33877 replies to this topic

[PItiful Boar]

i don't know what the fq im doing 

[PItiful Boar]

yeah i dunno

[pokari]

Yeah, me neither ~w~;

79

78 yesterday i wasted two hours or something like that lying in bed and listening to an audiobook that wasn't even really all that great to begin with

I spent that same night(?) reading not-actually-that-good manhwa until four hours past bedtime. We are brethren.

And what is it with kinda mid stuff just not quite letting us go, sometimes XD

77 bru i just wanna collect some stories, so that when i reach the end of my life, i wouldn't say well, i didn't manage to control the means of production, wasn't able to free anyone from their shackles ... but i did gather some cool stories
 
and i dun wanna go some place far and exotice like fiji, i just want to get to know how honest hard working people do their work each and every day and write about some stories... this is not too much to ask for , is it?

That sounds firmly like, "it should be very possible, so long as you don't want to get paid for it" territory XD

Well, not for me, mind. My social anxiety would get right in the way >.>

If you wanna try it out just a bit, though, seems worth a try? Might go very differently than expected, might not, therefore it's an adventure!

[PItiful Boar]

80 hey bru i'm better with sunlight - not surprising

[PItiful Boar]

and i found my old phone - fk yeah

[PItiful Boar]

81 i only slept 6 hrs last night, from 1-7 or so, but i was actually feeling better for some reason... 

[pokari]

At our ages, I feel like smaller deviations in sleep usually hit 1-2 days later tho ~w~;

82

80 hey bru i'm better with sunlight - not surprising

Ah, sunlight. Alas, sunlight. I knew him well *holds up skull dramatically*

[PItiful Boar]

8333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 i wanna have some fuuuuuunnnnn in the suuuuuuuun

 

also is that a hamlet reference, with the skull?

i need to find another bookstore where i get the children's books for my friends now that i don't visit morgan hill any more... i think...

[pokari]

Fun fun fun, in the sun sun sun~
(Okay maybe the Red Dwarf theme song isn't quite the mood)

But yus. I was silly-referencing "Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio." X3

84

Speaking of books, I renewed my library card today :'3 It's been a while since it's worked.

[PItiful Boar]

85 i've come to the conclusion that almost all web novels are good for the initial 300 or so chapters...

similar thing for manga... like i was reading this manga called about revenge of the iron blodded sword hound... .and i thought it was something like monte cristo except with regression and instead of killing ur friends u have to kill the patriarch... UNTIL the mc realize it was a huge misunderstanding and it's really demons from an alternate dimension who made your dad's personality cruel and twisted

and then all is forgiven... right...

ditto what i said earlier about neverendling pile of mediocre stuff that generates enough dopamine

[pokari]

86

I mean, save for the precise length things fall apart at, this seems true for nearly everything—long-running TV shows, printed novels, whatever format. (Though printed novels seem a little more insulated from it and I'll get into why I think that is in a bit)

But, in essence, there's two basic problems.

The first, and arguably the more subtle of the two for it's obviousness, is simply that in order for something to stay good whoever's writing it needs to happen to keep putting put good stuff. This is a problem because a lot of stuff being good is dependent in no small amount to good fortune—in most cases, this and that combination of story elements happen to hit just-so so that something is compelling, the author is in a place in their life where they're in the correct frame of mind and have the time to write properly, the correct team of people are assembled that click together appropriately to make a movie/show/mangaka-plus-assistants studio...

...so a lot of times things go bad by just falling prey to that (let's say) 3% chance every month that something goes wrong and the correct mix of elements falls apart in critical fashion. Thing is: That's exponential decay and will look an awful lot like a hard limit on how long a series can be good from a distance. Which is what I meant when I said its obviousness is a bit subtle: If the random percent-chance of things falling apart each month is high enough (say, with a bunch of web-novelists who barely know what they're doing, don't have editors, and have frantic lives outside of writing that might get in the way at any time), when combined with some quality-filter (like, meeting
a certain bar for deciding to translate webnovels in the first place, for instance) that excludes works that fall apart right away, it can end up looking like "well, these things last around 200-300 chapters usually" on just about random chance alone with no other factors involved. (There are other factors involved, but still).

Notably, that chance of things falling apart is greater or lesser each month depending on how much the series being good is dependent on circumstances. Experienced career writers (of whatever format), for instance the sort who have done their best to methodically pick apart and identify what makes thier stuff good and a reliable process that works for them, have a much better shot at having all the needed elements of a good story having been there (and thus continuing to be there) by design rather than by chance—the young adult author that wrote something where everything happened to come together in a way that slaps, less so. The big studio TV/movie series requiring a full crew and a huge budget is potentially far more vulnerable to external pressures than a sole author whose spouse is supporting them with a stable income. And in writing, editors are incredibly useful here—a person whose whole job is to tey to keep things on track, to say, "no, stop, what are you doing" or, "honestly, I think something is missing here" or even, "I think you really need to take a break and sort out your divorce before you continue writing."

For external factors, it helps the odds a lot if you can put things on pause when life gets in the way. Serials on a regular schedule often run afoul of that problem. You can start to see why I think traditional novel series have the upper hand on this one? (Though they still fall prey to it all the time)

So yeah. A lot of it's honestly just dumb luck.

I will talk more about the other, equally-obvious and much less subtle problem—simply running out of things to write about in a given story—in another post. Thank you for coming to my web blog :'3

[PItiful Boar]

87 lol very insightful piece

i need to think about this a bit... gimme a sec

Are you familiar with the "The Devil is a Part Timer"? I came across a familiar piece where the devil or demon king worked as fast food delivery worker (think door-dash-er). I guess things just kinda repeat itself... I saw the part where nothing to talk about and it just kinda hit me. 

I guess you have to do a lot of repackaging, throwing in stuff, disguise it. 

I also agree with what you say about experienced writers being able to pick apart what makes their writing work. I just feel that "if you don't write you don't eat" compels them to churn out subpar stuff, and that is just painful sometimes to watch

also last weekend was prob the most decadent i have had in a while... started w/ friday night reading until 3:30 am and that made my saturday sleepy af... and had my brain not been excited that much i'd be ok but then i was hooked, and saturday and sunday was just gone...

 

however, i am keeping to my bottomline that mon-fri are work days and for working

Edited by PItiful Boar, 18 March 2024 - 04:20 PM.

[pokari]

New dentist tomorrow, wish me luck ~w~

88

Also I finally installed and played some of Undertale today. Scratch one decade-old item off my to-do list, eh XD

[PItiful Boar]

89 gl

Undertale is a one man effort which is very impressive for a single person 

[PItiful Boar]

i do vaguely remember reading about it where there was a pacifist route, and a genocidal route

[PItiful Boar]

*90 how did it go man

[pokari]

Also I seem to recall there's like one character (not sure who) who if you kill while genocidal route it remembers in your save data even if you restart from scratch. Not sure who it is. There is at least one character so far you'd have to be a complete monster to kill IMO, but not sure it's them.

But yeah, you know what 'route' I'm on X3 I'm like 10 hours in, and genuinely don't even know how the 'fight' button works. I have made several monster friends <3

90 91 (never hit send on this apparently o.o; )

The dentist went surprisingly fine. I mean bizarrely they just did the first three fillings without any paperwork because the receptionist was on leave (like legit "I'll take you at your word that you have working insurance and/or will pay" no notes nothing signed—but like, that's dangerous for them, not for me) but their bedside manner was excellent.

Also I seem to recall there's like one character (not sure who) who if you kill while genocidal route it remembers in your save data even if you restart from scratch. Not sure who it is. There is at least one character so far you'd have to be a complete monster to kill IMO, but not sure it's them.

But yeah, you know what 'route' I'm on X3 I'm like 10 hours in, and genuinely don't even know how the 'fight' button works. I have made several monster friends <3

90 91 (never hit send on this apparently o.o; )

The dentist went surprisingly fine. I mean bizarrely they just did the first three fillings without any paperwork because the receptionist was on leave (like legit "I'll take you largely at your word that you have working insurance and/or will pay" no notes nothing signed—like, that's dangerous for them, not for me) but their bedside manner was excellent.

Edited by pokari, 23 March 2024 - 07:10 AM.

[PItiful Boar]

92 ah the friendship route

 

monsters are friends not experience points

glad your dentist was such a cool dude

the cheapest in the neighborhood iirc is the indian medical center (where they have student dentists do your teeth)

in another news ive installed on linux mint on a very old laptop and it's actually usable!

[pokari]

Linux mint is supposed to be quite decent for that ^^

It turns out that, in general, you don't actually need to keep expanding the amount of processing power and memory required for the same tasks just because it's available ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ who knew

93

Indian medical centre is actually where I do my primary medical stuff. But I honestly largely trust doctors-in-training to diagnose me and refer me to specialists if necessary (though I know to ask for my primary care physician within their system when I feel I need them, who, like a lot of their non-student physicians, is basically on loan from Stanford and is actually Fairly Fancy™), at least much more than I trust them to operate on me (which is essentially what tooth-fillings are, even if they're comparatively low-stakes...)

Edited by pokari, 23 March 2024 - 10:04 PM.

[PItiful Boar]

94 Indeed, who knew.

Im feeling a lot of dopamine deplete and a lot of guilt for not doing what i shouldve been doing yesterday ie looking up taxes ... it's like doing pushups but a lot worse

and i can't even begin to fanthom how much fun i'll have monday

WTF is wrong with me...

is there any motivation left within me