Reasons to celebrate

A) I nearly missed the "three weeks for Dreamwidth" celebrations. I don't usually do memes but it's now not only 7 years since I've been here but almost exactly 12 years that I've been at LJ. Because I've been slowly posting all my old meta on AO3, it's made me re-read a lot of history on these sites, giving me a sense of how much time has passed. (Remember when we could only download fan vids over slow modem connections?)

So for what it's worth, some selected items from this list

1. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?

I like conversation with my fandom, and there aren't many platforms online that really facilitate that. It was, to me, the prime feature of LJ, but I wanted a home for my content that wasn't going to be as arbitrary as LJ and which really wanted people like me and my fandom circles.

2. Why did you choose your journal name?

I originally chose the pseud around 1996 or so when I signed up for a personal (not work) email account. I was a librarian at the time, and stayed involved in the field for some time. Even though I'm not one anymore I think it still expresses some very relevant things about me.

3. Do you crosspost? Why or why not?

Yes, it was very important to me that DW have this feature. There are people I still follow on LJ who either don't have or don't really use their DW accounts. Also, although I'm not really involved in communities there at this point, I'm sure they're still more active than around here.

4. What do you do online when you're not on DW?

I'm going to assume this means, "besides work and personal things like bill paying." In some ways I find this question perplexing because I so take it for granted that everyone my age and younger does everything online (not exclusively, but at least in part) that I'm trying to think of what I could possibly mention.

I looked at my browser tabs for help. Besides reading news articles, lately I've been checking Tumblr every day; I usually look at some Twitter accounts I follow (I've got a read-only account there); I download new fanfic from AO3; and I send some personal emails. I also am signed up to two consumer survey companies and generally do some of those every week. I guess that doesn't sound like much but my days always seem to disappear anyway.

5. How about when you're not on the computer?

This is a little easier. Again, presuming it's about entertainment and not making meals or doing laundry, I do some reading every day (almost always fanfic); watch TV, both alone and with Mike; listen to NPR shows, though I'm always doing something else at the same time; have phone calls with friends; and go for walks now that the weather's nice. Other occasional things include eating out, and shopping for fun. I'll be going to a few movies during the summer season as well (see below!)

8. What community do you wish was more active?

Any of them.

10. Tell me about your default icon.

It wasn't a particularly conscious choice at first -- I kept rotating it for a while. But it was not as context specific as other icons I had in the early days, and kind of neutral looking, and I kept re-using it. Since I stopped paying for an account at LJ, I barely ever change it since I am always cross-posting there anyway.

I'm sure part of why I kept it is that it's from the Buffyverse and I find that that's still an important connection to my reading list. Plus the text seemed, to me, a commentary on how people both do and do not know one another online. Back in the early 2000s there was still this mentality that online spaces were this sort of alternate reality and you couldn't actually know anyone you didn't meet in person. I'm pretty sure that now that people connect through their phones more than computers, and have a decade or more of online presence, that there are fewer people around with this idea that online and offline lives are completely divorced things.

11. What features do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?

I still think that image hosting is an important issue. It was the killer app for Tumblr. I have also, due to online services closing or changing, lost most of the visual content in my account. Of course, I would still have this problem if DW became my host and it closed down or changed policies. But I have to admit it would make posting images much simpler.

The other issue is that I think there are still a lot of people out there who want to find a reliable image host that isn't likely to censor them. I think it could be a real plus for DW.

14. Did you have a gateway fandom? Still in it? Why or why not? Is there a community for it on DW?

Buffy wasn't my first fandom, or even my first online fandom, but it was the one in which I became part of an online community, and it started me writing fannish stuff consistently. I still consider myself part of it even though the majority of my attention is elsewhere now. There are some communities for it here on DW but if any of them are active someone needs to let me know.

The community I co-mod, buffyversetop5 is also available on DW but there's never anything contributed here.

B) This advice is so true, and I'm glad that there's now some long-term data on comparisons between giving professional investors your money and just making some simple decisions of your own.

Anyone watch "The Big Short"? I quite liked it, though I thought they should have done more explanations as the topic became more complicated than making most in the beginning. But I could see the problem of juggling attention to explaining topics with moving the story along.

To me the kicker was at the end of the film, when we find out that Michael Burry's investments are now exclusively in water. If that didn't give everyone chills, I don't think they got the point of the film.

C) I've just seen Captain America Civil War today and thought it was as good as critics and fans have been saying. It's very dense though, and I found myself wishing at various points that I could be seeing it at home so I could pause, rewind, etc. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to say about it until that point.

One downside is that there is entirely too much shaky camera footage in the film. It makes following action a lot more difficult which is a real waste of great stunts.

For those who have seen it, NPR had a segment on the politics in the film which I thought was well done.



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