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tickle-bugs · 1 year

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For the warmup prompts can you do Beetlejuice and Lydia (platonic! I do not ship them romantically in any way whatsoever) with the dialogue of “I bet I can get you to say my name.” If not, I totally understand!

So for people who haven’t seen/listened to the musical the vibe is completely different from the movie LMAO less “this is our weird uncle beetlejuice the family won’t talk to him he’s wanted by the feds and can’t come within 500 feet of the house” and more “cool but still weird cousin beetlejuice who collects strange rocks, is always in danger of being actively actively on fire, and is wayyy too into dark humor”. It’s a good show! If you like comedy musicals with a rock lean to the soundtrack, you’ll probably like it. It’s got a Little Shop of Horrors sensibility to it, I think.

If anyone tags this as ship w/ Lydia and Beetlejuice I will crawl out of your screen like the girl from the ring and gnaw on your bones I’m so serious

AU where the plot of this show doesn’t take like. A week LMAO. Basically Lydia hasn’t said BJ’s name yet but she also hasn’t decided what to do with her dad yet. So they’re at an impasse. Lydia regularly goes to hang out in her haunted attic and lament because Delia won’t go up there, thus making it safe. Beetlejuice keeps doing Say My Name-style ad pitches to get Lydia to summon him properly but he’s not very good at it.

EDIT: FORGOT THE BODY HORROR WARNING OOPS!! It’s very mild but just in case anyone needs it <;3

Full-Time Spectres

Lydia’s life is far from conventional, perfectly so, but she’s started to adapt to the strangeness in the walls of her house. She doesn’t have the one ghost she wants most of all, but she’s got three that do just fine for entertainment and scheming purposes. She’s gotten used to the cold spots, the occasional flicker of the lights, and Adam’s habit of walking through walls rather than doors--he figured out that he could and never wanted to stop.

Some things she’ll never adjust to, though, like her attic being strewn with scraps of brutalized board games.

Monopoly’s been pinned to the wall with a knife, Ludo sits perfectly still on a shelf with suspicious-looking green liquid in the shot glasses, and a chess board hovers in the air, eternally aflame. It’s a massacre and she doesn’t know where half of these things came from.

“What’s, uh…what’s happening here?” Lydia kicks the door shut behind her. The door creaks open. She kicks it closed again with a frown.

Adam looks up and squints at the door. His eyes dart around as if he can see the schematics of it and diagnose the problem from halfway across the room. Lydia allows herself a tiny smile.

“Adam’s teaching me to play checkers.” Beetlejuice beams, which is unsettling in itself.

“Well, I tried to reach him to play chess, then a few other things…it didn’t go well.” Adam pushes his glasses up his nose and surveys the board in front of them. He captures one of Beetlejuice’s pieces with a triumphant little ‘aha!’.

Beetlejuice takes a long, pensive look at the board. Very thin tendrils of smoke curl out of his ears as he tries to decide which piece to play. Adam, sweet Adam, goes to help him make an advantageous move, but Beetlejuice shushes him.

“What are you doing?” Lydia sidles over to Barbara, who fumbles with an old lamp. She sets it down before she can shatter it.

“Well, it was going to be a surprise but…” Barbara gestures excitedly to a small nook in the attic. She’s rearranged various boxes of her former belongings to build a shoddy sort of booth. A heavy, ugly floral curtain hangs precariously over the doorway.

“It’s a dark corner!” Lydia gasps sarcastically.

“No—well, yes, but it’s supposed to be a kind of mini dark room? I don’t know much about them but I know you’re always taking pictures.” Barbara shifts awkwardly.

Oh. Oh.

Lydia cradles her camera in her hands, running her thumb along the outside. The pebbled texture is a kiss to her fingertips. If she concentrated hard enough, she can remember the feeling of her mom’s warm hands over her own, showing her how to hold the camera.

“If you don’t like it—“

“You made this for me?” She whispers. She tries to swallow the lump in her throat.

“Still workin’ on it, but yes.” Barbara gestures lamely.

“You…didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got nothing but time. Might as well use it right.” Barbara shrugs. Lydia bounces on her toes.

“I’ve still, um, gotta clear out all of our junk. Adam and I don’t need it anymore, not really, and you need room to breathe. I know it’s not much, but--”

Lydia crashes into Barbara for a hug. She’s icy to the touch, but her touch is the most comforting thing Lydia can imagine. Barbara pulls her in close, cradling the back of her head with her cool hands. There is no heartbeat in her chest, but Lydia can feel that it’s not empty.

A memory of her mother prickles at the back of her mind. She pushes it down.

“Do you want help?” Lydia pulls away and looks towards the dark room, ignoring the twinge of grief in her gut. She can see its potential around the edges.

“It’s your surprise! You can’t help with that!” Barbara gasps, affronted.

The curtain falls heavily from the hooks and thumps into the ground. A plume of dust kicks up and Lydia coughs.

“Okay. Maybe you can.” Barbara scratches her head. Together, she and Lydia hoist the heavy curtain back into precarious-looking hooks embedded in the wall. As they back away from it, silently begging it to stay in place, Beetlejuice sits up ramrod straight.

“Adam, Barbara’s throwing away your coin collection,” Beetlejuice gasps and points over Adam’s shoulder.

“What? They’re vintage!” Adam whirls around. Beetlejuice moves a bunch of pieces around, making a bunch of captures, and eats a piece for good measure. He winks at Lydia. She fondly rolls her eyes.

“You know I would never.” Barbara says. Adam deflates. She kisses his forehead. He grumbles a little but accepts it.

When Adam turns back to the board, Lydia has the express joy of watching him go through the five stages of grief in real time. He looks from Beetlejuice to the board in sheer despair.

“Why do you keep eating the pieces?” Adam puts his head in his hands.

“Because, Adam dearest, it makes you mad.” Beetlejuice pats his shoulder solemnly. Lydia snorts.

“Well, I’m officially out of games.” Adam pats his thighs and stands. He ambles over to Barbara and appraises the curtain. He puts his hands on his hips and starts muttering about supports and tracks. Lydia tries to follow along but her eyes near-instantly glaze over.

“Sooooo, Lydia.” Beetlejuice slides over to her. “Have you given my offer any more thought?”

“You still haven’t given me a convincing argument. Calling yourself ‘the worst of the best’ isn’t exactly a glowing review.” Lydia wrinkles her nose.

“These two like me!” Beetlejuice points at the Maitlands. Barbara gives a teasing ‘meh’ gesture just to see him splutter in offense. She laughs softly.

“I’ll admit, I’m coming around on him.” Adam chuckles.

“Thank you, Adam. Mwah.” Beetlejuice blows a kiss in his direction. Adam turns a little pink and goes back to working on the curtain. Barbara whispers something in his ear that makes him turn even pinker.

“They like anyone. I’ve met cardboard with stronger opinions than them.” Lydia scoffs, then turns. “No offense.”

Adam and Barbara both shrug.

“Fair point. Counteroffer: you hate your dad, I hate your dad, let’s kill him.” Beetlejuice gives his most enthusiastic jazz hands. Lydia stares at him blankly.

“Denied.” She pushes his hands out of the way.

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that you suck. Your fate hinges on me and you can’t even get me to say your name. You spend all your time cheating at board games because you need me more than I need you. That’s pretty lame for a big, scary demon,” Lydia says mockingly, curling her fingers into claws. When Beetlejuice gives her the finger, she gives two right back with a smirk.

“Lydia, be nice,” Barbara chides, goosing Lydia’s side. She yelps and smacks her hand away.

Beetlejuice gasps. Lydia slowly meets his sparkling eyes.

“No.” Lydia points at him. Beetlejuice smiles slowly, wicked and full of mischief.

“I’ll kill you. I’ll bring you back to life just to kill you--”

Lydia steps back, Beetlejuice steps forward, and all hell breaks loose. Lydia springs over a pile of Maitland junk and ducks under Adam’s arm. She shoves him into Beetlejuice’s path.

Beetlejuice simply picks Adam up and deposits him elsewhere like a Maitland mannequin. He squeaks and leaps out of the way of their chase.

The two of them circle each other around an unbuilt dining room table kit, Lydia just barely keeping out of arm’s reach. She bolts past a dilapidated spin-your-own-yarn kit and dives through Barbara’s legs to hide behind her.

Beetlejuice stops and visibly considers the consequences of doing the same. Barbara gives him a withering look. He tries to circle around her, but Lydia’s excellent at moving her around like a meat shield. Beetlejuice visibly starts scheming.

Barbara looks at Lydia, looks back at him, and slides out of the way.

“Barbara!” Lydia screeches in outrage but there’s not enough time to screech and run. He grabs her and pulls her into a bear hug.

“Thank youuuu, Babs!” Beetlejuice grins at her. She shakes her head fondly and honorably discharges herself from the battlefield.

“Hey Lydia…I bet I can get you to say my name.” He cackles evilly. Lydia hisses at him, but damn it, she’s already giggling nervously. He swoops his hands over her stomach, wiggling his fingers but not quite touching.

“B-Beetlejuice!” She squeaks and rocks up onto her toes in lieu of running.

“That’s one!” He singsongs, finally touching down on her stomach. She folds into his hands—unwise, really—and curses Beetlejuice to the high heavens and below.

“Think we should help her?” Adam leans over to Barbara. They both watch Lydia worm around in Beetlejuice’s arms, not making much of an escape attempt despite the volume of her threats.

“Nah.” Barbara moves a crate of nearly-unused embroidery hoops out of the way with tender care. The curtain collapses again. Both Maitlands sigh.

“Beetlejuice, you fucker!” Lydia growls, but quickly loses it to laughter. He’s doing this infuriating little pinchy-thing to her sides, one that makes her leap clear off the ground each time. She tosses her head back and cackles, her whole face scrunched with the force of it.

God, she hasn’t laughed like this since…well, it’s been a while. She’d forgotten that she could.

“Eh, that probably counts. One more!” Beetlejuice finds a deathly spot on her lower ribs and decides not to leave it alone.

“Beeeeeeeeeeeee--AHHH!”

“Hm, yeah. See, now we’re gonna have to start over.” Beetlejuice tasers her sides, right at that spot, and feigns disapproval. Lydia makes a noise at a pitch audible only to dogs and demons.

Crunch.

Lydia’s foot connects directly with his face in a frankly-stunning high kick. He drops her roughly. Something goes flying across the room and hits the wall with a quiet thump. Barbara gasps sharply and covers her mouth in shock.

Beetlejuice touches his nose—or rather, the space where it used to be, and a thick hush falls over the attic. Everyone’s eyes drift to the nose, now fallen among jars of the most rancid-looking kombucha on the face of the earth. It twitches plaintively.

He laughs, loud and boisterous. His lack-of-nose whistles as he does. Adam picks up the fallen nose and gags before tossing it to Lydia and wiping his hands on his shirt.

“Got your nose,” Lydia giggles weakly, depositing it into Beetlejuice’s hand.

“Nice shot.” Beetlejuice chuckles, uncomfortably nasally, and shoves his nose back into place with an awful crack. He takes a long, wheezing inhale and gives her a thumbs up.

“So…” He sidles close to her, bringing back the jazz hands.

“No.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.” He sighs.

“Lydia, are you alright?” Delia’s voice curls faintly up the rickety staircase. She climbs up, but not all the way—Lydia can tell by the shuffling of her awful shoes.

Everyone freezes.

“Lydia?”

She opens her mouth to answer Delia and Beetlejuice squeezes her sides. She yelps and whirls around, but he doesn’t even have the decency to feign innocence. He just does it again, waiting for the precise moment she goes to speak.

“Y-Yeah, I’m o-okay.” Lydia wrestles with Beetlejuice’s hands, her voice shaking with barely-restrained giggles.

“Oh god, please don’t make me come up there.” Delia’s ‘whisper’ is anything but. Beetlejuice snorts.

“I’m fine! Just, uhm, doing spring cleaning.” Lydia calls back, stomping on Beetlejuice’s foot. He doesn’t even flinch.

“Okay.” A long, heavy pause from Delia.

“You can go now!” Lydia yells. Delia’s heels click quickly down the stairs, back towards the dreary living.

“You’re insufferable,” Lydia hisses at Beetlejuice, punching his shoulder. He holds his hand over his heart and gives a grand, sweeping bow. When he stands up, he smacks his head against the dagger in the wall. Lydia snickers at him.

He turns around like a penguin, never one to do things normally, and makes a delighted noise at the pierced Monopoly board. He pulls the knife out of the wall and pokes his finger with it a few too many times, fascinated with the sharpness of it.

He stretches, makes a bunch of vague measurement and aiming gestures, then lobs the knife straight upwards. It lodges into the ceiling with an enthusiastic ping! The blade warbles with the force of it.

Beetlejuice slaps the Monopoly board down on the floor and plops down in front of it. Adam bemoans the state of the attic ceiling as Barbara consoles him.

“Wanna play?” Beetlejuice snaps his fingers and the board changes, shifting into black, whites, purples, and greens. Graveyard moss creeps along the edges of the board. Monopoly components spawn into existence on the board, appearing in puffs of fog and comically-quiet wails of the damned.

“Sure.” Lydia sits opposite him. She pokes at some of the moss. It sprouts to meet her touch.

“If you get stabbed, you lose?” Beetlejuice casts a cursory glance to the still-wobbling knife. The blade shifts slightly out of the ceiling.

“Deal.” Lydia sticks her hand out to shake. Beetlejuice takes it with gusto.

“You guys wanna play?” Lydia turns to the Maitlands. Barbara and Adam look at each other, communicating in that telepathic way of theirs. Barbara grins and leads Adam over to the board to sit.

“I call thimble!” Adam reaches for it. Beetlejuice swats his hand. Adam reaches again. Beetlejuice swats him a little harder.

“You can’t have the thimble. I’m the thimble.” Beetlejuice pinches it between his fingers.

“Can I have the thimble?” Barbara leans close to Beetlejuice and looks up at him through her lashes. Lydia never would’ve guessed that a demon could blush, but sure enough, Beetlejuice’s face takes on the slightest bit of color.

“I sense that I’m being manipulated.” He narrows his eyes.

“Is it working?” Barbara smiles.

“Yep.” He slaps the thimble into her hand. She passes it to Adam. He beams. Beetlejuice rolls his eyes but his gaze lingers on them for just a bit too long.

“Well played, Babs. Well played.” Beetlejuice scoops up the racecar piece and frowns at it. Its tiny metal form melts and reconfigures into a small hearse. Satisfied, he places it right next to the cat piece—Lydia’s, of course. Barbara takes the top hat with pride.

When Beetlejuice jumps Adam for his extra get out of jail free card—of which there are a suspicious amount in Beetlejuice’s version of the game—Lydia laughs and swipes a bit of Beetlejuice’s money. Adam’s hiccupy cackles are the backdrop for Barbara robbing the bank in broad daylight, taking as many bills from the tray as her heart desires.

Lydia’s life is certainly very strange and painfully unusual, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world. She can only hope that her mom will love being part of the attic’s menagerie of ghosts and ghouls as much as she does.

#this...this got out of hand #rewrote it twice so it might be a bit of a mess but i think i got to mash together the concepts i was leaning between #hope u enjoy it anon!! thank u for this!!!#my fics #beetlejuice musical #ticklish!lydia #lil bit of adam at the end too but im not gonna tag it #lydia deetz #adam maitland #barbara maitland #beetlejuice #not gonna tag delia either but bless her heart #not explicitly ship but. i think adam barbara and beetlejuice hold hands sometimes idk #tried to include a couple easter eggs/references i hope ppl enjoy those hehe #also bj is just so much fun to write. funky lil freak

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sineala · 10 months

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Hi Sine! I find myself in possession of a very long plot (not going to count how many of those are in my inventory), and was hoping you'd share what program(s) you use for yours? I'm the sort who'd use a murder-wall with notecards but I don't have space rn. I *should* use tagging systems but all the ones available are so sketchy and unreliable that I lose focus just typing. Also I tried to search but. This is tumbs. Thanks - Shusu

Oh boy, this question was made for me!

The first novel-length story I wrote, I wrote in TextEdit. All 90,000 words of it. I basically just made a list of the scenes I wanted in the order I wanted them in, started typing the story above the list, and deleted every scene from the list when I had written it. I don't recommend this.

These days, I use Scapple and Scrivener. I have much more detail below. I am sure I have talked about them before but, as you say, Tumblr is hard to search.

Different things will work for different people, and I don't always start this way, but sometimes, while I'm still trying to rough out an idea, I start with a mind mapping program. You know that brainstorming technique that you learned in, like, third grade, where you take a piece of paper and you write down the main idea in the center in a bubble and then branch lines out from those with more bubbles containing related ideas, and then branch things out from those, and so on? You can get programs to do that instead of a big piece of paper, and the advantage to doing this on a computer is that your piece of paper can be infinitely large and you won't ever run out of space.

I will sometimes skip this step if I already know what order things are going to happen in (in that case, I just make an outline), but if it's the kind of unformed idea where I just want to write down everything that happens as I think of it so I won't forget it later, then I use a mind map.

I also use it to write down bits of dialogue as I think of them; the program I use lets me change fonts and colors and so on, so I have color-coded my dialogue by character:

I feel like I have probably posted this before but Tumblr is not letting me search. Also, this is probably not how you're supposed to use this, judging by how it exports data, but whatever.

There are a variety of programs that can help you make mind maps, and I'm sure a lot of them are good. The one I use is Scapple, which I like for a few reasons: it's very easy to use (you type something in, and then to connect two bubbles you drag one on top of the other) in a way that gives you a lot of freedom; it's not a subscription model like a lot of apps are (you buy it, you pay once, you can use it forever, and it costs about $20); and mostly, it's made by the developer of the writing program I use (Scrivener), meaning that the two programs integrate very well.

So then there's Scrivener.

Scrivener is probably the absolute most useful software I have ever owned; I have bought it four times now. (All three desktop versions and then the iOS version.) It is a word processor that is designed to help you structure and write novels. There are similar programs for free or at least cheaper, of course, but this is the one I use. (It also isn't a subscription; you just buy it.)

The downside is that it's a very complex program. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can look a little daunting. It's one of those programs that has hundreds of features and you will only use about fifty percent of them, but everyone uses a different fifty percent, so there's something for everyone. (It can generate character names! There's a feature on the Mac version where it can highlight words by part of speech! You can change all the icons! The LaTeX export is pretty decent!)

Honestly, as long as you can figure out how to make scenes, rearrange scenes, edit synopses, and get your work out of the program, you're good to go; that's probably what you'll be doing most of the time.

Scrivener is basically designed around the murder-wall-of-notecards writing approach. A Scrivener project contains your Draft, which can have a bunch of folders in it (chapters) which can have individual documents (scenes). Each scene has an index card associated with it, and each index card is where you can write a synopsis for each scene.

You can view your story as single scenes or as a whole story (optionally with a window showing the synopses, so you can remember what you thought was going to happen while you are writing; I have shown this above) or you can just view the synopses as an outline or as index cards, like so:

There's your murder wall right there.

Rearranging the index cards also rearranges the scenes. (Rearranging the scenes using the list in the sidebar also rearranges the scenes.) So if you want to swap scenes around, you can do that. If you want to write the end first, you can do that. If you want to add three more scenes in the middle, you can do that.

You can also search your whole project, color code the index cards, tag them however you want with keywords (e.g., a keyword for every character who appears in the scene) and then look at everything you've tagged with particular keywords, notate scenes by whether they're done or not, and basically everything else you can think of. Mostly I have used this to color code scenes by POV so I can keep track of who's talking; I could also have used keywords.

So my first move when I start a project in Scrivener is to make a bunch of blank documents for all the scenes I think I will have, give them some kind of meaningful title, start writing down on the notecards things that will happen in each scene, and then move them around. This is where Scapple comes in handy -- both because I already have an idea from making a mind map in Scapple of what scenes I want, and also because the integration between Scapple and Scrivener makes it really, really easy to get started.

How do Scapple and Scrivener integrate, you ask? If you make a mind map in Scapple, you can drag and drop it into Scrivener and it will automatically make one scene for every bubble you have, and the text of each bubble will be on the notecard, so you can basically start with all of your scenes that you already have made in Scapple and then reorder them as you like.

Scrivener projects also have a Research section, where you can store basically anything related to what you're working on; you can set it to show your draft and your research at the same time. Basically anything can go in here. Mine usually have notes, more notes, character information, lines I cut but wanted to save somewhere (there is also a versioning system built in if you prefer that), comics panels, reference pictures, and entire webpages. This way, you'll never have to figure out what you did with that thing you looked up for your story, because you can keep it right there with your story.

Scrivener costs $60, which is kind of a lot, but there are very often coupons for 50% off from online software retailers (I just saw one on Boing Boing a couple days ago that still works as of the time I am answering this; I can vouch that they are a legit retailer). Also if you know anyone who has won NaNoWriMo, they get a Scrivener coupon as part of their winnings, and some people don't use theirs. It has a thirty-day free trial period (IIRC that's 30 days of use, not 30 calendar days) so you can try it and see if it works for you.

I also made a Compile Format for Scrivener 3 -- the current version -- so I can export HTML suitable for AO3 or Dreamwidth in one click. Scrivener can export your work in basically any format you can think of, but the default HTML exports all have too much stuff in them for my liking.

(Scrivener also has a bunch of preset templates for various kinds of writing -- like, there's a Novel template with room for character sheets and settings and all of that. You can make your own template, too. I actually made my own template for writing fanfiction for AO3. I'm not sharing this one because it is so personalized to me that it wouldn't be useful -- but, for example, I already know that I'm going to want a document in my Research section where I list notes about canon, and one where I list what bits I need to edit, and one where I copy in any conversations I've had with beta readers that I might want to refer to, and one where I list the things that will be in the AO3 header (it contains empty spaces for Title, Fandom, Tags, Summary, etc) so I can now always start with that. You can make a template yourself by opening a new project, setting it up exactly the way you like with the Research documents exactly the way you want, and then doing File > Save as Template. It will copy everything including any text that's in there so you want to use something that doesn't already have any story or research content written in it because then that will get copied. But it's a real timesaver.)

Anyway. Scrivener is the best.

#replies #rfpreiwaphase #scrivener

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hushed-chorus · 1 year

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Hello, folks, and thank you for all the recent tags! It was great seeing so many WIPs! Also, a cheery Easter to those who celebrate. I’m drinking tea and eating chocolate eggs. It’s incredible.

I’ve been travelling this week, and spent last weekend banned from my laptop due to a bad case of The Sores, so I’ve not written as much as I’d like. But! I managed to do some editing on What Remains After The Storm (and get Chp 6 published!)! I also did some discovery writing by hand for a Piranesi-inspired fic. It’s been bloody delightful to just take a concept, write, and see what unspools.

Since it’s Easter, I’m sharing some spice from upcoming Chp 7 of What Remains After The Storm. It’s what Jesus would have wanted. Excerpt and hello tags under the cut

Eight years of [redacted] have left me ill-prepared for the mysteries of an adult body, because apparently I can’t indulge in even the cleanest fantasy without my cock perking up. It’s like a bloody dog that’s heard a knock at the door. (Less noisy, of course.)

I reach down to rearrange myself. The touch makes me hesitate.

Slowly I press my palm against the length of me, crushing it between hand and thigh. My fingers brush the tip. I pause, swallow.

I’ve never done this before, but I know what to do. Perhaps it’s all the crass talk I overheard as a child, or perhaps it’s instinctual. And now, here, with privacy and full access to my anatomy…

Snow won’t be back any time soon.

@johnwgrey @bookish-bogwitch @artsyunderstudy @erzbethluna @facewithoutheart @captain-aralias @raenestee @aroace-genderfluid-sheep @yeonjunenby @cutestkilla @ivelovedhimthroughworse @larkral @stitchyqueer @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @ileadacharmedlife @confused-bi-queer @aristocratic-otter @tea-brigade @whogaveyoupermission @nightimedreamersworld @fatalfangirl @thewholelemon @onepintobean @chen-chen-chen-again-chen @shrekgogurt @theearlgreymage @martsonmars @blackberrysummerblog @orange-peony @palimpsessed

#six sentence sunday #simon snow fic #what remains after the storm

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mentalisttraceur-software · 4 months

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This post was created and written in Emacs as Markdown (with Frontmatter YAML), and then I used my mostly-finished Python code to post it as NPF using the Tumblr API.

The Python packages I'm using are

`pytumblr2` for interacting with the API using Tumblr's "Neue Post Format",

`python-frontmatter` for reading the frontmatter (but not writing; I hate how it disruptively rearranges and reformats existing YAML),

`mistune` for the Markdown parsing, for now with just the strikethrough extension (`marko` seems like it would be a fine alternative if you prefer strict CommonMark compatibility or have other extension wants).

The workflow I now have looks something like this:

Create a new note in Emacs. I use the Denote package, for many reasons which I'll save for another post.

Denote automatically manages some fields in the frontmatter for the information it owns/manages.

Denote has pretty good code for managing tags (Denote calls them "keywords"). The tags go both in the file name and in the frontmatter. There's some smarts to auto-suggest tags based on tags you already use, etc.

The usual composable benefits apply. Denote uses completing-read to get tags from you when used interactively, so you can get nicer narrowing search UX with Vertico, Orderless, and so on.

So when I create a new "note" (post draft in this case) I get prompted for file name, then tags.

I have my own custom code to make tag adding/removing much nicer than the stock Denote experience (saves manual steps, etc).

Edit the post as any other text file in Emacs. I get all the quality-of-life improvements to text editing particular to my tastes.

If I stop and come back later, I can use any search on the file names or contents, or even search the contents of the note folder dired buffer, to find the post draft in a few seconds.

Every time I save this file, Syncthing spreads it to all my devices. If I want, I can trivially use Emac's feature of auto-saving and keeping a configurable number of old copies for these files.

I have a proper undo tree, if basic undo/redo isn't enough, and in the undo tree UI I can even toggle displaying the diff for each change.

My tools such as viewing unsaved changes with `git diff`, or my partial write and partial revert like `git add -p`, are now options I have within easy reach (and this composes with all enhancements to my Git config, such as using Git Delta or Difftastic).

After a successful new post creation, my Python code adds a "tumblr" field with post ID and blog name to the frontmatter YAML. If I tell it to publish a post that already has that information, it edits the existing post. I can also tell it to delete the post mentioned in that field, and if that succeeds it removes the field from the file too.

The giant leap of me being able to draft/edit/manage my posts outside of Tumblr is... more than halfway complete. The last step to an MVP is exposing the Python functions in a CLI and wrapping it with some Emacs keybinds/UX. Longer-term TODOs:

Links! MVP is to just add links to my Markdown-to-NPF code. Ideal is to use Denote links and have my code translate that to Tumblr links.

Would be nice to use the local "title" of the file as the Tumblr URL slug.

Pictures/videos! I basically never make posts with media, but sometimes I want to, and it would be nice to have this available.

#software

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ruedesfillesducalvaire · 7 months

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*waves* as someone who has grumbled about Denny very often, I can link you to some of the reasons why some of us get really frustrated with it1 I'll send you a URL to a sort of summary after this and hope Tumblr doesn't eat it :P But also one big reason it gets people frustrated in Tumblr spaces specifically is because Denny cuts and rearranges things in several places, and if you're doing a group readalong--as is often the case here -- that just throws everyone off , repeatedly, in a way that other differing translations don't. So do also keep that in mind when looking at people in the old tags grumping about it- it was just the source of Some Awkwardness, and became kind of an in-joke with the group reads that had this happening.

Ohh I see, thanks so much for explaining that and providing that link (which I'll also paste here for anyone else who might be interested: https://www.tumblr.com/pilferingapples/182027215356/whats-wrong-with-norman-denny?source=share)

BTW I found the difference in tone between this ask (calm, measured) and the post you linked (full roast mode) really funny—time heals all wounds, I see, or at least dulls the pain 😂

But yeah that's all super valid, happy to join in bagging on Norman Denny from this day forward [readying tomatoes to chuck] 🥲

My edition is Denny, but I also tend to read classics partially in book form and partially on Project Gutenberg from my phone (when lying in bed/in the dark/commuting/out and about/etc.), so I basically read half Denny and half Hapgood. In terms of straight-up reading experience (without having made any comparisons, either between translations or to the original French), I was fine with both (but now having read of Denny's Crimes, I am indeed annoyed with him).

[Fairly irrelevant sidenote] The one thing that bothered me at the time of reading was Hapgood's use of 'thou'. I don't like it when translators use 'thou' in place of 'tu'; I find it has completely the wrong effect, because to a modern English speaker it reads as more formal, instead of less. I prefer when translators find another way to convey the difference in address.

#asks #the brick #the brick translations #les mis translations #analysis #norman denny #isabelle hapgood #les mis #les miserables #les misérables

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wintersmitth · 1 year

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Ten books to know me

Rules: 10 (non-ancient) books for people to get to know you better, or that you just really like.

I got tagged by my amazing @mathomhouse-e and I am always down to have an excuse to talk about books.

HHhH by Laurent Binet.

Up until 2 years ago, I thought I would never touch anything related to real-life historical events, particularly anything related to WWII. Got burned badly by a historical novel when I was about 15. This book, however was on sale, and I think it is one of the best book-reading decisions I have done in a while. Completely rearranged my understanding of WWII, and also gave enough basis for better understanding of the current events.

2. Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo.

I have lots and lots of gripes with Bardugo writing, but not in this case. Bardugo wove a wonderful story, and I firmly believe it should not be branded as Young Adult. I couldn't put it down, and the story kept me on the edge of my sit.

3. Sherlock Holmes.

Look. It got nothing to do with Sh*rlock BBC. I do, genuinely, love Sherlock Holmes. I love that funky detective dude and his bestie, solving crimes and helping mistreated people out of trouble.

4. The Hunter and the Hunted by Ivan Bahrianyi.

And look, this Ukrainian book has even English translation. The original title actually translates to 'Tigertrappers'. It's an incredible story of man convicted for some bogus crime in USSR, his forced deportation, and the hunt on him. The book has an incredibly strong imagery and the vision of the train full of people compared to an angry dragon has stayed with me over the years, and has infused into my nightmares.

5. Overture: The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

Perhaps to no one's surprise, Sandman is here. The whole comic series has kept me sane this year, but Overutre is especially dear to me.

6. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.

Incredible. Incredible graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi about her experience of growing up in a war-torn Iran. Read it during the lockdown, cried like a bitch. Poignant, important story.

7. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.

I love Pterry dearly, and I often speak of any given Disc book as 'Oh I love this so much', but when I say that about Night Watch, it means I love it above all else. It is a very personal book, and it is also the only book I took with me when I left Kyiv last year for my then-undetermined exile.

8. The Thirteen's Tale by Diane Setterfield.

I read it years and years ago (my edition says it was published in 2009) and it still stays with me. A haunting story of people slipping through the cracks and weaving their own story.

9. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett.

Yeah, so I got two Pterry books here, and? I wish I had Tiffany Aching books growing up.

10. I would be a bad Ukrainian if I didn't name

Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko.

What a man. What poetry. He really experienced being a Ukrainian to his fullest, and insane how we still find his words topical, fresh and valuable.

I am tagging @tj-dragonblade @quillingwords @seiya-starsniper from Dreamling Nation, but also @saltforsalt @davinciae and @flaielis

#sansael talks #tag game #dreamling nation #books

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yardtonki · 2 years

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Adobe indesign cs5 5

#ADOBE INDESIGN CS5 5 PDF#

#ADOBE INDESIGN CS5 5 UPDATE#

#ADOBE INDESIGN CS5 5 PDF#

apply Alt text (for the visually impaired or for situations when graphics are turned off) or tag an object as an “Artifact” so that it won’t be read aloud by PDF screen readers.

Here’s an awesome improvement: You can select an object choose Object > Object Export Options to: By default, it’s the same name as the character or paragraph style you’re editing, but you can always change the name to something shorter or more CSS-friendly, a lot easier than renaming the style sheets. Another nice feature is that the Class field is also editable. For example, we might want to manually enter the HTML element “blockquote” in the Tag field. In the example above, we’re editing a paragraph style called “Pullquote.” InDesign’s default behavior (what you get if you leave the Tag field set to ) is no different than before - the paragraph will be formatted as a regular paragraph with the style name as a class attribute: in the exported EPUB/HTML file. In either case, you can click inside the Tag field and manually enter a completely different tag that you want InDesign to use for that style. For paragraph styles, you can choose to map the style to a Header tag (h1-h6) for character styles, you can choose from span, em, and strong. It lets you override how InDesign maps your InDesign-styled text to CSS styles and HTML or Tagged PDF markup. Style MappingĮxport Tagging is a new option at the bottom of both the Paragraph Style Options and Character Style Options dialog boxes. There’s no doubt that linked stories could be very helpful for some people, but most people will likely end up ignoring this feature unless Adobe makes it more robust.

#ADOBE INDESIGN CS5 5 UPDATE#

Note that you cannot change the formatting or the text in the “child/clone.” Well, actually, you can, but if you later change the parent and then click Update in the Links panel, any changes you’ve made to the child are wiped out - again, just the same as it has always worked in linked Word docs. But the ability now to link from one story to another inside the same document is novel. Linked text is not technically new you’ve been able to link to Word and Excel docs for many years (by turning on a checkbox in the Preferences dialog box). Change the “parent” text and the “child” text changes, too. Have some text that shows up looking the same in 15 different places in your document? You can now duplicate a story and link the duplicate to the original, like a clone. Now, in CS5.5, you can set a story’s order in the new Articles panel. An article can combine multiple text and graphic frames, and then allows you to rearrange their order. Order is particularly important when trying to export EPUB, XHTML, or accessible PDFs, but can be important at other times, too. Until now, if you wanted to specify an order for your stories - that is, headline first, subhead next, then story, and so on - you had to either put everything in the same text thread or use the Structure Pane (which was designed for XML and is difficult to master). Adobe today announced a significant release of InDesign and the Creative Suite, dubbed 5.5! While there is a little for everyone - there’s one or two features that will excite every CS5 user - how much you’ll want 5.5 directly correlates to how much work you do with interactive documents (EPUB, DPS, HTML, and accessible PDF files).

#Adobe indesign cs5 5

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trustcreation · 2 years

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Free clipboard manager

FREE CLIPBOARD MANAGER WINDOWS

It does this by creating a single clipboard entry for all of these items, so you can easily copy items from multiple locations and paste them onto one central location. One of Clipboard Master’s useful features is that it allows you to copy multiple items from multiple locations simultaneously. Collectively, you can store up to 10000 entries on it and access them at your fingertips whenever you want.

FREE CLIPBOARD MANAGER WINDOWS

It helps you copy, paste, collect, and organize your text snippets, images, files, and folders across various Windows programs. Clipboard Master IMAGE: Clipboard MasterĬlipboard Master is yet another powerful clipboard manager for Windows with an extensive set of features. Similarly, you can also put to use triggers to listen to events like desktop unlock or window focus to perform operations like removing formatting or whitespace from the clipboard or replacing some part of the text snippet with another piece of text.ĭownload ClipboardFusion 5. Plus, you can also opt for cloud syncing-with a Binary Fortress account-to sync your clipboard text with other devices.Īs for advanced operations, Clipboard Fusion allows you to use hotkeys, create macros (using C#) to perform text transformation on your copied text snippets, and automatically set triggers to perform various clipboard actions.įor example, with macros, you can parse your clipboard text and get rid of invalid HTML tags, clear the clipboard at will, or convert text to some other format. All your clippings are saved and categorized accordingly to make it easier to access them. Using ClipboardFusion, you can save various kinds of items to your clipboard history and access them later when required. It manages to get the balance right between being an easy-to-use app and an advanced clipboard manager with features like macros and customizable triggers. ClipboardFusion IMAGE: ClipboardFusionĬlipboardFusion is one of the popular clipboard managers for Windows. Similarly, you can also sort, edit, and delete your saved items to have them organized and managed under their dedicated tabs.ĬopyQ employs various system-wide shortcuts for different operations, and you also get the ability to add custom commands to the context menu, run custom commands automatically when the clipboard changes, assign shortcuts to your custom commands and create custom scripts to perform specific operations with your clipboard.įor instance, you can create commands to save web links in your clipboards automatically or to paste the current date and time with a keyboard shortcut the scope of use is quite broad.ĭownload CopyQ 4. That way, you can find items quickly and easily. Plus, there’s the option to add notes or tags to your copied items.Īll your saved clippings are saved in customized tabs on CopyQ. You can use it to store text, HTML snippets, images (including screenshots), and other kinds of formats. It comes with editing and scripting features as a bonus to the basic clipboard manager’s history and management functionalities. Plus, Ditto employs a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts to help you perform different operations on the app quickly and efficiently.Īmong other features, Ditto includes the ability to share your clipboard amongst friends/peers, view stats for copied and pasted texts, group clippings, and rearrange clip order.ĬopyQ is one of the more advanced Windows clipboard managers. And you can access all of your clippings using a simple keyboard shortcut.Īnother useful Ditto feature is Special Paste, which lets you paste text in various formats like upper case, lower case, inverted case, sentence case, and many more. All your clippings are saved in a database to make them easier to retrieve at a later time. With Ditto, you can save just about any type of information, be it text, images, HTML snippets, or anything else. Rather, it’s an extension to the standard Windows clipboard that augments its functionality with features that eliminate the need for an advanced, dedicated clipboard manager. In addition, ClipClip provides you the ability to look up your search history (using a dedicated keyboard shortcut), customize hotkeys to suit your workflow, upload your clips to the cloud, and password-protect your folders to keep them secure.īesides these clipboard features, ClipClip also includes a bunch of other functionalities, such as screen capturing, text formatting, image editing, text extraction (OCR), quick web searching, and cloud synchronization with Google Drive and Dropbox, which can come in handy at times.ĭitto isn’t a full-fledged clipboard manager. Similarly, it also has another interesting feature, Text Translation, that lets you translate your text clippings into different languages with a single click. ClipClip employs a keyboard shortcut, which gives you a list of all your past clippings so you can easily paste them.

#Free clipboard manager

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emptymasks · 3 years

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I’ve seen a lot about your thoughts on Elisabeth and Tanz der Vampire, and they’ve been really helpful getting into those musicals! But you have a huge list of other musicals that people can get into…

So I was wondering if you had any musicals you hadn’t mentioned in a while that you really like or would like to talk about??? (preferably something from your lists that has a blue heart please?)

Oh if only you knew how long the list of European musicals really is... I however have only seen 9 (if I counted right) and I have a lot more that I still need to watch. Oh also, I only put the blue hearts on any musicals that I was providing multiple links for so people could see which version I reccoment the most highly. If a musical only had one link and didn't have a blue heart it doesn't mean I didn't like it.

I've watched: Mozart das Musical, Elisabeth das Musical, Tanz der Vampire, 3 Musketiers, Mozart L'Opéra Rock, Dracula (the Graz production), Rebecca das Musical, Roméo et Juliette and Schikaneder.

If you enjoyed those two you're likely to enjoy Rebecca! It's written by the same composer/lyricist team as Elisabeth and Mozart (and same lyricist as Tanz der Vampire - though if you're listening to any German musical, original or translated, 90% of the time the lyrics will have been done by Michael Kunze that man is everywhere). The Stuttgart production has my favourite set design of any musical! Well... Actually probably. There are so many big set pieces it's insane, way more than I've seen in some Broadway and West End musicals. You can tell so much work went into it and the visual effects that I won't spoil if you don't know the plot but if you know the plot you know what I mean by the effects at the end are so good and I didn't expect them at all and I freaked out so much the first time I watched it. Jan Ammann as Maxim in the Stuttgart production is the best Maxim. No I won't take any argument. Other actors feel a bit one-dimensional to me, but the way Maxim acts at times comes from trauma and some actors and productions seem to forget that, but Jan really goes for it and his Maxim is a lot more sympathetic and I just want to give him a hug. Pia Douwes as Mrs Danvers, if you've seen her in Elisabeth what more do I need to say, she's amazing. A musical goddess. Her Danny is a bit more wild than some, but she kills it. My favourite video, which I put the blue heart next to, has understudy Christina Patten as Ich/I, but I adore her she's my favourite. She adds some spunk to Ich in act 2 and her voice is so pretty and aaaa. I just love these three actors together in these roles.

Roméo et Juliette is another favourite of mine! It's hard to choose which one to recommend, but it has to be the original 2000/2001 production because of the sweetness and chemistry and voices of Damien Sargue and Cecilia Cara as Romeo and Juliet. They're so pretty and work together so well. The only reason I say it's hard to pick is Mercutio. I adore him, but in the original production they cut out a song they had planned for him and he doesn't really do much at all? In the 2010 revival they gave him two more songs and you care about him so much more and John Eyzen plays such a good Mercutio. So I'd recommend the original but if you want to like Mercutio more, which you should he's amazing, I'd recommend watching at least clips of John's. It's an interesting musical because all productions are non-replica and also change around the order of songs, add or take away characters, all sorts. The Hungarian production is also very popular and I'm sure it's great, I just haven't' gotten around to watching it yet.

Mozart das Musical was the first non-English language musicals I watched so I have a fondness for it, but it's not my favourite. However, I do realise I have forgotten most of the songs and the few I've gone back and listened to are better than I remember.

Dracula isn't super popular and I understand why, I don't love the plot of the Dracula/Mina romance in it, however. I do love this musical because despite how I find the plot lacking, the songs are so good! At least, I love them. And the actors are all doing a great job. And it's one of the few Dracula adaptions to keep Quincy Morris so they get bonus points for that.

Mozart L'Opéra Rock and modern French musicals... This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they're often more like pop-rock operas now. So if you're not into musicals with that style of music it might not be for you, but I still enjoyed it even though I didn't think I would because of the style of music. Mozart and Salieri's chemistry is very good, Salieri's bisexual crisis song is iconic, actually all of Salieri's songs are iconic.

Schikaneder... eh. I didn't like it that much and I didn't really like any of the songs. There's no English subtitles, but someone sent me the entire English synopsis and I watched it with a German friend so I had double the help of understanding it. Doesn't mean others might not like it, just none of the songs stood out to me and I had no desire to listen to any of them again. It's by Steven Scharwz of Wicked fame and I love Wicked, but I didn't love this.

3 Musketiers!! God it's so underrated and not spoken about within the European musical fandom that I even forget about it and literally forgot to write about it earlier in this post. It's a Dutch musical (though did also have a German production) and it's really good!? Faces you might know are Pia Douwes as Milady de Winter, Stanley Burlseon as Cardinal Richeliu (Netherlands Der Tod in Elisabeth), Henk Poort as Athos (Netherlands Phantom and Jean Valjean). The dialgoue is funny, the songs are good, some of the set pieces have no right to exist in this tiny musical?? They made this giant boat and pelt the actors with rain just for one 5 minute song and then we never see the boat again? And while I recommend the Dutch one because Dutch musicals deserve more love and it has official English subtitles!! Official ones, not fanmade! I have the DVD and it comes with English subtitles (and Dutch and German subtitles) which is so nice. The German version is also good, good cast, Pia came back and Uwe Kroger as Richeliu and omg they rearranged the songs and the German arrangement of Nicht Aus Stein is insane and amazing and frankly iconic.

That's all of the ones I have watched. Next on my list to watch are Rudolf and Notre Dame de Paris, both of which I have listened to some songs from and already love (I've listened to way too much of Notre Dame de Paris and am so in love).

I want to start organising streams where I'll host the musical either by getting the video from Youtube or my own files and anyone who wants to join can come along and watch with us, chat with us if you want or just watch there's no pressure to chat. I thought about doing weekly streams? This would also make me finally watch some of the ones I've been meaning to for ages. But I keep wondering about time zones. I'm in the UK and would want to stream at about 11pm at the latest (11pm BST/GMT+1 as we’re in daylight savings at the moment, if the streams continue past the end of October which would be wild then I’ll make a note of the time change that would be to 11pm GMT), which I know can work for other UK and Europeans, but for any Americans would be in the afternoon. So, I wondered if doing it on a weekend would be better? Then it doesn't matter if it's in the afternoon? Maybe Saturday evenings then? It would either be Saturday evenings UK time or Friday evenings UK time. What do you guys think? If people are down then I'll make a separate post with a list of what we'll be watching each week and if anything happens to me that means I can't stream one week then everything will just get pushed back a week, but I don't see that as likely to happen. And I'll only be streaming those that have English subtitles, so don't worry about not being able to understand anything.

edit: am also open to 10pm bst if others want that, im just trying to think of what time works best for everyone so sorry if 11pm is a little late for europeans, i know 10pm could be a little early for americans. also in case it sounded like these are the only musicals i will be streaming, thats not so, ive got more than just the ones mentioned on this list!

(Tagging some people who I know are or might be interested in streams to see what you think of that plan: @sirona-art @ringwraith100 @tanz-der-trash @smilingwoland @the-weird-dane @witchgaye @ami-fidele @kisstheghouls @looking-4-happiness @ladysapphire928 @sloanedestler @tinywound @persephonaae @phoenixdewinter @uwucoffee @freshbloodandgothicism )

#european musicals #mozart das musical #3 musketiers #dracula the musical #retj #romeo et juliette #mozart l'opera rock #mozart l'opéra rock #musical theatre #musicals #broadway #musicaledit #rebecca das musical #rebecca the musical #answeredasks #non english language musicals

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jengarie · 3 years

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#showyourprocess !

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES — When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you, @rinielle for tagging me! She chose the piece above (original post), and oh boy this one was a whole ass rollercoaster ride! Unfortunately, I hadn't turned on the timelapse feature for this but I'll try to go through each part of the process as best as I can!

The photos I'm gonna upload are gonna be a mix of screenshots and literal photos of my screen, because I'm taking some of them from my updates to friends, since a lot of the steps got lost in my painting process.

But before that, let me tag some other amazing creators!

@dragonji: this gif art!

@candicewright: this yibo painting!

@wendashanren: this gifset!

@mylastbraincql: this gif!

I haven't been able to keep track of who's been tagged so apologies if you've already done this! Also, no pressure to do it at all if you would rather not! <3

Planning

Sometimes, I get an idea first and find reference photos to go with that idea. But for this one, I sought out a reference photo first, and built an idea on top of it!

After that, I roughly sketch out the base pose. Usually, this looks very messy, but it doesn't really matter as long as I understand which part goes where!

The idea for the background didn't really come until the creation process because I don't think I really planned this to be a full piece.

Creation

Sketching

Honestly, from this point on, it's more of trial and error.

So, I redid the the initial base pose—made it cleaner and a little bit more detailed. See: the added definition in their arm muscles, the rearrangement of Wei Wuxian's legs, and Lan Wangji's hand on Wei Wuxian's back. If you look at the second photo, I also changed the pose a bit midway—I tend to edit as I go sometimes when I change my mind. (For this, I thought, given the Lan arm strength, it would be better to make Lan Wangji look more at ease carrying Wei Wuxian. This gets covered by the robes anyway though, so it didn't matter much in the end.)

I also started adding details to the base! I usually start with the face and then the hair! I usually go for the clothes next, but I dreaded the robes in this piece so I guess that's why I ended up with a basic idea of what I wanted for the background instead LOL I also figured out how I want the final crop to look like, so I blocked out all the other areas with an extra layer!

Okay, onto the part that killed me like ten times: the robes. There are a lot of interactions between their robes here given their pose, and not to mention they also have layers upon layers on each of them! So, to maintain my sanity and to keep track of which part is which, I color coded them into the most colorful sketch I've ever made.

Another reason why I filled in each layer of robe with a solid block of color, is so that all the lines underneath gets covered. Without all of the colors, the actual outline actually looks like the one on the right. What a nightmare!

I also ignored the crop again for this part, because it's always better to draw past your borders, in case you decide to rotate or tilt or whatever your piece later on. I didn't do the feet anymore though, because that I was sure wouldn't show in the final piece anymore.

After that, I did the sketch one more time and then started adding the base colors. (I didn't have a screenshot of just the base colors, and the final CSP file is a nightmare so I copy pasted the layers into a new canvas to show you guys :') )

By the way, I drew their robes flowing this way, because I wanted it to frame the lower arch of the moon behind them for the composition. It was a little frustrating that I couldn't get Lan Wangji's robes a little higher because of Wei Wuxian's legs but I later filled in the empty space with his forehead ribbon anyway, so it all worked out in the end!

Painting

Because apparently, I was a masochist back then, I merged the base colors all into one layer and started adding shadows to the robes. (These days, I add shadows first and then, merge. It's much easier this way.)

And then, I started painting! Again, I did the face first and then the hair, before finally the robes. This was my first time painting side profiles and honestly it was quite a pain to figure out LOL but !!! I think I did a good job and I'm proud of how it turned out. I again used reference photos for this one but I can't link any because they were just several random Pinterest photos that I didn't save.

Another thing to note is that I use the mesh transform tool a lot, especially on faces. That's largely why Lan Wangji's face looks so different in the latter two!

And then I went with the robes. Somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't like how I planned to do Lan Wangji's sleeves and the flowy part of Wei Wuxian's robes and I... decided, with much dread, to do them over. So I sketched on top of the painted layers and redid the robes, again.

It was at this point that I decided to take a break from this piece because it was honestly very draining! I think it took about three weeks before I decided to open the file again and continue it.

When I did, I just finished painting the rest of the robes and their hands. The blue details on Lan Wangji's outer robes were painted on a separate layer that I put on Multiply. I probably did more adjustments to the face and hair and stuff, because my painting process is honestly a mess :')

Final Adjustments

I added some correction layers on certain areas to fix some of the colors. See: Lan Wangji's sleeve becoming much brighter and paler; Wei Wuxian's legs having less contrast. And then I merged all of the layers (excluding the background) and added a bit of blur. See: Wei Wuxian's ponytail; the entire lower part; the flowing forehead ribbon. My reasoning for this is so that most of the detail (and therefore the flow of the eye) goes to their faces and expressions!

And then, I put a blue Overlay layer on low opacity to make Wangxian blend better with the background, added a bit of shadow on the inside and the lower sections and added the glowing details for the added flair. I initially wanted sparkles and/or stars but they didn't turn out as well as this did. I also upped the contrast by a little for the entire piece!

Aaaand, that's it! In truth, I did a bit more color adjustments to the whole piece, but I was a dummy who forgot to turn them back on before posting so ... oh well.

Posting

Before posting, I upload it either on my spare private Twitter account or on a drafted Tumblr post so I can check the colors on my phone. This is because the colors on different devices can look very different, and I would at the very least want all my pieces to look nice on both of my devices!

And then, once I deem it satisfactory, I just try to think of a caption and post! Some artists wait for a certain time where most of their followers are active, but I didn't have a lot of MDZS followers at this point so it didn't really matter to me.

It still doesn't really; I haven't actually been able to figure out when my MDZS followers are awake even now.

#showyourprocess #mine #whew this was so long oops #but this piece took like #maybe 1.5 weeks sans the break i had to take #so !!#LOL #tag game

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todomitoukei · 3 years

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thank you @haleigh-sloth for the tag and the shoutout ♥♥!!!

1. How do you begin writing your analysis: do you start writing about the first thing that strikes you; or do you step back and look at the narrative structure first; or something else?

Hmm depends. I mean a lot of my metas are answers to asks about specific topics/scenes that I receive, so I already have the topic for the meta and then usually just start writing my response however it comes to my mind, only stopping if I have to look stuff up if I don't fully remember scenes/lines that I'm talking about. Once that's done I go over it a couple of times to edit/rearrange/format, etc. When I do my translation comparison posts I just write down the translation first and then do the analysis (I kinda go back and forth all the time when doing this because sometimes I don't feel like doing the translation part anymore and sometimes I don't know how to phrase my thoughts for the analysis part so it's just kinda chaotic and unstructured, but slowly turning into a continuous text)

2. What do you like to keep in mind while writing your analysis/meta?

I like to include sources so that people don't just read my takes and run with them, but are able to check out the references for themselves, too, and draw their own conclusions from them while also getting more details from the sources. That includes referencing the manga by either quoting it or including panels when it comes to what characters have said/done within the story, as well as including sources to back up the conclusions I draw/takes I share (i.e. when talking about anything mental health-related)

3. Do you try to keep your value judgments separate from your analysis?

Kind of? I mean, my main focus is usually the original Japanese text, which is just pretty factual, however, if there is an opportunity to shit on Endvr, well...... :-*

4. Do you prefer analyzing characters, or arcs, or both?

Characters! I always prefer to focus on the psychology/philosophy of things and prefer to treat the story as being part of the characters to further understand who they are as people, rather than the other way around. That being said, society shapes people so I find focusing on the setting of the story very enlightening, too, so if a story has an arc that focuses a bit more on the society/world in the story, then I guess that is also worth analyzing.

5. Do you think receiving feedbacks/responses on your analysis/meta help improve your critical skills?

Nah, most of the criticism/"feedback" on here is from people who lack any kind of reading comprehension so I'm good lol. Writing meta helps me sort my own thoughts so I don't care too much tbh, I kinda prefer reading people's own separate metas in that case because I feel like I usually try to say everything I've wanted to say before pressing post. I do like to see people adding actual valuable insights/correct me when I was genuinely wrong or providing more resources, though, so don't be afraid to add anything to my posts (unless you're just gonna be rude and misinterpret everything I said)

6. Do you consciously decide which media you want to write analysis on or does it naturally come to you?

I mean... this is my bnha side blog so I'm just writing about that, and only because Dabi/the lov/the Todofam live in my head rent-free anyway :) and I honestly wouldn't even know what else to write about? The only other thing that I am absolutely obsessed with is Life is Strange, but it's just my comfort game/series so I don't really care about writing or reading about it.

7. Do you prefer writing long or short metas? Which ones do you prefer to read?

Long metas, both for reading and writing. But good formatting and panels also help to make it easy to read and not get lost in the text, so if the format is shit then short ones. Overall, though, long ones usually mean there are more points brought up and more references made, which means more details to better support the point that is being made. Also, I am unable to keep myself short so I think my posts usually end up being kinda lengthy even when I try to make them short? I definitely always end up debating with myself whether or not I should add a read more somewhere or if it's short enough that it won't piss people off when it appears on their dash, so if I've ever pissed you off... sorry lol.

8. Which are your favourite analysis/criticism/meta blogs?

@transhawks @redphlox @haleigh-sloth @hamliet @thyandrawrites are all incredible blogs that really make being in the fandom fun and I love their insights!

9. Which shows/movies/media do you think deserve to have more analysis done on them?

Hmmm, to be honest, I don't really interact with other fandoms, I usually just consume media and form my own opinions without looking into the fandom's overall take, so I don't know which fandoms don't have a lot of metas. As for which ones I overall think deserve to be analyzed a lot, I think Psycho-Pass, similar to bnha, has a lot of potential for talking at length about the ethics behind their society and how governments often mask their crimes as being for the greater good etc etc. Also, stories like Tokyo Ghoul, Violet Evergarden, and Angels of Death might be really good for metas, too....

10. According to you, what are some prerequisites for good quality analysis?

Providing resources - no one wants to have to fact-check everything on their own, so provide at least some sources for what you talk about. Good formatting is also important. No one wants to read a 10k single paragraph or have to reread a sentence several times because it stretches across a whole paragraph (this is @ Kant and @ me). Additionally, it's really helpful to bold/italicize words/phrases to make reading easier and more accessible.

Tagging: @transhawks @redphlox (I know haleigh tagged you too, but I'm a rebel >:])

#thank youuu haleigh ♥#hope this was at least kinda interesting?? idk #tag thing

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orlissa · 2 years

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So @readthelastpaage tagged me to share the six books I'm most excited to read in 2022, but honestly, ghere is like the book I got for Christmas, and beyond that I have no idea what I'll be reading 😅 But my plan for today was to rearrange my bookshelf, so I thought I'd share some recommendations from there, if that's okay?

Note: some of those I have in Hungarian, so you get a shot of the Hungarian cover, but I'll be sharing the English title. Also, they are not in any particular order, just how I came across them while rearranging my shelf.

1, Tom King: The Vision

One of the inspirations for WandaVision, The Vision is a limited series about how Vision creates a synthezoid family for himself, and tries to integrate that family into a suburban neighborhood--which of course ends in catastrophe. The story is a beautiful piece of the suburban gothic, with a very interesting narrative voice, and some visual solutions/panel transitions unusual for American comics

2, Carolyn Cocca: Superwomen

Some non-fiction for you: one of my fav sources for my dissertation, Cocca analyzes female characters in popular media, while also focusing on audience feedback and how it influences content creation.

3, Theodora Goss: The Curious Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

The gothic meets modern YA tropes. A story about a group of young women all related to/creations of the greatest monsters of 19th literature. Featuring the daughters of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Beatrice Rappacini, the bride of Frankenstein's monster, a creature of Dr. Moreau--and Sherlock Holmes. It's also a meta novel, as the it is technically a novel written by one of the characters about their adventures--with the other characters continiously interrupting the narrative to add their own two cents. (P.s.: it's a trilogy, and the second book is what I got for Christmas from a friend. The author is of Hungarian origin, and I actually have mutual friends with her, which is just a tiny bit exciting)

4, Anything by James Herriot

Okay, this is mess, because his works are kinda all over the place because of the different editions, but honestly, guys, read James Herriot at least once in your life. Herriot (real name: James Alfred Wight) was an English vet, working in rural Yorkshire starting from the late 1930s. His books are basically collections of loosely connected, half-factual/half-fictional short stories/anecdotes based on his life as a vet.

5, Ashton-Hand-Meadows: My Lady Jane

Humorous YA historical what if, with the goal of giving a happy ending to a queen who lost her head: Lady Jane Grey. The book also features her husband, Gifford, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and Bloody Mary. Also, there are people who turn into animals, and people who don't like it.

Note: it's a whole series, with each book focusing on a different historical figure with a different fantasy element. The story abou Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë has ghosts, the one about Calamity Jane has werewolves, while the newest one about Mary, Queen of Scots takes place in the same universe as My Lady Jane

6, Rebecca Ross: Queen's Rising & Queen's Resistance

YA fantasy set in fantasy France and fantasy Scotland of a small group of rebels attempting a coup the reclaim the throne from a tyrant for the rightful queen, helped by a girl who inherited one of her ancestor's memories that the group needs to find a lost magical object, without which they are destined to fall. It starts a little slow, but holy crap, especially the second book goes really hardcore, not being afraid to ask the hard questions--all the while there are no unnecessary love triangles, and the main characters are just... good people? And it's just refreshing to read? (Note: a possibly iffy aspect of the story is that there is a significant age difference between the main couple--she is 17-going-18 and he is 26--, and I was unsure about it first, but it works? Especially since he is completely absent in the middle part of the first book, and there is only one kiss between in that volume, plus he is a big simp for her)

7, Elizabeth Lim: Reflection

A what if? story for Disney's Mulan: what if instead of Mulan, it was Shang who got wounded in the battle on the mountain? As Shang lies dying, Mulan has to go down to the underworld to save him. An intiguing exploration of Chinese myths, and just overall a great story.

8, Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now

I read this one a coue of years ago, but this is exactly the kind of book that stays with you for a long time. American teenager Daisy is sent to live with her aunt and cousins in the English countryside, but just as the children are left alone as the aunt leaves for a business trip, WWIII breaks out. The story is basically about how they experience the war away from the front, how it slowly, but completely turns their lives upside down. (Note: there is a movie adaptation with Saoirse Ronan, George MacKay, and Tom Holland. It diverts a lot from the source material, but only in a way that makes it a good adaptation.)

9, Alisa Kwitney: Rogue Untouched

Basically an X-Men au of Rogue discovering her powers in a less traumatic way, only to get tangled up in a criminal organization selling mutants (feat Gambit). An exciting story, plus I really liked how the author played with Rogue's powers, brought in social media, and how spot-on her Gambit was.

10, Liza Palmer: Captain Marvel - Higher, Further, Faster

A prequel of the movie of Carol and Maria's first year at the air force academy, about their struggle to break the glass ceiling and learning that what you want is not always what you need. Not much action, zero superheroing, but an amazing character study.

#personal #books #book rec

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sbooksbowm · 4 years

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The ‘Does This Make Sense?’ Check - Chapter 4, Part 5, Preservation

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 3 covers how fic binding completes the communication circuit via fan reciprocation

Part 4 covers how fic binding challenges traditional publishing norms

The Redundancy of Preservation

Anthony Grafton writes that to understand books, we must interview them in their environment, so to understand bound fic, book historians must attend to two fannish environments: the unstable digital distributing platforms from which fic came, and the material preservation form born in fannish response [1]. The history of fandom media illustrates the instability of digital media in myriad ways: links break, sites crash, URLs expire. Many of the binders have experienced fic loss—returning to bookmarked fic only to find it had disappeared, deleted without any indication of what it may have been—but few said that it wholly or significantly influences their desire to bind fic. In response to the question, ‘Who or what do you trust to build a reliable archive of fic, if anyone?’ the binders unanimously cited AO3, but with trepidation. One binder wrote ‘I do not have unshakeable faith that they will be able to remain successfully funded for the foreseeable future or that laws won't be passed that lead to the site being shut down. The key to survival is redundancy, both digital and offline’. Another echoed, ‘the entire internet is ephemeral, and I have had too many technical snafus to put my entire trust into digital format’. And a third: ‘I’m going through my bookmarks and archiving them to the Internet Archive so they are protected against author removal’. The binders share a general wariness towards relying on digital forms, and while preserving fic is not the only or driving reason for binding fic, it is on the list. Preserving works in print also communicates their legitimacy, especially that of queer works, which historically have been condemned or outright destroyed. Bound fic counters the pitfalls of digital sites, where fan work may be lost without warning, but lacks the real-time feedback in comments and kudos and the links to additional fan works, although those still exist online. Bound fic also counters fallacies of traditional publishing, which tends to ignore fan works. As I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 3, although works like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies emerge from commercial publishing houses, I reiterate that they are not fanfiction precisely because they were not written in nor attend to a fannish context in the way that bound fic does [2].

The binders change the text in preparing it from digital for print form. All of the binders cut comments and many exclude or rearrange any combination of summaries, author notes, and disclaimers, and kudos and hits statistics. One lacks sentimentality around these excisions: binding fic ‘is less of an archive project than a pleasure project’, so the concern for preservation pales to readability. Binders range in their approach to formatting metadata: two binders include metadata (author, title, tags, archive warnings, etc.) as a ‘copyright page’, with content warnings and research notes as appendices. Another includes summaries and tags because to make ‘these books to feel like a true physical version of what’s there on the web’. One binder of 104 fics has modified their typesetting process to expedite the time from screen to print in attempts to bind as many fics as quickly as possible:

Nowadays I drop everything in and go, for two reasons. I try to do a lot of fics and [editing out Author Notes] is a huge time suck. But these notes are also significant as part of the metatext. In the future these will be of interest to any scholar studying early years of online fandom and just contributes to these books being a time capsule of a phenomenon that is very specific to our time and place.

By favoring production speeds over editing, this binder prioritizes print preservation (and documents a book’s environment for a future book historian); ten binders move metadata and extratextual information to appendices or smaller, side bindings to avoid interrupting reading flow without eliminating the information. Although the lack of text editing seemingly counters the attention to craft, the binders distinguished between the craft of the book—its binding, endpapers, and internal ornamentation—from the content of the text itself. Formatting a text can be the most time-consuming task, so reducing that process expedites the production of a volume significantly.

A few themes emerge regarding losses in transforming fic to print form, including accessibility, interactivity, and malleability. Only people with copies of the fic can read those copies, although the fic remains online for the time being. The loss of hyperlinks and comments strips the fic of its community context. Printed versions inhibit the writer’s ability to edit and update the fic, and one binder noted that ficbinding’s greatest strength and weakness is that it makes fic ‘a fossil of a fixed point in time…It leaves no room to adapt’. But the gain is a hard copy and a sense of long-term preservation independent of online activity: ‘As long as Modern English can be read and the book remains undamaged by water, fire or other problematic time-passing problems, it is here and real’. This kind of preservation aligns with a history of recovering lost works via their textual commentaries; were every copy of Harry Potter to be lost and the internet wiped, one could reconstruct the events of the series via bound copies of Annerb’s ‘The Changeling’ and dirgewithoutmusic’s ‘boy with a scar’ series. Similarly, where the digitally-linked community disappears, it is reforged through sharing the copy with the author, who ‘gets to see how a reader put different materials together to best represent their work’. One binder wrote, ‘I think this is a case of having your cake and eating it too: the electronic copy is still there for the wider audience to read, the text is set in a permanent form which has its own artistic value’. The gains of permanence, the opportunity to create a physical object, and the ability to thank the writer for their work through bound fic outweigh the instantaneous losses of accessibility and digital interactivity.

One of my final questions to the binders concerned the long-term preservation of their library: where will their bound works go if they can no longer take care of them or die? One binder was in discussion with the University of Iowa special collections, which is home to a notable fanzines collection. Four posed sending the volumes to fandom friends, two want to bequeath them to family, and two have explicitly stated their wishes in their wills. One added that he firstly trusts fans to appreciate fan-printed books as both ‘stories worth reading’ and as art objects, rather than non-fans who do not understand the connotations of the works. Binding fic is a momentary win in the long-term battle against information loss, and these personal libraries prolong the question of how and where these works will survive. One binder articulated the long-term value of these volumes: ‘I think that people making fine binding versions of fic absolutely validates this place in libraries, and I have no doubt that some of the books made by the fic binding community will make their way into the special collection libraries or museums and other institutions’. Ensuring that preservation will most likely be a self-undertaken project, in the way that all things fandom are.

Citations

Anthony Grafton, ‘Codex in crisis: the book dematerializes’, in Worlds made by words: scholarship and community in the modern West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.311.

If you actually go back and read the drafts of the Introduction and Chapter 3 that I have posted, I have not yet explained this. Basically, adaptive works like P&P&Z don’t meet Coppa’s criteria (fic made to fannish standards, written about stories currently owned by someone else. Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, etc.). I’ll have a post next week about this issue with upcoming reimaginings of The Great Gatsby to elaborate further on this really fun question.

#does this make sense check #chapter 4 #fic binders #bookbinding fic #fic binding #preservation #Anthony Grafton #phew!#that is it #we did it #thanks for sticking with me

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