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Advertising should be the easiest and probably most ignored part of your site. That makes it no less important, but there are a wide variety of ways you can make it both easier on you and more tolerable to handle. I'll try to sum up how to effectively advertise, how to handle your own advertising boards and some common issues people run into. All while simplifying things as much as possible in order to make it a relatively untouched part of your site in terms of the work you have to do. The purpose of this is to simplify your advertising and make it so you have to dedicate only the time you want to it. It should not take up the majority of your time on board and should be easily delegated if you so decide. This is going to be horribly unorganized because I've been doing this so long I have it down to a machine-like routine and am trying to remember things as I go. I am, of course, not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying that I've been advertising for years and this is what I've noticed to be the easiest way to do things while simultaneously dedicating very little time to it. The Unspoken Rules: Advertise on each board only once a month. Do not use doHTML, most sites don't allow it. Make sure your code works before you post it. (align=center vs center, urls link back where they should, etc) Keep your ad PG13, even if your site is not. Don't advertise in Cboxes or outside the advertising section. This is a dick move. Do not criticize someone else's site. Keep your images under 500x500. Most things over will be resized and will direct to the full sized image instead of your board. Your ad should contain: The Site Name (This should also be the name of the advertisement thread) Any age limits The genre A link to your board's index. I've seen so many ads that are just SITE NAME! With no description and a vague image. This does nothing to indicate what your board is about, and who should be interested in it. You don't need to cram a ton of information into the ad, but you have the thread title and description to work with. Utilize them. The entire point of advertising is for other people to see your ad and go "Oh man, that looks nifty!" And click it to explore your board. If your ad is a stock image of a pie and your board is about horses, no one is going to bother because they don't want to RP on a board about pie. I recommend having the title be your site's name. The description being your genre and any age limitations. I also recommend having your ad contain several links, to things like availability, rules, index and plot. Many also include a link back link, which while super helpful, isn't the sole purpose in advertising. If you want to, you could just link to the advertising board in general. Things you should worry about with advertising: Linking back/New ads. That's it. Don't worry about organizing them, don't worry about making your advertising board pretty or fancy. Advertise, provide a place for people to link back and be done. Anything else is more work than it's worth and takes up time that is better spent RPing. Don't worry about sorting them or deleting them. Don't worry about locking them or posting fancy 'THANK YOU FOR ADVERTISING' nonsense. No one goes back to look at their own ads unless its to bump them. Your Own Boards: Have a first link and linked back section. You don't need anything else. Anything else means you dedicate more time to it. You can split them up based on hosts, but I find that's more trouble than it's worth. You generally won't get many ads outside of your host if you don't advertise off your host. Splitting them up isn't worth the multiple clicks it takes to get to the ad to link back. Having these two available makes it much, much easier for you to keep track of what you need to link back to as opposed to trying to rely on your own memory. Have rules. No one will read them. I assure you of that. But have them and keep them simple. They're there so you can delete ads as you feel and if anyone decides to bitch you can point them in that direction. (This has happened and I find it utterly ridiculous but covering your ass is always good.) Because no one will read your rules, don't bother making a big deal of them. Don't go and hunt down the rule breakers to yell at them for breaking the rules. Just delete the ad. They won't come back and look and if they do, you can point them at your rules. Your rules should be simplistic. Ie: No boards from X host. No DoHTML, no porn, every ad you post, we'll post back, etc. You do not want to limit who posts to your board because that, in turn, limits whom you can post to. If I see a board that advertises on mine but then makes me jump through hoops to advertise on theirs, I'm just deleting their ad. Don't make a rule about posting multiple ads. It will get broken. You will spend more time than anyone needs deleting them. Either link back or delete it, whichever you prefer. Most sites will post once a month, maybe once every two weeks. Your board will get hit multiple times. It's part of life. No one can memorize every board's rules and no one should bother trying, for that matter. Remember: You want to keep things simple and easy for you to manage. That means letting go of some control. Don't Lock Boards. This takes up more time than you need to dedicate to it. Plus, some boards prefer to bump their post as opposed to posting multiple ads. Don't hesitate to delete ads. Not comfortable with a site? Their ad is broken? Can't get back to the site or figure out how to advertise on it? Delete the ad. Done and done. It isn't your job to police them or to make sure they receive exposure. It's their job to make sure their ad works. You do not have to justify why you delete an ad. (The rules are just so you can, if you so decide.) When sites advertise in your First Link section: Link back. That's it. You can always reply to that thread with "Linked back" so you can, personally, keep track of things. Or, if you have multiple people handling advertising, this makes it so there's no confusion and no one winds up spamming another board. When sites advertise in your Link Back section: Do nothing. You are done here. Don't bother sorting ads once they are posted. Don't bother going to other sites to tell them how they broke your rules. Just let them drop the ad, delete it if you don't like it and go on. You should barely ever touch the linked back section and only hit the first links to link back. I just opened a new board! How do I get started advertising? Well, presumably you have all of the above set up and have an ad made. Fantastic! Go to a directory or to really, any other forum. Go to their advertising section. Drop an ad. Go back. Find another site. Rinse repeat. Do this until you're tired of doing it. I recommend knocking out 5-10 ads a day when you first start a board. You do not have to maintain this, nor do you have to do it every day. Just make sure you're getting out there and advertising. List your site on directories, get affiliates with other new boards and established ones alike. Then go back to dropping first links. Link back within a week. This is so you don't get too bogged down. I generally hit up my advertising before I start writing for the night. Knock out a couple link backs, then go enjoy myself. I'll also frequently hit other sites that have posted on the one I just linked back to and first link them. There, look at that! You got your 5 ads done and it took, maybe, 10 minutes. I can easily dedicate several hours to advertising and legitimately enjoy it, but I know many people hate it. I think one of the reasons I can enjoy it is because it isn't the focus of my day and I have it set up so its incredibly simple and requires very little time or attention outside of actually dropping ads. Questions? Concerns? Want to tell me why I'm wrong? Feel free to do so!

Back in July of last year, I started playing The Sims 4 again. After Realm of Magic was released, I started playing and stayed playing and anyone that's ever played The Sims knows how hard it is to stay interested in it sometimes. Anyway, I got on this kick and I kept playing, and TLDR I'm still playing. LMAO I started formulating a story in my head based on the interactions between the Sims in the game and in November of 2019, this turned into Throw Me Away, a short quick Sims fic that I posted on the official Sims forums. I had more lore than that and back-story and world-building that I wanted to expand on in my head, so I was going to do a sequel, and then decided that I was doing two sequels and a prequel. Oh, and a rewrite of TMA, too, and this series altogether became Of Frost and Fire. I also started a Sims RP site based on the lore that I came up with for OFAF, which was running since Christmas. At the end of February, a semi-big name in the Sims community joins Simprovise. I took a step back from being an admin to deal with some personal issues and this person immediately attacked my substitute admin for 'stealing' from his comic. What'd we steal? Blood-bonding, fairies, the concept of humans stealing magic from fairies, vampires being possessed instead of undead, and Morgyn Ember being agender and getting a biology degree. Hmm. Vampire: The Masquerade, Celtic mythology, Lineage II among other things, Vampire: The Masquerade, and the actual settings on the fucking Sim. Also biology isn't a weird degree to get. Morgyn has a twin brother, you might've seen him around here before, he's been my avatar for like ever, and he has a heart condition. Morgyn's motivations for taking biology is the hope that someday the science and magic might converge and lead to Morgyn saving this brother's life. So there's an in-universe REASON why Morgyn took that degree specifically. Ever since then we've been dealing with this idiot off and on, and I believe I just got an anon message on Tumblr from one of his lackeys yesterday (can't tell, they all smell the same to me). At this point, I don't even know what the fuck this idiot wants anymore, and quite frankly I don't think he knows either. He sounded creepily possessive of me at the start of this and then turned on me when I repeatedly rejected his attempts at "protecting" me from my friends so tbh this whole ordeal doesn't have great connotations. The only thing that makes me feel better is this psychopath lives in Italy, and thus is a whole pond away from me. I don't know. Some part of me wants to quit the fic, quit the site, quit the fandom, and just ignore other people play this stupid game and be left alone in peace. I don't have to deal with this shit. The other part of me doesn't want to let some idiot halfway across the world manage to make me stop doing something I enjoy because they can't come to grips with reality. I mean seriously, how fucked up do you have to be to think you were the first agender to ever agender? Please. You're a couple thousand years too young I'd bet. Anyway. If anyone wants to read it, you're welcome to ask for the link. Otherwise, send me some good vibes cause I can really use it right now. I'm running out of the patience and mental fortitude to deal with this shit. At least I'm used to being the bad guy. P.S. It's funny that you need to make it out like I stole from you to make yourself look even half as good as me.

I DO care about my site. I love it, and I am glad that our interactive swashbuckling story is already eight years old, and counting, and that I can also count on a few people since six- eight years ago. This is an important achievement. BUT I DON'T CARE ANYMORE if some people think it's not active enough (it is, just way slower than it used to be). I don't care if those newer members decide suddenly a long time investment isn't worth and they leave. I had to accept the idea that these are who we are, this is our current rhythm and that we won't get new staying members unless our members bring their friends, to stay for writing with them. (Which they don't, because most of our members don't have friends interested in our setting, or writing - at all or in English). And when I see on the resource sites all ask for "active sites, not dying ones"... and that slow = dying for most people, I get angry. We aren't dying, even if our story is progressing way slower than a few years ago. Just that we have other commitments or health problems which don't allow us be as prompt as we used to be. Our main quality is of being reliable. We finish most threads we start (no matter when, but we do). Our story is coherent and consistent, and progressing. I let it lower with the advertising, knowing that I have to resign with the few members we have and with some of them quitting due to lack of interest, to the site being slower and slower and being able to do nothing to change it. All the advice on the resource sites are things I have tried in vain, one or another time. This is who we are, and I don't care if someone thinks it's a dead site, when we know we aren't. Just posting once at 2-3 weeks on average. We are welcoming. There is always a possibility to interact with a character or another, given that we are writing in liquid time. As for events... it's normal that some plots are for certain factions (nobility only, commoners only, seafarers only). On most sites it is the same. We are also flexible and willing to integrate anyone. The problem is that most people want replies at least every week, if not sooner, and only 2-3 people might be able to post as quickly. We aren't playing pretend with our characters, and this is also one reason to find less new members interested. Historical fiction is a niche, and there aren't many people who like doing research. In my opinion, the coherence of the plot is a bonus, it is something good, but others might not like that they have to... pay attention (even if it is required for any writer! ). Also I am shocked how little creative are most people. When I ask them, upon joining, "What stories do you feel more inspired to write? What stories have you created this character for?" the reply is usually a variant of "I don't know, anything". (which means "you think it for me, and I am just riding along... or not even). I used to believe that I, as administrator, have to be an example, to promote the activity I want to see. Now I don't care anymore about it. There had been too many years when I did it, without any result. I mean, I can control only my activity, and "activity begets activity" is not always true. People will post when they have time. And no matter how many replies are piling up into the OWED section, they would reply only when they are available. I learnt it the hard way. Lately I am in the same situation, having lowered my activity significantly, just because I can't do it as I used to, anymore. I am not flaky, and I still am going to finish everything I started, but it will take more time. I just have difficulty writing lately. Having half a day taken out and returning home unusually tired and mentally exhausted doesn't help. Having to spend some of the other part of the day cooking, shopping for our household or attending literary events adds to the lack of time for writing. And I have to split my writing between novels (and short fiction too, especially for certain contests) and the two RPG sites I am on. So... I do what I can. There are days when I can't write at all, and days when I can do only one writing thing (usually correcting/ editing what was already written). I don't care anymore if I don't meet self-imposed deadlines, because I simply can't. Sometimes I think (I might be wrong or I might be right) that if I was somewhere in the countryside, so that I could write outside, and have no other daily worry, I would succeed to do it. But as I can't go anywhere, that's only an excuse . Or a dream.

Like I always do, I decided to take a serious break this weekend and not code anything, and of course, like four hours into my break, I'm coding again. Rofl. One time, I actually managed to code for about six months straight, pretty much. I'd wake up, eat something (maybe, if I was feeling kind to myself), and then get on the computer and start typing code, day in and day out. For months. I forgot Christmas existed because of that time-span, it was crazy. But apparently brain does and doesn't want to do it again, because on the one hand, I really want to go code shit, but on the other hand, I would much rather go back to sleep. You know how much sleep I got today? Like, 11 hours. That's ridiculous. I'm still exhausted, you guys. So anyway, time to ramble about code! I helped someone install the character mod for SMF 2.0, and discovered something in it is not compatible with PHP 7+, and I don't know what. Mahahaha. That's so grand! Now, of course, with Character Manager version 1.0.1, I'm rewriting it from scratch (a-friggin-gain), on PHP 7.1, to make it compatible with PHP 7+, and also this version is first being written on SMF 2.1, and then when it's done, being back-ported. Several new features are shipping with 1.0.1, there'll be a built-in journal system, character status streams, and the shipper handler I promised is happening in 1.0.1 too. This will be the last fully free version of the char manager. Beyond 1.0.1, it will be missing certain functions, bundled with the Battle Suite, because I have to bridge the char manager and the Battle Suite anyway, so I'm just putting them together as the SMF RPG Suite. I will be packaging the last functioning version of the Battle Suite (4.0) and public-releasing it, but that version and char manager 1.0.1 will not be updated further. ABS 4 and ACM 1.0.1 will also be the last versions of both that guaranteed support SMF 2.0 -- but they cannot be used together, as Battle Suite 4 does not have the functionality to bridge with the Char Manager. So you either use the Char Manager, or the Battle Suite + SubAccounts. For ACM 1.0.1, I'm redoing how character profiles/creation is handled. The character creation and edit screen is now set up to be tabbed. Where you place image upload custom fields also won't matter, because all image uploads will go into the Images tab. Biography fields are set up to be separated into tabs and sections, very similar to how Nova handles it, same with the character grouping system -- ACM 1.0.1 brings back departments and ranks, though departments are child-alliances and ranks are standalone, again, use one, two, or all three, only alliance is required, and even that's technically optional. I'm actually super stoked about how the character biographies and the character list are handled. (This is the main character list.) (Character management screen.) Names are also separated into three, one field per name (first, middle, last). All three can technically be left blank, but they won't display right. Haha. Admins can decide if they want names ordered First Last, Last First, or Last, First, anywhere the name is shown, thanks to this separation. (Add/Edit a character screen.) Basically everything in ACM 1.0.1 is built differently than how it is in 1.0.0, so there should be an upgrader script that I can write, which will convert the database information from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1. No promises on that, but the structure is very different in 1.0.1, so it should be able to run alongside 1.0.0's database tables (you'll have to uninstall 1.0.0 anyway, just leave the database information in-tact, install 1.0.1, and then run the upgrader). The converter from SubAccounts to ACM will still be packaged in 1.0.1, and also still be hidden. Honestly, if you still haven't made the switch from SubAccounts to the Char Manager, I'd wait for 1.0.1. It is much better, just, trust me. Rofl. What's the Battle Suite? Borne of a flat-file series of random number generators, that were designed to "spawn" random Pokemon, the Battle Suite became the answer to table-top style systems on play-by-post games. Everything in the Battle Suite can be renamed and customised to one's liking, and it can be adjusted to suit everything from Pokemon to Bleach to Dungeons and Dragons to modern fantasy and beyond. Listen, this shit is off the hook kinda cool. It handles skills, skill levels (use a skill, it will decide whether it succeeded or failed, roll for secondary effect if there is any, calculate points awarded and award them accordingly, AND it has a controller that can be turned on or off for child skills, which can be set to sporadically award some of their points to their parent on a % chance), STAB and STHB (same-type attack/healing bonus, when using a skill of the same type the user is, it will multiply the damage or healing amount by a set number, yes this is customisable too), abilities, creatures and creature skills and abilities (it will restrict users to adding creatures that are in the spawner/bestiary, so you don't get people randomly taming unicorns when there are no unicorns in your universe), a random encounter spawner (spawns skills and abilities, too, and gives you a copy-pasta BBCode to pop into threads, majijijijik), bestiary (full listing of all creatures in the spawner; you can add information to the entry table and set the table and main content area up however you like, it'S ACTUALLY REALLY FRIGGIN BOSS). It also has drop-down selectors that will load a selected user's skills and or abilities in a thread and allow easy finding of which skill a player wants to use, no fancy coding required, you can roll a skill as an NPC's skill and also roll its damage/healing output lower than it actually is. ABS 3.5 also had a quest system, the quest system, faction system, shop/item system (use items in threads easy peasy lemon squeezy, also features user selling, trading, and you can sell and trade creatures, shop system also sends out alerts for: someone bought your thing, someone accepted your purchase offer, someone is now selling an item that matches an item you want, etc), and reputation system (reputation alters rolls based on IC actions and how they fall on the morality scale, or which faction becomes happiest with them because of these actions), will come in ABS 5 which will ship with the RPG Suite. (If I seem really proud of the Battle Suite, I am; blame the Battle Suite for making me the coder I am today, and consider it my magnum opus. The char manager is nothing compared to the Battle Suite. Nothing. It took me several years and five major versions to get the Suite as good as it is now.) Following the releases of ACM 1.0.1 and ABS 4.0, that will conclude my work on SMF 2.0. I may later release the mature content mod, and perhaps the topic description mod (thread dating will be packaged with ACM 1.0.1 by the way, goes hand-in-hand with the journal system), but I will not be making any new mods on SMF 2.0. From there on out, I'll be working exclusively with SMF 2.1. (Yes, I'll still make 2.0 themes, I guess, if I must P=) I'm just done with SMF 2.0, and tbh, with 2.1 around the corner (I'm fairly sure they're seriously considering releasing SMF 2.1 Beta 4 as RC1, so it may be another year, before they do, but this may well be it guys, finally), 2.0 is getting a hair done-to-death, and it's time to move on. After I get my queue of things-to-do pared down, I'll be working on releasing some free and not-so-free themes for use on SMF 2.0 and 2.1 Beta 3. The free ones will not be very fancy; just putting that out there now. They will, however, come in a range of colour schemes, and probably have jQuery and bootstrap support by default, and also be mobile-responsive out of the box. The not-so-free ones will have templates altered according to their pricing tier (ergo, the $10 ones will have a custom board index). Some of my older themes have really cool elements that no one is using and it's a damn travesty, so a few of the premium themes will be super cool. In the interim, though, idk what the frick my sleep schedule is doing (okay, no, I have an idea of what it's doing), but I'm tired all the time. Scuse me while I die for the rest of the weekend. (I AM SO SORRY EVERYONE WAITING ON THEMES, I LOVE YOU, SORRY.)

Sites feel pressured into Discord because it is popular, leaving bad experiences to build resentment I once heard a person say that they dislike stats so much that they will never join a site that has them; they went on to say that stats affected nothing in roleplay, were a waste of time, and were meaningless math. In a different time, stats were none of these things, but efforts to cater to -lovers and -haters combined created a common system where numbers exist, are work, but have no value and affect nothing. No doubt, this person had a bad experience because they tried something even the site's admin's likely didn't understand. This is the exact same trend as Discord. The first thing every site admin hears about discord is "Do you have a Discord?", and then they feel pressured to get one because everyone has one, usually not realizing that Discord has its pros and cons. I firmly believe this fad will continue the way of stats and people will eventually begin to dislike it because they don't understand. Unless Discord can fix the cons... Guests don't see activity Discord is a separate app that has to be launched and there really isn't any integration for a real-time chat on a webpage. There is a brand new widget for websites where you can see who's online, but that doesn't say much as they may be bots or people AFK. So, whenever people do things on Discord, a guest doesn't see that. All they see is what's on the website. In fact, in order to see, they have to launch a whole new app, figure out what the discord join URL is, choose a handle, and log on. It's not very guest visible, leaving a guest with more "Is this site active?" than before. Guest questions don't get responded to as quickly I don't know any staff who monitor both the Discord and whatever cbox/chatango/etc there is at the same time, especially while idle. Discord has a way of sucking up your attention, meaning that responses to guests take longer than usual. This also plays into how welcome a guest feels at the site, and their interest usually hinges on whatever the question was. Most roleplayers have very little in common Perhaps the most important point about Discord is that it creates a community for like-minded people. While in Discord, chat turns to personal lives, media, music, and video games pretty often. Roleplays have encouraged players to be a community for a very long time, but the truth is that most roleplayers just don't have that much in common, which can mean that even the most valued roleplay members are suddenly the least valued in Discord, falling through the cracks. Activity tapers off on the forum because it encourages players to plot but not play This is the one most important reason that Discord can be bad for a roleplay. It sucks up your attention and people go off to chat about other things. This is nothing new about chat, but now that the roleplay is no longer even on your screen and that you're surrounded by your buddies from other places inside the app, the temptation to wander is much stronger. Personally I feel that plotting has gone up due to players being more accessible, but actually playing the game is much less for forum-based roleplays.

I haven't really drawn or painted anything since late 2017 or something, but it always seems to be the Bleach site that makes me start drawing again. Thus, when it closed, I stopped drawing, and now that it's back... well, I'm drawing again. For a long, long time, I drew exactly like Kubo Tite (no shit), and unfortunately that kind of coloured my art style for the following ten years. Only real recently did I start managing to make my anime-style artwork look any different, more like mine, but I realised somewhere in there that I didn't want to draw anime-style art for the rest of my life, anyway. I wanted to paint. A long time ago, I started edging my way into digital painting, and honestly it was really kind of a pain in the ass. My brain was too caught up with its OCD in the details of the lines, which in animanga style artwork, we know is really important. You mess up the lines, you mess up the whole thing. Right? Right. So my brain had trained itself to focus on getting the lines 100% perfect first. Well then I couldn't quite shade it after that because OH sure I could get that line exactly where it should be. But don't ask me about the colour and light right there. No clue. Really commonly, I heard from digital painters that "If you want to paint, master drawing first. If you can't draw, you can't paint," and here I am, ten years of that shit later, saying, "That's not necessarily true." And that up there? That's exactly the fuck why. Here's the thing, if you actually paint everything instead of draw and then paint over it, there's no real drawing skill necessary in that. Certain styles of semi-realism require lines because you'll use them to some extent, but if you're just gonna paint it all anyway, drawing is almost completely useless to you. (I say almost, because you do learn some really solid anatomy that way, and if you're painting people [or, shit, animals? animals have anatomy], and most do, yeah that's important.) The preliminary sketch in a full-blown digital painting doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to really look entirely like what you'll be painting. All it needs to do is get the point across, for you, and build some semblance of image composition. That's it. Slap them grey blobs up and build your image after that with value and colour. No drawing really necessary. And at least in my case, focusing too heavily on trying to master drawing actually really screwed me over as far as digital painting goes. We live in 2019, where art and image programs can effortlessly pick up a thing, move it, and blend it back together. Or grab a part of an image and push it that way. Tilt this character's eyes just slightly more upward. Make them slightly bigger. The drawing part doesn't have to be perfect. But I will instinctively focus way too hard on the lines. And then I will instinctively depend on them too heavily. So, really, it's more a matter of deciding what exactly you want to do and be good at. Because you shouldn't be focusing too hard on something you actually don't want to be doing. So, this is Suifeng (pronounced soy-fawn) of Bleach. I did this in about 4 hours total in Photoshop CC 2018 on a Huion H610 Pro tablet. I built her face and the basic rough shape of the rest in black and white, then added colour and started throwing light everywhere (and colour dodge, bit of colour dodge). Mostly this was like, Aight Arc, you're Asian. Act like it! Do the Asian thing and turn a couple grey blobs into a masterpiece. Not entirely sure if I've got the Asian-art-magic, I'm not Chinese or Korean, I'm Filipino and Thai, so it was like welp this may not count for me hahaha. But I actually really like how it came out. Now if I can do this without references, that'd be bloody grand. Come on brain, you know how light and colour work! Stop acting like you don't!! Blah blah, rare artist rage among the coder rage. In other news, I've started on ACM3, and it already hates me! Ahh, I'd expect nothing else.

A few days back, I closed In Populus Technology down. For those that don't know, that was my hosting and SMF theme/mod commission service, and it did quite well for several years, considering how few people actually use SMF for their role-playing sites nowadays. I realise, however, that I will be disappointing a few people when I say, I'm done. So this blog post is mostly to explain it to those that haven't pissed me off in some manner, so they understand why exactly I came to this decision. It wasn't one I took lightly, and I'm not doing it to be spiteful (well, maybe somewhat). Fair warning, this is pretty ranty. I'm done apologising for my feelings so I'm not even sorry. Once upon a long time ago, in an era now far behind me, I was a doe-eyed socially-awkward youngster that discovered the joy of online social interaction. I never got into anything dangerous, but my mother did, so I was pretty smart about what I did on it. Role-plays were both a creative outlet, and a way for my anxious ass to be able to make friends. It was, and remains, the only means of social interaction my messed up brain is capable of handling; full stop end of story. Going anywhere makes me nervous in reality. I can't even go to the gas station alone most of the time. So one can imagine how happy I was to help others. Obviously, they liked me when I did, and given I so craved approval and someone liking me, yeah, it was magnetic. Up to that point, I'd never actually had someone like me before. One good thing about being so messed up, my particular combination of ways I'm messed up in the head does make me learn very, very fast, and pick up on things like coding at the speed of friggin light. SMF was pretty big back then; everyone wanted to use it, because it was self-hosting without the huge upfront investment IPS was and is, but nobody could crack its secrets. Until me. This sounds boastful, but if you've ever seen my work you know it's really not; I eventually became the best SMF coder in the RP world. I have yet to find evidence anyone knows it as well as I do around here. At this point, I'm also the last one. The joy of helping people, seeing sites that I helped with do well, used to be enough to keep me going and make me keep learning, even when I wanted to just give up. SMF and learning it were never easy, and I had no guide. I had to just dive in screaming yolo and hope for the best, because no one in the RP world knew how it worked, and the official SMF community is elitist as hell. "I can't stop," I'd say to myself. "There are all these other SMF admins that I need to stay on my game for and help out. If I stop making SMF themes and stuff, there'll be no one left to do it anymore." The last remaining decent SMF coder went away about a year or so ago. Now was my time to shine, and I felt like my life was finally just beginning. But you know what? I'm going to be real for a second. I have basically never personally stepped in and helped someone with a theme or a mod or their board in general, and not had them stab me in the back, or at least slap me in the face, somehow. Every SMF admin that has a husband in IT or server management or networking or... fuck, I think that one just fixed computers, thinks he knows better than I do, and will be a misogynistic turd and she'll let him because she trusts him. I should hope she does, but he never has any inkling of an idea of what the hell he's talking about, and I can usually prove it - being undermined and invalidated in the one thing I do really well, by someone that doesn't even know how to write a basic database query, is frustrating on many levels. Especially since I can't call him out for the dumb prick he is. Oh, they all love me and sing all my praises, sure as can be, until I start having opinions, feelings, or god forbid request something. I've had people turn against me; straight up drop their site in my lap, and then bail on me to figure it out on my own; lie to me all the time; smear my name all over the internet in any corner they can; call me every name in the book; act like my best friend to my face and then be talking shit on me elsewhere; waste all my time and then blame me for it; go around in godawful circles about what they even want in the first place (and still blame me); treat me like their personal butler here to do their bidding immediately and on the spot when they want something; one posted my full legal name in a very public chatbox on a very large resource site; undermine and invalidate my efforts and skill; rip apart something I made because it wasn't good enough without asking if they can even edit it; steal from me; blatantly and right to my face tell me they are stealing while giving me the full overexcited rundown and details of what they're stealing and how, and expect me to be okay with it; treat me like their personal therapist; talk shit on my friends and their role-playing style; underhandedly and covertly question my intelligence; treat me like I'm a 12 year old; blame me for all their mistakes that mess up their board even though I told them not to do that; ask for my help and then defer to their husband that doesn't actually know what the fuck-all he's doing, because I haven't been doing this work every single day for over ten years or anything, surely he knows better; and basically just piss all over whatever semblance of joy and self-esteem I got from helping others without even the courtesy of calling it rain. This isn't all one or two people. This is every non-friend I've ever helped. And I've helped a lot of people over the last 10+ years, and they all hit one or more of these unless they were my friend already. I could've handled a couple toxic people out of a larger bunch. All of them? I'm afraid to help people I don't know real well, right now. At all. With anything. No, I really am. Because every dang one I do help turns into a nightmare. And certain genre admins are the most picky, finicky little fucknuggets I've ever had the displeasure of interacting with. I have a site I really like that's looking for staff, and I was going to, but now? Nope. Bruh I got too many trust issues now. Y'all be acting like lil angels and then turn into sociopaths when you don't get your way and the world doesn't conform to you. Sometimes things aren't all rainbows and lollipops. I'm always willing to talk through those times, but I have never had anyone actually talk to me about whatever it is, and work something out. I just immediately became the bad guy. I have so many horror stories from helping people with their sites that they literally outnumber the ones I have from running a shonen animanga RP with no combat system for 12 years (listen, that's a nightmare; I have mild PTSD-like reactions to some of what that site put me through, and it is the main reason I am now such a hands-on admin, but also I have OCD so that doesn't help, and I wouldn't call myself much of a delicate snowflake). I never intended to stop offering my theme and mod services. In fact, at one time, a personal grand dream of mine was to use the revenue from hosting sites and doing theme commissions to create an official, registered hosting business specifically for SMF. I even started coding an updated new software similar to SMF that meets current web-standards, and has a bunch of features RPs really need by default, because I thought I'd found my tribe and I wanted to shower it with love. I went above and beyond for people, and I suppose my biggest mistake was thinking I was even vaguely valuable to them. Hey, everyone on the internet's expendable, right? If you don't like this person, there are plenty of others. You know what they say about never doing work for your family or friends, because they turn into clients from hell? I had the opposite experience. The only people that weren't a client from hell in some manner were the ones that were already my friend, which basically tells me I was seen as a beneficial accessory. Nobody actually liked me, they just saw an opportunity to get what they wanted with minimal effort. The moment I started having feelings, or boundaries, or even just had a bad day, I wasn't beneficial anymore. There was one that loved to braindump and vent about all their real-life problems and whatnot, more than one actually, two or three, but the moment I actually did it back about something more impactful than my allergies were acting up, woo, hold the phone. No no no, you aren't supposed to be a person, stop right immediately now. Yeah, that is how that came off. If you don't want the heat, man, don't walk into the kitchen. And it is this mindset that is destroying the RP community, it's not just the SMF people. It's everywhere. I see it everywhere. Nobody cares about anybody else, whatsoever. They're all just text blocks on a webpage, but y'all can be doing some real, serious damage to someone with your selfish bull. Yeah, take care of you; ultimately only you really can. But have some damned common decency and act like your momma raise you right. If I did and said half the crap y'all be doin and sayin my momma like'a pop me in the teeth. Other people aren't here merely for your convenience, and those of us that help others aren't going to tolerate your crap forever. Someday, there won't be anybody left willing to help you, and then where will you be? I shut down everything, even my RP sites. I don't run any sites now, and I don't intend to anytime soon. I'm not doing requests or commissions anymore, and have absolutely no desire to code. Being blunt, if I ever release the updated version of the SMF Character Manager for 2.0.x, it will not be anytime soon, and it will not be free. I may release some of the themes I have lying around that I'm not using anymore, but those won't be free, either, nor will any of the other mods I still have about. Maybe someday, someone will step up to the plate and fill the gap I'm leaving behind. Maybe not. I'll do my job here at the Initiative, but I'm not doing any more than I have to. I need to take care of me, now, not ungrateful pricks on the internet. Now it's my turn to be a selfish jerk. Maybe I'll have occasion to RP with some of you. I did join a couple sites, and I apologise to them because I am a salty, stressed-out wreck right now. I'll wrap up this salty, autism-sleepiness-and-ADD-fuelled mess with this. Just because someone isn't talking about it, doesn't mean they're not having a hard time. It just means they're not talking about it. Be kind. Everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about. Thank you for tolerating my ranting long enough to make it here, and I'm sorry it turned out this way, but I can't do this anymore.

It is nothing new that the world is functioning upside down in various aspects of life. Why not in the writing realm too? 😢 As you know already, and as you can see from the blog image, I have published three novels up to now. Two others and a short stories anthology will follow soon, almost certainly all three to appear this year. I published with small indie presses, because this is what I have the possibility in the current book market conditions. Many writers more seasoned than me published with the same two indie presses, so I am in good company. (And they aren't vanity presses, printing and dumping the books in your arms. No, they assure launching events, participation at fairs, the collaboration of literary critics, etc.) I am glad that I have started to become a little known among the contemporary writers in Bucharest. If one googles my pen name (despite being quite common internationally) one can find something about one of my novels too. If googling the titles, there are few information about them, but they are, reviews and photos. I had good reviews from the literary critics at the book presentation events, I had my novels displayed at the bi-annual Bucharest International Book Fairs... all these are successes for a junior writer, with only 3 novels published up to now. What's more important as a success, is the fact that I have a senior writer's support to get in the National Writers' Union (union as in professional association, not what you understand generally by trade Union and we call Syndicates, which is work regulation-related.) It will happen, most likely, in 2019, after I get the required number of publications. My publishers also support this endeavour, and they will rally enough literary critics to get the required recommendations portfolio until then. (It has started building already). It sounds lovely, but... let's vent my frustrations too, here, not on my public blog, where those who have generated them in a way or another can see them... And this comes with the warning that the Romanian book market, unfortunately, doesn't ressemble the English speaking books market, so most of the book marketing ideas I find online, in English speaking blogs, unfortunately do not apply. While the English speaking market is catering to nearly one billion people (there were, in Internet statistics, 400 million native speakers of English, to which to add 400 million speakers of English as a second language, in 2006, and I assume the population has increased in 12 years), the overall population of Romania was of 19.5 million people, out of which about 4 million are abroad, about 3 million too young to read my novels (below 14)... and from the remaining 12.5 million, about 40% or more are poor, too busy to survive and not reading anything else than an occasional newspaper or religious book. Sad, but true. Of course, from the remaining people who would read in principle (some regularly, some occasionally) not all are fans of historical adventures fiction/ YA, what I am writing. This is a realistic analysis. As far as I heard the publishers say (not only personally to me, but also in interviews on the internet) - and we have our "big fives" here too, plus a whole constellation of small indie presses (the equivalent of self publishing would be here dealing directly with the printing house without a publisher, which is recommended only for professional books which have already the distribution ensured or for people who print one memoir book in their lives to give to 50-100 people, not needing ISBN or anything), in my country a book (written by a contemporary national writer, not translations of international bestsellers and not books required for school reading like our classics) printed in 1,000 copies is already considered a best seller. My novels were, 2 of them published in 200 copies, the first one in 300. It is the level generally the writers around me use. Now, my sincere frustrations? - I haven't recovered the costs on any of them. Yes, I have sold some, but the greatest amount was given freely. Now, to be honest, I knew from the start that I wouldn't get rich from writing. I did it from my heart, and I loved when I received compliments about the books (not only from the critics, I appreciate more the readers' compliments and questions, even if I know the critics' are of importance for the accession to the Writers' Union). This is when I felt they got their mission, to brighten someone's day and to transport them to another time and place, offering them an insight on that way of living. But I would have appreciated if I succeeded to recover my costs. Some writers know business owners and get sponsors. (I had sponsors too, back in 1999, for my professional handbook in project management). I don't know influent people who would be able to sponsor me, every cost is supported from my meager savings (given that I am retired now). Yes, I sold books at various events... but the money received covered the expenses of the event, with very little margin (if any). - I can't reach exactly my target group, the high-school and Uni youngsters. Until now, my novels were bought mostly by grown-up or older people who were nostalgic about the style of novels they use to read, because these were the ones coming to the literary events. - I had also two interviews in English about my novels (1, 2, I remember one more but I can't find any link, just the file where I replied to the questions) and one other would come soon, but I can't reach the Romanian book review bloggers, despite having seen some other writers getting several reviews. It's not about the novels' quality, it's about whom you know in the field... and I don't. Or, at least, not yet - I am still working on it. And praying for a bit of good luck. ...And everything needs more money. Half, I understand this as in the fact that if I try to expand my marketing network, this doesn't come for free because this is what those people gain their living from - organising things. I understand that some reviews/ forewords/ have a price too, because those critics are famous and listened to, on one side, and on the other side, this is what they are gaining their living from. In the rare cases when I made reviews (I hate making reviews, but I consider that if some people spoke in favour of my books at my launchings, I have to give it back to the writers' community and do it whenever needed from me), I made them from the moral spirit expressed above, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask for any benefit. (Well, I received the book free from the publisher in exchange of the review). I am lucky that I don't have to pay my beta-reader/ first editor, because many people have to do it too. She does it from friendship, for free, and I am grateful to her. But in a world which wouldn't function as upside down as it does, the writer should be allowed to write - like it was before the ascension of social media - and the others should do the marketing part. I am sure that Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas weren't the ones to do much more than writing. Yes, they received their money after the books were sold, but nobody asked them money for publishing, for book launching events organisation and other things. Or, if now shedding money is a must because there are too many books published and no publisher assumes the economic risks anymore in this crisis economy, at least they should want the money from the sales! Not before recovering the costs... One would say fame has a price. But I still have the feeling that things aren't how they should be.

Despite the fact that the amount of tabletop roleplaying I have been fortunate to experience can be counted on one hand, I follow what’s going on in that world closely. I look to it for ideas, concepts, and similarities in the socio-political sphere. Each year there is a prompt calendar in August for the tabletop roleplaying world to answer in whatever way they see fit. I’m rather quiet and being a new member of staff, I thought I would partake. It also helps promote my site I plan to open up after the holiday season. Of course, it is long since past August, but I was sick with two internal infections and am now feeling better. I don’t expect to be able to do this thirty one days straight. The idea is just to get each one done. For a few, I might not be able to think of anything interesting and will provide a youtube video or use an alternate prompt from a different day. Everyone is free to use the blog section to partake. I’m interested in seeing others thoughts. With that out of the way, let’s start with prompt 1: Scenario. I looked up various dictionary definitions as well as people who responded to this one to get a feel. My favorite that I found the most relevant to rp was on one blog (which of course I can’t find now) that defined scenario as an incomplete story or a story in motion. He stated that a story is something complete and whether or not fiction depicts the past. What I see my position as an admin is to create a world that allows for the most Shandification. Shandification is a term created by the youtuber MrBTongue regarding narrative. To sum it up, movies and television stories typically go from A – B – C – D. This is just a snapshot of what’s actually going on. Events happened prior to cause A. B likely didn’t happen solely because of A, but also other events, interactions, and even characters we are not seeing on the screen. His definition of Shandification is: A shandified story is one where the narrative is free to move in its own direction and pace in a setting well realized enough to allow this freedom of movement. If we look at A – B – C – D to be the plot or series of threads and events between two characters, both of those characters are interacting with other characters causing and affecting those events. Character 1 has not only the above plot with Character 2, but also with Character 3 that Character 2 has never met. In addition people leave, things come up, new ideas come forth, causing the plot between Characters 1 and 2 to end up being A – B – E – H. Going back to the world of tabletop, a game master’s role is to run a scenario. The players will eventually not notice what the gm wanted, notice things that gm never noticed, and the player characters will go off in a new and different direction. A good gm will let their players do this while hitting the essence of the original campaign allowing for a unique scenario. The other option is to try to force the players back to the original concept, which is referred to as railroading and is widely disapproved of. I see an rp site as a complex clock. Each post and thread being winding gears and pistons. The site forum itself being the frame and the characters being the bird that pops out each hour. It’s always moving and even when it stops or breaks it can always be repaired and brought back to life. Unlike a clock, the members of a site can grow bored and restless, taking their gears, pistons, and birds to another clock. This makes Shandification all the more important and going back to the definition a well realized setting is key. The big question is how do we do that? That goes into day 2’s prompt. Here's MrBTongue's Shandification Video

It's been a while. Like a long while. Crap happened. Real life snuck up on me. Yeah. It snek. I took a long break from Gaia (still debating changing its name, Hera and Ceres are on the table), and I came back to it and I'm sitting here like "what was I doing again?" Everyone should know by now about Salerno's new template system, and I keep saying that all it is is just rewriting the templates in the new language, I'm not even changing them that much, but that's kind of a lie. See, globals can't be called in templates anymore, so I can't just invoke the data I need by using the global line. Instead, I have to explicitly pass the data I want to be accessible in the template to it when I load it, and it's kind of a pain in the butt to do. What I ended up doing is setting Ananke to load first all the variables I want in it, and then triggering the templates and passing the globals to it. So basically how this works is that the globals are passed to every template that's rendered, and if you need information in it, use the $page global, because it'll instantly be available in the template that corresponds to the source file you're in. So, let's say that for some reason it's not loading characters in a profile. We'll get into the source file (the one in /application/sources) for user profiles (profile.php), and then in the function that displays a profile, we'll write a code that will ping Hypnos for character information and bring it into $page. Then, that data is automatically available in the page variable in the template (profile.html), but since $page context is set up in the source files, it isn't instantly everywhere, just the template that's loaded in that source file. In this way, it should be very easy to add new things and get new stuff loading, so the hope is that as the software grows, it'll easily change and adapt to the new demands we have for it. Since I'm having a hard time remembering what I was doing, though, I'm not terribly interested in doing it. I've been trying to get my writing career off the ground, and mostly it's just hard. I can write really well I think, but that's absolutely no guarantee that I'll do well as a writer, either, so I'm trying not to pigeonhole myself into just one thing, you know? Like, I want to publish books, but I'm also looking into writing for blogs, and taking writing commissions and ghostwriting work, and fanfiction, you know, just whatever I can find. For those that don't know, ghostwriting is when someone hires someone else to write a book idea they have for them, it's common for like politicians that don't have a lot of time to spend writing, and then they publish it under their own name instead of the ghostwriter's. The moral quandary here is pretty obvious but it's kind of a big grey moral blob, because ultimately it's very beneficial to both parties - the writer doesn't have to fuss with publishers or waiting for royalty cheques, and can charge a lot more. And the client doesn't have to spend the time figuring out how to write it, and still get something good, and recognition for their ideas. So that's what I've been doing, a lot of writing. My main idea is that I need a reader-base. A group of fans that like my work and might commission me for written pieces from time to time, that can tell their friends about me, and maybe eventually I'll get a network of potential clients. As for my books, I actually want to go through Inkitt. Inkitt publishes books on their own platform as e-books, and then books that perform well on the site with readers get actual publishing deals Every single book they've published has become a bestseller, in part thanks to their marketing skills. And this will also help me establish a readership! It's really kind of a massive 180 from what I was pursuing, and no I won't give up on Gaia or anything, but the thing is that I've always known that I was put here on this earth to write. Some people wonder "what am I here for?" and other people just know, and I'm one of the ones that's always just known. I learned to read and write at a startlingly fast pace, and was one of the best readers in my state from the time I was 7 into high school. I've consistently read at a level far beyond my peers, my reading comprehension is beyond insane, and I've had universes constructing and deconstructing themselves in the back of my head for as long as I can remember. I was born to write. And I keep thinking that nothing else really works out for me, you know, I've had job after job and tried thing after thing and the only thing that ever seems to go well for me is writing (listen, I've consistently won NaNo in the first week of November, I can crank out novel-length pieces in a very scarily short amount of time if the inspiration is there). So it's like, maybe I should just give up and write, you know? Idk. I know it doesn't always work out. But I guess I'll never know until I try. My friends always told me "If Stephanie Meyer can make it so can you," and you know I squint at them suspiciously but okay I guess. lol Honestly though, it did make me start thinking about, you know, how the ridiculous circumstances of living tend to make us put our dreams on hold, sometimes for way, way too long, because we're too busy pursuing things we don't actually want to buy stuff we don't actually need. One of the biggest things that made me turn away from writing as a serious thing that I could go for, is how unsure it is. You know? Like, be a doctor you're basically guaranteed to get a job because there aren't enough of them, or get into IT because that industry is absolutely booming right now, go into something that will make you money, it's not important to be happy it's important to have money. Screw your dreams, fuck the ecosystems, we need more money. And I hate to say it, but someday, maybe not in my lifetime but someday, that dependence on the almighty dollar is going to bring humanity to its knees. It already is. And the sad thing is that we either know it and can't do anything about it, or are blind to it, and both are just as sad. I'll shut up now. I love how I always end up getting into long-winded rambles that try too hard to be philosophical in these. My bad. All I meant to do in this was ramble about how I forgot what I was doing with Gaia. Gosh. Lol TL;DR I forgot what I was doing with Gaia and decided to ramble about stupid crap instead of figuring it out. orz

A tiny rant brought to you by /r/TalesFromTechSupport Pro-Tip: Not knowing anything and realising that you don't is infinitely better than knowing a small amount of something and thinking you're tough shit. I promise you, if you recognise your own ignorance and embrace the opportunity to learn, you're already better than 98% of the end users people like myself have to deal with every day. I promise you. And this can be extended to anything else. New RP genre you've never played in before? Check. Fandom you're unfamiliar with? Check. Doing things differently in the grocery store? Check. Listen, ignorance is remediable. Ignorance is not a problem. Anyone worth their salt will be more than happy to help you if your honest interest in learning is there. You're always going to run into something you don't understand that well, but that's why there are other people around to help. Being an insufferable jerk-off is not remediable. If you come to me like "Okay idk what anything is, I'm sorry I'll be a pain in the behind," I already fucking like you, because it means you recognise your own ignorance and have already accepted that there are going to be things you don't know, and that is great. That means I can do my job, and you'll be listening to me, not fighting me at every step of the way and questioning my intelligence because you read a Wikipedia article once. Stop being sorry for ignorance. Be sorry for superiority complexes gained from five minutes on Google.

As most should be aware by now, I'm coding an entire software system geared specifically for role-play. (If you didn't know, I guess you do now.) I actually had it in my head for a long time. I remember posting on some odd resource site asking what features people wanted in their perfect RP software, to get ideas, but by now, I've long forgotten what was on that list. Frankly, oh well. The software's called Gaia (if you're interested in checking that out, there's a preview installation available for its Alpha 3 build, and screenshots and stuff in the Gaia coterie), and I'm pretty much just making my own perfect software. Most people probably think I prefer SMF over everything else, but honestly, it's just what I know better and can modify easiest. For one reason or another, the other softwares out there never really clicked, and I can't honestly say SMF did, either, it was just a challenge (and I love those). By this point, SMF has a lot of fundamental problems, and I'll be the first one to say it. So the decision to make Gaia was one I came to over time. In the early stages, though, I didn't really have the confidence in my ability to code, to think I could do it. Funny story, though, I think coding Gaia is actually making me a better coder. There are no crutches with it. I can't fall-back on x's default functionality, because I have to write that default functionality first. There is no structure to follow; I haven't written the structure. And I'm running into a lot of schnags that I'd never run into with SMF because it operates the way it operates, but Gaia only does what I tell it to do. It's kind of like only really eating oranges as pre-peeled and separated mandarins in a cup, and then someone handing you an actual orange. It's like, Whoa, and then you're like, What the fuck do I do with it. If you'd told me two years ago I'd be here, working on making my own web application software, I'd have probably laughed at you. Honestly. Because back then, I didn't think I coded that well. I still don't, but, here I am, and I've got a working software I've coded entirely myself, so I guess I'm pretty good? LOL Funny story two, I'm Kemetic Pagan (Kemet is the original name of Egypt before the Romans came along and renamed it; it means "black land," so named for the rich soil deposits the Nile flooding left behind). And somehow Gaia became full of Hellenic primordial gods. I've got Gaia itself, then Ananke (the consort of Chronos, she is the goddess of necessity), which loads all the settings and themes, Ourea (the primordial god of the mountains), which handles all the user functions (all of them), Erebos (god of darkness), which is the helper class that does all the menial busywork, and Metis (the Titan goddess of wisdom, she is the mother of Athena), which handles all the database functions. And the theme is named Eros (in the original myths, he was born from Chaos after Gaia and Tartarus, and had a hand in forming the cosmos; he is the god of irrational desire and attraction). How the hell I ended up with a Titan god party in the core folder, I don't know, but here we are. (If anyone's curious, I named it Gaia because it was envisioned as a returning to the roots of RP and walking away from the over-complication and bloat of social-media-angled software. Gaia seemed like a fitting name for a software with such a purpose.) Alpha 1 was kind of a trip. Mostly I was focused on getting the user functionality operable, and I did good. Then in Alpha 2, I mostly wanted the settings working. Alpha 3 I jumped into making the forum module (Gaia is not exactly a forum software, as I didn't intend for, nor design, the system to revolve around the forum functions - Gaia can technically operate without the forum system), but I realised about there that despite rewriting them like five times, the database functions were still really restrictive. It became most obvious in Alpha 3 when I was getting the forums displaying. I had to do like four or five different database calls to get the forum index working. That was too much. So in Alpha 4, I set out to rewrite it from scratch, again, in order to loosen up the database functions and keep them secure while not restricting functionality to the point I had to fuss with it really hard to get a core module working. ... Alpha 4 was an unmitigated asshole. I don't even know why but it was throwing me all kinds of hell. So I scrapped Alpha 4 about an eighth of the way into it and restarted. Now I have Alpha 5. Idk what happened between 4 and 5, but 5 is going much smoother, and I should be caught up with Alpha 3 by tomorrow night, ish. I've also gotten a lot of little things working along the way, like the login page looks nicer, and the theme variants now work appropriately, and I have a rough idea of how to make theme installations work, um, profiles have cover photos now, they did not before, there's also a password strength metre, Alpha 5's got a better WYSIWYG editor than Alpha 3 does, reCAPTCHA support is now a thing... I also rewrote my form input validation handler to be able to check for the reCAPTCHA response and run a session check without being explicitly told to (so it will now automatically do a session check for every form that a user can submit to, and to get reCAPTCHA working on a form, one line of code is all that's needed to tell it hey this form requires a reCAPTCHA validation and it'll figure it out on its own). This whole thing's been rather the trip. And kind of a gigantic "HEY FUCKNUGGET YOU ARE ACTUALLY GOOD AT CODING, SHUT UP," message. I also intend, sometime after Gaia reaches Beta-testing stage, to set up an install script that will set up a new installation of Gaia on a server with no back-end access, so that I can get a free host for Gaia working, and you can sign up for a Gaia site like you would a Jcink or Proboards site. (I'm hoping that makes people more inclined to try it, because I'm fairly convinced a good deal of the RP world would love it if they tried it.) I've been at coding it for almost three weeks now, I think it is... not nearly done with it. But I'm making pretty good time, and I actually might get it to Beta before my original guesstimate of this summer. I may not. We'll see. I guess it really depends on how many more times I have to fucking rewrite Metis. xD Anyway, blah blah, I just needed to typeramble. xD

So I just released ACM2 for 2.0 a while back. I actually didn't change much of anything, just adjusted some installation steps to account for: The difference in syntax between SMF 2.1 and SMF 2.0; The fact certain things that were in the templates are now in the source files, which thank you, gdi, bout fuggin time; and this means, pretty much the ACM2 on SMF 2.0 now is the exact same one as the one on 2.1. ... like down to the templates. Which means some of the templates are wonky as hell, because 2.1 does themes a lot better and is mobile-responsive out of the box. I just installed ACM2 on my site and got it going. If you were curious what kind of stuff you can do with ACM2 if you get brave enough: I'm pretty much like, so this is basically the prettiest friggin' character slash rank list ever... I started work on ACM3, too, my motivation's just basically nil, so I didn't get far (I think I hit the database structure and just kinda Died Inside). I will say that one level of bio-field will be taken out; if you want tabs back, you can arrange your profiles into tabs again pretty easily. Ahm, we'll also have built-in recent-posts tab for characters, I apparently also did not do the Smart Thing and make character names colour globally, so that will also be built into ACM3. My bad. I did it for threads and profiles and then Forgot for the rest I guess. (I am so forgetful and ADD you guys, like, half my "problem" as a coder is actually that I will autism-hyper-focus for months on friggin end and then finally get distracted by something... for another months on friggin end, and when I come back, I don't even know what the hell I've done. Lookit this what is this I coded this??? What? When? I literally don't remember doing it. Are you sure it was me??? Y'all laugh, I'm serious.) I also am probably going to redo the damned URL structure; again. Because I can't... seem to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't action=end;area=in;sa=crazy;sec=shit;id=like_this. Why are SMF's URLs like this. Like I know PrettyURLs is a thing that friggin exists but this should be built into the damned thing. Listen, this isn't 2006. (By the way, if you want your URLs like /board/topic/topic-title, PrettyURLs is a thing that exists. It basically uses the same rough logic as IPS, actually. Unfortunately its profile rewrite uses username, not display name, and I didn't tinker long enough to figure out how to make it switch to display name. I'm... fairly sure it can be done, I just have to figure out how.) BUT, I think it'll be action=characters for the character list and the auto-lists, and then managecharacters for char and npc user controls, and then character;id=whatever for viewing a character's profile. So it'll be all spread out a bit but the end result is the URLs will be a bit shorter. I'm also trying to formulate a better name-arrangement set up (and ACM3 will have a few name order options that will use the middle name or middle initial), because I ran into this issue with my site. You see here in this screencap, all four of these characters has an east Asian name. Their name SHOULD be last first, not first last, because east Asians order it last first. Right? Okay but if I change the name ordering to last first, Cynemaer Eccleston, very focking European name, goes Eccleston Cynemaer. ... nah. Anyway, yeah, after the crazy roller-coaster that was 2018, I decided I wanted to go home, and home for me has always been Bleach, so I run a site again, bit sooner than I intended, but whatever. Turns out Bleach-verse still causes plot-bunny explosion in my brain, and everything else I was doing kinda drowned in a flood of Bleach-muse. Meanwhile, nice to have this minor influx of SMF-stuff to do around here. I like seeing new SMF sites spring up. Also, I thought to myself helping someone, and I'm not gonna say who because they weren't a problem and I don't want to make them feel bad, lol, that it'd help if they were more specific about something. I was like, "I know they all seem to think I'm basically the SMF God for some reason, but I'M REALLY NOT," and then I figured it out anyway, so I guess I know why everyone seems to think I'm SMF God. I also fixed something in a giant wall of PHP whilst half-awake. Yanno, I never really know if I should be like, wow I'm cool, or wow I'm terrifying, or wow I need a life??? Yeah. I just wanted to show off some pretty stuff and ramble a bit about ACM3. My last blog post was kind of... well, you know. After stepping back, I do feel a bit better, but also worse, somehow. (And sorry to everyone that I may incidentally flake on, but I'm following the muse right now. I'll wander back eventually.) Maybe after a bit in Sacred Space AKA Bleach-land, I'll... be less mopey. I just kinda fell into the jaws of crippling depression and haven't really crawled back out again. Not that it's obvious. It did occur to me, part of my problem might be that I'm very good at hiding it when I'm not doing so hot. And when people do think I'm having a hard time, I'm just busy. So I guess it kinda leads to this weird misconception that I don't ever actually get upset. (I'm actually stupidly depressed right now, you just can't honestly tell if you're just watching my posts.) And then when I do finally hit my limit, it tends to explode out of me in a fit of impetuous anger that's actually more hurt than anything, it just expresses wrong because lol what is normal brain function and typical socialisation. Arc don't fuckin' know her. In other news, winter finally came. Bbl gonna hibernate until it goes away. (Sorta kidding.)

I am desperate. I don't know what to do anymore. It feels like talking to the walls... and I wonder what I have done so wrong in my childhood in order to deserve this at mature age. I wish that, as so many parenting books exist, how to make a stubborn child obey, eat or take medicine, it should also exist books how to take care of old parents. How to make a stubborn 89 years old eat, or take the medicines according to the posted schedule (and to my phone calls, because I never let it only to the printed schedules, I remind her). And to obey me in general, because she is doing everything NOT how I told her to (and how the doctors tell her in some cases). I wish I mattered... and yes, I know she loves me, but she would wish me to obey her now, like I did when young. She thinks she knows everything and she is always right, not accepting to be contradicted (when even what she used to know, isn't valid anymore, and I remind her continuously that she is comparing things at distance of 30-50-70 years, and from two totally different social orders - socialism vs. capitalism- so she shouldn't because they are nothing to compare.) She knows better than the doctors, better than me, better than everyone, and she does only what and how she wants to, no matter that it is harmful. I am green of anger this afternoon, after I heard that she started taking at 3 pm the medicines she had to take starting with 6 pm. I explained her again for the thousand times why the schedule must be kept, why I am always calling her, to remind her to take them when due, then... I am still the bad and disrespectful and crazy one because I shouldn't dare to talk this way to my mother. 😞

I finally broke the two-week or so streak of every piece of code I was writing during that time-frame working immediately, and caused a few errors today. Rofl. Mostly I've been bouncing back and forth between working on the Character Manager, and working on the theme orders I've got sitting in queue staring me down, but I keep taking minor breaks to go do RP posts. It seems kind of Wild that I'd be doing all this work for RP boards and then not RP? Like, I guess some people do, but it just seems weird to me, so I try not to get caught up doing something and forget what the heck-all I'm even doing it for. (This is why I can't quit RP, you guys - okay no there's another reason but, spoilers.) I've gotten pretty far along in the next release of the character manager, though! I'm SUPER excited for this, y'all, it's gonna ROCK. CM 1.0.1 may actually be released specifically for 2.1, 2.0 functionality not promised, I'm not sure. Mostly I'm focusing on doing it before I figure out how I'm handling releases. Just thinking about what's easiest here, because tbfh I have no idea. Lol. But there are some things it does on SMF 2.1 that it just cannot do on 2.0 (I'll show you in a second!), and the default templates would need to be tweaked to work with Curve (Curve is SO DUMB, Curve2 is much better, much more intuitive to work with). I'm probably a little over halfway done with 1.0.1, so that's exciting. (Honestly, I can't wait til I'm done, seriously, I can't, I'm so sick of coding right now.) if($arceus == 'sick of code' && $time_spent_coding >= $too_long) { $arceus_speaks_in_php = true; return $help; } (Fun fact, that's valid PHP.) The breaking the everything-working pattern is actually really nice, like you'd think I'd be happy about not breaking anything? But it's like, when things go smoothly and nothing errors out on me, I just kind of sit here, and stare at my screen. And wonder what unholy hell is going to go wrong eventually, because things only go so right when chaos is ahead. Does this make me jaded, or just really anxious a person? I have no idea which it is. Listen, though, I've gotten to the point where I'm good enough with PHP that, when I do break it, finally, I break it really good and solidly thorough. It's a thing. You think ignorant people can break things, hoowee, no, the real breaker-masters, are the PHP whiz-kids that take a thousand years to finally break something. It's like breakage karma sort of builds up like honey and it attracts THE BIGGEST MOST VICIOUS STINGING EVIL SUGAR ANTS KNOWN TO EARTHKIN. LIKE THE KIND OF VICIOUS STINGING EVIL SUGAR ANTS THAT MAKE YOU WONDER IF THEY'RE ACTUALLY ANTS AND PROBABLY HAVE HORNS. Is earthkin not a word? It is now, screw off, spell-check. So I did want to show this: It's big, but this is the full character creation page. As mentioned last post, it's tabbed, and all of the image fields are in the images tab, instead of wherever, so they can be placed wherever. They do still sort by position, if I remember rightly, but this makes a little more sense, as far as interfacing logic goes. You'll notice that SMF 2.1's fancy new WYSIWYG editor loads both in all the text-areas in standard, as well as in the custom fields marked as textareas. This way, BBCode is a breeze for users, and on the list at some point, probably, is figuring out how to make it periodically save the character form. Because that'd be boss. Anyway, the WYSIWYG is one of the things that needs to change to be compatible with 2.0, because 2.0's WYSIWYG loads a different way. Being frank, I'd probably just take out the WYSIWYG triggers entirely. This here is the main character management page. Now with more cool! They're colour coded by default, but you can change this per theme. Approved characters are green, pending ones are pink, and characters that are in-progress are a pale steel blue. Character blurb parses for BBC by default, it's actually built into the back-end. Now, I wanted to show you guys... this! Yeeeees!! It sends alerts for pended characters to the staff team!!!!1111 These are also links, so it links to the character's profile, and also to the ACP approval queue. It sends to users in any member group that has the 'cmod_manage' permission; by default, though, users in root admin group #1 always get approval queue alerts. This is, of course, another thing that won't work on 2.0, and that's a damn crying shame. (Again, as in 1.0.0, new characters from anyone with 'cmod_app_bypass' permission skips the approval queue outright - since root admins always have all permissions, admin group #1 never has to wait for approval even if it's on). The entire system here for approval is actually rather quite bloody slick. If I do say so myself. (Am I allowed to say that? Is that gloating?) So when characters are accepted or rejected, it'll send an alert to their player, that tells them char name was accepted/rejected, so they know when their character(s) can be played. Aaaahm. Beyond that, pretty standard stuff. Oh, this time, I remembered to put the stupid page indexes in, so if you have 200 characters, they won't all show on one page (it'd be 10 pages lol). There's one other thing I have to share, that I just got done. This wasn't in 1.0.0, so this is super exciting. This is the new auto-list page in the ACP. Variable will strip out any wacky characters and leave just lowercase Latin letters, numbers, and underscores, because variable is the page URL that it uses for this auto-list. So we want it to be as clean as we can make it. If you try entering two of the same variable, by the way, it'll fatal_error on you. Haha. Then, name the page anything you like, select a bio field from the set of fields you created for your site to use as the auto-list base, type up a header description and... Ba-BING! It generates and displays an automatic, alphabetised list, no coding required, right on the list page, of all the active characters' values for that field, and it looks nice, too. This is for automatic face claims and the like. If you want to do job listings, you can use it for that, grade listings, dorm numbers, HP-style wand stuff, anything you want to keep track of, set that shit and forget it, because it will automatically update the list when a new character is activated and has that field filled in. You never have to touch a list again, and neither do you need to know how to code to make one of these anymore! (Yep, you're welcome.) [Insert Fuck Yeah! reaction here tbh.] This was a feature/function that I wanted in the Char Manager from day one, it just, I wanted the mod itself done and FAST so I could start using it at my own places, so tbh I kinda rushed through 1.0.0. I should theoretically be rushing through 1.0.1, but here we are. Lol So far, though, so good. Nothing's broken hopelessly yet (1.0.0 doesn't support PHP 7+, of course, so I'm building this version on PHP 7.1). There is also a giant welcome message when you first get into the ACP for the Char Manager, in 1.0.1, this will explain what everything is, what it does, what it's for, how to control it, etc, etc, and once you've seen it, it doesn't show again. I think my next tackle will be the NPC controls. Which basically run off the general character controls, just with an extra field that marks it as an NPC. Cheehoo. Yanno, after I eat. (Have I mentioned I'm bad at food?)

Whenever I don't get to share a bed with my SO, for whatever reason, I tend to have pretty strange and wacky dreams. For the last two nights this has been the case. I rage quit on my dream last night because in my dream, we had a guest over. There's no other way to say it- our guest was morbidly obese, but was still capable of walking herself around. She announces to everyone: "I've got to pee." So she gets up. Walks into my room. Lies down on my bed... AND PEES ON IT. RIGHT. IN. FRONT. OF. ME. I'm quite upset about this for obvious reasons and am like "YO. Why the fuck you peein' on my bed?" Actually, that's the nice version of what I said. I made her feel very bad, but instead of just being sad, she tried to argue back with me. ABOUT WHY IT'S OKAY TO PEE ON MY BED. It's fine to pee on my bed, she says, because it's hard for her to sit on a toilet. This made me go quiet for a second, because okay, honestly, a big part of my line of work is helping people sit on a damn toilet LOL, and then I remembered, BITCH I SAW YOU WALK IN HERE AND CLIMB ONTO MY BED which seriously in all honesty cannot be any easier than sitting on the shitter, and so instead of arguing with her further I just legit rage quit on my own dream and woke up. OMG. I'm still worked up about it. Guys, I love sleeping literally more than anything else I'm not even kidding so PEEING ON MY BED IS JUST ABOUT THE BIGGEST SIN YOU CAN COMMIT AGAINST ME, DON'T DO IT.

I guess each RPG - which is a collectively written story - gets sometimes the misfit. But while we encourage the misfit as a character in various ship crews, as a personality interesting to explore in the interaction with other characters, we don't encourage the lone wolf in a creative endeavour based on collectivities (ship crews). Yes, the odd one or two might happen, as secondary characters, forging their paths among the collectives - but they are rare sights. (Exactly how women sailors should be rare sights too, the odd one or another). Unfortunately, most often it doesn't happen so, and I don't understand why the writers don't try more to work on their characters and make them fit the story. Because if the character doesn't fit, the experience on the site, ie in writing the story, won't be as good as the one for those whose characters do fit. Instead of looking strangely at the suggestions and rejecting them, you should look widely at the story as a whole, to see what characters are really needed and how can you adapt your ideas so that they really fit. What we get instead (and they don't stick much around, when they are the wrong characters for the ongoing story)? 1. The captain. There are people who want their characters only as captains, and they are disappointed that here the captainship (or any higher position) is gained in the story, by being a dedicated writer, involved in the story, doing properly the needed research, bringing good ideas and collaborating with the others. They don’t realize either that crewing a ship is extremely difficult (“so what? I’ll have crew immediately” – yes, and this is why in 4 years, after having several captains, the ships in our story are still undercrewed… so why would we want even more ships?). And I think these are the more control-focused and individualist writers. They don’t want the captainship for the reasons me and a few others who got it wanted it – to help push the story forward when nobody else did. They think that it sounds cool and that being captain meant doing whatever they want without any rule… and it is not true in the given setting. For a captain like some cruel ones wanted to be (and didn’t stay because we didn’t offer them this opportunity… especially when speaking about a character too young to be really a captain), the pirate crew (because pirates do elect their captains, unlike in Navy and merchant shipping, where they are appointed) wouldn’t have elected them as captains first and foremost, or they would have demoted them at the first signs of dictatorship. (And if they didn’t want to step down, what about killed in their sleep?) 2. The present day/ fantasy guy. There are people who don’t want to do research at all, and who want to write about a historical setting as if it were a present day story, just with different clothes, but with the same mentalities and facilities as in the present, or who want only their fandom and nothing else. For these sort of writers, a fantasy setting would suit them better (and eventually not a RPG site, but a fanfiction/ individual story). And I am adamant about keeping the experience of the historical setting, because this gives the charm of a historical fiction story: having, through the characters, the experience of living in that particular century and place, with their mindsets and challenges. Strangely, but many people don’t care about it, at all or not so much. Come on, guys, if we, those who don’t have English as mother tongue, could do research on the 18-th century and on life aboard ships, those who do have English as mother tongue could do it even better than us. Especially that most things are, now, either copied on the site, under resources, or given as links to internet articles - which is much more than I ever had on the first site I had joined, when I wasn’t sure how to formulate what I was searching in order to find it. 3. The lone wolf. Again, an embodiment of a control-focused and individualist writer, who wants a character who doesn't take orders from anyone... and who isn't, actually, integrated in the story, having only short thrills with immediate satisfaction, when in the world of writing everything happens gradually, in time, as the chapters (threads) succeed one over the other. A lone wolf as a secondary character, getting occasional plots from time to time, while the main characters are seafaring focused and part of the crews? Yes, it is perfectly all right. We do encourage exploring all kind of characters; but we have a main focus. 4. The colonial lady. Nothing against such a character in itself, as long as her mentality fits the time and setting and she doesn’t want to be a modern day feminist misplaced in that time. Ladies, slaves, prostitutes, honest housewives of working men or women working hard to earn their living are interesting to explore. It works well, in the same mindset as the case above, as a secondary character who has plots from time to time, as the story ideas ask for it. What I am adamantly against is the ones who want to transform a seafaring adventure into a colonial life story, by not having people aboard the ships (again, because this usually asks for research), then they complain that the site shouldn't be seafaring focused. Well, what does "Age of Sail swashbuckling adventures" tell you? Not exactly, or not only "colonial life". The site, story, setting is seafaring-focused, with the colonial life only a side bonus. Yes, the story is obviously focused on the four ships’ seafaring adventures. People should have first a character aboard a ship. Then, for the times when that ship’s story is less in the limelight, to create characters aboard the other ships and on the islands. One can create any character fitting the setting, or to write for existing or newly created NPCs where the action is in the moment x. Creativity is free, but in the limits of the historical setting and of the story (which is continuously expanded, and reasonably added to - for example, when we do have 3 islands as main setting, one can have an odd thread in another location, as long as it makes sense - such as Cuba, or Bahamas, or the Mainland. But having a part of the story taking place in Europe just to suit a character's / writer's whim... wouldn't be advisable. Who is not in the setting, is not active in the story. 5. The “here but not quite” people. Unfortunately, in all factions, there are lots of people who don’t understand that writing a story together with others is a collective endeavour for which everyone’s absence harms/ blocks the story. They post once in a blue moon and they aren’t invested in the story because they don’t give themselves the time and the commitment to get invested. I can’t help seeing the potential of all characters for various stories,and missing them in the story, because they were the ones who had the power to make things happen. Ultimately, this is the characters’role, to make the story happen. And by not writing, people not only reject this potential and the development of stories which would need them; they reject other characters’potential development too, because writing stories alone within a RPG sometimes is a solution, but most often it is not.

Since returning from my break from RP and now back in full admin role. It has made me aware of how important some things are to the survival of a site, and how going on a hiatus may change how people treat you. I used to help many people get their sites going, offering help, advice, and time to help. When I have asked for the same things now I have received radio silence? It hurts to think that the help I gave was so easily forgotten. That being said, there have been many people who have been supportive, and completely believed in me. Even during the more difficult times. I'm determined to remain active. I'm currently caught up on all my threads, and working on revising the Canon list, along with other information on the site to clarify or encourage members. I'm beginning to slowly feel like my old self again. My mental health has improved. I've worked hard on improving every aspect of my life, and I feel my writing is better for it. I don't dread things or procrastinate. I take my time yet get them done. I set goals and I meet them now. I expect to be treated with respect and treat others with respect. I learnt some lessons, especially recently about how your vision for your site can be changed, and if you let it, people will use a lapse in an owner being around to mold a site to being what they want it to be.

I don't really know why I'm writing this, maybe to get it out somehow. It's late and I'll regret this tomorrow. Sometimes I don't handle things well, I get tired so easily. I love studying biology, but I don't always have the energy to be a student. It goes up and down. Sometimes I have days where I have so much energy, I get so much done, then I hit rock bottom and I lie in bed for an entire day. And then I just skip classes, and curl up with a book or some of my hobbies, trying to feel better. And I'm lonely, which is silly. I have several friends, family who lives nearby, and I know that my parents would come to pick me up for a visit home if I just asked. I guess that is my problem, asking for help. "I'm fine." My most frequent lie. Those acting classes did pay off I guess. Most of those who know me know I struggle with migraines, a lot. They leave me so exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I can deal with the pain from the migraines, it's the exhaustion that tears me down. Today started good, I had plans to work on my ethics paper, then I had a migraine attack. I took a painkiller and slept for three hours. I woke up, so tired, so exhausted, I'm crying and shaking. I'm going to post this before I regret it and just delete it before even posting, as a reminder to myself. I have a bad habit of thinking I'm fine after I come up again from one of these downs, it's a cycle. Maybe if I see this tomorrow I'll actually gather up the courage to make an appointment with a psychologist, or just another appointment with the school councilor. Someone. I'm sorry, this is a letter to myself on my public blog.... I hate it, but I think, I think if I don't post it somewhere I see it again I'll just keep going like I've done now for the last three years. Ignoring it.

More strange dreams! So I have this thing where I can dream in one setting and then not dream again in it for years and years, but when I do, I instantly remember everything that happened before. I'm not sure if it's been a long time since I dreamt in the setting I was in last night, but either way- that same sort of thing happened. I can't control my dreams, so going back to a setting isn't anything I have any power over and it's not a choice I make. Anyway, in this setting I'm a boy (I'm actually a female if anyone is wondering, I know there tends to be great confusion circulating around this) living with his mom and sister, only in a previous dream my sister had been stolen by Satan. For whatever reason, I was convinced that I could find her if I investigated the sewers that were beneath my house, and in a previous dream I had done this as well. It was a maze, and it was very confusing, and I always had a camera with me so I could retrace my steps if necessary. Although I got lost sometimes, I also always found my way out. My mom knew about this, and in the dream I had last night we had a conversation about it. She had a tracker on me, apparently, and was concerned because I would be down there so long that my camera battery was ready to die, or I got so far away that even if I really did make it out of the sewers I might wind up lost on the surface somewhere, out in the wilderness or in a town I didn't know or something. I don't really have anything to say to her about this, because I'm determined to find my little sister and plan on continuing to investigate in the sewers. And then I'm in the sewers again! Only I have no camera this time. It's very alarming as a result, since I don't have any light to work by. I start exploring through some of the places I have already been through, but then begin taking paths within those areas that I hadn't looked into before. I notice that things are starting to become strange, like I'd find little quivering clumps of blood and bones on the floor, which would then explode like some creature from the deep once taken to the surface. It wasn't a violent explosion, they just kind of went pop and bleeeehhhh all over. It was gross, but I kept going. Eventually there were structures in the sewers that shouldn't be in the sewers, like wooden walls and things of that nature. I eventually came upon a series of bathroom stalls, and in them I found one of my classmates from school. Not like, a fake classmate made up for this dream setting, but an actual classmate from a school I have gone to. This person wasn't anyone I particularly liked because he was an asshole, but none the less he was like "WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!" and my reaction was "k." We try to make it out of the sewers, and then after a series of even more ridiculous events and more exploding blobs, I suddenly realize that I'm dreaming. I don't have my camera with me, and there was no way I'd be in the sewers without it. My classmate is someone who lives clear on the other side of the country and there's no way he'd be here either, and also I found him in a bathroom. In the sewers. Har har har. So, upon realizing this is a dream, I wake up. Cue a strange interlude where I'm in the kitchen with my grandma and grandpa, and we're watching a family of bigfoot play with goats outside our window. We lived in a fucking cul-de-sac and don't have any farm animals, so I'm not sure where either the bigfoot or the goats came from. I'm looking at them with my grandpa while my grandma is fiddling about with something, and just as we call her over she misses seeing them. Anyway, something about this interaction or the dream or maybe both makes me understand what I have to do in order to get my sister back, or perhaps I understand that I'm never going to get her back. Either way, I know what I'm going to do next. I take my camera and head into the sewers, where my mom follows me. I take the original path that I had taken in my dream, but instead of things getting weird I just am lead to a hallway with a few rooms in them. The doorways are all pitch black, but some of them have strange textures to the blackness. I didn't know which one to go in, but picked the blackest of the black and went in there. I fell into a room with a bed, a window, and a black gelatinous blob on the floor. I immediately understood that this black blob was Satan, and that I had weakened him somehow???- perhaps by understanding earlier that I had been caught in a dream, and woke up from it. Anyway, I took out a knife and chopped up jello-Satan into a bunch of tiny pieces, and then smooshed him into the carpet so he couldn't go anywhere. And then my mom showed up with a carpet washer, and she sucked him up out of the carpet. We were going to make further efforts to take care of Satan, but then I heard voices in reality which made me wake up. I'm very tired from all this and don't feel like I got much sleep. >(

An anonymous user asked me: I've written a guide about this (This person is obnoxious but isn't breaking any rules- what do?), but if you don't want this person on your site, then I can see why it might not seem as though it applies. However, my advice on the matter remains the same: just ask the person to leave. If something about someone sits wrong with you as an admin, then you're not required to put up with it. You deserve to feel comfortable on and enjoy your own site, which you cannot do if someone else is souring the experience for you. It doesn't matter if you can't put your finger on what bothers you about the person, and it doesn't matter if they've done nothing "wrong." The best thing to do is always to just ask the person to leave, because then you can go back to enjoying yourself and they can move on to a place where they're not rubbing the admin the wrong way- which will inevitably impact their experience on the forum whether you mean it to or not. It's not only the best thing for you, it's the best thing for them also. Telling someone to leave without a tangible reason behind it can be tough, though. You need to be open and honest with the person without putting blame on them. It needs to be clear in the message that nothing is up for debate and that they need to leave no matter what. An example of what you can say: If you think that the person is going to cause problems, then you can always create a separate usergroup with posting and PMing permissions removed from them, so that there's no "damage" they can do. If you're concerned that this person is going to trash talk your forum afterwards, then this: (1) proves that they're someone who shouldn't be on your site to begin with; (2) is publicity. Even bad publicity is good publicity; (3) is nothing that anyone can hold against you. A message like the one above is calm. It might make someone hurt, but the aim is not to hurt and there is nothing inflammatory about it. If someone wants to tout your being honest and reasonable as anything but that, then it'll only convince similarly-minded individuals who you probably also don't want on your forum to stay away, and will draw level-headed folks your way. It's okay to be afraid of backlash, but in the RP community, backlash only has power if you give it power. Hope this helps, anon! - GR If you would like to ask me for advice, you can comment on an article or send me a private message! Be sure to include if you would like to remain anonymous.

I tell people I love them (as a friend) a lot and that I care about them because I think it's important to. It weirds some folks out, and that's okay. It can't hurt to tell someone that you care about them. But it can hurt for a person to go around thinking that no one cares at all. For some people, hearing that they're cared for might be the only nice thing they hear all day.

An anonymous user asked me: Hello anon and thank you for the ask! It is difficult to say that there are things you can do to attract people to your forum without advertising, but there are definitely things you can do to make guests want to stay! Have activity on your forum. No one wants to join an empty forum, one without any posts. That means if you are the only member, you need to be posting- even if it's with yourself! This also means that hiding the IC forums from guests is a very bad idea. Make it easy to join. People are impatient and want to get started as quickly as possible. You can help things move along by streamlining the joining process. Make all your documentation easy to find, have a starter guide to walk people through the joining process, have a simple application (or the option for one- some people do prefer the much longer and more detailed ones), be quick on checking applications. Be unique. Your forum needs to offer something that others do not, otherwise there's no reason for anyone to join it. Being unique doesn't mean that the entire concept has to be something incomprehensible, but if you notice that a lot of other forums in your genre do things a certain way, try to find a spin to put on it. Familiarity is good, but monotony is not. Be present. In the same vein as being active, you- the admin- need to have a presence on the site. Post in the cbox, even if you don't have anyone to talk to. Have wanted ads posted. Some people find it easier to join in to a roleplay if there are some wanted ads available for the taking. They're a good way for people to quickly get plots, character interactions, and even a bit of backstory. Reward people for signing up. If there is a monetary system on the site or any sort of items- anything exclusive that can be earned, really- it's always nice to give newbies a little something extra for joining up! BE POSITIVE. It's majorly off-putting to see negative comments in a cbox- about being bored, not having posts to do, not having muse, etc. Also on resource forums, it's a very good idea to share the FUN times you have on your forum instead of all of your frustrations. Obviously, one way makes your site seem like a nice place to be vs. an unhappy place. You want your forum to be a happy place! None of that gets the word out about your forum, however. You do have to do some form of advertising in order to get people to stop by the site. There are a multitude of ways in which you can do this: Tell your friends. All of them. Even the ones who aren't interested. They might come across someone who is interested in what you can offer and send them your way. Be sociable. Make new friends, even people who aren't interested in joining your forum. It never hurts to meet new people, and the same logic above applies here. Even if they aren't interested in your forum, your new buddies might meet someone who is and can send them your way. Put your site in your signature on every site you're on that allows it. Resource sites like The Initiative are a great way to passively advertise your forum simply by posting and being active there. They can give users an idea of who you are as an admin and a player, and people who like the things you say might stop by and take a peek at your forum. Get listed everywhere you can. This includes directories, but also top sites. These are another wonderful way to passively advertise for your site, requiring you to only click a button occasionally (in the case of top sites). Advertise on tumblr directories. Many of them let you post without having a tumblr account and they function very similarly to directories. Get affiliated. Find other sites to affiliate with. I personally like to affiliate with like-minded sites or sites within the same/similar genres, as well as panfandom forums (if I'm running a fandom site). As I no longer have applications on my forums, I will also affiliate with any other site that does not have applications even if they aren't of the same genre as my site, for example. However, there are other methods of affiliating which might suit you better, such as affiliating with any and every site you can. If those sites die, then your button is stuck on their index forever and ever. Affiliates are another form of passive advertising. Advertise on other social media. Even just one post makes a difference, but having a promotional tumblr, deviantart (if your forum uses artwork or you have artists making art for the forum), Twitter, or even Facebook page for you RP is a good way to get the word out there in a way that's less of a grind than advertising on other forums. You can share links to plotters, open threads, character quotes, wanted ads, and teasers for plots to come on social media. This requires more upkeep than directories and top sites, however as most of these methods allow you to queue items you can easily set up posts in advance and just space them out over the course of a week, month, etc. Advertise smarter, not harder. When you do advertise on other forums, don't bother dropping an ad if it takes you more than 5 seconds to find the advertisement forum. If it's difficult for you to find, then it's difficult for people to crawl through sites to find also. When I'm advertising, I use ctrl+f and do a search for 'adv' or 'plug'- if neither of those things come up, I bail. Advertise on sites that have won awards or are currently being promoted on resource sites or that are at the top of top site lists, as those sites are in theory the ones which are getting the most traffic (and therefore increase the chances of your ad getting seen). Dropping large amounts of ads can be effective, but it helps to even post just 5 ads a day. You can do this easily by posting 5 ads on a site one day, and then doing links backs on the next day. Lastly, installing Google Analytics on your forum is not a bad idea either. It will track where you get your traffic from, and once you know where you get the greatest amount of traffic from you will know where to focus the most of your efforts. Hope this helps, anon! - GR If you would like to ask me for advice, you can comment on an article or send me a private message! Be sure to include if you would like to remain anonymous.

Moral (or ethical) relativism is a branch of philosophy with a few different schools of thought, but in the end it more or less boils down to different cultures having ideas of what is right and wrong and that no point of view is wholly correct because no point of view encompasses all truths. This is how I view life. I believe that every group has ideas on what is right and wrong, and that, generally speaking, most groups do what they believe is right. However, to others, that might seem like the wrong thing. I did not always think this way. In fact, I used to very much be one of the "it's my way or the high way" sorts of people. I still am, in some ways. I'm very opinionated, and if I'm making something I'm going to make it the way I think is most right. But it's shaped the way I approach other people and interact with them, and I feel that interacting with others with the thought in mind that they are doing what they think is best (even if I don't agree with their concept of what's best) has been a help to me rather than a hindrance. In my line of study (medical care), it's almost a mandatory way of thinking (but that's a topic for another day), though I developed my own opinion on this before it was encouraged by school. There are a number of people who are outraged by the idea of moral relativism, and I had an encounter with some of them yesterday. I admit that I struggle still to see exactly where there issue was in the context of the problem we were discussing, so I cannot share with you what the exact nature of their issue was, but in general they seemed upset that I did not support one warring party in a fictional war and tossed the term moral relativism at me in a manner which I presume they thought would be insulting. I was not insulted, but this was the first time I had encountered such a strong reaction to such a scenario and it got me thinking. The idea of moral relativism doesn't claim that everything a culture does is perceived as correct within that culture. Women not having the right to vote is/was an example of this: though it is/was the norm within cultures, there were/are a number of people who did/do not perceive this as right or fair. Change was brought about as a result. It also appears to be the case that, as a society develops, it gears itself more and more towards the fair treatment of the people within that culture. This is not the case everywhere and as a species we do indeed have a long way left to go, but another thing that I feel people misunderstand is that change is not instantaneous and is never easy. It is an ongoing and infinite process, and as such takes time. Moral relativism also does not claim that the indigenous thought or reasoning behind a certain policy within a culture was correct to begin with, because the very point of the idea is that nothing is. Moral relativism doesn't forbid that groups or individuals have their own ideas on what is right and wrong. It does not require that everyone thinks the same way, only the recognition and acceptance that what is right for you might not be right for someone else, and vice versa. It does not advocate interfering with a group that you do not agree with, certainly not by aggressive means, but it also does not say that you shouldn't defend yourself from aggressors. It doesn't say that you have to put yourself second for "the greater good" or in the name of tolerance. It's a fascinating idea because at its very core I interpret it as meaning you do you and do it freely, but beware the consequences of your actions. It's not promoting lawlessness at all. It's a reminder of the world as it is: all our actions do have consequences because not everyone agrees with us and thinks the exact same way we do. But it's also an idea for what the world could be: empathetic to one another and accepting of our differences. Empathy is key in the positive development of society, and part of empathy is being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to understand why they experience things the way they do and understand their situation. I do feel that thinking that no one else has shoes worth putting on aside from you is incredibly ignorant. Without empathy we get groups of people who believe that they are wholly right and that everyone else is wrong, and I do, personally, find that alarming (not to mention obnoxious). A group that believes they are the only correct one feels justified to do anything at all without regard for how it will impact others, and we are aware of the results of that kind of thinking. And that's my thought barf for today.

An anonymous user asked me: Boy, do I ever empathize with this situation! And unfortunately, I don't have a simple response. Firstly, I would like to say that you should always do what's best for you. In the event that you are inspired over something new but are lacking inspiration for your current site, go with the new thing. Don't feel like you have to hang around and play with what already feels dead to you just because you feel obligated to entertain others. Roleplaying is about having fun, and if the admin of a site isn't having fun then no one is going to. Ergo, do what's fun for you. Second, be realistic and honest with yourself. Answer the following questions: Do I have the time to spend on both building a new site and keeping my current one active? Do I want to spend the time on building a new site? How would I split my time between two (or more) sites? Do I have the energy to achieve this? How will my working on another site impact my current community? How will it impact me? How will these impacts make me feel? Why do I want to create another site? What is it that interests me about it? What would this new site give me that my current site cannot? Is there a way my new idea can be incorporated into my existing site to satisfy the interests that aren't being met? Does this idea exist on any other site? If so, why do I not want to partake in it on that site? Am I okay with my current site potentially suffering while I create a new one? Depending on your answers to those questions, you might have just talked yourself into or out of starting another site. If you talked yourself out of it, then continue about your business as usual. If your answers still point you towards wanting to start another site, then I would advise you to wait. Is this still something you are going to want to do in a week? A month? Sometimes we get these fleeting desires that pass just as quickly. If inspiration survives through your waiting period, then it will probably last the construction process of the site and the time spent on your waiting period won't detract much from how long it takes to actually build the site. In the event your inspiration lasts, then I suggest coming up with a plan of action and sticking to it. Pick what days you're going to spend working on the new site and do it. If you're equally committed to your current site, then you need to make time to spend there as well. As to how your members will feel about it and not wanting them to feel as though you're abandoning them, it's important to remember this: you can't change how your members feel. It is entirely out of your control. Some of them might be upset just for knowing that you even thought about opening up another site. Others might not care at all. Don't get hung up on how they feel. The only thing you can control are your own actions, so if what you want is for your members to feel as though you will still be there for them, the best thing to do is to offer to include them, and to show them that you aren't going to abandon them. The best way to do that is by sticking to your schedule. Thanks for coming to me Anon, and hope this helps! - GR If you would like to ask me for advice, you can comment on an article or send me a private message! Be sure to include if you would like to remain anonymous.

Hey again everyone! We have been working hard to improve the look and feel around the site as well as adding helpful new awesome features. One of those new features is Two Factor Authentication. This is currently enabled to help protect your account from being hijacked if it is ever hacked. If you have suggestions for more questions that we can add (if you choose to do security questions over Google Authenticator) than don't hesitate to post in that thread and give us some ideas! Next up! We have updated how blogs appear on their main page. We now have the most recent article fully shown with the other articles truncated below. It came with a Grid layout and a traditional layout. We also increased the height of the cover image to better showcase an image of your choosing! All around we have made some aesthetic changes to many things around the site (like the embeds that were difficult to read). We hope you enjoy them! Another cool feature that we added is we now have discord integration! So if you're in discord either on your computer or on your phone you will now get notified when new topics are posted around the forums. Currently it is set up to primarily post from the "Wanted, Roleplay" section and the "Roleplay Conversations" sections. In the future this may change. Please feel free to provide feedback in the Staff Contact forum to let us know if you think we should add more or remove any so we know what you like. Now! Onto Challenges! The Best of 2016 has been posted! We would like to thank everyone who nominated and to remind everyone to look out for these same things as we will be repeating it next year and probably with more categories! You are free to contact us and let us know of categories you think we should add! Go check out the winners here: Following that! We are looking for award ideas! Funny, nerdy, bizarre whatever! We want to make awards fun to both have and earn. If you have an idea for an award for something around the Initiative than please let us know what it is and how you think it should be earned! We would love more fun and creative ways to engage you! Moving on from awards! Our Spotlight Challenge is nearly at it's end! Don't miss your opportunity to get your site listed in the header of the Initiative for an entire month! Check it out and send us some stories about Valentine's day! Remember they don't have to be about love! Voting for Graphics Challenge 9 is up! Go vote for your favorite one here: We have also posted a new graphics challenge! It's super easy and fun! Go make some avatars of some animals! Think you have what it takes to write a graphic inspired challenge!? Go check out this writing challenge: Last but certainly not least! Don't forget about @Gothams Reckoning advice blog. Just send them a PM with your question that you would like advice on and they will post it in the blog and give you advice. You can be completely anonymous just advise GR when you send your PM. We just want to add that we can't have this awesome community without you! So we thank you for being awesome members and being supportive to one another! You all rock! The Initiative Staff

Hey everyone! This month we are wrapping up the nominations from 2016! We will be getting awards out as soon as we go through the nominations and get everything picked out! We have quite a few new guides in our guide section. We recommend going to check them out: https://rpginitiative.com/guides/ We have new graphics and writing challenges posted in their respective challenge forums. We have also posted this months' Spotlight Challenge. Valentine's emotions! Tell a story about a Valentine's day, good or bad. We want to remind you about our lovely @Gothams Reckoning blog! You can request directed advice from a longstanding administrator of the roleplaying community. You can find it here: Have a Happy February! The Initiative Staff!

Sometimes I am feeling cheated of character development. Cheated in my writing, in the story we are writing together, not receiving the same thing I am offering, but only a tenth part. I have said before that Nothing happens if you don't write. Everybody knows it is true, still they don't write even if they all declare they love their characters and they want the plots they have suggested and we have planned for months, waiting for their free time to actually write the story. In some cases, this leads to "this has happened" decisions between writers, without showing how in a thread, but just mentioning it in passing in another thread. I this case, if I feel cheated of the character development, usually there are remedies for this: some characters have journals and tell their version of the story, with their thoughts and feelings about it. Some characters, for whom it isn't in character to keep a journal, might write a letter to somebody dear and confess there if it is a thing which can be confessed, or can open up to a friend in a certain circumstance. I guess one of these three solutions can be applied unilaterally in most cases, so that at least my characters gain the character development they have been cheated of. In some cases, after waiting longer than anybody else would have had patience for, the thread starts and continues (from their side) with one post a century, written quickly, as if wanting to get rid of it instead of developing their characters and making them enjoy the story. I receive something emotionless, without letting their charachters develop through the plot, making them less than wallflowers. What satisfaction would they gain from this kind of writing, I can't understand. I do write my characters normally through the threads, giving them time to feel, to think, to watch, to react and to make the story happen, to take in through all the senses what happens. But by their lack of proper reactions, of a real contribution to a story they wanted/ asked for, I still feel cheated of my character development. They get even less than mine, too, but by their choice, because there would have been a lot to react to and vibrate to in my posts. And sometimes I don't know what to do to fix the story, at least on my side. I feel cheated, I feel that writing in partnership doesn't attain that partnership feeling, that I am giving everything and I receive just crumpets in exchange, that I am doing all the work and the others are sabotaging their own character development, and mine as collateral damage. That the story isn't anymore how it should have been, because it lacks... enthusiasm? Feeling? Life? And that if I wrote it alone from both characters' perspective, it would have been more pleasant to read, more developed and immersing the readers into the proper athmosphere of the setting.

Hey everyone! So loads of missed updates. I apologize. The world mostly ate me over the past few months so I apologize for the lack of them. I'm trying to work on making sure they are more consistent for everyone. Trying for every two weeks. So first things first! Welcome, again, to @Gothams Reckoning for joining the The Initiative staff! You are amazing and your guides are great we are really happy to have you. We have lots of things going on including January Nominations for the Best of 2016! This is this months Spotlight is a lottery of sorts. By participating in the nominations you earn yourself another chance to earn your site into the spotlight! Read about it here: Nothing else big for this update! Don't forget about the graphics and writing challenges! Participating will now start to earn you new cool awards so get in on it now. The Initiative Staff

It sounds like you're a staffer, and if that's the case then I would encourage you to have the member speak with this person! In my opinion, this is not a task which the staff should have to handle, but then again I place strong emphasis on members being able to stand up for themselves and communicate their wants and needs. If you decide to get involved as a staffer, then in order to perpetuate fairness you will have to oversee any characters that have been created from a wanted ad. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it depends on how much work you want to put on yourself vs. your members. But moving on! Your member should keep this in mind: whether or not they confront this player, there is nothing that forces them to roleplay with this character. There is nothing forcing them to say that their wanted ad has been fulfilled if they don't feel that it has been. If they want to talk to this player, then there are a few different ways they can approach the situation. Either tell that player the above- that even if the character gets accepted, they will not consider the wanted ad filled and do not want to write that plot with that character; or, be honest and open with the other player and tell them simply that they're not interested in them taking their wanted ad. I recommend the latter over the former, although it should be followed up with the former if the person in question does not relent. If you decide that staff intervention is necessary, then how you solve the issue is up to you. Some variation of the above can be included in the message you send them, but whether you pend the application or reject it depends on how you want to handle things on your forum. If the posting claims before the application is accepted is a problem (an issue which I would consider separate from the matter of taking a wanted ad without discussing it with the person who posted the ad first), then I think a simple reminder to the member would be sufficient. Good luck, Anon! If you would like to ask me for advice, you can comment on an article or send me a private message! Be sure to include if you would like to remain anonymous.

An anonymous individual came to me with the concern about playing a character that could be the source of some controversy. The character in question is from a series which takes an alternate- and obviously fictional- look at real events and people. There is a big difference between the real version of this character and their fictional portrayal, which is where the controversy arises from, as some of these differences may be seen as insensitive. This character has little in common with the real person other than the name, and if the name was changed to something else then there would be minimal issue with playing the character. So what do you do? Most importantly, remember this: any character you play has the potential to offend someone. There is absolutely no kind of character you can write that will not offend anyone. Even a character without conflict or problems is likely to offend someone because they aren't contributing anything to the story. Now, there are two reasons why a person could get offended by your character: 1) you are not representing where that character comes from accurately or with grace, or 2) they are incapable of handling their own emotions. Know that the most important part of playing any character is making sure that you are representing their nationality, race, religion, sexuality- and every other part of them- with respect and empathy. Do what research you need to, read articles, be informed. If someone approaches you and says that something about your character is incorrect, be open to constructive criticism (but as with all things, take it with a grain of salt). That person may know more than you on the subject, and can help you in accurately portraying the different cultural/etc. facets of your character. So long as you do this, then you have reason 1 covered. However, that means that no matter how much work you put into presenting your character with care, they might still offend someone. In that case, that falls under reason 2. At that point, I wouldn't worry about it. You are not responsible for how another person reacts to the way that they feel. That doesn't mean that it still can't be uncomfortable to deal with, however. This leaves you with a question to answer! Is your desire to play the character greater than your apprehension over possibly offending someone, and the effort you will have to go through to deal with any offended individuals? If the answer is yes- then take up the character! If the answer is no- then don't! Good luck, Anon! If you would like to ask me for advice, you can comment on an article or send me a private message! Be sure to include if you would like to remain anonymous.

First off we want to touch on an important subject that was brought up in a post here: We here at the Initiative allow for mature content to be discussed in an open forum and a safe environment. We strive to make sure that you feel safe and that you are comfortable here. If you are approached by another member regarding something that makes you uncomfortable then please report it. Being uncomfortable is not okay and we will look into all counts reported to us. If you don't know how to report something you have many options: Click the report link on the content in question (There is a report link on every post, every PM, every image, every link everything) and type your concerns into the box. The staff is then notified of your report and we look into it ASAP. Engage a staff member (You can add a staff member to any PM or else PM them directly). Simply reach out (Only Morrigan bites here) We take every report seriously and investigate everything. We want you to feel safe here so please tell us when you don't. Next, onto more fun things! Only two more days for the graphics and Writing challenges to earn yourself some advertising space! Also the voting is up for the June Spotlight Challenge! Get your votes in for your favorites! https://rpginitiative.com/forums/forum/101-spotlight-challenges/

Hey everyone! Just a few updates! We would like to welcome @txernest onto the staff as our new Graphics moderator! We are still looking for more staff! Many jobs to fill! Check them out! The featured (most wanted job this week) is the Featured Content Manager! Also, one more week before the end of the Calendar challenge! Don't forget to get your entries in to be featured in the Initiative spotlight as well as the calendar forever!! Other challenges to get your entries in for are the Color Change Graphics Challenge and the Trapped Writing Challenge! We also want you to remember that there is voting up for the Tech Graphics Challenge! Finally we have gone HTTPS! Which means we are secure. You may still notice some directory links and forum pages show as "insecure" or having "mixed content". This is normal with forums unfortunately as content embedded from sites that aren't HTTPS will cause this (including images from places like photobucket and tinypic). You are free to upload your images to your post and signature or the gallery and use them if you would like to make the site more secure. In fact we recommend it! You can even use them offsite in other signatures!

I admit I am confronted with an activity problem on my nearly six years old site. Most of the sites have one, at a moment or another. I feel it is something wrong with the very slow pace we have progressed with this year, and with people posting, instead of each week, only 1-2 times a month. In one year of writing, we have covered only two story months. In other years, there were three to six story months for a year of writing. If a quicker pace was possible before, and it created more enthusiasm for "the next episode" of the story, why it isn't possible now anymore? I think some people lose interest because the writing partners take too long to post. I am trying my best to stimulate people to write and be inspired, with everything I can, but it seems I am the only one doing it - and sometimes it feels damn lonely on my own site. This is when I get pessimistic and I think that nobody else cares about it, while I am giving all my best to the story and the community. It feels as one-sided as I am losing inspiration for stories I loved writing. I think this is my main problem, especially that I know this site used NOT to be like this. The community was bubbly, involved, there were people of all speeds, and the stories were written quicker... Now, they are disenfranchising from us by simply not posting and not being anymore part of our WRITING community. Being active means being connected to the community. If we, each of us, no longer feel like putting in the effort, then we have made the conscious decision to let our site die. I am always willing to make this effort, but I can't do it alone. And, unfortunately, not recognizing that we have an activity problem means not seeking consciously solutions, both within ourselves and all together. The inactivity is the problem, at the whole board level. And instead of being stimulated to be more active when others aren't, each one is complacent that "the others haven't posted either, I can procrastinate as well." Some do not even acknowledge it is a problem for the site, in order to seek solutions - both inside them and together with the others. When we can't get more writers (because, let's admit, older sites seem to be less attractive for newcomers, despite the reassurance that they are more established and less prone to disappear in a whim), the solution to keep going on is to be more active ourselves - and it is a collective endeavour. A person alone can't bring the needed activity, when the story is collective, needing various crews. Being needed is a nice feeling, and it should be one more motivating reason to find inspiration and time. (This is exactly why I am always writing more for others than alone; because I know that other people are waiting for the "next round"). I am thinking ”My posts are needed, people are waiting for me, so I’ll make time as soon as I can”. (Which may mean instead of watching a movie or of doing something else which is for free time). When I am sad, bored or tired of numbers or of drama in real world, I am starting to write, in order to get immersed in a different world. And I keep writing. But if one person not posting, doesn't lead to inactivity and site dying, when most persons on a small site aren't posting, the 2-3 who do... can they really make a significant difference, no matter how often they post? Because it is just a little part of the plots, and usually not the important ones, which get forward, and the others get waiting and waiting. I have seen this elsewhere in the past. Sites once busy, then one left, another stopped posting, if those two weren't anymore, others stopped posting too, either waiting for the others' posts, or just because - and in 2 months the site was a ghost town. And it is something which would naturally lead to the death of the site, if nobody stops it somehow. But how to stop it? What more can I do in order to make the plot running smoother, better? I really am trying my best. And maybe from here a big part of the lonely feeling... Don Quijote fighting windmills, misunderstood by the people around? I do care - about our writing community together, writing because this is what gathered us together. I can't do everything in this world, but I am doing as much as I can, and I am searching for what else to do in order to keep the community together, to keep the story going. And nobody else admits that inactivity might be a problem. I understand people being busy for a while and people having lost interest (in writing in general or in this story in special). It doesn't mean I am not regretting their good characters, their writing style, their warm presence and their interesting ideas. I do. But I know I can't fight something which belongs inside each person. If they don't have motivation from inside, to write, I can't give it to them with any outside intervention. And, in exchange, I start losing mine if my writing partners don't care about the story anymore, because I feel I am doing everything in vain, for no readers and no writing partners.

How can one overcome frustration and regret? Yes, I know, one would say "be happy with what you have/ actually is, instead of focusing on what you don't have/ what should have been". But is it so easy? It is again tied to the frustrating missed opportunities I have been blogging about almost two years ago, to the fact that nothing happens if you don't write and to me claiming that I don't care anymore, as advised above... just that I actually do and I just pretend I do not. We do have some amazing stories going on "Before the Mast". But they could have been better, and I can't escape this thought. There are threads which are going on in 3-6 characters and NPCs, written by 1-2 people, when they should have involved 10+ characters and NPCs, written by 5-6 people, just because there are people who keep away their characters from threads where it would be natural for them to be a part of (or post 1-2 times then vanish). Their characters whom they keep away from the story won't leave a mark on it, when for the character's personality and/ or role in the story it would have been normal to do it. Nevertheless, even if they aren't explicitly involved, they still are involved "somewhere in the background", ie passively the outcome of the story the writers didn't want to introduce them into will affect them too. If the whole ship is taken prisoner, they would be numbered among the prisoners, as long it isn't written that (and how) they have succeeded to escape believably. They can't be two days later happily chatting in a tavern scene, as if nothing had occurred. One doesn't live in a time bubble. But most often, they aren't chatting two days later. Those who are counting their number of threads and don't take more, even if it would have made sense for their characters to be involved, at least are good at keeping track of what happened and this doesn't happen. What happens more frequently is that a writer's hiatus (or vanishing without words) is usually lasting longer, and the characters are nowhere to be found when they are needed. I keep imagining how the ongoing adventure threads would sound if everybody was there, as they should have been, and it makes even lonelier the endeavour of writing it alone or with only one writing partner. And the "It shouldn't have been this way!" gives a bitter taste to stories I actually enjoy, the taste of the the frustrating missed opportunities. (Then others come and say that roleplaying is an activity which should have been done with others, not alone... as if I preferred it alone vs. with others!) I keep wondering how to deal with it... How not to think anymore at how the story should have been developed and what chances the others were missing.

Once I believed that there is one truth in everything, and all the other perceptions are wrong. This was how I was educated, and how my mother still believes. (But she also believes she is right in everything, when she isn't, and often what she knew isn't applicable at the current society). As I grew up and gained experience, I understood that there is no absolute truth, everything being various shades of gray. Whiter or blacker, but still gray. And that, unfortunately, everyone has his own truth, his own perception we can't fight. We can give arguments towards our version of the truth. We know sometimes we did this, we wanted (or sometimes even harvested) these results... but to some people they are seen completely different. Some of our efforts and deeds are missing, some results are seen totally different, and the arguments don't hold because... simply their perception is radically different, and they are conviced it is the correct one. The problem is that feelings and perceptions are something personal, and they don't take into account the others' realities, the others' different perceptions. So people who would have cooperated, can't, remaining each one in his own world. Ultimately, the two people with irreconciliable opinions would part ways, each one holding to his own piece of reality, to his own perception, both feeling wronged or disappointed by the other. And unfortunately it is nothing to be done with it, even if I wish it was. Others succeed to make the effort to see the other perspective too. To agree with it or not, but to extend a hand, together with an acceptaince that the other point of view can be sincere and valid too, even if it doesn't invalidate his own feeling. Do you believe there can be different realities, different perceptions for the same facts or results?

and their manners corrupted from infancy, then what else is to be concluded, sire, but that you first make thieves and then punish them? - quote from Ever After sorry this is basically a test entry. New to this blogging software. I'm accustomed to Livejournal so a forum with a blog is a NEW and ASTOUNDING thingamajig. And yet somehow still WAY MORE COMPREHENSIBLE than tumblr. I love tumblr. I just have no idea how to effectively communicate via tumblr. I just obsessively reblog all the shiny things and make annoying hashtags. Like that is my sum contribution to tumblr. I AM A BAD TUMBLRITE. ... TUMBLRIAN? ... TUMBLRER? Thing. I am a bad thing. I fail at thinging. Okay, so this blog will hopefully be about MEDIEVAL STUFF. I run a medieval game, I study history, I play medieval lords and ladies several weeks a year... it's a hobby. My current historical fascination is on Byzantium, Vikings, and the Late Roman Empire, but I am also a GIANT HISTORICAL FASHION NERD. Specifically my other historical era romances are 12th century southern France (HI ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE) and late 15th century Italy (Rome under Alexander Borgia and Florence under the Medici, plus the Sforza and Visconti of Milan, and Este of Ferrara). I've learned a bit of Naples in that era but mostly only their dealings with Spain and the Borgia. Oh, and I also have done research for the reigns of Edward I, II and III of England. Don't ask me about the Wars of the Roses. I never have managed to completely parse that era... and I do NOT fangirl most of the Tudors so meh on that. Elizabethan England I can converse on but it's not something I've studied in-depth beyond a mild fascination with Mary Queen of Scots... Let's get one thing out of the way here REALLY QUICKLY: Do NOT talk to me about Reign. JUST DON'T. The laziness of not jjust making up a new kingdom to set that mess of a show in upsets me. So does the hideous thrift-store fashion design. God, if you're going to make a quasi-historical show with deliberately modern outfits, AT LEAST BE FABULOUS WITH THEM. TBH if A Knight's Tale couldn't make that work WTF DID YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING CW??! ... IF you do want to see a quasi-historical with crazy glam outfits that aren't really historical but are still f*cking fabulous go watch Virgin Territory. The movie is horrible but the clothes were by ROBERTO CAVALLI and MY GOD IT DOESNT MATTER THAT THEY ARE NOT HISTORICAL THEY ARE STUNNING. I WOULD WEAR SOME OF THOSE GOWNS OMG. It's like what Reign wishes it could be but will never ever be because they insist on sticking their lovely cast in junky, ill-fiting, un-flattering outfits 95% of the time. The other 5% they clearly stumble into renting some of the old Tudors outfits or something off any random historical movie Hollywood has recently done (YOUNG VICTORIA? REALLY, CW? Because nothing says 1500s France LIKE A F*CKING SCARLETT O'HARA HOOP). Does the Reign costume department even realize that basic Tudor ensembles are not that hard to sew? You can cheat like a mofo on making those things. THE WHOLE TUDOR ERA NOBILITY WAS BASICALLY CHEATING ALL THE TIME ON THEIR OWN CLOTHES. Like, really? Hell, you could just run around sticking the girls in evening gowns if you wanted to- sure, slap a faux-corset looking prom dress on Adelaide Kaine and run with it but COULD YOU AT LEAST MAKE SURE IT FITS THEM??! Like, are alterations THAT HARD? Sorry. I just cannot be having with the clothes in that series. They are not even pretty fantasy clothes! Most of the time it's NOT EVEN PRETTY it's just some random hodge-podge mess of clothing they stuck on these lovely actresses until they look like they've been ransacking a vaguely glamorous aunt's clothes and playing dress-up. I'm not even sure what the plot is of Reign. My eyes were too scalded by the horrors of their sartorial choices to let any other senses function. So, yeah. DO NOT APPROACH ME TO TALK ABOUT REIGN.

The books you need to look at: The Vikings by Gwynn Jones The Varangian Guard by Sigfus Blondal Harald Hardrada: The Warrior's Way by John Marsden Marsden is the most readable if you just want a good glimpse into the Viking age. Harald was the last real Viking conqueror and my god he was good at it. It's a tragedy that the only thing people remember is his defeat in 1066 by Harald Godwinson (who then lost to William the Conqueror it was a really BAD YEAR for England ok). Things you need to stop thinking about Vikings: - They were dirty and stupid and illiterate (some were, of course, but not all of them) - All girls all the time were shieldmaidens (no, actually: RICH GIRLS were shield maidens. They had to pay someone to take over their wifely duties of running the household while they were out Viking. But YES lots of girls could kick your ass six ways from Thor's Day with weaponry. But being trained to fight is not the same thing as being a shield maiden. SO STOP THAT). More on that from Gwyn Jones up there. - Dark Ages girls had no rights. No, actually they had A LOT OF RIGHTS. Girls could be queen, girls could topple empires, girls could reign Byzantium, girls could lead a freaking army, could do anything a boy could do... The whole resurrection of the strict patriarchy actually came later into the middle ages and renaissance. The Vikings held equal primogeniture to a large degree; they'd never understand a strict patriarchy- and they'd be the first one to disbelieve any girl was a helpless fragile flower. The actual reason they would run around murdering an entire town ok? They figured the women could fight just as well so kill them to be safe. - Absolute monarchy had absolute control No. No it didn't. Even the Byzantines were forever fighting their own rebellious generals and stewards and armies. So that is how the Vikings could swoop in and cause YET MORE CHAOS. - Vikings were limited to the ocean. NOPE. Those longships work hella well in rivers. And streams. And are easily carried overland if need be. So guess what: wherever there is water THERE MAY BE VIKINGS. Now, Dark Age Peasants, let's see you sleep well tonight... This is your random medieval blurb for the day.

My father died on the fourth day of Hannukah, 3 weeks before turning 93. May God rest him in peace! He is in the photo, at his 90-th anniversary, with the granddaughter who ressembles him the most, Raluca. 93 years of life means a full, accomplished life. Three daughters from two wives, four grandsons and two granddaughters from the first two (as I can't have children), and he lived long enough to play with three grand-grandsons and two grand-granddaughters. A new grand-grandson will be born soon, and I am curious if they will give him my father's name too. I feel close enough to him to care and be affected... Not as close as a father and a daughter (even divorced) should have been though. There are things in the past I resent him for. I had sought for other father figures in my life when he wasn't around, in my childhood and teen years: my mother's cousin, a work colleague of my mother's, then the fathers of two of my friends were also a bit like my fathers. And these ...absences can't be erased from my soul. It is something I grew up with, since I never knew a father in the house, and I had to come to peace with. With the children's questions and wrong assumptions. With my feelings of something lacking when everybody mentioned their fathers in a certain context. But I know I wasn't the only one to go through this. And I am glad I knew him, even if later, and that I have memories with him, to cherish now. There are things I admire him for too. He was strong of mind and optimistic, even if he was doing dialysis for the last 1-2 years three times a week. Stronger than my mother, who is 86. He used the computer as long as he could see on it, when I have colleagues my age who can't adapt to the modern technology. He wrote his memories in MS Word, he copied CDs, listened to music and watched movies on the pc, talked with me on yahoo. More than some younger people are able to do. And he was an extraordinary man, living through extraordinary times - he had been Jewish during the Second World War, he chose to be a communist since young, when they were outlawed. He had learnt as much as he could - both in technical field, where he was a... junior architect, I think it's called in English the one who has only the architecture college, not the full degree, and in the economics field, where he got to be a renowned economist with several books and publications. He had been an expert in his field, prices and tariffs. Even after retirement, people called him for expertises in court, when there were trials related to this. He had talent at drawing, at cooking... which I haven't inherited from him, unfortunately. I used to say that I don't love him, even if I don't hate him either. But maybe I do love him still. Or at least, I care more than I expected to. Maybe in my own, strange, convoluted way, not like everyone. But I didn't expect to cry for him as much as I have done it since I heard about his passing. It feels stranger and helpless because I am at so much distance and I can't go there now. I can't be with my sister (OK, halfsister... does it matter how much percent one has the same blood? I don't think so.) And as I told her at phone, words are useless. How to say "Condolences" when it's more than this. One says this to somebody stranger, but when it hurts the same... there have to be invented new words. And when they aren't invented, then tears might be enough. And here... I can't do anything significant either. I don't know even what mourning customs to keep, since we don't share the same religion. Me, Christian Orthodox, he and my halfsister, Jewish. I had the same dilemma when my eldest halfsister died in 2003. Then, it was my father who understood and helped me in his own style. He made a sort of memorial book for her and gave me one copy as well. It sort of made up for not being there. And when I succeeded to arrive there, in 2008 and 2011, I went to the cemetery too. Ultimately, after a long consideration, my husband and I decided to keep mourning for him for a few weeks. Until New Year's Eve. But he will be in my soul forever, for the memories we have got together. It is just right. And the candles have been lighted in my house for him ever since. There will be some other things I want to do too. Both some Jewish and some Christian Orthodox, because this is how I know to deal with death. Some time within this month, I want to go to the Jewish Community when the Kaddish is said, and to read it with the others. I am not sure if I'll go to the Synagogue or maybe only to the Community, which seems less intimidating for me. When I read the Kaddish for my halfsister, it was also at a community event. As for how I know to deal with death, yes, he'll be on the lists of prayers for the dead, together with my deceased sister and the others of his family, as my prayers list for the deads has three rows for three different families, and I would never admit to anyone who might not understand, that the people listed on the middle line are not Christian Orthodox. Some people said that prayers are good no matter in which faith; this is how it got to be like this. I'll give for charity in his name, according to the Orthodox traditions. Including to a young man who has somehow a part of his name, even if not his sound, practical mind... And I am sure I'll find more ways to express my feelings. Probably in written, since this is what I can do better. Farewell, my father! I am glad I knew you, I am glad we have some beautiful memories together. The hurtful part will efface in time. Death brings forward the happy memories. I am glad I am the mix of two different nationalities and cultures. I am glad I had the opportunity to know yours too, and that you and my sisters have helped me with this.

I hate Reign. Stop talking to me about Reign. You want medieval shows? You want Renaissance shows? HERE are some you ought to spend your time with instead: RENAISSANCE: Borgia- Netflix. Italian sets. Gorgeous and at least quasi-historical costuming. Actual faithful replicas of some of the jewelry. Balls-out crazy plotlines while yet remaining a touch closer to the spirit of balls-out crazy that actually made up the Borgia-era papacy. The Borgia: Showtime. STUNNING costumes, great cast and heartbreaking plots. I love this show too. Wolf Hall: Technically Tudor-era but also good. I don't even like Henrican/Tudor era but this is acceptable and the costuming is both brilliant and almost entirely accurate (dear GOD wtf are those hoods why did you do this, Tudor England? WHY?) MEDIEVAL: Vikings: Technically Dark Ages not medieval but still freaking fantastic. Worth it just for the eye-candy. Totally inaccurate clothing but I love the plot enough not to mind. At least it's believable fantasy Viking most of the time. And the plotlines actually compel me to watch. The Bastard Executioner: Medieval Wales in the reign of Edward II. An increasing amount of fantasy elements showing up but I like it, even if the plot's going a little slow and the fact the main female lead is named Love... annoys me to no end yet the show is good enough to let me keep watching. Not very accurate clothes but believable enough and they're working within a budget so at least you can tell they TRY to be medieval. Mostly they succeed very well: if I wasn't someone who does medieval clothing for FUN I wouldn't notice. The Last Kingdom: Dark Ages/ early medieval. This is when the Vikings are taking over England and Alfred the Great will be the one to throw them back. Touch of mysticsm here and there but overall AMAZING. You should go watch. Marco Polo: Netflix series. 12th century Mongol court. I don't actually know much about Mongol clothing but I suspect a lot of this is hysterically wrong to someone who does know that era but it's at least believable-ish. What the series does get right is the Mongol way of thinking and doing things, and the conflict within the Mongol peoples as Kublai's court becomes increasingly Chinese while others remain closer to their own traditions. This show is so far from being about Marco most of the time that I love it. I LOVE the intrigues in the court, I love Jingem's hair, and I love Kublai Khan.

I DON'T CARE ANYMORE (Or so I say in this moment; tomorrow I might discover that I am actually caring, and just attempting to grow a shield around myself). I want to write with everybody, and I see lots of character opportunities which remain unused. No fault of mine; I have shown them to everybody, they have been invited into threads, for certain plots the NPCs and characters for adoption had been publicly advertised, together with their plot opportunities. If nobody is interested, even if there are plenty of interesting opportunities, then what else I can do than writing them alone? I don't see anything bad in writing a story alone; I'd see it as bad if others wanted to join and I didn't allow them. When I keep encouraging them but they don't, then it is up to them, not up to me. Some promise they would write. They show their interest, in some cases they even post 1-2 posts... then they stop writing. Sometimes they stop any communication, not knowing if they ever intend to return or not. Sometimes they are still here, lurking... but not writing. Sorry, but if you have characters in the story, it means keeping them active, showing initiative, involving them in various plots (eventually without being prodded and invited, but by your own initiative), answering with new ideas when I am asking, in plot threads, "what story twists would inspire you to write more consistently? Which is the story you want to tell?" If you keep silence, it means you don't want anything to happen. And in that case, sorry to tell you, but nothing will happen to your characters whom you keep away even from threads where it would be natural for them to be a part of. Do you remember the words you have witnessed at the weddings shown in movies? "If any person here can show cause why these two people should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace." You didn't speak when asked. If you kept silence then, it simply means the time to object has passed. You missed the opportunity to be a part of that story. Most likely, deliberately. Then... why complain, when you avoided it and stayed away? And in these cases, where people join and vanish, or lurk but don't plot and don't write (well, I guess plotting but not writing to make it happen is worse, and it had happened many more times)... why are you wondering that I am writing alone, and that I find more ideas for plots involving my own characters than yours? Simply because I am tired of empty promises and unfinished stories which, ultimately, still my other characters have to save from the graveyard and lead to completion... So, yes, I am writing. And I keep writing. I don't care anymore if you do or not. I know I am giving you the right example - it is up to you if you follow it or not, but don't tell me you didn't have the opportunity, because you did. You could have done exactly what I am doing. With me, with others, or all together. I don't care anymore if you badmouth me for writing alone, when you know my first preference wouldn't be to write alone, but with you and with others. However, don't expect me to trust you again after you have let me down and you have made me to put my creativity on curling pins in order to apply damage control to several abandoned threads and give them a proper ending.

You say you like your character. OK, then maybe you know that no character development can happen unless you post regularly and get involved with him in the story. That a character grows through interaction with other characters, while doing his duty, while partying or while fighting. There can be (and are recommended to be) individual plots too. But, again, just planning them and not actually writing them doesn't count. He has to be actively part of the story if you want exciting things to happen to him, to grow, to develop, to make friends. Equally, logging in and lurking on the site without actually writing doesn't count; your characters still don't get the development you want. There is no other magic solution than get to actually write.

One hears it so often from RPG partners - "If you don't like it, go write a novel (or fanfiction) instead!" But is this really the solution, instead of talking with the writing partners and finding by negotiation and compromise a solution matching everyone's writing needs, halfway? Writing a novel? Been there, done that (in my mother tongue) - several novel-length stories. (The list is somewhere here, in this blog, but given that it doesn't allow me to past links in words anymore, I give up searching for it. Breaking my blog entry with http links splashed as such isn't an aesthetic I prefer.) And yes, I do finish what I start. But writing a novel is a lonely endeavour. Just me and the computer (or notebooks before) and the research sources. Then, it stays somewhere in a corner of the computer and this is it. If in the past some people were curious to read the manuscript, even when it was handwritten on paper because nobody had a PC (and the existing PCs were writing on colourful cards, not on paper at that time) now people don’t read as much in general, I have noticed this. Since I discovered that RPGs do exist, ie one can write a story together with other people, and get it published on the internet for more people to read it and to discuss about it, I have no more interest in writing alone. (I might return to it some day, I don’t dismiss the possibility. But maybe something would change in order for me to return. Maybe at that moment I’d have around me a support group interested in reading and discussing characters, plots, motives, literary techniques). I like more writing with others instead of writing alone, plotting with others instead of doing it alone, making come true both my stories and the others’, negotiating and finding a midway for aspects where the expectations are radically different, so that it keeps being fun and interesting for all of us, discussing what’s behind the story and the research process, gossiping and discarding several alternatives after choosing the one with the most ripples for the plot. Finding online likeminded friends of any ages, places, cultural, social and national background, interested in writing and reading, when there are none around me. So yes, this is the answer why I wouldn’t write a novel alone, but one with others (a RPG, how writing with others is called) but still applying the rules of creative writing to this writing endeavour, planning included (just planning together, no more alone, and writing together, no more alone).

NIGHTMARE ZERO'S POPULARITY ON THE RISE A recent new video game released at the beginning of this year has gamers from all over Nyxis flocking to play. The video game, which is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) is set in a fantasy land called Sedna, where players can choose a character from several different classes to explore, fight monsters, interact with other players, and more. The open-ended plot of the game, which involves taking on jobs, fighting monsters against one another, and joining guilds, is said to be a large part of the draw. Read more here!

What can they do what pirate men can't? I honestly can't understand their appeal (and I have 2 pirate men). I am honestly exasperated. Pirate women existed, indeed. But they were damn rare, and not exactly in command position. Yes, you'll say Grace O'Malley, Sayida Al Hurra and Ching Shih But even they were more pirate ship owners than captains, and they had captains to actually command the ship. Pirate men were plenty. Some ships allowed no women aboard, others had 2-3 women and a full complement of men (50, 70, 100 or more). So yes, pirate women were rare. And since I joined my first RPG, in August 2009, I have seen lots of pirate women characters. On one RPG, there was a full ship with pirate women, led by a lady captain. I know, that was more pirate fantasy than historical fiction. And this was exactly what I didn't want to see happening when I made "Before the Mast". A place for historical fiction, not historical fantasy. Still I had seen lots of people complaining "why I can't make a pirate girl my first character? But I want a pirate girl!" As if they desperately wanted a pirate story, a man couldn't do even more things than a girl could. Some portrayed correctly or at least acceptably (and accepted as second characters), others so fantastic that they didn't get approved, asking for changes the writers didn't want to make, in order to make them more realistic and less special snowflakes. I still can't understand what's the appeal. Yes, I had a sailor girl too for a while (not a pirate, a girl disguised as a boy, with a history which made sense for her - and a sailor girl while having 4 other sailor men aboard the other ships and writing NPCs for all ships too); but she isn't one anymore for one year and a half of actual writing (and about 7-8 months in the story). And when she'll go at sea again, probably in 2-3 years of story time and after the timeline of the actual story writing, it will be on her brother's ship - not a pirate, not a Navy one, just a little merchant family ship on which women weren't as rare. Which is my problem now, you may ask, as long as I am sticking to the rule of having people first getting another character, or having a woman start as civilian and working up their story to become a pirate? This ensures dedicated writers whom one can trust, to write realistic characters. But, at the same time, it doesn't solve the problem of pirate women being rare. Because in this rhythm of having dedicated long-term members who want a pirate girl (who is well written)... I can't deny them, but at the same time the ship becomes in greater measure exactly what I wanted to avoid: girl-filled. Then where's the rarity? At the same time, this opens another can of worms - "why there are many pirate girls and I am still denied to make one?" (answer: because you just arrived set to make a pirate girl, without willing to work to earn this.) My purpose is to bring the 18-th century to our people, to have the opportunity to live our adventures (as males or females, it counts less for me; the story per se counts, and the most appropriate character to make it happen will do it. If it happens this to be more males at sea and females ashore, so be it). My main reason for keeping them as rare as they actually were in history is "but history says women didn't fully participate in their setting in real life, so we don't want them to do so in ours". We are not trying to write a fantasy society where everything is possible, but to replicate somehow the real life of that time, with its society constraints. And I think here comes my problem: they were rare; when everyone and her mother wants to be one... how come are they rare anymore? And if 50-60% of the ship crew are female... how is it realistic anymore? I have tried to encourage male seafarers a lot. If in that setting women didn't go on adventures, you choose the setting knowing that those were the society expectations, men to go on adventures and women to have land-bound professions. So this is where my understanding fails, because if you know these were the conditions... why do you want something different? Let's assume I am talking about a different setting: amazones'society, and I join it. I read the setting and the rules, then I decide what characters I want. If I want a warrior character... would I make a man? No, a woman. If I want also a male character, I would make him a slave to the amazones... but highly skilled slaves existed, so I'd make him a carpenter or stonecarver. Am I clear enough what I am saying? Why do people make characters which don't fit the story, instead of trying their best to choose the most appropriate characters for OUR story, not for some other one (colonial or fantastic)? Why so many try challenging the story instead of adapting to it by bringing the most appropriate character to implement that part of the story?

It just has to come sooner or later, in a painful or natural and serene way. Why now? Because the bells were tolling. Why now? Because the new moon in Sagittarius is the moon of unexpected changes. And I have to open to them, no matter what they would entail. To mourn my losses, to gather the remained pieces... and to go forward. I had moments of hesitation, when I thought I'd give up. But I can't. There is no turning back, ever.... just forward. "Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar!" - Traveller, there is no road, the road is made by your steps.

What can I say about Halloween? There is actually not that much that I can tell you about Halloween since we do not celebrate it over here. What I can tell you is my story of celebrating Halloween last year in West Hollywood. I stayed in LA for 10 months last year for my internship. I also was here during Halloween, which honestly was some kind of crazy happening for me. It was hard to understand what it was all about and at some point I just stopped thinking and went along with it. My friend took me to Disneyland and we went trick or treating there, dressing up and it was fun. I had not expected it to be so much fun, but it was a pleasant surprise. What has made the biggest impression on me was going to West Hollywood to watch the parade there. To see all these costumes and that people had worked so hard on them. It was a very different kind party or celebration and I think how we celebrate things and how Halloween was celebrated in La both have their pros and cons. It is certainly a special celebration and I am extremely grateful to have been party of it. I will miss it this year for sure but who knows in the future I might celebrate it again. Love, Amelia

I think that in writing a story together with other people, negotiation and compromise are the key words. (Some see compromise as something bad, they give it a negative meaning. No, I don't mean that kind of compromise, but giving and taking mutually, and meeting the others half-way. And some people are really willing to do this, and I am thankful to them.) Why do I say negotiation? Because the objectives of each character must be met. Not only mine and not only yours. And this is why, while I accept surprises and sidetracking from the initial plan, as our muses lead us, I don't like somebody (or me) throwing a major, life-altering event without prior discussing it on yahoo or in a pm with all the thread partners. Because it is not only their character's story, it is everybody's together, and everybody has to find something fun (or interesting) in it. Usually, the answer is "yes". I had never said "no" to a plot ideas which made logic for the characters, however I have said enough times "yes, but let's twist it a little for this reason," so that all characters' goals are met and the story is not spoiled for any of the characters. When entering a thread, I want to know an outline beforehand and find my own, original way through it. This way of working has several advantages: 1) for me, half of the fun is also outside the board, plotting with the others, on yahoo, our next moves... It is also a kind of spontaneity, but a different one - throwing ideas at each other (some thought before, some spontaneous indeed, which came at the result of the other's idea), analysing the potential reaction of our characters in different situations and what makes logic and what doesn't really - this way we are playing more scenarios before choosing the best one to write it. We end in actually writing one idea, but we are playing with 3-4-5 alternative ones before deciding the one to be written, so it gets more fun than playing only with one idea! And even if 1-2 of those ideas exchanged happen to be silly, we still have fun with them before agreeing that it wouldn't be feasible for the x reason. Or other times we merge 2 ideas, one of each of us, in a new one, more interesting/ intriguing! The ones who are against plotting might allow themselves this experience once, for a try, and see if they haven't fun with playing with several alternatives before choosing the best one. 2) we end knowing better both our characters and the others', from this discussing the plot before. And sometimes new characters or NPCs emerge from here. 3) Some ideas don;'t make sense and they are discarded, but on one's idea the others add too. And when it is a negotiation process so that everybody's goals get met, both the story and the character developement (each character's) are enforced, without running the danger of somebody spoiling the story. Because if 2 or 3 people strive to write a good thread, then it would be a pity that one of them attempts to ruin it only because of a miscoordination! But if talked in advance and properly analysed, his idea might have merits and be included in the story somehow (probably not in its entirety, but only bits and pieces or slightly changed) without ruining it. 4) it reinforces the friendship and community feeling between writing partners. 5) it helps with some details which go"building towards" a main event; I like doing it in respect to almost all my characters in a story. I mean nothing comes out of the blue, when it arrives to that point, even if it might be unexpected for the reader at that moment, he might say: "I could have known it before if I was paying attention to little hints". I had tried the surprise road too (both "totally surprise" version and "agreed beforehand in a way, but partner changes mind and does the radical opposite"), but it definitely doesn't fit my style. My writing gets slowly building towards something, and once we get to the scene we have been building to, looking backwards, there are a lot of little hints to the readers (which could have been interpreted the right way or not , but they are crumbles on the road). If the castle is shattered and the opposite happens... all my work, all my writing, had been for nothing, and my character is looking like a fool... worse, I as the writer seem a fool in these conditions. You would say that "it happens in real life too" for people not to get the expected outcome, and I am not in favour of "happily ever after" scenarios when it is not the case. I am in favour of a heads up given to the writer a while before, not being put in front of the accomplished deed, in order to find the best way for the character to deal with the situation. Yes, the character might still look like a fool if this is desired, but the writer doesn't anymore.

Warning: This is a VERY LONG One-Shot. This is the head-canon for my character and his backstory up to his present situation. ( Special thanks to @Morrigan and she knows why ) Born to a well-to-do family in suburban France, Henri was bounced between family estates a lot as a child. He wouldn't remember the reason; that his parents were not having a good time of their relationship. He wouldn't remember the fighting, or the screaming. Instead, Henri would remember the sheep and the goats, making cheese, and bouncing between public school and a prestigious, expensive academy his father insisted he go to. Summers spent with Russian cousins who were sent to visit who smoked cigarettes, and drank cheap vodka. The Russian he learned was passable. Enough to communicate with the older, wilder kids. But when it came to school, Henri would spend month here, a month there. It wasn't an ideal situation, but Henri thought nothing of it. It never occurred to him that it was anything but normal. The bloody fights, when both his parents would come home covered in blood--they didn't bother him. He didn't question it. His parents were the alpha pair of their pack. It was part of the territory, right? To continue reading, click the spoiler: © Ghost, 2014

There isn't some self-agrandizing in death. No. Not unless you die doing something particularly ridiculous that in some way glorifies your death while also being self serving to your memory. Or at least that's how it typically is. You don't remember those who are just simply dead. Or maybe you do. But there are thousands of people who die every day and not everyone gets even so much as a funeral. Some are simply gone. Their bodies are sent to be cremated. The ashes are dumped unceremoniously or put in a box on the shelf in the back of the crematorium. Not everyone gets a funeral. Please click the spoiler tag to continue reading the story. © Ghost, 2014