Tabenings - End of Year Edition

Well! I didn't want the year to end without a final 2018 blog post, so here it is!

Let's see... it's been a while and a bunch of stuff has happened. Not least of which, Uzobono and I released CORE #13: Outreach. If you somehow were unaware of that, go get it!

I am of course a delicate snowflake, so as you have witnessed I slunk right back into my shell after producing it. Reaction was largely positive but not 100% carrying me through the streets on the fans' shoulders, so as is my wont I threw down my quill and stormed off. Okay, not really. Anyhow, if you are here reading this you will probably like it so have at.

In much more recent news, tumblr rid itself of all porn. This is a severe blow to me because Tumblr was one of the half-dozen pillars of my porn consuming habits, and I have yet to figure out how to once again find the naughty artists on my regular update-check circuit. Many of them have migrated to Twitter, so I have gone over there, but the interface is more awkward and it will take some time to get used to.

Hmm, gosh, what else. I purchased and played through Thronebreaker, a card-based video game set in the Witcher universe. I enjoyed it, but not enough for a second playthrough. Other than that it has been mostly World of Warcraft, although for the upcoming holidays I purchased Factorio on a friend's recommendation so we'll see how that suits me.

Back to smut. Other than the tumblr-pocalypse I'm not recalling any big events or releases, at least in my subgenres. Of course, it's been... yikes, two months, so there's probably stuff I am forgetting. Lemme see what's in my collection from that period...

• GreenT posted an absolutely magnificent animation of a buxom terminatrix in a clear plastic uniform over on his DeviantArt page. 
• I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about HomeStuck. I tried, once, but it was just baffling and the characters and stories seemed totally unrelated to each other so I gave up. However, I really love the areolae on the renders that BreedingDuties produces. He had a tumblr up until this week, but now can be found at Newgrounds and Pixiv.

• Speaking of Pixiv, I was over there nosing around and whilst searching using the 'goblin' tag, I found some really excellent goblin - heroine mind control. The artist is Iryda, you will want to check out the combat set first, and the naughty mind control set second.

 But gosh, a lot of what I snaffled the last two months was from tumbr. Le sigh.

Anyways, I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a marvelous new year. Perhaps I'll even resolve to return to weekly updates in 2019! Come back and find out.

Tabenings - Non-Smut Edition

Heya!

So, nothing going on smut-wise this week. Guess I needed a break; also, I've been dieting, and that may be affecting my libido. Down twelve pounds though!

So let's talk about video games. I've mostly been playing modded Skyrim recently - I tried out the Helgen Reborn mod, and the Rigmor of Bruma mod, and the Bruma mod, and a bunch of other stuff that adds sexy clothes and things. No catgirls yet.

The mods have been okay, although it always surprises me how much effort people will put into these things - voice acting, new character models and objects and skins, not to mention the dungeons and quests, etc - and yet the writing always seems, well, not great. I mean the quests in stock Skyrim are no Grapes of Wrath, but I'd just think, I dunno, that fan-made stuff would be better. Maybe I'm just entitled, I dunno.

Actually what I've enjoyed the most recently is doing some of the base game stuff that I'd never done before, namely to collect all the dragon masks. There were a bunch of large-ish dungeons which I'd never delved! So that was fun. But, of course, I'm done now.

I also picked up Cities: Skylines, because it was $5 on a Steam sale, but I just couldn't get into it. It seemed more like work than like fun. Maybe I'll try again later.

Just today I'm noticing all the sudden buzz around Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which was released today. Or last night at midnight, whatever. It's a somewhat Skyrim-style game only set in a realistic Bohemia of 1402, so no magic and you have to eat stuff or you get weak and die. Although you don't get to design your protagonist - it's always the same guy - I am a huge history buff so a realistic medieval Bohemia might be right up my alley.

Reports are it's pretty buggy, though, so for my $60 I'm gonna wait until they've worked more of that out. Maybe in a month I'll give it a shot.

Right, that's enough nattering for the moment! Have a nice three day weekend and I'll see you next week.

Tabenings - Next Up Edition

Hello again! I actually went upstairs and brushed my teeth and was all ready for bed when I recalled that it was Tuesday and I had a blog post to write. So here I am!

Obviously there won't be a lot tonight but I can natter for a bit. I got scene five over to Uzo, so CORE #12 is proceeding; scene five is pretty hot, too, I think. Scenes six and seven should be pretty quick. Right now it's fifteen scenes total, but some of those are just a couple of pages. Do not expect it for Halloween.

No progress on the 'Modding' front. I am trying to decide if my hand is too open in some of the scenes so far, where I am showing the brainwashing rather than simply proceeding with the story and implying the brainwashing. Undecided on that.

On the video game front, what I had suspected might happen, has actually happened. Sunday evening I sat down, ready to play some more Divinity 2, and I realized: I didn't want to. I looked at the icon on my desktop and thought "Shit, another long-ass fight that will only be won by abusing the mechanics after having to reload a dozen times... nah, fuck that."

I'm like two or three fights from the end of the game, the big reveals and all that story stuff. But... it's just... work. It's not fun.

This is what I was bitching about from the start. The fight mechanics are so unforgiving that every fight is a chore. And instead of finding cool new gear and learning new skills which make the next few fights easier because I'm more of a badass, the next fight is totally impossible unless you have leveled up as much as possible and found all the higher level gear you can and min-maxed everything. At no point in the game are you ever a badass. The bad guys are always more powerful than you, and you can only ever win by the skin of your teeth.

It's not fun.

So it looks like Divinity 2 will now go to that grey Hades where games that were kind of cool but ultimately not something that was worth playing go, at least as far as I am concerned. I switched back over to my Europa Universalis IV campaign, and diplo-annexed Savoy which finally gave me that land bridge between my Austrian heartland and all of my low country possessions. After several vicious, close-run wars, I managed to break France, and it was nice to spend an evening tinkering with my government and occasionally helping Poland to remove kebab without stressing about one mis-click sending my rogue out of backstab range in the second round and having to re fucking load yet again.

Yes, yes, I really should have been working on 'Modding'. Thursday. Definitely Thursday.

Tabenings - Sebille edition

Good news, everyone! I've just donated blood!

Yours!

Mwah hah hah!

Sorry, just getting into the Halloween spirit. However, all tricks aside, I do have a treat for you. A video game clip!

I know, I know, not what you came here for. You only thought I was a pornographer. I'm really a video game player with a pornography hobby.

So, as mentioned last week, I have been playing this game "Divinity: Original Sin 2", or as I call it "Fuck! Reloading again...". Part of what has gotten me through the head-desking combat system has been the unusually heavy mind control fetish content. As I said earlier, one of the major plot points is the magic sucking-out of "source" from hapless victims, leaving them drained, with a big black sigil on their forehead and black-on-black eyes, and mindlessly obedient.

Mindlessly obedient. Mmm.

Well, another major Mind Control plot point revolves around one of the main playable characters, Sebille. You can pick her as your main character, and as with all of the six possible main characters, even if you don't pick her she can be part of your four-person party. As she is in mine.

Now, Sebille is an elf. Elves in Divinity are a bit more feral than usual - small sharp teeth, cannibalistic, a bit more on the creepy side than elves in Tolkien or D&D. And Sebille is an assassin. A brainwashed one.

At some point, she was captured by a shadowy character referred to as "the Master". He brainwashed her through the use of a magical scar on her cheek, which utterly enslaved her to him. Once she was his mindless tool, he kept her in a box. Now and then he would take her out and send her to kill people, which she would do.

Anyhow, she escaped one day when some bozo left the box open, and managed to put back together a bit of her personality. She's now focused on getting revenge against the Master.

The main problem with her plan, of course, is that if she meets the Master he will simply turn her back into his mindless slave. The mechanism by which he will do this is a song, which was programmed into her earlier and which will re-activate the brainwashing.

Luckily for her, she has discovered a counter-song, which she teaches to the player character. Thus, the plan is they will confront the Master, he will sing the brainwashing song, the PC will sing the counter-song, and Sebille will kill him. And finally be free.

Of course, when I played this, I got to this scene and said "Oh my God I have to watch him re-enslave her", so I did. And I did again. And a few more times.

It's not played for the fetish, sadly. If we were doing this there would be a LOT more "Yes, Masters" and follow-up slave-sebille scenes. Oh, the potential follow-up slave-sebille scenes. Sadly, no. But even so, the one scene was still hot enough to grab me right in the sex when I saw it.

And because I love you, I recorded it! And brought it here for you!

As a foreword - there is a lot of wordplay at the start of the scene, but I have skipped through that. I'm sorry if you want to hear all the exposition; you can pause and read it if you want. I wanted to get to the good stuff without the clip being ten minutes long. Everything past the halfway point of the clip is in full. I also included some of the initial loading screen, because it has a picture of Sebille front and center so you can have a good look at her.

I'll natter a bit more afterward, so: here's the scene!

Okay! It's like a quarter page later but I am gonna assume you watched it.

Obviously, it's much much more potent when you've been playing with Sebille in your party for hours, learning her backstory over time, using her as your heavy hitter in fights, and, in my case at least, romancing her. To then succumb to the need to see her enslaved, and have her taken away permanently, just because you betrayed her... RRRR. So hot.

Of course, in my "real" playthrough I ultimately reloaded and did sing the song, and saved her, and killed the Master. I mean, of course I did. And although it was tempting to let her get enslaved, go away and do that quest that the Master then offers you, and then come back to see if slave-Sebille has any new dialogue or has changed any, I am 99% certain that would not pay off and basically be a big waste of time without any new slave-sebille fun at all, so I haven't tried that. Yet.

Really, aside from the hot backstory, and the snapping fingers / snap to attention, all we get is one good "How may I serve you, Master." But given that this is not fetish porn, that's a lot!

Also, THE-HYPNOMAN really should nab that "How may I serve you, Master" audioclip, it's very hard to find those and it could be nicely re-used for the various shorts he does.

Alright, those of you here for the smut are dismissed. I'm now gonna ramble on a bit about HOW MUCH WORK it was to bring this clip to you.

I don't stream or twitch or any of that new-fangled stuff. So from the moment of "OH SO HOT I should share this on my blog" to me posting this here required that I perform all sorts of really bothersome computer bullshit.

To whit:

1. I needed a game recording program, so I downloaded and installed CamStudio. Which I'm not going to link because the fucking thing didn't work - the video recorded but I could NOT get the audio to work. I spent hours on google searches and hapless attempts to coax it to pull from my audio card. No dice.

2. Eventually I gave up on that and downloaded OBS. Which I am also not going to link because that fucking thing installed a smidgen of malware which I had to remove; thanks Malwarebytes! (It wasn't terrible, just an ad-bot, but come the fuck on.) And then OBS did not work for VIDEO; it recorded the audio just fine, but the screen was black.

3. This time google searches said I should update my video driver, so I did that. I have a GeForce 960 which I got a few years back to play Witcher 3, and the NVDIA driver upgrade was (relatively) painless.

4. But now OBS decided to only detect my game screen some of the time. I would hit the record hotkey and get game video, but then when I did it again a moment later I got blank screen. I gave up and went to bed.

5. Tried again the next day and finally came up with the video AND the audio. But then Blogger would not let me upload a video larger than 100MB, and the FLV file OBS produced was 255MB, so... compression time. I installed Avidemux, which is a nice little video editing program and made me very happy by easily doing exactly what I wanted it to. Probably because it's made by French people. Anyway, it has a super nice feature wherein you simply pick your desired filesize and it compresses it in the optimal way to reach that filesize! *Happy Tabico noises*

All told, I put in way more fucking hours on this than I probably should have. Especially when I could have been writing smut! I hope you fucking appreciate it.

Speaking of writing smut, I haven't been entirely unproductive - 'Modding' is up to 21,038 words! I'm still thinking 38,000 when it's done. And Uzobono is working on Scene four, although at this precise moment I don't have a lick of scene five ready. So I guess I know what I'm doing next!

P.S. Callidus could have done all of that stuff in, like, 20 minutes. I know.

Tabenings - Word Count Edition

Herro yet again!

So I am plugging away at 'Modding'. Current word count is 9,535. I think I'm about 33% done with the initial draft. Gotta work through some plot and storytelling before I hit the really hot mind control bits.

Also in initial talks with Uzobono about CORE #12 or possibly another Division universe one-shot, a la Guided Tour. Since we're now into double digits I'm demanding a change in our profit-sharing arrangement. My current percentage is not enough but I figure a few more percent and I can give up the day job.

:D

However, I have to say, if I did want to make some money with my smut - and I do but not enough to overcome the logistical challenges involved - I'd be writing a porn game. You have probably noticed but if you haven't there's a small gold rush going on. Big studios are not going to get near porn with a ten-foot pole so there's a nice wide niche for individuals to create porn games and make a decent sideline at it; for the biggest small games, even a reasonable living.

I can write (or so I delude myself) and I can also code fairly well. Art, not so much, but of course I could Opportunities that.

But if I don't have space in my free time to produce much smut anyway - and I don't, you can see my productivity - working on a game is of course right out. Alas! There are some good ones out there, though; I've linked to several in this space.

Okay, time to get a little more 'Modding' done!

Tabenings - Harem Edition

So that's going fairly well, albeit slowly. I've been spending some of my free time recently playing The Last Sovereign, a pornographic RPG Maker game. It's... well, it's really good. Although frustrating.

Sierra Lee's writing is excellent, and her plotting is better - really, Bethesda, look at this game and then look at Fallout 4 and hang your head in shame - but there are a lot of hidden mechanics and it's really aggravating to find yourself with a bad or mediocre result at one point due to something you missed six hours of gameplay earlier. I've restarted from saves a number of times and it's getting old.

That said, find a good walkthrough and give it a shot, if you are fine with textual porn. And why would you be here if you aren't? But if you like naughty pictures - and I do, a bunch - she also has two other games with actual drawn porn in them, Noxian Nights and the recently inaugurated Kingdom of Deception. The KoD intro is fun, though a bit short, and personally I don't get into prostitution as a fetish so it's a bit lost on me. Orcs, sure, but whoring is 'meh' as far as I'm concerned. Not that it's mandatory, but if you want the small amount of smut in the KoD intro you kind of have to go that route.

All the games are free in one of the usual Patreon models, where the most recent content is for folks what pays their money and the earlier content is freely downloadable.

More 'Flesh' shortly.

Tabenings: Tylmarande Edition

Not a lot going on smut-wise this week, I spent much of the weekend working on someone's costume for Halloween. No, not mine, I have plenty already in my closet.

Fun discussion from last week on video games and their possible mind control / corruption themes. I am as it turns out a big fan of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and have re-installed it (and applied the fan patch) a couple of different times. I can rarely bring myself to fight through the interminable Hollywood sewer, but I do love me that Heather, rrr. There's a mod I apply to her, 'nigh-naked Heather', and... well. Rrr Heather. Also a fun game aside from that, I've rarely seen its equal in sheer atmospherics.

I also did Star Wars the Old Republic for six months or so when it came out - some fun corruption there, including as mentioned the girl who joins the sentient bugs (Tabico? Enjoying girls turned into bugs? Who would have thunk?) I understand that there has since been an update or two which allow for same-gender romance (at least, of a specific NPC) but thus far that hasn't been enough to lure me back in. I did enjoy several of the different class story arcs, though, at least one of which (Imperial Agent) played with mind control liberally.

And I do recall that set of Silithus quests! Mmm Cthulhoid Bug Overlords.

Now one instance of video game corruption that hasn't come up, but was exceedingly powerful to me - and those who recognized the name in the title are nodding their heads - was from Neverwinter Nights, the isometric Dungeons & Dragons based game from 2002. Aribeth de Tylmarande, smexy elven paladin, is seduced and corrupted into a Chaotic Evil blackguard during the main story quest.

At this remove, a lot of that storyline was pretty forced, and the seduction was sadly not all that seductive, more "look at how badly they treated you - why not join team CE?", but at the time good damn did it push my buttons. I loaded and replayed and loaded and replayed the scene where she gives in and converts to evil oh so many times.

And then in the Hordes of the Underdark follow-up campaign, you can find her wicked spirit in the underworld and get her to sign up with your party, either by returning to the light side (*roll eyes*) or remaining as a wicked, wicked, naughty girl (*rrrr*).

Heh. I'm tempted to go play it again right now just for that, and I don't even own the game any more.

A Backdrop of Doom

As mentioned, I am also intending to use this blog to jot down notes and ideas - and this is one such!

Being old, I played a video game back in the day called "Myth: The Fallen Lords". It was a hell of a lot of fun mostly because my friend and I played through the single player campaign co-op. You weren't really supposed to - you could only play missions co-op if you had beaten them on single player - but we discovered a cheat code that "insta-won" any level, so we would start a level in single player, insta-win it without even looking at it, quit, and then play it in multiplayer, which was much, much more fun.

The game was platoon-level real-time strategy in a fantasy world; your troops were elven archers, dwarven grenade tossers, and crazy barbarians with claymores. The bad guys were various humanoid monsters - orc and goblin type stuff, but creepier. It was fun to play, and the world-building was well done. It was also challenging - there were lots of ways to fuck up, the bad guys were hard and you had to hit them just right, and your forces carried over between levels so if you only just eked out a win, you weren't going to succeed on the level following.

Now, if you're worried about spoilers for a game that came out in 1998, you will want to skip the next bit.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the game, perhaps oddly, was the ever-growing sense of doom that came with each mission. You see, you would "win" any given level - and then discover that, elsewhere in the world, the bad guys were marching from triumph to triumph and just rolling over all your allies (who you'd thought were fairly tough) and pretty much everyone but you. You'd start rescuing people from some city while the good-guy army dealt with a bad guy army up north. You succeed in the rescue, and learn that the good-guy army was totally obliterated by heretofore undreamed of amounts of bad guys. You'd cut through some local groups of bad guys to avoid being entrapped - and then learn that the entire north half of the good guy country had been overrun. You'd retreat again and discover that other kingdoms you'd hoped to get help from would not be sending any help because not only had they been conquered, it had been achieved through impossible dark magic that twisted their citizenry into still more monsters and those critters were now coming for you.

The news just kept getting worse, even as you succeeded in desperate mission after desperate mission.

It was awesome.

Anywhoo, I was recalling that experience and thinking that it could be a fun backdrop for a dark fantasy erotic mind control story. The small group of protagonists learn of an evil plot to take over world (using lots of delicious mind control and corruption) and set out to foil said plot. They discover along the way (as they are going from place to place attempting to learn what is really happening and what if anything they can do about it) that the plot is totally already underway. And then the news reports start rolling in about cities and then kingdoms being absorbed into the suddenly very real mind-slave empire.

Could be some lovely scenes of various former allies and contacts being reached out to (via magic radio / palantir / crystal ball) only to discover that they are now eager slaves of the Witch-Queen.

"i belong to Her now; serving Her is my life's purpose. You are fortunate you could still contact me. Most humans here had nothing in their minds of worth to Her and have been transformed into drudge (note: 'drudge' as a group noun), but some of us had information or skills that could be made to serve Her. i was fortunate enough to be one of those. Mmm, it took Her only an hour to bend my soul. Now i am Her creature forever. i was so stupid to try and resist. Surrender, all of you. Join me."

And all that coming from someone that only a while ago had helped our protagonists and sworn to fight the WQ to her last breath. Delicious. A few repetitions of that sort of incident ("Not you too!") and you've really got an oppressive/erotic atmosphere!

Throw in a possible means of stopping the WQ if only our heroines can figure out what it is and reach it in time, a secret traitor or two, and you've really got a story.

As it happens, I do have a dark-fantasy-overrun-by-wicked-goddess universe ready to hand - the above plotline would work really well when paired with 'The Loosing of the Dark' for instance - but I'm kinda-sorta leaning towards the heroines managing to scrape out a win, which is not something I'd do to dear Sauriann. Although she was defeated, once, in the WQ era, and is actually staging a comeback at the "present" time in Middle Urth. Would have to be a new story, though; it won't mesh with what I am doing in 'That Which Has Been Lost' (you'd like a link for that one, wouldn't you?) so I can't work it in there.

And, more pertinently, I have other story ideas higher in the queue. Still, worth putting down for possible reference.

Friday Roundup

Well, I *should* be getting ready for my trip, but first let me drop a little update here.

Dollmistress just shared some preview pics for one of the two games she's working on - and if you haven't played a Dollmistress game, you owe it to your fetish to do so. I'd start with Space Ditz, and then go for Miss Adventure, and *then* Overseer, but really you could do any order and be well served. I would definitely advise having a walkthrough or other guide ready to hand, though. DM plays for keeps. I finished Witcher 3 on 'Blood and Broken Bones' (I know, I know, casual) and I think I had to reload saves more often in Space Ditz.

I believe all three games are available via the forum over at the Hypnopics Collective.

As I say, she's got two new games currently bubbling away in development, and just revealed some delicious new pictures from one of them. One in particular caught my eye:

Now, I have no idea what's going on there, but in my mind that lovely lady is the voice of late-night radio WDRN, breathing sultry news and updates and taking calls from insomniac listeners who are well aware that secret cabals of mind controllers run all the major institutions of modern life, but aren't capable of doing anything about it.

Sort of like the late night lady DJ you can hear in the Vampire: Bloodlines game, the Deb of Night, only with discussions focusing less on vampires and more on the mind control drugs in the water supply and the secret ponygirl ranches in back-country Montana...

All right, it's Friday and that means time to scan the last week's comments for anything that requires answering by yours truly... ooh, looks like I skipped last week. Eh, I was busy prepping the Secret Files. So the last two weeks of comments.

I daresay the reappearance of 'Deeper Than You Think' therein addressed FZY1's observation from the 12th!

sohta was wondering about the number of issues left in the current story arc of CORE. That's easy: one! CORE #10 will wrap up this story arc, and CORE #11 will kind of sidestep to a different set of threads for a while. Same characters, but doing some different stuff. I do like the idea of the protagonists in one story becoming the antagonists in another, that's a good one. Interestingly, I was planning to do the opposite in 'Radiance' - Briaza, the antagonist in chapter one, would have been the protagonist in chapter two.

I am amused by the expressed skepticism, not to say dismay, from certain parties regarding the 'mind controllers lose' ending of Radiance.

Ziim seems to have been a hit. I only ever intended to write the bit as it stands - I'm not actually sure where I'd go with it, were it to continue. With superheroes you run into the problem that the heroes kind of keep ramping up in power, so either eventually they would defeat the Ziim simply by being too super, or the Ziim would win and that would be the end of that. As I say, I had no further plans in mind beyond the sexy vignette as it stands.

Half Shim - I shall give Notepad++ a try, I am familiar with regular expressions. Thanks!

Vanderbilt - but if the protagonists were all really smart *and* had super powers, how would I ever get them to fall into the mind controllers' clutches? No, no, I need those character flaws, hubris in particular, so that I can stop them from always winning!

And sorry about the jellyfish. :P

Hmm, and as for my unfinished stuff, it appears that what I should have been working on is a story about ponygirls *in* Middle Urth! Who knew?

Final Tabenings of May

So, the 'Seed' epilogue has been split into two parts and nicely polished, so that's a go for this coming weekend. No sex, no mind control, but there are some good lines in it.

Not a lot of motivation beyond that, at least tonight. Playing a little more Stardew Valley and debating if 'Blood and Wine' is enough to motivate me to re-learn how to play Witcher 3. I played the entire release campaign, and liked it well enough to start a second 'complete everything' play-through, but that fizzled out somewhere in Novigrad and I haven't touched it since last year. I bought 'Hearts of Stone' but despite everyone saying how good it was, have never yet played it.

'Stellaris' still appeals, though waiting for the next major patch might be the way to go.

Not going to kick off 'Joba' (Note the cunning name change! Also... Novamist Valley. How clever! How obfuscated!) tonight. If I'm feeling horny tomorrow, perhaps.

Also need to get CORE #10 revised and completed and over to Uzobono (who sent me a nice email from Belgium, or maybe Belarus) before I leave on vaycay at the end of June. Obviously there's time, but since I need to do it, perhaps sooner is better than later.

Monday Mooning

No, not with my butt, you perverts.

So, Uzobono is off on her month-long trip for the CIA (note: informed speculation only), which basically means I can stop writing for a while. Right?

No?

Eh. I did precisely bupkis this last weekend (aside from playing Fallout 4's Far Harbor DLC) so any chance of 'Pierced' the-conclusion-no-I-mean-it-this-time coming out over Memorial Day weekend is pretty much shot. Which may be for the best, I'm continuing to second-guess the endgame I've come up with. I'm having difficulty living up to the reputation I have created for myself in my own mind, and to be honest (spoilers!) I haven't been seeding the preceeding chapters with hints or clues with the intent of there being some big reveal, I've just been writing to move the story forward.

Maybe I should know better. Don't write anything without a solid, gut-punch ending ready for it.

But at any rate, I'm not best pleased with my plan for the finale at this point but I need to put the story to bed so I can move on to the next thing, whatever that may be. I'll try getting it underway this week so that I can hopefully conclude it first weekend of June.

I'm still a bit enthused by that Stardew Valley / Joja story idea I outlined a few posts back. Some intelligent, urbane commentators provided some really great suggestions there in the comments and cogitating upon them gave me the intertwined plotline I need to actually make it a story with some tension to it; if I could knock it off in a week, I'd do it, but I am doubtful of my ability to do that.

Also, need to write that last chapter of CORE #10, and then collect all the renders that Uzo has created thus far and re-edit the whole script. That is our process, by the way; here, I shall outline it for you:

a) I sit down with a blank page and write story pages, which consist of a page number, the layout of the panels on the page, a brief description of the content / image in each panel, and any dialogue. I'll do this one or two chapters, each between 4-12 pages, at a time. Send to Uzobono.
b) Uzobono renders the images. (As far as I'm concerned, this step is fucking magic, because holy shit does she make purty renders, with details and oh the expressions she can capture) She sends them back to me as individual images, a chapter's worth at a time.
Steps (a) and (b) proceed concurrently, so that in theory at least I am moving forward with writing while Uzo is moving forward with the renders. I throw in some initial comments on the renders in case there's something that I'd like changed or added.
c) Having received all of the renders, I review and edit the script both for general goodness and to best fit the images that Uzo has rendered. Send final, complete script back to Uzobono.
d) Uzobono does the necessary postwork and then stitches the images together onto the pages, and inserts all the word bubbles and sound effects.
e) Deliver to you!

So for CORE #10, we're well into step (b), with everything but one scene written and only two scenes left to render. But, as I say, Uzobono is off to Davos for some Illuminati consulting gig and won't be back until July, so there it shall stay until then, although I need to finish up my end through step (c) so that when she's back she can render the last two parts and kick right into (d) and then (e).

But tonight I'm still feeling 'bleh' so I'll probably do some video game and go to bed early. Perhaps tomorrow Tabico will be ready to kick ass and take names.

Lewd Advertising

So, for what I think is the first time ever, I bought a game because of porn of that game.

I was browsing /aco/ over on 4chan - yes, my secret shame, but these are the Secret Files - and there was a thread for Stardew Valley. I had never heard of it, but hey. Anyhow, the porn was pretty good - here's a fine example - and it appeared to be a farm/romance sim, and I've been suffering from that ennui which I mentioned, so I bought it!

It's pretty good so far. I have some quibbles, but overall it's low-pressure fun. I like supporting independent game developers so dropping $15 to try it out was no problem.

However, as I said, I'd never heard of it until Hey! Porn! Which is an amusing entree into a game, and a sign to media producers of all sorts that shutting down fanart of your content, even smutty fanart, is actually a bad idea.