#HTML Table Generator

[froala]

Html Table Generator - Overview with Froala

An HTML table generator is a tool that simplifies creating HTML code for tables. Users can input data and customize the table's appearance, and the generator automatically produces the corresponding HTML code. This tool is especially useful for quickly designing and embedding tables in web pages without manually writing the HTML, saving time and effort. Please read this blog to learn more about the HTML table generator.

[bloggercodingtips]

Best stylish HTML table generator to create HTML tables online

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[cthulhubert]

Alright, so bear with me.

Humans have three cone cells in our eyes that are how we perceive color in the world. I often think red, green, and blue, but apparently people studying them use Long, Medium, and Short to be unambiguous (just for one example, if you activate M really strongly and not L or S, the color people report seeing is yellow-green). Each type activates at different strengths to different wavelengths of light. Here's a lovely graphic from Wikipedia showing response levels of each cone type to different wavelengths:

So you can see that if some light activates L some, but not M, we'll perceive deep red, activates them both a bit, we see orange or yellow, depending on the specific amount.

It's interesting that some effect (a specific mix of pigments, or some structural coloration) could be producing some mostly 495nm light, or a blend of some slightly higher and slightly lower wavelengths, and either way we see cyan. (And a good thing, too, otherwise our display technology would be extremely unconvincing.)

Of course, then there's what happens when we get activation of L and S at once, but not M, our eye-brain systems don't infer "yellow-green", because green is specifically what's missing from there: we generate magenta, a non-spectral color. (And when all three activate we get white, of course.)

I found myself thinking about birds, with their four cones.

They're more evenly spaced too, the bastards. (These bastards are specifically finches but I'm under the impression that most birds are similar.)

(Of course, "violet" actually means ultra-violet here. Look at the graphic, their UV cone stops responding where our S cone starts. I would edit this, but spent like half an hour discovering that tumblr doesn't support table under html or code/"preserve formatting" under markdown anymore; so you get a screencap of what I sent on discord.)

Birds could see "vio-green" (accepting name suggestions) as a color region as distinct from blue/indigo as green is from purple/magenta.

Look at that. Two whole ass independent spectral color divisions we don't have, and six non-spectral inferences. Eight whole categories of visual perception more than us. Decadent.

The heart quails to imagine what the 16 color receptors of a mantis shrimp would create. I mean, okay, it doesn't because we've studied their eyes and brains and they don't blend colors the way we do, smooshing them down to a much simpler set of perceptions.

But imagine if we rebuilt our eyes and brains for it! Color indicates chemistry, with that level of subtle blending of characteristics, would vision become like tasting everything we look at?

Please pet the bear that is with me on your way out.

[prokopetz]

By request, the random character generator for Eat God has been updated to allow individual parameters of each generated entry to be rerolled. This turned out to be an interesting challenge, because by-the-book character creation in Eat God leaves a lot of stuff to human judgment that a computer needs to have explicitly explained to it, like "if you have a Trait that swaps two of your Facets when activated, and then you re-roll your Facets, keep rolling until you get a Facet array in which the Facets to be swapped are not equal"

I think I've caught all the weird edge cases – but then, that assumes I've thought of them in the first place! I'd appreciate it if folks could give it a spin when they have a moment and let me know if it does anything strange. I've also made a few adjustments to the HTML which should make it easier to copy-and-paste results into Tumblr's post editor, though you'll inevitably lose most of the formatting.

Known issues:

If you generate a full slate of six results, trying to re-roll any result's Creed will produce no response, because the generator enforces uniqueness across multiple results and there are currently only six entries in the random Creeds table.

For similar reasons, if you generate a full slate of six results and one of those six results has "Bottomless Belly" as a non-dependent Trait, then re-roll every inventory slot for every result until they all come up as food items, the generator will crash, because you've got nineteen inventory slots to fill and the random food table currently only has eighteen entries; the odds of this scenario occurring by chance are on the order of a billion to one, but it's not terribly difficult to do it on purpose if you have some time to kill.

[anexperimentallife]

Y'all really think staff is making these decisions? Nah, man, as someone who used to work in IT, I can confidently tell you that the people who make Big IT decisions for large companies are corporate overlords who are almost always the people least qualified to make such decisions. Then staff has to either do whatever stupid thing the bosses told them to do, or get fired.

All you have to do is look at the recent submarine comedy to understand the phenomenon of people who think having money and power gives them more expertise than folks who have spent years--decades even--honing their skills.

Hell, despite being hired because I knew more about the web than anyone in the company (this was in 2000, so all it took was knowing how to make tables with html, build a css stylesheet, and have a general grasp of usability standards), I had a boss whose areas of expertise were marketing and graphic design constantly trying to tell me how people used the web, and chewing me out for "sucking the life" out of his huge graphics.

(Like, dude, this was when most people had dial-up, and nobody was going to wait five minutes for pretty graphics to load--they were going to click away to a competitor's site that loaded in under thirty seconds. They also weren't going to click through twenty different pages for info that could have been presented on the landing page.)

So yeah. Your ire towards staff is entirely misdirected. All they can do is what their bosses tell them.

[calendae-creations]

Hello. Do you have any tips on getting started selling your handmade goods? I am disabled too and sometimes the only thing keeping my sane is knitting. Right now I'm knitting things for myself and friends. I think I may get to a point where I want to sell things I have knit instead of just gifting them and I was curious how you go about doing it and if you have any tips for getting started.

I'm not like, wildly successful at this by any means, so if anyone else has any tips, omfg please share your wisdom.

That said, first of all fuuuuuuuuck etsy. Not only do they have shitty policies in a number of ways (you can google it if you want; i don't feel like getting into that series of rants), I never really made many sales there in the decade or so I tried. And tbh most of the knitted things up for sale there are so disgustingly underpriced, it might be hard to get enough money from a sale to even cover the materials cost, let alone labor time.

Once I had given up on etsy, I was selling on twitter for a while? But we all know how twitter's going, so I don't even remember my login info to delete the account, lol. I did make way better money than I ever did on etsy tho! Like, twice the sales in one year than I got on etsy in ~10. Not even exaggerating. I made decent sales on facebook from a page for my business, but stopped trying after the third time they changed the interface in less than 6 months. If you can figure out how it works though, go for it!

I'm trying to build a proper website of my own for Calendae Creations, but html is hard and so is the rest of my life, so that's on the back burner for now. I'm really not sure how successful it'll be if I ever get it up and running.

Currently this is my only sales presence online, and I haven't tabled at an in-person event since 2018. I've been pleasantly surprised at being able to generate any income at all on the website famous for not making money, lol. I do really want to get into more in-person sales, but I really can't speak much to how well knitting sells at different kinds of events, because when I used to do ren faires and flea markets I was mostly selling pottery, jewelry, and live plants. I'm pretty hopeful about trying to get a table at Staunton Pride next fall though?

Tbh, as much as I love my job, I really would not recommend this as a full time primary source of income to anyone who has literally any other options. I'm just too disabled to do anything else anymore.

Related, does anyone know how to file USA income tax for this kind of thing??? I am so lost trying to figure it out.

[inspofromancientworld]

Megalithic Sites

A megalith is a huge stone that has been put to some type of purpose, typically between the Mesolithic through the chalcolithic period, fading out through the Bronze age. They can be single or multiple stones, though they are generally not tombs.

Single stones can come in three general types: Menhir, also know as 'standing stones', monolith (a single stone on its own), and capstones, which cover burial chambers without other supports. Multiple stones can come in five general types: Alignments which can be rows or spirals, megalithic or Cyclopean walls, which are rough-hewn bolder walls, stone circles or cromlechs like Stonehenge, dolmen which can be called a portal tomb and are table like entrances into tombs, and cist which is a stone coffin.

By German Archaeological Institute, photo E. Kücük. - Dietrich L, Meister J, Dietrich O, Notroff J, Kiep J, Heeb J, et al. (2019) Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey. PLoS ONE 14(5): e0215214. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0215214Image: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215214.g001"Copyright: © 2019 Dietrich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited." (links to CC BY 4.0 the day the picture is uploaded), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90543136

Humans began building large stone structures even before we began living in cities. Some of the earliest are around the area of Gobleki Tepe in modern day Turkey, which were built around 9000 BCE by a culture that we don't know what they call themselves and first rediscovered in 1963. It wasn't until about 1994 that the excavations began. These sites consist of many large stones that are decorated with male figures and animals. Because these sites predate writing, we don't know what the purpose was, but we can tell by what refuse is around that these sites were not for full-time shelter. Because of this, we believe that they held ceremonial significance. However, with less than 5% of the site excavated, we still have a lot to learn about this site, though we have learned so much already.

By Mahmut Bozarslan (VOA) - https://d33vxfhewnqf4z.cloudfront.net/a/tarihin-yeni-sifir-noktasi-karahantepe/7351113.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145335567

Nearby, there is a site called Karahan Tepe that was discovered more recently that might be older, possibly dating as far back as 11000 BCE. It also includes area where the stone for the megaliths was quarried. It was first rediscovered in 1997. It hasn't been as excavated or studied as much as Gobekli Tepe, however it appears to have been intermittent in habitation, possibly following herds of grazing animals and availability of wild growing grasses such as barley and wheat.

By Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15044109

Atlit Yam is a site one kilometer off-shore from modern day Atlit. At the time it was built, approximately 6900 BCE, during the last Ice Age, the location was on the shore. There is a large stone semicircle that would have been around a freshwater spring. This site also has what appear to be houses as well. Around 6300 BCE, Mount Etna appears to have a collapse of its eastern flank that likely led to 40m tsunami in the Mediterranean. There were piles of fish and other evidence of rapid evacuation of the site. Within the site, there is also a woman and child that appear to have had tuberculosis, the earliest known cases, as well as men who have inner ear damage that indicate that they probably dived to fish and that the water was likely cold. There is evidence that this was one of the earliest sedentary cultures with grain storage and what appear to be wells, before it was abandoned to the tsunami and sea-level rise of the end of the last Ice Age.

By Raymbetz - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7525976

Another pre-agriculture seasonal megalithic habitation is Nabta Playa in modern day Egypt. While the location is now within the Sahara Desert, at the time, it was a rich savanna with a lake nearby. Archaeological findings suggest that people began camping there seasonally around 10000-9000 BCE. The megalithic structure was probably built around 7500 BCE, The megalithic site seems to be a "calendar circle", though there is some debate about that. Given that the exact alignment of the stars and seasons has shifted over the past 12000 years, it's difficult to know for sure which constellation the stones align to and which season, but they do seem to align with the bright stars in the constellation Orion. There are suggestions that the site was used as a ceremonial gathering site prior to the building of the stone circle based on the remains of cattle found in the location. It's believed, based on modern nomadic cultures, that cattle would have only been killed on important occasions.

Resources:

Milo Rossi (miniminuteman on YouTube and tiktok): Series on Archaeology of Southern Turkey Series regarding Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse

[manonamora-if]

How do you do the planning to create an interactive fiction game? I have the general idea for an interactive fiction story but I'm a complete mess when it comes to organizing and planning. Where do I even start?

Hi Anon!

I was waiting for this question to appear at some point, lol :P I spent all day on this....

Create your Interactive Fiction Game

Last February, I detailed my process when working on CRWL. You can read that post here. It is not a perfect (or even good) template to use, since it is specific to that project in particular. I also have a list of programs I am using/have used when creating my projects here!

But, yes, organisation and planning is VERY important when you want to tell a story, no matter if it is in a game or novel. But unlike a novel-like story, you need to add coding on top of it. I would say these are the two big components of IF.

Disclaimer: I am not the Voice of Knowledge when it comes to creating IF, takes this information with a grain of salt and do some research too! :)

Long post, so breaking the post. Here's a Table of Content

1- Gameplay/Visual (aka Choosing your Coding Program) 2- Planning your Story (or Why it is better to start small at first) ~ ~ A- Game Pattern ~ ~ B- From Pattern to Outline ~ ~ C- From Outline to Writing ~ ~ D- Writing Tips 3- Coding the whole thing ~ ~ A- You are stuck ~ ~ B- Test everything ~ ~ C- UI Customisation 4- Publishing and Marketing ~ ~ A- Publishing your game ~ ~ B- Regarding marketing ~ ~ C- Scheduling Updates and expectations

1- Gameplay/Visual (aka Choosing your Coding Program)

Though the story is very important (obviously), it is important to know what kind of gameplay and visual you want for your game because it will dictate what kind of program you should use:

Do you want to make a Visual Novel? Then you might want to look into programs like Ren'Py.

Are you gravitating towards parsers (player entering words/sentences to advance the story)? Inform might be what you need.

Do you just want to give players choices? Twine formats and ChoiceScript seem to be the most popular ones on Tumblr.

Note: There are waaaayyyy more programs that those four, and you may be able push the possibility of what a program can/is supposed to do with enough coding knowledge.

Even in each category, some programs will be more complicated to learn than others. For the Choice-base games for example, ChoiceScript is considered one of the easiest to code in terms of logic and formatting of code. In the same vein, the availability of tutorials/community* to help will make a huge difference in learning the program. And finally, some programs may require some knowledge of other languages (ex: HTML/CSS) for further use/customisation.

Note: While most may be in English, there may be even tutorials/communities in your language! (if you are ESL)

And finally, you may want to think about the visual aspect. Some programs/formats will allow you more customisation than other, whether it be text formatting to complete customisation of the base UI (how the page looks). For example, in Twine (SugarCube/Snowman especially) , you are only limited by your knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

P.S.: Some programs, like ChoiceScript, are not open-source.

A good way to know what kind of program you want to use is to look at tutorials online and test it yourself too.

2- Planning your Story (or Why it is better to Start small at first)

Now that you've settled on a coding program, it is time to work on a story.

If it is your first time, the best advice I can give you is to start with a small and contained stories. The learning curve can be daunting when starting, more so if the project is complicate and long. Starting short and easy won't feel too overwhelming, you will learn what works best (or doesn't work) for your creating process AND it makes it easier to learn coding in your chosen program. Starting with a full-blown RPG with extensive Combat Mechanics and hundreds of long-ass quests is not a good idea if you've just begun with the program.

You can even take advantage of Jams to test your skills/ideas or request feedback on IF Discords Communities or in the IF Forum.

But whether your story is large or small, the planning part should be very similar.

A- Game Pattern

So you have an idea for your IF, great! Now let's think about patterns, or how will the story be told. Do you have a linear story in mind leading to one important finally choice? or do you want a lot of branching with many endings? Or even a lot of choices culminating in one final event?

Knowing about pattern will help you plan the story and define important events to happen. It will also make you think of variations to take into account and what kind of action you'd need to reach a certain part of the story. Obviously, you don't have to stick to one pattern (as you work more on the story), but it helps.

I really like this blog post detailing the different patterns of CYOA games. [I used it when creating MtP]

B- From Pattern to Outline

With that general idea of how the story should pan out, we can start fleshing it out a bit more. I often use the "Funnel Technique" when I create my stories (big picture to small details), but it may work more for linear stories rather than very branching ones. It goes something like this:

Start with your general idea: genre, theme, world, time period, etc... But stay general. You don't need to go into too much details at first.

List your big events and make a timeline: what is the conflict to push the story forward? why does it happen? what does character should learn from it? what can they do to resolve it? etc...

Do the same with other smaller plots (if you have them!): every plot needs a reason for it to happen.

Combine the timelines: not only some beats will need to happen before others (especially if they are the catalyst of the next one), this will help you to know when to introduce a certain character/lore/etc...

Delimit your chapters: with your timeline, you can now break it off into smaller chapters (you can include what important action/information each chapter should have).

And here is your outline!

During this process, it is a good idea to keep note of everything you can think of: characters background/personality, important lore of your world, etc...

It is also then where you may want to think of aspects to track (relationship, choices, etc...) and give it a name.

While you don't have to research things at this stage, it may help you if you are working with a topic/setting you are not familiar with.

C- From Outline to Writing

Now that you have your outline and your timeline, you are closer to writing :D You could decide to write away, or you could plan your chapter a bit further.

I usually do the later, as it helps me think of possible places to include choices or variation for the player. [This is also where the graph comes into place] I even go a bit further and plan each passage (text screen), making notes of what the player will see (dialog, action, description...) and if there is variation to include. This last part is very much detailing work, and helps me with writing.

After all this, it's time to write!

D- Writing Tips

Here are some stuff that I do to help me not get overwhelmed when I write and help me to be organised when I code:

The "one page per screen" technique, where you add breaks between each screen/passage, can be helpful to demarcate each part of the chapter/scene you are writing. Headers or links with a table of content can also be helpful !

While it matters little at the beginning, tracking choices and consequences of those choices and important variables will help with continuity and variation. For example, if you give the player the choice to set their height, you should take this into account if the MC goes into tight spaces. Similarly, if the player chooses to confront someone, the next page should probably not have a romantic tone.

Use colour code, comments or formatting when writing to separate choices (link list or cycling options, etc...) or variation for a tracked variable (ex: tone of voice, physical change, etc...) from the rest of the text. This will help when coding.

While writing, if you get ideas to include further into the story (ex: new choice, mechanic, sub plot, etc...), write it down on a separate page and only come back to it when you are do writing the part/passage/scene/chapter. A sudden idea might seem fitting but may push you towards a dead-end.

Edit Edit Edit! 1st drafts are awesome, but it can always be improved [Cough cough, not calling myself out at all, Cough cough]. Using Grammar Checks is immensely helpful (more than one, since none will focus on the same aspect of writing). And Beta/Sensitivity readers are godsent!

3- Coding the whole thing

When your story is ready (or part of it you are ready to release), you will need to code it.

The best advice I have for this is to code your story first and make sure it works. It can be tempting to deep dive into the formatting of the page (especially if the program you chose enables you to customise it extensively). An IF can look amazing, but if it breaks everywhere, it is not going to be fun to play.

A- You are stuck

And don't worry, it happens to every one! Coding can be a difficult puzzle to solve, even with the solution right under your nose.

The most important advice I can give is to always refer to the official documentation or look for tutorials online (other may have come across the same issue before you).

If nothing helps, there are often coding communities (that focuses on the format/program you are using) where you can ask for help (Discord/Forum, etc...). Do not be afraid to ask for help!

B- Test Everything

And when you are done, test again. Testing/Playing (whether by yourself or with Beta Readers) is the only way to catch errors.

Similarly, if you want to add some custom code to your project or use a built-in functionality, but don't know if it works, the best way to find out it to try it out! Read the documentation, play with the code and test it.

C- UI Customisation

This part will be highly dependent on which program/format you are using. While CSS/HTML is the same anywhere, it's implementation can differ greatly. Be sure to check the official documentation about the matter.

If the program allows you for customisation, this can be loads to fun to edit your UI to make it look however you want. Like the previous point, this can need a lot of testing too.

If you are just starting, having the basic UI is just fine :) You can always change it down the road. But if you want to zhuzh it up, here are some elements you can consider when editing:

Colour palette fitting your story. Steer away from bright colours if your story is dark, and vice versa.

Image in the background can make text hard to read. Having a block of colour between the text and the image will make reading much easier.

Colour contrast is IMPORTANT. Readability is easy to mess with when having multiple colours, use this website.

Simple is usually better. A complicated or busy page will be distracting. Stick to simple.

Use a template. This is more of a SugarCube comment, but if a template is available (and you like the vibe), use it. It will make editing your UI easier (tag or link to the creator in your game page/post).

If you can: remember to make your project as accessible as you can (with your knowledge). Colour contrast (maybe dark/light mode), Font change (font, size, etc...), limit or toggle animated text/images, etc...

4- Publishing and Marketing

A- Publishing your game

There are many places on the internet where you can publish your IF projects. Different formats will congregate towards different websites. For example: Dashingdon hosts only ChoiceScript, Itch has anything and everything, Steam will require a fee to publish there. You can also host your projects on other platforms or your personal website (ex: Neocities allows it), though you might want to stick to places where there is an established readership. In any case, follow the selected website's instructions for publication.

If you have a working and published demo (or finished game), I'm nudging you to create a page for it on the IFDB. There, people can leave long reviews and rate your games! You can also Archive your project to preserve it. [SAY NO TO LOST HISTORY]

B - Regarding marketing,

If you are lucky, the algorithm god will pick up your game and show it to everyone. You'll get thousands of readers and hundreds of ratings. You'll always be on everyone's top page and you will go viral.

But if you are not (like most of us), you can start building a readership on social media. Tumblr had a substantial community for IF, Twitter has quite a lot of game developer, Mastodon is a thing I think?, and there are a handful of Discords and Forums dedicated to Interactive Fiction. Having a presence and be reachable is unfortunately important.

Some random points:

Announce your project before you publish it, but be close to be ready to put it online when you do so!

Do not "sell" your project on something you are not sure you can achieve (ex: game mechanic, complicated romance, etc...), just to set expectation.

Have an introductory post with a synopsis and links to the game/demo (if available) and important known aspects (genre/theme/TW). Depending on the genre, you may want to include short intro of some characters.

Make pretty pictures for your posts/game page (Canva is free-ish)

For ChoiceScript: having a CoG Forum page seem to be important for reader interaction and getting feedback.

On Tumblr: submit your project to directories like @interact-if, follow and interact with other IF authors, answer asks, do Tumblr stuff...

On Itch, consider introducing your published project in the Community section, write devlog for updates or discussion, answer comments, review other IF games...

Discord: some IF/Coding discord allows you to promote your projects there, take advantage of that.

Be upfront about your boundaries and keep them! (less marketing, more of a social media interaction thing)

C- Scheduling Updates and expectations

Unfortunately (and I say this as someone who is really bad at it), having a regular update schedule may be the best thing you can have for your project, especially if it is a long WIP. This can help keep your readers engaged with your content. If you have longer breaks between updates, writing prompts can be a nice substitute.

If regular is not possible (which is totes super fine! don't burnout on something fun), have clear communication about the state of the project. Set specific upload dates (ex: 12-Oct-22) when you are close to release it, have vague ones (ex: end of the year) when you are in the early stages. This will help with expectations and disappointment.

Do not promise more than you can do. That's pretty self-explanatory. And fix bugs you receive as soon as you can.

AND! And I can't stress this enough. IRL should always come before updating your WIP/publishing content. You should never force/push yourself to do so if you are not enjoying it. Do not be like me and hurt yourself. No amount of notes/readers is worth the hurt!

TLDR: Do not be like me, be better.

Right. I think that's it.

[no-psi-nan]

4) Where do you find inspiration for new ideas?

hsfjdlshfks I generally don't go looking for new ideas, they just break into my house and start squatting there lol. Aside from the spontaneously generated ones, I actually take a lot of inspiration from other fans! Blorbo discussions especially tend to spark interesting thoughts that lead to headcanons and stories. Sometimes fanart (all kinds) causes me to go down a different thought path than before - like, I recently saw some truly banger torisai art that changed the planned ending of a WIP lol. It's never direct inspiration though, like I genuinely wouldn't bother making something that already exists unless I thought I could bring something radically different to the table. I'm making the stuff that I wish existed but doesn't!

20) Have you noticed any patterns in your fics? Words/expressions that appear a lot, themes, common settings, etc?

Lol. Yeah all my romantic stuff is sweet and cozy and heartfelt because I'm cheesy and love that stuff. Even my most deranged lemons are super affectionate <3 I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to call me out on other patterns lol.

27) What is your most and least favorite part of writing?

The best parts are the initial concept & brainstorming, plus writing blorbo dialogue. I'm sure it's extremely obvious that I love writing Akechi dialogue in particular – the less hinged, the better!

Worst part is the post-posting creative slump, where I've gone through all the effort of creation & posting and then there's no feedback and it just feels bad. Hate having to wait out stupid human feelings to get back to creating. It doesn't always happen (I was actually really pleasantly surprised by the reception of the toilet blog lol) but it's just a real bummer when it does!

29) What’s your revision or editing process like?

Not too intensive for me since I kinda edit as I go along. Before I get started writing, I always go over the last part (sometimes all of it), to get back in my groove, and I'll tweak it if it needs it. Once I'm done writing, if I have a beta I'll send it over, and either way I'll wait a few days before giving a final read-through and posting. Naturally a few months later I'll be reading the fic on AO3 and find typos or grammatically weird sentences, but that shit happens to professional authors too so whatever lol. Update it and carry on...

40) If someone were to make fanart of your work, what fic or scene would you hope to see?

All fanart is definitely welcome lol, but generally the romantic fics are nearer and dearer to my heart so shippy drawings inspired by my fics would have a same-type-attack-bonus on my heart!

74) You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

The CSS/HTML probably lmfaoooo.

Otherwise, probably the pairing if it's one of my captained ships, and the way I write my dialogue and don't spend any time describing shit like settings or clothing lmao.

Thanks for the ask @hillbilly---man!! 💜💜💜

[Context] <- still open for these!

[secularbakedgoods]

How to Prevent Amazon from Ruining Your Life

(a.k.a. how to sell ebooks on places that aren’t Kindle)

Let’s face it, Amazon has a history of screwing people over. Especially those people who depend on Amazon to make a living. If you sell ebooks on Kindle and you want to insulate yourself from whatever raw deal those maniacs come up with next, you should make sure your ebook is also being sold elsewhere. And by “elsewhere” I mean “everywhere.”

Please note: following this guide will make you ineligible for KDP Select. If you’re mostly dependent on revenue from KDP Select, this guide will not be helpful to you. But Amazon will ruin your life someday.

Step 1: Make an EPUB

KDP, and certain other services like it, allow you to upload a Word document and automatically convert it to an eBook. If you really want to sell your ebook everywhere, though, you’ll need an EPUB file.

EPUB is a near-universal ebook file standard. Most ebook apps and eReaders can read EPUBs, and every vendor will accept an EPUB file for upload. You can even use an EPUB instead of a Word document on KDP.

You can create an EPUB file for your ebook using Sigil, which is a free and open-source ebook editor with extensive documentation. EPUB files are formatted in XHTML, so a quick education on HTML basics from W3C would serve you well here.

Don’t forget to include a cover and table of contents within your EPUB, as well as metadata tags for your book’s title and your name. Most vendors require them.

Optional: Convert to MOBI and PDF

Newer Kindles can apparently read EPUBs. Older Kindles might not. In the event someone with a Kindle wants to buy your book from a vendor that isn’t Amazon, you can package your EPUB with a MOBI file.

You can convert your EPUB to MOBI using Calibre. Calibre can also help you convert your ebook to a PDF, although I wouldn’t recommend using a Calibre-generated PDF for any print-on-demand services.

Step 2: Upload Everywhere

Here’s a list of vendors I upload my ebooks to:

DriveThruFiction (also does print-on-demand)

Gumroad

itch.io

Ko-fi (using the Shop feature)

Payhip

Smashwords (will, if you meet certain formatting standards, automatically distribute your book to Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, among others)

None of these sites have exclusivity agreements, meaning you can upload your ebook to all of them at once. Remember to check whether a vendor has submission guidelines for ebooks, and make sure yours fits those guidelines.

Once your ebook is uploaded to these other vendors, you can use Books2Read’s Universal Link feature to centralize most of your book’s URLs into one link.

And now, the next time Amazon nukes an entire department or shadowbans an entire genre, you can send your readers elsewhere to buy your books.

[enigmalea]

Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

[copperbadge]

Showed someone my NaNoWriMo setup and uhh I didn't think novel writing in excel could inflict psychic damage to others?? I just wanted a simple way to look at my daily word count 🥺

I mean, do what makes the work easiest, Anon, follow your bliss, don't listen to the haters, even me. I write villanelles in Excel for very good reasons of accessibility!

When we talk about "they did WHAT in Excel?" it's generally because it seems like the person is making more work for themself, and absolutely because if they send it out into the world that way, they're making more work for everyone else. Presumably you aren't submitting your NaNo novel to agents as an Excel document -- I did leave one villanelle in Excel as proof of concept but generally they’re not still in a table when I transfer them. I kind of get why you’d do something unorthodox, because I write my novels in plaintext, which is now widely seen as a bit weird; I use absolutely no formatting I don't have to, and I tag formatting with <i>basic html</i> because I want to be able to find it once it's in its final form and needs to be typset. That seems like more work too but it has internal logic. 

I think to me the issue is that I know what a pain in the ass it is to work with prose in Excel -- I actually do it quite a lot for work. The bulk of the work I am doing today is taking a sheet that has 40 names in it and writing a biographical blurb for each name on that name’s line in the sheet. It’s a method of data visualization fairly unique to the way I run the shop, but it works because you see the data points and the blurb side by side, and it makes it super easy to import all the information to the database eventually. 

But I also know its limitations. Like, I’m genuinely very curious, do you put the whole day's new writing into a single cell? I can't imagine you would because eventually you'd run into the issue of cell height limits, even if the cell took up the whole screen, and it would make scrolling a nightmare. Although if you struggle with re-reading and endlessly correcting rather than moving on to new work, it would certainly make that more difficult to do, which could be an advantage. Or do you put every new paragraph into a new cell? That makes more sense, though I'd wonder about whether quotation marks would fuck up the formatting. 

And it seems like especially with the latter (though really with either) it doesn’t actually make getting the wordcount significantly easier. I couldn’t figure out how to get the wordcount of a cell in Excel at all -- are you using COUNT, and building a pivot table? That’s quite impressive if so. Or are you making a new sheet for each day and writing into the new sheet? That seems like it would make it difficult to get everything out of the book easily, on the back end, but it would mean you’d get your eyes on every day’s work a second time. 

I tell you this not to try and evangelize you away from Excel, but just so that you know -- getting a daily wordcount in GDocs or Word is not super difficult, as long as you mark where you started that day. In GDocs, you just highlight what you want to count and hit Tools > Wordcount; the window will return something like Words: 207 of 309, meaning the document contains 309 words and you’ve highlighted 207 of them. In Word it’s slightly clunkier; you highlight the words and hit “Review > Wordcount” and it will tell you how many words are highlighted, but to get the total wordcount you have to de-highlight and do the wordcount again. 

In any case, honestly, do whatever makes it easiest to write, especially during NaNo. Just...maybe make sure it’s in a Word document before you submit it anywhere. :D

[aromanticyaoi]

trying out a new lore format for toyhouse; resembles an old format i used before, but the long-form description is now in a different column so it looks less awkward...

in general, i favor this kind of simple table design over fancy html profiles. i don't want to scroll through 10 dividers and 69 moodboards just to read a character's biography.

the only downside of the table design is that it looks kind of bad on mobile.