beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have been thinking about how and why people use computers, livejournal, dreamwidth.

There was a short story I read from ages before the internet was a Thing that was about a student learning computers, and one of the assignments was to go through old old data and sort it. Don't remember where the story was or many details or I'd reference it better. But. The student saw that in the early days of computing it was all numbers, accounts, business, science, practical stuff you'd need a computer to get done.

Then humans started being human with computers.

And eventually it was all kinds of EVERYthing in there, like recordings of your partner to prove they snore that turned out to get used every night they were away.

So I was thinking, the internet very swiftly has been for all kinds of EVERYthing
but
lately I have been seeing less of it.
( Read more... )

I dont think we use online quite the way we used to. Not just we here dreamwidth, we here humans. The way the computers are set up focuses attention for you, will you nil you, and I think we started going quiet in several ways, not being focused on.



But I also personally went quiet for ordinary reasons of doomscrolling, falling out of fandoms, and not really having new opinions.

... sometimes I disagree with earlier me, sometimes a show developed in directions that dumped me right out of it, but the baseline stuff about gender and sexuality and disability feels rather like having the same grumble for twenty five years, because whatever progress we make, there's still grumble to be had. And it hasnt got any more interesting to say it.

All the reasons I fell out with my degree topic, cultural studies, also get in the way of interacting with media texts.

Tricky.



So I take this thought for a wander for a whole bunch of minutes, and then at the end I get the impulse to friends lock it, because anxious.


I kind of miss posting multiple times a day and having a little chat going in the background.

Hello humans, we are human, let's be human!

Let friendship thrive.



I'm going to have to find new ways to try that.

am reading some of my old notes posted to LJ and the discussions that followed them.
am reading them on dreamwidth because on LJ the deletion of accounts has absolutely gutted the discussions.
am very glad I have the copies. reconstructing them from email is theoretically possible but given the way LJ titles all its emails... yowch.

have also been running into walls whenever someone links to del. including collections that were at del. of things that look like they would have been useful.

I kind of miss paper books, because even if you find one with the pages fallen out the chances are still good of finding another copy with pages, but paper books wouldn't have had these discussions in the first place. So I'm just sad about ephemerality.

I've been reading people getting a Dreamwidth account and deciding to xpost, and several have said something like "You can xpost from Dreamwidth to LJ, but I don't know how to post from LJ to Dreamwidth... hmmm, maybe I'll just stay on LJ"
er, why?
Because, the xposting thing, that means that wherever you post from it goes to both places, right? So what's the difference xposting from Dreamwidth or from LJ, since it goes to both?

Not that I have yet either imported my LJ or learned how to xpost, because staying away while there's beta, but.
am I missing something?

Just unfriended a bunch of communities, mostly highlander and comics.
If I unfriended a people and you're unhappy please to say so.

Been thinking about fanfic posting best practice and how it changes in relation to the tech tools available.

Posting in parts:
(wherein I discover how it is like both television and sonnets, and how those things are like each other)
( Read more... )

... also, this wasn't quite what I set out to write.
I was going to be dry and technical about labelling.

The header on fic is something between those FBI warnings at the front of movies and the blurb on the back of books. And I guess it's another fixed form: you get a set number of lines, dealing with particular concerns in set order. Usually not so very poetic in effect though.
On mailing lists the header went in the part 0. Which avoided the arguments where some people wanted it and some people didn't - don't want to read it, just don't read 0/10.

... I'm getting a sudden urge to write a disclaimer/warnings/rating sonnet. Oh *dear*.
... maybe just a haiku?
... teach was write, poetry makes you mad...

LJ has a handy dandy tool called lj-cut that lets you stick stuff not everyone will want to read behind a link. But writers have to put enough outside the cut to get people to click on it. ( Read more... )
If the Subject line on LJ were used like the Title on mailing lists, more stuff could go under the cut. Maybe.

As it is the header goes outside the cut pretty much everywhere, giving us all the data we need to choose to read or not read. Which is cool, in it's way, but when people are xposting to half a dozen communities at once then it do get a tad bit repetitive. Also if they're not putting it in big letters in the title line it takes actually reading the body of the post to find out if it's 1/10 posted ten times or 1/10 thru 10/10 completely posted.

Not cool, dude! I might not have my glasses on!

... aaaaand we're back to how much work is reasonable to ask the writer to do to save me time.

The way I figure it with the memory-title issue is if one cut-n-paste by the author can save potentially a thousand cut-n-pastes (if it's memoried by everyone on a large community), then that small courtesy would be quite a nice gesture.

The don't-make-me-read issues are more personal. Though the accessibility issues involved in that make it a disability Thing too. Bit sideways of what I set out to write though.

What else... oh yeah, the 1/10
This apparently takes a bit of explaining to look logical.
( Read more... )
I kind of thought all that was, you know, logic and obvious, but I've seen someone argue about it and decide to do it their way instead. I always hate rules I don't know the reasons for, so I thought I'd explain this isn't a Rule, it's a Logic.

The thing with LJ is, we're all writing our own thing here. When we post to communities it's like old style mailing lists in that there's a lot of people that we're joining and they probably have some rules they'd like us to fit in with. But when we post on our own journals there's no particular requirements whatsoever. We're absolutely free to speak here, and nobody can kick us off LJ for doing it (unless we violate the terms of service, of course). But that means people who don't like the way other people are doing things can do their own thing and then say, being perfectly reasonable, that nobody else can tell them what to do. Which, true.

But the conventions have evolved as a way of conveying the information most likely to match story with reader in the least possible space, and they've been knocked about by quite a few years of use now, and do in fact seem pretty logical when you poke them. So I like them.


... what else... ah, last thing: tags

LJ and teh internets have these new handy little features called tags.
They're nifty. I like them.
I'd like them more if the things I care about enough to write about most didn't get lost when they went over some dumb limit (and without a word to me), but in general, tags are made of win.

But there's a big difference between LJ, where writers tag their own posts, and del.icio.us or however you spell it, where people collecting pages make the tags. LJ encourages people to make rules about tags that they want to impose on others. Which... can come out a bit obnoxious. Once again, more helpful to explain the Logic than to make it look like a Rule.
( Read more... ) Yet apparently some people are feeling pressured or even told off because of their tagging habits. Which is a reader problem - don't scare off the writers! Never enough fic to go around!

Though, natch, trolls are always with us, loud people in crowds also, and the old misreading problem is unlikely to go away any time soon. The usual social balance - trying not to be offended and not to offend.

... I do my best, but some days? Not so very much with the balance.



All that? Up there?
Not exactly original to me.
It's talking about conventions, so if it *were* original to me, bit of a problem.
But I thought putting it all in one place might be useful.
Putting it all in *this* place might be *less* useful, since my friends list pretty much do things the way I like already, but I thought I'd run it past y'all before I had a think about where else it might be useful to put it.

If there's other places I should link to like for references, like classic how-tos on the web that could have saved me half an hour, or other LJ posts or a community that makes it especially clear in the userinfo, that would be useful stuff to go in comments too.

torchwood_three linking to all the Torchwood talk? Yaays.
But it don't half make me feel like I'm hogging the conversation.



(/random)

apparently I have 181 entries with the tag Torchwood
... woah ...

so I invent some new tags, torchwood episode review, and a tag for each number of episode.
... Livejournal needs to make tags work better. Because I think as it is there's 81 and counting that one cannot access via tags. Hmmm.

anyways, nice mindless job, adding tags to all the old entries.
... I'm sure I'll get to it sooner or later ...

I have now caught up with reading fanfic.
I seem to have read every Jack/Ianto fic in existence.
Or at least every one on the Torchwood Three community newsletter.

This may not sound impressive
but
I only started at New Year.

*headdesk quietly*

Most of them I liked are in Memories. Some are on del.icio.us (sp?) because they weren't on LJ.

Very, very, very few of them have an actual plot.

I shall therefore be greatly distinctive as a writer if I actually get around to the writing part any time soon.


It isn't that I don't like sex. Or happy snuggly stories. Just they get a tad bit samey when they're stripped of context, outside events, and anything beyond description.

Suits and braces and stopwatch and coffee are all yaay, yes, but I rather like the saving the world parts, you know?

Also, have long since had enough of suicide.
At this point I'm reduced to giggling about it, or just closing the story.
Because past a certain point it just goes road runner.

Also also, I appear to have guilt about reading NC17 stuff involving the Doctor.
Finding some of it involving extreme kink and stuff that only immortals can get away with I could in fact have lived without.
... in a pass the brain-o sense ...

... come to think, there *is* a good use for retcon ...


PS Have noticed I have about 137 stories Memoried yet have sent, er, possibly about 13 bits of feedback.

Feedback to Torchwood fandom: You don't suck! On the whole. Most of the time. Especially the stories with capital letters, paragraphs, punctuation, spellcheckers, and (rare wonder) beta readers. In fact, y'all look really a lot like most fandoms. With lots of fanfic in.

Slightly short on MPreg, considering, but I'm sure that'll be fixed shortly.

... slightly less sarcastic feedback: There's a bunch of good stories out there.
The hot ones I can't FB on because I blush too much and sometimes steam up my glasses. But there are some that are very hot.
And a lot of angsty drabbles. Angsty drabbles and ficlets, never going to be in short supply.



I'll have to go through all the stories again to make any sort of recs post. May be some time.

To: People posting fanfic
Re: Fanfic titles

If the title of your post is 'fanfic' then, once memoried, it joins the other bazillion stories that couldn't be bothered to cut n paste the title into the subject line and is immediately impossible to find.
If it doesn't have a title at all it's just that much worse.

Pick a word. Any word. It doesn't have to be a good title. It could be a random number for all I care, but please, just put *something* in the subject line.


/rant
(again)

... PS: beta readers? of the good.
(this bears repeating)




... I'm mostly ranting at people from months back on fic communities for Torchwood, who probably won't ever read this. I aren't meaning to be rude at my actual friends list. Me and basic social skills sometimes need a refresher course...

Finally someone plugged LJ back in!
That was just bad.
And not everything looks quite worky now even.

Instead of LJ I did reading books.

Ibsen, A Doll's House
Have now read the chapters in the book about it that are about the Drama Text and Translation. The first chapter takes 50/170 pages. This was the chapter I was going to read before Torchwood. Note to self: size matters. ( Read more... )


Now totally unrelated things I'd put in their own post if I actually believed LJ would reliably be there for other posts:

Thought on DW and TW and themey connections:
( Read more... )

Also: Jack and guns ( Read more... )


Now I want to have more interesting thoughts.



I was thinking what you'd have to do to A Doll's House to make it all men.
Big problem is the bit where she has to get someone else to sign for her loan. Who has to do that now?
If there's no women in the story then there's no patriarchal oppresion, which might be really missing the point.
And if they're all men then the children bit gets tricky to include.
And then there's the servants.

So there's a lot of stuff that is very specific to that time and those characters and those genders.

But there's other stuff that doesn't have to be. I mean, a bloke acting like Nora acts would be acting very queer, but that doesn't make it impossibly implausible.


... Why I always got to read things sideways?
:eyeroll:


Anyway, more book now.

Have been wandering around the 'friends' page for the RobinHoodBBC community.
It seems like I post a bit more than other people.
Say, six or seven times as much.

... sorry?

... unlikely to change. Have nobody to make words at who isn't on a computer.

Chat rooms do feel more like talking
I get to the end of the conversation and get attacks of OMG I said that.

message boards are quite a lot like talking, but slower, and with more thinking.

LiveJournal is least like talking, because nobody talks back until I'm done, nobody minds if I go on for pages (because they don't have to read) and I can lock it all up again later if it turns out to be a silly thing to say.

oddly enough I like LJ best
*sigh*

I read a
isiscolo.livejournal.com/301625.html
thingy about friending policy on LJ, and it made me think a vaguely unconnected thing, about monolog and dialog.

LJ lets me do the bits of conversation that I'm good at.

I can say the things I want to say, which as anyone with me friended knows adds up to rather a lot of saying in any given day. And I can read the things other people want to say. And, and this is the important bit, there is no particular pressure on me to come up with an appropriate response to any of it.

See I can do talking right up until there are other people involved. I used to get a lot of funny looks, like I was a walking Random Surrealism Generator. Because in my head things connect, but in my words they do not always so much connect. Writing actually helps, because I can quote a bit and then reply to just that bit and that makes it clear which bit I am talking about. But even so, there will be things that make me say a thing that is not so much a reply to that thing. And whenever that happens, I can wander back here to my LJ and say it, and no longer get that RSG blank stare. For things here can be random, and people can be blank about it, but they don't have to stare, or in fact reply at all.

It's like LJ is designed for optimum austism friendly 'interaction', because it is mostly action, but gives the illusion of the 'inter' part because it all ends up on the same page, and sometimes turns into actual conversation in the comment bits.

I like it.


[link made visible April 2022]