It Me

in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.

*Nüwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.

thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.

the scene in artificial condition where mb is talking to [threatening presence] thru the door feels like guard doggy. is it just me or did we all imagine them standing really close to the door in a sort of intense way. anyways

And we all know Murderbot is a feral cat of course.

But ever since I was a little girl, I have been in awe of @lackadaisycats's work... so now everyone else in PresAux is cats too:

And ART, of course, is an horrible Cheshire cat thing:

And bonus: Three, Lark, D'Artagnan, and ComaUnit!!

Will you stay? Down on your knees? Or will you bite the hands that feeds-- --

I've had Murderbot on the mind, so naturally when the early 2000s rock comes on... I'm having a good time.

apologies for the... minor delay.

but! three pieces of art this chapter, for your patience!

for the record! I was also being extremely overambitious

don’t know how to paint landscapes (time to paint a landscape)

don’t know how to paint interiors (three point perspective time babey)

let’s draw everyone’s new clothes (it takes forever for me to decide on outfits)

there were literally 7 pieces I wanted to draw for this chapter

also I was traveling around and acquiring employment (ugh)

a) Unprocessed grief over ART's death seeking a new outlet

b) CPTSD reaction to being hauled around, called a weapon, and not given a choice

c) A reasonable reaction to ART almost killing its humans, including one of Mensah's children

Copy-pasted text directly into the html editor on AO3 and added all my formatting tags by hand.

Built all my work skins by having the skin editor open in one tab, the fic draft in another, and repeatedly updating the css and then refreshing the fic draft to see what happened.

She didn't understand my reasoning that:

Copying from libre office into the rich text editor resulted in entirely unnecessary numbers of <span>s being dumped into my fic.

Copying into the html editor and then switching to the rich text removes all formatting, including paragraph breaks.

Therefore, copying into the html editor and manually doing everything for the basic html is the easiest option.

AO3's text editor uses <em> tags for italics, which is normally better because screen readers will read that text differently. But when I'm writing feed dialogue, the italics are only aesthetic, so I want to use <i> tags instead.

AO3 doesn't like some css. Using another editor can result in endless cursing while you try to fix what you made elsewhere. I have seen this happen to Finch. I save time by not being to build it twice.

This has nothing to do with whether or not I knew that there were tools that would let you edit css and watch the effects live or whatever. It's not like switching tabs and hitting refresh takes that long anyway.

I am very practiced in closing all my tags.

i am trying so so so gently to explain to my dear friend that there are tools that will help you preserve these precious mortal hours of your life. where you can make a lil playground that responds instantaneously instead of taking 30 seconds for every little edit to

change one thing in your workskin

save the workskin

go to the fic tab

refresh the fic page

see if the change worked

AND you don't have to live in fear of the Post button being 2mm away from the Preview button

(i learned these things from my very first baby Finch job when i fucking broke the production site as i was rawdogging the HTML)

i beg you fey

i beg

Copy-pasted text directly into the html editor on AO3 and added all my formatting tags by hand.

Built all my work skins by having the skin editor open in one tab, the fic draft in another, and repeatedly updating the css and then refreshing the fic draft to see what happened.

She didn't understand my reasoning that:

Copying from libre office into the rich text editor resulted in entirely unnecessary numbers of <span>s being dumped into my fic.

Copying into the html editor and then switching to the rich text removes all formatting, including paragraph breaks.

Therefore, copying into the html editor and manually doing everything for the basic html is the easiest option.

AO3's text editor uses <em> tags for italics, which is normally better because screen readers will read that text differently. But when I'm writing feed dialogue, the italics are only aesthetic, so I want to use <i> tags instead.

AO3 doesn't like some css. Using another editor can result in endless cursing while you try to fix what you made elsewhere. I have seen this happen to Finch. I save time by not being to build it twice.

This has nothing to do with whether or not I knew that there were tools that would let you edit css and watch the effects live or whatever. It's not like switching tabs and hitting refresh takes that long anyway.

I am very practiced in closing all my tags.

i am trying so so so gently to explain to my dear friend that there are tools that will help you preserve these precious mortal hours of your life. where you can make a lil playground that responds instantaneously instead of taking 30 seconds for every little edit to

change one thing in your workskin

save the workskin

go to the fic tab

refresh the fic page

see if the change worked

AND you don't have to live in fear of the Post button being 2mm away from the Preview button

(i learned these things from my very first baby Finch job when i fucking broke the production site as i was rawdogging the HTML)

i beg you fey

i beg