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wannabespiderman · 3 months

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Man vs machine

Hello! This is my first fanfic written in English so I'm slightly nervous to post this but I couldn't get this idea out of my head so... I hope you enjoy :)

Bucky Barnes x Reader

Just an old man confused about modern technology.

You were walking past the living room door when a discontented grunt caught your attention. You took two steps back to crane your neck past the half-closed door. Bucky was sitting on the sofa, leaning over the living room table, which looked like a toddler’s table compared to him, his face illuminated by the bright screen of his new laptop that you’ve bought him not too long ago. His eyebrows were tightly knit together when he mumbled a quiet curse. You turned around, a curious expression on your face as you walked through the door.

"You okay, baby?" you asked and promptly sat down next to him. Bucky gave you an inscrutable look before turning his eyes back to the screen. “Where the hell do I find my emails?” he asked in frustration. A sudden laugh escaped you. You should have realized that a 106 year old man who had little to do with electronics would have some trouble with a laptop. Bucky gave you a displeased look with a slight, unconcious pout appearing on his face. “Click on the internet icon.” You spoke softly, willing to help. Bucky’s brow furrowed. “I don’t need the internet, I need my emails.” You stayed silent for a moment, slightly baffled by his words. Just last week you took the effort to set up a Google account with him and you were pretty sure he had paid attention then. “Bucky.” You said an amused huff escaping you. “Your e-mail is connected to the Internet. Just click on the icon.” Bucky clicked his tongue in annoyance to cover his slight embarrassment and went back to staring at the desktop. He was definitely taking his time, and at one point you doubted he knew what an icon was. “Need any help?” you asked as kindly as you could, though the sight of Bucky squinting his eyes like a real old man made your voice sound rather amused. With an exhausted sigh, Bucky leaned back against the seat back and rubbed his face, his shoulders visibly slumping. “You do it.”

You snort, but immediately apologize after he gives you an exceptionally grumpy look. “You can do it.” You said encouragingly, giving him a small smile. Bucky rolled his eyes, but relented and bent over the laptop again. You shuffled closer to it so you could see the screen properly, and the little orange and blue Firefox icon literally jumped out at you. You pointed your finger at it and looked at it again. “Just click on this one.”

You tried to be patient with him, really, and actually he did exactly what you said, but you couldn’t hold back the little sigh that left your mouth as he moved the cursor over the Firefox icon and clicked. Once. “Okay.” You mumbled, rubbing your eye. Apparently, you needed to be more specific. "This time you click twice." Another brief but piercing look from Bucky before he actually double-clicked and the browser opened. You sent a quick thank you to the heavens before instructing him to type the url into the search tab and cringed silently when he started typing with both of his pointer fingers. Right this second you decided to teach him how to properly type with all ten of his fingers later. A few more instructions later, probably a little more than usually necessary, he reached the Google log-in site.

“I assume you can handle the rest?” It was supposed to be a statement but your voice shifted into a question at the end.

He hummed quietly in affirmation, though his brow was still furrowed as if this whole thing was incredibly complicated which, to be honest… it probably was for him. You pressed your lips together, a slight sting of guilt coursing through you, your previous amusement and frustration about his hardship completely vanishing. One second you were quietly sat next to him and the other you had your arms wrapped around his bicep and your head leaning on his shoulder. “I’m sorry about laughing earlier.” You whispered, almost too quiet for him to understand if he weren’t a Super-Soldier and had enhanced hearing. “I know it’s new for you.” Bucky tried to shrug it off but you saw how his eyes softened when he tilted his head to look down at you. A sudden, quiet chuckle escaped him, making you quirk an eyebrow in curiosity.

“You’d think, as a Cyborg, I’d be better at this.”

#bucky barnes #bucky x reader #marvel #marvel mcu #mcu #marvel cinematic universe #fanfic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #fanfiction

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reelmegabyte · 4 months

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ever wonder why spotify/discord/teams desktop apps kind of suck?

i don't do a lot of long form posts but. I realized that so many people aren't aware that a lot of the enshittification of using computers in the past decade or so has a lot to do with embedded webapps becoming so frequently used instead of creating native programs. and boy do i have some thoughts about this.

for those who are not blessed/cursed with computers knowledge Basically most (graphical) programs used to be native programs (ever since we started widely using a graphical interface instead of just a text-based terminal). these are apps that feel like when you open up the settings on your computer, and one of the factors that make windows and mac programs look different (bc they use a different design language!) this was the standard for a long long time - your emails were served to you in a special email application like thunderbird or outlook, your documents were processed in something like microsoft word (again. On your own computer!). same goes for calendars, calculators, spreadsheets, and a whole bunch more - crucially, your computer didn't depend on the internet to do basic things, but being connected to the web was very much an appreciated luxury!

that leads us to the eventual rise of webapps that we are all so painfully familiar with today - gmail dot com/outlook, google docs, google/microsoft calendar, and so on. as html/css/js technology grew beyond just displaying text images and such, it became clear that it could be a lot more convenient to just run programs on some server somewhere, and serve the front end on a web interface for anyone to use. this is really very convenient!!!! it Also means a huge concentration of power (notice how suddenly google is one company providing you the SERVICE) - you're renting instead of owning. which means google is your landlord - the services you use every day are first and foremost means of hitting the year over year profit quota. its a pretty sweet deal to have a free email account in exchange for ads! email accounts used to be paid (simply because the provider had to store your emails somewhere. which takes up storage space which is physical hard drives), but now the standard as of hotmail/yahoo/gmail is to just provide a free service and shove ads in as much as you need to.

webapps can do a lot of things, but they didn't immediately replace software like skype or code editors or music players - software that requires more heavy system interaction or snappy audio/visual responses. in 2013, the electron framework came out - a way of packaging up a bundle of html/css/js into a neat little crossplatform application that could be downloaded and run like any other native application. there were significant upsides to this - web developers could suddenly use their webapp skills to build desktop applications that ran on any computer as long as it could support chrome*! the first applications to be built on electron were the late code editor atom (rest in peace), but soon a whole lot of companies took note! some notable contemporary applications that use electron, or a similar webapp-embedded-in-a-little-chrome as a base are:

microsoft teams

notion

vscode

discord

spotify

anyone! who has paid even a little bit of attention to their computer - especially when using older/budget computers - know just how much having chrome open can slow down your computer (firefox as well to a lesser extent. because its just built better <3)

whenever you have one of these programs open on your computer, it's running in a one-tab chrome browser. there is a whole extra chrome open just to run your discord. if you have discord, spotify, and notion open all at once, along with chrome itself, that's four chromes. needless to say, this uses a LOT of resources to deliver applications that are often much less polished and less integrated with the rest of the operating system. it also means that if you have no internet connection, sometimes the apps straight up do not work, since much of them rely heavily on being connected to their servers, where the heavy lifting is done.

taking this idea to the very furthest is the concept of chromebooks - dinky little laptops that were created to only run a web browser and webapps - simply a vessel to access the google dot com mothership. they have gotten better at running offline android/linux applications, but often the $200 chromebooks that are bought in bulk have almost no processing power of their own - why would you even need it? you have everything you could possibly need in the warm embrace of google!

all in all the average person in the modern age, using computers in the mainstream way, owns very little of their means of computing.

i started this post as a rant about the electron/webapp framework because i think that it sucks and it displaces proper programs. and now ive swiveled into getting pissed off at software services which is in honestly the core issue. and i think things can be better!!!!!!!!!!! but to think about better computing culture one has to imagine living outside of capitalism.

i'm not the one to try to explain permacomputing specifically because there's already wonderful literature ^ but if anything here interested you, read this!!!!!!!!!! there is a beautiful world where computers live for decades and do less but do it well. and you just own it. come frolic with me Okay ? :]

*when i say chrome i technically mean chromium. but functionally it's same thing

#txt #long post #permacomputing #sustainability

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simnostalgia · 5 months

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I've recently learned how to scrape websites that require a login. This took a lot of work and seemed to have very little documentation online so I decided to go ahead and write my own tutorial on how to do it.

We're using HTTrack as I think that Cyotek does basically the same thing but it's just more complicated. Plus, I'm more familiar with HTTrack and I like the way it works.

So first thing you'll do is give your project a name. This name is what the file that stores your scrape information will be called. If you need to come back to this later, you'll find that file.

Also, be sure to pick a good file-location for your scrape. It's a pain to have to restart a scrape (even if it's not from scratch) because you ran out of room on a drive. I have a secondary drive, so I'll put my scrape data there.

Next you'll put in your WEBSITE NAME and you'll hit "SET OPTIONS..."

This is where things get a little bit complicated. So when the window pops up you'll hit 'browser ID' in the tabs menu up top. You'll see this screen.

What you're doing here is giving the program the cookies that you're using to log in. You'll need two things. You'll need your cookie and the ID of your browser. To do this you'll need to go to the website you plan to scrape and log in.

Once you're logged in press F12. You'll see a page pop up at the bottom of your screen on Firefox. I believe that for chrome it's on the side. I'll be using Firefox for this demonstration but everything is located in basically the same place so if you don't have Firefox don't worry.

So you'll need to click on some link within the website. You should see the area below be populated by items. Click on one and then click 'header' and then scroll down until you see cookies and browser id. Just copy those and put those into the corresponding text boxes in HTTrack! Be sure to add "Cookies: " before you paste your cookie text. Also make sure you have ONE space between the colon and the cookie.

Next we're going to make two stops and make sure that we hit a few more smaller options before we add the rule set. First, we'll make a stop at LINKS and click GET NON-HTML LINKS and next we'll go and find the page where we turn on "TOLERANT REQUESTS", turn on "ACCEPT COOKIES" and select "DO NOT FOLLOW ROBOTS.TXT"

This will make sure that you're not overloading the servers, that you're getting everything from the scrape and NOT just pages, and that you're not following the websites indexing bot rules for Googlebots. Basically you want to get the pages that the website tells Google not to index!

Okay, last section. This part is a little difficult so be sure to read carefully!

So when I first started trying to do this, I kept having an issue where I kept getting logged out. I worked for hours until I realized that it's because the scraper was clicking "log out' to scrape the information and logging itself out! I tried to exclude the link by simply adding it to an exclude list but then I realized that wasn't enough.

So instead, I decided to only download certain files. So I'm going to show you how to do that. First I want to show you the two buttons over to the side. These will help you add rules. However, once you get good at this you'll be able to write your own by hand or copy and past a rule set that you like from a text file. That's what I did!

Here is my pre-written rule set. Basically this just tells the downloader that I want ALL images, I want any item that includes the following keyword, and the -* means that I want NOTHING ELSE. The 'attach' means that I'll get all .zip files and images that are attached since the website that I'm scraping has attachments with the word 'attach' in the URL.

It would probably be a good time to look at your website and find out what key words are important if you haven't already. You can base your rule set off of mine if you want!

WARNING: It is VERY important that you add -* at the END of the list or else it will basically ignore ALL of your rules. And anything added AFTER it will ALSO be ignored.

Good to go!

And you're scraping! I was using INSIMADULT as my test.

There are a few notes to keep in mind: This may take up to several days. You'll want to leave your computer on. Also, if you need to restart a scrape from a saved file, it still has to re-verify ALL of those links that it already downloaded. It's faster that starting from scratch but it still takes a while. It's better to just let it do it's thing all in one go.

Also, if you need to cancel a scrape but want all the data that is in the process of being added already then ONLY press cancel ONCE. If you press it twice it keeps all the temp files. Like I said, it's better to let it do its thing but if you need to stop it, only press cancel once. That way it can finish up the URLs already scanned before it closes.

#Sims tutorial #Tutorial #HTTrack #website scraping #old web #internet archive

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cocklessboy · 2 years

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I’m 37 years old. Two years ago I realized I was transgender and started transitioning. I now fully look and sound like a man, take testosterone HRT, and have had top surgery.

Transitioning has changed my life in loads of ways. Severe depression and anxiety turned out to be dysphoria-induced and mostly went away with the transition. The testosterone makes it easier to build muscle and I’m in much better physical condition. I used to get PMDD (like PMS but so bad it can cause suicidal thoughts, lasting for weeks out of every month) and now my emotions are pretty stable. I’m more confident. In a stressful situation, I have the ability to stand up for myself whereas before I always defaulted to submitting or running away.

But recently, my transition helped me in a very unexpected way. I started noticing that I was really hyperactive. I never used to be. I have a sleep disorder (not diagnosed yet but I have all the symptoms of narcolepsy and will hopefully be tested for it soon) and I’ve always been groggy and tired all the time. But now I don’t just have energy; I’ve become straight-up hyperactive. Cannot sit still. Constantly fidgeting - not just stimming (I’m autistic) but feeling like I have to be constantly moving around or I’ll explode.

At the same time, I was editing a video I’d been working on for ages, one where I’d recorded myself playing a game for a long period of time then was compiling all the footage into a single video with narration. I watched this footage, watched myself, and started realizing I wasn’t just hyperactive. I was constantly distracted. I’d forget what I was doing the moment something shiny caught my eye. I’d start a sentence and never finish it and forget I’d ever been talking.

I started thinking a little more carefully about my life. About how often I make a cup of tea and leave it in the kitchen to brew only to forget about it until I go into the kitchen hours later to make a cup of tea. About how I have to hold my keys in my hand as I walk out the door otherwise I know I might forget them. About how I always have to have important things in my line of sight or they’ll fall out of my brain. About how I have to set three reminders for every important event and still live in constant anxiety that I will forget, because I often do. About how I have two monitors on my computer and I always have to have several things going on at once. I can’t just watch a video, I have to play a game, too. I can’t just scroll tumblr, I have to be listening to music. I always have a ton of tabs open on my browser (which is Firefox! get Firefox if you don’t have it! it’ll change your life!) with YouTube videos which are paused partway through. I have a mountain of unfinished projects because the moment the inspiration wears off I get a new idea and start a new project instead.

Add in the hyperactivity, and... Well, I managed to get a referral from my GP for ADHD evaluation. I managed to find an English-speaking psychiatrist (I’m an American living in central Europe) who takes insurance and specializes in ADHD. After three sessions where he asked me many questions about my life and my childhood, he said he was quite sure I have “some level of” ADHD, and I could start trying medication, and then we’d start working on lifestyle changes (schedules, exercise) to make the medication as effective as possible.

When I first met him I explained that I’m transgender. My name has not been legally changed yet but I asked him to call me by my real name and he had no issue with it. Totally unfazed by the whole thing (although the receptionist was always annoyed by me and insisted on listing everything under my deadname to match my insurance - not out of transphobia, but out of bureaucratic nitpickiness). Now and then during our conversations when I was talking about my childhood he would say OH! RIGHT! I keep picturing you as a little boy. You were a little girl. I have to keep reminding myself (because the symptoms are different - I wasn’t hyperactive as a child, I was quiet, and I did well in school, which is not how most boys present). It was extremely validating that this guy not only accepted me as male, but straight-up kept forgetting that I was even trans.

So the first medication we tried was atomoxetine. This is an SNRI which was developed as an antidepressant, but only turned out to help people with ADHD. I’d had manic/psychotic reactions to antidepressants of all classes before, so we started me at a low dose, and unfortunately I started getting paranoid and hallucinating, so I stopped it immediately.

The only other ADHD medication available in this country is Ritalin (no, we don’t even have Adderall here!). It is not covered by insurance for adults because of a deeply-rooted belief in the wildly-outdated mental health care system here that ADHD is something only children have and that they should grow out of it as adults, but it’s not prohibitively expensive (a month’s supply at my current dose is about $12/£10; I’ll probably need to bump up the dose at least a little bit but it shouldn’t become unaffordable).

This medication? Is fucking magic. I’m convinced it was made by a wizard, or perhaps some kind of divine entity.

I do get some side effects. It makes me desperately thirsty and if I don’t drink a shitton of water, I get dehydrated. It kills my appetite (but it only lasts 4-6 hours and my second dose of the day wears off by evening, at which point I get very hungry and eat loads, so I’m not worried about that). It makes me slightly shaky sometimes, but that seems to be going away as my body gets used to it. It also makes me really sleepy for about an hour after I take it, which is not an officially-listed or studied side effect, but there are enough other people online trying to figure out why Ritalin makes them sleepy that I know it’s not just me. (One theory is that if you’re really sleep-deprived, as I am, but have ADHD, the sleepiness signals might not be getting through because your brain is all out of whack, and the Ritalin fixes the receptors so you finally become aware of how exhausted you are and get sleepy for a while; I’ve seen suggestions that a higher dose might fix this.)

On the other hand, I have now experienced actual happiness for the first time in my life.

I always knew I was struggling. I knew things were hard. Over time I became aware that they were not this hard for other people. But I had nothing to compare to. I didn’t know how other people felt. The world would tell me: that thing you’re struggling with is easy. Just do it. The only possible reason you haven’t done it is that you are lazy, or you don’t want to, or you’re not trying at all. Normal people did not seem to be able to comprehend how basic life tasks like making food or showering or vacuuming or writing an email could be so difficult they felt impossible.

And now I understand why. With the Ritalin, those things are easy. So easy I don’t even have to think about them. If I’d spent my whole life like this, I might not be able to understand how it could be difficult either.

With the Ritalin, when I see something I need or want to do, I can just do it. Immediately. I make the decision to do it, and then I do it. (If that sounds like a simple and obvious thing to you, congrats! You probably don’t have ADHD or any other form of executive dysfunction. If it sounds like a miracle, you might want to get yourself evaluated if you haven’t.)

With the Ritalin, a task that once involved hours or days of frustrated struggle trying and failing to get my body to move, to get myself to start Doing The Thing, wanting to do it, straining to do it, feeling guilty for not doing it, hating myself for being such a failure, might take... five minutes. Oh, right, I need to take out the rubbish. I stand up. I grab the bag. I carry it down to the building’s containers. I come back up and put a new bag in the bin. Done.

Yesterday, I placed a grocery order in the morning, then I did all of my work due for the next two days (something which on its own would normally take me 4-6 hours). Then the grocery order arrived. I put everything away, tidied up the kitchen, and chopped some vegetables to roast in the oven with some chicken (I never used to buy meat because it was too complicated to cook, or I wouldn’t be able to cook that day, and the meat would spoil before I could eat it). While it cooked, I chopped up a whole cabbage and made sauerkraut, then made three more batches of lacto-fermenting vegetables and set them all to ferment on a shelf. Then I cleaned up the kitchen. Then I ate my chicken dinner, washed up afterwards, got some exercise, showered, and had several hours left to relax and play video games before heading to bed.

In the past, getting all that done might take a week, or longer. The vegetables would have spoiled before I could start them pickling. The chicken would have been wasted. The kitchen would remain a mess. My work would get done only at the last second. I was always running out of time while also never getting anything done.

But another thing the Ritalin has made apparent is just how much I’ve been trying to do. Even with this magical medication, there is always more to do than I have time to get done. There’s so much more cleaning that needs doing. I have so many projects to work on. I have so many errands to run, so much paperwork to do, so many appointments. And until recently, I always managed to get done the most necessary things, the ones without which I wouldn’t be able to survive. I always managed to get my work done, eventually, at the last second. I managed to keep my appointments. I managed to submit my taxes (on the last possible day). But I poured so much effort and energy into it, wasted so much time struggling with it, suffered so much from the anxiety of “what if I don’t manage”, that I was miserable and exhausted all the time. It felt like the stress was slowly killing me, and it may well have been.

Now I know that I can get it all done. Eventually I’ll catch up on the housework and be able to just maintain my flat instead of constantly battling the ever-increasing mess and clutter. It’s easier to get exercise now, which makes it easier to sleep, and it’s easier to get up in the morning. I don’t waste hours lying in bed anymore. Slowly, gradually, I’m chipping away at things I’ve been putting off for years, and making progress on projects I might otherwise have abandoned.

And I’m happy. I feel happy. The pressure has lifted. The anxiety has calmed. I can do it now. The brain gremlins have gorged themselves on stimulants and passed out, and they won’t bother me again for 4-6 hours.

And all of this, all of this, is only possible because I finally realized I was transgender and transitioned. Because after 35 years of being miserable and not knowing why, I finally saw a little bit of representation that I identified with that led me to finally understanding who I am. Because I live in a country where it’s not difficult to physically transition (changing your legal gender is another question but since I’m not a citizen here that, fortunately, does not apply to me). From the day I realized I was trans and wanted to change my body, to the day I got a referral from my GP, to the day I was officially diagnosed and given permission to start HRT, was only a matter of about three months (and it would have been less if one of the doctors hadn’t been away for a few weeks).

Transitioning was the best thing that ever happened to me in so many ways. So many more ways than I ever imagined. I knew I’d be happier with my body and voice. I didn’t know my depression and anxiety would mostly disappear. I didn’t know my sex drive would change and sexual activity would become tremendously more pleasurable. I didn’t know I’d be more confident and assertive when I needed to be. And I certainly didn’t know it would help me realize I had ADHD and get proper treatment, leading to an incredibly dramatic increase in my quality of life and ability to look after myself.

I have more to say about all this, but I’ll save it for other posts. For now: trans rights, fuck terfs, fuck transphobes, trans rights, queer rights, trans rights, and praise the sun for Ritalin.

#transgender #actually adhd #transmasc #queer #lgbtqia+#ritalin #neurodivergence #actually autistic #long post #trans rights #fuck terfs #fuck transphobes

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ikuzeminna · 2 months

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Hi! How did you learn to read Japanese? If I'm not wrong that you do, is the Japanese depiction of the GW characters' personalities different from their Western depictions?

Hey! Learning how to read Japanese is definitely an adventure in and of itself. For me, I had learned how to read and write hiragana and katakana from the Yoshida Institute’s site long before smartphones existed, along with a few kanji. I would use hiragana for my cheat sheets at school. (Yes, I learned a whole different alphabet just to cheat at history and geography instead of simply studying for my exams like a sensible person, even though I realized it was way more effort. I'm not exactly smart.) I started learning kanji properly years later with the kanji learning app Japanese Kanji Study, which I can't recommend enough, then took a brief language course and then accidentally ended up studying Japanese in college for 1.5 years, which is where I learned all my beginner's grammar (みんなの日本語 anyone?) and, as is totally apt for a beginner, hentaigana.

It’s funny when you can't string five sentences together without issue, but can make out Nobunaga's scribbling, something many natives are incapable of. Great, balanced education you thought up there, folks.

At least I got a laugh out of one Ranma ½ episode where Ranma found Kuno’s journal entry and couldn’t read it because of course that doofus would write it in the most archaic manner possible.

Anyway, as far as reading aids go, I’m just gonna plug everything I’ve used over the years for anyone interested. The Firefox extension 10ten reader has been a lifesaver, as has been Jisho. When it comes to comprehension, Google translate is dog crap. I’d recommend Papago, which must have been trained specifically on East Asian languages as the results are much better. Not perfect, but better in my experience. Google translate has long incorporated OCR (image to text) so it may be less useful, but I’m very fond of the no-install Capture2Text which can convert manga speech bubbles to text, provided the scans are clean enough to read the kanji.

For grammar, I stuck to Minna No Nihongo. Bought all the books and slowly work through the lessons now.

The most valuable asset though is having a fluent or native speaker you can ask. Nuance is impossible to grasp if no one explains it to you. Even with vocab, you’ll run into plenty of words with the same meaning. Dictionaries often don’t distinguish in those cases. Having someone you can ask makes learning a lot easier.

Now for the Gundam Wing part of your question.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by Japanese and Western depictions, or rather who you mean. If we’re talking official sub vs. dub then yes, there are a few differences. Heero isn’t perpetually constipated in the original (he actually has a sense of humor!) and Duo is a lot less flirty than his dub version. But it’s nothing grave. Certainly not Seto Kaiba levels of the dub rewriting his character to make him rant about not believing in destiny every time he opens his mouth.

Or Saber Rider being the leader of the Star Sheriffs. wtf I grew up with a lie D:<

Now, if you’re referring to fandom spaces, I am, without a doubt, the wrongest person to ask as I have never seen what the Japanese Wing fandom is up to and have never really been in touch with what the West is doing either. Have I seen fanfics and do I know 1x2 is the most popular ship? Yes. Have I spent 10 minutes looking at a manga panel, trying to figure out what is going on, only to hit the back button as fast as I could once I did? To the detriment of my poor eyes, yes. But when it comes to fandom differences, I think @muwi-translates could give you a proper answer. I can’t really say much as I’m not involved in the fandom in a way that lets me know such things.

I just sit here in my bubble, talking to myself most of the time.

#gundam wing #japanese

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chimeraacademy-comic · 2 months

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Dark Purple or Lavender?

I don’t know how many people are aware but Chimera Academy has a website, and has had a website for a while. However, it’s only been recently that more work has been done to get the website to a better usable state. It is the place we would like to direct people to when out in the wild one day.

So, since Were-Ah had the day off and I’ve been getting better at doing things in a more timely manner so I can hang out with her on Discord, we both sat down to go over the website.

At least… that was the plan, until we realized an issue…

The website’s background colour (which had been updated earlier today) was not the same for the both of us.

Were-Ah was getting this deep lovely purple, which had been the original background colour.

Meanwhile, I was getting this lovely lavender colour, which was what Were-Ah changed it to.

Okay… weird, but most likely it was a cache issue. For those not familiar, there’s some bits and pieces of data that get stored by your browser called a cache that allows a page you’ve been on previously to load quicker because the browser kept that previous bit of data. Such as the colour of a background. No amount of clearing her cache fixing the issue.

Maybe it was a browser issue… browsers work differently all the time. Anyhow who has bounced around between Chrome, Firefox and Edge know this. Three additional browsers later nothing has changed.

Perhaps it’s a computer problem, so she tries her laptop. Still dark purple.

At this point, I also tried opening the website on my phone, for reasons I’m not completely sure. Maybe to see if I would get the same dark purple colour, even though the lavender colour was the one that Were-Ah wanted, and it was still lavender, on my phone.

Then, in a moment of madness, Were-Ah decided to check the website on her phone. Let me be clear, she had never tried to open the website on her phone before. This means there is no old data from the website, on that phone, which means the website should be lavender on the phone.

It was dark purple.

At this point, we both thought, maybe… maybe it has to do with Were-Ah’s internet. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes any sense, but weirder things have happened. So she goes and texts her friend, while I go and message my sister. We both ask them to check the website, and send us a screenshot.

My sister kindly agreed to this and sent me a screenshot of a lavender website. Well, there’s our answer! It was Were-Ah’s internet!

And then… the friend sent back a screenshot… of dark purple. We were both horribly confused. Why did my sister, who didn’t even live in the same city as me, get the right colour, while the friend who was also in a completely different area from Were-Ah got the wrong colour? This made no sense…

Could the colour being pulled be limited by location? But how would that work? Surely not… we thought as Were-Ah asked her mom, who had never looked up the website herself, to look up the website and send a screenshot. Meanwhile, my intrigued sister got her boyfriend in on it and also checked the website.

Dark purple on Were-Ah’s end.

And lavender on mine.

Welp… that is starting to get weird, and while the answer is probably (hopefully) just that the server closer to Were-Ah is taking its sweet time to update, we have a question for everyone. Please check out the website, and send us a screenshot to let us know.

Dark purple?

Or lavender?

#chimera academy #webcomic #neocities #website issues #lavender or dark purple?#send us screenshots #let's see how messed up this is

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the-sleepy-archivist · 4 months

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Backing Up Fanfictions with Calibre + FanFicFare (with screenshots!)

If you've been reading fanfiction for any significant length of time, you've probably had the horrifying realization that a fic or series that you absolutely loved was deleted. Maybe the author was harassed or stalked, maybe they didn't want an abandoned WIP lying around, or maybe they just didn't like the fandom any more. Whatever the reason, it is so important to back up your favorite fanfictions.

Calibre is one of the most popular ebook management softwares available, primarily because:

It is full-featured and fairly easy to use

It has a large plugin ecosystem (like Firefox's addons)

It's available for most operating systems

It's completely free

By "ebook management", I mean it can do things like indexing and searching a library of your books, downloading covers and metadata for them, etc. I originally got Calibre for backing up ebooks I had purchased from various online stores in case they ever shut down (like Microsoft Books) or decided they wanted to take a book back (like Amazon has done), and so I could read in whatever app I wanted.

BUT, remember that plugin ecosystem I mentioned? JimmXinu took advantage of that to create FanFicFare, a plugin that allows Calibre to download stories from over 100 creative writing sites (primarily fanfiction archives, but also erotic writing sites among others).

Just paste in the URL to an AO3 fic, for example, and it will:

Download the fic in your preferred format (EPUB, MOBI, TXT, HTML, others)

Fill in all the metadata for you (story name, author + AO3 pseuds, the fic's order in a series, if the fic is complete or not, word count, all tags, etc.)

Generate an ebook cover from scratch OR using art that was embedded in the fic

From here you can just click on a tag to find all other fics in your library with the same tag; you can also click into the author or the series. It's almost like having a mini-AO3 on your computer, one that is always available and where fics never get deleted.

Installing Calibre

Download Calibre from here, choosing the appropriate copy for your operating system

Run the Calibre installer and click through the wizard. For most people the default options work well.

Open Calibre; the Welcome Wizard should appear and walk you through initial setup

Choose your language, and the place on your computer where you want Calibre to store the fics/ebooks that it downloads, then click Next.

Select the device you use most often to read fanfiction on. This helps Calibre decide what format ebooks should be stored in (but you can override it with FanFicFare later)

You should now have Calibre open with an empty library. NOW we want to install several plugins to teach it how to handle fanfics.

Installing Calibre Plugins

First up is Count Pages. This plugin counts the words and pages in a fanfiction and shows it in Calibre so you know whether the fic you're looking at is a oneshot or a behemoth.

Look for an icon like the one below and click it to open Calibre preferences.

2. Under the "Advanced" section, click "Plugins"

3. At the bottom of the Plugins dialog, click "Get New Plugins"

4. Type "Count Pages" into the "Filter by name" search box at the top right. Once the plugin is visible in the list, click it, then click "Install". It will bring up a prompt about the security risks, but we are only installing well-known plugins today (ex. ZimmXinu has been developing FanFicFare for over a decade). Click Yes to install the plugin.

5. It will then prompt you to restart Calibre in order to begin using the plugin, but just click "Ok" because we're going to install a couple more plugins first.

6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for three more plugins: "Generate Covers", "EpubMerge", and "FanFicFare"; once all 4 plugins are installed, close Calibre completely and open it again. You should now have several new buttons on your Calibre menu bar:

FanFicFare is now installed! But we still have a little bit of work to do to unlock its full capabilities.

Configuring FanFicFare for Your Fanfic Site of Choice

So FanFicFare is now installed, but right now if you tell it to look at a fic on AO3, it will be browsing AO3 as a new, anonymous user without an account. This means that:

It won't be able to see explicit fics because it hasn't accepted the "See adult works" prompt

It won't be able to see locked fics (ones you can only read if you are logged in to AO3; these are very common nowadays as authors try to prevent AI engines from scraping their fics and flooding them with spam comments).

So we need to configure FanFicFare to accept the adult prompt (if you'd like to download anything rated higher than T), and we also need to give it our AO3 username and password so it can download locked fics on our behalf.

Click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button in the Calibre toolbar. A dropdown menu will appear. Click "Configure FanFicFare"

2. At the top of the "Basic" tab, select your prefered download format (if you prefer a format not listed, like PDF, don't worry, Calibre can convert it for you later).

3. Click the "Personal" tab in the FanFicFare settings dialog, then click "Edit personal.ini"

4. It will open a very basic text editor where you can type your personal fanfic site details for FanFicFare to use. If the box is small and text is cut off or hard to read, resize the editor window by hovering over the edge of the window until your cursor changes into an arrow with two heads, then click and drag to expand the window.

5. Type "is_adult" (without the quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find. The first result should be this a line that looks like "# is _adult:true". Delete the "#" and the space after it to uncomment the line; the text color of that line should change from yellow to green and light purple.

6. Type "archiveofourown" (without quotes) into the Find bar, then click Find until you see a section that looks like the one below (it should be the first or second result):

7. Type your AO3 login details after the "username" and "password" text. Do not put any spaces between the colons and your username or password. Note that your password is stored in plaintext in this file, so don't let anyone else get a hold of it.

8. Skip this step if the only site you're interested in downloading from is AO3. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each fanfiction or erotic writing website you use. There are only a few sites in personal.ini out of the box, so you may have to copy a specific site's configuration section from defaults.ini, which has example sections for all 100+ supported sites.

9. Click "OK" to close the personal.ini text editor, then click "OK" again to close the Customize FanFicFare box.

Whew! Lots of clicking but you're done now! Time to download some fanfic.

Downloading or Updating Fanfic(s)

Copy the URL of the fic (I'm using one from AO3 for this example).

Click the FanFicFare button on the Calibre toolbar. It should automatically detect that you have a URL from a supported site in your clipboard and paste it into the dialog

If you want to download multiple fanfics in a batch, you can hit enter and paste more URLs into the box, one per line. NOTE: please do not try to download like 30 fanfictions at once; a bunch of people doing that can strain AO3's servers, and your account might have its download capability temporarily throttled to prevent that.

5. Click OK. Calibre may look like it's frozen for a few seconds, but this is normal during the metadata fetching process. Once it figures out which of the fics you pasted actually need to be downloaded, it will unfreeze and begin downloading them

6. Once Calibre has begun downloading your fics, it will display "Jobs: 1" with a spinning icon in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. If you click that, you'll get a progress bar of what it's doing

7. Once Calibre has finished downloading your fics, it will display a summary of the job in the bottom right corner of the Calibre window. In this summary, "good" updates meant that a fic had to be downloaded, while "bad" updates indicate fics that didn't need to be updated (because you already had them on your computer) or that could NOT be downloaded due to an error (usually a fic that was deleted or hidden in a private collection). You can click "View Log" if you're curious about which fics were downloaded and which were skipped. In this example, 2 fics were missing from my library and were downloaded, while "Where the Sand Meets the Sea" was not downloaded because it was already on my computer and up to date.

8. Exit the FanFicFare log if you clicked into it, then click "Yes" to accept the results and add the downloaded/updated fics to your library. The fics should appear in Calibre almost immediately. Then FanFicFare will kick off a second job by calling the Count Pages plugin to grab a word count for the new/updated fics. Once that job completes, just click "Yes" in the job summary window that appears in the bottom right of Calibre to store the word counts in your library.

And you're done! You just backed up your first fanfictions :)

Downloading a Series

FanFicFare can actually pull all of the URLs for individual fics in a series for you automatically!

Copy the AO3 series URL (not to an individual fic in the series)

In Calibre, click the dropdown arrow to the right of the FanFicFare button on the menu bar, then click "Get Story URLs from Web Page"

3. FanFicFare should automatically detect that you have a supported web page in your clipboard and paste it into the text field. Choose the download option you prefer: downloading each fic in the series as a separate ebook, OR combining every fic in the series into a single ebook, commonly called an anthology. Note: anthology ebooks can get rather large in file size if they have embedded fanart in them.

4. Once you pick an option, FanFicFare will grab the URL of every fic in the series and automatically paste them into the FanFicFare fic download window. From there on out just follow the normal steps for downloading those fics (this will start at step 3 in the "Downloading Fic(s)" section above).

Updating Fanfictions

Just wanted to note that you can update fanfictions in multiple ways. You can either:

Select ebooks in your Calibre library, then click the dropdown arrow next to the FanFicFare toolbar icon and click "Update Existing Fanfiction Books" OR

Take the URLs and just download them like you would a new fic. FanFicFare will automatically replace your existing copy with the updated one. This way you can just paste in the URL from an AO3 subscription email alert instead of having to hunt down the fic in your library first.

For Advanced Users

FanFicFare can actually pull the URLs off of any page of multiple fics - this includes pages of bookmarks. For example, if you want to download fics that you have bookmarked and tagged with "favorite", just filter your bookmarks for that tag and then use the resulting URL in the steps for "Downloading a Series". Note that FanFicFare doesn't handle pagination, so if you have multiple pages of results for that bookmark search, you'll have to paste in each paginated URL separately.

Summary

Well this got WAY longer than I meant it to. I think my background in technical writing is showing - this is probably more detailed than the average tumblr user wants or needs. But whatever, at least it's thorough. If you found this guide useful, please reblog it! The more people who back up fics, the better the chances that those fics will be available if you want them later. And if you end up using Calibre extensively, consider donating to the one-person developer team to keep the project going :)

#ao3 #archive of our own #calibre #fanficfare #calibre plugins #backup #backing up fanfiction #long post #archival #back up the things that make you happy folks #mine

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messymindofmine · 1 year

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I totally understand why some people don't love how 405 was handled wrt the language Marjan used and I do agree that certain things weren't handled well but as a Muslim woman myself, I loved the episode as whole. I've always wanted to delve deeper into Marjan's background and I'm so excited to see the show do that. This episode was so important to me bc it addressed a lot of feelings I deal with when it comes to being a Muslim woman in this world. Literally her first scene in the series is Marjan talking about how she finally felt respected for the first time when she went viral. Just think about that. It's worth mentioning that when the show aired for the first time, Marjan was the first Muslim woman firefighter on TV. To my knowledge she is still the only one. And I love what they've done with her. I love that her religion is an important part of her but that's not all there is to her. I love that she's been allowed to be badass and vulnerable at the same time. I love that she's allowed to be flawed and to grow. There have been so many moments that I've found myself relating to Marjan without even realizing it. In 103 when she gets slut-shamed at her mosque, I love that they did that. Bc this is a genuine thing that Muslim women face. If we're not getting shit from other ppl, we're getting shit from our own community. But Marjan refuses to accept it and she refuses to be anything other than who she is. People can see her as being arrogant when she puts so much importance to her Firefox persona but I'm gonna have to seriously disagree with that. I love that they put so much emphasis on that in this episode bc let me tell you, I would absolutely have been one of the people stopping Marjan in the street and thanking her for what she does. I like to think there's a lot of little Muslim girls out there that can see Marjan and be inspired by her. There is importance in the way she asserts that she came to the 126 bc she wanted a work environment where she felt safe. Think about how hard Marjan fought in s3 to restore the 126. I like that it was consistently brought up in this episode bc she fought harder than anyone. But now she no longer feels safe and she needs go her own way for a while to figure out what she wants. I love the direction the show is taking for Marjan and I can't wait to see more. It's only made her more awesome in my eyes. As TK so rightly said "just when I thought she couldn't be anymore badass."

#911 on fox #911 lone star #911 lone star s4 #marjan marwani

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x-neurodivergent-reader · 2 years

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Headcanons: 13th Doctor & ADHD!Reader with tics

@agent-barnes40’s request: “I developed tics due to my ADHD medications, so imagine like 13 mimicking the tics without realizing it and reader getting very angry and set off by them.” “…I started my vocal which was a clicking noise. It was fine and became normal. I recently started snapping my fingers…”

A/N: Sorry for the wait - I hope you like this! It was supposed to go up yesterday, but I can’t seem to post anything on Firefox for some reason? I ended up having to switch to a different browser to post this ._.

The reader here is gender-neutral.

Content warnings: None.

Your tics had become a normal part of your life since you started taking the medication that led to them. Sometimes you even forget that you have them – and after the first few trips with you, the Doctor has gotten used to them, too.

The only issue that might potentially come up regarding them is when you and the Doctor are in situations where you need to be quiet, to avoid being caught by someone/something.

It can be difficult to try to withhold vocal tics, or any that make a noise at all, if the urge to do them starts to build up in those moments. Thankfully, though, you’ve survived so far!

If the Doctor started to mimic your tics for any reason, it definitely isn’t on purpose – and certainly not with the intention of setting them off for you. Chances are that she picked something up as a habit without realising it.

It first happened when you and the Doctor were talking, just after getting off of the TARDIS. She was starting to ramble, and as she was trying to remember something important, she snapped her fingers and clicking her tongue a couple of times.

She didn’t seem to notice the new little action that was similar to a couple of your tics, and you tried not to notice it, either… but despite your best efforts, it did indeed set them off, as you found yourself snapping your fingers and making a clicking noise, as well.

The Doctor barely noticed, until she looked at you and saw the way you glared at her. She asked you if she did something wrong, only for you to look pointedly at her hand, which was still in the air from when she had just been snapping her fingers.

“Do you mind?” You asked flatly, and it took a moment for the Doctor to follow your gaze, before realising what had just happened.

Seeing how frustrated you are, she was quick to apologise, admitting that she did it without thinking.

She would promise to be more careful to avoid setting off your tics in the future – especially since, again, neither of you would want it to happen in a much more tense situation.

#13th doctor imagine #13th doctor x reader #13th doctor x y/n #13th doctor x you #13th doctor imagines #thirteenth doctor imagine #thirteenth doctor imagines #thirteenth doctor x reader #thirteenth doctor x y/n #thirteenth doctor x you #doctor who imagines #doctor who imagine #doctor who x reader #doctor who x y/n #doctor who x you #neurodivergent!reader #adhd!reader #My Imagines

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 10 months

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Had a conversation with someone today about browsers, and it made me decide to write a post about a thing many people have written posts about before, and I saw those posts for a long time and largely ignored them, but then one day I decided to follow their advice, and it was so much quicker and easier than I’d expected. It turns out everyone’s right: it really is a good idea! Really! So here is my post to be that person telling everyone to: switch to Firefox!

Most of the posts I’d seen about it before focused on the way it’s the only browser that doesn’t mine and sell your data, which is of course important. Dating mining by giant corporations is evil for many reasons, I understand that as a broader issue. But to be really honest, on an individual level, I don’t care all that much whether Google knows what I’m doing on the internet. For quite some time, I never cared enough to bother switching browsers.

But then I did, and learned there are a lot of advantages besides the data privacy. Mainly, Firefox is so much faster. All else equal, on the same machine with the same capabilities, Firefox will open things quicker and more cleanly and easily than Chrome. “Cleanly” is the best word I can think of for the interface – it doesn’t bombard you with ads and widgets the way Chrome does. It’s not constantly pushing stuff at you.

In terms of extensions and stuff, it can do everything Chrome can do and some things Chrome can’t. It can import your bookmarks, browsing history, and saved passwords so quickly and easily. I’d seen before that it could do that, but had assumed it would be a whole process, hadn’t realized it would take literally thirty seconds.

So that is my PSA to say don’t stick with inferior browsers for too long like I did, just due to being used to it. You can import all your stuff into Firefox and it’ll be just like what you’re used to but better. While I’m at it, here are some other applications on my laptop that I recommend:

For the video and audio player: MPC-BE. It’s open source (open source means “free, but in a really good way of community and collaboration”, so you get the free stuff and don’t even have to feel bad for benefiting from the labour of the people who created it without compensating them, though it’s nice to donate if you can), and it’s so, so much better than the default Windows video player. You can customize everything in it to work with your keyboard. I have it set up so I can play/pause, go in or out of fullscreen, go to the previous or next file, and go forward or back by 5, 10, or 30 seconds with one key each. You can set it up to not have the bar at the bottom appear on the screen when you pause it, which makes taking screenshots so much easier.

It can open almost any video or audio file type, including plenty that the default player won’t play. It’s good to have VLC downloaded as a backup, because I’ve come across a couple of file types that MPC won’t play, and I had to use VLC to play those ones, VLC will play anything at all.

Also, you can have more than one video/audio file open at a time. The default Windows player doesn’t even let you do that, which is absolutely ridiculous. Download MPC-BE and change your default video and audio players to that, it’ll make your life better.

Audio editing: Audacity, obviously. Well, it should be obvious, though I actually didn’t start using that until somewhat recently. I found it a bit difficult to work out the controls in it, so instead of taking ten minutes to learn it, I was cutting up audio in my video player. Last year I finally took the time to learn to work Audacity, and it was so worth it. It’s not complicated, it only took about ten minutes to figure out. And now that I’m comfortable with it, it’s so much easier than anything else.

Video editing: NCH VideoPad. This the only software on my computer that I’ve paid for (besides Microsoft Office, I guess), and usually I try to find open source versions of stuff I want. But I’ve tried a bunch of different video editors, and just haven’t found any free ones that work nearly as well as VideoPad. I found myself editing a video in one program, exporting it, then importing it into a different program that has features the first program didn’t have, so I could use those too. VideoPad eliminated the need for that, it’s one program that does everything I want it to.

VideoPad isn’t expensive, and what I really like is it’s a one-time fee. Fuck the software subscription system, if I’m going to pay for something like that, I want to actually own it and get to keep it forever. I think VideoPad does have a subscription system, but it also has an option to pay a one-time fee to buy it outright, and that’s what I did. I paid for it once quite a few years ago now, and that was a very good purchase, I’ve gotten great use out of it.

For downloading: Jdownloader is an excellent way to get video and audio files off the internet. Doesn’t work every single time, but it works for a lot. I have used it so much in the last few years. The “allow right click” browser extension can be pretty useful too.

For screen recording: ShareX. Lightweight, fast and simple program that does everything I need it to, for free. Sometimes, if Jdownloader fails me so I try a whole bunch of other options and still can’t work out how to download a file, I find it can be easier to just play the whole thing while recording my screen.

For conversions: Media Mobile Converter. There are plenty of internet programs that do this, but I found it was really worth downloading a program that will let me do this right from my computer, so I can convert multiple files at a time. I use it most often to convert video files to mp3, like if I download a song off YouTube and just want the audio. But it’s also nice for taking video or audio files that are in weird formats, and converting them all to mp3 or mp4. Occasionally I’ll get an mp3 that’s too old for Audacity to read, so I use this convert it to wav and then it works no problem. It’s a useful tool to have on hand, and again, open source.

This has been a PSA about the pieces of software that make my life better.

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ageless-aislynn · 3 months

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Friends. I have learned something VERY important. My computer... hates Google. No, seriously. I realized that the entire last bunch of blue screens that happened after the BIOS, Nvidia and Intel driver patches were occurring either as soon as I loaded up Chrome or was taking it down. If Chrome did manage to load, then my Nvidia graphics card would literally GROWL the entire time it was on. I am not speaking metaphorically. It sounded like it wanted to bite my ankle but now I know, it was just Google it wanted to bite.

The final piece of the puzzle was yesterday, when I tried to use Google docs (via Firefox). My computer HATED Google docs. My computer sees anything Google and it WILL do this:

Apologies for the crudeness. It was what my computer insisted on in exchange for letting me type, you know, G👀gl3.

Trigger warning: flashing lights

Halo 2 Honor Guards Google: "Hey, Ais' computer, would you like to see what amazing products we have for you today--ERK!" *essplodey*

Ais' computer: *Needler sounds and maniacal laughing*

(I removed Chrome, btw. Firefox has always been my main browser but sometimes it would act weird on certain sites and they'd load fine on Chrome so I'd split my browsing like that. If FF has issues with any site, I'll either try Opera for a secondary browser or *shudders* Edge - edit: no disrespect meant if you love Edge. I just had Some Problems with it back when it was Internet Explorer and I've never forgiven it. 🤷‍♀️ Either way, Chrome has gotten the boot and my computer is much happier about it.)

My frens, it is a weird new computer world I've found myself in but, if I can keep the computer from crashing, then I'll try to thrive in it. So far, at least it doesn't seem to mind me transcribing my ch7 "15 Minutes" draft into my email. It's an awkward way to edit but it's better than nothing.

Now I just have to make sure I don't mail the dang thing to somebody. Like, say, Noble Team!

Hey, guys, what did you think of my rough draft? Did you like it? What did you think about that part with the huge... Hey, WAIT A MINUTE, COME BACK HERE!

Um, yeah. They loved it. I'm pretty sure they're rushing off to blog about it right now! 😇

Seriously, though, I hope to have it ready to post in a couple more days. We'll see. Ch8 will be (emailing) right behind it and ch9 is still being hand written. It's... something, at least. 🤷‍♀️

I may see if the computer is stable enough for me to put my ol' faithful version of Word 2003 (my beloved) back on there. But for now, we email like a Spartan in the AU Party 'hog!

Anyway, I share because I care. Hope you all are doing well. Love you, frens. 💖💖💖

#ageless aislynn #computer issues #computer problems #ais is writing #love you frens #trigger warning: flashing lights #flashing lights

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