Consonants and vowels all together, equally

Hey all! I am coming to you with the following questions because I've reached the kind of impasse where there's a manic squirrel running around in my head and there doesn't seem to be an answer that can keep me out of trouble! Please, please, please, even if you never like to comment, even if I intimidate you, please let me know if you have any opinions about the following questions. I might have follow up questions for you if anything is unclear.

Many, many, MANY THANKS in advance!

( two questions about AO3 tagging )

( tumblr tagging )

( DW icon descriptions )

I do have systems that I'm using now, but with all the incoherent and unspecific grouchiness around they are apparently inadequate! I like to avoid getting into fannish trouble because then you just end up on fandom wank for having bad tags and all the old bullshit gets dragged out and trust me, I've been called a sockpuppet enough in this lifetime.

It's that time of year in which people are very busy, so I just wanted to say in one place at one time my general social policy.

In short: I will not call you, I will not text you, I will not try to see you, I will not ping you on chat, I will not @tweet you, I will not expect you to reply to any comments I might make in your journal, and I will not expect you to contact me in any way. I never want to be seen as any kind of social burden, or as someone who obligates other people socially. If you feel that I have done that, please let me know, and of course I will reduce my contact with you further.

• I do not initiate emails unless they are brief, urgent questions. I will state the relative urgency of the question and the time frame during which I need an answer. Otherwise, I will not email you.
  
• I do not @tweet people as a general rule. I do not DM on twitter, but I will reply to DMs.
  
• If you would like to chat with me, please ping. I am never on invisible, and when I'm busy I say so, so if I'm online I'm generally amenable. I will not attempt to chat with you, even if you are online and your status is "available."
  
• I trust that people who do not want comments on their journal entries will set them to have no comments. However if you would rather that I not comment on your journal please let me know.
  
• As a general rule, I reply to the comments on my journal. However I do understand that journal comments are not obligations for conversation, and do not expect people to reply to my replies.
  
• Similarly, I do not expect people to reply to the comments that I make in their journal unless I've asked them a question. However even in that case of course it is up to you whether you wish to reply or not. I do reserve the right to not comment in the journals of people whose consistent nonreplies to comments implies, to me, that they are not interested in people commenting in their journal. I will not think less of you for this; I just probably won't comment in your journal.
  
• I'm not really on facebook, but anyone on facebook probably knows this. I try to keep up with the invitations, though.
  
• I do not initiate in-person meetups, because I understand that people are very busy and don't really have time for that sort of thing. I hope that when they do, if they would like to see me they will contact me.
  
• I do not call people, unless I have a very time sensitive question and I know they're home.
  
• I do not text people except to negotiate logistics.
  
• I try not to post on LJ/DW more than ten times per week, so as not to spam flists.
  
• If there is a similar way in which I can reduce my social burden on others on tumblr, please let me know. I don't see tumblr as creating a social burden, but anything I can do to lessen social burdens on tumblr, I will do.

As for me, well, spending two weeks nearly entirely offline and having no one notice or look for me or try to contact me does tend to put things into perspective; I think I'm just not the sort of person who is missed or needed in that way. I'm pretty sure that if I got busy again, and took more time off, I would be able to do so without anyone being any the wiser. I am, fortunately for me I reckon, neither so in-demand nor so important to anyone that I need to make the kinds of announcements that are so popular this week.

Anyway, please feel free to contact me in whatever manner you choose.

Look, it's just going to be spammy around here for a while because I've had THOUGHTS and I want to share them as that's what the journal is for.

On the LJ version of this post is a poll about whether people are entirely opposed to reading DW. Of course, for those of you reading this on DW the question is moot.

I'm doing that 30 days of fanfic meme during the 30 days of September but while they were written I didn't get around to posting them while I was away this weekend, so there's a bunch of backdated entries that may well not have turned up on your flists. This includes an answer to a question that sangueuk asked me this weekend: one-two-three-four-five.

Fanfiction writers mention this all the time, but in nearly ten years of being in fandom I've actually never had anyone send a message to ask me when I'm going to finish something. I'm choosing to believe this is because I finish stories before I start posting them and then post them very regularly, so I've never abandoned anything or left something without updates for any period of time, and not because I pretty much suck and I write too much already so no one would ever want to ask me to continue writing anything. ALLOW ME MY DELUSIONS, OKAY?

Wow, that moment when we could comment on LJ was short-lived, wasn't it? Well, when things are back up and running I'll throw them a few bucks. They're fighting the good fight over there and I'm happy to be patient while they get all that straightened out.

In the meantime here are some short thoughts:

• The EWFS sequel is so close to being done I can taste it. Seriously: two scenes, one of which I've started, and the epilogue will be done and I'll send it and the reworked final chapter to the betas and then do what I really should have been doing the last two weeks, which is work on the STBB. Though that one is so fun and so clear in my mind that I think it'll go really fast.
  
• Oh my god Morissey stop being a dick. People might take your comments about animal rights more seriously if (1) you didn't try to boil down a complicated issue into a sound bite (2) you didn't do this at moments of global sensitivity (3) you didn't also run around saying weirdo racist anti-immigration bullshit. Sorry you don't like all them brown folks in your lily white England, but that's the breaks of being a colonial power.
  
• However, Chris Daughtry, you keep letting your geek flag fly. Cosplaying with your kid at SDCC, two thumbs up.
  
• My brief moment of reading the newspaper (mostly due to the phone hacking scandal, which I could not get enough of) has ended now that the news is back to "things that give Clio anxiety attacks." You know, like racist massacres and monetary crises and drought-related famines.
  
• KENNA IS PLAYING THE TOTALLY FREE AFROPUNK FESTIVAL IN BROOKLYN NEXT MONTH STOP SO ARE JANELLE MONAE SANTIGOLD CEE LO GREEN STOP BASICALLY THIS FESTIVAL SHOULD BE CALLED THINGS THAT CLIO LOVES STOP
  
• Love you, Karl, but I'm not seeing Loft. From the summary of the original Belgian film that was posted on tumblr, it just sounds like a movie of men being jerks to women for two hours, and then possibly getting some comeuppance but not really. Yuck, no thank you.
  
• I've been actually seeing tons of people on the weekends. It's really fun to be social! And I'm glad the horrible heat broke.

Okay so this is the thing: If you have issues with the royal family as a symbol of imperialism, or with weddings in general and particularly Christian ones? Totally valid! Write about it! Share with the class! Some folks on my flist already have done so this week.

But if you're just telling me that you "don't care" about the wedding, without anyone asking you? It doesn't make you look cool; it just makes you look like a jerk. It's a very difficult thing to say that you don't care about something without dismissing the thing entirely, which also sort of dismisses the people who care about it on any level.

And more to the point, you aren't adding anything to the conversation. I don't care that you don't care. I haven't been sitting here wondering why everyone I know isn't talking about the wedding. If you don't care and you stay silent on the matter no one will notice!

We all have frivolous things that we like, and one person's frivolity is another persons couldn't-be-bothered. Which, yay diversity and all of that, but you have to actually act on it.

because it's probably better to be defiant than to head down the shame spiral or delete all my fic with explicit sex scenes. In no particular order.

( Read more... )

At halfamoon: The Unpopular Woman Love Post at which I'm planning on commenting in support of Mercedes Jones, Britta Perry and Suki, at the very least. I'm sure you all will find tons of ladies you love as well.

Also norfolkdumpling, who made a lot of the Trek icons I use, turned me on to iconomicon and it's flat out amazing. Though given how many folks are following it I'm sure many of you know it already!

And finally, after the one-two punch of a great Glee (finally) and a touching White Collar I'm listening to this mix which my iTunes genius dreamed up ( for Marching Bands of Manhattan )

I think it's just not really possible for me to have these conversations anyplace. Everyone is angry, and they want to vent. And that's great that you feel like shouting in your journal makes you feel better. I support your doing that.

The thing is, what I can't do is continue to read it every day. Because what you vent out doesn't just dissipate into the atmosphere. I have to digest the anger that you don't want to digest. Venting doesn't make me feel better; it makes me feel worse. And I can't be angry in the way that you want me to be angry. It's not how I work.

Turning my anger into positive action makes me feel better. But I can do as many positive things as I possibly can, and you will still be yelling, and I will still have to take in your anger and see how I can change my actions because of it, and I just don't know how it can ever be enough.

Just, the more I look around the more it seems that if I'm not angry, and I don't want to be angry, I really can't be a feminist.

So! A lot of people have been joining my Dreamwidth circle lately, so I thought I'd say a few things about, you know, how I do what I do, social-media-style.

I really love DW and how it's set up and the extra cool features (like the way you can see what's behind someone's cut without leaving your reading page). Cross posting is super easy, and anyone can comment there with their LJ name under open ID. So if I was to decide you could only comment on my entries over there, which I obviously haven't, you totally could! And nothing's ever locked, just like pretty much nothing's ever locked here.

I also have a fic journal there, the_water_clock. Everything is cross-posted though.

I still have a ton of DW codes if people want them. I'm just saying, you don't have to choose! You can have BOTH! I like that I have a backup for my LJ, and another place to network and make pals, and there are definitely comms that are only on DW like tenwomen. I try to comment on people's DWs rather than their LJs because I like to support DW. But I'm totally still here on LJ. Now that I have the comfort of someplace I can go if I need to, I find that I don't need to cut ties here in order to live over there.

In short, don't get too woeful that everyone is leaving LJ. People have been moving some content off LJ for a while. A lot of the live-watch and here's my life stuff is on twitter, and the picspams are on tumblr. I have an account in both places. I don't think some people getting around to activating their DW will make it that much quieter around here.