Arctic Light

From snickfic:

The No-Frills Friending Meme, 2023 edition

Spooky season is upon us, the weather is turning gray and wet (or sunny and hot, depending on your hemisphere), and I think it's time for a friending meme. Come meet new people! (Re)Populate your DW circle!

... move the comment button back to the other side? Just when I'd gotten used it on the left?

AAAAAAA.

I'm currently in the process of a much-needed tag overhaul for my journal. As you might expect, in a journal I've had since 2006 (and in which I only haphazardly used to tag things, especially in the early days) my tags are a mess. The fanfic ones, at least, are fairly well-organized and consistent, but I had a bunch of tags that were vague or weirdly worded or duplicates (e.g. both a "vids" and a "songvids" tag, which are now merged under "fanvids"; tags for "my books", "books by me", "fiction by me", "pro fiction by me", etc). I had a lot of tags that really needed top-level tags, so now, for example, my tags for separate book series and authors are sorted under a top-level books tag (e.g. "books:dresden files" instead of being tagged random variations like "dresden_files" and whatnot). The book posts could still use another pass for better and more consistent sorting, because they're mostly just tagged under the top-level "books" tag and/or a variety of inconsistently-worded series and author tags, but I don't have to do that right now.

I've known that I needed to do this for awhile, but the main reason why I've dragged my feet for so long was because of the dreadful thought of organizing 400+ tags on both my DW and LJ to match. I've settled that in favor of just not redoing the tags on the LJ side. Yes, it means they will now be out of sync, and a number of tags on LJ will now have EVEN MORE duplicates due to future crossposts, making it harder to find things.

But aside from not really wanting to hassle with it, I feel like the main function of the LJ journal is as an archive at this point anyway. And some of my old tags are interesting snapshots in time, of my thought processes or of changing terminology, like the way I used to tag with "ficathon" what we now call fandom exchanges. So keeping all the old tags feels more appropriate. Anyway, I don't think I could ever remember all the changes and merges to make them sync up completely even if I tried.

(I am going to have to remember not to import tags if I ever run another import from LJ -- something I haven't done in a number of years, and probably won't, but that'd screw my DW tags all to hell. So I'm basically making a note of that here to remind myself not to.)

So yeah, behold my new and better-organized tag page! At least, organized to the extent that it is. A number of the more random and rarely-used tags are never going to get top-level categories, and I'm still figuring out how to categorize some things - I think the one I'm most torn about right now is the variety of tags I used to use for short fic - "commentfic", "promptfic", "prompts", "vignette", etc. Right now I've got it as "fanfic:promptfic" and "challenge:prompts" (also "fanfic:shortfic" for the extremely outdated "vignette" tag that I don't think I've used since 2008). But I think some of my new tags will also need to be edited and perhaps reconsidered as I put them into practice and find out whether they're easy to use and intuitive enough for me to remember them.

Does anyone know if there is a way to force a community to load comment pages in the default DW style (the pink-on-gray one) unless the user's style overrides it? That is, individual journals can be set to have "light" comment pages instead of the main journal style; you do it from the "site skins" section of the settings. But when I switch to any of my communities, the "site skins" options vanish.

(The reason why I want to do it is because I cannot find a community site scheme that doesn't produce what are, to my eyes, cluttered and hard-to-read comment pages, especially for people unfamiliar with DW. The pink one isn't perfect, but it's far and away less cluttered and easier to figure out the comment nesting. WHY CAN YOU NOT F*CKING DO THIS.)

ETA: While I'm at it, why is it so incredibly hard to keep the DW journal site style page from snapping back to your main journal without telling you it's done so? Is that a browser issue on my end, or something that happens to other people? At least this time I only managed to change my tagline to that of the community I was editing. Typically I end up changing my entire site style every time I try to edit a community, because it WON'T TELL YOU - it's just like "yep, still working as [community name]" and then changes your entire journal. >___> My least favorite thing about DW is probably the a;skjf;ldsj;lad;; community management, in general.

ETA2: Thank you so much to ratcreature for telling me how - I was completely wrong about which part of the settings it was in (it's actually the ticky box in the above link that says to use the chosen style instead of the site style, which is ticked by default, but if you untick it, the pages show up exactly as I want them). For some reason I never parsed that phrasing as doing what it actually does.

After tossing around the idea of doing an original fic commentfest at DW in the comments to the last post - I went and made one! If you don't have a DW journal, you can comment anonymously or with OpenID. I also have some invite codes if you want one.

(Shiny new icon is made by china_shop, who has more of them here!)

three_weeks_for_dw is a 3-week period at the end of April/beginning of May to encourage content-posting on DW. (Here's an explanation.) I was thinking about doing something for it this year, since I still post my (relatively infrequent) locked posts to LJ only and a lot of the fannish places where I play are on LJ; it seems fair to do a little DW-only stuff too, since I like both places. But, yeah, no time. However, here are some currently ongoing multifandom DW commentfic fests that are Relevant To My Interests:

- The People With Disabilities Being Awesome Commentfic Fest hosted by terajk (now with an index of prompts on Delicious). Come on people, leave me some Highlander prompts so I don't have to resort to answering my own. *g* Thus far, I have written this untitled commentfic (though it grew to about 1400 words, not so much of a commentfic after all) for the prompt "Dresden Files - Michael Carpenter - 'Get away from my children'".

- Friendship Fic Comment Fest at littlegreen42. NEEDS MORE PROMPTS. :D (Highlander? Stargate? A:tLA? :D?)

- Asexy Fanworks Comment Meme at asexual_fandom.


And here are a few that might be relevant to my flist's interests:

- Female Trope Character Fest at such_heights.

- Transfic Mini Fest hosted by kanata.

- livrelibre has a big list of commentfic fests with several that I didn't know about.

- ETA: And also the fantastically awesome 3W4DW anime/manga/manhwa/manhua drabblefest hosted by littlebutfierce! SO MANY FESTS I CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THEM ALL.


These bite-sized fic fests are great for me right now, because I really can't spare the time to sit down and write anything long, but having all these prompts available is giving me oodles of inspiration to scribble off something short.

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/341576.html with comments.

Yesterday's Fun Spring Task (TM) was the semi-annual mucking-out of the chicken coop. Naturally certain members of the household wished to lend a hand.

Dog: oooOOOOOooo! Can I help?

Me: Nope, got it covered, thanks.

Dog: But I can really be useful! See! And, wow, this stuff smells *awesome*.

Me: OH GOD! I HAVE TO LIVE WITH YOU!

Dog: ... dude, have you tried this?

Me: *gags* *looks for garden hose*

In other news ... ( Lots of noodling about Dreamwidth )

Based on the number of "... what is Dreamwidth?" answers to the poll in my last post, here is a quick overview. (As I understand it, anyway; I have a number of the people who are involved and/or enthusiastic backers of the site on my f'list, but I'm not personally involved with it. Please correct me if I pass along misinformation!)

- Dreamwidth is a new journaling/blogging site that will be opening up this summer. It's planned to be fandom-friendly (edit: but not exclusively fannish) and fairly small, at least at first. You will need to either buy an account or get an invite code from an existing user to get in, like LJ used to be. (Paid accounts start at $3/month, and you can let your account lapse to a free account later if you like.)

- Here is a list of features that are different from LJ (discovered via foxfirefey)

- Here is a roundup of posts by people who are planning on switching from LJ (link from rydra_wong)

- Here is Dreamwidth's About/FAQ page (still in beta itself) with sundry informative links.

The answers to the poll in my earlier post indicate that (at least around these parts) most people who are opening DW accounts will still be cross-posting to LJ, and many people won't be moving at all, at least not until things shake out a bit. One of the nice things about Dreamwidth is that, from what I can see, it's being designed so that it will be easy to use with other blogging sites -- i.e. you can have an LJ and still participate easily in DW discussions, be friended by people on DW, etc., and it works very smoothly with Open ID.

First, before I type anything else - I just realized that I never thanked the people who nominated me for Stargate fan awards. So ... THANK YOU, wonderful people! I'm so sorry it took me so long to say so! *bows in your general direction*

Anyway, moving on ... Dreamwidth (new fandom-friendly journaling platform) has announced their open beta dates (accounts will be available April 30).

[Poll #1374680]

( Rambling and blather about fandom under the cut )