Galleries on Anna Plays Skyrim are temporarily broken

[annathepiper]

Y’all, I had to downgrade the subscription plan I’m using on FooGallery, the plugin that manages to my screenshot galleries. The reason for this is, I’m still unemployed, and my unemployment benefits run out in January. So Dara and I had to start instituting some cost-cutting measures, and one of them was the subscription I’m paying for FooGallery.

I did not eliminate FooGallery completely from this site, but I downgraded to the cheapest option available for use on 5 sites.

But here’s the problem: I had forgotten that that tier of subscription removes a core piece of functionality I was using. Namely, creating galleries that read files directly off my server file structure and use a JSON file to get the metadata for them. I’d started using this functionality, longtime readers of this blog may recall, because I started running into issues with FooGallery being able to handle the huge media library this site uses by definition.

Now, though, I’m having to punt back to that previous functionality. Which is requiring me to manually recreate every single screenshot gallery from Merawen’s playthrough forward.

This, as you might imagine, is tedious as fuck. But it’s doable. It’ll just take me a while to fix.

Until I’m done with that, I’m putting a temporary hold on putting up new playthrough posts. I have not lost any actual screenshots or their associated data, but I will need to recreate all the galleries, and I want to do it in the same order they were originally created in. Which means not making any new galleries until that’s done.

And that by extension also means not putting up any new playthrough posts for a bit, just because I don’t want to put up posts and then forget which ones are missing their screenshots. It’ll be easier on me organization-wise if I do it this way.

One more thing: this does also raise the risk of my reproducing the earlier behavior of FooGallery breaking if I try to make it handle too large of a media library in WordPress. I’m going to try to fix this problem by seeing if I can save out a bunch of these files in smaller sizes, and maybe reduce the load on the library. Plus, I know the plugin’s gone through a bunch of revision since the last time I saw that issue. So the issue may or may not repro anyway.

I will post an all clear when I’ve fixed all the galleries and regular playthrough posts can resume.

Read more on Anna Plays Skyrim.

Comments

[tiggymalvern]

I'm so sorry you're in that situation, I hadn't realised you're still out of work. The computing industry situation sucks right now. My SO had to go job-hunting over the summer, and every single publicly-owned company has a hiring freeze. He had so many people he made inquiries with tell him, 'We'd love to hire you, but we're not allowed to right now.' It's SO stupid that companies won't hire good people because the only thing the CEO cares about apparently is the short term opinion of the shareholders, not the long term good of the company.

I really hope you're able to find something soon ::hugs::

[annathepiper]

Thanks. Yeah, this has definitely been one of my harder job hunts ever. :/

It's not the longest I've been unemployed; Dara and I looked at my resume and saw two different stretches where I was out of work for about 11 months. But our budget's going to get really tight if this persists to January.

[tiggymalvern]

The SO says have you applied to Rec Room? That's where he ended up working and he says they hire above average numbers of women.

https://recroom.com/careers

He says he'd be willing to look over your resume and forward it to the right people, because frequently who you know is how you get hired. And also neither of us know your full legal name that you work under, only your pen name XD

[annathepiper]

I don't see any QA positions on that Careers link, unfortunately. :/

If your SO would like a copy of my resume anyway to send around internally I will of course be happy to provide it. Contact me at annathepiper AT fastmail DOT com with an email address I can send it to.

[tiggymalvern]

He says screw what the careers page says, send them your resume and get your name in there anyway. That's what he does. He says just do that for every company, it costs you nothing.

[annathepiper]

All due respect to your SO, but what this would cost me is time, and a credibility hit if I send them a resume for a skillset they're not even actually hiring for. It makes me come across as somebody who clearly can't even read their Careers page if I submit an SDET resume and they're not even hiring SDETs.

It also costs them the time to look at my resume and realize "who the hell is this person, we're not hiring QA right now, why is she bothering?" And I'd get a form letter to the effect of "thank you for submitting your resume, but we're not hiring for QA right now, we will keep you in mind if we open a QA position"... by which they mean, my resume will go straight into the bin. Because I'll have established myself as someone who didn't take the trouble to even spotcheck what they're hiring for before I threw my resume at them.

[annathepiper]

P.S. Don't get me wrong, if this strategy has worked for your SO then great, I'm happy for him. But in my experience, the only situation that warrants my throwing a resume at a company that has no publicly posted job matching my skillset is if I hear from someone at that company that they have a position opening up that isn't posted yet, and maybe I have an opportunity to get my resume in early. In which case I'll want to know specific people I can send my resume to. Hence my asking for a point of contact.

But that is not the same situation as just throwing my resume at a random company on the off chance that they might have a QA job at some point in the future.

[tiggymalvern]

I know nothing, I'm only passing things along. I'm fortunate that I've always been in a position where demand exceeds supply, so job interviews are more about me interviewing them to see if I want to work there. Tom applied to Rec Room for a position that required Unity and C sharp, neither of which he knew, but they hired him because he knew multiple languages and was obviously capable of learning more. So now he's learning them.

[annathepiper]

Is he a dev? That gives rather more leeway for that kind of thing, I think.