KJ

Tumblr is down, and I can't even go commiserate with everyone about it, because Tumblr is down.

This one-liner post feels like the kind of thing that I ought to be posting on Tumblr. I have no idea what to do with myself.

Why, Tumblr, did you pick this night of all nights to be down? When I'm working late, and covering the desk, and finished all the work I had to do that could be done on the desk, and I'm supposed to be writing fic for a silly meme? And why did you decide to go down at the exact instant I had finished one prompt and was in the process of posting it?

Internet problems. :P

New news post, in which they address the comment pages outcry... kinda.

Rest assured, we are paying close attention to all of your feedback.... We're also aggregating all your feedback about the presentation and usability of the commenting form in the general sense, including items missing from the previous version, and the appropriate project teams are reviewing this feedback to help guide what further changes will be made. Thank you for your patience as we continue to work on the new commenting system.

As I said in my comment to that post (but in nicer words), I find this statement so disingenuous, I could scream. If they cared about paying close attention to our feedback, they wouldn't have rolled out this change in the first place. People have been complaining, requesting, begging them not to change the commenting functionality ever since we first got wind of the possibility last week. The negative reaction cannot possibly have come as a surprise to them. How can we trust them to listen to user feedback when they could have prevented the problem by paying attention to the feedback we were already giving them?

And yet, they keep doing this. Implement drastic change without any prior warning, let people scream and howl for a little while, roll the change back, then sneak a more moderate version back in once the uproar has died down. I wonder when a critical mass of users will finally get sick of it.

Help, I've fallen into Tumblr and I can't get out!

Is it the fast pace? Is it the ease of replies? Is it the fact that it's much easier to check from my phone? Is it because Dragon Age fandom seems to be more active there than on the journals? Is it the fact that there are pictures of cats and otters and owls and cats and Varrics and cats (among other things) at every turn? I don't know; all I know is that I check my dashboard constantly, and show no signs of letting up.

Somehow, it's much less scary to add someone I don't know on Tumblr than it is to friend them on LJ or add them to my DW reading list, and it's far, far less scary to reblog a post than it is to leave a comment. I'm not yet convinced it's the most effective way to have in-depth conversations -- following comment chains, especially, can get really confusing -- and yet it seems to be working for lots of people. Would it be too spammy to start linking my fic there, or my in-depth meta posts? I'm still so unsure of the etiquette. Thoughts welcome on that, or any other advice on how to Tumblr; as much fun as I'm having there, it still doesn't come nearly as naturally as the journaling sites.

lifeofkj: come join in! I'm still mostly reblogging, but original content is starting to work its way in, mostly photos and the random DA spam that doesn't seem worthy of a full post here.

ETA: I'm certainly not leaving DW/LJ for Tumblr; I'm so much happier with the journaling sites as a place for longer posts and especially for fic. Plus, this is my home. LJ, especially, I've been posting here for going on eight years, and the thought of walking away from that is a little bit terrifying. ;) So no worries, if you had them -- owlmoose and owlmoose will continue to be my primary venue for posting anything more than a picture or a few sentences for a long time to come.

This is something I've been meaning to do for awhile, and the demise of Google Reader as a sharing platform seems as good a time as any. The changeover to the new design happened a few days ago, and I think it's safe to respond with a nice hearty "DO. NOT. WANT." The design is so clean as to be difficult to navigate, and I find it hard to determine which entries are unread, which would seem to defeat the point of an RSS reader, so it's probably time to start searching for a new one. Any recommendations?

But anyway. I've been thinking about how I want to present myself online, which tools I want to use for what, how to interact with new fandoms and old, the best ways to forge new relationships while sustaining existing ones. I feel like I'm at a crossroads of sorts, in a good position to remake myself, and I should take best advantage of that.

So, with that, here's a list of my current online services, and what you can expect to find at each one. Of course, any of these are subject to change, or current whims -- they're my living rooms, after all, and I reserve the right to redecorate at will. But for now, this is the plan.

iamkj - Twitter is for daily life spam (although not too much of it; I'd say I average maybe five tweets per day) and quick link sharing. This tends to be the place with the least fandom-related content, although of course I can never keep it out entirely. It's also where I tend to be the most political lately.

lifeofkj - Tumblr is still very new to me, and I don't always feel like I'm doing it "right", but I'm starting to see its charms. A lot of the Dragon Age action seems to be happening on Tumblr, and I really like it as a way to share images, photos, and quick tidbits that are too long for Twitter. But I will probably never warm to it as a way of long-form blogging, or posting fic. Right now, I am mostly reblogging stuff, mostly Dragon Age and cute animals (or Dragon Age characters with cute animals), but that is very much subject to change.

owlmoose - I'm going to see how Pinboard words as a substitute for sharing links on Google Reader. Consider it an experiment. Right now I don't have much of a network over there, so please do add me if you're interested!

owlmoose - The home for fanfic. Everything new (save drabbles and commentfic that I decide not to save for posterity) will get posted on AO3. My FF.net account is essentially defunct as a place for posting now that "Aftermath" is finished. So if you're looking for the fanfic, AO3 is your definitive source.

owlmoose/owlmoose - And now we come to the big question, the one I've been asking myself for months now. If I'm sharing daily life tidbits on Twitter, and following fandom on Tumblr, and posting my fic to AO3, what's a journal for? That's the part I'm going to have to feel out a little more, but I expect it will be for all the things that don't fit into the other spaces: longer posts about politics and fandom and books and movies and everything else that I love writing about. So maybe that means I'm not posting as often as I used to, but maybe that's okay: fewer posts, but more substantial ones. (Except in November, of course...) I'll keep crossposting fic, of course; no reason not to. I will also continue to crosspost all entries to both journals for the foreseeable future. I do think of DW as my primary journal, but I'm happy to keep the conversation going in both places.

Feel free to add me or follow me anywhere! I am always happy to meet people, expand my circles, find new friends or meet old friends in new venues. This is meant to be a welcoming space.

(Keen eyed readers may notice that Facebook is missing from this list. That's because I do Facebook under my real name, and I have a lot of coworkers and family friended there, people who I am not comfortable inviting into my fandom life. That's where I draw the hard line, where I've built the wall. I know that anyone who was truly determined to link this journal with my offline/work persona could probably do so, but I prefer not to make it any easier than it has to be. Thanks to everyone for respecting this over the years -- I appreciate it a great deal.)

Delicious!Fail is starting to make the mainstream press: Violet Blue on the transition and why it was both a technical and PR disaster.

Also, have a linkspam! Looks to be well-updated.

Sad, sad news: ff_press is going on indefinite hiatus, because it depended on Delicious to run. This bums me out far more than losing the site functionality for my own purposes. :( Why, AVOS? Why?

I still see the old site on my computer, but the new interface at work. Is it a Mac versus PC issue? I really don't understand.

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.

Try as I might, the world doesn't stop moving when I go on vacation. Here are some things I would likely have written more about if I hadn't been trying to keep up on my phone as they were happening. This is also my official notice that I am as caught up on LJ/DW/Twitter/email/Google Reader as I'm going to get. If you posted something you wanted me to see and I haven't commented on it, or otherwise indicated that I've seen it, drop me a line.

-- Supreme Court says video games are protected speech: Most excellent news, of course. It's not a particularly surprising result, but I'm still glad to see it. Maybe more on this one later.

-- Major fanfiction site is bought by a web developer as a money-maker: Haven't we been here before? Ah, the FanLib debacle. Good times. Of course, you remember how that all turned out: FanLib bought by Disney, then shut down only a couple of months later. Good thoughts on why this new for-profit venture may or may not be a problem from the OTW blog, here.

-- IMF head and accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn will likely go free; he was released from house arrest, and the case against him is falling apart, largely for the same old tired victim blaming reasons we've seen a thousand times before. And yes, presumption of innocence and better to let a thousand guilty men go free than to lock up one innocent and all that. But isn't it funny how so many of those guilty men who go free are those who have been accused of sexual assault?

-- Google+: I received an invite, haven't gotten around to using it yet, but I expect I'll at least poke around. My antipathy toward Facebook is well documented; on the other hand, I get nervous about outsourcing too much of my online life to Google, especially when they bungled their last attempt at social networking so badly (remember the disaster that was the Buzz launch?). What it really comes down to, of course, is that a social networking tool is only as useful as the people who are on it. So I am adopting a wait-and-see attitude. I may end up using Facebook for RL and Google+ for fandom, if enough people migrate.

I should probably have done this awhile ago, but despite today being shorter I was pretty zonked when I got home, so I crashed on the couch with T and Dragon Age and the cats for awhile.

Today I just did two panels, went to lunch with folks, and sat in on the post-mortem. There was an after-party as well, and I thought about going, but my social energy limit was just about tapped (which is probably why the couch had such a strong hold on me this evening) and so I bowed out. Maybe next year -- and I expect I will go back again next year -- I will feel more confident in my ability to go up to people and talk to them. I did end up feeling pretty comfortable talking in panels, though. While my lunch group was gathering, one person mentioned that their friend was a first-time con goer. When I said that I was, too, he seemed really surprised and said that I didn't show it.

So anyway, some quick thoughts before bed, and maybe I will come back with a more coherent conclusion tomorrow.

( Thoughts on day three )

Deep thoughts will have to wait for tomorrow. For now, sleep. If you are reading this and you were at the con: thanks for making my introduction to the world of cons such an excellent one! It was great to see/meet you, and I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did.

SE asked me to give my opinion on WikiLeaks and its creator/leader Julian Assange.

( Secrecy, government, and freedom of speech )

( Julian Assange himself. )