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.

Oops, missed a day.

5. How about when you're not online/on the computer?

Not... on the computer?

Oh, that would be when I'm asleep. Right.

Er. Most of my non-computer time is either: sleep, chores, travel time, or roleplaying games. RPGs are my only significant non-computer-based activity, and one I love very much. There are some things from my old lifestyle that I do miss, though. One is cooking, and I'm working on doing that more (well, obviously I cook all the time, but cooking as an activity is a bit different from cooking solely to generate nutritious variably-tasty comestibles). The other is moviegoing, and that's unlikely to change in the short term for various reasons.

6. What do you wish people who read your journal knew about you?

That I'm an interesting person.

My thoughts on yaoi!

Um. That is, this is primarily a fandom journal, and so many of my friends on DW are fandom-related friends. And one thing that has always frustrated me about fandom is that most conversations about our objects-of-fannishness are held via creative mediums: more often than not, someone with an opinion about the characters, plot or themes of a given book/show/movie will express that opinion via fanworks, particularly fic. And other people mull that over, and respond in kind.

As a non-writer, that frustrates me to no end. I adore fanfic, I read it voraciously, but I'm an extremely slow, uninspired and uncertain writer, and creative fiction isn't my language. Whereas I interact with my fandoms by talking - meta, squee, criticism, whatever - and the ratio of meta-to-fic, in fandom as a whole, is pretty freakin' tiny. When I post meta, people rarely engage with it, and I rarely see other people posting much of it either. (Not that I post much of it myself these days, as it's a bit like talking into the wind.)

None of which is meant to say that anyone else is doin' fandom rong - not at all. As an avid reader, I love the fact that there's so much interesting, thinky fic out there (and even if I wasn't, I would never presume to tell people they should converse the way I want them to). I just sometimes get a bit frustrated and sad that nobody seems to speak my language, or to want to engage in the kind of conversations I can have.

But! On the up side, at least that means there is a metric ton of awesome thinky fun interesting fic out there - at least I can hear and enjoy the language, even if I can't speak it. :)

3. Do you crosspost? Why or why not?

Yes, and no. By default, my entries are all crossposted to eleanorjane, which is specifically intended to be a mirror to this journal. I have never felt that I belonged in fandom enough to turn away friends, and there are interesting people on LJ who I would miss if I withdrew to being DW-exclusive. I do sometimes turn crossposting off if I'm posting something DW-specific, though.

I also crosspost some of my entries to my primary LJ, ladyjestyr, if it's something that I think might garner interesting discussion over there, or be of interest to my flist (which is almost entirely non-fandom). Crossposting to that journal isn't on by default, though; I only turn it on for specific entries.

I know there's been a lot of meme content here lately, but I don't have the juice for anything creative and there are some interesting questions here, and it's all about online life, which seems perfect for 3W4DW.

(For those readers that haven't seen it elsewhere: 3W4DW is Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, a three-week fest celebrating the anniversary of DW's open beta, aimed at stimulating content and community here on Dreamwidth; during the fest, a lot of posters do something special, and we generally avoid crossposting our 3W4DW content to anywhere else.)

1. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?
I've always been an earlyish adopter of social media, even back before that meant something specific. When I heard about a new journalling service, I was interested, and then somehow I failed to hear anything more about it until a month or so before open beta. A kind friend gave me an invite, and it coincided with increasing frustration about the changes happening at LJ. I was so impressed with the featureset at DW, the plans for future development, and their transparency and responsiveness to user concerns and requests.

The only reason I still do anything at LJ is that there are people there I'm not ready to say goodbye to.

( rest of the days under the cut )

For Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'm going to try and post daily, and I want to write a series of posts about things I love, big or small. I'm calling this Twenty-One Days of Love; in these posts I'm going to talk about something I love, with pictures and accompaniment and fireworks where appropriate, and then link to some examples that I hope some of you all might love too.

Let's kick this off with an unusual start: webcomics.

( Day One: I Love Webcomics )