trying on a metaphor
todays bird
oozey mess
Claire Keane
occasionally subtle
Cosimo Galluzzi
wallacepolsom
will byers stan first human second
DEAR READER
KIROKAZE
Origami Around
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
ellievsbear
JBB: An Artblog!
d e v o n
@theartofmadeline
⁂
shark vs the universe
styofa doing anything
Kiana Khansmith
seen from United Kingdom
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@bickeringwiththemuse
Infopost
Writer's recreational side blog. Literary humor, snippets and stories from other blogs, character design and setting inspo.
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Edit: The UI here has gotten bad enough that I will no longer be logging in to tumblr with any frequency and will no longer be updating this blog. FIND ME ON WANDERING.SHOP for future updates. The only exception being if someone sends me an ask about trying to navigating and find each other on Mastodon. Ah, maybe.
Hello mr Gaiman. I am not writing to you because of any question, I just want to thank you for your work.
I live in Ukraine, my dad is now in Kharkiv and he was recently injured. Sometimes I feel anxiety despite the fact that I am in a relatively safe city, fear for my dad and sister who lives in a less safe city. Several times I thought that I would die in a moment. But you and your works give me strength and inspire me to paint no matter how bad situation is. When I re-read and re-watch Good Omens and The Sandman I feel safe and calm forgetting about potential danger. I remember when there were very strong explosions and at that moment I thought that I might not live to see the release of the second season of Good Omens, and this made me very sad because your works have become an important part of my life. So thank you for your creativity and for existing.
Best wishes and thank you again
That made me so sad, and at the same time so happy that things I've done and made are helping you.
Today is World Refugee Day, and I hope you and your loved ones survive the current war and that you do not ever have to become a refugee.
do you ever just … picture a whole scene, a whole fanfiction in your head, you know how to place every single word of the english dictionary that you need (or your language dictionary), you know how to structure your sentences, you know just what your characters are going to say to each other and then… and then you just open microsoft word.
Its the doc! The blank document steals the ideas from. Your brain!!!! If you want to keep your ideas,, do NOT look at the doc when you open it, look STRAIGHT* AT THE KEYBOARD and write the first words to pop into your head! Once the document isn't empty it, takes away its evil power over you
two things:
the mental image of that is hilarious
it might just work
Fucking hate watching children go “um Actually UwU” about AO3. saw someone say that fixing a bug with bookmarks isn’t a good reason to close a site down for a couple hours and they’re all lying about what they spend money on
meanwhile this very week my actual day job shut down the internal programmes for idk how many hours to fix a minor bug that popped up out of nowhere. I mean??? I don’t know shit about IT but “shut down all functions while we fix a problem” is so damn common. And “oh this took longer than we said” as well.
AO3 is impressively transparent about their bug fixes and downtime. They communicate fast, mention the reason why they're doing things and actually keep their promises.
Meanwhile my workplace regularly shuts down entire applications for maintenance with minimal warning or explication and often keeps them offline way longer than initially communicated.
Also it was not just 'oh we need to fix a tiny bug with bookmarks'. It was 'there are more bookmarks than a normal database can handle'
Source
Migrating over 2 billion of *anything* is gonna take a while and I imagine having people using the site and adding more bookmarks while that is happening would be kind of a risk!
Doing it without losing any data is impressive as hell. I've seen commercial vendors shrug and say, sorry. You're losing 24 hours worth of transactions. Just re-enter them.
It would have been simple for AO3 to 'lose' a million or so bookmarks to buy some time. They're just bookmarks, who cares? It's not like anyone's paying for this.
But nope, they did it the right way.
I have a lot of things I could say about this (for context, I just retired a month ago as chair of the AO3 support committee so I have insight, but I am speaking only on my own behalf and not as an official representative).
First: this particular type of data migration (moving from INT to BIG INT) has happened twice in AO3's past already (for history, and for kudos) and it was the same each time - a large table with hundreds of millions of items being moved is time-consuming and you need to be cautious doing it, and it WILL require a few hours of downtime to be safe. It is not "fixing a bug". It is moving the content of all bookmarks on the site. It will have to happen again for other types of data in the future, because AO3 just keeps growing.
Second: They can't know exactly how long a migration like that will take, so they make their best estimate. They can't test it before-hand on the test archive and have it reproduce exactly what will happen on the live archive, because the live archive has so much more data. Estimating "how long will it take to move 700 million items" is a matter of experience and luck. (Yes, 700 million is more the actual number of bookmarks involved, I know people keep citing the 2 billion number but each bookmark is assigned an ID number, and bookmark numbers iterate by 3. The highest ID number available under the old system was the slightly over 2.1 billion number, so the actual total is about 1/3 that. It's still a lot.)
Third: In general, AO3 tries not to have downtime, and it does very well. My observation is that the process in this case was usually like "Ok, let's start doing this and see how it goes. *waits to see if things start to get painfully slow and a lot of errors start happening* Ok, there are lots of errors happening and the site is getting slow to use, let's block all bot traffic and see if that helps. *that helps for a while and then things start to pile up again* Ok, let's try flipping the site into maintenance mode (i.e. take it down) just for a minute or two and see if that lets it catch up. *that helps for a bit and then things start to get slow and not catch up with just a few minutes of downtime* Ok, we do need to actually take it down and just let the process run until it finishes. " My point is that they first try various options that, if they work, will not require taking the site down all the way, before resorting to downtime. If they left it up, the process would take a lot longer, and people would experience a lot more problems while using the site. Taking it down is safer and more efficient in that kind of case.
Fourth: The same people doing the work need to communicate it to the people who do the tweets/tumblr posts/status updates. So not just doing complicated database stuff, but also telling communications "hey we are about to do X and Y and it will take approximately Z hours". (Fortunately we have mostly moved on from the times when it was literally the SAME people trying to do both things, and have dedicated communications folks to help.) Sometimes when they are trying to do a lot of things at once, the technical volunteers might not communicate as quickly or clearly as would be ideal, or a comms person might not immediately be available to make a post, so a status update is a bit later than we prefer, but we try to always communicate to users before doing something big like taking the site down. In a normal situation with planned downtime, the ideal is to make a post a couple of days before, then an hour before, and then at the time the downtime happens, and then when it's done. Sometimes there isn't time for as much advance warning, when something is either unexpected or doesn't go as planned.
Fifth: Also the people doing this are doing it in their spare time, around real jobs, and often on their evenings, weekends, in the middle of the night, while they're trying to cook dinner, etc. and they're doing it better than many sites with paid employees and larger staff. So cordially, anyone saying that they're lying or not doing a good enough job can go to hell.
i've always wanted to visit the beautiful city of chicago because i love their citation style
ofmd has so many great characters but can i just take a sec to say how much i appreciate Pete. he means so much to me!
Pete is a bald, chubby guy with a speech impediment and visible facial scarring. and i'll be honest, when the show first started i thought i knew where they were going with him. i'm also a bigger guy with a speech impediment. i'm used to characters who are like me in these ways being nothing but jokes.
and that...never happens. no one ever mentions Pete's lisp or pretends they can't understand him. he's a fat, bald gay man with a lisp and the show presents him as desirable, attractive, and really just a decent guy. there are no jokes about Lucius "settling" for him or cracks about "really? you're dating him?" and Lucius kind of going "oh beauty's on the inside," there's none of that. Lucius and Pete very obviously find each other sexy, and other characters treat their relationship with respect and feel genuine joy for them.
it's just so, so refreshing. when Pete is the butt of a joke, it's because he's a blowhard and a big ol goofus, not because of things he can't help. he's shown as desirable and attractive because he is, and that's not a joke. he even gets a sweet story about moving past toxic masculinity and finding love, and he's one of the funniest characters on the show with so many great lines! i just love how the writers handled this character so much.
I get it...! 😲 If I can't punch, I just have to use lasers and beams...!
the symbiotic relationship between tumblr and AO3 should be studied in a lab
hey you. tumblr user. do you have an AO3 account
yes
no
I feel like some of you guys think "bad art" is like someone gluing rhinestones to a water melon, or a guy who made his own armchair out of Ohio license plates, or a trashy romance novel where someone says "the blue-eyed one kissed the brown-eyed one," when in reality bad art is a 1000000 Billion Dollar movie where none of the workers got paid and every single creative decision was market tested to see how lucrative of a profit it could foreseeably make to wow shareholders.
Insincere, passionless, money-hungry art is almost always bad art
if you want to create but feel intimidated and overwhelmed, you're forgetting something: good art doesn't exist. all art is terrible. every story and song and movie and picture is worse than the one before it and all artists should be in prisom
"It took my whole, entire mortal life to remember who I was... and now it's time for you to do the same, my brother."
look, it's easy, okay? High Fantasy has An Hero whose Destiny is Sword, and Low Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Job is Sword.
expanding it to a full matrix: Sword And Sorcery has An Hero whose Job is Sword, and YA Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Destiny is Sword.
wow, this is an exceptionally effective taxonomy.
So today I watched this interview with the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and they demonstrate the phenomenon "space ship acting"
and they all go
and it just cracks me up, ESPECIALLY Sir Patrick Stewart
I love when they just throw themselves across the room
Jonathon Frakes said that once during one of these scenes Patrick Stewart leaned over to him and said “I’m a Shakespearean trained actor you know”
I drew a bunch of silly stuff with my werewolf woman and decided to gather it one post. Sometimes you just have to decompress through being goofy
You can read about her here.
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These comics are just some silliness I drew for fun. It's not really canon, she lives in a separate setting and isn't able to talk as a werewolf. Her original story is also pretty rough and tragic.
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Pumpkin carving comic was a reward I drew for my patron Taxis
Beach comic was a reward I drew for my patron Shroom
i will... draw for fun... the things that..... bring me joy ...
