Looking Back: Co-Writing A Lot Of Fan Fiction

So if your follow me on twitter you'll notice I do follow people who write mature-rated fan fiction, some of them are folks I've come to know and others are people who I'm big fans of, so there is a reason for that. Way back around this time in 2004, I got heavily involved with writing fan fiction based on on the world of pro wrestling by giving a bit of feed back on a piece co-written by writer name Kristi, and that kicked off over a decade of writing for us, where we covered every possible scenario we can think off based off of WWE story lines, gimmicks and characters. Now most of our work was on the now defunct WOWEFA, but just about everything was more posted in a Yahoo group's file section that has since been removed thanks to the Yahoo / Verizon not finding Groups worth keeping around these days.

Being critical as I look back at well over 2000 pieces of fan fiction, I can say we certainly had a tendency to letting series run too long, and proofreading was really neither of our strengths. Our characterization and just general formulaic approach really made things weird when we put together larger projects... and without question, a lot of the things we wrote didn't age well. I know I had and still have a real lack of variety of putting words together in forming a sentence, so when I look back at just things I know I did I just want to proverbial bang my head against wall. Still that comes with the territory when one looks back at one's own work and just cringe while wondering if something could've been written better.  Hell we probably would've been better served if we did more than just focus on pro-wrestling, but we never could connect on other pop culture realms.

But the important think is we had a lot of fun along the way. Sure we had our creative differences. arguments cause we both had real strong opinions as it came to our fandom, but I think more often than not, things were positive. Hell we had nights where we'd write from like 7 PM EST to like 4 AM EST, and we wrote damn near every day, only taking nights off for Sunday pay-per-views. It was rare we didn't at least chat once a day to go over an idea, put together a rough outline or look up details of dates, venues, match cards to make sure things fit a timeline. We put a lot of effort into everything we did, with nearly every one-shot story being at least 5 pages, and we had somethings going well beyond 100 pages. It was a huge amount of personal time invested on both of our parts.

Which is why every now and then I consider going through and finding away to preserve anything since that was a huge part of my life, maybe upload everything to Archive of Our Own, but to get everything in the correct format, not to mention trying to clean up typos, double spacing and fixing wrapped text issues would take a long time, and I have been put off by investing that much of my time doing that. Plus, there are a lot more talented people writing fan fiction of his sort these days that it would feel weird putting things out there from 16 years ago.

And it's why this time of year always makes me remember fondly, and I do keep in touch with Kristi on occasion, but this is probably the first time outside of the fan fiction writing community I've straight up talked about it in any regards. I enjoyed writing and I met some great folks along the way thanks to it.

Introducing The Space Bar

On Friday of last week, I went about streamlining my stream, primarily because I want a more unique look that is just for my stream, and I realized I needed a background since I was getting ride of the chat only overlay which basically covered 70% of the screen. So I went to DaemonsWolf (https://www.darkwolfcreative.com) and even though she normally doesn't do just backgrounds, I loved what she did by including the Purgatory bar from Mass Effect 3 in a previous piece, so I knew she could come up with something cool. This background will make its debut during tonight's stream over at twitch.tv/fredcasden

Highlights from June 14 to 20, 2020

This week's highlights covers the week of June 14th to 20th 2020, and features moments from Overwatch, Mass Effect Andromeda, Gears of War, Star Trek Online, Pokemon Shield and Twitch Sings!

Thoughts on AT&T Shutting Down WB Interactive

It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has seen the complete mess that always comes as the result of corporate mergers and buyouts, that sometimes certain divisions that were once pillars of one company are basically kicked out the fucking door by the new corporate power structure to make sure the 'bottom line' is as pretty as possible for stockholders. Perhaps the biggest once most people my age can recall would be the AOL-Time Warner merger which basically saw World Championship Wrestling get sold off to the then World Wrestling Federation for a couple of million dollars, because a.) the accounting practices of Turner Broadcasting and then Time Warner were fucking abysmal and b.) people really hated that the only reason anyone watched TNT was for the wrestling on Monday Nights.

Still, in the realm of video games, it's probably not as noticeable as often video game publishers like Blizzard or Electronic Arts stay within their lane... but when outside companies come in, say for example Disney, things gets a little strange. Everyone knows Disney as a media empire, the House of Mouse has had its fingers in so many pies from amusement parts, movies, television shows, comic books and of course video games, and for the most part Disney handles things in-house as it relates to its various divisions, often striving for the peak of quality of whatever it is they are doing... right up until affects their bottom line. You see Disney had an in-house video game Division, obvious called Disney Interactive Studios that was around from 1988 to 2016, to make their own games and distribute them to the various consoles out on the market. But Disney being Disney, overtime they found it cheaper to just licensee things out to other publishers to do the developing, marketing and distribution in order to maximize their own profits. It's why Disney basically shutdown Lucas Games who was working on the Star Wars 1313 game (that most people were looking forward too) and awarded the license rights to Star Wars games to Electronic Arts.

So what we're seeing with AT&T and their move to shut down and sell off the studios associated with WB Interactive which includes NetherRealm Studios and Rocksteady is that they are looking to just licenses out their intellectual properties. They make a profit off of it it because a video game publisher is paying for the right to make a game based on something they own and also get a good size of the profits of anything sold, the risk entirely falls on that of the publisher. They not only must develop and sell a quality product they have to do under the pressure of having to make the another company 'happy'. It's why when EA screwed up royally with Stars Wars Battlefront II it was such a big deal and a blow to the Star Wars brand that Disney basically had to step in and tell them to get their act together , threatening to pull the license and award it to another publisher. It's why EA basically got rid of micro-transitions as it related to SWB2 for quite some time before slowly rolling them back in. In the case of AT&T, which will still own the rights to Mortal Kombat and obviously the DC Comics franchises, they are going to be in seat Disney has been in.

Now, What does this mean for things like Mortal Kombat... well once would assume that whoever buys NetherRealm Studios would get the Mortal Kombat license to go along with it and probably will still have the permission to develop the Injustice series for further installment, but now the risk ends up being there could be a chance that if NRS gets shutdown by whoever buys them, another studio would work on the MK games. So one would worry if say Electronic Arts bought NRS, and known their habit of shutting down studios and basically restructuring them to the point they can't be effective... but considering that the Mortal Kombat franchise is so huge, I wouldn't worry too much, but I'd have that in the back of my mind the entire time.

The real question is who do we want getting their hands on these different studios and getting access to the various licenses to the AT&T catalog? From my point of view, the big ones are Microsoft, Sony, EA and Blizzard. Microsoft and Sony would make whatever they get their hands on console exclusives, so of the two, I'd want Microsoft to have the rights to things since you not only have the Xbox release but also PC versions, and they have proven to be willing to work with Nintendo to expand things to the Switch. Sony on the other hand would want to keep everything to their systems only, so this would probably reignite the console wars based on what games are exclusive to what system. With EA and Blizzard, they'll want to release whatever is developed on as many systems as possible, but both have made decisions that were not in the best interest of their customers for the sake of profits.

Anyway.... that's just my opinion

Twitch Milestone, Nintendo Switch and Pokemon Shield: Oh My!

This week we hit the 1000 follower mark over on my Twitch channel, and we celebrated by following through on a plan I put in place back at the end of February to add a Nintendo Switch (and how I managed to get one when they are pretty scarce), my reaction to the button layout and what was it like playing a Pokemon game for the first time in nearly 20 years!

New Art Work From DarkWolf Creative

I once again commissioned new artwork from DaemonsWolf over at DarkWolf Creative (https://www.darkwolfcreative.com) and this time, it was some two cross over pieces. While both features my infamous sidekick, one sees him pondering how to get an idol with Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. The little detail of having the Bunny wearing a shirt the same color as Lara's top was real neat. The second piece sees the Bunny hanging out in a bar with Wrex from Mass Effect and Marcus Phoenix from Gears of War. The bar location is of course Purgatory seen from Mass Effect 3 and that setting location was determined by DaemonsWolf, and is a great example of why I often just give a general idea of what I'm looking for when I commission anything because I don't think I could've came up with that in my original pitch.

Art From My Youth

My aunt sent me these pictures that I drew way back in I think 1991 or 92 (time frame is based on the fact I tried to draw Darkwing Duck), and man I guess what colors I had to work with were really limited LMAO