The aim to make your tv series appear "dark" or "edgy" or "gritty" or whatever does not mean that the screen has to be literally too dark to make out anything. I get that there are mood lighting choices, and atmosphere through colors and so on, but it completely defeats any kind of purpose if your viewer can't see or follow what's going on. It is not all that sinister if you have to squint and guess what is happening. Seriously, things can be dark and edgy even if there is a lightsource somewhere! (This was brought on by me trying to watch SGU, but really it applies to a lot of series.)

...I'd make people stop using weird symbols in their delicious tags only to influence the sorting, or make them look pretty or whatever causes people to stick random symbols and brackets into their tags. That kind of thing just makes it harder to browse, subscribe and search by tag, and to generally find and use the bookmarks across the site (outside of one specific account where you see the sidebar, so it doesn't matter much that they randomly put some §, @, ', (, ~ into a tag to make it cryptic).

Even without it there are already significant variations, but if I want to look for say Kirk/Spock slash fic I can reasonably guess to try the tags "kirk/spock", "k/s", "spock/kirk", even "pairing:Kirk/spock" is not too bad, because that is relatively common syntax for those who like hierarchical tags. But sticking completeley random symbols in just sucks.

I realize the tag bundling interface on delicious is so broken that it is a pain to sort tags, so I get the impulse to just arrange tags in groups by putting symbols in. But that makes so many other things harder. *grumble*

I know I have ranted about the usage of "Spock Prime" in the narrative and dialog just a few days ago, but since then I've come across this far more often. Like every day I see stories doing this. More than one. It occurs even in stories that I found on rec lists, not through random, at-your-own-risk browsing. (In case you're wondering, musesfool recced this offender.) Just, WTF? This is getting out of hand if you can't even trust recs to protect you.

Please tell me that some fan somewhere has written a Greasemonkey script or something to do word replacements on the fly in your browser to fix epithets, and I can adapt this to replace every "Spock Prime" with "Ambassador Spock".

ETA: Thanks to the awesome gnatkip I have now indeed found a script that will do this word replacement for me. Greasemonkey to the rescue.

It drives me absolutely crazy when in ST:AOS fic the older, time-traveling Spock is called "Spock Prime" within the story text, assuming the story is told from a POV character withing the fictional universe rather than some jokey outside parody narrator or omniscient meta fiction narrator. It's fine for a pairing label, but please, please find some other way to distinguish the character from the younger Spock in the text. I am usually not that picky about narrative voice, but this just throws me out of the story in a way from which I can't recover. It's one of the few things that will just make me stop reading immediately in this fandom.

Does anyone on my f-list speak French and could tell me why this LJ entry has one of my HP drawings hotlinked? (It's one of illustrations I did for Beth's In From the Cold.) I noticed this a couple of days ago when I looked at my website referrer logs. Unfortunately my webhost doesn't let me disable hotlinking in the usual ways you see in anti-hotlinking tutorials, and so I tend to just ignore the occasional random hotlinking from outside fandom (usually it's some jerk that includes my stuff in their "ew, someone draws superheroes gay" lulz, so there's no hope of fixing that) but this seems to be from within fandom, and somehow that makes it different for me. So two days ago I commented there and asked the poster in English to not hotlink my artwork, but it had no effect so far, and they posted in their LJ after this time, so presumably it's not a matter of internet absence over some prolonged holiday break or something. Sigh.

From what I gather the entry seems to be some sort of meta fiction in which the poster talks to the characters about a WIP and the poster is using my art as some sort of story illustration? But I'm not sure. (Gah, why has all my French knowledge vanished? I guess that happens when you don't use a language for a decade.) Anyway if it's used as fiction illustration it would be doubly annoying, because I drew this specifically for Beth's story, and don't really want to see it with random fanfic, meta or otherwise. Also, it's just rude to hotlink.

I guess I could move the file, but that would mean fixing links in at least four places (my own website, LJ, IJ, and my art blog), and that is annoying. The profile has messaging enabled so I could try that on top of my comment, or would that come across as nagging and I should just give more time? OTOH it can't take two days to get an LJ entry edited.

Anyway, this makes me cranky. I'm not even mentioned by name or got a link in the entry, so besides my sig on the art there's no credit given either, nor any way for me to hear if people who see my art there like it. *disgruntled*

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

What the frell did photobucket do to their image upload? It's been a few months since I last uploaded a photo to my account, but I never had a problem, though their flash(?)-thingy for bulk uploading never worked for me. But now I click on the upload button, and a small window with the title bar "select files" pops up, but I don't actually see anything in the window, just some wildly flickering movement, and then my browser crashes.

What is wrong with these people? Why did they have to break their site?

Are there other ways to upload to photobucket, like FF extensions or something, that don't use the website? Or do I just have to stop using their site entirely?

ETA: After looking at their help I found a way to use the old uploader, which I would have clicked had the link to it been visible in the box at my screen resolution and font size, but it was not, but cut off by the box frame and thus hidden. FAIL, photobucket, FAIL.

Why do they now have a tag limit?? Worse, the delicious FF extension doesn't inform you of this, it saves the tags properly and you see them if you look at it in the extension (so not cut off like too long notes), they just don't work for the tag searches, meaning I didn't notice while tagging via the extension and have no idea for how many of my bookmarks the tags don't work properly and which one I'd need to edit down to the more essential tags without going through them manually. This sucks. *grump*

Because I'm quite frustrated with the delicious redesign (now revamped without dots -- unfortunately they didn't stop there), I looked at alternative services. Only to find them even worse or just too different in purpose.

Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.

Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.

Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.

Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.

ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.

Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.

Sigh.

I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).

Some of you may have noticed that I use del.icio.us quite a lot to tag fanfic (unsurprisingly I'm ratcreature there too). I also use a lot of tags, applying the tagging philosophy that you really can't have too many assigned to a story to easier find it again later. The redesigned site tells me it's about 3500 tags now, and I frequently add more.

Now, while I'm a bit dubious about the look of the new design, in particular that in list view the bookmarks, in particular those with many tags (and I tag stories with several dozen sometimes), take more room, I'll probably get used to the more superficial changes. However, that it now doesn't offer you a section with "unbundled tags" is really bad for me. To use recently added tags when they are merely displayed in the huge lists of several thousand other tags is quite impossible.

Their interface to bundle tags has been atrocious before, and drove me crazy (last time I sorted tags I had added into my bundles and changed some it took nearly a *day* and it weren't that many edits), so I only use it to bundle my newly added tags when I have at least some hours to become utterly frustrated, and just use the "unbundled" section to find the more recent ones again. That is now impossible, it seems.

Also, I didn't think this was possible, but the tag bundling interface got *worse*: It now won't load my larger bundles (like the "authors" bundle) at all for editing, and while it does load the smaller bundles, it now jumps you back to the top whenever you clicked on a tag to add it, so you can't even go through the list anymore without scrolling down again and again and again.

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?

So LJ discontinued the option for new Basic, i.e. ad-free accounts. Without announcing it beforehand, or even saying so outright in the actual news post (they used advertising speak describing this as "Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account." *snort*).

Considering how they pressed ads into more and more places and made them harder to remove also for paid users ever since the "no-ads" policy was first softened with the "Plus" account, like ads on the main site standard pages rather than just journals, this persistent snap.com hassle, all the "sponsored" communities and v-gifts, the "partnership links" like to MSN, and so on, I'm not surprised, but that they don't even realize that this is a major change for the site and its culture is disheartening.

And I've seen in comment threads a response "well, you can't expect a business to let you use up resources without anything in return, so it's no wonder they finally discontinued the ad-free accounts", but that completely overlooks that free users on a site like LJ aren't *leechers*, like say non-registered downloaders on a free file storage site, they provide the content that makes other users (some of those paying) and casual visitors (some of those seeing ads when browsing elsewhere on the site even if they enter the site through an ad-free LJ) come to LJ in the first place.

And maybe they did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it's not tenable to have free accounts anymore (not that they communicated that anywhere I could see, they seem to assume their users are too stupid for three choices in the sign-up and thus one needed to be removed), but it is just not true that they don't get anything in return for their services from free users. It may or may not be "enough" in their financial bottom line, but if all the free users connecting on LJ around a topic decide to go to elsewhere for whatever reason (better features, less ads, whatever), it's not as if the paid ones into that topic would stay either. For example, even while I'm not into fiber arts and crafts, even I noticed how many knitting-related things moved to Ravelry, and I suspect a ton of users who were on LJ mostly for knitting may have gone away completely, so now casual site visitors on the look for knitting stuff like a pattern, won't land through Google in some LJ comm and look at LJ's ads, but on Ravelry's site. A social site is nothing without user content.

This doesn't affect me much in practice, because I haven't created a new LJ account since I got my first one, and I surf with AdBlock on anyway, but it is still aggravating.

...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.

I haven't seen any new issues of newuniversal (written by Warren Ellis, art by Salvador Larroca) in the last couple of solicitations, which led me to believe that it may have been a miniseries rather than an ongoing one as I thought, but then I actually read the first six issues-- I had read the first issue when it came out, but it seemed very much a comic that is better read in larger chunks, so I waited-- and it turns out that it isn't, not even the end of a clear arc, #6 just stops with a "to be continued..." So does anyone know what's up with the series? Is it on hiatus? Cancelled?

It would kind of suck if the series stopped prematurely. While it isn't exactly an awesome comic, it's not awful either, and I'm quite enjoying it so far. The story isn't original (not even in the "new twist on old idea" way), which isn't surprising since I understand it is some kind of remake of a short-lived old Marvel alternate universe (that I had never heard about) or something like that. Basically it's just an "superpowers emerge because of mysterious event, what happens next?" setup, with some mythology stuff abut the nature of those superpowers and their trigger (the "White Event") thrown in, and the art isn't memorable either (though not awful or anything), but I'd still like to see the rest. It may have taken a bit, but after six issues I'm now actually somewhat interested in the characters and the plot.

On a somewhat random and ranty note: why is Marvel so fond of pasting "new" in their titles anyway? Like, there's "New Avengers", "New X-Men", "New Excalibur", "New Warriors"... far more than DC does. I find it annoying, and it makes collecting series a pain because you first have "Team Blah" then it changes to "New Team Blah" for a bit, then it either goes back to "Team Blah" directly or first to "Fabulous Team Blah" if they feel inspired before it reverts to "Team Blah" again, possibly with messed up numbers, and if you try to figure out in which order the story lines were published a while later, you need several hours of web research to untangle the mess. Not to mention that you risk getting the wrong comics when you try to get them via mail order, because you didn't realize that the website actually offered "The Fabulous New Team Blah" (say the Volume 2 incarnation of Team Blah) when you wanted that issue of "The New Fabulous Team Blah" (say the Volume 4 incarnation of the same). Does this actually help immediate sales? I mean these restarts are just as likely to give me an excuse to drop a series from my pull list and not add the new one if I'd been already following it, as to add it when I didn't, it really depends on the artists and writers, and well the inertia of having a a comic on my list and being completist about it goes actually a long way to stick with a series through a run by a team I dislike, whereas name changes give me an easy out. And like I said, retrospectively they get really confusing fast.

Why do some authors not provide summaries? Or even just an excerpt they like, or a quoted line, or something? I'm collating the SGA thematic list I talked about earlier from my bookmarks, and how am I supposed to come up with a summary for some epic that I read months ago that I then tagged for having interesting aliens, when not even the author provided one?

I mean, with short stories I can at least sum up the point myself, perhaps not in the most flattering way, but frankly if an author cared about facilitating decent blurbs when others link to their stories, they would have written one in the first place. But that just doesn't work so well with epics, especially when the things I remember don't make a good summary, and rereading whole novels and novellas is a bit more of a hurdle than glancing over a 2,000 word story again. *grumble*

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.