default

Mostly Spoiler-free Namesake Review :)

I wanted to do this for such a long time. :) Now that my copy of the first volume is here (Thank you, Isa and Megs!) and I finished reading it, I think it's the perfect occasion!

For those of you who don't know about Namesake, it's a great webcomic created by dqbunny and secondlina , about people who visit fantastic worlds where the events of several well-known stories take place. Sharing the same name as the protagonist of those tales, they take part in the telling (or retelling) of the story, a task which is apparently crucial for the continued existence of human culture.


Collapse )
default

In case you were wondering what was happening to LJ...

atiko  posted some enlightening links:

http://varymydays.tumblr.com/post/…
http://www.time.com/time/world/art…

We often hear people talking about the freedom of expression and how it is limited in certain countries. Since we do not live in said countries, we might think that we have next to no influence regarding the matter.
Well, now we do.
I am just as annoyed by the outage as anyone else, but I feel this incident has greater things at stake than the ability of posting my own views of a Harry Potter movie. DDOS attacks in general are highly immoral, but I absolutely refuse to be driven away by a few bastards who are trying to ruin one of the few remaining areas of free debate a country has. And believe me, considering what's going on in Russia, I was highly surprised that LJ could afford such a luxury so far, given the way non-government opinions tend to be treated there.
I fully support Livejournal in this conflict, and I invite others to set personal matters aside and do the same.
xelexplain

Punctuation problems

The fifth chapter of my fic is almost ready (currently in beta), and I am facing an issue which I'm sure all people noticed who post stories on fanfiction.net: for reasons I cannot truly understand, the site recently started swallowing all double/triple punctuation marks except for the ellipsis. What this means is that things like "?!", "!?" or "--" get reduced to "?", "!" and "-" respectively.
I contacted the site support in this matter, but not too surprisingly, they did not respond. :/ I have a nasty feeling that this "censorship" stems from some misguided notion of preaching grammatical correctness, but regardless of the reason, the current state of affairs deprives us writers from some very important (if often misused) tools. (Yes, I've tried writing without them in chapter 4. No, it did not work out too well.)
Thus, I had no choice but to search for an alternative. What I found is this:
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the interrobang. hailing from the 1960s. It was supposed to serve the purpose what you'd expect: to replace the "?!" and "!?" forms with a single punctuation mark. It never became widespread, but is nonetheless part of the Unicode character set. I don't think even the great fanfiction.net preprocessor could find fault in it. The problem is: while it is pretty self evident, most people are not familiar with it, and it is also missing from some (supposedly Unicode-compliant) fonts.
So, what do you think? Should I use it? Can you even see the character on your screen to begin with?

Poll #1750008 What do you think of the interrobang above? :)

Can you see it? Should I use it?

Yes, I can see it fine. I think it could work.
3(100.0%)
No, I can't see anything, except maybe a square. Not good.
0(0.0%)
I can see it, but I don't think it's a good idea.
0(0.0%)
I can't see a thing, but don't let that stop you....
0(0.0%)