#to figure out how to flesh out and implement the ideas we generated

[whentherewerebicycles]

in my dream job era

#I could not love it more #it’s just the perfect blend #of types of work #today I was in back to back meetings but all of them were useful and engaging and energizing #tomorrow more meetings #where I get to do a lot of asking questions and thinking with people to identify issues and articulate priorities #and solve problems #and then like most of the rest of the week will just be like #doing sustained thinking & strategizing & research #to figure out how to flesh out and implement the ideas we generated #it’s just perfect!!!!!!!! #the thing I have learned about myself professionally is like #I just love and thrive on and NEED a ton of people contact #especially the kind where you’re working on a project together #but I also really need quiet no interruptions thinking time where I can shut off email/teams/whatever #and just like #synthesize… reflect… research… consolidate… experiment… reflect some more #anyway every time I see that meme that’s like ‘I have no dream job I do not dream of labor’ #I’m like CANNOT relate #I was a creature made to work #but like #work that is deeply fulfilling and values aligned and pushes you to constantly be learning #etc etc etc #anyway… THRIVING #what a relief after 10 months of being like maybe I’ll never use my brain again

[transforming]

Life Update + Commissions!

Hey y'all! So here's a life update because right now, it's fucking hell on earth:

I'm going through major financial instability in my life, and as a college student, it's really hitting hard. Parents are out of a job, and my college just implemented a salary earnings cap for student jobs, which honestly I think is stupid and cruel to low-income students like me. On top of that, where I live, students can't work part time jobs outside of university, which would make it even more (and already) extremely difficult for me to cover my living expenses, let alone tuition fees.

After talking to some of my friends in this community about what I could do to keep myself afloat (and try to keep paying for my studies), and after getting some advice on how to proceed, I have decided to open up writing commissions.

To start, here is how it's gonna work with me:

Firstly, send me a message. You could do it over here on Tumblr, that's fine, but I'd much prefer it if you could message me on Discord, since I'm more reachable there. This makes things a lot easier for us to talk through your ideas and delve deeper into them, really flesh them out, and figure things out before I start writing.

Do NOT send me commission requests through asks.

Second, make sure to properly read through my rules below. Pricing details are set out below (rule 4), so make sure to keep that in mind when you're sending a request and when we're in discussion.

The number of commissions I will take on at at time will depend on a number of factors:

balancing my writing with college assignments & priorities

my level of interest

my writing mood / mental health

I'll make sure to provide updates on when I'm open to them or not.

Okay, now that those are out of the way, here are the very important rules that need to be taken in consideration.

The Transforming Commission Rules:

1. I reserve the right to refuse writing commissions.

Beside the above-mentioned reasons for the number of commissions I'm willing to take; or regardless of the reason; or for no given reason, no means no. Flat out.

I may not like the idea. Maybe I'm busy with classes, life or other commissions. Or perhaps my mental health's taken a downwards spin and/or I'm just not in the mood to write at the moment.

Make no mistake, if you pester me and ask if I've reconsidered your idea, I will simply just block you, no questions asked. If you want to politely ask again if my classes/time/mood were the issue for my saying no, I'd be more than happy to talk things out.

Also, please keep in mind that besides writing stories and my college classes, I have a life too. If you message me about a commission and I don't respond immediately, I'm either just busy or asleep.

I'll make sure to reply to those that inquire, it might just take me a sec.

2. Be as creative as possible, but also use your common sense.

As a creative writing student, I'm gonna be hard on this: one-sentence commission requests that just say "Make me into a twink!" or "Turn me into a frat bro!" will more than likely get refused. That said, try to make your request a little more compelling for me.

Come up with a plot summary, throw some more tf's in there, maybe add a delicious plot twist that would subvert a part of your idea, . I can only write so many of one type of tf story - they're fun, but don't make me bored sick of writing any more of them.

Also, be conscientious and realistic about the length you want. I'm no literary god with unlimited time, and I definitely can't fit a heavily descriptive tf AND a good plot in just 1,000 words.

If you're feeling insane super generous, or more supportive to help me out, and want to commission longer pieces (more than 3,000 words), we can talk more about it when you make the request.

3. I have limits. Push them and our deal's off.

Some of these are without question:

Underage characters / tf's (you will immediately get blocked if you make such a request).

Feet

Violence / pain / rape / non-consensual acts

Homophobic tf's (refer to my repost of @idesofrevolution's post - they've explained it better than I ever could)

Chastity

Unrealistic sizes

Animal tf's

Celebrity tf's (more details below)

I'm primarily a male tf writer, so gender tf is fine, but a heavily female focused story is a nope from me.

Don't even think to ask, I simply will not write them.

As much as I used to include them in my previous stories (especially with TF College), I won't generally do celebrity tf's anymore (i.e. stuff like "Turn me into Henry Cavill!") There may be a lot of very sexy celebrities around, and as hot as it may be to become them, I've had my fair share of writing those stories to the point where I'm done with them. Writing up original characters are more my thing these days - I'm a creative writing major, after all.

There is, of course, some flexibility with this, so if you have an idea but aren't completely sure, you can always ask me. If the idea is compelling enough -- and the guy hot enough -- maybe I'll make an exception. That's much better than getting rejected.

4. Payment & Delivery.

See, as much as I'm struggling right now, I'm not inconsiderate either - I know I'm not the only writer going through shit. I also know people aren't gonna dish out money to completely cover my life and instantly get me out of this hellish rut.

That said, I charge $0.04/word (for my British friends, £0.03/word). That's $40 (£30) per 1,000 words, or $20 (£15) for 500 words.

Payment is via PayPal. In full, up front. I will not begin writing until I've been paid.

When it comes to format of delivery, I will send you a pdf of the final story, provided you give me an email to send the pdf to (unless you' message me on Discord, for which I can just send the pdf to you directly).

5. Use of Images & Posting on Public.

The final say on any images included in these commissions are up to you. You're completely welcome to bring your own images to for me to write around, but if you don't have any, I'm happy to try and find some I feel fit the particular story if you'd like me to.

Then again, I can't make any promises. If I can't find image(s) that fit, or you don't like the ones I provide, I won't climb every mountain or cross every stream to find something. These are writing commissions in the end, so keep that in mind.

I'll also give you the final word on posting these commissions here on Tumblr. If you specifically don't want me to post yours, please say so during the process. If you say nothing, I may end up posting some of them after they've been delivered.

If you're okay for me to post the commission, but would like to remain anonymous (as in not get tagged on the post), make sure to let me know that too. This is an easy one to forget, so I'll be reaching out to you on posting after I've delivered it.

- Drew the Transformer

P.S. Don't forget, you can also tip me over on ko-fi, if you can't or don't want to commission! Seriously, any support during this very difficult time is always welcome, but I'll also understand if you can't.

#not a story #tf commissions #life update

[writingquestionsanswered]

So, I have this problem I'm not sure how to fix, but I often feel like my writing comes off as shallow and/or repetitive. Idk if I'm explaining this in a way that you can understand, but the writings I admire the most are the ones where you have beautiful quotes and you can feel things and you want to highlight those quotes, and I want my writing to be like that, but I often feel like it turns out "feelingless", like it's just a bunch of random description and you can't really tell how the +

how the character feels or it's all really flat and not quote worthy, if you get what I mean? So, if you could help me maybe write something more meaningful, I guess, I would be so glad! Thanks for all the work you do, it helps a lot!

Writing More Meaningful Prose

Some writing problems can be solved by implementing a single step or short-term method. Others require implementing various things over the long-term, and this is one of them. In other words, this isn't something you can improve overnight or over a short period of time. However, if you implement some of the following advice, you can improve it over time. This is how it is for all writers. :)

1) Read. Read, Read, Read... Read

It sounds like you probably do read, and that's good. Keep doing that. Keep highlighting beautiful quotes. Keep paying attention to the things that move you when you're reading. If something strikes you as being the kind of prose you want to achieve, highlight that, too. Analyze it. See if you can figure out what strikes you so much about it compared to your own writing.

2) Plot and Purpose Matter

If you feel like your writing is flat, nine out of ten times it's because you don't even know what you're writing about. You may have a basic story idea, but you don't have a solid plot. You don't have fleshed out characters. You don't know their motivation, goal, internal conflict, or their character arc. You don't know the obstacles they'll have to overcome, and how, or who put them there. You don't know the themes and motifs you want to explore, and you don't know what your readers want to take away from your story. Without all of those things, you can't have the kind of meaningful, vivid prose you're looking for, because that kind of prose stems from conflict, emotion, exploration of theme, etc. You need to know where your story is going before you can give your writing meaning.

3) About Theme and Motifs...

One of the things that makes those quotes you love so beautiful and meaningful is that they speak to what the story is about. They're not just random quotes about how pretty the sky looks or how much one character loves another. For example, the themes in Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone tie into the numerous real-world systems of oppression being dismantled by today's younger generations. For example, here is a quote that I found to be particularly powerful and beautiful:

“They don't hate you, my child. They hate what you were meant to become.”

― Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

The quote speaks to the themes of prejudice, inequality, sense of duty that feature so heavily in the book, and that relationship to theme is what gives this quote its beauty and power.

4) Remember the Sensory Details

Something that is often missing in flat writing is sensory detail. Here's another quote:

“They wear their secrets like glittering diamonds, embroidery woven through their lavish buba tops and wrapped iro skirts. Their lies and lily-scented perfumes taint the honeyed aroma of sweet cakes I am no longer allowed to eat.” ― Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

This quote hits on so many sensory details:

Something we can "see" (Sight): "glittering diamonds," "buba tops," "iro skirts."

Something we can "touch" (Texture): embroidery, woven, wrapped

Something we can "smell" (Scent): lily-scented perfumes, honeyed aroma

Something we can "taste" (Flavor): sweet cakes

Something we can "hear" (Sound): there aren't really any sounds in this quote, but I think "their lies" does lend a bit of "sound" to the quote because you can almost imagine lies being spoken.

5) Time and Practice

The hardest of all of these for most newer writers to hear is that the kind of writing you want to achieve takes time and practice. You can implement the tips above and it will help, but they won't make your writing instantly stellar. As you implement these tips, however, learn what works for you and what doesn't, and start to hone your own personal style, you'll find that your writing begins to improve over time. You start to eventually see the kind of writing you admire so much in other books.

I hope that helps! ♥

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

Visit my FAQ See my Master List of Top Posts Go to ko-fi.com/wqa to buy me coffee or see my commissions!

#writing #writing tips #writing help #writing advice #wqaadvice

[twyam-if]

Update #1

Goals for this week:

-Writing/Mapping out the character creation, prologue, and outlining the rest of the story.

-Figuring out how Twine works...again.

-Revealing two, new characters. One of them is an RO!

-Special surprise!

-Answer more asks.

I'm going to strangle Tumblr. I saved this draft twice and both times it never saved it. Stares into the abyss in pain, eats my mango ice-cream in despair.

In any case, I uh, should’ve started with this. Whoops!

Welcome to the update notes! I wanted to post these on Saturday instead of Monday, but unfortunately I was busy with a prior engagement on Saturday to properly write this out.

I'm currently in the middle of out-lining and writing out the character creation. For the prologue, I just need to continue writing it out. Which means, hopefully in a few more weeks or less, I can post the prologue for everyone and start working on Chapter One. I'm still in the midst of outlining my story as I did have a general idea of it, but after adding in more scenes and fleshing it out, I got so inspired and I ended up thinking of more scenes. Suffice to say, this will take a while lmao

Coding is pain. I write the story in a seperate document, and yet the HTML/CSS say: "Hey, you added something wrong and there's 50+ errors."

Me:

Hopefully, I can show you guys a template of what the game will look like soon. I want to make the template first before I implement the story into it!

It's ironic because I like to code, but coding makes me cry.

Next, I can safely say that I can show you guys two more characters that will be important in your journey! One of them is an RO, but the other isn't. Depending on the popularity of the other guy, though...well, we'll see when we get there!

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that I could have shared the other RO, but I thought because that they contained spoilers that I didn't put them there, but after looking through my notes again...this character doesn't really have spoilers that is aimed towards the story. So like...

Me: Stares into the abyss again.

I'll post the two characters up later after I finish preparing them, but I'm going to make a seperate post that will contain the ROs and characters that are important to the story. I'll link it to the pinned post!

As for the special surprise, I will show you guys a glimpse of the world of Romaen in 'journal entry' forms later down the line. Out of anyone in Romaen, this specific character would be the one to record everything in perfect detail.

To add onto this: These logs are all made by a completely different RO that will be revealed in the future. Their appearance is a spoiler so I'll leave them anonymous, and I'll also hide some areas where there's going to be spoilers. I do eventually want to add these onto the game as a form of Codex, so you'll be able to see a small summary of what the world will contain, but we'll see what happens down the line.

I hope you guys enjoy them!

Thank you guys for being patient with me. I'll continue answering asks in a timely manner, and hopefully, I'm showing you small cracks and glimpses of what my book will contain.

I'll see you guys again in asks soon, and stay safe everyone!

#castor talks #twyam #twyam if #castor updates

[apprenticevida]

Nuestra Alcoba Azul 🍋🔞

Word Count: 2,575 sorry I got carried away with this one

Pairings: Jinana/Vida

Synopsis: tear the bitch apart With renewed confidence Vida gets a taste of what the masquerade is all about

Notes: Day 3 of @midsummer-masquerade Day 3: Denial, Impact Play, some Worship and Collars

Thank you @the-iron-orchid for letting me work with Jinana! I hope I did hir justice.

Alcoba Azul by Lila Downs

Warnings: SPICY LEMON. Impact play, voyeurism, Praise and Punishment, BDSM, biting, masturbation, cunnilingus, orgasm denial/control, squirting, humiliation, subspace, nipple play, manual sex/no insertion

After bidding their lovers farewell and good luck, Vida saunters out of the room. With a renewed confidence in their sense of self and sensuality, they’re ready to experience everything the Masquerade has to offer.

As the witch wanders through the halls they hear cries of ecstasy from various rooms. Some are behind closed doors, others open to allow guests to join. Every once in a while they pass by a room with a shimmering barrier in the doorway; it’s meant to allow voyeurs to enjoy the show while allowing the performers the security of knowing they won’t be interrupted, a friendly guest informs them as Vida sips from a glass of vodka.

When they eventually find the grand ballroom, Vida discovers it’s been transformed into a large aftercare playroom. Plush beds with comforting blankets are spread out on the floor; massage oils, balms, and decanters of water are readily available on numerous low tables throughout the room.

They make a mental note to stop by before the end of the night.

Continuing their exploration brings them to a hallway full of “vendor” tables. No coins are being exchanged: the invitation explicitly stated that any toys or accessories procured were The Countess’s gifts to attendees.

A leatherworker’s wares catch their eye. Harnesses, leashes, and collars all colors of the rainbow are on display. With the help of the proprietor, they find a collar that fits snug against their throat. The band is black with intricate swirls and spirals carved into the leather with a gold O-ring at the center. Committing the name of the woman’s shop to memory (Rhett’s Wares), Vida promises to visit on their next trip to the market.

With the collar they announce their submissive inclinations to potential playmates. It’s thrilling to feel eyes roving over their figure and for now Vida is content with only being seen.

When a peacock-haired figure catches their eye Vida decides they’re ready for more.

Despite hir petite figure the mage radiates power and confidence. There’s something about hir that has ensorcelled Vida. They down the rest of their drink before walking over.

S/he’s lounging on a chaise opposite Nadia, who, as luck would have it, has excused herself to visit other revelers.

While they’re generally thrilled to please multiple dominants, seems a little too much too soon.

“Hello, I’m Vida.” The witch waves shyly when they’ve approached the unfamiliar mage.

The figure elegantly extends a delicate henna-laced hand

“Jinana,” s/he responds in a warm, husky tone. “A pleasure.” S/he eyes Vida top and down, evaluating them.

Vida takes hir hand and brushes their lips against hir knuckles.

“You’re… really beautiful.” Vida breathes against the lilac-scented skin. “Would you like to play with me?”

“Hmmm, that depends, Vida.” S/he rolls their name on hir tongue like a piece of candy. “What do you want to play?”

—————

It doesn’t take long to negotiate the scene and its boundaries. Surprisingly, there’s little they disagree on and their hard limits are the same.

Jinana leads Vida to a cobalt room decked with sapphire blue drapery and pristine white furniture.

“There’s a bath in the back, go freshen up and I’ll sort things out here.” S/he orders, gesturing to a folding screen that separates the spare room and alcove hiding the bath.

Vida’s thankful for the simplicity of their costume: once the clincher is unlaced they easily slide out of the crimson robe.

Their bath is diligent, if rushed. They don’t want to keep Jinana waiting, but s/he made hir preference for a bathed partner clear. They find a vial of vanilla oils to massage in when they’re dry and dress in a flowing white bathrobe before they return to their playmate.

There is a sawhorse in front of the door and two white chairs in the center of the midnight blue carpet. Jinana is seated in one with an end table with toys and vials next to hir. S/he gestures with an elegant hand for Vida to sit across from hir.

“Before we get started, priya, are you sure about the door?”

Vida sits in the chair, glancing at the closed door behind Jinana.

“Yes, ser. I’m sure.”

A smile plays on Jinana’s lips.

“As you wish.”

A flick of hir wrist and the door swings open, a shimmering barrier forming to separate the room and the hall.

…to allow voyeurs to enjoy the show while allowing the performers the security of knowing they won’t be interrupted…

“Now Vida” Jinana crosses one toned leg over the other. “How do you like to play?”

“Well, usually—”

“Ah-ah!” S/he chides, wagging one manicured finger towards hir companion. “Show, don’t tell.”

Vida feels their face flush as a shiver runs up their back. This was going to be a fun experience.

Vida catches their lower lip between their teeth as they nod in understanding. They spread their legs slowly, knowing the angle of the chair means Jinana’s view will be shared with any onlookers.

First they trail a few fingers down the side of their face and neck. When their hand meets the robe’s neckline they gently glide the silk away from their chest. A sensitive nipple pebbles under the fabric and hardens when it meets the cool air. With one hand they tweak and pull the nub while the other hand repeats the dance on the opposite side. When their breathing gets harder to control the shrug of the robe entirely.

With heavy lidded eyes they meet Jinana’s gaze, hir chin resting on one hand. The other holds a riding crop in an almost listless manner. There’s maybe a meter between the magic users; Vida can clearly see the fire burning in Jinana’s eyes behind hir silver filigree mask

Upping the ante, Vida let’s one hand stroke down their belly and to their already dripping cunt. It’s impossible for them to hold back a moan when one cold finger slides against their hard and swollen clit.

“Remember priya, no coming without permission.” Jinana’s voice is low and hir eyes dark.

“Yesser,” Vida slurs. Something about hir energy makes Vida want to bend to hir every command.

For a while the only noise in the room is the slick sound of the witch’s ministrations, punctuated by moans and gasps as they try to keep a steady rhythm.

By now a few guests have gathered by the door. Vida can hear the susurrus of conversation, but either the partygoers are too far away or Vida is too far gone to make it out.

The chair beneath then begins to creak as their hips buck against their hand. Their breathing comes quicker now. They’re close so close and they begin to lose their sense of control and

“Stop.”

Vida freezes with a gasp. Their cunt clenches in anticipation, as if to hold on to the edge of their release. Jinana stands from hir chair and taps the riding crop against hir free hand. The leather makes a satisfying thwack against the henna flower on hir palm.

“On your knees, priya.”

In the foggy subspace it takes a moment too long for hir words to register. Vida feels a hand push them from the chair to kneel in front of Jinana. Their head jerks around in an attempt to find an intruder but the room is empty behind them. Jinana taps their cheek with the crop and uses the leather implement to make them face hir.

S/he makes a tutting noise with her tongue in disapproval. “I thought you were going to behave. Although,” s/he lets the crop graze against their neck. “It seems someone else has had to call on your attention before.” They press the tag of the crop against the bruises on their neck and their eyes flutter shut at the pleasure-pain.

“Still, you did give a riveting performance. Would you like a reward, sweetling?”

Vida is dazed and their eyes won’t focus, but they innately know hir question needs an answer.

“Oh, yes please, ser. I’ll take whatever you think I deserve.”

For a moment Jinana is reminded of hir Ilya. They’re both very pretty when they’re on their knees begging in adoration. S/he files the thought away for later as s/he removes Vida’s mask.

Now, however, s/he lifts one foot into the chair behind Vida and pulls the front off hir dress aside.

“Well then?” S/he quirks a brow at hir submissive.

Vida’s eyes jump between the sights before and above them. They’re trying desperately to form the question in their mind.

“May I please touch you? With my hands I mean?”

Jinana smirks as s/he responds. “For now. Until I decide otherwise.”

Vida adjusts their position so Jinana’s thigh rests on their shoulder. They rest one hand on top of hir leg and the other on hir opposite hip. At first Vida wets their lips and leans their head forward before they stop. An idea pops into their hazy mind. They turn towards the leg on their shoulder and begin to trail soft kisses up Jinana’s thigh, squeezing hir leg every so often.

Their partner hums approval and threads hir fingers through Vida’s hair. Hir nails card through their silky curls; a low moan rumbles in Vida’s throat and into Jinana’s soft flesh.

The soft kisses on Jinana’s leg turn to kitten licks and then open-mouthed kisses until they slowly reach the apex of hir thigh. They take one more adoring glance at the mage before dragging the flat of their tongue along hir slit.

The smell of lilac mingled with Jinana’s musk makes a heady combination. Vida almost feels drunk off of their lust. As they lap at hir sex they moan into hir, fingers pressing into Jinana to anchor themself. They swirl the tip of their tongue against hir clit before gently sucking.

Jinana lets out a groan of pleasure and tightens hir grip to guide Vida to the right spot. S/he gives gentle praise when Vida begins to work their mouth against her. The hand Vida placed on Jinana’s hip slowly moves higher. They caress hir side, hir stomach, hir sternum before brushing their fingertips against a nipple.

With a gasp Jinana tugs Vida’s head away with one hand and snatches their wrist with the other.

“That,” s/he sighs. “Is cheating.”

Vida’s eyes go wide. Gripped as they are, they're at hir mercy. “Are you going to punish me, ser?” Their voice is thick with arousal and hope.

“Cheating does get punished.” S/he jerks hir head at the sawhorse and releases Vida. “Go.”

Still on their knees, Vida glances at the wooden structure. They swallow. “Which way would you have me face, ser?”

“Away from the door.”

Vida didn’t realize they could get any wetter than they were. Their legs are slick with their own lubricant as they stand and walk to the carpentry table. The table is at a height where they have to keep their feet spread wide when they bend over. Their face is red with embarrassment and it’s only made worse when they can’t keep their cunt from twitching from need and excitement.

“Five for cheaters. Count aloud,” is the only warning Jinana gives before the crop makes contact across the swell of their ass.

“One!” They shout at the floor.

The next strike is focused on one cheek.

“Two!” Their brow furrows.

The third lands on the other side.

“Th-three!” Vida can feel tears well up in their eyes. They have to rest their head against their forearms.

There’s a pause. A small warm hand strokes up their back and Vida’s head jolts upward.

“Do you need a break?” Jinana’s voice is as soothing as hir caress.

After a breath Vida shakes their head.

“I-I can take two more, ser.” They swallow and reposition themselves, pushing their ass out farther and widening their stance.

Jinana grins in amusement before getting back to work.

The fourth strike is at the top of their thighs, just enough to make a satisfying sound without stinging.

“Four!” Vida cries out loud and clear.

The final blow lands on their sex, the wet sound echoes in their mind.

“Five!” Vida’s voice is somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Their punishment is over, but neither of them have come yet.

“Very good, priya. You’ve done so well!” There’s genuine joy in Jinana’s voice and Vida’s heart swells. The shorter magician helps straighten the pliant Vida up and turns them to face the door.

Without their mask Vida somehow feels more vulnerable than they did when fully displaying their sex.

“You haven’t come yet, have you?” Jinana’s voice is almost taunting as Vida shakes their head in response.

“I’ll need to fix that. Sit down.” S/he summons a cushion onto the sawhorse and with one hand pressing on their shoulder guides them to sit. S/he walks behind Vida and begins to stroke one warm hand along their neck.

They already feel their eyes lid in pleasure as Jinana demonstrates how attentive s/he’s been. Hir hands accurately mimic Vida’s earlier actions. Jinana begins to add to the bite marks on their neck, hir small teeth indenting into their soft skin.

By the time hir hand reaches their small bundle of nerves Vida is a mess. They buck into hir fingers, push back into hir bites, pull away from hir fingers pinching their nipples. Their cries and moans of ecstasy are the only sounds they know how to make.

They’re coiled tighter than a spring, but Jinana hasn’t given permission yet. Cruel, lovely Jinana won’t talk with hir mouth full.

Not yet can’t yet so close so close please please please ser

“Come for me, Vida.”

Their orgasm crashes over them, toes curling as they scream. Legs splayed and thighs tighten as their hips chase the sensation. They feel the familiar sensation of their ejaculate release and have to hide their face in their hands in humiliation.

By the time they finish they’re trembling and Jinana holds them through their aftershocks. They don’t uncover their face until they hear the door close. Vida’s still beet red and their body feels overwhelmed and tender.

“How are you feeling?” Jinana asks as s/he strokes their hair.

“W-“ Vida takes a shaky breath. “Was I okay?”

“Oh you sweet thing!” Jinana holds them to hir chest. “You were lovely. But how are you feeling now?”

It takes time for Vida to self-process.

“Like I’ve been,” they make a clawing motion at their chest. “It’s like you tore everything out, but in the most perfect way. Everything feels… lighter? I guess? I feel… amazing.” They sigh.

“Do you need anything?”

Vida winces when they adjust their position. “A salve, I think.”

“I’m sure there’s something here. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

—————

After another bath and talking through the scene again with Jinana they put their costume and mask back on and leave the room. Any of their onlookers have gone to watch or join other scenes. Vida breathes a sigh of relief and says goodbye to Jinana.

Even with the salve Jinana applied, Vida needs a break. When they arrive at the ballroom they take an empty futon and sip water. Julian, sporting more marks than before, finds them here. Taking a seat next to them he strokes their leg and his face dons his incorrigible smirk.

“So… I didn’t know you knew Jinana.”

#the arcana #the arcana game #apprentice vida #fan apprentice #jinana #other people’s ocs #the-iron-orchid #vesuviaafterdark #midsummer masquerade #fan fiction #lemon #baby’s THIRD lemon #minors dni

[quillquiver]

So I already didn't trust occam when she was bullying people for doing art wrong over a year ago and I don't trust Jess after she lied about future episodes and tried to blame it on meta writers. Like I know no one has any network connections or anything like that.

All I know is I can't think of one book, tv show, or movie that has a love confession between two big characters and then never mentions it again. I can't think of another one that had a blatant love interests with dates and a kiss and is dropped. To me that's weird. That says "something" happened. I don't know what but I know nothing can be done to change what occurred.

I do think though we should use this instance to try and make sure that CWs inclusivity isn't just tokenism. Our show is done (for now) but no other fandoms on tv in general should have to settle or deal with whatever episode 20 was. Queer characters, BIPOC, and disabled characters should have more fulfilling story arcs and we need to try and keep that message.

Yeah, for sure! My reblogging and sharing of receipts has nothing to do with my feelings re: campaigns for better representation. The CW might be the most “progressive” network in looking at the number of queer characters they have on screen, but you’re totally right, a lot are tokenism, very few are actually well fleshed-out characters, and it often feels like they understood that there’s a dedicated audience for queer content but haven’t thought about anything beyond capturing our viewership. 

I also think that this would be a great time to start talking more seriously about representation on TV--and on networks like the CW--in a more meaningful way. But I think that before we start talking to the network directly, we need to figure out what we actually want.

The problem with representation is that it’s a really nebulous concept. Good rep to me might be bad rep to you! So if we’re going to start asking for better representation, we need to be specific about what we want, and we all need to rally behind a unified message. Do we want sensitivity readers? Do we want the network to put forth a hiring initiative for projects headed by BIPOC, queer, disabled and/or woman creatives? A hiring initiative that tackles the lack of minority rep every CW writers’ room? 

Asking for things that are actionable and can be implemented into the structure of the network will guarantee us better results than vague demands about representation. At that point, it would probably be a good idea to set up a website; transparency is key, here. We’d want everyone--not just SPN fans--to understand what we’re asking for and why. I think that after all of that is done, only then would we want to start twitter campaigns, writing letters, sending in proof of cancelled subscriptions, etc. and we’d want to let people know what we were doing via our website so that if, say, we did get the network’s attention, they could go to our website and see what we were asking for. 

Like, I can’t stress how important transparency is here, and how transparency paired with a centralized platform leads to consistent messaging and, hopefully, actual results. We got a whole bunch of things trending a little while ago, but it sounded like almost no one outside the movement understood what we actually wanted. I think this was a mix of people being deliberately obtuse and not doing their research... but also just us having a fractured message from the get-go. So yeah. I realize this is probably way more than you wanted when you sent me that ask, anon, but I truly think that we could make a difference here if we went about it differently. 

#queer representation #activism #anonymous #answered

[tsukikoayanosuke]

Terraludus, Twisted Wonderland Fan-Dorm - Basic Idea (and me rambling about nonsense)

So, I was looking through my dashboard one day and I saw @dreamerwicked-sweet​ ‘s fan-dorm challenge and I was like: "Challange accepted!"

I immediately opened my fanfiction/novel files and it appears that I have so many unfinished novels and fanfictions that are still sitting there ^^'

But we're not gonna talk about that! We're here to make a fan-dorm based on one of my unfinished drafts.

There will be background details of how this dorm was made, what is it based on, my typical Behind the Fic. So far, this is so little, and I will continue this when I have time.

Okay, here we go!

Welcome to our fan-dorm: Terraludus!

Etymology

The name of the dorm is a combination of two Latin words: 'Terra', which means 'earth', and 'Ludus', which means 'game'

Concept

The dorm founded on the 'Undying Spirit of the Chosen Players of Judgement'. Students who are from this dorm excel in elemental magic, magical combats, and magical weapon creation. They can not only cast the three main elemental magic (fire, water, and wood) but also be able to manipulate their surrounding element within their highest level element. So, for example, you are an expert in fire magic, then to enter this dorm, you must be able to not only cast fire-based magic, but also use more spells to manipulate an already exist fire in your surrounding, or combine other spells with your basic fire spell to create an advance level fire spell. 

Unlike other dorm where only the Dorm Leader who are the only one who can have customized Magical Pen, the students of Terraludus have the liberty to create their own Magical Weapon to suit their battle style. While magical pen, staff, wand, and tome are common, there are also students who have magic sword, exploding marbles, even a frying pan.

To be the Dorm Leader, one must be able to control all there elements and has their own customized Magical Weapon.

Behind the Scene

This dorm is based on my unfinished novel titled 'Permainan di Bawah Langit' ('The Game Under the Sky' in Indonesian). In this story, there are six powers (called En) that exist in this universe: Àite, Mind, Firinn, Cumhachd, Ùline dan Anam (which is basically the six Infinity Stone: Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time, and Soul).

The novel centered around two teens, Lionel, a timid boy who was bullied by his twin sister, and Juliet, a mysterious girl who suddenly appeared without any memories. The story follows the growth of Lionel as he slowly gains confidence, even find himself some new friends, and growing his relationship with Juliet. Here's the thing though. Both Lionel and Juliet have En Anam, which means eventually they have to fight each other to determine the fate of the world. Here's a plot twist though! In this era, who don't have two, but three En Anam users! The last user is none other than Lionel bully sister, Lunette.

While the first five powers are pretty common and having more that one power is normal, nobody in this world can have En Anam. None, except two in every generation. Well, you see. The world is currently being judged by a figure named 'Mother Nature'. They have the authority to decide whether to destroy the world or preserve it. How they determine it is by having them choose two humans who were given the En Anam (along with their chosen other En users) and fight each other in a game of life and death. Whoever wins the battle shall absorb their teammates' power and becomes the next 'Mother Nature' and brings gift or punishment to the Earth. 

.

.

That's basically the summary of the draft. It was heavily inspired by Katekyo Hitman Reborn, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Rewrite, and Infinity War. It was a mess, which is why I didn't dare to pick it up again.

Why I picked this instead of the other draft? Well, this is the most fleshed out of them all. My first pick was actually a story where when you die, you find yourself in a train to the afterlife, but you have a choice to rewind your life or continue your life with awesome power. But I don’t know how I can implement it to Twisted Wonderland AU, and the character aren’t as fleshed out as this one, so I choose Permainan di bawah Langit instead.

To transfer this to Twisted Wonderland AU is pretty hard. First of all, there are no such things as Infinity Stones or En Powers or Magical Girl Transformations (because in the novel, to use your power, you have to transform into your 'magical boy/girl costume')  in Twisted Wonderland, so I have to change it to fit the AU. The first thing I think of is the Fire-Water-Wood gameplay system. So, why not we make use of that? So, instead of six powers, we have only three. And they are elemental powers, so basically, the students here are benders. The Unique Power though can be more creative, like using Wood Magic to heal others or creating mist from Water Magic. I can combine the Infinity Stone power and combine it with the elemental magics.

And since one dorm usually has two to five main dorm members, so I have to cut my cast into five. I will be making their bio soon.

I don’t know if I will change the logo or not. I made it myself with Logo Maker app. Technically it represent the whole dorm: children able to control water (the river), earth (the flower) and fire (the moon?), and the butterfly represent the magical-girl transformation or represent the ‘game’ (like a butterfly-catching game). I’m bad at designing, so please forgive me.

#twisted wonderland #disney twisted wonderland #twst #twisted wonderland fandorm #twst fandorm #twstdormcreations #terraludus

[phoenotopia]

2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun. 

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

--------------------------

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all! 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mint: late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)

In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken.

Patzer was frustrated with the amount of manual work it took to track his finances with these tools, which at the time weren't smart enough to automatically categorize "Chevron" under fuel or "Safeway" under groceries. So he conceived on an ingenious hack: he wrote a program that would automatically look up every business name he entered into the online version of the Yellow Pages—constraining the search using the area code in the business's phone number so it would only consider local merchants—and use the Yellow Pages' own categories to populate the "category" field in his financial tracking tools.

It occurred to Patzer that he could do even better, which is where Mint came in. Patzer's idea was to create a service that would take all your logins and passwords for all your bank, credit union, credit card, and brokerage accounts, and use these logins and passwords to automatically scrape your financial records, and categorize them to help you manage your personal finances. Mint would also analyze your spending in order to recommend credit cards whose benefits were best tailored to your usage, saving you money and earning the company commissions.

By international standards, the USA has a lot of banks: around 12,000 when Mint was getting started (in the US, each state gets to charter its own banks, leading to an incredible, diverse proliferation of financial institutions). That meant that for Mint to work, it would have to configure its scrapers to work with thousands of different websites, each of which was subject to change without notice.

If the banks had been willing to offer an API, Mint's job would have been simpler. But despite a standard format for financial data interchange called OFX (Open Financial Exchange), few financial institutions were offering any way for their customers to extract their own financial data. The banks believed that locking in their users' data could work to their benefit, as the value of having all your financial info in one place meant that once a bank locked in a customer for savings and checking, it could sell them credit cards and brokerage services. This was exactly the theory that powered Mint, with the difference that Mint wanted to bring your data together from any financial institution, so you could shop around for the best deals on cards, banking, and brokerage, and still merge and manage all your data.

At first, Mint contracted with Yodlee, a company that specialized in scraping websites of all kinds, combining multiple webmail accounts with data scraped from news sites and other services in a single unified inbox. When Mint outgrew Yodlee's services, it founded a rival called Untangly, locking a separate team in a separate facility that never communicated with Mint directly, in order to head off any claims that Untangly had misappropriated Yodlee's proprietary information and techniques—just as Phoenix computing had created a separate team to re-implement the IBM PC ROMs, creating an industry of "PC clones."

Untangly created a browser plugin that Mint's most dedicated users would use when they logged into their banks. The plugin would prompt them to identify elements of each page in the bank's websites so that the scraper for that site could figure out how to parse the bank's site and extract other users' data on their behalf.

To head off the banks' countermeasures, Untangly maintained a bank of cable-modems and servers running "headless" versions of Internet Explorer (a headless browser is one that runs only in computer memory, without drawing the actual browser window onscreen) and they throttled the rate at which the scripted interactions on these browsers ran, in order to make it harder for the banks to determine which of its users were Mint scrapers acting on behalf of its customers and which ones were the flesh-and-blood customers running their own browsers on their own behalf.

As the above implies, not every bank was happy that Mint was allowing its customers to liberate their data, not least because the banks' winner-take-all plan was for their walled gardens to serve as reasons for customers to use their banks for everything, in order to get the convenience of having all their financial data in one place.

Some banks sent Mint legal threats, demanding that they cease-and-desist from scraping customer data. When this happened, Mint would roll out its "nuclear option"—an error message displayed to every bank customer affected by these demands informing them that their bank was the reason they could no longer access their own financial data. These error messages would also include contact details for the relevant decision-makers and customer-service reps at the banks. Even the most belligerent bank's resolve weakened in the face of calls from furious customers who wanted to use Mint to manage their own data.

In 2009, Mint became a division of Intuit, which already had a competing product with a much larger team. With the merged teams, they were able to tackle the difficult task of writing custom scrapers for the thousands of small banks they'd been forced to sideline for want of resources.

Adversarial interoperability is the technical term for a tool or service that works with ("interoperates" with) an existing tool or service—without permission from the existing tool's maker (that's the "adversarial" part).

Mint's story is a powerful example of adversarial interoperability: rather than waiting for the banks to adopt standards for data-interchange—a potentially long wait, given the banks' commitment to forcing their customers into treating them as one-stop-shops for credit cards, savings, checking, and brokerage accounts—Mint simply created the tools to take its users' data out of the bank's vaults and put it vaults of the users' choosing.

Adversarial interoperability was once commonplace. It's a powerful way for new upstarts to unseat the dominant companies in a market—rather than trying to convince customers to give up an existing service they rely on, an adversarial interoperator can make a tool that lets users continue to lean on the existing services, even as they chart a path to independence from those services.

But stories like Mint are rare today, thanks to a sustained, successful campaign by the companies that owe their own existence to adversarial interoperability to shut it down, lest someone do unto them as they had done unto the others.

Thanks to decades of lobbying and lawsuits, we've seen a steady expansion of copyright rules, software patents (though these are thankfully in retreat today), enforceable terms-of-service and theories about "interference with contract" and "tortious interference."

These have grown to such an imposing degree that big companies don't necessarily need to send out legal threats or launch lawsuits anymore—the graveyard of new companies killed by these threats and suits is scary enough that neither investors nor founders have much appetite for risking it.

For Mint to have launched when it did, and done as well as it did, tells us that adversarial interoperability may be down, but it's not out. With the right legal assurances, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and investors who'd happily provide users with the high-tech ladders they need to scale the walled gardens that Big Tech has imprisoned them within.

The Mint story also addresses an important open question about adversarial interoperability: if we give technologists the right to make these tools, will they work? After all, today's tech giants have entire office-parks full of talented programmers. Can a new market entrant hope to best them in the battle of wits that plays out when they try to plug some new systems into Big Tech's existing ones?

The Mint experience points out that attackers always have an advantage over defenders. For the banks to keep Mint out, they'd have to have perfect scraper-detection systems. For Mint to scrape the banks' sites, they only need to find one flaw in the banks' countermeasures.

Mint also shows how an incumbent company's own size works against it when it comes to shutting out competitors. Recall that when a bank decided to send its lawyers after Mint, Mint was able to retaliate by recruiting the bank's own customers to blast it for that decision. The more users Mint had, the more complaints it would generate—and the bigger a bank was, the more customers it had to become Mint users, and defenders of Mint's right to scrape the bank's site.

It's a neat lesson about the difference between keeping out malicious hackers versus keeping out competitors. If a "bad guy" was attacking the bank's site, it could pull out all the stops to shut the activity down: lawsuits, new procedures for users to follow, even name-and-shame campaigns against the bad actor.

But when a business attacks a rival that is doing its own customers' bidding, its ability to do so has to be weighed against the ill will it will engender with those customers, and the negative publicity this kind of activity will generate. Consider that Big Tech platforms claim billions of users—that's a huge pool of potential customers for adversarial interoperators who promise to protect those users from Big Tech's poor choices and exploitative conduct!

This is also an example of how "adversarial interoperability" can peacefully co-exist with privacy protection: it's not hard to see how a court could distinguish between a company that gets your data from a company's walled garden at your request so that you can use it, and a company that gets your data without your consent and uses it to attack you.

Mint's pro-competitive pressure made banks better, and gave users more control. But of course, today Mint is a division of Intuit, a company mired in scandal over its anticompetitive conduct and regulatory capture, which have allowed it to subvert the Free File program that should give millions of Americans access to free tax-preparation services.

Imagine if an adversarial interoperator were to enter the market today with a tool that auto-piloted its users through the big tax-prep companies' sites to get them to Free File tools that would actually work for them (as opposed to tricking them into expensive upgrades, often by letting them get all the way to the end of the process before revealing that something about the user's tax situation makes them ineligible for that specific Free File product).

Such a tool would be instantly smothered with legal threats, from "tortious interference" to hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And yet, these companies owe their size and their profits to exactly this kind of conduct.

Creating legal protections for adversarial interoperators won't solve all our problems of market concentration, regulatory capture, and privacy violations—but giving users the right to control how they interact with the big services would certainly open a space where technologists, co-ops, entrepreneurs and investors could help erode the big companies' dominance, while giving the public a better experience and a better deal.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we

[uglyducklingpresse]

Backlist Bulletin #6: NETS

NETS is not strictly an erasure, so much as an idea of an erasure. The title is taken from inside the letters “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” Each numbered piece in the book offers a Shakespeare sonnet in pale gray text, almost melting into the page, with some words Jen Bervin has selected in full black. So the erasure exists but the source text is still discernible. In the “working note” which closes the book, Bervin states her aim of making the language “open, porous, possible,” also saying “when we write poems, the history of poetry is with us.”

*

The first thing I think when I hear the word erasure is Mark Doty’s banger, “Homo Will Not Inherit.” Published during the mid-late years of the AIDS crisis, it opens with a description of New York City, arriving at a xeroxed picture of jesus taped up in public space, with “homo will not inherit; repent and be saved” written on it in marker. The speaker responds repetitively to this attempted warning. In one iteration, he says;

I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit:

stupidity, erasure, exile

In a poem that finds a lot of fierce delight in queerness, this stays with me like a hook. The inheritance, which is our pain on the cultural, heritable level. The inheritance which is the queer condition of being erased, being unremembered, or remembered wrongly. In a poem which, by and large, is celebratory, I am haunted by this moment.

Claiming literary techniques as queer can be sloppy and counterproductive, at times, but it is also very satisfying. So I’d like to claim erasure as queer.

*

Another thing I like to claim as queer is all Shakespeare (fight me.) I could talk for a long time about the sonnets as queer texts, and about contemporary gender nonconforming queer writers like Julian Talamanetz Brolaski or Jos Charles who implement ornate, archaic language in parts of their work. Literature is one of the ways I know we have always existed.

I realize that enjoying classical trappings, and specifically liking Shakespeare, is not an original position. What I’m getting at is that people talk a lot about the continued relevance of Shakespeare without acknowledging that there is at this point a vast cultural apparatus propping up his relevance. It’s like the ur-version of complaints about remakes and sequels on successful movie franchises. There is a lot of work that probably never gets made because we are all still gagging over Shakespeare’s relevance. (I admit I’m thinking more of theater than poetry.) I’m saying I’m ambivalent about the choice of the sonnets as a source text for erasure, and even having spent some time with the book, I am still not sure about it. Is it the clearest text, for Bervin, for this project of illuminating the presence of a history of literature within the present?

*

What is interesting (and very queer) about erasure is that it contains, inherently, a question of which text is the true text. Is the original the truth? Or did the original contain and obscure some deeper reality which the erasure made visible?

*

*

Why erasure? Does erasure have inherent qualities? Is it easier to erase than to generate? Certainly it feels game-like, math-like, as though it sits in another part of the brain. Is erasure an act of creation, distinct from writing?

I’ve read some erasures that feel successful that are mostly strange-making or whimsical. I’m thinking mostly of Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter’s collaboration Of Lamb.

But beyond the surreal or disruptive possibilities of the form, erasure is political. There’s this great Solmaz Sharif essay about that. Erasure occurs in the non-literary sense of the world, all around us. There’s active erasure, and erasures of selective attention. Some news is not news, some voices are not voices. There are structures for archiving and validating peoples’ stories which constantly erase entire perspectives, entire lives, from the record.

Erasure is political and as such can sometimes be corrective. A couple years ago New Republic put together a piece about the movement towards erasure poetry under Trump, some need emerging for a reclamation or recontextualizing of language, faced with the illogic and malice embedded in the administration’s rhetoric. I know of two writer-artists (Erin Mizrahi and Isobel O’Hare) who are making erasure poetry from #metoo celebrity apology letters. Or Chase Beggrun’s book RED. RED is taken from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as NETS is taken from the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Chase’s project feels clear and specific, in how it relates to the source text — where the original was a story about monsters, male heroes, and woman-victims, in RED it is a woman who acts, pursuing and being pursued by husbands and monsters. It is a book about trans identity which never needs to argue about trans identity. It simply finds itself, existing within the flesh of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, like a figure inside a sculptor’s stone.

*

There are many beautiful moments in NETS. With the original Sonnets present as a ghost-bolster, it is easy to see beautiful things, easy to appreciate the sparseness Bervin can create from those compact, lush texts. But the most impactful single poem, for me, is not in that category. It is this:

NETS came out in 2004. The Sonnets were published in 1609. In art the specific brings the general to life, which also contains the possibility of alienation, of staying too opaquely inside of the present and making work which fails the test of time. In this poem, the potential for making work against the backdrop of history comes alive for me. In this poem I understand why this project is necessary, why Bervin needs access to a canonical, larger-than-life, ancestral vocabulary for her own experience.

— C. Bain

NETS is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on January 24 are 50% off, use discount code DISAPPEAR at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

#read

[skeksissquid]

Progress Blog: Weeks 8 -            11-12-19

     Over the last week, I can think that it is safe to say that I have been making fairly good progress with the models that I have been making. I made a lighter model in essentially one day on Wednesday, worked on some rocks as well as design work on Thursday, Friday I started to model a porcupine as a prop of Trespasser, and then yesterday, cleaned up said model.

     So to start off with Wednesday, there was a lighter prop needed in game, so I started to make that. Started off with a cube, and scaled along different axes in order to get the base shape of the bottom. Afterwards I used inset faces to create the sort of port at the top where the flames go through. After that, I fiddled around with the angling of the inset faces to give it more of a smooth look while also being asymmetrical along the y axis. Afterwards, I used a cylinder and booleans in order to make holes in the sort of port to resemble that off a zippo lighter. After that, I made a sort of hinger using more inset faces, which led to me using a different object to make the top of the lighter, which in this case, would flick off. Upon completing this, I started to map UVs, which was way faster than in the past due to pressing ‘U’ and using project from view, which is an incredibly useful tool in making UVs. (Thanks for showing me this, Mr. Compton!) After trying to import the model yesterday into the game though, have found that the textures are off, not sure if the UVs are on the inside of the object, but I hope that's not the case, because if so, chances are that I’m going to have to restart. But then again, if that the case, I can make it better and try to decrease the poly count further.

     Moving on to Thursday, more rock props were needed for a rock throwing mechanic in the game so that not all of the rocks look the exact same, and would create some variety. To start off, I used an Icosphere, and fiddled around with them to get the desired sort of outline of the shapes that I wanted the rocks to be in, then applied a subdivision to them, followed by further tweaking to create the shapes that they resulted in, and for them to look as organic as I could get them.  After I finished that fairly quickly, I talked to Austen about some sort of design work that I could work on to help the game, which resulted in us trying to come up with sort of “ritual areas” as David called them, that were supposed to be implemented. Due to a lack of information, as well as developing upon the monster’s behaviors, Austen and I tried to flesh out the monster’s backstory as well as came up with a variety of ideas, which leaked into Friday since that persisted until the end of the day. The idea that we came up with is that the monster wants to do something with the dead, which would equally be creepy as it would be intimidating, and so the obviously the ideas of using bones and whatnot came up, with the original concept that we came up with being a skull with ribs tied underneath the maxillary to give the appearance of upward facing tusks, but after developing the monster further with the idea that its hands are too rigid to tie knots or rope, that idea was scrapped due to the monster not being able to realistically achieve that. So, the next idea that was entertained was the idea that the monster sort of respected the dead, and due to it not being able to bury the victims it has, it instead would set the bodies against trees, and then uproot surrounding trees to rest upon the location where the body would be, sort of like a teepee without any covering and made of three to five trees. This idea seemed plausible, but further discussion led to the conclusion that this would sort of diminish the horror due to the respect for the dead. So finally, instead of thinking about having bodies in trees, I thought about the victims being in the water, which led to me remembering about the First Salmon Ceremony, in which salmon would be returned back to water on a raft of some kind, which in terms of our monster, instead of on branches of trees, could be made of wood and bark sheets from the monster tearing the wood from the trees. After showing this concept to Austen, he didn’t like the idea of the bodies being in the water, but he did like the idea of the sort of “plate” of wood and bark, and further looking at the monster’s motives, wants to grow and change, which is caused by it eating other animals, and become a sort of chimera of all sorts of creatures, but an important detail is that he doesn’t eat humans. So the conclusion came that he leaves these bodies out on these “plates” for other animals to go to in order to feed, which brings more animals into the area for him to hunt or to ambush. This came to be the final concept that we decided on for this creature. 

     Continuing with Friday, an animal that was decided that we want in the game as a prop and something the monster would gain attributes for at some point would be a porcupine, so I started to look for references for a hairless American Porcupine, and turns out that I couldn’t find any images for this google search. It’s almost like people don't want to deal with the quills that they have. So I had to instead use skeletons, (which rodent skeletons are gnarly,) images of them in life, as well as using the closest relative to them the I could find, in this case, a rat, for a hairless, muscular, and organ reference. This model took me all of Friday, and majority of yesterday to get to where I with it as of today. The reason that the model does not have any hair is due to American Porcupines being covered in a very large amount of long hair, and quills towards their rear, leaving only their paws and face really exposed, which in turn left to a very bland looking model, but with the plans for the prop to be a carcass hat the monster has, its what was needed, ad with all the hair being done in Unreal to make it look as good as possible, which I will need to figure out fairly soon. So as for the injuries for this porcupine, let’s call him “Terry” for simplicity, Terry needed to have a accurate sized bite mark for his size in comparison to the monster to make the effect somewhat more realistic. So, after talking to David, we agreed that in the final game, the monster will stand around 7.5 feet tall, and upon using the body of the monster as a reference in Blender, I used the monster’s head as a measuring tool so that I could figure out how big of a bite I wanted to use on Terry. After copying the he'd multiple times, the body, when standing upright, is approximately 4 head tall, given that the heads are facing vertically, which makes the head around 1.9-2 feet long. Afterwards, I used a sideways facing head to compare it to a forwards facing head, which was approximately 1.5 feet long, with the snout being around half of that size, making the injury that would have to go across Terry be some what 7-8 inches across, and given that American Porcupines rang from 2-3 feet in length, with Terry being on the smaller side of things, this bit will take up around a quarter of Terry’s body length as a result. Using this information, I started to make a pit where the bite would be for me to continue today and tomorrow. 

     So in summary:

-     Wednesday: made a lighter prop and finished it with completed UV mapping ( might need to be redone, since importing it into Trespasser after exporting it led to strange effects which I can ask Compton about)

-     Thursday, made some generic rock models, as well as talked design with Austen and came up with a decision on ritual areas

-     Friday: started to work on Terry

-     Monday: Detailed Terry further

Models from this week:

The lighter model (No UV Test Image)

Rock 1 (UV Test Image)

Rock 2 (UV Test Image)

Terry (Front)

Terry (Side)

Terry (Bottom)

Terry (Top)

Rat anatomy reference

Porcupine skeleton reference (As said, gnarly)

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/324540716867223237/

What I hope to accomplish next week:

-     Finish working on Terry (This means learning a bit of Unreal so that I can use hair textures to apply to Terry)

-     Start working on polishing a pseudo final version of the Monster  on its first stage to be used in game

-     Start working on the second stage of the monster and applying detail work there

-     Work on more props

Problems I may run into:

-     Timing constraints on trying to learn as well as model

-     Me trying to learn too much or too little of Unreal for my benefit

-     Getting caught up in detail work for some of these models.

[toastedmultigrainbread]

Concept Art Assignment!

This first assignment for the subject involves choosing a poem from The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear. After you choose the poem you are to go about designing rough concept pieces revolving around an animation you could create which relates to the poem somehow. 

Now first I began to look through the book which we were provided and found a few interesting ones which got me thinking on how I could possibly make something original and interesting enough for an audience. After 10 minutes or so I came across the 66th poem in the book. It goes like this:

“There was an Old Man of Dundee,

Who frequented the top of a tree;

When disturbed by the crows,

He abruptly arose,

And exclaimed, "I'll return to Dundee."

Now immediately my mind went to some tense situation that I could create as I love anything action related. However I felt like it might be a little extreme and chose to do a somewhat comedy type piece. 

Design Ideas and Pitch

To begin the task I decided that before my proper pitch for the design and concepts I wanted to break down the poem into each line. By doing this I separated the ideas and tried to break down the story happening in the poem and to generate ideas for animations and concepts which could fit in with it.

“There was an Old Man of Dundee,”

Shows the Old Man of Dundee waving (4th wall break is intentional to connect with the audience, so they feel as if they are really being introduced to him).

He then points to a sign to the left of him which reads Dundee

It then changes scene to the Old Man standing in the centre of the shot, it then zooms outwards to show a town in the background which is Dundee

“Who frequented the top of a tree;”

The Old Man pops out of the top of a tree very dramatically

He has his arms open over the top of his head is a fancy pose

The leaves of the tree should rustle, and some could pop out as well when he emerges

“When disturbed by the crows,”

Displays him sitting against the trunk of the tree (he is still up in it he’s on a branch as well)

Make the tree seem bigger than a normal tree (cartoony style exaggeration)

The Old Man is sitting there freaking out because the crows are trying to attack him and he’s waving at them to leave. He could also grab an oversized leaf and try to shield himself with it

 “He abruptly arose,”

Old Man jumps up and aggressively throws down the leaf he was using as a shield

He then crosses his arms and turns his head to the side huffing

“And exclaimed, ‘I’ll return to Dundee.’”

 Shows the Old Man slide down the tree trunk to the ground and he sadly speaks these words whilst hunched over and walking off

He is shown at the end walking towards the Dundee city in the distance and the scene ends with a black hole closing the short (Similar to old cartoon endings or transitions)

 Life Drawing Practices

These life drawing practice sessions were surprisingly fun and I learnt a lot about managing proportion in them. This management of proportions as well as finding the centre of gravity in a figure is a key part of improving even in animations. Learning about how the hips angles and shoulder angles affect the figure was very interesting as well as I honestly hadn't thought about things like that before. 

Below are some images of the drawings done in class along with small notes from myself as well as from the instructor who would explain how to set up a drawing. 

I really like the more roughly done drawings above as when trying to set in darker lines it made me nervous that it wouldn't look as good as the roughs. I do however believe that with more practice I would find it easier to finalise the line work. This type of realistic drawing is very far from my comfort zone as I would like to specialise in a cartoony art style for my animations.

Character Concepts

The character concepts for this was very fun and I immediately got an idea that I believe was pretty good for what he should look like. The poem mentions that he is an old man and he comes from Dundee. Now Dundee is a city in Scotland and from this I thought that the character had to have some Scottish clichés to really sell the story I adapted from the poem. 

To start off in a sketchbook I roughly drew up my idea which stayed pretty consistent through the planning process as I did like the initial design. 

Then by using my drawing tablet I created slight design variations to double check that this is what I wanted as well as checking to see if any other design or colour set may be better. This part of the assignment was probably my favourite part as I love to come up with funny looking characters or just characters in general.

Thumbnails

In my sketchbook I drew up some thumbnails after re-reading my storyline and idea for this assessment. These would be later used as reference for the rough concepts as well as the environmental designs. 

The thumbnails also (as thumbnails usually are) had to be really rough which was actually pretty difficult for me to keep remembering as I sometimes tried to put to many details in them. In the end though they came out okay and are the basis for the visual representations of this assignment and its story.

Animatic to portray basic ideas

This really basic animatic was created in Clip Studio Paint and was just to make things flow a little more as well as giving me more ideas on what could be tweaked visually.

Environmental Art

These environments were also done in Clip studio Paint on my computer using my drawing tablet. The first and third images are probably way to detailed for this stage and did take up a little more time than I needed. The second one is pretty basic and was made to try and get the layout for the buildings right as the environments need to be well set out and organised.

I did enjoy making these but there could have been more done later on such as different angles for the tree and the giant branch that the character sits on while getting attacked by the birds.

Rough Concepts (In order of story as well)

The rough concepts seen below were again made on the computer I own. These were really fun to make and I ended up putting them into order of how I want the story to run if this does get animated for my next assignment.

Finally these are all of the rough concepts that I created for the assessment and these turned out to be way more fun to create than I originally thought! The main rule for these concepts since they were rough only was that 10 - 20mins on each one was plenty of time. These didn't have to be final pieces or really neat drawings they just had to portray key scenes from our planned animation and story. 

Drawing roughly like this made it easier to just flesh out the ideas that were also created in the thumbnails. This time limit also relieved some of the pressure off of myself as I like to get drawings perfect the first and only time which is obviously not a good way to think. The roughness of these drawings is also just a frame for final drawings and concepts later down the line if this does become an animation I can make for our next assignment. 

Overall I feel that this task was both challenging (for my stupid perfectionism) but was extremely fun to create ideas and characters based on the story in a poem that I adapted to be possibly animated. As well as this the life drawing lessons at the beginning really helped me understand the figure more and these skills could also be implemented into any of my future art pieces and animations!

#assignment #edward lear #poems #animation #design #concepts

[gfdatingsim]

So…

@robinthegreenbird submitted:

I’ve played both routes ((haven’t perfected any yet lol)) and I just wanted to say, That this is easily one of my favorite games. Also I have a question what parts did you make? Once again I love this game so much!

rosie: thank you so much!! making the game was a lot of fun so i’m glad you’ve enjoyed it :)  my parts of the game were ford’s last two dates – mabel’s dinner date of dreams and sunset confessions. writing those two was super fun!! 

i knew i wanted a special mabel-ified date (as she is my favorite character) so i incorporated her into the dinner date i planned for the player and ford– with her extra bits of pizazz on top, of course. when i wrote the meteor shower part at the end, i was in a rough patch and wanted some love and that good good validation, so i let ford give it to me, lmao. as the second-last date of ford’s route, i wanted it to be special and sweet, with ford’s affection toward the player really evident and confirmed, in a way, so it wasn’t just longing glances and blushing for the entire route lmao. it was originally the mabel-match date, but sovo swapped the schedules around and i think it works even better!

the pool date was more of a challenge. the last date of the route, the team and i agreed it had to be more of a serious one– one for ford to feel comfortable opening up to the player about everything that’s happened to him, not just what he told them on the dinner date, yanno? all about weirdmageddon and that business. writing angst isn’t really my forte – so thank you phoe for helping me write that nonsense– but we needed it to be important and kinda heavy on ford’s end, with the end of the game almost relying on how the player reacted to his story. all the seriousness got to me though so the option to jump in the pool was my executive decision eyyy 

i also wrote the two between-y bits with mabel and dipper – pancakes and interrogations and the fine summer’s wedding! i wrote those just before the game came out, but since i was still in the middle of my college semester, it took me a bit longer… which is why poor sovo had to do a large chunk of the editing themselves, which i do apologize for;; but even with all the mad stress and load on their shoulders, they did a phenomenal job with everything they had to take on, and this project wouldn’t be the same– well, it wouldn’t even exist– without them!

i hope this answered your question, if not a bit wordy. i am a writer after all. thank you for playing! <3 

sovo: I worked on all the programming, a bunch of background art, the GUI, Stan’s driving sprites, playtesting, writing, editing, managing, you name it. As you can imagine, at times this project really stressed me out! 

The worst of it was probably the editing/rearranging/rewriting, which was a way bigger task than I anticipated. When we were organizing in Discord at the beginning of the project, we had so many writers that we split the whole game’s story up into nine pieces, one for each writer, and each with the same deadlines. At that point it was just the Ford and Stan events themselves– no in-between events with the kids, no transitions, no introduction or end. Writers handed in first drafts, then second drafts, and then those drafts went straight into editing. 

The idea was that Isa, Rosie, and I could do all the editing to bring about a more unified voice, since we essentially had nine voices in there, but in hindsight it was… not the best plan I could’ve gone with. Not asking the writers to polish their dates further meant that way more had to be done in the editing stage– plus we still had to write a remaining third of the game from scratch (transitions/intro/ending). When I think back to it I can still feel my dread from those times lol, because there was so much work to do and as the school year loomed, there were three– and then two– and then one– people available to do it. Isa (below) is right, the discord went dead for a long time after the writers handed in the last of their drafts about a month into the project. 

Also, almost everyone in the group was into Dream Daddy, so many of our writers followed DD’s suit and wrote mini-games into their dates (mini-games that I still don’t know how to implement). So I had to cut all those out and patch it over with writing. Then in some drafts there was still placeholder text left, like “[insert wall of text here],” which I had to figure out or just patch over with new writing. Then sometimes there was still wonky dialogue, or odd behavior, and I’d try and nudge Ford or whoever into character again. Then the introduction and ending were still partially done or just plain missing, so I grafted Rosie’s intro draft onto another intro draft and led it into Ford’s cryptid hunt event, and drafted an ending for the sim, and then Isa really fleshed it out after.

And while this wasn’t strictly necessary, I ended up rearranging Ford’s route just a tad. Ford’s route originally went cryptid -> ddamd -> dinner date -> pool -> baking, so the dinner date was originally Mabel’s matchmaking scheme– which Rosie pulled off super well! In fact, she pulled it off so well that something felt off to me about Ford’s route progression, because while each date stood fine alone, it’s like things peaked a little too soon. After a lot of puzzling over what exactly felt off, I finally switched it up to go baking -> dinner date -> pool instead, rewriting the context of the baking date so that it would fit in.

Honestly, I don’t think the three of us really know the extent of the work we did during editing, even now? Like, to add to the above, Rosie also altered/added stuff & wrote much-needed transitions across the game including the two in-between events with the kids, which I think really tied the game together by giving it a bit of non-dating-centric story! And Isa did a bunch of editing/rewriting all across the game, especially on Stan’s route. While they worked I got to settle into my drawing/programming/playtesting role, which was a whole other batch of tedium, but everything turned out great!

isa: *cracks knuckles* alright sooooo. to start off I was really in the deep of it all really early on, starting from the brainstorming stage! Like Sovo said, the base we started from was the dates- the chat came up with possible date scenarios for both characters and we voted on which ones we’d want to see in the game! Coincidentally, all the final dates that made it in were mostly proposed by me! But all the others we tried to incorporate somehow even if they weren’t top 5; for instance, a drive in movie was proposed but didn’t make it so it turned into watching a movie at home after the main boxing part of the date. I also arranged the date order before we started writing based on premise, and what was most believable for the progression + time to get to know Stan and have things get more intimate and hopefully natural feeling! The concept and writing for Stan’s final date was all mine! Although I had originally had it stop after the kiss in the diner to leave it open-ended with “you wanna get out of here?” so the player could decide whether they…. took a ride on the Stan O’ War or not lmao, but then Sovo encouraged me to make it more steamy ending which I’m forever grateful for mwuahah. Everything else about the date was a piece of cake honestly, I found it easy to write since I knew where I wanted Stan + player to be in terms of their relationship/flirt level. The hardest part was…. finding a way to cut the makeout short that would be in character! Which is why I used poor, poor Robbie as my plot convenience. Sorry m'dude.

I edited and fluffed the intro form what Sovo had and edited…. the whole game actually I think. In terms of fixing typos, grammar, adding little lines here and there, etc. both in Stan and Ford’s routes. A huge role was also communicating from Sovo to the other writers on what still needed to be done, organization, due dates, etc. So I was kind of like a manager/coordinator too. I also wrote transitions from one date to the next, like the nap reader takes in order to fit Stan’s boxing date cg in the game and wrote them cuddling Waddles as well as the first half or so of the final version intro to Stan’s final date (Sovo then took up the rest!). I wrote a couple general intros too but they didn’t make it in since Rosie did such a good job lol.After talking with Sovo and deciding it’d be okay to change Ford’s date order to feel like a more natural progression, I made changes accordingly to the intros and things that were now out of order within his dates, mostly the baking date since that was the main one affected along with the swimming date. I had fun writing for Ford on that one, I really like the small things with him, like having the idea that he can crack two eggs in one hand super easy.

The biggest thing for me was making sure everything was cohesive and in-character while editing the rest of Stan’s route. Each date was wonderful but with so many writers there were quite a few inconsistencies from one date to another, which is understandable since everyone just started writing on their own and didn’t know what others wrote until after. (And also I made some executive decisions on what I thought was and wasn’t out of character or what I thought didn’t fit with what we’ve seen in the source material or what would happen after the finale.) There were a lot of things that had to be removed as a result, which led to big gaps I had to fill and choices/possibilities I had to streamline. For instance, I completely rearranged and had to rewrite a lot of the movie part and the end of the date. Sometimes in the dates there were a lot of choices but none of them really had much of an impact on your approval rating in the game, which became more important later on, so I had to make bad choices worse and good choices better! So like for the films, the date ends differently depending on which film you pick, but if you’re doing well enough already and you pick an option that isn’t the best, you get an okay ending and aren’t completely out of luck lol (picking a horror film is neither the worst nor the best but if you have a high score already it’s more of an inconvenience than anything). Also, consistency was key. I had a unique challenge with Stan’s accent and how to write it in, so I’d find myself reading over his dialogue many times and keeping what felt natural and not forced to it wouldn’t be understood in context with other words lol. And simple things like punctuation- all the writers wrote things differently, so like TV vs tv vs t.v. etc or Stan O'War vs Stan-O-War, etc. That part’s more tedious than anything. OH, and I grabbed the voice clips from Gravity Falls as well as the sound effects for that version. It felt weird without an actual car horn to interrupt; I also found alternative tracks for the disco date until phoe pulled through! 

And then finally, I rewrote the general farewell at the end from the base that we there already, and embellished and added a bit more floof to Stan’s possible endings. For his bad ending I think if you got a low enough score that your dates got cut short, he’d be pretty cold because wow you just made him fix your car and you were kinda rude to him bye stranger. And if you got far enough that he set up the disco date for you but your score was low overall, he’d be kinda heartbroken but definitely wouldn’t let it show, he’s just be gruff and defensive. And if you did well, he’ll let his fondness show a bit more in his own way. You’re still only someone he just met, and he’s spent so long hiding that he’s still getting used to being himself so he won’t bear his entire heart just yet, but there’s definitely promise and he’s excited. I headcanon that he sends you weird trinkets in the mail and texts/video calls you pretty regularly until the Stan O'War II docks somewhere close and you two can visit and catch up.

This project was a lot of work….. it was pretty dead in some spaces, mostly after the writers finished their dates and it got passed on for the monstrous editing job lol. Some times I couldn’t stop editing, others I was slammed for weeks with classes and personal life, and Sovo was so kind and understanding! I really learned a lot about writing and am sad it’s over, but also. Not lol. I’m so amazed with how it turned out and I can’t believe the reception it’s gotten!!! ;u;

#isa answers #sovo answers #rosie answers #long post #submission #robinthegreenbird #game process

[erinthewriter-blog]

My 5 Draft Revision Method

Before I started writing, I imagined Authors as these fabulously miserable people who wrote in silk robes with a pipe in their mouth and bird on their shoulder. Whether it was sacrifices or wizardry, the method behind their magic was always a secret, so today I thought I’d put my Five Draft Revision Process on blast! I don’t use this for essays or poetry, just long form passion projects (Truth Weekend) like books and screenplays. Every story has special needs, but this general frame work gets the job done!

If you’d rather watch my video on this then click here.

Marking Draft One (The Crap Draft)

After I’ve poured my heart into writing the first draft and have completely cut soup out of my diet, it is time to read it over and create a revision map. A revision map is just a fancy list of things you need to fix in your story.

While reading, take note of:

- Any plot holes or inconsistencies so later you have a blueprint of where you need to problem solve.

- All time stamps so the timeline isn’t ridiculous.

- What is your story lacking and what information is missing?

- Which characters could be fleshed out more?

Next, I write up a new synopsis that identifies what my story articulates at this stage and who my characters actually are vs what’s just in my head. This side by side comparison of brain to page helps me see what the gaps in my vision are and how I can fill them in. Lastly, I take the time to sort out plot holes. If it means printing out my outline, cutting it up, and mixing around the scenes then I do it. It’s not easy, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder in later drafts. Describe the plot hole, talk it out with a friend (when you say it aloud, the problem sounds obvious), figure out what scenes and characters it effects and change them.

Don’t beat yourself up because your plot is jumbled and your characters aren’t fully realized humans yet. The craft of writing is within the revisions. You already did the hard part of vomiting this genius idea onto the page and most people are too scared to even do that. Now you must sculpt!

Pro tip: talk to yourself in the margins! This unfiltered conversation about stupid lines and irrelevant plot points will help you generate new ideas. The first draft is just there to tell the story to yourself. Now that you know the story, you can edit a better one.

Writing Draft Two

The second draft is all about adding. FILL IN YOUR PLOT HOLES. Don’t get preoccupied with space and conciseness. Lay that shit out. Now is not the time to be nuanced. Whatever didn’t happen in the fever dream that was draft one, needs to be implemented in draft two. Have fun, homie. Now is the time to be on the nose and nerd out on all the geeky lore you spent months creating.

Revising Draft Two (Hell Season)

I hate editing draft two. I think I always will because there’s just so much information and I have a tendency to get overwhelmed. Though, a good thing to remember is that we’ve already done the dirty work of plot holes and weird time jumps so now we just have to trim the fat.

This draft is where I figure out all the scenes and dialogue I don’t need.

-Is this conversation moving the plot forward or letting the audience know more about the characters? No? Cut!

- What Easter eggs can I hide in plain sight?

- What needs to be shown vs what could be summarized vs what could just be mentioned?

- Instead of saying she was angry, how can I show that?

- How can I express their backstory in a way that isn’t an insane info dump? I’m still working on that one.

After draft two is when I usually send it to my editor, Bryt, because at this point I’m sick of looking it and I need someone else’s eyes on it before I look at it on a micro level. I advise you to wrangle up a writing buddy if you feel the same way.

Draft Three

This edit is all about making it look pretty and that’s the phase that takes me the longest and the phase that makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. Here is where I read the whole thing out loud and listen for what sounds unnatural or just ugly. I check for flow, conciseness, tone, and atmosphere. Then I line edit to find the right words to articulate what I mean while taking out fluff words that don’t add to the image. For example, saying a cloud is “fluffy” does not enhance the image. We know clouds are “fluffy” so you don’t need to say it. Find a more interesting adjective.

I also agonize over if my characters sound “uniquely them” while also keeping in mind that there’s still time to break it down, experiment, and find cool new ways to tell this story.

Draft Four

We’re in the home stretch. This is where a lot of people send off their cleanest manuscript to betas and I would go more into that process, but I’ve never done it because I’ve had Bryt by my side for the past five or so years. Nevertheless, I’m now sending my script to film professors who are kind enough to talk out my movie with me.

It is key to print this draft out no matter how long it is. You can even print it front to back. It is essential to read your story this way because it is so much easier to point out typos, especially coupled with reading it aloud. When you read it in the way your audience typically would, it is clearer to see which scenes are dragging, if there’s weird tonal shifts, and an unevenness in POV. So take out your red pen of death and just fucking murder it.

Draft Five

Draft five is just adding all of those murderous micro-changes then reading it aloud, front to back, without wanting to change anything. If your face scrunches up at a line or your eyes glaze over at one point because the scene is terribly boring (granted, if it’s that boring, then it shouldn’t even be there) then you’re not done. Revise until you are obsessed with this piece of material! Don’t stop until you are in love with it and wouldn’t change a single thing.

Alright guys, that was my 5 draft editing process. I hope it helped and that next month is a time of marvelous growth and change for you. Happy writing, bye!

#novel writing #novel editing #writing #screenwriting #screenplay #script #creative writing #writing reference #writeblr #writing resources #writing inspiration #writing inspo #writing motivation #film #cinema #amwriting #literature #author #authortube #booktube #booklr #book writing #book editing #journal #studyblr #studyspo #Erin Jay #Erin Jones #writer

[ruminativerabbi]

Compromises

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, seriously got my attention the other day when he suggested that the Civil War could have been averted had people on both sides been more willing to compromise, which thought he then followed up with a wistful observation about the consequences of parties in opposition being unwilling to meet each other halfway: “…men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand [as a result] where their conscience had to make their stand.” In other words, Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, was putting forth the notion that the deaths of almost a million people (including soldiers on both sides, free civilians, and slaves) could have been averted, possibly even totally, had people with opposing views only been willing to reach a compromise that would have been at least marginally satisfactory to all sides without requiring that anyone on either side compromise his or her own principles unduly…or at least impossibly. But is that really true?

There are two ways to approach that question. One is to note that the decades leading up to the Civil War were filled with so many compromises set in place to hold the union together that it’s hard even to remember their precise chronological order. (The correct order is as follows: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise Tariff of 1833, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. There were also any number of lesser-known, unnamed efforts and initiatives intended to defuse the tension between slave states and free states, each of which too was some sort of compromise.) So to say that these people simply couldn’t compromise isn’t quite right: in a sense, all they did was compromise. But, in the end, because each of these compromises ended up permitting slavery to continue, even if managing in one way or another to delimit its extent (and particularly outside of the traditional South) or its terribleness, they all came to naught. And that was because people who loathed the “peculiar institution” could never truly be content with any compromise that allowed men and women in bondage to be treated as chattel that could be bought and sold rather than as actual human beings possessed of inalienable human rights. To suggest, therefore, that the responsibility for the bloodiest of all American wars rests equally on the shoulders of all concerned because their shared disinclination to compromise led inexorably to war—that is the viewpoint I’d like to write about this week.

Time has not been kind to our founders with respect to their inability to see slavery as a pure evil to be eradicated, not tolerated…and regarding which compromise aimed at making slavery less bad was therefore impossible.

Some readers may have come across an extremely interesting essay by Noah Feldman, a professor of Law at Harvard, that was published in the New York Times last week. (For readers who didn’t see it, click here.) In it, Feldman writes about James Madison, our fourth president, and suggests that people trying to unravel the racial politics of modern-day American start by contemplating his willingness to compromise. Madison was a principled man. He regularly referenced the inherent right to liberty of enslaved individuals, including his own slaves. At one point he suggested—apparently entirely seriously—that Congress sell the western lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to raise the $600,000,000 he estimated it was going to take to purchase every slave in the United States, all 1,500,000 of them, and grant them their freedom. (His plan was for Congress to find the money to send the newly-freed slaves back to Africa, where he felt they could flourish best absent the inherent “prejudices of the whites” that would have made it unlikely that they could simply live as free Americans in this country.) He left clear instructions to his wife, Dolley, to free all his slaves after his death, which instructions she for unknown reasons did not obey. In other words, here was the man among our founders who truly understood the perniciousness of slavery…and who wished, not only for the slaves he personally owned, but for all slaves held in bondage in the United States to be freed.

In other words, here was a man whose middle name was Compromise. He understood the badness of the institution and he came up with suggestion after suggestion to seek the kind of compromise that would end it permanently without wrecking the economies of states that were built on slave labor. Yet he went along with the idea of prolonging the slave trade for decades after independence (the importation of slaves from overseas only ended here in 1808) as the price for bringing Georgia and South Carolina into the union.  It was Madison who first proposed that each individual slave be considered the equivalent of three-fifths of a free person for the sake of determining how much each state owed the federal government. That specific proposal was not accepted, but the Constitutional Convention of 1787 did indeed adopt Madison’s proposal in order to determine representation in Congress based on the population of each state. Was that the specific kind of thoughtful compromise that General Kelly wishes men like Madison had been around to implement in the 1850s?

Is compromise always a virtue? In the years leading up to the Second World War, compromise after compromise was reached with Nazi Germany in an attempt to head off war. But if, instead of offering up other people’s land to the Germans in 1938, France and England had gone to war, it seems at least possible that a swift victory, followed by regime change, could have been attained. If the United States had been involved from the beginning, victory would have been not merely possible, but more than likely. Compromising with evil—with the fascism behind Nazism or the racism behind pro-slavery sentiment—nothing too good can ever come of that kind of compromise.

I have a special relationship with James Madison, but I’m guessing no readers will be able to guess what it is. Do you give up? You might as well: my relationship with our fourth president is rooted I the fact that the apartment house in Queens that I grew up in was called, of all things, “The James Madison.” (Most of the six-story red-brick apartment houses along Yellowstone Blvd. and 108th Street in Forest Hills were named after some historical figure from our nation’s past. Before we lived in the James Madison, we lived up the hill from there in the Benjamin Franklin, also known as 103-26 68th Road.) So I grew up feeling some sort of strange kinship with the man. And he was, in many ways, one of our nation’s most worthy founders.  As Jefferson’s Secretary of State, he managed to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase that expanded our nation’s borders far beyond the Mississippi. He successfully guided our nation through the War of 1812, which resulted in the firm establishment of the U.S among the family of nations and made of us a naval power to be reckoned with. He personally wrote the Bill of Rights.  But he was willing to tolerate slavery even though he clearly believed the institution to be morally indefensible. In other words, he was prepared to compromise…even if doing so meant abandoning one of the most basic of all principles upon which our national ethos was and is based, the inalienable right of every individual to live free.

Is it fair to look down on people for accepting as givens the basic beliefs about the world that “everyone” simply believes to be true? A few years ago, I remember reading and slightly liking Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel, The Book Thief.  The plot was a bit contrived and the writing, I thought, easily betrayed the book’s origin as a so-called “young person’s novel.” But what interested me was the framework itself in which the story unfolded: set among eleven-year-olds in 1943, the plot concerns children who have in their lives only known Nazism as their nation’s guiding philosophy. All the figures of authority in their lives are openly anti-Semitic and fully subscribed to the principles of Nazi fascism—and that list includes their teachers in school, their minister in church, the policemen in their town, the mayor and his town council, all the shopkeepers, the librarians in the public library, and their doctors and dentists.  In other words, the characters in the book are children who have never known life other than under the Nazis. Mostly, they accept as obvious truths the lies they hear from all the authority figures in their town. But not all do, and in particular one specific girl, the so-called “book thief” herself, does not—and so comes to understands the perniciousness of Nazism without anyone explaining it clearly to her, rebelling against a philosophy so pervasive in her time and place that her friends barely even notice its existence as a thing that even could be evaluated, let alone rejected.

We tend to lionize people who somehow find it in them to look past what everybody just “knows” to see a truer, clearer version of reality—like those in antebellum America who somehow knew to reject all those quasi-scientists and ardent theologians (including rabbis) who felt certain that slavery was a reasonable institution because black people were intellectually and emotionally inferior to white people. Today we laugh at that kind of “scientific” justification of racism…but what of people who lived in a world in which everybody just “knew” that to be true, the same way we today just “know” that it is reasonable to own and trade animals—and to eat their flesh and wear their skins—because they presumably exist in the first place solely to serve humankind?

General Kelly was wrong when he argued that the Civil War could have been averted by compromise not because yet another compromise could not conceivably have been worked out between free and slave states, but because any compromise that ultimately left chattel slavery intact was almost by definition doomed to collapse eventually. Those possessed of a clear moral vision understood that easily, and also that enduring compromise is only truly possible when both parties to it can respect the other side’s opinion and its proponents’ right to hold it. But when the other side favors something openly evil and wrong, compromise is impossible…and reprehensible. The Civil War could have been averted by abolishing slavery in all states and working out a way to keep the economies of the slave states from collapsing. That would not have been labeled a compromise—it would have been labelled a bold stroke to preserve the union not by compromising its most basic values but by affirming them.

[system76]

GNOME UX Hackfest 2017

Designing the future of GNOME Shell

I just got back from a week-long design hackfest in London focused on GNOME Shell and related components. It was a fantastic week with friends from GNOME, Red Hat, Endless, System76, and elementary working together to help make GNOME even better.

In the end we generated a lot of designs that will need to be refined, thought through more, and tested before implementation. But I’m confident the issues we raised and solutions we arrived at will positively affect GNOME Shell in the future. I look forward to the designs getting better hashed out and sharing them as soon as we can!

Photos by Jakub Steiner unless otherwise noted.

Attendees

I was joined in London by Cosimo Cecchi, Mario Sanchez, Robin Tafel, Allan Day, Florian Müllner, Jakub Steiner, and Tobias Bernard.

Cosimo, Mario, and Robin are from Endless; Allan, Florian, and Jakub are from Red Hat; and Tobias is a student at TU Berlin. I attended on behalf of System76, but also brought my experience and knowledge from elementary.

We were all there, however, as GNOME community contributors and designers to work together on the future of GNOME Shell.

Tuesday, Nov 14

Tuesday morning we headed to the first room Endless booked at a hotel and it was super fancy. Lots of wood textures, interesting glass and stone artwork, and nice ambient lighting.

Tuesday room, photo by Cosimo

Shared Agreements

First, Robin ran through the Shared Agreements that Endless uses at events to help create a welcoming space and arrive at an mutual understanding from participants:

Bring your full, honest self

This is a safe space

Assume good intentions from each other

Be open, listen actively

Speak your mind & heart

We all agreed to operate under these guidelines, wrote them on a large piece of paper, and posted it at each venue. I really liked this opener to ensure we’re all working together and getting the most out of the event!

Agenda

Next, we hammered out our agenda for the week, which you can check out on the hackfest wiki page. In summary, we decided to focus on three main areas for the four-day event:

Activities Overview (2 days)

First-Run Overlay/Tutorial (1 day)

Login/Lock Screen (1 day)

We also decided to fit some of the other items in from the list in between if we were stuck, burnt out, or just had extra time. With the agenda decided, we dove straight into the Activites Overview.

Activities Overview

One of the first points that came up is whether people think in a more app- or window-centric way, or if that depends on the context. We also questioned the effectiveness of a big grid of alphabetic apps as the main way to see apps, and talked through potential user-customation ideas like being able to craft your own space for work and using drag-and-drop and folders to let users map things to their own mental model. We also talked about not making the default case be the overwhelming wall of apps, and ensuring a spatial model with both the pagination and how different views are connected to one another.

The first day of discussion was largely high-level and unconstrained. It ventured, at times, into tiling window managers, window switching, larger OS-wide spatial models, and “using the Z-axis.” We eventually did spend some time generating a lot of sketches and mockups of potential ideas, and Allan shared an idea he had been working on. We kind of settled into two main areas we needed to tackle: how to get into this “app picker” view, and how this app picker view would operate.

We had less consensus on how to get into it, but had started arriving on a few shared concepts with how it would operate:

Provide a “favorites” area that is the default view with user-manipulable icons and folders

Have a sort of “app basement” (thanks for that term, Robin!) where all apps live and can be brought out to the favorites area

Have a “suggested” area that would surface frequent/recent apps plus recently-installed apps to proactively prevent users from having to dive down into the basement

These concepts would help make the app picker more immediately useful to users than a paged list of everything on their system, and would help make folders actually behave how users seem to expect to based on their experiences with mobile OSes.

Other Concepts

During the exploration and generation of ideas, a few otherwise uncategorized ideas were brought up. These aren’t necessarily things that will happen, but stood out to me as interesting concepts.

One was using app icons to badge windows and workspaces in the Activities Overview; this is something we do in elementary OS and can be a boon to glanceable recognition of tasks. Another idea was revamping the Super + Tab window switcher to basically utilize the existing window spread as its UI.

Some concepts we briefly touched on

These ideas weren’t fleshed out in detail, but I think they would be interesting areas to explore. Badging windows and workspaces, for example, could be a relatively small change that greatly increases the usefulness of the overview.

Wednesday, Nov 15

The space Wednesday was larger if slightly less inspiring than the venue Tuesday. We spread out and got to work on refining our ideas. Thanks again to Endless for booking this space!

Wednesday room, photo by Mario

App Picker

First, we regrouped around the app picker view itself. We found we were generally in consensus on what should be there, but still had questions around how exactly it should look and work. We also started generating ideas for how to get to it: Spatially on the same layer off to the left of the window spread? Behind a button that expands into the picker? From a sort of Dash that slides over on top of the existing view?

Sketch of the existing mouse travel for launching apps

Getting Spatial

Something Tobias brought to the hackfest was the constant push to think spatially — that is, organizing interface elements into a sort of virtual physical space, keeping animations and locations of items consistent within the rules of that model.

Thinking through spatial models and layers with paper, photo by me

We seemed to arrive at a consensus that workspaces should continue to operate vertically and live to the right of the window spread, meaning for balance reasons the app picker should probably live to the left. This negated some of the more radical ideas like having it slide up on a sheet from the bottom (because it would be very unbalanced). Apps living to the left also keeps the general mouse travel from existing versions of GNOME Shell, meaning it would be an easier transition for existing users.

We ended the day wanting to sleep on the ideas we’d had and to give some of the designers opportunities to mock their ideas up in a higher fidelity.

A sketch of how the app picker itself could work

Thursday, Nov 16

Activities Overview Wrap Up

Thursday we met at the Red Hat offices to wrap up our work on the Activities Overview. We shared some higher fidelity mockups and basically arrived at a consensus of the way forward. I don’t want (nor do I have the authority) to announce anything official, but my feeling was that several of the ideas we brought up earlier would need to be fleshed out and tested a bit more, then GNOME will need to decide when to implement them. It won’t likely be in the next cycle, but our work hopefully provides the foundational design work and a path forward.

First-Run Overlay

Next, we dove into the First-Run Overlay. We started with Robin showing us what Endless plans to ship in Endless OS, including the design process and thinking that went into it. Endless OS isn’t vanilla GNOME, but many of the same concepts could be adapted for GNOME itself.

My rough translation of the Endless overlay to a vanilla GNOME Shell design

I brought up my reservations with first-run tutorial patterns, but I think if implemented very basically (with only a couple of screens), it could work. Ideally it would also be implemented per-session, meaning that downstreams like Endless OS, Pop!_OS, and Ubuntu could choose to implement it and extend it or pare it back to match their experiences if they so choose.

We agreed that there are really five different components to the idea of user education and help as far as a GNOME-based OS is concerned:

Help Guide (which is launched on first login in GNOME today),

First-Run Overlay (like what Endless wants to implement),

A sort of feature gallery in Initial Setup to show some features and how to access them,

On-demand videos or tutorials that apps or the shell could call over some API (eg. in-context “help” actions that pull up a help UI focused on that feature), and

Progressive disclosure/education through something like tooltips

None of these are mutually exclusive, and each one could be worked on. We spent a small amount of time working on some designs for a first-run overlay, but the tricky part there is more implementation than design.

Progressive disclosure of actions and keyboard shortcuts, photo by me

I also plan to file issues for progressive disclosure/user education through context like in my sketch above.

Starting on Login/Lock Screen

In the afternoon, we moved on to start discussing the login/lock screen. Allan started by writing up the goals of the lock screen, along with the issues that have cropped up with it since its release and the constraints that it has to operate within. The idea was to guide the discussion and design process by solving the issues while still addressing the original goals.

We ended the day after a bit of discussion, and rough sketches of how space could be better utilized, but nothing concrete.

Some rough initial ideas, photo by Robin

Friday, Nov 17

Login/Lock Screen

Friday we devoted to the login/lock screen. We started iterating through ideas, looking at how other platforms operate, and mocking things up. We ended up with several really interesting concepts that were very different from one another visually, but shared some things in common:

Iconified notifications (not the entire contents) to tell users there are notifications to be seen when they unlock

Reducing the number of clicks/actions to log into the last-logged-in user

Using the user’s desktop wallpaper instead of a separate lock screen wallpaper

Making stronger use of user avatars (and thus doing something intelligent in Initial Setup to ensure all users have a uniquely recognizable avatar)

One of my favorite concepts shared was by Tobias. He mocked up using the user’s wallpaper as a stronger identifier combined with their avatar as cards in the user list, then expanding that wallpaper out to the full screen when the user is selected. I’ve reproduced the gist of it in this terrible sketch:

At the end of the day, we didn’t have a single clear path forward, but had many concepts that we want to explore further. We did have a consensus of the key goals and some converged ideas around notifications and user avatars, which was productive. I look forward to seeing these ideas more fleshed out!

Food, Sights, & Social

GNOME Beers

What would a hackfest be without a little bit of food and socializing as well? Allan led the way to several delicious food venues throughout the week including Malaysian, Vietnamese, Australian, Thai, Ethiopian, British, Spanish, Italian, and probably half a dozen others I forgot. We also spent some time in the evenings at a handful of local pubs, and met up with more members of the GNOME community at the GNOME Beers event on Wednesday night.

Borough Market, photo by me

Walking across London Bridge, photo by me

Out on the street after lunch

Millenium Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedreal, photo by me

We spent one long lunch grabbing food at Borough Market, walking along the River Thames, and crossing the Millenium Bridge doing a small amount of sightseeing. After a different lunch we briefly stopped by the British Library.

“How far does this go down?” at the British Library, photo by me

St. Pancras station, photo by me

We ended the week at a big band jazz performance by Beats & Pieces as a part of London Jazz Week, and got what I’m told is a traditional British cuisine: salt beef bagels.

Beats & Pieces big band jazz, photo by me

Summary

Overall, the event was a huge success in my eyes. We iterated through a lot of ideas, generated quite a few designs that can be refined and eventually implemented, and also just bonded as a community of designers within GNOME.

I am sure I missed some things we discussed, and I purposefully left out any higher-fidelity mockups (since these ideas are in no way set in stone). If you want to dig into things on your own, be sure to visit the hackfest wiki page for more details. Also feel free to tweet at me and I will try to answer any questions.

Thanks to GNOME, Endless, and Red Hat for making this event possible, and System76 for sending me out to London on such short notice! I look forward to our continued collaboration.