half-real worlds of paper and ink

Hey guys! Anyone got any Harry Potter femslash recs? Hermione/Ginny would be nice, but anything well-written and enjoyable will do. I need to spam someone with those. XD XD

Why? Here's an IM conversation, edited for sanity's sake, and posted with the other party's full consent, heh.

( I can't believe you didn't know about fanfic. I should have educated you sooner. )

A lot of flailing around ensued. And then I tried to pitch Archive of Our Own again. :P

Eeeeh. I wonder why people are still asking me whether they can use Flexible Squares at Dreamwidth. (For, um, anyone who joined the party late and never made the connection, I created and submitted Flexible Squares for the style contest at LiveJournal ages ago, and it was made into a system style over at LJ.)

I have nothing against anyone using the style at Dreamwidth. Or anywhere else, for that matter. It's just this: with all the styles Dreamwidth currently has, and the flexibility of Core 2/Tabula Rasa, you don't need Flexible Squares. It's old news. Completely outdated. Can be thrown out of the window and fed to sharks. (Also its default is in ugly blue/grey colours.)



. . . I am tempted to fiddle with the CSS for Core 2 and coming up with something that looks exactly like Flexible Squares, just to prove my point. Well, just CSS won't be enough, but it won't take up to over 1,000 lines of S2 like last time.

. . . Then people will be asking why the CSS they've been using over at LJ doesn't work here. XD You just can't win this one, I guess. There's no way I'll use some of the class names we had for FS. I was young and not very bright then. I am still not very competent with CSS now, to be honest.



Uh. Let me finish bug 1813 first, and that style still in limbo in dreamscapes, before getting grandiose ideas.

I hate my internet connection. Hate hate hate. I have lost count how many times it has fizzled out today. Even when it was working, it was pretty damn slow, but I am already too pissed off at my current service provider to upgrade to a better account. The one that I have now is not supposed to be bad. And rumour has it that the upgrade doesn't do much anyway.

Waiting for the connection to come back so that I can access web pages is bad enough, but bearable. The intermittent connection killing my SSH sessions and disconnecting me from IRC -- that is just evil. Especially getting disconnected from the SSH session. ARGH. I was doing something, damn it.

(. . . What the heck, the connection died again as I was typing this. This is why I draft everything elsewhere.)

Sigh. Let's see if we can balance this with some good news. Here we go:

• I now have an Archive of Our Own account! If you need a reason why you should support the effort, it's this: FANDOM OWNS THE SERVERS. That has to be the most awesome thing ever. You can request for invites here.
• I finally managed to upload the patch for bug 1886 and made a bit more progress with bug 1813 before the internet connection went nuts. Damn you internet connection!
• Uh. Off the internet, I've managed to potter around the garden a bit and trimmed some of the wayward looking plants, so the garden looks a bit tidier. It won't last with all the rain we're having, but I can live with that.

Why are weekends so short! The other weekend projects listed in last post are definitely doomed.




askjhfldhff;;; The connection died again just before I hit post. Did I mention that I hate my internet connection. Yeah.

This hasn't been a very good week.

I've had a persistent sore throat that doesn't seem to want to go away no matter what I do, and it makes me feel as if I'm about to come down with a flu. Ergh. No amount of gargling or throat lozenges is doing the trick -- this might mean a visit to the clinic. :(

I've been coming home from work feeling tired and out of sorts, and I've been getting nothing done the last week. Lack of motivation: check. It's been so bad that I'm not even doing the simple things that can be done in minutes, like generating the diff for a patch for bug 1886. (It's already done -- the work is all there. I just need to generate the patch again because of, uh, I'm not entirely sure what happened, probably some Unfortunate Event between ftp-ing it over and uploading it to Bugzilla. Alas.)

( work stuff, end of year appraisals )

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Reading-wise: I've finished Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air, which I didn't like very much. It's the first book in a series. This is rather unfortunate, because I was recommended the second book in the series, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, and I thought I might as well start from the beginning. I'll try post a longer write-up for it later.

Kind of hit a snag in reading Dorothy Dunnett's Gemini -- it's sitting on my desk waiting for me to pick it up again.

Nanowrimo: as predicted, it is going nowhere. (For the curious, the total wordcount is now 0. If it was possible for it to be a negative number, it would be one.)

I think I'm having an allergic reaction to the book I'm reading.

No, seriously. I got it from a used book store and it's dusty and looks slightly icky and if the microwave still worked I would've considered putting it in to kill germs and stuff, but it isn't so I can't, so now I am stuck reading a slightly icky looking book. I started sneezing the moment I started reading it -- you would've thought that the dust of centuries were upon it.

Now I have a sore throat and an itchy nose.

Dangerous hobby, reading. Who knew.




(For the curious, the book is Caprice and Rondo by Dorothy Dunnett, in which I spend a lot of time feeling like I'd like to throttle the main character, despite him being fascinating and clever and all. I have been doing this for six books, people! Someone should come join me.)

I always feel mildly benevolent towards Thursday nights. Mainly because the next day is Friday so I don't feel too guilty about staying up late, XD. I know the logic's flawed (I still need to get up early to go to work on Fridays), but there you go.



. . . And now it's Friday morning, and I haven't managed to finish drafting this post. XD Oh well. My kindly feelings towards Thursday nights will have to be expounded upon some other time.

Poor Mercurial. It got a (virtual) shoe thrown at it in a fit of frustration while I was trying to generate a patch. ( thwarted by version control! )


Also in this week: first-times in a couple of things!

1. I ordered books online for the first time! ( hooray for free shipping! )

2. I submitted my first Dreamwidth patch! ( hooray for new layouts! )


( misc )

That's it!

Hullo! I am back from internet-less lands! Not that anyone had noticed that I was gone, I suppose, XD. I was at my grandma's for three days, and while internet is accessible using my mobile phone, the phone itself is somewhere at the lower end of the phone spectrum and it is not much fun trying to view even pages made for mobile view using that thing.

But! I am back! And currently on leave, and will only be back at work on Monday.

What I am up to right now: searching for bills and paying for them before someone comes and cuts off the electricity, etc. Which wouldn't be a good thing, considering the whole family is here and everyone will give me disapproving looks if that happens.

Once that is done I'll have to update my Dreamhack and, uh, do stuff. Poor 'hack, left alone for such a long time. Hopefully this time I'll get things done and not lose momentum after a bit. Among things I think I would be able to help with is converting stuff in dreamscapes to S2, but I haven't really attempted that yet, so we'll see how it goes!

Speaking of dreamscapes, I've posted a layout there for comment, but there hasn't been any response -- either it's good enough or no one really wants to bother with it. XD Admittedly it's much easier (and fun, I bet) to check out new colour schemes to existing layouts that go through that hassle of installing and testing a new layout. But, if you're interested, the relevant post is here, and I'm willing to help if you get stuck trying to use it. Both layout and theme layers are public, layerids are 77089 (layout) and 77090 (theme). yati is using the same layout with a different theme, which I haven't submitted.

Aaaand speaking of Dreamwidth, I still have invite codes. (Though I suppose everyone who really wants an account probably already has one.) Ask if you need/want a code!

What I also need to do: compare book prices and get The Unicorn Hunt. The ending of Scales of Gold made me go asffdfghlhl;hh;;khg WHAT? I should have known that was going to happen. Both the ending and me going WHAT? That's Dorothy Dunnett for you. (Seriously, if I had found her books earlier, I bet I would've been more interested in history in general and the Renaissance in particular and would've wanted to get more grounding in the classics than what I had in school. I can't believe I'm looking things up for this lady.)

Maybe a reaction post later. I have notes for this book. Notes.

There's a masterlist of fanworks posted for ff_exchange compiled here. I shall be spending many, many hours reading through things in that list. ♥

Also, the list of Chocobo Down (prompts that weren't fulfilled for the round) is here, and it's a pretty awesome list as well. I might try write something! Maybe!

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So. I decided to randomly open a save of Final Fantasy X I had on the memory card, just for the heck of it. It also had something to do with all the research that went into the FFEX fic -- it made me realise how much I missed the game.

( plot and gameplay spoilers for Zanarkand and things after )

Reposting this here. You won't believe how many times I went in to edit the fic after posting it to the comm. Why is it you notice these things after you post?

(ff_press, you can ignore this; it has been picked up earlier in FFEX)

Title: On the Precipice of the World
For: xianghua (for ff_exchange)
Medium: Fanfiction
Request: I think the culture of the summoners is fascinating. Why do some summoners have tons of guardians and others one or none? What makes someone decide to become a summoner — and how does the church of the summoners keep it from being suicide by giant monster for every emo idiot who comes along? My favourite characters are Yuna and Tidus, and I think the way that their relationship echoes, in some ways, the relationships of their fathers throughout X is really interesting.
Fandom: Final Fantasy X
Characters/Pairings: Yuna, Rikku, Tidus, cast (with a strong leaning towards Tidus/Yuna)
Rating/Warnings: PG
Feedback: Concrit very much welcomed!
Spoilers: Everything up to Zanarkand, with foreshadowing of what comes after.
Word Count: 6,400
Summary: The closer they get to Zanarkand, the harder it gets to let go.

( Zanarkand is waiting. )