Random thought of the moment

 Okay, so I am currently playing Persona 3 Portable.

There are a couple of layers of reasons for this; the immediate layer of "why now" being that after finishing with Pokopia, I ended up dropping seven other games (in one case because it ran like garbage on the Switch, so I plan to try on the Switch 2 when my brother is done borrowing it, then on the Steamdeck if that doesn't work, but all the others I'm unlikely to return to) and wanted to pick something I knew I could and would actually complete (also I wanted to play some kind of Persona game this year because of the series' 30th anniversary, and it's awkward trying to play 1, 2 or 2 due to lack of modern console support).  The less immediate reason, the reason I even owned a (physical) copy of it, is that when Persona 3 Reload was announced, I saw people on Discord talking about how awful it was that they had left out the female lead from the portable version.  In talking about that, they gave examples of how much more personality the female player's dialog choices had, and I was won over to the idea that hey, maybe it was actually worth replaying to see her version of the story.

I hadn't realized just how different it would be, but that's not actually what I wanted to talk about.  What I wanted to talk about was this random thought I just had about the foreign exchange student that the player character forms an S.Link with.

As translated, he's from France (with an accent so overstated that it borders between comically overstated and downright offensive) but I don't know if he always was, or if in Japanese he was American and they changed his name to make him French instead.  Either way, what just struck me randomly was how absurdly stupid his dialog is in translation.  (More observant people were probably struck by this straight away, but I have a disturbing tendency not to think about this sort of thing while I'm engaging with media; I only tend to think about these things afterwards, and while I'm reading/watching/playing something I mostly only think about things like where the plot might go next.)  The character, Bebe, is overwhelmingly in love with Japan and its culture, so in the English translation of the game, he is constantly tossing in Japanese words then repeating them in English.  Common enough in American media when dealing with an otaku character...but he's supposed to be speaking Japanese, or the player character wouldn't understand him!!!  So wtf?  How are we supposed to interpret his dialog?  Is he actually tossing out French (or English, if he was originally American) words and then recalling the Japanese word he was looking for?

Or was he just given the most absurdly stupid translation possible?

😰

Pretty sure the answer is number two, there.

Which sucks, because he's one of the few boys the player can't force the heroine to date (I assume, since his S.Link is so far unchanged from the original version).

I absolutely do not intend to force the heroine to date any of the boys, ofc.  (Especially not Shinjiro!  I know what happens in the end if she's dating him, and it's actually pretty twisted!  (Especially since Akihiko is obviously into him!  Don't be denying the doomed yaoi, Atlus!))  If she can't date Aigis then she will not date.  (Given the ending of the game, isn't it better for her not to date anyone anyway?)

Anyway.  That was my random and pointless thought about one small aspect of the Switch port of a PSP reworking of a PS2 game from like 2006.  (Which I haven't played since its first release, 'cause why would I have wanted to replay it with that ending?)

Looking back on the last few months

    So, things have been.

    Ahem.

    Yes, I know that's not proper grammar.  Or rather, it's very weird grammar.  (Technically, it's not totally wrong?  Things have indeed existed, which is basically what that means?  But's not phraseology that people would normally use.  Nor is the word "phraseology," but that's beside the point.  Actually, I'm not positive it's even a word, but this one character uses it in The Music Man, so...anyway.  Irrelevant.)

    My life has lately felt even weirder and more stagnant than ever.  Partially because I more than ever feel the need to hide in my house from the world, but it's definitely not just that.

    I had to buy a new computer because of the end of support for Windows 10.  And, as I believe I posted before, I absolutely HATE Windows 11.  To the extent that I've been putting off even turning on this computer so much so that one of my utility bills will be paid a day late and it took me a week to look at the results of the MRI I had done.  Also that this computer's battery emptied itself in the time between when I last turned it on and when I turned it on this morning.  (Though it also seems to have turned itself on at some point without my permission to download updates, which 100% should not be possible, but as soon as I plugged it back in and turned it on, it started installing updates.  I looked over all its settings as soon as it finally turned on (after it was done updating the stupid thing turned itself off again!) and didn't see anything authorizing it to turn on at random intervals to check for and download updates, but it apparently did so anyway.  (I think I'll put it on airplane mode before I turn it off, which will hopefully prevent it from doing that again.  Might not stop it from turning on and exhausting its battery, but it should prevent it from downloading anything when it's supposed to be off.))

    So, because of my new aversion to going online due to it requiring this overpriced hunk of junk (I didn't realize that the computer was named the Latin word for "conquered" because I was being targeted to be conquered by Microsoft!), I've been doing my writing on my old computer in airplane mode, because unsupported OS don't matter if the Internet can't touch ya! 🤣  (Ugh, those Windows 11 emojis are so ugly!  Why would they even make the emojis worse for the new OS?  Why would they even change them in the first place, for that matter!?)  Which means, of course, that getting any of what I've written onto the internet to, say, quote a passage in my blog, is suddenly somewhat tricky.  Unnecessarily tricky, in fact, considering that one of the changes to the way Blogger adds pictures to a post means that I can't add them on my phone anymore.  Also there's the fact that for some reason this computer has decided that I should not be allowed to access my own pictures on Blogger, nor even to upload new ones!  Thankfully, it turns out I can still add pictures by dragging and dropping (for the moment!) so I can still add pictures, but it's even more awkward than ever before.

    Anyway.

    What I've been writing lately has been (surprise, surprise!) another Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic.  Though I did at least get a little writing done on the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, but...ugh, it's such a mess.  It's actually really hard to rewrite it just because the current draft is such garbage.  It's much easier to just focus on writing pointless fanfic.

    I want to talk about this current fic now, blathering meaninglessly, as usual, but I think I'll put in a blocker line so the whole post won't go on the front page of the blog.

Forgot a few things!

     I forgot a couple things on my previous MDZS-related post.

    First, I wanted to mention that I not too long ago watched the anime Raven of the Inner Court.  Like The Apothecary Diaries, it originates in Japan but its setting is inspired by ancient China.  Unlike the other, though, I was pretty disappointed by Raven of the Inner Court.  The body count of bystanders was pretty high, the romantic elements were far too highlighted and far too shallow (at least in Apothecary Diaries Jinshi is trying to pretend he's not head-over-heels for Maomao, plus he actually has a personality and is extremely entertaining to watch), but I think my biggest problem with Raven of the Inner Court is that the anime's pacing is terrible.  They were clearly rushing to get through as much of the plot from the light novels as possible; if they'd spent twice as many episodes on the same amount of story, it would have surely been better, or at least had a lot less of "wait, who's that again?" syndrome.  (Having better character designs with more distinction between characters and a higher animation budget would definitely have helped, too, of course.)  However, as some of my problems with the story were definitely built-in to the original work, I'm not going to bother reading the light novels to get the original version, since I plainly wouldn't be satisfied with it, either.  And I'm obviously not its primary audience (since I prefer queer romance), so that's fine.

    So why do I mention it?  (And especially in a MDZS context?)  Because two of the male characters in it had names that made me sit up and take notice, especially in connection with each other.  Now, keep in mind that this is their names as written in the subtitles.  Unlike Apothecary Diaries, which gives its characters Chinese (or possibly just Chinese-like) names that can be pronounced in Japanese, Raven of the Inner Court gave its characters...how do I put this?  The Japanese versions of actual Chinese names.  If you ever do something like look for MDZS merch on a Japanese storefront like Mandarake, you sometimes find the names transliterated as they're said in Japanese, which gives really weird different names for some of the characters.  (I think "Lan" becomes like "Aoi" or something, going on the meaning of the character used (blue), instead of matching the sound.)  So, there is some uncertainty in my mind as to whether the names in the subtitles on Raven of the Inner Court should be viewed as the names intended by the author of the light novel or not.  (And since I don't actually care, I haven't bothered to look into that.  I would expect that it's either easily found out just on Wikipedia or something...or it's basically impossible to find out because nothing's ever been said in print.)  But either way, whether it's just the subtitles or the author's intent...

    ...two of the male characters are named Wei Qing and Wen Ying.

    Given that the lead of MDZS has the birth name of Wei Ying and one of the major female characters is Wen Qing, it feels like that cannot be a coincidence.

    It still could be a coincidence, of course.  (Or it could be someone in the translation-to-English pipeline deciding to throw in some MDZS references.)  But it's just so weirdly overlapping that it's hard to look at it as coincidental.  (And I did at least look up when the light novels started being published, and it was definitely after MDZS was published, so it's not impossible.)

    Then the other thing was....

    The other thing was...

    ...

    ...I've forgotten it.

    😭

Various MDZS-related thoughts

     So...a week ago Monday, I started rereading MDZS.

    Like, I actually did nothing else on that Monday except read MDZS; no internet, no TV, no games, nothing but reading.  I thought reading a gay romance novel from China in which two tyrannical dictators and a couple more would-be tyrants were thoroughly defeated was a good way to show my spite and disgust at something else that was happening in the real world that day.

    I ended up getting partway into volume three of the official translation in that first day.  (They had just defeated the Xuanwu of Slaughter when I finally stopped reading and went to bed.)  So, in one day I got through about 2 and 1/3 volumes.  The remaining 2 and 2/3 volumes took me six more days to get through.  😅  (I.E., I finished on the following Monday.  Well, except some of the bonus chapters.  Those were still pending and didn't end up finished until yesterday.)  Admittedly, I barely even opened the book at all on Saturday because I ended up having to spend most of the day out of the house actually doing things.

    Anyway.

    Rereading the novel really jammed my face down into the reality that I have been doing a very bad job in trying to recreate the characters in my fanfiction.  (It also really forced me to notice how sloppy my memory was of various things about the novel, including that I had been convinced the Yi City arc ended in volume one when it was actually entirely in volume two.)

Online Ads Make No Sense

 Seriously, online ads make absolutely no effing sense.

I was just reading a web comic, and it's on one of those sites that has a bunch of ads between the comic and the comments.  And I wanted to see if anyone was saying anything interesting.

So that meant I ended up scrolling past the ads.

Their algorithm thinks that I live in a different part of the Midwest than I do, that I am over 50 (I'm only 49!), that I'm single and looking for a partner (well, I am admittedly single, but I have less than no interest in a partner), and that I am simultaneously a man and a woman.

Seriously, there were ads offering "real women" for men over 50 right next to ads promising they knew where single women over 50 could go to find a man.

Like.  Um.  Why.  What.  Who.  How.

But mostly why.

All the why.

I'm aroace, you know?

There is literally nothing on my phone's data (yes, this was looking at the web comic on my phone) going to sites aimed at singles.  There are no dating apps.  There isn't even a phone or texting history with anyone to speak of!  (Though I'll be worried if advertising algos have access to our phone's call and text history...)

The sites I visit most frequently on my phone's browser are Blogger, AO3, Big Bad Toy Store (aimed at adult collectors, but not "adult" toys in the "can't show it on TV" sense), and three web comics.  None of the latter are aimed at older people, and one of them is expressly LGBTQ+ in its subject matter, yet those ads were exclusively presented as hetero.

So wtf is up with that?

Why would they assume I'm both halves of a horny older couple?

It's just...

UGH.

I don't think I can put it any more clearly than that.

Wild

     Okay, this is going to be a weird one.

    Yesterday, my brother and I were at my parents' house.  Nothing big going on, we just end up over there at least once a week, because...well, because.  It's the sort of thing that maybe didn't feel so weird when we were in our twenties, but is starting to feel decidedly abnormal now that we're both in our forties.  (Heck, I'm almost to my fifties at this point.)  On the other hand, it typically includes a free meal, so...

    Anyway, there we were, at our parents' house, and they wanted to watch something.  Rather than the most recent episode of Doctor Who, it was suggested that we watch a movie.  And my brother had been wanting to get the rest of us to watch the Jack Black movie School of Rock since none of the rest of us had seen it.

    So that's what we watched.

    A bit pat in places, and I disliked the stereotyped depiction of the gay boy, but it was overall fun, and I appreciated that despite the "date" and stuff they didn't do a standard Hollywood forced "romance" between Jack Black's lead and Joan Cusack.  (As an aroace person, I'm particularly rankled by forced romances in movies.  Let people stay single, ya jerks!)

    Anyway.  What I wanted to talk about was my double-take moment during the end credits.

    There were, naturally enough, lots of song credits at the end.  And one of them was for the song "T.V. Eye."  Listed right after songs by Marc Bolan and David Bowie, just where you'd expect to see Iggy Pop, right?

    Only the reason I did a double-take, the reason I forced my father (who always handles the remote, even at times when it 100% does not make sense for him to do so) to rewind so I could look at the song's listing again, was that the "performed by" credit didn't say "The Stooges" or "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" or whatever else you would expect it to say.

    It said "Wylde Ratts."

    That's one of the names Curt Wild's band goes by in Velvet Goldmine.

    More importantly, it's the "performed by" credit for Curt's songs in the end credits of the movie, and the "performed by" credit on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack for "T.V. Eye."  (Sadly, the soundtrack does not include "Gimme Danger," so when I did an expanded soundtrack for Velvet Goldmine (for my own personal use only, ofc) I had to get my brother to grab the audio off the DVD of the movie and prepare it as an .mp3 for me.  Wish I could have done the same thing for "T.V. Eye," actually, since the performance in the movie is better than the one on the soundtrack, but unfortunately there's a huge chunk of dialog over the guitar solo.)

    Meaning that they didn't use Iggy Pop's recording of the song, they used "Curt Wild's" recording.  So that if they had used the vocals (they obviously didn't, 'cause I would have noticed that!) then that would have been Ewan McGregor's voice.

    Which is epic.

    I went to IMDB and looked all over the place on School of Rock's page there, to see if there was any mention of the Velvet Goldmine connection, but there wasn't.  Which is kind of disappointing.

    Anyway, I just felt like that was the sort of thing I ought to share with the world. 😅  It's not crucial, deep or meaningful, but I, personally, found it interesting.

    And wild.

Finally finished, at last...

    It's been a ridiculously long haul, but I'm done with (the first draft of) this stupidly long fanfic!  🥳

    Of course, this is still just the first draft.  And the second draft will require a stupid amount of work.  But I get to do other things before I have to deal with that!  I want to get the third book of the God Killers out as soon as humanly possible (hopefully sometime next month), and I have a couple of really short fics I want to write (because I am stupid) and I need to actually go looking at other peoples' April A to Z theme reveals because I want to stop being the kind of jerk who joins blog hops and then forgets to look at the other blogs. 😰  But for tonight, I'm just gonna put up this post and relax.  Or possibly work on the summary of book two of the God Killers, but who really knows what I'll do before I do it. 🤷🏻‍♀️  Mostly, though, I'm  just going to celebrate that I finally finished this massively long work:  the first draft is 494,315 words long!  (Which took from April 23, 2023 to today, March 24, 2024...omg...that's kinda freaky that both dates are the same as their year...)  And that is just stupidly long.  (Admittedly, there's a lot of stuff in there that's been given the strikethrough treatment, but I doubt that contributes more than 10k, if even that much.)

    I still have a lot of problems to contend with in the next draft, like the primary romantic pairing being a lopsided "romance" in which he's in love and she only feels friendship, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Compared to the way their stories end in the original work (he eternally loveless, she long dead) it's still pretty good as an ending point.  I hope. 😅

    Anyway, I really enjoyed how I started the first scene of the epilogue, and I wanted to post it here because it will be a very long time before I can post it anywhere else.  In the final battle, the fic's lead, Jiang Cheng, took a massive injury, but didn't want to relax his guard and get medical care until after his enemy had finished dying...meaning by the time he could relax he was about halfway to passing out from all the blood loss, and ended up being fairly delirious before he finally did lose consciousness.  So then the epilogue starts as he's waking up again...  [...and I should probably point out that even though I'm working with the TV adaptation's canon, I'm following the novel's formatting of using italics to indicate the POV character's direct thoughts.]

            Jiang Cheng was…asleep?  Or maybe napping?  Unconscious?  Resting?

            Is there a difference?

            Whatever he was, his eyes were shut and he was lying down, insensible to the world.  Then the world came barging into the room, screaming and stomping and shouting and smelling like blood and sweat and death and soup.

            Or that was how it seemed to him.

            Opening his eyes with a low grunt, he slowly spotted the cause of the noise:  Wei Wuxian.  Why am I not surprised?

            Wait, shouldn’t I be surprised?

            Isn’t he somewhere else right now?

            Ugh, why does everything hurt so much?

            “Now see what you’ve done?  You woke him up, Qing-jie!”

            “Me?!  You’re the one making enough noise for a whole army!”  Wen Qing’s indignation made Jiang Cheng laugh.  Hadn’t she known Wei Wuxian long enough to know better?

            “Hey, you okay?”  Wei Wuxian sat down on the side of the bed.  “You look half dead.”

            “I feel worse.”  Jiang Cheng tried to sit up, but didn’t manage much.  “Where am I?  How did I get here?”

            “You passed out due to massive blood loss,” Wen Qing told him, walking up behind Wei Wuxian.  “Next time, don’t refuse treatment just because the enemy hasn’t finished dying yet.”

    [Wei Wuxian is the lead of the original work, and kind of Jiang Cheng's adopted brother (though also kind of not, since he wasn't formally adopted).  "-jie" as a suffix means "older sister," and can be used with an actual blood sibling or (as in this case) as a term of endearment (or affectionate teasing) with a woman older than the speaker who is not related to the speaker.]

    Anyway, it's kinda freaky.  When I did a mini-outline for what needed to go in the epilogue, I looked at what I had written and then said to myself  "Ugh, looking at this, it’s gonna be even more than 10k, isn’t it?" and you know what?

    The epilogue ended up being 10,300 words.

    To me, that seems pretty freaky, since I usually cannot judge in the slightest how long something will be from the outline. (Like the time I thought an outline section would be about 50k and it turned out to be more like 150k....)

    I just had to take a screenshot of the final double palindrome of the work. 🤣 Because I'm weird like that. Kind of a doozy, though! 😅

    And this happened earlier this afternoon:

    I have a terrible tendency to do things like the above, where I was writing along and just started typing my own thoughts instead of the narration. I did that a lot in this scene, actually, because I had plotted it all out and written it in my head twice over (consistently) earlier in the day, but when I got to the scene--the point of which was for Jiang Cheng to talk to his love interest, Wen Qing, and establish that no, his grandmother wasn't forcing her to marry him, but that she actually wanted to--it came out all wrong and kind of went insane. To the point where I gave up on it and decided that future me could deal with it.😅 I'm too burned out to write a scene that difficult right now, you know? Besides, I probably need to retool their whole relationship in the next draft, so she's more into him the whole time, and thus doesn't have to have this weird aromantic but somehow still into him even though she only thinks of him as a friend thing going on.

    Anyway, in the case of the above, the problem was that I am just far too aromantic and asexual to write a detailed kissing scene. Because I've never done any kissing, and it just sounds icky. (This is also one of the reasons I cannot write detailed sex scenes.) In this case I was also extra uncomfortable about it because it was hetero, and it's been a while since I wrote anything hetero.

    Aaaaaaand it's dinner time, and I have not stopped working on the computer since getting up this morning. (Seriously, ate lunch at the computer and everything.)

    I think I need to just hit "publish" on this post and leave it a jumbled mess and worry about the rest later.

    Like tomorrow. After I've eaten and slept and done other vital functions that I have been putting off.

    Because I have finally finished this %$^#$in' long thing and I deserve a rest! 🤣

April A to Z Theme Reveal

     So, this is something I haven't done in a long time--and have never done on this version of my blog, having only done it back on the Wordpress version--but I'm thinking about taking part in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge this year.

    I even have a theme!  (Of sorts.)

    My theme is going to be "characters I have written about."

    Which sounds pretty dumb when I actually write it down, but...

    Some posts will be more talking about the character as a character, and some will be more focused on excerpts of my writing.  (Which sounds astonishingly arrogant now that I'm looking at it on the screen...)

    The characters are going to be a mixed bag (I don't have them all picked out, but I have at least a few candidates for almost every letter), some being truly original characters from things I've written, some being mythological figures I've written about, and some being other peoples' characters I've written fan fiction about. 😅  I might be especially looking forward to that last category, even...

    I plan to talk about what the characters are like, and why I've chosen them for the blog post, whether that's why I like them, why they're important to me, or whatever other reason I had for picking them.  (In one case, it may be "I couldn't even find any other characters whose name starts with the letter U".)  Some of them even have art I can post.  (Mostly the fan fiction, but a few of the originals, too...)

    For the most part, I'm hoping I can fulfill this challenge using works I've already released online, or plan to release eventually.  If that doesn't work, I may have to dip into older works that I would otherwise like to pretend don't exist due to sheer cringe.  (The letter "V" might require that, unfortunately...)

    Anyway, I'm hoping that this will both help me get back into the spirit of more regular blogging (instead of a frenzy of blogging in November and barely even doing so sporadically the rest of the year) and maybe also help me to start visiting other people's blogs again.

    Oh, final thought, re:  "adult content."  My blog itself does not contain adult content, but my fiction often contains swearing and sometimes contains what would be called "suggestive material" if it was in a movie.  So while my posts are totally SFW, their links may not be wholly so.  I think that leaves me okay to not click the "adult content" marker on the actual challenge form (when it's available to fill out) but if I'm wrong about that, please let me know now so I don't make that mistake later!  Thanks! 😆

Plushie!!!!

 So, a while back I mentioned that I had just finished playing Sword and Fairy 7, and how much I wanted a plushie of this little cutie:

Well, guess what?

Not quite the same, since this is the friendly version rather than the peach-colored enemy type, but probably the closest I'll ever get.

And how did I obtain such a plushie?

Well, I happened to be in a Gamestop last night and noticed this on the shelf:

When I looked at the back, and saw that the contents included a plushie of the leaf fairy, how could I have resisted?

Unfortunately, not everything in the picture ended up being in the box.  😭  The "chipboard character standees" and the DLC download code card aren't there.  Well, actually, maybe the download card is inside the actual box of the game itself, but I kinda doubt the standees could be.  (Though I suppose it's possible? 🤔)  I already have the Nendoroid of Yue Qingshu and the doll of Bai Moqing anyway, so that's two out of four even without the standees. 🤣

Anyway, the important thing is that the plushie is safe and sound.  Also the four disc soundtrack!

Of course...I already had all the music as .mp3s I bought on Steam, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Having physical media is always a good thing.

....

There is, naturally, the slight hitch that I don't actually own a Playstation 5. 😅  But surely the price will come down on those things eventually, and then I can get one... 😅

Anyway, I just wanted to post about that.

Partially just because it's been a while since I posted anything. 😅

(Wow, am I over-using that emoji in this post...)

Looking back on 2023...

    So, 2023 is ending, and I thought I should post about that, because that seems like a thing to do.

    To be honest, the Year of the Rabbit has not been kind to me, it feels like.  Which is weird, because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit myself.  Then again, I recall reading somewhere (around January, I suspect) that each cycle is connected to one of the five elements, so I guess whichever one 2023's Year of the Rabbit is connected to is bad for whatever one 1975's Year of the Rabbit was connected to?  (Or, you know, I just had a bad year and everything else is unconnected to that fact. 😅)  

    It's kind of weird, though; I don't really remember any of the past Years of the Rabbit, or even if the fact that it was same even mattered to me in the slightest.  I mean, obviously I didn't care for the first one.  Uh, I mean, the first one after 1975, since I was obviously unable to care while I was a newborn infant.  But I don't really have any memories of being 12.  Or rather, I have no memories connected to being 12:  I'm sure I remember plenty of things from that year, I just don't think of those memories in terms of my age at the time. 1987...I wanna say that's the year I graduated grade school?  Except that sounds kinda late for it, doesn't it?  Wait, if one typically is six when one starts first grade, then...yeah, being twelve when you graduate sixth grade does track.  So, yeah, that would be the year I graduated grade school and started high school.  (My high school was a combination high and junior high, so it was one school from 7th to 12th grade.)  In which case it was actually a pretty decent year for me in some respects--I met my high school best friend, the only person from high school I still have any contact with--but in other respects it was awful, since my entire high school experience can be summed up with one word:  pain.  As to the year I turned 24...nope, no memories whatsoever connected to being 24.  That would have been 1999?  Ack.  Nevermind.  Waaaaaaay too many memories, almost all of them bad.  That's when I...actually, no, if I go into too many details then I will totally be doxxing myself if anyone who knows me happens to stumble across this.  (Which is unlikely, but I'd still rather not take that risk.)  But it was a bad year for me.  So...turning 36...that would have been...2011.  Hmm.  Yeah, I actually do have zero memories connected to that year.  I'm wanting to say I got my second BA in 2010, in which case I was not currently in school in 2011, but maybe it was the year I started volunteering at the museum where I used to work.  In which case 2011 was probably pretty good for me?

    Anyway, as to why this year was not good, well, there's a lot on this blog about it already.  I was taking part in a game jam in my fledgling indie game dev hobby, and started getting heart palpitations, which became so bad that I dropped out of the jam and stopped writing altogether for about a week (maybe only a few days), and then decided I wouldn't do any more game dev until the heart palpitations were all cleared up.  (I did permit myself to write for non-game dev purposes...which in this case meant fan fiction.  So, so, so much fan fiction.)  They, uh, still aren't.  They're less frequent--a few spells per month--and pretty minor, but they still happen.  Meaning I haven't felt safe returning to game dev, despite that I was in the middle of rewriting an old series of my (many) unreleased novels and releasing them as interactive fiction.  So it's just sitting out there, the first two of seven, taunting the universe.  Admittedly, very few people have even interacted with the game pages, let alone actually read them, but that doesn't change how annoying it is not to be working on them.  But heart health is a scary thing and I don't want to tempt fate.  (And yes, I have seen doctors about this heart thing.  It's just that they can't find anything wrong with my heart.  I don't even have high blood pressure.)

    Looking back on the year, that's honestly been the major part of it.  Just more and more and more doing nothing because I'm scared to do anything.  Though also my favorite Chinese restaurant closed shortly after my birthday (my birthday was the last time I ate there, in fact) and although a new one has opened in the same space using the same name, my parents have eaten there since it reopened and they said the menu has changed and isn't as good.  😭  I also feel like my house has become even more of a roiling, uncleaned chaos, but I think part of that is the health thing; I'm afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting my heart.  Which is dumb, but somehow I got into that mindset and it's hard to push myself out of it again.

    But this is depressing, so let's change the subject!

    Please be amused by my very amateur attempts at photography instead:

    Since rabbits feature heavily in a few choice moments in Mo Dao Zu Shi, Goodsmile released special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroids of the two leads.  And somehow I didn't actually take them out of the boxes for some photographs until today. 😭  But they're super-adorable, right?  😁  I'm not sure how clear it is in this picture, but their eye highlights are little bunnies.  🐰  The bunny-ear headbands were the pre-order bonus for getting them directly from Goodsmile.  😁

    Anyway, looking ahead to next year...

    I don't do New Year's Resolutions.  Those seem like "promises I don't intend to keep," you know?  But I do have goals for next year.  Things I want to do, and hopefully will do.

    My goals (in no particular order) are:

• Polish up and release book three (it's already gotten a couple new drafts and I've already put it in the game engine, so it just needs polishing and some work on the glossary)
• Finish this @#$^#@$#ing fanfic that I've been working on since like April (it's at like 385k words now!)
• Post my dragon-based MDZS fanfic tomorrow (since it had gotten to nearly the end of the year, I figured may as well wait and post it in the Year of the Dragon, lol! (yes, I do know that technically that doesn't start until February, but humor me))
• Start exercising in some manner (if nothing else, there's supposed to be a Vocaloid version of Fitness Boxing coming out in a few months, that should help)
• Try to fix up my awful diet at least a little (I do plan to talk to my doctor about weight loss when I see her in January)
• Do at least a little cleaning around the house (hopefully enough that I can replace my dying refrigerator)
• Try and give away or sell some of the crap I don't need/want/use anymore
• Get my car fixed (it died on me again)

    Okay, admittedly, a lot of those sound like exactly what everyone says every year, but a lot of my health problems are coming to a point where I can't keep on going like this much longer, which has given me a lot more motivation to fix the problem, only I keep trying to diet too strictly and going off it and making things worse. 😭  (Hence why I plan to ask my doctor about it.  And hope she'll have something to say other than "let's cut you open and staple your stomach shut" because that is just cursed.)

    Hmm...what else did I want to say?

    I've made a few plans for the turning of the year.  I managed to finish the book I was reading today (volume 4 of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun) which is good, because I did not want that to be the first book I read in the new year, 'cause about half the volume is just the two leads being insanely horny for each other and refusing to do anything about it, until I just want to scream at them.  (It's a pity it's so insanely thirsty, because the actual plot of the novel is fairly interesting, but I'm not sure if I can put up with any more drowning in lust garbage.  It's agonizing to read.  Especially as someone who is both aromantic and asexual, because I can't even connect with it in the slightest.)  I'm going to read something short before the day ends so that it's not the last thing I read, either.  (The only short thing I haven't read before that's lying around is a sexually explicit fan comic for Promare, but I have a feeling it will actually contain far less horniness than that volume of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun.)  And then, at some point before midnight, I will start reading a book I got for Christmas, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines by Garret Ryan.  It was one of the few presents I wasn't expecting, but I'm really looking forward to it:  I read one of his earlier books, and it was a lot of fun, a combination of things I already knew some of and interesting tidbits about the ancient world that I didn't know.  (I seem to recall that there was one thing in the previous book that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember what it was, specifically...though I'm betting it had to do with same sex relationships.  That tends to be the spot where straight male scholars drop the ball most often.)  Anyway, I figure that of all the unread books on my shelf, that's the best one to be reading at the turn of the year.   Well, that and I promised I'd let my mom read it when I was done with it, so I don't want to wait too long to get to it. 😅

    I have some sparkling apple juice to drink at midnight (I don't drink alcohol), and a naughty-but-not-too-naughty snack to enjoy with it, too.  I'll probably either get lost in playing My Time at Sandrock and barely notice midnight or I'll start watching Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves around quarter past ten to be watching that when the year ends.  Not connected to New Year's in any way, but it's on my unwatched Christmas gift pile, so...hmm.  Then again, maybe I should dive into Doctor Who instead, to usher out the 60th anniversary year?  (I got the second season for Christmas.  And I do mean the actual second season, as in the 1964-1965 season.  There's some real gems in there.  Also the unbearably awful "The Web Planet" which my brother and I couldn't even finish when we tried to watch it before. 😅  But it starts with "Planet of the Giants," which is pretty good, then goes into "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which is better, and...anyway, there's a lot of really good ones in there.)  Hmm.  I'll have to think about which to do....but I'll probably end up gaming anyway. 😅  Oh!  That's right, I could also watch some anime on Crunchyroll:  there should be a new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and I wanted to start watching Frieren...  (I still haven't had the courage to check out season two of Heaven Official's Blessing, in case the subtitles are as bad as the ones on the blu-ray...and New Year's Eve seems like a very bad time to take that risk...)

    Oh, yes!  Gaming!  That was it!

    Someone on one of the Discord servers I'm part of posted a thing about the games they loved that they played for the first time this year.  I thought I should do that, too.  In chronological order...

    (That's order played, btw, not order released.)  Technically, Sword and Fairy 6 probably doesn't belong, as I didn't quite love it, but...because of the different sizes of Switch and Playstation covers, it was going to be even more lopsided if it was only eight, like the version the person on the Ooblet server posted.  (Said person being primarily a PC gamer, they didn't have the different image shape issue.)  I mean, I suppose I could have tried to balance it out by removing Oshirabu, but...that would have felt much more wrong.  I did play more games that I loved this year, but there were a lot of remakes and remasters in my year, including things I had played in their original versions:  Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Grandia II, and Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space.  (There may have been even more than that and I'm just blanking on the others.  Though technically I only played about half of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii; I hit the point where one of the characters said something that pissed me off so badly I was like "yeah, I'm just going to put this aside for a while until I cool off..." and then I never ended up picking it up again. 😅)  I kinda shouldn't include My Time at Sandrock on this, since I only started it like two days ago, but...it's the type of game that's much more make-or-break on its mechanics than its story, so I already know.  😆  (Thankfully, there's a full character creation at the start, so you don't have to play as Mr. Generic from the cover there.  I'm playing as a woman with purple ponytails.  💜  Though if I'd known the town doctor was going to hit my character design sweet spot, I might have played as a guy after all in order to romance him.  (I do not do het romance in a game if I have any choice in the matter.  Just not how I roll.))  I still would have probably gone with purple hair, though.  I almost always choose purple hair when it's an option.)  Even more technically, Forager kind of doesn't belong, because I first started it when I bought that copy a year or so ago, only the TV I had at the time was not compatible with the Playstation 4 and I lost so much of the edges of the picture that the game was literally unplayable because so much of its UI was off-screen.  Therefore, I had only played like two, three minutes before I gave up in despair.  When I got a new TV this year, I started playing it again for real...ah, crap.  It and Sword and Fairy 6 are in the wrong places; I got the TV because I was already playing Sword and Fairy 6 and was losing too much of the edges of the screen, and I was determined to keep playing it, enough so that I actually went to buy a new TV.  (Thankfully, it was a cheap one...)

    Anyway, top three of those are....

    At number three:

    And at number two:

    

    (To the extent that I've bought the doll I found of the secondary female character, and the Nendoroid of the heroine.  😁)

    And--drumroll please--the number one favorite of the year...!

    I've even bought all three of the Ooblets plushies released through Fangamer!  (And will likely buy every other Ooblets plushie they make...)

    And on that note, I'll bring this post to a long and rambling close.

🎉  Happy New Year! 🎉

NotNaNo '23, Day 15: A Weird Fandom Thought

    All right, so I have some strange fandom stuff I want to say, but it will involve heavy spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi...and also for Hamlet, in case anyone happens to stumble across this blog after having arrived from another planet and/or the distant past and therefore doesn't know the plot of Hamlet.  (If any such aliens/reverse-isekai-protags are reading this, give it a read!  Widely regarded as one of the greatest works in Western literature, and also very short, as it's a play and therefore can be performed in about...well, I think the runtime on the movie of the entire play was something like three and a half hours?)

    Anyway, my point is just that I'm going to put my NotNaNo update at the start of the post today instead of the end.  Because spoilers.

    So, in terms of my writing today, it was actually pretty disappointing.  I really wanted to hit 50k today.  It's the 15th, the halfway mark, so I have no excuse not to have written that much already!  But somehow I never seem to manage it quickly in NotNaNo, unlike real NaNo.  🤷🏻‍♀️  But I've been having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position for writing for the past few days (that was one of the contributing factors to my low total the last two days), so I've had to be working at a makeshift standing desk and it's pain-inducing for my back, plus the table shifts sometimes and I have to catch it before my laptop can fall, and generally I have more trouble forcing myself to write in this position, but sitting just wasn't going to happen, so combined with a really unpleasant next scene, it was just a "yeah, no" situation.

    Total words in the work:  298,674

    Words written today:  3,660

    Words written in November to date:  48,674

    Pretty version:

    Anyway, now, the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I decided to put after my word count because it gets into MDZS fandom stuff and involves heavy spoilers.

    I think I've figured out a way to do the "read more" line like I used to be able to do on Wordpress, so I'll put that below here...

Amazing Idea: Rental Museum!

     Okay, maybe it's not all that amazing an idea, but it came to me as a flash of "this is exactly what I need in my life."

    So, what is a "rental museum," you may be asking?  (Assuming you're not just rolling your eyes and clicking away...)  This is an idea I literally had like five minutes ago (well, longer by the time you're reading this, lol) so it's not very fleshed out yet, but it's basically a combination museum and rental storage place.

    More accurately, it's a place where people could rent space to display their collections and thereby free up space in their homes for more collection.  😅  (Who, me?  What makes you think I have a spending problem?)

    So it'd be like renting cases at an antique mall, except that nothing's for sale.  But the up side?  It would also be open to the public so that other people could come see the collections on display (among other things, this would mean you could show people your cool collectibles without having to allow them into your home) and there would be a small fee to get in to see the collections, right?  Then as they're leaving, the guests would have the option to fill out a small form about the collections they liked and didn't like (which would be identified to your liking, so it could be by name, by nickname, internet handle, whatever), if they were likely to come back again to see any of them, and if there was one in particular they came to see.  Being highlighted in these questionnaires as something people came specifically to see (or possibly just as something people would come back to see, or just as a favorite for the visit) would net a discount on the rental of the space, proportionate to the amount of attention gained among the visitors.  So, if your collection was popular, you wouldn't even be paying for the rental space, or not much anyway.  Plus your collection would be stored in a safe, guarded place, you could come and look at everything in pristine glory whenever you wanted, and it wouldn't be cluttering up every surface in your house.

    Obviously, there would have to be safeguards in place.  A collection would have to be vetted before the rental agreement could be signed, to ensure that it contained nothing offensive or dangerous.  That kind of thing.  Also, there would need to be a way of organizing the space, so you wouldn't have a doll collection sandwiched between baseball memorabilia and war memorabilia; you'd want all the dolls in one area, the action figures in a nearby area, the show business memorabilia in another area, etc.  This might mean either moving some collections around because a particular part of the facility was full, or even turning away potential collections because their particular type of collection belonged in a section that was full, but...like I said, this is an idea I only just had, so it's not fleshed out, and if it was really going to be a thing it would need to have all sorts of finely turned details worked out precisely as far in advance as possible.

    And, let's be real, I don't have the money, drive or social skills required to start something like this.  (And yes, social skills would be super-necessary to start something like this.  You'd have to be able to talk to a lot of people to get the funding, the location, the insurance and the staff to run such a complicated establishment.)  I just think it would be 100% a great solution to a few of my problems. 😅

    Case in point:  when I had to reorganize my Nendoroid "wall" because the Year of the Rabbit Wangxian Nendoroids arrived, I seriously found myself asking the question "which is better to go next to a ghost king, a vampire noble or the prince of the underworld?"

    (As you can see, I decided to go with the vampire.  Mostly because I thought his box fit better, thematically.  Although now that I think about it, Zagreus also would be less fitting on that row since he's from a video game, so he doesn't really fit in with characters from non-interactive media. (Okay, technically there evidently is a game based on MDZS, but it's like a cell phone thing?  I dunno; I saw it mentioned on the MDZS wiki, but I didn't look into the details at all.  (I also know of at least three fan games, but that's another matter entirely.))  Gotta say, though, the top row...that's like Lan Wangji's fondest dream:  sandwiched between two of Wei Wuxian. 🤣  He gets both the original and the Mo Xuanyu versions. 🤣  (And, ideally, someday I'll have the original Nendos of both LWJ and WWX, but I gotta find them affordably first.  Or Goodsmile could reissue them.  That would be ideal, 'cause then I wouldn't have to risk accidentally ending up with a knock-off.)

    Anyway, the fact that I had to ask that question is sort of a "send help, please" thing. 😅  (Or maybe the real "I need help" indicator is that I'll have to reorganize the whole thing again after the other Bocchi the Rock Nendos ship... 😰)

Name Generator Serendipity

     So, still working on this MDZS fanfic I've been working on since, like, late spring.  😅  (At this point, I think it would take a miracle for me to finish it before NaNo, so I guess it'll be what I'm working on in November, too...)

    In the process of working on this, I've been forced to come up with names for additional characters, because while the original novel has a lot of characters, there aren't all that many from within any given clan, particularly not outside the main family of any given clan.  (All the more so considering that more than half of the novel takes place more than a decade later than this fanfic does!)  I've gone through a lot of different methods in trying to name them:  for a cousin of Lan Wangji, I decided to look at the names in The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and try to find him a good name by picking and choosing from names there.  (I probably need to rename him, though; I didn't end up liking any of the meanings of the characters' names for a member of the Lan Clan's main family, so I ended up naming him after Shen Qingqiu's sword, but the more I look at that as a character name, the more I feel like it's somehow off.)  For a few later additions to the cast, I looked at the names of all the playable characters available in one of the Dynasty Warriors games, and picked given names from there, but that was still pretty limiting.  To give a courtesy name to a character who only had a family name in the novel (the head of the Ouyang Clan in the novel's present), I picked a character trait of his, came up with a few ways to spin it positively and ran those through Google Translate until it gave me a result that felt like it could work as a name.  (In my defense, since then Seven Seas Danmei has added descriptions for some more novels they've licensed, and one of them has a character with the same given name, so at least I stumbled onto an actual name.)

    Finally, in looking at the reference works on AO3, I found a link to a name generator that was highly recommended, and which always provides the meanings of the names to go with them.  So far I've felt maybe its list of names isn't quite as voluminous as I'd like  (I feel like I keep getting the same names often) but it's definitely the best option I've come across so far.

    And today I found myself wanting to name a minor Jin Clan asshole who was going to show up a few times, so that I wouldn't have to just keep calling him things like "that guy who did that thing and pissed everyone off."  (Okay, so I would neve have used quite that phrasing, but you get the idea.)  I only had to hit the "Generate names" button once or twice before this screen came up.

    Not only is there a perfect sarcastic name (ie one with a meaning completely antithetical to this guy's character), but it had actually generated with the Jin family name attached!

    Obviously, a sign that I was meant to use it.  😆

    (The fact that right above it is Xue Yang backwards is also kinda wild, but somewhat irrelevant. 😅 (Xue Yang, so far, has not appeared in this fic, though he's been talked about on several occasions.  He'll be showing up in the not too distant future, though, which is always a challenge, because it's hard for me to get a good handle on his behavior and speech.  Though I was really proud of one of his interactions with Jin Zixuan in "A Hidden Road."))

The Weird Way My Brain Works

     Normally, I'd be finishing up my writing day about now (just after dinner, that is), or would have finished it a few hours ago, depending on when my enthusiasm/momentum/procrastination petered out.  Today, I haven't quite started yet, because when I finished up yesterday (not long after lunch), it was with the depressing realization that I didn't actually know what happened next.

    I mean, I knew what had to happen:  the characters are embroiled in a war, which will be over as soon as they assault the enemy's capital, but before that they had to defeat another town, and my plans had not included any mention of just how they were going to do so, or even what, precisely, that entailed, as this is a war between cultivation clans, so they do not, technically, own or in any other way control the land they're fighting over.  (It doesn't make any sense to me, either.  This may be a genre thing that I'm too ill-versed in the genre and setting to understand.)

    So today I was just like "eh, I'll give my mind a break and just play games all day."  (Sole advantage of being unemployed...)  Yesterday I had taken a few notes in my "Continuing the current fic" file on Google Docs (which I use for jotting down notes and just writing extensions to wherever I happen to be in whatever I'm working on), and shortly before dinner I was looking over them, and then adding to them, just sort of brainstorming in text form.

    I wanted to share that, because I find it kind of funny that this broken process is coming from an allegedly functional brain.  (Rather than copy-paste the text, I decided to use a screen-shot.  Because.  It is unedited except that I blurred out the swear words because I don't like to swear on my blog for some reason.  But I did not go in and fix the grammar, punctuation, or the fact that I don't typically bother with capital letters in this sort of brainstorming session.)

        I suppose it's basically the same kind of process that idea bouncing involves, only there isn't a second person involved so I'm just bouncing the ideas off myself? 😅

    So, yeah.  My brain is a demented place, but at least I know how to get my fanfic through this last bump in the road of the Sunshot Campaign so that I can finally get to the political drama on the other side. 🤔  Since getting into writing MDZS fanfic, I've been writing about so many things I would normally avoid like the plague...  😰

    (BTW, word count on this monster fic will hit 180k today.  I shudder to think how long it's going to be in the end.)

Blogger and "Total Pageviews" ~ A Mystery

     Okay, so since I posted "A Hidden Road" on pages here on my blog (following my somewhat questionable decision to delete it from AO3 because of one truly upsetting comment), I've been paying more attention to the "Total Pageviews" number when you visit the blog (or, in my case, hit the "Preview" button from a post or page in the editor).

    This is because in that time it's gone up, a lot, while the number of views for the individual posts and pages have not gone up much at all.

    Meager photographic proof:

    (Wow, that partial screencap turned out to be enormous.)  This was what it said at 8:05 yesterday morning.

    This is what it said at 7:30 this morning.  (And as of about two minutes ago, that number had gone up to 7,834.)

    However, if I just add up the number of visits to the pages and posts, the total is only 1,435.  (Yes, I actually went through and added them all up.)

    Before I added the fic (and a link to the blog in my profile on AO3, in the hopes that someone would click on my profile, wondering where my fic had gone, and then follow the link to find it here, which might have happened once, but I'm not sure about that (even if it did, they didn't finish reading it, because the pages that had gained a view stopped a third of the way through)) that "Total Pageviews" number was somewhere in either the high 4,000s or the low 5,000s.  I think the latter, but I'm not positive.

    So where the heck did all those extra views come from, when most of them don't represent a view of a post?  (Especially considering that when I click "view post" from the post management screen, that makes the post's view counter go up one, so a lot of the 1,435 are actually me.  (Though it sounds like maybe I can turn that off, which would be sweet.  I need to look into that as soon as I'm done with this post.))

    Now, admittedly, just following the link to the blog will take you to a landing page that shows the full posts without counting on any of their view numbers, so some of that may be people clicking through from the Insecure Writer's Support Group and then not clicking on any individual posts, and the spike could (conceivably?) be something the whole IWSG has been experiencing, with some bot going through all the links on the IWSG's page, but then not leaving comments, or not leaving them on my particular blog because the landing page doesn't have a comment form, and the fact that it happened since adding the fic is coincidental.

    The only other theory I have is that maybe when a search engine grazes the page, that counts as a pageview even if the person who ran the search didn't actually visit the blog.  Given that I've been posting more and more about MDZS (which is very popular worldwide), that seems possible?  But it's weird to imagine that Blogger counts a search engine as a pageview.

    Obviously, none of this actually matters, since worrying about how many views my blog has gotten is 100% empty vanity (well, maybe not "vanity" exactly, but something akin to it) but I have to admit that it's weirding me out that my total numbers have gone up so much so fast (it's been like a month and a half, maybe?) compared to how much they went up in the preceding two and a half years.

    Anyway, that was just sort of sitting on my brain and bothering me, so I wanted to let it out.

    I may try futzing around with the settings to see if I can make it so the total only goes up in accordance with the posts and pages, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

    EDIT:  I just had a look at my stats page (lol, should have done that first!) and I can confirm from what I saw there that it is definitely a bot.  (Surprisingly, according to those numbers, the numbers shown on screen should actually be higher, which suggests that Blogger started cottoning on to it being a bot and stopped counting it after a while.)  The bot is using Mobile Safari on an Android device (weird in and of itself, considering Safari is the Apple browser!) and coming out of one particular country, but I feel like I'd be insulting the country if I said which one, so I won't.  The bot accounted for almost 5.5k pageviews.  There's also the possibility of a bot elsewhere for the "Other" views that were around 1.7k pageviews.  The ones that actually seem to be genuine views account for about 500 of the new views over the last month.  In itself that's already an unrealistically high number, imho, but not quite as shockingly so.
    (This makes me very glad I've never attempted to monetize my blog, because I would totally feel like a thief if I was getting paid because some bot is glitching out and loading my blog repeatedly.)

Writing Style Alignments (+ awkward shilling)

     So, not too long ago, someone posted this "Writing Style Alignment" chart in a Discord server where I (mostly) lurk.  I thought it was something interesting(?) to talk about, so...

    What really strikes me about this is how I don't fit in any of those boxes.  I have elements of "Lawful Pantser," "Lawful Plantser," "True Plantser" and even "Neutral Plotter."

    So, let's look at those in sequence here.

• "Writes everything in order"
• This is 100% me.  If I try to write things out of order, it just doesn't work.  In the past I used to write little snippets as they came to me and then sew them into the narrative when I got there, but I eventually had to give up on that practice because it pretty much never worked out well.  Because so many little details change as I'm going along through the story that by the time I get to whatever scene I pre-wrote, various things no longer worked about it. 
          This is also why I hate having to go back and add in stuff to a scene later on, because the flow gets terminally wrecked by the addition.  For example, on "A Hidden Road," I realized belatedly that I needed Wei Wuxian's faith in his relationship with Lan Wangji briefly shaken by something someone had said to him (in order for it to be strengthened by a reassurance, of course), but I had gotten to the end of the first draft without ever having that moment, so I had to add that in on the second draft, and the only good place for it was in a late night conversation they already had on a different topic.  So I had him lying awake worrying about their relationship...and then had him want to talk about it, but try to start out on a "lighter" topic that ended up preventing his intended topic.  Which is to say they ended up having the same conversation they did originally, and it just started for different reasons.  Awkward af.
• "Uses the flashlight method to get to the end"
• I have no idea what the "flashlight method" even is.
• "Ends up in strange places"
• Nope.  I usually have a pretty strong idea of where I'm going by the time I actually start writing.  I may pass through some pretty unexpected places on the way there, but I typically get roughly the ending I was always aiming for.
          Though sometimes some things change.  Like on "A Hidden Road" I ended up changing who the villain was because as I went along I realized that the villain I had planned on using didn't really have much motivation to be villainous left after a few of the details I added in earlier scenes, so I made the henchman into the villain and the original villain into more of a red herring.  Or in "Scions of Troy," a character who started out as a minor role became one of Ariadne's potential future girlfriends.  (Which is to say that she's obviously interested and Ariadne seems a little interested.  But she's not scheduled to show up in any of the later books...though given the way I write, that could always change...)  But the larger picture of the ending in both cases (which can be summed up as "heroes triumphant") remained the same.
• "knows random details no one else cares about"
• Um...probably?  But really that sort of applies to the main story, as no one cares about what I write in the first place.

• "Knows the ending, writes towards it"
• Yup, this is absolutely me, 100%.
• "loves to worldbuild"
• Enh, not so much.  I like making up a few trivial details about the world, but mostly that requires a mind for the medium picture that I don't possess.  (Y'know the saying "misses the forest for the trees"?  That's totally me:  I see the trees and I see the continent, but I don't see the forest.  Can't, in fact.  It's part of the same mental block that prevents me visualizing things, I think.  (But I'm not sure about that.)  Hmm.  Actually, maybe it would  be better to say that I can see the forest and the leaves, but not the trees?  Well, you get the gist of what I'm saying either way, I hope.)
• "uses character bios/has definitely taken personality tests for their characters"
• Nope.  I've sometimes tried character bios, but I can't think up enough of the needed details on command for them to be useful; I kinda have to just summon up those details out of the ether as I write. 😅  I may have tried personality tests once or twice (probably for Atalanta and Ariadne), but typically I don't know enough about my characters' weird details and/or too much doesn't apply to them, so it would be wasted effort.  (For example, a common question on those sort of things is something along the lines of "how do they take their coffee?"  Which I can't really answer under any circumstances, 'cause I don't drink the stuff, but I might be able to make a half-hearted guess for someone in a modern setting, but for someone in an ancient setting?  Atalanta and Ariadne have never even heard of coffee, so how could I possibly answer that?  (The same would apply to the entire cast in any MDZS fanfic, outside of a modern AU.))

• "Starts an outline"
• Yup, often the case.  Or rather unless it's gonna be super-short, I'll at least have a paragraph or two summarizing what I want to do in the story.  Sometimes it gets expanded into a proper outline, or at least the early portions, and sometimes that doesn't happen for a while.  My outlines generally are more detailed at the start and eventually peter out into vagaries like "the war happens" "they win" "epilogue i guess?"
• "goes off script and ends up in unexpected places."
• Enh...sort of?  I mean, it's more like little details that get added in change the trajectory, but it's typically a pretty slight change.  Like the change to "A Hidden Road" I mentioned above about the villain change:  that happened because of one line that one character happened to say that opened the would-have-been villain's eyes to the fact that hey, maybe he shouldn't hate everyone quite so much, but the new villain's agenda wasn't much different than the old villain's would have been, so the actions the heroes take in response are pretty similar to what they always would have been.  Or this brief Dragonji story I wrote because it was screaming at me to write it (despite that I'm in the middle of a Jiang Cheng-centric, massively-long, CQL-based AU), which I started out with the assumption that after a certain, very early point I was gonna have to go look for a co-writer so it could turn into smut, only then I just had this one tiny, very canon-accurate moment where dragon-in-human-form Lan Wangji gets flustered on seeing an underclad Wei Wuxian, and it just seemed like so much more fun to have it turn into a more slow (and mercifully consensual) romance than the smutty thing it had originally been building towards.  But the "happily gay ever after" ending is still the same, so it's not that I ended up somewhere unexpected, just that I passed through an unexpected place.
• "but that's okay cause this is more interesting anyway"
• My fingers are itching to fix that, but it's a quote so I can't go in and add the apostrophe that needs to be in front of "cause."
          Anyway, that's not totally an actual point?  But I mean, yeah, my diversions from the original plan do tend to be more fun/interesting than whatever I had originally intended, but surely that would be the case for anyone who decides to pursue an alternate to their original plan, because why would they deviate from the plan if it was less interesting to do so?  (Though I guess it's debatable about that Dragonji story.  The smutty version probably would have been a lot more fun to read, but trying to find and work with someone else to get the smutty part written would have been anything but fun.)

• "Brief outline"
• Yup, definitely.  At least to start with.
• "Likes to use beat sheets"
• I don't think I ever even used those back when I was studying screenwriting in grad school.
• "Modifies and updates outline as they go."
• Yup, absolutely.  My outline for a long piece like the one I'm currently working on (over 160k at this point) becomes sheer chaos, but that's okay, because I mostly only consult the paragraph or two describing the next however many scenes.  (Right now, that paragraph is...actually, there's two sets of them.  One describes the next major push of the Sunshot Campaign, and the other outlines the whole rest of the war.  After which the rest of the fic will happen.  (The outline for that part is fuzzier, but the current plan (which will likely not change!) is for Jin Guangshan to be the big bad.)  Absurdly, I think I originally intended the post-Sunshot Campaign part to be the bulk of the fic. 😰)
• "Thinks about writing character bios, rarely does"
• Yeah, actually, that fits me pretty well. 😅

        In the end, I'm not sure what it means that none of the squares really fits me, or that I come close to fitting into boxes of all three of the major types.  I'm not sure if that says there's something weird about me as a writer, or if it means the person who made this chart doesn't quite grasp the way other people write.  I feel like after this got posted the only people who talked about it said they didn't quite fit any of the choices, so I think the person who made it missed their guess about how it should work.

    Anyway, it seemed something interesting to talk about, so I thought I'd talk about it. 🤣

    (If anyone out there is confused about the whole "alignment" thing, these charts are sort of a meme, inspired by the D&D alignment charts of Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and Good/Neutral/Evil, with the center block being True Neutral.)