Forgot to mention... I'll be in Portland, Oregon for ONE! NIGHT! ONLY! on Saturday. I seem to be making a tradition of taking train journeys just for the hell of it on the fourth of July weekend.

Anyway, I'm crashing with schwern but don't have any other plans, really, so if you're in PDX and wanted to catch up, let me know.

This entry was originally posted at http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/39416.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: Treat
Fandom: Hornblower, Master and Commander, Sharpe, Pirates of the Caribbean (crossover)
Pairing: Archie Kennedy/Tom Pullings (mostly). Sexually explicit.
Kinks: Animal play (for kink_bingo)
Length: 600 words
Notes: Set in the Shore Leave universe; shortly after the end of that story, I would think.

"Archie, bless his heart, was like having a puppy jump onto your bed; you petted him to calm him down." -- Shore Leave

( Shore Leave puppy fic this way. )

[Crossposted with comments open on both sites: DW, LJ.]

This is a response to telesilla's it's like rain on your wedding day where she says:

Every time I see a member of the fanfic community attempting to apply the laws of copyright to themselves, it makes me boggle. Apparently it's okay to dismiss/ignore copyright law when it's, oh say, Acme Shark's copyright on everything connected with the SG universe, but if it's comments on an LJ being moved without your permission? OMG UR IN MAH COPYRIGHT VIOLATIN ME!

This makes me twitch a little. I don't see the irony at all.

I think it's important for us to distinguish between copyright proper, the broader cloud of intellectual property rights that exist both for creators and consumers, and the even more chaotic mess of interpretation of those rights.

Currently, in the world we live in, media properties (movies, tv shows, books) are protected by copyright. This is a fact.

Currently, in the world we live in, the words we type on the Internet are protected by copyright. This is also a fact.

Now, any explanation of what "copyright" means will begin with "you can't copy that stuff without permission". That applies equally to media properties and to our words on the Internet.

However, the explanation would go on to say "except under certain circumstances". One of those circumstances is "fair use". Fair use allows you to copy, verbatim, a small portion of a creative work; it allows you to criticize or satirize a work; it allows you to transform the work (you've heard of Transformative Works right?) to make it into a different work; and so on.

Fannish creative works (fanfic, fanart, fanvids) are, in most cases, protected under Fair Use. Creating a transformative work based on a media property is not at all the same as copying the original thing wholesale.

This is the first way that writing fanfic differs from copying LJ content: fanfic is transformative fair use, while straight copying is not.

The second part of the explanation would go on to talk about licenses. A license is used to say "I retain copyright over this work, but I allow you to use it in certain ways." Creative Commons provides several well known licenses for content, but what you may not know is that you grant a license almost any time you use the Internet.

If you agree to a website's Terms of Service (TOS), you agree to allow certain things to be done with the content you provide to that website. It might not have been clear to you at the time (and that's an issue with TOSs, and with technical literacy, which I don't discount), but you have to grant that license in order to allow the site to re-publish your content to the other users of their service.

The LJ TOS says:

LiveJournal reserves the right, without limitation except by law, to serve any user Content on the web, through the downloadable clients and otherwise.

This includes through their API. When you agreed to the LJ TOS, you agreed to make your content available through the livejournal.com website, through RSS feeds, through desktop clients that use the APIs, through various websites that use the APIs, and who knows what else.

I tried to find a separate TOS for the API and couldn't (the closest thing is this bots page), so as far as I can tell, API users are also governed by the overall TOS, which does not restrict any client from accessing and displaying LJ content. (They really should have an API TOS, now I think of it; the best way is to set up an API with keys per developer, so that if any developer breaks the TOS you can shut down their service. LJ has not done this, however.)

So, in short: you gave LJ permission to publish and display your content, including comments, through their API, and gave other LJ users (whether using livejournal.com, a desktop client, or another web-based client such as Google Reader or Dreamwidth) permission to access your content through that API.

You might not have known it, and it might suck, and you might not like it, and that's perfectly valid. But you granted a license, and so this is not, technically, copyright violation.

This is the second reason copying LJ comments is nothing like fanfic: you granted a license for the copying.

(You will have noticed that I said fanfic is transformative fair use, thus not copyright violation, and that copying LJ comments is licensed, thus not copyright violation either. I firmly believe both these to be true.)

Thirdly, any discussion of copyright and intellectual property on the Internet has to operate on several levels simultaneously:

What does the law say?
How is the law interpreted?
How is the interpretation changing over time?
What do we want it to be in future?

Right now the law is in flux, with battles going on constantly over what degree of copying is, or should be, legal. Are you allowed to burn your own CDs to mp3? Can you keep a copy on your computer *and* a copy on your iPod? Can you backup your computer containing those mp3s to an online service like Jungle Disk?

Most of us believe that we should be able to do all those things -- copy media between formats, store it on different hardware, back it up offline or online -- but the RIAA would disagree.

Simultaneously, we feel threatened when someone takes our creative work (like LJ comments) and copies it between formats, stores it on different hardware, backs it up on another LJ-like service. Suddenly we're in the RIAA's shoes and we see the other side of the story, and our responses can be kind of contradictory.

I think this is really natural! It's an area of confusion and contention on every level from the personal to the legislative. PEOPLE DON'T HAVE ANSWERS TO THIS RIGHT NOW. And it's pretty normal for us to flail around as we try to figure it out.

(By "we", incidentally, I don't mean fandom. I mean society as a whole. Take a look at some of Stanford professor Larry Lessig's presentations for more information. I recommend How the law is strangling creativity for starters.)

branchandroot had an interesting post yesterday about correspondence vs contributor models for understanding this, and the way she frames it is really useful: here are two legal precedents, and we don't know which applies. I work in this field professionally, and I have these conversations all the time, sometimes with actual trained lawyers, and they don't have straight answers either.

In short, intellectual property is going through a bit of a chaotic phase right now, and nobody really knows exactly what's legal and what's not.

This is the only way in which copying LJ comments and writing fanfic are alike: laws, standards, and understanding of the issue are confused in both areas.

I don't see where the irony is.

Fandom: Master and Commander (bookverse)
Pairing: Jack/Stephen
Warnings: None; not even any explicit sex.
Previous parts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part e on LJ; Full story on AO3.

It's been five years since I wrote the first few chapters of Rumour's Harbour, part of my Particular Friends series of M&C fic. When I came to upload it to AO3 recently, I was kind of ashamed to see it sitting there unfinished. So, here is the final part at last. Thanks to fairestcat for beta under difficult circumstances.

( 3700 words )

This entry was originally posted at http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/22023.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

(crossposted, comment wherever you like.)

Well, whaddaya know, DW is in open beta! I've purchased a paid account, but not a seed account. If anyone wants to get an account, you can do so at Dreamwidth shop.

There have been a few problems with the paid account sales (god, I hate working with payment systems, and I have to say I could kinda see this coming a mile away because those things are complete bitch to test without opening them up), and the issues are documented on dw_news. The one outstanding problem is that you need a Paypal account to sign up, you can't just use your CC without creating an account. D'oh! This should be fixed in the next few days, though.

We're having some open beta celebrations in the age_of_sail community. If anyone on my LJ flist is in that corner of fandom you might want to watch that comm, whether you join DW or not, as there will be recs, fic, etc posted over the next two weeks.

I'm going to be writing a Hornblower/Heyer crossover fic. Edrington/Sophy to be exact. Thankyou, random pairing generator!

In related news, I actually finished Rumour's Harbour last night. Yeah, I know, only 5 years too late. I just wanted to pound out a final chapter for it so I could post it to AO3. It's in beta right now and will be posted soon. O_O

In non-fannish news, work is busy but fun, home is a huge mess and I haven't cooked in ages (must go to farmers' market on the weekend I think), and I'm trying to figure out what travel I'm going to have in the next 6 months or so. Possibly London, possibly Buenos Aires, probably Ottawa and Edmonton around Canadian thanksgiving. Then I will probably go back to Australia for Christmas/NY and to renew my visa. Wow, that's a lot. And I'm not even counting domestic travel.

Oh, and just to loop back to DW for a moment... I'll have some invite codes to share, but I'm going to wait a week or so before doing so. Many of you will get invites because you signed up with OpenID, and some of you will buy accounts anyway, so I thought I'd let all that shake out first before distributing invites to those who don't fit into either of those categories.

Via idlerat

OK I'm not a DW expert or anything, by a long shot. But if anyone who reads my journal either here or on LJ wants some rudimentary pointers, help finding answers, etc - how to set up open ID, how to import your journal, how to find comms, wikis, posts, individuals with DW info - I'm available. Comment, message me, or email me (skud@infotropenet). My IM details are also in my profile.

Anonymous comments are turned on for this post.

I'm going to Wiscon in May, for the first time. I haven't actually been reading a lot of SF/F lately and I fear I may be a bit out of the loop.

Can anyone rec me relevant books to read which a) are new releases I might've missed, or b) have come up a lot in conversation lately so might be good to know. I'm thinking, for example, of books that are likely to be discussed in the context of race in SF/F, or that are connected to panels that are happening.

(And when does the panel list go up anyway? People keep talking about the panels they're on, so I am seeing bits of it but not the whole picture, as if looking at a distant scene through a spyglass.)

This entry was originally posted at http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/16844.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Attempting a crosspost with comments directed to DW. In theory, if you're reading this on LJ, you should be directed to DW to comment.

This entry was originally posted at http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/14927.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

This is an attempted crosspost between Dreamwidth and Livejournal. Here on DW, I'm damned_colonial, whereas on LJ I'm damned_colonial.


Today I set up a community, overheard_on_dw.

And here's a poll:

[Crosspost from here.]

I wanted to post something more substantial, but for now I'd just like to say that I don't believe Amazon did this intentionally, and that I really do understand how it's all too easy for this kind of thing to happen. Hell, we're working on a similar thing at work, and I could see how mistakes could happen there. Stupidity not malice, and all that.

So I'm collecting some links regarding potential causes for the event known as "amazonfail" as a research tool for myself, re: how not to do it, traps to avoid, etc. These may or not be the actual causes of amazonfail, but they are potential ones, and ones which you'd want to guard against if you were setting up something similar.

* Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Making Light thinks it haseverything to do with the fragility of large organizations.
* tehdely thinks it's Bantown trolling for lulz.
* sbisson, Why hasn't Amazon fixed things overnight? On Amazon's internal development structure and how it can lead to this kind of thing.
* weev claims he caused the whole thing through scripting, invisible iframes, and outsourced captcha entry
* bryant debunks the above particular claim
* Dear Author posits that it was category metadata that was used as the filtering criterion.

Got any more links? Let me know.

Lessons to learn:

* Watch out for organisational flaws that could lead to this. Make sure that changes to search algorithms, filtering, etc are reviewed by cynical bastards who can pick holes in the system before it rolls out.
* Be careful of systems where one team controls the code and another the data. They can interact in weird ways. (Oh boy can they; ask me how.)
* If you base your adult content filtering on community flagging, make sure people can't mass flag or cause others to mass flag through XSS or similar attacks
* Google has "safe search" that you can turn on and off. This is better than blocking stuff across the board. Make it clear that "safe search" is on, when showing search results that have filtered out some content.
* How to protect against social engineering attacks by hate groups (cf. LJ's strikethrough)? No idea. Any ad-revenue-supported site is at high risk from this sort of thing.

Actually, I had five, but I've already given four of them to people who responded to my earlier poll.

The fifth one, I'm giving away to someone who gets an OpenID account on Dreamwidth and posts Age of Sail commentfic on this post.

I've also been informed that they're handing out invitations to validated OpenID users every day. So even if you don't get the invite I'm handing out, it's still worth signing up for the OpenID account. Details are in the linked post.

Dreamwidth have fixed the RSS so that markup for usernames and stuff is no longer messed up. So if you'd like to follow my dreamwidth journal, it's dw_colonial, and it looks much cleaner now.

[Crossposted from Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there, as you prefer.]

I recently got recruited to the Archive Of Our Own tag wrangling team. Yesterday there was a team meeting, and I asked whether I could share some of what I learnt, and was told that was fine.

So, ObDisclaimer: All this is my own perspective, not an official publication of the Organization for Transformative Works or the tag wrangling team, and is subject to change. Is pretty much certain to change, in fact: that's what "beta" means. Plus, I'm a tag wrangling newbie, so I might get things wrong. Despite that, I hope this is interesting/useful to those of you already using AO3.

I've had an AO3 beta account for a few weeks and I've uploaded a number of my fics there. I've also submitted a lot of feedback, much of which was tag-related, as it turns out. Since I got added to the mailing list, I've seen even more feedback come through, often in the following forms:

"I marked my fic as having Bob/Bill as the pairing, but I see some other people have added Bill/Bob, and I'm wondering how that's going to work out, since those are basically the same pairing, only expressed different ways."

"I write fic in Fandom X, but only the bookverse. I see you have Fandom X listed under movies, not books. Fandom X is both books and movies!"

"I added John as one of the characters in my fic, and when I followed the tag, I see that the John from my fandom was conflated with the John from another fandom. They're different characters!"

"I added a new character or pairing for my Fandom X fic, but it's not associated with Fandom X!"

All these questions, and more, are answered/resolved by Tag Wrangling.

On AO3, the following things are all tags:

* fandoms
* characters
* pairings
* freeform tags (eg. "remix", "aliensmadethemdoit")

(Ratings, warnings, media forms, and categories (m/m, f/f, etc) are also tags, but only admins can manipulate them, so I'll skip them for now.)

What tag wranglers do is basically the following:

* Figure out what fandoms there are, and what media they belong to
* Assign characters and pairings to those fandoms
* Mark tags as synonymous or ambiguous

Fandoms: Basically, when you post in a new fandom, it will wind up under "Uncategorized" on the Fandoms page until someone comes along to wrangle it. Generally a wrangler who's familiar with that fandom will take it on (I'm taking on Hornblower, Master and Commander, Sharpe, etc.) They'll put it into books, tv, movie, or whatever category seems most appropriate. Sometimes they'll get it wrong, or it'll be confusing (book/movie fandoms are haaaaard!), so if you see a fandom that's been wrangled into a media category, but you think it's been done wrong, leave feedback. If your fandom is sitting in "Uncategorized", just hang in there for a bit, and someone will get to it eventually.

Characters and pairings: These can be attached to fandoms, and will then feed into the search interface to help offer an appropriate list of characters/pairings for the fandom in question. The first time a character or pairing is used, it won't be attached to the fandom, and will need wrangling. If your character/pairing is sitting orphaned for a long time, you could drop a feedback note asking for it to be wrangled.

One of the biggest issues with characters and pairings is coming up with a "canonical" version of the name, and then making everything else a synonym for it. So for instance, "Benton Fraser" is the canonical name for the main character in Due South, and "Fraser", "Benton", and "Benny" are synonyms for that. If you tag your fic with "Benny" and the synonym's been set, the system will know that that's the same person as "Benton Fraser". Canonical names are "Firstname Surname" in most cases, though there are a bunch of subsidiary rules that I won't go into here.

(Synonyms in action: see Due South or Humor or Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski and note "Tags with the same meaning". I'm not sure why this doesn't show for characters, eg. Ray Kowalski, but hey, beta!)

The canonical pairing descriptor is always alphabetical by surname ("Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin") so any other options (Jack/Stephen, Stephen/Jack, Stephen Maturin/Jack Aubrey, Aubrey/Maturin) will be marked as synonyms for the canonical one. So you can put in any pairing descriptor and it'll work out OK in the end, but if you want things to work quicker and save the wranglers some work, specify your pairing in the canonical format.

Characters such as OMC/OFC/Original (Fe)Male Character, Other, Various, and Everyone (eg. "Ronon/Everyone") are added as character tags with "No Fandom", so that any/every fandom can use them.

Another concept in the tag system is one of "ambiguity". An ambiguous tag is one that can be used to mean multiple things. For instance, if you create a character tag called "Ray" in Due South fandom, it's unclear whether you mean "Ray Vecchio" or "Ray Kowalski". Let alone Rays in other fandoms. So "Ray" would be marked as an ambiguous tag and there would be a pointer to all of the possible canonical things it might refer to. As a fic uploader, you may find it expeditious to avoid using ambiguous tags. On the other hand, we're in beta test and this stuff needs to be sorted out sometime, so if you add something ambiguous, wait a while, and don't see it wrangled appropriately, drop them a note.

Freeform tags: You can see all the freeform tags in the tag cloud. These are tags which are neither fandoms nor characters nor pairings. You can put just about anything you want there. Again, the wranglers try to find a canonical form of the tag, and then mark any others as synonyms. So the example given in the docs is "Alien Sex" which has synonyms "Alien!Sex" and "AlienSex". Another example is "remix" which has synonym "remixed". And I linked Humor/Humour/Funny above. Freeform tags don't seem to create as much confusion or generate as many questions as characters and pairings, at least so far.

So, in short, the most important thing to know is that there is a tag wrangling team that is working in the background to clean up, normalise, and organise all the tags, and that what you can do to make your fic as findable as possible as quickly as possible is to use canonical character and pairing tags wherever you can. Apart from that, if you have any questions/comments about tags and tag wrangling as a user of the site, you can leave feedback there.

Poll #1376618
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Are you planning to get an account on Dreamwidth?

If you already have one, what's your username? I'd like to read you.

With regard to your own journal on LJ, are you planning to:

When reading the journals of others on DW, I will

Would you like an invite to DW?

The reason(s) I'd like an invite code are:

If you say you'd like an invite, I'll put you on the list for any I get hold of. If you're not an LJ user and would like an invite, email me.

Here's what to do.

First create an OpenID account

This will let you comment on DW entries, as well as several other benefits.

1. Go to http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/
2. Type in yourname.livejournal.com
3. Approve the thing on LJ that asks "Grant identity validation?" You will then be returned to DW.

This OpenID account lets you do far more than you'd think. You can create a reading
list, comment, upload icons, etc. The main thing you can't do is post your own entries.

Your user profile on DW is at http://www.dreamwidth.org/userinfo.bml -- you can set various options there, including setting and validating an email address to get comment notifications and the like.

One other thing about OpenID accounts: they'll quite likely receive invite codes, and some of those will happen before open beta on April 30th. So setting up an OpenID account (and registering an email address) is a way to get in the pool for that.

Reading my journal on DW

OpenID users are able to create a reading list (similar to a friends list) on Dreamwidth. You do not need a full account to do this.

Choose this option if:

1. You want to try out Dreamwidth as much as possible
2. You have several people you want to follow on Dreamwidth

To add me to your DW reading list, go to http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/profile and click "Subscribe". Obviously you can repeat this exercise for any other person or community on DW.

Your reading page is at http://your-openid-account.dreamwidth.org/read -- if you login you'll see links to it in the obvious places.

Reading my DW journal via RSS

Use this option if:

1. You have no intention of moving over to Dreamwidth and don't want two different reading lists
2. I'm the only DW person you want to follow

Subscribe to dw_colonial which is the syndicated feed of my DW journal. The RSS feed is a little messy in some ways (user tags show up weird), but that should be fixed at some point. It's still readable in the meantime.

If you intend to comment on any entry, click through to the DW entry and do it using your OpenID. I probably won't see comments on the syndicated feed, and syndicated entries are purged after a couple of weeks.

Further reading

zvi has a great post about the types of DW accounts, when they'll be available, and how to acquire one, here.

(crossposting this)

General principles

1. My LJ friends are my friends. I am not dumping them, even if they don't move. I might unfriend them because we've drifted apart (geographically or interest-wise), but there are plenty whose lives and LJ posts I want to keep up with. I will do my best to maintain those relationships.

2. No hosted service is ever 100% trustworthy, 100% secure, or 100% immune from technical glitches, business difficulties, or the like. I will keep backups of all my content, and use other technical means to avoid tying myself too tightly to any such service.

3. Some content of my LJ should stay right where it is, so that people can find it/link to it. The primary category here is fanfic, but some other posts also count.

4. Other than the above, I don't want to keep the minutia of my life publicly available on LJ. I'm just not comfortable with that any more.

What to do with my LJ

* Lock (private) all ephemeral posts. Do this progressively, starting with the earliest. I have currently locked all ephemeral posts up to the end of 2004, and am working forward from there.

* Post all fanfic to AO3.

* Appropriately tag all remaining public posts. Switch to a theme that presents them as well as possible.

* Clean up flist. Unsub from people that I don't regularly read, leave communities, and the like. For syndicated feeds, subscribe to RSS in Google Reader or re-syndicate on DW.

* Close down secondary accounts (eg. oeconomist, which will transition to a syndicated feed.)

* Close down or add new admins to any communities for which I am currently the sole admin. I don't want to feel responsible for these. (eg. crumpeteers, kiss_me_hardy)

* For communities to which I feel a particular fondness/connection, make backups and/or port content to DW in some way (eg. article_xxix, atkm_scrapbook).

* Empty out user profile page, leaving a pointer to DW. Create future-dated journal entry with similar pointer.

* Change default journal settings to disallow comments on new posts (any that I make will direct people to DW via OpenID -- see below).

* Consider modifying notification settings? Do I want to know if new people friend me on LJ?

Dreamwidth setup

* I am not going to import my entries. I have a backup for my own use, or if anyone requests something to be dug out of the archives. My fanfic will be left unlocked on LJ, and posted on AO3.

* Icons have been imported. Don't create any new ones on LJ, but don't delete what's there.

* Crossposting: I will manually crosspost only "important" things, for some definition of that that becomes increasingly stringent over time. At some point after open beta, I will turn off comments on LJ and direct them to DW (with a help link for OpenID information).

* Inviting friends: I will maintain a list of friends who have asked for invite codes to DW. This will be limited to people I read on LJ or know in person. I'll pass out codes in whatever order works for me, but more or less first in first out. (Example exception: if a group of friends wanted to come across simultaneously, it might be better to facilitate that.)

* How will I continue to read my LJ flist? Will I syndicate them to DW? Continue to read on LJ? Use Google Reader? As yet undecided on this. I'd tend towards syndicating to DW, except that I don't imagine that would handle flocked posts. In the short to medium term, I will almost certainly keep reading on LJ.

* Have a good hard think about ephemera on DW. Do I want my menstrual rants, work-related peeves, or other trivial crap to be public? Forever? For a while? Initially I will probably post publicly, but consider locking down after some time (3 months?) The process of reviewing and locking down LJ posts hasn't been too onerous -- about an hour or two to go through a year's worth. Tags may help here.

* Create the communities I want on DW. I've already set up "age_of_sail" and "knitting", just to get the ball rolling.

* Create syndicated feeds I want. I've done my infotropism blog, and xkcd was already there (of course!).

* Choose a client, since my current one (Xjournal) doesn't work with DW. I think I may revert to a command line one in the short term, or even just write posts in a text editor then paste into the web form. Keep an eye on iDream going forward.

Other -- mostly personal website stuff

* I need a stable place to store multimedia -- mostly images, but some other stuff too. DW won't have picture hosting in the near enough future, so I will need to come up with something else. I should probably just set up a place on my own web host, and MAKE SURE IT'S BACKED UP. (I lost a bunch of LJ pictures a few years back through accidental deletion, and am still kicking myself.) This media hosting can also serve images (eg. banners/cover art) for AO3 or wherever. I have ideas about how to do this in a nice low-key way, with a subdomain, a web host, and a perl script.

* Set up OpenID on infotrope.net, delegating as described by zvi, and use that for commenting on LJ and elsewhere around the net.

Have I missed anything? Do you feel like I'm doing an appropriate amount of stuff to maintain our relationships? Or will you be joining me on DW?

Further to my Why Dreamwidth post, I said I'd post some of the features I like about DW. I'm quoting in part from this wiki page.

The first set are either implemented or should be by the time of open beta (end of April):

* Friends list has been split into "watching" and "granting access". The friends page is now known as the "reading page".

* Maximum post length and maximum comment length have been increased enormously. No more writing a lengthy comment and then having to break it in two!

* The navigation bar doesn't suck. Among other things, it contains links to refresh the page in "style=mine" or "style=light", which is worth the price of admission on its own. I hate the nav bar on LJ but on DW it's actually useful.

* They've replaced the lj-user tag with a generic user tag that lets you link to people on other journalling sites with <user name="whoever" site="something.com"> -- particularly handy for transitioning from LJ to DW.

* If you use OpenID to access DW, you can add user pics, subscriptions, etc. It behaves like a "lite" account, making it a good way for LJers (or others) to get their feet wet before signing up for a full account.

* Adult content tagging has been revamped in ways that make me much more comfortable with it. Tagging is optional, no penalties for not tagging, and other people can't tag your stuff for you.

* Respect lj-cut tags in RSS feeds: users can now set a new syndication level, in addition to "full", "title", and "summary", and if the "ljcut" synlevel is selected, it will show full posts in that user's RSS feed unless that post is behind an lj-cut, in which case it'll only show the uncut portion with a link to read more.

* Community maintainers will be able to make certain changes to posts made to their communities: adding an <lj-cut> to a post that doesn't already have one, selecting a more restrictive security level (changing public to members-only; changing members-only to maintainers-only, etc), selecting a more restrictive adult-content warning (none to 14+; 14+ to 18+).

* New paid user feature: Google Analytics integration, so you can choose to add your Google Analytics code to your journal and get reports on where your readers are coming from.

And some from the "later" pile:

* Some kind of main account/alternate account system, so that you can (invisibly and privately) designate one of your accounts as the "parent" account and all other accounts inherit that account's settings unless specifically overruled.

* The ability to create separate "archive pages" for your journal's "greatest hits", for specific tags, etc, etc, that will display the subject line and a brief description of each post all in one place and in an order of your choosing.

* Killfile support -- nuff said.

Dreamwidth is a fork of the LJ codebase. synecdochic announced it back in November, and it's currently in closed beta. I have an account there: damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org.

There's a tradition among DWers to post a "Why Dreamwidth?" post, and this is mine.

Why I'm moving to Dreamwidth

The first set of reasons are social:

1. I miss the sense of warm fuzzy that I had for LJ back in the day. Dreamwidth is giving me that warm fuzzy.

2. I want a place where I feel welcomed.

3. I want to feel safe posting fannish works and sexually explicit content without fear of strikethrough.

4. I like their business model: explicitly human-scale.

5. I trust that they won't try to monetize through advertising -- not that I object to advertising per se, but that I fear its effects on the other points above.

The second set are technical:

6. Dreamwidth is an open source project with majority-female contributors, which mentors and supports new developers. I love it to death just for that.

7. They're fixing all the niggly little things that annoy people about LJ, and ditching stuff that's just dead weight. I'm going to post a list of things I like in this regard, in a separate post.

8. They're making a strong effort to interoperate with LJ and ease the transition, though journal importing, OpenID, cross-site user tags, and more.

9. Unlike most existing LJ-like sites, they've done the thinking about scaling and reliability.

Which is not to say they are, or will be, perfect. Every site and every business has its difficulties, and I don't expect DW to be 100% shininess and rose petals forever. I do, however, think it has better potential than the other alternatives.

zvi_likes_tv has been posting some great stuff about transitioning to DW, and what it means for herself and her friends:

* An introductory guide to Dreamwidth in closed beta from a non-expert
* Stage 4 complete, in which she talks about her own transition process

I haven't yet figured out my own transition plan. I'll post about here on LJ when I have one, but generally speaking I'm aiming for something that mostly lets me keep contact with my friends here, while gently nudging them to move.

Nor have I exactly figured out how I fit into the DW project, other than as a cheerleader, because I'm STILL feeling the code burn-out from 2007, and I need to dive into another legacy codebase like I need a hole in the head. But DW has at least brought me to the point of getting a development environment provisioned, so that's something.

Dreamwidth will go into open beta on April 30th. Accounts will be for sale then, or available through invites. When that time comes, if you're willing and able to buy an account, I strongly urge you to do so to support DW. If you're willing but not financially able, let me know, as I'll probably have invite codes.

Here are a handful of pairings that showed up when I ran the generator:

Sir Edward Pellew (Hornblower) / Fanny Hill (Fanny Hill)
George, Prince of Wales (Real people - English Royalty and Nobility) / Thomas Paine (Real people - English literature and letters)
Colonel Moncoutant (Hornblower) / Admiral Harte (Master and Commander)
William Dobbin (Vanity Fair) / Prince William of Orange (Real people - Other)
Harriet Smith (Emma) / Hagman (Sharpe)
Mr Elton (Emma) / Jack Aubrey (Master and Commander)
Midshipman Wellard (Hornblower) / Fanny Price (Mansfield Park)
Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility) / Preserved Killick (Master and Commander)
Mr Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) / Napoleon (Real people - French Revolution)
Vicomte de Valmont (Dangerous Liaisons) / Chauvelin (The Scarlet Pimpernel)
Davy Jones (Pirates of the Caribbean) / Archie Kennedy (Hornblower)
Antonio Salieri (Amadeus) / William Wilberforce (Real people - English politics)
Major Cotard (Hornblower) / Chevalier Danceny (Dangerous Liaisons)
Robert Southey (Real people - English literature and letters) / Horatio Hornblower (Hornblower)
Beau Brummell (Real people - Other) / Emma (Emma)
George III (Real people - English Royalty and Nobility) / Mary Bryant (Real people - Australian convict era)
Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice) / Cecile de Volanges (Dangerous Liaisons)

My brain, it hurts!

Years ago, there was The Pairings That Ate Fandom ficathon, brought to you by apocalypsos. Then I made the Georgian-Regency edition, with characters from fandoms like Pirates of the Caribbean, Hornblower, Jane Austen, and real historical figures (anything from around 1750-1820, roughly speaking).

I was just uploading one of my stories from that ficathon, Advantage (Archie Kennedy/Sophy Stanton-Lacy) to AO3 and I was remembering how much fun it was, and thinking I might do it again.

Anyone interested?

Below the cut is the list of characters from which the pairings were generated last time round, plus a few I've just added. I know there are plenty missing, though.

( a long list )

Poll #1370948
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

You're missing a whole fandom! Please add...

You're missing a character or characters from my fandom(s)! Please add ... (specify fandom too)

I might be interested in taking part in this