owlmoose | Network

misskat posting in

From the fabulous

trixieleitz:

If a community is running into the bug where S2 dies when there are long threads, they can click on the "expand" link to open the rest of the thread in a new tab or window.

They can also click on the "top-level comments only" link near the top of the comments section to view, well, top-level comments.

I need to check with D to see if I should put this in the BBB-- on the one hand, fewer requests about it is ok. On the other hand, we need more information to figure out where the breaking point is.

-Kat

case posting in

fandomsecrets

⌈ Secret Post #2359 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 066 secrets from Secret Submission Post #336.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

ceares posting in

fanart_recs

Fandom: Leverage
Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Leverage team
Content Notes/Warnings: none
Medium: digital
Artist on DW/LJ: none that I'm aware
Artist Website/Gallery: DA Ianspirational
Why this piece is awesome: This is another piece that could serve as a poster for the show. The author uses line beautifully to capture the characters with likeness through body language rather than facial features and it's 100% them.
Link: Leverage

astridv

Tea Parties by

Snickfic
Drusilla/Buffybot; rated teen; 1311 words
Summary: Dru has lost all her dollies, but she knows where to find a new one.

Crossposts: http://astridv.livejournal.com/420896.html

rionaleonhart

Final Fantasy VII is a much sillier game than I remember. I'd forgotten about the bit where you get mistaken for a soldier and shoved into a uniform and have to pose for Rufus. I marched so badly in the televised parade that the television station operators, enraged by the dismal ratings, sent me a bomb.

I'd also forgotten about the bit where Red XIII dresses up in a soldier's uniform and sneaks onto a military ship and nobody notices. Red XIII is a quadrupedal lion/dog thing. Nobody notices.

VII feels to me like a 2D-era Final Fantasy that happens to be in three dimensions. I came into the series with VIII, which I think took itself more seriously than any of its predecessors did, and since then, with the exception of IX, Final Fantasy games have been pretty straight-faced. Perhaps that's part of the reason why opinion is so divided on later games.

Come to think of it, X-2 and XIII-2 do bring a bit of the silliness back. Maybe Square feel that their formerly-commonplace silliness should now be confined to spin-offs and direct sequels?

(Here, incidentally, is an exchange I had with my housemate, who is a Legend of Zelda person, when she was playing Twilight Princess and I was playing Final Fantasy XIII-2:

Riona: Why do you turn into a wolf in Twilight Princess?
RD: Because at the beginning... you're pulled into the twilight... and it turns you into a wolf.
Riona: ...
RD: You can't judge! With your Final Fantasy XIII-2 - 'oh no, this person's been swallowed up by the paradox!'
Riona: Look, it makes perfect sense. Someone's been absorbed by the paradox, and they're walking around as just an outline, so you have to make them visible with the magical powers of your little flying creature that is also a bow that is also a sword.

Later, RD proposed a surprisingly plausible theory: 'I think that when they're coming up with ideas for Final Fantasy games, they just pick two words out of a hat and combine them. "Gun... sword. Yeah!" "Goddess... motorbike. Let's do it!"')

Speaking of Final Fantasy XIII-2: why don't people write Hope/Serah? I thought you were supposed to have everything, fandom! It's not as if they're minor characters!

Also, I don't 'ship Noel/Serah, but I do still think that Noel/Serah first-time fanfiction should exist in which Noel has absolutely no idea what he's doing. He lived at the end of humanity; I seriously doubt he has much experience in sex or romance. So Serah has to walk him patiently through pretty much everything. It'd be great.

Whilst I'm rambling about Final Fantasy games, a few notes on Final Fantasy XIII:

The environments in Final Fantasy XIII are incredibly beautiful, but it's hard not to feel a bit disconnected from them. It's probably most pronounced in Palumpolum; I never emerge from that town feeling as if I've actually been there.

Storyline-wise, Sazh and Vanille's travels together might be my favourite part of this game. I really love their relationship. I wonder sometimes how Sazh felt about Vanille and Fang's reunion. Did he worry that he was no longer necessary in Vanille's life? (Gameplay-wise, of course, Sazh and Vanille's travels together are the worst part of this game because you don't have a decent Commando. For a while you don't have a Commando at all. But I love their relationship so much that I am prepared to forgive that.)

It probably wasn't a bad idea to shunt Snow out of the way for three and a half chapters. I love Snow, but he's best in small doses. He was my second favourite Final Fantasy XIII character at first, just behind Sazh, but Lightning displaced him a while ago. You're a sweetheart, Snow, but you're also completely intolerable sometimes.

(What if, instead of Lightning Returns, we got a game called Snow Returns, with Snow as the central focus and the sole party member? What a terrifying thought.)

Crossposts: http://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/361888.html

the_rck

Last night was the first softball game of the season. The park where it was had plenty of shade. I believe we have two or three other games at this particular park. I hope I'm remembering correctly. Shade is by no means guaranteed, and it makes the whole thing considerably more pleasant. Last night was especially nice because it wasn't hot.

The coaches pitch for their own teams at this level. It's next year that the girls start to pitch. Our coach is not a very good pitcher, so the girls tend to strike out a lot. Each girl at bat gets five pitches, good, bad or indifferent. If she can't hit one of them, she's out, even if they were all bad. Scott kept saying that they ought to give the girls golf clubs because of how low to the ground the pitches were. I think part of the problem is that the coach insists on standing way back from the plate. The other coach stood about half as far from the batter as did our coach.

Cordelia played left field a couple of times, second base once and catcher once. At second base and as catcher, she tagged runners out. There was another girl she should have tagged out, but none of the girls knew that they had to tag the runner to get her out. Cordelia got on base twice (I think she batted three times) and made it home once.

I think Cordelia's team lost, but nobody told us the score. There's always a parent who's keeping score. The forms are arcane and complicated. There's data to be entered for each batter as they run the bases. I don't understand it at all. Scott doesn't either.

Fortunately, the park was close to Whole Foods. Scott didn't have time to get dinner before the game, so he went to Whole Foods to get something to eat. I'm not sure what we're going to do about that. The games all start at 6:30, and we were late getting there last night in spite of having half an hour to get there. Traffic was difficult. We couldn't have left any earlier because Scott wasn't ready to go. That'll be a problem next week, too. (Tomorrow's game, it won't be an issue. Scott has PT and will be coming late to the game. Cordelia and I will be riding to the game with another family.)

How late the games end is going to be an issue, too. Scott had to go in to work early this morning and, ideally, should have been in bed at 8:00. The game ran until 8:30. I don't think he was in bed until about 9:30. That's not sustainable, but I don't see that we have a choice.

carmarthen

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Crossposts: http://carmarthen.livejournal.com/542455.html

carmarthen

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Crossposts: http://carmarthen.livejournal.com/542093.html

rivkat

OK, so do/how do you all separate fiction from comics? My system is breaking down. (We use Library of Congress for nonfiction, but that's terrible for fiction.) I have a rough system of "nonsequential comics like Gorey or xkcd shelved with fiction, sequential shelved as comics." But it's only rough and I'm not really sure I want Maus shelved alphabetically by title with the comics instead of alphabetically by author name with the fiction.

Any suggestions? (To make matters worse, I shelve tie-in novels and scripts alphabetically by series title in with the fiction, except for screenplays by Robert Bolt.) A pure mix is unlikely because of shelf height issues; I think it makes sense to have the noncollected comics, issue by floppy issue, segregated from regular fiction, though I could probably be argued into a change.

Crossposts: http://rivkat.livejournal.com/395032.html

19_crows

The Likeness, Tana French. I couldn't decide if I even wanted to read this after my irritation with In The Woods and its ending that didn't solve the mystery. Well, it solved the murder but it didn't solve THE MYSTERY. But somehow I bought this anyway and then it looked like a good book to read on a plane, and I wasn't disappointed.

The premise here is completely unbelievable: a detective who's the spittin' image of a murdered woman will go undercover and live in her household to catch the killer. There's a lot of shilly shallying about whether or not the detective will agree do do it (though of course we know she'll say yes, that's the point of the book.) Maybe that helped me, the reader, overcome my skepticism because, as ridiculous as it is, it works. The detective more than inhabits her role and is drawn into the emotional life of the group - why shouldn't she be? this is her "family" - and that's what won me over. The characters and the emotions felt so true. I finished it a couple of weeks ago and am still thinking about them and how things ended and how they might have been different.

Summer and Bird, Katherine Catmull. Originally I wrote a long review explaining everything I didn't like about this book, but I'm sure nobody else cares. The poetic style isn't for me, and I was annoyed by the magical world, which wasn't described enough to feel real. It also doesn't seem to have clear rules that the sisters must obey on their quest to find their parents. For me, learning the rules, being thwarted by them, and working with them is what gives magical stories (Oz, Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, Harry Potter) their tension. In this book, things just happen to the girls. They have some agency but are passive in many ways.

Some of the emotional things felt true and moving, like each sister's concern for and resentment of the other. The depiction of how someone can be made to distrust and hate a loved one, and learn to have contempt for the weak really worked. Other things didn't - the abandonment issues, like the Swan Queen's abandoning her people and the mother abandoning her children, didn't feel worked out. The ending was unsatisfying, especially the father's role.

Also, could she have chosen a clunkier term than "the attainable border" for one of the major plot points?

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, Ruth Rendell. A genial con man is involved with several women, one of whom is crazy. What could go wrong? A number of tangled web weavers’ lies intersect in curious ways. Rendell is magnificent at describing how people make bad decisions that make sense at the time, and the way emotions change as time passes. The tension towards the end of this one is deliciously unbearable.

A Death in the Family, James Agee. I've read an excerpt from this but never the whole book, and I'm really liking its stately pace and beautiful descriptions.

Crossposts: http://19-crows.livejournal.com/185618.html

oursin

Email today anent my website by somebody representing 'a low cost website design and promotion company', exhorting me to install Google Analytics and to take advantage of their company's special offer discounts for their 'low cost social media service where we "tweet" and post for you regularly every day... about your products or services as well as lots more'.

Apart from not proof-reading their emails before they send them, or perhaps they really believe that possessive its boasts an apostrophe (not the only error), this representative appears to have failed to register that, hello, this site is not a business! ain't no money in it atall!

I mean, I would be very grateful if people could be driven to my deconstruction of historical myths about sex, but on the whole, not to the extent of paying someone to send semi-literate tweets on my behalf.

Okay, I realise that my web design is so out of date that by now I am probably qualified for some kind of English Heritage listing as a handcrafted website, c. 1998, though with some minor alterations over the years ('no! no! don't destroy that rare period feature!'). I daresay it could do with a spruce up, but then, you know, unspoilt period features...

I'm also thinking of doing away with some of my curated link pages, on the grounds that although I update them with incoming information, these days I no longer have time to check these regularly to see if the links still go anywhere or 404 (or worse); and surely most of this information is far more readily available than it was when I began this project.

I might, however, install Google Analytics: I'm a bit unprepossessed with sitemeter at the moment.

thingswithwings posting in

kink_bingo

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brownbetty

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Crossposts: http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/629426.html

blueraccoon posting in

fucking_meds

Dear Seroquel/quetiapine:

You suck. You're supposed to make me less anxious and sleepy, not ramp my anxiety up into high gear and leave me tossing and turning and so anxious I can barely breathe. Maybe that wasn't you last night, maybe that was just the panic attack, but you certainly did nothing to stop it. You've really been falling down on the job of helping manage my anxiety, so I think we need to go our separate ways. I remember taking you years ago and sleeping for fourteen hours a day...what happened?

no love,
becc

Dear lorazepam:

I don't want to take you, I'm going to make that clear. I worked to get off benzodiazepenes a couple years back and I've been doing okay without them, until recently when the anxiety and panic attacks started creeping back in. You were really helpful in the ER a couple weeks ago, though, so I'm hopeful that you can help me get through the next couple months without losing my mind. I'm still surprised my psychiatrist was willing to prescribe you given how much he wanted me off the alprazolam, but I guess I worried him enough when I mentioned I'd been in the ER for anxiety. (That sucked, but you made it a lot easier.) So work with me here, okay? Help me sleep at night and fight the panic attacks and we'll be copacetic.

cautiously,
becc

Current Mood: cautious

kuro_pantsu posting in

ff_minigames

Hi everyone, it's me the evil minigames mod.

To apologize for my lack of minigames lately I've decided to make it up to you by creating a giant 10 round trivia quiz of 100 questions in total, so sort of a 10x10 quiz with a large point bonus for anyone who gets a perfect score.

But as this is me and I'm evil, this trivia is going to be the annoying kind that you'd find on the FF wikia easily enough but would have trouble finding in the games themselves if at all. (YES, IT'S AN 'ALL THERE IN THE MANUAL' CASE. FEEL FREE TO HATE ME - I WAS THINKING SLIDER PUZZLES WERE A SOFT OPTION ANYWAY.)

( ROUND 1: THE NAME'S THE GAME! )

POINTS:
It's 1 point for each question you get right in this round plus 5 points for participating in the GREAT BIG HORRIBLE QUIZ overall. (There are going to be 10 rounds so if you get all 100 questions right... *rubs hands*)

Mods may participate so long as they do not look at the screened comments!

DEADLINE:
SATURDAY 22ND JUNE 11:59PM EDT (4:59AM BST)

Good luck everyone and have fun ~~throwing those bricks~~! <3

Current Mood: devious

cindergal posting in

trope_bingo

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giandujakiss

Alexandra Petri:

“Please, look as beautiful in this swimsuit as you possibly can while telling me why gender should not determine your level of compensation.”

Don’t we notice how ridiculous this is?

No man will ever be asked this. There is no explicit beauty portion of the competition, whatever the competition. “Thank you, Jim, for that insightful reply about job creation. Okay, trousers off.” That’s not a phrase you will hear on national TV.