Marri's Minions

Community member and tumblr user @kaylin881 wrote this answer for your original ask:

Glowfic is a subgenre of RP fiction which stereotypically includes rationalist themes such as exploitation of magic to solve wider societal problems, characters talking about their problems, and a general tendency towards power creep. It encompasses significant amounts of fanfic and crossover fanfic but also a lot of original characters and settings. One of the genre-defining features of glowfic is the phenomenon of “alts”, or alternate universe instances of characters, meeting each other and interacting. Kingdom Hearts isn’t glowfic because (a) it’s not in an RP format, (b) it’s not particularly rationalist in theme as far as I know, and © none of the people involved are members of the glowfic community (again, so far as I know).

Findekáno: *picks up the phone to call the radio station.

Favoriting:

[On the top right of a story, next to the title, there is hamburger menu. If you click it it drops down. One of the dropdown options is Favorite.]

Also note that if you favorite an author what this appears to do is put all their threads in your favorite list. (And if they don’t have any there is no change I could discern). 

(Favoriting an author:

[On author page on the left there is a menu of links. The bottom one is Favorite.])

There are three things you can favorite: authors, continuities, posts.

Every post you favorite will appear in Favorites. Every post in any continuity you have favorited will appear in Favorites. Any post that includes an author you have favorited (so, they have posted it in ever at any time) will appear in Favorites.

If a new post is created in a continuity you have favorited, you will receive a site message notifying you. This does not happen if the post was created in a different continuity and is later moved. This does not happen if the post is imported from Dreamwidth (this is reasonably manual and doesn’t come up much).

If a new post is created by an author you have favorited, you will receive a site message notifying you. This does not yet work for authors joining threads; they have to be the very first person to post.

If you just want things to appear in your Favorites page and not to get the site message, there’s a check box for this in the Account page named “Notify when a favorited author makes a new post” you can feel free to turn off.

Someday I would like to fix the “no message on existing posts moved to continuity” and “no message on author joining a thread” bugs, and also probably split those out as separate “disable notifications for this”, and also-also give people an email option separate from the site message option, but then, my to do list is veeeeery long xD

Oh. Who does then? Are these people you and/or Kelsey know? Can I contact them?

like i want fuckin.. space operas where humans weren’t all that phased by aliens because there had always been other species, and our starfleet utilizing translation potions to help communicate

or a cyberpunk world with like digital magic and the hideous, deformed descendants of dragons creeping through the deepest darkest alleyways of the cities, devouring any fool who dares go down where the neon lights don’t reach

magic mecha to defend us from the giants awoken form their slumber by fucking dwarfs who couldn’t stop mining where they knew they shouldn’t, meanwhile rival mage factions are getting close to all out war to be fought with spellcasting pistols and rifles rather than wands or staffs

This is a small, but highly interesting genre that I find absolutely fascinating because, generally speaking, Epic Fantasy worlds are VERY OLD and they DON’T EVOLVE (see: Harry Potter, Game of Thrones).

But anyway. I think Brandon Sanderson was writing something like that, which means that in the not to distant future, someone will probably claim he invented it, but IN THE MEAN TIME, here are some recs:

1. Cold Magic by Kate Elliot 2. The Curse Worker Trilogy, by Holly Black 3. The Order of the Air series by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott (these are in the same ‘verse as Graham’s other Numinous World books which take place after the fall of Troy, during the ascension of Ptolemy I, the reign of Cleopatra, and the French Revolution, as well as short stories throughout history). 4. The Many-Coloured Land books by Julian May 5. Actually, I think the Trillium books that Julian May co-wrote would count too, but you have to read MZB to get there so I understand if you don’t want to. 6. The Buried Age, which is a Star Trek book about the theory of very old thing being more advanced than you, an advanced society

I think Kevin Hearne has a series too? Iron Druid or something?

KINMUNE is a short story about an AI time-traveling into the past. If you know even a little bit about TES lore, you can sort of understand what’s going on. 

“I’m not like normal girls lol I read the wikipedia page on Bundy! I’ve got such dark fascinations.” “I guess I’m such a twisted person, I watch horror movies for FUN!”. “Haha unlike other girls….I LIKE night time!” “I know who cthulu is so im basically satanic, I bet my mom would be so shocked!!!”. “I reblogged one picture of a skull, so yeah you could say I’m morbid >:3” “I’m insaaane!!! The dark depths of my soul would scare anyone”

Back when I taught beginner swordplay for a medieval re-enactment group, I had a lot of girls come in and try that on me–“I’m a freak and I’m into really weird stuff, people get grossed out by me.” “I’m kind of insane, don’t talk to me unless you want to damage your brain.” “I’m actually kind of into some violent things.”

The best part of doing that was treating them like totally ordinary people–”You’re into weird stuff? That’s a Ranma t-shirt, do you mean anime?” ”Oh, you’re insane? I’m mentally ill myself. I take meds for depression and anxiety, and it’s why I’m studying to be a psychologist.” “Yeah, it’s pretty normal around here to collect replica weapons. They’re really pretty, but I prefer to spend my money on less-showy sport versions that I can use in actual combat.”

You could see the defensive awkward grins melt off them, the anxious self-conscious fidgeting flow out of their bodies and onto the floor, as they suddenly started standing straighter, planting their feet firmer, meeting my eyes more, flinching less when they landed their swords on me. They stopped self-deprecating around me, started more confidently stating their preferences and sharing their personalities as something more nuanced than “you’ll probably dislike it.”

 This one’s for @marrinikari and @throne3d.

Constellation, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I don’t think I mention enough how much I love the Constellation.

I started glowficcing at the very end of its being on Dreamwidth, a little while before the Constellation sprang into being from Marri’s head, like Athena from the head of Zeus. So I only had a little taste of glowficcing not on the Constellation, and that was quite enough.

I am genuinely unsure whether I’d have ended up getting into glowfic if it weren’t for the Constellation – doing it on Dreamwidth was that unwieldy. I know I’m not the only one to have expressed this sentiment. If we’re counting up our Very Large Numbers of glowfic, T’Mir style, I think Marri should get a significant cut of every new thread made.

I made the Constellation mostly for fun because I don’t get to code at work any more, and picked up the pace around when Firefox starting threatening to turn off LJLogin completely (I think we’d gotten to the point where you had to start editing config variables in the .env file to get it to stay? No idea if it still functions on up to date Firefox browsers any more, and it certainly never worked on anything like Chrome or IE or Safari.). Sometimes it’s an interesting intellectual puzzle, and sometimes it’s a way to learn new things, but mostly it was just “I need a thing, it doesn’t exist, I’ll make the thing.”

And people like it. This is always slightly mind-boggling to me. I built this thing for lulz in my free time and people use it and enjoy it and write me essay length letters. (Mori <333333) And this is amazing and motivating and man I know I do not have free time for half the things I’m doing on this site but getting reactions like this is what makes everything so very, very worth it.

And some of it I feel a little silly taking credit for! (Even putting aside @throne3d’s fantastic hard work, which I always try to give appropriate credit for.) Like, I love the search feature, but so much of that from a technical perspective is just “the database supports text search.” If our host happened to require that we use the MySQL database instead of the PostgreSQL database? Not a thing I could’ve done without a ton of work and possibly buying an additional server. But then some of the things that seem Super Obvious to people are probably weirdly complex on my side, so it probably evens out eventually xD

Your list of glorious edge cases is in fact glorious. It’s actually really helpful! Things like this are why I’m still too nervous to take the site out of beta (...okay they’re like 10%, and 10% fear of prices going up and the remaining 80% is Nebulous Legal Fear) but then you guys find them and I can fix them and you just. Report them, with helpful details, instead of bitching at me. I have worked with customers before, guys, this is so important in a way I’m not sure people understand? This is the actual best way to bribe me to fix things.

Even the AWS outage! Like. We run on Heroku, which is hosted on AWS, which went down for like five hours, and this is at least two removes of anything I can personally fix, and was a large enough outage that I couldn’t have done anything anyway because it affected my actual job and I had to respond to panicked messages “I’m sorry but I have to ignore this.” And no one yelled, or ragequit the site, or anything! Literally the worst that has ever happened to me is that someone might make passive aggressive comments about proper staging environments! Which I ignore since I’m not the one who causes the problem. (Like Throne said, we do have fairly extensive tests, but actual test environments are supposed to mimic production, which means I’d have to spend the same amount of money on them, and, no thanks.) This is ridiculous in all the best ways.

And that tip jar works way better than I expected it to! I know it’s not feasible for everyone, I totally get that, no one should feel bad if they aren’t contributing. But I don’t think I’ve spent more than $10 a month on the Constellation at any point in its life, and for a month it actually went over by $1 (and then my free Amazon credits expired and that put paid to that xD) but like... I’ve had donation buttons on things before, and this is the first time people reliably use them, much less actually covered my costs however briefly, and I cannot say enough times how amazing that makes this group.

the universe in this story is opposed to scientific reasoning, and attempts to figure out underlying principles are met with a huge middle finger on physic’s part

but! I have more ideas!

they work by magic