Leaderboard
Popular Content
Showing content with the highest reputation on 08/14/20 in all areas
-
Meta - Fall 2020 Site Chat
Nandemonai and 4 others reacted to Clephas for a topic
As I was one of the members that burned out a while back (too many VNs played for the sake of my blog on the site), I know something of where you are coming from. I was spending something like 50 hours a week playing VNs, many of them I didn't like or whose concept I found boring and pedestrian, to be able to be fair when doing my VN of the Month column. I was using a tiny scoop to try to get through the piles of hot steaming brown stuff to get to the stuff that shone regardless of genre, and my satisfaction levels kept falling until I just fell apart. I was even working on one screen while playing on another at times, while using meal times as a time to get caught up on a VN. To this day, I have to be careful not to play too much in the way of VNs, or my trauma comes back, despite the fact that I am loving what I'm reading. Heck, I'm currently recovering from another bout of that while doing something else to put myself back together. More recently, I was becoming increasingly depressed that the only community I still enjoyed being a part of was doomed. With the increased rl stress that hits every time I leave the house over the last four months, I was on the verge of collapse when I decided to get online and do my latest scan of the forums... and saw this. To be honest, just the fact that you are getting involved in the site again at all eased a lot of the pent-up stress that has been weighing on me every time I come online of late, so thanks for coming back.5 points -
Grisaia no Kajitsu isn't rated a 2/10 or anything close to a 2/10. Ergo, the scores cannot be trusted.2 points
-
Meta - Fall 2020 Site Chat
Nandemonai reacted to Tay for a topic
Hi everybody. My name is Tay. I’m the site admin, and I’m writing this post to share a few thoughts and to apologize for what has been a very difficult period for the site (and many of us in the real world, myself included). Please note that I am actively working on the site today (01:26 update: currently waiting on Nayleen’s help on a mysql issue that I don’t know how to solve) and will be available in this thread and on Discord throughout the day. Why did you disappear? I was overwhelmed by real-world responsibilities and the real-world issues affecting the site. I feel deeply that it’s my responsibility to keep an appropriate baseline amount of support (server, forums fees, forums UI theme subscriptions, front site plugin subscriptions), and have mostly done so, but not being here in a full, active manner means that I was unaware of even large issues, such as Invision losing my auto-pay details. I feel really bad, guys. I'm sorry. Why didn’t you more proactively pass along the keys to other community members instead of just ghosting us? Dropping torrents caused hundreds of real-world issues that made a site hand-off – even partially – unconscionable until resolved. It makes me happy that they feel like an ancient memory to most of you, but they have been my lived reality for a long time. Only this summer did that chapter fully come to a close. Fuwa is in the clear, for what it’s worth, and for the first time I feel like I have options. What the &$% is going on with site/forums updates? I’m working to fix some issues in how I access the various databases on the server. Once that’s fixed everything will be updated and troubleshooted. It’s going to be another Fuwapocalypse. But it’s gotta be done. I give you my word that, so long as I can get @Nayleen’s help, this will be done by week’s end. As regards the forms, specifically, Invision, the software company who made our forums software, deleted the auto-pay credentials I’d given them and the software license lapsed for several months. It’s been renewed and everything will be updated as soon as I get Nay’s assistance and make a bunch of meticulous backups. What is your plan for Fuwanovel going forward? It may not be appropriate for that to be my call. I need to touch base with all the core users still active and sort out what’s best. I love Fuwanovel. It’s been a work of love spanning more than ten thousand hours (and much more than that in dollars). But my focus and passion -- help bring visual novels into the wider gaming community – has been realized. I’ve been fortunate enough to facilitate or be part of some major, tectonic shifts in the industry. It’s a different world and I am likely not the best equipped to pick a direction. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. What I’m confident about, however, is that the way I went about building Fuwa, while successful, is unsustainable. Palas put it incredibly well last month: “It’s like running a business, but without, well, the business.” Perfectly said. For better or worse, I’m wholly or largely responsible for the projects he highlights: enormous and technical VNTS posts which took two people 5 or so hours to do every Friday night, an ambitious reviews hub scouring VN reviews from across the net, a VN reviews team, forums projects, etc. A lot of what I did on Fuwa amounted to spending ungodly amounts of time watching trends in both the industry and site traffic and building ideas around what I thought would bring interest to the community and the VN player base. It worked well: we had huge traffic and played an important role in bringing VNs out of obscurity. But the lived reality was often me researching, designing and proposing these projects, and asking others to step up and either run or contribute to them without compensation. We’d have people putting in 20 hours a week, some weeks, on top of core admin staff working 30-40 hours weekly, and it STILL wasn’t enough. Most pitched in because we liked the cause, and liked hanging out with each other, and liked the dopamine rush of user engagement. Some did it because I asked them. And some did it because they felt like they had to. I’m still working on pulling apart my feelings on this issue. I don’t know how to fix this part of being a fan site. I do know that it is wrong to ask so much of members without paying them. Fuwa has never made money and I was never able to pay for help. This isn’t going to change anytime soon, so any new site reality is going to have to take into account the need for a lessened human cost. Anything else you want to say? Tons. But that’s good for now. I’m spamming Nayleen on all the usual channels and mostly just want to get the site fully updated. We can chew on the site’s existential questions in the meantime.1 point -
VNs sometimes get criticized for their overuse of the ellipse (…). And I suppose I'll start my defense of the use of ellipses in VNs, by extending an olive branch. VNs do misuse the ellipse to an astounding degree, and I have an interesting little anecdote demonstrating this point. In college, me and some friends decided to spend a Friday night getting drunk and reading the worst VNs we could find. We stumbled upon Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme. There is a LOT wrong with this VN, but a glaringly consistent detail of bad writing we all noticed was the excessive use of ellipses. After we all collectively noticed and pointed out how often ellipses were being used, we decided to start counting every instance of an ellipse we spotted. Keep in mind, they had already been used plenty before we even started to count. Before we even reached a total playtime of 1 hour, we counted over 100 uses of ellipses, and gave up counting after that. I share this anecdote for two reasons. Firstly, as a petty example that Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is horrible and I almost want to say it has no right to exist. And secondly that overall I am in agreement that ellipses do get misused often in VNs. So I am not entirely attacking this point of criticism, but I do think that many who do champion this specific criticism of VN writing miss one very important function that the ellipses achieves in VN writing, that it can't achieve in traditional print. The written word as it is presented in VNs is transient. With each click you typically receive one line at a time. And after a certain point all the lines disappear and you are greeted with fresh words from the top of the screen if NVL, or the top of the dialogue box if ADV. Furthermore often (though not always), sentences aren't displayed whole at once. But rather they get displayed in a sort of typewriter effect. This means that regardless of whether the narrative is in past tense or present tense, the occurrence of the text and the story to the reader will always be in the present. Character dialogue, internal monologues, narrative descriptions, it is all being presented to us in real time. A book on the other hand has everything written out and open to display. You can scan the whole page as well as the next page, and you have equal access to every page of the book at any given time. Want to skip to the ending? Well the medium can't stop you. This is not true of VNs. You can fast-forward, but you can't just skip to the end. The only way you can typically access specific parts of a VN is by creating a save point and therefore being able to load it up whenever you want. But you only have that option for everything you already read, you can't just pick and load sections you haven't experienced yet. Because for all intense and purposes, that's in the future. It hasn't happened yet. In other words, there is a sense of time in how the narrative of a VN gets expressed. Well in VNs, the ellipse can be used to demarcate time and expression. In this way, VNs can literally show the passage of time, without having to tell it. And I always thought the golden rule of writing was “show don't tell”, in this function the ellipse is being used optimally to show and not tell. Here is an example of how I would write a certain passage if I were writing it for a book/short-story, and then I will proceed to rewrite it for a VN. Novel/Short-story: “I don't know about that,” she briefly paused while biting her lip, “you sure it will be okay?” Visual Novel coded in Renpy: “I don't know about that...{w=1.5} you sure it will be okay?” The {w=1.5} is a wait command in Renpy that pauses the text for 1.5 seconds before resuming the rest of the line. Without having to tell the reader “she briefly paused”, we literally showed the pause by manipulating the speed in which the text gets displayed. The ellipse helps signal to the reader that the character is hesitating to express her thoughts, while the {w=1.5} command is running in the background. Now if the detail of “biting her lip” is also important to you. You would have to script things slightly differently, but you could make it that after the ellipse her sprite changes and bites her lip and you hold on that image for 1.5 seconds, before transitioning back to her previous expression and continue the text. So now you not only showed her hesitation and the gap in time it took for her to finish her thought, but you also showed her expression change. This is a way you can “show and not tell” with VNs that you could never achieve when writing for traditional print media.1 point
-
1 point
-
From this CM, I'm sure that @Flutterz will like the banner1 point
-
8/13 Forums Update - Bugs/Complaints Here
Mr Poltroon reacted to Dreamysyu for a topic
If I remember correctly, I believe the previous version used to show what the title of the next unread topic was. Is there any way to return that?1 point -
I gotta say, when the last update happened (at beginning of the year i think?) this site would eat up my google chrome memory and make the site laggy for some reason, specially in blog posts with lots of pictures. I was too lazy to report it and just began to post less instead, but it seems the site became smooth again. Good job!1 point
-
If the backer status is no longer a thing, maybe we could make this a post count goal, similar to custom titles. Incentivize people to post more to get the cool stuff.1 point
-
1 point
-
8/13 Forums Update - Bugs/Complaints Here
Tay reacted to NowItsAngeTime for a topic
When can non-admins/mods have banners in their profiles?1 point -
I am a prolific abuser of ellipses myself. I abuse them because... well, it is so easy to use them as a means of expression. Emotion, humor, hesitation, etc. These things can all be expressed in a wall of text to indicate the state of the writer's thoughts using an ellipses. They are just so darned convenient.1 point
-
First one has a few copies on Amazon Japan although they aren't cheap. https://www.amazon.co.jp/堕落の国のアンジー-狂界の牝奴隷達/dp/B004UCWI1I Can't find anything for the second.1 point
-
1 point
-
I seem to have joined (or, activated) at a great time Wish all the best for Tay, this site and community.1 point
-
A lot of things comes into play in rather hilarious ways when it comes to scores in vndb. The biggest divide is from TL readers and people who read JP. First the English readers. The highest scored vns are the ones that are tl'd and recommended to beginners. Beginners usually are easily impressed and give high ratings. As you read more and more, you tend to give lower scores and be more critical. So when you start to read more obscure titles, you'd give lower scores. You might or might not have scored the more obscure titles as a beginner if you read them early. Hard to say, as later on you choose things out of your normal reading range because you'd read everything else you wanted to read. Now to the Japanese readers. Although not universal, most people who for some reason decided it was a good idea to learn jp. Prbly has consumed so much weeb material they wanted more. So they usually are more picky or know very well what they enjoy. Moe loves will give 10/10 to moe stuff and wise versa for edgy or chuuni stuff. Or they might be more reading everything. Overall though I'd say they give lower scores averages. So basically. A low score title might be just low because the readers are more strict. Or it might just be bad. If someone has good taste and recommends it, usually it's the first. G-senjou was the first vn I read. Loved it at the time. Years later I tried reading it in JP. I found it enjoyable. But I didn't enjoy it nearly as much the 2nd time. As a afterthought. Afterwards I didn't bother changing my vndb score for the game. And I don't think many people do either. Even if their subjective taste change with time.1 point
-
Sharing some NSFW erotic scenes [+18 only]
Mr Poltroon reacted to Kyoki Chiho for a topic
Thank you very much for your comment! (and sorry for my extremely slow reply T_T ) I didn't notice that in my scenes the main character is always seduced or lured into sex. I've read the rest of my scenes and it's like that in most of them! I wasn't aware of it :0 I guess that it's easier for me to write erotic scenes like that. It's hard to explain, but I feel that it's more natural like that. I have a few ones in which the action is driven by the main character, but those have some kinky content and I'm unsure if I can post them here. I'll definitely work on this in the future. There's always room for improvement, right? Anyway, once more, thank you very much for your comment! It means a lot to me \_^▽^_/1 point -
MALE AND OLDER FEMALE? (English)
Deniz reacted to Templarseeker for a topic
If your looking for older female heroines, you might have get into old school Eroges/Visual Novels if you're willing to tolerate it the old art, but you'll eventually find what you're looking. Secret Wives Club: As the title implies, heroines are compose of housewives and it's your job to spice up their boring sex life. it has light NTR elements I suppose Crescendo: I think there's two adult heroines in this VN/Eroge. Your Older Step Sister and the School Nurse. It has a nice story too! Amorous Professor Cherry: two adult heroines including the protagonist's professors and a classmate. There's plenty more, just try going here and here... Have Fun!1 point -
Firstly, by “Hot” I mean purely in the Mcluhanistic sense of the word. Though I think we all acknowledge that VNs can be a very “hot” medium in the erotic sense as well. But seriously speaking, VNs are a hot, highly intensive medium; and this is precisely why I see so much artistic potential in them even if relatively few as of yet have fully capitalized on this potential. To provide a brief definition of hot and cold media I think the simplest explanation is the more immersive a medium is the more hot it is. The less immersive, and the more causal the experience of it is, the more cool it is. Reality TV is probably the best example of cold media. You can enjoy an episode of Terrace House or Jersery Shore or whatever (insert reality TV show) while paying relatively little attention to it. In fact dumb television's appeal is precisely because you can passively enjoy it while watching it with friends and family. Honestly this is why I think most Japanese TV (I'm intentionally exuding anime here) is so bad, but that's probably a rant for another time. Hotter media require more focus and attention from the participant. The best example of this would be literature. While reading a book, you need to pay sole focus to the words. And so this involves a hyper concentration. Hence it is high intensity, thus hot (seriously I didn't come up with these terms, famed academic Marshal Mcluhan did half a century ago). So then why do I do think, and more importantly why do I boldly claim that VNs are fundamentally a hot medium. Well, because for the best VNs and and the most memorable experiences VNs induce, we are highly involved in the moment. Practically there ourselves. And this is because the combination of text, audio, and visuals create a sensory experience which practically places us in the fictional scenes that are being depicted. It's the same reason why Lets Plays of Visual Novels just don't feel right to most VN fans. At least not as a first time experience to a particular VN. Because the first time you experience a particular VN it is a deeply intimate experience. I mean sure there are kusuge which are probably more fun to play with friends or in a live stream then they are to read individually. But then again they are called kusuge for a reason. Precisely because they aren't good, and more specifically don't conform to the medium's strengths. So where am I going with this? I don't exactly know. Maybe to start a discussion about VNs as a medium of their own; which I think they are. That is to say I think they exist in a separate category from video games. Though I acknowledge there can be VNs with gameplay. I think a “VN with gameplay” is very different from a “game”. And I suspect most gamers would also agree. Anyway, its in my nature to make bold claims when I believe something. But if you disagree with me I'd be happy to discuss it with you. More then anything I like to create conversation about concepts which interest me. And if you agree with me, well I'll be happy to know I'm not alone.1 point
-
did you finished all route in the game? if i recall there is a scane of rin and saber, i think UBW good ending is a harem for shiro( no love interests between saber nor rin) this WK from fuwa maybe can help you1 point
-
hmm dunno what he means, what series that giving harem route? if i recall there is no harem ending at majikoi series, but if group of sex 1 man and more females there is.1 point