This story has one, but rather painful, problem: it ends unfinished after 45 chapters (221,852 words; last update Nov 15, 2012), which is quite painful.

Aside from that, the story is excellent: Harry after returning from the Heavenly King Cross station freaks out that he is The Master of Death (whatever it means), that he would be hunted forever by to-be-Dark-Lords and decides to pretend to be dead and hide in the Muggle world.

Fifteen years later he is provoked to reveal himself (and he is also hunted down by the Head of DMLE Hermione Granger), and then they are trying to work out from there. Everything resolves nicely, Hermione becomes the Minister, the whole Britain starts to unite in fighting against The Great Evil™, I was expecting Ginny finally finding out she was completely misused by the evil, all good stuff … and, that’s it. Oh, well.

I have written some time ago this prompt about Ginny’s troubles learning to live in the high-society:

I generally like “Long Live The Queen” by offsides, It is unashamedly a muggle-wank story, if you like them, a story I would consider classic in the trope. However, I have been disappointed with its (arguably rather small and generally unimportant in the overall story) romantic subplot: in the beginning, Harry and Ginny finally find an understanding (and sharing a first kiss), then the story happens, Sir Harry is suddenly buddy-buddy with the Queen, high-society flying, and what he does in the romantic arena? He dumps all his old friends (including but not limited to Ginny) and he says that he has to start to build his friends network again. I really believe that not just Bat-Bogey hex, but good ol' fashioned kick in the balls was deserved there.

I was thinking about the similar situation (Harry gets to be unbelievably important), but he doesn’t leave Ginny and they together try to navigate the new waters they found themselves in. I was thinking about mostly Ginny-centered story, where she struggles with her being originally a working class farm girl picking up eggs from their hens in the morning to private dinners with Queen and Royal Household. I was thinking for example about her becoming a friend of then (1995, just before their divorce) Lady Diana and her common sense and her ability to keep cool would help the princess to sail through better than how she in the real life did. Or something like that. And yes, of course, all small jokes about Harry and Ginny struggling with the order in which to pick forks and similar stuff.

It was two years ago, when I wrote this, and since then I have met only one story which at least distantly resembles this prompt: “The Commoner Queen” by Pilargirl. The summary describes it pretty decently: “AU. A 1000 years ago, a plague extinguished 3/4 of Britain's magical population, including 3 of the 4 founders; Godric Gryffindor remained and founded a new world, with a monarchy that would last for years to come. Now, Ginny Weasley is the Holyhead Harpies' star Chaser and a simple commoner, but Harry James Potter of Evans and Gryffindor, Prince of Wales, has his eye on her.”

It is very AU and I really don’t like much any kind of royalist!universe, because it clashes horribly with the original bourgeois spirit of the canon, but when working with this kind of prompt some kind of upper class/aristocracy is necessary. And at least it is not Hermione-is-pureblood racism whitewashing type of story.

It is nice that the length of the story is pretty reasonable (21 chapters more or less just exhaust everything which is available) and the story doesn’t waste MUCH space on nonsense.

However, the principle conflict I wanted to have: Ginny working her way out of la merde des poulets towards being an upper-class lady is well preserved. Thank you.

Hi, I have created a fork of the Greybeard project called “Moldavite” (meteorite induced explosion near Nürnberg caused a lot of gems falling on the ground in Bohemia, if it is not a symbol of the cooperation inside of SUSE, then I don’t know what would be ;)). The main project site is https://sr.ht/~mcepl/moldavite/ and OBS project. Whereas, as I understand it, Greybeard is at least for the moment more or less on the back burner, I hope to continue to work on this.

One of the best characters in the first Fantastic Beasts film, Modesty Barebone, was left alone in her old childhood home, abandoned both by all adults and her brother Credence (who turned into Obscurial, so he was really not in a shape to take care for her), and never mentioned again (AFAIK).

Let me start here small story as a prompt:

She didn’t even know why she took pieces of the wand with her when she left for her old childhood home. When Credence exploded and left she was completely washed in pure magic. She thought in the first moment, that she is going to die, that the explosion is going to kill her. But nothing like that happened. Credence’s magic recognized her and protected her even when the whole building collapsed around her. Showered with magic, she saw weird fragments of stories in front of her eyes, she heard sounds she couldn’t hear, she was flying in the middle of the room for a moment, she lost consciousness in the end.

When she woke up, she was in the ruins of the building, hidden in the hole in the wall just the size for her to comfortably fit in. After the experience of the pure magic surrounding her, she was not even surprised when she found out that pieces of the wand Mary Lou broke were together again and the wand was pleasantly warm in her hand.

So, that is how it was: abandoned and lost little witch with her wand in the middle of New York with nobody knowing about her, without any food and without any money …

That’s it. I would like somebody to continue with this story. Little (eight years old) girl living on streets of New York, who has wand (well hidden, because she knew from the experience with the New Salem Philanthropic Society that many people could hurt her), but not much else. She will have to learn how to live on streets with the children gangs of New York, and perhaps later she will meet somebody who will teach her to use her magic. Something like a cross-over between HP universe and Oliver Twist.

Inspired by the linked prompt, but I have never seen anybody to pick it up and do it justice.

There are new chapters of this awesome story! I would never believe that Petunia fixing the story in the Marauders’ time could be such fun! Beautiful mixing of the Muggle and Magical world! Really recommened!

Is there any difference in cache files for Flatpaked Firefox and the normal one?

I have been using FanFicFare application for downloading Fanfiction stories as EPub from the main fanfiction websites. It works just fine for most of them, but there are now terrible problems with the biggest of them all, https://fanfiction.net, which is behind Cloudflare and generally inaccessible to scripts.

Therefore functionality has been added to script which with appropriate flags (-o use_browser_cache=true -o use_browser_cache_only=true) and when correctly configured it can “download” HTML pages from the Firefox (or Chrome) cache instead and stitch them together into EPub same as if the pages were downloaded from the Internet.

It all works perfectly fine with Firefox as packaged by major distributions (openSUSE in my case), but it doesn't work with Firefox installed from Flatpak. Is there any difference between the storage of cache in Flatpak Firefox? Is there some kind of access protection to its caches?

This book was a bit of let-down for me. Yes, it is very nicely written, characters are well described, they have even some (slight) development to them (which is rather rare in all fanfiction stories), but it feels like painting by numbers. Elizabeth and Gardiners travel all the way to the Lake District, so there is never a meeting at Pemberley, and Lydia is ruined (for long time it seems irrecoverably, but it turns out better). Then Elizabeth meets Darcy when she hides in London with her uncle and aunt and everything proceeds as you expect. Lydia is sent to Canada to be married and saving the fame of the Bennet family, D&E have their happily ever-after, Jane finds some replacement for Bingley, who in the end (with many rounds around) marries Georgiana. Everything is very predictable and it takes extraordinary time to get there (59 chapters). If you read one of stories like this, you probably shouldn’t bother.

(cross-post from that other site)

One of the best characters in the first Fantastic Beasts film, Modesty Barebone, was left alone in her old childhood home, abandoned both by all adults and her brother Credence (who turned into Obscurial, so he was really not in a shape to take care for her), and never mentioned again (AFAIK).

Let me start here small story as a prompt:

She didn’t even know why she took pieces of the wand with her when she left for her old childhood home. When Credence exploded and left she was completely washed in pure magic. She thought in the first moment, that she is going to die, that the explosion is going to kill her. But nothing like that happened. Credence’s magic recognized her and protected her even when the whole building collapsed around her. Showered with magic, she saw weird fragments of stories in front of her eyes, she heard sounds she couldn’t hear, she was flying in the middle of the room for a moment, she lost consciousness in the end.

When she woke up, she was in the ruins of the building, hidden in the hole in the wall just the size for her to comfortably fit in. After the experience of the pure magic surrounding her, she was not even surprised when she found out that pieces of the wand Mary Lou broke were together again and the wand was pleasantly warm in her hand.

So, that is how it was: abandoned and lost little witch with her wand in the middle of New York with nobody knowing about her, without any food and without any money …

That’s it. I would like somebody to continue with this story. Little (eight years old) girl living on streets of New York, who has wand (well hidden, because she knew from the experience with the New Salem Philanthropic Society that many people could hurt her), but not much else. She will have to learn how to live on streets with the children gangs of New York, and perhaps later she will meet somebody who will teach her to use her magic.

Inspired by this prompt, but I have never seen anybody to pick it up and do it justice.

Pride & Prejudice meet Persuasion meet Horatio Hornblower, slightly too long and slightly failing on “Show, don’t tell” rule, but otherwise obviously professionally written thing and the tension is really high and adventure dramatic. Highly recommended.

https://webcompat.com/issues/124428

A typical FloreatCastellum story: delightful, very original, well written characters. And brief.

A completely geeky author of the yet-to-be-published book “A Brief History of Red Telephone Boxes in The United Kingdom, Malta, Bermuda and Gibraltar, and their social impact in the 20th and 21st centuries” finds so far unrecognised phone book in the London Whitehall and her passion for the research breaks through all anti-Muggle repellent charms. And the story starts from there. Highly recommended!

I have heard about this story so many times, I have felt compelled to download it and read it. It is pleasantly written, I don’t have any serious complaints about it, but in the end it is just yet another indy!Harry mixed with (never explained) sudden whirlwind romance, where Harry and Daphne get from 0 (him not knowing her name) to marriage (and of course the married bed) in a week or so. If you read something like this, you've read it all, I am afraid. Interesting part is that the whole story is from Daphne’s point of view (that’s at least something different).