First and most relevantly, I understand that this website has been around since the turn of the millennium, but I feel like having twenty years of experience should have led it to have a slightly more adaptable (and less confusing) interface. Like, it's taken me most of the day to go through every single option and roughly learn what I can do (and to use an Incognito window to check changes I've made to my profile from a reader's POV), so don't be surprised if you find some random errors here and there.

Second, personal information. I'm male, born in December of '95 (making me Twenty-Five as of pre-December 2021), and Australian (Welsh heritage. Don't be surprised if some British slang or culturally-incomprehensible metaphor pops up in a fic). Don't expect much more from me: any information that comes up in Self-Inserts will be either harmless to share, deliberately misleading, or carefully curated (the name Jason Townsend, for example, is relevant to my family but isn't used by any of them). I know better than to willingly give away identifiable/incriminating information on the internet.

Finally, what I write is in the vast majority of cases, directly inspired by other sources. It's also, more importantly, written for me, myself and I, as an exploration of myself and trying to answer my own questions about my morality (which I find much easier when the person I'm asking will respond like I would, but typically holds a position of power I never will. After all, "nothing discloses real character like the use of power"). My reason for posting any of my work is partly because I've read a lot of fic's over the last decade and I'd like to give back to the community, and partly because my family have encouraged me to put something out into the world and think highly of my writing skill. Having a Self-Insert will be nigh-mandatory, mostly because I can't justify characters being influenced or developing OoC traits unless I have a medium with which to 'mould' them. Having the Self-Insert be at least noticeably-strong compared to the general populace is usually because the only way to interfere with an established plot is to have the power to turn heads, or plot contrivances that often reinforce that the OC (which, let's be honest, is what almost all SI's tend to become) is being put into these circumstances by the writer, rather than making the decision themselves. Also, if I was Inserted into a story, I would immediately question how such a thing occurred and would most likely finger a friendly ROB as the cause (because I'd be at their mercy either way and a malicious ROB would probably just kill me on the spot. A Random Omnipotent Being typically doesn't get to where they are by being incompetent and making mistakes, unless they're at the point of deliberate carelessness and casual cruelty), and deliberately inserting myself into a situation without a strong sense of agency would convince the SI that there was no point in putting themselves into the line of fire, and therefore having minimal effects on the setting and being an exercise in pointlessness. And, y'know, putting yourself in a deliberately-awful situation is a dick move.

And yes, that means things will generally go well in my stories, solely because I write for escapism's sake and there is WAY too much depressing shit in the world, especially in this day and age. That doesn't mean things won't go badly from time to time, just that a happy ending should always be earnable through reasonable effort.

Recommendations for finding good fics: Reddit, TVTropes, and word count. The first two are websites with sections dedicated to Fanfic Recs, and the third is the simple act of setting yourself a minimum word count and searching any of the traditional websites (SpaceBattles, SufficientVelocity, QuestionableQuesting, ArchiveOfOurOwn, etc) with that in mind. You can't always run a search engine with those kinds of terms in them on a given website, but a 'good fic' typically isn't under twenty thousand words, simply because any story (regardless of medium) worth spending your time on typically needs payoff of some kind, lest it hype you up for no reason.

If there's a specific fic I think is worth telling people about, I'll put it down at the bottom of my summary. If you want one, search for it yourself.

Creative endeavours I recommend for creative's who don't know where to start: CYOA (Choose Your Own Adventure) games are extremely common, and can always serve as starting points from which you can adapt ideas or run entire stories from. The two most notable I know of are the Conduit CYOA (based on travelling to Original Settings but causing effects on your home realm where you use 'Bridges' to travel from), currently backed up on 1d4chan dot org, and the JumpChain CYOA (which will coincidentally be my first port of call in fiction-writing), based on being sent to various IP and picking up supernatural abilities that are often considered normal by the standards of the setting, with the end-goal of obtaining a MTG Planeswalker Spark. Just about everything up to now can be found in the following Google Drive: drive dot google dot com forwardslash drive forwardslash folders forwardslash 1kGrOvocAj37D5TOCUcVNaT1xvKnnuqjE.

Recommendations for original fiction: the Animorphs series (and just about anything else) by Katherine Applegate is really damn good, and inspired me as a kid to get into reading (mostly because I liked the premise of focusing on the action and noting how the main characters were affected in their downtime by the actions they were often confronted with or forced to take, impressing a sense of deadpan realism while keeping enough slice-of-life elements to build the characterisations and drive home the impact of fighting a near-hopeless war combined with the mundane realities of teenage life).

Also, Mother of Learning by nobody103 (currently hosted on FictionPress)

Recommendations for anything else: this ain't really the place to discuss the merits of Age Of Empires Online's Celeste servers and Civilisation 4's Caveman2Cosmos mod, or whether Mashups are better than Remixes, or whether or not you should watch Some More News on YouTube. If you're interested in Hearthstone, look it up yourself.

Author recommendations: NoodleHammer (hosted on FFN), Ack1308 (FFN), Saphroneth (FFN),

With This Ring by MrZoat (currently hosted on QQ, previously on SB and SV respectively)
Sure As The Setting Sun by bunnyscribe (hosted on AO3)
This Bites! by Xomniac (hosted on FFN)
A Twelve Step Program To Omnipotence by Bakkughan

More to come... whenever, I guess.