After my brief break from bingo reading, I finished The Ex Hex for my Read by Candlelight or Flashlight, and 2 short stories from my Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries omnibus for my Locked Room square.
That means: CARD BLACKOUT! I’m done!
I didn’t – really didn’t – think I’d black out my card this year, because I’ve been in a year+ long slump. But I made one significant change this year: I didn’t plan a single read, other than holding off on books I wanted to read until bingo started. As much as I love the idea of book lists, and I love the activity of digging through my books to create these lists, it turns out I really hate being held to them, and it was killing my game enthusiasm.
It also helped, it’s true, that I’ve been on a rather long UF reading streak. 🙂
Now it’s just about waiting on the calls for the bingos to start rolling in.
Squares on my card that have been called: (this list is getting long so I’m putting it in a spoiler tag)
View Spoiler »
Accumulative reading table with links to reviews below the card.
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The spreadsheet:
| Bingo Square | Date Called | Book Title | Date Read | |
| Row #1 | ||||
| X | Mad Scientists and Evil Geniuses | Sep. 7 | Naked Brunch | Aug. 30 |
| X | Stone Cold Horror/Creepy Carnival | Sep. 29 | Wild Ride | Sep. 1 |
| X | Vintage Mystery | Sep. 23 | The Filigree Ball | Sep. 16 |
| X | Dem Bones | Oct. 2 | Independent Bones | Sep. 14 |
| Read by Candlelight/Flashlight | The Ex Hex | Oct. 4 | ||
| Row #2 | ||||
| Murder Most Foul | Charleston Green | Sep. 18 | ||
| Lethal Games | No Nest for the Wicket | Sep. 1 | ||
| Spellbound | The Once and Future Witches | Aug. 31 | ||
| X | Black Cat | Sep. 15 | Thornyhold | Sep. 13 |
| Relics and Curiosities | On the Edge | Sep. 8 | ||
| Row #3 | ||||
| Shifters | Naked Brunch | Aug. 30 | ||
| Terror in a Small Town | Agnes and the Hitman | Sep. 3 | ||
| X | FREE SPACE | Like a Charm | Sep. 7 | |
| Psych / Highway to Hell | Archive of the Forgotten | Sep. 3 | ||
| X | Truly Terrifying | Oct. 1 | The Cannonball Tree Mystery | Sep. 5 |
| Row #4 | ||||
| X | Noir | Sep. 24 | The Big Over Easy | Sep. 22 |
| X | Genre: Mystery | Oct. 5 | The Alchemist’s Illusion | Sep. 2 |
| Country House Mystery | Murder Most Fair | Sep. 16 | ||
| X | Tropical Terror | Sep. 4 | The Mimosa Tree Mystery | Sep. 4 |
| X | Locked Room Mystery | Sep. 28 | Black Lizard’s Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries | Oct. 5 |
| Row #5 | ||||
| Splatter | Carpe Jugulum | Sep. 9 | ||
| Cryptozoologist | Bayou Moon | Sep. 11 | ||
| X | Plague and Disease | Scourged | Sep. 3 | |
| In the Dark, Dark Woods | Paper & Blood | Sep. 12 | ||
| X | Gallows Humor | Sep. 25 | Murder Most Fowl | Sep. 10 |
| Wild Card Spell | |
| Amplification Spell | |
| Bingo Flip Spell | |
| Cell Conversion Spell | |
| Transfiguration Spell | |
| Double Trouble Spell |
Congrats on the blackout!
Thanks! 🙂
Btw, it occurs to me that we‘ll have to tell people in „the new place“ how to create spoiler tags on WP …
The only way I know how to use spoiler tags is with the UBB plug-in. (Which I think we’ll have on the ‘new place’) – but how do you do it?
I don‘t, at the moment, because IF there are spoilers in my reviews they literally are half the review or more, so I just put a general warning in bold print at the top. But I remember someone in the early days of BL came up with a handy piece of (easily-applicable) code which I think I saved for future reference back then. Will have to go and dig.
Does the UBB spoiler tag rely on JS?
I’m not sure how it works – it’s in a drop down menu in the classic editor toolbar (and I’m sure it’s somewhere in block editor). I popup window shows up and you put all your spoiler stuff in there, and it auto-magically puts the spoiler in the post. I’d have to dig through the code (which now I’m going to do because you’ve got me curious) to see if I can tell how it’s done.
Interesting – it’s just CSS from the look of the code. Did now know CSS could do that (although I’m not sure there isn’t anything CSS can’t do, except onClick).
Yes, I just saw that too! 🙂
It just might be CSS — I just had a brief look at the HTML element. At least the HTML span element has CSS “hooks” (classes: view / hide spoiler; cursor: pointer), and there’s a UBB css stylesheet in the header which includes properties for the spoiler tag.
Here’s the link for the spoiler tags instructions:
http://pagefault.booklikes.com/post/457427/diy-spoilertags-
It still works, I checked. The screen shots are gone, but the separate link for the JS code that’s part of the instructions still works, too:
https://pastebin.com/2wtqpntj
I have no idea how one could implement JS in a WP environment without editing the base files.
Carly (pagefault / bookaneer) mentions in the comments on her post “inserting the Js into the HTML of the post” … no idea what exactly she means, but just possibly via “style” definitions?
Maybe in the < head > part of the page – but I’ve not seen where we have access to the header of the html – I think most of the pages are built dynamically, so we’d have to edit the template pages. Which is intimidating.
It is. Carly‘s comment was about the html coding field in the drafting area for „regular“ BL posts — where „style“ is the only way I can think of smuggling in JS. If it works for CSS properties, arguably it should work for JS, too … though I find even that process daunting, never mind trying to access the head section, or the area between head and body (which is where Carly‘s BL instructions say that bit of code needed to go).
Oh! I just remembered something else.
Eons ago, when I was creating my Shakespeare site, I copied a nifty bit of code from a CSS guru’s online manual that showed html elements (images, text spans / paragraphs) only on “hover” and had them set at width / height 0px for all other display options.
This was way back in the internet Stone Age (aka the era of Internet Explorer); it worked without self-referential links only for Firefox and Opera — for IE I found I had to include self-referential links (not “img src” but honest-to-God “href” wrapped around the images — for all practical purposes, a sort of pre-JS version of “onClick”), which of course made the whole thing clunky as heck in terms of code.
But if this worked (essentially) as a matter of “pure” CSS for images and bits of text even then, arguably it should still work for spoiler text bits now?
Theoretically; although some functions may have become deprecated over time.
Ultimately, I think Christine is going to want the UBB/Book Database plug ins, which will make alternative spoiler solutions not as urgent. Even though the two aren’t meant to work together, they do have a certain amount of cross-over which is useful, so I’ve told her I’d pay for one and I think she said she was willing pay for the other, at least for the first year.
If you guys want me to pitch in for either or both, do let me know!
Oh we’ll definitely welcome your assistance. 🙂