I am messing around on AO3 (instead of doing all the other things I need to do, yes, shush) sort-of catching up on Yuletide fics and sort of thinking about maybe starting to do some actual tag wrangling now that yuletide is over (though I think I need to poke somebody about getting an account for the chatroom) and you know what I have discovered that I have a very strong opinion about, regarding AO3 canonical tags?

If you're working in a canon where somebody's full truename is powerful, and hidden, and binding, and they are very, very careful about who they offer it to and when they use it, even in the privacy of thought --

Then you shouldn't make their full truename their AO3 canonical tag.

It's just wrong. First off it breaks pretty much every rule of magical etiquette, plus it's a breach of trust, plus it's a massive act of hubris. I think *especially* because you're applying it to fanfic - sealing something with a person's truename is to try to make it them; to use a truename irresponsibly can change who the person is, because you're saying that whatever you've given that name to is the person, in some of the oldest Deep Magic there is.

And so sealing a fanfic with a truename - it's saying that your fanfic is the person true, and it runs into the danger of making that true, of shifting the person into the version you've sealed into the fic. And I don't like it. Fanfic shouldn't be about making it true.

...and, okay, yeah, the above is only about half-serious. But if I had fic posted to the AO3 in a fandom where this was relevant, and saw my character name tags turned into truenames? I would not like it. (Luckily the only fandom I currently have up where this applies is Earthsea, and Earthsea has a tradition that a person's truename becomes public-domain regarding stories told about them after their death, and is framed such that most Earthsea stories are in that context, so it's a slightly different situation.)

I've been messing around on LT a bit - I did some things I'd been putting off, and rewarded myself with some book cataloging (is a book on saints' cults in medieval Christendom religion, mythology, folklore, history, or magic? And how does that have to affect where I put similar books that aren't Christian-flavored? Arggh.) And alongside the usual grey areas of cataloging, I ended up wading into an argument on how we should list gender in the drop-down on the crowdsourced author pages for trans authors. (I don't have all the answers, but at this point I'm at least confident to know when I can say: No, sir, you are wrong.)

Anyway. Right now I'm sick of all this categorizing of things that cannot be categorized. You know what is much nicer? Numbers! And espreite just posted a v. v. serious entry about privilege and oppression among numbers. So I have made a poll! ( Which numbers describe your identities most accurately? )

It's exciting to be cited!

(No, I'm not telling you which of those is me, and if you know, please don't say outright or spread it around, because I'd like to leave this post unlocked. Since I found that citation mostly because I'd just read icarusancalion's post of tips for internet paranoia, and decided to make sure my grown-up name was still sufficiently uncontaminated by all the stuff I actually get up to. And it was! That's the only google result for it that's actually me! I plan to keep it that way.

(I like to grumble about the fact that my parents gave me a name that's mostly different from the one they actually *called* me, with the justification that I might sometimes want to use a blander name when I was a grown-up. But you know, it kind of comes in handy, now that I actually *do* have to be that grown-up sometimes.

(If you google my nickname+last name, you get me 4 times on the first page, once on the second, and 4 times on the third. Nothing scandalous, but some of it doesn't exactly present me as smart and responsible and sane. Also it links back to Melannen on three of those first-page links. Melannen brings up stuff I *probably* don't want prospective employers to see. Especially since I've never blocked indexing robots.)

Anyway. The reason I haven't been posting as much here is that for the past week or so I've been spending a lot of my limited net-time here and here. (This is not to be taken as me drifting away from lj; I'm still reading as much as ever. But I seem to generally be able to make about 1 post per day, and if I use it elsewhere, I don't post here.)

Besides, nobody commented on the fic I posted yet. :( (The reason I haven't finished it yet like I said is that that promise only goes in to effect once stellar_dust actually reads it; until then the timing of "this time tomorrow" is safely in indeterminate Schrodinger space. Yes.)