RatCreature's Journal

st_aurafina is a hosting friending meme, and if you found my journal through that: welcome!

I've recently stopped crossposting to IJ (I doubt anybody noticed), because I haven't actively used that site in ages, and I have decided to disable comments on my LJ crossposts. I'm sorry if you prefer LJ for interacting, but DW has been my main journal for a long time now and I don't have my full range of icons on LJ, which I really miss when commenting there, and I'm not likely to ever pay them for icon slots again, so the recent developments gave me the push to limit commenting in one place.

It's not so much that LJ moved their servers as such, as that they don't even care enough anymore to do any announcements for their users about the move or the glitches so many experienced in either the English or the Russian LJ news. It seems a bad idea to add non-duplicated content in an infrastructure that the owners care about so little.

Finally, as always with the beginning of a year, I have good intentions to draw things, and I've noticed that it has been about three years (!) since I last offered any drawbles, so I thought it would be fun to do the drawble meme again.

The original format is as follows:

1. Comment and I'll pick one or two of your DW interests and draw you a picture.
2. You have no say as to what I draw for you or as to how much it will suck.
3. Copy this and the pic that is drawn for you into your journal. (Optional)

You can also prompt me, for example if you don't list interests, but prompts tempt people to ask for fanart they'd really like to see (their favorite rare pairing or character or such), and that ends with disappointment for everybody. Them, because they get a doodle totally mangling their cherished idea, and me because I feel inadequate at fulfilling a real wish.

The reason I like these drawbles in the first place is because they allow me to do absurd little doodles that aren't demanding, so I don't experience that vicious-cycle that I get with "proper fanart": feeling I suck because (of course) drawing attempts never look like what you imagine with your idea, and then never draw anything and thus never get any better.

Anyway, you can offer prompts to me instead going with your interests, but keep in mind that these are quick doodles, so for a prompt that is a description of some epic scene you've always wanted to see realized in fanart the results aren't going to very satisfying for you (or much fun for me). Also, I don't draw porn, and I'm not good at portrait likeness.

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof, especially considering how very rusty I am) you can expect, look at the drawble tag or my drawble series on AO3 that collects them.

I don't make any promises for results or a timely delivery, but in the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers.

I don't see the lock icon anymore in my style or the older default site scheme I use to display entries (I'm still sticking to XColibur there iirc), though I do see them in some other journal styles and the style I see when I use a mobile device. Is this a new way to hassle users to switch to their new site and f-list styles? Is anyone else having this problem?

I totally forgot to post a thank you note for the anon DW fairy who gave me some points a couple of days ago. I only now renewed my account and realized that I hadn't posted a thank you. Well, better late than never. So thank you.

(The latest news of LJs upcoming "improvement" projects make me happier than ever that DW exists as alternative. Infinite scroll and site style for all flists, seriously LJ?)

So, LJ migrated my Scrapbook, which is a good thing, because apparently the old system had already corrupted ten of my pictures so they couldn't migrate them now, when I myself had only noticed two that had been messed up while I happened to look at old posts. However I would have liked the migration report a little more informative when listing the damaged ones, because if you haven't titled your pictures, the report doesn't even give you the folder. Or, you know, if LJ's Scrapbook hadn't corrupted my pictures in the first place, but I've learned not to set my expectations too high when it comes to LJ.

The thing is, when the old Scrapbook was still around and destroyed one of my pictures, I could usually still see the preview picture that had been created, and of course the folder and the position the picture was in. I asked support whether they might be able to give me that information at least about the pictures they corrupted, but the reply, while prompt, wasn't helpful. They could just tell me that they passed this on to the migration team as suggestion, so that maybe the log could become more informative for others who aren't migrated yet.

Thanks to the DW search function I have at least found posts for about half of the images when they were embedded or linked, and could reconstruct what they had been, and restore those. But I'm still at a loss what some of the other pictures were. Well, hopefully the new system won't eat any more of my stuff from now on.

Verschlimmbesserung, i.e. a portmanteau of Verbesserung (improvement) and Verschlimmerung (deterioration/worsening), to describe intended improvements or upgrades that end up making everything worse. Also used as a verb ("verschlimmbessern"), cousin to the equally useful "kaputtreparieren" (repair/tinker with a thing to the point that it becomes broken). Not entirely unrelated to this language observation, I'm still trying to decide whether I should opt to display everything on LJ in my style (which I find confusing, because I'm used to comms and journals all having their layout), or deal with the new comment pages on comms that have not disabled them, which unfortunately includes a number of fest comms I'd been browsing.

It's rather annoying that LJ is under DDOS attack just when I wanted to check out the xmenbigbang.

Is anyone else having trouble to load LJ correctly? Since yesterday most of the time style sheets and icons don't load for me. I've tried clearing my cache and reloading the pages, but the problem persists. Sometimes the whole page loads, but most of the time some or all style is missing, and icons even more often.

I'd been looking for a way to download my LJ Scrapbook, because when my last laptop died I lost some of my local image files. Additionally if the Scrapbook was gone, I'd have a hard time to restore my posts properly even with the pictures I do still have locally, because with the cryptic Scrapbook file names I don't know which picture it is I linked in a post. Of course I can deduce that something was a for example a rat photo or a comic page scan, but which rat photo is not always obvious from my entry text or the image alt text. So it would be good to have the photos backed up with those file names somewhere.

But when I asked LJ Support whether there was a way to do a backup other than manually (and I have several hundred pictures), they were no help. However looking around I found this post how to download the stuff from Scrapbook with wget. It's still less than ideal, because this method duplicates the byzantine file structure with a folder for every image, but that's still better than downloading from my browser. If anyone knows of a better method, please tell me?

To counteract the quiet on my flist/dwircle I thought maybe I ought to just expand my reading list, so I wondered whether there are any XMFC friending memes around, preferably on DW, but I'd take LJ too. Or maybe there is an fanartist friending meme somewhere? I've seen one for writers during the three weeks for DW thing earlier this year, but one for artists would be fun.

Unrelated, I feel really apprehensive about the antibiotics dosage I'd gotten for Noah to start him on once the course of Baytril is finished this weekend (Noah unfortunately has declined in health recently and has something in his lung, which is not myco, but from the way the lung looks on x-ray they took today either a localized infection or a tumor, so as the tumor couldn't be helped, he gets antibiotics). Due to their schedule he was treated by a different vet from his usual one this morning, and the dosage they gave me seemed high, but I wasn't sure I had seen this antibiotic before. But then I checked at home in my records (well the pile of paper recording previous vet visits, but I keep good track of which rat gets what, because after death breeders usually want a feedback on the illnesses to see problems with their breeding lines down the road), and I had been given the same antibiotic for another rat before by another vet at the same practice and then it was 0.2ml twice a day while Noah now is supposed to take 1ml three times a day. So with that huge a difference (0.4ml vs 3ml daily) I feared some sort of decimal point error, so I called back obviously, and mentioned my fear and also that the previous dose was so much lower. So the assistant told me the doctor would check, and when she called back the vet said she checked the dosages and redid the calculation, and that the amount was right, though she has no idea why the other vet (who wasn't in just then) prescribed so much less that last time. This makes me really uneasy. :/

There has been a sharp increase in spam comments in my LJ and an also some on DW. I screen anon comments, but having to delete amd report bunches of them is getting rather tedious. Okay, it's a couple every day, so not a flood, precisely, but still. I don't like the idea of turning off anon comments entirely, but if this keeps up, I'm not sure what else to do. Has anyone else noticed more spam than usual recently, or is it just me?

I've always found the LJ notes feature really useful. Like for example if someone changes usernames I can add a note with the old one. And of course you can make a note if you have less than pleasant run-ins with someone and many other things.

Only just now I'm seeing one of those note stars behind a name for whom I have not added any notes, and yet when I hover I see a note. I don't see the star behind the name in all places as I would if I had added the note, but I do see it in one community post where the user name is linked. I had met the fan online before (the post I noticed it in was notice in kirkspock that easilymused1956 died and the note is behind that name, maybe you see the note star too?), so I double checked, but I really do not have any such note visible on my note management page (also it doesn't make much sense to me). So now I wonder what happened there that made the note, that I assume someone has for this person, visible to me, when it is not mine.

Also I worry whether something could make my own notes visible, or whether I could do something inadvertently that shares my notes. Do you know what happened there?

ETA: It seems to have been due to something the poster did when inserting the name rather than the worst case scenario of LJ randomly displaying notes, and the poster has fixed it now, but I'll certainly make sure to take extra care how I'll insert LJ username codes in the future.