Arduinna

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.

I'm guessing that by this point most people have seen the links to kouredios's friending meme for folks who want to talk more on DW & LJ, but if not, you should check it out. Lots of people showing up from all over, into all kinds of fandoms and non-fannish things! (And here's the LJ version, for the LJ-inclined!)

I continue to fail to post because I get bogged down by wanting to say ALL THE THINGS, so I never finish anything.

So in the spirit of just freaking posting more, dammit, I will not wait till I have a huge post about Leverage to post this bit of Leverage news:

A letter from Dean Devlin

As of the writing of this letter, we still do not know if there will be a season six of our show. Just as we didn’t know when we created the last three episodes which are about to air. Because of this uncertainty, John Rogers and I decided to end this season with the episode we had planned to make to end the series, way back when we shot the pilot. So, the episode that will air on Christmas is, in fact, the series finale we had always envisioned.

This is not to say we would not do a season six should we get the opportunity. Everyone involved with the show, from the cast, the crew, the writers and producers, would like nothing more than to continue telling these stories. But, in case we do not get that opportunity we felt that, creatively, after 77 episodes, we owed it to you, our fans, to end the show properly.

I sincerely hope you watch these last three episodes. They build to our conclusion. And the finale, I believe, is the most powerful episode we’ve ever done.

From all of us who make the show, thank you for watching, supporting and encouraging us. I’ve never experienced a fandom as intense, loyal and wonderful as you all.

Let’s go steal a series finale!

Dean Devlin

Executive Producer/Director LEVERAGE

I'm torn on the possibility of cancellation; I love Leverage a lot and want it to keep going, but I also feel like they've started to wander sort of far afield recently in some eps, and it's tough to keep a show fresh past five seasons.

But man, I'm glad that if they're going out, they're going out the way they want to.

Images:

There's currently a smallbatchicons request fest going on for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth; anyone can request up to five icons on any theme (show, character, color, emotion, object, whatever), and anyone can fill those requests.

If you're the requester, you leave a comment with screencaps/images you want the icon-maker to use, or if you want text, leave that instead.



Fanfic:

Not Prime Time is open for signups. "Not Ready For Prime Time (Fandoms), or otherwise known as Not Prime Time, is a gen, het, femslash, and slash multifandom secret fiction exchange for medium sized fandoms. This is for the fandoms that are no longer eligible for Yuletide but are not megafandoms."

This looks like a lot of fun, and I'd probably be signing up if the deadline wasn't four days before the Vividcon deadline. Woe.


Not Prime Time (AO3 collection)
Frequently Asked Questions | Megafandoms List
npt_admin on LJ | npt_admin on DW

Fandom

And finally, this is little late, but, there's still just about an hour about 45 minutes to take the OTW survey, if you haven't yet.


I took the OTW
Community Survey!

click to take!

(If you want to link to these and keep the cut tags intact for people, link to my front page or link to this archive page)

(disclaimer in part 1)

Finding fandom

It wasn't easy to stumble over fandom in the 1990s if you didn't have a specific interest in it. Which doesn't mean it was hard to find!

But fandom wasn't being talked about on tv, or in random newspaper/magazine articles, or being linked to off mainstream sites. Media companies weren't hosting forums to try to corral people's fannishness into appropriate venues, where like-minded people could easily find each other and link off to other more fannish sites; mostly TPTB were sending C&Ds to people who posted pictures of their show, and being very wary of this whole "world wide web" thing that was taking control away from them.


(source: a 1997 cache of the page X-File Fan Fiction Links, found on Wayback If you click that link, it will look different than my image; I made my browser's background black before I took the screenshot, so it would look the way it did originally. There were an awful lot of black-background XF sites around then...)

Most fans were careful never to publicly link back to (or even mention) fan sites, to protect each other. If there was a newspaper article about us somewhere, it got talked about and linked (or quoted, if it wasn't online) all over the place, as something rare and strange and worrying (journalists almost always got it wrong, for one thing).

(Fifteen years later, I still twitch when I see people linking to archives or vid sites or individual fanworks in public forums, particularly media-controlled forums. The instinct to hide was instilled that strongly.)

And really, everything, not just fandom, was out of sight in the very early days. The web was brand new, small, and scattered, and consisted of lots of little pockets of interest that weren't very well connected. Search engines were in their infancy, as well, and not everything was indexed.

But pretty much, all you had to do was look around on the web or Usenet for your preferred source's title, and you would manage to find something that would point you in the right direction.

( Online services companies )

( Links pages )

( Webrings )

( Fanlistings )

Where the fans were talking

Discussion was the primary function of fandom in the 90s, at least in my corners of it; fanfic was great and got devoured, but it was secondary to talking about the show. (Although for that matter, we also talked about the fanfic.) While there were people who only wanted the fic and ignored the discussions, there were also people who only wanted the discussions and ignored the fic. And where today someone watching an episode might think "I wonder what would have happened if he'd accepted the coffee?" and write a 600-word snippet about it, back in the day they were as likely to post the question to their preferred discussion place and start a conversation about it that could last for days. (Or vanish without a ripple. You never knew.)

So fans were talking all over the place, and there was a good chance you could find a format that worked for you; if you didn't want to talk, you could lurk and watch other people talking. Like anything else, it was 5-15% of the people doing the talking in most places, while everyone else lurked.

( Newsgroups )

( Mailing lists )

( Message boards )

( IRC and other forms of chat )

( Personal websites and archives for essays and reviews )

Where the fans were reading fanfic

To start with, if you were on newsgroups, mailing lists, or message boards, you were very probably reading fanfic there as well, either mixed in with regular discussion or on separate fic-specific groups/lists/boards.

Beyond that, the two main ways to find fanfic was on archives and on personal web sites.

( Archives )

( Personal webpages )

( Newsletters )

Monofannish or Multifannish

There's a myth that it was hard to be multifannish in the heyday of mailing lists. It wasn't hard at all, even before Karen's site; it was just that if you didn't have multifannish tendencies to begin with, it was easy to be monofannish and just play in the one sandbox that interested you. You could ignore anything that wasn't relevant to your own personal interests.

( Looking for more fandoms )

( Spreading the cross-fandom word )

part 1
part 3

If you haven't heard yet, AP is reporting that the feds have shut down Megaupload and arrested its founder and several employees with violating online privacy laws.

I'm trying to get my head back to a fannish space after a rough month, and between Yuletide, Pinboard, and the OTW elections, there's a lot going on. I may have things to say about some or all of that if I can start wrapping my brain around things, but meanwhile I've been trying to sort out where to find info about Pinboard stuff and OTW elections stuff. So elections first:

The OTW Elections site has a lot of useful info, but unfortunately it's not easy to find; I don't think they were expecting quite this much activity, and the News posts that serve as links to the information are starting to scroll off the front page. So I dropped the Elections folks a note about it, but given that it's in the middle of what's turned into a very busy elections season, I have no idea if they'll be able to address it this year or not.

So meanwhile, some direct, sorted links to help find information better on the site:

Who are the candidates:

List of candidates, complete with official candidate statements and including links to transcripts of the first two chats

Links to the candidates' journals, where you can see how they interact day-to-day with people, ask them questions directly (by comment or PM), etc.

Chat transcripts

Transcript of the first candidate chat

Transcript of the second candidate chat

Further chat responses from the second candidate chat


Followup questions from the chats

First set of followup questions, after the initial chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • What concrete things will you do as a Board member?
    
  • What do you see as Fanlore's role?
    
  • What do you tell people when asked "What does the OTW do?"
    

First set of followup questions after the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • Three questions, combined into one set relating to plans for outreach
    
    • to fans outside Western media journaling fandom
      
    • to fans outside of Western media fandom, especially anime/manga fans
      
    • to underrepresented sections of fandom.
      

Second set of followup questions after the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • How would you balance increased internal communications (i.e., more meetings) against already overburdened committees?
    
  • What was your role in the server-naming issue, and if you had none, what would you have done had you been involved?
    
  • How can the OTW further support and encourage fair use projects, what do you value about those projects, and what will you bring to them personally?
    

Third set of followup questions after the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • In the face of volunteer burnout, what would you do in your current committee to help bring in more volunteers and increase long-term retention, and what would you do as Board member to do so org-wide?
    
  • How do you intend to balance the goal of increased transparency, which brings with it a heavier workload for everyone concerned, with the goal of reducing staff and volunteer burnout inside the org?
    
  • How will you balance your role as Board member with your other roles inside the org (in terms of time commitment)?
    

Fourth set of followup questions after the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • Request for Naomi and Betsy to expand more on their concrete plans, also open to other candidates to answer.
    
  • What have the candidates done specifically to promote organizational sustainability, and "build the builders" (help turn fans into the builders of their own tools/places), for both technical and non-technical roles.
    

Fifth set of followup questions following the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • What do you see as the Board's role in soliciting all kinds of feedback, and how will you prioritize this as a Board member?
    
  • What do you see as the biggest challenge to sustainability in the org, and how will you work to ensure a sustainable future for the org?
    
  • What do you mean when you use buzzwords like "transparency", and how does it affect a casual user of the AO3?
    

Sixth and final set of followup questions following the second chat

• Questions (simplified):
  
  • What do you think of barriers to easy participation in the org right now? If you think they need to be lowered, what specific, concrete things will you as Board member do to do that? How will you reward casual participation without devaluing more committed volunteer work? How will you balance the needs of casual contributors, volunteers, and staff?
    
  • Direct to Betsy and Naomi (others answered as well): Why do you think your committees are so special that they require representation on the Board?
    

This is not a post about Sandy, even though right now she's touching almost everything I'm doing and thinking. I'm still trying to find a way to say something about her, and how hugely important she was and is to me, and how much I miss her already, and the big huge sinkhole that opened up in fandom when she died.

So last night, to distract myself a bit from everything, I watched an old Mythbusters ep I'd never seen that my tivo brought me, where they debunk the idea that the NASA moon landing was a hoax. And it was good, watching them bust conspiracy theory "proof" after "proof", in concrete, provable ways that are just nifty.

(Like, Earth sand/dirt/grit particles are all rounded and worn down from being weathered for eons, while Moon dust particles are sharp-edged on accounta there's no weather there to weather them, so where dry Earth sand won't hold a footprint because there's nothing holding the rounded particles together, dry Moon dust totally will. Hence debunking the theory that Neil Armstrong's footprint in the moondust was faked, because dry dust won't hold a footprint like that. Hah.)

And then in the last few minutes of the ep, they go to an observatory (the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico), and meet an astronomer there. She's a woman, which made me happy. And then the voiceover introduced her, as "one of the observatory's top docs -- Russet McMillan." And I hit pause on my tivo and just gaped.

I used to read a Russ(et) McMillan's stories, in a bunch of different fandoms, years back. This does not seem like a common name, to me. And this woman is fan-shaped, and fan-styled (long, loose hair, very casually styled, and wearing jeans and a comfortable jacket), and just generally has a vibe where if I saw her when I was at a con, I'd assume she was at the same con. But still -- what are the odds, right?

Pretty damn good, as it turns out.

There's a lot of ways to look at that, and most of them went through my head -- holy shit, a fan I used to interact with, at least a little bit, is a successful astronomer, zomg that is fantastic! And is on Mythbusters, how awesome is that! And she's just generally totally cool and competent and collected through the entire segment, which, go her. <3

But mostly what I was thinking, in the midst of feeling the loss of Sandy so much, was, wow, fandom and fans really are everywhere. We really do endure, and we pop up in the most unexpected places at the most unexpected times.

I have no idea if Russet's still fannish; her stories are still up, but it doesn't look like she's written in years. (ETA: I'm told she's not only still fannish, but still attending Escapade, which makes me really happy to hear.) But she's still a part of my fannish history; she wrote in more than half a dozen fandoms that I was in at the same time as her, so I saw her name all over the place back then.

It was weird and wonderful to stumble over her again, no matter how distantly, and strangely comforting.

( clip from the show beneath the cut )

Fans, man. Fans are awesome. ♥

Okay, so, the "share by email" thing to generate invites seems to work reasonably well, as I got an invite under a RL gmail acct that way and promptly parlayed that into a self-invite to my fannish gmail acct.

(I was feeling all caught up to fandom and modern and suchlike last week when I got myself a tumblr to see what that was all about, and then google-plus shows up. Oy.)

I am poking around in other people's circles to find people I know, while at the same time trying not to just randomly add people because they happen to be there - I never know if that seems weird or not. (Er, likewise on Tumblr, actually.)

I'm Arduinna on Google+: https://plus.google.com/109908241133158620610 -- I think that's the right URL, if I parsed the way astolat did hers correctly. They really have to move to names instead of numbers for those, that's wretched.

I'm aka-arduinna on Tumblr, because some chick in Denmark who goes by the name "Arduinnas" cybersquats on "Arduinna" (without the s) all the damn time, argh. Anyway, this is me there, very exciting I'm sure: http://aka-arduinna.tumblr.com/

I am very amused and grateful that the first thing people seem to be doing is uploading their default icons, and have obediently followed suit, in both places.

And now I'm all caught up to the fandom of right-this-second and will go watch White Collar.

(p.s. my RL one is under my first name and last initial, and currently has no profile pic attached; you can find it with that much info if you know me. I'll be keeping that fannish-pseud-free in case it turns into an actual Facebook replacement that I can let family know about, so I won't be adding any obvious pseuds back. And probably won't be saying much there. But it's there, anyway!)

(The hc_bingo amnesty period, which I wrote this for, runs out in ten minutes. zomg. That is cutting it tight even for me.)

Author: Arduinna
Title: Cabin Pressure
Fandom: The Persuaders, Brett/Danny
Rating: G
Below, or here on AO3


( Cabin Pressure )

I was poking around Fanlore the other day, and hit the entry for Gentle on My Mind, a very long* Professionals h/c slash story about a brain-damaged Ray Doyle and his journey to recovery, by Kathy Keegan (aka Jane of Australia). (There's also a sequel by Joana Dey, but I'm not talking about that here, having never read it.)

It's a relatively long entry, but one-sided: skimming through it, it turns out it consists almost entirely of flyer blurbs for the various chapters, with a link offsite to one review, which happens to be glowingly positive, written by someone who loves the zines. Which is fair enough; lots of people absolutely adore these stories, and rec them whole-heartedly.

But. Many other people do not adore them, and it's just weird to me to see the only writeup being Jane saying that some fans are interrogating this awesome text from the wrong perspective, and a single positive review. In my experience of the fandom, pretty much everyone had an opinion about it (whether they'd read the stories or not, just based on the fairly detailed discussions), and the conversations about roamed all over the place, in all directions.

This is how history vanishes, without anyone even realizing it; have newer fans even heard of the zines, or about the controversy surrounding them? (You can still find some of the later convos on Pros-Lit, fwiw.)

To try to stave off that vanishing a bit, I figured I'd try to dig up some of my reactions from years ago and whap them into some sort of publicly postable form that could be linked to, to add another point of view to the Fanlore entry.

So here's my cobbled-together review, pulled from a few different private and list emails back in 1998 and again in 2003 and rewritten a bit to smooth things out.

In sum: I didn't like this story.

( Gentle on My Mind summary )

The author wanted to tell a story about how brain damage may change people, but it doesn't make them useless, or turn off their emotional or physical needs. They're still capable of being vital members of society and of having relationships. And that is the story she tells -- it's very clear that she wants that message to get across, and it's one that resonates for a lot of people.

The story she shows underlying that is very different, focusing heavily on Ray's new "youth" and adult Bodie's strong attraction to it, to a degree that many people find very uncomfortable. /putting it mildly.

( Gentle on My Mind review )

So in the end, while I appreciate the story she was trying to tell, about brain damage not meaning dead or nonfunctional, I was far too squicked by the underlying attitude to enjoy the story at all.

* "Very long" here means three novel-length zines and two novellas, each considered to be one chapter of the overall story. back to top

So, for the record, I don't like this show, for a variety of reasons. I watched the first several episodes and largely gave up, and the random ep here and there that I tried to watch after that just confirmed that decision; I stopped even looking for SG-1 characters showing up in it, and it went completely off my radar.

Today, ladysorka put up a highly abridged version of the latest ep, with just the guest stars, and I couldn't resist.

Fair warning: My reaction to the show hasn't changed.

So I start watching, and ( spoilers )

More cheerily, I keep getting spam for "ReplicaCartier watches", and reading it as "RepliCarter watches". Heh.

I have a giant post that I've been adding to for, um, weeks now, about the shows I'm watching. It's getting ridiculous, so I'm just going to pull sections and post as I finish them up instead of trying to get it all done before posting the entire thing.

So since TAR was the last thing I watched, TAR is the first thing to get posted. I'm not going back and reworking these; this is what I wrote up week by week.

Rambly spoilers below for each episode to date!

( 18x01: 'Head Down and Hold On' and 18x02: 'I Never Looked So Foolish in My Whole Entire Life' )

( 18x03: 'We Had a Lot of Evil Spirits Apparently' )

( 18x04: 'This Is the Most Stupid Day Ever' )