Laptop User Protip · 8:15pm Dec 2nd, 2013
No matter how much you may think your computer would benefit from the caffeine, do not pour a glass of soda into the keyboard. It will not end well.
For reasons that may or may not be related to this, I'm probably reneging on my promise to finish Reign this week. But who knows? My computer might be back in working order sooner than I expect. Also, now that we can tag sequels I need to decide on an official order for the time loop trilogy. I'm torn between putting Reign immediately after Stitch since that's closest to where it fits chronologically and it provides context for Queen Sparkle's behavior in Fate, but I want it to remain skipable and I'm worried the mature tag will scare folks away and keep them from ever getting to Fate at all. Thoughts?
*scratches off caffeine from the "Sergiovan's custom PC enhancers list"*
Oh daaang. Man, that happened to me once with hot chocolate. Sucks, yo. Hope getting that fixed up doesn't turn ugly. :(
1565348
Worst case scenario, I buy myself a new laptop as an early Christmas present. Still, I probably won't be around Skype or steam for the next couple days, and any writing I do get done will be on my phone.
I think you can set multiple sequels. Just not multiple prequels. So set Stitch as the prequel to both.
Why not just tag both as sequels of Stitch?
I'm guessing it's a has_many-belongs_to style relationship, so you probably can do that.
It looks like you can do a forked sequel. Can you do forked prequels? (Apologies in advance for terrible ASCII diagrams)
Forked Sequel (pretty sure this is possible):
/--> Reign
Hard Reset -> Stitch In Time -<
\--> Fate
(Set prequel of Stitch to Reset, set prequel of Reign to Stich, set Prequel of Fate to Stitch, and make a note on Fate that Reign comes earlier but is optional)
Forked Sequel and Prequel (ideal, but not sure if doable):
/-->Reign--\
Hard Reset -> Stitch In Time /---->------>---\-> Fate
(set prequel of Stitch to Reset, set prequel of Reign to Stitch, set Prequel of Fate to (Reign AND Stitch)
1565362>>1565365>>1565378
That would make the most sense, I was under the impression you could only do one sequel to each. I haven't really been in a position to play around with it with my computer out of commission. That's probably the way I'll go with it.
1565360 You too, huh? Though I can blame mind on my idiot klutz of a nephew, but he managed to fry my hard drive with my entire NaNo fic.
1565388
Well how it works is that "A is a sequel of B" is defined by going to story B and setting its prequel attribute to A. So you ought to be able to go to stories B, C, and D and set all of their prequels to A, which should show up as all of them being A's sequels (as long as you're the author of A,B,C, and D).
Actually heard from a classmate of mine who dropped hot chocolate on his earlier.
I always keep my drink a good 4-5 feet from my laptop whenever I'm working. Safety first.
1565390
That's why I keep all my stories nice and snug on Gdocs. I trust them not to screw up more than I trust myself not to
1565407 I can't write on gdocs, or access it from work, and I just hadn't gotten around to uploading more than the first chapter. Silly me, I wanted to read them over one more time before turning my betas loose with their red pens and sticky notes.
1565401>>1565388 I just checked with Obs to be sure - you can make the same story a prequel to multiple others and it all works just fine. Apparently. Obviously I've not tested this.
Blame obs if it doesn't work.
Man that sucks. I recommend you buy your next laptop with a square trade warranty (amazon or Costco) as it covers ALL accidental damage 100% of the cost. Drink spill? Covered. Drop? Covered. Electrical shortage? Covered. Hard drive failure? Covered. Run over with car? Covered. Plus the repair time is less than two weeks in most cases. I love it so much!
Yes, I do think Stich should be linked to both Reight and Fate, but adding a note about the nature of that story, just in case someone wants to skip it.
It is amacing that it started as an alternate ending!
well, pouring liquids into a computer is in the troll's guide to surfing teh interwebz... hopefully it'll work sooner rather than later!
I tried pouring a 44 OZ on it. More is not better.
1565407
Whew.
I personally use dropbox, and having just destroyed my laptop's screen (but lucked out of breaking the drive, fortunately) I'm very glad of that.
eugh
1565447
Too bad he can't warranty that glass of soda too. What a waste.
I had absolutely no problem with reading Reign last, after Fate.
I reckon just put it as a sequel to Fate, it should be fine. Anyone who's stuck with you that long surely won't be scared off, because the trilogy gets fairly dark in itself. I imagine they'd be smart enough to realise the chronology themselves, too.
Reign feels more like a "standalone in the same universe" than a sequel to me. Like Changing Lives.
Maybe it'd prefer Gatorade.
Normal keyboards can survive the dishwasher (note the qualifier can).
Probably not a good idea with a laptop, though.
As for the mature . . . if it's skipable, you could view it as a side story with mature content, which readers could read or not as they preferred. Maybe tag Fate as the sequel to Stitch, but mention in the A/N for Stitch that Reign is side stories set chronologically after Stitch? Alternately, you could specifically tag which chapters have mature content (unless it's all of them, of course), and let readers decide if they wanted to read mature or not. I've seen that done on some stories before.
Your catch with that last suggestion is that since the story would be tagged 'mature,' viewers without it enabled just wouldn't see the story at all.
This will show my age, but what the heck. I remember putting most of a bottle of Pepsi down the keyboard of a TRS-80 Model I (expanded all the way out to 64k), and spending two days with a screwdriver and a box of q-tips fixing the problem. Even then, the vowels still tended to stick down.
Sorry to hear that your computer's out of commission. As it happens my laptop had a rather final sort of failure a week or two ago (doesn't work at all and blinky diagnostic codes indicate a probably failed CPU) so new laptop for me since a nice shiny new CPU chip would be at least $275. Hopefully yours won't need anything more drastic than a new keyboard.
1567521
It will indeed, but you could argue those were the interesting days since the computer could be more interesting and really unique... Soda has never been for keyboards or computer insides.
** deleted comments were result of accidental triple post.
1567521
That's not even slightly as bad as the time my mother decided to pour peroxide over her keyboard. Have you ever seen the silicone under a membrane keyboard melt? I spent three days prying that shit apart only to find the inner workings of the computer resembled fried green eggs.
Ick, I had that happen once. Luckily, the laptop already had a lot of... 'issues'... so I had the "yank battery and unplug power cord" motion down to a science, and pulled all power. Spent about 4 hours cleaning everything out and got it to live for another year or so, until the hard disk decided to click-of-death at me.
Good luck with the lappy. Worst case, odds are you'll be able to find a little netbook type unit for <$100 (or the equivalent wherever you happen to live).
1569448
Fried the motherboard, actually. Luckily, it was Cyber Monday so I found a deal on a new laptop (Toshiba P55-A5200 to replace an HP Pavilion dv6 if you care) for about $200 more than the fix would cost me.
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Not bad at all. Don't know much about either model specifically, but good on ya.
I'm using a nice Fujitsu Stylistic q702 hybrid. Does everything I could ask it to do, except most 3d gaming :p... 'course, if I'd have known how broke I'd be a year later I'd have saved my money and gotten something cheaper.
1569630
Would not recommend the HP. Even propped up, the cooling fan positively screamed when I was using such processor intensive programs as a web browser
This exact thing happened to me...
Darn Mountain Dew, why couldn't have you been nutritious for my now late-laptop?
Why not simply tag both Reign and Fate as sequels to Stitch? The system does allow multiple sequels to the same work, after all...
1604325
That's exactly what I ended up doing. I was a total idiot to make this post when I couldn't jump on and check it myself