RatCreature's Journal

That was a lot of fun.

( I do have a very spoilery question though )

Does anyone know how to undo this? I must have pressed the wrong key combination, but I don't know what I pressed (I wanted to press Ctrl+T to open an new tab), and now instead of dark on light my Firefox tabs except the active one have light writing on dark background. It's a bit disorienting. I can't find a corresponding setting in the menu.

I don't always read the announcements on the ff.net mainpage, so I only now noticed the update from January 5th which says "We are redesigning the storymarks (story bookmarks) feature and unfortunately the new system is incompatible with the current setup. If you have existing storymarks, please save them at your earliest convinence [sic]." What on earth are these "storymarks"?!? Do they mean the favorites list? I do have favorites bookmarked that way, though most are old, and more recently I've just used the the story alert feature, but I'd still save them, only it doesn't seem like you can export them as bookmarks. Or do they mean some other feature I'm not aware of? I have never seen the term "storymark" on the site before in all the years. Why can't they call things in their announcements like they are called in the site navigation?

ETA: sholio explained to me that they are apparently something separate from the favorites (phew!). I still can't find the feature (maybe they are already gone?) and don't recall ever seeing anything called that, but at least I won't miss the feature. Also I can see why they need to redesign it, if the feature was so hidden as to completely escape any notice by a regular user.

When a Tumblr post contains more than one picture, with certain numbers some of the images tend to be resized rather small with maybe only one image largish. And then when I click the images I just get an annoying slideshow that barely makes the images larger and actually makes large images *smaller*. Is there a way to click somewhere (or change a setting somewhere) that enables me to see the images at their proper size as they were uploaded? Or at least at the 500px width resize Tumblr does for single picture posts?

I need opinions on an art choice for my secret_mutant piece, that would be revealing if I posted it publicly in the post. So if you don't participate in that exchange, are online more or less now when this is posted, and are willing to get a PM and answer a quick question right now (no art or X-Men knowledge required) to help me decide something, could you comment here?

Do book recommendation algorithms ever work for anyone? I mean, I've rated almost all the books I bought on Amazon in an attempt to see if this improves things, yet rarely seem the recs tempting or helpful. For one thing it insists on reccing me the n-th parts of series instead of the first, despite me not having bought the earlier ones. I'm not really interested in reading even the first of the The Wheel of Time series, let alone the 13th part, which Amazon apparently recced me due to having bought The Kingdom of Gods. Similarly I've now entered and rated quite a number of books on Goodreads, yet their recs are not all that helpful either. Admittedly sometimes books crop up that look interesting or some that I've read and liked (and just not entered), so they are not always completely wrong, but I have yet to really feel compelled to read a book from their list next. Well, at least Goodreads thinks I would like to read the first part of The Wheel of Time series (because I added LOTR) not the 13th.

I've started to post a bunch of my fanart on AO3 even though sadly you can still only embed art, not upload it, so it's not truly archiving yet. But the advantage is that many of the stories I've illustrated are there and thus I could take advantage of the associations, and also I like having tagging options.

Anyway, I've wondered what to do about drawbles, which for me outnumber "regular" fanart more than 2:1. On dA I put them in the scrapbook so they don't swamp the rest of my gallery, on my website they are in a different section, and in my fanart blog and journals are mostly bundled in a couple of drawble posts after the prompt rounds. But what do you do in an archive like AO3?

On the one hand I'm a completist in the sense that I want to have all my stuff in the places I pick (my personal website shows drawings I did in elementary school -- it's a thing), OTOH I naturally want the art that took a lot of effort to be somewhat more prominent, so that the first impression for visitors is not that I do only sloppy, quick doodles, when they browse my works in a fandom.

So how do you resolve that problem? I assume writers must have similar issues when deciding how to archive quick prompt response fic, drabbles, meme fic and the like. Do you bundle several into a single work? If so by which method? All of one fandom? Or maybe bundle chronologically somehow, like all you did for a prompt post? Some other solution? Or do you just let your other stuff get swamped and trust the audience will sort it out via tags? What's your presentation strategy?

Can you freeze pureed pumpkin okay? Because buying a whole pumpkin is much cheaper than buying pumpkin segments per kilo, I now have to deal with something of a pumpkin surplus, and it would be convenient if it was possible to freeze it in manageable portions once I pureed it. Last year when I bought a whole pumpkin I just had two very much pumpkin-themed weeks, but this year I'm wondering whether I couldn't freeze some. (I don't use my freezer much beyond storing vegetables I bought frozen, so I have no experience with freezing fresh vegetables.) I like pumpkin pie, and also soup and such, but not necessarily all pumpkin all week, and you can't buy pureed pumpkin in cans here (at least I have yet to see it offered anywhere), so if it froze well, that would solve two problems.

Also, I need to dust more diligently (or at all really *embarrassed look*). I'm working on a painting and dust motes keep sticking to my wet paint. Yikes.

How do I make the super annoying confetti background on my Tumblr dashboard stop? Can I turn this off? I could live with their 10 billionth post announcement on top, but not the moving color spots all over the screen. Otherwise I need to figure out how to stop this moving background (actually not just a simple background, it moves all over their buttons too) from displaying through my Firefox somehow. Why are they doing this to their users?!?

ETA: I figured out that this stops if you don't just reload the dashboard, but leave (like going to your Tumblr) and then come back. Then the announcement and the horrible confetti goes away.

I was reading the daily_snitch and saw in the community section "fantasyverse is a new land community." My reaction then was "what is a 'land community'?" so I headed over to the comm profile, which in the about section also only says that it is a "land community" but does not explain what that is, but it apparently involves teams and challenges. I then head to the FAQs which unfortunately don't give a definition either.

At this point I assume that it must be some sort of incredibly common thing that everybody (except apparently me) in fandom is familiar with. I tried looking in Fanlore, but that wiki failed me too, because it does not have an article on this. I tried following affiliated links, but aside from ending up on a master list of land comms that showed me that there are a ton of them, I didn't easily find a link to a clear definition what they are either.

Could anyone on my flist give me an explanation what these communities are/do?