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wolfe
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Hi hello I want a spot again because that space is super active now and I gotta contest.

<a href="http://remnantproject.proboards.com/"><img src="https://storage.forums.net/7000811/images/VgDkKEyZifdkLJJXHvRh.png" border="0" width="88" height="31" alt="The Remnant Project: Non-Canon RWBY AU" title="The Remnant Project"></a>
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wolfe
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Bruh I am finally going completely unchained and doing the events I've always wanted to play in with 150% max ambition.

I have no idea if they're actually feasible in Play by Post, but if they are HOO BOY I am changing up significantly how I do events in the long term. Total genre shift to Drama/Horror and Drama/Suspense for a bit so I can get PUMPED to write again let's goooo
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wolfe
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mfw I commission someone to do art on my OC

And I'm the one practically forcing them to take payment at sketch stage because like I'm sweating trying to be as trustworthy as possible.

Like they may think it's a sketch but it's already professional quality af and it feels so scummy to wait until final to pay as a customer. I'd much rather them draw the last bits knowing that I already paid and won't ghost rather than have to worry about that at all. Like I am a rando, please let me prove that I am not a ghoster by paying early I've seen enough to know how talented you are cmon let me throw money at you
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Researching papers for school expanding your horizons and leading to new conclusions is really good, but not when you're already 6000 words in and find new evidence to basically convince you that your initial thesis was wrong.

Very cool for learning, not cool for finishing.
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One of the most gratifying things for me recently is seeing that the site doesn't need my posting activity at all to stay alive anymore.

It's finals month, so I'm too stressed/time crunched/sick to post anywhere close to regularly and have dropped from daily to like once a week or so in posting, but the site is chugging along just fine after a few weeks of this. It's nice to know it's reached the point to where I can just kind of focus on school for a bit and just do maintenance staff duties and still have a site when I come back in which basically nobody is effected by my absence (except those who I owe posts for, but yknow I planned for this and pared down threads A LOT so I'm only really in like 2 of them right now anyway).
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wolfe
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So I'm binging Peaky Blinders right now, and I knew some of the characters were real obviously.

But in the latest season they mentioned a date so I googled it out of curiosity -- and A LOT of these crazy people are real! AND ELECTED! Some of the crazy junk they got into wasn't even made up!

They hired an actor that looked EXACTLY like one of the guys too it's spooky.

So, uh, today I learned late 20s-early 30s British Parliament was wild.
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wolfe
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𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚒 Avatar
cyanide darktearz 💀 Avatar
Return the slab. Or suffer my curse.
[ the man in gauze intensifies ]


No lie that dude scared the hell out of me as a kid. I remember that dude very vividly because I was too scared to even move aside from pulling a blanket over my head and running out of the room when commercials hit.
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1:10 active staff to active member ratio has been the golden number for me in the past.

Active being the key term, and for non-progression system sites it may be 1:15 or 1:20. For sites with no progression system and also not running site wide events frequently it may jump to 1:25 or 1:30. The amount of work that goes into making sure applications are up to snuff in terms of rules, running events and scenarios, distributing XP per thread, and general support though is something that I'd ideally want 1:10 active staff to active members.

People with more tend to count inactive staff as staff, which to me is pointless. Why would you have 15 staff members when 13 of them did nothing staff related in the past 6 months? I see it on a bunch of sites and it just blows my mind. Why would you give someone authority/power and then zero responsibilities? The power is unnecessary, then, and staff is used more like a social status symbol than an actual role with responsibilities if that makes sense. The logic seems to be that if you put all your 'core members' in staff roles it secures their place in the community even if they do nothing with those roles ever.

Staffers with a lot of time and know the system can do better, and staff with the opposite of that can do worse. I know someone who essentially solo staffed a site with that jumped from roughly 30 to roughly 70 active members during their six month stint as a solo staffer in a very stat/progression system site with constant events and that was nuts. They both had a lot of time and had a lot of skill in dealing with stuff and the discipline to never procrastinate even with their vast reserves of time. That is not the norm and most people, including myself, wouldn't even try to do something like that because it's silly and means that if the one staffer burns out from the massive amount of work then the site simply dies.

On my site I have one active staff member to fifteen active members -- alongside maybe five other members who I don't consider 'active' in the sense to where I rarely have to do staff related work to their characters because their posting speed is less than once a week so thread completion is infrequent. I could lie and say that I am a superstar staffer who does 1:20, but that's a misrepresentation because I get help from members volunteering to take on basic roles like calculating XP for threads or helping me do prep work for events so I don't have to solo run everything anymore. With the most tedious and thus most draining and the most time consuming and thus easiest to procrastinate work being split among people with zero staffing responsibilities but a desire to assist in basic tasks, it helps a decent chunk even if the metric is still 1:15 active staff to active members.

That being said, it's impossible to provide feedback on what might be right for you if there's no indication of how much work needs to be distributed per member. Grading applications on a full freeform site may take 30 seconds, whereas doing it on a stat-heavy site and if you're doing line by line reviews might take 30 minutes if there are a lot of errors and multiple revisions on the part of the player. If the former is all you expect out of accepting apps, then one person can deal with 100 apps quickly and easily by copy/pasting acceptance messages and then moving member groups. In the latter, 10 apps would represent an enormous amount of effort and would hopefully be split among multiple people.
last edit on Oct 19, 2019 20:19:30 GMT by wolfe
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OHOHOHOHO. NOW, AM I THE SELF-PROCLAIMED PRINCESS OF OBSCURE BULLSHIT FANDOMS OR WHAT.

okay, so - arguably animanga forum rp is obscure enough on its own, maybe even moreso than webtoons - but foreign webtoons fandoms are so hard to find, especially if the artist doesn't have a twitter or anything and the platform that they publish on doesn't even have a commenting system (although, tbf, this doesn't encompass all the ones that i read). where are my rpg fans? my escape devildom fans? am i cursed to just read sock goblin alone and cry about heartwarming feelings?

BUT THE CROWNING JEWEL ON MY OBSCURE INTERESTS IS INTERACTIVE FICTION. that's right. it's basically a text-based rpg, and it's the coolest fucking thing i've seen in forever, and no one else is willing to jump in this rabbit hole with me that i know of sobs. it's just really fun! there's puzzles, drama, gripping writing, and it's just GWAHHHHH. it goes over so many genres, it's so fun, and it's just. PLEASE. dm me or something im serious i NEED to talk about these with someone OTL and get someone as invested in them as i am.

my favorite interactive fiction game currently is alias: the magpie, AND IT'S GREAT, SERIOUSLY, PLEASE PLAY IT, PLEASE PM ME/DM ME WHAT YOU THINK, IF YOU GOT STUCK, ETC., LET'S TALK ABOUT IT OTL, but counterfeit monkey is absolutely SO fun and it's what i've been working on lately. if you're new to if, though, stuff like bronze might be better?? spider and web is a sci-fi fave of mine THAT IMO IS PRETTY GRIPPING...IDK......PLEASE.......TALK TO ME ABOUT IT FOREVER.

(p.s. my discord is lovelorn#0859 in case anyone is genuinely interested)


Choice of Games built an entire company based off of interactive fiction. The quality varies a bit, but everything under their label are generally at least decently good while Hosted Games (aka just finished games that don't go through the vetting process) range from awful to amazing.

Shout out to Fallen Hero: Rebirth as an absolutely brilliantly written first part to a villain protagonist based game for the superhero genre. Zombie Exodus is top tier for the zombie post-apoc genre. Silverworld is a fantastic game based off of a wacky time travel concept that sends you back into the stone age. Choice of Rebels: Uprising is god tier if you like more political fantasy. Totem Force is basically morally gray Power Rangers almost, which was a neat twist. A Study in Steampunk, Choice by Gaslight is a fantastic steampunk genre one as well.

EDIT: ChooseYourStory has a lot of free ones, with super varying quality. One shout-out I want to give after a BIG WARNING that it is a Rated R one 150% in every sense of the word is Eternal which is longer than most books in each playthrough with 650k total words. It is grimdark done VERY RIGHT but WARNING that it IS 150% GRIMDARK.
last edit on Oct 11, 2019 2:49:19 GMT by wolfe
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wolfe
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Ngl

I've come a long way with social anxiety. Was TAing a class and it started off REALLY BAD with me completely losing my train of thought and fumbling around. I recovered to at least be passable towards the end and not completely panic, which is good enough for a class that I know really little about and was just covering for the day.

Like I just completely looked like a complete moron in front of 30+ people who were all staring at me. That would've made me melt down in the past, but now it's just embarrassing but manageable. Progress!