The issue here is that it enables those who would make the actual CP to hide their work easier in the flood of generated content.

Animesque art is one thing, photorealistic is another. Neither actually harms an underaged person by existing, but photorealistic enables actual abusers to hide themselves easily. So IMO, photorealistic 'art' of this sort needs to be criminalized so that it can not be used as a mask for actual CP.

Normally I err on the side of 'art' being separated from actual pictures/recordings of abuse. It falls under the "I don't like what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it" idea.

Photorealistic images of CP? I think that crosses the line, and needs to be treated as if it was actual CP as it essentially enables real CP to proliferate.

I wish I knew what to tell you. I am on Chrome with uBlock Origin, and I don't see YouTube ads. I'm logged into both Chrome and Google/YouTube

I think it's a good thing for me that I don't start from the flesh-out story end. I start out with 1+ characters and a scenario. Everything builds from there as I write. I don't know where it's going, so I don't feel as much pressure to get there.

That, and I am writing a Serial over on Royal Road, and have a handful of Patreons. This applies just enough 'expectations' pressure to help push me forward when I would otherwise slack more. :)

Doing Okay. I've gotten through my hyperfocus on leveling a new-to-me class in Final Fantasy XIV, so I am able to pull my brain back to writing more. I want to get two more chapters up on my Patreon before my next public chapter is released on Thursday.

The views are cumulative across all chapters, so 1k readers x 100 chapters would be 100k views, before getting into things like my editor-in-wife and I revisiting pages as we slowly clean up my early chapters.

But overall, I do feel very good about my story, and most of my other story ideas take place in the same world (if mostly on different continents), so each time I work on any of these ideas, I am fleshing out the world as a whole.

From the same character's speech (as opposed to switching talkers)? Well, supposedly that's against the rules, but it generally feels better to insert a bit of minor movement anyway :)

Well, for the story itself, it might just be easiest to quote my blurb:

An ancient, dreadfully powerful dungeon core that had once been sealed away to slowly fade into oblivion is revived by a chance encounter, though in a much-reduced state.

A temple monk on her way home for a vacation is distracted into exploring a newly born dungeon due to the cuteness of its rabbit monsters, leading to an entirely unexpected chain of events.

A kitsune whose death caused a goddess to pity her fate and revive her as a reincarnated dungeon.

These three quickly form bonds of necessity and convenience, but then have to navigate a complex relationship and build their own rules to live by.

And for my particular world-building, Living Dungeons have avatars, which is very important to the core story.

I'm writing over on Royal Road (And cross-posting to Ream right now, I may add scribblehub), so each chapter is being published on the website. This is not a direct income maker, the website is free, but Patreon for early chapters is getting me a small monthly amount and there is the possibility of getting a deal with something like Amazon Unlimited (I would prefer to avoid that specific publisher, but we will see what the future holds).

Anyway, I got drawn to RR thanks to a Reddit serial that linked there, and that was my introduction to the Living Dungeon concept. And after a few months of reading various stories on Royal Road, I felt the itch to write my own. :) I had at one point been intending for it to also be a trope-subverting 'harem' story where everyone had good cause to be involved in the relationship and were well-fleshed-out people, but the core relationship stabilized at a triad, and I dropped the harem idea. I would have had to force it in, it no longer fit.

Bonus though: That meant I got to drop the age of one of the future characters, which felt better for her general concept, and that in turn generated the opportunity to touch on another aspect of the world that I hadn't had reason to describe yet. And I get to have another woman get involved in a romance with interesting dynamics, though I am not quite there yet.

And I might as well link it:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/57517/no-need-for-a-core

I also have several more ideas waiting in the wings, but I am trying to get my backlog a bit more robust before I divert some of my attention to building those up.

Outside of combat, I have very little that needs to be described in that much detail. I do have one specific mechanism in my Living Dungeon story that I felt needed that level of detail, and the description went through a few edits to fine-tune it to communicate the idea accurately but keep the writing clean enough to not be jarring to the reader. I am fortunate enough to be able to get some feedback to help me in that process. I felt that this mechanism needed to be accurate because it is relevant at several points in the story.

The less relevant it is to story beats, the less I am worried about specific details. I have a second mechanism involving large colored, glowing crystals in a ceiling. I described the basic layout and the colors, because they were relevant to events in that room, I did not describe the shape of the crystals, because it doesn't matter.

In combat, how much detail I go into depends on the fight. Less important/low-stakes fights get more of an overview. A duel or spar with setup and some emotional charge? I am getting down to blow-by-blow, especially if I want to show the progression of a character's skill or power, and when getting that detailed I often need to specify which hand a person is using to do what, so that I can line up the action properly.

A right-handed person has a shield in her left hand, and therefore deflects a creature's charge to her left, and is thus spinning left to slash her axe across the back of its leg. I could have described it as her spinning counter-clockwise, which would be more technically accurate but would pull the reader out of the story more to think about. 'spinning left' suffices.

So, I would mostly just try to be sure that it needs to be described in detail.

Nuclear Radiation almost killing people is probably the most problematic, there will be all sorts of long-term damage.

The sci-fi disease at least has the exact properties you want it to have, and the Alien Creature option simply gives you physical damage which comes in your choice of severity. I'd lean toward that over all, but it really depends on what fits the story best.

And might I recommend Royal Road as one of your publishing platforms? Pure fantasy tends to do better than Sci-fi, but at least it is a point of traction. I know a lot of people post across multiple platforms.

I have three MCs in my current work. One of them has two bits of art, one of which is the cover art I am using on Royal Road.

https://www.royalroadcdn.com/public/covers-large/57517-no-need-for-a-core.jpg

My other art is on Night Cafe:

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/KPK3NDl5Jc3N7evZ5b1K/KPK3NDl5Jc3N7evZ5b1K--1--928g5.jpg?tr=w-1600,c-at_max

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/DEE7CrQ6xXndVy4MZmOq/DEE7CrQ6xXndVy4MZmOq--1--co4mf.jpg?tr=w-1600,c-at_max

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/k9TMQToJO5PDWpRJGuXi/k9TMQToJO5PDWpRJGuXi--1--qkrza.jpg?tr=w-1600,c-at_max

All of these are AI art, including the cover art (which was done and edited by someone else for me).

I consider these placeholders until such a time as I get properly commissioned art, but that costs money that I do not have.

facepalm

Well, we have a horror movie intro right in the article.

Mi first realized that the experiment had been successful when he saw the silkworm’s eyes turning red under the microscope.

Allow me to introduce my wife's ice cream recipe. Obviously, your base is going to be different, but I'll post the whole recipe here to make sure I don't miss anything.

Strawberry Ice Cream with Lemon and Mint Note: This is more than one batch worth of ice cream (approximately 1 ½ batch for the size ice cream maker I have at home). Fill your ice cream maker to the level recommended by your machine’s instructions. Don’t worry about your mix sitting in the fridge while waiting for your bowl to re-freeze, it just allows the flavors to meld more. Don’t worry about the berries getting too soft. It is ice cream, they will be slightly more firm than everything else, no matter how long it sits. Since my household likes lemon and mint, the below listed amounts are minimum, we tend to use more. Once your ice cream is ready, it finishes beautifully with a bit of huckleberry balsamic vinegar poured over the top when served.

Ingredients: Approximately 32 ounces by volume of fresh strawberries, washed and stems removed
3 tablespoons of lemon juice, more if lower quality(or to taste)
1 cup sugar, divided (into 0.25 cup and 0.75 cup)
1.5 cup heavy cream
0.5 cup whole milk
2 tablespoon fresh mint, minced (or to taste)
Pinch salt
3 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
approximately 1 lemon’s worth of zest, finely grated (or to taste)

Directions:

1. In mixing bowl, blend approximately half the strawberries with a stick blender. Chop remaining strawberries (to slightly larger than chocolate chip, so that it does not clog the ice cream machine) and add to same mixing bowl. Add 0.25 cup sugar and lemon juice. Stir together. Set aside in fridge for at least an hour to macerate.

2. In a small saucepan, warm the dairy, 0.75 cup sugar, salt and mint. Warm the milk mixture, whisking to incorporate flavors.

3. Whisk egg yolks together with vanilla extract; then temper: when the milk mixture is warm, slowly spoon into the egg yolks, whisking to keep from cooking eggs. Repeat several times until eggs and milk mixture are approximately the same temperature, then whisk yolks into the mixture. On medium to medium-low heat, thicken mixture until it coats the back of a spoon. Let cool.

4. Combine milk mixture with strawberry mixture and lemon zest and mix well. Chill in fridge until cold enough for your ice cream maker (at least an hour).

5. Pour into ice cream maker and follow manufacturer instructions.

6. Serve immediately for soft serve, or place in Freezer for firmer texture.

(extremely loosely based off of “Strawberry Ice Cream Like Ben and Jerry’s”, and “Homemade Ice Cream: Perfect Custard Base”)

If it wasn't usually running something and was idling, it would be more so. But generally speaking, I have something occupying it.

Bingo, you've described my experience exactly. My computer is almost never off.

shrug I play mostly single-player RPGs and similarly story-heavy games, so while the mechanics are different and the graphics much prettier, the structure is the same as it's been for the past 30+ years: Follow the story to get anywhere, or just wander around in your current area if you want to grind.

Well, that's all the more reason to not try to monetize through Amazon. But Patreons seem to only be about 0.5% of the people who Follow a story on Royal Road. Well, I'll have to keep working on more incentives I guess.

I tried DuckDuckGo for quite a while, but I consistently failed to find things that I knew existed, so would switch back to Google anyway.

example: I am publishing a serial over on Royal Road, and one of the things an author there with any amount of traction does is search for links and possibly re-hosts of their materials. Links are fine, but re-hosts are obviously a no-go and you want to report sites that do that and/or take other measures. Google would find sites tracking and linking when I searched, but DuckDuckGo did not find any of them.

Heck, DDG didn't even find most of the tech sites that my title happens to overlap phrases with. ("No Need For A Core?" manages to trip over conversations with server cores, which is hilarious for a high magic fantasy series). I just can't trust that it finds enough stuff.

technically any MMO (or other RPG) that lets you build a female character, but I would say FFXIV as there are a lot of interesting female secondary protags.

Hmm, by that standard, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous both qualify, though opinions on the NPC companions vary.

Nier: Automata

Immortals: Fenyx Rising

A couple of the Star Ocean games let you choose between a Male or Female protag.

Meh, my wife and I are 48 and are both playing the same JRPG phone game (Another Eden. It's a Gatcha, but plays more like a traditional single-player JRPG). And she loves to watch me play FFXIV and other story-heavy games that she has trouble playing herself. And we are in a D&D game Saturday nights.

So I wouldn't worry about it too much, you just gotta find the right woman.

Elves… As wise as they are old. And of course they all old, right? I mean, it’d be unthinkable for the wandering Elf spouting wisdom of the ancients for the low low price of $699.99 (plus gratuity) to not be old. R-Right?

points at my wife's Pathfinder character, a 16-year-old kitsune pretending to be a 116-year-old elf girl

Check it out! Fashion revolution, new styles and the hottest new designs to wear in the post-apocalypse world!

So, Post-apocalypse JoJo's Bizarre Adventures?

A deep intrigue story filled with deep plots where everyone has their own interests. It’s for a baking competition.

But we already have The Great British Bake Off. ;P

I love his books, and I have 110% stolen the name "Bionanonics" for use with a sci-fi character in RP forums, and if I ever write a sci-fi story I am going to probably use it there too. I am currently wrapped up in writing a fantasy serial instead though, so no idea if that will ever happen.

I have not read Light Chaser though. I should look that up.

Been there, done that, and fuck no.

But I also have no problems with leaving my phone on Do Not Disturb and reading a book. I am happy to ignore the world. I don't let connectedness rule me. I use it.

Usually. I also have ADHD, so sometimes I just need my stimulation

That's what I see

This site has the servers listed: https://lemmyverse.net/

and from one login, you can subscribe to communities hosted on different servers, but communications seem to be rather laggy when you do that.

Glad to help, and I have another.

When my brain gets a certain level of fuzz when I try to concentrate, I go take a quick nap. Sometimes it's longer than 'quick', but that means I really needed sleep. But much of the time, I really do just need that brief bit of rest and reset to let my brain chill.

Alternatively, I'll go take a shower, or deliberately take a break from writing to take care of a household chore. Just, do something to break things up.

quick test

Edit: yeah, I just tested, mine started with the upvote automatically applied.

FYI, just like Reddit, all posts start at +1 upvote, your own. you'd have to actually remove it manually.

I'm rather hoping third-party apps like Jerboa will be able to allow multiple logins at once and have the ability to merge the feeds into one presentation.

I've grabbed the same login name on multiple lemmy servers plus kbin, so my identity is really easy to keep track of at least.

As someone with a little bit of professional software QA experience, let me say that this is possibly the weirdest bug I've encountered.

Not the worst, there was an MMO that during early development a Player/tester could crash the entire server, deliberately. Just the weirdest.

Okay, so I just had something weird happen. I was in the middle of replying to a thread further down (the Emet-Selch art) and this post displaced the post I was on. It did not displace the comments, and I was in all actuality still replying to the thread I had started reading, but visually this post had replaced the post I was on. Including the title.

And this made me realize I had it happen to me before and explains my confusion then. That previous time did not have quite this level of visual jarring to it, so I didn't notice immediately.

Is this a known bug?

OP nailed a lot of the feeling and theming around that character and expansion of FF14. His Emet is perhaps a touch younger and less worn down than the canon one, but that's fine.

It's also hands down the best MMO I've played.

My process is influenced by my story's nature/how I am publishing it: I am writing a serial on Royal Road. This means I am writing chapters of about 2000 words, and are generally a fair amount over (I try to not let a chapter be less than 1800, but some chapters just are short before the next section that will be long is going to start).

Each chapter roughly represents a scene, 2-3 very short scenes, or a significant piece of a very long scene and I need to find a suitable break point.

So that is what I am aiming for when I sit down to write. I want to complete a scene/chapter. I don't want a dangling thread. I want someone to be able to read this chapter and not feel like I just randomly stopped somewhere.

It's in my not-writing time that I think about the rest of the plot and potential future scenes etc. Well, I try to organize it that way, which doesn't always work. But this is how I focus my writing overall.

An expansion on 6: Each of my stories (I have three serial-type stories, though I am only currently publishing one of them) is on a separate continent, and with an undefined temporal relationship. I am not getting any of these groups involved in world-spanning plots, so I don't have to define where they are in time relative to each other.

This makes things a lot cleaner, I don't have to worry about discrepancies or conflicting narratives.

Heh, I feel a little qualified to provide some thoughts here. I have ADHD, and technically just barely kind of qualify as 'pro' (three whole Patreon patrons!), but I do have over 200k words published with almost 900 followers, so there is that. And this is what has worked for me, it won't work for everyone.

1. Figure out if you are a planner or panster. If the task of creating an outline means that you will probably never get around to writing, then you are best off being a panster.

2. If you are a panster, you probably want character-driven stories. Sure, you can have conflict and antagonists, but your characters are going to be acting and doing interesting things based on their personalities and desires. Plot happens to help drive character development, so don't try and make the plot anything too complicated, it's just a tool of your real story.

3. Write the story you want to tell. Create a few characters that you like in a setting/scenario that you find interesting. These should be people you want to get to know, and a situation at least moderately interesting to see how they cope with. High-stakes drama is not required (and may not be desirable).

4. Let yourself daydream about the story when doing the things that make your mind wander anyway, such as washing dishes or other chores. And if you daydream to go to sleep, do it then too. Keeps ideas churning about future developments.

5. Figure out how much (or how little) extra stimulation you need. This may vary. I often but not always enjoy having a music selection playing (Heavy on the Final Fantasy OSTs), and I have a civ game running that I can take breaks with for a turn of play and then back to writing (it's not hard to set up a modded game where it takes an hour to process a turn once you have enough cities)

6. Have more than one story to tell in the same world. This way every bit of world-building you do for any story helps all of them, and you can switch to writing a different story when your brain fizzes out on the primary story.

I'll add more thoughts later as they come to me.

Oh, ouch. yes. Write first, edit later.

Following up on my much longer post, I use a combo of ProWritingAid (which works with Libre Office) and Grammarly (as a Chrome plugin) to double-check things, but I also ignore a lot of their suggestions. But at the very least, it means I do not have to worry about missing minor grammar issues and typos (those are the suggestions I accept).

Dithering is the bane of writers. Though at least when I dither, I try and side-track to other places like here instead of staring at the page.

I am currently writing a serial story where I am publishing three, 2K-ish word chapters every two weeks. This means I am writing more than that as I am building a backlog and I am also writing secondary material (Patreon-only stuff).

What keeps me writing is in part the style of story I am writing. I have a very character-driven story and have only a loose outline. To write the next thing, I just have to ask myself 'what happens next' and keep building.

And these characters and this world live inside my head. When I'm doing things like washing the dishes or other physically engaging but mentally low-effort activities, my head is playing through either the scenario I am on or possible future scenarios with these characters. coughs er, I may also have ADHD.

For additional motivation, I talk about the story with my wife (who is also my editor, though she is far behind what I have actually published for editing. Thankfully it's a web publish on Royal Road, so I can go back and edit freely), and I get feedback, and she wants to read it, so I have encouragement there.

I get further encouragement from my readers (almost 900 followers), and gods the dopamine hits from 'the numbers go up' mixed with 'they really like me' is great.

But I also have a lot of spare time at the moment, and writing has become my primary 'productive' activity. I wouldn't be able to keep up this schedule otherwise.

I don't know if this will help you, but if you want to try, come on over to Royal Road, maybe even give my story a try, and definitely find a bunch of others you like. Get comfortable in the community, comment, and offer edit suggestions (most of the stories here have not been professionally edited yet, and the website is literally built to make offering edit suggestions easy: just highlight text and you get a button that pops up saying "suggest edit").

When you think you are ready, pull the ideas you have together to give you a starting point with the characters you want to write about in the scenario you want to start them off in. And then just start writing.

Write the story that you want to read, but that no one else is writing. Don't write what other people want to read, write what you want to read.

Get a few chapters ahead (try for 1,500 words at a minimum per chapter, I recommend a separate file for each chapter), then begin publishing at a rate you can keep up with based on your speed so far. And if you need help getting set up, well, there are forums there too who are willing to help.

Fair warning though: If it's not fantasy, stories are not going to do well. My own suffers a bit from not being a LitRPG or Cultivation novel, two of the most popular types there, but it is at least fantasy.

This is a side-quests sort of game, only you have to go and find the side-quest dungeons.

Don't worry about the main story progression, go exploring, clear other dungeons. Can't clear this one? then go find a different one.

You can get better gauntlets, stronger boomerangs and bows, bigger and different bombs, etc., and that is just off the top of my head.

I'm going to second @Kwakigra@beehaw.org here in that you should just write what you want to write.

Coming from a fiction writing perspective, it would be "write the story you want to read, because no one else is writing it." This is advice that has been floating around for a while, I forget who first said it.

Writing because you feel you should, will never feel as good as writing what you want to write.

I've given this way too much thought:

Goth magical girl is the younger sister of the leader of her particular squad of girl power heroes and puts up with being dragged along for the heroics.
But the setting is more of a wild-west-themed fantasy world, and has the magical equivalent of Digimon (perhaps they are fey creatures instead of digital creatures)
Their adventures lead them to needing to conduct a raid against the vault of the biggest church of the lands, where they fight off a powerful (but misguided) young priest.
One of the items they successfully raid is a scroll with a prophecy that seems to indicate that the heroic older sister is supposed to fall in love with that same young priest and have a child who will be the final key to saving the world against [Threat]. But the two of them hate each other now.
Twist: Goth girl thinks that priest boy is kind of hot.

I also cross-posted this idea and thread to Royal Road here.