wednesday signal boost

Missed out on last week--whoops!--but better late than never. Just for that, y'all get an extra big signal boost this week...

Stuff Happening Around Dreamwidth:

I didn't realize this, but we have a theadventurezone comm! I have sneakily gotten T into listening by merit of leaving the Crystal Kingdom arc on while we were gearing up to play D&D and hooking them on the story, so I've been really immersing myself in the Balance arcs lately. I'm enjoying all the different comms people have been digging up and signal boosting, so I figured I should do my part to find neat comms.

With that in mind, I've also gone to post at the latest episode post for the_good_place, since I just caught up on it last night. Oh, and brainwane has a communal Metafilter FPP framing request over at metafilter! I love that kind of thing! Plus, thisfinecrew has some useful updates on the ongoing LAUSD teachers' strike. ✊🌹

thisweekmeta is also kicking off, and I'm super excited to see it kick off. They're looking for more sources! There's a lot of good pieces I've seen on their latest linkspam here and was going to link, but... they already did and this is getting longish. So. Go check that out.

If you liked snowflake_challenge, there's a spinoff happening for this summer at sunshine_challenge! Good to keep our minds on for now, I think.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia is coming up soon for February! I have a huge thing for psychic bond creatures, so I'm still... well, psyched.

Also in February, sara is kicking off Dreamwidth Is For Shitposting month. She has kicked off a big list of great ideas--I have some thoughts on "inside a whale"!--and melannen has gleefully broken out her coding skills to create a shitposting topic generator. (She's still taking suggestions to feed it!)

Stuff I Found On Dreamwidth:

From jesse_the_k, I learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a dissent necklace and that other people have made an enamel pin for it. I've been eyeing up canvas jackets I could get to display my burgeoning collection of enamel pins as it is, so this is very exciting. (They do other pins! They have one of Alice Ball!)

seperis has a big ol' post about her bunnykeeping. I love people talking about the social dynamics of their pets and the ins and outs of their petkeeping setups, so I rolled around in this like a happy happy dog with a really dead fox.

kabarett has been hosting some interesting discussions about traditionally-recognized autism symptoms being, uh, synonymous with trauma, bouncing off a piece from a parent frustrated that protecting her son from being traumatized has made him "undiagnosable".

breathedout has some fascinating and dramatic details from the real life of Patricia Highsmith. In particular, the first one is an achingly painful image I wouldn't be surprised to find in a tragic poem.

ursula has an interesting piece on researching character names, especially in medieval Europe.

nerdflighter is thinking about how to handle edge cases of dysphoria, and how/whether to offer a particular person an identity that might or might not fit better.

quinfirefrorefiddle has a pretty cool roundup on fannish history. It's been a while since I thought about the Pit of Voles! Now that I work in a vole lab (although not on them), I gotta say that the moniker doesn't work nearly as well as it used to for me.

wanderingnork found a study that argues that you should be aiming to be about 85% wrong when you're learning in order to achieve maximum growth, and has some complaints about the methodology.

Stuff helpful for using Dreamwidth:

I am perhaps the last person to get around to this, but hey, there's a new signal boosting bookmark around! astolat made the first one, and melannen helpfully improved it so it warns you if you're trying to share a locked post. It should make it easier to format and share posts, which is nice. I don't know how much I'll personally use it, on account of how this system with a notepad works a little better for me, but we'll see.

tozka has some helpful tips on comm using, and how we should try using them now that we're by and large not using 'em to archive fanfic anymore.

On that note, novembermond spent some time explaining how to find interesting comms, whether it's worth resurrecting one, and when it's probably a good idea to make a new one. I need to post to comms more often, probably. Hrm. I also really need to scrape together some cash for a paid account; I want that network feature! Maybe after student loans come in and T has a job again.

jesse_the_k has a helpful guide to using Markdown on DW.

the sorrow of my favorite absence

...but wow, having been spending so much time over on MeFi, I really miss the whisperspace of favorites. (I'm stealing that concept off of greywash, who had a really interesting piece about it last week.) Here's her on the whisperspace of Tumblr tags:

What the tag whisperspace on Tumblr gave me, essentially, was a way of signaling a break between "this is the media-absorption experience I want you to have of this content" (a thing of which I am incredibly aware, in the specific case of fiction); and "also, fuuuuuuuuck I'm a moron, I totally posted this by accident, which is a thing that signals a sort of touching incompetence on my part that you may find amusing/endearing/cringingly tragic, depending on our social relationship."

In other words: I think a lot of what I miss about tag whisperspace was that it was a clear and intuitive way of signalling a break between the part of a social media post that is media and the part of a social media post that is social.

For those of you on my feed who aren't familiar with the way communication works on Metafilter, basically everyone has accounts and all the discussion happens on topic-centered posts in a nonthreaded chronological format. (It is wonderful. No one is ever going to fuck with my chronological read of threads.) There are no in-line images, no icons, no tags, and usernames only appear at the bottom of the text, so you only see who has written something after you've read it. (Well, ideally, anyway. Especially if they're long-winded, like me.)

But you can hit a little button at the bottom of any post or comment and it will say "you favorited this comment!" And you can see who favorited any given comment--lurkers cannot post or interact in any way, you have to have an account with a login to do anything--and if you follow how many favorites you've gotten for this or that post, you also see a list of everyone who has favorited that comment and when. (Here's an example from a recent comment of mine, which happened to be about Dreamwidth and how much I'm enjoying coming back here.) And anyone reading can see how many favorites any given comment has, right next to the username.

I actually really love this because it is a form of whisperspace communication: it's a part of the conversation that allows those direct social communications to happen totally distinct from the textual conversation itself. It lets community stand besides someone who has made a difficult comment or who is grieving; it helps people "read the room;" and most of all it lets me build the kinds of friendships that don't really require shyer people to come out and talk that much. It lets me, who is a loud person who will talk the ears off a donkey, say "hey! I'm glad you said that!" without actually saying so and derailing things.

Of course, people being people, there is also a strong contingent who think favorites are a popularity contest--and in some ways, they are!--and who think they twist discussion norms to hurt each other. (And there are people who claim to use favorites like bookmarks, kind of like LJ or DW memories/favorites, but I have never understood this arcane concept. I use mine as a medium of communication, which is I think very common.)

But I haven't mentioned the thing I use the favorites for that makes me love them best of all: the ability to do the equivalent of smiling, nodding, and projecting thank you for saying that in a rough conversation, especially one where I'm concerned the other person thinks I'm angrier than I actually am. The ability to try to smooth over a certain amount of conflict by sending affiliative communication over the line, even while I'm still in conflict, and to be able to receive that behavior too. I think it helps people drop defenses and talk to one another, because you can build norms of saying "oh, thank you for saying this!" in a way that lets lurkers participate but also encourages long-form, in-depth conversations and focus. It's very nice.

I'm pretty sure that it's not a high priority here, but it's definitely something I'm wistfully thinking about today.