wherein Liz defeats Yuletide! (...conditionally)

My story is done in rough draft!

...Oh god, now I need to edit it.

Hey, is anyone willing to beta for me? You don't actually need to know the fandom in question -- the nature of the story is such that all relevant details are included and explained as you read. Mostly I need to know if it flows naturally, if I'm being tin-eared anywhere, if I've made any spelling or grammar goofs, and if my structure accurately mimics the particular real-world thing I chose to copy. It's between 1,000 and 5,000 words.

I can post the fic as-is and edit any time up through late on the 24th, so I don't need the beta job back until Saturday afternoon.

Help, please?

3 things: Yuletide progress report; LJ hates its users; the state of the smoke shop

1. I made a few mostly cosmetic edits on my Yuletide story and uploaded the beta draft to AO3. This is because I will be in a minivan heading to New Jersey tomorrow evening when the deadline arrives, and it is better to have a slightly untidy story than no story. :-) (In all honesty, the story will work as is. I just want it to work better.)

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2. This new interface thingy LJ just rolled out, I do not like it. Not at all. The default pages are ugly and the margins are awful. I want more white space at the edge of my pages, thank you. I also want the light blue shading at the top of the comments section to go die in a fire. It is vaguely painful to look at for too long -- not enough color contrast, I think.

Plus all comment subject lines have been summarily made to disappear and turn into bold headings in the comments themselves, which is just... I don't know who thought that was a good idea, or why, but it is a BAD IDEA. It destroys functionality for no reason. Why was this not TESTED or run past the user base?

...

I am beginning to think about redirecting all comments to Dreamwidth and seeing if I can recreate even more of my LJ reading list over here. Also I may have to embark on the long and unspeakably tedious task of switching all the links in my master fic lists to point to DW entries, and all the internal links (forward to next chapter, back to previous chapter, jump to main index page, that sort of thing) to point to DW as well. That will take forever and a day, but I suspect it may be worth the headache in the long run.

The ONLY good thing I have noticed in the new LJ code is that on the mobile version, when I hit the back button from an entry to my f-list, I no longer get jumped up to the top of the page; instead, I only get jumped up one or two entries, which is still not ideal but is at least vaguely more functional. And that is not worth all the new idiocy in the slightest.

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3. PM has been massively overstaffing the smoke shop this week, in anticipation of last minute holiday shoppers. Today was actually quite slow, but I'm pretty sure that's because it rained all day. Tomorrow should be busier.

Anyway, I left about two hours before the scheduled end of my shift, because there was no point in me just standing around with nothing to do. I am of two minds about leaving early. On the one hand, I don't earn money if I'm not on the clock. On the other hand, if I go home, that means less work-related stress and more chances to take a nap. I am a big fan of naps. :-)