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Question Where should I begin reading again

7 years 8 months ago #1 by Beyogi
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    • Hi everyone,

    I've been out of the Whateley Universe for a few years and would like to know where I should start reading again. The last major story I recall was where a Jade copy was adventuring in Sarah's demonic stomach/underworld.

    I think that was before the website change, but not sure. Anyone got an idea where I should begin?

    Thanks,
    Beyogi
    7 years 8 months ago #2 by Yolandria
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    • Well...That's a tough one. You have a whole new Gen2 series you can start on...You can try and pick up where you left off. Or you can refresh your memory and start at the beginning again to catch up. it's all on you and how much time you want to put into it. If it were me. I would start over and refresh my memory of who's who in the zoo .
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    7 years 8 months ago #3 by Katssun
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    • I feel like the Kayda saga and Imp's stories are the best launching point for new or returning readers of Gen 1, largely because it matches Kayda's experience into the Whatelely universe, and Imp is unaware of the Academy, but fully immersed in the universe as a whole.

    You could also try the Kodiak Conspiracy or Whilst Any Speaks, though Kayda's stories are still very important with those.

    Gen 2 is on its own, and should be read in release order, until you get to the Kayda/Lanie tie-ins.
    7 years 8 months ago #4 by Arcanist Lupus
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    • It depends on how much you remember from before, but like Katssun, I tend to put the start to the "modern era" of Whateley at the point where Elrod and Morpheus were added as authors. That said, Whilst Any Speaks, which was released before the first Elrod story (Buffalo Gal), is pretty much required reading in my opinion. Starting there gives you about 160-170 chapters to read, but Kayda and Lanie take off running with the main Whateley threads, and are pretty closely intertwined so I don't think you can really start after that. The Morpheus stories are independent, although you definitely shouldn't miss them, because they're Imp-pressively fun to read.
    "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." - Spider Robinson
    7 years 8 months ago #5 by E. E. Nalley
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    • If you are going to start with Whilst Any Speaks, Polk makes an excellent point that you should really start with The Kodiak in Winter, then read A Cold Plate of Vengeance, THEN start Whilst Any Speaks. From there read the Lanie Kayda stories in published order.
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    7 years 8 months ago #6 by Valentine
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    • Part of it depends upon how much you remember. Refreshing yourself on Loophole and Kodiak is a necessity because EE and Elrod pretty much pushed through Spring Semester 2007.

    Phoenix has started writing Hank/Lancer stories, but they won't make sense until you get to The Riddle of Sappho (A Kayda story, Elrod's new character).

    The Gen 2 stuff you can just start with the first one and start reading.

    Until you reach the Fall 2007 semester start, all of Morpheus' stuff is off campus.

    Before you start into the Fall 2007 stories (A Tenuous Blade, Imp 4: A Teacher's Tale, There's No Place Like Poe) you should catch up on JG's Ashes and Steel, The Book of Darwin, Small Mercies, Murphy's Law's of Whateley, and Blood Brother Blood Sister. They catch the Outcasts up to Fall 2007.
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    7 years 8 months ago #7 by Anne
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    • I'm lazy, and the search engine here doesn't always seem to work well for me. Any way, what I would like is a set of links that would lead me to these stories and have the parts linked at the end, so that instead of having to go back to my search at the end of part one I could just click on a link to part two, for example.:pinch:
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    7 years 8 months ago #8 by Kristin Darken
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    • Anne wrote: Hey we need a :hot: emoticon for Kristin and people who are enduring a hot summer...


    Why yes... yes we do! :toohot:
    Fate guard you and grant you a Light to brighten your Way.
    7 years 8 months ago #9 by Kristin Darken
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    • Anne wrote: what I would like is a set of links that would lead me to these stories and have the parts linked at the end, so that instead of having to go back to my search at the end of part one I could just click on a link to part two, for example.

    It's doable. The down side of it, though, is that then parts of a story are just that.... parts. Not separate articles/content of their own. So we lose the ability to track them on their own as unique stories... they would only be parts filed under a 'header' article or story.
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    7 years 8 months ago #10 by Valentine
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    • Anne wrote: I'm lazy, and the search engine here doesn't always seem to work well for me. Any way, what I would like is a set of links that would lead me to these stories and have the parts linked at the end, so that instead of having to go back to my search at the end of part one I could just click on a link to part two, for example.:pinch:
    Hey we need a :hot: emoticon for Kristin and people who are enduring a hot summer...



    If you click on the stories page and sort either by title or author, the stories should be all together. Then if you open one chapter in a new tab, you can jump right back to the sorted tab and open the next chapter.

    :toohot:
    Don't Drick and Drive.
    7 years 8 months ago #11 by Anne
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    • Part of my frustration is that for example I just clicked on the tag cloud on the left side of the page for items tagged Gen 2 year 1. There are 14 items so tagged. This is barely what has been posted in the last 30 days. I know the team here is busy and working hard to keep this site so interesting, so I'll just keep plugging away at this. Some of the old tags entirely disappeared when the new tagging system was initiated which means I suppose, that the whole site has to be retagged. I wonder, is there anything we can do to help the effort?
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    7 years 8 months ago #12 by Valentine
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    • Anne wrote: Part of my frustration is that for example I just clicked on the tag cloud on the left side of the page for items tagged Gen 2 year 1. There are 14 items so tagged. This is barely what has been posted in the last 30 days. I know the team here is busy and working hard to keep this site so interesting, so I'll just keep plugging away at this. Some of the old tags entirely disappeared when the new tagging system was initiated which means I suppose, that the whole site has to be retagged. I wonder, is there anything we can do to help the effort?


    While that is an incomplete list of Gen 2 Year 1 stories, it is all the Gen 2 Year 1 stories that have been posted since early March this year. There are 46 stories in Gen 2.
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    7 years 8 months ago #13 by Phoenix Spiritus
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    • Yeah the new tagging system over-rode the old system, but since the new tagging system lets any of the authors create new tags on the fly, rather then having to get Kristin to create them all, its all good.

    Problem with how slow tagging the site is going is that only a few of us are doing it, and well, I had a couple of Hank stories reach out and make me write them so I got distracted.

    Yes, all the stories need to be re-tagged, as much as the older stories using the white background section break need to have them all replaced with brown background section breaks.

    I know this, unfortunately they are not easy to fix with an iPad so i need to be in the mood to setup my laptop at home and use it in order to fix things … and works been busy for me.
    7 years 8 months ago #14 by Kristin Darken
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    • Comments like these make me want to remove the tag cloud until I have time to finish tagging all the stories...
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    7 years 8 months ago #15 by Rose Bunny
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    • Kristin Darken wrote: Comments like these make me want to remove the tag cloud until I have time to finish tagging all the stories...

    Gives Kristen a hug and a coupon for free large fries with any soft drink purchase at McDonalds.
    Don't let it get you down. We appreciate your hard work.
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    7 years 8 months ago #16 by elrodw
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    • If I won a large lottery, there'd be a pile of money for authors and staff so that when things like this come up and frustrate our people (like Kristin), they could just roll in the fresh piles of bills and say "f it - I'm getting paid!"
    Never give up, Never surrender! Captain Peter Quincy Taggert
    7 years 8 months ago #17 by Kristin Darken
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    • *nodnod* And that's probably where some of my grumpiness is coming from this morning. The summer gig I'm doing this year pays less this year than it did five or six years ago when I last took a job with the company in question and its less than 40 hrs and not consistently a full week's work. So on show weeks, I'm only making about 80% of what I got per week the last time I worked with them... and on the rehearsal weeks, I'm only getting about 20% of what I was expecting. So, in general, I'm trying to get through the summer with somewhere around half the income I was expecting... in theory, I'd be making about 40% more if I'd just gone on unemployment for the summer.

    So I'm a little more stressed than I would like to be and while I'm as eager to have a working Tag system as everyone else, it's been explained. I've already put in... a LOT... of time just reworking the site and content system so that tags will even work. It's just a matter of time to get all of it tagged...

    But honestly... there ARE other ways of finding stories. The tag cloud is just there for fun and the off chance that you somehow missed something along the way and see it listed in the cloud and check it out. Anyone actually reading stories should either be going through the story collection by the release order ( sorted by publication date) or by the recommended wiki reading list as shown in the wiki.

    I sometimes wonder if people think the only way to stories is by the Sidebar shortcut panels to the most recent content.
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    7 years 8 months ago - 7 years 8 months ago #18 by Malady
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    • Hmm... At 100% Zoom, on my screen, I have blank space to the side of the avatars that don't have ads... Could that space be monetized?

    Although, the existence of that space requires pages be long enough. Which full (20 post?) forum pages are, and so are most (all?) stories.
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    My Patreon. But, support the Crystal Hall 1st?
    Last Edit: 7 years 8 months ago by Malady.
    7 years 8 months ago #19 by Kristin Darken
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    • Google ads doesn't allow you to have more than 3 large ads. Plus that thing at the bottom. In fact, the only reason I can have the three we DO have is because I'm using fully responsive ads. ie, they're self-regulating. If two of them jump to the larger size, the third automatically loads a smaller one.

    As to sidebars further down? The only real estate that tis worth anything on a web site is what is visible when the page loads. If you have to scroll for it, its worth less. Thus, the Google ads are pushed to the tops.

    Now... I 'could' use Project Wonderful ads instead of Google. But PW requires people to bid on site ad locations... which generally means, unless you're a well known market for their product; your average site gets generic/bulk ads (or none at all) in various locations. Google ads cost a bit more. That means the few clickthroughs that we do get actually pay something 24/7 instead of having them worth 1/100 of a penny except for the one hour that someone puts a decent bid in for.
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    7 years 8 months ago #20 by Anne
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    • Believe it or not I get lots of null results for titles. Tried to search for Kodiak in Winter, got lots of text references to any of the words in the phrase, got none of the pieces with that as a title. I really am trying not to complain too much. But if I who have read most of the pieces on the site have trouble with finding stories after they either go off right side or are old stories then I know that newbies are having even more trouble with the site.
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    7 years 8 months ago #21 by Phoenix Spiritus
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    • Hi Anne,

    I Know you're not trying to complain, but you're pressing on a sore. We didn't plan on being such a mess, creating this new site was forced on us when we got targeted by hackers and the old site was hacked like three times in a single month.

    This site was set up in emergency circumstances as quickly as we could, and the first priority was getting forums working and just migrating more then a thousand stories to it.

    Yes its a mess at the moment, we know, we only just got the tagging working in a way we like, and we've only just got the back end story writing nd publishing working in the way we like (like in the last month). We are well aware that we now need to go through an re-tag and re-edit all our stories, but there are like a thousand of them! It took us something like 6 months last time when we were migrating them into this site, its going to be a similar timeframe before we can get back through them and fix all this.

    In the meantime, the working method is to use the Stories category on the top menu bar, then select which generation you want to read from the left menu bar, and then filter by author, or alternatively just click the published date column to organise stories and start reading from the last story you remember.

    Apologies for this, but we are still in the process of cleaning up here, and the people doing this are the authors who are also trying to make sure that a steady stream of stories keeps getting published.
    7 years 8 months ago #22 by Anne
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    • I really do appreciate the hard work everyone is putting into the site. As someone else noted, If I were to come upon a large pile of money at least some of it would end up here. Good fiction like this deserves to be supported.
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    7 years 8 months ago #23 by null0trooper
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    • Anne wrote: Believe it or not I get lots of null results for titles. Tried to search for Kodiak in Winter, got lots of text references to any of the words in the phrase, got none of the pieces with that as a title.


    TBH, most site searches tend to be "meh". The experts at providing that service as quickly and effectively as the online search engines are the companies that make them.

    For some items, I go to Google (because the search engines do index the site), where a search for "Kodiak in Winter whateley" retrieves the story as the first hit, and the Wiki article as the second, The work put into both keeping a clean organization for the stories and into the wiki do help out a lot and are valuable. There's just not a lot of available manpower for it.
    Forum-posted ideas are freely adoptable.

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    7 years 8 months ago #24 by Kristin Darken
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    • And again, the means by which it sounds you are going about it is 'the hard way'. To say the least. Try this instead:

    1. Click on the Main Menu button for STORIES
    2. Click on the Left Sidebar Menu for ORIGINAL TIMELINE
    3. Look at the top right of the center section for a drop down menu of how many stories listed per page. Change that to 50 or 100.
    4. Find the header row for the table labeled: TITLE. Click on that once to sort alphabetically by story title.
    5. Scan through stories - note that its not listed with the "A"'s meaning you have the title wrong, try K's for just Kodiak in Winter. Find its not there... try T for The and discover it listed under "The Kodiak in Winter" the correct title. This would be why a search engine wouldn't find it for you... as there is no 'grouping' of words of "a kodiak in winter" ... while maybe a search for 'kodiak winter' might have worked. either way, you don't need the search engine because you have a sortable table.
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