Challenge #12: Create a Rec Countdown.

I've decided to rec: 5 icon communities, 4 media featuring women on a ruthless revenge quest, 3 direct-to-DVD Disney movie sequels I think are actually good, 2 communities for finding fannish events, and 1 movie I'd rec to everyone (which is extremely uncommon).

( Rec countdown )


Challenge #13: Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before.

(Skipping this one.)


Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

Well, I was really delighted to get a late treat for my Quodo-as-exes prompt in Quodo Mini-fest! And a vid too! I don't think I really realized this about latetreatbonanza until after I'd run it the first time, but nothing much matches the surprised delight of getting a late present out of left field (I mainly made the community from the creator's perspective of just wanting motivation to finish up my own late projects). But I've noticed it in the way the recipients react to their gifts -- it is definitely SUCH a joyous experience getting a surprise gift! So yes, that was an unexpected joyous moment for me last year.


And I'm done with snowflake_challenge, reasonably on time this year!

Hi all, just making a quick public post:

1. A PSA for those who don't track Dreamwidth's support tickets, some change in Dreamwidth code a couple of months back has created a bunch of new bugs. Some of these are fairly minor and merely annoying (like the inability to update subscription settings and your circles from the Manage Circles page), but there is one feature that is broken in quite a bad way: customizing journal styles on Dreamwidth communities. Basically, if you try to change your community's layout, it will instead change your journal's layout (I tested this out and it let me change my community layout ONCE, but then all subsequent changes were applied to my user account) (see below). I believe this means it is possible (although rare) to permanently lose customizations on your journal's layout if your community and personal account share the same style but with different customizations applied. And also, community layouts currently can't be updated properly (see below) (although you can still freely switch your main layout). So be careful!

I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been announced anywhere to the general Dreamwidth population either through email or on dw_news... This seems like something you'd want to give people a heads up on, especially since people have been waiting on a bug fix for something like two months now...

Edit: Okay, actually, I found a workaround to setting community layouts to the one you want. If you browse through all the themes and find which page (out of 128) the theme you want to switch to is on, then you just need to manually enter a URL like this into the search bar (if it's already in the search bar, you need to press enter to reload the page): https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/?authas=examplecomm&cat=all&page=52
This will take you to page 52 where you should see your community's (examplecomm) current theme listed on the right and then be able to select a new theme below. This should set the layout of the community rather than your personal journal. However, if you click on any other links while in the Select Style pages before clicking on the Apply Theme button, the theme will be applied to your journal instead.

2. For personal reasons, I had to do a minor cleanup of my access and subscriptions. But while I was doing that, I decided to remove some people who I friended through friending memes and I just didn't click with. (Note: Even though the manage circle page is NOT working (as mentioned above), you can can still change access settings by going to individual profiles and changing your settings from there.) As a result, this might be a generally good time to let me know if you would like to change our access settings (like want to (continue to) be friends, or are in a similar situation where we haven't clicked and you'd like to take this chance to revoke access and unsubscribe).

3. I'm taking icon and meta requests over at promptmepromptly. I would especially appreciate lots of icon requests!

4. Photobucket has actually... NOT failed me for the last time...? Basically, I got an email from Photobucket saying that they would like to sell public photos of people uploaded to their website to third parties for the purpose of AI training. Opting out of this policy requires account deletion. This seems... like a truly insane business decision from Photobucket, and that's really saying something given their history of insane business decisions. But well, I don't care -- I am no longer able to access my Photobucket accounts anyway as they are unpaid, and seeing this new policy made me decide it's time to call it and just delete all the accounts I can still log into. Surprisingly, when I did this, Photobucket offered me the chance to download all my photos, which is something I gave up trying to do years ago. ??? So now I have the full collection of images for my main Photobucket and also for wd_lims, which I forgot I once modded. (I have not been able to download the photos for the finalfantasyland Photobucket, though, because it is tied to the finalfantasylandmod@gmail.com account that I no longer have access to because I handed it off to a different set of mods who should have changed the password and also the recovery email.) Anyway, thus ends my relationship to Photobucket... on a weirdly bad/good note.

I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!

( Social media lifecycle )

Challenge #13 - In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.

Some random recs (all art) that are NOT Quodo (I might post a Quodo recs round-up in quodo later if I have time):

• I found this series of Disney princesses wearing furisode by Sunnypoppy -- I like the way the original colors have been incorporated in the kimono and how heavy/winter-appropriate the getup looks. The Elsa and Anna ones look great, and I'm also a fan of the short skirt and long sleeves on the Tinker Bell one, and the Pocahontas design just looks really nice/classy.

• This series of (watercolor + color pencil + digital, I'm guessing?) pieces featuring Star Trek characters as mermaids by Mackoonzie (mostly Enterprise characters but some DS9 and TOS as well) -- I really like the coloring and sea lighting, and the various designs/choices of sea creatures to use as the tails are great!

• Some belated Multifandom Doodle recs?? There was so much good stuff in the last round's collection, but in particular, I loved these ink portraits of Spock and Lando Calrissian by cherryontop, and the fantastic (animated!) pixel art by ElAurianBarkeep, especially Gotham at night and Trucy and Phoenix Wright on a bridge at sunset.


Challenge #14 - In your own space, do the Fandom Wrap Challenge.

( Top 5 lists )

Challenge #15 - In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

The prompt here focused on the Twitter explosion, so I guess I'll talk about platforms in a kind of rambling, disorganized sort of way.

( What platforms to use for fandom in the future )

I originally wrote this for Tumblr, but for various reasons -- among which, being able to showcase Dreamwidth's much more powerful HTML markup capabilities -- I figured it would be helpful to crosspost this to DW as well. So here's my DW sales pitch, for my reference:

( Main selling points )
( Tips for getting started on Dreamwidth )
( More Dreamwidth features and weaknesses )

Anyway, I think I've covered the main things about using Dreamwidth. I always want more people to come talk to me on Dreamwidth because I feel like that site is the only place that facilitates people getting to know me both on a purely fannish level and on a very personal level (I know people can make the personal + fannish sharing combo work on Twitter and Tumblr, but having everything be out in public just really does not work for me). But I realize it's hard to just start using a site you're unfamiliar with, especially one like Dreamwidth that tends to have a bit of a learning curve and is generally out of step with the direction of modern social media. And especially when you don't have many friends there already, which is probably the case for most people. But it's a site I respect and trust a lot, and I think it facilitates deep, long-lasting friendships. More than anything, I think the main difference between DW and Tumblr is that Tumblr is mainly a site for sharing content with other people and reacting to it, while DW is more geared toward helping you organize your life and your thoughts. They have a lot of overlap in terms of the kind of personal and fannish musings and experiences that can be shared, though. Anyway, if you're interested in joining Dreamwidth but it's intimidating/confusing, please reach out! I have lots more recs for active communities depending on your interests, too!