Raccoon in Space!
Welcome to 2014! Today, Disney/Marvel released the first official publicity photo from the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy film, and it features the clearest view yet of Rocket Raccoon that you don’t have to still-frame to get. They also put out the following synopsis for the movie: “An action-packed epic space adventure, Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits — Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon, Groot, a tree-like humanoid, the deadly and enigmatic Gamora, and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Peter discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand — with the galaxy’s fate in the balance.” Those of you who have followed the Guardians comic book may recall that Rocket Raccoon develops a close bond with Groot the tree-guy through the series. We’ll see what happens here. Guardians is blasting off in theaters this August.
image c. 2014 Marvel Productions
About the author
Mink (Rod O’Riley) — read stories — contact (login required)a Mink from Garden Grove, California, interested in music
Ed-otter of In-Fur-Nation. Former Califur programming director. Co-founder of ConFurence.
Comments
I've been in a passive/aggressive tag war with GreenReaper about "Guardians of the Galaxy" as a tag for, well, since about this time last year; I guess the "Rocket Raccoon" tag is a compromise that worked.
I was not aware that this was an issue . . . at least, I do not recall deliberately removing such a tag. I added 'Rocket Raccoon' to this and other stories since he has been the Guardian most highlighted in our coverage - probably because he's the one our readers care about the most. Both would be accurate tags. I generally only add them if I think they have worth because, well, we have a lot already and adding more may slow tag lookup and clutter articles.
Apparently I got the spelling wrong here, though. It's fixed now.
Well, where the hell did all my "Guardian of the Galaxy" tags go, then? Was I being passive/aggressive at some bit of code?
I usually try to not add tags myself unless I know I'll be using it; since there was a movie coming up, that's why I figured this one was okay (this is a tag, whether "Guardians of the Galaxy" or "Rocket Raccoon", people will want in a while). You also seemed to nix a lot of tags on the Previews, but I assumed that was the old Newsbytes problem, so I kept it down to ten, though "Guardians of the Galaxy" was always there because passive/aggressive and it usually made the top 100 sellers of the month, so it was "above the fold". Funny thing, I actually figured I would try "Rocket Raccoon" next time, but then my bank account went tits up and I went into a funk, so I haven't done much with comics for a while.
That being said, I always figured it was a one-sided "war," and you should have been adding quotes around the word yourself in the original post; at most I thought you were thinking "why don't he pay attention" and then always reminding yourself "I should email him or something so I don't have to do this next time" and then you forgot about it like ten seconds later because, seriously, who thinks about tags for more than ten seconds at a time (I just noticed this because you adding the tags sent me like 10 emails at once).
It's possible that I removed the tag, but I don't recall doing so, certainly not consistently. I'd typically only remove one I thought would be unlikely to be useful for readers - usually because it'll only ever be applied to one or two stories. Obviously, if I'm doing this several times, that's not the case.
Irrelevance to furry might be a trigger, but I've had no problem with your use of X-Men - sure, it's shorter, but size isn't a huge factor. More tags help syndication, too; they're reported as keywords to Google News, etc.
Dealing with lots of relevant tags is an issue I'd prefer to solve technically, e.g. by having a height-limited or expandable tag field on the front page.
Unfortunately I've not used the revisions feature consistently on your stories. However, for this piece, it suggests that it was submitted without a "Guardians of the Galaxy" tag. (I could have removed the tag before making a new revision, but I don't think I would have - I tick that box on my initial edit if I'm going to use it at all.)
Adding tags through the tag box is somewhat unreliable. I always refresh after doing so, just to make sure it went on properly. Perhaps this indicates a more general technical issue with tags.
For In-Fur-Nation posts, I usually try and avoid really really specific tags, such as the name of a work or a particular character. Usually it's because I assume that's not what people are searching for. I want to cast a wider net so I use rather broad tags, as you can see.
I guess I'm more of a e621 type of guy; tag just about literally everything.
But then I kept breaking the "related stories" thing on here, so I stopped.
I think my "disappearing tags" thing may have more to do with copy and pasting them over, or lack thereof. I don't even use the "add tag" box on the published or saved page; I write down a list on my Word document before I even submit, and copy that over and put it in the box on the submission page.
That should work. Perhaps there is a character limit. Check next time to see whether it got them all!
Related stories uses a relatively simple algorithm - it takes the most recently created tag based on the internal tag ID and lists all stories which use it from latest to earliest, then goes onto the next tag. This is based on the theory that the most recently-created tag is likely to be a) the most specific, and b) used on the fewest articles.
At least, that's how it's meant to work. In fact, it picked CGI as the term to use here because it was doing a text-based sort rather than a numeric sort, in which 937 (CGI) was higher than 3243 (Rocket Raccoon). It took a while to fix this but I think it's done. Explains why things weren't always that related! (Also, it'll now let feed items like this show up as related stories.)
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