golemesque-blog asked: wayyyy belated, re: "cutoff phrases" and stock phrases that we both use and think a lot: you've got tourette's, right? i know there's a link between tourette's and OCD and i've got OCD traits, so i wonder if that's what's up with that

Yeah, Tourette’s is comorbid with OCD and I’m pretty sure I have subclinical OCD traits (some of my tics are complicated enough that they really sound more like OCD compulsions when I describe them).

I guess I’d say that it relates to thinks like stock phrases in that stock phrases can “feel right” in the way that performing a tic can “feel right.”  There’s a certain sense that there is a groove with a certain shape, and it “needs” to be filled by something, and it’s satisfying to fill it, and frustrating if it remains unfilled

Stereotyped motions or stereotyped phrases feel to me like they’re joining two things that are supposed to be together, like snapping something into a hole shaped like it, or combining positive and negative charges.  This was supposed to be there.  There we go.  Good

golemesque-blog asked: myc locked down her twitter before i could read it and verify it was her and i feel like i was blessed

I know what you mean – I kept reading it and knowing I probably shouldn’t, and then I accidentally refreshed the page and it was locked, and I thought “oh, uh … ‘thanks’, I guess?”

golemesque-blog asked: i like the northern caves bc my first encounter with the internet was a close-knit community a lot like the cafe, though they were strategy gamers, not book nerds but also, i am really into the mystery at the centre of the narrative and i really like what i imagine salby's work to be like, in an aesthetic way

Cool!  I actually find myself wishing I could read Salby’s books occasionally, which feels pretty weird since I made them up.

The forum stuff is based on my experience on several forums, and in particular some formative experiences on a forum devoted to Xenogears and Xenosaga.  There were a lot of really nerdy, heated arguments there about whether or not the Xenosaga series would eventually lead into a remake of Xenogears, and various “big personalities” on the forum known for their takes on that and related questions, and overall there was this sense of this one big mystery everyone was wondering about.  So I’m drawing on all that heavily.

(In that case, we will never really know the answer, because Xenosaga was meant to be a 6-game series but they had to stop after 3 games b/c money, so no one knows what the original plan looked like)

golemesque-blog asked: if u want i can talk to my bf and we can write you a script to quickly generate the CSS for the forum formatting?

Thanks, but I think it probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble – I can do the CSS pretty quickly with just copying and pasting now that I’ve done a few forum thread chapters.

The tough thing about the threads at this point isn’t the formatting, it’s making something that looks to me like a plausible forum thread (plausible mixture of big-name posters and more rarely seen ones, getting across what I want to get across while still making the conversation kind of disorganized, making sure the people don’t all sound the same, etc.)

golemesque-blog asked: i just started your new story and i want to punch the reviewer quoted in the face

That is the intended effect!

Let me know what you think of it once you’ve read more