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A weird angle of downtown Buffalo on a beautiful night.
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A weird angle of downtown Buffalo on a beautiful night.
(Your picture was not posted)
May. 16th, 2018
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more chronicles of dude’s coworker:
the man, we’ll call him J, has recently married a woman from Costa Rica. He has rapidly been trying to learn Spanish, and has spent a bunch of time in Costa Rica. (He also has spent a solid year in absolute hell dealing with the paperwork but hey. They got their passports issued yesterday, so all is well, for the moment.)
He is not particularly gifted with languages.
Nobody will teach him swear words, mostly because they know he’ll get confused and use them inappropriately. But, one evening, there was a soccer game, and, well. He learned the word “carepicha”, which is a mashup of “cara de picha”, or, literally, “dickface.” He was delighted at his first swear, and repeated it a lot, like a toddler.
(To be fair, repetition is how you learn. He caught his wife practicing swearing in English as she did the dishes. “Fuck you, fork,” she whispered. “This fucking spoon. Fuck you, spoon. I’m going to fucking wash you, you fucking fuck of a spoon.” J said, delightedly, as he related this story, “she’s gonna do so great in Connecticut.”)
His wife swears constantly and won’t tell him what she’s saying, though he’s started to understand enough to have some idea that it’s truly horrendous. (”I think she asked the man in the intersection whether his eyes were stuck up his ass,” he said meditatively. “She sounds awesome,” I said in complete sincerity.)
Flash forward, they go to the beach. There is a vendor there who sells cold coconuts. Like, you cut the top off, I guess, and chill them, and then you can drink cold coconut water out of them, and it’s great, I’m told, like I’d know anything about that sort of thing. I’m going to mess up the whole story because I forget what he said they’re called. But, whatever the word, it’s a two-syllable word starting with p, and “fría” afterward. So, J, with his hard-working toddler-level Spanish, marches up to the fellow, money in hand, and says, “Quiero tomar su picha fría por favor.”
“I would like to take your cold dick please.”
He said, incredibly enough, the man just stone-faced handed him the coconut and told him how much it cost. He had, of course, instantly realized what he’d said, but had no idea how to take it back.
Another incident: He advised, when studying a language, to focus first on establishing crucial vocabulary, and really try to avoid learning two similar words at the same time.
He, unfortunately, had learned uvas and uñas at the same time, and consequently gets them confused. One day he was out shopping, and while there, his wife texted him. “Necesito pintar mis uñas,” she said. “Blanco, por favor.”
His garbage brain, as he put it, cast aside the verb and any context, and seized on uñas, and blanco. Yes, i got this! i’m super smart, he thought, and went to the fruit aisle. Meanwhile, the wife is at home, working on something. Ten minutes later, she clearly has a moment of realization, and texts him, this time in English. “Send me a photo of what is in your basket, please.”
He took a picture. He had white grapes. In Spanish, those would be called uvas verdes. (Green grapes. We call them white, but Spanish speakers apparently have superior color perception, as those fuckers are clearly green.)
She had asked for white nail polish.
(Your picture was not posted)
more chronicles of dude’s coworker:
the man, we’ll call him J, has recently married a woman from Costa Rica. He has rapidly been trying to learn Spanish, and has spent a bunch of time in Costa Rica. (He also has spent a solid year in absolute hell dealing with the paperwork but hey. They got their passports issued yesterday, so all is well, for the moment.)
He is not particularly gifted with languages.
Nobody will teach him swear words, mostly because they know he’ll get confused and use them inappropriately. But, one evening, there was a soccer game, and, well. He learned the word “carepicha”, which is a mashup of “cara de picha”, or, literally, “dickface.” He was delighted at his first swear, and repeated it a lot, like a toddler.
(To be fair, repetition is how you learn. He caught his wife practicing swearing in English as she did the dishes. “Fuck you, fork,” she whispered. “This fucking spoon. Fuck you, spoon. I’m going to fucking wash you, you fucking fuck of a spoon.” J said, delightedly, as he related this story, “she’s gonna do so great in Connecticut.”)
His wife swears constantly and won’t tell him what she’s saying, though he’s started to understand enough to have some idea that it’s truly horrendous. (”I think she asked the man in the intersection whether his eyes were stuck up his ass,” he said meditatively. “She sounds awesome,” I said in complete sincerity.)
Flash forward, they go to the beach. There is a vendor there who sells cold coconuts. Like, you cut the top off, I guess, and chill them, and then you can drink cold coconut water out of them, and it’s great, I’m told, like I’d know anything about that sort of thing. I’m going to mess up the whole story because I forget what he said they’re called. But, whatever the word, it’s a two-syllable word starting with p, and “fría” afterward. So, J, with his hard-working toddler-level Spanish, marches up to the fellow, money in hand, and says, “Quiero tomar su picha fría por favor.”
“I would like to take your cold dick please.”
He said, incredibly enough, the man just stone-faced handed him the coconut and told him how much it cost. He had, of course, instantly realized what he’d said, but had no idea how to take it back.
Another incident: He advised, when studying a language, to focus first on establishing crucial vocabulary, and really try to avoid learning two similar words at the same time.
He, unfortunately, had learned uvas and uñas at the same time, and consequently gets them confused. One day he was out shopping, and while there, his wife texted him. “Necesito pintar mis uñas,” she said. “Blanco, por favor.”
His garbage brain, as he put it, cast aside the verb and any context, and seized on uñas, and blanco. Yes, i got this! i’m super smart, he thought, and went to the fruit aisle. Meanwhile, the wife is at home, working on something. Ten minutes later, she clearly has a moment of realization, and texts him, this time in English. “Send me a photo of what is in your basket, please.”
He took a picture. He had white grapes. In Spanish, those would be called uvas verdes. (Green grapes. We call them white, but Spanish speakers apparently have superior color perception, as those fuckers are clearly green.)
She had asked for white nail polish.
(Your picture was not posted)
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bedbugsbiting replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
I seriously thought uvas was going to be a slang for balls.
You know, it probably is, but I don’t know where that would have landed him, in the grocery store.
He also had a story about asking for a cucaracha in a restaurant, instead of a cuchara. The proprietor stared at him in shock and he was like “… what did I just say?”
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bedbugsbiting replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
I seriously thought uvas was going to be a slang for balls.
You know, it probably is, but I don’t know where that would have landed him, in the grocery store.
He also had a story about asking for a cucaracha in a restaurant, instead of a cuchara. The proprietor stared at him in shock and he was like “… what did I just say?”
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So, Dude’s semi-boss is in town, and he was telling some great stories about his kid, who is eleven now. He’s a single dad and the mom is only very vaguely in the picture; he has pretty much sole custody.
He gave his daughter The Talk, you know, the one about how babies are made etcetera. He figured it was time, and he had to do it. She stood there with her arms crossed over her chest not quite looking at him the entire time, giving zero feedback. He sort of petered out nervously once he’d hit all the points he’d intended to, and said, “So uh… okay. Do you have, uh. Any questions?”
She raised her head and fixed him with a keen stare. “Just one,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, stammering a little, “I mean– okay! What do you want to know?”
“Do you have to be so awkward about it?” she asked.
“Uh,” he said.
She gestured, sort of waving her fingers at him, and he backed out of the doorway, and she shut the door to her room, and he went away.
“It went well,” he told us. “I think.”
(Your picture was not posted)
So, Dude’s semi-boss is in town, and he was telling some great stories about his kid, who is eleven now. He’s a single dad and the mom is only very vaguely in the picture; he has pretty much sole custody.
He gave his daughter The Talk, you know, the one about how babies are made etcetera. He figured it was time, and he had to do it. She stood there with her arms crossed over her chest not quite looking at him the entire time, giving zero feedback. He sort of petered out nervously once he’d hit all the points he’d intended to, and said, “So uh… okay. Do you have, uh. Any questions?”
She raised her head and fixed him with a keen stare. “Just one,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, stammering a little, “I mean– okay! What do you want to know?”
“Do you have to be so awkward about it?” she asked.
“Uh,” he said.
She gestured, sort of waving her fingers at him, and he backed out of the doorway, and she shut the door to her room, and he went away.
“It went well,” he told us. “I think.”
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walburgablack replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
that is *delightful*. one of my friends on-purpose learns the dirty bits of every language she can and only then starts acquiring the crucial vocabulary, so I get to be on the other end of this experience a bunch.
That sounds fantastic. I would only get into terrible trouble with this sort of thing.
I honestly don’t know how to swear in any languages besides English. I learned Spanish in school, and from my mother, and my mother learned it in school, so her Spanish is fluent but… lacking. She was aware of this, and asked a Spanish exchange student for pointers, and the girl innocently gave her a list that she then cross-checked with another native speaker (an older Puerto Rican woman, I think), and the second person was like “jesus christ those are filthy you can’t say any of that to anybody burn this paper immediately”, and some of that is that I believe Spaniards have exceptionally filthy mouths (i say this without judgement as a simple statement of fact ok), but a lot of it is that knowing what’s an Unforgivable Swear is sort of… contextual.
Anyway. Dude’s coworker J grew up among Puerto Ricans and so knew a few words, and especially knew which words were fighting words to be avoided, and it turns out Costa Ricans don’t have exactly the same boundaries; his wife off-handedly called her son one of the words he’d been taught Never To Say Unless You Want To Probably Die, and he about had a heart attack.
But the only time Dude has ever been to the UK, a friend casually called her mother, to her face, a “fucking cunt” over a minor difference of opinion, and he physically recoiled into a wall in visceral cringing horror, and the mother hadn’t really even noticed and they were both like “what just happened to you” as he tried to collect himself, so this is clearly true across languages.
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walburgablack replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
that is *delightful*. one of my friends on-purpose learns the dirty bits of every language she can and only then starts acquiring the crucial vocabulary, so I get to be on the other end of this experience a bunch.
That sounds fantastic. I would only get into terrible trouble with this sort of thing.
I honestly don’t know how to swear in any languages besides English. I learned Spanish in school, and from my mother, and my mother learned it in school, so her Spanish is fluent but… lacking. She was aware of this, and asked a Spanish exchange student for pointers, and the girl innocently gave her a list that she then cross-checked with another native speaker (an older Puerto Rican woman, I think), and the second person was like “jesus christ those are filthy you can’t say any of that to anybody burn this paper immediately”, and some of that is that I believe Spaniards have exceptionally filthy mouths (i say this without judgement as a simple statement of fact ok), but a lot of it is that knowing what’s an Unforgivable Swear is sort of… contextual.
Anyway. Dude’s coworker J grew up among Puerto Ricans and so knew a few words, and especially knew which words were fighting words to be avoided, and it turns out Costa Ricans don’t have exactly the same boundaries; his wife off-handedly called her son one of the words he’d been taught Never To Say Unless You Want To Probably Die, and he about had a heart attack.
But the only time Dude has ever been to the UK, a friend casually called her mother, to her face, a “fucking cunt” over a minor difference of opinion, and he physically recoiled into a wall in visceral cringing horror, and the mother hadn’t really even noticed and they were both like “what just happened to you” as he tried to collect himself, so this is clearly true across languages.
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walburgablack mentioned you on a post “I was afraid of planting mint, is the funny thing. Every blog I read,…”
@bomberqueen17 that *is* what I’m getting from all of this, yeah. I was just hoping to do everything from seed and the others took, but well.
I have mint in my yard that I just gather little bouquets of and have given to various people to plant with the warning that they should be ready to contain it. And my sister claims I never really warned her, and this mint is so much worse than her other kinds of mint, and so actually she ripped it all out of her garden because it was trying to get into the driveway and choke out the shasta daisies.
I’m not offended, but she was a little mean about it, really. But I mean, she’s a little mean about basically everything, so.
There are many kinds of mint! This was a spearmint. She has other mints in her picking garden– chocolate mint, which is a kind of peppermint, and apple mint, which is a soft mild little mint and sort of timid, and there was a third kind I forget that died off. So not all mints are invincible. My mother had mint in her garden when i was a child, and a tree grew and shaded the patch so much the mint all died. I gave her some of mine and she stuck it in the middle of a field and it’s going to take over but that’s fine. Mint needs sun and wet.
I’m going to get a pot and plant mint in the pot out near my yurt, because I think peppermint tastes like shit in mint-sage tea and makes overly-harsh mojitos.
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walburgablack mentioned you on a post “I was afraid of planting mint, is the funny thing. Every blog I read,…”
@bomberqueen17 that *is* what I’m getting from all of this, yeah. I was just hoping to do everything from seed and the others took, but well.
I have mint in my yard that I just gather little bouquets of and have given to various people to plant with the warning that they should be ready to contain it. And my sister claims I never really warned her, and this mint is so much worse than her other kinds of mint, and so actually she ripped it all out of her garden because it was trying to get into the driveway and choke out the shasta daisies.
I’m not offended, but she was a little mean about it, really. But I mean, she’s a little mean about basically everything, so.
There are many kinds of mint! This was a spearmint. She has other mints in her picking garden– chocolate mint, which is a kind of peppermint, and apple mint, which is a soft mild little mint and sort of timid, and there was a third kind I forget that died off. So not all mints are invincible. My mother had mint in her garden when i was a child, and a tree grew and shaded the patch so much the mint all died. I gave her some of mine and she stuck it in the middle of a field and it’s going to take over but that’s fine. Mint needs sun and wet.
I’m going to get a pot and plant mint in the pot out near my yurt, because I think peppermint tastes like shit in mint-sage tea and makes overly-harsh mojitos.
(Your picture was not posted)
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current ongoing saga in my online retail hell life:
one of the services i sell a lot of online– hundreds of customers– is that we develop film.
there are a small handful of people who bought the service and then never sent us their film. i figure life gets busy, and left them in the queue, and forgot about it– one is 500 days old now, another 400some, one 150 days but emailed me like 2 months ago saying “i didn’t forget! i will soon!” and i replied with the instructions again, and then there’s this one who’s like. 115 days ago. (And like… I just dunno what to say to these people so I’ve just let them sit. Seriously though.)
She sent a convo and was like “i never got instructions?”
I’m like. The listing begins with READ THIS LISTING, and then the instructions immediately follow. The photo accompanying the listing has the instructions written on it. When you make any purchase from my shop, the email you get says “Thanks! If you ordered film processing, here’s the address to send it to!”
So I wrote back. “Mail me your film at the following address.” (The specific phrasing is important; by coincidence, I wrote “mail” instead of “send”, because I had just explained to another customer that generally the US Mail works fine for this, and it was on my mind. I was worried it came across as too harsh, but. Come on.)
An hour later she wrote, “Do I mail it to you?”
…
What the fuck. What the fuck.
She has to be able to read and write because she is communicating with me by writing. And I get it, the listing itself says “send”, and that could be ambiguous; do I mean FedEx, or somehow email, or what? but I had just written her a convo that verbatim mentioned the US Mail, so. She’s in California, and my store is clearly marked as being in New York, so it’s not like she’s going to be able to drop it off, or get me to pick it up. You don’t need specialized understanding of the world to realize that, I hadn’t thought. And honestly you could use FedEx or DHL or UPS, that would be fine, or like, private courier I suppose if you really wanted! But yes, you can mail it, I just told you to mail it.
What else can I say? What more can I tell this person???
So I just… copy-pasted the text from the message I’d just sent her.
“Mail me your film at the following address.” I couldn’t resist adding, “are you getting these messages?” at the end.
I just hit refresh on the convo page and it doesn’t look like she’s written back.
Really, though, what else can I do?
I very recently had a customer write to me and ask me if developing film resulted in digital images. And I was like, duh no? but I collected myself and wrote back kindly and sincerely, explaining that it’s an analog process and if you want it to be made digital, that’s why one of the options is to digitize the image. I get it; some people don’t remember film, don’t remember a time before all images were digital. It’s a recent development but not that recent; there are adults who would’ve been too young to be aware of much as it was changing.
And that worked out fine, the customer wrote back “Oh I get it now! Thanks so much!” and bought the correct service and mailed me her film, and it’s at the lab now getting worked on. Great! Perfect.
But I don’t know what to do about this current customer.
(Your picture was not posted)
current ongoing saga in my online retail hell life:
one of the services i sell a lot of online– hundreds of customers– is that we develop film.
there are a small handful of people who bought the service and then never sent us their film. i figure life gets busy, and left them in the queue, and forgot about it– one is 500 days old now, another 400some, one 150 days but emailed me like 2 months ago saying “i didn’t forget! i will soon!” and i replied with the instructions again, and then there’s this one who’s like. 115 days ago. (And like… I just dunno what to say to these people so I’ve just let them sit. Seriously though.)
She sent a convo and was like “i never got instructions?”
I’m like. The listing begins with READ THIS LISTING, and then the instructions immediately follow. The photo accompanying the listing has the instructions written on it. When you make any purchase from my shop, the email you get says “Thanks! If you ordered film processing, here’s the address to send it to!”
So I wrote back. “Mail me your film at the following address.” (The specific phrasing is important; by coincidence, I wrote “mail” instead of “send”, because I had just explained to another customer that generally the US Mail works fine for this, and it was on my mind. I was worried it came across as too harsh, but. Come on.)
An hour later she wrote, “Do I mail it to you?”
…
What the fuck. What the fuck.
She has to be able to read and write because she is communicating with me by writing. And I get it, the listing itself says “send”, and that could be ambiguous; do I mean FedEx, or somehow email, or what? but I had just written her a convo that verbatim mentioned the US Mail, so. She’s in California, and my store is clearly marked as being in New York, so it’s not like she’s going to be able to drop it off, or get me to pick it up. You don’t need specialized understanding of the world to realize that, I hadn’t thought. And honestly you could use FedEx or DHL or UPS, that would be fine, or like, private courier I suppose if you really wanted! But yes, you can mail it, I just told you to mail it.
What else can I say? What more can I tell this person???
So I just… copy-pasted the text from the message I’d just sent her.
“Mail me your film at the following address.” I couldn’t resist adding, “are you getting these messages?” at the end.
I just hit refresh on the convo page and it doesn’t look like she’s written back.
Really, though, what else can I do?
I very recently had a customer write to me and ask me if developing film resulted in digital images. And I was like, duh no? but I collected myself and wrote back kindly and sincerely, explaining that it’s an analog process and if you want it to be made digital, that’s why one of the options is to digitize the image. I get it; some people don’t remember film, don’t remember a time before all images were digital. It’s a recent development but not that recent; there are adults who would’ve been too young to be aware of much as it was changing.
And that worked out fine, the customer wrote back “Oh I get it now! Thanks so much!” and bought the correct service and mailed me her film, and it’s at the lab now getting worked on. Great! Perfect.
But I don’t know what to do about this current customer.
(Your picture was not posted)
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cimness:
When I started a recs list, everybody’s were hand-coded html lists on their websites. Livejournal changed that, and popularized recs lists far more by removing the biggest barriers to participation, the need for webhosting and the need to code html. But livejournal was far from an ideal situation for a recs database, as it didn’t have tags for the greater part of its existence. Many people’s recs journals were simply filled with posts that started with a list of which fandoms were represented within; many didn’t contain a masterlist and were hence not searchable.
Fandom-wide resources Crack Van (where reccers could sign up for a week or month at a time to represent their favorite fandom, pairing, or subgenre with curated recs and introductory blurbs) and Recs Rainbow (a blog that maintained an index of self-submitted fandom reccers and when they were updated with what) also came into existence.
Navigating these resources in search of new recs lists for a new fandom was itself a big task, but they still made everything a great deal easier, because navigating the maze of personal blogs and fic posted directly to topical communities all over the site, + fic posted to smaller archives and personal sites, was still very difficult - arguably more difficult in some fandoms, because finding fic meant performing keyword searches for communities, paging back through their entire catalogs of entries, surfing from person to person.
Delicious.com, with its revolutionary tag sorting that went beyond the individual user account, became the best place to find and search for fic very quickly. Suddenly you could look at the most recent bookmarks from other people in real time for any pairing you could think of - although without standardized tags, they weren’t all the bookmarks for the fandom; for that you had to surf around between different bookmarkers’ accounts using their networks, or find them by clicking on popular stories to see who else had bookmarked them and going to each person’s account. External bookmarking services still rely on the user to fill in all the info, though, so not every bookmark is equally informative - warnings, ratings, summaries, even author names or story lengths, or more importantly, the fact that something was still a work in progress, could easily be missing from the bookmark.
In some ways - like the automatic inclusion of the author’s headers - AO3 is already an improvement on Delicious. In others, it’s a pretty drastic step backwards - like the fact that you can’t follow a particular user’s bookmarks, or see whose bookmarks they follow. Right now AO3 is primarily adapted for saving your own bookmarks, for which purpose it’s quite useful; and the archive itself and its search filters already let you discover new fic with much more ease than the previous disconnected systems ever did; but they miss an essential function of recs lists, which is: they weren’t just for finding any fic, they were an aid in narrowing down the field of fic to ones you might be more likely to enjoy: the recommendation part. Simply the fact that someone, or several someones, has recommended a thing before isn’t the same as getting a recommendation from someone whose taste you already know is like yours in some respect. Sorting the search results by number of kudos or bookmarks is only going to give you the Billboard Top Whatever list, while reccers are djs, curators of content.
And as the recent discussion of exposing bookmarker-side tags as a provider of content warnings show - particularly for racism and other issues where the creator may be unaware or not want to tag correctly - AO3 has the potential to create new functionalities with tags that could do things we’ve never been able to do before. A simple ‘hot right now’ or ‘trending recently’ algorithm like the ones used at Ravelry and Pinboard’s Recent Fandom Bookmarks page (which doesn’t work, because of the fandom exodus away from Pinboard, but was a great idea) could make it much more efficient to check out recent significant developments in a fandom, for example. My present workaround is to use the works search, filter by date for things completed or updated within the last (2 weeks, 6 weeks, 1 year, whatever, depending if/when I last looked at the fandom in question) and then sort by descending bookmarks, kudos, or hits. The ability to follow other bookmarkers could let you surf to see what friends of friends are reading and discover new people with congenial taste, which is the best way to receive recs from outside your own fandoms. And if bookmarker tags were or could be exposed when browsing the archive, a highlight color for someone you already follow could allow you to pick out comments that are more likely of interest.
Any of that functionality is definitely still in the future, if not a complete pipe dream, and it’s quite rightly behind other issues for the people who are coding the archive. A support and feature request person commented on the recent Tumblr discussion that inundating them with duplicate requests would be useless, but someone on the post suggested that using the bookmark tags and bookmark collections functionality more would be the best current step. Of course, I don’t know if that person was correct, but I’ve got nearly 900 bookmarks there, so beginning to tag them strikes me as a fun and exciting (albeit long-term and time-consuming) task.
This post on Dreamwidth
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cimness:
When I started a recs list, everybody’s were hand-coded html lists on their websites. Livejournal changed that, and popularized recs lists far more by removing the biggest barriers to participation, the need for webhosting and the need to code html. But livejournal was far from an ideal situation for a recs database, as it didn’t have tags for the greater part of its existence. Many people’s recs journals were simply filled with posts that started with a list of which fandoms were represented within; many didn’t contain a masterlist and were hence not searchable.
Fandom-wide resources Crack Van (where reccers could sign up for a week or month at a time to represent their favorite fandom, pairing, or subgenre with curated recs and introductory blurbs) and Recs Rainbow (a blog that maintained an index of self-submitted fandom reccers and when they were updated with what) also came into existence.
Navigating these resources in search of new recs lists for a new fandom was itself a big task, but they still made everything a great deal easier, because navigating the maze of personal blogs and fic posted directly to topical communities all over the site, + fic posted to smaller archives and personal sites, was still very difficult - arguably more difficult in some fandoms, because finding fic meant performing keyword searches for communities, paging back through their entire catalogs of entries, surfing from person to person.
Delicious.com, with its revolutionary tag sorting that went beyond the individual user account, became the best place to find and search for fic very quickly. Suddenly you could look at the most recent bookmarks from other people in real time for any pairing you could think of - although without standardized tags, they weren’t all the bookmarks for the fandom; for that you had to surf around between different bookmarkers’ accounts using their networks, or find them by clicking on popular stories to see who else had bookmarked them and going to each person’s account. External bookmarking services still rely on the user to fill in all the info, though, so not every bookmark is equally informative - warnings, ratings, summaries, even author names or story lengths, or more importantly, the fact that something was still a work in progress, could easily be missing from the bookmark.
In some ways - like the automatic inclusion of the author’s headers - AO3 is already an improvement on Delicious. In others, it’s a pretty drastic step backwards - like the fact that you can’t follow a particular user’s bookmarks, or see whose bookmarks they follow. Right now AO3 is primarily adapted for saving your own bookmarks, for which purpose it’s quite useful; and the archive itself and its search filters already let you discover new fic with much more ease than the previous disconnected systems ever did; but they miss an essential function of recs lists, which is: they weren’t just for finding any fic, they were an aid in narrowing down the field of fic to ones you might be more likely to enjoy: the recommendation part. Simply the fact that someone, or several someones, has recommended a thing before isn’t the same as getting a recommendation from someone whose taste you already know is like yours in some respect. Sorting the search results by number of kudos or bookmarks is only going to give you the Billboard Top Whatever list, while reccers are djs, curators of content.
And as the recent discussion of exposing bookmarker-side tags as a provider of content warnings show - particularly for racism and other issues where the creator may be unaware or not want to tag correctly - AO3 has the potential to create new functionalities with tags that could do things we’ve never been able to do before. A simple ‘hot right now’ or ‘trending recently’ algorithm like the ones used at Ravelry and Pinboard’s Recent Fandom Bookmarks page (which doesn’t work, because of the fandom exodus away from Pinboard, but was a great idea) could make it much more efficient to check out recent significant developments in a fandom, for example. My present workaround is to use the works search, filter by date for things completed or updated within the last (2 weeks, 6 weeks, 1 year, whatever, depending if/when I last looked at the fandom in question) and then sort by descending bookmarks, kudos, or hits. The ability to follow other bookmarkers could let you surf to see what friends of friends are reading and discover new people with congenial taste, which is the best way to receive recs from outside your own fandoms. And if bookmarker tags were or could be exposed when browsing the archive, a highlight color for someone you already follow could allow you to pick out comments that are more likely of interest.
Any of that functionality is definitely still in the future, if not a complete pipe dream, and it’s quite rightly behind other issues for the people who are coding the archive. A support and feature request person commented on the recent Tumblr discussion that inundating them with duplicate requests would be useless, but someone on the post suggested that using the bookmark tags and bookmark collections functionality more would be the best current step. Of course, I don’t know if that person was correct, but I’ve got nearly 900 bookmarks there, so beginning to tag them strikes me as a fun and exciting (albeit long-term and time-consuming) task.
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domestic bliss part umpteen
May. 16th, 2018 11:17 pmvia https://ift.tt/2k7055H
I dunno if I’ve told this one on here. If I did, forgive me.
So a while ago (a couple weeks? 2012? I’m never sure, i think it was recent-ish though) Dude and I were drinking sort of fizzy beer. Now, Dude basically never farts (audibly, anyway…) but when he burps, he just lets fly with really gross belches.
So he let one of these out, and the cat meowed at him. She meows when we sneeze too, like she’s offended. But she didn’t seem offended, she just seemed like she was answering.
He decided that the cat’s name was now going to be [belch noise], and started trying to get her to answer to it.
I can’t actually make that sound– I can burp, and it’s gross, but he makes this, like, majestic high-pitched rumble with impressive diaphragm support. I can’t make that noise, my chest just isn’t the right shape. [BRRAAAAP!]
Anyway, ever since then, whenever he burps, he claims to be talking to the cat. She does answer sometimes, but we don’t drink enough beer for her to have really gotten conditioned to it.
Yet.
(Your picture was not posted)
I dunno if I’ve told this one on here. If I did, forgive me.
So a while ago (a couple weeks? 2012? I’m never sure, i think it was recent-ish though) Dude and I were drinking sort of fizzy beer. Now, Dude basically never farts (audibly, anyway…) but when he burps, he just lets fly with really gross belches.
So he let one of these out, and the cat meowed at him. She meows when we sneeze too, like she’s offended. But she didn’t seem offended, she just seemed like she was answering.
He decided that the cat’s name was now going to be [belch noise], and started trying to get her to answer to it.
I can’t actually make that sound– I can burp, and it’s gross, but he makes this, like, majestic high-pitched rumble with impressive diaphragm support. I can’t make that noise, my chest just isn’t the right shape. [BRRAAAAP!]
Anyway, ever since then, whenever he burps, he claims to be talking to the cat. She does answer sometimes, but we don’t drink enough beer for her to have really gotten conditioned to it.
Yet.
(Your picture was not posted)