RatCreature's Journal

I think this AO3 filtering trick deserves more attention

2013-09-22T18:44:47Z

Unfortunately the tag filtering on AO3 still doesn't have an easy way to exclude stories with certain tags, but I didn't realize that you can use a - with the "Search Within Results" in the sidebar to narrow things down and not only in the full search. (I almost never use the full AO3 search, I dislike it.)

And even better, you can (in an admittedly somewhat tedious way) exclude wrangled relationship tags by their id, so that you don't exclude text matches in the summary accidentally. This archive news post describes how. I won't use this for casual searches, but it is worth looking up the ids of the few pairings I really loathe to get them excluded in all my searches. And apparently there is an unofficial userscript for this too, so maybe I'll install that... Right now I use a blurb blocker to filter, but it would be more efficient to get the search right rather than hide results.

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wow

2013-06-15T13:02:22Z

Looking at the Worst Room Tumblr just now (a blog that posts photos of horrible rooms and small "apartments" for rent in NYC at outrageous prices) makes me feel so much better about my place.

Also, of course I knew that fictional depictions of supposedly crappy NYC apartments in tv series and such always make them vastly larger than they would be in reality (perhaps because you couldn't actually fit a professional camera larger than an iPhone, the person operating it, and a person being filmed into an actual crappy NYC apartment from the looks of these photos so you'd probably have to stage them and leave one wall out that you don't see or something), but these are just astoundingly awful. Like, many seem to be either windowless closets rented as bedroom for several hundred dollars or some sort of crawlspaces repurposed for sleeping in, that are too low to stand or even sit.

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linking to a discussion

2013-02-18T00:59:32Z

mashimero is brainstorming about what it would take to make a fanfic&fanart/media challenge truly collaborative and is looking for ideas/experiences/opinions from a wider circle.

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awesome use of post-it notes

2011-08-17T20:29:01Z

Take a look.

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community promotion

2010-04-17T14:14:51Z

A while ago I wished that there was a fanart request community on Dreamwidth, i.e. a place where you could ask for fanart you'd like to see, and which in turn artists could browse for inspiration and ideas, and additionally have the opportunity to make someone happy with a fulfilled request. Like the fanfic kink memes in some fandoms, but with requests in posts, and tagged and thus easier to browse than comment threads. However I was too lazy to create and moderate such a comm myself, so I just described my idea in create_my_comm.

And now the fabulous noxie has created artondemand. It's still very new, but you should check it out.

Also, I just noticed in my profile that it's my one year anniversary on DW. And I got a comm as a gift. ;)

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kicks LJ

2010-04-09T17:25:37Z

I know they have server trouble, but this is annoying. I'm in the middle of reading a multichapter story there, but it takes always five attempts or so to get the thing to respond, and just now it doesn't at all for me. *grumble*

In other news, AO3 has a post asking what features you would like to see in your ideal fanart archive, as they plan to expand from just fiction eventually. There are many ideas already in comments, but if you are a fanartist or like looking at fanart, you should chime in too.

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SPN link

2010-03-09T11:13:30Z

In case you haven't seen it: reveria made an awesome looking Supernopoly (Supernatural themed Monopoly game). Just wow.

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fascinating optical illusion

2010-01-16T17:22:20Z

It is really cool how color perception works.

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art rec

2009-06-25T12:50:44Z

Today I came across the website of this really cool artist, Alex CF, who creates fake specimen display cases with horror and fantasy animals and such, in the style you might find in old museums or cabinets of curiosities. The website describes it as "cryptozoological scientific art". Sometimes it is whole sets, with documents, skeletons, preserved specimens, tools and all sorts of stuff and they come with short stories of a sort explaining the fictional background. I especially liked Cthulhu Specimen Box, The Lycanthropy research of Edward Harrell, Severed “Draco Alatus” Head and Infant stillborn Draco Alatus, Expedition to the Plateau - Lost World Exploration Case and Experiments in extra dimensions; The Cheshire cat, but really you should browse the whole site. (Obviously due to the nature of the art the displays are slightly gory.) I only wish the photos of the works were in a higher resolution, because you can't make out all the awesome detail and read the text in the documents on the site.

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