Words are inadequate

Good news: DW's <user name="user"> syntax can now be duplicated with the fewer-keystroke-requiring @ user (without space).

Bad news: anyone whose posts have been referring to Twitter accounts with @ user is now unexpectedly pointing to a lot of Dreamwidth accounts.

Worse news, though I assume this is in the nature of a bug: this seems to happen for RSS feeds too. See, e.g., https://pricetags-feed.dreamwidth.org/626785.html .

Mostly I wish there'd been some public warning / comment period that this was going to happen. :(

(xposted to dwstones, though the moderator may be AWOL.)

One thing about being awake and not going to yoga is that I'm reading Dreamwidth on my real laptop instead of at work. Which means that I see siderea's The Recipe for how to build community on DW, and have the time/space to share and reflect on it.

I've some sort of personal aversion to short linky posts without much to say about them: it doesn't feel like DW is the right venue for that. But I do recognise that more posts are better for engagement / community. So.

And maybe this will get me back in the habit of, you know, /writing/ here.

... here, have a couple of other links too.

The Cookie Experiment: "And I had a flash of insight: 'Wait. There WAS no other activity. The real experiment was to count how many cookies I ate.'"

Followup-ish, Cookies for Claris: "This is applied cookie psychology. This is I/O cookie psychology. It's cookie psychological engineering."

siderea observes that it may be time to consider leaving Livejournal (ironically, post is only avaible on LJ, at least right now). Short form: LJ is now based entirely in Russia, not just owned by Russians, and there appear to be political purges of journals already going on.

I wholeheartedly recommend Dreamwidth as an alternative. I find it to be like LJ but less deliberately frustrating. rebelsheart offers a guide to leaving LJ for DW.

For now at least, I'll continue to live primarily at DW and crosspost to LJ. We shall see what, if anything, changes in the next few months.

Complaints of xpost failure have been coming through; let's see if this one makes it.

Wrote the Last Lousy Fifty Words of the bookwyrms story last night. (Give or take a couple hundred, what with actually writing transitions and making the ragged edges of scenes meet properly instead of [[[DOWNSTAIRS]]] or [[[CAN'T DO THAT]]] or just leaving a bunch of whitespace.) It got a first-read response of "adorable," which is good enough. I'll let it sit for awhile and revise it early next week, and then I guess I submit the thing to its designated anthology.

I'd still like to be writing longer pieces (this one clocks in at 1500 words) but hell, two stories drafted is twice what I had for all of last year.

This evening I hop a train to Seattle, on which I shall Relax and also do the reading for the Commie Pinko Writing Contest. And tomorrow I'm off to the Rainforest Writers' Retreat in the company of Nicole and Klagor and what I presume are a variety of other cool people. I have no idea what I'm going to work on while I'm there. Maybe I ought to brainstorm/outline one of these ideas I've got lying around. Maybe that'll get me writing something more substantial.

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Unrelated to writing, it'll be good to get away for awhile. The main advantage of a long-distance relationship wasn't so much that it provided opportunities for random travel; rather, it provided opportunities for random travel without my partner. I love uilos dearly but we're both at home All The Time. After nine months with only a week and a half break for VP I'm starting to get twitchy for some sustained Me Time.

I could also do with some time when I'm not expected to be staring at work, I expect. Brain is slowly leaking out my ears.

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Linkspam, loosely media-related edition.

Liam Neeson versus, well, everything, from "Wolves" to "Outdated Ideas About Sexuality," with a stopover at "The Bastard English" ("aren't there actually two of those?").

Very tangentially related, A History of Ireland in 100 Excuses. Via Crooked Timber, where Maria notes, "It’s almost impossible to cherry-pick because half of the fun is the cumulative effect, and the other half is they’re so damn funny." (For linguistics geeks, an explanation of #10, and further amusement.)

TV Is Broken: "Did it break?" "No. It's just a commercial." "What's a commercial?"

Against Big Bird, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain, in which scott_lynch re-encounters the best Sesame Street special ever, Don't Eat the Pictures. "[I]t's plain that we've had Big Bird figured all wrong. He's no kindergartener. He's a previously unknown aspect of the Eternal fucking Champion."

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order. Brilliant. (My preferred viewing order is "IV," but I'm in the minority that doesn't care much for Empire on account of how it's not a complete story.)

rbandrews notes that "someone at w00t harbors dreams of being a slipstream writer."

21 days for Dreamwidth, #21:
What's your favorite thing about Dreamwidth?

I could say that it's the friendliness, or the developers' willingness to keep working on things that are frustrating, or the way it's imported nearly ten years of history from Livejournal without much of a hiccup. But honestly? It's the expanding cut tag.

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, click over to Dreamwidth to take a look at the cut tag ETA: and click the triangle next to it!)

( It expands! )

So there's that.

(the cool new people i've met are a close second, though. *wave*)

Ten years ago shadowsong sent me a message on ICQ, more or less out of the blue, telling me that I should sign up for an account on this "Livejournal" site, so that I could read about her exploits in Scotland. So I did, and it was kinda neat. I spent a month or so reading her friendslist before I realised that I didn't really care about most of them but there were a few (jude, skreidle) I wanted to keep up with, so I started adding people on my own. And then I got a real job and figured that being behind a computer all day was as good an excuse as any to start posting.

Happy decade, jazzfish! Ten years worth of putting words on screen has improved my writing immeasurably. There are lots of places I could stand to improve, but I've got a good start on the sentence-level craft. Not to mention all the people I've met through you: jadelennox, playing_tragic, awakedreamer, everyone else I've been forgetting.

I dunno if my LJ presence will last that long, but here's to another ten years of jazzfish.

Tired. Apparently I can't actually get by on five hours sleep any more, not for two nights running anyway. But, you know. Some nights you just gotta turn that vicious cycle of You Suck as many times as you can.

Also warm. Feh.

As I'd expected, I'm better off leaving comments enabled on the LJ side and importing them over every so often. So I'll go with that.

(To those of you who never comment and chose "I'd comment less" anyway: what, you're going to start deleting other people's comments?)

And it looks like the crossposter works, so, yay.

Final decision on LJ paid-account features such as polls and photos and all can wait until next March.

Why hello there, LJ comment notification emails from yesterday! You certainly took your sweet time getting here, didn't you?

(ObDWPlug)

One of the more unexpected WisCon panels I attended was on Dreamwidth. The panel consisted of four or five people talking about why they used DW. The comment that really drove it home for me came from (I think) the moderator: "I use Dreamwidth because there's a Preview Comment button in DW. (laughter) I know, right? It's such a trivial thing. But it's also something that's been a requested feature in LJ for literally years now, so much so that it was implemented in DW like a day and a half after the release. DW is highly responsive to user feedback, especially since a lot of the bugfixing and feature work is done by users. Meanwhile LJ is busy giving out little snowflake cookies."

I was reminded of this when I got home last night and tried to catch up on LJ, and couldn't figure out why the links on my Friends page that I'd helpfully labeled "previous twenty" were only taking me back ten entries at a time. Finally I found it, buried in a news post next to an electric purple ONTD header image: "we changed everyone's default entries per page from 20 to 10 to improve performance! here's a link to fix it, if you really want to."

This is an annoyance to me; it's something I can easily fix. If I'd made a special script based on the number of default entries, I'd have to tweak that script. If I'd created that script for accessibility reasons, and was simply too exhausted to fix the script, and too exhausted to try to read LJ without it. . . suffice to say that I can see where jadelennox is coming from.

I created a Dreamwidth beta account last April, and bought a seed account (which I've yet to activate) once they went on sale, because DW seems like a really good place to be: responsive to user requests, open to people fixing stupid things about the code, generally Not Evil and (so far at least) Not Stupid. (Anyone else remember when one day Brad went in and decided to put an arbitrary limit on the number of posts you could make per day, without telling anyone? Good times, and shades of things to come.) For the past year and change I've been considering switching over. I've watched friends make the jump, pretty seamlessly it looked like. Mostly I've been resisting having to keep a reading list in two places.

Another thing mentioned at the panel was that DW has a plan for how to read locked LJ entries from DW. I'm pretty sure that that would mean I'd no longer have any good reasons not to use DW. (Bad ones, yeah: photos, redoing my journal style again, all the normal hassle associated with moving to a new platform for anything.) If and when bug 710 gets resolved, I expect I'll be spending some time setting up crossposting and crossreading and all that good stuff. (I have no intention of abandoning my LJ-using friends! I like you non-gender-specific guys!)

I've had an LJ account for nearly ten years now (missed 'early adopter' by *that* much. I blame shadowsong). It's been my online home for twice as long as any given physical residence. It makes me a little nostalgic to think about giving it up. But, sometimes it's just time.