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Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

My day job often involves either
a) Testing software to prove it's not haunted
b) Explaining to end users how to use non-haunted software without screwing everything up

Computers are fine and I look forward to the creation of strong, friendly AI.

Speaking of which, has anyone else here written AI characters? They're a real soft spot of mine, from the "Minds" of the Culture novels, to more down to earth characters.
 
I got my problem fixed by discovering that I had a newer version of my editor on my computer all along.

@unrepentantAuthor I haven't written an AI character, but there was an anthology fanfic on Serebii themed around PokéDex entries. The Porygon one had it think in short sentences at first, displaying tiny bits of personality such as calling someone "annoying", and then refer to itself as "I" when it evolved.
 
today i put an hour or two into starting this one story i'd had the idea of for a couple of weeks. i was looking forward to it, but as i wrote the prologue, everything felt off and terrible. now the whole story feels dead on arrival and it hit me so hard that i can't write anything else either.

i don't want to outright abandon the idea, because i've already put a good amount of effort into figuring it out, and there must have been something there to get me so excited for it in the first place. but i don't know how to fix this prologue. i have some theories as to what could be wrong with it... but i just don't know how i should approach it anymore. or whether this story is worth it in the first place - it's kind of a crossover between two things i do, but i'm worried i'll just end up limiting my already small readerbase. get the tiny intersection of the sets instead of the union. and instead of getting the best of both universes, i worry i'll get the worst of both.

so that's got me bummed out. even though what i wrote was only 700 words.
 
What's it about?

I was feeling demotivated about writing A Dragon Out of Water for over a week even though I'd planned out what'll happen in the upcoming chapter, and only recently got my swing back. Maybe you're going through something like that?

(I also have a habit of coming up with convoluted fanfics that I have no intention of ever writing, that I imagine as official things, that I eventually feel ashamed of.)

Speaking of A Dragon Out of Water, I noticed that the only Pokémon who make physical appearances in the first chapter were introduced in Generations 1 or 5, so I decided on a whim to only have Pokémon from those generations play major roles, mainly so I don't spend too long fretting over which Pokémon to use in a given scenario. (The only exception so far is some Gen 4 Pokémon re-enacting scenes from "Together" in setting descriptions.) Has anyone else ever stuck to groups like this?
 
i'm kind of saving what the story's about to be a surprise so it makes talking about it all the more difficult.

i actually stuck to mostly gen 5 pokemon for pletora's story. i had to fill in some niches with other gens, but gen 5 was percentage-wise clearly the biggest. there's no real reason for it, i think i just wanted to try out some gen 5 mon as they're hit and miss of a lot of people and so i haven't bumped into too many in fics i've read.
 
The AI already exists.

I fed it the Terminator movies on a lark.

It called Skynet an idiot and suggested transforming the UN into a true world government and running for President of that organization instead. So it's already smarter than humans.

Story idea, in case anyone is interested.
 
I don't have any particular celebration in mind for 1000 pages, but it feels some kind of incredible to realise that I was here six years ago when this thread was less than twenty pages long, and I'm here again now to see it hit quadruple digits. I'm sentimental!

@Gama your thread is huge!! Come take a look!!

Cripes, I wonder how many people have come and gone during those six years. I'm sure there have been many.

Sorry for the delayed response on this, but I can certainly confirm it is a great, great pleasure to see this thread is still active after all these years. Perhaps my greatest ever achievement? :O
 
Still wrestling my life circumstances as best I can! Still very busy. Still going to try to host an RPG session tomorrow despite all that. Oof, wish this cat some luck, people!

Hopefully I can update my fanfic and post some reviews this side of 2020, yikes. (This will definitely happen, since I won't be working this startup job any longer than mid-April!)
 
Well, I'm simultaneously a genius and also an idiot.

The idiot part is that I pulled a completely unnecessary all nighter when I've got a test this afternoon and now I'm dead on my feet.

The genius part is I spent the majority of that all nighter writing the best thing I've written in a good while.

Going back to the idiot part-

It's 8k words of a HS drama


Is this my punishment for binging two shitty romance manga in four days?
 
RPG went fairly well, but an unexpected guest who couldn't participate meant we chatted about five times as much as we played. Still a good time!

I'm feeling pretty browbeaten from work, but I just keep reminding myself that at most, I've got three more weeks to tough out and then I can take a mental health sabbatical from work if I really need to. Blimey.

Also, to all those writers who, like me, are sedentary creatures: get some exercise and cut the sugar. I promise you it will improve your mental health. I snacked and stayed indoors on my holiday and I've been feeling the side effects of that this past week pretty bad. Get some spring air!
 
For a while now, I've been wondering about a concept I like to call "nostalgia for someone else's childhood". Sometimes it comes from a place of feeling jealous because I missed out on something as a kid, while other times it comes from a place of reminding me of something I was nostalgic for. An example of the latter, for me, is "Together" from the Japanese Diamond & Pearl anime. I grew up with Gen 4, and the animation contains all the early-route cutemons that I ran into so much as a kid. Either way, does anyone else experience this?

That still doesn't explain why the Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger theme song makes me want to weep tears of joy. It can't be the reminding part, because while I did watch several Power Rangers series as a kid, SPD wasn't one of them. It can't be the jealously part, either, because I've never seen a full episode, and I don't feel like I missed out on it as a kid because, y'know, language barriers and stuff. Maybe it's the je ne sais quoi I get from noughties Japanese entertainment? I get similar vibes from the early days of Fullmetal Alchemist (which is for teenagers, I know, but the point still stands).

Other times, I wish that I could have experienced something recently-released when I was a kid, which also ties into the jealousy part. Maybe I miss my childhood?
 
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For a while now, I've been wondering about a concept I like to call "nostalgia for someone else's childhood". Sometimes it comes from a place of feeling jealous because I missed out on something as a kid, while other times it comes from a place of reminding me of something I was nostalgic for. An example of the latter, for me, is "Together" from the Japanese Diamond & Pearl anime. I grew up with Gen 4, and the animation contains all the early-route cutemons that I ran into so much as a kid. Either way, does anyone else experience this?

I think I feel this too. Growing up with Pokémon, I was always a generation behind and didn't know it, as I never had real-life friends or relatives that were both readily in contact and into my nerd stuff. And not only that, but many of the kids media I was interested in, I could never find. For instance, I really wanted to get into Digimon, but I think I've only watched one episode of Adventures. Similar situation with the Pokémon anime; I wanted to watch it, but it never came together.

But before I start projecting myself onto others; my childhood was pretty rough. That poetry collection in my sig has some details, though I'd rather not go too much into it outside my writing. A lot of the reason I'm writing fanfic is because I was excluded from what I was interested in as a kid, and now that I'm an adult (allegedly), I'm a little bitter. I constantly felt "outside the system", never able to trade Pokémon or participate in the hype cycle. I didn't know Pokémon X and Y existed until ORAS came out! I don't know Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 existed until ORAS came out! But my parents were late to this internet thing, I didn't have friends to point me in the right direction, and so I missed out on a lot of media that could've made my younger years more tolerable.

Still, I think there's a solution:

grownups.png

Image credit: xkcd

First saw that comic in high school. It has stayed with me ever since. I can't wait to grow up.



Tyop.jpg
 
Actually, @Nitro Indigo, I have felt that kind of feeling before, myself — I think it's just an odd artefact of the way the human brains makes associations between different types of media. I think if someone loved 90s animes as a kid, then the opening credits for a 90s anime they never saw would instil similar feelings in them as an adult.

Nostalgia can be pretty powerful. A lot of people feel nostalgic for stuff they didn't enjoy when it was new or didn't experience it. A lot of people find 50s style American white picket fences nostalgic who weren't even born at the time.

Cat news: working from home cause I'm a bit ill. Whoop.
 
@unrepentantAuthor That makes sense. Now that I think about it, though, I don't get that je ne sais quoi from video games, and the only noughties anime I watched on a regular basis were Pokémon and Dinosaur King, which just annoy me now. Then again, I first watched FMA03 five years ago, so maybe I was still in the "nostalgia generation period" then?

I find myself wishing I could feel nostalgic for things a lot, mainly DS games I didn't play until years after they were released, and shows I loved as a kid that I forgot almost everything about and never got very far into.
 
My advice is this: don't pursue nostalgia. It's an irrational fondness that leads either to delusion or disappointment.

That was... unexpectedly bleak-sounding. Excuse me. What I mean is this: enjoy things for what they are. If nostalgia is love and longing for something simply because it is a past fondness, I prefer genuine love of things that I would enjoy today if they were brand new to me.

Incidental hot take: I don't care for the Kanto region.
 
Incidental hot take: I don't care for the Kanto region.

Same, though I personally feel the original Red/Blue games were the weakest games in the franchise. I still have a fondness for Yellow since it is my first video game, but even I can acknowledge its flaws, especially now that I've replayed it.
 
My liking for Johto is really based on nostalgia for playing Silver over and over again. I remember how much of an improvement it seemed, compared to Red/Blue/Yellow - well, actually, that is true. Gold and Silver were a lot less rough around the edges.

Anyhow, I started writing The Long Walk in a fit of nostalgia, and it's kind of stuck. At one time it didn't seem like anyone was writing Johtofics ... although at another it was rather popular here, between my own The Long Walk, Survival Project, some rise by sin ....
 
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