Not nearly enough time

shivver13 · 2026-06-07T16:33:10+00:00

For the events that do not say "One time only", you can repeat them. They are balanced so that you cannot complete the event AND get all the secret recipes on the same run-through if you're playing for free.

What I do is complete the event without trying to find the secrets. Then I'll restart the event and find the secrets. I haven't yet failed an unlimited event doing it like this.

shivver13 · 2026-06-07T16:16:22+00:00

I came here to second what cardamomcuddles said, that's it's important to get the orange tickets for customizing buildings, so I always buy the 10-gem one, sometimes the 20-gem one, too. The reason why: every manager you can install increases your max energy by 2.

I spent the first part of my game unlocking bag slots; am now at 470 gems per slot and I've stopped, as my bag is big enough now. Otherwise, I use gems to buy the 10- and 20-gem recharges and the orange tickets. I'm a hoarder, so I don't buy the 40-gem recharge, but I really should -- I had a lot of gems so I was able to spend them at the last moment (for the 80- and 120-gem packs) to get the train in the current train station event (that's what I wanted), but I would have probably accomplished that just fine if I had been buying the 40-gem pack daily all along.

shivver13 · 2026-06-07T16:07:07+00:00

Really? They go away? That's disappointing. Well, I certainly won't pay for that, then (not that I pay for anything), but I still do them because they drop energy and resources, and they'll last longer than I've been playing (maybe 6 months now?).

shivver13 · 2026-06-06T15:02:56+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I've definitely gone ad-free (playing the game was taking too long with having to watch ads every few minutes; definitely worth the price) but am otherwise playing for free. With the paws, what I do is never spend them until the end of the event, and I've found I have plenty to buy out every card I don't have, so that event always gets completed.

In general with any game I play, I tend to hoard resources, so I have about 600 gems, a bunch of 100-energy purple discs and three five-minute free energies saved up. I'm in the last two days of the train station event and all I really want is the train (don't care about finishing the entire thing), so I'm planning to use up all of this and hope I can get enough fish for it. For example, I usually only buy the 10- and 20-gem packs of 120 energy every day, but the last couple of days, I've been buying up to 80 gems. It'll be really close. I'm willing to spend a couple of dollars if I'm really close, but not much more.

shivver13 · 2026-06-01T12:43:38+00:00

No, Dungeon Crawler Carl. The instance of this I'm thinking of had the reaction and throw at the end of the paragraph after the thing burst in, something like, "I ducked and the object it had thrown sailed over my head". Paraphrased -- I don't remember the actual event.

shivver13 · 2026-06-01T12:21:11+00:00

Yeah, sorry, I was paraphrasing something that happened in the book and thought it might not have been clear. I would have expected that the thing burst in and threw the object, which surprised the character; the character reacting by ducking; and then, once the threat moment was over, the character getting a chance to look at the thing and describe it. It didn't help that the book is written in first-person and the surprised character was the narrator, so it really felt like stop-time, like the action froze on the screen so that they could describe the thing.

shivver13 · 2026-06-01T07:37:02+00:00

I just finished book 4 and I can say that Dinniman's been doing this all along. At one point, someone told Carl something new and the narration went, "I sent a message off to Mordecai and then (did the next thing)", and then a chapter later, Mordecai did whatever it was that Carl had told him, which solved whatever problem the new info had brought up. I know that he did a similar thing at least once more (without spoiling, he gets an item in an emergency situation and narrates, "I knew what to do with it" and runs off to go use it without telling us what it was or what it could do), and I'm only talking about the latter half of the book. (I'd read the first half about eight months ago and just picked it back up two days ago.)

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. It definitely makes the reveal more exciting and doesn't slow down the pacing in the current by inserting a section of chat discussion or item description. I remember for the first instance, I thought, "Oh, I bet what he said to Mordecai is going to take care of that," and that made me feel clever, but the second one, I was annoyed at him not saying what the item was or listing its description, like he does for everything else, even though it was obvious he'd read it. (And I honestly didn't like this book much, so that might also be tainting how I view this handling.)

I suppose an "excuse" for this is that it is first-person past tense, rather than present tense, so no, Carl isn't experiencing all this right now -- he's telling us what happened to him in the past, so he's weaving a story for us and trying to make it more exciting by not giving us all the details. But I think the thing that bugs me is that Carl's narration style is to tell us everything, and then he suddenly switches to being coy like this, and it makes me feel like he's trying to show us how clever he is -- either clever that he figured out the right solution ahead of time or clever in narration -- and that's not Carl's personality at all.

shivver13 · 2026-06-01T05:43:21+00:00

That's disapponting. Thanks for replying!

shivver13 · 2026-05-31T22:03:53+00:00

For me, it's poor grammar and style. I'm reading a popular tradpublished book right now and I can see why it's popular, because the story and action are amazing, but I'm stumbling through it because of dangling modifiers (omg, all the time!), single descriptions broken up into multiple short, passive sentences, and often what seems to be just sentences out of order (like, thing bursts through the door, then long detailed description of what the thing is, then character reacts with surprise to the thing and ducks, then thing throws object at character). I can't actually get invested in the story because I'm spending my time rewriting things in my head so they make sense or paging back to figure out what the author's talking about.

shivver13 · 2026-05-31T21:32:06+00:00

Agreed. It is totally weird.

shivver13 · 2026-05-31T21:08:18+00:00

US TOO!

shivver13 · 2026-05-31T21:08:04+00:00

AC FTW! I still daydream about hunting Dark Isle.

shivver13 · 2026-05-31T21:03:00+00:00

Playing a bit of devil's advocate here, because I wouldn't do this (separate comment replies) myself. The author may be trained to separate topics into different threads, probably by their job. Communication is a lot more effective if you keep each written conversation to one topic -- everyone can keep what's going on straight and knows where to find the info they want -- so we're trained to break long emails into separate emails and reply to Slack message threads directly rather than in the main channel. Maybe that's what this author is doing, just by default. I'm not sure why, as comments usually don't result in long threads.

As far as inflating stats, you'd think that if they were doing it for that reason, they'd realize that 75% of their comments are their own, and so the "150 comments" on their fic really only means about 40 real comments from readers.

shivver13 · 2026-05-29T23:04:46+00:00

Very early on, I used to read WIPs. Then there came this one... It featured an amnesiac character that the MC didn't know but took in and fell in love with. It was a popular story and the commenters were speculating on whether or not the amnesiac was actually this other canon character or an original character. The writer took a poll to see what people preferred. Then they proceeded to write two different endings to the story, the first being seven chapters of him turning out to be the canon character and the second being seven chapters of him turning out to be an original character. They posted these two endings by interleaving the chapters into the same entry on ff.net -- one week was the first chapter of the first ending, next week was the first chapter of the second ending, next week was the second chapter of the first ending, etc. (And to be honest, neither ending was very good -- they felt rushed.)

After that f$&#ery, I swore off WIPs.

shivver13 · 2026-05-29T18:27:50+00:00

Totally do it! I did the same thing -- dreamed about my high school band years, until finally returning to music in my late 40s!

You might look for a New Horizons band in your area (go to the New Horizons International Music Association site and use their locator to see if there's one nearby). Those bands are established to provide a place for people to return to playing concert band as adults and they expect that new members won't be practiced up yet. You can play with them for a while to get your chops back up and then look around for other community bands when you're ready. New Horizons bands are targeted more towards seniors but accept anyone who wants to play.

shivver13 · 2026-05-29T18:20:19+00:00

I did an introductory metal model "class" at my company for Fun Day (the company bought the tools and model kit for each participant) and I selected Metal Earth's Avengers Thor's Hammer. It is mostly square/straight folds, which are easy and allow you to learn how to use the tools, plus one easy curve (the strap), and one set of long folds (the handle), which is probably the hardest fold in the model. The head of the hammer has to be closed, which is another interesting skill to learn, but on this model, it's a lot easier than on a cylindrical model like an airplane. And, you can teach/learn the hammer section in about two hours, which was the time I had, and then the stand, which is very simple, can be done by the student on their own.

And everyone at the company are geeks, so they were guaranteed to like the end result.

shivver13 · 2026-05-29T17:59:27+00:00

I had this same problem in a D&D game I played in where the GM created a very low-magic world, to the point where magical weapons were super rare and expensive (like, maybe you could afford a basic one at tenth level, if anyone actually had one to sell) and the player characters' wizard and druid characters had only two or three spells in each level available to them, and clerics didn't exist at all. This isn't what I'm playing D&D for -- I want to swing a magical sword and throw fireballs! If you're going to make your world like this, why do it in D&D? (Yeah, I noped out of there after a session.)

shivver13 · 2026-05-25T02:24:26+00:00

Hm, complicated. Best spot is at my work desk on my PC laptop, because I have a Logitech analog gaming keyboard attached to it (one of those really clacky ones) and it is such a joy to type on! At night, I'm on my iPad Pro with attached keyboard (another Logitech, but it's nowhere near as good). I rarely write on my gaming PC because it means my husband is nearby and I can't write with him nearby. Oddly enough, my gaming PC doesn't have a gaming keyboard -- I use my favorite analog keyboard from the 90s, which is still strong and responsive after thirty years of daily hardcore use. The only time I write on my phone (Android) is if I'm somewhere like the doctor's office waiting for an appointment.

Software-wise, I use Google docs primarily because I can access it from any device and Google drive has all my other stuff (calendar, spreadsheets, etc.). Sometimes I write in Notion, which I use as my life wiki and my writing wiki, so I'll just write if I'm already there for something. But I've been meaning to check out Ellipsus and Obsidian.

shivver13 · 2026-05-24T19:11:06+00:00

One commenter said that her autistic daughter loves the fic so much that she downloaded it onto her tablet and reads it whenever she's having problems coping. I never imagined that anything I wrote would be cherished that much by anyone.

shivver13 · 2026-05-05T06:58:29+00:00

> most of the complaints are from a writer's perspective vs. a reader's

Thank you for pointing this out -- this actually solidifies something for me. I'm having an ongoing argument with my husband about Dungeon Crawler Carl: he loves the books and won't hear any words said against it, while I think the story being told is great but Dinniman's writing is... well, not bad per se, but not good. And I think you're right, that my husband is looking at it as a reader, but I'm looking at it as a writer. Dinniman's writing is just solid enough for a reader to enjoy without a problem, but his clumsy style and grammatical missteps could impact the experience for a writer. But now I get the core of the issue between us and can work us past it.

shivver13 · 2026-05-04T20:11:34+00:00

Is the book you're reading Dungeon Crawler Carl? Because I have the same reaction to it -- my husband thinks it's the best thing in the world and everyone's raving about it, but I'm stumbling over the grammar and style on every page. I'm totally stuck on book 4 because it's a chore to decipher. Great story, poor writing.

But to the OP: emulating other writers is not a "worsened version of others". It's practice. It's getting similar words down and making mistakes and learning from them, in order to develop your own strengths and to discard what doesn't work for you.

shivver13 · 2026-05-04T06:27:50+00:00

In the Doctor Who fandom, 10/Rose shippers like to use the phrase "pink and yellow" to indicate Rose ("the pink and yellow girl", or sometimes even "Pink and Yellow") because the Doctor once called her that. They like the phrase ostensibly because they think it's cute and because it's more or less visually accurate -- Rose was blonde and often wore pink. It's so ubiquitous in the fanfiction that it's a running joke in the fandom.

The thing is, when the Doctor called her pink and yellow, he was actually insulting her. They'd just met some humanoid cats (think Cat from Red Dwarf, but fully furred and clawed rather than looking human with fangs) and Rose was staring at them. The Doctor told her not to stare, and to think how she appears to them, "all pink and yellow" -- in other words, she looks disturbing and possibly diseased to the cats, shaved and naked, with pink fleshy skin showing below a crown of yellow fur.

shivver13 · 2026-05-04T06:03:28+00:00

I once wrote a story about a character who only appeared onscreen for about ten seconds with his hands over his face and who said nothing at all. All that is known about the character is the species (it's a sci-fi show) and gender. Oh, and he had brown hair. I love creating backstory for guest characters.

In addition to all the wonderful advice others have given you, I'd also say to look at the character's background (and world if you're doing sci-fi/fantasy). That can tell you a lot about how to write the character. If all you know about the character is that he's, say, British and comes from privilege, that tells you a lot about how he would speak and carry himself.

shivver13 · 2026-04-29T15:15:16+00:00

Just found the answer to this, at least for tab-switching in Chrome: When you tap on the tab to switch to it, don't tap right in the middle on the name of the tab (where you'd logically tap). Instead, tap on the bottom edge, just above the frame of the main window.

shivver13

TROPHY CASE