u/Daddy-forge

for the longest time, it felt like every big crypto story came out of the US.

memecoins/politics/ETF headlines

meanwhile Europe has been doing something that's a lot less exciting to read about, but probably more important over the long run

It's been figuring out what the rules of the game actually are

not saying every regulation is a win and some of it will probably slow things down

but ya if the goal is getting someone to make recurring investment with stability instead of chasing the next 100x token, a market with clearer rules feels a lot less intimidating

It also explains why European-first platforms like bitpanda seem to come up more often in conversations than they did a few years ago (not complaining)

it fits what a lot of newer investors seem to be looking for

the irony is how the boring part of crypto might end up being one of the biggest reasons more people actually stick around

I've read manga my whole life and almost no prose fiction until a couple years ago, so when I started writing my own progression fantasy web serial I just naturally tried to pace it the way my favorite manga paces things. Big fight, aftermath, a training arc, a tournament arc, escalate the power ceiling, repeat

what I didn't account for is that manga gets an entire visual language to do a lot of that work for free. splash page then two page spread of the villain's silhouette and panel of just the protagonist's eyes narrowing yet none of that translates to prose and I spent probably three months writing chapters that felt hollow because I was trying to hit the same emotional beats a splash page hits, using only words, and words alone don't create that kind of impact without a totally different toolkit

The thing I'm slowly figuring out is that prose has to do with interiority and rhythm what manga does with paneling and white space one line paragraph on its own can do some of what a splash page does, if you've built the tension right beforehand. but you can't just chop your sentences short and expect the manga effect, the way I was doing at first. It has to be earned the way a splash page is earned by everything before it.

I've been going back through my early chapters and honestly a lot of them read like someone describing manga panels instead of writing prose, which in hindsight is exactly what I was doing and rewriting now with an actual prose pacing sensibility instead of a paneling one. much slower, I think, but it's finally starting to feel like a real story and not a storyboard with the art missing