got_quiet

Challenge 7: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

Fannish Resources I Created:

The BLM Visual Novel discovery tool I started this last year for the Snowflake Challenge. I've updated it this year to include some more games (5) and added a "no preferences" option to each question. Not every game labeled as a Visual Novel offered through the BLM bundle is included (Just the ones I thought rec worthy) but there are still 31 games to choose from. So if you bought the BLM bundle in 2020 and are trying to decide what's worth playing, maybe this will help!


The Bigass Fantasyland Challenge I created a series of worldbuilding prompts for a writing challenge on Gaia Online in 2010. I've been meaning to move it to a slightly more secure place, or maybe make a little ebook out of it or something. But for today's challenge I finally finished transferring it to neocities. The formatting is eh, but it's at least a step. There are almost 500 worldbuilding prompts here. It'd like to create a randomizer, or something more extensible, but haven't prioritized this in a long time.

Fannish Resources I Use

4thewords - Definitely the #1 fandom related tool I use. It's a writing tool where you fight monsters that represent a word count goal and a time limit, and you gain things like clothes for your avatar or furniture for your home by beating the monsters. I'm on a 1136 days streak writing there. However, 99% of those words are personal journaling and writing reviews, only 1% is fanfiction or anything like that.

Librarything  - I have been using librarything to keep track of the books I own and read for about 15 years. On top of managing my own library, I catalog for the legacy library project which creates catalogs of historical figures if we have a record of what they owned. Want to know what was on Susan B. Anthony's shelves? You can just check out her account on librarything! There are also groups if you want to chat with people, and fun with stats. For example the vu et nul autre section will tell you which books you and only one other person own.

As a platform for books I like it a lot more than goodreads (I don't use goodreads) because 1: fuck Amazon, and 2: librarything has a web 1.0 vibe and is relatively disconnected from the social net. It's a great site for people who think tinkering with data is a nice evening activity.

https://randombundlegame.com/ - After the BLM Bundle came out, sifting through the hundreds of entries to find something worth trying was a real chore, so a beautiful soul created a search tool that lets you filter by many facets to actually find something in that massive pile. It has been updated to include many of the major bundles that followed after the BLM Bundle's success as well. I wouldn't be able to work through all the Visual Novels in the bundle if it weren't for this tool (and I don't understand why itch.io can't provide something native that works like this >.<).

Another bundle similar to the one set up for gathering resources for BLM protests popped up recently, with proceeds going to an aid group supporting Palestinians. While there is some overlap with the games in the BLM bundle it appears there are only 200 out of the 1000 items that are in both. Though my math could be wrong. There wasn't too much overlap for the VNs, so I figured it was an easy buy. The bundle page is here.

Meanwhile I've played and reviewed 28 VNs from the BLM bundle on playingstory and have three more reviews in queue, which puts my about a third of the way through, I'd estimate. I'm skipping games that are kinetic novels or are clearly not games based on narrative choice for the most part, as there are a few of those that snuck into the category. There have only been a few that I straight up didn't like. The rest have been at least mildly entertaining. I thought I would be able to finish the whole batch by the end of the year, but somehow we're already in June, which is bullshit.

The bundle navigator also shuffled things around to accommodate the new bundle, and that was what I was using to keep track of games I had or hadn't played, but it looks like things didn't get scrambled too much so it should be fine.

I'm still playing Octopath Traveler, but it has become the grind that others complain it is. I basically only play during times when i'm not feeling well or can't think to do literally anything else! The bosses take so long to kill if you aren't properly geared or leveled. But it is satisfying to find the right party or skill combo to take them down still, so I'll probably keep going until that stops being the case.

I also ended up watching some Shitt's Creek. I very rarely watch live TV shows (are they even called TV shows anymore?) but I like this one a lot. It will probably take me forever to finish it though, if I ever do, cause I'd usually prefer to watch anime or something. At least I can trick myself into thinking I'm studying then.