KJ

Here is a list of all my currently active public accounts on the Internet. Will be kept updated as things change.

Journals and Micro-blogging

Dreamwidth: owlmoose
My journal and my primary home base on the Internet. Personal posts, political posts, fandom posts, cross-posting of fic and other announcements. If it's important, it will end up here sooner or later.

LiveJournal: owlmoose
A mirror of my Dreamwidth. As of this writing, and for the foreseeable future, I cross-post all DW entries to LJ and allow comments in both places. If that ever changes, I will make ample announcement. I also use my LJ to participate in a few communities.

Twitter: iamkj
Brief daily life tidbits and interesting links. This is where I'm most likely to share the kind of links I used to share via Google Reader. June update: Basically inactive right now. I need a better iPhone client.

Tumblr: lifeofkj
Mostly reblogs (fandom, politics, cute animals), quick fandom thoughts, and daily life spam. Increasingly, I'm posting my fic here first, as well, although anything worth saving will end up cross-posted to AO3. As of June, where I am most active on the Internet.

Fanfiction

AO3: owlmoose
Fanfiction. This is my fanfic archive, complete starting in November 2009, and some older works are there as well. Some things will be posted to DW or Tumblr first, but AO3 will always be the place to find the definitive version.

FF.net: owlmoose
My older work, all Final Fantasy X/X-2. No longer updated with new stories as of December 2007.

Writings of an Owlmoose
My WordPress-based fanfiction archive, complete through December 2010.

Other

GoodReads: owlmoose
Updated sporadically. I intend to use it more regularly in 2012.

Pinboard: owlmoose
Links to cool and useful things. Mostly for my own saving purposes rather than sharing, but I'm always happy to add people to my network!

This list is current as of June 3, 2012. Subject to change as communities and my online participation shifts. Feel free to add or follow any of these accounts! I have a fairly free add-back policy. :)

So word is that Yahoo! has made an agreement to purchase Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Yes, that's billion, with a B. I've heard rumors that David Karp will stay on as CEO, that Tumblr will be allowed to largely continue operating as an independent entity, that Yahoo will try to entice Tumblr users toward other Yahoo services. All the news stories I've seen have not included official comment from either company, so it's all speculation at this point. Supposedly there will be an announcement tomorrow, but the wailing and gnashing of teeth has already begun.

But we've been here before, haven't we? Stop me if you've heard this one: Fandom congregates on an advertising-supported Internet platform and contributes content and traffic that helps make the site a success. Then the founders of the platform can't keep up with growth and/or can't figure out how to make sufficient money off the userbase, so they sell to a larger media company that either shuts down the site or starts making drastic changes, and fandom moves to a new platform. Second verse, same as the first...

Little bit louder and a whole lot worse.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: there is a tension in all social media platforms between the users as customers, the users as audience, and the users as providers of content. And remember, as far as these corporations are concerned, we aren't their primary customers. Their advertisers are, because ultimately they're paying the bills -- and the shareholders. You'd think that, since these sites have no content without their users, that they'd put more effort into making users happy, but their track record is notably poor, as a group and Yahoo!'s in particular (buying eGroups and driving out adult content, buying and shutting down Geocities, the acquisition of Flickr that nearly killed the service, and my personal favorite: the De.li.cio.us debacle). Any LiveJournal veteran knows how badly these acquisitions can go wrong. That particular series of botched acquisitions is a huge reason that fandom migrated to Tumblr in the first place. So I think we have lots of good reasons to be worried.

That said, I'm officially taking a "let's wait and see" attitude. One thing all reports agree on: Tumblr, on its own, was almost out of money, and I would currently rather have a Tumblr owned by Yahoo! or another large media company than no Tumblr at all. (And it could have been worse -- rumor was that Facebook was once involved in the bidding. *shudders*) But whenever fandom sets up camp on a platform run by a for-profit company, this is the risk we take. And this is why, ultimately, I think we're better off with non-profits that are either created by fandom or explicitly welcoming to us. Because then we really are the customers, and the content we produce is valued, and not just for the advertising dollars it might attract.

(Adapted from my comments on a Tumblr reblog.)

Not ganked from anyone this year, it just felt like a good time to do it.

Take the first line from the first post of each month, and that's your Year in Review. (Skipping my monthly writing wrap-up posts.)

January: Welcome to 2012, everybody.

February: I gave in to the siren call of every single person on the Internet ever and watched both seasons of Sherlock, finishing up tonight.

March: Sorry to have been so absent lately.

April: As expected, FogCon has been great so far.

May: LJ added a spoiler tag that works in comments!

June: Whenever I go a week without posting, it feels wrong, like somehow I might cease to exist in this corner of the Internet if I don't interact with it often enough.

July: Jet lag, or something, is seriously kicking my ass the last couple of days, so I haven't had much brainpower to post about anything, including the rest of the trip and coming back.

August: I was home sick from work today, so I took the opportunity to download the demo for a game that's been getting some buzz on my Tumblr dashboard: Cinders.

September: Many moons ago, vieralynn wrote a very detailed character development interview that I snagged with the intention of writing up for my Aeducan.

October: Sleeping in on a Monday and then wandering down to Panera, instead of being up at the crack of dawn for the first day of a new academic quarter, has helped it sink in that I'm not actually having some weird long weekend, but am facing a new era of my life.

November: What better way to give myself an incentive to do more journaling than to meet more people here?

December: Things I have done this weekend: [a lot of awesome with Nay, Sev, and Ira].

This feels very meta, with a number of posts about how rarely I've been writing posts. I'm not surprised, though, given how much I've been posting at Tumblr instead. All part of the continuing process: what to post there, what to post here, how to keep myself active and connected with my journaling community even as the fandom action mostly moves elsewhere. Is it wrong that there's a tiny part of me that hopes the ongoing Tumblr redesigns that are making it more and more difficult to carry on real conversations there will drive people back into the arms of Dreamwidth? Probably.

So Tumblr is, once again, alight with discussion of slash versus femslash versus het, and all the various reasons why so many women chose to write slash, thereby focusing on male-centric narratives rather than female-centric ones, and people are accusing each other of sexism and homophobia and internalized misogyny, and I don't know why I am always compelled to comment on this topic, but... here we are.

The first thing I want to say, as always, is that it is the opposite of helpful for anyone to attack anyone else for writing what they write, 'shipping what they 'ship, loving what they love. People have a multitude of reasons for their preferences, all of which are very personal. And the "problem", such as it is, isn't about what any individual person writes/ships/loves, etc. It's about patterns and trends, and where they fit within our wider culture. So I hope no one ever takes anything I write on this subject personally, because that's not, and never has been, the point.

I could link to all kinds of things, but I'll start with this post, which focuses on the historical context of m/m versus f/f erotica and how differently they have been portrayed in the mainstream media. It's worth reading and not too long, but the quick summary is that men having sex with men has historically been positioned as shameful and degrading, when it's visible at all, whereas women having sex with women is presented almost exclusively for the male gaze. The author then suggests that the different contexts make it revolutionary to bring positive and joyful depictions of m/m sex into the spotlight, whereas shining the spotlight on f/f sex is more problematic.

I certainly understand where the author of the post is coming from, and agree to a certain extent, but whenever someone concludes that the solution to problematic depictions of women in the media is to write more about men, I get edgy. Why are women so quick to erase ourselves from the narrative? In a world that is so focused on men and their stories, why is our first instinct to perpetuate that imbalance rather than reclaiming the story for ourselves? It bothers me.

As always, I don't have any easy answers -- and I think it's more important to raise the questions, anyway, to think about them and keep them in mind as I make my own choices about what stories to tell. That's all I can really do, anyway.

As long as I'm on the topic of meta, I want to point the folks who don't follow me on Tumblr to these two really great bits of fandom meta: meta vs. criticism vs. critique and slash fandom and queer fetishization. These are some of the best pieces I've read on those topics in a very long time and can't recommend them too highly. They're both going into my toolbox of references, for sure.

What better way to give myself an incentive to do more journaling than to meet more people here?

the
[ MULTI-FANDOM ]
LiveJournal → DreamWidth
friending meme

Why yes, there has been another epic fail on LiveJournal, why do you ask? The main thing is that they've disabled custom formatting for reading the friends list and introduced many other changes to make it more Tumblr-like. Once again, LJ is tweaking itself to be more like the flavor-of-the-month social networking service rather than concentrating on what makes it different, and once again I wonder why any of us are still there. I mean, I know why I'm still there -- fannish projects/communities that live on LJ, and enough friends who haven't yet moved -- but I wonder how much longer it will be worth the effort.

Anyway. Check out the meme, and if you do decide to make the switch, let me know so I can add you on the DW side. :)

Jet lag, or something, is seriously kicking my ass the last couple of days, so I haven't had much brainpower to post about anything, including the rest of the trip and coming back. But I will do pictures and such eventually. Pompeii was awesome, but it was also hot and tiring, and I never really had time to recover from it before I had to get on a plane. I suspect that's part of what wiped me out so much.

I've mostly been able to keep up with the journals, but if I've missed anything important, drop me a line!

LJ added a spoiler tag that works in comments! Yay, LJ!

LJ is taking away the Scrapbook. Boo, LJ! -- Update: Apparently it is an "upgrade", so I will reserve judgement. But given LJ's track record with "upgrades"...

LJ is giving me whiplash.

I haven't been silent, really, just more active on Tumblr because it's more my speed right now -- I can dash off my quick thoughts on a reblog, or write a tidbit rather than an essay, and it all feels much less serious. To actually sit down and compose a journal entry takes more mental space, more energy, and so I've been less likely to do it.

For one, work has really been getting me down these last few months; there's a part of me that wants to talk about it, lay out all my unhappinesses and frustrations, and there's another part that finds the whole idea depressing and oppressive. And if I got into it here, I'd want to tell the whole story, whereas on Tumblr I feel like I can get away with a couple of sentences, or even just a paragraph, ranting vaguely about how I'm having to work another long shift or why the students are being annoying or what exciting new shenanigans my corporate overlords are up to this week.

So I'm sorry I haven't been a very good journal-reading or -writing friend lately. Maybe someday soon I'll tell the whole sordid story of the Winter quarter (which ends this week THANK GOD) and then I'll be able to take a breath and move on.

See you Sunday.

(Okay, I am being a little overdramatic. But only a little.)

Not ganked from anyone this year, because I wasn't crazy about any of the variations making the rounds, so this is last year's variation, adapted slightly.

( Master List )

( Questions and Answers )

In conclusion: I don't even know what to say, really, that I haven't said already. It's a new chapter in my fandom life, and it's big and scary and really exciting. I hope I can keep it up.