Arduinna

My family and I have been occupied with getting ready for my sister's funeral, which was this weekend. In the meantime, therienne did me the huge, huge favor of getting the word out about my sister's three cats, who needed homes. That post went viral in short order, spreading to places that have boggled me, and I'm grateful to everyone who read and signal-boosted her post.

I'm very happy to report that thanks to everyone's efforts to spread the word, two of those cats went to their new home today. mero picked them up this afternoon, and Molly and Katie are all set now. <3



Soon to be snoozing in front of a new window instead, but still together, yay!

We're still looking for a home for Romy (Romeo), the 10-year-old male cat.



He has allergies that require monthly shots and a modified diet, and those allergies have caused him to lick off most of the fur on his belly and hind legs. But he's as sweet as can be, friendly and well-socialized and loving, and beyond the allergies he's healthy and happy. He's very person-oriented, and all he wants is a person to love who'll love him back.

If you know anyone who might want him, please have them drop me a comment; I've got anonymous commenting turned on so they don't even need openID.



And seriously, thank you so, so much to everyone who's helped spread the word about this. My sister made arrangements for the cats this summer when she discovered that her treatment hadn't worked and she wouldn't have long to live, but a few days before she died we found out that those arrangements had unexpectedly fallen through, and we didn't have time to do anything about it at that point.

We couldn't have gotten Molly & Katie into their new home without the help of so many kind people, and my entire family is grateful.

You spend the day obsessively refreshing your mail for your assignment, then when it finally appears, you open the email with a hand over your eyes in abject terror of what it might be.

Happily, mine appears to be one of the fandoms I offered to write! Go figure. *g* Hopefully, my writer has made the same discovery and is not panicking at their assignment.

Also, for anyone who wanted a button to click to default rather than having to send an email, it looks like AO3 offers just that - in the "My Assignments" page, there's a section for "Manage [work]" that lets you click either "default" or "post to fulfill".

I have no idea what happens if you click default, and I'm not going to test it. *g* But it's there!

Now to start reviewing source...

\o/

There are a bunch of things I keep meaning to post about (Venture Bros, omg that second to last ep was so good! Burn Notice is back! [although I haven't watched this week's ep yet so please don't spoil me *g*] Fringe! [also haven't watched this week's ep, so please don't spoil that one either, sorry!] Yuletide signups are almost live! AO3 NOW ALLOWS VID EMBEDS OMG!!! - and, you know, has shinier code in general, and tons more Yuletide stuff, but omg VID EMBEDS! Permanent URLs even if your hosting changes! YAY!!)

But the thing that causes me to actually finish a draft for once is this:

( cut for image )

\o/ GO HEIDI! She looks fabulous, and as Tom and Lorenzo of Project Rungay put it:

"Ahem. As we recall, a certain Ms. Garcia threw down the gauntlet during the Project Runway Season 8 finale judging session with a derisive "I'd like to see you wear that dress, Klum."

Why, kittens. We do believe Miss Heidi Klum just gave Miss Nina Garcia the finger, figuratively (and fashionably) speaking."

HAH!

Now let's see if Nina actually wears Gretchen's godawful knit-granny-panties and hideous shiny green leather jacket combo.

There are more pics at the link - Heidi is totally showing that dress off, and looking very happy about it, too. Yay for Mondo!

(Icon totally aimed at Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, not Heidi. <3)

The short version of this post: I made an AO3 skin! And it is blue! \o/

( longer version cut for rambling and nested screencaps )

And to answer the question I know at least a few people will want to ask, this is how you increase the margins on story text so it's not sprawling across almost your entire browser:

#chapters { margin-right: 10%; margin-left: 10%; }

Those are the settings from the screencap, to give you an idea of what percentages you want to play with.

Yay for skins!

I found this on my Network - this is awesome. They're having so much fun, and are so good!

I didn't actually intend to make a follow-up post; I didn't think one would be necessary. But I think it is. I mention several people by name in this, because I can't see any other way to have a conversation about concrete things. I hope no one takes this personally; my intent is to look at a trend that caught me very much by surprise, and that I don't think anyone else has noticed, and that I think has real bearing on the current conversation.

So, after making my last post, I started catching up on other posts a little, and came across laurashapiro's announcement that she's going to be warning for common PTSD triggers and common triggers for migraine or epilepsy. She included a list of the vids she's showing at Vividcon this year in various shows, with warnings attached, so people can be prepared when they see them.

I generally skip warnings, because I don't want to know what's in vids before I see them. But I spent hours yesterday watching vids specifically with that trigger list in mind, and when I came across Laura's post I wanted to see if it matched my general experience with those vid discs.

It didn't, at all, and in fact was so different I sat there blinking, because her warnings also didn't match my memory of her vids. So I re-watched them.

I think she got these warnings very wrong in the context of the current discussion. In fact, I'm honestly boggled at how how much my interpretation differed from Laura's. So I went looking to see if it was just her I disagreed wtih.

It's not. My take is different in the vast majority of the cases I found.

Laura linked me to the list of vidder-provided warning posts being gathered by were_duck, so I went through every vid I could. Everyone on this list says they're using that same list of PTSD and physical triggers to provide their warnings.

I'm only going over individual vidders' warnings; I can't speak to how accurate the VJs who are providing warnings for their entire shows are. Also, I'm only including vids I could find online (one of the vidders on were_duck's list had no listed vids online that I could find, so that person isn't included here).

( avendya )

( chagrined )

( china_shop )

( damned_colonial )

( laurashapiro )

( mresundance )

( such_heights )

( thuviaptarth )

( my take on all of that, cut for length )

Maybe what's needed really is a second convention, run by people whose focus is on warnings-based risk-aversion, or at least risk-alleviation, to cater to a crowd that's uncomfortable in the Vividcon environment, with a specific infrastructure in place to help cope with the difficulty of accurately warning for triggers appropriately. I think there's enough passion and dedication being shown to make that possible; maybe some of those passionate folks could be the beginnings of a concom, working in concert to create the sort of con environment they envision, and from the look of the response the idea is getting, this would be a hugely popular con.

That would be fantastic, if you ask me - more vid cons, aimed at different vid audiences! \o/ Vividcon for fans who don't want warnings; the other con for fans who do. Any vidder submitting to either con would know what was expected, and could choose to submit to the con that best suited them (or to both, if they were fine with both methods of distribution).


(edited to cut for length, with apologies!) (eta2: to fix the cut to where it was actually supposed to be *facepalm*

I have signed up for H/C Bingo! (hc_bingo) We shall see how this goes. No rows are leaping out at me on first glance, except for a few "oh dear god, what was I thinking" sort of things. *g*

( card beneath the cut! )

There's a meme going around for sparking posts for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth:

What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about _________ I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for?

This is only sort of relevant to me, since it's not like I've ever posted that much, but I'll go with the spirit of it: since I plan on trying to post at least semi-regularly for 3W4DW, does anyone have any requests? Fic prompts, etc., are also fine. I make no promises about answering everything, but I'll give a shot at what I can.

As usual, I watched Doctor Who over at therienne's and merryish's place on Saturday.

( spoilers under the cut )

From there somehow we moved on to Dead Zone, SG1, and Due South, and spoilers therefor. I don't even know. Also ep one of the second season of Being Human, woot.

They've finally set a release date: July 13th. (My sympathies to anyone vidding this for Vividcon, ouch.)

Details on tvshowsondvd.com, including box art and suggested prices.

Still sorting away at the zines (it takes a while - I'm a packrat, it's hard to let things go!). Tonight was sorting through Pros printouts - circuit stories I'd copied (or printed off, if I got them via Proslib) and put in binders. I'd actually done a purge of these five years ago as well, clearing out a lot of the random stuff I'd kept. But I still had a pile left.

Some of them were easy to put into the recycling bag, because they're online now - Of Tethered Goats and Tigers, Rediscovered in a Graveyard, Suitable Gravity. There are a few that aren't online (or that I only have txt files for) that I can't quite bring myself to recycle - The Die Is Cast; Kind Hearts; a whole slew of Meg Lewtan historicals that I adore for their unabashed, unashamed wallowiness.

Then I found a whole stack of loose paper, and thought I'd missed something in the first round of purging - this had to be about 25 stories that I'd meant to recycle.

Except not so much. It was a two-inch, two-pound, double-sided stack of a single story: Waiting to Fuck Fall.

I didn't even remember that I had this; I know I never ordered it through the Circuit Library, never made my own copy. And this copy looks like it was created at different times - different paper, different toner quality, etc. I think I inherited it from the_shoshanna when she moved to Canada. (Shoshanna, do you remember? Was this yours?)

I never read it on paper; I wasn't kidding about the two inches and the two pounds. That was a lot of loose paper to contend with, and I just never got up the gumption, especially since I'd largely begun drifting away from Pros. I did eventually read it - online, when it got put up a year or two back. (Yeah, never think to yourself, "Oh, I know it's long, but maybe just the first few paragraphs to see what it's like, and then someday I'll get around to the whole thing..." unless you're willing to lose an entire weekend -- it's 350,000 words.)

Thing is, I'm never going to read this paper copy. It's loose, the quality isn't great in many places, it's hard to hold and read; I like paperback-sized things for reading these days (and preferably nice clear print). If I ever want to read it offline, I'll put it on my Kindle, where it will weigh a few ounces and fit neatly in my hand, and where the cat can't accidentally destroy the pagination by chasing a dust mote across it, and where I can resize the font when my eyes get tired.

I should recycle it.

But. What a piece of Pros history, this cobbled-together printout, passed from fan to fan! Maybe I should put it in the donate pile. (Although then some poor archivist will have to deal with it. *g*)

I am awash in nostalgia right now. I'm sorting through some old zines with an eye to selling and/or donating a bunch of them, and came across my copy of Twogether, the Due South zine that was the sequel to Two, both put out by IIBNF Press.

Due South was my first real zine fandom, such as it was; my first zines were ST:TOS, but I only had a handful, bought used out of a box at a dealer's room at an SF convention back in the mid-80s.

But after I got online and found FK fandom (omg people other than me watched FK! and taped it! and talked about it! *\o/*), I found out about DS fandom. I'd been watching DS since the pilot movie, and loved it, and was over the moon to realize it had a fandom. It even had a slash fandom!

It even had slash ZINES. omg.

So somewhere around 1995, I ordered my first-ever brand-new zine. I'm pretty sure it was Cry Wolf, from Ann O'Neill in England. I had to wrap up my cash very carefully to mail it off, and I had no idea if it'd made it until a month or two later, when suddenly there was a package for me, with a digest-sized zine full of Fraser/Ray stories. A (tiny) book of Fraser/Ray stories! It was to swoon.

I was hooked. I bought the next Cry Wolf, and two volumes of Pack Mates, all from England, and hey all of a sudden, I was a real zine fan! I had a collection.

And then Bernice advertised Two, and I bought it, and wow. It was amazing. Twice as thick as the Pack Mates zines, beautifully laid out, chock full of stories, like my old ST zines. I was still very much in my fannish honeymoon phase, and read pretty much anything and thought it was all good, but my memory of that zine is that it was aces. I mean - how can a zine with fuzzy stickers of moose in it not be awesome? (I'm not kidding. Random fuzzy stickers. I loved that zine so much.)

It even inspired me to write my first-ever LOC to a zine; I'd sent comments to online writers before, but I'd learned that part of the deal with zines was that if you read one, you were supposed to send a LOC. So after I finished it, I wrote... the stupidest LOC ever. *g* I had no idea what I was doing!

And it's not that I remember writing the stupidest LOC ever; I'd completely forgotten that I LOCed the zine, and if I had remembered, I probably would have thought that I wrote something reasonably coherent and useful.

But (here's where I tie in the first paragraph) tonight, when I looked at my copy of Twogether - the sequel to Two, remember? - I flipped through it to the back, where the letters of comment were, and there's my name. omg. (I had the same omg reaction when I got the zine, thinking back; for some reason, I hadn't expected the letters to be printed. *facepalm* I'd thought Bernice would just pass the feedback along to the authors. Total newbie, me.)

None of which is what triggered this post.

What triggered this post was looking at the other letters, and having a jawdrop moment. See, some of the names in there I remember from back then. Most I don't. Three in particular, I don't.

One right after the other, I saw letters from sakana17, sherrold, and movies_michelle -- all women I became friends with a few years later via other fandom means, and whom I'm still friends with. (*waves!*) And there we all were, sitting in the same LOC column together in 1997, in a zine printed in Australia and shipped halfway 'round the world.

I really love seeing how far back fannish connections actually go. <3

(Also, man, DS was some kind of mega-vector. Freakish.)