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It's the fiftieth issue of The CaT Gazette, and to celebrate, I've made a custom thumbnail for this issue that accurately portrays the feeling of writing this thing up every week.

As you may or may not have noticed, I cancelled a lot of my stuff this past week. Nobody was really interested in the cancelled material and I have a job and college to deal with irl, so writing something no one would ever read just isn't practical anymore. The cancelled projects include: Now, to finish Star Spirit, I'm creating a movie called Tech 10: Star Legacy that serves to cover the material I had planned for S3/Final Saga. Tech 10 may not have an audience, but I made a promise to myself that the story wouldn't go unfinished like almost every other franchise on this wiki. In addition, the rest of the material I had planned for the Renovation Project will be covered in Recaps on the OS Tech 10 series pages.
 * 13
 * Everything in the Tech 10 Renovation Project
 * Odyssey
 * Tech 10: Double Crossed
 * BTFF RPG: The Next Evolution
 * Tech 10 Shorts
 * Tech 10: Star Spirit Season 3/Final Saga

Work on Ben 10: Milky Way Race continues. I updated the page with a custom title and a couple new episode descriptions (one of which you may want a Caeser Cipher for) and created a page for the MWR version of Spitter. Check those out!

We're currently voting on the future of Support Group. Please make sure to give your vote on this matter.

We've updated the Main Page and Navbar's layouts to make them more accessible. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the new designs!

Part of that update is a new, streamlined Community Portal, which I will go over here real quick just to get you up to speed on it.

From left to right: The OV Omnitrix's dial will take you to a random page when clicked. The eight other categories linked on the original Community Portal have been separated between the Events and Support tabs for the sake of making things less cluttered.
 * AF Omnitrix: Links to the Omnitrixes category.
 * Heatblast: Links to the Aliens category.
 * Ben 10 Logo: Links to the Series category.
 * Ben: Links to the Heroes category.
 * Vilgax: Links to the Villains category.

I've started making badge art for pages that are fairly iconic but have art too outdated to be used on badges. This should open up a lot of freedom for pages that can be featured on badges, so be sure to bring up anything that comes to mind, and make sure to check out the list of badges that still need replacing.

Only three more CaT Gazette's after this one until the end of the school year in my area. Since I work at a school, I go on break at the same time the kids do, so I should be more available during the summer.

On an unrelated note the latest Samurai Jack episode was great but the oversensitive people screeching about it on Tumblr is even better.

Lesson 6: Writer's Block

This is admittedly more of a problem for stories created when "[Name] 10" series were all the rage, but they still pop up on the wiki from time to time, and there's really quite a bit of misinformation about the subject despite how straightforward it seems.

Generally speaking, a self-insert OC is usually little more than a vehicle for the author's own fantasies and daydreams. While there's nothing wrong with fantasy escapism, relying solely on the idea of escapism to engage your audience, especially when there are a million characters just like yours out there...doesn't work very well, to say the least.

Now, contrary to popular belief, the idea of a self-insert OC isn't exclusively bad and can actually be pulled off well...assuming the author knows how. Considering that the majority of people jump right from using bad self-inserts to hating the idea altogether, these examples are fairly rare, if not necessarily hard to pull off.

When using yourself as a basis for your character, your goal should be to make your character realistic instead of idealized. Idealized self-inserts are boring Mary Sue-ass shits that you might as well toss in your local dumpster fire. Realistic self-inserts will be more interesting because they represent an actual person, and actual people are generally more relatable than idealized cardboard cutouts.

To create a realistic self-insert, you should give your character your flaws as well as your strengths. This can be difficult if you're not one for introspection, but all you really have to do in that scenario is ask around. I'm sure everyone around you will be able to point out plenty of crappy things about your personality.

Of course, there are ways to make self-inserts that are good while still not being realistic persay. A lot of these methods should be examined on a case-by-case basis, but my personal favorite type of unrealistic self-insert is the Self-Parody.

Self-Parodies are characters that take their creator's faults and eccentricities and dial them up to eleven. For examples on this wiki, there's Sol Masquerade, whose entire character motivation is getting some tail, and CaT (Character), who's basically a slightly moronic sociopath who screws with people to entertain himself. These characters get away with not being realistic by being played for comedy, a genre which can blatantly disregard realism for the sake of a joke.

To reiterate, having a self-insert isn't always a bad thing; hell, it can even be downright good as long as you do it correctly.

Unfortunately, most of you cannot do it correctly, and should probably just stick to writing characters unrelated to yourselves.



Art Corner

Spitter Redesign

By ChromastoneandTabby

A new design for the terrible black sheep of all Ben 10,000 aliens.

Nothing to report this time around.

Well, that's it for this Sunday, folks. I hope you enjoyed the fiftieth issue of The CaT Gazette, and I'll see you next week! Feedback and support are appreciated!