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hurt/comfort angst factory

@the-starlight-writer / the-starlight-writer.tumblr.com

noodle | he/him, they/them, it/its (mutuals only) | main blog is @andifthestarsweretodie | my posts are tagged #noodle speaks | characters here will all break your heart and make it whole again

Welcome to this blog! a.k.a 2024 intro post

  • Noodle! he/they/it (please only call me it if we're mutuals!)
  • Final (4th) year university student standing on the slain corpse of my dissertation with a blade in hand to take on my masters project
  • Legally an adult but have been old in my head since I started talking; asking about my timelines in life will confuse you greatly so just stick to the basics of me being over 18
  • Writer! Used to be a predominantly a romance writer with a lot of projects in that genre on indefinite hiatus. Now would describe myself as a fantasy writer based on the project I spend the most time working on: TKOM (intro post here)
  • Also a visual novel developer! Proud creator of the aroace dating simulator, The Hyacinth Cafe. The intro post of that project can be found here and the demo is available for download from my itch.io
  • Most of my work is tagged! For my romance works, check out the tags #wip: the moon's boy and #wip: press x. My fantasy novel is tagged with #wip: the king of mycenae. My visual novel and the art sketches that come along with it are tagged #project: the hyacinth cafe
  • All posts written by me are tagged #noodle speaks!

Have fun while you're here :) feel free to send me asks and I want to start participating in STS / writeblr in general again so please do tag me in ask games and stuff

"I have depression." - character who has been through extensive therapy.

"I feel dead inside all the time and nothing helps!" - character who does like, regular introspective thinking and is aware of the concept of mental health.

"Leave me the fuck alone I'll be fine once I get over my stupid shit." - repressed character.

"It's fine I'm just having an Empty Time. What? Yeah, empty times, you know, when everything is like bzzzzzz in your brain and you don't shower for two weeks. Why, what do you call it?" - ooooughhh now we're talkin

honestly i have to kinda disagree with that post thats like “being knightcore doesnt mean pro monarchy just swear ur undying loyalty to ur bff or ur crush or smth”

no. thats not what makes it sexy. either grapple with your beloved master’s role as a symbol of the state or choose to ignore it entirely and remain their loyal hound to whatever end, uncaring of the structures of power which you serve. become naught but a blade, the burden of your choices left to settle in the hand that wields you. it’s not about being besties forever it’s about OWNERSHIP and DUBIOUS MORALITY and FRANKLY QUESTIONABLE POWER DIFFERENTIALS

nice pair of characters who trust each other more than anyone else in the whole entire world it would sure be a shame if one of them betrayed that trust for the sake of trying to keep the other alive. it would sure be a shame to love someone so much you destroy them

“i need you to live even if it means you never forgive me for this” is an emotion

rapidly switching between ‘i just wanna have fun and tell a fun story’ and ‘i must make this moving and intelligent enough that i might impart all my relevant wisdom onto the audience and teach the world of things they may not otherwise understand solely with this piece of writing’ 

if you're writing and find yourself thinking 'this is too weird/gross/offputting/esoteric/ambitious/catered to my specific interests + sure to push away a broader audience' that is the devil speaking and it is a lie. you are already firmly on the right path and you need to double down

Shout out to characters who want to be used. Shout out to characters who are so desperate to be worth something that they'll endure anything. Shout out to characters who build their entire self worth around being useful, being a tool. Shout out to characters who don't care how they are treated, as long as someone pays them any attention at all

I heart prey animal rage I love when characters are fucking insane with terror

When they're not dangerous like a hunter but dangerous like a spooked horse kicking your skull in

Let's hear it for prey animal rage let's hear it for killing everyone else in the world before you'll let them catch you

Welcome to The Hyacinth Cafe~!

[Alt text: A banner with the words "The Hyacinth Cafe" in large title font and the subheading "An aroace dating sim visual novel by rawnoodlings" beneath it in smaller print.] Game Description:

Micah, a young programmer two steps away from being a shut-in, gets dragged out by his best (and only friend) Laurie to a local butler cafe after she wins their bi-annual lottery. This lucky win gets her free access to the cafe's top five most popular butlers, all with different styles and approaches to their job of keeping people company, for an in-cafe chat and off-site date.  "You're going to learn how to talk to people, and men, so help me God."  Our Micah is aspec and arospec, not caring enough to figure it out properly, but more than that, he is so poorly socialised that in order to figure out if he feels love or lust, he needs to interact with more people! Laurie, knowing this, thrusts him headfirst into the chance of a lifetime by nominating him in her place!

Screenshots!

Game Details!

  • Nonbinary (he/him/they) Black protagonist
  • 5 character routes (plus 1 secret route), one major bad end
  • Each character route splits into two possible endings based on your choices and the temperament of each character!
  • Go on dates with hot men from an aroace-spec perspective and explore the breadth of human connection and how so many people experience it!

Character Art and CGs by rawnoodlings Story and programming by rawnoodlings Backgrounds by Rachel Chen and others Background Music by Asobeat

Demo is available for download on my itch.io here:

Anonymous asked:

In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?

well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.

so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.

but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.

it's a lot of things.

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Taylor touched on it, but yeah webcomics are EXTREMELY not the scene they were when a lot of people our age got into it (people our age now being in the position of having enough work behind them to 'abandon' it meaningfully).

Almost everyone I know who used to run a webcomic back then still cares a lot about those stories. Some people have moved into different mediums, some have rebooted their work and repackaged it for places like patreon or aggregators, a lot of them still produce free work for their audiences in one form or another even if it's not a continuation of their original 'one big story'. And some of them ARE still plugging away at the same projects, the same way they always did. But the skills that got people into webcomics 10-15 years ago are not the skills you need to get any kind of attention in today's market.

I complain a lot about 'hustle culture' taking over artistic spaces online, and that grievance really roots from what happened to webcomics more than anything else. There is no reason that you should need to be a marketing guru to publish an free indie comic online. There is no reason that you should be expected to update daily, or three times a week, or even once a week if you don't want to. There was genuinely a time when some of the best examples of the genre (and best known among Webcomic Likers) were uncategorisable experiments published one page at a time every other phase of the moon on wordpress blogs or static html sites.

If you were excited by webcomics as a medium in 2010, you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more - or at least certainly don't exist in the same form, or to nearly the same extent. Project Wonderful and webrings meant tiny comics still had shared readerships, and an avenue for connecting with new audiences through peers with similar interests. Micro-forums and comment sections meant each comic had its own little mini community, often full of other artists who were excited to talk process. Maybe the defining artistic relationship of my whole career, which has opened up more job opportunities than my actual degree, was forged in a webcomic forum with about 8 regular users.

The biggest loss I felt, personally, was the disappearance of spaces for talking about art with amateurs who really cared about experimentation and expression. A lot of it was super goofy, but bouncing off other teenagers with messy over-ambitious ideas about infinite canvas and found-object comics and branching storylines really ignited my passion for trying things. There were always parallel conversations about how to find an audience, whether merch was worth it, which conventions made money, but they were just as questing and experimental. Today, creative spaces are (somewhat necessarily, by nature of the way the internet has changed around us) dominated by marketing talk. The question hanging over every creative question for webcomic artists today seems to be 'but will it drive engagement'. And that's fucking miserable.

Anyone who got into webcomics before the shift to algorithmic feeds, omnipresent adtech and the premeditated murder death of Project Wonderful has probably looked around at some point and thought 'where the fuck am I?' Some artists have adapted comfortably, but a huge proportion of those who were most invested ten years ago were just never going to be interested in the skills that drive the current webcomic market. Because it is a market now, not an art scene. People have always needed to make money, and webcomics have never been especially profitable, but there was a time when they were an outlet - something you did after your shift at the bar, because it came with broad possibilities and a vibrant social scene. Now they are a second job.

Here's my point: when you notice the great proportion of long-running comics that just faded away or stopped altogether at some point, it is worth recognising that this wasn't just burnout. It was an extinction event.

JOIN. COMIC. FURY. https://comicfury.com/index.php There's still a thriving social scene full of crazy experimentation if you know where to look. It's true that a lot of the 'pop culture' view of webcomics has shifted to trying to 'make it big' on webtoon, but there are alternatives. If anyone's interested in making comics and feels overwhelmed, don't let social media expectations kill your love of the craft. I've been making comics and posting them online for 10 yrs with very little social media presence, and have a small group of readers who I love and value + have formed some incredible frienships through shared interest. It can be done! You dont have to turn something into a career for it to be worth doing

This got long, sorry, but I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately and I have a lot to say.

I was incredibly lucky to join that 2010s wave of comics… and it was just dumb luck. Right place, right time. Webcomics back then was a small but supportive community of scrappy DIY-ers. Putting out a comic every week (let alone 3x a week, or daily) was NO small feat on its own and success was never guaranteed. It was hard!! JUST making a comic is hard. We had to rely on each other to navigate setting up our own websites, learning how to make and sell merch, learning how to table at conventions. We had to take our own preorders and update a stupid little thermometer jpg on our website. We linked to each other and helped each other, and (some drama aside) we had each other’s backs.

Thank you @jammyness for bringing the hope

Love this conversation.

I'm on my second semester teaching a class actually called "web comics," lol, and it has been helpful to articulate my experience of this shift to students (all too young to have been around for much of the transition being discussed).

It IS bleak, it IS a predictable corporate colonization & hollowing-out process. The internet IS culturally broken in ways that it wasn't several years ago, when I and others participating in this conversation here were starting making webcomics.

BUT: people are still people, and there are still many of them who will be interested in the weird, idiosyncratic work you want to make. There is functionally an infinite number of them. This is still in a way a MIRACULOUS time to be making independent comics: you don't have to pay thousands of dollars to print and distribute your serialized book, you can put it online, EVERYWHERE, for free. This is INCREDIBLE.

As individual artists we can't change the huge, systemic things happening! We can't turn the tide of the algorithmic-presentation logic of the entire internet! We can't make huge swaths of the population go back to RSS, or get back in the habit of visiting individual websites, or whatever. BUT we can do something-- we can make work without compromising in the ways the platforms want us to compromise. We can engage with our audience and other artists in a humane and honest way... We can say things and make things that institutional pop culture can't.

basically we are doing the actual work of pop culture here, as independent & self-motivated artists. what we are making is more important than these platforms and will outlast them.

I have been wanting to make a low-artifice interview podcast around a lot of these ideas; maybe i do that sometime soon; it is nice to see this stuff talked about by folks I know and whose work I really like

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