5/5/2011

3/16/2026 2:40 AM

25685

11

13 wins / 25 losses

Lauded Sage Exemplar

>DEVOTION

A Stack of Cats

You are a man on a mission. The cats, they must be stacked.

A puzzling math and logic game I made just to put some of the scripting practice I've been doing to use. Have fun and please let me know if you encounter any bugs.

Should be solvable by middle schoolers, or those with same basic level of intelligence as a middle schooler.

Agent of Order

Orbiting a barren planetoid in a system full of nothing just past the edge of the frontier, The Last Outpost is just another refueling station. Strategically important, true, but on a routine stop you never expected to spend longer than a couple hours there, let alone a couple of days fighting for your life...

There are five epilogues, but some may be difficult to discover. Note that actions have consequences, but not always immediate ones. (And if you just need an End Game link, go play around with the probe.)

Facts About the Planet and the Solar System

A compilation of some little known facts about the solar system, as well as the debunking of a few myths.

In addition to the scientific explanations, there's a small story dramatizing it all.

Hopefully young readers will find this fun as well as educational. :)

(Might not be the greatest story ever written, but consider this: it got me 200 points.)

Inseparable

It doesn't matter what they say...

Jack the Bean Counter

KOBOLD KEBABS

For Endmaster's 4th Prompt Contest. The story must involve a cooking competition.

Love is for the Birds

...and the squirrels. Sort of.



Written in six hours, for no other reason than to avoid consignment to the SHAME pit after my other Romance contest entry didn't want to cooperate.

Now You Gotta Deal With This S***

A tale told in verse. A text from your sister requesting a pick up from a party leads to a night of strangeness.

Inspired by Bucky's ballad contest. Though...I wouldn't call this a ballad. I'm not sure what I'd call it, actually, other than exceedingly stupid, and fun to write.

(Don't pay any attention to the scores, they're just for me to track which endings reviewers get.)

Read My Stories or Die!

HATE.

THE PURITY AND INTENSITY OF MY HATE IS LIKE A THOUSAND MERCILESS, UNQUENCHABLE SUNS.

AND YET, I ONLY NEED ONE...


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silver Horn, Silver Hooves

When the weather is fine, you've been coming to this grove to drink from the pool for centuries now. Today, you meet a stranger and hear a story that changes all that...



A fairy tale adventure.

Another Damn Wolf Story

unpublished

Character Creator

unpublished

A list of storygames with substantial effort put in, all written in the last couple of years and sorely in need of ratings and reviews.

A modernized guide to the forums. The path to internet popularity and happiness, and a few CYS specific do's and don'ts.

This would be basically another topic, but there is no perception of "CYOAs" among children, that's a series of books from the 70s and 80s, and I'm not sure an equivalent for kids currently exists. The content of many of the original books would be too morbid, though I know they've toned down and edited some for republishing. But most similar things you see now are written by indie authors for adults; End's got a whole thread bragging about his. But mostly as far as what I think most people would be encountering, choice based narratives and other IF trappings (aside from actual IF) have been folded into many different genres of indie and mainstrean games, and even to movies like Bandersnatch. Which is all beside the actual point here. Will has been saying he mispoke, so whatever, but if you're arguing that mature content doesn't belong on a site about fiction "for children", then it sure sounds like you're saying mature content doesn't belong, full stop. That goes waaaay beyond the scope of the OP, and that along with the monetization remark and the general thrust of CYS being a big failure that needs to get those numbers up!! is the thing that I and several others have been responding to. But I really am going to go to bed now lol.

It always baffled me a little that someone's preteen could just be sitting there going absolutely unhinged while frantically making alts, and mom and dad noticed nothing amiss. (14 and up is easier to understand, that's the age when these kinds of kids start growing mold hunched over a screen in their rooms, so mom and dad aren't seeing all the porn and execution videos either, or hearing the alt right influencers the algorithm steered them to while their gamer friends are threatening to rape them.) But as far as CYS, 2017-2018 was the peak of toxicity of the kind that Will's upset about anyway, with it slowly fading through 2019. It was kind of a strategized thing in some ways, it was vitally necessary to sandblast the gay furries and anime twinks of the Bad Mod era off the site, and we had Steve at the forefront of that. Steve was a bit legendary, he was a very self impressed, drunk, degenerate, bisexual asshole who could switch effortlessly between charming Irish bastard to masterful ragebaiter to highly abrasive cunt, he'd switch between them for fun to keep people off balance while he argued them into the ground. (Lawyer was a good career choice for him.) And it was very much a double edged sword, he could drive us all into a gibbering fury too, but he was protected by incredible writing output. Also at that time CoG was known for its users on the "histrionic woke" end of the spectrum, and we were living rent free in their heads apparently (this iirc was a little before what happened to Avery and Price of Freedom, so we didn't hate them as a company yet, we just marvel at the ridiculous culture.) Anyway, they were always lurking the forums and you could make them real mad that they couldn't police it, so they'd retreat to their own little spaces to whine and bitch while we'd laugh at them in ours. CoG actually turned on most of them later and banned these lolcows of yore, they were bad for the business side of things.

Really getting all these serious testimonials here, I never knew how much you struggled with that stuff until you brought it up today. (I still want to smack your parents hard in the face with something.) I remember reading a few of those Goosebumps CYOAs too. (The actual Goosebumps books were basically a currency traded around in middle school.) I'm assuming most younger users wouldn't be familiar with the books today so much as how branching choices are integrated into RPGs or the Telltale games and the like. Or VNs if we're being real. Which reminds me, I wish I could hand around a fresh round of King of Dragon Pass keys to help the new generation be more based, but they're all on shitty Chromebooks now so that's not going to work. :(

He doesn't come up often anymore, but "Pedo Mod Kiel" we used to call him, that was the hint.

(I also name dropped him right here a little further up the thread, this thing sure has grown fast.)

The Shrimp Jam output was nuts. I'm pretty excited to do another one although I'm not crossing my fingers for so much response again, it might just be that the stars aligned for this one.

There is no Wholesome Dog big enough for this. Thanks for sharing it all, I got kind of emotional there too.

I feel like I've brought this up a few times, so I know you realize this EXACT topic was pinned in the Newbie Board a few months ago, after being brought up by a newbie, using the same IP as a banned spammer while obviously lying about not knowing them in real life? And you know this person still has an account and was logged in just today, as it was mentioned in his very thread. It's not REALLY some astonishing thing this thread didn't dissolve into "raging insults" or that you didn't get banned, the edgy toxic racist community that you thought would do so only exists in your head.

Goddammit, did you try to eat the cookbook with buttered peanut butter and syrup?

Just a little aside here, but we all know that entire classrooms use the site, and I noticed that when an author of published Amazon novels put one of his stories here at the end of January he pretty quickly got 11 ratings--compared to two ratings at Amazon since 2024. Characterizing CYS as dead somehow is insane, I'd ask for exanples of other hobbyist sites that have lasted this long with an active and vibrant community still in place, or other hobbyist writing sites at all that give substantial feedback of any kind to new authors, but Will hasn't seemed big on providing examples for the things he says in general. Hell, my other ancient niche interest is the Adrift engine for parser IF, and they're lucky to get five posts a month on their forum, and maybe that many games in a year.

Nah dude, you can't backpedal out of this one. Mature content has no place on a site like CYS devoted to fanfic of children's stories, that's the thing you just said and how you apparently actually believe the site should be. This goes way beyond whatever your perception of the forum is now. And I must just have a little more confidence in the community, since I'm pretty sure people who are capable of writing publishable work also have the ability to use Google. (To see how they too can turn a thousand hours of Frankenstein surgery on their vision into something suitable for horny Facebook moms, for less than they'd make in six weeks part time at McDonalds. Hint: just add werewolves! Sexy ones.)