Glowfic Ebooks

[Kappa]

If you had to look at the character name directly attached to every comment, I would probably change the names of multi-use journals to something more ambiguous, or omit them entirely. Having the name attached to the profile and not the comments means it's there, but not obtrusive.

[Lambda]

Possibly the most difficult/intractable/problematic case would be Mark borrowing Miles's journal.

[DanielH]

What I’m thinking of now wouldn’t work with all readers. On the computer, though, it would visually look exactly like now (except perhaps with a dotted underline or something under the username; I’m not sure how that would work exactly). When you hover over it you get a tooltip (the title text that’s common on images can actually be added to text too) which says “Possible character name: Sherlock Holmes”¹. This gets it out of the way so it isn’t immediately visible, and it properly qualifies the statement as potentially false if you do go looking.

Another option would be that I do make it something more ambiguous, so it reads “calendarofcrime (Sherlock, cis female)”. That feels a bit weird to me too, but it is accurate (with Sherlock being template name instead of character name) and doesn’t require special handling for different characters. It might be weird when you first meet “sicaria (Sherlock, trans female)” in Milliways (especially since that scene is from Shell Bell’s point of view and she wouldn’t know or care that Sherlock was trans because she’s too busy being terrified. This would depend on the general edits feature being built already, but as I said that’s trivial from a technical standpoint. It also requires manually maintaining the database of more ambiguous names, but that shouldn’t change very quickly.

A third option I considered, but find particularly unaesthetic, is to just not include names when they’d be ambiguous, but include them otherwise. This has the problem of having some characters go around with names on all their comments, and others go around without, and those without not just being a handful of accounts like pythbox but even major character accounts.

I would actually say the Mark case is straightforward: use the name “Miles Naismith Vorkosigan”. When even mindreaders call him Miles sometimes, I think that’s appropriate (same with the one case I know of where Sherlock impersonates Tony). Kappa, if the rest of the name system is possible to your satisfaction, would you agree with my assessment here?

¹ Is there ever a cis female Sherlock with this name? Effulgence doesn’t have one, it looks like she was in some other RPs but my skimming says she’s a Stark there too.

[jalapeno_dude]

Another option would be that I do make it something more ambiguous, so it reads “calendarofcrime (Sherlock, cis female)”. That feels a bit weird to me too, but it is accurate (with Sherlock being template name instead of character name) and doesn’t require special handling for different characters. It might be weird when you first meet “sicaria (Sherlock, trans female)” in Milliways (especially since that scene is from Shell Bell’s point of view and she wouldn’t know or care that Sherlock was trans because she’s too busy being terrified. This would depend on the general edits feature being built already, but as I said that’s trivial from a technical standpoint. It also requires manually maintaining the database of more ambiguous names, but that shouldn’t change very quickly.

It feels a little icky to me to insist on specifying trans vs cis literally every time we see the character speak, especially given that a lot of the characters in Effulgence have pretty fluid gender identity. (Revealing that the sicaria account is trans is also a fairly major spoiler, and it doesn't feel right to me to reveal that right away when we meet them.)

[Kappa]

When a Sherlock or Sherlock-blend is impersonating their relevant person, it's appropriate to treat it as though the impersonated person is actually speaking.

If you really, really want to attach character names to comments, it's possible that identifying just the template in ambiguous cases - e.g. calendarofcrime (Sherlock) - might be a better plan than something like what you suggested.

[DanielH]

Yeah, I agree that idea was icky. I suppose there’s no reason it’d have to be maximally specific, though. I don’t recall it being a major spoiler; it was revealed 57 comments (11%) into the first thread where she is present, and I don’t remember it being plot relevant at that moment except for explaining her amount of money.

The reason I want to attach names to comments is it makes it easier to keep track of what username means what. I’m fairly bad with names in general, and usernames aren’t even particularly namelike. Sometimes that helps, (it’s hard to forget that calendarofcrime is a Sherlock once I know that), but sometimes it just makes things harder (I can’t think of any Effulgence examples at the moment, but I always forget which of the Sanders gemini twins’ usernames goes with which twin in Incandescence). Having the template available when the actual name isn’t would probably take care of most of the problem.

I can also avoid implementing this, since Kappa still seems to dislike the idea even with her suggestion of just identifying template. I have enough other, apparently less controversial, features on the list to keep me occupied for a while.

[jalapeno_dude]

Bug report: it appears you are getting the chapter titles from Kappa's index, not the posts themselves. This matters for the Spirit posts, e.g. this one. Not sure if the correct solution is to use the post titles instead or list them both when they're different.

[DanielH]

I think I can use the post titles when they’re different, in all but one case, thread 1.1, where the ToC title seems correct. Another option is to have the ebook’s ToC based on the Dreamwidth ToC, and the ebook’s chapters based on the post titles.

I’ll generate and look through the whole list of differences before I decide on something.

Kappa, is there a reason you don’t have the full title for the Spirit threads in the ToC? Is there a reason you haven’t edited the title of the post I linked to (posts and their titles can be edited even if comments can’t)? These reasons might be nonobvious and might apply to the ebook too.

[Kappa]

I don't put the full titles of the Spirit threads in the TOC because the full titles of the Spirit threads are really freakin' long and choosing single lines from each one is aesthetically pleasing to me.

I didn't edit the title of that post to match the title in the TOC because the title in the TOC is (iirc) taken from a quote in the body of the post and I don't want to make a post's title be a quote from its body for brain reasons.

[DanielH]

It looks like there are a few other posts that are shortened because of length; I’ll see if I come up with something better than “use one set of titles for the ToC and the other for the thread”.

Yeah, “he couldn't have imagined” is in the post body. The high school student who at that point doesn’t go by any names he likes is thinking about how his dad might force them to move somewhere worse than Forks, and “[h]e honestly can't imagine anywhere worse, but then, before Forks he couldn't have imagined Forks.”

I will look at this more later. Now I am going to bed.