So, 3w4dw is happening, yeah? I'm not changing my crossposting because I already don't post anywhere except DW and sometimes JF, and I seriously doubt anybody is staying away from DW because JF is too active. :P

(well, and a certain anon kink meme I can't stop refreshing, but I can't give that up. This is how much I can't give that anon meme up: as you may know, I have had javascript turned off on LJ for quite some time now, because the crufty javascript they've been pushing in made the site stop working with my browser. With javascript off, I can read my flist and post signed comments, which is usually all I do. Until I got tempted by this anon meme.)

( This is what you have to do to leave an anon comment in LJ if you don't let the site use javascript: )

...yes, I have fallen for current tiny RPS fandom hard enough that I go through that voluntarily anyway. And no, it is not the least bit exaggerated. (and yes, it's almost as annoying to do with js off in DW - but oh, look, I don't have to turn js off in order for DW to function! Amazing.)

So anyway, right now the thing I love most about DW is I can post anon comments on it without wanting to commit murder. There are a lot of awesome DW anon memes going on for 3w4dw right now, incidentally. Far too many to keep track of, in fact - just reload the 3w4dw tag on latest - when I am still reloading the lj ones for tiny-fandom-of-doom and also forsciencememe, the anon meme for rock-star scientists, literal or otherwise, which I would be *all over* if it didn't take me about ten minutes every time I try to post a comment on it. Especially I would be all over it requesting epic Othniel Charles Marsh/Edward Drinker Cope hatesex, about which more anon (in the other sense of anon), possibly.

ANYWAY ANYWAY. My actual point, when I started all this, is that there's so much going on for 3w4dw that I have decided, with the exception of a few community events and some anoning, to save most of my effort for after the event is over, where things will probably be quieting down and everyhing won't be getting lost in the rush. (That, or I am bone-idle and/or exhausted). So it will be business as usual here - i.e., long rambling posts every ten days or so.

My contribution to cross-site-ness for the time being is probably going to be going through the flists of the small-fandom lj communities I'm busily stalking and dw-watch everyone who crossposts. :D

---

And now for con_txt! If you have been following this saga, you will know that I submitted an utterly ridiculous number of panels (in the non-david-mitchell sense of panels, though do you know how tempted I am to suggest a fannish panel game for Saturday evening entertainment? So tempted) to the concomm, and I have just gotten the first voting-results email.

...ten of my panels are either in, or possibly/probably in, and by con-txt tradition, they are now asking *me* to volunteer for or find mods for them all. I know some of you are going to con-txt, or know people who are: anybody interested in modding or co-modding any of these if they get in?

( Panel Fun )

( And now for a cute and cuddly baby Dalek! )

If I made a small flock of these daleklings - say, 4-6, in a rainbow of bright cheerful nursery colors - would it be worth submitting to the con-txt art auction? Would anybody bid? I have been messing with the pattern for so long that I've lost all perspective on it, I have no idea if it even looks like a Dalek anymore, because I've forgotten what Daleks look like when they aren't pink crochet. Oh, I know! Poll!
( Because this entry wasn't long and scattered enough already! )

On the off-chance you haven't heard yet, lj continues to find new ways of being skeevy.

Mind you, I wouldn't have noticed this one, because about a month ago I had to remove lj's javascript access completely in order to be able to log in to my account. On the upside, I am also no longer getting virus warnings every few days! And pages load a disturbing amount faster! On the downside, wow, there's a lot of stuff I can't do on lj anymore. Including bookmark fic on delicious/diigo, so I have even been trying to find as much fic as possible other places.

So, here's why I still read my LJ friendslist despite all that:

1) A small group of people I value as people, mostly RL friends and people I met though fandom who aren't very fannish any more, who have no interest in crossposting to DW (and probably never will unless LJ completely stops functioning - a couple of them still post to deadjournal, too.) I will still be reading LJ for them as long as DW doesn't have locked post syndication, but I am considering trimming my LJ friendslist down to just those people. (And seriously thinking about cutting some of them who I rarely trade comments with, even though I still enjoy following them - they probably don't remember I exist, since I don't post to my journal anymore.)

2) An even smaller group of fannish people who will never join DW, ever, because they have bad blood with some of the more vocal DW supporters. ...there are several of them I would miss if I dropped them, and I don't want to get on their bad sides but I honestly doubt any of them would miss me much if I stopped hanging around.

3) An even tinier set of journals I think of as blogs rather than journals, that is, I don't care if I ever interact with them, I just love the content they post (actually, right now that's just urbpan, who is a zookeeper, photographer, former 'zine publisher and urban naturalist in Boston; and ursulav, who draws pictures cute and/or disturbing animals; I should just syndicate ursulav_feed's journal, but urbpan posts some of his best stuff under lock; he should probably move up to category 1.)

4) Communities. I've never really joined that many LJ communities, and I've dropped a lot of them since I started transitioning off, and haven't joined many new ones, but the ones I still read I don't want to leave without finding replacements. :/ So here's the list of LJ communities I really don't want to say goodbye to - anybody want to help me re-create them here?

( Let's make communities for TMI, nature, little details, top gear, and Doctor Who OTP! )

Here is why I still have everybody friended on LJ, even the ones I only read here, or who don't post anymore anyway: because there are some dead people I care about on my lj flist, and defriending them feels, I don't know, I don't want to do it, okay? But I don't want to leave them there all alone, either. :/ And somehow I suspect they will never move to DW.

Here is why I still have content on LJ: I hate broken links on a deep moral and aesthetic level. And I don't think DW has a built-in tool that will strip your entries out of LJ and automatically replace them with a link to the imported DW copy (though if anyone knows of a tool that will do this, plz, let me know!)


Now, I am going to go write some posts for already-existing DW communities, in the spirit of that meme a few weeks ago about getting more activity here. :D

Every time somebody posts on dreamchasers that they have "won the open id lottery", my brain translates that as "I wrote/found some really hot and shameless smut! And it was easy!" And then I'm disappointed.

Anyway, as most of you probably know by now, for the past two years I have been journaling almost entirely on journalfen.net rather than on livejournal. This gives me a really upside-down perspective about all of the hand-wringing going on about the TRAUMA of moving to Dreamwidth, let me tell you. So, as one of the couple dozen people who blog primarily on Journalfen, I want to share my perspective on migration.

This is why it was a no-brainer for me to move to DW:

1. ( The site is fan-friendly, fairly small, personal, and not fixated on financial growth. )

2. ( The software here *works*. )

3. ( I like the people who are here. )

If there's one important thing I learned from migrating, it's that when everybody is done moving and settling, you will still have a community. It will be different than before. It will be better. Regardless of which service you wind up on: You'll lose readers. You'll drop people who you read. What you post about will change, and the way it effects the network will change. But each service has benefits that attract different people, and you will settle in to the one that suits you best, and the other people on that service will be people who agree with you about it being the best, and this is a good basis for making new friends. You'll get new readers. You'll find new journals to read. The people who really matter will stick around one way or another, because if it really matters, you'll make it work. And the rest of it isn't the end of the world.

Anyway, I loved it at JF, and I'm not leaving, but I'm glad a lot of the JF people are here on Dreamwidth, too. The people who tough it out and blog on Journalfen are an amazing bunch of people, with a wide diversity of interests. Let me introduce you to some of the JF people who've been posting interesting stuff on DW:

ashenmote has made the best commentary yet on redirecting comments in crossposts.
cyprinella will make you want a bog of your own.
ionized just posted a gay marriage round-up that is possibly the funniest thing I have read all week.
trouble has been running history and thinking about disability.

You'll note that none of those journals really scream "fandom" at first glance. Yeah - here's a secret: Journalfen is supposedly a service just for fans, but most of the people who blog there aren't really mostly about fandom. In fact, a lot of the most interesting things going on at JF aren't just about media fandom; if you've never gone beyond the fandom_ communities you've been missing the best part! By far, the most awesome thing on JF is the hot_daily community, run by puipui, which posts a picture every day of a hot person. What makes the community so much fun is that "hot' is an infinitely variable description - people of every size, gender, age, race, and shape come through, and they are all hot.

At the beginning of every month there's a special giant picspam post, the topic of which is selected by popular vote. This month's poll is almost over, and it's a write-in poll! Muppets are currently tied for first place. If you have a JF account, you should totally go to the hot_daily poll and vote for muppets.

(Why, yes, I did just write this entire meta post just so I could tell you to vote for muppets. ;) Because it's *that important*.)

I had forgotten how I react to coding. This is how I react to coding: I went from knowing nothing about anything but basic html to dreaming about Core2 last night. In about six hours. (Of course, for some reason I also dreamed that treewishes was secretly Terry Brooks, so that may not be diagnostic.) I am not *good* at coding, because what I enjoy is crashing through reinventing the wheel and doing things the wrong way by trial-and-error and example without actually reading the directions or re-using old solutions; but I do find it hard to *stop*.

Anyway, after hours of pounding away, I now have a DW style that is a vague approximation of the ugly, crufty, half-broken S1 style I use in various hacked-together forms on LJ and JF. Only on LJ and JF it is high-contrast black, and my DW version is very, very pink, mostly to thumb my nose all all the anti-Tropo Red people. :P (The One Pig With Horns is just a placeholder image, though, promise, stellar_dust.)

The important thing, though, is that it has custom friendlist colors!!! I am just synesthetic enough that seeing my flist people without their proper color screws with my head. So, style with custom colors! (If anyone wants to use this style, which is a variant on LJ's Punquin Elegant, or the Generator port I made, I can give you the core2-compileable source, and if you'd like me to port another basic LJ style over instead, let me know and I'll try it; the code is really, really ugly though (I mean, even in the original S2 version before I mucked with them it was ugly, and I could tell this without even previously knowing anything about S2. Here's how ugly: I had to look at the Core2 test style in order to figure out how to add comments.)

( Herein I talk about styles coding such that anybody who actually knows about it will laugh at the stupid, because I have forgotten how to talk about programming, and anybody who doesn't will be bored to death. )

Anyway, more important question (And test of polls!)

So, if people ask me what fandom I'm in, I have two options: pull out the long text file that I use when I'm offering to beta or write in a multifandom fest; or say "just fandom!"

I have been "in" a fandom a few times, in the sense of really working to build relationships and creations within a particular canon, but I never quite felt comfortable; we were brought together by one thing only, and it was fun, but just by nature of being limited to that one shared interest, there was a lot of conformity and round pegs jammed in square holes. And then I went multifannish, and then panfannish, and then just plain fannish, and this is where my head belongs, really always has. But right now, I'm, to a really kind of strange extent, keeping my fandom-as-community separate from my fandom-as-creativity.

( By which I mean... )

So one thing I'm hoping my new fresh start here will do is help me make a place where I can be panfannish, butterfly around and be attached to no particular fandom, but still be both productive and connected in a new way. I'm going to keep my JF account, and keep posting there the kind of things I've been posting, and try to post here the sorts of things I've been failing-to-post there, and build a network that'll help me do that. I think the watch/trust split will help with that, too; I can have reading-people and interacting-people and they can be both, but they don't have to be.

We'll see if it works!

(So far, so good. This was originally going to be a very different post about how cool it is that, according to del.icio.us, the most common fandom tags for fanfic at the moment are Merlin, bandom, SGA, SPN, Torchwood, Harry Potter - and Yuletide. Apparently I am not the only person who's engaging through tiny fandoms as much as large ones!)

You know what? I think the absolute most appropriate thing I can possibly put in my first-ever-Dreamwidth post is a rec for my sister stellar_dust's just-posted DW ficlet (DW as in Doctor Who, not DreamWidth, although the reason it's so appropriate is that the DW could, totally, also stand for Dreamwidth, because it is a story about the unspeakable eldritch horrors that lurk in the hearts of web-page-coding and the awesomosity of women and computers, all in just 325 words):

A Perl of Great Price.

Go read it.