RatCreature's Journal

Normally I download fanfic from AO3 into Calibre with that FanFicFare plugin, because that is very convenient and imports all the meta data.

However as of the most recent update (to 2.17.1) it won't download locked content anymore. I get an error that it can't log in, even though my password hasn't changed and I can log in via browser. It also still downloads non-locked fanfic form AO3 without problem. Does anyone else have this problem?

ETA: Googling found me some recent message board posts by the FanFicFare creator, explaining that AO3 has changed its login process to disallow automated tools to download locked stories. That is inconvenient.

...to find a new WIP update notification in your mail and then, when you go to read it, AO3 is down.

I seem to be unable to actually stick with reading anything right now, whether fanfic or pro. This is really frustrating, for my reading to be so frazzled rather than feeling immersive and relaxing.

I need need to find something that really hooks me. Unfortunately I don't even know what exactly I am looking for. Several of the things I started and then stopped reading were things I usually enjoy. Have you read anything recently that you couldn't put down?

I currently use Calibre to organize my ebooks, and I wonder if it would work out to use it to backup and keep track of the fanfic I downloaded on my tablet as well.

I do not want both mixed up, because the fanfic would totally drown out the books by an order of magnitude, and also the tags I want to use for both are very different. I've seen an option in Calibre to create virtual "libraries", but I wonder whether that is really good for keeping things separate. Has anyone experience with using Calibre for both? Or a better system?

I'm a bit wary to import hundreds of stories into my Calibre Library only to find out it would be a mess I'd have to clean up manually...

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.

I don't understand how people who try to insert German endearments into their Charles/Erik fanfic end up with female endings. I get that English is deficient when it comes to the concept of grammatical gender, but the auto-translate bots tend to default to male (e.g. if you enter "my Beloved" into Google translate it gives you "mein Geliebter" as first choice not "meine Geliebte" though it gives you neuter if you don't capitalize, presumably because it assumes some noun ought to follow and is indecisive or something), and plenty of endearments authors could pick are the same for both genders anyway (e.g. "mein Schatz"). So how do authors arrive at the female endings? An additional question is of course whether Erik would choose German of all things as his love language to begin with.

I've been wondering whether there was any Star Trek fic that somehow deals with the ongoing consequences of that apocalyptic phase Earth had before the utopian Federation in the Trek universe with the Eugenics Wars and WWIII and such. Not adventure stuff like some frozen Augment surfacing, but more slice-of-life fanfic in which the mundane longterm annoyances of living on top of former sites of industrialized warfare come up. Like the environmental damage or how the Earth citizens in former target and strategic places may on a semi-regular basis get their lives disrupted, because some uncleared weapon remnants resurface or the like.

I guess that with the improved Federation tech making cleaning up easier they probably have cleared much of that warfare legacy and pollution by the time the Trek series take place. OTOH from what I vaguely recall of the flashbacks we got over time to that era it's not out of the question that in hurried and chaotic rebuilding with first contact on top of it some duds somewhere in the ground that hadn't been exploded so far didn't seem like a priority. Or they just poured some concrete on the nuclear contaminated waste hoping for the best and that it won't be worse than the increased overall background radiation they are bound to have.

(This was brought on by some idle musing as yesterday evening there was once again some travel chaos and public transport disruption, because they had to evacuate an area, after they found some unexploded WWII bomb or other that had to be defused. Which is a fairly common occurrence here, especially when they are digging around in the harbor area. They usually have to evacuate five hundred meters around such a site, so that means a couple of thousand people living there have to be elsewhere for a few hours, and inevitably some train track is affected and closed, and a bunch of buses get disrupted and you get chain effects in the connected lines too.)

So have you ever read any Trek fic like that?

So I just came across a story announcement for a WIP and it seemed interesting from the author's notes, but then the author referred to the part as "chappie". And no, just no. Don't do that. *sporks* (similarly "ficcy" should be forever banned as well)

I have just seen a Kirk/Spock/McCoy fic tagged as "Mckick". Granted, on the story itself rather than the journal's tags it was written out, so don't know whether this was just for tag brevity or is really used as pairing name proper somewhere, but even with knowing the pairing it took me a bit to decipher what this tag on the post meant. Smooshes just get the more confusing the more people are involved.