KJ

One of the stupidest elections in my memory is now over, with Gavin Newsom, Boy Governor, retaining his seat by a healthy margin (about 25% according to the Secretary of State's website, as of this writing).

Boy, was that a great use of $300 million in taxpayer dollars and the time and effort of California's grassroots activists. eyeroll emoji

Can we please, please fix this terrible broken recall system now?? Like we should have done in 2003?

Days written: 12/31
Year to date: 64/240
Words written: 4,174
Percentage of those words written in one day: 26% (my Horizon Zero Dawn post)

( So.... yeah. )

Specific goals.... can I just say I missed them all, and rather badly, and leave it at that? I'm doing okay on other fronts, but as far as writing goes, I don't even know what to do. I'm not inspired to post. I started a little bit of fic and hated it, so that stopped. About the only thing I've managed to do is keep up with Lady Business anchor posts, barely, and write Goodreads reviews on those few occasions that I've actually finished a book. It seems almost ludicrous to set new goals for May. And yet I feel compelled to keep plugging away. But it's obvious that goals alone are not going to inspire me. What I really need, I think, is a space for creative and social writing that's separate from this place that's now my work desk -- or at least some way to differentiate the desk that isn't just closing my work laptop and disconnecting it from my monitor. I have no idea what that could look like in this not-large apartment that's essentially all one room, but I need to come up with something. I miss my writing. I need to find my way back to it.

Extremely gentle goals for May:

1. Write enough days that I don't fall a full month behind pace for my GYWO goal. That means at least 17, or a little more than 4 per week.

2. Post to my own DW at least 3 days each week.

3. See if I can't turn that fic idea into something postable by the end of the month.

I wish I could think/talk/post about literally ANYTHING else besides the terrible air, but it is difficult. The AQI (Air Quality Index) in San Francisco ticked up into the Very Unhealthy range yesterday afternoon, and there it is expected to stay for at least a little while. Turns out one problem with having bad air for a prolonged period is that the inside air also starts to turn bad, especially if -- like me -- you live in a place without filtered A/C. Ever stayed in a smoking room at a hotel, in the parts of the world where you can still smoke in hotel rooms? It's kind of like that, with the smell lingering in the air and sticking to your skin and getting in your mouth (seriously, I feel like I'm constantly tasting it, although I concede that this may be at least partly in my head).

Stanford cancelled classes today, but indoor events will go on, so our concert will continue as scheduled. At least it's in one of the newer buildings with a high-quality air filtration system, and the doors are meant to be light- and sound-tight, which limits the amount of outside air that can leak in. Our director sent an email letting us know that we could cancel if we felt it unhealthy to sing; I am unsure, but I was already down here by the time I saw it (I decided to work this afternoon, in part to catch up on things and in part to get out of my hours), so I figure I'll give it a try. I have water and cough drops, and can drop out if I have to.

It astounds me when I'm reminded that some people live in parts of the world where these AQI levels are just a fact of life. (The AQI page I linked above has a link to a FAQ about dealing with levels that are off their index, and it specifically mentions Beijing.) This live world map is both fascinating and terrifying. Not that I was exactly dismissing this danger before, but it will never not be real to me again.

It was... something. I'm very glad I watched with friends, both IRL and online, with Twitter almost continuously open. It was really validating to know that other people were WTFing at the exact same things as me.

Obviously I haven't been talking much about this presidential campaign. In a way, there's both too much and not enough to say. Right now it feels like there isn't much left to do besides continuously reload 538 and pray.

Well, it's official: I didn't properly import my backstory into DA:I. It wasn't at all clear that we needed to download the world state off the DA Keep site. So we started over -- and there was a confirmation screen this time. Still, 12 hours lost! At least it should go faster this time.

Update: I just repeated the conversation from our first attempt at DA:I that clued me in that all might not be well with my world state, and it went much more satisfactorily this time. I suppose it was worth starting again. Otherwise, it would have nagged at me the entire time. I'm just glad that T was completely willing to do so.

So Game Informer is doing a month-long series on Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is available here for anyone who's interested and hasn't seen it already. It went up last week, and since then the details have been coming fast and furious: from the article, from the website, from developers answering questions and dropping hints on the BioWare forums, from fans speculating about these tidbits of information and coming up with theories based upon them.

And I totally understand the impulse to tear through every scrap of data you can find, especially when it's been so long without any new content, but it's not for me. I want to approach the game as a near-blank slate, a new experience. I want surprises. I want to discover the characters and get to know them as the game presents them, not have my impressions adulterated by advance fan reaction. I don't want to guess all the plot twists for myself in advance. I don't want to develop elaborate headcanons that will almost certainly be contradicted by the events of the game. Again, nothing wrong with that, if it's how you enjoy doing fandom. But any fun I get out of that kind participation is negated by the sense that I'm ruining the games for myself.

In a way, this is nothing new: I've been dodging spoilers on the Internet for about as long as I've been on the Internet, and it's impossible to avoid them entirely -- I was spoiled for a key Harry Potter character death by a headline on CNN! But nothing has prepared me for the experience of spoilers on Tumblr. At least in my other fandom venues, people have always used spoiler cuts or white-on-white spoiler text. Tumblr has no spoiler text option, and while cuts exist people don't tend to use them, especially not for images, and you can't put tags behind them at all. It's not built into the site function, but more importantly it's not part of the community's culture. In "the olden days" of journal reading, you usually got at least a few days between something being released and people posting lots of spoilery things about it. On Tumblr, it's often a matter of minutes before images and gifsets and reaction posts are everywhere.

So for the first time ever, I've installed blocking software (the xkit extension), and although it's helped, it only works as well as people are willing to tag. It's like an arms race, keeping up with the tags and terms that different people use, and I have to wonder how effective it will be. I've already asked three people to be more careful about tagging, and they were all receptive, but at some point I'm probably just going to have to unfollow people. It's either that, or quit Tumblr for a year and a half, and I really don't want to do that. The other day, I was half-joking with here_be_dragons about creating a "DA3-free-zone pledge" and only following people who agree to sign it, and although it was mostly a joke, I wonder if it would actually work.

The NPR list of the top 100 YA Novels, as chosen by reader nomination and vote, is out.

Remember I complained a little while back about the inclusion of YA novel nominees that were also on NPR's 100 best Sci Fi/Fantasy novels of all time, when the SF/F list was supposed to exclude YA as a category -- an exclusion that kept a lot of popular female authors from being represented?

Here are the novels that are on both top 100 lists. Guess what they all have in common. Just. Guess.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series by Douglas Adams
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Dune by Frank Herbert (just the first book on the YA list, the series as a whole on the SF/F list)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

This is where I should write up some commentary about this amazing coincidence, but right now I'm just too angry to be coherent. Nice work, NPR quiz editors.

Why? Why why why why? Why take away the ONE THING that made you better than other community sites?

I. Don't. Get. It.

Edit: And you know the really SHITTY thing? They only made the announcement on a Russian language community, a couple of weeks ago. The latest news post, from 12/14, makes mention of "changes to comments coming soon!" with no details. It's like they knew they were going to have to sneak it by the user base. Feh.

The change: taking away subject lines from comments. Which is vital for users like fic memes. It makes them impossible to read or track. Disaster for fandom, and you all know I don't use that word lightly.

Son of edit: Looking to leave feedback? This seems to be the best place.

Google is taking all the sharing features out of Google Reader. (Official announcement from Google is here.) No more following other users, sharing and commenting on links, group link blogs, etc. The idea, I guess, is that Reader will become a simple RSS aggregator, and you'll do all your link sharing on Google+

Because we've all moved in to Google+ like good little minons, haven't we?

This, my friends, is a potential disaster.(1) Google Reader is probably the centerpiece of my online life. I depend on other people finding the good stuff on blogs that aren't quite what I would normally follow but still have awesome content. It's my curated Internet, and I will miss that, terribly.

I also have to wonder whether this is a sign that Google is planning to shut Reader down entirely at some point, and that would take us from potential disaster to an actual one. I use Reader for everything. I follow blogs for work, blogs for politics, blogs for fun. I use it to follow high-volume celebrity Twitters like ebertchicago and neilhimself. I use it to follow high-volume cute animal Tumblrs like herekittykittykitty. I literally do not know what I would do without it.

What are we up to, now -- three major Internet service redesign fails in the last month? Facebook, Delicious, now this. Not to mention all the other shenanigans Google has pulled on us lately. To quote Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

You can’t force me into using Google+ by stealing pieces of Google Reader. That’s not how that’s going to work.

So, how is it going to work? Interesting question, at least for me. My online presence has gotten quite fractured over the last few years. It wasn't all that long ago that all of my publicly visible online social activity -- writing, conversation, link-sharing, on every topic I cared about -- was centered in a single place: my LiveJournal. But as my community has spread, changed, migrated, grown in some areas and shrunk in others, I've been adding more and more services to my plate: Facebook, Twitter, Dreamwidth, Google Reader's sharing features, Tumblr. Maybe it's time for me to rethink that, consolidate back down again, or at least come up with some coherent plan for what content I'm going to share where. One thing to consider: if I have to decouple sharing content from RSS feeds anyway, there's certainly nothing tying me to Google Reader. My options could open up considerably.

Maybe that's just as well. Over the last few years, I've been getting nervous about just how deeply my online life depends on Google, its products, and its services. Perhaps this is another sign that I shouldn't be storing so much content in the Google basket. I recently saw (via, what else, a link on Google Reader) a really thoughtful article about Google by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, entitled, somewhat ominously, "It Knows". His thesis is that everything Google does, no matter how far afield from search it might seem, comes back to their core value of improving search, either by giving them more data, more content, or by strengthening the tools used to retrieve that content. I tried to find a pull quote, but there was too much; I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Soar is not particularly alarmist in his conclusions, at least not in terms of the misuse of personal information, and to be fair that's not what concern me. What does cause me concern is the suggestion that Google sees its user base not as individual customers, but as its beta testers. Its content aggregators. And suddenly, some of their stranger decisions over the years start making a bit more sense.

I'm not about to give up on Google entirely, of course -- it's made itself far too useful. And that's the rub, isn't it? Even when we're angry, they've made it extremely difficult for us to walk away. And that's what worries me, as much as anything.

1. Although not the disaster it would have been a few days ago, before Google announced that they're working on a policy that will allow pseudonyms. Finally.

I mean, seriously. What the hell? Was there any kind of warning on this? Any secret "preview our new service!" opportunity? Because if not.... wow.

Guess it's time to leave. You all know I am generally for riding out the changes with free Internet services, but not when they totally break them overnight. Any recommendations for other bookmarking tools? For my purposes, the only real problem is not being able to see all my tags, but what a problem to have. How is a bookmarking service useful if I can only get to a handful of randomly-selected tags?

Bleh.