Mindlack

There are some who will give riddles to people they want to assess. And there are others, who ask them to instead climb mountains. Guess which category is Kiki? Guess which category Gabriel would have preferred? 

The Odd One Out has a new chapter online! 

(PS: If you didn't answer: "the category of people who will take care of Reborn City and help him go home", you might have been wrong ^^)

Do you know which color the lake is supposed to be on Azurine Island in Reborn 18.4.1? I'm on my first visit, and it's blue. But in TTar's playthrough (for instance), and in my memory as well, it was always brown at that point... Am I mistaken or is there something wrong?

I have just finished the first draft of the last part of Part 2's finale of The Odd One Out.

I'll probably need to retune it a bit, write the latest chapters' character rates...

And then there will be all the pictures for the chapters 41-45. 

I said it earlier, the idea is one of the earliest ones I had and one of those I was most eager to write. So I really hope it works and you enjoy it...

Sometimes I should just sleep instead of writing late as if I was trying to get nightmares...

I just finished the first draft of the second-to-last chapter of the second part of The Odd One Out. Here are the last sentences:

... I think this finale is going to be online for Christmas. How ironic. 

Do you sometimes worry that your own stories will make you lose sleep? 

I just wrote my protagonist into a pretty bad situation. It was planned a while ago, but funnily enough it’s more emotionally demanding than I thought. How am I going to sleep tonight? 
 

But there’s actually a more fearsome question. He’s going to end up pretty quickly (after an emotional roller-coaster, doubtlessly) in even worse trouble – how will I manage to sleep then?

"Bow before death, Gabriel..."

This isn't his deadly enemy's line, but it could as well be.

Gabriel is in the lion's den, surrounded by dangerous Meteors who have attempted to kill him. How will he get out of this? 

The Odd One Out's new chapter is online! 

What's inside Blacksteam Factory? Or, more precisely, who is there? What nefarious schemes could they be enacting? 

The Odd One Out has a new chapter. 

I'm not sure what's more annoying (at least it's not tragic, just annoying) of my discoveries of tonight.

1) I found out I hadn't actually proof-read my assignment a couple of hours before the deadline.

2) I found on my computer updated versions that somehow weren't the ones I had submitted online.

3) I realized I had about two hours of lectures to watch for tomorrow but I'd really rather sleep.

4) I have an exam (for something different) in less than 48h and I still have barely studied for it.

5) And there's also this math stuff (actually several different, rather unrelated "math stuffs)" to study and that it's (more accurately, each one is) impressively slow.

...

(deep sigh)

Well, back to studying it is. After all, there might be (real or imaginary) situations that are undeniably much worse.

Today is The Odd One Out's first "anniversary"! (insane stats below)

It's almost unbelievable how much has happened since I started posting it. 

To celebrate it, I thought it funniest to find out some stats... so I copy-pasted everything into Word, used some formatting magic to remove the pictures and make the presentation more uniform... 

The result can't be trusted too much, but the order of magnitude is... well... 

36 chapters

210 pages

109 820 words (reportedly)

Some 350 KB in memory.

It's so big that Word starts to struggle with elaborate search queries... and we've only just passed Shade!  Next year, to do the same task, I will have no choice but use command line tools. 

(Also, I should start revising the earliest chapters at some point, but I'd rather keep going on, given that we're getting closer to one of my earliest motivators for the story, in less than ten chapters...)

Remember the first time you played Reborn?

How a charming, enthusiastic, somewhat not-quite-down-to-earth young girl encouraged you to go to her "really nice" friend Mr. Shadow because there was a door he could open? And then, you found yourself in the Power Plant? 

Imagine that happening to you in real life. What would happen then? 

[Ominous music background with lots of tense pauses]

A new chapter of The Odd One Out is online.

And we're still respecting the Candy-approved guideline of a Gym battle every at most five chapters, I didn't think it was possible. 

Have you ever wondered what Shade was doing in its free time? When it's not terrorizing people? Foreseeing future disasters? Being randomly cryptic at mysteriously glowing Trainers from nowhere? 

The new chapter of The Odd One Out might provide you with an answer! 

The Odd One Out's new chapter is online! We're closing the Orphanage arc -- and re-instituting character ratings, and chronological order as well.  

I've been trying out Zumi's Rejuv character sorter. I had 68 characters, after removing Rifts and PCs. But when looking at the results, the only thing I can think of is how it took over 320 ~ log_2(68!) comparisons to sort the list. Truly, you can feel the difference between O(nlog(n)) (minimal average number of comparisons for a list-sorting algorithm) and n when you have to specify each comparison by hand (Volta or Florin? Jolene or Alexandra?...)

I recently found out that my Reborn story's title (The Odd One Out -- there's a new chapter just available btw) was almost the name of a (entirely unrelated) YT channel with millions of subscribers. People (including me) are weird, I guess?

Time spent procrastinating the Shade fight because I feared I would get so wrecked: a couple of weeks. 

Time spent preparing for said battle: a few hours. 

Final score after first battle: 6-0. 

Maybe, just maybe, counting the number of times I fail makes me overthink stuff? Or am I just getting better?

Over 4,300 views for The Odd One Out, that’s amazing! Thank you to all (human) viewers! 
 

The next chapter is coming as soon as I can get a good Wifi spot – a dozen days at latest. 

On a not-too-unrelated note: I used to be stuck on some soon-to-come part (chapters 35-ish). I couldn’t write it satisfactorily – it felt poor, eventless, almost a waste of words, among others. A couple of days ago, I had a, er, great idea and I finished to write it entirely. Now it’s much more epic (and, I’m confident, more original), but... kind of weird at the same time.

I guess we’ll wait and see... 

A survivor from study, summer and a bit of manual work, The Odd One Out is back for a historical chapter. 

For the first time...

A Gym Battle happens...

Only 5 chapters after the previous one!  

There is also an important plot deviation which you will see more about in the next chapters.

Chapter 30 of "The Odd One Out" (my Reborn story) is now online. Enjoy! 

I've also been trying to write out that Rejuv idea I kept in mind -- but I'm not that convinced by the beginning.

It's supposed to be more interesting later, but, the issue with the later parts is that it's really hard to assess a likely result if I deviate from the original plot, because so much is unknown...

Chapter 29 of "The Odd One Out" is online! Still not quite satisfied, but since I can't find what annoys me...  

There are many things in this chapter, but mostly I think it's a transition... And there's a significant divergence from the game plot approaching. 

@&~€%$£#*!

I’m usually fine with the chapters I write, but I’m really struggling with the upcoming one. 
Each time I read it, it feels so somehow wrong. And I don’t really understand what causes this feeling. 

I guess I’ll give it another try tomorrow. 

All in all, such a downer evening. 
 

First, there’s this TV show which is even bleaker than usual, showing several meltdowns by very relatable characters.

Then, thinking afterwards, I realized some unexpected implications of my fanfiction’s premises. It’s not relevant to the chapters currently online, but... it sheds some future plot points in different (and darker) lights. 
 

Now I think I’m going to sleep before it gets even sadder. At least it’s not about anything really important. 

Chapter 28 of my Reborn story "The Odd One Out" is now online.

I will neither confirm nor deny that the entire chapter is mostly a paranoid Gabriel freaking out about the voice-activated lights in the ruins. 

I will neither confirm nor deny that the chapter title is a voluntary pun on the iconic sentence of some famous Orson Scott Card novel.  

There is a rambling madman in the ruins... But a very dangerous one. Very, very dangerous. 

Part 2 of "The Odd One Out" has finally started. It's been a long break, but I hope it'll be worth it! 

It turns out it's not a good idea to go try and play Reborn late at night, when you're not very good at the game, with a frail early game team and against an updated AI. 

Who would have guessed?

Anyway, there are now pictures (and, alas, an updated death count) for the latest (i.e. month old) chapter of my Reborn story, "The Odd One Out". It's likely (yet not certain) that the next chapter (and beginning of Part 2) will be released this week-end.  

The final chapter of the first part of my Reborn story is out! Will Gabriel survive Corey's death trap?

(There's going to be a break of maybe two or three weeks before part 2 starts)

Second, more of an idle remark -- it's surprising the amount of questions you get to write down about a yet-incomplete plot when you try to fan-fiction/AU your way through/around/inside it. 

(Yes, it's again about that Rejuv story idea. I don't know if I'll have the time to write it but it's rather cathartic to plan the highlights).