a body in a celestial crime scene

good news! it's a google colab notebook now, so you can run it anywhere without having to download anything! you might have to run the first cell twice.

anyways: more

“And thus we solved the mystery of the sinister house called The Copper Beeches. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept solely alive by the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle’s past that he finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were married, by special license, and he now holds a government position in the island of Mauritius. Miss Hunter is now a head of a private school in Walsall, where I gather she has met with considerable success.”

Like, that man has lived, breathed and died for every second of all those 800 years; he is peepaw. Everyone else is still very much like 17-30 mentally, and it FUCKING shows. Heaven just feels like the PHD corners of a college campus.

Hua Cheng is the only one who even comes close to being on Xie Lian’s level, but that’s cause he is one of those young people with the souls of an ancient being kinda characters like he’s giving teen vampire boyfriend like he still very much feels like he’s 25 but he’s been 25 forever.

I was experimenting with setting one skin for my laptop and a different skin for my phone and ended up with a halfway decent dark mode of my medieval skin by adding that one and my simplified low contrast skin together.

I'm going to start by telling you what skins do.

They basically take a website and put a little outfit on it. So for example, instead of having a white background, a skin makes it so that AO3 has a dark purple background. Or an image for a background. Or a gradient background.

Skins change the way the site looks, and those changes can be small (like what font is used or what the background looks like) or they can be large (changing a username to an icon, putting the filters on the left instead of the right).

The way that skins do that is through code. Websites are built in a code language called HTML. Skins are built in a language called CSS. What CSS does is modify the way HTML looks.

People like me think it's really fun to write CSS code that makes AO3 look different from the default site. We're fan coders (and sometimes professional coders), and we share our code with other people so that they can put a cute outfit on their AO3 account. Those other people don't need to code at all. They just have to copy our code and paste it into AO3.

(sidenote: I'm talking about site skins here, not work skins. Works skins just put a cute outfit on a specific fic, and the author does need to do a little bit of coding to apply those)

If you want to put a site skin on your AO3:

tap on your name at the top of the site and go to your Dashboard.

From there, select the link called Skins.

On the Skins page, tap on the button labelled Create Site Skin.

Give your site skin a unique name (if it's not unique on the Archive, you'll get an error and it won't save). I just add my nickname at the end of whatever I end up calling the skin. That usually works.

Copy the CSS code of a skin you like and then paste it into the big empty box labelled CSS.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Submit button. This will save the skin to your account, but it won't apply it yet. You can have dozens of skins saved if you want to.

After Submitting, AO3 will send you to a page that shows you the saved code for that skin. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, and select the Use button. Now the skin will be applied to your account and AO3 will look different for you.

What I did here was create a new site skin that I just called "combo skin for pi" and I added my other two skins as a parent to it - essentially combining them together.

To add a parent skin, you can edit what you already saved or, after step 5 above you can select the button labelled Advanced, then on the button labelled Parent Skin and type in the name of the skin you want to add on.

An Evening in January - Jeremy Miranda , 2016.

American , b. 1980 -

morphosyntactic plural ≠ semantic plural

"*****smut marked with asterisks so you can skip!*****""

Don't. Don't do this.

You let readers know what your fic contains through proper tagging and rating. Content warning notes at the top of the chatter are also great. You can even summarize key "this is the plot relevant stuff you missed of you're skipping this chapter" notes at the bottom too! This is a much smoother reading experience.

This is HELL on screen readers which is a disability access issue. Screen readers will read out every single asterisk you put, which I have seen done as entire page breaks. It's an awful reading experience. Please just don't.

Readers do not need their hands held through the reading experience. If they're enjoying the fic but don't care for smut, they can just skim until it gets interesting again. If they REALLY don't like smut, you warned them. There's a back button. You don't have to do a special song and dance isolating out the specific parts you think might be "icky". (If you think those bits are icky and don't like writing them, consider just don't! Fanfic is a hobby we do for fun and you don't have to write anything you don't find enjoyable. There's plenty of readers for gen fic and smut free ship fic).

Please, please don't try to span the entire page with whatever symbol you're using for your scene breaks. It takes an eternity for screen years to get through, and typically has me noping out of even the most interesting stores.

Instead, use just three (or fewer) make. Three is standard, and does the job without making your story unreadable.

It is hell

It is absolute hell

From navigation to listening to the voices

It's just awful

Since then I've tried to write with screen readers in mind because the number of websites that think about accessibility is SO SO SMALL

If you don't believe me, use NVDA which is a free accessibility tool. Otherwise you have to spend thousands of dollars for a slightly better one. Then try to navigate a website.