Trains in Anime

Rated T, 1266 words, Lilanette

The door of the school bathroom closed with a loud slam. Marinette looked up and immediately wished she hadn't. Leaning on the doorframe was Lila, and for some reason, she was smirking. This was going to be annoying.

"I know what you're doing", she said.

"Drying my hands? Yeah, it's not really a secret." Marinette rolled her eyes.

"Inviting Jagged Stone to your birthday party, just to undermine me?", continued Lila, as she slowly inched closer to Marinette. "That's almost flattering. And stupid. You keep acting so high and mighty, but you're really just the same as me… Except I'm better at it."

Marinette sighed and continued to stare straight ahead.

"Why do you care? You're not even invited."

Lila laughed.

"Oh, I know, I just think it's funny. You tell me off, but when you drop big names to seem more interesting, it's suddenly alright, isn't it? Do you already have an excuse for when he won't come?"

Marinette shook her wet hands and grabbed a paper towel, still doing her best not to look at Lila.

"What makes you think he won't come? He was very excited when he invited himself?"

Lila drew her face into a scowl. "Oh, drop the act. We both know you just made that up. Jagged Stone doesn't even know who you are."

Marinette turned around and looked at Lila.

"You know I designed his last two album covers, right? There was a news story. You can look it up."

Lila's smile briefly faltered, and she took a step back. "You don't expect me to believe…"

"Look it up right now," said Marinette, now angrily. Lila hesitated for a moment, then dragged out her phone and began typing. As she looked, her eyes suddenly opened wide in shock.

"See? I'm not a liar like you," said Marinette with immense satisfaction. She leaned over to her rival's phone. "You think you're so much smarter that you don't even pay attention to the people around you."

"I… what? How do you even know him?"

"You know he is Juleka's dad, right? The black-haired girl with the pink highlights? She's in our class. Also, I used to date his son."

Lila looked even more shocked. She started scrolling furiously.

"Wait, that guy?" She turned over her phone, with a picture of Luka on it. "Why?"

She mumbled something that sounded a lot like, "you could have anyone…"

"It's none of your business who I date."

"Well, of course not, I don't care!", spat Lila.

Read more on Ao3

The problem with any new social media site is setting up a digital identity, and on a site like this, that requires a great deal of graphical things. Icons, obviously, but also the overall design and layout of the blog. The provided default ones are not necessarily all my favorites, so over the coming days, I will probably experiment a bit with various adjustments. To do these adjustments properly, of course, I need some sample content here; something that looks very much like a typical post, so I can check whether what I'm planning actually works. This is that post.

As a result of that, you don't need to read this post. Though if you do, please leave a comment or whatever it is the people here do, so I can check the formatting for them! But really this is just going to be me rambling for a bit because that is more fun than googling for Lorem Ipsum, or copying a post from my tumblr. (This is a test for the styling of links, by the way). Graphics of course also require images, like icons, and I'm not sure I'm in love with dreamwidth's approach to them. Why do I always have to crop an icon when I upload it? These are icons that I've used for decades, and they are the exact size and aspect ratio that I like. I also really wish I could upload my icons as SVG, to retain their quality, but I guess that is too rare a requirement for them to implement. (Or is it? I actually haven't checked. Hang on… nope, doesn't work.) I'm also not sure whether there are Javascript security issues here. Want to find out together?

The other big issue is actual images in the context of the post itself. My initial impression is that the Dreamwidth workflow for that is terrible, so I probably won't use this feature that much, but I guess it's still worth exploring.

Okay, I don't think I'm doing this properly with this image. This is yet another annoyance of Dreamwidth. Others include:

• Having to write HTML manually instead of providing Markdown. Yes, I know there's a rich text editor, but I don't trust these things.

• The name is just stupid. Dreamwidth? I suppose that comes from Bandwidth, but for dreams? Still, I can't help but wonder about Dreamheight and Dreamdepth, and I'm sure I'm far from the only one who has ever made that joke.

  I suppose it's not that terrible, and I've gotten used to Archive Of Our Own, so what can I say.

• What's definitely true is that this site feels very 2004 era, early web 2.0. The tiny fonts everywhere (that's definitely going to change on my blog), the overly sugary and incredibly tiny icons, the way there's a "mood" and "music" section under each post, it all makes me feel like I'm back in my early DeviantArt days.

Of course, none of these things really matter; Fanfiction.net is worse (I do have a presence there but I only ever cross-post things from Ao3 there these days) and still incredibly popular. What matters is the community. Finding out what that's like will be the most important part for me over the next few days and weeks.

Alright, I think that's enough content to test my CSS, isn't it? Maybe a bit more, just to be on the safe side. I have to admit: I hate CSS these days. Oh, sure, I started with web development in the late 1990s, I am familiar with it, but there was a point many, many years ago when I stopped being interested and decided to work on native apps (and these days microcontrollers) instead. It's so finicky, and I'm never super satisfied with the result. So it will probably take me some time to figure out.

If you've made it this far, thank you, and please leave a comment about the nature of styling of comments so I can check the styling of comments!