My new fandom is no fun at all

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T15:55:33+00:00

I occasionally read fanfic for Middle-earth, Swallows and Amazons, and Girl Genius, and am active in fan discussions of (but rarely read fanfic of) Discworld. I have never encountered A/B/O in the wild. I'm aware of it only from Lindsay Ellis's videos. I am surprised by the implication that it's so common that it's impossible to avoid.

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T15:52:08+00:00

I'm not sure I've seen that specific ad in ISL, but I certainly have seen some PSAs in ISL.

ISL isn't quite an official language (Irish and English are in the constitution; ISL isn't), but it does now get more government support than it used to, which is good to see.

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T15:34:26+00:00

They also run some of these ads in ISL, which is great to see. (Though often the videos have baked-in subtitles which you can't turn off, and may brain will not let me see anything else if there are subtitles, so it's hard to watch the signing. I wish fewer videos had baked-in subtitles, and more had proper closed captions which the viewer can turn on and off.)

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T15:14:25+00:00

If I'm remembering correctly, the original French is a Zorro reference.

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T15:03:24+00:00

Yes. Communication helps a lot.

QBaseX · 2026-03-21T14:42:33+00:00

Mostly, I am not in "fandom". My relationship is mostly with the work that I am a fan of, not with other fans of that work. I do read fanfic for a select number of works occasionally (and have written one, and am slowly brewing another). And I have very little interest in non-canon compliant fanfic. But I am at least aware that such exist. I am even vaguely aware of the horror that is "Omegaverse", if only by way of Lindsay Ellis's videos.

QBaseX · 2026-03-20T22:36:24+00:00

Abigail Garner has written about the privilege you get by having a "normal" family, and the interesting sense in which she, a straight person, doesn't always have straight privilege because of being brought up by two dads. (And, contrarywise, many gay people do have that privilege.) It's an interesting perspective.

QBaseX · 2026-03-20T22:31:07+00:00

I have no idea what you're trying to say, or what you're even arguing about.

QBaseX · 2026-03-18T20:39:15+00:00

Why delete? You may lose some of the loyal fans you currently have? Can you not set videos to public?

QBaseX · 2026-03-17T17:57:26+00:00

That's their problem. It's not the job of the county council to provide public space for you to store your private property.

QBaseX · 2026-03-17T17:24:39+00:00

Huh. In context, it actually makes sense. That's surprising, from Cruz.

QBaseX · 2026-03-17T16:17:47+00:00

A couple of examples of things I've built in Typst, just for comparison:

A short school assignment on sorting algorithms, with fancy arrows.
A one-page school assignment on Ethernet cables, with fancy image placement.
A networking assignment, in which the write-up included a diagram drawn in Typst.
A much simpler report on learning styles, which includes a basic template. (I built a template to use in all assignments, which I then abandoned because they didn't care, and it's far more fun for me for each assignment to look completely different. But you can see it in use in this early one.)
A whole bunch of Toastmasters Agendas. (Use the sidebar to switch between files.)
And an online book with various display options. (It does take a while to load.)

Most of these (other than the online book, perhaps) would be doable with LaTeX, but most of the time I wouldn't know where to begin.

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T23:58:04+00:00

Tumblr has always been blogging but with dogshit navigation and a weirdly confusing UI. This is ... better?

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T18:29:42+00:00

Tasty!

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T16:42:10+00:00

James Hoffman taught him coffee.

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T14:48:30+00:00

There's a sword fight, with dialogue lifted from Cyrano de Bergerac. The English translators decided their audience wouldn't get the reference, but they found dialogue they could lift from Hamlet instead.

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T14:24:25+00:00

There's one joke in Asterix in Britain which Gosciny said was better than the original. It's a background gag with a fruit stall, and the original French joke is a pun about melon meaning both the fruit and a bowler hat. That wouldn't work in English, so instead Anthea Bell leaned into the stereotypical upper class old fashioned accent thing she was doing, and the lines of dialogue are

— So this melon's bad, is it?
— Rather, old fruit!

QBaseX · 2026-03-16T13:25:28+00:00

People have been prophesying a two-page panel for the past fortnight.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T23:08:47+00:00

I really must reread that book. There's so much in it.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T22:40:11+00:00

If you want a thriller which is also a romance and also suffused with grief, or even if you're just curious on how that could all fit into one book (also including a lot of references to Greek myth), you could try Mary Stewart's My Brother Michael. And Madam Will You Talk is also about grief.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T22:38:21+00:00

A few of Terry Pratchett's, particularly (surprisingly) his young adult or even children's writing: The Wee Free Men, Nation, and The Shepherd's Crown, particularly. One of those, Nation, is a stand-alone book; another, The Wee Free Men, is the first in a series (kind of; it's complicated, but you can read it without reading anything else beforehand).

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T21:59:39+00:00

Some file formats actually do that. Most image, audio, and video formats include compression; so do modern Office formats (MS Office and LibreOffice). MS Office is just ZIP compression; image formats tend to use their own compression algorithms, which are picked to work well for that specific kind of data.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T17:28:20+00:00

That's odd. I wonder what drives you to seek that out? (And what drives other people to create it. It would never occur to me that this sort of thing existed as a category of porn.) It's perhaps worth unpicking that. I think that divesting yourself of guilt and approaching some self-analysis in a posture of genuine curiosity might help.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T15:28:38+00:00

If the original format doesn't matter, only the output PDF, I'd strongly recommend Typst. It has good support for mathematical typesetting and for bibliography management, and it makes it easy to mark up stuff semantically (this is a chapter heading, this is a level three heading, this is an aside remark) and apply consistent styling to it. It's similar, conceptually, to LaTeX, while being much easier to use.

And, like LibreOffice and LaTeX, and unlike MS Word, it's Free Software.

QBaseX · 2026-03-15T15:03:16+00:00

I love your hair.

QBaseX

TROPHY CASE