Having finally imported my LJ into my DW, I have set about the task of trying to organize my tags into something ... usable.

This is best described as hellish, although the improvements made to DW's tag management system are making it, at least, bearable (in that the headaches are caused by the nature of tagging itself, rather than the implementation of it.)

I am also learning interesting things about myself in the process. For example, I had a separate 'science' tag and 'science!' tag, because I think we can all agree that "SCIENCE!" has a different meaning than science. However, when I actually looked at my tag uses, I realized that having two separate tags was redundant. Because it's all SCIENCE! :P

Also, things that I have decided, on balance, require fandom: tags of their own include sodapop, sports, springtime, and squid.


In other news, I am giving in and getting myself an Etsy account. If I have to. I guess. Anybody want to be my referrer? (Does being a referrer get you anything?)

(Also, linkedin is creepy. jsyk.)


I spent most of yesterday and the night before, with some very welcome help, attempting to fix all the computer hardware. As result, instead of using a power cord with a socket made of electrical tape that burnt through every three days and stopped working if you looked at it wrong, I now have a power cord that causes my computer to completely shut down without warning if you look at it wrong. I'm not sure which is preferable really, though I suppose the new way is less of a fire hazard.

(Other things that did not actually get fixed: my newest mp3 player (which seems to have firmware issues, and no way to actually alter or access the firmware); my external media drive (which I was able to confirm does still have the data on, but still cannot get to function as a drive, and have nothing to copy the data onto); my sound system (which used to sound tinny in the speakers but fine with headphones, and now sounds tinny with headphones too.)

On the upside, my monitor is no longer floating around loose in the case with scary rattly noises, and my CD/DVD-RW drive works again! And that means I can run a linux liveCD! And oh, linux, how I miss you! And oh, linux, how I do not miss trying to find the necessary drivers to make my peripherals work!

I think the next large-ticket item I am buying is a brand-new terabyte external drive. Perhaps with my election judge money. Any recommendations?

1. I am now declaring myself Officially Caught Up after those sixteen days I was offline for Pennsic! *whew*

2. I have started working on tidying up my last few loose ends on LJ. I finally imported my old LJ entries, and I'm planning tonight/tomorrow to reshuffle my filters and friends there and make one last sticky post. This seems like an apropos time, yeah?

But! As part of this, I decided to try to fix my ancient and deeply crufty and broken custom style by just switching over to one of the S2 site styles, since I never plan on having a paid account there.

( Help me figure out a new lj layout to use? )

(And yes, the next step is fix my DW layout. And tags.)

3. I have posted fic ! And you can't see it!

Specifically, my let's-be-realistic goal for kink_bingo was to get one square filled by the points deadline. And I did! Just barely, but I posted James May/Oz Clarke Vampire AU RPS to topgearslash just before the deadline, thus filling my "bites/bruises" square, and crossposted to topgearslash the next day. Alas they're both locked communities, so unless you decide to join, you can't see my story until I decide to update my AO3 account.

And while I was glazed with victory from that, I started posting a story at the new Top Gear Anon Porn meme, but I'm so not brave enough to say which one. (you can probably guess, though. It's in my style: unfinished WIP. :P )

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

Hi! I am still lacking energy to do anything serious online, but here are some things anyway:

Signal boost via zvi: If, like me, you recently got weird malware on your system that tried to get you to install anti-virus software, and couldn't figure out where from because you'd only been on trustworthy sites, you probably got it from an ad running on Livejournal. Just so you know. ETA: a thread about it on lj news - if you think you got hit, drop in and leave a comment, it might help.

(I think I got my system clean - I have Spybot running to stop unauthorized registry changes, and cleared out a bunch of suspicious files - but will probably be doing a format + reinstall as soon as I have time to think anyway.) When is DW going to be able to syndicate flocked lj posts so I never have to go back there again? Plz?

*****

I am one of those boring old fans who's been around long enough that the slash-misogyny argument just seems tired; yes it's important, but it's the same thing I read about in 2003. And 2005. And 2007... So instead, here are some awesome Sherlock Holmes stories about women:

Commonplaces, by Astolat. Irene Adler goes to visit Holmes after "The Final Problem."

Thoughts Without Words by Katie Forsythe. Holmes goes to visit Irene, and a conversation is had. (If you've been reading Holmes fic, surely you've found Katie Forsythe's work already, but this one is just *amazing*. It's full-on unreliable narrator - SCAN is given an entirely new interpretation, as is Holmes' history - yet the Holmes and Adler here are so amazing that I get it confused with canon. And I almost suspect the naked!Adler scene in the movie was based on this story.)

Five Times John Watson Quite Unintentionally Saw Irene Adler Naked, by flowers4ophelia. Irene and Holmes carry on together and annoy Watson a lot. Movieverse, though not necessarily contradictory to bookverse.

An Ideal Husband by Irene Adler. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both receive the same visitor. (this is also heavy on the Violet Hunter, who was in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" and seems to be the third-most-loved-by-fandom female from a case.)

Enclosed by Recessional. Mary Morstan receives a visit from Sherlock Holmes. Recessional has been writing a lot of really excellent Mary Morstan fic of late: you should read.

Blood Shift by Toft. Mary Morstan and Watson find something necessary in each other.

five times Mary suspected Holmes and Watson were more than friends and one time she knew it to be so., by Lady Paperclip. Mary Morstan is visited by certain inescapable deductions. And also Irene Adler, which is sometimes the same thing.

Leaving, by Telanu. Holmes visits Watson and Mary.

Congenital Defects, by Branwyn. Mary Russell is visited by a series of increasingly wodehousian mishaps as the result of an inconvenient aunt.

Honeycomb Series, by LizBee. Lizbee has written most of the Mary Russell fic that I actually liked; this series deals with Russell's Jewish identity and her marriage to Holmes.

Suppressed, by Jane Turenne. Mrs. Hudson visits Watson.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Murderess, by Flourish. Miss Madelyn Mack is visited by sudden and unexpected violence.

...in other words, Holmes fandom and its subsidiaries are full of amazing female characters, and people should be writing more stories about them. Especially Mrs. Hudson, who I suspect has a lot of unplumbed depths. (I know there's a published series where she solves the cases and secretly feeds the clues to Holmes - it even sounds sort of good; I'm keeping my eyes out for it - but I am suddenly convinced that Mrs. H has been in the employ of Mycroft - aka M of what will eventually be MI-6 - for a very, very long time. Pre-dating the time at which she was assigned to keep an eye on his brother.)

****

And on that note, I just picked up the first Irene Adler novel (well, okay, the second, because why read a series in publishing order when you can read it in the order you find it at the public library). I'm only about ten pages in, and I'm provisionally liking it. But I can't get past the fact that this Adler is apparently a soprano. Adler's a contralto, isn't she? This is actually very important to her backstory, considering the different expectations of a contralto and soprano in classical opera!

Did I in vain spend all that time looking for pieces for contralto and violin solo? (Well, no, it wasn't in vain, because I found Yehudi Menuhin playing Erbarme Dich, which I fell in love with instantly and only wish he had a better contralto to play for. I want Madelyn's secret recording of Holmes and Alder performing that to exist in RL. Please.)

****

While I'm asking about minor canon points, here's some more, in various fandoms:

1. So a veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan war naming his dog "Gladstone" is roughly the equivalent of a veteran of the *current* Afghan war naming his dog "Gordon", right? People who know more about Victorian politics than me: What statement exactly is that making?
   
   I only know as much about Gladstone and Disraeli as anyone who's read "The Annotated Alice" far too many times, but the longer I watch Holmes-movie-fandom without *anyone* mentioning that the dog's named after the PM, the more I notice its absence.



2. Sarah Jane Smith currently drives a lime green Nissan Figaro, and used to own a bright red Volkswagen Beetle named Ethel. Does anybody know what model Volkswagen she was driving in "School Reunion"? And did she have a car during her Old Who appearances, and if so, what was it?



3. Can anybody get access to a copy of the article "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) p. 639 ? I can't, not even after stealing my sister's JSTOR login, but I would really really really like to read it!



4. Is there anything anywhere in primary or secondary Star Trek canon about the cultural significance of male Vulcan hairstyles and/or beards? (Other than the obvious.)



5. I swear that within the last several years there was a find somewhere in England of items related to witchcraft that included what was probably a prosthetic phallus: does anybody else remember this? For obvious reasons it is difficult to google. Or any citable links to archeological finds of life-sized false phalli in England in the last century?

***

And on the off-chance you haven't found it yet: asexual_fandom now exists! And I didn't even have to be the one to start it!

I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to get done on DW today - finish and post porn for open beta, write that post about accessible HTML (since it is blogging against disablism day), work through the support instructions, get a couple recs posts together, ladedadeda. But it has become apparent that I will not be accomplishing any of these things.

However! stellar_dust bought me paid account! So I can abuse paid account now!

I have made iconses! A new version of my old Mathnet one, and, since I *can*, a Mathnet dreamsheep! (Feel free to take & use these. Because Mathnet.) Also, of course, a Commander Valentine dreamsheep, just for me.


Also, I can abuse polls! The proportion of people on my flists who are crossposting has gotten big enough that it's starting to involve a lot of scrolling. I'm not going to defriend anybody, but I would like to set up a default reading filter on LJ. So, please fill out my poll?

ETA: No wonder nobody was voting in my poll! The poll creator still has the option "lock to friendslist" and I didn't stop to think that probably meant "access" rather than "subscribe". Since I haven't been accessing people, ya'll couldn't vote. New poll up shortly! Also, will be pointing out poll generator fail.

I give you a subtle visual metaphor for the relationship between corporate power and the common people, by which I mean a scan of
( Archie Andrews getting butt-raped by Satan )

...I bet you thought I was kidding!

Ooh, have a bonus panel:
( Jughead's nuts being groped )

These are both scans from "Archie's Clean Slate", today's trophy from the $.50 back-issue bins, which was published, under license, by Spire Christian Comics. An amazing comic, from the publisher possibly best-known these days for Hansi, the Girl who Loved the Swastika.

Interesting in several protest-related ways: first, because in the 21st century, Archie Comics is absolutely totalitarian about copyright (any fellow devotees of the gone-but-not-forgotten Improved Archie will want to note that in this comic, Betty is in fact a Crazy Christian). Second, because "Clean Slate" was attempting to appeal to hip young people in 1973, and it appears to be trying to position environmentalism as a Christian issue at the same time it's trying to convert people to Christianity, with the result that it does both very, very badly. (It also attempts to harness the power of SCIENCE, btw. I quote: "Copernicus cures celestial myopia!" "And Christ cures spiritual blindness!")

Also it features Jughead as an anthropomorphic kangaroo.

That is all.

I am really, really tired of hearing people going around talking about how the planned LJ strike for tomorrow is useless and stupid and therefore nobody should bother taking part in it.

( In summary: Why do you hate America? )

I just got my "paid account will be expiring" notice from LJ. Which incidentally also marks my five-year lj-versary.

The sad part is that if you'd asked me a month ago, I would've said "eh, I don't really need to renew anyway; I don't use my extra icons that much and it's the only thing I'll miss. But SUP hasn't been too evil, so maybe I will anyway."

Now? Lj's not getting another red cent from me. Ever. ...only. Comment editing! Thread expanders! ohh I will miss them so much! especially when reading 5,000 comments of angry newspost every day.

Really, the conversation I'm having in my head right now goes almost exactly like this one, right up to the point with the human womens and beers.

Come to think of it, human womens and beers sound like a really good idea...

I think I may have just done something stupid.

And it didn't even post in the right order! (bah, LJ). So you kind of have to read the melannen ones from the bottom up, and then the necreavit ones from the bottom up, for it to make *any* sense.

I'm not sure which is sadder: that this is the closest thing I've written to fic in months, or that this makes the *second* ficlet I've written that could be summarized "Ginny Weasley learns about birth control."

It would be ignoble of me to use my free virtual gift to send theljstaff a report card of FAIL, right? Right. (I will be strong. Now, if they only still had the flaming bag of poo as an option...)

I just got around to updating the newbieguide XF directory, so that's one obligation no longer hanging over my head. :D Took me all night, too - since when is XF fandom active again?

Meanwhile, still posting mostly at http://www.journafen.net/~melannen . Still not done the Tek Jansen mood theme for it, either. I'm planning to stick around at JF long-term. I've been meaning to get more active there for ages, as I've felt less free to talk on LJ - for reasons that only have partially to do with the change in tone of the administration. It's partially to do with the way my flist here has gotten bigger and more diverse, and as a result I've gotten shyer about talking about my specialized interests. You guys are awesome, and I'm going to keep reading everyone here because I *don't* want to lose you, but I have long-standing interaction issues, and JF makes me feel free, like a particularly good feminine hygiene commercial. :P

I just used electricandroid's flist transfer cheat to friend everybody from here that had IJ and GJ accounts under the same name - let me know if I missed you (or friended a wrong journal.) I'll be checking there once a day or so, probably. I'm *not* auto-adding everyone at JF - I've had a different flist and tone there for awhile, and seriously, if I added all ya'll my list there would be way too big. If you've a JF and want to read my fan randomosity there, friend me or drop a comment and I'll friend back.

Meanwhile, I'll be commenting here. Probably more than ever, if the last few weeks are any judge. And if whoever is targeting pornish_pixies ever gets around to getting me tossed for my underage femmeslash fics from four years ago, there's always openID.

I've had a choice the past few days (courtesy of kyabetsu) between Internet and A/C, and I picked the one that I absolutely needed in order to function.

(And no, that was not internets! Contrary to what some people might claim. :P)

...Okay, I'm usually all about suck it up, it's only 103 deg F in the shade and humidity 88%, nobody needs air conditioning, but I'm still getting over an infection, even the *basement* is too hot to do anything active in, and it was a choice between sit still with a wet cloth on my head or get stuff done.

So the mood theme actually has progress on it!

Also, one of my fellow pornish_pixies charter members has finally made a statement about the recent unpleasantness that I can wholeheartedly agree with (especially the title!): And if you haven't read Watership Down yet, why not? (Only unlike her, I think I've already found my Watership Down, and it's here. Okay, maybe less a Watership Down and more a Thorn Valley, but still. It has talking varmints, internal politics, and people with poison gas, so it's good enough for me.)

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!

tl;dr entry over at my lj, of which the only really interesting part was the zombie uprising.