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sistervirtue · 4 months

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making a copy of this bc op disabled reblogs and i just got reminded it existed and would like to not lose it

ok so . im outing myself to the world but thats fine this is too funny to not share

so. ive run a roleplay blog for a few years. i keep it separate from my main, yknow, its just a side hobby and ive been doing it since i was like, 12. its cringe but hey yknow at least im not 30 and writing ya novels

now its pretty common for rp blogs these days to have rules. right? you dont want to just bag any weirdo on this website, and as you can imagine bnha roleplayers are batshit crazy (see: conversion therapy todoroki) so mine are pretty strict and detailed. because ive been doing it long enough to be exposed to what counts as carbon monoxide poison from a screen. one of those rules is "if youre mutuals with people who write porn of the kids even aged up im blocking you we're keeping a ten foot pole on this". because as a 20 year old man i have a healthy disinterest in seeing paragraphs of teenagers fucking

so the dash is astir with talk of a guy writing age up bakugou porn and im like ok whatever. make a post bitching about it . mutual likes those posts but then the mutual is turning around and being buddy buddy with this guy so i dm the mutual like hey whats going on here . mutual is like "well why dont you talk it out with him hes not as mean as he seems i prommy" and im like sure whatever i can have civil conversation and if it ends with One Less Person writing weirdo porn then i might be able to get into heaven

so i dm him and he loses his fucking mind. it lasted all of 10 minutes because he was sending paragraphs like this and i was too tired to give a shit

(take note of my icon thats a special tool thatll help us later)

(also he goes by the name rxgelord. WITH the x. thats also important just because its funny as fuck)

so the guys clearly bothered by the idea that people might possibly talk about him without his permission and im a little miffed after being misgendered (which hed do again later) so i just post our dms. swing first and hey batter batter lets play ball i dont give a shit this is bnha roleplay

once again: loses his damn mind. he makes a psa post about me talking about how im just some pussy infant and hes too HARD for me and shit and also they do bakudeku muffin roleplay in the comments of that post which is fucking insane

anyway. at one point while joking about the whole thing i called him a "wannabe bakugou kinnie" as a joke and apparently he felt a very serious need to address this

and im like holllllllllllllly fucking shit

you may have noticed that his posts are incredibly over-formatted. this goes for everything he does he is pouring a LOT of time and energy into typing his 9 paragraphs about how im an insane bitch or whatever. (if theres literally one thing i can give him credit on its that his graphic editing skills are kinda good. i will be honest) his rules document is also just as insane and features gems such as:

(this dude thinks hes pulling bitches on a bnha roleplay blog)

so we're just full on ragging on him at this point and hes getting MADDDDDDD MAD. he misgenders me again and when i point it out he has the following excuse:

(art by @/pcktknife. anyways)

after a certain point i get dmd an old copy of a 130+ page callout he had a year prior and im like WHAT and it included his yugioh rp blog career and various allegations like having been involved in gang violence, doxxing, etc. also a picture of the hickies he bragged about leaving on his uwu pink glitter gf which looked more like he was trying to go for the killing bite but hey. yknow. apparently im a toddler idk how that works

along in this we also find his twitch account, which was under the name rxgelord, and it featured edited graphics of his real life face with bakugou. he posts selfies a lot too i wont share them even if theyre public but he has knuckle tats and a goatee and uses the greyscale filter. if this gives you an idea. he also had 5 twitch followers and detailed his desire to be a rapper/dj and im like holllllly fucking shit this guy cant be a real person. holy fuck.

anyways. skipping a lot of unnecessary bullshit and paragraphs of text with gifs from 2013 attached hes constantly going on about how we wont just "say it to his face" which i think is hilarious bc i was, the entire time. but im like ok fine you want me so bad

so i send him this. he posts about how "he won when he got all might" (for some reason hes calling my ex mutual by the character name. i dont know) and then hasnt posted in 4 days. he deleted his twitch. im a little worried bakugou. dont say that. may have actually chased this man off the internet . to go have real life sex with his real life girlfriend so he isnt so mad

anyway we ended up turning one of his posts into an eminem uberduck

im honestly probably forgetting something this was so much and it was so fucking funny and honestly im glad to have been there

update: he has not in fact posted since last summer. god bless.

#just copy pasted it . for posterity #very funny how in the og ppl are asking abt ctt. dont worry abt it #bakugou dont say that

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dulcesiabits · 7 months

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genuine question what did you do in order to get so much attn and stuff on fics? like writing skills aside cause obvs you're really talented but is it like the way you tag stuff or did you join networks or smth?? cause no matter how hard i try my stuff doesn't really get notes🥲

Hi!!! I'm going to be honest and say that getting attention to your writing is a combination of a lot of different factors, but a majority of it boils down to luck. Success, too, looks differently for each person, so what does it look like to you? What does engagement mean? 50 likes? 100 likes? A heartfelt anon ask?

But don't feel bad if you don't think you're getting any notes! It's not a reflection on your writing skills at all. When I was just starting out, it took me a while to gain attention. However, I can give you a breakdown of how I, at least, think gaining traction works! I have been writing for a long time now. Under the cut for length.

1). Time. This may not be the most immediately helpful advice to you, but I've had this blog for four years. I've had time to establish myself as a writer and gain followers. That means people "know" or "recognize" me, and though I wouldn't say I'm popular (that is hard to gauge, after all), that does mean I have had time to establish myself. If you're a newer writer, then you've had less time to build that sort of credibility or rapport than an older blog has. Also, sometimes it takes a while for a piece to kick off! A lot of my posts have accumulated notes over the years, not just all at once.

2). Networks/mutuals. I'm not in any networks (though I have considered joining some), and I'm a bit of a private person, but it does help to talk to other writers. I can't verify for networks and how helpful they are, but I can verify making friends with other writers and interacting with them. If nothing else, having the support and being able to support people with similar interests as you is really sweet! It means you don't feel like you're writing alone in a void, and I personally treasure my writing friends dearly. Bouncing ideas off of other people is super fun!

3). Tagging. I don't think I tag my fics in a particular way, but it is nice to have consistent tags, so readers know what to look for, and can easily filter out the writing they do or don't want to see. So, I have a general writing tag ("liya writes"), but I also tag things like "character x reader" and "character name." I would recommend that you only tag things that are relevant to your fic, if only for courtesy. Trying to boost your fic by adding unrelated tags might see like a good idea, but it will be inconvenient for other people who, for example, didn't want to see a Childe fic in the Diluc tag, and turn people off from your writing.

4). Formatting. This may seem like a small thing, but I think the appearance of your writing is important. Do you have a consistent theme or organization? Do you have summary, word count, warnings, and the name of the characters who appear in the fic? Most importantly, if it's a long fic, do you have it under a read more? How is the writing itself separated? Bullet points? Paragraphs? Is it easy to read, or is it one long block with no differentiation? A pop of color never hurts, either! I personally keep my posts simple, with blue and pink dividers for a bit of color, and all the necessary information at the very top of the fic. Consistency and ease of reading are important to consider! Is this something that attracts a reader's eye?

5). Promoting. How do you promote your fics? This falls under a similar vein as "tagging" and "networks/mutuals," too. Sometimes it's good to reblog your own fic at different points of time, so followers who are new or don't dig around in your masterlist can see it! And sometimes, having other people (especially writers) reblog your work can give it the exposure it needs! I would warn against asking writers to reblog your work, though, especially if you don't know them, just out of courtesy. I might ask my friend to reblog a piece if I don't feel confident it'll do well, but I would never ask a complete stranger who I don't know.

6). Posting time. When do you post your fics? Weekend? Weekday? Afternoon, or night? I think there is a particular time when people are on tumblr the most, so it might be helpful to look those statistics up to maximize the coverage your writing receives. Time zones are something to keep in mind, too. Additionally, are you posting when the fandom is at peak popularity, or are you posting after hype has died off? The engagement you receive also depends on how much people are into the current fandom you're in.

7). Content. What sort of fandoms do you write for? Are they older fandoms, newer ones, smaller ones, or bigger ones? Who do you write for? Popular characters? Less-known ones? You might find less engagement with a smaller fandom, or a less popular character. Additionally, what do you write? Longer fics? Headcanons? Drabbles? I think, in general, that longer pieces might take off a bit more slowly, but tend to linger more, but short pieces will explode immediately, but might not be something people come back to as much. This is only because of the length of time it takes to read, and different readers are attracted to different formats.

8). Luck. And no matter how well you follow all the rest of my advice, there's still a chance your writing might not take off. Again, that's nothing on you, but more so to do with the fact that engagement is ultimately unpredictable. There's no set way to predict what sort of writing your potential audience will resonate with you. I'm sure plenty of writers can tell you about fics that they laboriously poured over, only to receive no comments on it at all. On the other hand, sometimes posts blow up when you didn't expect them to!

I'm not going to tell you that notes don't matter; after all, it's not wrong to want engagement or acknowledgement over your craft. We post things online for a reason. But it is important to ask yourself what you ultimately want out of sharing your writing: do you want a community? To connect with others? For clout? To hone a skill? Or just for fun? Maybe there's a variety of reasons you post. I can't say tell you how to feel, and there is no "wrong" reason to want to write. But notes also aren't everything, and I hope you have enjoy what you're doing at the end of the day!

#liya answers #i think its helpful to solidify your own goals around writing! what do you want out of it? what is success? what are your goals?#and my controversial opinion is that idgaf if people write for clout #just like its fine to want notes. nothing wrong with wanting attention #like i take writing 100% seriously but not everyone does and thats ok #its still valuable that are people are trying to learn a new skill and practice a very fun craft #do i have some writing pet peeves? yes...#but i mind my business at the end of the day #maybe with minor complaining to my friends. LOL

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kwiyoshi · 8 months

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彡✎ Is Blogging Still a Thing, or Did It Get Lost in MySpace? ("Is blogging still relevant in the age of TikToks and Instagram?")

Every time I go on social media platforms like Twitter or Tumblr, I can post the most trauma-dumping content to ever exist, or even post the funniest memes. This image is all I could think about in regard to that.

In a world where cat videos go viral and memes have become a form of communication, it's high time we ask: Is blogging still relevant in the age of TikTok and Instagram?

Blogging? Whats that

A blog is defined as an online journal or informational website that displays content in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts appearing first. It serves as a sort of forum for writers to express their opinions on specific topics (Minaev 2023). Over the years, the relevancy of blog sites such as Tumblr and even Blogspot (now known as Blogger) seems to be declining.

Tumblr, tumbled away

For Tumblr specifically, I noticed that not a lot of people are talking about or even using Tumblr after they banned explicit content on the platform. Honestly, even before they banned adult content, I still never heard anything about Tumblr. However, it was reported that the website experienced its most significant drop in the number of blogs following the ban on adult-oriented content in December 2018, plummeting from 521 million to less than 370 million in just two months (Eira 2023).

To make matters worse, Tumblr does not even appear on any of the social media usage rankings anymore. Most people nowadays would prefer using social media platform giants such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. In short, Tumblr fell off. From that, it seems that Tumblr isn't "the vibe™" anymore with Gen-Zs.

Despite Tumblr not seeing the light of day in today's generation, I do think that blogging in general is still relevant on platforms such as Twitter and its newest competitor, Threads (from Meta). I do think that some, if not, most of the community from Tumblr has migrated to Twitter due to the similarities that the two platforms have.

Twitter, Oops I meant X

Twitter, or you can even call it "X" (don't call it that), has done quite an amazing job at carrying on Tumblr's legacy but through a different format. Twitter is considered as a microblogging platform that combines content creation and instant messaging. It also increases interaction with an online audience by sharing brief remarks using a microblog (Sprout Social 2023). Personally, I think that Twitter is a great platform to receive news, interact with the fandom that I am in, and also see who got canceled (again). I feel that part of the reason why Twitter seems to be more popular than Tumblr is due to the character limit that Twitter has, which is capped at 280 characters per post (without the premium subscription). As someone who suffers from mild ADHD, I would prefer Twitter to Tumblr for that reason. I find that Tumblr could be quite overwhelming to some people, especially those who have just started out. Twitter, on the other hand, is mostly short-formed content, that can also be separated out as a thread.

Here are a few examples that I took from my own Twitter page:

Hanging on by a Thread(s)

Threads (from Meta), is also really similar to Twitter in terms of everything. It is also a microblogging platform. In my honest opinion, I quickly got tired of Threads after a week of using it. I just thought it was quite boring to use and there isn't really anything new other than being able to still use your existing Instagram account to create a Threads account. It just felt really similar to Twitter and I think that might be part of the reason why it is not doing as well. I also feel like I am very comfortable with Twitter and have been a part of Twitter for a long time now (even though it got rebranded to "X"). I still hate the fact that Twitter got rebranded to X. No one can ever make me call it X.

Welcome back to my channel !

Besides Tumblr and Threads, blogging has also evolved into a video format, called vlogging. Vlogging is short for video blogging or video logging (changing the b to v from blogging, very original). Most content creators nowadays would typically post either their daily routine or the adventures they had on platforms like YouTube or TikTok. Each of their videos has a unique style that fits the aesthetic or personal preference of the creator. I find that vlogging is one of the easiest media to consume due to the fact that it is in a video format where I can see their vlogs visually and also from their own perspective.

Final thoughts and prayers

Overall, I do believe that, in some aspects, blogging is still a thing and is also relevant in the ages of TikToks and Instagram. With social media platforms such as Twitter, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, and Tumblr, blogging will remain relevant.

References:

Eira, A 2023, Number of Tumblr blogs in 2022/2023: User Demographics, growth, and revenue, Finances Online, viewed 27 September 2023, <https://financesonline.com/number-of-tumblr-blogs/#:~:text=The%20site%20suffered%20its%20biggest,the%20global%20COVID%2D19%20lockdown>.

Sprout Social 2022, Microblog, Sprout Social, viewed 27 September 2023, <https://sproutsocial.com/glossary/microblog/#:~:text=Microblogging%20is%20a%20combination%20of,offer%20popular%20platforms%20for%20microblogging>.

Minaev, A 2023, What is a blog? - definition of blog, Blogging & Blogger, First Site Guide, viewed 27 September 2023, <https://firstsiteguide.com/what-is-blog/>.

#MDA20009 #Week4

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mypoisonedvine · 2 years

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Okay I’m gonna be honest I think I might have misspoke but I can’t remember basically I’m the anon who’s writing the dark!Steve x adopted!sister fic. I was wondering if this emoji🩻was taken? Thank you for your responses by the way❤️loving all your work! Going to reblog soon I just feel like my comments need to be more eloquent than how they are now.. which brings me to one of my questions? I only just recently made a side blog for fandom type stuff(my main blog is very pg, self care, self love type stuff)(and my brain requires things to be separate), and I adore so many of your works, a lot of them older and I was just wondering if it’d be weird or bothersome if I suddenly started reblogging them with comments and such? I saw that one post about how it’s not formatted like Instagram and how with fics and such it’s more like a library, but I just wanted to make sure with you personally.

oh im big on separating things on blogs too, that's why i have a main and some tiny sideblogs for tiny fandoms and such. and i would be honored to get comments on old fics, that doesn't bug me at all! you're so sweet to check and also just for stopping by again! still so excited for your fic!

#🩻 anon

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lakelandseo · 1 year

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After Google: Should SEOs Jump Ship?

There was a pre-search-engine age. It’s hard to conceive of now, but there was. Even in the early days of search engines, when Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Excite still competed for the crown, I can remember web portals. Pages that I’d start at, in the “computer room” at school, to navigate and explore the web not by searching, but by clicking on organized links.

In the beginning, there were web portals. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

These were already the death throes of a previous internet age. Search engine dominance, and specifically Google dominance, has been the norm for this kind of journey for decades now. It’s all that many SEOs have ever known.

But what comes next?

People have talked for a long time about existential threats to Google's dominance, and often, implicitly, by extension, SEO. You’ll have heard the claims that Amazon or YouTube are now preferred engines for certain kinds of search, or that Google is going to struggle against the unique technological advantages of Apple, AI chatbots, the unique regional advantages of Baidu, or the unique format advantages of TikTok. Or maybe you’ve even heard that people prefer to restrict their searches only to Reddit. Even mainstream outlets are suggesting that Google search quality may be in decline.

This post is not about the health of Google search as a product, or about the implications of improving AI products for your SEO strategy right now. (Although, I know of at least one post for this blog being written on that topic!) Instead, this post is about which of these threats, if any, actually stand a chance of unseating Google’s dominance.

In what capacity?

To ask what might take Google’s role, we must first ask what role it is that we’re interested in. Google is many things, and possibly part of the reason Google’s doom is so often predicted is that we’re not always talking about the same specific things.

What exactly is it that search engines as a genre, and then Google, have dominated? Perhaps we might mean:

The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’ve not yet discovered? For example, you might not know yet what the best site is for a given topic.

The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’re already familiar with? Perhaps you’re searching on Google hoping to see a result from Reddit, or from Wikipedia.

The place you’d start to answer a given question? So maybe you’d be happy with a non-web result as long as it answered your question.

The place you’d start to complete a task? So, again, the best answer might not be a web page at all.

The truth is that the present reality blurs these use cases to the point of it not being useful to separate them. But for Google to be replaced by something that maintains this close alignment, it’d have to be a close peer competitor.

The obvious pretenders

There are two that come to mind, as similarly resourced companies trying similar things via a similar method (a web index): Bing and Apple.

I don’t want to be dismissive of Bing, or of the value of someone — anyone — else maintaining a similar enough competitor to keep Google somewhat honest. Although it’s often mocked in SEO circles, Bing in reality is not so many years behind Google at any given point. But, really, it’s hard to see the events that could lead to Bing supplanting Google at its own game. It’s just too similar for people to make the switch. One possibility based on recent news is for Bing to become less similar, pursuing one of the precise alternatives I’ll cover below - but more on that when we get to it.

Apple, on the other hand, is doing something similar, but with some unique advantages. I must credit my former colleague (and 2023 Mozcon speaker) Tom Anthony who has been very prescient around Apple’s moves in this space, going so far as to backward-engineer Apple search results that weren’t supposed to be publicly available. Apple can do things that Bing can’t, leveraging Apple’s app ecosystem and device integration to provide search results that skip certain steps of a user journey in ways that Google cannot, or will not.

The trouble with Apple as a Google search competitor is obvious, though. The unique advantages, as I said, are to do with apps and hardware. Apple devices are expensive — prohibitively so. (This varies by market - in the US, with the base price of a phone contract being so high, iPhones are more palatable and have a notably higher market share than in Europe, for example. But, that’s a topic for another day - either way…). There is a fairly hard cap on the market share of a search engine that is only superior on high-end devices, and not only that, but ones from a specific brand.

So could Apple take a big chunk out of Google? Yes, it may already quietly have done so with various iOS changes pushing the prevalence of Apple’s own search results. But totally replace Google? Very unlikely.

You can say the same for regional competitors like Baidu, Yandex, or Naver. These may well consistently beat out Google in their own backyards, and perhaps even spread to nearby countries and regions, but it’s hard to see them beating Google in its own backyard(s).

Revolution, not evolution

So what about competitors that replace Google by doing something totally different, to solve the same problems? The reality is that a lot of the problems we solve right now with web search, are not actually well suited to web search. The fact that something like a Google Home will often answer your questions by essentially reading out a featured snippet is a symptom of Google’s dominance, not a symptom of web search being well suited to that use case. Even Google themselves recognize this, and betray that in tools like Google Translate, clocks, calculators, and so on, embedded in SERPs. So who might the more disruptive threats be?

One name that came up a lot in 2022 is TikTok, and I’d point you to this excellent post by Lidia Infante on this very blog. To sum up her argument, TikTok can take market share from Google, but it can’t replace Google entirely. TikTok is too specialized (in video format and certain topic areas), and the quality assurance is too weak. So, again, we have a competitor that chips away at Google without replacing it.

Then of course, most recently, SEOs of Twitter have been right to point out that for many queries, ChatGPT produces better responses than Google. Take this example, “excel query for extraction the domain name from a url”:

The ChatGPT result above is far more informative and easy to follow. However, like TikTok, this only works for certain things. ChatGPT is not a web search engine:

So you have to be willing to abandon the premise that your result should be a web page. Which, in this context, comes down to: do you trust an answer if you don’t know who wrote it? ChatGTP and similar technologies have access to “knowledge” sourced from the web, like Google, but they don’t cite a source. Indeed, it would be immensely difficult to trace the source of their various claims, some of which seem quite… odd.

Similar to TikTok, then, this is something I might prefer to Google for a specific kind of query. In this particular case, the kind of query that previously took me to StackOverflow. But I’m not going to ask it for mortgage advice.

I noted above that Bing is rumored to be integrating ChatGPT with its own search product. This enlarges the threat to Google in that it makes this technology more accessible, but really, the same qualms apply - there are many, many queries for which this is not helpful. Even if Bing can hybridize these technologies into a “best of both” of traditional web search and NLP, well - that’s already the road Google is going down.

The other challenge with this “ChatAI as search” model is an economic one. Google and Amazon have both already come to the conclusion that the type of queries asked of their personal assistant devices are barely, if at all, economic to run - because of the limited monetization opportunities for purely informational queries. Perhaps my distinction above, about what we mean by replacing Google, is very relevant here - some of our use cases of Google as a search engine are actually just a loss leader for others. As such, perhaps this bundling of disparate uses is necessary.

The King is dea… wait, wait, he’s still breathing

Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines in the United States as of January 2022 - via Statista

Ultimately, these threats look set to chip away at Google, not replace it. At worst, a broad monopoly will be sliced up and shrunk, and that doesn’t feel like any great evil. For SEOs, we should be aware of these new search engines, and these new “search engines”, and of the risks attached to being locked into the Google ecosystem. But don’t forget the chart above: the original pie is not going anywhere. The Google SEO game is still not a bad game to be playing.

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bfxenon · 1 year

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After Google: Should SEOs Jump Ship?

In the beginning, there were web portals. The internet was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

But what comes next?

In what capacity?

What exactly is it that search engines as a genre, and then Google, have dominated? Perhaps we might mean:

The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’ve not yet discovered? For example, you might not know yet what the best site is for a given topic.

The place you’d start to find a web page on a site you’re already familiar with? Perhaps you’re searching on Google hoping to see a result from Reddit, or from Wikipedia.

The place you’d start to answer a given question? So maybe you’d be happy with a non-web result as long as it answered your question.

The place you’d start to complete a task? So, again, the best answer might not be a web page at all.

The obvious pretenders

There are two that come to mind, as similarly resourced companies trying similar things via a similar method (a web index): Bing and Apple.

Revolution, not evolution

The ChatGPT result above is far more informative and easy to follow. However, like TikTok, this only works for certain things. ChatGPT is not a web search engine:

The King is dea… wait, wait, he’s still breathing

Number of explicit core search queries powered by search engines in the United States as of January 2022 - via Statista

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hellroots · 3 years

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『 MOBILE FRIENDLY RULES 』

— here you will find my rules or can also find them on my gdocs as well once i’m done with it. please like this if you read it, but otherwise don’t interact with this post, thank you. rest assured that i always read my moots rules before following and that i fully expect the same courtesy. i tried not to let them get too long but feel free to ask me anything you wanna know about them if it’s not clear ok?

『 THE MUN』

NOXTROMUN, THEY/THEM, 21+, BRAZILIAN

shy but friendly ! i don't follow for follow, if i follow you that means i've read your rules and want to write with you. i have no triggers nor squicks of my own except drama in the dash, for that reason i do not engage in callouts/witch hunts and if you do it on a constant basis i might have to hard block you for my own peace of mind. although i may come off too strong/harsh, i am always up to talking things out privately. as long as you are civil, so am i. any form of hate will be deleted and blocked - sometimes mocked, if i’m feeling cocky…

『 THE BLOG』

HELLROOTS, INDIE ( POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING AND NOT MINOR FRIENDLY ), HIGHLY SELECTIVE & PRIVATE MULTIFANDOM MULTIMUSE

primarily run on a low activity \ effort and with a slow speed.. my muselist changes a lot, depends a lot on what i’m watching lately so bear with me please. this is a drama free zone, therefore do realise that mun ≠ muses and (obviously) writing ≠ condoning !! as a quick note, do keep in mind that my blog is my safe space, just as your blog is yours - you are responsible for your own internet experience just as i am responsible for mine. should anything in my blog annoy/trigger/squick you, i strongly encourage you to block me & not write with me - your mental health is far more important ( for me, and hopefully for you as well ) than rp. on that note, please do not softblock me - that’s annoying, just hardblock please.

『 THE TRIGGERS』

TRIGGER HEAVY, PROPERLY TAGGED AND TAKING NO CRAP

i usually tend to write for trigger heavy fandoms (such as asoiaf, kingdom and others) and may incorporate some of it into my writing, muses' backgrounds and overall characterization. if you're bothered \ squicked \ triggered by that, i kindly encourage you to reconsider and not follow me. no amount of rp fun is worth your mental health. i try to tag everything accordingly and i fully expect the same courtesy for our followers' sakes. be aware that there may be mentions of death, gore, violence, consanguinamory \ endogamy (especially when it comes to the lannisters and kekkei genkai clans), rape ( kingdom, though it will only be mentioned on the character’s backstory ) and cannibalism ( hannibal and kingdom ) , as well as unhealthy relationships and dynamics alongside with powerplay, and otherwise bad behaviours. for all that is sacred, please, do note that i, the mun, do not approve, support or condone any of these actions or behaviours !! i simply am capable of separating fiction from reality. as long as everything is properly tagged, with mutual consent and there are no minors involved (muse and especially not muns), . i support the right of a consenting adult to explore these awful dark topics in a safe fictional environment with other like minded consenting adults, people shouldn’t have to share their traumas to strangers on the internet to explain why they write what they write, be considerate. if that notion bothers you perhaps you might not want to interact with me, for both of ours sakes. fair warning, most of my graphics and aesthetics might trigger those who have xylophobia/hylophobia (phobia of trees or wooded areas), and considering it is a main theme here i will not be tagging it, i'm sorry. but its too many. however, if you want me to create a special tag for you, there's no issue! it will be either "[your mun name] don't look!" or "[your url] don't look!", whichever you prefer. QUICK EDIT/ADDITION: i do not believe that aging up fictional characters is inherently a bad thing - from what i understand, the whole appeal of aging up a character is that while you like their personality but you do not want them to be kids (for whatever reason) but insteasd adults. if you are one of those who think that aging up a character is automatically something bad (without even knowing why it was done in the first place) don’t bother following me because i do think that opinion is quite silly.

『 THE INTERACTIONS』

OC, DUPLICATE, MULTIMUSE AND CANON DIVERGENT FRIENDLY

my tagging system is simple, i tag triggers as "tw; x" and . images that may be sensitive or triggering as "cw; x". you can further see how my tags work by taking a look at my tag dump post, just search ‘tag dump’ on my blog and you will find the most recent one i’m using. i shitpost and talk oocly on the dash constantly but you can easily blacklist my tag if it bothers you. here's something you should know about me: when i'm doing drafts i usually don't feel like chatting much, so please do not spam me because i won't be able to reply, i love to talk with my moots but sometimes it overwhelms me. on that note, please don't pester me for replies ic or ooc, i am slow and chances are that if you try to guilt trip me or just nag me about it i'll leave as the ones i'll get to in the later end on purpose, just out of spite. yes, i be like that. please be patient - i’ll never pressure you and expect the same in return. plotting wise: i prefer to just wing it with just a faint idea of where to take the thread but honestly i'm cool with anything. please be considerate when formatting your replies, i have a bad eyesight & if i can't read it, i won't bother with it. my own formatting is simple and clean. on a smaller note, please bear with me and my muses as my muses ramble a lot but you don't have to match the length, just give me something to work with. if we write together, the chances of me making edits/tagging you in stuff are really big, just lmk if you don’t like that though !

『 THE FLEET』

MOSTLY BI/PAN MUSES, MULTISHIP AND MULTIVERSE, SMUT FRIENDLY

i love shipping but i like my ships to be devices to move the plot/dynamics/muses forward, every once in a while though i partake in some much loved self indulgent shipping. just because i ship a certain pairing don't presume that my characters are approaching yours with second intentions, please. most of the time i like to reblog those relationship memes, so if you’re interested in a ship the best way (other than sending me a message ofc) to let me know is by sending ones. there will be some triggering ships here ( like the lannisters, both cersei x jaime and joanna x tywin are my otps, and potential inter clan ships, like with the hyugas - i mean how the hell you think they keep the byakugan in their family?? ) that may either be played with trusted friends or be mentioned/reblogged sometimes, all properly tagged so you can easily blocklist/avoid it. most of my muses are either bi or pan, those who are not will be specified. don't be afraid to reach out to me for shipping right off the bat - i'd rather have you to be open and honest with me about the interactions you want than lying to me, just know that there will be needed some plotting and threading first to see if your muses match. as an adult, my blog is smut friendly, i partake in sexual sunday a lot because some of my muses are very lewd in nature, you can blacklist my tag if that bothers you as well.

『 THE FINAL NOTES』

GENERAL RP ETIQUETTE APPLIES, CREDITS, THANK YOU FOR READING MY RULES

lastly but not least, general rp etiquette applies on my blog: no godmodding, forced ships, etc. there’s only ONE thing that truly makes me go apeshit crazy, and it’s when people don’t read my rules. i ALWAYS find out and it’s not pretty; i block it like it’s hot, ♪ ♫ ♬ block it like it’s hot ♪ ♫ ♬. i strongly assure you that i always read your rules before both following you and also before sending memes, just in case. on a much smaller note, i’m not so hot on single shipping and i really feel weirded out about people forcing me to pic who i’m going to interact with due to theirs DNI’s. while i get DNI’s when it comes to actual predators, when it’s something seemingly random chances are that i’ll softblock you because it weirds me out how volatile some can be when it comes to a hobby. i have some trigger heavy hcs ( for example, the one about jiraiya’s hypersexuality being rooted in trauma that he suffered at a young age ) that i share with only a few muns that are closer with me, so i’ll be mentioning them every once in a while but won’t share them, please don’t insist. i don’t really like most of the main characters of the franchises i write for, and when it comes to certain characters i reserve the right to decline an rp for my own comfort. for further info on what i use to make my graphics please check my “CREDITS.” tag. most of my stuff is made by me, i’ve got a lowkey rph in case you wanna check it out it’s @brazucahelps, however if you want a custom content i can see if i get a free time to come up with something :D

IF YOU READ THIS FAR, THANK YOU SO MUCH — JUST ONE LAST THING, COULD YOU PLS LIKE THIS SO I KNOW YOU’VE READ IT? <3 THANKS!

#RULES.

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todomitoukei · 3 years

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thank you @haleigh-sloth for the tag and the shoutout ♥♥!!!

1. How do you begin writing your analysis: do you start writing about the first thing that strikes you; or do you step back and look at the narrative structure first; or something else?

Hmm depends. I mean a lot of my metas are answers to asks about specific topics/scenes that I receive, so I already have the topic for the meta and then usually just start writing my response however it comes to my mind, only stopping if I have to look stuff up if I don't fully remember scenes/lines that I'm talking about. Once that's done I go over it a couple of times to edit/rearrange/format, etc. When I do my translation comparison posts I just write down the translation first and then do the analysis (I kinda go back and forth all the time when doing this because sometimes I don't feel like doing the translation part anymore and sometimes I don't know how to phrase my thoughts for the analysis part so it's just kinda chaotic and unstructured, but slowly turning into a continuous text)

2. What do you like to keep in mind while writing your analysis/meta?

I like to include sources so that people don't just read my takes and run with them, but are able to check out the references for themselves, too, and draw their own conclusions from them while also getting more details from the sources. That includes referencing the manga by either quoting it or including panels when it comes to what characters have said/done within the story, as well as including sources to back up the conclusions I draw/takes I share (i.e. when talking about anything mental health-related)

3. Do you try to keep your value judgments separate from your analysis?

Kind of? I mean, my main focus is usually the original Japanese text, which is just pretty factual, however, if there is an opportunity to shit on Endvr, well...... :-*

4. Do you prefer analyzing characters, or arcs, or both?

Characters! I always prefer to focus on the psychology/philosophy of things and prefer to treat the story as being part of the characters to further understand who they are as people, rather than the other way around. That being said, society shapes people so I find focusing on the setting of the story very enlightening, too, so if a story has an arc that focuses a bit more on the society/world in the story, then I guess that is also worth analyzing.

5. Do you think receiving feedbacks/responses on your analysis/meta help improve your critical skills?

Nah, most of the criticism/"feedback" on here is from people who lack any kind of reading comprehension so I'm good lol. Writing meta helps me sort my own thoughts so I don't care too much tbh, I kinda prefer reading people's own separate metas in that case because I feel like I usually try to say everything I've wanted to say before pressing post. I do like to see people adding actual valuable insights/correct me when I was genuinely wrong or providing more resources, though, so don't be afraid to add anything to my posts (unless you're just gonna be rude and misinterpret everything I said)

6. Do you consciously decide which media you want to write analysis on or does it naturally come to you?

I mean... this is my bnha side blog so I'm just writing about that, and only because Dabi/the lov/the Todofam live in my head rent-free anyway :) and I honestly wouldn't even know what else to write about? The only other thing that I am absolutely obsessed with is Life is Strange, but it's just my comfort game/series so I don't really care about writing or reading about it.

7. Do you prefer writing long or short metas? Which ones do you prefer to read?

Long metas, both for reading and writing. But good formatting and panels also help to make it easy to read and not get lost in the text, so if the format is shit then short ones. Overall, though, long ones usually mean there are more points brought up and more references made, which means more details to better support the point that is being made. Also, I am unable to keep myself short so I think my posts usually end up being kinda lengthy even when I try to make them short? I definitely always end up debating with myself whether or not I should add a read more somewhere or if it's short enough that it won't piss people off when it appears on their dash, so if I've ever pissed you off... sorry lol.

8. Which are your favourite analysis/criticism/meta blogs?

@transhawks @redphlox @haleigh-sloth @hamliet @thyandrawrites are all incredible blogs that really make being in the fandom fun and I love their insights!

9. Which shows/movies/media do you think deserve to have more analysis done on them?

Hmmm, to be honest, I don't really interact with other fandoms, I usually just consume media and form my own opinions without looking into the fandom's overall take, so I don't know which fandoms don't have a lot of metas. As for which ones I overall think deserve to be analyzed a lot, I think Psycho-Pass, similar to bnha, has a lot of potential for talking at length about the ethics behind their society and how governments often mask their crimes as being for the greater good etc etc. Also, stories like Tokyo Ghoul, Violet Evergarden, and Angels of Death might be really good for metas, too....

10. According to you, what are some prerequisites for good quality analysis?

Providing resources - no one wants to have to fact-check everything on their own, so provide at least some sources for what you talk about. Good formatting is also important. No one wants to read a 10k single paragraph or have to reread a sentence several times because it stretches across a whole paragraph (this is @ Kant and @ me). Additionally, it's really helpful to bold/italicize words/phrases to make reading easier and more accessible.

Tagging: @transhawks @redphlox (I know haleigh tagged you too, but I'm a rebel >:])

#thank youuu haleigh ♥#hope this was at least kinda interesting?? idk #tag thing

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sage-nebula · 3 years

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Game Review — Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

In the past, I was never really one for farming sims. In fact, I used to pass on every single Harvest Moon game because the idea of farming just didn’t seem fun to me. Then I heard you could have same-sex romance options in Stardew Valley, so I played that, fell in love, and thus got very excited for the newest Story of Seasons game, since I knew that Story of Seasons was Harvest Moon previously, and Harvest Moon inspired Stardew Valley.

And all I have to say is . . .

Overall Score: 5.5/10

. . . oh boy.

Well, I actually have a lot more to say than just that, but that should give you a general idea of what the rest of this review is going to be like. I do want to say up front that I have played through the entire first in-game year to give the game a fair shake, so please trust me when I say I did my due diligence to give this game a real chance before I reviewed it. If you’re ready, jump under the cut (best read on my blog for formatting reasons) and let’s get into it.

The Pros:

The character customization, while not perfect, is definitely several leaps in the right direction. None of the clothing or hairstyle options are gender locked, which is amazing. There is a variety of skin tones to choose from. You pick your pronouns independently of everything else, voice included, so you can 100% have a trans character if you want to (or a nonbinary character if you don’t mind using gendered pronouns for your nonbinary character). I do wish the clothing selection was better (especially at the start, when you only have two outfits to choose from) and having different body types would be cool as well, but the fact that you have so much freedom with regards to gender presentation is a definite plus.

Likewise, being able to have same-sex relationships is a huge plus as well. Honestly, it was what convinced me to pick up the game; I might not have gotten it if it didn’t have that option in there, but that pushed me over the edge. I mean, the fact that it’s 2021 means this sort of thing should be expected, but with Japanese games on Nintendo systems it’s really not always guaranteed, so the fact that it was included still does deserve to get a mention as a plus.

It’s easy to raise affection with the villagers by just talking to them, which is an improvement over Stardew where you pretty much had to give gifts to raise affection (because I don’t think talking did it, or if it did, it was abysmally slow). I was able to unlock heart events pretty quickly just by running around the town and talking quickly with the villagers each day, which is particularly nice since the preferred gifts can be pretty expensive at first.

I enjoy that not all of the heart events necessarily involve the farmer, especially for characters that aren’t romanceable. It’s nice to see the villagers interacting with each other more, to see that they have lives and relationships outside of the farmer’s sphere of influence. It also gives you unique insight into the characters, because how they act around or with each other isn’t always how they interact around or with the farmer.

Being able to sow seeds in multiple patches of dirt at once is nice, especially since otherwise it takes much longer than it does in, say, Stardew. I mean, in Stardew you can hold the A button and sow everything at once, whereas in Olive Town you have to do it one press at a time. So to be able to do a multi-plant is very nice.

The pet and mount selection is pretty great, too. I love how many different types of breeds of dog there are, how many different cats and different types of horses, and of course the unique mounts like the unicorn or the wolf.

The farm has a lot of space once you unlock the different areas, and is divided into neat sections to make organizing easier.

Having not played a Story of Seasons game before this one, and knowing that Stardew Valley’s developer was inspired by Harvest Moon, I can’t say entirely which features were unique to Stardew and borrowed and which ones Stardew borrowed first. However, I have seen others claim that the tool bar at the bottom of the screen (which is nearly identical to the one in Stardew) was unique to Stardew, so I can say that this is one area in which they copped something from Stardew and did it well. The fact that you can put your tools into a separate tool bag to make some emergency room in your bag is nice too.

The Neutrals:

While there are a lot of villagers and they all have their own heart events and interactions, the day-to-day dialogue can get very repetitive. I can’t tell you the amount of times Laura has told me about losing track of time during Laura Things, or how many times Jack has told me about how his mom told him about planting different crops and he thinks that’s just too much work. The dialogue only really seems to change around festivals / after plot changes, and it can really make characters that might otherwise feel fleshed out feel more like . . . well, NPCs. Which they are, but you don’t really want them to feel like that in a sim game. So while the characters are (mostly) unique, sometimes they can feel a bit repetitive.

The plot is a bit weird. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s weird that the plot focuses on wanting to turn the local town into a tourist hotspot. I get that the idea is that they want to bring commerce into the town (I guess), but that everyone is on board with it and the fact that it’s essentially gentrification just feels a bit . . . weird, for a game that’s supposed to focus more on nature. The tasks associated with it also get very repetitive, and that’s not even talking about how you literally have to improve the roads and lamps twice to make a difference.

The holiday festivals are also pretty average. It’s either a cutscene, or a tiny minigame (or sometimes not even a minigame, but I’ll get to that). The minigames are charming, but they’re not something that I’d want to do the following year. You’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times. It’s also strange that there’s not a festival to celebrate your farm at all, whereas at least in Stardew we had the Stardew Valley Fair and I hear that in past Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games they had farm celebration festivals, too. It’s just a bit strange.

The music is hit or miss, and mostly miss if I’m being honest, but I’ll still put it here. The songs are too short; they loop far too fast, and often sound no better than you’d expect a game on the GBA to sound (especially that first cave theme, ugh). There are some nice melodies, but again, when I compare it to Stardew (which I know isn’t exactly fair, but also Stardew is made by a grand total of one person when this game had an entire team so I feel it’s at least a little fair), it’s a pretty big letdown in the music department.

The bachelorettes are not very unique. Like, they are different, you can tell them apart, but . . . the primary difference between Bridgette and Linh, for instance, is that Linh is Korean (and also looks like a child which I don’t like at all if we’re being honest) while Bridgette is white. Otherwise they’re both sweet and shy and have basically the same personality. Reina and Blaire are also pretty similar, in that they’re both outgoing party types. The main difference between them besides their hair color (brunette and blonde respectively) is the fact that one works at the museum while the other is a waitress. The only one who really stands out is Laura, and while Laura is great (and the one I chose to marry), it’s still disappointing when you see how varied the bachelors are. It feels like not a lot of effort was put into designing the bachelorettes, which is sad when you consider they’re kind of major characters since they’re part of the dating pool.

The Cons:

This game is AWFUL to play. How, you may ask? Well, let me count the ways:

To start with, the loading screens are atrocious. There are loading screens between everything that you do. You go to town? Loading screen. You leave town? Loading screen. Start your day? Loading screen. Go in and out of barns or coops? Loading screens. And they take ages, or at least in this day and age it feels like they take ages. Particularly when you go into town, immediately realize you forgot a resource you needed for an upgrade, and go back so you get back to back cutscenes, they’re fricking awful. I cannot believe that loading screens this annoying were necessary for this game. I refuse to accept that as truth. They absolutely could have cut out the time it takes to load had they spent more time on development instead of rushing this title out for the anniversary, and speaking of things they could have ironed out in development . . .

THE LAG. THE FREEZING. THE CRASHING. THE POP-IN DISTANCING. If I didn’t know that an entire development team worked on this game, I wouldn’t believe it. This game is, put simply, a mess. Even when my farm was brand new and had pretty much nothing on it, I was noticing framerate drops both in docked and handheld mode. I’m talking, I had maybe one coop and two planted areas for crops, and the framerate was noticeably dropping. And now that I do have more stuff on my farm? Not only is the lag atrocious, but the game can’t load everything on the screen at once and so things have to pop into view after a few seconds. You can see video footage of this here, which also features one of the delightful loading screens. And this doesn’t even get into how the game will randomly freeze, or how I’ve had it crash once already. And from what I hear, I’m not unique in this. The fact they had the nerve to release this game as finished when it performs like this just boggles the mind.

Despite the fact that the Switch has two control sticks, this game plays only with one. This means that you can’t, you know, aim your tools with anything but the main control stick. And when you’re both controlling your character and aiming with the same control stick, the latter gets pretty hard. This leads to me missing things with my axe or hammer even when they’re right in front of me, as well as taking a lot of damage from the cave enemies simply because I couldn’t get in the sweet spot to both hit them with the hammer and also not get hit myself, particularly before they escape. It adds a lot of unnecessary frustration because the controls are so flawed and imprecise.

Similarly, there is a sweet spot when it comes to harvesting or picking up items off the ground, and it’s impossible to determine what that sweet spot is because you don’t get a little aiming box for that. So you can be right on top of an item and unable to pick it up because you’re not in that sweet spot.

Apart from the framerate drops, there is input lag as well. This is most noticeable when swinging axes or hammers, or trying to pet cows and other animals after milking them. And yes, I know it’s the game and not my Switch, because it’s not consistent (and also doesn’t happen with other games). Again, this is something polish and more time in the oven probably could have handled, but now it’s too late and just makes the game frustrating to play.

Technical, mechanical gameplay issues aside, though, there are still a ton of other issues. For instance: makers. Again, I can’t say if previous Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games had these, or if they were invented by Stardew and copped by this dev team, but what I can say is that while makers also exist in Stardew, they are handled way better there than the absolute nightmare they are here. Again, to count the ways:

In Stardew, the makers can sit flush against each other and buildings, as well as flush against paths, making everything nice and not taking up too much space. Here, not only are the makers gigantic, but they can’t be flush with anything. They can’t sit up against each other, against buildings, or against paths. This means that not only do they look ugly, but they also take up a tremendous amount of space that therefore can’t go toward anything else.

In Stardew there are a handful of makers that do things. You’ve got furnaces for making bars, mayonnaise makers, cheese makers, fabric spinners, etc. There’s a variety, but it’s not so much that your farm becomes nothing but makers. By contrast, Olive Town is drowning in makers. You have all the above, but also more that contribute to those because . . . okay, let’s take the fabric spinners for example. In Stardew, you can put any type of wool onto the fabric spinning wheel, which will make one kind of fabric. In Olive Town, you first have to have a thread maker to make thread out of grass, AS WELL AS a yarn maker to make yarn out of wool. THEN you have to have a thread fabric maker to make fabric out of thread (and the thread differs depending on the grass used, which means you can make many different types of fabrics, but only one at a time), AS WELL AS a yarn fabric maker to make fabric out of yarn. So whereas in Stardew you have one maker if you need cloth, in Olive Town you need at bare minimum two, at max four, and that’s not even getting into how slow the process will be if you only have one of each kind. Because each maker only makes one of an item, and then you usually need multiples of that one item to make the next item in the series. So for instance, your thread maker makes one spool of thread, but it takes THREE spools to make one piece of fabric. Then you might need TEN pieces of fabric for a recipe. And the makers all take literal in-game hours to make. When you consider that the costs for some things are very high (the house upgrade I’m on right now requires 80 ingots and 120 pieces of lumber), you pretty much have to have at least four of each type of maker to get things done at any kind of reasonable pace, hence the factory hell my farm is currently in as seen in the above linked video. It’s a fucking nightmare. And yes, maybe it’s more realistic that you can’t go immediately from wool to fabric, but this is a farming sim where you interact with spirits, ride unicorns, and befriend wolves. This is not a game where you need to push realism.

The mining is also just . . . not fun. At all. Not only do you have the “it’s really hard to aim properly, especially when you’re trying not to take damage” issue mentioned above, but there’s also the fact that there’s just no variation. In the first mine there are no enemies at all, you’re just breaking rocks. The second mine introduces enemies, but only one type of enemy (basically little moles that you have to whack with the hammer). The third mine has the same enemies, but they’re stronger and appear in multiples. And that’s it. Unlike in Stardew, where there were tons of different monsters that did different things that made the mines exciting, here it’s pretty boring because the enemies are easy to avoid (and it’s best to avoid them because of how much of a pain in the ass to hit them without taking damage from running into them is) and the levels all pretty much look the same. Whereas I loved dungeon crawling in Stardew, here it’s something I purely do to get ore to make ingots in the stupid fucking makers because there’s literally no entertainment value to it otherwise, especially since the music is subpar at best.

Related to the mining, when you defeat enemies or drain lakes you can find bags of items that need to be identified at the museum. You can only have Reina identify these bags one at a time. So it’s a bunch of spamming the A button and hearing her go “oh!” over and over and over again because they, for some reason, couldn’t implement identifying items more than one at a time. And the best part? Identifying items comes with a LOADING SCREEN between you selecting the item to be identified and Reina identifying the item! How fun!!

You can really tell that they cut corners in this game, content-wise. For instance, the first festival in spring is an egg hunt. You would think that it would be a minigame where you look for eggs (again, like Stardew). You would think that, but you would be wrong. Instead, you get to watch an extended cutscene of your character finding eggs. That’s it. That’s the “egg hunt.” I skipped the mushroom hunt in fall because I assumed it would be the same, but apparently that one actually was a minigame, so joke’s on me, I guess. But either way, the fact that the egg hunt wasn’t an egg hunt at all speaks to cut corners and rushed dev time, just like the myriad of other problems that plague this game. It’s pretty bad when you can’t even include an egg hunting minigame for whatever reason (or at leas come up with unique events for spring and fall).

There is a ton of furniture with which to decorate your house, which is great! Or it would be, if you were actually given freedom to decorate, but you’re not. You can buy whatever furniture you want, but there are very specific places where you’re allowed to place it, and nowhere else. For instance, furniture and rugs can only go in the little space in front of your counter in your house in the first two house upgrades (Log Cabin and Small House). This space is very small. Despite there being a GIANT ASS FLOOR with which to cover a rug, I wasn’t able to use it until I got the third house upgrade. You have a huge empty table that you’re not allowed to put anything on. You can’t move any of the furniture around, nor can you rotate furniture that you buy when you place it. You also can’t place furniture on rugs either. Seeing so much furniture in the game is pretty exciting until you realize that you can do basically fuck all with it. Apparently they didn’t have enough time to implement real decoration into the game either. (Then again, imagine the lag in your house if they did.) As a final complaint, you can buy picture frames that claim to let you place framed memories in your house. You have a camera as an in-game tool, so you’d think that you could place pictures of your pets or your love interest in your house. You would think that, but you would be wrong. There’s no way to change the pictures in the picture frames, or at least none that I’ve been able to find just yet.

Just like Stardew, when you first arrive at the farm in Olive Town you find that it has been completely overrun with nature, and you have to spend time clearing away the debris so that you have a place to build your farm. Unlike in Stardew, the debris comes back at a ridiculously fast rate. Several in-game hours, if not more, of each day are spent cleaning up puddles (even if it didn’t rain), breaking rocks, clearing weeds, and chopping trees. Your farm can easily become overrun with nature again in just a few days’ time, meaning that a lot of your time that you would spend doing things like scavenging the mines or talking with villagers is instead spent doing basic, boring chores around the farm so that you still have livable land. And while farming sims like this one are games that are basically built around doing chores at least in part, the extent of the damage in this one (given that it happens all day every day, instead of just at the start of each season like in Stardew) really kills any fun or enjoyment you’d otherwise have as a player.

Farm upgrades come as entirely separate buildings, rather than expanding on the current building you have. So while in Stardew you could turn your existing Barns into Big Barns (and then Deluxe Barns), in Olive Town you have to buy an entirely separate building, and then painstakingly move all your animals to the new building one by one. Similarly, you can buy a silage to upgrade from your silo, but you’ll still have the silo on the farm. It doesn’t upgrade your existing development at all, despite being an upgraded form of that existing development.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Pioneers of Olive Town has some good ideas, but ultimately the terrible gameplay and lackluster execution of those ideas leaves so, so much to be desired. I will say that a patch was released recently which improved the loading screens a little, and for that I added the .5 to the score. (I took notes on things I liked / disliked / was neutral on as I played, so that I wouldn’t forget anything.) But a slight improvement to the loading screens doesn’t do much to help it when the lag is still terrible, the game still has freezes, and overall the gameplay itself just isn’t very fun. I probably will keep playing it for a bit longer to get to the marriage scenes at least, since I’ve almost maxed out Laura’s hearts. But honestly, there are so many better life sim games out there (the oft-mentioned in this review Stardew Valley being one of them) that if someone asked me if I recommended this game to them, I would have to say no.

Let’s hope the dev team does better with the next game. Maybe not feeling the pressure of it being the series’ anniversary will take some pressure off of them while they make it.

#story of seasons: pioneers of olive town #2021 game reviews

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countdown-to-destruction · 4 years

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Inuyasha Sequel: a rant

Put this up this earlier on a post I re-blogged, tried to edit a part or two where I didn’t like the way I had phrased it, and ended up messing up the whole format I wrote this in. Luckily I wrote this as a draft earlier anyways! So I did a some fixing and now I’m just copy-pasting it again and making it a text post instead. This will be very long and a little nit-picky but I wanted to make a post ever since I heard about the upcoming sequel to Inuyasha, Hanyō no Yashahime. I did put a TLDR at the end for those who don’t want to read everything. Not sure how many people in the fandom still follow me and will see this, as it's been a long time since I was actually active in the fandom, but it's hands-down both my favorite manga and anime of all time and I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately so I had to post something. Before reading this be sure to read all of the translated character bios for Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha so that this makes sense.

When I first heard that Inuyasha would be getting a sequel I was excited! But after reading up on it, to be completely honest I'm not feeling this sequel anymore. I know it’s an unpopular opinion but hear me out. Firstly, it seems like Rumiko is mostly involved in the character design aspect and the writing is up to Katsuyuki Sumisawa. The music will be produced by Kaoru Wada which is great! And from what I’ve seen and read online a number of others who worked on the original series will reunite so hopefully the story will go well. However, knowing Rumiko isn't personally writing and not knowing how much input she has or will give makes me unsure about watching. The original Inuyasha anime followed and was based off of the events in the manga, and there was no manga prior to this for it to be based on. Depending on what happens this could be an alright sequel or a total miss. Unfortunately sequels in general are known to be disappointing in some way.

Secondly, if I hear anything about Rin being the mother of Sesshomaru's twin daughters I'm out. This part will be a SUPER long and in depth explanation on why I think this way, feel free to skip if you're not interested. Please don't come for me on this, I'm here to explain my thoughts and feelings on the sequel and the theories around it so far, not start an argument. I'm more than aware that there's plenty of controversy out there on this pairing and personally I do not support it. I never saw their relationship as more than a friendship, or something akin to child and guardian as Sesshomaru and Jaken are basically Rin's caretakers up until she goes to live in the village with Kaede. He definitely cares for her deeply but I can't see it in a romantic way, being that Sesshomaru isn't even a character focused on romance to begin with. He learns compassion through Rin's second death but that doesn't mean he loves her romantically. As a reminder his main goal is to seek power and be powerful, and it's stated that he needed to learn compassion and grief in order to mature. It's what helped him learn to wield the Tenseiga at its full potential. In addition, she was really young when they first met and still was when she went to live with Kaede. The idea of Sesshomaru (an adult) having romantic feelings for a kid under ten years old (around eleven at the end of the series, and still a literal child in all ways) and waiting for her to age with the intention of marrying her sits totally wrong with me. Age wise I realize that Inuyasha is decades older than Kagome and that his father was much older than his mother, Izayoi, as well. The difference here is that Kagome was a teen when she met Inuyasha (who not just physically, but more importantly mentally was also a teen) and clearly Izayoi was old enough to conceive Inuyasha and give birth. As far as the audio dramas (more specifically "Asatte") go they're generally considered as an outtake reel and are essentially parodies, or a form of satire. Some will debate on this but realistically there’s plenty of reasons this is true, and those who take the time to properly check them out understand that. For me I've always had a headcanon that at some point in her teen years Rin would inevitably develop a one-sided crush on Sesshomaru and that he would ultimately set boundaries and reject her, seeing her as more of a close companion than a love interest and wanting her to live with someone she can grow old with. He gave her the choice to follow him and it's most likely that she would, but I think that once she began aging he would want her to have somewhere to settle, given that he enjoys roaming and seeking out other powerful beings to battle. It's strange to me that they decided to give Sesshomaru hanyō/half-demon children in general but based on the artwork we've seen it's fair to guess that they might have made Sesshomaru and Rin a pairing in this sequel.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I want to clarify that if you ship them together I'm not writing this here because I want to hate on your ship for no reason, or in order to create an argument on if the pairing makes sense, these are my thoughts and opinions on the matter and I’m voicing them because it’s what I believe. I already know that somebody won’t like this and will take it personally. People usually say that once Rin is an adult the pairing is acceptable but I disagree. I find it quite creepy that someone would think it would be alright for an adult to wait around for a kid to grow up with the intention to marry and/or sleep with them. Watching from a distance is the same exact thing, after making an impression on the child... let’s not normalize this. In this situation it would be grooming. We all have our own opinions when it comes to our ships and fandoms and I try to respect that but I can’t get behind this one.

Next we have the apparent lack of parental figures for the heroines. Where are the original Inuyasha characters at? Moroha's character bio says she barely knows her parents (Inuyasha and Kagome, our former main protagonists) and has been alone since she was young! It makes me think either something has happened to them or some kind of bizarre event separated them. And sorry, not related, but why does she transform by PUTTING LIPSTICK ON?? That part threw me for a loop.

When it comes to Setsuna and Towa their parents are absent too. I find it difficult to believe that Sesshomaru wouldn't keep track of his children given how he treats Rin and reacts to her going missing in any capacity. Especially if he happened to be fond of whoever their mother is. One daughter works as a taijiya/demon slayer for Kohaku and the other mysteriously transports to Kagome's era and is raised by Sota (I thought we had finished with the time jumps when the well closed but apparently not. When the Bone Eater's Well closed after Kagome's return it gave a sense of finality and closure to the story, and showed that Kagome had chosen where she was most happy and felt she belonged. I think that bringing the theme of time travel back into the sequel makes it feel repetitive, like something right out of a predictable fanfic. Props to Sota for taking in and raising a child who showed up out of nowhere though).

Another thing that came to mind when I read these character bios was why Inuyasha and Kagome's daughter and Sesshomaru's daughters are the exact same age. Of course there's nothing wrong with that. It only struck me as odd because suddenly everyone is having kids at the same time. And so far there's no mention of other characters like Sango, Miroku, Shippo, Jaken, Kaede, or Miroku or Sango's three children or where they are. One might expect that a story focused on the children of some of the original Inuyasha's main characters would feature appearances from those who had important roles in the previous series and their children. Which brings me around to wondering what made twin daughters a trend? Two sets of twin girls is a unique choice (Sango and Miroku's twin daughters. For such a small group of parental characters, what are the odds of two sets of twin girls? Where is the creativity and again why the repetition?).

Lastly, Sesshomaru's daughters lack some of the common yōkai/demon characteristics we see on Inuyasha and other characters. Their ears are human, and they have no markings or otherwise (that I noticed) with the exception of Setsuna's mokomoko/fur which is similar to Sesshomaru's. So perhaps they take more after their human mother? Given that Inuyasha seemed to inherit strong genes from his father it's interesting that they did not. Their ages also interest me as they appear to age the same way as humans do. Yōkai/demons are known to have a longer lifespan than humans and appear to slow down or almost stop aging at some point. Perhaps this confirms that the slowdown in aging occurs once they reach the equivalent of a human teen?

Overall Inuyasha was a fantastic manga and great anime on its own, and I never got the feeling that it needed a sequel. As a stand-alone it was everything it needed to be. I thoroughly enjoyed both formats of the original, though I do have a tendency to disregard certain parts of the anime. I always preferred the manga more when the anime dragged out certain scenes (Shichinintai/Band of Seven arc for example) or straight-up excluded, changed, and added others. Taking that into consideration the sequel might end up being the same for me in that way, but rather than one scene that plays out for too long or an excluded, altered, or unnecessary added scene, if it’s not any good I’ll simply disregard it altogether. When the anime comes out I certainly plan to try watching it out of loyalty to the fandom, and due to the fact that it's "technically" canon (without Rumiko being the writer I don't necessarily consider it canon, much like how some folks do or do not consider the movies canon) but I get the feeling that I'll wind up giving up on it in disappointment.

TLDR; Overall I'm left questioning if the sequel is worth watching (for me) given what I've read and heard so far, but nonetheless I will give it an optimistic try! I'm currently wondering how much we'll see of the original Inuyasha characters, if we get to find out what happened to them, if the number one pairing I'm not fond of will make an appearance (and cause me to drop the whole thing), and questioning parts of the character backstories and designs (why is there a repetitive and recurring theme of time travel and does it end up hindering or ruining the story, why do the protagonists all lack parents, and why do the hanyō/half-demon characters lack common yōkai/demon traits and does it make them more human than demon?).

#inuyasha #hanyo no yashahime #sesshomaru #please don't be sessrin #kagome #a feudal fairytale #internal screeching #my thoughts #my opinions #unpopular opinion

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killian-whump · 4 years

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Assuming there's a sequel, what do you think will JJ's role be? Do you think he'll make a hollywood healing and return as a nefarious outlaw (with a limp) or a jaded washout who lost both his legs? Or maybe he's already dead and only appears in flashbacks? What do you think has a higher chance of happening?

This is a really good question...

As I said in another post, I’m not entirely sure that Maddie Hawkins has another story in her - that includes JJ. I think it’s pretty clear that she’s done with him, and won’t be giving him a second chance.

And, besides, I think a retread with these same two characters might be a bit dull, no? So I feel like if they DO bring these two both back again, it’ll have to be something along the lines of what @gingerchangeling was proposing, where it’s years later, JJ’s as healed as he can be (obviously, with a limp or even a missing leg), and he hunts down Maddie for his own revenge... but there’s a kid. And it’s obviously his kid. And what do now??

Because we all know that Hollywood loves a good “bad guy changes his ways entirely for the kid he never even knew he had (or wanted)” storylines. I mean, her future headcanon is just that good. I don’t think they could possibly come up with anything better IF they want to bring BOTH characters back again.

But they might NOT bring them both back again. Dolly never said anything about bringing Maddie back for a Season 2 - only JJ. And, to be honest, JJ’s likely got a lot more tales in his life that could be told. It’s implied that he’s pulled the same trick he pulled on Maddie with plenty of other women. He’s obviously been at this for quite some time, and has many outlaw adventures they could show in flashback form.

We could also see them explore Deke’s story and tell about what happened between HIM and JJ in the past - and show us the tragic death of his wife. Given she died in a fire and not from a bullet wound, I don’t think JJ meant to kill her - and it’s obvious he’s not as cavalier about killing innocent women as he is innocent men. It could even be that this accidental killing of a young pregnant woman is what pushed JJ into being the murderer he is in S1′s story - sort of a “I’ve already done the WORST possible thing, so what does it matter?” mentality. That would likely make for a good story, as well - and I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more of David Denman’s bounty hunter.

Speaking of which, they could just show us the adventures of Deke and JJ on the road back to nearest town and the Sheriff’s station, and it could just be an hour’s worth of quality whump with Deke torturing him the whole damn way. I mean, we all know that’s got MY vote, but I have this weird feeling it might not be what Dolly would go for ;) But then again, who knows? I mean, she DID say that they wanted to see JJ suffer a little - and man, did he ever suffer at the end there. Maybe Dolly’s one of us and we just never knew it? XD

Actually, there IS another way they could bring JJ and Maddie back together again - if he heals and escapes, she could even team up with Deke to try to recapture him, and we could see his hijinks on the run as he tries to get lovely young ladies to hide his limping ass from the law, lol.

Although we have to remember that if there IS a Season 2, it’s likely to follow the same format that Season 1 did, and each episode will be based on one of Dolly’s hit songs. So if we DO see JJ again, it’s very likely we won’t be seeing anything that will tie directly into this episode, so much as it would be JJ filling the role of “nefarious outlaw” or “double-crossing lover” in an entirely separate story based on an altogether different song. In which case, it likely would be from JJ’s days before meeting Maddie, because that would be easier to explain than having to go into HOW he escaped from Deke AND how he healed from those injuries Maddie gave him.

Or maybe they’ll scrap S2 entirely and Dolly will just write an entire album of new songs inspired by Colin, and we’ll get a season of hour-long music videos FOR that album, with Colin playing the lead in every one!!! :D

HEY. Don’t you all start telling me that’s not going to happen. I don’t come on your blog and crush your crazy dreams, do I??? XD

#jj sneed #heartstrings spec #jj sneed spoilers #not whxmp #anonymous #kw ask box

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heldtoflames · 5 years

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I don’t think it’s that they dislike your unpopular opinions — as everybody is entitled to them but it’s the way in which you word things. You do seem very abrupt, blunt and slightly rude which is fine as this is your blog, your rules and is the very reason I haven’t unfollowed but I think it makes you not necessarily intimidating but makes me worry if you’d be the same during OOC interactions if that makes sense? I feel as though there’s a polite way to construct your opinions, that’s all. :)

Under a cut cause I got long again

I get where you’re coming from but I think if you’re saying unpopular opinions(and y’know, it is an unpopular opinions meme – I see a lot of people using itas an “excuse to rant” while talking about popular ones) then you’re going torub people up the wrong way regardless of how you word it. If I’m going to betalking about things I don’t like, I might as well have a little fun with it,like the comparison to William Shatner (it does read like William Shatner I’m sorry).Also to be completely honest – heavily formatted posters/bloggers are generallypretty judgemental of people who don’t follow similar aesthetic formatting. I’mpretty sure that most would see my clumsily put together theme and unformattedposts and decide I’m not worth the time before they even read what I have towrite. Therefore I figured as nobody like that actually follows me, theygenerally won’t be too hurt by it. And even so, it was a little fun to say “youthink your writing is better because you have a photoshopped image next to itbut that really contributes very little.”Yeah, I am taking the piss, but like I said it’s the nature of the meme. Theopinions are unpopular, feathers may be ruffled, so I might as well take thepiss and have a little bit of fun. Really if anything the reply was meant to beread cheekily rather than angrily. I have been told I come across as “angry” inmy writing, even when it’s unintentional.I got called up for this at work. When I adjusted my wording to be friendlier Iwas complained about for being ‘patronising’ so I really can’t fucking win. Thisis people from a separate office who only speak to me via emails though, peopleI speak to face-to-face or on the phone always say I’m “lovely”.I have been called “intimidating” maaaaany times, but for a variety ofdifferent reasons. Some because I speak abruptly and formally. Others have saidthey think I write “too well” and are intimidated they can’t match quality(which y’know, is very flattering) and others have just said I give them a“wall of text” that’s too scary and they can’t be dealing with that. Some havesaid it’s just the nature of The Hound (and others characters I rp) that asthey’re intimidating it sometimes translates to the writer.Then others have told me that I’m an “absolute sweetheart” and they have noidea why people find me intimidating. (These are also people that talk to meOOC regularly so there’s that). I do like to think of myself as quite afriendly person.Still, it’s the nature of the meme. I reblogged it so people can hear unpopularopinions if they want, and in which case that’s going to be the response. When I post ooc, I generally like to hit humour points, so while I wascomplaining I had fun with it. I feel like if I was considerably politer, itwould just be “I don’t think formatted posts read that well” which wouldn’thave made anyone laugh. I like making people laugh. It means a lot to me. I am interested to see how you think it should be written, as you think it’stoo rude, but I think it would lose the fun/playful aspect.Similarly, when I made the post talking about losing 2 followers I wasn’tupset. I mean, I like milestones (when I went from 200 to 197 I was so annoyedbecause I’d hit 200) but I mean people can follow and unfollow me as they like.I just found it a little funny that people thought being compared to WilliamShatner was upsetting enough to unfollow. Especially when I only lose followerswhen I either post smut, NSFW, or SanSan. I mean it could’ve been for any reason but timing suggests otherwise.All in all, like you said, it’s my blog, and I don’t want to adjust how I speakfor sensibilities. It would be one thing if it was someone’s trigger, or if Isaid something racist without realising, etc. But I’m just taking the piss, andit’s part of me. If you’re worried I might be mean OOC, talk to me OOC and find out.

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larriefails · 5 years

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First off, I’m not a rad nor a larrie, I’m a louie who hates both. I was just commenting on that because I’ve been in the fandom since 2013 and the de facto leader comment not only came from the boys but also during a billboard interview. In the billboard interview, they highlighted how Louis was the one taking the business calls and talking to their team about certain things. Also it’s not completely impossible to believe that once the 1d train ran out the big producers/names didn’t care to +

Work with him, because he was no “harry styles” liam is the same he even said that Simon didn’t want him on his label as a solo artist despite him having a great rapport with him. But there were other times louis’ business contacts were brought to light such as when he went to the Brits in 2016 and a reporter commented on how he was constantly on his feet to greet big name record executives and businessmen. He has the connects in the business that’s all I was trying to state.

Look, 99% of the time when I reply to an anon “you sound like a conspiracy theorist” it’s not because I think they believe in Larrie or because they’re rads, it’s because they fucking reason like conspiracy theorists

And your reasoning here is just… conspiracy theory mess. I don’t care which parts of it you believe or not, I don’t care what your personal feelings on these specific sets of conspiracy theories are. It doesn’t matter, the point is that you’re reasoning like a conspiracy theorist

I was gonna put this in a separate post, but I think it fits here very well (I might still make a separate post about it who knows)

A few days ago, I saw this video on twitter of a woman talking about her own death like it was nothing in a very matter of factly way, wearing a wig and using a very funny tone. Someone in the replies linked to her IG page so I went to look at it, and when I saw comments telling her “thank you for accepting my follow request” I realized she was usually on private and I’d just been very lucky to find her profile to be open, so I followed her just in case with the intention of watching her funny videos later

Since she was a new follow she continuously appeared on my recent IG feed and I soon realized how relevant what she was saying was to my interests

This is the woman

One day she posted this, and my alarms went off

Let me clarify that I don’t care if she’s a professor or a therapist or not, I followed her because I thought she was funny and that she’d go on private soon, this was all a complete surprise to me. The DM rang close to home to me, seeing as I’ve read Larries for a while now, it was all too familiar, her reply was too

Then she posted this

Once again, I said it before and you can read it here X it doesn’t matter if she’s a professor or not, if their suspicions are real or not, if she’s lying or not, because going through UCLA’s professor roll call is a step too far, and confronting her about it, even more so. And the way she presents it.. she’s right. She just linked the website, she never claimed to work there. If you go to her page, she’s very careful with the information she provides, so the people that want to prove she’s lying have very limited resources. They go with the preconception that she’s lying so they try to find ways to prove their preconception

You have the preconception that Louis was the de facto leader of 1D, so you’re working your way backwards to prove it. You’re looking at bits and pieces of interviews that will prove your theory right, but that’s just not what reality is

“The de facto leader comment not only came from the boys” .. no it didn’t, though? They didn’t say this. Do you know where the “the boys say Louis is the leader” comments come from? Stuff like this

Context for that interview? The Hot Desk, August 2011 X

One Direction had exactly ZERO songs out, this interview was recorded before they even released WMYB. All 5 of them had written on 3 songs of their first album that would come out in November. Savan Kotecha was still running the show. Louis was still 19 and he hadn’t been in show business for a year. How much of a leader that conducted business meetings do you think he was? I’m not gonna watch the entire interview to see the context, but this is not Zayn saying Louis was the de facto leader, this is Zayn kidding

What to even say about this, which is from the video diaries in X Factor?

Or this?

What? No, no they’re not, like, they’re just not, they’re standing in a circle and looking forward

This is just ridiculous

Does the person that created this gif set not realize that this is the performance where Louis doesn’t sing at all? It’s Torn at judges’ houses. It’s infamous for the fact that only Liam Harry and Zayn sang. This is all for dramatic effect because X Factor was a reality show

Louis liking motivation chants means he’s the leader? That he goes to business meetings? I’m so confused

That’s not because “he’s the leader” that’s because he’s the class clown

If accepting an award means he’s the leader then I guess this meme fits 1D very well

They all accepted awards, Christ

Anyway….

And that’s an entire gif set that was solely engineered to show that Louis was the leader and that “the boys said so”…. but they actually didn’t? The only two times it comes up they answer jokingly and it’s before Louis could do anything remotely leader like. But that gif set is so popular, created by a Larrie but that spilled out to the general fandom enough that I saw it on my dash reblogged by non CT blogs X

And it created this notion among some people, especially those who have Louis as their fave, that the other members of 1D had in fact said that Louis was the de facto leader, when they didn’t. It’s conspiracy talk, scouring through hundreds of MILLIONS of milliseconds of footage to pick 9 of them and put them in a gif set to prove a point they’d already decided on

There are also three news articles linked (copying and pasting directly from the source, sorry for the weird formatting idk how to take it off)

1: That’s the number of hotel rooms in Mexico City used for dance rehearsals. The guys locked down a room for three hours. Louis took control of the rehearsals and even helped conceptualize some of the routine.

That’sabout 1D learning the choreography for Best Song Ever

How exactly does it prove that Louis is the de facto leader for him to take over 1 dance rehearsal when everyone in 1D had confessed they couldn’t dance a million times at that point? Louis had some musical theater experience, so that’s that..

Harry: Louis is still loud and mischievous - he likes to test the boundaries. He’s quite outspoken. You need someone like that, because he’s great at standing up for us as a band.

That’s perhaps the most “leader like” comment any of them have ever made about Louis, and it’s not really about him being a leader once you put it by itself instead of surrounding it by “look at all the times they said he was the leader,” right? It’s just more of a testament about the fact that Louis was louder than the rest, which we already knew. If someone had asked me six months into my journey in the fandom who I thought was the loudest in band meetings I would’ve said Louis. That doesn’t mean he’s the leader. A leader has SO many more characteristics than being loud and outspoken. In fact, a lot of leaders aren’t loud or outspoken at all

The last link they put is once again, what How I Met Your Mother explained as the cheerleader effect X which taken away from the time period sounds quite misogynistic but let’s not dwell on that. Basically, it’s when a group of women appear hot when they’re all together but not individually. When you have the gif set all together, it looks like “wow, these are hot arguments as to why EVERYONE thought Louis was the leader,” but look at them individually, see their context and they’re not as hot now, are they? Especially when you realize, once again, that these are very very small morsels of time taken from very very large portions. That’s how Larries operate

Several people in your management and inner circle have described you to me as the unofficial businessman or leader of the group. Is that a fair assessment? I’ve sometimes felt like that, but to be honest most of the time I’m the immature one who needs to be told to get focused. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I have to be kind of be on board with every minor detail and [I’m] quite opinionated.

And that last link is also the Billboard interview you mention in your ask. Do you know when it’s from? December 2012. One Direction had just released Take Me Home, their second album, which according to the interview that Larries love the most to base their sabotage conspiracies, didn’t very much involve 1D’s input at all

Savan Kotecha: I think by album 3 (Midnight Memories), yeah, not all of them, there was definitely one or two-one especially-that was like, kind of bitter about the fact, that, you know

Ross Golan: They were a boyband?

Savan Kotcha: And he was not the talented one. He wasn’t the singer, and he wasn’t the star. And you know which one I’m talking about…

Ross Golan: Of course.

Savan Kotecha: And he then started having something against me and against that process, I think. And, you know, maybe we could have been more inviting in the creative process during album 2 (Take Me Home) and not been so…authoritative.

At that point, Louis STILL wasn’t in a position where he could really be the leader. None of them were because the creative process wasn’t inviting still. It wouldn’t be until the third album

The conclusion here isn’t that Louis isn’t outspoken, or that he didn’t care about business or that he didn’t defend the band, or that he didn’t want to write more, or that he didn’t want to make connections. No one here is arguing that he didn’t care at all or not giving him credit for anything. The point I‘ve been making for days now and that people don’t seem to get (one way or another, because I’ve gotten very unpleasant messages about how he’s not equipped to be a businessman and shit like that that I’ve just decided not to publish at all), is that things don’t have to be black and white

I don’t think ANYONE was the leader of 1D. I think that Louis’ personality made him stand out more in certain aspects (such as meetings with their team), and because people need to label everything all the time, instead of describing it as it was, it took the position of “de facto leader”

The problem here isn’t even that people believe he’s the de facto leader, that wouldn’t concern me at all in and of itself because who cares? It’s not hurting anyone… The problem is that it puts an excessive amount of weight on Louis’ shoulders, I also explained this. It’s this dichotomy of a person who basically carried the whole band during its five years but that also is completely defenseless and at the mercy of binding contracts to even choose the socks he wears

These sort of preconceptions aren’t harmful by themselves, they wouldn’t be harmful in a normal band. I wouldn’t have a problem with this preconception if Louis was Calum Hood and this was 5SOS, my problem is that this is One Direction and preconceptions and conspiracies have tormented these guys for YEARS. No conspiracy and no preconception is innocent, they all have to be dismantled, we have to examine EVERYTHING that leads to absolutes if we want a chance at healing the fandom, and I don’t mean the 1D fandom because that’s gone now, it’s never gonna heal, I mean Louis’ specifically

If we want a chance at him being left alone from Larries these things have to go. Stop seeing him as this commodity that you can just paint over and start seeing him as a person, not a caricature

That interview also doesn’t say anything about him taking any calls business or otherwise. I don’t think anyone has ever said it and I have no idea where it came from because I’ve found zero sources. The interview doesn’t mention him “talking about certain things“ either, it’s just what I pasted here. That’s all of it. Everything else comes from years and years of stretching this one question out of this one interview done when Louis was still 20 and 1D had less than 2 years in the music industry. It’s no exactly the smoking gun y’all think it is, guys. Same with the Savan Kotecha podcast

Then the rest of what you say is just noise, man. IDK what to tell you. It’s just noise. If Louis had ran the show BTS for five years, then he’d have access to the best producers and writers on speed dial, why would he not being Harry Styles hinder how he’s perceived by the people that work backstage? They’d recognize the person that was “the backbone of 1D” for who he is because those things spread in the business. If LOUIS said that wasn’t happening, then it’s because your preconception was wrong and you took a bunch of things out of context to create a “narrative” that simply wasn’t real. Louis was dedicated to the band and wanted to write for it and involve himself in the creative side and he GENUINELY WAS IMPORTANT for the band, but he wasn’t its backbone or its de facto leader

Simon didn’t wantt Liam on his label probably because he couldn’t afford him, btw. He decided to stick with Louis because they’ve been thick as thieves since 2014 and those contracts cost money and Syco is a very small label with very limited resources, so they couldn’t offer anything to more than one member. I’m aware that I’m making assumptions here, but they very much align with reality, especially now that Syco lost so many other acts and now that Fifth Harmony disbanded and Syco landed only Lauren (Camila being like Zayn) and having to leave Ally, Dinah, and Normani go to other labels. That doesn’t mean they saw no value in them (in fact, I think Lauren is the one faring the worst), it’s just that they can only afford so much

And how much can you grin on one report written by the HUFFINGTON POST in 2016?X I’m talking about the “Louis hugged industry people that one time” comment you made. Once again, I’m not saying he doesn’t know anyone. I’m saying I BELIEVE WHAT HE SAYS. If he says he can’t easily get the producers and writers he wants, then I’m going to believe him. And that one report doesn’t really change anything for me. It’s, once again, very conspiracy theorist behavior to put more weight on an isolated report from an untrustworthy source three years ago than on Louis’ own words. If he really had enough reach to be friendly with everyone in the industry, then he’d be able to get any producer he wants

You can’t have this dichotomy that you present in this very ask of “they’re not picking up the phone because he’s Harry Styles” but he was the de facto leader of the biggest band on the planet for five years and everyone in the music industry knows him. It just doesn’t mesh together. You’re placing him in the same impossible position Larries are placing him and that’s harmful. He needs fans that see him as a person and you, I’m sorry to tell you, do not. You see him as a caricaturesque figure that can both be incredibly important and incredibly subjugated

“He has the connects in the business is all I was trying o state” 1. no that’s not all you were trying to state. 2. According to himself, he doesn’t have all the connects. He’s clearly close enough to be friendly with Rob Stringer, but that doesn’t mean that Rob Stringer will lift a finger for him and according to Louis, he’s not.. But that doesn’t mean that Louis can’t get ANYONE or that he’s being sabotaged. As always, truth lies somewhere in the middle. The only reason it’s harder to spot in this case is that people stretch it on every possible side so much

I know this is long as fuck and I probably lost any person that was willing to read my drivel in the first place, but I just really think it’s important that you start taking what LOUIS SAYS ABOUT LOUIS as fact, instead of twisting it around to present alternative facts that would present a reality that will please you more. It starts at “Louis was the de facto leader” and it ends as “he’s been faking fatherhood for three years and lied about his mother’s last few days” Sick..

#debunked #leader Louis

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ask-shakespearehigh · 5 years

Text

Q&A post with the Mods!!!!

This is going to be a long one oh boy

How strict is the delineation of creative control vis-a-vis characters/plays between the mods? (@pedanticlecturer)

We generally have the plays split up along lines of “what we know”— we have a list at the very beginning of the blog. Sometimes we’ll draw the others’ characters (mostly me drawing some of Star’s…) but even then the final say on characterization is up to the “main” mod for that play — mod aster

what aster said -- mod star

What is your favorite play? What is your favorite character in terms of how they were written in the source material? (@pedanticlecturer)

I think my favorite play overall is Macbeth, just because I like the vibes (and the fact that I too could kill Macbeth), the fact that you don’t say it’s name in theatres, and the fact that it’s a play I did a full read through and analysis of in class. Favorite character? Puck from Midsummer. — mod aster

uhhhh,, hmm. ive always had a soft spot for midsummer since i saw it with aster esp bc of how fun the costumes were. of the comedies it has the largest potential to be the most visually pleasing bc of the concept of fairies,,,and im gay and dramatic so i love that. id die if i got to costume design for midsummer,,,or be in it,,,yeah. fav character. hmm. probably mercutio?? i recently saw a version of romeo and juliet where mercutio was played by a woman and oh my god it was amazing!!! not to mention mercutio’s portrayal in baz luhrmann's INCREDIBLE version of r n j!!! (I based my mercutio design on him) he just spends the entire time making dick jokes. love that. -- mod star

How do you answer asks so fast? I mean it's great but I'm impressed 😂 (Anon)

Personally, it’s a mix of: notifications on, quick drawing speed, and using the blog to avoid my class work — mod aster

aster is fast and (as you can see from all of my answers) im lazey -- mod star

Are there any elements/characters of the plays you're covering that you would have liked to work into this blog's plot, but couldn't due to the constraints of the setting or the synthetic nature of the blog? (@pedanticlecturer)

I wanted to make everyone gay but unfortunately due to plot constraints we have to have some hets but that wont stop me from making it lgbt as possible. -- mod star

I did want to make The Tempest more of a central play, but it just didn’t translate well. Similarly, other supernatural elements like the witches in Macbeth. This isn’t so much a constraint mentioned, but my own time/energy means that I want to show the Macbeth backstory, in a specific format, but I can’t right now— mod aster

Is there a hierarchy of import when it comes to each play's individualized impact on shakespeare high's general arc? If so, what plays are crucial to the foundation of the story? Which ones did you do mostly for shits and giggles? (@pedanticlecturer)

This is phrased like an ACT question and i might not answer it right so sorry in advance but: mod aster and i only selected a few plays for each of us to do given we dont know all of shakespeare’s works, but we tend to put more emphasis on the the more well known. But it also comes down to 1. How much we have plotted out for each play and 2. What the followers ask about most. Our two most popular are hamlet and macbeth bc people are familiar w those but around march caesar always becomes relevant again. I didnt even have designs for some of the characters until someone asked about them. -- mod star

I would say the same as star— it generally comes down to what people ask about. I will say that the overall plot is sort of separated into “has happened” and “is happening”. Like, the human potion of Midsummer, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth are all in the “aftermath” portion, while Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet, among others, are happening. We’re trying to incorporate as much as we can, and I don’t think any of them were really put in without some thought.— mod aster

What personal significance does shakespeare hold in ur guys' lives? (@pedanticlecturer)

I go to a theater school rn and so ive dealt w shakespeare (although not all of them) it also helps that i was in loves labours lost last year as moth and that i read hamlet and r n j. Theres also a theater in my state that always does One Big Shakespeare per season and they always do them super well!!! My love for shakespeare probably started w seeing midsummer at that theater w mod aster!!! So. Theater kid rights!! -- mod star

To be honest, I got back into Shakespeare Because of the blog. I’ve been friends with some people that got really Pretentious about Shakespeare, and it kinda put me off of it. I did have a book of abridged plays (the plays’ plots written out in prose, basically) that I read as a kid, which is what got me into not only the plots of a lot of the plays, but also the idea of having them illustrated. And, same as star, the theater in state does the One Big Shakespeare— and they tend to do some really cool things with the costumes, setting them in diff time periods. I haven’t been able to see any lately since I’ve moved, but they still slap. — mod aster

🥰😘💙🥰🥰💜💟🥰I 😍💗💚😍😍LOVE🖤🖤 YALL ♥️♥️🧡💛💚💝❣️💕💘💖💗💓💞💝❤️💛💜 okay now i have a question i swear— how long have the two of you been doing art??? and what were your first shakespeare plays??? (@hellaghosts)

Uhh i started drawing when i was like idk 12 and i have the giant boxes of sketchbooks to prove it!!! I moved to digital art at abt 14-15 but mostly stayed traditional until this yr when i got a Neat New Tablet so some of my sketchbooks are sitting abandoned rip. My first shakespeare was either romeo and juliet or midsummer nights dream and i love both of them v much!!! I have a very old piece of art that i did for r n j for my freshman class assignment on it and it hasnt aged well alsdjfjafd circa 2016 i think??? -- mod star

Oh man. I started drawing when I was about 10, but it was Bad. I don’t think I got much into drawing again until I was about 14? Sometime around the end of middle school/beginning of high school. I would say I started getting into drawing as more than doodling/coloring edits sometime around 2015-16? I would draw on my iPad with my finger, then I got a tablet for my computer, and now I pretty much stick to my iPad with an Apple Pencil. My first Shakespeare play was….. uh…… probably Midsummer???? I have No idea. We would go to plays when I was little, so I honestly don’t remember if I saw others before. It may have been Romeo and Juliet— I had that book where it was the original and the “modernized” with the little dog that explained things— which, if you know it makes sense, but if you don’t is probably a bonkers answer. — mod aster

Do you think this blog has like? An overarching thesis (be it b/c intentionally or simply b/c ur own take on the world has bled thru to the point where u believe it’s central to the piece at this point)? (@pedanticlecturer)

Not gonna lie, I had to read that like three times AND dm you to figure out what you were asking from us and all I have is “be gay, respect women, write your own happy endings”. — mod aster

This blog started with an ides of march shitpost and you think we have enough brain energy to write a whole thesis? I projected feelings of found family onto my half of the blog but idk if that counts. Be gay do crime 420 69 -- mod star

What’s the nature/rough dynamic of ur relationship? How do y’all know each other? (@pedanticlecturer)

Met mod aster when i was like 4 and even tho we didnt live close we became like, best friends although the Best part didnt start until we were like 13-ish and eventually we talked like non stop (about anime and homestuck. Yknow. 13 year old kid things) and we didnt see each other a lot bc of Distance and now its even worse bc aster is in colleg.,e but we consider each other siblings regardless of family bc we’re adopted into our own respective families so that bled over into our friendship and it would feel weird calling him anything other than my brother now. We’ve seen each other at our best and worst and if you really want a good insight on what we’re like as siblings watch griffin and justin mcelroy’s overview video of catlateral damage wherein i am griffin and he is the long suffering justin. -- mod star

Star is basically my long distance sibling and functionally the only cousin I recognize bc like their parents are basically an aunt and uncle and like our dads look enough alike that we’ve both accidentally gotten the wrong dad for a hug or similar so like. Anyways yeah Star is the Griffin to my Justin, complete with our absent middle brother who we love dearly— mod aster

Dubiously relevant q but what kind of music do y’all listen to when u do art (if that is indeed a habit either of u partake in) (@pedanticlecturer)

It can depend on the piece? I was working on some (unrelated) oc prints that were song-focused, and for those I just listened to said song on loop. Sometimes I have playlists. Sometimes I’ll just be in a Mood and throw a song on loop. But a lot of time for the blog, I’ll listen to The Adventure Zone for the billionth time, because I have Too Much Attention. I’ve also, on request from Star, linked the most recent “loop song”.— mod aster

I tend to obsess over the same like 3 songs every few weeks so those get listened to on repeat but it also depends on the tone of what im drawing or who im drawing i might genre switch bc of that. If im drawing ophelia i stick to lana del rey and if im drawing hamlet its the neighborhood, horatio is sufjan stevens etc. i have categorized,. Most of the characters i draw into different songs/genres/energies of music but not like i ever follow that. Sometimes i just pull up a really long nonsense video and forget to draw. Essentially: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- mod star

How’d y’all come up with ur pseudonyms? (@pedanticlecturer)

I love space so much and my main blog is starryeydsailor space gay rights!! Im also tiny and full of energy and bright so basically i;m star -- mod star

Uhhhh i was like “hey i want to do uhhhhhh flower?” And then I google searched flower names until I found one I liked —- mod aster

How did you end up deciding the rough timeline of events in canon? (@pedanticlecturer)

It’s mostly determined by like. How we choose per story? If that makes sense. Like, we just take story by story, and decide “is it happening, has it happened, and when?” And then we fit them together in relation to each other just by dint of. All existing at once. Like, I knew I wanted Macbeth to be in aftermath, because like, even though there’s no murder, the way I’ve translated it to the AU is still kinda heavy, and it’s something that I don’t know that I could do properly if it were happening right now. Also, it’s more interesting IMO to have them at different times. Tl;dr we wing it per story and slot them together— mod aster (mod star agrees I just can word better, in theory)

If you could tell the story of shakespeare high in a different format than an ask blog, would you? Obviously y'all are making very good use of the format, but would you want to write this as a animated series or like? a comic book? or is the form inseparable from the story? (@pedanticlecturer)

I kinda wanted to do a webcomic or maybe to plot develop through like, animatics but the element of surprise comes from the asks we get and really makes us think so the blog is a good start. We didnt think we’d get this far -- mod star

Pretty much what Star said— there are certain elements where it’d be neat to do as a comic or as an animatic. Like, the fantasy dream is like, an anthology webcomic of each story, where you can like, see other characters in the background and stuff. But to be honest, we develop a lot by what we’re asked— there was a post about developing worldbuilding by being asked questions and then pretending you’ve thought about the answer, and it’s not far off. Personally, it’s hard to just lay out a story, because I have a whole WORLD and what’s relevant? What are people interested in? It’s by getting questions that I can then focus in on an area to develop. And yeah, we Super didn’t think we’d get this far lmao — mod aster

Any headcanons about your characters that you don't think will ever come up on the blog through asks or plot posts? (@pedanticlecturer)

I could make a whole separate post for this!!!!! Mostly its voice headcanons (and by mostly i mean like 1 or 2) or relationship hcs!!!! -- mod star

Honestly same. I don’t think I have voice headcanons for mine, though I bet I could find some. I’ve got a bunch of miscellaneous headcanons that just kinda float around, but like they’re scattered, too numerous for this post, and also not always things I’m sure are canon yet.— mod aster

#mod post #mod aster #mod star #q and a #birthday #we cant seem to read more AND tag so like brb gonna go kill god

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