Fanfic recs

aaaa it updated!

Spoiler

 

Not actually a fanfic, but a short story about war machines.

Malak (rifters.com)

 

Ah sweet, Peter Watts wrote my favorite novel (Starfish). I recognized that domain name! Thanks for the link!

 

enjoying the hell out of this thank you

“You may be the last Uzumaki, but you’re not alone anymore.”
>Naruto would now die for you

 

It's just their work skin! Most authors don't do nearly as much with them, but the title and summary sections are among those you can apply custom CSS to if you so choose. So I'm afraid that's just the author's taste in kerning, haha.

If you want to see exactly how they did it, Inspect Element would probably work. And there's at least one series of tutorials on this sort of work skin wizardry out there, though I don't have a link on hand.

 

I saw a tutorial for workskin wizardry that had retroactive text as in you read a chapter, go to the next chapter, there's a link to the previous chapter in the body of that chapter, you click the link and there is text that wasn't there when you read the chapter the first time

 

:EYES:

That sounds incredible for doing a fic that features time travel password shenanigans

 

“The Talk” (quotation marks are part of the title). Very goofy and short (under 300 words total, over five short vignettes) Steven Universe fic about various parties attempting to explain sex to Steven and very clearly not understanding it at all. Fucking hilarious and flawlessly IC.

 

I am having SUCH TEACHERFEELS over that Naruto fic oh my god, my heart, it is overflowing

also the author is still responding to comments on it (and within a day!) so maybe it isn't as abandoned as all that? perhaps? hopefully??

 

Do you remember where...?

 

That is some homestuck level bullshit right there.

 

Unrelated to the tutorial Wingyl mentioned, I went back and found the series I was thinking of now that I have some free time: La_Temperanza's AO3 Work Skins/Tutorials. (Their Choose Your Own Adventure tutorial does involve hiding/showing different text within a chapter, which sounds related to that retroactive text trick.)

There's also a number of AO3 collections compiling these sorts of tutorials, which you can find by checking which collections a tutorial has been added to – this one and this one have some neat things, for instance.

There unfortunately isn't a standardized tag for work skins yet, but if you want to go digging, the following tags all have some content: Work Skin, Workskin, CSS. The most relevant canonized tag is the more general Fanwork Research & Reference Guides.

 

It's definitely not abandoned, the last update was Friday

 

Oh, and a quick note for anyone not familiar with how AO3 skins work: If you do anything fancy with CSS, keep in mind that it won't work for anyone who has workskins disabled or downloads the fic (AO3's native download function strips custom work skins), and in some cases may not work as intended with screen readers. Ideally, you should make sure the fic is still readable with the skin removed, either by not putting necessary information in CSS to begin with, or by including an alternative version of that information that displays when the custom CSS is removed. (La_Temperanza's tutorials are very good about this, IIRC.) If that's not possible, you can save readers some confusion by mentioning it in the author's note.

 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/25174384/chapters/75543767?style=disable here's the retroactive text thing, link is to the Hide Creator's Style version which has the actual instructions/code for the retroactive text.

The entire work is less a tutorial and more someone playing around with doing wild things in the AO3 workspace - amongst other things the work is named "CSS In Testing" but with Creator's Style on it's named Bleed Gold in gold wordart that turns blue when you mouse over it - but there are instructions for all the madness. It's not usually in the Hide Creator's Style section but it was for the retroactive text.

 

oh right yeah alerts

@coldstars i found the link, it's CSS In Testing aka Bleed Gold and the chapter with the retroactive text explanation is linked above (turn on creator's style to get the retroactive text example instead)

 

caught up with the Naruto fic. am now afflicted with a terrible and terribly specific craving which no other story can fulfill.

*sigh* time to go reread snake in the grass again...

 

jesus retroactive text is straight up voodoo. i can't wow reaction because that doesn't exist so i'm not reacting at all. but. wow.

 

Denmark's New Groove

Somebody wrote Hamlet/Emperor's New Groove for Yuletide.

In iambic pentameter.

It's beautiful.