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.)

A couple of weeks ago, paian linked to a nifty little greasemonkey script that has made Dreamwidth so much more usable for me, I can't even tell you. The script is attached to your computer, not your account, so you don't have to be logged in to DW to make it work.

It's here: Dynamic and persistant DW reading/network page expand/collapse/hide.

If you're on Firefox and you have Greasemonkey installed, what this does is add two things to the subject line on each post you see: (-) (x) . That's it. They are WONDERFUL.

If you click the (-), the post you're looking at shrinks down to just the subject line and the comment count/reply links line. (You also then get a (+) in the subject line, for if you want to re-expand it.)

If you click the (x), the post you're looking at vanishes utterly, and the space where it was closes up so you don't see any gaps between posts.

Whatever you click stays clicked no matter what page you're on; if you collapse a post on your Reading page and go to that person's journal, the post is collapsed there, too. It's also collapsed if it shows up on your Network page. Likewise for anything you hide completely; it's gone everywhere. Really freaking handy for NSFW posts that scroll by at work that you don't want accidentally showing up again!

If you hide something and you want to unhide it, you just go to Tools | Greasemonkey | User script commands | Clear hidden entry values, and boom, you've got your hidden entries back. (You can also clear your collapse/expand entry values).

( Here, have some screencaps )

One of the things I have always disliked about LJ-type journaling is the lack of control over what I see; I want to be able to mark things as read, and delete them if I don't want them, and flag them to go back to later. This doesn't let you flag things, but with this I can finally see at a glance what entries are new, and I can get rid of ones that I just don't want to see.

It makes the Reading and Network pages so much cleaner, and so much easier to keep track of. <3

I've been poking around Dreamwidth for a couple of weeks now, looking for communities, and figured this would be a good Friday to start sharing the wealth. And since I've been happily catching up on the last few eps of Burn Notice*, here, have some comms:

bn_sparks - adult fanfic, both het and slash

burn_notice - discussion

burn_notice_fic - all genres, all ratings

burn_notice_graphics - fanart and graphics

winter_deaddrop - prompt-based flashfic comm

Some of these aren't very active yet, but hopefully if more people are interested that will change. (And that Fanlore entry I linked up there could use some love, too, now that I look at it...)

---
Follow Friday (followfriday): Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die". Just introduce us to some new things to read. You can see all the entries on DW that have been tagged Follow Friday here.

---
* I'm not all the way caught up yet! Please don't spoil me for the final two eps of s3; I'm watching those this weekend. TYK!

God, season 16? Seriously? I remember when we expected it to be cancelled every year, and now there's like, three months between seasons. (Also, the racers traveled uphill both ways, in the snow. In Alaska. By themselves. Poor Guidos.)

My love for TAR isn't as intense as it used to be, but I've been enjoying it again for the past few seasons. This season there are no actual assholes that I've noticed, which is really nice. Looking at the field right now, there are only a few teams I would rather didn't make it to the final four, but that's mostly because there are a few teams I hope really do. I'm not actively rooting against anyone, which is sort of refreshing.

Random observations on this week's episode:

( spoilers ahoy )