bloodwrites

In which I embark on an adventure in building character shrines.

I've been working on a Dean shrine. It's still pretty empty, though I dug up some meta from frickin years ago that's giving me a start.

I have no idea what I'm doing 😂 I missed the era of character shrines, and they've only recently come onto my radar.

Of course I knew what a fansite was, static fansites were my fandom beginnings, but the specificity of character shrines is a new concept to me.

And I feel like I've missed out on the chance to create about a million character shrines over the years. So many neglected blorbos 😢

It's local only (hiding on my hard drive) right now, I have no idea where I'm going to host it at this stage, but Neocities is of course an option.

These posts are my weekly 'round up' of the things I've been up to and the things I've seen in fandom over the past week. Shits hectic right now, with the muskapocalypse and all.

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I've been a hardcore Firefox devotee for years, but the recent update shaved valuable pixels off my limited screen real estate, so I went looking for an alternative.

Vivaldi was really the only option, because I wouldn't touch Chrome with a ten foot pole (yes I'm aware Vivaldi is chrome-based shut up), Opera is so 2000's, and Brave is some kind of block chain fuckery or some shit IDEK.

Sorry, did you say 'Edge'? Fuck no.

Anyway. Vivaldi. I imported all my bookmarks and passwords (yes I use Firefox as my password manager, they kinda got grandfathered in because they used to have an actual password manager then integrated it into the browser and it's not ideal but it mostly worked for me), and started having a play.

Sync is great (I gotta have sync, Firefox was barely adequate in that regard), the built-in notes app is fantastic, the web panels are WONDERFUL, the reading list...

I could go on for hours, honestly. It's got a ton of nifty features and I was almost sold. Then I opened my website.

There were horrible grey scrollbars in the middle of my page. So apparently chrome based browsers still need webkit to make scrollbars pretty. Okay, well, serves me right for not concerning myself with browser compatibility. Sorted that out.

But while I was staring at scrollbars, I realised some of my images looked like shit.

Yeah, images (particularly small and pixel images) look like complete arse in Vivaldi and no amount of settings or css seems to be able to fix it.

So there's that. I've also got a wee issue in that the development tools (as far as I could tell with my short poke while trying to figure out what was going on with the images) are not working for me. I do most of my CSS in Firefox and it Just Works. I couldn't even figure out how to save the css file I was working on in Vivaldi FFS.

Perhaps there's a plugin or something. I do hope so. I'd like to reduce the cons of this browser down to 'image rendering is shit', because the other features are piling up in the pros column and its already having a positive impact on my workflow.

I wrote the above last night. Then, today, missing Firefox like whoa after Vivaldi did something else weird (fonts, now, for some reason it wants to display Verdana—shut up, I'm nostalgic—entirely in bold WTF), I went looking for an answer to my valuable screen real estate issue.

And I found it. It required me digging in the .mozilla folder and creating a CSS file, but Honey, I Shrunk The Tab Bar! The top chrome of Firefox is now even smaller than Vivaldi!

'Course, I'm still really liking Vivaldi's web panels and built in RSS reader and Reading List and Task List and Notes app... And I kinda figured out the dev tools, except saving files is a bitch and a half, and it crashed on me today, losing a whole bunch of CSS I'd just edited.

So I'm thinking Firefox will probably be my webdev browser, and Vivaldi will probably be my other stuff browser, cos it's good for social media and reading and shit.

This fucking original character that kept insinuating himself in everything I wrote for a while.

Sometime in April 2020, during the first Covid lockdown here in Aotearoa, I invented an original character for a Dean/OMC fic. His name is Ryan, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Ryan is an Apocalypse World hunter. He was invented for and first appeared in Minutes to Midnight, an angsty slow burn bittersweet S14 fic that may or may not ever be completed and published. I needed someone new and complicated for Dean to fall in love with for the plot and Ryan was born. I wrote a good chunk of this fic, but it was heavy, and I lapsed.

I was finishing WIPs and posting a lot during the first lockdown, but I was also writing new stuff. There's a couple other things I started writing with the intent of wincest endgame but suddenly and inexplicably, Ryan would appear in them and derail my plans.

Sometimes it was the exact same surly, broody Ryan as in Minutes to Midnight. Most of the time he was a little different. Different scars, different personality, different levels of aggression.

But he was always scarred in some way and he always wanted to bone Dean (and vice versa).

So because he kept inserting himself into my fic, I started referring to him as 'fucking Ryan', and it's a fun double entendre. First, he's fucking annoying (that fucking guy), but it's also what Dean wants to be doing, so.

A note from the middle of a post-Carry On fixit I was working on, sometime after I stopped writing Minutes to Midnight:

woops, I'm veering sideways into Dean/OMC territory. Fucking Ryan keeps popping up and wanting to fuck Dean. But it might be easier for Dean to do that with a virtual stranger. It's hard enough to get brothers to fuck much less do that while also giving Dean angsty hangups. I think he'll be freer with someone not Sam.

This was the first time I referred to him as Fucking Ryan.

There was also a post-15x19 fic.

Then there was Scars and Something You Like. I don't know which of the two I have published so far came first, only that Scars was the first I posted, and then, months and months later, I found Something You Like on my hard drive, needing only a tidy, so I posted that, too.

For a little while, I believed that I would never post another version of Ryan after Scars. It seemed weird to have written the same OC (with subtle differences) into two different stories that essentially existed in different universes.

But fuck it. If Chuck can do it, no reason why I shouldn't 🤣

I love this fandom.

ETA: there's now a series based around one of the versions of this character.

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