horrible BS, even as a kid, and that rage has only grown as I’ve grown older and found out more about how screwed up it is on every single level.

But the way that last paragraph is written rubs me the wrong way because you can’t paint every single person in an entire career field as unequivocally corrupt, bigoted and all around callous murderers. Good cops DO exist. Plenty of people go into the career hoping to fix things, or just genuinely want to help their community in whatever way they can. But the thing is, they’re fighting a losing battle because the system is working against them. When they DO speak up against the corruption, bigotry, violence and other issues, they tend to get fired and blacklisted from the field. Or sometimes, they get outright murdered and it’s treated as a “suicide.”

A shitty fact of life: sometimes, the people who are more willing to resort to underhanded tactics and willing to turn a blind eye to corruption are the ones who climb up the career ladder furthest. And in the case of the police, it’s deep-rooted enough that it can’t be fixed internally anymore. But that doesn’t make literally every police officer corrupt.

I’m not posting this to make some political point or argument though. I obviously disagree with Kurikuri’s opinion, but I respect it. I can even respect her decision to remove the stories featuring the police, or even the ones heavily focusing on the characters’ jobs as pro heroes. I can see how heroes are just another version of law enforcement, because honestly, they are.

As a writer and a reader, I fully respect that it’s ultimately her choice to delete her stories. It’s not my place to make demands. She’s the one who created it, and as a writer I know the hard work and time that goes into crafting stories, so I believe she has a right in how it’s used and shared. The fact she shared it in the first place was something she didn’t have to do.

But the thing is, she DID share it, which is why I have this conflict.

As a writer, I’ve always believed that fiction can be more powerful than fact.

Fiction can give readers a window into mindsets you’d never imagine before, because you can connect more easily with fictional characters than real people on the news. That’s why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so critical in the battle against slavery: it didn’t just gave a face to slavery, it let readers experience the characters’ lives directly. People got to see the struggles and suffering firsthand, feel the rising crescendo of hope each time freedom is in reach, and the soul-crushing despair every time that hope gets dashed by outside forces.

Fiction may not always be “true” or even “accurate,” but it can help us understand other people, see them as fellow humans, in ways that nonfiction just can’t. It can evoke emotions, empathy and familiarity in a reader that a news story or biography can’t capture because it draws you directly into their world.

And it’s that part—the part where readers enter this fictional world to connect to characters they’ll never meet—that leads to the other power of fiction that many people overlook:

Fiction has the ability to help readers persevere.

How many people reading this have used books to get away from trouble in their lives? To take a breather from all their anxieties and stress, and dive head-first into this other world for just a moment, where nothing else matters? How many people reading this had their whole lives changed by reading a story where a character’s words resonated with them? Where it helped them come to an epiphany about how to do better, how to be better.

Sometimes, the world is too overwhelming and we need to escape it. That’s the beauty of fiction. It lets us go to a world where our problems just don’t matter. Even if the world in question is worse than our own, it can still be a relief and give us hope because hey, at least we’re not living in 1984 or the Hunger Games, right? Stories are what keeps many people going through the hardest time, what gives them hope that life isn’t utterly hopeless.

And even after a story is finished, whether it’s fan fiction, a book, a show, or any other medium, that story will have a special place in people’s hearts. Many people will go back to those stories years later when they’re faced with immense stress and need a break from the real world, so that they can dive into the world that helped them persevere the last time they felt so bad. Just having a copy of it on hand can be a source of comfort even if you never read it again.

I want to highlight one phrase Kurikuri used in her post to describe how people feel writing stories about police and heroes: "fun and escapist”. That’s honestly so accurate, those stories are escapist, and that is why I’m so conflicted.

Stories about superheroes, while technically revolving around themes of law enforcement, are a form of escapism FROM police corruption.

There’s a reason that superhero comics are so popular in America. Superheroes appeal to a natural desire for justice because as so aptly pointed out, the real world doesn’t always HAVE that justice. It gives an ideal for people to aspire to, a glimpse of what could be, what should be. (Come to think of it, that’s probably why I hate the DC cinematic universe so much, it’s skewed way too much to favor the villains/antagonists and maximize suffering for the good guys.)

Right now, the world is full of more injustice than ever before. I can’t turn on the news without feeling my rage and stress boil over. Every day it gets worse and worse somehow, and I (and many others) genuinely fear that the United States may be heading towards a civil war this November. Donald Trump’s voice alone is enough to make my blood boil at this point.

I, and many others, turn to fan fiction so I can break away from reality because that amount of rage and fear just isn’t healthy.

I don’t have depression, or anxiety, or an abusive family, or a chronic illness. I’m not at risk of being made homeless anytime soon, nor do I need to worry about bills right now or going hungry. I’m a privileged white girl who has barely anything to worry about. What I’m saying is I’m fucking lucky and I know it, but I STILL can’t stand thinking about the state of the world and need to get the fuck away from it to take a breather for my own mental health.

And I also know that many people don’t have that option because their situation is so bad, they NEED to be aware of it at all times.

In the past when writing for other fandoms, I’ve had people tell me my fan fiction was the reason they did not commit suicide.

In my early college years I fell into the creepypasta community and was pretty active in it, especially on deviantArt. I don’t know if that particular fandom’s subject and focus makes it more appealing to teenagers going through rough times or what, but I swear, more than half the people I spoke to suffered from some form of mental illness, abusive or broken family and home situations, bullying, and every other way the world can screw someone over through means beyond their control.

During that time, a few readers left comments that waiting for my stories to update were what kept them going. They didn’t explicitly say that it was the only reason they didn’t kill themselves. It was more just remarks like, “Your writing is the only thing keeping me going.”

I’m not vain enough to believe my stories are so good, it made people decide to continue living JUST to see what happens next. Suicidal thoughts and urges are much more complex than that. But it’s still not something you expect to hear on something you write for fun.

I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t because my stories were "just that good.” I think it was because they needed something to cling to in bleak times. That sometimes at the lowest point where all seems lost, people need just one little thought, just the smallest thing to push away those dark urges before they could fully overwhelm them. Something like, “If I die now, I won’t get to see how that story ends.” It’s such a small thing, but having something to look forward to can be so powerful in fighting off impulsive decisions.

It’s made me hyper-aware of just how powerful writing is.

To me, I see writing as a way of helping others. I give people that option for escape. It’s a large part of why I update on a regular, weekly schedule, and why I published extra chapters when the pandemic got announced and when the riots started. People need that comfort, that little break from reality to just sit and breathe so they can get through the rest of the day. I can’t do much to fix the world, but I can at least give people that.

Right now, people need that escape more than ever.

And deleting the stories is taking that escape away and causing MORE stress.

In times like this, people often turn to the stories they know will help most, and plenty of people in fandoms will first search up their favorite ships. They look for fluff, smut, angst... It helps people feel better to focus on these two people who are obviously in love as they work through their troubles.

Many times, readers will be more drawn to stories in the canon universe than radical AUs set in other universes. That’s how they were introduced to those characters. I myself can enjoy no-power and fantasy AUs sometimes, but what I really crave are how they interact in the canon world because that’s the world and versions of them I want to see the most. By deleting EVERY SINGLE STORY IN THE CANON UNIVERSE, that option was removed.

In many of the stories that were deleted, the characters’ careers were honestly a minor facet of the story. Some used it to establish the setting, such as treating injuries after a patrol. Some just simply used it to explain they work at UA, a school for teaching kids with superpowers. Some just had them work as heroes because it’s set in the canon universe, and never directly show ANTTHING about the work.

I’m not always looking for a story about how being a hero shapes and impacts their lives, and most of those stories that got deleted AREN’T about being a hero. That’s just one piece of their character, it’s far from the focal point. It could honestly be removed from several of them without changing the rest of the story.

I can get wanting to make a political point and I respect that, but by deleting those stories, you’ve taken away a key source of comfort from hundreds, thousands of people. By deleting the stories, you’re making the stress worse.

On Saturday night, I realized several of my favorite stories are suddenly gone. I knew Kurikuri had deleted a bunch of her stories, but I hadn’t realized just how many of them I liked. Some of them I’ve specifically sought out to reread multiple times in the past, never really paying attention to the author. Realizing they’re just gone caused me heavy stress because it made me paranoid about all these other stories I like to reread. I don’t expect those stories to be around forever, but I still didn’t expect them to vanish so suddenly. I never thought I’d need to download them to make sure I’d still be able to read them while the site is still up.

I spent hours searching out specific stories to see if they were written by her, and make sure they’re not gone forever. I have no way of knowing which ones she’d written and deleted because there’s not exactly a list out there anymore. My desperate search for those stories and one in particular (which I still haven’t found) contributed to the lack of sleep I got that night.

And I need to reiterate: I am mentally healthy and have no major stresses in my immediate life. And that’s why I’m hyper-aware of how this stress will affect people who AREN’T as lucky as I am.

If an author decides to delete their stories because they feel the stories themselves push harmful values or themes, fine. If they’re getting harassed, or it reminds them of a bad time in the lives, or they just don’t like that story anymore, okay. I can respect that and accept it.

But these stories were deleted for the EXACT reasons that people will be looking for them now more than ever, and that’s where I draw the line.

This applies to ALL fandoms.

If you as a fan fiction writer have more than, say, 100 kudos on a completed story or one-shot, there’s a good chance people will read and reread your story in stressful times. If you have a reasonably popular story that updates on a regular or even semi-regular basis, there is a chance that someone is using it as a lifeline to have something to look forward to while the rest of their lives go to hell. Maybe not because they specifically love it, but because it gives them something routine.

I want to make it clear that it’s not our job to care for other people’s mental health. Fan fiction writers don’t have an obligation to people, we’re doing it for fun first and foremost. We’re not some sort of saviors, and we shouldn’t think of ourselves that way or we can honestly screw people up worse. We’re not obligated to write these stories JUST for our fans.

At most, our stories are sources of support and comfort for readers. A little break from reality. If writing a story is causing you more stress than enjoyment, stop. Fan fiction, and all other fan media and stories in general, is ultimately created for the creator’s enjoyment more than anything.

Your own mental health comes first. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

But with how utterly fucked and unfair the world is right now, people need those stories now more than ever. So if you’ve got a story out there that’s fairly popular, please, please, PLEASE be mindful of your readers before deciding to delete it. Now is the absolute last time people need more stress trying to find a single story. And if you’re going to delete it, maybe give readers a heads up so that those who need it or have some powerful attachment to it for all the reasons I’ve discussed here can download a copy for their own personal use.

Don’t hurt your readers to make a point.

#fanfic #fan fiction #fan fic #fandom #my hero academia fanfiction #boku no hero academia fanfic #kurikuri #letaizawarest #erasermic #maizawa #writing #stories #aizawa shouta #yamada hizashi #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #tw suicide #superhero #superheroes

[bookworm-2692]

About a week ago I finally finished bookbinding @airdeari‘s beautiful Zero Escape fic The First Nonary Game. It took about a month (between all the waiting for glue to dry and also several days each week when I was unable to work on it), and was so much fun! It’s so satisfying to just... hold this book in my hands. 

Details about how I made it, along with additional photos (and commentary) below the cut.

So I came across this post on Tumblr, which immediately inspired me to try bookbinding myself. I spent a few days watching so many tutorials from the youtube channel linked in the post (I’ll link the specific tutorials I used in this post), and googling how to actually manage to print pages so they form proper signatures, because the inbuilt booklet creator in Word doesn’t exist in my Word apparently so that’s fun.

Anyway, once I started, I asked @airdeari for permission to print and bind his fic, and he immediately said yes, so that was good. Then I spent a good couple of days copying the entire fic into a Word document, and fiddling with formatting so it would look like an actual book (section breaks, page numbers, headers with the fic title on the left page and chapter title on the right page (this took ages to work and I kept on stuffing it up), and making sure things just... looked nice. I added in the art After The War that @keycrash created specifically for the fic (third pic above), and an “afterword” containing credit and links and the author’s notes from AO3 (because even if I’m the only one who will ever see it, it still feels weird to not add the credit stuff in so it’s there).

I then saved the document as a PDF, and used CheapImposter to correctly shuffle (impose, hence “imposter”) the pages so when folded into signatures, each page would be in the correct order. This program was the first free one I could find, and was great because you could specify the number of sheets you want per signature, rather than stuck with a default. I chose to have 11 signatures of 6 sheets of paper, since that was the amount that would have the least blank pages and the end of the book. The file was 261 pages, so with two pages per side, and two sides per sheet, you divide the number of pages by 4 to get 66 sheets of paper

I then printed. There was only one (1) paper jam in the process, which was great. Unfortunately, I realised after I printed that one of the headers for one chapter was wrong (I hadn’t properly disconnected the two chapters), but fortunately that only involved reprinting 4 sheets of paper.

I used the following tutorials to make the books: DIY Textblock, a general “how to make a textblock” tutorial; DIY Kettle Stitch, a specific look at the stitching for a textblock, since the first tutorial doesn’t focus on this; DIY Book Cloth, since I chose to use fabric for my cover; and DIY Hardcover Book, how to put all those pieces together.

So then I started folding all the signatures. I was watching so much Brooklyn Nine-Nine during both the folding and stitching sections, since it was repetitive actions I didn’t need to concentrate on that lasted hours.

It was at this point that I sliced each signature one by one to make the end smoother and less pointy. In future I recommend not doing it at this point - wait until the very end. Instead, move straight onto stitching. 

I don’t have any photos of the stitching portion, since my phone died the morning I started the stitching, and I wasn’t able to replace it until after all the stitching was done. In fact, originally all the photos from before the stitching were lost too. It was only about two days ago that magically the My Photo Stream thing kicked in and brought back all the photos - if it had worked two weeks earlier I would’ve had more. As it is, all photos from September to January are gone forever, unfortunately. But that’s another discussion entirely.

The above is the first book photo on my new phone, so as you can see, all the stitching was completed, the spine was glued, and the purple paper attached. I couldn’t buy two A4 sheets, so instead I had to buy one A3 sheet and cut it in half. Which was difficult cycling home from the city with an A3 sheet that didn’t fit in my bag on account of being A3 and not A4, but oh well.

I don’t have a book press, so I used a pile of DND books and my brother’s weights instead, as shown below.

I then had to re-slice the book after this point bc my first go wasn’t even, on account of slicing each signature separately. Next time definitely I’ll just do it at the end like this. I then also sanded it to make it smoother. It’s still not perfect, but it’s something that’ll take practice and patience so.

Next I made the book cloth, which involves using appliqué sheets to combine cotton fabric and tissue paper. But first I want to talk about the fabric I chose for the cover, because I’m quite proud of it. I spent ages wandering around the shop, trying to find something that fit the feel of the book. Spoilers for the content of the fic if you haven’t read it yet, and also for the source material (999/Zero Escape). I was thinking about some sort of blue swirl thing, because of the Gigantic sinking. I found that, but hesitated because it didn’t fully fit, and my favourite colour is blue so I always pick blue. I also considered flames/fire because of the incinerator thing, but couldn’t find any. I can’t remember if I just couldn’t find any four leaf clover fabric, or if I’ve just since thought about that as a cover. But instead I chose the butterflies below. They fit in several subtle ways that I’m proud of. The colours of blue and pink(/red) matching the receiver and transmitter coding all throughout 999, as well as the moments of purple as well (I don’t think I need to get into that, I’m sure it was analysed to hell and back when the game first came out). The butterflies also point towards the butterfly effect, and in turn the different timelines present in the series. So together it just works. /spoilers over

It’s also just a pretty fabric.

Now the making of the book cloth. I had to make it twice, because I was too impatient the first time, so the iron was too hot and it steamed, which wrinkled and warped the tissue paper, so the fabric was all wrinkly too. The second time took ages and was a worse quality appliqué sheet, but worked well enough anyway.

(My parents: did you have the iron out? what were you ironing? you never iron)

And then I cut the book board to size, using the measurements from the tutorial video. I’ll repeat them here: front and back cover: width = width of textblock minus 3mm, and height = height of textblock plus 6mm, and spine width = width of textblock spine, spine height = same height as covers

I then glued the board onto the book cloth, and put it under the book press. The dnd books are not large enough to cover the whole thing, and also I really wanted the board to stay flat and not curl, so I grabbed way more dnd books and way more of my brother’s weights. I also accidentally started putting the glue on the wrong side of the board (bc one side is smooth and the other is rough), hence the colour difference as well.

The corners were cut and folded and glued over...

And then the textblock was glued in, and put in my book press for a whole weekend. I added a sheet of paper to absorb the glue so the pages wouldn’t become wrinkly, but instead the sheet I added was fine and every other page in the book is wrinkly. So I dunno what happened there. After the weekend I took it out and looked at it, and then put it back for another week to be sure.

And then the complete book is shown at the top of the post!

As I was starting I was talking a lot about it, like about the process I had to go through, or how I was going to obtain what I needed, etc. Mum asked if she could read the story. I froze, like a deer in the headlights... because this is a fanfic. She saw my fear and immediately backed down, explaining she only wanted to read it because if the story was that important to me that I was going to literally turn it into a book, she wanted to read it to yknow like know me better or something? Which makes sense. And when I got over my initial reaction, and remembered that indeed it was technically my dad who introduced me to fanfic, and thought about it more, I said okay. Because since the fic is technically a prequel to the first game, and most of the characters are technically OC’s (like, from the first game we know that all eighteen children must exist, but most of them don’t have names or anything so they are effectively OC’s), then knowledge of source material isn’t strictly necessary. This fic can probably be enjoyed on its own. I mean I’ll probably have to explain the concept of morphogenetic fields, and the last four chapters might not make sense? But I’m okay for my mum to read it. So when she’s less busy at work I’m going to download the epub onto her phone for her - we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, this fic is a masterpiece, extremely well written and I highly recommend it. As said, most of the characters are effectively OC’s, and yet they are all given such rich histories and personalities. All of them have access to the morphogenetic field, so I’m just so glad that @airdeari​ explores nine unique relationships with the field - nine unique sibling dynamics, and esper powers and abilities. It’s just so good.

#bookbinding #zero escape #999 spoilers #999 #the first nonary game #airdeari #i forgot to mention the most essential step of making the book #before i printed the pages i read the entire fic again through word #its still so beautiful #i cant wait for my first read of the fic using my physical book #if youre in the ze fandom and still have not come across this fic yet #first of all who are you and what rock have you been living under #and second of all please read this fic bc its anything and everything you could ever want from a fng fic #feel free to ask more about this and what i did btw #it was so fun binding this book #i want to do more of my fav fics now haha #this fic is 100k and it was like the perfect size for a fic to print #most of the other fics i really like are much much longer so i'd probably have to split them in half #and idk if i could do that #too much pressure to split between the right chapters #oh well uni has started so i have a while to think about which one to do next #ive already promised a version of this fic for a friend who wants to draw her own cover #so we'll see how that goes!

[cribbra9]

file down site

fast file site When compared to following clouds, media playback in mobile environments is advantageous. Especially regarding videos, the next cloud must be downloaded as a whole, while streaming. Just to stream! I have to install another app again. Cloud alone isn't enough to stream. Faster than the next cloud. About 20%. Once you open a document with a cloud viewer, it breaks significantly less than the next cloud (but breaking itself is already a problem). Web app is supported. It's rudimentary, but it is possible to write. However, the thing is that the document format is a bizarre format, such as .ndoc, which makes it extremely incompatible. File sharing through the URL (but this is as far as another cloud is concerned). Webhard It has a smaller capacity compared to the next cloud. Compared to foreign cloud services, it boasts poor service quality. Compared to the next cloud, it is very disadvantageous for music playback. Continuous streaming is possible only for several selected sound sources. The next cloud only needs to be in a folder. You must share a URL so you can't share music files or videos. According to the report, there is a saying that N drive looks like a local drive when installed, but only it happens like a local drive, which is no different from the folder synchronization setting. It's a whole lot worse for computers in the first place when external programs play tricks on them. It's far better to just clean up the synchronization folder.*** It is extremely specialized in playing music. In particular, it is the only cloud that can play sound sources in an environment similar to MP3 players we are familiar with. Although each song has some buffering, it appears to play around 192kpbs continuously, let's assume that communication is in good shape in a 3G environment. Needless to say, in reality, it's often take off at that point) It has a large capacity. This is a significant advantage when considering domestic cloud services all together, which have low quality of media access in cloud services. You can substitute the finish drive above. In particular, if a picture is contained in a document, it really is rarely opened properly. Streaming songs often cuts off (but not often) due to communication problems with the cloud, not Internet speed problems. I feel like it's about once every two hours. And if you listen to high-quality sound sources, it gets buffered often, or if you're in a place where in fact the 3G environment isn't smooth, it gets cut off more often. So when it's in that state, you must find the path of the folder where the song was playing and play it again. The only way to talk about is folder sharing. Only some documents or presentation files are available for file viewing. Except for those points, you'll find nothing to say even if it really is almost a webhard level. Foreign Cloud Comparison (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Skydrive) Google Drive It exerts tremendous power on paper documents. In particular, even without an office program, Google Drive can cover it to some extent. Not fancy ppts or fancy excels, nearly every simple document is OK. It is beneficial to reflect the progress of work in the mobile environment. By setting up only offline views, the files you work on can continue to be reflected in the cloud instantly. It is just a very convenient feature for sharing files with other users. It is easy to connect to other Google services such as Gmail. If you don't upload documents right to the Google drive but write them on the Google drive web app, the capacity of the file will not account for cloud storage (what do you mean, if you just use the web app, the capability of the Google drive is infinite). Now, photo media access is strong at the dropbox level. You can flip through photos and videos can be played immediately. However, the loading time seems to take a little longer compared to the dropbox. I feel it), but it doesn't bother me. There are the most apps that may be connected. In a desktop environment. Various connection apps allow various operations in the web environment without installing programs on the computer. It's a bit of a problem that the app doesn't connect at all on mobile, but it is the best in the desktop environment. Upload a small pdf file and change it to Google Docs format. It could then be stored again in MS Word format or something. However, it really is only possible with pdf files of 2MB or less. There is no bandwidth restriction in name. There is a testimony that it's a block after a large amount of writing, but it's not stipulated by company policy. If you are using Google Docs web app, you can save documents indefinitely, but if you save them indefinitely, it is the same as when you lose your Internet connection, you're going to sink and use MS word, right?) Google Docs web app, cloud-connected web app, support for editing files utilizing a variety of programs, nonetheless it is still crude compared to office programs used on computers.Is it obvious?) Dropbox It exerts its strongest power in media viewing. Photo folders? Could be flipped smoothly (Domestic cloud services require a specific amount of buffering time for every photo). However, in the event that you wait a little bit for the dropbox, the photos in a single folder are loaded entirely. While considering Photo A, Photo B is loaded and scrolling is possible without the blockage. Video? Beyond streaming, you can freely specify before start of playback. It is the best in the world with regards to media reading. There are various means of increasing capacity. Camera upload settings, invitation of friends, events at the business level, etc. The speed is relatively good. It is a lot faster than the Box and doesn't bother with Google Drive. The file capacity limit which can be uploaded from the free account may be the largest. 300MB. The bandwidth of the free account is bigger than that of the Box. It is updated by 20GB each day. It's practically infinite unless you are going to share large files. 웹하드순위 The starting capacity may be the smallest. Two gigabytes of dirt. Price compared to capacity may be the priciest cloud service. Dirty bastards... There exists a saying that changes in documents cannot be reflected instantly when working on documents. Word documents shouldn't flip different files like picture documents. The dropbox itself can't be documented. There are probably the most compatible apps in the mobile environment. If you need to work on a document, you can choose the interface you need through the app drive and work on it leisurely. In the case of document files, simple document inquiry is a convenient axis because previews are provided. Unlike additional.dropboxes, if you can find multiple Word documents in a folder, Word documents can be flipped on the file or file, as is seen in the photo file. File sharing support is fairly good. This box allows anyone who manages or creates a website to share data conveniently with little usage of the net page's resources. However, the bandwidth of the free account is 10GB per month, which is quite small. Slow. Not paid people. Media access is very disadvantageous. It's even worse than Google Drive, which says it's disadvantageous above. It's better to just do it on some type of computer than listen to it for a test. The uploadable file capacity limit is the smallest. 100MB. Free account only. In a mobile environment, real-time documentation is rarely supported. If you don't install Boxeditor, the documentation will undoubtedly be written with an extension that may only be written on Box (it works, so it's much better than Dropbox, but it's significantly less than Google Drive). It had been recently updated (on 22 February?). Media access is currently quite convenient. Especially photo files. But the pace is still a little slow.*** Skydrive The writing function is quite powerful. Many cloud services offer Web apps. But Skydrive's may be the most like the MS office documenting environment we've often used. And there's also the most supported handwriting, even though it is four-legged. The basic capacity is rather good. 7GB. Well, it's not that strong a difference. It is no exaggeration to state that the interface of mobile apps may be the most backward cloud service ever.

#웹하드순위

[of-another-broken-heart]

I’m just going to copy/paste this because it took me hours and I’m drained. 

I guess I have to format it again if I want it to show up at all... 

I couldn't even make it back home before breaking down crying again.

Driving while chronically sleep deprived, exhausted, fatigued, and dissociating is bad enough. Doing it with all that AND without being able to see? How special. 

I barely had time to sit down, my phone rang. I answered it, begging for someone to hear me. For thirty straight seconds. "Hello? Hello? Hello???" Finally someone spoke, but they couldn't hear me. I'm sobbing. They hung up. I scrambled to call back, from my computer, because at least then I'm not fighting a lack of reception as well as my anxiety. They called again. I didn't answer. I waited for my computer to ring through instead. I'm put on hold.  I'm sobbing. It was just to ask what my pharmacy is. Which I already answered on my paperwork. Which I answered, again, at check-out. And I was forced into a third confirmation via a pointless, needless, anxiety-attack inducing phone call hazing. For something I already answered. 

It's not fucking fun. People don't choose this. I didn't choose this. But does it matter? "Call," the command comes. "Just call." "Call to confirm." "Call to ask." "Call." "Call." "Call." 

I want you to think of something that takes physical hold of your body and brings to you to tears. I want you to hold that and sit with it until it does those things. I want you to choose to reduce yourself to a sobbing mess, struggling to breathe, alone. And I want you to picture a world where you are commanded, demanded, required to do this. For virtually everything. Imagine needing help - but you must first re-traumatize yourself with your most painful memories until your nose is running and your eyes burn from crying. And you're exhausted for the rest of the day, too. Maybe multiple days. Absolutely exhausted. So fucking depleted that taking yourself to the bathroom is almost impossible. Feeding yourself - even eating something out of a can, or microwaved - is a herculean effort. Does that sound fun? Of course not. 

As for the appointment itself: It's the same. Much better bedside manner. But it's the same underlying capitalism-serving "care" system. It's my fault. I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not blacking out alone on the side of the road enough. I haven't dissociated hard enough and/or blacked out while driving yet, so it can't be that bad, right? Not until I'm maimed or dead, right? Why address the root of a problem when we can just plaster on endless band-aids instead? When we can blame you for hurting, instead of the environment that's poisoning you? I'm not medically sedating myself into an obedient little wage slave, and that's the real problem. I should aspire to produce capital for someone with most of the remaining hours of my life. That's the purpose of living, that's the reason for "health"care - not to care about health, no, just to keep the wheels of capitalism well-oiled with wasted human life. Inherent human value? Quality of life? Nah. 

They refused my medical history. I brought the 72-page pdf on a flash drive. Because that's how I was given it. Because I can't afford to buy and operate a personal fax machine and/or print out a chapter book's worth of pages of medical records. I went through the trouble of getting the files, and it took over a month - only to be told "we can't take anything but paper or fax." I filled out a file release form as best I could. But I didn't have the phone number or address memorized. Not even before that place became synonymous with medical neglect and trauma for me. So now they're going to go through the ancient months-long ritual of requesting the self-fucking-same documents from LISH, either by mail or fax, because they "can't" access a flash drive or a pdf or use email. Welcome to 2021. We're back to "normal" and teleheath never existed and the internet is fake and technology is a myth and why do anything efficiently when you can waste time and do damage to people instead? My Aunt called to check in on me during her lunch break. (Thank you again) She offered to get the file printed and try to hand it in for me. I'm too tired to hope. I'm too exhausted to think they'll accept it without fuss. Anything and everything to make things harder.

Top priority order of business is the whole "diseased for life" thing. Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Hypothyroidism. Daily hormones for every day of the rest of forever, gatekept behind eternal doctor visits and prescriptions and pharmacies and copays and and and and did I mention this is forever? I've got a referral to have a thyroid sonogram done. Haven't ever had one of those before. Need to make that appointment. I was able to have my blood drawn for the thyroid testing without needing an additional appointment, which was a nice change of pace. Normally you're supposed to fast for that, but I wasn't expecting that could be done during the visit. Three years of having to make additional trips to the lab for blood work. I ate immediately before getting there, so hopefully nothing had a chance to metabolize and skew the results. Even though it was great not to have to juggle yet another appointment for health shit, it was stressful. The nurse took three tries before she had all the supplies she needed in the room. I already have anxiety spikes (which also raise my blood pressure and heart rate) for all doctor visits now. (White Coat Syndrome, I learned, it's called) I didn't need to have a rubber cable tied around my arm, popped off, tied again, popped off, and tied a third and final time to make it worse. A pro to that con: she was incredibly accurate and gentle. I normally have sub-dermal bleeding and some bruising after having blood drawn, and keep the bandage on for a day or two. The bandage didn't last even an hour after I got home - but there wasn't a single spot of trapped blood, and I almost couldn't even tell where she stuck me.

I have another new diagnosis to add to my growing collection. Hypertension. High blood pressure. I used to have slightly low blood pressure. It stunned the first doctor I ever saw (you know, because I'm fat, so that sort of thing is supposed to be ~impossible~) and it frustrated my last doctor at first, too. But now, with years of building stress and anxiety? It's almost like living with your most basic human needs barely provided (food, shelter, healthcare - let's not bring up social needs LMAO those don't count anyway, right?), and at constant risk of being taken away, for months (years, in some cases) on end, is some form of stress. It's almost like being constantly dismissed and told "you're just not trying hard enough" (WHILE TRYING YOUR BEST JUST TO SURVIVE EACH DAY) is some form of stress!It's almost like perpetual, ongoing, worsening stress has a negative impact on your heart! It's almost like there are decades of data that spell this out, plain as day!It's almost like I noticed my elevated heart rate back in NOVEMBER and mentioned it out of concern to my last doctor - who dismissed it outright because my reading in-office wasn't *that* bad, and also shouldn't I be on 5487 psych meds instead? If I was sedated out of my mind, I wouldn't be physically capable of feeling stress in my body despite the presence of real-world stress factors. That's healthy, right? Don't bother to solve the stressors, just neuter the body's response to them. Super healthy response. (Not) My GYN took note of my concern in December, when my vitals DID show as high in-office. Not that my GYN had the jurisdiction to do anything about it. I'm being put on another medication to try to mitigate this, and potentially also address some anxiety. I haven't picked it up yet. I don't know the name. I don't know if I'll be able to afford it. "Your copay is only a dollar!" Yes well, when you don't have a dollar, you can't afford a dollar, can you?

I was given a list of psychiatrists. To "Call!!"Precisely none of them are a reasonable distance away. Nearly half aren't even in my insurance network. Some explicitly exclude Medicaid. Others are exclusively for children. I was suggested a medication for depression and anxiety. I can't remember which one. Either Abilify or Lexapro? I declined it for now, either way. I wanted to be able to research it. Lexapro is just another SSRI and I already know those don't work for me. Adding a chemical bouncer to my brain to make sure the happy chemicals stay out to play doesn't help when there are no happy chemicals in the first place. A quick search for Abilify doesn't address anxiety at all so it was probably Lexapro. In which case, I am not interested in repeating a different-flavor-Prozac experience. It was not good. I didn't get any notes with that medication, regardless. I got a sticky note with "Valerian Root Extract (tea or tincture)" and "Magnesium Glycinate 2 capsules" scribbled on it, instead. Out-of-pocket home rem-maybes. I can't afford to experiment with snake oils, so mostly I'll probably just spend a bunch of time looking for data and research and studies for those substances, and that's it. If I get around to psychiatric care, I will have to start from scratch in my insurance's shoddy search tool, again. And, frankly, it's not a priority. My mental health struggles are the result of a lot of physical factors and external/social factors, and no amount of artificial chemicals bullying my brain is going to solve any of it. When your car starts leaking oil, you don't just commit to buying more oil forever and dribbling it all over, wherever you go. You fix the fucking leak. If your house has a gas leak, you don't invest in gas masks. You fix the fucking leak. If you end up with a burst pipe, you don't commit to wasting water and money and damaging your environment. You fix. The fucking. Leak. But in these comparisons, I'm getting prescribed oil and gas masks and infinite water damage/waste/bills as long-term care.

I mentioned my fatigue. It was the final straw that made me give up with the last doctor. It just keeps getting worse. It's been getting worse for over 3 years. And I'm so, so fucking tired of it getting pinned fully on the fact that I'm not on psych meds. I WAS on psych meds during part of those 3 years with my last doctor. And it didn't fucking make any difference! A daily chemical lobotomy does not address or restore my lack of physical energy. My decades-old medication-resistant insomnia has never vanished with psych meds before, and it's not likely to do it now. Especially not with yet another of the same family of chemicals that I already know don't work. I want my concern to be taken seriously. I don't want it just brushed into the mental health corner, again. Being too tired to even do the things you used to enjoy - no one fucking wants this! I don't want this! I miss being able to go for walks. I miss going to the gym. I miss seeing how much I could do, and feeling good, and feeling strong. And I can't do any of that now. Not without risking harming myself in the process. 

No one wants this. I keep talking, but it feels like no one listens. At the earliest opportunity, we're back to repeating the same tired old shit that doesn't work. I try to come prepared, and the stress and time and system make sure I fail to stand up for myself anyway. I didn't get to document my disordered eating history. The relapse this year. Restricting, sometimes to the point of not eating at all. I declined to be weighed, because I want my care to be based on relevant data, vitals, blood results - not the shape and size of my body. But I was too tired to realize I needed to dodge a verbal ask for the same information. Which, it turns out, is nearly as bad a trigger as having the scale spit it out for me. Being your own advocate for equal care, when you're already tapped out? I'm not winning that challenge. 

I'm frustrated. I'm not giving up, but I am frustrated and beyond tired. I don't really expect anyone to read this mess. But it's here.

#personal

[cutneck31]

what's webhard?

Webhard Compared to the following clouds, media playback in mobile environments is advantageous. Especially regarding videos, the next cloud must be downloaded as a whole, while streaming. Just to stream! I have to install another app again. Cloud alone isn't enough to stream. Faster than the next cloud. About 20%. Once you open a document with a cloud viewer, it breaks significantly less than another cloud (but breaking itself is already a problem). Web app is supported. It's rudimentary, but it is possible to write. However, the thing is that the document format is a bizarre format, such as for example .ndoc, that makes it extremely incompatible. File sharing through the URL (but this is as far as the next cloud is concerned). Webhard It includes a smaller capacity compared to the next cloud. In comparison to foreign cloud services, it boasts poor service quality. When compared to next cloud, it is extremely disadvantageous for music playback. Continuous streaming can be done only for several selected sound sources. Another cloud only should be in a folder. You should share a URL and that means you can't share music files or videos. According to the report, there is a saying that N drive looks like a local drive when installed, but only it comes out like a local drive, which is no different from the folder synchronization setting. It's a whole lot worse for computers in the first place when external programs play tricks in it. It's far better to just tidy up the synchronization folder.*** It is very specialized in playing music. In particular, it is the only cloud that can play sound sources in an environment similar to MP3 players we are acquainted with. Although each song has some buffering, it seems to play around 192kpbs continuously, assuming that communication is in good shape in a 3G environment. Of course, in reality, it's often take off at that point) It has a large capacity. This can be a significant advantage when contemplating domestic cloud services all together, which have poor quality of media access in cloud services. You can substitute the finish drive above. In particular, in case a picture is within a document, it really is rarely opened properly. Streaming songs often cuts off (however, not often) due to communication problems with the cloud, not Internet speed problems. Personally i think like it's about once every two hours. And if you listen to high-quality sound sources, it gets buffered often, or if you are in a place where in fact the 3G environment isn't smooth, it gets cut off more often. And when it's in that state, you have to discover the path of the folder where in fact the song was playing and play it again. The only way to share is folder sharing. Only some documents or presentation files are available for file viewing. Except for those points, there is nothing to say even if it is almost a webhard level. Foreign Cloud Comparison (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Skydrive) Google Drive It exerts tremendous power in writing documents. In particular, even without an office program, Google Drive can cover it to some extent. Not fancy ppts or fancy excels, almost any simple document is OK. It is beneficial to reflect the progress of work in the mobile environment. By establishing only offline views, the files you work on can continue being reflected in the cloud instantly. It is a very convenient feature for sharing files with other users. It is easy to connect to other Google services such as Gmail. If you don't upload documents right to the Google drive but write them on the Google drive web app, the capability of the file will not take into account cloud storage (what can you mean, if you just utilize the web app, the capacity of the Google drive is infinite). Now, photo media access is strong at the dropbox level. It is possible to flip through photos and videos could be played immediately. However, the loading time appears to take a little longer than the dropbox. I feel it), nonetheless it doesn't bother me. There are the most apps which might be connected. In a desktop environment. Various connection apps allow various operations in the net environment without installing programs using the pc. It's a bit of a problem that the app doesn't connect at all on mobile, but it is the best in the desktop environment. Upload a little pdf file and change it to Google Docs format. It could then be stored again in MS Word format or something. However, it is only possible with pdf files of 2MB or less. There is no bandwidth restriction in name. There's a testimony that it is a block after a large amount of writing, but it's not stipulated by company policy. If you use Google Docs web app, it is possible to save documents indefinitely, but in the event that you save them indefinitely, it's the same as once you lose your Internet connection, you're going to sink and work with MS word, right?) Google Docs web app, cloud-connected web app, support for editing files utilizing a variety of programs, nonetheless it is still crude compared to office programs applied to computers.Is it obvious?) Dropbox It exerts its strongest power in media viewing. Photo folders? Can be flipped smoothly (Domestic cloud services need a specific amount of buffering time for every photo). However, if you wait a bit for the dropbox, the photos in one folder are loaded entirely. While considering Photo A, Photo B is loaded and scrolling can be done without any blockage. Video? Beyond streaming, you can freely specify before start of playback. It is the best in the world when it comes to media reading. There are various means of increasing capacity. Camera upload settings, invitation of friends, events at the company level, etc. The speed is relatively good. 웹하드순위 It is a lot faster compared to the Box and doesn't work with Google Drive. The file capacity limit that may be uploaded from the free account is the largest. 300MB. The bandwidth of the free account is bigger than that of the Box. It really is updated by 20GB each day. It's practically infinite unless you're going to share large files. The starting capacity is the smallest. Two gigabytes of dirt. Price compared to capacity is the priciest cloud service. Dirty bastards... There exists a saying that changes in documents can't be reflected instantly when working on documents. Word documents shouldn't flip different files like picture documents. The dropbox itself cannot be documented. There are the most compatible apps in the mobile environment. In order to work on a document, it is possible to choose the interface you want through the app drive and focus on it leisurely. In the case of document files, simple document inquiry is really a convenient axis because previews are provided. Unlike additional.dropboxes, if you can find multiple Word documents in a folder, Word documents can be flipped on the file or file, as can be seen in the photo file. File sharing support is quite good. This box allows anyone who manages or creates a website to talk about data conveniently with little usage of the web page's resources. However, the bandwidth of the free account is 10GB per month, which is quite small. Slow. Not paid people. Media access is quite disadvantageous. It's a whole lot worse than Google Drive, which says it's disadvantageous above. It's better to just do it on some type of computer than listen to it for a test. The uploadable file capacity limit may be the smallest. 100MB. Free account only. In a mobile environment, real-time documentation is rarely supported. Unless you install Boxeditor, the documentation will be written with an extension that can only be written on Box (it works, so it's better than Dropbox, but it's less than Google Drive). It had been recently updated (on 22 February?). Media access is now quite convenient. Especially photo files. However the pace is still a little slow.*** Skydrive The writing function is very powerful. Many cloud services offer Web apps. But Skydrive's may be the most like the MS office documenting environment we've often used. And there's also the most supported handwriting, even though it is four-legged. The basic capacity is quite good. 7GB. Well, it isn't that strong a difference. It is no exaggeration to state that the interface of mobile apps is the most backward cloud service ever.

#웹하드순위

[rpgsandbox]

          Contents of the boxed set, including planned stretch goals

Kalisz. Shit. We’re still only in Kalisz. We need to get out of here. Fast. The artillery barrages are getting closer. The Soviets will be here soon. Sarge says we move out after dark. I’m not sure we’ll last that long.

A classic roleplaying game returns. The new retro-apocalyptic edition of Twilight: 2000, published in partnership with Game Designers' Workshop, goes back to the roots of the franchise with a boxed set for sandbox roleplaying in the devastation of World War III. The new edition will be the fourth in the series, the first being released by GDW in 1984. Just like the original version, the new edition is set in a year 2000 devastated by war – now in an alternate timeline where the Moscow Coup of 1991 succeeded and the Soviet Union never collapsed.

                                         Art by Niklas Brandt

"The first edition of Twilight: 2000 was an iconic game for me back in the '80s, and we are humbled and honored to work with Marc Miller and Game Designers' Workshop to bring a new edition to life. The original game was really ahead of its time. Our goal is to build on the amazing sandbox survival gameplay and develop it further, making it more accessible using the tools of modern game design," says lead game designer Tomas Härenstam.

"When I saw this proposal to revisit the Twilight universe, I signed on immediately. As I have seen the work proceed, I have not been disappointed, and I look forward to seeing this project become reality," says Marc Miller of Far Future Enterprises and co-founder of Game Designers' Workshop.

                Sample Layout Spread – Texts Are Placeholder Only

                Sample Layout Spread – Texts Are Placeholder Only

Also part of the project are Amargosa Press (who have recently announced the new Dark Conspiracy 4th Edition RPG), Polish RPG publisher Black Monk Games (who will act as a consultant on the Poland in 2000 AD game setting as well as publish a Polish edition of the game later on), and Far Future Enterprises (who publishes the fifth edition of the Traveller science-fiction roleplaying game).

                                   The Twilight: 2000 Boxed Set

Making RPGs in boxed sets is expensive, but we really feel it's right way to go for Twilight: 2000, bringing back the feel of the first edition of the game with that iconic Poland map.

If we reach our base funding goal, the boxed set will at the very least include two beautifully illustrated full color books – a Players' Manual and a Referee's Manual, each of about 100 pages detailing rules, setting, gear and scenarios – as well as several empty character sheets and a huge, full color travel map (format 864x558mm) of central Poland on one side and southern Sweden on the other.

If we exceed our base goal, we will add more content to the boxed set as stretch goals. These include combat maps and tokens, cards for initiative and encounters, custom dice, additional content in the books, and more.

                Unlocking stretch goals will add content to the boxed set.

LIMITED EDITION METAL BOX: As a exclusive to this Kickstarter, you can even get your copy of Twilight: 2000 in a limited edition metal box. This deluxe edition of the game will only be available via this Kickstarter and will not be produced again. To get your game in the metal box, choose the LIMITED EDITION reward.

                              Metal Box Design (Work in Progress)

A Referee's Screen will not be included in the boxed set, but can be added to your pledge.

                                Referee's Screen – Work in Progress

Some say it didn’t have to be this way. Some say history could have taken a different turn. If the Soviet Union had collapsed back in ‘91 when it was on the ropes. If the Gang of Eight military coup against Gorbachev had failed, the world would have looked very different today. Some say. I think it’s bullshit. This storm was always coming, sooner or later.

It doesn’t matter anymore, anyway. Now, all that matters is to survive each day.

It’s all up to us now. Our squad. Jonesy. Diaz, manning the M113. That Polish girl Katje. The men and women around me. No one else will come to our rescue. The final words from division HQ, before they signed off for good, left little doubt.

“You’re on your own now.”

Just like the original game, the new edition of Twilight: 2000 is set in Poland, but the game also offers an alternative Swedish setting, as well as tools for placing the game anywhere in the world. In the game, players take roles of survivors in the aftermath of World War III – soldiers or civilians. Their goal, beyond surviving for another day, can be to find a way back home, to carve out their own fiefdom where they are, to find out more about the mysterious Operation Reset, and maybe, just maybe, make the world a little bit better again.

The core gameplay builds on the hexcrawling system established in Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands RPGs (both Silver ENnie winners for Best Rules, in 2015 and 2019), developing it further to fit the gritty world of Twilight: 2000. The characters explore the devastated lands using a large hexagon map of Poland or Sweden – or wherever in the world you wish to place your campaign.

                    Poland Map by Tobias Tranell – Work in Progress

                      Sweden Map by Tobias Tranell – Work in Progress

                                 Map Detail – Work in Progress

Ronson carries the SAW. Diaz is like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, he can build a new carburetor out of a pair of coconuts and some dental floss. Kasia, all of 17, is the closest thing we have to a medic since we lost Doc. Jonesy is a ginger who Diaz says looks like the cat in Aliens which is how a German intel officer got a name like Jonesy. Top’s been in the Marines long enough to have fought in the Tet Offensive… and me? I’m just a grunt. We’re all trying to get by. Top once called us “the last family.” He might be right. Kasia made a gagging gesture when he did. But none of us expect to see our actual families again.

                                            Art by Niklas Brandt

The core rules of the game build on the Year Zero Engine (used in award-winning RPGs such as ALIEN, Tales From the Loop, Forbidden Lands and Mutant: Year Zero), but heavily adapted to fit Twilight: 2000 and its focus on gear and gritty realism.

Twilight: 2000 will be crunchier and have less random elements than other YZE games. Twilight: 2000 will get a solid ruleset that captures the gritty, realistic feel of the original, but in a more accessible way and that fully realizes the potential for sandbox gameplay. We aim for a system that retains depth and complexity, but that is less granular and easier to use.

Instead of a dice pool as in other YZE games, Twilight: 2000 uses a two-dice system. You'll roll one base die for your skill and one base die for the attribute connected to that skill. Base dice range from D6s to D12s. Skills and attributes are rated from A to D, with a better score giving you a better die to roll. Attributes and skills are fairly broad, with specialties used to fine-tune your character. Combat uses battlemaps with 10-meter hexes to regulate movement and ranged attacks. Extensive systems for critical injuries as well as component damage to vehicles give crunch to the system, while keeping it fast and playable.

More information about the rules will be presented in updates during this Kickstarter.

                                              Art by Niklas Brandt

                                           Art by Niklas Brandt

Twilight: 2000 is a game with a large and proud community. We want to extend a big thank you to everyone, for your warm welcome to us and the upcoming game since the project was announce a few months back.

Beside the comments field here on the Kickstarter, we have opened a section dedicated to Twilight: 2000 at our forums, and you're very welcome to join the discussions there. Also, of course you have the pre-existing Twilight: 2000 Facebook group which is an amazing resource and community hub, and the new Facebook group Twilight: 2000 by Free League, created specifically for the new edition.

We are very eager to hear your questions, thoughts and requests for the new edition. Even if we might not be able to fulfill every wish, we certainly want to listen to your advice and feedback.

After the Kickstarter concludes, later in the fall, we will share a full Alpha PDF of the game to all backers, so you will be able to playtest the game and  give your feedback on it before it goes to print.

                                             Art by Niklas Brandt

Kickstarter campaign ends: Thu, September 3 2020 8:00 PM BST

Website: Free League Publishing

#RPG #kickstarter #Twilight 2000 #Free League Publishing

[lindoig8]

A rest and some exploring

Saturday-Wednesday, 1-5 May

After our stint in the desert, we decided we needed to take it easy for a few days to let Heather (and me) recover completely – and to catch up on a few things we wanted to do.

We had to go to the supermarket and pharmacy one day and whenever we are out, we take the opportunity to stock up on wine because it is quite hard to buy wine in quantity in the Northern Territory. We also needed to arrange the repairs to our caravan so called in at a recommended place and booked it in for the day we leave Alice Springs for Gemtree. That was scheduled for a Sunday so we extended our stay here for an extra day and booked the van in for the Monday. The husband-and-wife team at the workshop were a bit strange – customer relations is definitely not high on their agenda, despite friendliness and pleasant people being mentioned several times in the testimonials on their website – maybe they wrote them themselves. They openly ridiculed us for breaking their cardinal ‘15/25’ rule. They say the roads are so bad around here that nobody should drive with tyre pressures above 15 psi or speeds exceeding 25 kph. Had we complied with their ‘rule’ I suspect we would still be on the road to Alice Springs and would have missed our camel trek entirely. Despite them verging on the offensive, we are told they do good work and do it quickly, so we made our booking and are certainly hoping that the advice is correct.

We also bought a few bolts (so we had some spares) in order to restore our towball and trailer hitch to its correct state. We had lost one of the two bolts holding it in place on our way here and the hitch was hanging at 45 degrees instead of horizontal as it should be. It was quite a ticklish job, but I eventually repositioned everything and inserted new bolts, but tightening them sufficiently was another challenge. In the end, I had Heather holding one wrench to stop the bolt turning while I swung on another one turning the nut until I thought it was tight enough. We will know once we reconnect the caravan and do a few clicks (at 25 kph???) on the rough roads out here.

Thursday, 6 May

Having rested up a bit and caught up (a little bit) with our blogging and email, etc., we had a day out in the West MacDonnells. We called in to Simpson’s Gap for a start. We have been there before, but there were many fewer people there this time and we enjoyed wandering around looking at birds and plants, and we even found some rock wallabies. It is a dramatic cleft in the mountain range and has a wonderful stream and small lake – effectively preventing us from walking through to the other side. The rocks are simply amazing, rugged and beautifully coloured – my photos don’t even hint at how majestic it is.

We called in at Standley’s Chasm next: expensive and so crowded that many of the visitors’ vehicles rimmed the road well outside the huge parking area. It was even worse than last time we visited – and we chose not to stay last time. The same this time! Although people say it is wonderful, we are not into lining up and paying to fight with the hordes that jostle along a path in the hope of seeing something more special that the free, peaceful wonders in the wilderness outside the gates. We just did a quick loop around the carpark to the exit and kept driving.

We drove a short way off the road to eat our lunch and we were surrounded by hundreds of budgies, maybe thousands. They were everywhere – far more than we have seen on other trips – but they are too small and too flighty to get a decent photo of them.

We went on to Hermannsburg but just drove around for a few minutes and out again. We have booked a tour for next Wednesday that will take us back there – and we have seen the area around the mission a couple of times before. The aboriginal settlement looked a lot bigger than I recall but nothing looked new so maybe it is my memory that is fading rather than the settlement growing.

Perhaps the most spectacular thing we saw on the day was Gosses Bluff.

I don’t recall much about it from our previous visit, but it is fantastic. There was one couple having lunch when we arrived, but they left soon after and we had the entire place to ourselves. It is the remains of a massive crater created millions of years ago when an asteroid/meteorite (or comet) a kilometre across crashed into the area with a force greater than a million Hiroshimas. (I have since read that it was a comet rather than a meteorite - that is one big iceblock! - as big as many of the icebergs we saw in the Arctic and Antarctic. And how much bigger it would have been if such a lot of it hadn't melted and evaporated as it tore through our atmosphere.) It created a crater more than 20 kilometres across, but that has now completely eroded. What is left is just the central blip that formed in the same way that a droplet forms when you drop a stone into a pond – a mere 5 kilometres across. It is a circle of hills with some smaller hills inside, but you drive a few kilometres between more hills on the way into the residual crater. I will post some photos as well as two videos I took from the top of one of the hills – yes, I climbed to the very top. Each video covers about 180 degrees, but I couldn’t get into position to make a 360-degree sweep. I will also post another photo taken from a lookout about 10 clicks away that shows what is left of this gargantuan asteroidal phenomenon. We walked around a longish loop path meandering around the base of one corner of the crater and back to the carpark. It really was spectacular.

We called in very briefly at a few other places along the road, but it was getting late and it was after dark when we arrived back at the caravan at about 7.30.

Friday, 7 May

We spent almost all day in the caravan. I had decided to attempt to claim some of the cost of our abbreviated camel trek against our travel insurance and spent virtually the entire day on the claim form. Obviously, insurers go out of their way to make it as cumbersome and difficult for anyone to lodge a claim and NIB is no exception. They would not accept a long email I wrote containing all the relevant details and said I had to fill in their 11-page claim form – helpfully attached. But it is in pdf format and can’t be completed without printing it – and we don’t travel with our printer. More emails back and forth to discover that there is an online claim form that they hadn't told me about. Alas, after spending an hour or two online, frequently having to find 2-year-old emails for irrelevant details, I reached a point where I had to specify what our actual loss was. The only choice you get is to start by detailing the airline you flew with and a raft of information about that – and until you complete that, remembering that we didn’t fly anywhere, you can’t get any further with your claim. More emails to be told that I had no choice but to complete the hardcopy form. I eventually paid the caravan park to print the form for us and more hours went into handwriting all the information in my original email to them – all 11 pages of it! And despite the incident or our claim having absolutely nothing to do with our normal GP (or any other GP for that matter), it is obligatory to have him complete another page and a half of details covering (inter alia) decades of Heather’s medical history. Fortunately, we have a great GP and he agreed to do it so I bundled everything up and posted it to him with a stamped/addressed envelope for him to submit the claim when completed. There was yet another raft of (entirely irrelevant) stuff they require to ‘substantiate’ the claim, but fortunately, I had all of that in electronic form so I have compiled that into a document and will send it all off to the insurer to attach to the claim when Justin posts it to them. That was virtually a full day’s work – and I have zero expectation of seeing a cent as a result. Not that I think all insurers are dishonest rogues, but I am sure they are!!!

We did sneak out of the van for a few minutes to check out the restaurant in the brewery next door to the caravan park – and booked for dinner on Sunday: Mother’s Day and my birthday. We also booked for lunch at a the Ooraminna station in the East MacDonnells for Sunday lunch when we were in the office arranging to have the claim form printed. We love the eastern ranges and there is a lot we want to see out there again – perhaps some of it from Gemtree in a couple of weeks’ time.

While I was swearing at our travel insurer, Heather did some washing and cleaning as well as sorting photos and posting to Facebook and her blog. We seem to fill in every minute even when we are supposed to be resting and recovering from our adventures – or planning and arranging more.

[knittingstudyblr]

My Study Method

Hi everyone! :D So I’ve been asked to post about my study/ note-taking method and well.. this is me trying to do that! 

First of all, my note-taking for this semester has been a mess, since we were able to get through half of the semester before quarantine hit and I didn’t transition that well... Also, my way of writing summaries changed a little since our exams ended up being completely open book. But anyway, here we go!

1. In-class notes

If the class is using a classic lecture format (like my multivariate methods course from last semester), I use a mixture between the outline note-taking method and annotating my slides. I’ll mostly just annotate the slides on my iPad and add in pages of drawings/ notes/ examples if I need to. Here you can see a graphical example, which I just scribbled down on an extra page that I added in between the slides. I also use a color-coding system for my highlighters. I use green for definitions and potential exam questions, yellow for generally important stuff and blue for questions that I need to address at home. If I’m not as lucky and the slides are really bad (or the lecturer only uploads them after a session), I have a magnetic keyboard in my uni backpack and I’ll just type up the notes in pages using the outline method again. 

For seminars, I’ll typically just take my iPad with me and write out any of the important points. Seminars are really reading-heavy here, so I make sure I prepare my readings for the session, annotate them and maybe have a page of questions/ notes ready for longer or more complex papers. I’ll explain more about that later! :)

I don’t take my laptop with me to uni! I used to, but a) it gets quite heavy lugging around a laptop, an iPad, prepped lunch, water and maybe even some books every day. (I also walk about 1.5 kilometers from the train station to my university building, so it’s just not comfortable.) b) I recently invested in a new laptop and I’m not quite yet ready to carry this one around with me everywhere, risking that I could bump into something or whatever... I’m a little paranoid when it comes to my devices...

2. After the lecture

After the lecture, I go through my annotated slides again and look up all the things that I highlighted in blue, meaning I have to look at them again. I then try to go through the material again in the context of the whole lecture - most of the time, I just zoned out and got lost. If I can’t grasp the subject after that, I go through old notes to see if I might know that concept from earlier classes or look it up on the internet. I add these explanations in another color of pen, mostly green. This way, I know that I needed this information to understand the concept at the time, but my professor didn’t mention it in this detail and it probably won’t be that vital for the exam. 

3. Readings

In seminars, we are assigned weekly readings. Also, in almost every case there is a paper due at the end of the semester which you should work on during the semester. honestly, I mostly forget about it and have to do it all in two weeks... For readings and research, I have two things that help me structure it.  a) Color-Coding I color-code my highlighters for readings a little differently than for slides, because highlighting obviously serves a different purpose here. I use the colors to distinguish certain concepts so I can later quickly find certain parts of the paper in class. I use my colors in the following way:

yellow = generally important points (I try to use this as little as possible) orange = critical points, especially in the discussion (limitations, methodological  problems and so on) red = hypotheses (so I can find them on a glance) pink = authors motivation, idea behind the paper blue = further literature that could be useful for my homework paper later (I highlight the authors name + year in the citation) b) Note-taking for paper research When I’m researching my homework-paper, I also use a note-taking system to collect the most important points of each article as it will be relevant to my paper.  I use a Cornell-style template and modify it for my needs. In the smaller column, I write the author and year of the article (since this is also how I name the Pdfs in my files). I then add the important points next to it in the big column. And again, I color-code... I use black for important points that this article makes. grey is for takeaways for my own paper and things that I can use in a different context. blue is for things from other literature that the article cites and that I will have to read up if I want to use it in my paper. 

I also switched from Noteshelf 2 to Goodnotes recently and I am still learning, but I’m starting to like Goodnotes more and more. I had some cloud- and sync-problems with Noteshelf that I couldn’t fix, so I had to find an alternative...

4. Summaries

If a course ends with an exam, I make a summary/ study guide that I can use for revision. I always want to start this early on in the semester, but honestly, I never do. I mostly start ca. 4-5 weeks before the exam. In this, I condense the slides and all other material I have collected over the course of the semester into one document. I also use previous exam questions as a guide to find out which topics I should cover in more detail.

I try to use drawings, boxes etc., especially for math-heavy content, to visualize stuff and remember it better. For more text-intensive stuff (which is usually a lot more content to study...), I try to read things out loud and explain them in my own words to myself, because hearing concepts out loud also helps me remembering.

I use this summaries for revision for about two weeks before the exam by reading over them a few times a day, whenever I have time. On the day of the exam, I get up early, make myself a hot drink and go over this summary once or twice again. I take them with me to the exam, but I’m not allowed to use them. Still, it helps me calm down to be able to look up things I’m uncertain about the last moment before the exam.

I hope this post was helpful to you! :) 

#studyblr #studyspo #psychblr #german studyblr #real studyblr #studying #study session #own