Just got out of the hospital. I'm fine, just hurt my back and had to get some things fixed. Might be slow and laid-up for a few days though.

But like I just had a birthday, right? I think this is like appliances where they wait until the day after the warranty expires to break!

We're calling to discuss your meepdragon's extended warranty!

Today is get outa my lair day ya whippersnapper kobolds!

Not really Galis want to snuggle kobolds lots!

But he also old now. Gonna waggle a cane at em!

Old-ify your Meep Dragon today! One day only! Grey snoots and complimentary canes to shake at whelps on the lawn!

I seem to be pretty bad at making more than one journal per year. Here we are again though, one more rotation of the meepderg around the meepstar! I shall share a smol cake with everyone.

When no one was looking, Galis had forty cakes. He had 40 cakes. Thats as many as four tens.

And that's terrible.

Maybe do myself an honorary birthday next week instead. Came off work starting at 3 am to 5 pm with an extra night shift two days in a row to find my mailbox broken again (third time in 2 weeks) and this time I know it was the postal worker . Wee, I love spending hours in line at the post office.

Was going to make myself a little cake or something but I just can't even now. Maybe later.

Sorry for the lamepost.

I think this month I want to try and get, artwise:

Firebeak (the herm gryphon in https://www.furaffinity.net/view/26550967/ ) posing in a sheer nightgown in a doorway being seductive at Galis. Poor Galis snoot-bleeds!

Something possessive-vorish, with a dommy pred, but safe (endo or reforming) with Galis - very little idea yet what exactly.

Another Christmas, and another new year coming up. Persevere, one and all - good times and bad, we can but keep trying.

I'm a big fan of haunted houses, Halloween, spooky games, and so on, and as ever, have been doing some musing on them.

I'm going with 'spooky' for the moment as something apart from just regular high tension, and apart from 'surprise' like a jump scare. Spooky being more that dread that leads up to a jump scare (when executed well). I play with design elements and gamemaking at times and one I've always wanted to do is a spooky/scary one.

I'm also considering it apart from specific fears. For instance, many people find spiders scary. But if I just plop a spider in front of someone - that's more a jump scare than dread, and relies heavily on the viewer's existing fear of spiders, if they have one at all. Zombies are a big 'victim' here of just being plopped in and the game going "See, scary, because zombies!" without actually creating any dread around them.

I often find, for me, that games defuse dread with action ("Thriller") mechanics. So for me (and I understand this differs for people), in order to be spooky or dreadful, those elements have to have high precedence over action, combat, etc. Taking Dead Space as an example, I would always lose my sense of dread or fear once gunfights got under way because the tone shifts to a power fantasy of killing all the monsters and I can't hold both in my emotional state at once (though I have a particular fondness for the Dead Space series, it's more as action games than scary games). So in a lot of ways, I tend to find games with less combat and less direct interaction with the scary elements to be, well, scarier than those that have a lot. So if it was just based on my own nature, I'd likely design a spooky experience to have very limited to no means of 'fighting off the monster'. et in some ways inevitability isn't that scary either... but counterplay reduces dread by making that the focus of the mind. If I can "outplay" the monster, then, I start to see "behind the scene and into the game as a game" as I start thinking more about how to play against a game obstacle, than I do about being afraid of something. I'm still strongly wondering on how to make a good line between "This is spooky and I should be scared" versus "This is a game obstacle and I should be analytical". I find the best scariness comes when the imagination is focused on what could go wrong, rather than how to resolve a problem.

I'm curious what you all find 'spooky' when playing a game! Where do your lines of "scary oh crap" vs "oh I wonder how to beat this obstacle" fall?

When I said I needed to write more I didn't expect this to be the first thing, but as I think about it... no, this is not a topic where silence serves.

I don't know 'who started it' on the demonstrations that turned to vandalism. I've seen the police over-reactions. I've heard rumors of instigating groups. I don't know enough to say much there.

But I know this. I've seen every individual or group who tried to talk this out for the last decade get completely villainized. I've seen everyone who tried to talk about how the police are getting trained to escalate rather than de-escalate get dragged through the mud. I've seen every use of "just a few bad apples" come up over and over for the behavior of authorities, forgetting the phrase is a "a few bad apples spoils the bunch. And I've seen every attempt at public discourse get shouted down - remember how the kneeling football players got treated? I don't care much for football, but if you were wanting an extremely harmless, convenient protest that doesn't interrupt people's daily lives: That was it. And no one listened. For heaven's sake, the 'response to the response' movements were more about shutting up the people complaining than helping addressing the issues.

Property destruction isn't right. But neither is the use of lethal force as a compliance tool, and especially when employed by agents of the government against its own citizens with no accountability is MUCH MUCH WORSE. Neither is, when unarmed people are killed, dredging up some excuse that it was somehow okay because... they didn't comply fast enough. They looked too scary. They didn't comply with the right order screamed at them. They twitched a bit. They complied but they should have complied differently. They did something else sometime else in the past. Those aren't reasons. Those are excuses and excuses just pour gas on a fire and then those making them act surprised when it becomes bigger.

We've had a long time to fix the issue of accountability and training. We know we teach police the wrong things in training - we wrongly focus on escalation over deescalation. We know they haven't been held to high enough standards - they cannot serve communities that fear them. And we have done nothing to fix that, despite that hardly being a new revelation. There are options and as a society, we haven't taken them. And the people who must bear the results of those poor decisions can only bear that so long. More eloquent people than me have spoken, but "be patient" is easy to say when you're not the one affected, and meaningless if you're not making any changes with that time.

I do not believe every cop is bad. I think it's far more likely the majority never have any part in this. And there's no perfect system. But I believe the way we hire, train, equip and hold our police accountable has created a situation that leads to repeated tragedy in foreseeable situations and I believe we have done nothing to fix that in the vain hope that people will just accept it as okay that this happens and no change has to be performed.

I should really write more! >..>

Weird, my last journal was a year ago to the day and has pretty much the same message! Strange, how regular this event is! >..>

*does little meep dance*

Old dragon is gonna chase gryphons off his lawn, what with their squawky noise and their fluff-tee-vee!

About halfway through my work program. Definitely exhausting. Been a bumpy road, but still hanging in there. Unfortunately my grandfather passed away recently. Not entirely sure I've processed that yet, I think the sheer amount of work is keeping it held off at a distance. It was not un-expected, but I'll miss him.

In the meantime, I'm just trying to get to the end of each day, for another few months. I'll pull through, so don't worry about me.

I don't expect to be -completely- absent, but it may happen. Either way, gonna be a scarcer dragon for 6 months! If I don't manage to see you, be good folks!

I missed a few folks. Happens, I've been incredibly distracted lately. I apologize to those who didn't know I've got bad internet lately.

For around a year, I'll be living on the road. This means internet access is not impossible, but at the mercy of awful hotel internet and my cell phone, which doesn't always have signal to some of the regions I'm traveling. At least not one that makes internet access easy or user-friendly. So I will definitely be 'on and off' for sometimes extended periods of time. I'm also very work-busy for this entire period, and 'mobile living' out of one's car and a suitcase is pretty darn stressful to start with.

But also, lack of consistent internet is giving me 'time with my thoughts' too, where I'm wondering what I really want to make of myself in life, and how I'm budgeting my time to that end. It's not about "oh I'm gonna leave and never return!" or anything so dramatic. Mostly though, that there's a lot of self-improvement I still feel I have to do, a lot of skills I still want to learn, and I don't make headway on that when I stay in all day on a chatroom.

Another year down. Time to grab my dragon cane and shake it at all the whelps on my lawn! *shakeshakeshake*

So in Persona 5, you have an optional set of sidequests revolving around "No-Good Tora", an older man who is a disgraced politician. He was a member of the Japanese Diet until he was caught essentially embezzling, and lost his office. Years later, he's trying to run for office again on a platform against the abuse of power by government officials, and you can support him if you want. Near the end of the quest chain, it comes out that he was framed for the original crime (How he himself seemed unaware of that is weird but not relevant to this).

I think this is a bit of a lost chance at storytelling. "No-Good Tora"'s story arc revolves around a few concepts:

1) Redemption in a realistic sense. Redemption in fiction often comes of the form of "this character committed super-murder-genocide against the space-faeries but now sacrifices themselves to save the sky-tree of life-happiness". Whether that sort of redemption is possible or not is very difficult to make a realistic moral judgement on because it's so far removed from actual real experiences. No-Good Tora never killed anyone, nor does he need to die to prove himself. He (hypothetically) abused his office for personal gain, and now is trying to make up for that by campaigning against the same abuses he once committed.

2) Facts vs Sources. One of the more interesting bits of dialogue from the side quests is someone heckling "Why should I listen to him? He's No-Good Tora!" to which you can reply "What does it matter if he's No-Good Tora? Is he WRONG?" This really hits a nail on the head that while it's okay, often even appropriate to distrust certain sources, facts don't care who says them and ultimately a given statement can't be examined solely based on who made it.

At the end I felt the interesting plot and morals were undermined by the needless "innocent all along!" part. It wasn't even necessary (people were starting to come around to liking him again anyway despite thinking he did it).

Things to take away when writing:

Let your characters have flaws and make mistakes. People identify with an imperfect protagonist trying to set right things they've done wrong. Don't undermine that by having the mistake ultimately end up being someone else's fault, especially someone else's fault with malicious intent. And make resolving mistakes take some real effort. No-Good Tora campaigned for years to get accepted as a serious candidate for a second time, he didn't just show up and make one apology and then good to go again.

Not everything has to be super dramatic. It's easy to 'amp up' the stakes by having everything be world shattering; it's hard to bring them back down again though. This is just general advice, but it helps to keep your characters' mistakes being things us poor mortals can relate to when possible.

Okay first, to warn again, BIG spoilers on the matter, so don't read!

I recently played Horizon Zero Dawn. It's a very solid game, so this isn't really a complaint, but it DID get me thinking about storytelling in general, particularly for stories that are outside of our personal frames of reference.

For those not familiar, Zero Dawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where there is no animal life larger than a pig or so (wild boars are the biggest you ever find). Instead, the megafauna role is taken by machine 'animals' - robots that vaguely resemble and act like larger predators and herbivores. Humans are reduced to a mix of tribal, and early-Roman era lifestyles. You play Aloy, whose own society is a proxy for Native Americans.

Naturally this sort of setting is going to evoke a lot of "How did this happen? Why are the robots like this?" And the plot does answer those questions. And to be fair to it, it's fairly cool. It's nothing "totally left field" but it has unique features to the apocalypse.

But in doing so, it never really tells Aloy's story, or the story of her tribe, or the story of the pre-Roman sun-worshipping civilization you have the next most contact with. It tells the story of how Aloy came to be here and how Aloy discovers the ancient past, which is NOT the same as the story of Aloy living in the world.

What I mean is, the "Here and now" plot is driven by an attack on Aloy's tribe, which she traces back to said sun worshippers, to discover they're in the middle of a civil war. The last sun-king, a bloodthirsty monster who practiced human sacrifice, was killed by his much more sane son. However, the high priests view the son as a heretic for defying the sun god by denying him human sacrifice, and splinter their empire. While the army remains loyal to the new sun king, the rebels are aided by a mysterious arms-dealing faction who seem to have power over the machine-animals.

But the entire sun-empire plot is just backdrop to the arms dealers, whose plot is the real main plot and has you discovering the secrets of the ancient pre-apocalypse world.

There's two ways the game could have went, basically. A story about primitive empires feuding to the BACKGROUND of a post-apocalyptic world, or the story of an ancient apocalypse being unearthed, to the BACKGROUND of primitive empires feuding. Zero Dawn most firmly is in the latter category, and there's nothing inherently wrong with this... and yet at the same time, this seems to be EVERY approach in games. I can't quite put my finger on why this bothers me, except maybe, because it leaves no mystery. A story of the new sun king vs the priests of the old sun king does not NEED the apocalypse explained, yet the effects (the robot animals, the ruins, etc) can still play into the plot, leaving you with those constant wonders about 'how' 'why' the world is the way it is. And since ALL of the characters were born in and grew up in a world with robot animals, it is just normal to them, so it's not like that would be out of character.

I feel like the main characters are the characters in the voice logs and holograms and etc that you find, because the story really is about their trials and hardships. It's a story about the WORLD, not Aloy or the tribes or the sun kingdom. And that's fine... but, I also have to wonder, why do we see so few of the other kind in science fiction games? Plots where the focus is NOT about discovering the 'old world' but instead completely grounded in the 'current time' to a BACKDROP of the old world.

For example, a big one that stands out is the Fallout series. So far these have always been about the 'here and now'. It doesn't really matter how the nuclear war came about, no one in the setting really cares, and while you CAN find details about the China/US war in the setting, they're mostly irrelevant to the plot itself, which might be about finding fresh water for a region or something else more limited in scope than 'save the entire world'.

Contrast to Mass Effect. Ultimately everything is about the ancient evil, the Reapers, how they came about and what not. Again, good storytelling (up to 3's ending) but this really feels like BY FAR the more-tread plot in sci fi games. Do we do this because deep down, we humans in the 21st century want our plots to always connect back to US (or people as much like us as possible), and OUR fears and experiences? Not unfair, just, wondering.

As much as I enjoyed Horizon, there's just something tugging at me, where frankly, I really WAS more invested in the plot of the sun empire and the new sun king, than I was in the 'ancient evil from the past is going to destroy the world unless you can discover everything about ancient history' plot it eventually rolled into. There's a part of me that thinks a plot where to Aloy, the machine-animals are just 'normal' and they're a part of the world with a mystery behind it, as she goes on in the life of a Native American proxy, would be more interesting than watching Aloy watch holograms about what, to her, is ancient history.

Bad incident ar work, resulting in double shift, followed by a power outage. Wee.

Tiny cell phone Galis has puffy little grumpsnout!

Raaaawr! *shakes old dragon cane at whelpersnappers!*

Trying to hash out a story idea. What are some intereting ways a pred could share a meal with a third party? Assume said third party is the smallest of the three.

Hard vore has the obvious answer but I doubt anyone wants to read that Still its on the table, but what else...

Sharing in soft vore seems hard! Bird method might be squicky like hard vore but its the only other one I can think of right now.

It was right in front of me...

I am a miniature giant space dragon!

*rawr... nibblenibblenibble!*

Darn whippersnapper hatchlings and their loud music and their eye-pods and their big fat Stalbon bellies and their wiggly Sevysnakes!

Older now! When do I collect Dragon Security?

Stupid comcast keeps missing appointments, hence my internet troubles. Cell phones are hard!

I am looking for a commission of my nonanthro gryph, Corvus giving some western style dragon a stuffing (just generic dragon atm unless someone wants to volunteer). Looking for something animateable so usually cell shading clean lines seems to work best. Trouble is finding an artist to do it. Anyone know good ones?

Severus rendition of him here https://static.f-list.net/images/ch.....age/340986.jpg is my favorite pic of him so far. He is supposed to be a very stocky gryph and very thick in more ways than one and that definitely captures it.