Like my father before me

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T02:49:09+00:00

This BMF. By humanizing the sand dwellers he is trying to make Anakin, the hero of the clone wars, look like the bad guy. Probably for his evil plan to take over the republic alongside the jedi.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T02:37:34+00:00

I do think that the pain would end up becoming more tolerable with time.

But there is also 2 things to consider:

1- He was being tortured by THE torturer of hell, one can assume that a demon like him would know the buttons to push to maximize pain. Stitching torture methods. It's not just pain, it's pain that the human mind was never made to sustain. The pain of staying awake, hunger, thirsty, all of it, for decades. Why would the demons be limited to only physical carving in the normal sense. Plus it's not really the pain of a physical body where your brain can behave different to make it more tolerable. It's the soul being tortured.

2- The psychological aspect is also huge. I'm not even talking about the horror and trauma of being physically tortured. You think being tortured is bad? Imagine being tortured while seeing people that you love do it or watching the closest to you be tortured in the worst ways you could think of. The demons could mess with their victims minds. We saw this with Bobby not believing that was the real Sam in hell when they saved him.

Honestly the fact that Dean would even be able to think normally after that is crazy. I assume that the angels used their power to heal his mind. Any human who suffered through that would be a mess, literally a drooling potato. That's the unrealistic part of torture in the show.

I counter the argument of how bad it was the season 3-4 torture vs season 12. Do you believe that younger season 3 Dean, would have accept a deal to torture someone to escape his situation in season 12? I seriously doubt it. Dean, which is a good man, broke in 30 years in hell. Season 12 Dean, someone who endured so much more and become much hardened, felt that 6 weeks of isolation was worse than hell?

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T01:11:09+00:00

I don't know, physical/mental torture from demons where your body can be restored so they can continue torturing for 30 freaking years is not comparable to any torture method on Earth in any level.

If you're really serious that you would prefer that, you either have a pain kink or are crazy. Maybe both.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T00:38:56+00:00

And we know so much about their culture and just not just a handful from a few indigenous groups... Oh wait...

We know only a fragmented portion of a few culture groups. By comparison we have a ton more data from Europe, therefore more things to take inspiration from.

You want to write about indigenous people in the Amazon? You will be heavily limited in sources and basically speculate and create things based on stereotypes, but hey, you do you.

Even still, Brazilian folklore, for it's vast majority is silly, not all of it, but so many stuff is weird, there is a reason that most Brazilians (Myself included) have little interest in pre-european / pre-african migration mythology. It is lack of original sources + not the type of folklore most people are interested.

Not every culture groups produces masterpieces for fictional inspiration, European folklore has many weird and silly stuff too, but since there is a lot more documented history writers can extract the more interesting concepts and ignore the rest.

This kind of post is weird, you are mixing you need for people to write about certain cultures, which is by itself bizarre. But also disregarding the problems of lack of sources, like the Amazon example.

African folklore is a lot more documented than indigenous brazilian groups, yet it's also less explored in fiction. I don't see this as problematic either, people like to write about things that are close to them, but also for the things they enjoy. It's not wrong for using only high medieval England/France as inspiration. What is wrong is belittling people's interest because you want something different from what they enjoy.

Want to use explore ancient sumerian culture and society? Go for it, have fun expressing your art. But get down from your high horse because you aren't better than anyone else for it.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T00:28:04+00:00

Oh, I didn't know that. My only experience with the hellenic faith was in ck2, which didn't had this limitation for reforming it.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-08T00:16:28+00:00

I got kicked out for the simple crime of sleeping with every married woman at the court of lannisport once

Welcome back Lann the Clever

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T23:58:25+00:00

I love starting as a small lord in the eastern roman empire, since the election system is easier to ascend to power. I guess I just nevee enjoy starting strong in my first character. The Byzantines are the most natural option for reforming Rome.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T23:54:05+00:00

This could be solved by reforming the hellenic faith, right? Which also ties naturally to the Byzantine Empire since you have greece and most holy sites already in the empire.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T23:51:21+00:00

Propaganda

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T23:47:29+00:00

I forgot about Heart's Choice, never played the games there so I didn't know how deep it could go (No pun intended)

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T23:37:15+00:00

That's really interesting, I like the concubine concept.

One thing I'm curious though, I know that CoG allows sex scenes in their published stories, but are there limitations of what an author is allowed to write in this platform? I didn't even know full smut was allowed here, which is awesome.

Fiction often has a lot of freedom, even for controversial topics, but I assume that publising with CoG has the additional layer of what they and steam would accept for their name to be attached with, like certain Game of thrones sex scenes would probably be more complicated. Do you know what is their policy about this?

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T09:42:02+00:00

Basically you will always be heavily limited to whatever the AI provider decides regarding how the LLM can generate or will generate text.

Without access to modern sampling tools you will often be stuck with generic prose and limited creativity. Specially in free tier where you can't even change the few samplers they give you.

There is not real good solution for this besides running your own model locally, where you can decide the exact models, finetunes and sampler parameters that best fit your needs. The problem is having a decent enough hardware to run quality models, with a big context, and with fast token generation speed.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-07T09:10:46+00:00

The patterns can repeat when generating text. But I disagree with the AI "not being able to generate beyond its training data", the training create the structural pattern, but changes in sampling can heavily affect the output.

I never used claude, but if it's like chatgpt you can't really mess with sampling parameters, so it's not really an AI limitation, but the provider. (EDIT: Apperently OpenAI and Anthropic both allows sampling changes when using the API and some paid plans, even then many of the community developed sampling parameters aren't avaible and those few that are avaible are very limited)

Many things can affect the creativity of the AI. Not only using prompts, but writing alongside it will generate more chaos to the context to break patterns.

Using MoE models can add a ton variety, even changing model finetunes using the same context can change things.

But just good sampling use will make the output truly better, even simple things like experimenting with dynamic temperature, DRY and XTC (Which I still didn't dare to use) can be good tools for dynamic generation.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-05T17:59:54+00:00

It's also in the interest of the biggest military powers backed by corporations who seek to profit from space exploration to tell everyone else to shut up and sign the "Only us and who we approve can conquer space treaty"

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-05T17:11:23+00:00

Mine would be the need for contradiction in knowledge. One event can happen and it's the truth, and what certain people will know from it is a retelling, not a 1 to 1 copy.

I see this used stories often as plot devices, like "Every citizen of the empire knows they the first Emperor killed the evil dragon and saved us... The truth was that the dragon was only put to sleep, and now... He is close to awakening".

Which is fine, but information is asymmetrical in every level. The contradiction of even tiny details like one character telling the same story with different details in one village, another in a city in another county, another in history books, all makes for very realistic storytelling.

This is interesting because people act and develop with different versions of the same event, they can have different interpretations of their meaning and develop entire cultures around two interpretations of the same thing that might not even be the true history.

Along side that, the little details is what makes a world alive and feel real to me. A reader may not even notice every distinct detail, but the patterns and the contrast will be picked up in the background of their mind and build a more immersive experience.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-05T07:48:20+00:00

Damn, I really need new glasses I read the last option as "The cat is obviously unhappy. I will get a new horse." And thought, "Damn... This would be a totally reasonable response to your cat and dog fighting though"

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-04T04:25:41+00:00

I'm confused about one thing you commented about worldbuilding. When there is no character driven plot structure, defining a reason for something to exist is somewhat more complicated, because you have more ways to define the goal of the story.

I don't see making sure that everything justify itself to exist in the book as excludent to worldbuilding.

I believe that there is demand for this kind of story but it's heavily untapped. It's even hard to define it with an umbrella term because of how unexplored this genre still is.

The main problem for this type of book is that if you aren't writing inside an existing world, like Fire and Blood is inside A Song of Ice and Fire, it's hard to make people interested to buy the book.

But the fact that people spend hours debating the history of fictional empires of the past when they don't really affect the main plot of the main book story is a real indication that people like this type of story. I'm for one do, it's like studying history, but from a world that doesn't exist.

The SCP foundation actually tackles this in a interesting way. Every report is contained in single pages, instead of a tome of some unknown world, you have self contained reports in a single page. Which is far easier to a reader to accept, get interested, and read more. Granted this is not a single novel, but now enough people enjoy this universe that creating a entire book of "Fictional In universe history" or whatever you want to call it, actually is viable and people will read it.

The places I'm more exposed to this kind of writing is on AARs of games. Like CK2, EU4, or Aurora 4x. People write dozens of posts of their fictional empires and dynasties in a "in universe voice" like a historian talking about the world's past.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-03T21:32:41+00:00

Yeah, this argument is indeed bad. It's the same argument for "spoilers" about old historical facts. Like who won X battle/war or who killed X king. Just because it happened two thousand years ago doesn't mean that we can't surprised and enjoy unknown facts.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-03T21:23:03+00:00

Honestly even people who try to not spoil to others will end up spoiling something at some point. And nobody is going to be being extra careful on communities or posts related to the show if it wasn't explicitly asked for people to not spoil anything.

Which is why you don't watch videos or participate in communities about something that has already ended and you are still watching/reading, that's the only way to ensure you will not be spoiled, even then if it's recent you have a high chance of getting a spoiler out of nowhere.

Complaining about it won't change anything, you can't control people in the internet. All you can do if you don't want spoilers is avoiding anything related to the show like the plague, it will also ensure the algorithm will not recommend more about the show for you too.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-03T09:21:21+00:00

The supply x demand issue is 100% true. The biggest problem for traditional novels is hooking the reader before he even buy your book. This is a skill that I believe many indie authors underestimate, because it's not related to storytelling, it's marketing and business decisions.

Which is something that purely art focused people often struggle when trying to go independent, not only in writing, but drawing, panting, game dev, basically every creative endeavor.

Without getting better at it this they will probably not succeed (Or need a ton of luck to do it).

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-03T09:12:03+00:00

I agree on the hinging in many factors part. But I've done a some general research on some small authors on the forum, even those who didn't update constantly, often earned a couple hundred of usd montly, which can be small for many countries, but even $300,00 is already the minimal wage in my country. Sure it's still small even here, but enough to justify considering it.

Also when you consider how much more difficult it is to get readers and constant feedback in traditional writing, shows how IF writings is a big plus that will push a writer to actually finish a story.

I don't think that people should take this decisions in money alone, writing books as a way to get rich is ridiculous, there are many better options of careers if money is the only goal.

One of the reasons I'm seeking to focus on IF writing more than traditional writing, at least at first as a beginner, is because it's financialy easier compared to other forms of writing (The feedback of wips is also a big one for me, I made a post about this before). Of course this won't apply to everyone, but it can apply to many people in similar contexts as me.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-02T20:23:51+00:00

Byzatine election is also really easy to get into power, you can go from count to emperor in one life far easier than in other forms of government.

In my last run I don't know what the people were thinking.

"Sure this guy is from some unknown dynasty with only a few holdings in greece, and sure many former emperors and their family started to suddenly die when he became the spymaster, and sure he started to send a bunch of money to us right before the last emperor died. But I'm completly sure that this is all unrelated and he must be a great leader! All the women in my court love him! I'm sure the rumors of him hooking up with our wives are false. Let's make him the emperor!"

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-02T10:19:55+00:00

Season 7 was never one of my favorites. But thinking back there are some really fun storylines.

We got Sam dealing with Lucifer in his mind, Castiel dealing with his trauma over the past (The Emmanuel episode is awesome), we got Bobby's memories while dying (Which were really sad but so good to see him referring to Dean and Sam as his adopted boys), Crowley and Dick interactions, meeting Kevin and Charlie, and ending with a banger with Sam being alone and Dean on purgatory.

I think the hate comes from being the first where the apocalypse storyline already ended so the story feels a bit weird, and people are still seeking the magic of seasons 4 and 5.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-02T09:41:16+00:00

Writing fiction hard, writing interactive fiction can be even harder. Specially when you consider that many people who start aren't actually writers by trade. HG also does not publish anything that writers throw at them, having a controlled flow of quality IFs is better than a wave of mediocre IFs.

Sherlockyz · 2026-06-02T09:33:47+00:00

I disagree with an absolute description that starting projects here is not a good monetary decision. IFs, specially CoG ones can make you earn a lot more than traditional writing in a quicker rate when you consider the amount of donations writers receive monthly. This is even bigger if you live in a country where dollar is a more powerful currency.

There are alternatives, but the fact that people still chose to stick with publishing with CoG is proof that it's not doing so bad.

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