• Aaah, I've been totally obsessed with this video ever since I stumbled across it on Tumblr a while back!

  • I kind of love those, though. "Poor X, will he be okay?" Bahaha, well, probably someday, but not next chapter!

  • Oh my god that would drive me nuts. I also respond to every review, but I would probably stop replying to that person. Or troll them.

    Okay, I probably wouldn't troll them, but I'd really want to. "Actually I just updated, you can't see the new chapter? Try restarting your computer."

  • I actually did it once at Yuletide, but only because the archive glitched and showed me one last gift fic right after I'd finished reviewing the other ones and was on my way to Christmas with my family. IDK, people seem to get more anxious about exchange stuff at Yuletide than they do at other times of the year. (At least I did get back to the author, though!)

  • Yeah, I was gratified that someone else saw this accidental ship! It was a pretty cracky ship, though. (Neville Longbottom/Millicent Bulstrode.) IDK, maybe I'll go back someday and write the confused denial version of the ship for the hell of it. I'm sure by now Idea Guy has long since moved on.

  • Trust me, gushing is very, very relevant to the author whose fic you're reviewing. :D

  • Oh jeez, yeah, those are definitely a thing (especially in exchanges), and I think a separate thing from the Insert Review Here, which seems to be more about technical difficulties.

  • I have been getting a couple of impatient reviews lately and I'm not sure how to respond, because I actually do have kind of a terrible update schedule. Fortunately most of my reviewers are squeeful, analytical, or, uh, masochistic -- which is a-okay in my book. Means I'm doing something right.

    I also have some amazing reviewers who are both 1 and 28 and I am still in total disbelief. It's like finding a real live unicorn on your morning commute, getting a raise and free cake at work, and then finding another unicorn on the way home. (They're great artists too.)

    EDIT: I also get Idea Guys every now and then. There was one that particularly amused me, because he shipped the characters I had accidentally started to ship while writing the story, but then he wanted them to get married and have five kids, and I was thinking more along the lines of confused drunken one-night stands and denial.

  • Sorry for the super-late reply -- yes, it's set during the overlap between Prohibition and the Great Depression! But also, because it's fantasy, I have some additional weird shit influencing things. Like, several characters are stranded time travelers from the future (well, the future relative to the early '30s), and the mob boss is ...actually surprisingly idealistic, but also a former medieval ruler who has very different ideas about ideal governance and democracy, for example. So I'm not sure it's particularly good in terms of... any kind of historicity given all the weird influences I've added. But I'm having fun with it!

  • My favorite kinds of stories tend to be pretty political! Unfortunately I haven't been writing a ton of original fic as of late, but my fanfic often veers into worldbuilding political systems that weren't originally there in the canon, and in that case I generally have to work within those confines. I will almost always start with something historical, if only because I know then that it was stable enough at some point in history to persist.

    Currently I'm writing an organized crime story explicitly based on my own hometown in the '20s and '30s. It's pretty easy to research and it's safe to assume almost everyone's on the take but depending on their prominence they may be more or less subtle about it. Because the tone is darkly humorous and there's a fantasy element, I often exaggerate slightly, although every now and then I come across something in my research that I decide I'd better tone down.

    I think one of the more important things to remember is that the system, whatever it is, is made up of individuals, and the individuals are influenced by the system but are probably not going to be perfect cogs in the machine. Some of them will be nigh-perfect, some will stick out and dictate the movements of other cogs that they weren't supposed to have contact with, some will break, and some will go off into the corner and start a black market to sell each other oil and extra cog-teeth and break down the entire machine metaphor. In order to be stable and believable, your political system can't be too rigid unless you're positing a mind-control-filled dystopia.

  • I don't particularly have any books I need to see voted on by anybody, I was just pointing that out. Maybe ones with a bit more thematic similarity, though? Like, you could pit books about modern-day Norse gods against each other and have American Gods vs. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, or maybe political historical fantasy and have A Song of Ice and Fire vs. the Chalion series, or have a British humorous fantasy series showdown between Discworld and the Chronicles of Chrestomanci.

  • Honestly this still wouldn't be helpful. In heavily-populated urban areas, you are probably going to be half a mile from at least one sex offender at all times, unless you're in a heavily non-residential area. There are 13 within a mile of my apartment and 7 within half a mile. I conduct sex offender registry searches regularly as part of my job and that's fairly average for people living in this city. (Chicago, not New York.) Get out into the suburbs and it drops drastically, and when I check for people living in rural areas there are maybe 3 within five miles.

    If you're worried about sex offenders, unless you want to avoid cities altogether, you'd be better off going to your local public database and learning the names and faces of the ones living near wherever you (or your children) are spending a lot of time.

  • Culinarily, they're nuts, but biologically they're legumes, the same category as peas and most beans.

  • I feel like this is a bit of an unfair contest! Discworld is a huge series with something for, if not everyone, a wide variety of moods and interests. American Gods is just one book! It's a good book, but still.

    That said, I prefer my favorites of the Discworld books individually to American Gods, and even the less-favored Discworld books are at least tied with it for me.