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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, my friend once took a screenshot to show me, and he also had seemingly hundreds of tabs open. How do you even make use of that? My limit is once I stop being able to identify what's in the tab by looking at it (which on my ultra-wide monitor is like ~30 tabs). Are you using Chrome? Chrome'll keep shrinking tabs down to lil nubbins, but Firefox stops after a certain point and it lets you scroll them. Though by the time you get into the hundreds your bigger problem is finding that one tab you know you have somewhere... Ytlaya posted:I've been seeing some Threads of Destiny spoiler-chat. I've been avoiding reading anything for the last 3-4 months, so I'll have a lot of content to binge once I do. The last few updates in particular have had some great imagery in them. Yrs has really kicked his prose up a notch. quote:The sky burned crimson and a titan of bone and blood stood over her. How high he stood, his ten heads crowned by scarlet fire, his fierce faces burning away the clouds. Black pitch drenched the titans body, and in it writhed men and women, beasts and spirits. The dead cried out, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand and more tattered spirits wrought into being armament fit to withstand the wrath of the gods. 
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Jul 13, 2020 23:19
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:The last few updates in particular have had some great imagery in them. Yrs has really kicked his prose up a notch. My favourite part of that quote is the implication that Grandpa sun turned the Bai he killed into his spear.
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Jul 14, 2020 01:32
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A delightful recommendation from the Sufficient Velocity Staff Picks for July: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/travelogue-of-the-stars-above.68842/quote:This being a relation of the journeys of a scholar, Rigel ibn Amir, ibn Hassan, ibn Salib, in which he recalls his travels amongst the stars and his encounters with the Cynocephali, the Bleymeds, the Puesedojinn, and the other peoples of the worlds above Mount Quf.
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Jul 14, 2020 09:58
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Oh that's fun.
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Jul 14, 2020 10:03
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90s Cringe Rock posted:A delightful recommendation from the Sufficient Velocity Staff Picks for July: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/travelogue-of-the-stars-above.68842/ This sounds really neat.
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Jul 14, 2020 18:42
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90s Cringe Rock posted:A delightful recommendation from the Sufficient Velocity Staff Picks for July: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/travelogue-of-the-stars-above.68842/ Ooh, something not about superheroes or leveling? I'm in.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:05
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But how will I know there is progress and conflict if I can’t see numbers go up or down?????
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Jul 15, 2020 08:23
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the blighted kingdom truly is a society
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Jul 15, 2020 10:12
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90s Cringe Rock posted:the blighted kingdom truly is a society a soon to be bullet ridden one
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Jul 15, 2020 15:51
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There's only 20 chapters of The Magic of Logistics so far, but I enjoyed what there is. Contrary to the title, there's very little discussion of logistics. It's more of a crafter/business story that happens to take place in a fantasy world. The fantasy races are entertainingly unique. The MC is a basically decent percent. There's classes and levels, but they're very much in the background and the story would work equally well without them. There has been no fighting so far and very little conflict. After slogging through some truly terrible fight scenes recently, I don't consider this a negative, but this story is definitely not for you if you want fighting.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:43
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LLSix posted:There's only 20 chapters of The Magic of Logistics so far, but I enjoyed what there is.
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Jul 15, 2020 17:48
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90s Cringe Rock posted:the blighted kingdom truly is a society shirunei posted:a soon to be bullet ridden one Yeah(TWI Patreon) Pirateaba has been hinting that the demons aren't literally evil for ages now. This chapter was way way better than the previous one imo, though still I think Rhir is kinda boring. Though guns being a thing is going to be a shitshow.
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Jul 15, 2020 21:51
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I really liked the recent PracGuide chapter. It's nice to see Catherine finally acknowledge some of these things (particularly the fact that she has held some level of authority over pretty much everyone she's worked closely with for a long time now and has gotten too used to solving problems through direct action (usually consisting of violence).
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Jul 16, 2020 05:47
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I like how Ling Qi finally learned to chill out (I'm not fully caught up yet; I'm on page 15 of reader-mode out of 17 so I still have a decent amount left). There are a couple characters I'm having trouble visualizing that may have had their appearances described at some point and I just forgot: - What does the Bao guy Ling Qi has the business contract with look like? I imagine him looking sort of chubby for some reason, but I don't think this is the case. - What does Xuan Shi look like? I know he has his turtle-shell hat thing and some black scales, but what is his general build? I feel like I remember something about him being sort of "stout" I like how this series constantly makes it clear that other characters have their own cultivation adventures going on that we just don't see. Like Ji Rong has obviously been doing a bunch of things, between getting his cheeky dragon and getting some big scar across his chest. edit: I lol'd at the part where Xuan Shi uses Rho Aias edit2: Oh, one other question - In these scene where Zhengui had that spirit eat their dream, what exactly did that do? Did that make them lose those thoughts or something? The game aspects of that choice also confused me; one mentioned permanently losing an art, but this was described as being a lesser punishment compared with a 1-turn cultivation penalty, which doesn't seem to make sense. edit3: Wait a sec, is Su Ling in the Inner Sect now? She suddenly showed up when it showed rankings. Did they let her join so she could participate in the military action underground or something? Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 20:31
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It penalized his cultivation as well as consumed the passion and emotion he felt towards the garden project, IIRC.
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Jul 16, 2020 21:11
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OK, throwing this in as a strong recommendation (though the first "book" is quite uneven while it tries to set the setting up) Nanocultivation Chronicles https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/28254/nanocultivation-chronicles-trials-of-lilijoy This is a very interesting mashup of a scfi postapoc (sort of LitRPG via nanobot augmentation unlocking posthuman capabilities) + cultivation (distinctly NOT xianxia, though still meditation focused, also nanobot driven) + "VRMMO" (LitRPG via its a drat video game) setting, and all three constituent parts actually fit together to drive a strong central plot/mystery. The numbers also do not get in the way of things either. The "outside" earth in the 23rd century is a mostly uninhabitable wasteland outside the equatorial regions due to constant fuckups in the late 21st century involving (a) global warming to kick things off (b) runaway inedible super-carbon fixing plants bioengineered to deal with that (b) global ice age when they hosed up a solar shade to deal with that (c) small nanobot disasters all over the place including a massive grey goo event in Australia that was stopped by carpet nuking. Everyone alive (~100 million) owes the relative stability of things to a apparently benevolent (?) post-singularity AI that got itself off the ground late in the series of disasters, which then proceeded to stabilize things, set the earth on a slow 10k year repair timeline, laid down ground rules of behavior / allowed technology, and then hosed off to do whatever post-singularity AIs do; with only the occasional subprocess popping over to orbital laser any residual grey goo flareups or warn off rule breaking. Oh, and it provided the "inside" VRMMO as an escape from the half dead earth. Humanity is now a dystopia ruled by an association of "clans" descended from the corporations/organizations/governments from the old 21st century who hold a stranglehold on the production of nanobot augmentations on the "outside", with even the most basic of integrations effectively requiring dept slavery from the bulk of humanity to afford. And there is no way for unaugmented humanity to even have a chance at competing without said augments (expanded senses, faster reactions, thoughts, communications, reinforced skin/bones, improved blood supply, etc). A basic neural interface is also required to access the "inside", where the bulk of "important" human activity now occurs (also held in a stranglehold by said clans, though "NPC" organizations do exist and still hold notable power in places). While "physical" augmentations/statups don't carry between the two worlds, anything mental/learned do translate (e.g. MC learns to understand echolocation in the VR space, and thus is able to echolocate in the physical world as well) Into this, the MC has a "fortuitous encounter" with a powerful legacy nanobot system from the pre-collapse era, where through meditation/cultivation rather than external augmentation, they are able to increase nanobot count & develop new capabilities, especially mentally. And the writing surrounding how these skills develop & are integrated is done superbly (e.g. echolocation). And of course, having a super powerful legacy system from prehistory ties into the main plot - where'd it come from and what is its impact on how the world is structured, both inside & outside. For those of you that read published scifi, this also has echoes of Blindsight and its meditations on consciousness/sentience/sapience as the MC develops her mind. Except where Blindsight ran with the thesis that these are unnecessary and actually a evolutionary dead end as humanity slowly loses ground, Nanocultivation is running the opposite direction, that these are critical to development of stronger intelligence. lurksion fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 01:56
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So, I’ve been clicking around on various writers Patreons...the loving Randiddly Ghosthound guy is pulling in $7K a month. I’m going to go self-harm now. Jesus.
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Jul 17, 2020 21:29
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https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon And this has gone down by a lot.
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Jul 17, 2020 22:51
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God I can't believe he's still making that much, I'd rather read Randiddly than go back to HWFWM, at least most of the bad writing is in actual story not MMO patch notes.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:00
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HWFWM was a really weird one for me, because the dude successfully identified his genre and schtick right from the beginning, kept it up for... I wanna say 40-50 chapters, then seemed to almost immediately run out of ideas.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:00
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I made it all the way to the "climax" of what I guess is volume 1 of HWFWM and stopped like 3 chapters before the end because it was so dull, and I'd been skimming for a while before that. Meh, maybe the pandemic is loving the author up and they need a break. Probably at least look at volume 2. Delve is just getting better but it updates so slowly now, it used to update multiple times a week but it's been just 1 chapter a week for a while.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:08
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Mulozon Empuri posted:https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon Ok, I like HWFWM, but that is loving insane. I guess the secret is to consistently produce half-way decent content? I figured you’d have to be putting up pirateaba word counts to get those kinds of numbers but maybe just moderately entertaining and 3x a week is enough to get it done? Speaking of pirateaba, has anyone itt seen the 10 page preview of the comic? Is it any good? The artwork looks pretty from the one page I saw.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:10
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navyjack posted:Ok, I like HWFWM, but that is loving insane. I guess the secret is to consistently produce half-way decent content? Or maybe the secret is money laundering? It's the only theory that makes sense.
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Jul 17, 2020 23:27
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lets be real, considering how much awful loving poo poo is given huge dollareedoos on twitter, im ok with amateur authors being provided a comfortable middle class income
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Jul 17, 2020 23:32
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there is not a lot I would not do to make 7k a month writing
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Jul 17, 2020 23:43
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navyjack posted:Ok, I like HWFWM, but that is loving insane. I guess the secret is to consistently produce half-way decent content? I figured you’d have to be putting up pirateaba word counts to get those kinds of numbers but maybe just moderately entertaining and 3x a week is enough to get it done? Well, 5x a week, and his monetization scheme is actually pretty clever. Pay and you can get the next ten chapters, but then you are caught up. Patreon chapters come out at the same rate as normal chapters, so if you stop giving, you have to wait two weeks for any new stuff. It's not exactly exploitative, but it's definitely leveraging human psychology pretty effectively. I thought the very end of part one was much better than the 20-30 chapters leading up to it, but the interludes are not filling me with too much confidence. I'll probably give part two a week or so, but I am close to dropping.
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Jul 18, 2020 00:10
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navyjack posted:Ok, I like HWFWM, but that is loving insane. I guess the secret is to consistently produce half-way decent content? I figured you’d have to be putting up pirateaba word counts to get those kinds of numbers but maybe just moderately entertaining and 3x a week is enough to get it done? I stopped reading HWFWM a while back, but lets be fair. He puts out 5 chapters a week, every week, or about 12k words a week. Every fourth week he doubles that and does two chapters a day M-F. He's putting in the work, and his early chapters were brilliant. Omi no Kami posted:HWFWM was a really weird one for me, because the dude successfully identified his genre and schtick right from the beginning, kept it up for... I wanna say 40-50 chapters, then seemed to almost immediately run out of ideas. This is a good summary. I'm sure part of the problem is his skill system. It was obvious to me from the word go that people just got way, way, way too many powers for anyone to juggle them for long. He did better with it than I thought was possible. Lunatic Sledge posted:there is not a lot I would not do to make 7k a month writing Right there with you.
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Jul 18, 2020 00:14
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Mulozon Empuri posted:https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon yeah it went down a monthish ago, because he said he's going on hiatus til august
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Jul 18, 2020 00:44
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LLSix posted:I'm sure part of the problem is his skill system. It was obvious to me from the word go that people just got way, way, way too many powers for anyone to juggle them for long. He did better with it than I thought was possible. This is the big issue, the cast of main party members is too big and they have far too many abilities to keep track of everything as a reader. Combined with how much stat block information he tries to give about every ability it broke down really fast as the story went on. I dropped it around when they went back into the reaper area and some of the updates were about 40% stat blocks by word count. It's really too bad because those first 40-50 chapters were fantastic.
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Jul 18, 2020 01:23
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Cinara posted:This is the big issue, the cast of main party members is too big and they have far too many abilities to keep track of everything as a reader. Combined with how much stat block information he tries to give about every ability it broke down really fast as the story went on. I dropped it around when they went back into the reaper area and some of the updates were about 40% stat blocks by word count. The cast of party members is not only too big, but the new additions are boring and in particular the love interest is flat and uninteresting along with the problematic violence. The old cast was far more interesting, but they seem to be shelved.
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Jul 18, 2020 01:58
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I like how in the semi-recent Threads of Destiny chapter (the Sun Liling one), she actually addresses part of why Ling Qi seems to defeat everyone at a similar cultivation level - apparently direct fighter types are just bad against types like Ling Qi that use these evasive area-affecting arts (and are very vulnerable in group fights to someone disrupting them and allowing a fighter/"duelist" type to attack them). This actually brings something to mind that I hope the author addresses - nearly every single other non-production cultivator peer in the series is a direct fighting type. It'd be good if Ling Qi had to face off against someone with a similar skill-set (or the "disruption"-focused one Sun Liling mentioned that is apparently strong against cultivators like her). Ling Qi's fights are generally less interesting to read than fights between other characters, because all she does is flit around laying down her arts and freeze someone once they've been worn down (now with the help of Zhengui making walls to further obstruct people). She only ever loses to people who are capable of just directly overpowering her. It's effective and makes sense for her, but not interesting to read. It's also nice that Ji Rong has mellowed out some. I imagine that he will probably stay relevant simply by virtue of being one of her only peers who will be capable of keeping up with her (as Ji Rong himself mentioned, they're the only two of their year who are on a similar level while not being ducal scions). I also like the glimpse we got into the relationship him and Sun Liling have built "off-screen." edit: One other thing that I noticed - her mother apparently broke through to red, but I don't think she's actually commented on it at all, which seems kind of weird. Was there a chapter about this that I missed or something? Shouldn't her mother be able to understand Zhengui and stuff now? navyjack posted:So, I’ve been clicking around on various writers Patreons...the loving Randiddly Ghosthound guy is pulling in $7K a month. It pains me that these random things get great patreon incomes, while Forge of Destiny's patreon only pulls in ~$1300/month. I can't imagine what a time-consuming pain in the rear end it must be to both write that series and manage all the user feedback on the "game" elements (and come up with the game elements, arts, etc). I also don't like Wandering Inn, but that having a high patreon doesn't bother me because at least that writer genuinely puts in a ton of work/time. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jul 18, 2020 |
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Jul 18, 2020 02:16
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I am happy that any writer makes good money.
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Jul 18, 2020 02:39
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asur posted:The cast of party members is not only too big, but the new additions are boring and in particular the love interest is flat and uninteresting along with the problematic violence. The old cast was far more interesting, but they seem to be shelved. Yeah, given that the precipitous drop in quality was 40-50 chapters in, I wonder if it's like Super Minion where the original treatment started as a nano/structured project somewhere else, and the speedbumps only appeared when he had to keep it going over time? It's really weird, because a lot of the problems aren't slow, creeping issues- they're huge obstacles that appeared out of nowhere. At least for my money: 1) Rufus, Gary and Farah were really well-established characters, and Cassandra was fine too. Dumping them for another group of five people with functionally identical roles and chemistry is baffling. (I honestly think the author gets confused too, because the instant they formed the party Humphrey stopped being a young, good-hearted but naive adventurer and just became Rufus. Seriously, if you change their names around 99% of their dialogue could belong to either character.) 2) The Sophie thing doesn't work- she got a bizarrely large chunk of space in the story, up to and including entire chapters focusing on the stupid elf crime stuff, and once they put her in the same room as Jason she just became an anime character. 3) What made the story work, at least for me, was "Laid-back rear end in a top hat goes to litrpg world, makes jokes," but it feels like the author forgot it was a comedy partway through and started actually writing a litrpg, which doesn't really work.
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Jul 18, 2020 03:41
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I finished Arc 5 of TWI and jesus christ, it's all Goblin murder porn.
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Jul 18, 2020 06:26
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Fun Katalepsis chapter, but i'm feeling worse and worse for Raine. 
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Jul 18, 2020 12:37
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Ytlaya posted:edit: One other thing that I noticed - her mother apparently broke through to red, but I don't think she's actually commented on it at all, which seems kind of weird. Was there a chapter about this that I missed or something? Shouldn't her mother be able to understand Zhengui and stuff now? When Zhengui broke through to Green, he became able to just talk, so even mortals could understand him then. That's when Ling Qingge became able to hear him, the Red breakthrough didn't change that. There was a chapter that noted she had reached Red, as well as a chapter or two mentioning the progress she had made while getting to that breakthrough point, but I don't think it was a huge part of the narrative.
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Jul 18, 2020 14:41
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Omi no Kami posted:Fun Katalepsis chapter, but i'm feeling worse and worse for Raine. At least Heather finally figured out that Raine is not actually okay with all this and is just being Raine about it?
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Jul 18, 2020 17:34
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Plorkyeran posted:At least Heather finally figured out that Raine is not actually okay with all this and is just being Raine about it? Which, yeah, in all fairness good communication is a two-way street. I get wanting to be the awesome girlfriend, but "I'm not okay with zombie threesomes" feels like a really reasonable thing to establish early.
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Jul 18, 2020 23:15
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Omi no Kami posted:Which, yeah, in all fairness good communication is a two-way street. I get wanting to be the awesome girlfriend, but "I'm not okay with zombie threesomes" feels like a really reasonable thing to establish early. Heather wanting to gently caress the hot amazon zombie seems like less of an issue than Raine's white knight thing. By now they've established that Raine doesn't just see Heather as someone to protect, but her role as Heather's defender does still seem important to her. Even if Heather is totally faithful by normal standards, Zheng sliding into that role will hurt Raine.
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Jul 19, 2020 00:34
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Yeah, and to be fair the white knight thing was established as a problem right from the getgo. Like, on one hand even without Zheng it's something they would've needed to address eventually since Heather is too decisive and leader-y to stay in the protect-ee mold, but Raine's older(?) and has been in relationships before, so if either of them should've had a better handle on how to talk things through before they became capital-P problems it's her. Of course I'm sure this is all a long con- while everyone is fixated on the relationship drama I'm sure that Praem is, like, a secret crime genius who's planning a diamond heist or something. (It's part of a 75-part plan to get Twil and Evelyn to talk. It won't work.)
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Jul 19, 2020 00:44
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