ELSEWHERE

I am glad you exist.

mek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 03, 2022 9:07 pm

I've been mulling over a little twine game about being a field linguist who goes off to Kuris when the island is discovered, and is part of first contact with ketal. I was thinking serial story for it, but I think a game could be fun. Mostly linear, still just the story of it happening, but interactive. But it needs to percolate more

Set ~15 years after The War/Snowtown Independence, in the early 70s. Strange weather patterns have suggested and satellite imagery confirmed the existence of an island south of Hjodenvede that definitely wasn't there before. A Valdesland research group recruits a team including the PC, a Snowtonite field linguist, and a Snowtonite magic-user to travel to the island and find out what it's doing there.

I want to take a bath but I don't want to set up the bath

My SSI form and my ballot have both been put in the outgoing mail box, and also after I did that I decided to check the online SSI form on a different browser and it happened to work, so I filled that out because I'm technically already late on it, and now I'm anxious that I'm also mailing a physical form back and worried they'll be annoyed I've filled it out twice. Probably should have just left well enough alone and not done the online one but oh well.

 
I'd thought the part of voting I hated the most was voting for the utilities director but it turns out I hate voting for associate justices more! I'm going to pass a law that everyone on a ballot have an easy-to-find website with information on it that will help people decide if they want to vote for them. At least the propositions &c were fairly easy and straightforward this time around, though the dialysis clinic stuff was on the ballot Again and I am even less certain whether or not it's a good thing to support. Currently going with 'no', so that's how I voted

 
Finished my first playthrough of Disco Elysium last night! It ended unexpectedly and I don't know how I feel about it, though the ride up to that point was extremely enjoyable. I did jump immediately into a second playthrough, but I think I'm actually going to set it aside for a while and let it get less familiar again before I continue it. Which means I need to find yet another something to play, hopefully this time something I can multitask during

Sad the novel still hasn't been translated into English and even sadder that with the lawsuit stuff happening there's a good chance it never is (officially).

I'm stealing this from Erika

Oldest OC
The earliest one I remember actually being a character was part of a series of comics I made when I was... I'm going to say 8 or so. They were about Nitwit, a jester/fool to whom bad things happened -- I remember one in particular had Nitwit stopping at a donut shop on his way to the laundromat, and because he has a laundry bag the cashier thinks Nitwit is going to rob him and calls the police. Nitwit is summarily arrested, end comic.

If we want oldest OC that is still in use, I suppose that would be Katters! She's about 16 years old at this point -- eventually we're going to reach a point where she has existed for longer than she didn't exist, in my lifetime, and that's going to be wild.

Newest OC
Literally just made Eline Dahlmans for the linguistics twine game I'm poking at -- she is a magic-user being brought along on the research trip to confirm or deny the presence of magic on Kuris (and/or confirm/deny that Kuris exists due to magic). She was made just after Mary Fylan, the field linguist and playable character

Most recent that has actually seen use..., I think that would actually be snow!Bird or Nickel -- snow!Bird being a port of Songbird into Snowtowniverse, in which he is a changeling magic-user whom Katters employs to remove a curse, and who is datable in the Dating Sim. Nickel is a changeling in Perfect Longing, one of the changeling RP settings, who became responsible for Ash after Gold left him and who is currently responsible for Moth/Anathema. He, is probably trustworthy. Definitely a guy who does things.

Favorite OC
A hard choice! I think Gold edges everyone else out, right now, but honestly if you ask me in a week I may have a different answer. I think I mostly just always want to be doing something differently than what I'm currently doing, so whoever I'm not writing/playing is my favourite. But Gold also gets a little bit of wish-fulfilment in there

Favorite OC design
I definitely lean more toward androgynous-to-masculine in my designs, and tend to favour tall/thin builds. Honestly, I have always had an issue with just, making characters that look to some extent or another like myself, which is why I made that character generator. But since all of my characters are just previous characters with a tweak to put them into a new situation or setting, all of those still just look like me

Main Reason for Making OCs
Make for pretty boring stories if there weren't any characters in them

Describe Your Character Creation Process
I need a character for something ->
Does the character need to be totally new? ->
Open up the character generator, generate a character. Regenerate as needed until I get one that fits the niche I need filled
Does the character need to be a previous character with serial numbers filed off? ->
Take the previous character, find the point at which the new one will diverge, examine how changing that event changes the life of the character. In what ways will they be different from the previous character? Go from there

Do You Ship Your OCs with Someone Else's?
Not as a rule, but it happens sometimes. Jones/Pearl was completely unexpected but ended up being a fantastic ship

Fav OC Ship
Other ships can be more fun, but Jones/Pearl is the most satisfying

Weirdest OC
Brutus. He's been toned down but still has some elements that are a holdover from the lolrandom phase of Snowtowniverse development -- wouldn't it be wacky if the pet dinosaur was a detective and did black magic? lol

He doesn't do either of those things anymore, to be clear, but that kind of 'he's a little too intelligent, in ways the other characters don't really notice' thing persists

Villain OCs
I don't tend to write Man Vs Man stories -- my antagonists are Nature and Self, and a big throughline in a lot of my writing is in redemption and at what points is it no longer possible. That said, 99% of my characters are assholes and would be villains in another setting.

That also said there are characters who qualify better than others: Zebra could certainly be called a villain, and The Prince of Too-Longing Flesh could also be considered the villain of Jones' story

Would You Consider Yourself Nice to Your OCs?
No

An OC You've Killed (If You Haven't Killed Anyone, Who Would You Kill?)
Setting aside the questions of 'do parents-of-characters count as characters' and 'does it count if it happened off-screen' and 'does it count if you've never written that character in anything else' and 'what is 'death' really', I'm going to go with Katters' mom, as her death is the impetus and focus of one of Katters' stories, which I think makes it important enough to count

Are Any of Your OCs Parents?
I'm going to set the 'do parents-of-characters count as characters' question aside here, too, and just say that Harry is unknowingly a parent, from one of his flings

Are there Any OCs You Find Yourself Neglecting?

An OC that's Difficult to Write/Draw/RP
Right now, all of them
(This is my one 'I don't write anymore' answer, I'm not allowed to use it again)

Tallest and Shortest OCs
Jones is almost nine feet tall, so.
I think Zebra is my shortest, but I'm not positive -- assuming we're not counting animal characters. I guess I have some child characters that would definitely be shorter, but that feels like cheating. They're not done growing, their potential height is taller than Zebra

Oldest and Youngest OCs
Setting aside characters that are functionally eternal, as also being cheating
For the youngest, going with the child in The Monster that Became a Child should also be cheating but I'm going to go with it anyway -- that being Tiffany, or an incarnation of child!Katters. For oldest, I think the oldest character that is still in any kind of circulation is Harry, at 45, though if I went digging I'm positive I'd find someone older than him. Like, Katters' parents are definitely older, for example. But I'm sure the generator has thrown me someone older for something and I just didn't make a specific note of their age at the time

Do You Dislike Any of Your OCs?
All of them have their 'I love to hate this asshole' moments, but I don't dislike writing any of them, off the top of my head. If I did, I wouldn't be writing them

Have You Ever Made a Self-Insert?
Oh sure. Zack, from my pokemon fanfictions and then from my webcomic, was a self-insert, and then Katters was a different kind of self-insert. But I'm one of those writers who puts a lot of himself into his characters, so all of them are some level of self-insert or another

An OC Regret
There's definitely some character somewhere in my past that I did something insensitive with as a teenager in the early 00s, that I wouldn't do today. Hell, there are things in current characters that have been retconned, toned down, or made more realistic. I don't know that I'd say I regret any of that, but it's close enough

An OC You Didn't Expect to be Popular
I don't know that I'd say any of my characters are popular, per se, nor that I have any expectations one way or the other for how people react to them

An OC You Didn't Expect to Love
I feel like all of the characters I love are the ones that I put specific effort into creating and developing, so I put the love into them from the start. None of them spontaneously became loveable, I made them that way. Ones that I am more lukewarm on, I didn't put that effort in.
So, there haven't been any surprises here

Shouldn't be spending money, but just bought a cheap portable desktop off ebay to maybe be able to get some work done in here, since my actual desk isn't getting set up any time soon. Will it work? Who knows, it's worth a shot

I also should get parts to hook up a hose to the shower so I can fill the bathtub without hauling a bucket of water over to it 16 times, but that is going to wait

Oz has a lot of energy tonight and it's very cute

and just say that Harry is unknowingly a parent, from one of his flings

I take comfort in the fact that I think Harry'd be just as uncomfortable to know he's a parent as I am.

Congrats on voting and everything. I dropped off my roommates' mail-in ballots (since my workplace is directly next door to city hall) about a week ago, but saved my own vote for in-person yesterday. Meant I forced myself to go outside, which was good on a day when I didn't have work or another reason to be out.

MA has ballot questions instead of props, and this year there are two that I actually care about, so of course those are the ones that haven't been called yet. Let's see if we can tax millionaires and get undocumented immigrants some drivers licenses!

_Sor
MOOP!

Sorcyress wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 10:41 am

and just say that Harry is unknowingly a parent, from one of his flings

I take comfort in the fact that I think Harry'd be just as uncomfortable to know he's a parent as I am.

How that story goes is his offspring turns out to be a half-vampire like himself, and the mother eventually gets tired of trying to deal with that on her own, so tracks Harry down and leaves the child in his care. He tries very, very hard to be a good dad (like his wasn't) and (figuratively) kills himself in the process

Sorcyress wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 10:41 am

MA has ballot questions instead of props, and this year there are two that I actually care about, so of course those are the ones that haven't been called yet. Let's see if we can tax millionaires and get undocumented immigrants some drivers licenses!

Fingers crossed for your millionaire tax, California's isn't looking so good.

 
Speaking of politics, these two people are the most politician-looking politicians I've ever seen: