started reading homestuck again along with the homestuckreplay blog which is similar enough to dracula daily that it's actually capable of holding my attention. funniest thing that has happened in the discord server so far is multiple people going 'surely even a week long break would be too long' while being fully aware of the bigger pauses later on.

in other news there's 1k words written for the next fifth wall update but it's all disjointed and i don't think i'm conveying red's character all that well. might have to rework his entire pov section :|

the age old want to just be able to beam my thoughts directly onto paper/screen.. i'm so tired.

new chapter within the next three hours if i can wrangle myself into editing this thing goddd

so outside of the general 'being sick' and 'academic responsibilities' part of the reason why i haven't been writing fifth wall is that i am, unfortunately, a huge coward at heart and didn't want to end up writing anything less than exactly what i had envisioned in my mind. however, i'll never improve if i don't write either. if swagcore hadn't shared a tumblr post about fifth wall today i probably would've ended up procrastinating for another month though.

currently sitting in vc in the revolution cave because i get lonely while writing otherwise. and it has been at the pace of a snail, but i've managed to write close to 2k words so. win i guess, if you ignore the fact that i'm writing this entirely in 2nd person and will have to edit the entire thing later to bring it to 3rd person. also considering using a form for the main choice question, like a survey format just for the vibes and because i need it to be less obivous that it's a decision impacting the characters at the very end because at this point i KNOW my audience and they like to cause problems on purpose (read: rigging polls). snippet for today, markdown syntax and all:

Sweat trickles down your back. //opposing ash who thinks this room is temperature controlled// Something's wrong here. It's like you're missing one half of a puzzle game, all the other pieces either lost or dumped into another box, and it didn't matter which because in the end you were still *missing* something.

we had a DSA class yesterday involving some simple array exercises and:

• turns out i have Zero reading comprehension skills at 10 in the morning
• we've all collectively forgotton most of the syntax for java. it took three of us to put together a simple program in thirty minutes
• if i'm going to have to deal with revising java i might as well utilise it for fic purposes

poll for fifth wall has been up for three hours and it's interesting to see how most are opting to play it safe ('observe' leading with 13 votes, red and ash are evenly split) instead of jumping right into it. i'm assuming a significant portion of that is returning readers from nbitm lol

that being said i don't think this is going to have as much of an impact as nbitm/be up to that standard because this is primarily for dialogue practising purposes*. also because i wanted to repurpose an old idea from a few years ago (lee if you're seeing this: it's the rat project) and i'm not entirely sure if i'll use all the elements of that yet (depends on what the readers pick honestly) but it's fun to spin around in my head.

*i hate writing dialogue to the point where i once wrote a 10k fic where there was only one line of dialogue. clearly the solution is to start a multichapter fic where the characters have very little to do outside of talk so i'm forced to actually put effort into that. this will not blow up in my face whatsoever.