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Happy birthday, DW!
I was planning to do some sort of thing to mark my ten-year DW-versary but I missed it a couple months ago, so let's all just celebrate together!
And paid accounts get more image hosting space, which I might actually use!
And also more icon slots, which I probably... won't. But I did go looking at what I currently have uploaded for the first time in a long, long time. I do still like most of those! And I could add more from indy comics and SF bookcovers I have more recently loved the art & characters in. (That's basically all I have, except some very bad home-made ones.)
I've considered finding a new indy-comic avatar and taking Commander Valentine off my default because it's been a long time since Tek Jansen fandom was a thing, but I still like the icon, and the less people know about Tek Jansen, the more she works as just ID'ing me rather than a fandom character (or, well, as ID'ing me, the character who hangs out in fandom) - I've been using her since before DW. (And I like Nick Fury a lot *more* than I did when I started using his red-haired expy in space as my avatar; he wasn't even officially Samuel Jackson yet back then!)
But. Can we talk about icons? Can I confess. I never really liked the culture of having a ton of icons and switching them on every comment. Like! I totally support those of you that do, and I think a really cool part of fan culture was lost when that stopped being a big part of fan communication, and if you love it, you do you!
But I ID people by their icons. Very strongly. So other people having a steady icon helps me remember who you are, especially if we haven't interacted a whole lot. Or your username is the same color as someone else's. (Yes, you all do look like your icons. Even those of you whose icons are inanimate or abstract. Especially those of you whose icons are inanimate or abstract. Yes, even if I've met you in person and you post lots of selfies. Sorry, I don't make the rules.) Switching icons a lot doesn't change this, it just means you're also a shapeshifter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For myself - well, the thing about icons being a really cool and important communications channel, like internet body language, is that communicating is hard! I think I mostly have this "writing DW posts" thing down, but I also don't want to discount the possibility that part of the reason y'all put up with me is that ten years ago I decided to very carefully choose my Commander Valentine (after making some mistakes!) to be a sort of neutral-to-thoughtful listening face that also reads as a nice white lady if you don't look too closely. Most of the other Commander Valentine shots are more... angry, and I really did find that I got really different reactions to comments I posted with them, even if the tone was exactly the same, or even to comments I posted with a more abstract icon.
People are biased and stuff, you know? Emotions are hard. We should all become AIs and upload ourselves into spiderbots. In the meantime, connotatively meaningful icons are an extra difficulty level that I am probably going to keep opting out of. But it does make me happy to see people excited about them again lately!
Meanwhile, if you wanted an update on my "clear out the books" project so far: the books are winning. /o\
The procedure so far seems to be get all the books on DD top-level class together, sort them into piles by subtopic, take a subtopic, pull out all the ones you are definitely 100% keeping, reshelve those, stare at the rest for a long time, then re-sort them into a pile of "keeping after all" and "actually this belongs in a different subtopic, I'll decide then."
Okay, I got rid of two outdated-but-not-enough-to-be-cool local travel guides (but kept the maps) and one biography, but, uh, that's not the 10% I need.
(how do you get rid of books? they are all made of joy. they are all things I care about. they are all hard to replace. [not all books are hard to replace, but that's one of my criteria for buying them in the first place - I keep going 'do I really need this? I can just get another copy later if I do' and then discover that the cheapest Amazon copy is $18 + shipping and it's not in any library in the state and the publisher no longer exists. I'm hoping some of this is an artifact of starting with the local history ones, which is a lot of small local publishers, but the next big category is the 700s, where all the art and craft stuff is, and I kind of doubt that will be all that much better.])
And paid accounts get more image hosting space, which I might actually use!
And also more icon slots, which I probably... won't. But I did go looking at what I currently have uploaded for the first time in a long, long time. I do still like most of those! And I could add more from indy comics and SF bookcovers I have more recently loved the art & characters in. (That's basically all I have, except some very bad home-made ones.)
I've considered finding a new indy-comic avatar and taking Commander Valentine off my default because it's been a long time since Tek Jansen fandom was a thing, but I still like the icon, and the less people know about Tek Jansen, the more she works as just ID'ing me rather than a fandom character (or, well, as ID'ing me, the character who hangs out in fandom) - I've been using her since before DW. (And I like Nick Fury a lot *more* than I did when I started using his red-haired expy in space as my avatar; he wasn't even officially Samuel Jackson yet back then!)
But. Can we talk about icons? Can I confess. I never really liked the culture of having a ton of icons and switching them on every comment. Like! I totally support those of you that do, and I think a really cool part of fan culture was lost when that stopped being a big part of fan communication, and if you love it, you do you!
But I ID people by their icons. Very strongly. So other people having a steady icon helps me remember who you are, especially if we haven't interacted a whole lot. Or your username is the same color as someone else's. (Yes, you all do look like your icons. Even those of you whose icons are inanimate or abstract. Especially those of you whose icons are inanimate or abstract. Yes, even if I've met you in person and you post lots of selfies. Sorry, I don't make the rules.) Switching icons a lot doesn't change this, it just means you're also a shapeshifter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For myself - well, the thing about icons being a really cool and important communications channel, like internet body language, is that communicating is hard! I think I mostly have this "writing DW posts" thing down, but I also don't want to discount the possibility that part of the reason y'all put up with me is that ten years ago I decided to very carefully choose my Commander Valentine (after making some mistakes!) to be a sort of neutral-to-thoughtful listening face that also reads as a nice white lady if you don't look too closely. Most of the other Commander Valentine shots are more... angry, and I really did find that I got really different reactions to comments I posted with them, even if the tone was exactly the same, or even to comments I posted with a more abstract icon.
People are biased and stuff, you know? Emotions are hard. We should all become AIs and upload ourselves into spiderbots. In the meantime, connotatively meaningful icons are an extra difficulty level that I am probably going to keep opting out of. But it does make me happy to see people excited about them again lately!
Meanwhile, if you wanted an update on my "clear out the books" project so far: the books are winning. /o\
The procedure so far seems to be get all the books on DD top-level class together, sort them into piles by subtopic, take a subtopic, pull out all the ones you are definitely 100% keeping, reshelve those, stare at the rest for a long time, then re-sort them into a pile of "keeping after all" and "actually this belongs in a different subtopic, I'll decide then."
Okay, I got rid of two outdated-but-not-enough-to-be-cool local travel guides (but kept the maps) and one biography, but, uh, that's not the 10% I need.
(how do you get rid of books? they are all made of joy. they are all things I care about. they are all hard to replace. [not all books are hard to replace, but that's one of my criteria for buying them in the first place - I keep going 'do I really need this? I can just get another copy later if I do' and then discover that the cheapest Amazon copy is $18 + shipping and it's not in any library in the state and the publisher no longer exists. I'm hoping some of this is an artifact of starting with the local history ones, which is a lot of small local publishers, but the next big category is the 700s, where all the art and craft stuff is, and I kind of doubt that will be all that much better.])
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lol - i'm glad i currently look like Chris Pine. XD (this might confuse him tho)
i have this thing where i want my icons to stick around where i put them... so i tend not to remove any, or, if i do, i have a new one w/ the same keywords to replace it. (i'm v stickler about this with my RP stuff more than my primary journal)
re: books - welp... i purged out a bunch of stuff i either hadn't read (and was p sure i wouldn't) or i had and i hadn't been impressed by. some i traded to the local used book store for credits/new books; others i toted over to the library, so i could visit them if i needed to, i guess.
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(That is also something I've noted with icons: people tend to be really bad at realizing what other people see when they look at them, sometimes because you need to know the fandom, sometimes you just need to know context that was cropped out of the shot. There used to be a meme that went around every so often that was like "explain your friends' default icon" and there were always surprises!)
That method of purging did okay with the fiction, but with nonfiction I'm a lot more likely to go "I didn't love it but I will still want to refer back to that one bit" or "I will need it if I ever need to know that one thing".
Our library does not take donations (and it's also REALLY REALLY bad at keeping older - defined as 5+ years - NF in stock.) Part of my problem is that I have far too close a perspective of what's realistically likely to be in the library. (In fact, a lot of these are classic older NF that I saved from the library's recycle bin as they pulled their last copy....)
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the camera part is right though - i photograph stuff when i'm feeling un-lazy enough to haul my camera around.
re: icons - i do love the 'random icon' button... b/c i can hit it like 15 times to find something that i'm okay with if i don't have a particular one in mind for a post/comment
icon-y stuff for RP - WAY more nuanced and thought out, since those, for me, tend to reflect something about the character's mood or actions for the comment/post
re: book purge - silly library... though i suspect it's a space issue?
you could start your own library like that little kid i saw on an ep of either Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow. XD
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I don't want to go into much detail, but I think it's partly a philosophy thing (we are about having a DYNAMIC and MODERN collection, we are not an archive, libraries aren't about BOOKS) and it's partly that the various people doing various part of collection development don't have a chance to have a very good idea of what the other people are doing, so the weeding and ordering are both sort of done in a their own vacuums and nobody really has a good idea of the collection as a whole or where the demand actually is. (which I get! it's hard! as I am learning with my collection! but it means I don't trust the library to have something just because it's a book one would think the library should have.)
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