WillowDarkling

The author never managed to actually make it clear what this MC’s eyes looked like, although the MC spent an inordinate amount of time staring at herself in a mirror. And changing clothes. And falling down and crawling.
I swear, there is not enough brain bleach in the universe, sometimes.  

I can now process people, and I’ve caught up as of now.  Thanks for your patience.

Update: It’s still currently impossible for me to process people to join the forum.  I can only apologise, but it’s just as frustrating to me.

Hm. That’s a rather awkward visual. I’m also not sure if the building is two stories high, if the crystals are two stories high, if the crystals are supporting the building off the ground, or if it’s the crystals or building creating the light.
Now, Greco-Roman architecture is not all that hard to describe. In general, the buildings would have columns in front, stairs leading up to the doorway, which could be wide and open or with a stout wooden door, depending on the usage, and a peaked roof. I’d drag out all the proper terms for each component, but anyone can Google that. The point is that it’s not hard to describe a structure if you approach it logically:
“After a short trek in the ankle high water, Loric found what looked to be some kind of temple ruins. Blue crystalline columns supported the structure, rising at least three meters out of the water, and their radiance illuminated the pale stone of the temple. The remnants of a broad stair, flanked by tall columns capped with intricate carvings, led up to an intimidatingly dark opening beneath the crumbling pediment.”
Or something to that effect…  
 

I know a lot of fanfics break with their ‘verse to reference things in other ‘verses, but speaking only for myself, I think it’s lazy writing. I mean, it’s just as easy to say that a mask covered only the eyes and nose of a character, leaving their mouth uncovered as it is to say they wore a mask like Batman when Batman isn’t part of their ‘verse at all. 
It’s really the writer’s choice, when you come down to it. When I do write fanfic, I try to stick to my ‘verse and not drag in references that wouldn’t fit. Same thing with dialogue. I try not to use expressions or slang that doesn’t fit my ‘verse. Can you imagine a character from LotR making a reference to something out of Harry Potter? It takes the reader right out of the story. I mean, would Glorfindel order butterbeer? Of course not. He’d rather have miruvor, or a good Dorwinion wine. 

I would only use the Iron Man/Optimus Prime description if you are describing the armored character from the POV of another character who would be familiar with those franchises. In that instance, the description would actually serve double duty, telling you what the armored character looks like while also telling you something about the observer (eg, that they’re from Earth in the 1980s or later, and that they’re into scifi and such).

For me, it very much depends on what I’m writing. If it’s set in a world of my own creation, there wouldn’t be anyone who knew who Ironman or Optimus Prime were, so that sort of description would be meaningless. 
If I were writing something set on future-day Earth, however, then those references would be applicable, and if I was going for a touch of humor, I might even use them. It would really depend on whether or not I was going for a grim mood or something more sardonic, I suppose.

This issue has been cleared up, and the Non-English subdomain of the Archive is now available for viewing again. Please let us know if you run into any other problems. Our coder is hard at work fixing the problems, but it takes time. 

Due to the recent server migration not going as smoothly as hoped for, it’s currently impossible to approve people to join the forum.  Some people may also be having issues with the archive.  This is being worked on and will be rectified as soon as possible.

I’m able to view the NonEnglish subdomain without issue.
I recommend clearing your browser’s history and cache, closing the browser, and restarting it. Navigate to AFF and try opening the subdomain, and it should open properly for you.

The forum doesn’t have the option of saving a post as a draft, as that would cause unnecessary database loads.

As with just about anything, this didn’t go as smoothly as it could have and should  have, given that it’s an intracompany transfer, from Nexcess to LiquidWeb, their parent company.  So, instead of finishing up by, say the 3rd, we finally finished this all up by the 19th.  Having said all that, I have to say I am really excited about the change, and here’s why.
SSL finally works as intended moving from Interworx to cPanel has made a huge difference.  We can actually tailor PHP needs to different subdomains.  For example, the forum needs 8.x, and has that version.  The archive is on 7.x.  Manta is working on bringing all of it up to 8.x  The ability to use the later versions of both PHP and my SQL are necessary to be able to implement things that we could NOT in lesser versions. The hardware is worlds away from what we used to have.  More powerful, and efficient. Much better physical virus protection Much better spam protection Mind you, Manta and I both tend to work a bunch IRL, so the SNAFU on the timeline really, really, put a wrench in things.  
 
BIG BIG thank you to Manta for carrying the load during this migration, as work, as it tends to do, wouldn’t let me have time off for much of anything.  Go figure.

That did the trick. Thank you! 

Hey, George. I’ve already mentioned this problem in our migration issues thread, so hopefully Manta will see it soon. But a temporary work around is to go to the very bottom of the page and switch the theme of the forum to “FantasyBeast” theme, and then you should see the standard three lines indicating a drop down menu at the top to the right of the Adult fan fiction banner.

Hey, George. I’ve already mentioned this problem in our migration issues thread, so hopefully Manta will see it soon. But a temporary work around is to go to the very bottom of the page and switch the theme of the forum to “FantasyBeast” theme, and then you should see the standard three lines indicating a drop down menu at the top to the right of the Adult fan fiction banner.

Yes, but they all have real life jobs and homes to take care of, and one of them is in the Southern Hemisphere, so on a totally different timezone than any of us. Plus, we are all volunteers. We’re not some heavily funded conglomerate. We are not on here 24/7, so give people time to at least catch up. 

Oh no! What is your username on discord? I can help

I saw this in the Malwarbyte’s blog, and thought I’d pass it on:
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/scams/2022/07/discord-shame-channel-goes-phishing/
I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but… never click on anything sent to you that you didn’t ask for, and never share any information based on a random post/text/Discord/tweet/Snap or any other forum. Don’t click the link, don’t scan the QR code, don’t feed the trolls, and stay safe!

Yes, but they all have real life jobs and homes to take care of, and one of them is in the Southern Hemisphere, so on a totally different timezone than any of us. Plus, we are all volunteers. We’re not some heavily funded conglomerate. We are not on here 24/7, so give people time to at least catch up. 

The forum software isn't our to edit, so that would only be possible if that feature exists in the software. That is for our admin to answer, though, since they are the only ones with access to the software. 

A fresh link is up! Sorry for the wait!

We pinned it back in 2016 so members would see it and hopefully respond. To be quite honest, I’m not the Forum Admin, so I don’t routinely check to see what’s pinned or not. I’m Archive staff, which keeps me busy enough. But I’ve unpinned this thread so it won’t appear on top anymore.

We love when one of our members publishes a book, and we’re happy to hear about it. However, we generally expect that such publications, if offered for sale, are original works. We all know you can’t make money from someone else’s copyrighted work because that’s illegal.
So, I’ve hidden the entire post because AFF does not countenance the sale of fan fiction, and the theft of copyrighted work. If you want to take the chance that you won’t get sued by the copyright owner, that’s your call, but AFF will not risk being shut down so you can sell fan fiction for money.

As you might have seen in an earlier post, we are going to be moving the archive to new server hardware, scheduled at the moment for July 1. Because this is a physical change, there will likely be some unavoidable downtime for the archive. So please, if the archive does become inaccessible, bear with us and we promise, we'll be right back!
One of the advantages of our new server will be stronger security measures, and we expect the recent spate of missing validation emails to go away once we've completed the transition. Right now, the registration problem is confined to anyone using a gmail address to register. (Our wonderful coder, manta2g, managed to fix the issues we were having with Microsoft email clients.) For the moment, new registrations are being manually updated, to bypass the need for the validation link. It can take 24 hours or so to process the manual updates, and we thank you for your continued patience.

There will be downtime at 2 am EDT on July 13th to replace part of the RAID array.  Also, the migration is nearly done