What I Read this Week

[bluewinged_songbird]

It's been a crazy couple of weeks since Tumblr imploded. In between running around like a headless chicken trying to wrestle with the sense of loss mixed with the excitement of adapting to a new social media platform, my tabs of fanfiction have been sitting unread. A pity, but I thought I'd at least share the two most memorable fics I read this week.

Korpimaan kutsu (9905 words) by rohkeutta, Feanor_in_leather_pants
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
It's a Steve/Bucky fic based on Finnish folklore and you do get a sense of the fairytale strangeness and undercurrent of darkness. That said, it was actually a rather lighthearted read and I found the quest for Bucky's dowry to be very easily solved and left poor Bucky just lightly battered enough for Steve to kiss it all better~ I loved every single minute of it.

I wonder if my impression was influenced by the other fic which I'd also finished this week.

For Love of Mithril (56519 words) by erunyauve
Fandom: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Now this fic, this fic. I'll be minding my own business, when out of the blue, I start wondering about some line or other and then I have to look it up. It is a trap. Each. And. Every. Time. There has never been once where I don't end up reading it from start to finish and hurt inside. The ship, Celebrimbor/Gil-galad, is extremely rare and yet Erunyauve manages to slot that all in in such a way that you believe that the events here are plausible in canon. Were my feelings gut punched, stomped to a bloody pulp and tossed in the trash? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Fics I still have in the tabs: Baba by Crownofpins and Scenes from a Marriage: The Studebaker by Speranza

Comments

Why do you hate Chrome?

[jesse_the_k]

*I* hate Chrome because I don't want Google in my business. So I use Opera (which is based on Chromium) and it uses even more resource on my MacBook.

Re: Why do you hate Chrome?

[bluewinged_songbird]

I hate Chrome for exactly the same reasons, I detest Google's commodification of people's private information. Unfortunately, Google and it's other predatory ilk are too ingrained into the internet ecosystem and it's very hard to cut them out completely, so I try to avoid them if I can. The irony is that I found Draft when I was looking for a browser-based, more writer focused text editor that wasn't Google docs. Oh, how the turn tables.

I'm not fully willing to forgo mainstream products just because it's so convenient though. I do try to use those that give me a bit more control over my privacy settings.

[squelettique]

I have a quick question because the formatting on this post is basically almost exactly what I want to do for some of my fanfic reviews and such. I've gotten to the point of being able to use HTML for highlighting, underlining, etc and some read-more, and links with titles instead of just the http list lol.

To move to the actual question, how did you get the Ao3 image there in the link? Is it a setting on your journal, or a setting in the HTML? I can link to Ao3 and fanfic on ao3, but I haven't thought of being able to have the little ao3 icon image there. Do you happen to have an easy-reference for that particular HTML? (if it is HTML haha.)

Got Your Back

[bluewinged_songbird]

Right, everything in bold with the links etc is from AO3's share function. They give you the html for the links to the fic, author, and fandom, as well as the ratings, warnings, additonal tags, and summary. I basically bolded everything in Markdown and deleted the summary.

Now the AO3 icon is part of site-specific markup. It looks like this:
<user name=crownofpins site=ao3>
The above code gives you this:
crownofpins

In Markdown, it'd look like this:
@crownofpins.ao3

So I could have done that for the user names on the AO3 share html but I'm too lazy. Btw, if you're looking at a quick way to type out a post without fiddling with too much HTML, I recommend learning markdown. The tutorial takes 10 minutes and has given me less tears.

Thank you!

[squelettique]

*displays total lack of knowledge* What's Markdown? I've mostly been trying to use the general html just so I could have something semi-truthful as a skill to list on my completely-lacking resume haha.

A "quick way to type out a post without fiddling with too much HTML" sounds amazing though. Especially if I can copy-paste the whole format of the post into a word doc (or some other text doc) and still retain the links and not have to actually delete all the HTML and apply to the doc what the HTML had (underlines, italics, bolds, links, etc) manually. Which is what makes it hard to move from Google drive for my general internet-writing needs lol.

Oh Goody!

[bluewinged_songbird]

You're part of the 10,000 people who learn something new each day and I'm so glad you asked!

Aight, here's the tutorial from farfromdaylight's dreamwidth primer. It takes 10 minutes and will change your life. Probably. I find it faster and less cluttered, but I've been gradually piling on the html as needed for comments and for more sophisticated things. You can use markdown in tandem with html you see.

I've been using Draft for my internet writing for quite a while. I found it when I was looking for a browser-based writing program that wasn't Google Docs, and it extended to my Dreamwidth posts since it lets me use markdown and html with a quick preview mode for me to check formatting. I was talking to potofsoup about it and she found out that it has a Google Chrome extension that just pastes the html/text from your document into any text area. Since I open an entirely new browser window for typing up lengthy Dreamwidth posts (what with going back and forth being Draft and OneDrive and the Create Entries page), I thought I might as well use the extension. I still wish they had a Firefox one though.

You know what, as a bonus for all us Tumblr/elsewhere HTML noobs, I'm just going to post all the HTML codes for stylization that I experimented and copy+pasted on a text file somewhere. Responsive images and textboxes for all!