forthwritten

piledhigheranddeeper

And now I am definitely going to work.

The ratbags claimed their first book victim and now Illness As Metaphor's cover has a little chunk chewed out of it. I am kind of impressed with the neatness of their teethmarks, but am not going to indulge their recently acquired tastes.

So, I seem to have doubled the rat population of my room. Rowan and Asha's breeder was ratsitting and one of their sisters had babies, and I couldn't resist their little ratty nieces. I thought a small group would be more stable - if one of the rats wants to sleep or be on her own, it means the other rat can play with the others rather than also having to be alone. It offers them more choice of companion, and I'm generally a fan of allowing social animals to live in groups (my ability to take care of all members of the groups and their personalities permitting). The most stable dog group we had was a small pack of three, and it was great to see how they interacted and how gloriously happy they were.

So they were introduced while I was away (with barely a squeak) and now there's a little black top-ear and a little chocolate dumbo in the cage. They are proving to be hilarious: there's a pipe in the cage that's a little narrower than the adults are quite comfortable with and the babies were curled up in that. Rowan decided she also wanted to be in the pipe. Rowan ended up with her head and shoulders in the pipe and her back end sticking out. I took photos.

The babies are very licky and cute and I'm looking forward to seeing their personalities emerge. Asha and Rowan are known as Thinker and Stinker respectively after Rowan decided to investigate the toilet bowl, so it will be interesting to see how the new babies turn out.

In unrelated news: gosh, the most recent codepush is a bit good. Expandable nested cut tags, eeee.

Current Mood: worried

Yesterday I removed two spiders from my room! I am kind of the biggest wuss ever when it comes to spiders and this is the first time I have ever removed something bigger than a money spider on my own. Of course, I then didn't get to sleep until 3 because, oh god, spiders on my face. I still kind of miss the division of labour we had going on in Ashtray Road - N. dealt with the spiders, I dealt with the moths, centipedes, earwigs and slugs, M. found the maggots in his cereal, we all flailed a bit and dealt with the maggots under the fridge.

three_weeks_for_dw starts today. If you tag your entries 'threeweeks' or 'three weeks for dreamwidth' your entries will show up on the Latest Things page. You can see all the public latest entries and currently popular tags at the main Latest Things page.

There's a meme going round because of it: What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about $foo I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for?

I can't promise anything because I really, really should be working, but you're welcome to suggest something for me to write about.

Links:
Follow-up on What Neil Gaiman Said. Personally, I think the original comment was a thoughtless one: I saw him talk about and read from The Graveyard Book, and I suspect what he was trying to say is that graveyards tell a story about history and culture and people and for whatever reason he wanted to tell the story of an English graveyard, but that doesn't mean that other cultures', times' or historys' graveyards don't have stories to tell. Obviously I don't have a special insight into his brain, but this interpretation seems consistent with what he was saying that evening. The flailing around and not-apologising makes me sad, because is it really so hard to say "I was on the spot and didn't think it through, sorry for screwing up"?

naraht is thinking about declarations of awesomeness, gender and self-esteem. I'm still thinking through my reaction to it: I'm kind of uncomfortable with people declaring that they're awesome and don't like how it can imply a hierarchy or competition, but simultaneously I recognise that it can be an empowering act and subversive when people or activities not usually acknowledged as such are self-declared or recognised as awesome. Then again, I often struggle to get beyond "you do not completely suck and most people don't hate you" so I'm not the best person to talk to about this

Current Mood: thoughtful

I'm currently debating how much involvement I want to have with LJ.

no_lj_ads has a pretty thorough summary, as does damned_colonial. I am becoming more and more uncomfortable with giving LJ my content. I'm unhappy with the way they roll out code (such as affiliate link hijacking or the gender identity you can choose to state) then furiously backpedals when someone notices. I like transparency and discussion and openness; I like that DW solicits user opinions and tells us about upcoming changes (such as with cross-site reading and changes to the update page) and DW is pretty much the place that I like and feel comfortable hanging out. In contrast, LJ is becoming the place where I don't feel comfortable or welcome but will go to see my friends.

So anyway: if I stop cross-posting, is anyone going to miss it? Comments are open on the LJ entry.

In other news,

liv is hosting a giant non-fandom friending meme. There are loads of interesting people posting (hello new people!) and you should totes read/post there if you're looking for new people to read on DW.

ETA: Something

liv does is post a weekly list of DW posts at her LJ (example) - would this work for LJ people?

Current Mood: geeky

Okay, stuff to do to layout:

~~Get the tags all on one line~~

Increase something (margin? padding?) between content and entry management links when there's no metadata

Make the entry management links look nice (align right, lowercase, re-order maybe?)

~~Do something with blockquotes~~

But hey, today I worked out how to change font and font size and that the little bar between entry management links/metadata was from border-right: 1px solid #646464 in there. Hurrah etc.

Ads by anti gay marriage organisations have appeared on LiveJournal. There is more at this post in unfunnybusiness and

fairestcat has more analysis of why you should care even if you don't personally see ads. And, of course, an alternative view of LJ's role in it. LJ is taking prompt action to get this ad off.

It was Blogging Against Disablism Day yesterday.

trouble has two round-ups (set 1, set 2) and a and a post about disability in Torchwood. I also liked

lindra's post about deafness and intersectionality and

aedh's post about why "I don't think of you as disabled" means denying hir experience.

Going on about Dreamwidth/LiveJournal: this is a really detailed guide to LJ history and controversies and I like

liv's "why Dreamwidth?" post. Personally, I'll be reading my friendslist on LJ but I'd rather direct comments to my DW account so they're all in one place.

Anyway, yesterday was French Paul's French night, then a group of us went into town and ended up in Popworld. What happens in Popworld stays in Popworld, but why oh why have I not yet learnt that red wine and Corona is a horrible combination? Today I have been enthusiastically aided in procrastination by the chaplaincy and had some good conversations with people (I thought one of them was a nice boy; turns out he's heard of encyclopaedia dramatica) including reminiscing about the internet during dial-up. I have also been consuming epic amounts of caffeine and have a small fanclub in the chaplaincy because I can work the coffee machine (seriously people - water, filter, ground coffee, it's not hard but your adoration and blatant caffeine addiction is endearing).

Also, I have two Dreamwidth invites. I'll need an email address so I can send it; if you'd rather pm/email me with your email address that's cool. I'd rather give codes to people who'd like to use the service.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Bat For Lashes - Glass

Today I made Tasty Food, hurrah.

fox_in_sand gave me some lovely cheeses (goat's cheese and cranberry Wensleydale) for my birthday, and Isaac had very thoughtfully nibbled off a sprig of bay, and I had mushrooms and spelt* and mascarpone as I was going to make a risotto anyway...

Anyway, I found some dried porcini in the cupboard, so I soaked a small handful in 500ml of hot water. I diced an onion, chopped three cloves of garlic finely and sliced a random spring onion I found in the fridge. I then sliced up most of a pack of chestnut mushrooms and sliced up some of the larger bits of the soaked porcini.
I made the stock up with the soaking water from the mushrooms and approx 650ml vegetable stock (made with Marigold vegan powder). I then rinsed approx 250g spelt. Then it was a case of frying the onions in butter, adding the garlic and mushrooms, frying the spelt for a couple of minutes then adding stock. I added a couple of bay leaves when I remembered, but they probably should have been added with the onions. I found it needed salt, probably because the stock in this is less salty than stock made up from powder or cubes. I also added a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper.

At this point it's all very virtuous and if you're vegan or care about your health you can stop there. Because I'm not and don't, I didn't. So I ladled some of the risotto into a bowl, chopped up some goat's cheese and added that to the risotto, then stirred in a generous dollop of mascarpone.

This makes enough for 3-4 people or several meals. I found it took slightly less than the amount of stock I made, but I'll use the extra ladleful to loosen it up tomorrow. None of my measurements are exact because I don't measure anything. Like I say, it is the least authentic risotto ever, but it was good.

In other exciting news, I stared at my chapter a bit more, panicked about university, life, the universe and everything to

ja_baby_ja, Rule 34ed

ja_baby_ja, realised that I have the text files from The Times from 1918-1920 and so, if I could be bothered to clean up the horrible OCR, I could investigate contemporary newspaper reports of the Spanish flu pandemic, and worried about my meeting with the director of postgraduate studies tomorrow.

Dreamwidth goes into Open Beta on Thursday *hyperventilates* *edits FAQs* More stuff in the latest news post. If you've set up an OpenID account there (it's straightforward - here's a FAQ) you'll get an invite code on Thursday so you can create a free Dreamwidth account.
I am sort of scared and nervous about this; it's so exciting to see something I've actually worked on develop, but it's nervewracking for the same reason. I keep seeing the quick-and-dirty FAQ I put together about DW-specific markup get linked and I'm all "argh I put that together in 5 minutes from the bugzilla report".

*Spelt is a kind of wheat - I like using it because it has a slight bite and nutty taste.

Meeting with supervisor today. I now feel a bit less confused about what I should be doing and a lot more guilty for not having done any corpus cleanup. Rather frustratingly, WS5 appears to have broken on my computer (shortcuts don't work, trying to open the .exe from c:\program files\wsmith5 doesn't work, opening Ctrl+R and trying to run it from there doesn't work) and MonoConc refused to recognise my .txt files as .txt files so I think I'll be working in the grad room tomorrow.
Found out that, as I'm volunteering as a helper at a conference, I don't have to pay the £300 fees. While working 8-6 is going to be hard work, not having to pay is pretty good. We also get fed and, if the last conference was anything to go by, supplied with truly impressive amounts of coffee.

Have more or less finished writing my FAQs - I could probably fiddle around with these forever but I'm handing them to the copy editing team for a fresh pair of eyes. Some of them aren't as extensive as LJ FAQs, but the whole point is that FAQs are for quick reference. I don't think a guide to HTML should be in FAQs, for example. Instead, Dreamwidth is going to include more extensive information in knowledge bases and have guides for more general questions to supplement the FAQs.
At the moment I'm mostly editing for visuospatial language, although I wrote the FAQs for dating out of order and polls this week. I find it interesting that I asked to change link text today, whereas I'm not sure if I would have noticed this was a problem even a few weeks ago.

I don't want to be a DW bore (I have sometimes been procrastinating on icerocket and even the posts by advocates are annoying when they're wrong or misleading) but I like the concrete things they think of to improve the site. I like that alternative site schemes were prioritised because the red username links in the default site scheme have different, distressing connotations in other cultures. I like that, when someone pointed out that the diversity statement could be read as excluding transpeople, one of the site owners responded in a non-confrontational way and it's being rewritten to explicitly welcome transpeople using their preferred terminology. I love what the accessibility team are doing.
I'm not fannish, I find it frustrating that Dreamwidth has been seized on as a fannish project when it's not, I find the hype and bitterness over invite codes hard to understand (people, it's in closed beta, this is the equivalent to sawdust everywhere and people in overalls banging on things and a crackly radio playing chart hits somewhere), and I think that level of hype is dangerous because it creates unrealistic expectations and with that, disappointment. Of course it's not going to shit glitter and rainbows and world peace. But I, personally, am glad that I've given it my time and contributed towards it.

It's really interesting watching people start to engage with Dreamwidth. The environment shapes the interaction, and it's interesting how the stuff that's changed from LJ in DW means that there are a lot of new issues and etiquette to be resolved. The distinction between subscribe and access is one - as

zvi points out, disallowing someone access has different repercussions and different niceties will have to evolve. After all, you can't say "sorry, I couldn't keep up with my friendslist" if there's a structure in place to stop subscribing to them but keep allowing them access to your locked content. It's going to be really interesting to see how that one works out.

I'm still thinking about how I want to manage my identity here (as discussed here) and I'm still unsure about how much to keep public and how much to lock down. Admittedly this was linked on metafandom, but getting patronising comments like "The hill tribe peoples are incredibly welcoming" on my public entries does not exactly make me eager to post publicly (and thanks again to Azz for touching that one). I suppose this is something to get over though; I should keep telling myself that lots of people post publicly with no ill effects and that they meet new people through doing so.
On the other hand, identifying and sensitive information is going to be locked. I'm also going to try to post less whiny crap and pointless stuff.

I don't intend to switch off the lights at Livejournal and I'll keep reading my friendslist there unless they all migrate (hey, I can dream) either by logging onto LJ or by syndicating to DW if there's an elegant way to deal with locked posts. I don't intend to delete anything there, but I also don't intend to transfer stuff over here; I don't like the accumulated weight of nearly eight years of writing.
On the other hand, I don't feel comfortable posting there, so that will probably dry up. It's a bit weird to think I'll stop using a service that I've been using for 8 years.

Anyway, I go now to experiment with solid food and put up a FAQ.

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently. I started my LJ when I was 17 and, as teenagers are wont to be, a bit naive and ignorant. Luckily I veered towards the extremely private end of naive rather than the "my dirty laundry, let me show you it" end, but I still managed my privacy in a way that now makes me feel uncomfortable.

This thing is that LJ-like sites are difficult in terms of identity and privacy. On one hand, I want to have conversations with sensible, intelligent people which makes a level of privacy appealing - a way of excluding those who aren't interested in or will disrupt such conversations. On the other, I want to attract the sort of people who can have those kinds of conversation, and locking down most of my content is not a good way to go about that. It means I have to go "hi, you're cool, I'm adding you" and I'm actually a shy person who hates making the first move.

Dreamwidth changes the terms of those interactions; I can subscribe to people without having to let them see my locked content, but at the same time, if I manage my content in the same way as I do on LJ, there won't be much unlocked content that people who subscribe to me but to whom I haven't given access will be able to see.

I have an over-elaborate system of filters on LJ, but one of the things I've come to realise is that there's a dynamic to these. Giving someone access to locked content subtly changes the ecosystem that is my journal - the presence of a new person means that there might be things I'm less comfortable talking about. With filters, I initially set them up in terms of how comfortable I felt with people - an inner circle and an outer circle, to name two - but I realised that I was using the outer circle filter to discuss things like anti-racism, feminism and queerness. So I started calling it my sensible people filter and started adding the people I didn't know well, but had interacted with during debates and discussion. Unfortunately, this means that they also have access to some personal stuff to which I'm not entirely sure I want them to have access. It's all a bit late in the day to reorganise it.

I will be separating access filters into privacy and content filters (again - I did once have a university filter and so on but then I realised that most of my writing was about university and so the filter was a bit pointless) but I'm not sure how to manage public and private identities. How do other people manage this?

Okay, I go now to gatecrash a lecture and then read some critical discourse analysis.

Current Mood: accomplished

This is a test post for location (okay, it works as I thought it did - edited to remove postcode).

ETA: I now have 1,758 words of FAQs, hurrah! Not sure yet how backdating or sticky posts (will) work nor am I clear on how DW-specific markup will work so I think I'll leave those for later on in the beta. However, the basics are done, I'll edit them either today or tomorrow and I'll look over Liv's FAQs in the next couple of days too.

Current Music: The Flaming Lips - Lithium

:D :D :D

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Rival Schools - Good Things

Oh, wow, this is so cool. It's really happening!

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Page generated Wednesday, 28 January 2026 11:23 pm

Entries tagged with dreamwidth

I maded a Thing

two rats good, four rats better

three weeks

to cross-post, or not to cross-post

making layout look good

disability; advertising

the least authentic risotto ever made

thinking about accessibility

thoughts on online environments and identities

on privacy and pseudonyms and identities

Test

Hello world!

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September 2019

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