I subscribe to journals I want to read, adding and removing as I gain and lose interest. If you add me to your circle, I'll check out the last five or so entries of your journal to see if I'm interested in reading. Pets, memes, and TV shows I hate make this less likely.

I'm being conservative about unlocking for people. I have not yet unlocked for anyone with whom I'm not reciprocal friends on LJ. I also have not yet posted any locked entries, so nobody's missed anything. (Locked content on LJ? Pleas for attention, grudgewanky snarling, and questions too embarrassing to ask in public, along with the occasional bit of bitching about family.)

My standard for unlocking so far has been extremely random, because I have a very weird headspace about being 'friends.' Er, long story short getting on my access list is weirdly difficult, but it's not because there's a super high standard associated with it or anything. I'm just weird.

That being said…I love people unlocking for me! No, like, seriously, I do. Way to be totally inconsistent, I know, but I love to see the behind-the-curtain stuff. And I don't break lock, really. And, if I were silently judging you, I'd just unsubscribe, I wouldn't say something hideously embarrassing. So, unlock for me if you'd like, it would be very cool.

Add or remove me from your circle at will. Please don't mention it, either way. I have circle notifications on, and I never know how to reply to a personal note.

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So, not that you could tell it by my journal, but I have spent the past week with some sort of severe gastric distress for several hours out of every 24 hour period. In an effort to combat stomach pains, I have been eating very little. ( triggery for food disorders, maybe? ) The worst thing about it is reading a story, and then someone just mentions a food, and I am filled with both longing and fear.

Pretty sure Thanksgiving is going to suck.

--

You could still ask me stuff in the dvd commentary meme. So far I've done a bit from that Parker & Sophie story and the tunnel scene from the Gaila remix.

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NaNoWriMo was a total failure. I think I overplanned and psyched myself out. This would ordinarily not be a huge fucking problem, but I had planned to write my 3 Ships story as my NaNo, and I still need to write the 3 Ships story. I can't … I pretty much can't face all of my NaNo prep work, so I need to come up with some other story entirely. :(

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Yuletide ... you know, it's fine to not write a Dear Yulegoat letter, but it is a terrible fucking tease to link to a Yulegoat letter in your signup and then keep that fucker locked. Whatever, my recipient is getting whatever story I write for them, since they kept their sign up tremendously vague, also.

Have not finished begun source review. Sort of wish I had matched on a song or a commercial.

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Happy Birthday, cereta!

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Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 700 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic (fic series, fic universe), lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

gakked from alixtii

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dodificus posts a fanfic recommendation just about every day. She's pretty heavy on SPN, but she also recommends J2, SGA, and other slashy goodness. I also really dig dodificus' podfic. NB: Australian reader. Warning: her recordings from the first year or so are very quiet.

cimorene posts a picture of women's sneakers or boots every day. Also, she posts plebefic headers, which are the weird, funny, or o_O headers collected on fanfiction around the web. You can read more about both of those projects on her profile. Additionally, she posts about life with her wife and the animals, two cats and a dog.

holiday_wishes is a comm for collecting all of those fucking wishlists. Post your wishlists there, and don't clog my reading page.

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Syfy greenlit American version of Being Human Auugh! Real nightmares. Chances of this being good? 50:1. Chances of this turning into fandom's new black? 5:1. I'm not deeply attached to Annie being black in this story (in some ways, in the American context, I think Irish Mitchell being translated to some sort of not-white situation may make more sense [actually, having given two seconds of thought, I think I might go for African-American Mitchell {although not WWI era in that case, either aged up to the Civil War or down to WW II/Korea} and Annie as a child of immigrants]) but if they are all white I will throw a shit fit. I will probably want to punch fandom in the face all the time regardless.

Tim Gunn on ProjRun 6 & 7 This makes me 10000% more likely to tune in to season 7. I was seriously considering giving it up completely, seeing just how horrible season 6 was and how much the pre-promotion on s6 insisted that nothing had changed when, clearly, everything had changed in a terrible, terrible way. One thing I don't remember, though, is Victoria Hong (season 4) being a terrible person.

Stephen Colbert rants about the sanctity of heterosexual burial Awesome (via justacat)

Manpain chart So, so, so apt. Also, don't forget to watch NCIS: LA tonight! (via cofax7)

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization Since we don't need bookstores to buy books, bookstores are going to have to do something else to get money

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So…in this season of NaNo and Yuletide, I know that many of my dearest readers are looking for pleasant ways to procrastinate.

Lo, this very night, I have discovered a fabulous way to do it: American Sign Language interpreted songs on youtube.

I have been watching a bazillion ASL interpreted songs on Youtube. Quality is extremely variable, as one should expect in what is, most of the time, a labor (or whim) of love at somebody's desk or somebody's high school foreign language final. However, there are some people doing full on music videos, using all of the fading and layering and special effects that a girl could want.

( Some videos! )

Fandom: Being Human
Characters: George, Annie, Mitchell, Nina
Summary: There are nine requisites for contented living: health enough to make work a pleasure; wealth enough to support your needs; strength enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; grace enough to confess your sins and overcome them; patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished; charity enough to see some good in your neighbor; love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; faith enough to make real the things of God; hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future. attributed to Goethe
Length: 2174 words
A/N: For rydra_wong
Warning Statement

A Place in This World

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facetofcathy explains how she is using An Archive of Our Own's tags and warnings system.

If you've felt confused about what to do where, this might help you out a lot.

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I asked Vera for these words, and then I put this off because I had some lame idea about responding in the form of fanfic, and I put them in the Post an Entry page to save them, and they've been pissing me off every time I go to post about something else, so now you will get my brief and off the cuff responses to each of these words.

Forrest

Okay, first of all, can we all just agree that Robert Sean Leonard Leonard Roberts (whoops) is just another fine young brother who should have more TV work? Where are you, boo? I miss you.

Anyway, Forrest was the character — pretty, standard English, upper middle class, supergayalot for a white guy fandom was already interested in — who made it clear to me that that thing where fans avoided writing about black characters was not just in my head.

dykes

I am a dyke, I like dykes. I prefer the term dyke to lesbian because dyke is more about digging chicks. The difference in song if you will, between Jill Sobule's I Kissed A Girl and Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl.

Just for reference, I abhor the term gay woman. I would rather be called a homosexual lady or queer miss, and I hate jejune titles like lady and miss. Look if I want to get all ~allied~ with cocksucking boys and girls who go both ways, let's all be queers together. Gay women is totally one of those compound words where the default is manly and then you modify it with woman and just AARGH. No. Don't. Stop.

I am a dyke.

functionality

Vera, m'love, what? I … like to explain how things work? I mean, okay, I do. I like to understand computers and websites and stuff up to, like, a power user level. (Yeah, the S2 work is rapidly approaching being above the paygrade I actually want to take on.) And then I like to tell other people what is going on, because they totally need that information. Also, it's fun. Also, I enjoy being right.

So. Functionality. Yeah.

icepick

Sister Icepick of Tolerance is my Unitarian Jihad Name. I hit the Unitarian Jihad Name Generator like twenty times before it gave me a name I liked. I like the name because it is sharp, and also because you can kill the X Files alien clones with icepicks. (I know you can kill regular human beings with icepicks, but the clones were tougher.)

Also, an icepick is a very cool thing to me, because it's one of the many tools on this Earth which I know is extremely real and practical for some people somewhere who do not live anywhere near the DC Metro region. So it has a fantastic quality, where I will never use an icepick or see an icepick used. or perhaps even meet someone who has touched an icepick (Willow informs me that she is familiar with the usage of icepicks) But I can order one from the Internet if I ever really want one. That is a most excellent balance of fantasy and reality.

threesome

I've known I was poly since I was fifteen. And my first serious sexual experiences were with my first girlfriend and her boyfriend. I don't get monogamy on a bone-deep, fundamental level. I like being in a situation where you can talk about someone you care about with a second person you care about, where you have a resource for understanding the first person, where you can say things like, "I like her right boob" and the other person says, "Yeah, well I like the left one."

And I like to read about relationships like the ones that make sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I grew up in the States, I like reading couples' romances too. But threesomes feel more … reality-based.

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Okay, and the actual reason I opened this up was to post links to cool flickr photos of pride flags. I'm thinking about doing some themes. ( links to photos )

In the great tradition of all yuletide matching everywhere ... I was totally not expecting to get matched on that fandom. But it's cool, it will provide me with the opportunity to review the source, which was pretty awesome the first time I experienced it.

(Watch my cage-y verb use, which disguises the medium of the source. Is it a movie? Is it an album? Is it a book? or a PSA? You don't know!)

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I've seen yuletide pinch hits, but not my yuletide assignment.

(My e-mail address is fine. I got my signup confirmation e-mail with no problem, so it's not that I whackily misspelled my e-mail address.

Also, also I read the part where I'm supposed to wait for eight hours before I start panicking. It just makes me D: D: D: , OK?)

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• Character of Color
• pegging
• safer sex
• threesome
• alien sex
• worldbuilding
• cunnilingus
• remix
• mpreg

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Mixing regular expressions and HTML drove this one programmer mad.

I know only enough about regular expressions to know I don't know anything about regular expressions. I know HTML very well. I know Cthulu only to the extent that any sci fi geek is forced to pick up that horror thing osmotically.

That was quite enough info for me to bust a gut.

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Comcast in talks to buy NBC Universal.

Of the good: NBC would be back to being owned by people in the entertainment* business, instead of GE, which, as far as I can tell, is in the business of being in businesses.

Of the bad: Apparently do not intend to fire Jeff Zucker as first act of business.

*entertainment distribution, anyway. They have a vested interest in people actually desiring to watch the stuff that is shown on their networks, which it is not clear to anyone that NBC actually cares about right now.

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On an upswing ( spoilers )

Okay, so everyone is excited that the Archive of Our Own is moving to Open Beta in about 13 hours. You know how people found out about Open Beta? By subscribing to otw_news. That's the news blog for the Organization for Transformative Works, which is the non-profit organization which sponsors the archive, the Journal of Transformative Works and Culture, the Fanlore wiki, and is filing amicus briefs and public comments on legal issues of concern to fans, around the issues of fair use and free speech.

Another great fannish comm is as_others_see_us. This is a weekly post of references to fanfiction and media fandom in the media, along with the occasional discussion.

Last but not least is the geekfeminism_feed. The Geek Feminism blog is not about media fandom, but it is about geek culture and women, so the areas of interest overlap.

P.S. I have one Archive invite available. First person to private message me for it, gets it. Mischief managed

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I am 10,000% over Callan the woobie. Because the thing is, Callan doesn't act like the socially maladjusted, emotionally incompetent wreck you would assume that someone who was ( spoilery background details ) would be. Heck, he doesn't even particularly act like someone with an inability to form close ties to people, considering his relationships with Hetty and Sam.

Look, I would be down with mad, bad, and dangerous to know G if they actually wanted to go there. I dig crazy characters (does anyone remember the Profitt Arc from Wiseguy? I do, with total fondness. The only times I really liked John Sheppard was when he got all blank-eyed and deep-voiced and psycho vengeful. [Okay, blanker-eyed.])

But they aren't giving G. this terrible backstory in order to play the effects out on him, they're giving him a terrible backstory in order to make you want to pet him and hug him and call him George. And I don't need all of that, I don't need a bad ass to be psychologically ~complicated~ and ~dark~. I love Sam, and his backstory to date has been pretty damn straightforward. Just keep the two of them squabbly and flirty, and I will be totally happy.

P.S. Seriously hot porno Sam/G commentfic. Has some POV issues, spelling issues, but otherwise awesome.

P.P.S. While I'm pointing to commentfic of awesome: White Collar: June/Neal The world needs more of this.

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Watched ( Glee. )

During Glee, they showed a preview for Avatar. I had been hearing for quite some time that Avatar was going to be an amazing science-fiction extravaganza I should really want to see, but, weirdly, all of this promotional material totally elided over the plot and premise. ( Now I know why. )

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I wrote up some info about using the styles wizard, because the last big discussion we had on styles showed that a lot of people didn't realize all of the things that you can do just with the wizard. I wrote up this walk through, but, at this point, I can't tell if it (a) makes sense or (b) is useful.

Let me know if there's anything too confusing or that's really unnecessary, let me know if there are any blatant errors. I'll post it to getting_started once I'm satisfied with it, and offer it to the docs team as the basis of a guide. (I don't write for official Dreamwidth docs because the official style guide has some stylistic decisions I can't support.)

---

A good while ago, there was a discussion about how to organize Select Styles. Reading that discussion was pretty disheartening, because so much of what people were asking for is already available with most official styles.

I'm going to walk you through selecting a style, so you can see how you can use the style selector to choose a theme and use the wizard to make a style your own.

( A few introductory notes )

( Picking a layout )

I'm going to use Tabula Rasa as the example for walking through the wizard. As I said above, 95% of the styles implement 95% or more of the options I discuss below. Some of the styles have extra options, a few of the styles have fewer options, and none of this applies to Zesty.

( We're Off to See The Wizard )

That's the basics of what you need to know to modify your style. As you can see, a lot of the ways people would like to search for styles don't apply (e.g. columns, modules available) don't apply, because they are selectable through the wizard or they are standardized for all of the styles.

There is one option people are very interested in which is dependent on style. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to search to tell you where in the entry the style displays the icon. There is a bug to make left or right side of entry something one can select in all approved styles, but it's slow going because the CSS can be fairly complicated and we haven't made people submitting new styles supply this feature.

The other option people expressed interest in searching for was fixed width versus flexible width. All of the official styles are fluid width layouts.

---

One thing people expressed an interest in doing that the style system makes somewhat difficult to do is preserving a particular set of wizard changes. There is a way to (more or less) do that, but it is a hack and requires being a little bit adventurous.

( How to save the Wizard )


( Some vocabulary. )