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*.)

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!)

I just went through my lj and made a filter of "people whose personal lives I will still care about even if all fannish content is banned and 6A is sold to Fox News" and it ended up being basically everybody on my flist who makes personal-life posts more than about once a month.

For somebody who lurks as much as I do, I sure do get invested. *sigh*

I also stuck a manually-coded blogroll up the side of my new layout, with non-lj blogs I keep up with, and ljs I read for non-fannish but non-personal content, because I don't feel like fussing with rss at the moment. ph34r my blogroll. They are all highly recommended by me, but not necessarily without reservations. And I refuse to be ashamed of reading any of them. Even Go Fug Yourself. :P

I'm adding a small list of web links under that, and the LT non-java widget is already up with recently-read books (Anybody here on LibraryThing? It's my current second home on the internet.)

After that, it should be just graphics-editing work and then I'm going to call the flist layout done. Haven't decided yet how much I'm going to do with the other pages, though I'll probably at least stick a header up on recent entries. But I want to watch Casablanca while I do the graphics work, and I can't find my tape of Casablanca! It's a tragedy.

Then maybe I'll actually have the attention span to post about other stuff!