When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

I'm not sure whether there's even any interest, because the painting itself got less comments than usual for my fanart posts, so I guess there will be ever fewer interested in the unfinished inbetween stages. But I already made the photographs after all, so I decided to go ahead with the art process post.

( very image heavy )

Because some people find the production process interesting, I decided to do a sort of "making of" post. If you'd just like to see the finished fanart, go here.

( very image heavy )

...but am I the only one who's somewhat put off by the whole terminology that Sweet Charity thing uses? The way they use "ho" in their slogans and frequently refer to participants as "hos", I mean. I've seen the charity auction linked on my f-list quite often, so even though I don't intend to participate I checked out the site, and their "I want to be a Charity Ho!" and so on really rubs me the wrong way.

I get that it's supposed to be a play on selling our talents to a bidder, or funny, or maybe clever for merging the old madonna-whore polarity into one "charity ho", or whatever, and that fandom appropriated related terms before, like in "pimping a fandom", which somehow doesn't bother me as much though, but still.

After seeing all the IBARW icons around, I've been trying to come up with an idea for an anti-racism icon that would fit with my icon theme, but so far I've kind of failed. Looking at my existing icons I'm even conspicuously lacking in icons of my avatar dressing up as COC. I have only a Teyla!RatCreature, and I haven't yet done the Ronon one I planned to complete my SGA team set (+ Wraith!RatCreature). Maybe I could be generous and count my Che!RatCreature too...

I never really thought about this until today, but in my icon set COCs (okay so there's no plural warranted yet, but I mean in principle) are also white through the design, which is that my creature avatar for fandom icons generally dresses up as different characters rather than icons showing images of the actual media characters themselves. "Blackface" disguises wouldn't be an appropriate design, so the idea to give my Teyla!RatCreature a different skin color didn't seem right to me. Though I actually didn't reflect about it much when I drew her. So it's just clothes, and I guess potentially hair, but most other "ethnic" features are kind of out with my avatar not being really human.

Actually looking closer I have to revise that statement, I do change my avatar's eyes making them narrower and slanted to varying degrees to make it look "evil", which is of course a fairly common cartoon technique. I'm not actually sure how much of that is racist stereotyping, because of the way that "cartoon eyes" don't work like actual human eyes. I mean, it's not like Asian people's eyes are actually positioned differently in the face when you draw them, they just appear slanted because the epicanthic fold reaches lower and some Asian eyes have a single fold eyelid rather than a double-fold one, so the area that's visible of the eyeball changes a bit, but human eyes have obviously a "fixed axis" what with being in a bone socket, and what changes for expression is the eyebrows. However for *cartoon* eyes to convey expression their axis is often changed like that of the eyebrows (though more subtle) to make the overall expression more intense. So for an angry look you don't just change the eyebrows, but actually tilt the axis of the eyes (you can see that when looking at Donald Duck cartoons, his character uses the eye-axis thing to great effect, you can look at classic model sheets explaining this effect this entry in an animation blog), and of course you make them narrower, because humans narrow their eyes in anger, and for happy, laughing eyes you change the axis of the eyes in the opposite direction. But looking closely I actually do draw the corners of the eyes differently for the evil characters as well, if you look at my Voldemort!RatCreature, my Sith!RatCreature and the WraithRatCreature. Umm, well, I don't know.

However, the only times my avatar is a different color are the aliens, that is the "Roswell/Gray Alien" type icon, which I made gray for obvious reasons, and the Wraith one, which ended up gray, because I wanted its hair look really white in contrast. Anyway, apparently I have no trouble changing its color then, but all the "human representing" creature versions have the same "skin" color (or maybe fur color, to be honest in my design it's not quite clear how much fur they have). In the rare color drawing containing my avatar (like this card) that color is actually a light gray, sometimes a light blue-ish gray, because that looks better than no color, so it's not really any kind of human skin tone. (I'm just pointing this out so that you don't imagine my avatar some kind of horrible light pink or something in a color drawing when I say that it is "white", that would just be ugly on it.)

So do you have any ideas for icon anti-racist motifs that would work?

I try to tag every fanfic I read on del.icio.us so that I can find it again. Now I'm reading some post-DH stuff and naturally my regular tagging (which includes names for all characters in a story for example) as well as the summary blurbs (which I've tried to be better about including in my links), would contain spoilers for DH. I know some people subscribe to del.icio.us feeds or just browse there, and it's not like I can spoiler cut. I'd really like to keep with my bookmarking and tagging routine, but I wonder whether I'm going to get lynched for having tags with spoilery character names. I could make all my post-DH bookmarks private, and unlock them later, but that negates the point of using a social bookmarking site, and I may forget about the unlocking, because I tag a lot of stuff, and even if I have a post-DH tag to find them all again, there's afaik no mass action for making bookmarks not private, so this course of action is somewhat inconvenient. So how should I handle spoilers on a social bookmarking site? What are you doing about your spoilery bookmarks?

Poll #1026237 fannish spoiler etiquette on del.icio.us
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

How should I handle spoilers in my bookmarks on del.icio.us?

I've seen a couple of posts on my f-list saying that connecting the recent suspensions to "freedom of speech" issues was misguided, basically because LJ is a private entity and can regulate their service as they see fit. But see, for me the issue isn't that I'm unclear about the strict meaning of "censorship" (i.e. done by governments not private companies) and that these provisions for "free speech" in their various local forms are mainly intended to protect you from being thrown into jail for expressing something, not to actually help you distribute it to someone. I mean, in pre-internet days nobody was obligated to let you use their printing press or later on their copy shop for, say, publishing your porn either. Or let you onto their radio station or whatever. Which is why I'm not that bothered from a mere publishing perspective, that isn't really any different than pre-internet.

But the electronic sites are also social spaces and are replacing in a way physical gatherings by people. Only those take place in virtual spaces that are privately owned (often by companies, though certainly there are a few alternatives or non-profits offering their own infrastructure) and I worry about the implications of that. If all "public" spaces for gathering and for speech are vanishing (and even gatherings that formerly also took place in a different kind of private space, say a pub, are now more easily controlled through the internet features of social sites), that is either vanishing directly, because e.g. yet another piece of public street with stores became a "private shopping mall" entirely rather than remaining public (and seriously around here they for example privatized the plaza in front of the central station so now you can't sit there anymore if you look poor or something but are accosted and removed by scary private security guards who personally bother and intimidate me far more than a few drunk punks and drug dealers loitering there before ever did), or indirectly because people move into virtual gathering and communication spaces that are private infrastructure to begin with, well once that move is complete the "free speech" you are allowed when you gather with others in principle is kind of inconsequential if all (or at least most) infrastructure is commercially owned on some level, and on the cautious and conservative side to avoid trouble and not loose business or advertisers or whatever.

So I do think how well (or badly) private companies handle these issues is connected to free speech on a practical level, even if on a formalistic level it is not.

After spending quite some time today looking for fanfic that I'd expected to be common but for some reason it isn't, I realized that semi-regularly I look for certain kinds of fanfic that I really expect to find, yet somehow it doesn't exist at all or in much smaller numbers than I'd anticipated from the size of the fandom.

I don't mean that obscure story you yearn to read, but that is somewhat "out there", like for example the SGA/Watership Down fusion I wish someone would write, with the SGA characters as space-exploring rabbits (though, honestly, it makes sense and the two would go great together as I explain in the notes for my fanart for such a universe, so I don't really think it would be that weird a fusion, but I can see why it hasn't yet become a genre. Though it should!), or specific fanfic in small fandoms, like say Spider-Man/Daredevil slash (though when I looked for that today I actually found some I had missed, yay!), but genres, pairings or plots you honestly expected to find.

Then I wondered whether other people have these kinds of lists of fanfic they're searching for periodically. For example every once in a while I look for these:

• CSI: Lady Heather/Gil Grissom D/s fic with Gil as Lady Heather's sub. I don't care whether it were angsty epics or PWPs or whatever, but for some reason almost nobody seems to write this pairing and even fewer with Gil as sub. I realize that het femdom D/s seems less popular than say D/s slash overall, but here's a popular character who's been at least briefly involved with a dominatrix in canon, yet it's hard to find kinky fic for them. I don't get it.
• CSI: AUs in which Grissom is deaf, either becoming deaf after his surgery failed or having been deaf all along in the AU. I've seen a few such stories, but nowhere near as many as I expected.
• Dark Angel: longish fic featuring Max with Logan and/or Alec, without any character bashing happening, and preferably with some Manticore-related plot, but really most important is the absence of character bashing. It shouldn't be hard to find this, but it is.
• Dresden Files: Harry/Ramirez buddy slash, or even just gen friendship stories focusing on these two. Okay, maybe that falls just under the "small fandom" explanation (and is a recent addition to my list), but seriously, there's is some Dresden Files fic, even for the bookverse, so I expected to find at least a few stories with Ramirez.

In my previous post a couple of commenters said that they find commentary on the process for art and fic interesting, and don't mind the creator expressing their "these things suck in my work" lists as part of that as long as that isn't all they talk about.

So in light of that I decided to do a kind of commentary on my recent picture of Dresden Files' Bob, which is also interesting to do for me, because I worked a bit differently here than usual. I did more of the work and also effects digitally than I usually do, resulting in some things that worked and others that didn't.

( long navel-gazing, also very image heavy )

I just decided to be finished with my drawing of Bob and go ahead an post it (see my previous post). Considering how much time I spent on it, it kind of sucks, partly because I tried new (to me) things, like surface textures, gradients and such digital stuff. It's not horrid or anything (well at least I don't think so) but just now I had the urge to put some disclaimer thing in the notes, i.e. listing all the things I know that are wrong with it like "I know the lightening doesn't look like firelight and the shadows are all wrong for that! and that the various metal textures suck! and the wood too! and that the candle light is all wrong, that that one candlestick turned out a bit too small and the other candle a bit too large..."

But I suspect that kind of thing doesn't go over any better for art than it does for fanfic. I myself quite dislike it when an author tells me at length all the ways their story sucks, and often I won't read it then, and with art I'll probably still look, but inevitably my attention will be drawn to all that is wrong (in the artist's mind) with the drawing, so that doesn't improve its impact any, though depending on how the artists talks about it it can be interesting from a technical viewpoint. Obviously I could have just not posted, but I spent hours on it and it's not that bad.

Beyond just being sick of the drawing after spending many, many hours on it, part of the problem is of course that I lack the skills to correct what I see is wrong with the drawing. I mean, okay, the size issues of that candlestick I could have easily corrected had I noticed earlier, not just towards the end, but it is far easier to see that the lightening and shadows don't look like what you want than to create the effects you want. So I get the urge to say that I know of the problems to not appear stupid/inept/oblivious/whatever to technical issues and give a "better" impression (well in theory, even if the realization lacks), but it's not like that makes the drawing any better, and in fact may even influence perception of the drawing negatively. Though I'm not sure whether people mind notes like that for art as much as for fic.

Anyway, I compromised by dumping my disclaiming in an extra LJ entry afterwards. And out of curiosity, a poll:

Poll #975503 The "I know it sucks in such-and-such way" author/artist's note...
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What do you think about a creator distancing themselves from their work like that?

Once I posted my first attempt at a SGA thematic list to my LJ I announced it on the sga_noticeboard and at sgagenrefinders to spread the word, in particular I asked John/Elizabeth shippers for links, because I don't read that pairing at all, and my list is completely lacking in that direction. Unfortunately nobody responded with any J/E story additions. :/ Then yesterday I x-posted to stargate_search, and it's not that I didn't get replies either, just again no J/E (so far).

I'd really like the thematic list to be somewhat "pairing neutral" and I can't imagine that there are no J/E stories featuring alien cultures, but I'm a bit at a loss what I should do about it. Somehow joining J/E specific communities, when I dislike that pairing myself, feels vaguely like trolling, also, I'm kind of unfamiliar with the infrastructure in that corner of SGA fandom. I mean, I looked at the SGA overview at the newbieguide, and while there at least six different communities for that pairing only john_elizabeth has a really large membership, so I guess that would be the best venue, but I x-posted at three places (albeit non-pairing specific ones) already, and past a certain point it becomes obnoxious, and when I looked over john_elizabeth to figure out whether that community would even allow fic searches, I did come across a post with a reminder not to x-post excessively. Any advice?

Argh. I just refrained from posting a lengthy, ranting comment, since I don't think the original post was intended to spark meta discussion or anything, and I already tried to make my point there, but it really rubs me the wrong way when mere "linking" and actual "archiving" are conflated like that in the whole fannish etiquette context of asking for permission to do so, authorial control etc. So I figured I might as well post my rant to my own LJ to get it off my chest rather than to comment excessively.

It's just that I've by now seen this from several people, who get somehow ruffled about links in fandom and wanting to control them, and I don't get that at all. I think extending this proprietary feeling to mere links rather than to actual copies and distribution of stories and the like is a bad idea for fandom as a whole, and feel the need to argue whenever this comes up. Because if it became accepted etiquette standard in fandom (to have to ask for linking rights or be thought of as rude) it would make a lot of useful things like recs and thematic lists far more difficult, whereas is wouldn't really improve the control of authors in any real way, after all it's not like other people were in control of the story by linking to it, and trying to limit or choose the audience by controlling links rather than controlling actual access is just strange, IMO. Linking and archiving is just not the same.

I mean, I get that there can be issues just with directing traffic, both for attention and traffic concerns like it shows in the discussions about reccing vids and related fannish etiquette. But it's not like the linking from other fandom sites that I mean has the issues that can arise when a high profile site directs traffic to you that the server just can't handle because someone randomly thinks something on your site is amusing or something (like say the Slashdot effect and the like), that may crash a website and depending on the hosting plan add unexpected costs too.

I completely understand that authors want to remain in control of the distribution of their stories, the places where actual copies are archived and such, so that if they felt like pulling a story, or changing it, or password protecting it or whatever, they can make the change or implement the password and it is done without having to contact a bunch of other people or to track down extra copies. I feel the same way about my fanart. But you can do that whether or not anybody links to you. The control over the actual story's presence on the net (as much as it exists with digital things that are unless special measures are taken after all copied as soon as anyone just looks at them) is yours no matter who links (also provided the site successfully kept archiving bots storing copies for search engines and automated internet archives like archive.org out through meta headers).

Controlling mere references to stories such as links, basically others just mentioning that you published something, is like demanding control over more than just your own story, it asks others to treat published things as if it wasn't published speech but private speech, which is counterintuitive and hampering for a ton of useful things enabling other fans to find things in fandom, especially as fandom infrastructure and technology already offer all the tools to make distribution more private to varying degrees (lists, f-lock, password protection etc) for random internet traffic but still somewhat accessible to the audience in fandom, if a fan is only comfortable with that.

But wanting to have all the control of locking content but all the advantages of publishing it, and none of the drawbacks of either, kind of seems to me like wanting to keep the cake and eat it too. It's just impossible.

I don't think of myself as a particularly picky reader, but sometimes I'm thrown out of a story by random mistakes in details that don't even matter much for the story. For example I was just reading a HP story, set around Christmas, as so many of them are around this time of year, and quite enjoyed it, only to come across a line where the POV character remarked that is was "past five and getting dark" or something to that effect. But the story takes place in London in the middle of December, so obviously it would already be dark by then, seeing how sunset there would be a bit before four in the afternoon and even with some remaining twilight after sunset that still means it's plain dark after five. And it's not as if you couldn't look up sunrise and sunset times on the net either, if you're unfamiliar with just how little daylight you get in Northern Europe during winter.

I have no idea why errors that aren't even particularly relevant bother me in written fiction, when I can completely overlook things like that places don't look "correct" on tv, like because they filmed in a different location or things like that. I guess it could be that with tv I just accept some built-in limitations, but written words don't have that excuse.

I rather like D/s stories, obviously not all kinds, for example characters doing the responsible "safe, sane, consensual" thing works less well for me than stories which are a fantasy directly (like slave!fic), rather than a fantasy once removed, but I've been wondering how much characterization (as I see it in the source) matters to me in the context of this kink.

The thing is, at first I was quite sure that how I perceive characterization doesn't have a lot of impact on whether I can get into a D/s story, for example in any pairing I like my preferences for who ought to be submissive and who dominant tend to be fixed, and I figured that that was a result of who my favorite character is, rather than any actual extrapolation I was attempting from the character's personality.

I simply have a preference for my favorite character to be submissive. That is true for me in TS with Jim Ellison, in XF with Mulder, in DS with Fraser, in SW with Obi-Wan, and mostly true with Sheppard in SGA (though I'm a bit more flexible there)... however it didn't hold up in HP. My favorite character is definitely Harry, but while I do read stories with him as submissive sometimes (that is, I'm not actively turned off by those, like I am in some of my other fandoms if a D/s story for my favorite pairings doesn't match my preference), I prefer Harry to be dominant by a vast margin. And I'm not really sure why that is, it might be because submissive!Harry kind of collides with my other kink for powerful!Harry, but then again I actually want my favorite characters to remain powerful and competent, even when I like them to be submissive.

I mean, when a story works for my kinks I'm pretty easy-going wrt characterization, but one thing that will cause me to stop reading even then is when a confident and competent hero character I like is turned into a snivelling, insecure idiot or saddled with neurosis and issues that are just completely not there in canon (it's not as if they don't usually have enough problems without adding random eating disorders and the like).

Anyway, the inexplicable glitch with HP in my personal pattern aside, I still think that my preference for whom I like as submissive in a D/s story is kink for me first, not characterization, though obviously I like stories much better if they get the character to fit with my kink while staying in character or at least arriving at the OOC place starting from canon characterization in a believable progression, rather than starting OOC. And I am curious about other people, so I made a poll:

Poll #805849 Kink or characterization?
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Whether you prefer a character to be dominant or submissive in a D/s story depends on...