the sun and the moon and the stars

Okay, nuts to this, I'm just gonna catch up. :)

8. (Alternate) What is your philosophy on journal layouts?

I'm a big fan of black text, white background, decent font size, decent column width, decent typeface, no ridiculous replacement cursors. I don't have any significant related accessibility issues apart from poor eyesight, but I have little patience for form that impedes function so I'll almost always view offending journals as style=mine.

I also don't much like layouts that don't show tags, both by post and by sidebar list/cloud, since I find tags invaluable for browsing and content discovery.

9. (Alternate) Tell me about your default icon.
For a long time my general internet pseudonym was Jestyr/LadyJestyr and Harley Quinn up there was my default icon pretty much everywhere. Jester -> Fool, and Harley Quinn was the best female Fool I could think of. Also, she's adorable.

A while ago I switched to a photo of me as my default icon in many places, but I still identify with this Harley Quinn icon as strongly as I do with my actual face. And I still use Harley as my default icon on places where I want to be me, but don't want to use an actual photo - dreamwidth, twitter and so on.

10. Pick 10 random icons from your userpics and tell me about them.

Okay, this can go behind a cut :)

( here be icons! )

11. What features do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?

* A kudos-style feature!
* User notes!
* A memories system analogous to Delicious (OMG WANT, never gonna happen though)
* The ability to remember viewing preferences (eg style=mine, style=light) by journal (i.e. "ok, I view these in their native styles, these in my style, and these in light style").

That's just off the top of my head. I know there's more. :)

12. What do you consider the five most "telling" interests from the list on your profile? Why?

In alphabetical order:

( Read more... )

13. Do you have any unique interests on your user profile? What are they? How'd they get there?

Amazingly, no I don't.

14. Did you have a gateway fandom? Still in it? Why or why not? Is there a community for it on DW?

The first fic I ever read was by cupiscent, in XMMV, and that prompted me to read voraciously in XMMV - so in that sense, it was a gateway. I think Constantine was probably more of a gateway, though, in that I was an active participant in the fandom - I wrote reams of meta, I wallowed in the glorious fics, and I even started (though never finished) fic of my own. Had it been released five or so years later, I probably would have vidded in it (and still think I might, even now).

(alternate) What is your favourite subject to discuss on Dreamwidth?

Fandom stuff, mostly: my fannish reactions to the sources I love, vidding angst, the fandom meta du jour. I kind of wish I had the focus to be monofannish, but there's too much to love. :)

15. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?

Right now, oddly, it's nail polish. Which may seem kind of shallow, but there's nothing wrong with loving the shiny. It's not something I'd ever done much with before, apart from low-level maintenance stuff, but I bought some OPI nail polish for my mother and I a year ago, and some more at Christmas time, and it triggered something: the urge to collect ALL THE COLOURS.

It's having two good effects, I find, which are probably reinforcing the obsession: firstly, it's an incentive to take good care of my nails, which are typically weak and prone to delaminating. I've never had such nice nails so consistently before, and it's making me want to keep them nice instead of picking at them.

(Which reinforces something I'd realised about myself recently: I need an apparent motivation for reward to do things, not just an intellectual one. For instance, my house has always been rental-house ugly, and I'm very untidy and disorganised by nature. Over the last year or so as it's been slowly renovated and improved, I'm finding that I keep it much nicer without even thinking about it. As I said to a friend, back in the old days I could knock myself out tidying and cleaning and the place would still basically look like shit - whereas now the only thing stopping it looking awesome is the mess, so that's all the incentive I need to deal with the mess unbegrudgingly.)

Er, tangent much? Anyway, yes, second awesome thing about the nailpolish obsession: it's a way of really feeling good about the way I look. I have a number of body-image issues related to my recentish health woes, and they can be very disheartening; keeping my nails nice and (better yet) pretty makes me feel just plain good about myself every time I catch sight of my hands - and that's priceless.

Hmm, so. I just changed my journal theme over to Elegant Grunge, a third party layout I found on dreamwidthlayouts. It's really quite nice, but I'm not sure about it - it feels like there's a lot of wasted space, and the text styling for the number of comments etc. is a little too muted for my tastes. I may have to hammer at a layout myself. Edit: I changed back to Leaving for Paris, the theme I was using before, and then changed the color scheme and a few layout tweaks. This'll do for now, but still:

Tag help needed!
So, I hear that Core 2 styles on DW can handle nested/hierarchical tags. Is there any jiggery-pokery one must enact to have such a wonder, or is it just meant to happen automagically?

So, one of the big things for which I was looking forward to Dreamwidth was an opportunity and a stimulus to be more active, fannishly. To a certain extent I think that's happened, which is good - hey, look, I posted a fanvid, that's a good start. Right? :)

But on the other hand, I find the LJ/DW divide frustrating. It's easy to maintain identities on two sites, but it's a lot harder to use LJ fannishly - my main LJ is my non-fannish one, and my eleanorjane LJ account was always very much second-best, because using it required using another browser, or logging out of my main account every time I wanted to post something or comment as eleanorjane. So my main LJ rolled along, and more often than not I'd just comment on something fannish, or sign up for a ficathon, or whatever, using my main ID because logging out and logging in again was too much hassle.

What I really want, I guess, is for LJ to allow you to switch between identities for a given post or comment without having to log out completely.

Part of the trouble is also in finding an audience. I have a large f'list on my main LJ, and although many (most) aren't in fandom, a few are, but they're all fairly media- and pop-culture-savvy. So if, for instance, I want to post meta, then I can either post it on my fandom journal where relatively few people will see it, or on my non-fannish LJ where I'm likely to get more feedback/input but most of the audience might not be speaking quite the same language as me.

Urf. No answers, I fear; only stopgap solutions. If I were starting over from scratch I'd do it differently - but then, that's true of a lot of other things, too.

Well, the Dreamwidth Open Beta has begun. If you authenticated your OpenID previously you'll get your invite code soon (if you haven't already); otherwise, you can buy an account now if you want one. If you already have an OpenID account and you're getting a full account, I'd like to quote torachan in saying:

Hey, folks, please don't delete your OpenIDs once you get a real account. Or if you do, please defriend everyone first, because otherwise it leaves a permanently struck through name on the userinfo page which cannot be gotten rid of. Not only is that ugly, but if too many people do it, it makes it really difficult to read and see who's actually on there.

But also, keeping your OpenID benefits you, not just the people you friended with it. If you delete your OpenID, you won't be able to manage any comments you've made with it in the future, plus at some point they may make it possible to merge your OpenID with your account so that comments made with OpenID show up as your account name.

If you've already deleted your OpenID, you can reactivate it just as you can any deleted account.

Also, today marks the end of the National Poetry Month in the US; I'm obviously not in the US, but I've enjoyed reading the poetry people have been posting in April, particularly musesfool's selections. So I'll pretend I fit the 'national' criterion and participate just this once, with one of my favourite poems:

( Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/What thou among the leaves hast never known )

Woot! grrliz has provided a tutorial to import a lot of her custom journal layouts from The Fulcrum into DW. The tutorial is here if you're interested, and you can view a list of compatible Fulcrum theme releases here.

I keep forgetting to give people access, as well as subscribing to them. That's awkward, because it looks like a snub. Hrm.

AUGH. And here was me thinking we'd got away from the whole 'friending being fraught with drama' thing!

Anyway - apologies if I flipflop on the access settings for a while; I'm still working out how I'm going to handle the 'trusted readers' issue thing. To be honest, I think I'll probably treat things largely like LiveJournal. I cannot think of many people where I'd want to read their stuff but I don't want them to read mine - and I'm not anticipating posting much (if anything) under lock anyway.

If that changes, well, I can burn that bridge when I come to it. *g*

...

In other news, iJournal is definitely inferior to xJournal. For starters, you can't have more than one entry open at a time, so I can't leave a half-written draft lying around. Boo.

...

Oh dear. I've just realised I don't know the code for linking to another user, a la LJ's [lj user=] tag. Time to go dive into the FAQs, I think. Wish me luck, and pass me a snorkel.