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I'm glad to hear those critical thinking skills came online and that you were able to use them to overcome your fears and achieve your goals. All the published writers I know have similar stories about facing not just the possibility of judgement, but real and repeated rejection, and eventually succeeding with perseverance. It's tough, and not everyone gets there. It's great that you were able to do so at such a young age.

As for your accusations, neither I nor anyone else need respond to them, because we already have a recently updated FAQ for that.

Kind regards,

~Neshomeh

You know how sometimes you see something that reminds you of an ex and you’re compelled to go look through their social media and see how they’re doing? Well, recently I saw a post that reminded me of this place, and so here I am.
I joined the board in 2011. I was 14. And because I was 14, I lacked the critical thinking skills to realize that what y’all were doing was honestly pretty cruel. So I blindly read all of the stories, practically memorized the wiki, and talked to people on the board.
And what did that do for me? It made me afraid to post my own writing, here and everywhere else. I thought that if my stories weren’t perfect, then they were a sin, and that if I posted fic that showed how much of an amateur I was, then people like you would come and make fun of me behind my back. It took me 5 years to get over that fear enough to post any of the fic I wrote. Now, 8 years later, I just received a copy of my fifth professional publication.
I’m telling you all this story because it’s not just me. Of the few former PPC members I’ve kept in contact with, all of them agree that what you’re doing here is elitist and mean-spirited. You people have no pity for kids who are just beginning to learn how to write, people who use an unprofessional outlet to practice writing in a way that is fun for them. It’s a real shame too, because some of you are actually very good writers. Just look at the worldbuilding that’s gone into the PPC universe! But then you take those talents and use them to mock those who aren’t as good at writing as you are, and that seems like a waste. No one bursts from the womb writing like Shakespeare. You need to give kids spaces to grow. Eventually they might come to regret what they’ve written, but they don’t need your help to do that.
If you’re on this board and you’re still a teen and you’ve gotten this far into my rant, let me tell you this: making mistakes is part of growing up. It’s healthy. People who make fun of kids for making mistakes and being bad at things are mean people who don’t remember what it’s like to be young and vulnerable.
And to those in their 20’s and 30’s, particularly those of you whose names I still recognize, all I can think to say is get a life. There are better things to do with your time than make fun of beginning writers and groom young kids into thinking it’s cool to be an elitist. Go write a book or file your taxes or something.
This is the end of my rant. I probably won’t be replying to any responses or checking on this thread after I post it, so don’t expect any answers.
All the best,
The artist formerly known as TheMadHatteress

I recommend checking out Bodies in Motion. It's really cool, for one thing, and drawing from life (sort of) will help you improve your anatomy, which is important to understand even if you end up drawing stylized figures. {= )

I haven't had a chance to make use of this treasure trove yet myself, but by golly, someday...

~Neshomeh

I'm fairly sure Aldegund has something very similar to an Undying patron, and that's... well, one hesitates to use the word "trigger", but it'd remind them of Balazebal in a baaaaaad way. Sander, CJ, and Young Cassie in particular would struggle even to be civil with her, while Doc and Cassandra Jane flat-out wouldn't bother trying. The Witch would just be kinda sad but noncommittal about it. Don't get me wrong, she'd think it was a bad, bad, bad idea, but humans gonna human, whatcha gonna do.

I'm really curious about what the Knights of Hope and Fear would think of the League of the Weald, come to that. Other than that they're all deeply unwell individuals in dire need of therapy and/or a hug, obviously, bc that stuff kinda goes without saying. =]

The ranger married that villain at the end of the campaign. Also, 61516 was the name of a warforged in that, but not the one I played. That was the first layer of the origin of my name.

I have figured out everyone's designs except for Scarlet, and I have drawn Cass and Myla and started on Sakura. I want to finish the whole cast before I post the art, though. (And possibly color it as well.)

Also, have you heard of Draw the Squad? This is an Internet phenomenon where someone draws a group of blank people (a la bases) in various humorous positions and others are invited to finish the picture with their friends, their OCs, etc. Here's one I found that would totally work for the Holy Order of the Bumblebee 'verse:


(CHA rests her leg on CJ who is dropping the mic, and the one laying on the ground is D&D!Willis plus an Alter Self spell that turned him female. Cass is the one being completely bewildered by all of this.)

-Twistey

Aldegund and her patron are both rather insensitive, to put it very nicely in the case of the patron. However, Cass and co would act as a stabilizing force against her, or if they're not there, Teyori would. Ey, that'd work.

-Twistey

My campaign was the same way for a while: the other Elf wizard and I were the only ones who didn't help kill the king and his older son. The Aasimar warlock was doing it for his patron, the human rogue was doing it for greed, the Half-Orc paladin was doing it because he and the rogue were BFFs and he would always do what the rogue said, and the Halfling bard had no clue what he was doing wrong. It was great.

-Twistey

So, a couple of days ago, I found out that K.A. Applegate, author of the Animorphs series, has no problem with people pirating her books due to financial reasons or them being not available otherwise. That was pretty great news for me, since the books are out of print, and I neither have a kindle nor the money to spend 4$ per book on a 50+ issue series. I've only ever read one of the books I stumbled across in a second-hand bookstore and listened to a couple readings on Youtube.

So I went searching and found out that you can download the books on Animorphs Forum both as ePub and as PDF files.

Also, I've decided to read them out in the Discord server. I started yesterday, but had to stop after a couple of chapters to to my voice starting to fail. Anyway, I'm planning to continue tonight, so if anyone wants to join, jump in. I intend to start at around 0:30 CET (which should be 18:30 ET). If you don't know the books, don't worry, so far it's been mostly exposition.
~Ak

You know the one. Sing along!

~Neshomeh

Found the guy IRL!

STR: tunnel.

Basically, it means that if something is affected, it will react, and if affected inversely, it will react inversely. This applies to electromagnetism and strong interaction, which is the force that keeps atoms together.

Wu proved this does NOT apply to the weak interaction, which is the force that tries to split atoms apart.

I don't know why that's important, but if people got a Nobel over it it has to really be important.

This probably only is for a very specific group of people, but whatever! One of my favorite artists, a guy going by the moniker of "grandson" has released a new song, called "Apologize."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjILi6KaVuY
Lyrics aren't NSFW, but they cover some heavy stuff. It's a little different than his usual intense style, but if you like it, check out his other works. His new, full album will be played on his tour, and released sometime later(?).

Another thing of note was that the movie Polar came out on Netflix. It's pretty bloody and violent (and very NSFW), and felt very John Wick-esque, but I enjoyed it.
It wasn't terrible, and was a simple story. But the main reason I mention it is because deadmau5 did most of the soundtrack for the movie, which can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4hRN5ocMkMzKWnolpT1Rja
It's fantastic, imho. I personally enjoy midas heel and the end theme, the most. The songs carry a sort of eerie, but vibing feel. I don't really have the words to describe music, if it wasn't obvious.

Anyhow, hope your month is starting off well, and rabbit rabbit!
- Helsinki

Shamus Young, its creator said in introduction to the first comic:

"Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign."

... that wasn't related to the Artificer, my character was just a complete badass. I started the game with double the hit points of any other party member, and I once bull-rushed a gibbering mouther to the floor, because the rules didn't say I couldn't. (A gibbering mouther is a blob of eyes muscle and teeth.)

Me and the Artificer also represented the moral half of the party, the Changeling psion being abrasive and self-interested, and the Elf ranger having ruined his brain with centuries of drug use and consequently making very bad decisions. (He broke one of the early villains out of jail because he had fallen in love with her.)

... I have a backup. I was mostly thinking of the unthinkable scenario in which either Nesh or I were no longer around, and then our sites crashed. ^_~

I think I do actually have something running off GitHub Pages - I wanna say it's the Board's CSS stylesheet? Not sure.

And the main reason I haven't looked at alternative coding utilities - other than that for what I do it's barely necessary - is that I do most of my HTML/Javascript at work engage with coding in a location where downloading new software might be contraindicated. :D

hS

This is a copy-paste of a message I sent to Nesh that should be useful for anyone trying to take copies of websites:

The magic incantation for archiving stuff

wget -x -p -m -np -k -E http://example.com/optional-subdirectory/

To use this:

1) Download the latest wget.exe from https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/ put it in a new folder where you'll want to keep your stuff
2) Then, Shift+right click on the folder you put wget.exe into and select "Open Command Prompt here"
3) Type in the magic incantation, hit Enter. The bits with dashes can go in any order, so long as the URL is last and the word "wget" is first.
4) There'll be a folder named example.com or what have you in the same place as wget.exe, and all the files there will have been rewritten to not have absolute references to other parts of your site (if you don't want that behavior, remove the -k , if you also want the originals, add -K)

(For a short explanation:
- wget is a program that's designed to download things
- Most of this is various options to control how wget will download things
+ -x says to always create a directory for the thing you downloaded
+ -p means to also download all the CSS, images, and so on that a
downloaded page needs
+ -m is shorthand for all the thing you need to ask for to get mirroring
+ -np prevents the download from following links that don't point into the site being downloaded (well, above the directory the thing you started from lives in, but that's minor)
+ -k enables the "make this download self-sufficient" rewrites mentioned above)
+ -E adds a .html to web pages that were missing one)

- Tomash

I actually had a little trouble parsing it at first - not because of any bad writing, but because my brain actually shut down when I realized what was about to happen to Jacob and Lise, and that it was the right thing to do, and that nobody else could do it.

"I was thinking of a small inscription. Something along the lines of 'They did the job they had to do'-"
"No! How dare you! How DARE you! They did the job they DIDN'T have to do!"
-- Lord Vetinari and Sam Vimes, Night Watch

And yes, I deliberately left the quote incomplete to avoid spoilers.

There's the Order of the Butterfly and the Knights of the Twisted Windowpane, who are both fairly light in tone and joke around fighting dragons and climbing (or not climbing) mountains... and then you have the League of the Weald, half a dozen really, really damaged people on the run from an immortal lich-king and his actually competent Legions Of Terror, which is just not sporting on a villain's part. That complete clash of worldviews is potentially the basis for some pitch-black fish out of water comedy, especially if it's set in the Butterfly Order's homeworld where things are generally nice and people are mostly good.

For those technically savvy enough, I actually potentially endorse GitHub Pages for hosting. At the very least, GitHub is good place to keep your website sources if you wanna back them up. But even just putting your stuff on the hard drive is a good option.

For the archivists in the audience, "wget -mk " is a command line command that will grab an entire website and convert all the links automatically for you so that it no longer points to where you grabbed it from. This command is included in Mac computers (just launch "Terminal" and type it in), but not on Windows.

For tech heads, Neocities actually runs an IPFS node. This means that you can run a node that will act as a fallback for accessing your site using IPFS should Neocities ever fail. I mean... nobody actually uses IPFS yet. But maybe one day.

I would heavily endorse not using Notepad. For one thing, Notepad only barely supports that Unix line endings that almost every other application in the world expects for text files. For another, ++ and other editors have support for all kinds of fun stuff that makes the editing experience much better.

But not that much. Since the individual missions and whatnot are mostly on Gdocs, and those haven't changed (or have they?), I'd be dealing mainly with "home" pages in batches anyway.

Now, when I do the Lost Tales, I did keep the file structure the same, so I'll be able to do that all in one solid go. ^_^

Oh, yeah, that happened. Really, really surprisingly quickly. Tomash's wizardry is invaluable.

As for Neocities eventually failing... well, all my stuff is backed up on my laptop and Archive.today (or whatever it is now), I think. Also, I think I might become a subscriber? At five bucks a month, it seems reasonable, and if enough people respect the Internet way of electing to throw money at things we value, hopefully it'll work.

I suppose I could maintain things on both Neocities and Tripod indefinitely, but... eh. {= /

~Neshomeh

Or possibly defensive? Either way, whenever she's around the rest of the Order, she's adamant that she doesn't want to go around seducing people, but since she knows she's going to have to...

Hopefully in a couple of weeks we'll see her do something at least slightly different. (And it's not like Little Miss Smartypants INT has more than one button, either...)

hS