Random Thoughts

An update!

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 06:38:12 GMT

It's been exactly 4 months so I suppose I should post to say I'm still around! I just don't have a lot of free time right now.

Website
My website was down for a couple of days, so I'm sorry if that affected anyone! I have pondered switching to a static HTML site generator instead of what I'm currently using, which would avoid this happening again, but see above re: free time. (If I do, I will write a tutorial for how to do it, specifically to make your own fanfic archive so you can upload a work and it automatically adds it to whatever index pages you want and then upload it anywhere that supports plain static HTML... let me know if that's of interest to anyone.)

A couple of people have emailed me with bug reports and feature requests recently, so there have been some changes:

AO3 Statistics CSV Bookmarklet: Should now work properly with Unicode characters (e.g. Chinese, Japanese) and quotation marks in titles

AO3 Works List CSV Bookmarklet: Now includes the work's recipient (if available). I also reordered the columns so apologies if that's messed everything up for you.

Games
Theory of Magic (AKA Arcanum). A couple of years ago my brother linked me to this idle/clicker game where you work a wizard up through the ranks. I suddenly remembered it the other day, figured a game where you mostly just let it sit there and do its thing was perfect for my life right now, and have been playing for almost a week at this point. Documentation is very light so it's a "discover it as you go along" sort of thing - there's a new wiki with very little information, an old wiki with lots of info that's only available on web.archive.org, a Reddit that is mostly inactive (but at least not private) and a Discord I haven't joined. But I'm having fun!

Beastieball: This is a Kickstarter for a new game by the people behind Chicory and Wandersong, both of which I loved! It seems to be a Pokemon-like Volleyball RPG. It's fully funded but they are still working on stretch goals so check it out if that sounds fun to you!

Twitter
I finally quit Twitter - Tweetdeck going away was the final straw. Still figuring out how best to fill the idle-scrolling/refreshing void in my life. Maybe I need to pick up a game?

Reading
I picked up a copy of Witch King by Martha Wells but I haven't had the chance to read it yet. I recently reread Death of the Necromancer (which is getting an updated rerelease soon) and the Fall of Ile-Rien, which I still enjoyed. I also picked up the Murderbot audiobooks in a Humble Bundle (which has already ended, sorry) so I'm looking forward to listening to those someday.

Food
I got an Instant Pot after a deep anxiety spiral about trying to reduce the amount of cooking with gas I do. I've never used a pressure cooker OR a slow cooker before! If you are a multi-cooker user and have favourite (vegetarian) recipes, please send them my way!

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Update: Pillowfort keyboard navigation userscript

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 05:16:44 GMT

As is frequently the way, a bit of sleep helped clear the mind. Thus, I now have a working beta for keyboard navigation in Pillowfort.io.

https://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/pillowfort_keyboard_shortcuts.user.js

There were a few things going wrong. For a lot of the time I thought I was being tripped up by PillowFort's lazy loading of content, but what was actually happening was the height of the top bar and the bottom position of the entry were encountering rounding errors.

Anyway, it's working for me now in recent versions of Firefox and Chrome.

Every time I visit PillowFort I am instantly turned off by the UI, so this may not be the last time I decide to do something about it...

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New bookmarklets/userscripts: AO3 and Dreamwidth

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 23:01:21 GMT

I hadn't coded anything in a while... actually, that's not true. I coded a thing I hadn't posted here. So let's start with that instead.

AO3 Additional Filters
This is a userscript (and bookmarklet) to add author, date and wordcount filters to the sidebar on works listings. I basically wrote it because I was tired of losing my date filters when I changed the sort field.

And here's the one I was working on the last couple of days:

Dreamwidth HTML Buttons
This adds buttons to the beta Create Entries page that insert HTML for you.

Both of these are in beta and have only been tested in my own versions of Firefox and (briefly) in Chrome.

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Script: AO3 reading time estimate

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:23:04 GMT

After a certain friend of mine remarked that she'd been up until 3AM reading fic three nights in a row (a "fictim", as Tumblr would have it), I remarked that it should be pretty straightforward to write a script that will estimate how long it will take to read a fic and pop up a warning when it thinks you'll finish too late for comfort.

So there's now a bookmarklet that will calculate how long it will take you to read a fic, and also a userscript that will do the same and then warn you if it think you'll finish after 1AM (or however you configure it).

These are both still in very early beta, so please let me know if you encounter any weirdness or have suggestions.
http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/work_reading_est.html

( I don't know if a point-by-point retrospective on developing this would be of any interest to anybody, so it's behind a cut. )

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AO3/DW/LJ/Pinboard keyboard shortcuts

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 01:36:12 GMT

This occupied most of my day today*:
http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/web_keyboard_shortcuts.user.js

It's a userscript (Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, etc) that runs on Archive of Our Own, Dreamwidth, LiveJournal and Pinboard, and lets you navigate up and down posts with the j and k keys. If you hit enter, it will open the current post in a background tab**.

It loads a few external scripts: jQuery (because Pinboard doesn't include it), Mousetrap (for easy keyboard shortcuts) and scrollTo (because I couldn't be bothered writing it myself).

Not thoroughly tested, which is why I haven't posted it to userscripts.org or anything yet. Let me know if you try it out!

* Most of the time was spent messing around with keyboard shortcut libraries. Ugh.

** I copied the code for this from https://userscripts.org/scripts/review/179969

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