#not least because tumblr’s post editor deleted huge chunks of my text

[theriu]

Day Two of River’s AMAZINGLY WEIRD, SURPRISINGLY COMPLETE DREAMS, apprantly. Note how they always seem to happen when I’ve woken up and made the (logical, poor) decision to go back to sleep for a bit.

Yesterday’s nap dream:

My family was on some sort of funky automated ride/theme park that took you into this big, crazy, super tall hotel, and it was kind of like a giant loopy mystery game. Only I “died” via a volleyball net before we even got to the hotel (dream me was really unclear if I actually died or if the ride operators claimed I “died” as part of the game rules, and awake me is no less sure).

Somehow I get left behind by the massive elevator, which goes up a few floors at a time and then you can explore but once it goes up it won’t come back down, and I guess there aren’t stairs? Not sure how, but me and some others got back down to the ground floor and then bargained a ride up from one of the employees on the cleaning crew (she had like one of those window washing platforms on wires, but indoors). Then it turned into a whole quest to get to the top and to solve the mystery of this weird hotel that I guess people have been getting stuck in and that breaks some laws of time and space.

When we do get to the top, we end up being sent back in time (which was very grayscale), and this clock or something is beeping an alarm, and I hurl it out a window. I think what happened is someone brought this clock back in time, and its existence and the events set in motion by its alarm going off right then caused a rift in time that resulted in the weird hotel coming into being, like a paradox. Destroying the clock unraveled the hotel’s existence, and I ended up back at the point before my family would have gone in the trip, but the hotel was gone and they didn’t know anything about it. So I guess whether I actually or figuratively died from that dumb volleyball net being strung over the ride course and snagging my head as we passed is a moot point now.

Last night/this morning’s dream:

I’m at this very fancy water park and arcade with my sister, likely inspired by my recent mini vacation to an indoor water park. I mostly remember the part where we were supposed to be leaving, and as is typical for me, everything was slowing me down. I lost some of my steampunk gear, our hotel room had a weird puddle in one corner that contained some live snails and an actual lizard (which I failed to catch), my sister left without me but my Grandma is having a good time and not ready to leave uet, and some GUY came up declaring his LOVE for me and I’m like “Who even are you?!”

Turns out he had been pretending to be two OTHER guys so of course I didnt recognize him, but he decided he loved me. Even almost followed me into the bathroom to talk about it but I yelled at him to not even dare and he skittered off.

BUT THEN, there are these alien bug monsters everywhere! And it turns out that the guy who thinks he loves me is actually an alien bonded to a human who was trying to help his host do this symbiotic bonding they can do (instead of the alien just taking over), but it wasn’t working because he didn’t have authorization (I guess his homeworld only picks 3-5 people for the process at a time), so he doesn’t have the right chemicals to complete the process.

And I guess he was a little addled in his desperation and thought I could help somehow?! I continued to make it clear that no, he was NOT in love with me and I did NOT return his affections, but I would fight the aliens trying to take over and forcibly bond with humans, and he would have to help me. Somehow we had cool mech suits and I was really good and just took out a bunch of gross aliens. We found that the little tentacly symbiotes were hiding in these cute rubbery pokemon dolls I’d seen earlier in the dream arcade, but they must have been scared of us, because when we yelled at the people picking them up, the aliens didnt just jump on their heads. We ended up gathering all the little tentacly sea urchin looking things into a pillowcase. And the alien/human duo who helped me somehow got the stuff he needed (maybe he ate one of the aliens…which is rather terrible if so). But yeah, that’s how I guess I saved the world or at least this resort from an alien invasion!

[twilights-800-cats]

Behind the scenes fun facts, because posting text stuff is more complicated than it seems and actually takes up a good chunk of time:

Before I post, I go over each and every chapter that’s going up for last-minute spelling and grammar changes. Unfortunately, if a chapter has been posted to Patreon already I can’t make huge sweeping changes, but if there’s something I missed on Patreon I’ll change it for the public.

I do not have a copy of Microsoft Word, so all my writing happens on the online version of Microsoft Office, which is like Google Docs but lacking any sharing features; basically it’s Word but must be online to save and its features are more pruned.

Why not use Google Docs? Everything I have is in Word, so sunk cost and all that - plus, while neither resource works all that well with huge documents, Word handles it a bit better. Not to mention that copy + pasting from Google Docs isn’t always so graceful...

FanFiction:

requires a .doc file that I need to export from Word and trim out all content but the chapter to be posted (eg if i need to post chapter 3 i need to delete 1-2 and then everything after 3)

need to manually add in line breaks

keeps most formatting (italics, bold, etc. there are some things that the ff.net text editor just cannot handle or will not translate to the posted chapter, but i don’t use those features anyway)

can take a second to upload big documents but otherwise? it’s honestly the least painful process

Patreon:

keeps formatting after a copy + paste the best, even keeps my line breaks and supports other things like centering, etc

HOWEVER - links are downright busted. i sometimes have to input a link three to four times before it will actually stick and work, and on rare occasions inputting a link will actually delete other links. patreon posts, for whatever reason, do not like having more than three links in a post. patreon is by far the WORST when it comes to creating a navigation bar

automatically hides lengthy chapters

Tumblr:

tumblr doesn’t support things like centering unless i hard code it into the html, not that i use those features anyway

read mores are a godsend for long chapters (but don’t always work)

navigation links aren’t an issue here until it comes time to input the chapter’s address into the tb au page, where i need to do it twice because for some reason the first time just creates a temp url that does nothing (and yeah that means i need to input the link, save the changes, exit the editor, reenter the editor, and then reinput the link to get it to work)

the thing that takes the most time, though, is that tumblr does not keep formatting. at all. i have to manually, using the original doc as a guide, put in every single instance of bold or italics into the doc, which takes so much time and is so boring

in addition, i cannot have both the tumblr post and original doc up on the same monitor, not without converting tumblr to mobile form and deleting the entire post i was working on - i have to put the original doc up on my other monitor in order to make those changes. if anything looks funky on tumblr, like something should be italics but isn’t, that’s why