Cimorene

At the end of a Very Long Post about the coming EU legislation, Article 13, @limblogs posited that fandom is going to have to build our next platform ourselves. She encouraged programmers and coders to jump in and posted a few links and followed up in a more posts. (On the topic of the next fannish platform migration, I recommend following @limblogs if you’re curious/tech savvy, or @cesperanza perhaps if you find that going over your head and want updates that won’t.)

I’m not exactly the target audience (nothing beyond CSS and basic linux stuff) but there were some links marked easier to understand and little in the way of summary, so I read it all to gather what I could. This is what it looks like to me:
( Read more... )

I was thinking the other day about how I have pared down the uses to which I subject this, my main blog! When I was 19 or 20, sometimes I'd make up to 17 posts a day. I used to post to livejournal:

★ Links to stories I really liked as I read them; today I post these to cimness via bookmarklet as I go.

Before Delicious, I kept an html file open at all times in which I put other recs in the order I read them, writing them up as I went, and every month or so I'd sort them by fandom and upload the new ones to the frontpage of my recs site, then go through and individually add them to the alphabetized fandom pages. Delicious has made my life a lot better.

★ Amusing quotes from badfic as I read it; today I save these and post them in daily batches of five.

★ Links to political & interesting news items, and blog posts from other sites; today I post these to cimness as I go (though today there are more of them, since I didn't follow Cake Wrecks, FailBlog, I Can Has Cheezburger, or the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks in 2002).

★ Beautiful images I stumbled across; today I post these to cimness (along with lots, lots more images).

★ Quotes from whatever book I was reading that I particularly loved; today I post these to cimness.

★ Random thoughts as they crossed my mind; today I post these to cimness, and when I used to, even as a teenie, occasionally feel constrained not to post every thought, that's actually the whole point of Twitter, which is nice.

In fact, of all the things I used to post, the only ones that remain are

★ Rants and essays and thoughts about fandom, and

★ Diary-like recollections from my life.

Now I also post organized sets of plebefic headers and shoes regularly, but I didn't start those until later.

In conclusion: ten years have brought wondrous advances to the world of blogging technology! Almost all of these acts of posting are a lot easier now than they were then, too. The only thing that isn't is posting to Dreamwidth, because I don't have an awesome Linux client for it to compare with Semagic back in the day (though I saw someone posting about a new one recently, I didn't feel up to investigating it).

I just want to point out that after removing the undeclared gender option after all (itself after saying they weren't going to) and beginning to use pop-up ads with malware, last night (apparently it was some weeks ago, but took a while to spot) LJ accidentally (I mean, they claim, but I believe them) added scripts that redirect all outbound links to certain business sites which add their referrer information at the expense of accidentally stripping everyone else's. After a few hours of people complaining, they got to work removing the code again and explained themselves, so that should all be over now, although I'm sure I'll see the rest of fandom discovering the old news without noticing the ETAs for a week.

Look, sure, LJ's been falling down and getting back up for years, ever since it stopped being a garage project and became a business, and that is normal. Yes, businesses want to make money, and for years I was the first cynic to eyeroll and say "What did you expect?" every time it happened. The fact that we expect businesses to try to screw us over if they can, and the fact that in LJ's case they frequently didn't even mean to screw up, doesn't mean we should just sit back and do nothing about it. After a certain point I, at least, get disgusted enough to walk away. To use a real-world business metaphor, I'd rather go a bit out of my way to buy a service from someone who isn't known to frequently, for example, destroy one's dry-cleaning or give one the wrong order out of incompetence. (This is why my dad and I stopped using Kinko's when I was a kid, and it actually was much less convenient to use the University printer - their business hours, for one thing. And their much smaller selection of paper. They were cheaper, though.)

I don't mind the ads - in fact I ignore them and can get rid of them easily - and I don't worry about malware because I'm running a reasonably secure Linux system. But that doesn't stop badly-designed ad scripts from screwing up the page loading on a regular basis, so that for example, the links on the page only work if I click my Readability style bookmarklet (I use eBook with medium margins) to strip the existing style before the page finishes loading all the way. And hey, ads don't piss me off in themselves - that's how the Internet pays for itself. On the other hand, malware and scripts that break the page (or the referrer link) do piss me off, because it's kind of nice, when people are trying to make money from other people's computer use, if they don't then make it impossible to keep using the computer. Seriously? You couldn't browser-test it? (And malware breaks your computer on purpose if you're running Windows and don't quite know what you're doing, and hey, it's ultimately my fault that my mother and clueless little sister sometimes visit livejournal, so, yeah, I'm pissed off.)

I've had three people in the past few weeks, one of them my wife, say they stopped using Dreamwidth because everyone they know wants to comment on LJ except me. My wife says she never gave them money in the first place (someone surprised her with a permanent account years ago), so she has nothing on her conscience. And look, I have people who keep commenting on my lj entries too, and am fortunate that the whole meta/media fandom circle with which I typically interact was the first one to move. It's too bad that I keep missing the comments on lj or getting them late because going to the lj site to read my flist there or check my comments is so practically and morally unpleasant. The thing is, if you keep using lj because other people are doing it, you're providing the content that lj is selling. You're part of the giant ball-and-chain anchoring fandom to lj. I don't want to be part of that. (I keep thinking about deleting all my content from lj, not that it would hurt them, but just because it irritates me to have it there. And to have to go there to answer comments on it.)

And I have Dreamwidth codes (seventeen of them), as does everyone I see on Dreamwidth, because the demand slowed down a long time before the supply did. At this point I have ceased to expect that anyone will ask for one, but there it is! I'll give one to anyone who isn't a spambot.

Last December I posted to advocate for ★ stars, & sect §, &asymp ≈, &infin ∞, &there4 ∴, and other math related symbols as replacement ♥ or bullets or just to spice up your journal text. But wait, there's more!

(format for all these codes is &# 9733 ;, without the spaces:)

Music:

9833 ♩
9834 ♪
9835 ♫
9836 ♬
9837 ♭
9838 ♮
9839 ♯

Tiaras and horses (aka chess):

♔ 9812
♕ 9813
♞ 9822


These symbols aren't safe for all browsers/OSes, but they will reportedly work with IE, Firefox, and Opera.

I'm going to move to Dreamwidth when it's possible mostly because of the more aggressive feature development, and the features they've already promised, like the separation of reading-list from people-who-can-read-your-locked-posts list.

There's also an element of Owning The Servers. That's the cry of the Organisation for Transformative works: "If only we owned the servers!", something that was borne in upon us here in fandom yet again just a few weeks ago when Scans Daily was TOSed and years worth of lively fannish community and data lost.

Yesterday metafandom carried synecdochic's announcement that the Open Beta period starts on April 30, and if I don't have an invite I'm going to buy an account then.

Dreamwidth will make it easy to move there, including a tool that imports your entire livejournal or insanejournal with comments. It won't import your friendslist (yet), but because of the two-pronged nature of their flist-replacement system, that's probably just as well. It should be easy to move to DW and continue interacting on lj, or to keep up both at once, but of course, the more of fandom that goes there, the better it will work; so I encourage you to check it out.

I also encourage everyone to check out zvi_likes_tv's lj - an amateur DW evangelist, she has a lot of information up, including how-tos and explanations.

Don't you get bored of the same bullet markers, scenebreak markers, etc? Look at all the fun little thingies you could sprinkle your stories and entries with instead! (Minus spaces obviously)

& #9733 ★ (This one isn't safe for all browsers and OSes)
& hearts; ♥
& spades; ♠
& clubs; ♣
& sect; §
& asymp; ≈
& sim; ∼
& curren; ¤
& crarr; ↵
& infin; ∞
& ne; ≠
& there4; ∴
& loz; ◊

More: HTML 4.0 refs @ Mozilla.org (Greek letters, extended characters, complete mathematical symbols, etc)

Body language has a lot of similarities across cultures, but the tone nuances of the written word... don't. In other words, you can't judge tone without cultural context of a grammatically correct but literally close translation - let alone an obviously inept one delivered by someone with an imperfect grasp of English. An expert translator can be trusted to fine-tune the finished translation to convey the same emotion, maybe, but not an ordinary double-fluent speaker.

For instance: whether short sentences signify impatience, whether strong directness signifies deliberate abrupt/rudeness, the appropriate level of circumlocution, weasel words and uncertainty markers to signify deference... these are cultural. They even vary minutely from one part of the United States to another.

But regardless of what emotions the leadership of SUP feels about me and my subculture, as long as their decisions are essentially rational and business-motivated, I don't care - even if they make mistakes sometimes, as I think, in the long term, they have this time.

pixxers has the most entertaining lj drama commentary so far:

I want to make clear that I don't expect all my fanfiction or all my communities or this journal to ever be deleted from livejournal, because I've never really written anything underage, although certainly it sucks for the people who like to.

I will not be making crossposts, nor setting up shop at alternate journalling services¹. However, in the event of mass livejournal outage, I will update cimorene111@journalfen.net, the journal I use for reading and commenting at fandom wank and related communities. There are no entries there now, but feel free to friend it if you're at journalfen, and to tell me your username so that I can friend you there:

[Poll #1032665]

I do not recommend JF, as I've said before, as a permanent LJ alternative, mainly because the poor servers are overworked and it tends to go down under the burden of heavy traffic. But since it's firmly in the control of fen, I think it makes sense to advocate it as a kind of base of operations for fannish communication in case of calamity; and the rest of the alternative journalling services seem to be rather splintering than uniting us. I also don't recommend it as an alternative to LJ's fic-archiving functions in fandom, but perhaps if we're lucky fanarchive will be able to come to our rescue there. LJ isn't really designed as a fic archive, anyway, and its character limits and frequently unreadable layouts make it less than ideal, though of course the comment feature has been a boon. (As always, my fiction and recs can be found at cimorene.net and waxjism.org - and I vastly prefer people read them there anyway.)

1. I own cimorene at gj and maybe at vox? But those are not for blogging purposes either - don't bother friending them!