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[Chibi Altaria]

@Neo Emolga To be honest, I feel that anything that involves time travel has to be handled particularly carefully. I mean the idea itself has been done time and time again, but it's easy to lose track of things and find reasons to justify what you're doing. I also dislike a lot of those plots that send someone back in time to fix something and ultimately ends up rewriting EVERYTHING to the point when they first began, like the whole story never existed in the first place. To me that seems like a lot of wasted effort. If I write something, I want it to have an effect on the future. I want it to move forward. Not backwards.

[Neo Emolga]

@Neo Emolga To be honest, I feel that anything that involves time travel has to be handled particularly carefully. I mean the idea itself has been done time and time again, but it's easy to lose track of things and find reasons to justify what you're doing. I also dislike a lot of those plots that send someone back in time to fix something and ultimately ends up rewriting EVERYTHING to the point when they first began, like the whole story never existed in the first place. To me that seems like a lot of wasted effort. If I write something, I want it to have an effect on the future. I want it to move forward. Not backwards.

Yup, totally agree with everything you said there. Very few movies and stories have pulled off time travel well and like you said, it's a very delicate thing. When I tried to think of ideas for ToJ IV, I should have realized that struggle should have been a sign that it really wasn't meant to be.

And on a similar note, I realized this morning I am truly an optimist.

I had a pretty disturbing nightmare last night that was pretty freaky and gory with quite a few downright twisted things going on. One example was there was this young girl that was looking in a mirror to see in freakish horror that she had become a sickly and disfigured anthropomorphic rabbit, and everything she touched just withered, died, and decayed, including plants and even a wooden fence post she leaned against. There was another scene where a boy suddenly had his arms fall off, then his legs, and then his head separated from his body, and he was forced to get around as nothing more than a head that had to bop and up and down to get from one place to another. There were several other things that I only remember faintly, such as an old ballroom full of skeletons and one of them was a person I needed to find (I don't quite remember the reason), which suddenly became a reality that said hey, no matter which skeleton it is, they're dead, it doesn't matter anyway now. And then there was a part where some monks and some priestly guy lead the way down a hill with a stone staircase to an underground chamber, and I thought they were the good guys until they were doing some kind of demon summoning or dark ritual. As soon as I realized things were getting dark and they weren't who I thought they were, bam, I ran my butt out of there and looking back, they tried to hunt me down, but I managed to outrun them.

I woke up this morning, unfazed about it, and began to think of ways to make what happened in the dream a neat horror story that might be intriguing and suspenseful given the right plot implementation, context, and mechanics (not to mention there was a lot of stuff that seemed out of sequential order). Halfway through the brainstorming process, I suddenly realized what I was doing and began to think "wow, talk about taking a bad thing and making it work for you!" Writing horror is usually out of my comfort zone, but hey, you don't learn anything new unless you try something different.

[Chakramaster]

Yup, totally agree with everything you said there. Very few movies and stories have pulled off time travel well and like you said, it's a very delicate thing. When I tried to think of ideas for ToJ IV, I should have realized that struggle should have been a sign that it really wasn't meant to be.

And on a similar note, I realized this morning I am truly an optimist.

I had a pretty disturbing nightmare last night that was pretty freaky and gory with quite a few downright twisted things going on. One example was there was this young girl that was looking in a mirror to see in freakish horror that she had become a sickly and disfigured anthropomorphic rabbit, and everything she touched just withered, died, and decayed, including plants and even a wooden fence post she leaned against. There was another scene where a boy suddenly had his arms fall off, then his legs, and then his head separated from his body, and he was forced to get around as nothing more than a head that had to bop and up and down to get from one place to another. There were several other things that I only remember faintly, such as an old ballroom full of skeletons and one of them was a person I needed to find (I don't quite remember the reason), which suddenly became a reality that said hey, no matter which skeleton it is, they're dead, it doesn't matter anyway now. And then there was a part where some monks and some priestly guy lead the way down a hill with a stone staircase to an underground chamber, and I thought they were the good guys until they were doing some kind of demon summoning or dark ritual. As soon as I realized things were getting dark and they weren't who I thought they were, bam, I ran my butt out of there and looking back, they tried to hunt me down, but I managed to outrun them.

I woke up this morning, unfazed about it, and began to think of ways to make what happened in the dream a neat horror story that might be intriguing and suspenseful given the right plot implementation, context, and mechanics (not to mention there was a lot of stuff that seemed out of sequential order). Halfway through the brainstorming process, I suddenly realized what I was doing and began to think "wow, talk about taking a bad thing and making it work for you!" Writing horror is usually out of my comfort zone, but hey, you don't learn anything new unless you try something different.

Honestly the whole "time travel" you mentioned is like you said. it's gotta be taken with care. I personally love it! The whole concept of it itself IS a paradox. I just can't help, but to think of it that way now. There's an infinite number of ways people can make a story about it now. BUT, it still has to be handled with care so the idea can be interesting.

Most recently I read a fanfic where someone tried using it. It had never occurred to me before that you could use time travel that way (and while it still perplexes my mind, I think it could kinda work....maybe in some universes). Like the way they ran it was odd to think about at first. They went back in time, but someone went back further than them to get a head start advantage on them. So they find a way to go back to where he went to stop him, BUT end up deciding to go back further to before he appears....and then try and shoot themselves back to the present so before he arrived so it's as if it never happened.

So at first...I thought that wouldn't work, but then I remembered. "Timelines." The infinite number of timelines is exactly why! Well that and a paradox happening, because once again he was changing something that was meant to happen. So upon him changing that he will cease to exist causing what he's doing to never happen back in the past which changes what he changed back to the original timeline, thus a paradox.

Man I could theorize on timelines for so long >.>

[Neo Emolga]

With time travel, you have to consider it before coming up with anything in the plot, and that's where ToJ IV screwed up. When I write my stories, I wing things and I don't start planning the ending until I get about three quarters of the way to the end. The time travel element in ToJ was shoehorned in and it made a royal disaster out of everything that happened before. That was definitely not a smart idea just for the sake of having another addition to the saga. Not to mention half of it was just spent rehashing what happened in ToJ III, just from a different viewpoint. That probably bored a few people.

PMD2 is a great example of how time travel can work beautifully, but it has to be planned and considered from the very moment you start writing. They definitely didn't shoehorn it in for that game's story. When it used right, it can be a very interesting storyline tool, but when used wrong, it's like using hedge-clippers for driving in nails. You can't have the wrong tool for the job. :P

[Chakramaster]

With time travel, you have to consider it before coming up with anything in the plot, and that's where ToJ IV screwed up. When I write my stories, I wing things and I don't start planning the ending until I get about three quarters of the way to the end. The time travel element in ToJ was shoehorned in and it made a royal disaster out of everything that happened before. That was definitely not a smart idea just for the sake of having another addition to the saga. Not to mention half of it was just spent rehashing what happened in ToJ III, just from a different viewpoint. That probably bored a few people.

PMD2 is a great example of how time travel can work beautifully, but it has to be planned and considered from the very moment you start writing. They definitely didn't shoehorn it in for that game's story. When it used right, it can be a very interesting storyline tool, but when used wrong, it's like using hedge-clippers for driving in nails. You can't have the wrong tool for the job. :P

Well if you ever need help coming up with time travel ideas throw me a notice! I love the concept and thinking up connections to those things. It's a big reason I love series like Back to the Future, PMD 2, Steins;Gate, etc

[Neo Emolga]

Well if you ever need help coming up with time travel ideas throw me a notice! I love the concept and thinking up connections to those things. It's a big reason I love series like Back to the Future, PMD 2, Steins;Gate, etc

Not sure if you've played TimeSplitters, but holy crap, that series is awesome. It's a more humorous first person shooter that has both a great single player and multiplayer mode. Ever wanted to have cowboys vs aliens vs robots vs gangsters? Bam. It's pretty much a first person shooter of the game Mash Up. XD

Anyway, yeah, I don't think I'd be doing another story with time travel again any time soon. I've also noticed time travel almost never works for a role play either. Unless if you can keep all the characters together (very unlikely), it would be a quick mess if everyone is in different time eras and people are doing things that should be affecting one another.

[Bulbasaur]

So my new computer keeps freezing up or restarting within 30 minutes of using it. It's not overheating. Anyone got an idea of what could be happening?

[Neo Emolga]

Seems like Photobucket is dying today. I've been having to move stuff over to Imgur because everything I've linked on Photobucket is suddenly dead and gone.

It sucks, Photobucket used to be really good, and they totally screwed it up when they did that lame redesign a few years back. >.<

[Fate]

Seems like Photobucket is dying today. I've been having to move stuff over to Imgur because everything I've linked on Photobucket is suddenly dead and gone.

It sucks, Photobucket used to be really good, and they totally screwed it up when they did that lame redesign a few years back. >.<

Oh, thank god. (Not that this is a good thing.) All day I've been thinking it was just me.

I used to use Photobucket, but nowadays I use Imgur exclusively. Limited, but it's got fast uploads and is easy to organize. I stopped using Photobucket after it implemented that dumbass auto-sorting feature. Suddenly, my recently uploaded images ended up somewhere I couldn't find. Does it still do that?

[Neo Emolga]

Oh, thank god. (Not that this is a good thing.) All day I've been thinking it was just me.

I used to use Photobucket, but nowadays I use Imgur exclusively. Limited, but it's got fast uploads and is easy to organize. I stopped using Photobucket after it implemented that dumbass auto-sorting feature. Suddenly, my recently uploaded images ended up somewhere I couldn't find. Does it still do that?

Yeah, it still does that. >.<

It's also slower, I hate the thumbnail previews, and the links keep wanting to redirect back to Photobucket itself and not the direct image. Seriously, if Photobucket croaked, I honestly wouldn't miss it. I only still use it because most of my stuff is still on it.