Random Thoughts

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!

When I was doing my other script updates I remembered my AO3 to Pinboard bookmarklet, and wondered if anybody was still using it. Naturally I recently received a very lovely email with some feature suggestions, so I guess that's a yes!

So, it's been updated, and now includes the following options:
- Include the author's freeform (additional) tags in the pinboard tags
- Add the word count to the description
- Include view_adult=true in the bookmark URL where relevant
- Include view_full_work=true in the bookmark where relevant

The last two probably need a bit more testing before I'm happy with them.

I also took the opportunity to rework the code so that it's easier for me to maintain (and use my hacky bookmarklet configuring method), and to change the URL, because it was formerly at bookmarklet.html. Because it was the first one I created. Yikes.

This bookmarklet is now looking like decision fatigue personified, but one of the things I know about fandom's bookmarkers is that they all have their own complex cataloguing system, and I love to support that.

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. )

Decided to write this bookmarklet during a discussion of advanced filtering in #yuletide, but had to leave before I finished it so it's no longer topical.

But I threw it up on my website anyway, so: bookmarklet to fetch AO3 tag ID

(Plans for next year: make my bookmarklet collection less hacked together.)

I'm back home and Yuletide signups are open, which means I've been frantically fixing bugs and tweaking my Yuletide Taglist filter. (Well, I suppose it's one way to combat jet lag...) Last year it was a separate page, but since I've been on a bookmarklet spree this year, I decided to make this one operate on the actual AO3 tag list.

random.fangirling.net/fun/yuletide/taglist_filter.html

Basically, it's for people like me who never quite know what they'll be requesting or offering until the final tag list goes up, and it lets you peruse the list and mark off the ones you're interested in, then slowly whittle it down.

As a bonus, it generates your bucket list for you!

Not having a terribly productive flex day so far, but we're going to the bank in the afternoon so maybe it will be productive in the "organising our finances" sense?

I thought I'd link to something I posted on ao3some earlier this week, though:
http://random.fangirling.net/fun/ao3/bookmarklet.html
This generates a bookmarklet (little button that lives in your browser bookmarks) based on the Pinboard posting bookmarklet that will fetch tags from AO3 and put them in the tags box for you.

I wrote the bookmarklet on Sunday, the generator on Monday, added Author tagging on Wednesday (by request) and this morning I added a feature to remove the brackets from the end of the fandom tag (ie. turns 'The Avengers (2012)' into 'TheAvengers').

Additional feature requests welcome.

PS: I have investigated doing this for Tumblr without much luck, and for Delicious (which I might be able to do but it'll be less elegant). I could do Google Bookmarks if I thought anyone cared...