rain-dare

Tagged by Fanatic-Rat.

Rules:
1.) Post the rules.
2.) Post 8 facts about your character.
3.) Tag 8 other characters.
4.) Post their names along with their creators'.

1.

In her original incarnation, Addy was a computer hacker rather than a reporter. Previously, in Tabira's early days, I considered having her be a comedian instead.

2.

Addy and Madras are great friends now, but after Addy joined the Artisans, they came into a lot of conflict: Addy snooping around for information from authorities and Madras cataloguing it for authorities. But in the end, they're both fairly nosy people. Perhaps that's why they ended up becoming so close.

3.

Addy's personality is a bit of a facade, as the Glennish war was rather unkind to her and her life was good before that point.

4.

Addy doesn't actually want to wear her bow, but it works well enough. People complain if they have no easy way to determine which set of pronouns Addy is accepting on a given day.

5.

Addy's favourite food is pancakes with hazelnuts and syrup. He also likes galettes.

6.

Addy personally delivers the paper. He enjoys flying a lot, even in (especially in) stormy weather, so he doesn't particularly mind. He does have help now that the Tabiran Informer has become more popular, though.

7.

Addy dislikes Sela. She sees Sela as a sort of representation of Tabira's oligarchy, and also as someone who's personally responsible for their victory against the Glennish. Her dislike has waned a bit in recent years, but it's still there.

8.

Addy likes children, but is generally regarded as being too permissive, and he avoids being around children who are too young. He seems to most enjoy being around preteens and teenagers.

Tagged characters:
iveechan-art's Curry
Millybat's Ruba
1Apple-Fox1's Fenn
Lullabynny's Luciel
DrakoNekoshi's Deigra
Yakalentos's Banette (?)

So for a year now I've been running Tales of Tabira, alongside its other admins, and I think I've been doing an okay job. I'm posting this for a specific reason: I wanna talk about prompts, and sort out my thoughts about them. In particular I'm going to talk about Intermissions.

So fundamentally, the purpose of a prompt in a group like this is to inspire creativity in others, or at least, to give them something to work off of. (The other obvious purpose is to be the centerpiece of the group, creating a story that is told back and forth between admins and members, but these go hand-in-hand.) A prompt can tell any story the admins would like, and can entail just about anything, but it's not a good prompt unless it serves the purposes of the group's members. That's how I feel, anyway.

So to that end, a prompt can't be too restrictive (for obvious reasons), nor can it be too open (because that makes it less useful as a springboard). This creates the basic struggle involved in coming up with good prompts. These two needs form a triangle of sorts with a third need: we have to provide a world and story that's worth following with each prompt.

To explain what I mean, let's look at Chapter 2's Darkhowl Woods, where the primary goal is to rescue children. Teams were (are) able to encounter Morgan, and to battle her too, but there were certain requirements: chiefly, she couldn't be captured or killed. This was done because we needed to use Morgan later! However, we also didn't want to simply prevent people from doing something they'd want to: that is, throwing down with the witch in the pointy hat.

Thus, the prompt ended up not being too open (people had things to do in the prompt, and things they wanted to do, with multiple options). It didn't end up being too restrictive (people could do the things they wanted to do, without running up against the plot). And we were able to do things with it, too (introduce Morgan, and set her up as a recurring villain).

I'm not going to claim prematurely that the prompt is perfect, because I'm sure there will be questions about it from new members, or people who don't find it as exciting. That's okay! It's our job to keep these things in mind, and always strive to improve. But for our core goals at the time, and for the fun we had in making it, Chapter 2's Darkhowl Woods was good.

And when I say "we need to keep these things in mind", I kind of understate the fact we already do. Intermission 1's burrow prompt has not, to be my knowledge, been completed by anyone. We were pretty happy with the reward, and I felt like we'd given people enough to work with, but overall, I think it comes down to the fact that it was a rather plain prompt, not as interesting as the alternative (babysitting Chili), .

Plus, Intermissions are expected to have low turnout. Ultimately, they're there so that we don't experience content droughts, which I really want to avoid. Some Intermission prompts serve the plot, others don't, but what ties them all together is that we put less effort into them. They're experimental, and when they are part of the plot they usually bridge gaps more than anything.

Still, when I see how much more popular Intermission 2 was compared to 1 or 3, I start to think that tying Intermissions into character arcs or NPCs is a good way to get things moving. With a little care, of course: Cerise's prompt in Intermission 3 has had the roughest reception, due primarily to being too straightforward. While I imagined that people could spice it up with tales of their characters' travels, the prompt itself didn't evoke those sorts of things well enough.

But when an Intermission prompt goes bad, I personally am not too bothered by it. We can do better next time. I'd feel more pressure to make every prompt shine if people were locked into guilds or couldn't go back and do old Chapters, but they can, so I can devote my worry to making each Chapter turn out its best, instead.

Even if it doesn't go bad, it's a good place to experiment, like I mentioned above. The Azelf dungeon prompt in Intermission 3 has been received both positively and negatively for its open-endedness, being based purely on a riddle. This was a deliberate choice on our part. Next time we have an Intermission similar to that one, we might try fleshing out the dungeon and providing guidelines.

Experiments aren't limited to Intermissions, either. Our approach to prizes has changed from Chapter to Chapter, and as we go into Chapter 4, there'll be a new sort of prompt introduced, using some of the lessons we learned from Chapter 2.

Thanks for reading this far. Overall, it's our first year, and we're learning yet. But putting it all to page, I don't feel bad that we're still learning. Stagnation is probably the last thing I want!

I recently had eye surgery to prevent a retinal detachment. Actually, I had surgery twice. It seems to have smoothed out now; for the entire month of June, I basically couldn't read. Now that that's fixed, I'm probably going to get new glasses prescribed soon, and my life will be a whole lot better.

Before that, I'm going to Servus Heritage Festival, which most people call "Heritage Days". Edmonton doesn't have a lot of attractions, but the food festivals are part of it. I've lived here for two years but it's my first time going, so that's cool. Also, I like food.

A lot of people complain about the lack of features deviantART provides for writers, or about various other aspects of using deviantART's writing system. Most of these complaints are entirely justified, because while deviantART's writing system is based on HTML, it lacks a lot of features present in HTML and otherwise that writers would find desirable, had they access to them. Luckily, they do: deviantART accepts PDF uploads in the same fashion as it does image uploads via sta.sh, which means that any writer willing to take a few extra steps to work with PDFs can enjoy features that deviantART normally lacks, including:

1. Justified text. Justified text, which begins and ends each line at the margins regardless of font or number of characters, enhances readability. It looks cleaner and is as easy as changing all of your non-centered text to justified instead.
2. Font choice. This includes the font of choice itself, as well as font colour and size. Although font colour is a feature to be used sparingly if at all, the flexibility provided by the ability to tweak fonts means that you can give your story a unique feel, or just pick a font that's easier on the eyes than Trebuchet, deviantART's default font.
3. Line and paragraph spacing. Automatic, even! As a feature of many text editors, it's frustrating to many who are used to having these that deviantART does not provide them. Generally I don't use them, but they're there if you use PDFs.
4. Proper adjustment to monitor size. Most versions of Reader built in to browsers, up to and including Opera's, will adjust the font size, the size of the viewer, or various other aspects of the PDF automatically to look better at higher resolutions. There might be some cause, somewhere out there, to complain about this feature, but I think it's a lot better than the one- or two-line messes that paragraphs turn into when viewed via deviantART by default. This applies to writing and journals, by the way: it makes me a bit mad that my journal looks so weird on my monitor, but there's nothing to be done about it.
5. Black on white is more readable than slate on white. PDFs are just generally much easier on the eyes. And if you're still not satisfied with the results of switching to PDFs, you can do a lot with them to make the switch worth it: they're very customizable, and not just in the ways described above. There are too many small reasons to use PDFs for me to cover in a journal that won't bore everyone to death, but suffice it to say that if there's a feature you find yourself wanting that deviantART's writing system doesn't have, you can probably finagle with it by switching your written works to PDFs.

The biggest problem with switching to the format is figuring out how to do. Fortunately, it's actually pretty simple, although the lack of good tutorials and help files out there makes it seem harder than it really is. Step-by-step, here's how to turn a written work into a PDF, then upload it to deviantART:

1. Write in OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or any other word processor with an "Export to PDF" feature. It's vital to note that Acrobat is in no way necessary, and in fact it's really a bit overpriced for anything but very fancy tasks like making character sheets. In LibreOffice, a cursory look under the "File" heading will find you the ability to Export to PDF. The settings don't even need to be tweaked prior to exporting in most cases, and you can save both an .ODT and .PDF copy of a piece of writing in case you want to edit it later. On that note, since LibreOffice's ability to edit PDFs is limited, don't delete your .ODT copies of a given work: save them for when you want to edit.
2. Create a thumbnail. Otherwise, your writing will be displayed to casual observers as having no preview available -- not exactly helpful. This can be as simple as creating a small (roughly 120x120) image in MS Paint, or painting a beautiful picture to go with your beautiful writing. As long as you have an image in a format deviantART accepts, and it accepts most, you should be fine. I recommend an image that at least somewhat speaks to the context of your writing, though, like a textual thumbnail or an image of the story's events.
3. Upload the PDF to sta.sh. Then edit its title, category and description as appropriate.
4. Choose to submit the PDF to deviantART. I suppose you could also edit the title, category and description during this step, but where's the fun in that? More importantly, you want to select "Add & Edit Files", then "Change Preview Image" on the right-hand side. The main file is the PDF itself, so you don't want to change that. After you've selected your thumbnail and finished making your deviation a deviation, it should be fine to submit it.
5. Allow the world to bask in the glory of your fine PDF writing. I suppose deviantART already takes care of this step for you, though, so forget about it. You're done.

It's not that difficult once you get used to the process of browbeating sta.sh into working and using a word processor rather than deviantART to write, and I think the results are worth it. It's not really a problem that people without Reader or a computer from more than five years ago can't read your writing, either: most readers don't fit that description, and those that do usually have access to a better device somewhere. And a lot of devices, like Android tablets, are suited to downloading and reading your PDFs outside of deviantART, which the format also facilitates nicely.

If you decide to use PDFs for your writing in spite of the hassles it can present, feel free to let me know how it works out for you. If you encounter any problems, I'm willing to try to help, but I'm no expert, so I can't make any promises.

In brief, I write a lot of things that I either scrap or that I wasn't taking all that seriously. I'm wondering if I should just upload them to deviantART anyway, so at least people can read them at their leisure. This category includes a few short stories and purposefully silly PMDe fanfiction. As it is, my gallery is pretty barren.

What do you think?