sofiaviolet: my life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot (plot)
I am granting myself dreamroll amnesty. I will never catch up and I'm just going to have to be okay with that.

Because, I shit y'all not, I have not been around since shortly after Con.txt. I was eaten by an unfortunate combination of Analog Life (mostly work, now work + class), tumblr (so low-effort!), fic on AO3, and a grue.

Major things happening for me right now: work, school, nerdy games, relationship, fandom )

Clearly nerdy games are the bright spot in my life. Pretty sure that group are my BFFs.

I also revived my abandoned twitter account tonight. Whee, back on the social media wagon.

So, two things to conclude:
1. If there's anything you need me to know that has happened since, like, mid-June, comment or email me or something? :)
2. If you are in or near Boston, come to the Anarchist Bookfair. Especially come on Sunday, November 11, at 11:00! Most of my Community Archives class (including me) will be on a panel about community archives.

(no subject)

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 12:38
sofiaviolet: be the trouble you want to see in the world (trouble)
[personal profile] rydra_wong is hosting another Giant Community Rec-O-Matic!

Dreamwidth account creation is open through the end of 2011 - no code or payment required.

I've been in New Orleans since Sunday. We arrived an hour late because our plane took its sweet time showing up at Logan. Not sure why. But we had a reasonably nice flight and arrived in time for dinner.

Apparently when I'm in New Orleans I wake up by 8:00. IDEK. Probably has to do with going to bed fairly early, since my parents (especially Mom) tend to go to bed (or doze off on the couch) by 22:00.

On Monday, Mom took Ellie and I to Magazine Street and bought me some new clothes, including a nice cardigan and some black jeans. Yesterday, we got groceries. Today is Mom's last day of work before Christmas (so it's my last day of having to kill time in the mornings by watching HGTV); I've re-purpled my hair yet again and am now waiting for her to get home so we can figure out our afternoon plans.

testing

Monday, October 31st, 2011 18:50
sofiaviolet: Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge (zakim bridge)
Dreamwidth's new update page has entered beta testing - turn it on at the beta features page! There's an entry at [site community profile] dw_beta for reporting bugs.

I have been sitting on my ass the past couple of days, because I am so uncoordinated that I wrenched my knee getting into a taxi. /o\ (My foot got stuck, and then I tried to turn the rest of me 90 degrees clockwise. It hurt.) Ellie had to go to CVS and buy me a knee brace. On the bright side, I succeeded in getting to class this morning, although I was slightly late since I waited for a bus at Ruggles instead of walking.

(no subject)

Sunday, May 29th, 2011 21:19
sofiaviolet: manneqiun feet and a sign that says Sale (shopping)

Recently

Went to a few yard sales (and the Kinky Tea and Tag Sale yesterday, where I spent most of my time socializing, and Boomerangs today, where I found a fantastic knife block for $2, which has made Ellie pretty happy). It turns out that yard sales make an effective carrot for getting me up relatively early on the weekends, and also getting me out of the house. Unfortunately, I walked 3.7 miles yesterday and 1.9 miles today, wearing flip flops for the first time since last year. Oops.

Links

science, kink and fanfic, Dreamwidth stuff, mental illness )
sofiaviolet: pomegranates and text: I planted a seed (seed)

Notes

Three Weeks for Dreamwidth happening now. Expect everybody to be posting all the time. (Seriously, the amount of stuff on my reading page today was terrifying. If you want the actual firehose, the threeweeks feed on Latest Things aggregates posts tagged with several variations on the fest name.)

Recently

Got to see the US Archivist speak today but was barred from the reception afterwards due to being a student (supposedly because of the presence of alcohol, which is doubly hilarious to me because I am over 21 and still do not ever booze it up). Although his speech was good (and confirmed that government archives are not my first choice but would not be too soul-sucking), and I got to archives-squee at the guy I sat next to.

21 Days of Dreamwidth

day 1 )

Questions meme

[personal profile] erika asked: three questions )

Links

4 links: male privilege, derby girl names, non-fictional women of interest, migraines )

Plans

Last blog entry for class, last paper for the same class, only paper for the other class, book reviews, responses for the New Orleans FONSFAQ (also still taking prompts), possibly some responses for other FONSFAQs, possibly a notable woman for She's Kind of a Big Deal, the thing I am making for MCR (yes, I am making them a thing).
sofiaviolet: heap of loose dollar bills (money)
  • [personal profile] dingsi: FONSFAQ Projects Masterlist
    FONSFAQ stands for "Frequently (Or Not So Frequently) Asked Questions" (about a particular topic). Someone hosts a topic, preferably one per entry, and then in comments people can ask - i.e. leave prompts - or claim some issue relating to the topic that they have always wanted to explain/write about. The host then collects the links to all essays that people have written in reply to the prompts and everybody has a lot to read and learn!
    I would kind of like to do a FONSFAQ but I don't know what I'd be enough of an expert in. :\ Maybe New Orleans?

  • [site community profile] dw_nifty: Your own domain as an OpenID in two lines*
    I just set up OpenID at my woefully out-of-date but pithier URL of http://metawidget.net. Like my e-mail over there, the idea is to future-proof my online identity: I more or less own my own domain, whereas it is possible that Dreamwidth, myOpenID, Livejournal or whoever else will do something I don't like (or just be reduced to a smoking crater by a DDoS or an antitrust lawsuit or something). Through the miracle of OpenID delegation, if I get sick of whatever site is doing the OpenID listing, I just fire them, change these two lines, and keep my OpenID. Also, it might motivate me to clean up my site, archive some stuff, and all that.
  • [community profile] leverage_flashfic! First prompt goes live on April 25th.
  • (no subject)

    Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 11:07
    sofiaviolet: lol internets (<3 internets)

    Notes

    Three Weeks for Dreamwidth

    I already have a few ideas of things to post. If there are things you would like me to post about, then prompt me. (No guarantees, since I will be offline for 5+ days, but I will try.)

    Questions meme!

    Long-overdue )

    Links

    2 links: Portal fanart and criticism of rape culture )

    Plans

    Finish up my semester (my last semester of undergrad omfg), MCR concert, Capture the Flag in Franklin Park, play party.

    (no subject)

    Sunday, April 10th, 2011 11:18
    sofiaviolet: Livejournal - I'm just here for the free porn (interoperability ftw)
    Ellie has found a new grocery store, which is good because it's closer and has better produce, but bad because it's not near anything else (that we know of). (Seriously, we switch grocery stores basically every year. At our old place, we went to the one in walking distance. The first year we lived in JP, we needed a T-accessible supermarket. After Ellie got a car, we started going to South Bay because there were other stores (like Home Depot) nearby. Then we switched allegiance to Dedham - Home Depot along the way, BJ's down the road.)

  • [personal profile] forthwritten: fanfiction and my younger self
    And so, when we were about 16 or 17, one of my friends discovered fanfiction in general and slash fiction in particular. In a way, we used it as a silent, secret rebellion, swapping these stories underground (no, really; our common room was in a basement). It fascinated me. Here were stories about people who presented as female one day and male the next, who loved people of their gender, who negotiated sex, who didn't have happily-ever-afters but who had to talk and argue and reconfigure their friendship. The screen did not coyly fade to black and the story often did not end with sex; instead, there were morning-afters and misunderstandings and confusion that had to be resolved. The people had agency and were active participants and, as [personal profile] the_shoshanna notes, sex did not fundamentally change them.
  • [staff profile] denise: [site community profile] dw_suggestions: A User's Guide
    So, you want to learn more about the [site community profile] dw_suggestions process! This entry will be made the "sticky entry" in the [site community profile] dw_suggestions community (replacing the existing one, which was starting to show its age) to serve as an introduction to the Suggestions process, Dreamwidth development, and just what the heck people should be keeping in mind while they're discussing things here.
  • [site community profile] dw_maintenance: New imports temporarily stopped; import queue paused
    We are therefore temporarily pausing the existing import jobs until the traffic clears up some and we are able to further modify the importer so that it is even less of a load on LJ. We are also temporarily stopping the ability to queue new imports, so that once we bring the import queue back up, it will give the queue the chance to clear a bit. (Also, we'd like to minimize the impact on LJ.)
  • Now to assemble a Powerpoint for tomorrow's mini-lecture on Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, and Teh Famous Rivalry!!!! (Wondering whether it would be cool to play an aria and make the class guess which of them is singing it...)

    (no subject)

    Friday, April 8th, 2011 20:50
    sofiaviolet: ?, he said. (good omens)
    Oof. Spend 30-ish hours finishing a paper and being at work, and you wind up with 50 open tabs after you skip 120 entries back. (Back when I was primarily reading on LJ, I would have had to skip farther back but I wouldn't have needed to open as many tabs.)

    internets

    Dreamwidth invite code, free for the taking, or check [site community profile] dw_codesharing.

    Warning: the queue for the importer is really backed up right now because so many people want to import and because LJ doesn't have the resources to give the import tool what it's asking for. If you can wait to import, please do.

    What to do with Dreamwidth: a list of tutorials and information

    Follow Friday

    [community profile] leverage_flashfic! The Leverage panel at Muskrat Jamboree wanted a flashfic comm and I volunteered to run it. No one has posted fic yet, but I am soliciting prompts.

    [community profile] ao3some, which may win for best comm name.

    [community profile] lj_refugees

    [site community profile] dw_community_promo is hosting a communities-only version of Follow Friday.

    Links

  • [personal profile] melannen: Love & Marriage
    One thing I love in a good SF story is ways of doing love, marriage, and romance that don't buy in to our society's idea of love+romance+sex+monogamy all on one single person as the only way to do it.
  • [staff profile] denise: (no subject)
    I've seen people wondering why imports are taking so @)#$(*& long. This might help shed some light:
  • [personal profile] synecdochic: LiveJournal's DDoS and Russian Politics
    So, people who grumble about "the Russians" taking over LJ should remember that in Russia, LiveJournal isn't just the top blogging platform, it's the blogging platform. It is Russia's free press. It is the tool being used to fight corruption and advance the cause of democracy. And, more practically to LJ users, the Russian-speaking sector of LJ is the reason LJ is still there at all.
  • [personal profile] helens78: Vote Ticky!
    I am in favor of tickys because tickys are a form of communication. They can help engender community and relationships in a way that can enhance comments rather than replacing them or taking away from them. When someone isn't commenting, it's impossible to know if it's because they're lost for words, aren't on a platform suitable for lengthy comments (how many users read the site from smartphones now?), don't have a lot of spoons, have to conserve typing time... or aren't reading and don't care. Seeing people's names crop up repeatedly in tickys helps us discover who out there is giving us their time and attention, and can be a greatly-appreciated form of support, even or especially in times when hearing many individual comments -- and feeling obliged to respond to each of them -- can feel overwhelming.
  • EDIT: [site community profile] dw_maintenance: LiveJournal slowdowns/DDoS affecting importer, crossposts
  • (no subject)

    Thursday, April 7th, 2011 08:25
    sofiaviolet: drawing of violets in multiple shades of purple (bunch of violets)
  • [personal profile] helens78: pondering... grainfest?
    Rumor has it that DW is going to be offering seed accounts again. For those of us who don't want one, can't afford $200 for one right now, or already have one, would there be any interest in some kind of parallel fundraising endeavor? We could use the term "grain" instead of "seed" (similar connotation, similar potentially-organic vegan term!), and make icons saying we're going after GRRRRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSSSS, and... okay, really I just think the idea of dreamsheep zombies saying GRRRRRAAAAIIIINNNSSS is hysterical, but seriously, I think it could be a fun project.
  • What Privilege?: Non-survivor privilege and silence
    Those of us who’ve experienced abuse, rape and other violations don’t keep it quiet because we’re ashamed. Or because it’s intensely personal. The main reason we keep it quiet is because we know how you’ll treat us if we tell you. We know you have a culturally-granted privilege to remain ignorant. To not know, and therefore not to be responsible. Not to bother. Not to think about it.
  • And Dreamwidth's hosting provider will be performing maintenance over the weekend. They estimate 15 minutes of downtime for Dreamwidth during a 6-hour window.
    sofiaviolet: pocket watches (steampunk)
  • Pack for Muskrat Jamboree
  • Attend MJ
  • Write capstone paper
  • Create 30-45 minute presentation for music seminar
  • Edit capstone paper
  • Write a few more blog entries for The Networked Society
  • Write two short papers for TNS
  • Write paper for music seminar
  • Possibly make Shiny Thing(s) to try and give to MCR after one of their shows
  • Go and see MCR a bunch of times
  • Remember to take my meds consistently (essential if all of the above is to get done, get done well, and get done on time)

  • And here are a few links for today:
    Read more... )
    sofiaviolet: Hello Kitty wearing a pink bow (Hello Kitty)

    Links

  • [personal profile] charmian: more notifications problems at LJ?
    Currently there's a notifications problem at LJ, which apparently has something to do with a third party [EDIT: possibly Spamhaus]. People are getting fairly upset about it in the comments of the news post (well, also because of the banner color scheme).

    Also, LJ is currently blacklisted with Spamhaus.
  • [personal profile] azurelunatic: Spamhaus and LJ
    LJ has been listed by Spamhaus, which has likely got a decent amount to do with the notifications some people aren't getting. I propose a plan of action for users to help the Abuse Prevention Team squish as many spammerbots as humanly possible.

  • Follow Friday

  • [personal profile] lireavue has been posting good links and personal accounts of the Wisconsin protests.
  • [personal profile] laughingrat posts about library and social justice issues.
  • [community profile] helpfordelight is an auction comm to assist [personal profile] delight with moving out of an unsafe housing situation and paying for her mother's cancer treatment.
  • [community profile] three_weeks_for_dw is ramping up for another round, beginning on April 25th. Planning of activities is currently in progress.
  • [community profile] unclutter is devoted to getting rid of one thing per day and one thing per new thing. (Kind of high traffic, but a really great way to clean sustainably.)
  • [site community profile] dw_meetups is usually pretty quiet, but if you are interested in hanging out with other Dreamwidth users, you should subscribe in case someone plans a meetup in your area (and/or plan a meetup yourself!).

  • Boston meetup

    Boston Meetup: tentatively scheduled for 3/17

    Meme

    Poll #6257 Ask me a question!
    Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 2

    My question is:

    I have another question!

    And another!

    When I answer your question(s), may I reveal who asked it?

    Yes, you can say that $username asked "blah blah blah?"
    2 (100.0%)

    No, please answer my question without attributing it to me.
    0 (0.0%)

    links

    Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 17:35
    sofiaviolet: lol internets (<3 internets)
  • [personal profile] jimhines: Troll Poll
    To me, a troll is someone who shows up solely to stir things up and piss people off. There’s zero interest in the conversation, zero interest in listening. It’s a game for the troll’s amusement, to poke buttons and see who s/he can piss off.

    To me, clueless =/= troll. Angry =/= troll. Even blatant violation of Wheaton’s Law doesn’t necessarily equate to trolling. We all act like jerks sometimes. (I might still ban you for repeated offenses, but I wouldn’t automatically assume you were a troll.)
  • The Morning News: Who You Are and Who You Say You Are
    A Norman Rockwell painting from 1995: You can almost hear the modem connecting over the course of 90 screeching, howling seconds. A man’s back is framed by a desk chair—because he’s at a desk, the only place he can use his computer, a 16-pound beige rectangular desktop model with a loud fan that has three plugs connecting it to various electronic conduits. The person is alternately posting on a message board and trolling a chat room under an assumed name, and probably an assumed age, sex, and/or location. There is safety in the scenery of this painting: the basset hound curled under the desk, the tapping of fingers on keys, the fantasy of being Petunia, 18 years old, from Princeton, N.J., when in fact the person at the desk is really Robert, 49, from North Hollywood.
  • Miller-McCune: Slugging - The People's Transit
    And off the three go toward the highway — and the suburbs — complete strangers, with not the least concern for personal safety, trying to shave 20 or 30 minutes, maybe more, off their afternoon trip home. “People are cooperating … to commute?” says Marc Oliphant, underscoring the novelty of what is going on here. “It’s like the opposite of road rage!”

  • I fiddled with the Dreamwidth bookmarklets some more, in response to this comment by [personal profile] facetofcathy. Now there are some view=flat bookmarklets (and they should work on LJ, too).
    sofiaviolet: ampersand hearts semicolon (ampersand hearts semicolon)
    I just removed a bunch of accounts from my access list. This was meant to clear out inactive accounts and people who weren't reading me in the first place, not to shut anyone out. If I revoked your access but you still want to read my locked entries, comment or PM me and I'll re-add you.
    sofiaviolet: lol internets (lol internets)
    [Originally posted at The Networked Society]

    In Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Shirky defines three basic kinds of blogs: the mainstreamed-media blog (too big for its writer/s to reply to comments etc.), "Blogging Classic" (outward-facing blog with a small enough readership that the writer/s can be involved with them), and journaling. (For comparison, Dreamwidth's Design Personas: Betty Broadcast and Ivy Inward on a journal site versus the first and last of Shirky's blog types.)

    I'm not personally interested in where the tipping point between Blogging Classic and mainstreamed-media lies. What I do care about is how popular a journal can get before its writer can no longer interact significantly with readers. I'd argue that there are two basic ways of managing a journal (as opposed to a blog): a semi-broadcast model and a more reciprocal model (for more popular and less popular journals, respectively). I'll name them along the lines of the Design Personas.

    Sandy (Semi-broadcast): Sandy has more readers than she can fully engage with. She has a group of friends with whom she interacts by reading their entries, replying to their comments sooner and more fully than others, and allowing them to read locked entries in her journal. Sandy tends to have far more inbound relationships (another user lists her as a friend, subscribes to her, and/or grants her access) than outbound relationships, and she probably has relatively few outbound-only relationships.

    Rita (Reciprocal): Rita is able to be friends with all or most of her readers. The volume of entries and comments posted by Rita's social group fits within the time Rita can devote to this form of interaction. She tends to have a relatively even number of inbound and outbound relationships, and many of them are mutual.

    So what is the tipping point between Sandy and Rita? For what it's worth, I currently subscribe to about 240 journals and have about 250 subscribers (although there are some inactive accounts in there, and about 30% of those relationships are non-mutual) and would consider myself a Rita because I don't feel that I have more other-people's-content than time.
    sofiaviolet: Lyn-Z of Mindless Self Indulgence (lyn-z)
    Music seminar went to the MFA yesterday; they have a lovely instrument collection. By special arrangement, we were able to hear several pieces by Couperin, Bach, and Mozart played on keyboard instruments: a very complicated harpsichord with two keyboards and three sets of strings, a clavichord, and a piano from 1796. So cool omg.

    three links )
    sofiaviolet: from Threadless t-shirt: two kittens playing with a grenade (this will not end well)
    [Originally posted at The Networked Society]

    Many important pieces of paper call me Dominique, but I wouldn't say that's my "real name." More on that in a moment.

    I've been a blogger/journaller (in varying proportions) since 2002, when I whirled through several journal sites before settling on LiveJournal. I have since switched my allegiance to Dreamwidth, which I have been using since closed beta.*

    I will be cross-posting and cross-linking everything I contribute to this blog on Dreamwidth. For the class and anyone who happens upon The Networked Society by whatever means: you are welcome to follow me home to [personal profile] sofiaviolet. For my regular readers: you can visit The Networked Society to read everyone else's posts.

    I have almost always been pseudonymous online, for certain values of pseudonymous: Sofia Blackthorne and sofiaviolet aren't on my passport or anything, but they're both me in a way my legal name isn't. I use them everywhere. This isn't the first time I've made a connection between my offline, "official" self and my online/offline "real" self, but it is the first time I've made the connection publicly in a manner that funnels people from Dominique to Sofia.

    So I'm not super-strict in enforcing separation of my "official" self's (fairly minimal) online presence and the vast majority of what I do online. I avoid directing people from Dominique to Sofia and exercise caution in directing them from Sofia to Dominique. Basic internet skills.

    As for internal separation, talking to one group of friends about this topic and another group of friends about some other topic - I pretty much don't do it. This is an area where journal sites, like most social networking/social media** sites, kind of fall down on the job. Sites using the LiveJournal codebase (which include clones such as InsaneJournal and forks such as Dreamwidth) have filters (user-defined groups of people; entries can be restricted to a particular filter or to multiple filters), which can be used for this kind of separation as well as for privacy.

    * I would like to devote another post to issues surrounding Dreamwidth: why the site came into existence, who has started using it and why, etc. I'd also like to talk about the experience of being an early adopter, something I'd never been before committing to Dreamwidth.

    ** In part three of her essay on Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure, [personal profile] synecdochic/[staff profile] denise (co-founder/co-owner of Dreamwidth) provides a nice disambiguation for social networking and social media:
    The two terms are not interchangeable, ultimately. Social networking seeks to (for the most part) replicate a person's existing social web (think of sites like Classmates.com and LinkedIn.com); its purpose is to define your ties with others. Social media takes that one step further: it seeks to create and nurture social ties to others, through the content that you provide.

    If you think of a site as a game, the "winning conditions" of the game will be a good clue as to whether the site is a social networking site or a social media site. If you win the game when you collect all of your existing friends, or collect as many new friends as possible, you're on a social network. If you win the game when you provide content that's interesting enough to get other people to build relationships with you, when your social currency is the content you provide, you're on a social media site.
    This suggests to me that social media users may in fact benefit from talking to everyone about everything, in terms of creating these new relationships. Not simply because diverse content brings more diverse followers, but also because publicly available content brings more followers.
    sofiaviolet: purple textures and dots (retrospective)
    I've had a headache for most of the weekend, spent waaaaaaay too long trying to sleep the headache off, and then it took Ellie and I all afternoon to get groceries (we hit Allandale Farms, Whole Foods, BJ's, and Stop-n-Shop. Plus Home Depot so she could price some set-building stuff).
    • All in a Name: New Software Benefits Transgender Students
      The new software, created as an adjunct to the Banner student information system, allows students to fill out a form specifying their preferred name and pronoun. The information appears on all paperwork seen by faculty, so petitioning professors individually, a process that gave students no choice but to out themselves, is a thing of the past.
    • via [personal profile] naraht: The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes
      My anecdotal evidence generally seems to support the idea that group sizes will usually plateau at a number lower than 150 participants. This comes from 20 years of doing facilitation both on and offline, running several software companies, and running various forums at America Online. In particular, many online communities provide good evidence for Dunbar's Number actually being an upper limit (either due to reduced efficiency or due to increased dispersion).
    • [site community profile] dw_news: Weekly Update: 30 Sept
      * Development
      * Code Push
      * More DW Creativity
      * RIP, Vox
      * DW Advocacy
      * Icon Renames
    • Dreamwidth Wiki: Advocacy

    • [staff profile] denise: DW artisans

    • via [personal profile] wordweaverlynn: Kink Aware Professionals

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