6481425
Did you get it off your lips?

--Sweetie Belle

6481428

Yeah, I'm fine. I've gotten this stuff on me before and it actually doesn't bond to skin very well, so you can pretty much just peel it off. I just had to be a bit careful since I didn't want to risk tearing my lips. It's a mild skin irritant so my mouth feels slightly sore but that's all. Worst part was the tiny bit that got stuck in my stubble.

6481446
Glad to hear it, though the stubble bit would suck, since some of the hair would probably come with it.

I was looking online, and it looked like getting superglue off your skin is similar to getting tree sap out of your fur. Things like nail polish, warm soapy water and hand lotion help. I wouldn't exactly put nail polish on my lips, though.

--Sweetie Belle

Anyone know any good riddles?

6490702
When I'm fat, I'm slow. When I'm thin, I'm fast. Wind is my death. What am I?

6490702

You have known me for many years, but you cannot touch me. I tell you the truth about yourself, but I do not speak a word. You cannot always see me, but I am always right in front of you. Who am I?

Just on the subject of riddles, I've been DM-ing a campaign and had my plucky band of adventurers be waylaid by an old, mysterious man who stood in an ancient gateway and posed them riddles. Every time they answered one correctly, he asked a new one. Every time they answered wrongly, he asked a new one.

Goddamn hours before they figured out that, as an old man, he couldn't actually stop them from going through the gate. When they finally reached the actual guards they were politely asked whether the crazy old man had hurt them.

6490754
/steal

Now, all I need is for the players to act against their instincts and not kill an old man on sight...

6490757 I actually had an player who wasn't a part of the game join our call to do the voice and riddles for him. Eventually when the party met the guy again (this time trying to prevent them from going back the way they came) and the party correctly just walked by, my guy went off-script and started negotiating what he'd give them if they answered his riddles.

Some people just really want to ask riddles. This is also how the party now own a defective health potion.

6490706
Um, bad gas?

6490720
A mirror?
Oh geez, I think this was a mistake I'm terrible at riddles.

6490754

6490763
Sounds like it was pretty funny.

6490805

Close, it's your reflection. I would also have accepted "my mirror image."

6490804
That one's kinda hard, but it's the wind part that should put you in the right track. What does wind kill?

Answer: I'm a candle.

6490891
Nice! I'm usually not that close.

6491035
Is it weird that I was hoping for bad gas?

6491198
What is weird is that you classify bad gas to fat and thin. I mean, what are the differential parameters even?

6491215
You know, I'm not completely sure. It made sense in my head, but now...

6491222
Ah, the fragrant mysteries of the butt...

I managed to slash off a small bit of skin from my left index finger.

It doesn't even hurt, really, but it does bleed quite a bit and now I'm having trouble typing without getting blood all over my keyboard.

Coagulate faster, dammit.

6491625
Ouch. Maybe you could put a bandaid over it for the moment?

--Sweetie Belle

6491632

Eh, it's already better. I usually don't bother with bandaids unless it's a cut that would take too long to close otherwise. Most of the time you just have to bleed a little and get it over with. The body will patch itself up on it's own.

6491650
If I've already stuck it in my mouth and washed and blotted it off and it's still bleeding, I'll stick a bandaid on it, even if I think I'll be yanking it off later that day. Sometimes I'll stick a bandaid on a scab I think I'm likely to pick at and reopen, too...

Also, sometimes a cut will have stopped bleeding but still be pretty sensitive to accidentally being touched, which is when a bandaid comes in handy. I'm left-hooved, too, so a cut there would be really inconvenient.

--Sweetie Belle

6491673

I prefer not to stick open wounds into my mouth, as I suspect that will probably make it worse. I do however keep a bottle of antiseptic alcohol nearby.

Anyway, since in this case it's not a cut along the skin but rather skin missing (meaning it won't just close) I sorta want it to scab over as quickly as possible.

6491693
It always seems to help for me. I do have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, but the expiration date expired, and I haven't gotten around to replacing it.

First superglue and then skin missing on your finger. Been doing a bunch of arts and crafts or something?

--Sweetie Belle

6491707

I do have a bottle of hydrogen peroxide

Never tried that stuff - I'm not sure it's available over here - but I've heard you shouldn't use it for wounds since it actually causes further damage and makes it heal slower.

First superglue and then skin missing on your finger. Been doing a bunch of arts and crafts or something?

Only for the glue. The cut was from slicing an apple. (I prefer eating apples that way.)

Speaking of crafting, though: I've been trying to design a special sword to my specific taste and philosophy. Been at it for years now, and I think I'm on the... fourth version? I lost count along the way, especially since some versions only existed in my head.

It started out kinda strange and then just got even stranger. The current iteration is probably the most efficient one while still retaining my basic vision, but I suspect anyone else who is into swords would look at it and wonder what the heck I was thinking.

(The glue incident happened when I was making a cardboard mock-up of the guard.)

6493060

I suspect anyone else who is into swords would look at it and wonder what the heck I was thinking.

I volunteer as tribute, judge, and executioner!

Okay, I'm not QUITE sure what I meant by the above, but I'd love to take a look at it. I'm a little bit into hunks of metal, you could say.

Fun fact. I was writing a chapter of my story, and in one scene one guy takes out a long sword for a moment to showcase as what his order used centuries before. Then he goes off to display what they use now, showing off '15 mins into the future' military gear and a rifle that was even able to be modded on the fly.

My editor immediately called me on skype, laughing his ass off.

Apparently, I had described the sword in detail, going even into how the leather grip look with signs of use and all that jazz. Then, a paragraph or two below I describe the gun. The description was basically: "It was long and made of metal."

I, uh... I'm not into modern weaponry that much...

6493198

I don't have any decent illustration of it just yet, alas. Might try to 3D model it.

But basically, it's supposed to be a kind of light bastard backsword. The blade is 33 inches long, has a cut-and-thrust profile and is supposed to be in the same class as what you might find on a baskethilt or similar sword. However, the hilt is just long enough for two hands. I'm still figuring out the pommel design but it will probably be pretty slender. The guard is medium length with hooked quillons and a sizable ring that protects both sides of the hand, probably with a perforated plate on the inside.

Basically, picture something like this, except it has a hilt long enough for using both hands.

My idea was to have a relatively light bastard sword that is intended to be used with one hand primarily and optional two-handing, rather than the other way around. Something I realized early on that if I take a design that would normally be one-handed and make it two-handed, it will actually make the sword somewhat lighter as I would require a lighter pommel due to leverage. (Early experiments with weighted sticks indicate that said leverage would also generate more momentum, so it may sacrifice some fine point control for stronger cuts when one-handing. I sorta hoped it would all balance out well enough, no pun intended.)

All of that is fairly normal but it really gets strange with my chosen blade design. First of all, it has a Toledo-style super-long ricasso that runs the full first third of the blade, with a large fuller in the middle and two smaller ones on the sides. From there the single edge runs the remaining two thirds with the bevel going all the way to the back creating a triangular cross-section, sort of like on a kitchen knife or some rondel daggers. My hope is that this will make it a strong cutting blade but with a stiff back to retain some thrusting capacity. Speaking of which, it has a spear tip but no false edge.

This basically means that only about 33% of the entire blade is actually capable of cutting anything, and it cannot do false edge cuts at all despite being over-all designed to resemble a double-edged sword in profile. Which I think most would probably consider to be an... unusual design choice.

I would love to help out anyone that needs help finding a good fanfiction, or finding an old fanfic they've read before. Message me, and I'm sure I can find something you would enjoy!

6495181 Fanfic seller, I am about to head into boredom. I require your strongest fanfics.

6495201
Anything specific?

6495205 No, just strong.

I want to see what you'll find.

This is one of my favorites. It has all what you can ask for in a story. It's dark, tragic, mysterious, and romantic. It's definitely one of the better ones I've read. https://www.fimfiction.net/story/53/the-empty-room

6493060

Never tried that stuff - I'm not sure it's available over here - but I've heard you shouldn't use it for wounds since it actually causes further damage and makes it heal slower.

Well... it's probably a good thing that it's expired and is probably basically water by now, then.

Only for the glue. The cut was from slicing an apple. (I prefer eating apples that way.)

If I do that, it probably means I'm gonna be putting peanut butter on it or something like that. Or maybe making a fruit salad. It's been a while since I've made a fruit salad. Maybe I should do that sometime.

Speaking of crafting, though: I've been trying to design a special sword to my specific taste and philosophy. Been at it for years now, and I think I'm on the... fourth version? I lost count along the way, especially since some versions only existed in my head.

It started out kinda strange and then just got even stranger. The current iteration is probably the most efficient one while still retaining my basic vision, but I suspect anyone else who is into swords would look at it and wonder what the heck I was thinking.

(The glue incident happened when I was making a cardboard mock-up of the guard.)

That sounds like that could be fun. You could try 3d modeling it in Blender, though I find Blender pretty confuzzling. I think Wise Cracker knows about Blender.

Designing things out in 2d might be useful, too. I've just been fiddling with Affinity Designer, which does cost money, but I know you can do similar things in Inkscape for free. I know with designer, I can plop down a triangle and rectangle, adjust them to exactly the sizes and locations I want, including telling it to do math and calculate how long the sides are and align points with each other, combine them into one shape, and all sorts of stuff, so I could easily see it helping planning these things out.

Of course, what I was doing with it was vectoring cutie marks...

I suspect one of the reasons I don't do things that involve cutting things out much is that I would end up cutting myself, though. Of course, conversely, if I did things like that more, I'd be less likely to cut myself...

--Sweetie Belle

I wish more people understood this...

--Sweetie Belle

6495584

I get this feeling with horror movies. I think most of them are pretty terrible, but that's actually a good thing for me. The worse the horror movie the more I enjoy it, typically.

6495623
Yeah, sometimes you'll be watching something that's so bad it's fun to watch, and that can be pretty enjoyable.

Sometimes, even without that, though, you'll know that what you are watching has bad writing, plot holes, etc, but you are still enjoying watching it. Maybe you like the characters, or the actors are doing a good job of covering for the flaws in it. Maybe what you are watching has a lot of amusing hijinks going on that carry you through the whole thing having fun even though there are loads of problems with what you were watching that you realise later. Or you could be getting caught up in a bunch of tension and drama, even though when you think about it, the drama is actually pretty stupid, and the plot should have ended a while ago.

But yeah, liking something doesn't necessarily mean it's good, and something being good doesn't necessarily mean you like it. I've had this trip me up when giving recommendations before, because I might recommend something because I liked it, and realise afterwards that it wasn't that good, but I was remembering enjoying it at the time I was watching.

And there are things I liked watching that have been pretty much panned across the board. I liked the Doctor Who serials "The Happiness Patrol" and "Delta and the Bannermen", despite knowing the problems they have. They had a lot of cheesy fun in them! Yes, they had Mel in them, who no one likes. Yes, one was blatantly making fun of Margaret Thatcher, and the other had major tone problems. Still, I like them...

--Sweetie Belle

6495584
6495623

Bethesda games.

To this day, I'm very fond of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and I think I liked it better than Skyrim. Thing is, I liked it because it was hilariously bad. It's very hard to take Oblivion seriously, but once you stop trying to take it seriously it becomes highly amusing and genuinely lovable. Playing it really felt like being in a bad, kitschy fantasy story, but in a good way. And at times it was so stupid that my brain turned it into pure awesome simply to justify what was going on.

Oh, the stories I could tell you. There was the time I ran into some necromancer wolves. As in actual wolves, who were also necromancers. Or how my character deduced, through completely logical reasoning, that one of the counts was a vampire. Only, it was the wrong count. Or that one guy I was told was a spoiled, irresponsible buffoon, but the context made him out to be this epic heroic badass and I actually liked that interpretation better.

It's much harder to tell amusing stories about my time in Skyrim: It feels strange saying this, but that game is just a bit too polished and takes itself too seriously.

6495904
You know, I think I remember being attacked in town during a quest in Oblivion and some guards saw me. I defended myself, more people saw me, and pretty soon I was sitting there with half the town dead and wondering when I last saved.

There was that mage guild where all the mages were playing practical jokes on either other, too. I did like Oblivion, and I've been meaning to go back to it again at some point. Same goes for Morrowind, and I had that one all modded up to look nice, went through did some quests and such, and got distracted.

I do have a lot of fun with Skyrim, but I also heavily mod it, and that might be adding back in some of the silliness. Like the time I decided instead of bulling Lars, I was gonna give Braith a knife and have her follow me as a companion. Didn't work that well, unfortunately. And I absolutely always do the Wabbajack quest...

Come to think of it, I've run back through the beginning of Oblivion a couple times, too, partially because I like Patrick Stewart in it. Main thing that would stop me right now is that with any Bethesda game, I always want to go through and install at least a few dozen mods before playing them.

I also remember an old Mac RPG I used to love playing called Taskmaker that had some very silly things in the game, including the programmers themselves as npcs, and it was a lot of fun. Of course, we're talking 68k Macs and it can only be played in emulation these days, though the programmer is still willing to sell you shareware keys for it.

--Sweetie Belle

Did you know that the original theme written for Star Trek: The Next Generation wasn't actually used?

Probably a good thing, actually...

--Sweetie Belle

This gif makes me happy.

The Fimfiction server just went offline very briefly twice in a row. Did anyone else notice that?

There's been no notification of maintenance or such. Hope everything's alright.

6505905
probably a reboot or two while trying to fix the register issue if that is still going on.

The moment when instead of fixing issues with a picture, you just start mass producing Scootaloos...

--Sweetie Belle

Naturally, I fixed things anyways...

--Sweetie Belle

6506790
I feel like I'm playing spot the differences. I got three. Line on the hair, scootaloos have been moved further apart, and the row sits lower on the second image.

6506592

6506940

Also fixed the ear lineart.

6507038
Wha... Phoooh! Can't believe I missed that!

6506940
6507038

Most of the moving positions was incidental. I was working on Scoots in one document, then copying into the other, and while the first time, I sort of plunked down the copies, the second one, I centered Scoots and positioned things more exactly. (I duplicated Scoots and actually typed in + or - however many pixels I wanted.)

The line in the hair was a mistake I realized right after exporting to a png, so that was definitely one of the things I was thinking of.

The big one was the ear, though. That was the one I knew was an issue, but was putting off. In the first one, the ear and head are all part of the same object. It's too rounded, the hair goes in front of it, not behind it, and the line is missing. There's also now a line where the ear meets the head (on both sides) like there should be.

This is vector art, btw, so while I exported to png, I could have exported to svg instead...

--Sweetie Belle

Today me and my parents are going to the Åsele market. It's one of my favorite events of the year, because I love wandering around a huge marketplace and looking at stuff.

My favorite stand is the guy I affectionately think of as the Machete Man, because he sells knives and machetes and stuff. I hope he still stocks that cool dagger I saw last year but didn't get the chance to buy.