Kobold King

3 hours ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

ANNOUNCEMENT: 

I will no longer be posting chapters of that Who/Potter crossover here. If you want to read it, I'm hosting chapters on Quotev.

I didn't know you were doing a Who/Potter crossover.  I have to look into this.

I was promised a candy bar if I went onto the forum and posted an absolutely heinous grammatical error, so...

Y'all're getting this.

10 hours ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Do you listen to Welcome to Night Vale, by chance? Their blend is more Lovecraftian cosmic horror and absurdist philosophy, but it might be worth looking into. Besides, it's super funny and weird and will probably give you feels.  

I keep seeing that name pop up, but no, I haven't heard it. Where do I have to go to do so? Is there a website?

7 hours ago, Cognizantastic said:

@Kobold King and @Voidus, do you think it'd be best if Adelmo or MV responded to Backtrack next?

Speaking of Backtrack, I was pleasantly surprised by my current book (City of Miracles) featuring a retrocog. Not cowardly enough for my tastes, though.  

Either works. I'd imagine Adelmo's probably going to be doing his best to maintain control of the situation by acting and talking quickly to get them comfortable, but MV might have some interesting thoughts of her own on the prospect of going back to The Dalles.

It's finally occurred to me that the reason my original sci-fi setting continues to elude my attempts at defining it is because I've been trying to write Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the upbeat optimism of 1950s pulp space opera.

I need to focus myself on making it one or the other... or else fully commit myself to blending the the two with a few less seams.

14 hours ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

I mean, you taste that stuff, and it stays with you forever. 

Are we talking about poison or Kool-Aid in general now?

1 hour ago, Delightfully Smoak said:

"So whats with McDonalds"

The thing I love about their type is their seeming inability to phrase an argument without attacking a dozen tangentially related entities. It's like hostility is the only thing that keeps their brains focused on the job at hand.

Guys, have I missed anything? My brother made me download Undertale and the past few months are just a blur of Megalovania and Spear of Justice remixes.

...because a little tiny something is better than nothing, right guys?

I am so sorry for being gone. I really have no excuse. I know Backtrack's not really the most high priority character for me to jump back in with, but, well... he's always been the easiest to get into the headspace for. Since, you know. We're both frail, kinda pathetic, skeevy little men.

I want to do a Lightwards post next--sparks, but I've missed writing that guy--but it'll be hard wrapping my head around what's going on in that battle after all this while. Someone might have to correct me when I post that and tell me if anything makes not a lick of sense or goes against something we planned way back when.

Once upon a time, Backtrack had been an ordinary man.

Steven Lawrence was his name. Steve, everyone called him. If they bothered to talk to him. He'd been a nobody, not noticed or wanted by anyone who passed him by. Heck, his mother rolled his eyes at him on the best of days.

Steven Lawrence was terrified of Epics. He watched some of the first of them on the news. He saw the clip on YouTube when Judge Regalia manifested her powers. He like the rest of the world had been scared silly of what these new beings might do to him.

Being an Epic was supposed to change that. And that first day, his Rending, made him feel that way.

...but, realistically, his 'Rending' was really more of a vigorous jog around the neighborhood looking at dinosaurs. When an Epic strolled by, he ducked his head and hid like any vanilla.

Listening to Adelmo speak, with his firm but somehow soothing voice, he didn't feel like Backtrack. Somehow, he felt like Steve Lawrence again, just listening to a fellow non-powered schmuck. 

"It’s kind of like a fighting video game, with all the cool Epics we have on our side,” the solider mentioned, smiling. “You probably played those before Calamity, huh?”

Mentioning an Epic's life before Calamity was supposed to be a taboo. Logically, Backtrack should probably be very offended.

But Steve Lawrence only nodded, and Adelmo went on, describing how safe from the Epics they could be.

“So...” Adelmo finished, “What do you think? I've got some vegetables too. We could always start with breakfast.”

It seemed like a long time that Steve, or Backtrack, or whoever was listening to the soldier's offer, simply stood there in silence. It was a sort of defense mechanism, maybe. His brain just sort of shut down, confronted with an offer that sounded good but could also end in really bloody death and possible zombification, and these were outcomes that neither Backtrack nor Steve Lawrence were particularly interested in.

...but getting away from this hell hole of a city was something that interested the both of them.

"...breakfast sounds good," he offered timidly. "Uh... you wanna go inside, or find somewhere, or... I dunno. I always sucked at making meal plans. Uh..."

He swallowed, glancing nervously around as though expecting a velociraptor to come careening out of an alleyway any minute. He half was.

"...wherever. You and MV decide. But I... do want to talk about this."

3 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Okay, remember a while back when I wrote this post? 

Check out Stick's Coppermind article.

Part of me says that this shouldn't bother me as much as it does. It's not like someone stole my magnum opus; they just took a silly post I wrote one day and used it in the Coppermind. But still, this is something I wrote, and whoever slipped that into the Coppermind didn't even credit me. Didn't even ask if they could use it, to which I would have said yes. And the worst part is, this isn't the first time it's happened. Someone took that post and copied it word-for-word into a new topic, again without crediting me. And I called them on it! 

Aaarrrrgh seeing something you wrote used in a wider context shouldn't be frustrating…..

You could always passive aggressively log in and add yourself as a reference. 

1 hour ago, Belzedar said:

But my favourite part of this idea, by far, is the opportunity for wordplay. You could put "Get" in every title. Part One: Get Gone. Part Two: Get Bent. Part Three: Get Even.

Part Four: Get a Lawyer.

1 hour ago, Delightful said:

There's also a difference between

1) influencing thoughts but not reading them

2) reading "Im hungry whats for lunch' thoughts

and 3) Total invasion of history and fears and secrets.

I think I'd more or less equate 2) with  office harassment and 3) with rape. 

Where does hijacking someone's body fall? Like say I have the power to telepathically control people's bodies from a distance. Can I use it to thwart bank robberies and stop terrorists and whatnot, or is it strictly off-limits no matter what?

Just now, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

I actually suspect some members *coughAnddrixcough* were forced to leave Wikipedia for not adhering to those rules, and so they came to TV Tropes to dish out what they were forced to take. 

I once served as the admin of a Doctor Who fanfiction wiki, and the other admin was one of the strictest, most merciless of his kind I've ever seen. It ultimately turned out he wanted desperately to be recognized by a much bigger, more academic DW wiki--tardis.wikia.com, for the curious--and all his relentless deleting of people's articles and shutting down dissenting opinions was to make it look like our wiki was cleaner and more united than it really was.

Also I caught occasional snippets of chats in which he revealed he was a teenager who was having a really terrible high school experience and possibly a horrible home life as well, so I suspect he was exercising ultimate tyrannical power in the one place he had any at all.  I suppose you could call it a formative experience for me, in learning to try to understand even the most asinine of people.

6 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

For me, it's the way they present themselves as a laid-back fiction-based cousin to Wikipedia….and yet their most prominent members are merciless and downright hostile to anyone who violates the rules that, so far as I can tell, exist only in said members' heads. 

So, like Wikipedia.

17 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Ah, now I understand.

Well, invading someone's mind is definitely a big no-no. Hm... I think we need another category between Jedi Mind Trick and Mind Rape. Like... duraluminum Soothing is not Mind Rape but it's no Jedi Trick either.

I kind of like @TwiLyghtSansSparkles' suggestion of "Mind Harassment." It's like the telepathic equivalent of wolf whistling at the office secretary.

5 hours ago, Oversleep said:

Machine learning.

The Mind Rape page does not have entry for Star Wars. Star Wars does not have an entry for Mind Rape.

I'm usually seeing the Mind Rape trope when there are some really unpleasant things done to minds - when it really is equivalent of sexual assault. Like Marsh or Eshonai.

TV Tropes itself doesn't do it--should have clarified.

The phrase has seen use on a variety of different forums and comment sections as a generic term for mind affecting magic, including uses as minor as mind tricks or emotional Allomancy. And I have seen people outright say that any magic that affects the mind is automatically equal to rape, which to me shows a pretty big lack of knowledge of what kind of trauma is associated with it.

I'm increasingly annoyed the TV Tropes - inspired use of the phrase "Mind Rape" to describe any sort of mind control / hypnotism / persuasion magic in fiction.

Does anyone really think Obi Wan Kenobi waving a hand over a guy's face and telling him these aren't the droids he's looking for is equivalent to sexual assault? No? Then you really shouldn't be trivializing the word by making such a comparison.

1 hour ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Maybe not. You can, after all, foretell the future.  

And, yeah…..two years.  

The ability to flawlessly predict the upvotes of any post or poster in advance would probably be the most underwhelming Epic power ever, but is somehow the one that most calls to me.

11 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

So far as plots go, what I usually do is I'll get a scene in my head, a scene that's so powerful to me that I have to write it. But it doesn't make sense out of context. So I'll have to work backward, figure out the world that the scene came from and what happened leading up to it. As I develop all that, the scene itself will undergo many iterations as I work toward the final version, the one that makes the most sense in the story that has coalesced around it. 

If I recall correctly Brandon Sanderson's said he works in much the same way!

Me, I mostly start with characters and then struggle to figure out worlds to give them birth and scenes to have them play out.

Ahem...

It is my solemn duty to say to the entire forum... "Called it."

Also, @TwiLyghtSansSparkles totally deserves it more than me. Especially being the one of us who's stayed most active over the years.

Also also. Two years? Seriously?

56 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

PUBLIC ALERT: 

Honking at a girl walking her dog is Not Funny. You will scare the dog and leave the girl rattled and angry. This is not flirting. This is not cute. This is just being a cremhole. 

That is flirting in the way kicking sand in a girl's face on the playground is puppy love.

On 3/7/2017 at 0:23 AM, Edgedancer said:

There is also the possibility that Steelheart's full weakness was along the lines of being confronted by someone that's not afraid of him, so someone not afraid of him would partially trigger his weakness enough to hurt him but he still has his powers overall unless he gets called out/confronted by such a person. At least that would be the most straightforward with how his weakness is presented in the book.

I now have the mental image of Steelheart's mother showing up to start berating him in the middle of a fight scene.

9 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

 

Thanks.  I know I'm probably okay—the last time I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering if I was making a million mistakes that no one cared to tell me about, my supervisor said that he had trouble thinking of things for me to improve on—but I still can't help it. 

"I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go--you're making everybody else look bad."

I sincerely apologize and I will try to get... something written. I'm caught in a sort of cycle here. Not writing makes me feel guilty and depressed and not want to write, but then not writing makes me more guilty and depressed.

I'll try to break it.