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thatwordybirb · 3 months

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Ask game! 5, 7, 9, 11, and 14!! :D

Oh! =O Heck, I didn't expect- thank you!! Um!!!

5. something you see in fics a lot and love

That's, ooo, that's tough, since I don't have much spare time and I mostly spend it writing mine instead of reading. Thinking back on my favorite moments, though, I think hurt/comfort is my jam. Heartache, heartbreak, hyperventilation, gimme pain, gimme panic, gimme people barely holding together putting one foot in front of the other even when the person they lean on isn't there, I wanna see what my faves are made of and I want it to hurt!

7. your favorite tropes to read/write/draw

Damn, might've blown my load a bit early there! X'D I'm not super familiar with the functionally infinite catalog of tropes, though, so... hm, had to ask my beautiful beta readers for suggestions - aaand we immediately got on a tangent about Wide Screen Farquaad and started cackling like goons, okay!! Er!!! Now that I think about it, Found Family is in everything I'm writing. My Animal Crossing story features a lot of Tom Nook's relationship with Timmy and Tommy, my MHA story centers around if Tomura was adopted by Principal Nezu instead of All for One, my Final Fantasy Tactics Advance story is all about Marche gathering a family of adventurers with Montblanc - it's an important part of everything I'm writing. Okay the giggles have stopped and one of my betas insists that "furries adopting children" is the Most Important but I don't think that's actually a trope, thanks sis-

9. a ship that isn’t your OTP but that you enjoy

Oh, um, hrm, fuck, I have. So many OTP's. So that complicates things! I love them all so much!! I think the best fit is Sonadow, thanks to @shadows-coffeebeans - I'm not totally in love with it (yet), but I do enjoy it quite a bit!!!

11. if you’re a writer or artist, what fic or piece of art are you proud of making?

I'm actually really proud of all the things I'm writing lately! =D Got three novel-length fics in the fire, really love how they're turning out!! None of them are er, out yet, though, besides an MHA one-shot I posted last April. I haven't started posting them because I don't want to be discouraged by lack of readers. I will once they're done (except the MHA one, I will start posting that when the final episode of the anime airs), but until then, they only exist as google docs for folks that wanna beta read.

14. the ship that always makes you smile

All of the ones I love do! But by far the one that gets the most content, and thus the constant deluge of smiles, is Sam & Max. Ship is called Freelance Husbands, I adore how dedicated the fandom is, and it always fills my heart with sugar and sunshine, especially even when it's angsty~!

Sorry this one took me so long to finish, you're probably in bed by now, but feel free to reply tomorrow (if you want to at all, no pressure), and thank you so much for the pleasant surprise!!

#me talking tag #personal #fanfic #fandom

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imhereforscm · 11 months

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Which Agatha Christie book would you recommend to an absolute beginner?

You gave me a chance to talk about books and my dear Agatha Christie and that made me very excited😁💖💖

I believe there's no "hard-to-read" book among Agatha's books. It's really up to what anyone likes and/or dislikes!

My personal opinion on her books is that I've never been disappointed. Also, it covers crime cases from a perspective of human psychology. It's not just about footprints and fingerprints and all that technical aspects and that's what makes me love those books, among other crime ones I've started and dropped many times, because I wasn't hooked.

But I'm gonna recommend three of my favourites. Again: I love all of her books, but these are my favourites so far:

*warnings: all of these books center around murder*

Lord Edgware Dies

This is the first book I read of hers.

The premise just like it's written in Goodreads:

It's true; Hercule Poirot had been present when the famous actress Jane Wilkinson bragged of her plan to ‘get rid of’ her estranged husband, Lord Edgware.

Now the man was dead. And yet the great Belgian detective couldn’t help feeling that he was being taken for a ride. After all, how could Jane have stabbed her thoroughly detestable husband to death in his library at exactly the same time she was seen dining with friends? And what could be her motive now that the aristocrat had finally agreed to grant her a divorce?

Cards on the Table

The premise by Goodreads:

A flamboyant party host is murdered in full view of a roomful of bridge players!

Mr. Shaitana was famous, as were his parties. He was also a man of whom everybody was a little afraid. So, when he boasted to Poirot that he considered murder an art form, the detective had some reservations about accepting a party invitation of cards and viewing Shaitana’s private art collection. Indeed, what began as an absorbing evening of bridge was to turn into a more dangerous game altogether…

Something else I want to add, which my version on the book had written on (idk why it's not mentioned here, when it's a crucial element and it really piqued my interest): in this case, there's no "who's most likely to commit murder." Because the special element in this case, is that all suspects have committed murder in the past. Therefore we know it could be anyone.

Elephants Can Remember

I found the psychological topic this book was dealing with to be SO intriguing. I can't tell you which theme it was specifically though, because that would be spoiling it.

Premise from Goodreads:

Hercule Poirot stood on the cliff-top. For here, many years earlier, there had been a tragic accident – the broken body of a woman was discovered on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. This was followed by the grisly discovery of two more bodies – a husband and wife – shot dead. But who had killed whom? Was it a suicide pact? A crime of passion? Or cold-blooded murder? Poirot delves back into a crime committed 15 years earlier and discovers that, when there is a distinct lack of physical evidence, it’s just as well that ‘old sins leave long shadows.'

I've read more books by Agatha, but these are my personal three favourites (I hope I'm not forgetting any, but I don't think I do). But of course, my words are subjective! These books might not be everyone's cup of tea, so if you think my recommendation were not satisfying, you can always look up more yourself💖💖 (I suggest you not going on Wikipedia, because there are HUGE spoilers there. Go on Goodreads.)

These books are from Poirot's series of stories. Agatha has also written about Miss Marple. I haven't read a lot of Miss Marple yet, but from my very little experience with her, she's very likable too.

The difference between Poirot and Miss Marple is that Poirot dives into the core of human psychology and all it's possible twisted states as a detective, while Miss Marple is just an elderly lady that lends her brains into cases she might come across. And mainly, Miss Marple does it by revisiting experiences from her life that remind her of certain aspects of the cases.

Both characters are absolutely lovely and breathtaking and even though they both have different approaches to solving cases, they're both very intuitive and their brains are wonderful in their own unique ways.

#book recommendations

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umazes · 7 years

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In the interest of having a civil discussion, I wanted to clear up the concerns I have about The Arcana. I think many of the people who have been raising concerns probably feel the same way and I don't want to be misunderstood as trying to attack the devs or kill the game, because this is emphatically not about that.

My concerns with how this is proceeding can be broken into 3 points

1. The pricing of the game.

I've said it before, but I don't mind paying for things. I've spent hundreds on merch and games. I've paid at least $50 to play mystic messenger, for optional content, and I haven't regretted it.

What bothers me about the pricing of this game is how absurdly different it is compared to other games, and how I have no idea why it's this expensive.

Most mobile dating sims (voltage and solmare, notably) tend to ask no more than $5 for a route. And that's not what I'm asking for, but it's a comparison worth noting, because I think of it every time I'm asked to pay the equivalent of $3 for a single choice in this game. Beyond that, it's costing $10 to buy a book, which ends up working out (as others have calculated) to somewhere in the vicinity of $500 if you want to play the full game.

I've never been asked for that much money for any game, ever, unless they also offer me an art book and something like a 3 foot tall statue. Even other dating sims priced in the hundreds offer posters or voicing or badges. Asking $500 per customer for just the game itself is ridiculous.

Here's where the "It's optional" argument comes in. It's optional, in the same sense that I can eat raw potatoes and cooking them with seasoning is optional. I can play the free game, but it's just not as good or coherent without the coin choices, and lacks all of the scenes that make the game what I want it to be.

The problem associated with just not buying premium content if you don't like the pricing is that from a statistical point of view, unless we explain WHY we don't want to pay so much for it, it can be misinterpreted. What if the executives think we don't want the content because it's bad? They can interpret it as mobile visual novels just not being profitable. "Don't like, don't buy" with no additional complaints can ensure the content just stops being available rather than altered to be affordable.

I want to pay for this game! God, I want to. If I could even buy a route for $50. If there was a discount the more coins you buy.

(There isn't. You save something like 81 cents if you buy the highest bulk tier as opposed to the same amount in small increments.)

I just can't afford to pay half a months rent to play one game that I have no guarantee of receiving the full content for, and I imagine that's true for many of us. And if it has to be this price, I'd just like to know why. It's been extremely unclear to me why it's priced so high.

2. The treatment of kickstarter backers.

I'll be brief here, because I'm not a backer myself.

It's very upsetting to me first and foremost that all backers were promised a free version of the game that is no longer available and can receive, at most, a $10 compensation or just suck it up.

"But they're refunding most of the kickstarter money and killing their game!" is an argument I have heard. And, well, yes. But the backers who bought tiers specifically for the promise of a full pc version have all lost out, unless the pledged $10 or less and did not buy anything in the mobile game.

I understand that a free mobile version was never a reward, and that makes sense. But for the people who pledged maybe $50 for the pc game, they've lost $40 and in addition will have to pay the $10 per book in order to still receive the content they were promised. It's absurd. At the very least, higher tier backers should be offered coin compensation. And the gall of allowing people to select neither refund nor waiting for the PC version indefinitely, of offering for people to just give their money away after this, is shocking.

The draw of kickstarters that I fund is that I pay for a product that isn't complete in order to receive it for a reduced price when it is complete, because that compensates what was essentially an uncertain loss to me at the time of pledging. This is a loss with no equivalent gain in sight and no overt plans for them to do anything much about it.

3. The response and treatment of feedback.

This one really gets me. Let me start off by saying that I am very, very much aware that they have no dedicated PR staff.

I had a recent interaction with the arcana Twitter after they found another user's untagged complaint. As has been standard to this point, they kindly advised us that paid content is optional, to which I have the response I gave above. Upon being asked again why they think the price is justified, this response was offered.

Ha ha! Funny joke! Apparently whoever was manning this Twitter account thought so. Except it wasn't a funny joke at all. Making a very callous and inappropriate joke of a real concern that has already negatively impacted users, after barging into an untagged complaint on a personal account, is about one of the worst responses I can think of. And nobody even asked for one at all, at the time.

But upon receiving that response, boy did I want a response. I've been seeing that response from them everywhere. "Send us an email". So I passed this along to some friends who do similar work and who have feedback concerns as well.

Firstly, I was told by pretty much everyone who had sent them an email that no response had been received. I brought this up in the Twitter thread, to which I received the answer that the team is small and can't respond to every email.

Well, okay, that's reasonable. Except that you DO have time to respond to every tweet, apparently.

Then send them! Throwing my feedback into some kind of void with no indication of how, if, and when they are being received is not an encouraging way to deal with customers.

Apparently, tweets are harder to pass along. Except that when I pointed out tweets can be linked and indexed in a variety of ways (it is a thought sharing platform, after all), I received the response that tweets are screenshotted and passed along as well.

Then why are we supposed to email??????

I was complaining about this confused response privately when another friend who works in customer service pointed out to me that companies tend to prefer social media over email communication anyway, because email can be treated as a legal document. This entire inability to respond to my questions promptly and honestly is making me really irritated in trying to resolve what amounts to a singular complaint that I would like to freely offer money to this game, and want to know why it's so hard.

And to be clear, I don't expect it to be resolved in a day. I don't expect the devs to work day and night to change their game. But if you are using official accounts to interact with your audience, I expect a prompt and professional reponse. I handle CSR duties daily in my job too. A simple "We will get back to you in a few days" or "This problem can't currently be resolved but we'll provide an update on how the discussion is going in a week" would suffice. Do a public update instead of responding to every email if it's too much. Walk away and respond to my tweet in twenty minutes after coming up with a better response.

If you're interacting with customers in a professional capacity, then be professional. I expect to be treated with respect and I expect to know where my feedback is going and what's being done with it, because as 85 stands the interactions I've had have been extremely underwhelming.

I'm not contacting these devs on their personal accounts and I don't want to be accused of bullying. I just don't think it's unreasonable that if I'm having a bad time trying to support this good game that I enjoy playing, I should know why.

#the arcana #i just wanted to get this off my chest

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