Warning: DitLs are inherently spoily. If you don't want to be spoiled, please leave now!

A DitL is "A Day in the Life"; in other words, the journaled progress of a given character. The purposes of a DitL are:

This page is also the one to use to link to other ToME-related creative efforts, such as fan fiction, haikus, original artwork, etc.

Please play nice: Do not modify text that the DitL or fanfic author has shared, other than to place footnotes and/or anchors -- your actual commentary should be below the main body of text. (Moderators reserve the right to edit if necessary.) Anything else you add to an existing thread should be in a Chatter section, at least until we've evolved a better method. Please feel free to make relevant suggestions on Wiki Suggestions.

Contents

  1. Recommendations for creating a DitL thread
  2. Day in the Life (DitL) Threads
  3. Fan Fiction Threads
  4. DitL-based Learning Competition
  5. Chatter

Recommendations for creating a DitL thread

IMPORTANT:

  1. If you are copying over a thread from the forum, please copy only your own posts. Yes, this does break up discussion, but it is a copyright issue.
  2. Please mark a copied thread as (copied), so that readers can look back to the original thread via the Archive if they want to read all the missing commentary.

Day in the Life (DitL) Threads

Thank you for sharing! Please add new threads at the bottom of the list.

The original archive from the forum lists the other Day in the Life stories not yet included here. Archive threads copied here contain numerous comments which have not, for copyright reasons, been copied to the wiki. Therefore, for additional information, consult the Archive.

Fan Fiction Threads

DitL-based Learning Competition

DitLs could be a useful way to get your characters past "humps" in the game where they tend to die very often. This learning competition is intended for a group to play a character together and write parallel DitLs in the spirit of learning from each other and improving play style.

This is not the kind of competition that confers on its winners the glory of a Lord Dimwit or a Neil Stevens. It draws on group contributions to aid individual gameplay, and brings a bonus "fun" aspect through interesting DitLs.

This is not to understate the importance of our personal achievements through this competition.

A new character is decided (about) every month. There will be multiple winners in a month, one at each goal level. Goals are self-selected and based on CL or DL.

Click this link to read competition rules and post your DitLs:

/LearningCompetition

Chatter

MayLith: Will the forum website continue to exist? If so, we can link directly to the non-copied existing stories there, which would be extremely convenient. In that situation, I'd recommend copying over the text of Z's archive to this location and making links out of that list.

Ideally, I'd like to see this top page contain:

It would be very nice if the links to individual stories could somehow be datestamped to show when they've been updated. If that is possible, a boilerplate example of how to do that should also be on this page, IMHO.

ReenenLaurie: It took me less than 30m I guess to do yours. But that is a lot for the amount that's been going around. (30x30 = 900m)

MayLith: Thank you!!!

ZizzoTheInfinite: One thing I've been wondering about is the various discussion subthreads interspersed through most if not all of the DitLs in the forum. I notice those were left out of Slappy's tale above, and that's probably fine for copying over existing finished DitLs from the forum;

but if the forum eventually goes the way of the dodo, or even if it doesn't, we'll likely have DitLs starting and progressing here on the wiki.

Will we want discussion threads for those, and if so, how should it be implemented? Perhaps something as simple as a "Chatter" section like this one at the bottom of the DitL page?

MayLith: To be honest, I hadn't noticed the discussion subthreads where missing from Slappy's tale; I was just very appreciative that it had been copied over. The thing is, what I noticed with Slappy was that some of the side discussion seemed to be quite useful to some readers. In a mature wiki, maybe that discussion shouldn't remain in a DitL, but the high points could be distilled out into FAQs, Documentation, Strategy and/or Spoilers as necessary... if it had to be. Personally, I find that the comments from readers add welcome personality and flavor to the tale itself, so I'd just as soon NOT split it out (though copying over sounds like a good idea.)

As for the format, I don't know. One thing I like about the original forum is the ease of quoting part of a previous post and then making a comment. That can be done here, too, but more awkwardly. A "Chatter" section is better than nothing, for sure, but the nice thing about a DitL forum thread is that comments by readers are almost always germane to a specific section the story. For a third person to try to re-index between a Chatter comment and some obscure place in the story sounds almost impossibly obscure.

Hmmmm... *sounds of mulling* The only alternative I can think of is to use a Chatter section, and the commenters implant footnotes (linked to Chatter) into the actual DitL, without changing anything else on the DitL itself. Would that work?

NeilStevens: That would seem to be an excellent use of the footnote system.

MayLith: See the Wiki FAQ on how to create footnotes.

FuriousOne: I'm going to try and do some of the DiTLs / prettify existing ones next week.

MayLith: Wonderful! Just watch the commentary... we're going to have to figure out how to do that one. :?

FuriousOne: I guess I'll leave the commentary alone for a while, since I wouldn't want to use others' words without their permission, and that's quite a few people. However, perhaps we should leave links to the forum threads for now (maybe under an Original thread: heading) and figure out how to deal with them later. For new DiTLs, we can use the footnotes, obviously:)

MayLith: *nods* I wish I could copy Slappy over in full, as there's a LOT of discussion in there, but that's how it goes. (And btw, I formally give ReenenLaurie retroactive permission for copying her over ;-) Plus many thanks.)

Regarding the existing forum DitLs, I think probably the *easiest* thing to do (with ZasVid's permission) is to echo and amplify upon the Archive here -- i.e.:

Things to think about: For sizeable DitLs, the commentary can get quite long. At what point do we break it up into a separate page (if that even happens?) And if we're using a footnote system, that'll break every single footnote.....urgh......

ZizzoTheInfinite: My current plan, when I eventually put up a DitL on the wiki, is to put a Chatter section after each piece as I put it up, and delete empty Chatter sections as I go. That would probably be closest to how it worked on the forum.

MayLith: That is a very good idea. If you named them Chatter1, Chatter2 (or whatever) you could then still use a TOC, and retain any chatter you wanted, or delete (as you say) a chatter heading that doesn't get any entries.

StarweaverBlue: An idea for handling long long threads: when writing, break off each page after 20,000 or 40,000 words (I have no idea what would be considered "too big"), into a foostory/part2 page. Repeat. Link the pages together reasonably and keep links to the most recent part or two on line for the story in the index here. Doing this will keep the chatter with the relevant parts without fuss even if you're using footnotes and space-epoxy.

FuriousOne: Good idea. I just attempted to prettify /Slappy and, well, it's tres long and le cumbersome to edit, as they say in France. Perhaps we could even come up with a series of templates for DiTLs - if we expect people to use the Wiki rather than the fora for DiTLs (and the fora are, at this point, admittedly more convenient for this kind of thing ;))... It would make posting a DiTL a bit more involved, I guess. We could have 'Character information', 'CL 0 - 25' 'Midgame' and 'Late game' - these are just what comes to mind off the top of my head, I'll have to mull over a little more.

MayLith: Merci bien for helping, Furiosity. I've been mulling this one quite a lot, too. As for templating...that's a good thought. Personally, I feel more *comfortable* DitL'ing on the forum. Even though footnoting/etc is possible on the wiki, it's cumbersome as all get-out and (I think) detrimental to feedback, especially for those who just want to make a quick relevant comment and are not well-versed in wiki.

The one thing I keep coming back to is using the forum for DiTL'ing and just indexing them here to make them more findable. (And yes, this goes totally against the whole purpose of the wiki, and maybe someday we can figure out how to make it work here.)

Another idea is this one: When you first create a DitL on the forum, include a "standard disclaimer" which says that the thread will eventually be copied in toto to the wiki, so anyone who posts automatically gives permission for that. At the bottom of each posted installment, a brief reminder of that could be made.... or something....

(just assorted musings before I hie myself off to work... I hate 12-9 shifts!)

ZizzoTheInfinite: One more question: The expressed preference for forum DitLs (expressed to me, at least) was for smaller segments posted more frequently as opposed to longer segments posted less frequently. Does that carry over to the wiki, or is this format better suited to putting up more story at once? Shorter segments would mean more opportunity to insert Chatter sections, but that by the same token might make the story flow too choppy (which was unavoidable on the forum, and so less of an issue). Thoughts?

MayLith: Hmm... I think I still prefer relatively short segments. The reason for this is that I had trouble reading a few extremely long-segmented DiTLs over on the forum. Well, no, I can read just fine. :) What I mean is, reading them was more like sitting back with a book. While I love to read books, when I'm on the forum or on the wiki there are many posts/threads to read and I'd just as soon not spend 45 minutes reading one monster post after another.

OTOH, there's at least one poster (I forget who) who wanted no comments at all and was quite concerned about flow. That's fine, too. I just think if you're going to post that way, you ought to warn your readers.

Also, I just had an idea a few minutes ago. What if we had a round-robin story-writing thing? We could post a sign-up list, and then each person could do their writing and cross their name off the list and let the next person go.... or something... maybe do it all on different pages (no peeking) and combine it at the end.... anyway.... I have to get back to work. Later!

LandrusTheAstonished: I do have a Very Stupid Question™ - what are all the trademarks about as in Bad Thing™? I recognize, what it should mean and I have seen it all over different places in blogs and so on, but I am curious were this originated from. Does anybody know this? The orogin of those trademarks? Maybe a page dedicated to this?

ZizzoTheInfinite: That'd be me, I suppose… :o Mostly humorous affectation, at least in my case, but it draws some of its heritage from a bit of hacker jargon. And Now You Know™. ;)

LandrusTheAstonished: Hmm, not exactly you alone. At least the "Bad Thing™" is wildly used in newsgroups mailinglists and so on. So I thought it shared some more common thought. See hacker jargon: Bad Thing.

Draeath: I've noticed that 'archive' is repeatedly spelled as 'archive' on this page. Before I went to correct it, I noticed it's also misspelled on the forum... is this intentional?

NeilStevens: Just looks like an error to me.

Draeath: Fixed. Sorry all, but it was bugging me...

RiLoKi: Just a thought but with the unorganized sprawl of the DitL page, I got an idea. Perhaps the owners of the respective ditls could move them into subfolders marked with their names, or perhaps by mod-name? It's a hastle yes, but it would make it look so much more orderly.

DayInTheLifeArchive (last edited 2009-06-07 18:58:39 by TorrentialRain)