403 private links
Oh shit did I almost forget to do this again?
Okay, so I have Opinions about AI and I know they are not 100% shared by all of my friends and AI controversies caused drama in at least one Discord I'm in, so I'm going to put this under a cut and you can read/engage with it if this is a thing that's interesting to you, or not. It also deals a little bit with bad things happening to kids in a weird, hard-to-define way that makes me uncomfortable and may make you uncomfortable as well.
I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!
Someone just linked to this in the eight thousandth discussion of static site generators or something like them for simple, basic websites and this just completely clarified my feelings about every single goddamn time I try to install and set up a static site generator.
I'm more grateful than ever for my commitment against the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. The death of forums and blogs and the centralising towards a single platform trades off control for convenience - and it's so collectively detrimental.
Lately, I've found myself thinking a lot about an online interaction I had about twenty years ago, which really shaped my approach to online interactions in general.
I liked and mostly agreed with this article on "the enshittification" of TikTok, Twitter, Amazon shopping, and other web services.
The prompt here focused on the Twitter explosion, so I guess I'll talk about platforms in a kind of rambling, disorganized sort of way.
I used to really like taking personality/sorting quizzes and sharing the results on LJ/DW (I've got a quizzes tag (all f-locked)) but I feel like personality quizzes have really gone downhill since their heyday on... (looks at the quiz site I shared my results from the most) ...Blogthings.com? I don't actually know much about that site, but this post I found when Googling the site name just now suggests that it was one woman's project and that all the quizzes were written by her... Which I guess would explain the consistently high quality of the quizzes!
Are you a member of a small, marginalized identity-based community of Tumblr bloggers, looking to advocate for yourselves, support each other, have meaningful discussions, build, and grow? Then Tumblr itself is standing in your way.
Knowing that Cait Corrain was a Reylo makes their actions make a lot more sense.
Not because of the ship they were interested. Not because of the fandom they were involved in. Rather, because knowing that they were active in fandom in a large, active ship with a lot of drama and a LOT of fic being posted, it really puts some aspects of the situations into context for me.
I've been thinking about fan space bullshit for a while (just not posting it anywhere lol), so I felt like now might be the best time, and this might be the best place, for me to get some of these thoughts down. I'm sure nothing I'm saying is 100% original, as I've seen many others express the same gripes with modern fandom, but I think this kind of thing can be talked about and rehashed at any point for the sake of d i s c o u r s e.
So I've been using DeviantArt a lot recently for a personal project. This combined with my Snowflake Challenge musings (where I pondered what is now the best site for posting adult art in the wake of Twitter's struggles) inspired me to write up a long comparison of how DeviantArt and Tumblr compare as sites for posting fanart. n = 4546 words.
The past few days I've been working on pieces for Zines, right now I'm working on a 2nd piece for one that is spicy. The SFW is just about done. And I'm brainstorming for another one.
Via bluedreaming, I came across a fair and very thoughtful post observing the impact AO3 has had on smaller archives, and by extension on fandom-specific communities. I love AO3 and everything it stands for and was born of, and I want it to keep existing. I also see a lot of commentary on the lost feeling of "community" in fandom spaces these days, and this post offers interesting insights into AO3's unfortunate contribution to the trend.
In 2012, for reasons that don't bear exploring at this juncture, I decided to make a list of all of the meta on reccing that I could find. I went through metafandom and I started going through metafandom and I ran out of steam. Every once in a while I'd pick it up again, and I'd, say, go pull more meta data for the links I'd pulled from metafandom. Sometimes I found that those links and entries that I read had since become locked or deleted; I chose to keep those links because I'd read the content there and I knew that I cared about it and maybe, someday, the entry would be accessible again, or, anyway, surely the data I did have meant something; I couldn't make myself delete anything, so there are some dead links in here.
Over my roughly 23 years in fandom, I've witnessed a number of scam artists, grifters, and otherwise bad actors within fandom. I've had the good fortune, but also the wariness and caution, to not be taken in by these people. So today, for my second Fannish50, I'm going to talk about signs of scam artists and other kinds of grifters, gaslighters, and toxic people in fandom that have become apparent to me over the years and have helped me avoid them.
Anon: Hey so I have a question. I asked one of the forensic psychology college professors (i'm a psych major) if l0li/sh0ta counts as cp and she said that it does because even though they are animated depictions, they are meant to represent children. Made me feel weird, what is ur stance on this?
Most of us have gotten used to building tables for the LJ bio field, and have discovered that the DW one doesn't work the same way. So I messed around for a while and came up with some guidelines.
A frontnav-style code inspired by a mix of vapourwave and general old Windows 78, Windows XP-era looks.
This is a test of lots of different mark up you should think about styling. It also uses a nonstandard icon size.