Arduinna

I was going to post about Perception today -- even went back and found an unposted draft from a couple months ago where I'd originally started talking about it! And then someone on my network linked to this Leverage vid as something that would be good for people who miss Leverage, which I clicked on and which shoved Perception to the side.

(I can't quite believe I'm talking about a non-VVC vid before talking about any VVC vids at all, but there it is.)



So I have thoughts about this! ( Which I'm cutting in case people would rather watch without any other influences. )

I've been caught up in Burn Notice since my post last night; there's nothing like having people tell you they're reacting completely differently to make you sit down and figure out why you're responding to a show in a particular way! Which is fabulous, as the more I think about it, the more this season crystallizes for me. Who knows if I'm right, but man, I'm having fun right now with it. <3

But that also means I haven't been thinking about other things to post, and I suspect linking back to an earlier post doesn't quite count as new content. *g* And it's 20 minutes to midnight.

So, er. Cat video? This is Darien, just barely 2 years old, hanging out in the bathtub at 4am.



(cats: posting equivalent of a saving throw?)

So since I posted my list of comms two days ago, a couple of people have created a new Person of Interest discussion comm: pofinterest_chat -- looks like it just got created today, in fact. Check it out!

Lifehacker had a post today about video conversion programs that looked interesting; I've used three out of their top five, but it's always good to have more options. All the programs they list are free and will convert multiple formats back and forth.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to write up a decent con report, and keep getting buried in the fact that I want to report on everything, which is a lot. We'll see how it goes. It wasn't helped today by digging out my panel notes from Friday and seeing the audio editing stuff, and promptly haring off to Adobe Audition to stare at waveforms for a while, and go "ooo" a lot. Time to start looking at how-to videos for that, too.

I haven't done one of these in ages, but I've seen folks reviving it recently, so what the heck. Have some comms!

Recs:

vidrecs Just what it says on the tin, and a good place to post those VVC recs burning a hole in your pocket... It's a low-activity comm right now, and I'd love to see that change. (note to self...) Anyone can rec. Basic rules: no self-reccing, one rec per post, two posts per reccer per day, publicly available vids only.

fanart_recs Again, just what it says on the tin. This runs mainly on a sign-up basis, where people sign up in advance to make at least 4 recs in a month in a particular fandom. They're always looking for more reccers, but I've never seen a month go by when there wasn't at least one person reccing things. Not always in my fandoms, but I've found some fantastic art this way.

fancake Okay, I rec this one a lot, because it's one of my favorite recs places. Themed recs, themes change every month, anyone can rec anything they want in that theme, one rec per post, three recs per reccer per day, amnesty period once a year for all themes. I need to get off my duff and start making recs again.

Fic prompts:

fic_promptly is a pan-fandom prompt comm that has a different theme every Monday through Thursday (Fridays are free-for-alls, post any prompts you want). This isn't an anon meme; every weekday there's a new post. The comm went silent for a while so may have fallen off people's radar, but it's been revived, and it's back in business.

meme_of_interest is the Person of Interest kinkmeme; it allows both anon and non-anon prompts and fills.

grimm_kink is the Grimm kink meme, which you can probably tell from the name. A little slow at the moment, but still active; the most recent comment on the prompt post is from yesterday.

Panfandom fannish chat:

tv_talk is a fairly new comm, where people can sign up to be Captain of a show -- which just means you agree to put up a new discussion post for people to talk in within a week of an episode's airing. Right now only two of the shows that people have asked to sign up for are currently airing, so it's a little heavy on the Teen Wolf and Falling Skies, but I'd love to see this take off as the fall season starts up. Oh, also anyone can post a "General post" about whatever they want, whenever they want - it's not just for official discussion posts.

The comm doesn't allow character or ship bashing, and the spoiler policy is one that works for me (no spoilers of future shows, no spoilers outside of cuts, no spoilers for episodes airing a week previously in general posts).

allfandom_chat is an anon-meme-style comm where you don't have to be anon unless you want to be, where you can talk in comments about any fandom or fannish thing you want. Brand new, set up this week.

whumpable For all your hurt/comfort discussion needs, whether finding h/c canons, talking about h/c tropes, making or asking for recs, etc.

Specific fandom comms:

pofinterest_fic This is the DW mirror to the most active Person of Interest comm on LJ. The _fic part is misleading; it allows "fanfic, icons, screencaps, any other fanart, fanvids, fanmixes, recs, links, discussion posts, news, etc. -basically anything that is related to the tv show Person of Interest" It's basically the only POI comm on DW right now, other than the kink meme, and with the new season coming up...

havenfans For all your Haven needs! Discussion, fic, vids, you name it.

grimm_daily A daily roundup of Grimm fic - originally meant for rounding up kink meme fills, but now lists fic from all over -- the kink meme, various LJ comms, AO3, ff.net. Which I just found, and have now added to my reading list. \o/

I went to Vividcon! \o/ And premiered a vid with therienne and everything! Which occurred to me tonight I never did announce here, because omg I came home and just collapsed.

It's Person of Interest, team gen, called "Some Nights". Streaming, downloads, lyrics etc here on our vidding journal

or if you prefer AO3:

[Vid] Some Nights (38 words) by Flummery
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Person Of Interest - Fandom
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: John Reese, Harold Finch, Lionel Fusco, Joss Carter
Additional Tags: Team, Vividcon, Fanvids, Embedded Video
Summary:

Team Machine

"Team Machine" really pretty much does sum it up. ♥ POI ♥

But one vid does not a con make, and the con itself was loads of exhausting fun, as usual. I traveled, also as usual, with therienne and mollyamory. The trip went the way it generally does, with one fabulous exception. I always check a bag just because it's easier having the extra room, and then there's always that doubtful moment of "okay, so how do we get to the labyrinth of dark, dingy, endless back corridors, with the weird sports-team elevator hiding around behind things as inconspicuously as possible so you're never sure you're in the right place?"

Usually we just wander around trying to find it, but this year were having issues that mean less wandering is much better, so I actually asked an airport employee what the best way to the shuttle buses was, just to confirm our instinct that we wanted to go thataway.

He pointed away from the direction I thought he would and said, "Go to door 1-F and go outside, cross all lanes of traffic, and it'll be right in front of you."

Which, for the record? Is a great shortcut from baggage claim! It takes you to the sidewalk in front of the parking garage, which is indeed where the shuttle buses are. The Springhill Suites shuttle picks up at Door 2, which is almost all the way down that sidewalk, but you're certainly not doing any more walking than you are in the labyrinth indoors, and it's all nice and bright daylight-y with your goal more or less in sight at all times. \o/

So a very auspicious start to a good con.

I'm hoping to do a more detailed writeup or two later, but wanted to get some general impressions down while they're fresh, and as a way of kickstarting this 30 days of posting thing (which I'm going to attempt, although I've never managed 30 straight days of posting anywhere). (I do write posts nearly every day, though. I just don't finish and post them. So maybe this'll work after all.)

I was really pleased by the Critique panel on Saturday morning (which was very well-attended); it kept drifting off into beta instead of public review, but that's to be expected these days, when the default is not to say anything critical (or I should specify: negatively critical) in public. But public crit was definitely part of it, and there seemed to be a general sense that people missed it, especially at the con itself. VVC has always been a haven for public crit, but there's been less of it in recent years.

I think the panel paid off on Sunday; Vid Review felt like it had more constructive crit than I remember it having lately. We're not back to where we were 10 years ago (and may never get back to that level, especially without Snady to be the voice of reasoned honesty), but it felt like maybe we're starting to recover the ability to give and take crit. This makes me ridiculously happy, as that's one of the things I most love about VVC; you can learn so much!

What else -- Premieres continued its recent trend of having lots of tiny-to-small-fandom vids; almost 40% of the show this year, by my count (compared with about 20% in the 2002 Premieres show I was talking about a few weeks back), in a vidshow where only one fandom had more than one vid (Person of Interest \o/).

And in 2002, there was really only 1 vid that risked not being recognized by more than a handful of people in a fannish context; this year, I'd put that at more like half a dozen.

It's an interesting trend. I miss the days when I knew more of the fandoms - but otoh I wouldn't have missed this year's Lego Batman and Wicker Man vids, in particular, for anything. (... don't watch those back to back, though.) Not to mention the gorgeous Queen Seondeok vid, and Little Miss Sunshine... And it's no bad thing to be past the days when a single fandom dominated the show; it was always great in the years when it was your fandom, but not so much when it was that fandom you couldn't really stand (people who disliked Stargate, Supernatural, or Buffy had it rough for a few years there).

OTOH, there's nothing like it when the entire room is reacting to a source that almost everyone knows to some extent. <3

And now I am abruptly hitting post, so this goes up on Wednesday and doesn't turn into yet another never-finished draft.

Someone on my network is subscribed to the Mark Reads feed (markreadsstuff_feed -- this is the Mark Watches Things guy, but writing up reactions to books he's reading, chapter by chapter. I had no idea he was doing this, and the first post I stumbled over was him reading chapter 4 of Squire, in the Protector of the Small quartet by Tamora Pierce.

... I am so screwed. I love Pierce's books; many of them are a nearly-annual reread for me, series after series after series all in a row. Kel's quartet was the first Pierce I ever read, and I adore her, and her books are always on the re-read list, along with Daine and all the Circle books.

And I read Mark's reaction to that one chapter, and then went back to the very beginning of his Tortall tag, to read along as he reacts his way through every book. He started with Alanna, and I found myself liking those books so much more through his eyes (I never disliked them, it's just that I didn't read them first, and they're the weakest writing and the most Mary Sue trope-y, so they suffered in comparison to what I'd already read).

He's huge fun to read along with, because he approaches everything with enthusiasm and willingness to be entertained and amazed, rather than cynicism and looking to score points. It's not that some stuff doesn't bug him, but mostly he's just diving into the stories and characters and having a blast, and it is so much fun, and makes me want to pull out my books for my umpteenth re-read.

So far he's read all of Alanna, all of Daine, and is currently through Chapter 7 of Squire. He reads a new chapter every other day (not counting weekends), so some weeks he gets through two chapters, some weeks three. (He alternates with a completely different book on the other days - right now, it's John Dies at the End.) I'm subbed to his feed so I don't miss anything.

And now I'm halfway through First Test. Again. ♥ Kel! ♥

I was home sick Thursday - not sick enough to want to stay in bed, just kinda draggy and bleah, and taking advantage of a lull at work. So I decided to watch some old vids, and popped in my home-burned DVD of the VVC 2002 tape. I haven't watched most of these in ages, and I'm having a lot of fun.

Wildly generalized things I have discovered during this:

* Cutting-edge vids from 2002 are generally very comfortably paced to my eyes. Like, I relax right into them. Which is kind of cracking me up, because -- of course they are, that's the era when I learned to vid! I imprinted on that general pacing. At the time, mind you, I thought they were fast, and now they're mostly not -- but they're comfortable. There's time to take in each scene during the vid (which could be more than one clip), connect it to the lyrics or music, place it in the context of the vid, and move on -- maybe ~2-3 seconds? They seemed more likely to use internal motion to drive things, rather than cutting boom-boom-boom.

By comparison, I'd also watched some of the Media Cannibals Tape 3 the night before, and while that has a lot of my favorite vids on it, the late-90s vids overall feel pretty slow to me now. (Not all! But a lot.)

* I think 2002 was one of the only years with a real mix of VCR vids and computer vids in Premieres, and in some cases the VCR vids looked better - because people were still figuring out how to export computer vids for cons. Back then, you uploaded a small version to the web (both reduced frame size -- usually half, sometimes even one-third the original frame size -- and highly compressed), because most people were on dialup and had 800x600 resolution monitors. So that's what "a computer vid" looked like, and that's what some people submitted to the con. There are several vids here that are just tiny squares in the middle of my screen, because they were exported at something like 360x240.

It's the exact opposite of now, when you'd see a smaller square and think, ah, made off old SD analog tv source instead of shiny HD digital source. (There are also plenty of computer vids at full screen on this, of course! But it's really noticeable when a computer vidder hadn't figured it out yet, and this was while VVC was still working out the standards for electronic submission to cons, which had never been done before - people were winging it as best they could.)

* That said, everyone was using analog source, no matter how they were editing it, which made me blink for a minute when I realized it, until I put it all back in context in my head. DVDs weren't common at all (and were incredibly expensive, and if they were put out it was years after a given season ended -- none of this "last season on DVD before next season starts" business, never mind instant high-quality downloads), and everyone had a VCR or three, and knew how to use them. Again, that started changing within a year. None of us had any idea what a watershed period 2002/2003 was.

It actually makes for a fun vidshow, when every vid takes up the whole screen (assuming a 4:3 screen, that is). There's no letterboxing at all on this tape.

* Digital isn't always better. Way back when when people were warning that home-burned discs had a 5-10-year lifespan, they weren't kidding. :( There are black spots throughout this home-burned disc of mine, where the video has just dropped out. But hey, part of the reason I recorded it was so my tape would stay as pristine as possible, so I can re-do it if need be. If I can find my tape. (Analog may be fuzzier, but you also don't lose the entire image if something drops out. It just gets fuzzier and fuzzier, but still watchable for a remarkably long time. As long as you don't pause, or keep watching the same vid over and over...)

Things change so fast, though; last time I backed up this tape, I recorded it using a set-top DVD recorder (which I used to record SO MANY THINGS. Not only old tapes, but also straight off my tivo, using the old "record to tape" function. Which I'm suddenly nostalgic for, for no reason.). I didn't have the ability to capture the tape into my computer -- no pass-through device, no space on the harddrive, not enough processor or RAM to even attempt it. Now? The dvd recorder is long gone, and I can't remember the last time I recorded something off my tv. But I do have a computer that can handle both downloads and capturing, with plenty of space and RAM, and I have my trusty Canopus to hook it up to a VCR. <3 (The DVD recorder I recycled, as I'd used it so much it was burning out. The VCRs I cling to. Don't die, little VCRs!!! I have tapes I can never replace!!)

* Wow, the fandoms on this disc are like a snapshot of my corner of fandom in 2002: Farscape, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Witchblade, X-Files, Buffy, Invisible Man, Forever Knight, Brimstone, Angel, Due South, OZ, The Sentinel, Starsky & Hutch, Xena, The Matrix, Highlander, and one lone American Embassy, which I've never seen. All the rest though; even if I wasn't in the fandom, I knew enough about it to mostly follow the vids.

---

More specifically, I'm fascinated by how some of my reactions to some of the vids from VVC 2002 have changed, and how some haven't.

( The most surprising difference to me was watching the Starsky & Hutch vid 'Help Me Understand' by Recycled Media Station )

---

( The other audio-experiment vid, 'Unforgiven II' by DigiRay (Farscape), hasn't changed for me as much )

---

( The other seriously experimental vid, 'Hero' by T4 Productions (Xena), is also interesting to watch in the wake of my own expanded horizons since I first saw it. )

---

Other, less detailed stuff I'm noticing:

Man, some of my favorite vids ever are on this tape. Like Solsbury Hill, by astolat. <3 <3 The con was just a few months after S5 of Stargate SG-1, when we'd lost Daniel to ascension and had no idea if he'd ever be back. It was a pretty fraught time to be an SG fan, especially a Jack/Daniel fan, and it was all I could do to watch this vid at VVC that year. But I love this, how it follows Daniel's journey from Abydos to SG-1 to ascension, and all the different people who bring him to his new homes. It made ascension really feel like the next step on his journey, rather than a loss. *happy sigh*

And then the flip side of that, barkley's Never Die Young, where Jack is left behind over and over again, and finally as Daniel ascends, and my heart just breaks and breaks. I must have watched this at the con way back when, but man, I don't know how I made it through.

... Apparently I am not over Stargate SG-1.

Weirdly, two other favs of mine are for a show I never really watched, other than an episode or two to be fannishly literate at the time: Witchblade. The first few years of VVC tried hard to make me change my mind about this show, starting with these two vids: killa's "Comin' Up From Behind" and bonibaru's "Go" (neither of them online, alas).

Comin' Up From Behind is just a kickass, boot-stompy vid of awesome Sara Pezzini, and the song's been in my walking playlist rotation ever since I saw this. It's sort of a day-in-the-life character study, starting with her getting ready in the morning (jeans! boots! gun! motorcycle helmet!) and then riding her motorcycle out into the dawn, where she very competently deals with all the shit that comes her way, from ordinary stuff to very not-ordinary stuff, including creepy white-haired guy and his creepy dark-haired, ponytailed lackey (the cut to him on "small fry" makes me grin every time, until finally she saves the world by doing a reset on the entire globe, and ends her day by riding away into the evening on her motorcycle.

Go is just as kickass, but starts from the mystical side of Sara's life, her connection to the Witchblade throughout history, rather than the modern-day cop side. ("Grandma was a suffragette" is *perfect*) She comes to grips with this new knowledge and being part of a world she never knew existed, until it's a seamless part of her helping her to do her job. The whole thing is action and motion and woo, with some fantastic mystical stuff going on everywhere.

The two vids are the opposite sides of the show's coin, and combined are an amazing intro to the series. (Spoilery. But amazing.)

Watching them again, man, it's a pity this aired just long enough ago to have fallen off fandom's radar. I think it might have been a bigger fandom if it had aired in the last few years.

I have been writing this post forever already, so won't go into many more vids, except to mention that I was startled to discover that this vid tape included Remi d'Brebant's Sentinel vid, "Possession". This vid made a huge splash in 2002 because it did some very different things -- it used a lot of still shots, particularly on the choruses. But it didn't premiere at VVC; it premiered at Escapade earlier that year, and showed at VVC in the Experimental show, I think. *checks database* Yes, Experimental.

It was incredibly hard to get hold of; Remi never put it up online that I know of, and I didn't think it had made it onto any tape collections. I had completely forgotten it was on this one. \o/ It aired a couple more times at VVC, but it hasn't been shown since 2004.

Fanlore has some of Snady's comments about Possession from when it was being discussed on Vidder after Escapade. IIRC, the still shots weren't just artistic choice (although they worked well that way), but also limits of the source and technology. I can't remember where I saw that being discussed, though (so probably shouldn't say it, but hopefully someone else has a better memory than I).

---

It's 1:30 am ET heading into a weekend, and if I post this now, almost no one will see it. But if I don't post it now, I'll save it as a draft and then decide it's not good enough to post, like I do with most of what I write. So here, have a post, whoever is up at this hour!

I have been reliably informed by separate sources that I need to stay off the internet for a while, possibly as long as a year, because there are huge honking spoilers out in the open all over the place, in both fannish and non-fannish spaces.

This is very frustrating! Because a) I'm the sort of person who, if you tell me "Don't look at that, you'll get spoiled," actually won't look at it. If you want to surprise me with something, you can put it in the middle of a room under a thin piece of tissue paper and tell me it's a surprise, don't look, and I will find a way to avoid looking at it for as long as necessary. (... Please don't take that as a challenge.)

But also, b) I spend a lot of time on the internet, really. And the people who warned me figure that the rampant discussion of whatever this is will die down in a week or two, so really it's probably okay to look at things again after that -- but that I'm probably going to be spoiled anyway at some point, because these spoilers are so widespread that everyone's going to assume everyone knows them and will talk about them freely outside of cuts until they happen, so basically I'm doomed.

So now I'm in this place of "I should just look. Rip the bandage off, get it over with, get spoiled and be cranky and move on" -- but being constitutionally incapable of doing that. I cannot deliberately seek out a spoiler, it's against my very nature. So I keep taking a deep breath and reaching to click the links for my DW reading list, or Tumblr (I should just give up on tumblr, man; I can't manage more than a day or two every few months, from avoiding spoilers), or ffa, or whatever, then stopping cold, unable to click. It's like telling myself I should just go kick a rock with my bare foot, because odds are good I'll stub my toe accidentally at some point anyway, so why not do it myself on purpose?

It is not easy being a spoilerphobe in modern fandom, man.

On the flip side of that, the Venture Bros team are clearly my soulmates, as exemplified in this interview with io9: Why the Venture Bros. creators want you to know nothing about Season 5

You two have been super-secretive about season 5. It's like you're the Mad Men's Matt Weiner of animation at this point. What can viewers expect coming up?

JP: It's not like we're being secretive. I just don't know why anyone would want to know about something rather than just watching the thing, you know.

DH: Yeah. And you could say for people to watch the show, we're not going to tell you what happens so you don't have to watch the show.

JP: Yeah, the means of delivery are just as important as the package.

DH: We spent a lot of time making sure this stuff happens in cartoons. so why blow by saying it out loud?

JP: And have people form opinions about crap.

Would that extend to like very broad things like "In this season, Dr. Venture is going to go on this adventure" or something like that?

JP: I mean, sometimes we'll say if certain characters are going to be around or not and sometimes we'll say there are a lot of exotic locations.

DH: It's like a crappy sales pitch. You do not want to hear us talk about might kind of happen.

Except that I’m interviewing you, and the whole reason I’m interviewing you is to ask what's happening in this season.

JP: Well, there's your mistake. Why don't you ask what you think you want to know and we'll see if we can answer it or be colorful about answering.

DH: Getting to your original point, I don't think that's really the point of an interview, to find out what's going to happen. You could find out how we write, you could find out what the show is about in broader terms, we could talk about all the past seasons. I'm not sure, I think you might be incorrect. I just want to point that out.

You reject my entire premise.

DH: I think it's a flawed premise that journalism is the art of asking what's happening next.

♥ ♥ ♥

This: "the means of delivery are just as important as the package", is really it for me. The context, the nuances, make a huge difference to me, and once I know something in advance, the ability to see it fresh in context is gone. Either it falls completely flat when I see it, or I don't bother watching/reading it at all, because there's no point.

I'm honestly glad it's easier now for people who want/need spoilers to get them; I just wish so many people didn't assume that everyone must want to know every possible thing in advance.

OTOH, it's vidding season, and most years as June progresses I pay less and less attention to anything but the terrifying looming Vivivdcon deadline (oh dear god, it's June already). So there's that. And if I need a break from that, I'm way behind on the POI kinkmeme, with lots to catch up on, not to mention a bajillion things to read on AO3.

And meanwhile, Venture Bros starts its new season tonight. \o/

mific posted a podfic of one of my stories today, Booty -- a bit of Halloween fluff in SGA fandom that I've always been inordinately fond of, so I'm extra chuffed that she wanted to read it.

Listen to her rendition of Booty here!

Many thanks, mific!

I mean to sit down and write up my POI reactions, but wound up watching Driving Miss Daisy instead. I have very fond memories of that movie, but as it went on, I got more and more confused by why some scenes had been cut.

Then, more than 3/4 of the way through, I figured it out: I had totally been expecting the movie to be the Quantum Leap episode. Which, hey, it is not!

*facepalm*

(Huh. Looking them up, I feel a little less bad about that now; the QL ep aired months before the movie came out, so I must have imprinted on it.) (Although seriously: how on earth did my brain actually elide Scott Bakula and Morgan Freeman into the same character?)

So now the POI reactions have to wait for another day. Oy.

I keep writing up posts about last week in Boston, then deleting them for an excess of rantiness. But I also don't seem to be able to move past writing up that kind of post.

( So I will just say, in short: )

*deep breath*

Okay, that took five days to get down to a plus-and-minus set of paragraphs. Now maybe I can move on to fannish things. Which I will take to another post, so as not to mix it up with the RL stuff...

I figured my first Person of Interest story would be something sweet and slashy. Instead it's gen and crossovery, but hey! POI fic! \o/

Inspired by a prompt on the new POI kinkmeme:

POI/The Equalizer Crossover
I honestly do not care how you manage it, or how you make the intervening 20-odd years of time go away, but the POI team meeting Robert McCall. Hell, maybe Reese plays chess with him in the park or something? I don't know.

On the kinkmeme

Or on AO3:

Legend (1730 words) by Arduinna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Person of Interest (TV), The Equalizer
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Harold Finch, John Reese, Robert McCall
Additional Tags: Crossover, Community: meme of interest, Older Characters
Summary:

"We have a new number, but... it’s odd.”

“Odd how?”

“Odd in that this is the eighth time I’ve seen it come up."

These are Greasemonkey scripts, which will work in Firefox and I think Chrome (and Chrome clones) and Opera. If you don't have Greasemonkey, it's definitely worth installing. You can get it in add-ons/extensions. Once you have the add-on, you can install all kinds of scripts to customize your browser to do what you want.

DW scripts:

Dynamic and persistent DW reading/network page expand/collapse/hide This is amazing, and I wish I could install it on my mobile devices. It lets you collapse (and later expand) or completely hide entries on reading and network pages on DW -- not just your own, but anyone's. Collapsing a post will leave the subject line; hiding it will make it go poof.

LJ New Comment "This script remembers which comments you've seen on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, and marks new comments with a link which says "NEW". Clicking the link selects that new comment."

Dreamwidth ljwho This lets you add notes to anyone's username on DW. It's browser-specific, so it's less useful than a native action tied to your account, but I still find it plenty useful.

You can find more DW scripts here.

AO3 scripts:

I found these through ao3some, a comm for AO3-related stuff.

ao3 download buttons This adds a Download button to everything listed on a works page, so you don't have to click into something specifically to download it. Just click the download button right there in the header info, choose your format, and you're done.

AO3 Kudos Tools Once it's set up, this will let you know if you've already kudosed something by changing the color of the kudos button to green, and putting a green background on your name in the kudos list. You can also set it up to put a dark grey background behind anyone else's name, if there are people whose tastes you really trust.

Fair warning on this one: it takes a bit of work to get set up -- not very much! But you need to edit the script once it's installed to add your username to the script so it knows what to look for, and to add anyone else's usernames if you want it to check for them, too. See below for instructions if you're not used to doing this.

AO3 Saved Filters This adds a section to the sidebar with two boxes, one for global tags and one for fandom tags, which will save whatever you put there. This took me a bit of figuring, but once I got it, I was floored.

Both of these will take either includes or excludes. To include something, just type it (enclose it in double quotes if it has more than one word: "hurt/comfort"). To exclude something, type it with a minus sign in front, again using double quotes if there's more than one word: -"hurt/comfort".

The "Global" box is persistent -- anything you put there will be filtered on no matter what works page you're looking at, and it remembers it across browser sessions. If you never want to see fluff, add -fluff to that box and hit save, and fluff will forevermore be filtered out of any results for you automatically. (You can always edit the boxes later to add or remove things.)

The "Fandom" box is for stuff specific to whatever fandom you're looking at, so you have to be on a specific fandom works page for it to show up (meta-tags don't count - "Sherlock Holmes - All Media Types" won't have a "fandoms" saved-filter box, but "Sherlock (BBC)" will. Collection works pages don't count, either. Both those pages will only have a global box.) This box is persistent for a given fandom: if you put -Lestrade into the box on the Sherlock BBC works page and hit save, you'll never see any works with Lestrade named in the header info when you're browsing through the fandom.

So if you never want to see fluff anywhere, put -fluff in the Global box and hit save. If you're good with fluff everywhere except The Wire, put -fluff in the Fandom box on The Wire's works page, and now that will be the only fandom where it doesn't show up.

I am just boggled at how customizable this is. Wow.

AO3 savior Works like Tumblr savior, in that anything it protects you from is hidden, rather than gone completely. You can choose to unhide them, then hide them again if you realize that nope, you really didn't want to see that after all. You can specify authors, tags, or summary terms/phrases; matches need to be exact.

Fair warning on this one as well: you also need to edit this script to tell it what you want it to protect you from. Again, it's not hard, but if you've never done it it can look confusing; instructions below.

( Editing those user scripts )

Couple of important notes:

1. Greasemonkey is installed on your browsers, and have nothing to do with your DW/LJ or AO3 accounts. You need to install it on every browser you use, and set up the scripts you want on each one.

2. This is much harder on mobile devices. iOS won't allow extensions to be installed unless you jailbreak your device, which I haven't done so I can't tell how well it works.. Looks like Android has a TamperMonkey app that's a browser that allows Greasemonkey scripts, but I don't have any Android devices so again have no idea how well it works. I can't find anything at all about installing Greasemeonkey on Windows phones/tablets on a fast search.

But if you're still regularly using a computer or two, these scripts are really useful.