caffeine diary

bestie pointed me in the right direction to find the deeply non-intuitive way to switch back to LJ being not-fugly.

LiveJournal is removing the option to leave your gender unspecified at account creation.

& fixed. ish.

I will miss you guys so much! *clings* 12 minutes till they pull the plug.

Things I could do:
+Read the Wikipedia article about Animal Hoarding I pulled up from discussion on the flist.
+Write up minutes from Sunday's committee meeting.
+NaNo. Ugggh.
+Yuletide!
+3_ships! Assignments went out! Mine... is interesting. :) I could theoretically write 3/4 of the requests.
+If zvi sends me my signup (shame! I forgot what Buffyverse threesomes I requested) I could work on my Dear Magi Letter.

Reminder that I'm wisdomeagle at journalfen and insanejournal. Also at Twitter, tho' I can't figure out how to make Twitter work.

*cliiinnnnngs*

+femslash08 is open for sign-ups! Which means I finally settled mine. If you can write femslash in any one of sixteen popular fandoms, and make requests in at least four fandoms, you can play -- and should! Femslash annual is always a lot of fun, and a big Buffyverse turnout would make me quite happy, but seriously, everyone interested in femslash should go play. I'll know if you did because I totally have the sign-up post on stalker-track.

+Multi-fandom one-sentence masturbation tag fic. Right now the prompts are mostly bandom or SPN, but the challenge is young, and we should all go play there with a multiplicity of boys and girls.

+Most of you have heard this by now, but LJ Advisory Board elections are going on. The poll is here; candidate position posts (or spammy, macro-heavy wankbait, depending on the personality of the candidate) are all linked here. Fannish folk probably want to keep rm and legomymalfoy in mind. This post links to other posts discussing the candidates (with a fannish flavor).

Still lost if Tamora Pierce land, but I'm on the last of the Tortall books (Terrier) so I should be emerging soon.

So LJ's gone and done something involving tagging adult content which directs you to the manage settings page where I end up once a year or so when LJ randomly converts my view from Dystopia to something else.

Only.

What the frak happened to Dystopia? At first I thought maybe it just didn't show as an option the scheme you had set, so I signed in with a sock journal, changed to Vertigo, and yeah.

You can't change back.

WHATTHEHELL.

There are about a dozen things I want to say, which perhaps justifies posting where nothing else will.

1. On the obvious: I think it's clear I'm no longer "officially" away from anything, as I've been reading and commenting on the full flist all weekend for something like three out of the past four weekends. Because I am obsessive about intentionality (though not perhaps so good on the follow-through), I feel a need to justify my journaling activity even though it's really mostly whimmy of late. I think (I can't be sure of anything) that I will never again be as active on LiveJournal or in fandom as I was from fall of 2004 to fall of 2005. I don't have the time, and I don't have the energy. On the other hand, I still feel I'll never *not* be part of LiveJournal and of fandom. Fannish response to texts is part of who I am now, and I still think every day, every moment "how shall I discuss this on LiveJournal?" even when I know I won't post about it at all.

2. That said, for the first time in months, I'm actually working on fannish projects. Admittedly they mostly fall into the "audience of one" category, but I am okay with that. As I usually do at this time of year, I'm thinking in remix titles.

3. My remix story was written by alixtii. I'm shocked, I tell you, completely and utterly shocked. My own remix, which I resposted yesterday, garnered almost no response at all, so I'm not sure I'm even justified in mentioning my remix strategy or discussing what went wrong (and I feel that something did go wrong, not in the prose per se, but in the execution of the brilliant idea I had that never quite made it into words because I was distracted). Maybe next year I'll be brilliant (and less procrastinatey. And writing a Paper of Doom at the time. So maybe brilliance is out of the question.)

I remixed yhlee and possibly the best way to describe "The Unicorn Remyth" is to say that it's a simple pastiche with point of view swap. I retained all the ambiguities of the original, because I think ambiguity is important, but as a result the fic was inaccessible in a way. *shrug*

I'm still very pleased with the fic I received and it's inspiring multiple thought trajectories about authorship, autonomy, and subjectivity.

4. [Poll #976217]

5. I have a paper to be writing, which would explain the blathering all over LiveJournal, of course.

6. I just finished rereading books 2-6 of Harry Potter and have now started on book 1. I expect I might cycle through them until there's book 7 available. I also might work on the WiP. Maybe.

7. I have half-finished (or in some cases half-started) posts on the many fannish discussions that have happened in my absence.

8. I'm watching the first season of Six Feet Under again. The first go-round I hadn't seen Sports Night. I concede, Peter Krause is a brilliant actor.

9. I'm bubbling with stories to tell, petrified that I've lost the voices, and still deeply conflicted about the extended leave of absence my brain has taken from fandom. But at least the stories are still there, if scared to come out.

Well. Not quite a dozen, but that will be enough to be going on with.

ETA: I did not actually realize, when posting this, that it really has been four months. Huh.

My dad sent me this link [http://q.queso.com/archives/001917] about why LJ went down the other night. Just passing the news along.

I have coffee with coffee ice cream and I have West Wing and I have way, way too many ficathons to write for. O_o

And my new unique interests:
( including some old unique interests )

So, as most of you know, you can include schools you've attended in your LJ profile, allowing fellow alums to hunt you down and kill you. Or whatever. And as most of you also know, several, how shall we say, fictional schools are included in LJ's database. (Now how'd that happen?) Some people (we'll call them the Smart Paranoid People) include only the fictional schools corresponding with their fandoms. Other people aren't fen at all and include only real schools.

And some people, like me, include both real and fictional schools. Tell me this doesn't yield the best results ever. The free mixing of meatspace and fanspace, the way the "schools" feature is also a "shared fandoms" feature (I've definitely met one new friend because we shared a rare fannish school)...

I included dates attended in my fannish schools, where those dates corresponded to the year I got interested in the source material. This yields a... pretty ridiculous list, where I've been attending middle school for over ten years and attended four high schools, but I really like it. It's... you know.

I have three high school fandoms (BtVS, VMars, BSC/CA Diaries), but the rest of my fandoms don't have schools, or have schools that also exist in meatspace. Can anyone think of a strategy for including those fandoms in one's school list?