Scribbles and Bits

Thank you again to everyone who's contributed to the Banned Book Sale; I didn't expect the response and am deeply grateful. I've sold like a dozen books in a week, which is super-unusual for me. Thank you!

Until I hash things out with itch.io (no response yet), you can buy the AllFam ebook (and the script version) on Payhip. I am slowly uploading all my ebooks there, starting with the stuff most likely to be banned. I have everything copied over now except for the Megapack which is... by far the largest and may take a bit.

EDIT: okay, Megapack should be up now too. Whew.

We uploaded Untouchable, a 4-page sketch comic about Rawlin's chronic and infectious health condition, and her self-loathing from it.

Mild content warnings for body horror, contagious chronic illness, and bad feelings from it.

Oh god it is a hundred pages. What have I done. What is time. What is space.

Here you go you weird people, as y'all voted, LB's Many-Selved Sourcedump 2.0. Now with a table of contents and organized by both creator name AND (roughly chronologically). 3.0 I can also organize it by topic but NOT TODAYYYYYYY I am going to bed

EDIT: version 2.1 is up. The very first link in it was dead. -_- Please replace your file. Also added a source I'd forgotten and added a "Wayback Machine URL protocol" bit to help compensate for other linkrot that surely exists.

Sneak: While updating healthymultiplicity.com with a new feature... with two clicks I ended up accidentally deleting every comic we ever posted to the website. T_T I am reuploading and correcting the filing system to make future things easier, but things might be hairy for a bit. I will update this post when I have finished, but I will probably have many bugs to fix.

EDIT 23:16: I have reuploaded all the comics (except Alter Boys In Love, which needs to be redone because I think its file is too big and my zipper/PDFer doesn't work on Linux anymore) and thumbs and corrected the file tree. You will probably need to update your bookmarks, and if anything is still broken or not showing up, please let me know right away!

I also have a treat for you guys but that will have to wait until I get a good night's sleep and finish the fixes from before. -_- The important thing is, no data was lost. Hooray for back-ups!

EDIT: Solution in progress! Thanks, friends!

Sneak: Soooo, it turns out my clever solution to the plural tagging problem by batch-renaming them as "1+" means that I can no longer get the "AND" command working to cross-reference multiple 1+ tags. It seems that adding the + sign (or any symbol that isn't a letter or number) changes the 1+ tag URL from pluralstories.dreamwidth.org/tag/plural:blahblahblah to pluralstories.dreamwidth.org/?tag=1%2B:blahblahblah. The OR command still seems to work (apparently it's the default if you just list the comments, as shown with https://pluralstories.dreamwidth.org/?tag=1%2B:relationships:romantic,1%2B:creator+speaks+from+experience,price:free ) but...

That... is a major problem. Like, I know kludging together the tag URLs for cross-referencing is really hard on mobile in general, but at least it wasn't IMPOSSIBLE. The whole reason I wanted to set it up this way was so people could cross-reference multiple tags at once and make sure they only got things that pinged ALL the correct tags!

I am also not sure how to FIX it. Like, batch renaming the tag to "plural" again has the same problems as before. Numbers get boosted up the ranks, but >1 just broke things completely, and any other number choice would be totally arbitrary.

The only other solution I can think of is to figure out a "1+" synonym that ranks alphabetically between "about" and "access," which is... I don't know any. (And "access" also doesn't come with any synonyms I can think of easily to give more wiggle room.)

Nooooooo. I tried too hard to be clever and reap my folly. T_T

Sneak: I did a much-needed update of the pluralstories tags! I know big sweeps like this make it harder for people but it really needed doing. <_<;

• The "language" tags have been popped out into their own section again because they were swamping the "access" tag section otherwise. The access section is way more manageable now!
• I changed all the "plural" tags to "1+" instead, which was long overdue. They're probably the tags people look at most, and having them under P meant they were buried at the end of the page, and also "plural" no longer felt expansive enough for my purposes. Renaming to "1+" solved both problems! :D
• In that vein, I relocated the "creator" tags into 1+, and I merged them into one "creator speaks from experience" tag. There were only two different tags in the first place ("plural creator" and "creator speaks from experience") because I created the "plural creator" one first, then realized that it wasn't expansive enough. That's a distinction that I no longer see as relevant to the archive. It felt like playing into turf wars.
• I merged the "dissociation" tag into "1+:type:medical" because that Venn Diagram is basically one circle.
• The 1+ change did mean I had to relabel the most vital "about the archive" tags with a preceding 0 so they'd stay on top, but oh well.

The 1+ tag is still hairier than I'd like, but oh well, it's an improvement!

Sneak: Our internet is having trouble so we're using roomy hotspot and need to move quickly, but we have uploaded this month's poll winner, LB Goes to Alaska: a travel comic about being the best entity at Zyfron's wedding, equal parts pontificating about identity and looking at moose. 32 pages. 2017. Script here.

Sneak: I went through the pluralstories "nonhumans" tag, and I manually added in the catalog entries the various nonhumans represented! I had considered doing a tag family, but it would've rapidly gotten out of control, with a billion tags all with only one or two entries. (Also the thought of trying to squish them down makes me cry--like, have separate tags for angels, demons, lwa, mpungos, gods, and spirits, or compress them down to "spirits"? But what if someone is SPECIFICALLY looking for Vodoun works and want lwa specifically? Oh no!)

Now, if someone really wants to find, say, a pluralstory with robots, they can just search "robot" and get a dozen!

The only entry I couldn't do this with was System's Out! because it's really, REALLY long and an outside submission. (I also was kind of stumped by Soft-Pedaled because there were characters I couldn't really guess the species of or how to quantify them!) But it's a start, at least!

As the winner of the patron poll, we have uploaded Gigi's Story, a comic Gigi made in 2013 when we had a brief lull in our homelessness about her feelings about our family at this time. This is the only comic she has ever made completely on her own. We have also uploaded the script!