I'd almost mark it as a (nonstandard) version of success: if you can keep making these things without being discouraged or running out of funding, it shows that you're doing well enough without external support. That can be cool too.

I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to publish said story, since it started as a chatbot experiment in spring of 2024 before becoming a serious story idea much later. But now that the world has retroactively made the story topical, maybe I will finish and release it.

I can't even get people who like my characters enough to get 3k words of feedback, much less inspire that much pointless rage. What did they hope to gain from this; did they say? The only thing I can imagine is "stop talking about them", where there is an objectively correct answer ("stop reading").

You can even see this in some fandoms for big companies, too. When Dragon Age and Mass Effect (both BioWare under EA) were both still releasing games regularly, it seems that only a vocal minority was a fan of both franchises. This led to EA trying to make DA more like ME with each installment.

I suspect this kind of thing must be common, because whenever I look at marketing advice for media it always says stuff about "don't experiment with your brand". Some advice I've seen basically says you should never have multiple genres attributed to the same pen name or brand name.

Over 20 projects? I wish I had the time and resources to have that many things going at once. Do you have time for much else besides writing and working on these projects?

2 is just reiterating my point in more detail. My entire argument is that no one has been able to create a tangible, unanimous definition of divinity. For 3, some religions don't establish genders for their deities, or have deities that can change gender at will... leading back to my point.

I realize I shouldn't engage, but...

1) To falsify the lack of divine beings, one would have to provide a tangible definition of divinity for the test. Even people in the same religion don't always agree on that (heresies).
2) People choose to ignore reality in their beliefs all the time.

"If god existed, we'd know about him by now."
- What if that being was not omnipresent, and too distant to be observed by human senses?
- Why does there have to be one or zero?
- Does a divine entity require a gender distinction?

It can go on, and no one is going to agree on the parameters.

This gets even worse with religious details, since such beliefs are usually too tied to someone's grasp of cosmology to untangle. For example, how do I explain to two people arguing over an omnipotent creator deity and total atheism that both of their belief systems are unfalsifiable?

Meanwhile, I use the Interactive Director even though it doesn't save me as much time as I feel it does. So misspellings are never a problem for me, but rollback errors are my bane.

(When changing image tags/transforms during rollback, sometimes the ID doesn't modify the script file correctly.)

Pickling is a way Python can save classes in a what is essentially a custom replay script, and the main method Ren'Py uses for save data. This is why classes that can't pickle give errors, and why it's technically possible to hack a computer with a Ren'Py save (which is a mini-program).

(Yes, this is about the second Fatal Frame 2 remake going back to the original design for the main character, and not using the cleavage window from the first remake.)

(And patronage really took a hit when the richest people of today are tech bros that really feel allergic to paying artists fairly...)

Today's rich people don't seem to have the same flair that the ultra-rich of, say, the Renaissance did. Instead of having cathedrals built and painted and named for them, they just buy a private island or design a truck that doesn't ever load in.