Because I, apparently, am picky about such things. I almost called myself a ‘diva’ but I went ahead and ate a candy bar. TV taught me that would help.

I’m still hungry.

Anyway, here’s an example. It’ll offer you a lightly-formatted text document to print, as well as a PDF link to save. The link for these is located in the upper-right of each individual chapter’s text, near the next/previous links.

The look is still not perfect - for one, once downloaded, there is no way to discern the intended order unless you’re careful to do so while you fetch the files. I could fix that by adding in a number to each chapter’s title, but I think that may change the permalinks as well. I could instead add a number as the first line of the text, I suppose… My original intent was to do so by providing an in-universe date on which the particular chapter takes place.

I’ll wind up generating my own PDFs I can better control the look of, but for now this should help the e-reader blues. Also, a single, monolithic PDF of the entire collection (or sub-sections, perhaps) might streamline the process. For example, one logical division would be from Blizzard through Two Thousand. That however is a sizable chunk. A few smaller installments might work better. This is something to further examine en-route to an .EPUB or .MOBI edition.

But that doesn’t change the main reason for this place: further progressing through the story itself. Sadly, there is no new installment today.

It’s been a rough few months timewise, as should be mostly evident from the lack of any sort of updates other than quick blurbs on twitter and this out-of-the-blue rant. I’ve worked on Awakening’s sixth part as I’ve been able, but spending a mere five minutes here, fifteen there, another half-hour over there… With all the separate sessions breaking up the creative process, the chapter’s very rough and doesn’t logically fit together. I’m not happy with it, and as soon as I can dedicate an entire afternoon to working on it I might actually make some progress.

There are a few things I’d like to share in the interim, however. It’s likely they’re not new to anyone, but I’ll do it anyway.

First, from @baltakatei via Twitter - Dinosaur Comics debates the scientific merits of immortality. I think the green guy should have eaten the yellow guy at the first sign of dissent.

From me: A photo from the very first high plains snowstorm of the 2010 season. It dumped as much as 13” in some areas (such as in front of my outward-opening door. The residence pictured is not my house). Much has since melted, but it has really made things a mess while working in the woods.

Also, as someone publishing content to the web, I feel compelled to mention this. There’s been a bunch of controversy in the last several days about an alleged theft of intellectual property by a magazine who supposedly stated ‘the web is considered “public domain”’ in defense of said theft. If the story is true… It’s quite possibly the saddest thing I’ve read all year. I won’t rehash it as it’s been thoroughly covered almost anywhere else you care to look and I’d probably miss important details.

It won’t change what I’m doing here, I don’t expect. This site is my sole current method of publishing my work. I don’t mind if someone prints off a copy for their own reading, or loads it on an e-reader for the same… Heck, even downloading it for offline reading, fine. Enjoy it.

All I ask (and all I’ve ever truly asked) is: Please, don’t distribute it elsewhere unless you’ve asked me. If asked, I’d almost certainly okay a repost. Mainly, this so I can keep track of where it’s gone across the Great and Scary Intertubes. It’d be something else if the site actually was a source of income for me.

Which, sadly, it’s not. I’ve never made a single cent off of this site (a very rough estimate is that it has actually cost me approximately $2000 USD to date in hosting and domain fees alone). To the best of my recollection I’ve also never asked for donations towards domain upkeep. More than once, I’ve thought about asking - but unless I can get myself on some sort of routine schedule for updates, I simply don’t feel right rattling a tin cup. The most I’d likely do is toss up a paypal button somewhere on the sidebar and never mention it again.

What I’d much rather do is finish the story and create a nice, clean epub/kindle version, perhaps with illustrations… Really wish I could afford to commission a couple of pieces right now. I’d like to get a group-portrait of several of the characters done.

Let’s see if I can’t make the most of the next hour or two before I fall asleep…

TL;DR:

“You’re still talking but all I hear is ‘blah blah excuses blah blah.’” —T’bia, from Awakening pt 6

Working on it.

I originally took the board down because I just couldn’t keep up with spammers. That and a couple of server moves really sealed its fate. The database is still floating around but it’s hardly in a usable state.

Someone suggested another board that might be willing to host a subforum for discussion. After speaking with one of their admins, there’s now a section devoted to Terra Fabula on the Planet Furry boards should anyone still be so inclined to discuss anything related to Terra Fabula’s universe.

Is it better than doing the same inside blog comments? Perhaps.

Is it better than this delicious plate of chicken and noodles before me? Questionable. I’ll get back to you after I lick the plate clean.

Terra Fabula: 927,649

Paradigm Shift: 386,818

Together, they’re pushing 1,314,467 bytes. Depending on if you count by 2s or by 10s, That’s 1.31MB or 1.25MiB.

219,734 of these are space characters, which (barring a minor overhead for inline formatting codes implementing a space) is also a good estimate for the total word count.

I’ve used the letter ‘e’ 122,658 times (539 occurrences of which are capital ‘E’). This is 9.3% of the total character count. As in, there’s nearly a 1 in 10 chance of a random letter pulled from the database being an ‘E’.

q, 1047 times, 32 of them as a ‘Q’. This is 0.08%.

The word ‘the’ has been uttered 16027 times. 7.2% of the total word count.

EDIT: Fixed in a way that shouldn’t break again. For a while.

I’m dearly going to miss cact.us, presuming the transfer ever completes…

I’ve been making tweaks to the CSS and sidebar tonight. Individual chapters now don’t show any of the ‘login’ and other meta crap; it’s down to just the chapter flipping widget that I’d been sticking directly at the top and bottom of the chapter text. I had to get rid of the navigation at the top of the text, because adding drop caps to each page was not playing nice with it there.

I’ve also added paragraph indenting, because trying to read without it seems to wig my eyes out a little. I’m still working on implementing text-only copies, just have to beat the plugin into submission with only a few minutes a night to tinker.

As an aside, I seem to start most of my front page posts with the letter ‘I.’ Hm.

It also needs to add a little more data to the beginning of the text: Chapter title, preferably the dates during which it takes place… I’d just use WP’s “page_order” but I’m grossly abusing that and I’m expecting my little hack with that to break the next time wordpress updates the database, anyway. It’ll change the field from my preferred bigint(20) back to whatever it was at (10 or 11).

Which means I’ll have to go update all the chapters back into their correct order. Bleh. I’m forcing the pages to sort using the entire date as such: 271506010000 This allows for two two take place on the same day, at different times of day, and still be ordered properly if their names aren’t in alphabetical order.

I suppose I could trim off the last pair of 00’s on the sort order, limit it to hours… It’d fit in the int(11) then. Bleh.

I’ve been on a domain buying spree as of late. I’ve been annoyed every time I get an extortion email “Want to buy bluevulpine.com for $50? $75? $250?” - had I wanted it, I’d have bought it when I picked up the .net version! The last squatter that contaced me I told off with some language that made a nearby sailor blush, and then ended with “I do sincerely hope that you enjoy sitting on a domain for a year that no one gives a rat’s ass about. Solid investment of your time and money, that.”

Somehow later that day it was out of the whois registry. Not sure how that works, thought they would have been locked into them for a year.

Anyway, I picked up the .com and .us. A buddy uses his .net for the blog, and the .com for (and not to belittle his effort, because I’m seriously considering the same thing up here in the hills) a ‘hobby’ business beside his regular employment. I’ve been helping folks in the area fix their computers since I moved up here. Maybe it’s time to hang out a shingle.

I also went on a browsing spree of the .US domain expiry lists. It’s amazing the absolute amount of spam-only registrations vanishing off the radar every day, having been replaced by something new that the spam filters haven’t adapted to just yet. However, in the mess, I found two novel names that may work for the aforementioned project of reviving/recreating Miavir’s index. How’s “foxytales.us” sound, along with the identically-pronounced “foxytails.us”?

Shrug. It’ll be something to keep me out of trouble.

As to the spoiler of changes. Ceth and Jadyn patch things up in a minimal fashion. Beyond that… The general tweaks here and there for language usage.

It’s still not perfect (none of it is) but I suppose if I had wanted to actually do this with my life I should have been an English major instead of studying Computer Sciences… Which helps so much when splitting wood, landscaping, deconstructing buildings, and the like. Guess it’s hereditary. Mother Dearest is a Biology major and she spent something like 20 years working for BNSF doing things that had nothing in common.

The Screaming Viking had this problem. The theme was using an outdated global variable ($author_email) in the comment loop. Since it didn’t exist, the get_avatar() call couldn’t be bothered to return the proper image code. However, it’s immensely happy if you just pass it a reference to the comment object itself - so changing this:

echo get_avatar($author_email, $size=”40″, $default_avatar );

into this:

echo get_avatar($comment, $size=”40″, $default_avatar );

fixed the avatars in that particular theme. (Zinmag’s Remedy.)

Personally, I discovered the delayed posting feature in WordPress. Friday’s update will now go up automatically. :D

The flash animation in this theme (the aurora up top is moving) really sucks the life out of my battery. I’m not entirely sure about keeping the theme, especially since I never intended to activate it yet anyway. We’ll see. At the least I suspect I’m changing the font from monospace to a serif variety.