Take this with a hefty dose of salt as I'm just a random passer-by, but for as long as I've known of its existence (and just for clarity's sake, I'm talking about long before genAI was a thing), Pinterest has been unusable. I've never known of artists uploading their own work and you thanked the three Graces if there was an artist name attached to an upload. Searching for anything on Pinterest was never successful for me.
I understand some artists used to go onto pinterest to find random inspiration from clothing et cetera, but that just feels like google with extra steps to me. Maybe I was just never the target audience.
I'm not sure I (or most of my fellow Americans) can truly relate -- I once had a Finnish friend who explained how kind of frequent and understated getting nude was for things like saunas, bathing dogs, and other tasks you just generally don't want getting clothes wet for. Over here there's such a huge culture of shame around our bodies that even being naked inside your own home can be an issue.
I thank you for your contribution to my collection ʚ♡⃛ɞ(ू•ᴗ•ू❁)
I tried to make a resolution this year to not buy any new games when I have all these demos, ROMs (and ROM hacks!), fan games, and otherwise free games so it's nice getting a recommendation like this.
You seem to have "Faunis" instead of "Faunus" throughout. I'm unsure if that is a stylistic choice or a mistake. In either case, you didn't capitalize the word 100% of the time so that's something you'll have to edit for consistency's sake. (I'm of mixed opinions on capitalization of race names nowadays.)
As an aside, it is certainly weird seeing a character of supposedly high standing say "lotta scrubs", but looking up the etymology, it appears to have been around for a few centuries and gained popularity after WWII, so I guess it's just personal bias that makes me associate it with gaming culture.
Yusha planted her axe into the ground, stood on the beards of both heads,
This caused me to look up parts of an axe, but also subsequently required me to reimagine what Yusha's weapon looked like. With her introduction resting it on her shoulder, I pictured a gigantic single-bladed axe.
She landed on the ground like a superhero.
Okay, this is the kind of line that sounds too conversational to me to be part of the narration, unless your narration already has that level of irreverence, which I don't feel like this story has had.
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Tense typo:
She just focused on running towards the shore where the boats are.
====
This chapter was much better composed than the last one, IMO. Had a nice flow, with a clearer ending that should easily lead into the next chapter.
Since I know you haven't read Before the Dawn yet, there's a re-initiation scene in that where the bottoms drop out of their airships that you could borrow the concept for, or you could get even more funky with it if you really want to rewrite the drop-in scene. Things like individual trap doors, half the ship decoupling, gravity Dust belts just making them float off, pretty much anything's possible. I did say it was a minor nitpick, though; it's not a big deal if it stays as-is.
Wrt tense issues, I find I struggle as well but I'm absolutely a basher so I constantly find myself drifting tense and have to go back and fix it before moving on. You seem to be doing really well so far, especially if you haven't had that much experience yet. I've read so many poorly-written stories of various lengths which will flip-flop between past and present tenses, objective and subjective POVs, changes to POV every other paragraph and even within paragraphs that this is barely ticking my grammar-meter.
I'll have to admit that your insistence on claiming this is "shitty fanfiction" is getting a chuckle out of me. I don't even think seeing Teto is the weirdest crossover I've seen. Also FWIW I'm almost completely unacquainted with the Vocaloid universe, I only recently learned of Teto because I've suddenly seen like a 900% increase in fanart cross my path lately (which I have no idea is because the character has become more popular or that I've started crossing into her spaces). TBH I think I only know of Miku, Ren & Lin I think are their names (the twin blonde kids), and now more recently Teto.
If anyone here is into puzzle platformer games I strongly recommend Toki Tori 2+. I think it's come out for just about everything at this point. It's somewhat billed as a metroidvania but that's only because of the platformer aspect of it and the large map you have to explore -- there's no combat and the only gates to progression are your own knowledge of the gameplay. You start with your only two abilities and slowly you are introduced to puzzles which give you insight into how those abilities interact with the environment and creatures, until by the end you realize you had ten times the number of options from the beginning as you thought you had.
There's also an abstract puzzle game I recommend called Hook (here it is on Steam to be sure). It was originally a mobile game, I think. It's not long, and it's not difficult, but it's zen and I personally loved the way it introduced and iterated on concepts.
Sorry if this comes off as creepy but I feel the need to ask due to my own disappointing searches lately: do you mean this in like "100% serious the devs let you sex up a catgirl" kinda way, or just a "we have catgirls, everybody loves catgirls" kinda way?
Also, I'm curious how much Morrowind differs from the ones before and after. Because I remember playing many hours of a friend's Oblivion and ending up souring on the open world enough that I legitimately never want to play Skyrim despite it being the most popular one, and I have Daggerfell and Arena on my GOG account but have never touched, either (I think those may have come free on the account?).
Personally, I recommend Snes9x as an emulator (I also play on linux, Ubuntu if that's helpful). As for hunting down ROMs, you can often find compilation "best of" packages on Archive.org or if you hunt around for trusted sites (I'm unsure of the rules here if I'm allowed to direct you to said trusted sites or not) I'm sure you can find it.
Officially, Chrono Trigger is on Steam and that probably takes minimal finageling nowadays even on Linux.
Sorry for being so late, it's been a rough work week for me.
Small nitpick, but this being Mistral, they should probably be using a different style of airship than a bullhead. Bullheads are massively over-represented in RWBY fanfiction anyway, but the four kingdoms are supposed to have different flavors of tech. Mistral in particular is supposed to look more rustic or fantasy flavored, with the canon airships being wooden with propellers and sails.
Another small nitpick: I'm reasonably certain that Maria's title was Grimm Reaper with the two m's. I don't think I can confirm that for certain but that was always the way I took it.
====
Some past/present-tense typos:
Before, she didn’t have a problem with heights; she’s flown in bullheads and stood at the top of a mountain before.
She just needed a few moments, and then she’ll be on her way.
====
I have a bit of a personal issue with the description just being "half of a key" because it doesn't really explain how it's split. For a key (as we'd be familiar with in the real world) to be split in half such that it wouldn't be functional without both halves but also structurally sound enough to work one you put both together it would probably need to look something like a Resident Evil puzzle piece, and that would be freaky enough that we should get some lines of Haru trying to wrap her head around what bent and broken thing she was looking at. For something in the RWBY universe with Dust powering most things, well, it probably shouldn't look like a key we'd be familiar with, maybe something more like half a scroll that needs to be joined with another.
This chapter also kind of ends without much fanfare. She just stumbles on her half of a key and then it just ends. I would have expected more buildup or promise of what was to come; I think the only three characters we see this chapter are Haru, Sky, and headmaster Leo, which is kind of weird after last chapter introduced us to several other students which by the laws of narrative are clearly Haru's teammates-to-be.
Technically, Emerald came first, but yeah. Emerald is/was an unrepentant thief and a villain (narratively speaking), Flynt Coal is a bit of a racist caricature, and most of the characters w/ darker skin tones introduced in V3 -- Amber, Arslan, Ciel, etc. -- aren't characters so much as set dressing. And that's purposefully ignoring the White Fang which is basically filled with stuff you'd see from Fox News.
Personally, I 100% believe it was all incompetence rather than intentional, but the fact remains it is there, and a lot of fans don't see it (I wasn't participating in the fandom until RT's shutdown but sadly I too had to have all the bigotry pointed out to me).
Well the bottom line is in terms of technical ability, all three hover around the same level -- so it's not like you'll want to tear your eyeballs out from the prose if you decently enjoyed After the Fall. There's just a lot of plot and characterization issues in Before the Dawn, which will probably invoke rage in any half-invested fan. If it weren't for those, it would probably be more forgettable than After the Fall for how little actually happens in it.
I'm hoping it doesn't end up becoming required reading going into V10, because the V9 epilogue hinted that we're going to see Jax and Jillian joining Salem's team.
Roman Holiday is a more enjoyable read than either of the other books, but it's not great writing, either. I cannot comment on E.C. Meyers character but they seem to be an adequate writer at best, if these are anything to go by. TBH I don't think the majority of the fandom even know they exist.
Now I can't be sure which video you're referring to, as there's been a few of them; there's been more than one infamous incident which revealed how much RT was kind of a toxic cesspit behind closed doors (including using an oblique slur against a trans crew member, on camera).
Take this with a hefty dose of salt as I'm just a random passer-by, but for as long as I've known of its existence (and just for clarity's sake, I'm talking about long before genAI was a thing), Pinterest has been unusable. I've never known of artists uploading their own work and you thanked the three Graces if there was an artist name attached to an upload. Searching for anything on Pinterest was never successful for me.
I understand some artists used to go onto pinterest to find random inspiration from clothing et cetera, but that just feels like google with extra steps to me. Maybe I was just never the target audience.
I'm not sure I (or most of my fellow Americans) can truly relate -- I once had a Finnish friend who explained how kind of frequent and understated getting nude was for things like saunas, bathing dogs, and other tasks you just generally don't want getting clothes wet for. Over here there's such a huge culture of shame around our bodies that even being naked inside your own home can be an issue.
Lol, yeah, I hadn't known before posting, only found out incidentally (ᗒ ᗨᗕ)
I'm sorry, are you telling me you get to wear a wizard hat in the sauna?!?
(I apologize for my American ignorance)
I couldn't even read past the third sentence and that was the first thing that popped into my head.
Yeah I'm not a deep Simpsons fan, I've seen some episodes but don't know all that much about it. I thought this was just some cute original goof.
Oh dammit (ᗒ ▽ᗕ) in looking up the source for your image I discovered that the Weiss pic is a direct Simpsons parody.
I thank you for your contribution to my collection ʚ♡⃛ɞ(ू•ᴗ•ू❁)
I tried to make a resolution this year to not buy any new games when I have all these demos, ROMs (and ROM hacks!), fan games, and otherwise free games so it's nice getting a recommendation like this.
I was not prepared (ᗒ ᗨᗕ)
You seem to have "Faunis" instead of "Faunus" throughout. I'm unsure if that is a stylistic choice or a mistake. In either case, you didn't capitalize the word 100% of the time so that's something you'll have to edit for consistency's sake. (I'm of mixed opinions on capitalization of race names nowadays.)
As an aside, it is certainly weird seeing a character of supposedly high standing say "lotta scrubs", but looking up the etymology, it appears to have been around for a few centuries and gained popularity after WWII, so I guess it's just personal bias that makes me associate it with gaming culture.
This caused me to look up parts of an axe, but also subsequently required me to reimagine what Yusha's weapon looked like. With her introduction resting it on her shoulder, I pictured a gigantic single-bladed axe.
Okay, this is the kind of line that sounds too conversational to me to be part of the narration, unless your narration already has that level of irreverence, which I don't feel like this story has had.
====
Tense typo:
====
This chapter was much better composed than the last one, IMO. Had a nice flow, with a clearer ending that should easily lead into the next chapter.
Apologies if there's a double-post of this one; internet being weird this morning.
I didn't even clock that. I think Blake more than Yang but you've got a point. Maybe this is ye olde coca-cola (ᗒ ᗨᗕ)
I'm pretty confident you're allowed to curse here ( ＾艸＾ )
But yeah, I like the bit of personality it adds to see how Ruby's decorated her sneakers.
Since I know you haven't read Before the Dawn yet, there's a re-initiation scene in that where the bottoms drop out of their airships that you could borrow the concept for, or you could get even more funky with it if you really want to rewrite the drop-in scene. Things like individual trap doors, half the ship decoupling, gravity Dust belts just making them float off, pretty much anything's possible. I did say it was a minor nitpick, though; it's not a big deal if it stays as-is.
Wrt tense issues, I find I struggle as well but I'm absolutely a basher so I constantly find myself drifting tense and have to go back and fix it before moving on. You seem to be doing really well so far, especially if you haven't had that much experience yet. I've read so many poorly-written stories of various lengths which will flip-flop between past and present tenses, objective and subjective POVs, changes to POV every other paragraph and even within paragraphs that this is barely ticking my grammar-meter.
I'll have to admit that your insistence on claiming this is "shitty fanfiction" is getting a chuckle out of me. I don't even think seeing Teto is the weirdest crossover I've seen. Also FWIW I'm almost completely unacquainted with the Vocaloid universe, I only recently learned of Teto because I've suddenly seen like a 900% increase in fanart cross my path lately (which I have no idea is because the character has become more popular or that I've started crossing into her spaces). TBH I think I only know of Miku, Ren & Lin I think are their names (the twin blonde kids), and now more recently Teto.
If anyone here is into puzzle platformer games I strongly recommend Toki Tori 2+. I think it's come out for just about everything at this point. It's somewhat billed as a metroidvania but that's only because of the platformer aspect of it and the large map you have to explore -- there's no combat and the only gates to progression are your own knowledge of the gameplay. You start with your only two abilities and slowly you are introduced to puzzles which give you insight into how those abilities interact with the environment and creatures, until by the end you realize you had ten times the number of options from the beginning as you thought you had.
There's also an abstract puzzle game I recommend called Hook (here it is on Steam to be sure). It was originally a mobile game, I think. It's not long, and it's not difficult, but it's zen and I personally loved the way it introduced and iterated on concepts.
Sorry if this comes off as creepy but I feel the need to ask due to my own disappointing searches lately: do you mean this in like "100% serious the devs let you sex up a catgirl" kinda way, or just a "we have catgirls, everybody loves catgirls" kinda way?
Also, I'm curious how much Morrowind differs from the ones before and after. Because I remember playing many hours of a friend's Oblivion and ending up souring on the open world enough that I legitimately never want to play Skyrim despite it being the most popular one, and I have Daggerfell and Arena on my GOG account but have never touched, either (I think those may have come free on the account?).
Personally, I recommend Snes9x as an emulator (I also play on linux, Ubuntu if that's helpful). As for hunting down ROMs, you can often find compilation "best of" packages on Archive.org or if you hunt around for trusted sites (I'm unsure of the rules here if I'm allowed to direct you to said trusted sites or not) I'm sure you can find it.
Officially, Chrono Trigger is on Steam and that probably takes minimal finageling nowadays even on Linux.
Sorry for being so late, it's been a rough work week for me.
Small nitpick, but this being Mistral, they should probably be using a different style of airship than a bullhead. Bullheads are massively over-represented in RWBY fanfiction anyway, but the four kingdoms are supposed to have different flavors of tech. Mistral in particular is supposed to look more rustic or fantasy flavored, with the canon airships being wooden with propellers and sails.
Another small nitpick: I'm reasonably certain that Maria's title was Grimm Reaper with the two m's. I don't think I can confirm that for certain but that was always the way I took it.
====
Some past/present-tense typos:
====
I have a bit of a personal issue with the description just being "half of a key" because it doesn't really explain how it's split. For a key (as we'd be familiar with in the real world) to be split in half such that it wouldn't be functional without both halves but also structurally sound enough to work one you put both together it would probably need to look something like a Resident Evil puzzle piece, and that would be freaky enough that we should get some lines of Haru trying to wrap her head around what bent and broken thing she was looking at. For something in the RWBY universe with Dust powering most things, well, it probably shouldn't look like a key we'd be familiar with, maybe something more like half a scroll that needs to be joined with another.
This chapter also kind of ends without much fanfare. She just stumbles on her half of a key and then it just ends. I would have expected more buildup or promise of what was to come; I think the only three characters we see this chapter are Haru, Sky, and headmaster Leo, which is kind of weird after last chapter introduced us to several other students which by the laws of narrative are clearly Haru's teammates-to-be.
Technically, Emerald came first, but yeah. Emerald is/was an unrepentant thief and a villain (narratively speaking), Flynt Coal is a bit of a racist caricature, and most of the characters w/ darker skin tones introduced in V3 -- Amber, Arslan, Ciel, etc. -- aren't characters so much as set dressing. And that's purposefully ignoring the White Fang which is basically filled with stuff you'd see from Fox News.
Personally, I 100% believe it was all incompetence rather than intentional, but the fact remains it is there, and a lot of fans don't see it (I wasn't participating in the fandom until RT's shutdown but sadly I too had to have all the bigotry pointed out to me).
Well the bottom line is in terms of technical ability, all three hover around the same level -- so it's not like you'll want to tear your eyeballs out from the prose if you decently enjoyed After the Fall. There's just a lot of plot and characterization issues in Before the Dawn, which will probably invoke rage in any half-invested fan. If it weren't for those, it would probably be more forgettable than After the Fall for how little actually happens in it.
I'm hoping it doesn't end up becoming required reading going into V10, because the V9 epilogue hinted that we're going to see Jax and Jillian joining Salem's team.
Roman Holiday is a more enjoyable read than either of the other books, but it's not great writing, either. I cannot comment on E.C. Meyers character but they seem to be an adequate writer at best, if these are anything to go by. TBH I don't think the majority of the fandom even know they exist.
Now I can't be sure which video you're referring to, as there's been a few of them; there's been more than one infamous incident which revealed how much RT was kind of a toxic cesspit behind closed doors (including using an oblique slur against a trans crew member, on camera).