A Fan's Playground

one

oh!!!! the linkding github notified me that the code has been updated to allow for a default guest user profile, so that I can set things up so people looking at my shared bookmarks page can see things in a more useful form!!!

VERY exciting news that this functionality is going to be available. rn my linkding is great for me but it's really not a good UI for guests looking at my shared bookmarks

it looks like this update is going to be in the next release; it was committed the day after the most recent version of linkding was released. no rush for me to do this right away, then, as I need to wait for it to be included. but soon I will need to put aside time to see if the notes I left myself from my last update are good enough to be able to do another update smoothly!


two

hearing a nuthatch from my front porch always brings me joy


three

SHRIEKING.

I can do it!!! I can update my website! I have the power!!!

LOOK AT THIS.

I successfully logged into aviansoph.com via filezilla! and made my way through the very confusing directory of files, to find the ones that are for my main website instead of alllllll the linkding related stuff!

(filezilla's user instruction info online assumes you already understand the file structure of your own website, which is fair lol)

which meant that then I found my index file for my main page, and I'll be able to update that page and create more pages!

look out, world!!! aviansoph dot com is going to happen.


four

I have so many wonderful things in my life - partner, friends, household, house, community, hobbies, etc. and yes not everything is perfect, but damn I am lucky!

and I am so glad for all of you here who are part of my online community! 💖 you're one of those things I am lucky to have as a part of my life!!!


five

I'm willing to tentatively pronounce that my new strategy for keeping on top of dreamwidth is working pretty well -- so exciting! fingers crossed it stays that way!

one

I love the kind of friend who feels comfortable being like, "we have hangouts scheduled tonight and I really need to clean my kitchen, want to come keep me company while I do that?" yes! I will absolutely come do that!

two

me like: how many ling wen relationships can I nominate for danmei fanworks exchange.

(answer: ling wen sweep! ALL my noms are ling wen related!)

three

I've decided to change all my bookmarking tags in my linkding to use words as prefixes for type of tag, instead of using symbols like I've done for the last decade or so

the way that linkding displays tags with the hash in front makes it just that extra bit too busy for me to be able to parse the symbols at a glance

and also unlike pinboard, it doesn't alphabetize tags on your bookmark, but displays them in the order you added them. so I can't expect where in the list of tags a particular type of tag will fall on a bookmark, because all my old bookmarks have tags that I added in a variety of haphazard orders, because at the time it didn't matter.

this change is doable! there's a very robust bulk editor system in linkding, which I love! but it will take time to get all my old tags changed, and time to get used to using the new ones. When I'm creating new bookmarks I really do just think in my symbols these days

it is interesting how much one's cataloguing choices are dependent on the infrastructure you use. I had to make changes to how I used tags when I first went to pinboard too!

four

biggest takeaway from mdzs book club this week: autistic nie bros. especially nmj. canon autism right here is all I'm saying:

Women, liquor, riches—[Nie Mingjue] touched none; art, calligraphy, antiques—a pile of ink and mud; the finest green tea leaves and dregs from a roadside booth—there was no difference. Meng Yao tried everything he could think of yet still couldn’t find if he was interested in anything beside training his saberwork and killing Wen-dogs. He really was a wall made of iron, impenetrable by even the sharpest blades.

nmj doesn't need a hobby, he already has one! and that's all he needs. <3

(meanwhile jgy needs a better hobby. like getting overly invested in the interpersonal drama of a historical reenactment club along the lines of the sca. you just KNOW he would get involved in sca politics in a big way! a safe outlet for him, though I apologize to everyone in his canton/barony/shire/whatever his local group is. and also his kingdom.)

five

SCUM VILLAIN EXTRAS ZINE TIME!!! IT'S REAL.

Preorders are up on tshirt's bigcartel shop!

my contribution towards this zine is a 4.6k word fic about the svsss questions extra, featuring sqq and lbh experimenting sexually. I think it's a really good fic! and I cannot wait to see the rest of the zine!

once the zine is fully out, I will be posting my fic to ao3, so if for whatever reason you aren't able to get the zine, you'll still get to read my fic eventually :)

one

It's been about two months now of spending a bit of time working on my writing every evening at bedtime, and it continually amazes me how well it works and how much I like it. I enjoy the process of writing so much more like this! I never expected to be the kind of person with a daily writing habit; that seemed like it would never work for me and I thought people who did it were fascinatingly alien. guess I'm an alien lol!

my word count goal for each day is tiny (100-200 words) but I love to see my fic increase in size bit by bit, and to look over what I've written and see how much I like the story I'm telling

every time I stop writing for the night, it's at a point where I have no idea where I'm going next. all the next day I continue to not know, but I don't stress about it. and having so much time for my subconscious to process it between sessions of writing means that when I get back into bed for the night and open my fic to write the day's words, I'm able to figure out what to write next! and it feels so good


two

I have never gotten any tattoos before due to being afraid of needles, but I worked on that phobia and it's much less of a problem now....and I have a tattoo idea I love.

which is:

description of dinosaur-themed tattoo idea

dinosaurs are cool, right? and the scientific process is cool, and paleoart is cool! what if we take an example of a dinosaur which has gone through significant evolutions in our understanding of its appearance over time, and create line drawings of the scientifically accepted understanding of the dinosaur at two different points in the past plus our current most up to date understanding, and then line up the three versions of the dinosaur in a row on my forearm.... with space left for an even more up to date version to add onto it in the future as our understanding continues to grow

the thing is. I need to be able to get this art drawn by someone who has an art style I like, and has sufficient paleo background to know what they're doing in depicting these dinosaur variations, and is taking commissions!

I would definitely want this dinosaur to be a theropod dinosaur, one of the ones we're now sure had feathers. and I'm feeling fond of oviraptor in specific! not because it's my fave kind of dinosaur (I don't have just one fave!) but because it's particularly interesting in terms of its history in scientific misunderstandings of it, so it would be thematically resonant in this tattoo context

three

I just! am so fond of bingqiu! the way they're incapable of normal healthy emotional communication but are so crazy with respect to each other that they can yes-and each other into truly wild displays of horny possessiveness!

it's endlessly fun to play with. characters who WILL hold the idiot ball but only in extremely specific ways that nobody else could ever match. but they match each other! 🥰


four

"x character makes a different choice at a significant canon moment" is a fairly popular type of canon divergence au, and it's interesting to me to think about how it often doesn't work for me. in most contexts in a canon there's a reason the character makes the choice they did, so if the story changes their choice out of nowhere, it doesn't feel grounded in the narrative and in the character.

often these fics are about making things nicer for the characters in question because the canonical choice is ouchy, and I get why that's popular, but I usually find it boring!

Details on what I find more interesting than that

I think I'm just more interested in the question of why people make the choices they do. and less interested in "let's turn this story into straight-up fluff," though there is of course a spectrum of how much this kind of story is interested in going straight for the fluff.

I think to do this type of fic in a way I'm most likely to be into, is to write it so that there's a small but significant change BEFORE the moment of decision, which allows the situation to be just different enough that the character would make a different choice. and even then I'm more interested in exploring the things that lead up to that moment of decision, what makes the character choose what they do, how the change to canon has affected things. Ending the story with "they made the good choice" rather than beginning with it; that's the happy ending right there!

or make the fic an exploration of how you'd think that this choice would be immediate happy ending times, but actually has its own complications and problems as well.

or make it a time loop!

five

As you may or may not know, I have been a power user of online bookmarking services for nearly my entire time in fandom. I was of course on delicious back in the day, until it got altered into unusability, and then I switched to pinboard. I've been trucking along with pinboard ever since.

But I heard that the pinboard guy is a jk rowling supporter these days, and I'd been thinking about trying to leave pinboard anyway because it seems to be basically abandonware at this point. But the jkr support was the tipping point on overcoming the inertia of staying with what I know.

Extended description of my efforts and successes in setting up a self-hosted bookmark manager after finding no other good options online

I'd heard good things about raindrop.io but when I gave it a try, despite some interesting features, I ran into major problems. My biggest problems with it were 1. that it truncates all bookmark descriptions and tags after a certain length, to save space, and I use a LOT of tags and description space; and 2. that I couldn't actually get the website to let me log in on firefox. So that was a deeply disappointing result for something that had seemed promising.

I also took a look at larder.io because it looked intriguing, but it failed to import the description field from my pinboard export, so that was a nope right out of the gate!

After a bunch of reading articles and listicles about other bookmarking service options, all the other online bookmarking services I could find were even less suitable for my needs, and I was getting pretty disheartened.

But then I learned from a friend about the option of setting up Linkding on a personal website as a way to self-host bookmarks, so that you don't have to rely on a service provided by someone else anymore, and it was so exciting to think of having personal control over my own bookmarks like that! I knew I had to give it a try.

I am very glad I went down that rabbit-hole of teaching myself css earlier this year for the purpose of ao3 site skin development, because it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to try out unfamiliar tech things, and indeed my rudimentary css knowledge was helpful in keeping me from feeling quite so lost in the process.

Linkding has particular requirements around getting it integrated into a website, so I gather this means that what I did to get it set up is playing "my first website" on hardmode. But here's what I did:

I followed the "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

Having my very own website with my very own bookmarking instance feels very "I am learning the forbidden magic" in a gleeful way tbh

But just because I have this set up does not mean I am done! For I would like to CUSTOMIZE my linkding instance!

Linkding has a built-in way to customize a user's view of it using custom CSS, but that's only for what that specific logged-in user sees, rather than changing the appearance of the public bookmarks page for visitors, so that doesn't quite accomplish what I'm wanting to do. I am investigating how to make more direct changes to my linkding instance but I'm still on shaky ground there. (if you have any useful advice, I'm all ears!!)

Also I want to do things with the rest of my website, aviansoph.com. As I mentioned above, I'm playing create-a-website on hardmode for the sake of linkding, so I can't follow most of the guides you find online for building a personal website. But it looks like if I set up an FTP server on my VPS I should be able to make a reasonable system for doing my website? I haven't had time to try this yet but we shall see!!

I can't believe it took me until my mid-thirties to become the kind of nerd who has their own website for the purposes of cataloguing information. I feel like this is one of the kinds of nerd I was destined to be all along.

My ship tags on pinboard were a total mess. I had no consistent method for deciding which name came first, so for any tag uncommon enough that it didn't show up as an autocomplete option, I had to look it up every time to see what I'd used in the past.

Some of my tags were ordered according to fandom's preferred usage (eg harry/draco), some of my tags were ordered according to which character is the more major character in the canon (eg moist/adora), some were ordered according to which character was my favourite (eg hilarion/alexios), and some were ordered according to whatever random decision I made at the time because I didn't know enough about the fandom to know how to tag (no example because these are obviously not fandoms that come easily to mind).

So this made it hard both to remember what I'd used in the past for a given ship, or to decide how to tag a new ship I'd never bookmarked for before.

BUT NO LONGER. Now all my ship tags are strictly alphabetical! I fixed them!

Aaand now the only agonizing part is figuring out what names I want to use for various characters, which can be remarkably challenging in some fandoms. And whether to alphabetize by names that are not actually names, for characters who don't get given names in canon (eg bahorel's laughing mistress - do I alphabetize her by B, by L, or not at all?)

At any rates, my efforts towards continual improvement of my pinboard cataloguing structure continue apace.

Next up: figure out how to tag for fandoms where there's multiple versions of canon with different names but fandom mostly treats them as one so a given fic could fit under either name, except for a rare few fics that are very specifically for one of the versions of canon (eg The Eagle aka Eagle of the Ninth)

Well, I set Diigo to importing my Delicious bookmarks, but I have no idea whether it's actually working at it or not, since there's no handy progress bar to watch or anything. It might be plugging away, or it might not be, and I won't know till Diigo sends me an email to tell me my bookmarks are all imported. This is a very weird feeling, to have NO IDEA whether it's working or not. I figure that if by next morning they're still not imported I'll assume there was a problem and try again.

In the interim, something HAPPY.

Four clips released from the upcoming Doctor Who christmas special!

( And I for one am very excited )