have been unavoidably detained by the world

So Dreamwidth is doing the anti-spam crackdown thing and reminded people to check that their emails are verified for their accounts.

I have the following accounts:

Eldabe - my main one, where I spend my time, hello.
Eldarwannabe - my LJ backup. It makes me sad I couldn't back up the comments, my favorite part, but I don't want to lose this either. Why didn't I back up my LJ to this account? I don't know, I'm a messy disaster.
S****** - An old account I made a while back to be my main complaining place for stuff I didn't put anywhere else. I used it for a few months and then stopped, but I logged back in to check anyway.
I***** - This account I've been saving for one day when I am a Serious Adult Person who blogs about Serious Adult Things. I should probably give up on that dream, but whatever! I still want the account, the username is really meaningful to me.

I pay for a bunch of Dreamwidth points every year, I don't feel bad about four accounts. I tried to log into each of them, and good news, I still have the first three passwords saved. Bad news, don't know what the password was for the last one and more importantly, don't remember which email address I connected it to! So that's my next great adventure to track down, WHOOPS. x_x

More importantly, I've been wanting to make a new account and I feel like this is a good impetus to do so. See, the thing is, one of the things that makes me anxious about the fics I'm writing right now is that they are darker fics in Cursed Child fandom, a ridiculously fluffy fandom. Like, RIDICULOUSLY fluffy. And there's been some...IDK, fandom drama seems too strong, but I was made to feel uncomfortable in this fandom for wanting to write about some dark stuff. And with my fandom anxiety, it completely shut me down for a while. And I feel like, if I can find an even MORE pseudonymous account to post some of my darker (and, uh, sexier?) stuff, it might help give me the courage to do it.

Part of me thinks, oh gosh, this is ridiculous. How many accounts do I want to juggle?

And part of me is like, if it helps, do it. It's free! I'll made a DW and an AO3 account and I'll just make sure to only post on those two platforms. And people will find my fics, or more likely they won't, and at least I'll have the courage to put them out there. And that's a good goal.

(Part of me is like, no one uses DW, I can just post them here and only make a new Ao3 account and the odds that anyone will put it all together are small lolol. But I've linked my DW on my fandom twitter and my fandom tumblr and my Ao3, so I think....not.)

The one thing is coming up with a new username. And maybe a new email address to keep it all tidy. I mean, roleplayers on DW do much more complicated stuff! This shouldn't be so hard!

I just got an email from the OTW that the demand for the rewards card deck was so high that they had to order more and it might take longer to get sent out, estimated seems to be a month or two.

I am delighted by this news, although I will admit that I reaaaaaalllllly want my cards haha.

You know what?

I miss LJ.

I mean, I say that all the time, but there was an Arisia panel about "Storytelling Platforms*" (read: fanfiction platforms mostly) and ahhhhh I miss LJ.

My favorite part of being in fandom was just talking about it. Talking about fic, talking about meta, having these long rambly conversations with a handful of people...it's my favorite.

And I liked that on LJ things didn't get too big. Thirty people could have an AWESOME amount of threads and conversation and spin-off threads and ideas and fic. Tumblr is too big and it gets impersonal and crazy and there aren't conversation on tumblr, there are reblogs which is not remotely the same thing.

I haven't logged into my tumblr account in...a year now? I locked both of my twitter accounts back in 2019. Most of my fandom conversation is happening on whatsapp these days, which is great, but only two people want to talk my fandom with me and I feel incredibly guilty because whatsapp is a demand platform - I can't post and then rest to see if they want to talk to me. I have to actively approach them for conversation and it's a lot harder for them to turn me down if they aren't interested. And people are allowed to drift away from fandoms! But it's just...harder. And of course, it's impossible to meet new fan friends on whatsapp.

I still have discord, but I find discord a LOT HARDER to use. It's so fast-paced, and you miss stuff, and there's no easy way to link back to an earlier part of the conversation and there are no threaded conversations and I find it pretty impersonal and difficult. I haven't made any fandom friends online since...gosh. A long time.

Anyway, the panel was amazing, and I enjoyed every minute. But I ached with missing LJ. Honestly, the panel made me interested in checking out Wattpad for the first time, because they have some conversation tools and that just...so hard to find.

(I recognize as I say this that I'm on Dreamwith. And I ADORE Dreamwidth! It's just not where my fandom conversations are and it's fandom I'm looking for, I have to be honest.) (Although man, I love you guys here. I'm working on logging in more, and checking my flist more too ♥)

( *Actual description of the panel below )

The OTW board is exploding in fire and mayhem!

Well, I mean, if you read the official post it sounds like business as usual, chaos disguised in politely worded sentences and punctuation. Luckily, fandom reporters got us covered.

My take? The board is always going to have to deal with constituencies who don't agree with everything they have done. (See: Unions!) Buuuuuut, on the internet, it's going to be magnified times A THOUSAND.

A lot of people have been (rightly!!) complaining that the OTW board was becoming insular and combative. Which is definitely true. But gosh, you couldn't pay me enough to be a board member*. Make one small mistake, or even just a decision that isn't universally adored, and you will be CRUSHED under the negative feedback spiral.

It can get kinda hard to separate the signal to the noise in that scenario. And frankly, I too would hide behind my star-spangled shield and sing the pokemon theme song to drown it all out. I don't agree with every decision the board made, but I do think they cared. I actually do with them the best.

Going forward, I'm almost considering donating and becoming a voting member. I have zero spare time, but this matters to be and I think this could be a great opportunity moving forward. And everyone is super excited about the potential. But if we really think the OTW should be run and contributed to by everyone, we too have to take responsibility in how we contribute.

The board screwed up. I'm not trying to defend the things they did wrong. I'm just saying it's so easy for the internet (you know, where fandom is) to end up in some very unproductive and damaging communication styles. And it's not always easy to find the blame for fallout.

*Not true. I'm looking at my job options these days AND YOU COULD PAY ME ENOUGH. Just don't make me bill out at 6-minute increments.

ETA: Also, the OTW has some pretty awesome legal staff, I vote we stop saying that stuff that was happening was illegal.

I want to post more. So, here is to more posts, less second-guessing, less editing *cough* and the five people left on LJ/DW that aren't in online RPGs.

I realized over this Dragon*con that I'm not remember the usernames of new fandom people as well. I've always had a pretty hard time with names (and faces) and fandom can be kind of an overwhelming place with so many active people that it can be confusing. I normally take a looooong time to get into a fandom, which can give me time to distinguish individuals as I go.

But I've been lurking around Inception for, gosh, over two years now, and I've still only remembered dozen or so names.

I think it's a little bit from the new fandom platforms. I used to remember people using a lot of visual cues, like their default user icon, their journal layout, etc. Tumblr users don't utilize userpics the same way, and the layouts are either super-plain or horrible.

But even more important, AO3! I think the layout to AO3 is fabulous and the downloading options are the best thing ever, but there is very little to distinguish the author while I read. Just the username on top, which I TOTALLY skim by sometimes.

I think there's a cultural shift that comes from putting the fic in a seperate place from the meta, the journal, the messy thought and the unbetaed flash fic. It's not necessarily a bad thing! AO3 is, for lack of a better term, a lot more cleaned-up than LJ. It's easier to find the fic you want and just zoom past all the other junk.

On the other end of the spectrum, tumblr is so jammed with junk that even when I know that people post flash fic or ficlets or dabbles and what-have-you on their tumblr, if I'm not constantly checking and saving (and I'm TOTALLY NOT) I won't find it again. It can feel that if it's not "clean enough" for AO3, it won't get archived.

There's a part of me that even misses the really messy ff.net days, when for lack of anything else, people basically wrote journal posts as Authors Notes at the beginning of their fic chapters. I would sometimes know a lot about the writer's personality, thought process and sense of humor (remember when authors used A/Ns to reply to comments? :D) before even reading the next chapter.

By contrast, AO3 notes tend to be fairly minimal, sometimes to frustration.

Of course, ff.net also had the "lack of distinguishing visual characteristics of the fic layout" problem, and I memorized very few writer names on ff.net, and I was never much active in fandom there either.

But at least people filled out their profiles on ff.net. On AO3 and tumblr, I may never know anything about anyone!

__

OH! I also want to post about LJ BNF culture. I had some really interesting discussions.

Back when tumblr was just another option instead of the primary and/or only platform People I Want To Talk To Are Using, I started to write a post about Fanfiction on Different Mediums.

So, that was a real essay. Maybe one day I'll finish it. But I've actually read a few nice old-fashined fics on tumblr, where they are doomed to be virtually lost unless they are reposted elsewhere. So I'm going to write these less-organized thoughts instead.

Here's the thing. Livejournal is not an ideal fanfiction platform. We (fandom) have come up with pretty great conventions in the standardized header format to make the fic we publish on this platform nicely accessible. We use linking and lj-cuts to neatly hide our fic so we don't flood our friends with text. We (well, most poeple) make masterlists to make it easy to find fic within blog posts. Some people make separate blog accounts for fanfiction posts. Some people tag their fics extensively.

This is all to try and make fics well organized here and easy to find here on LJ/DW/etc.

( But the thing is, the ideal place for fanfiction is still going to be archive sites. )