lettered | Livejournal Questions

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Livejournal Questions

This actually has nothing to do with the recent drama.

I have a confession to make. I'm a genius. But I'm really tragically stupid also.

-~~how to put on a header. And why everyone can figure it out but me.~~
-~~what a DDoS attack is. Looked it up on Wikipedia. Still really don't understand.~~
-~~where everyone gets the equipment to do all the icons and everything they do. Seems to me that stuff costs a fortune.~~
-how to write short fanfic.
-~~who Rodney is.~~
-~~Henry Jenkins.~~
-~~GIP.~~
-~~how NOT to hotlink some images. I can do it if the image is in a format Photobucket will upload, otherwise I don't understand.~~
-how people keep up with their flists.
-how people keep up with stuff like which new cat macro is funniest.
-how anyone keeps up with anything.
-why

seraphcelene can't be here RIGHT NOW, I dunno, making pie with me.
-how people find out people are talking about them when said people are not talking to them. It's not that I don't like gossip. It's that I don't understand it. I literally seem to have trouble paying attention to anything not aimed straight at me with a missile launcher.
-why I like Harry/Draco.
-flangst.
-~~how people not being able to post really isn't connected to the Great Strikethrough.~~
-how to play most online videos, or dl the equipment.
-birthdays.
-why I didn't find a plane ticket to NYC for an earlier day so I could watch DB with

a2zmom.
-Spike.
-betas.
-most emoticons.
-~~who Jo is.~~
-~~what Due South is.~~

In other news, The Sound of Music in Sparta. (link courtesy

imnotacommittee.)

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I love how you claim to be a genius, and yet there is a fail on html. :D

*tickles you*

I do not understand flangst, either.

how to put on a header. And why everyone can figure it out but me.
Use this tutorial. I swear it does everything in baby steps and makes it really simple. *I* could do it and I am an HTML moron!

That's all I've got time for... (and I really don't know the answer to most of the others!)

Hee.

-where everyone gets the equipment to do all the icons and everything they do. Seems to me that stuff costs a fortune.

They illegally download a version of Photoshop off of Kazaa. *eg*

-GIP

Gratuitous Icon Post!

-what Due South is.

A Canadian show I never really watched about a Canadian mountie played by Paul Gross. Also included Callum Keith Rennie (Leoben on BSG) as the dicky American copper dude.

That's probably all I can help you with. I still find putting up headers and all that coding stuff a big headache.

Flangst? Is that friends-list angst? (For real, I have no idea what it is. Can we be stupid together?)

-how people keep up with stuff like which new cat macro is funniest.
I get a new notification of that everytime a kitten upgrades my RAM.

I don't understand what a cat macro is. *feels dumb*

DDoS attack: Denial of Service attack (I forget what the other D is for). It's what happens when an outside party, like spammers, start deluging a server, like LiveJournal's, with lots and lots of mail or other requests for connection. The server overloads and starts denying some of the requests, but it can't distinguish one request from another, and so the users get denied as often as the spammers do. That's why people can't update or post.

Rodney: One of the main characters on SGA. I don't watch, so I'm not sure which one.

How people not being able to post really isn't connected to the Great Strikethrough: See DDoS.

How people find out people are talking about them when said people are not talking to them. -- Yeah, I don't get that, either.

Birthdays are here:

http://www.livejournal.com/birthdays.bml

The person has to have their dob in their profile, though or it won't show up.

Not hotlinking; just right click, save it to your own saving place and point people at it there, not the original place. If you don't have your own web page or something, LJ hosts stuff for free depending on your account type. Imagine everytime someone looks at it, it costs a penny; you make sure it's coming out of your purse not the original poster's.

Keepign up with my list; I'm home all day, speed read and skim very fast :-)

Jo is (probably) one of the female secondary characters on Supernatural. her mother is Ellen who owns a roadhouse where hunters hang out and she wasnts to be one as her dad was. She has a thing for Dean, but who can blame her? ;-)

Rodney is a character from SG-1/SGA, arrogant, immensely smart, cute, allergic to lemons. In my icon :-)

Betas check your fic from anything from typos up, depending what level of betaing you want.

who Rodney is

An apparently extremely whiny, bitchy and egotistical - but brilliant - scientist from Stargate: Atlantis. Never saw the show, but these characteristics seems to be recognized as essential by all SGA writers.

For Henry Jenkins, see

femmenerd.

For how to make icons, see "beg friendslist to make them for you".

For cat macros, see "insomnia."

That's all I got right now, flan-hater.

Henry Jenkins is a scholar - a professor in the field of media, communications, etc.

Awhile back, he studied online Star Trekkies who wrote fanfiction, then wrote a scholarly book about them. He's also studied online fanfiction writers who write m/m slash. The book was called, Textual Poachers, yadda yadda... He's since written quite a few books dealing with fandoms and online issues.

For scholars like me, who are studying online fandoms and fanfiction, he's The One We Follow, He Who Paved The Way. :-)

He's got a terrific blog, which you can read and rss-feed to your livejournal, here: http://www.henryjenkins.org/

You can read more than you ever wanted to about him, here: http://www.henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html

why I didn't find a plane ticket to NYC for an earlier day so I could watch DB with a2zmom.

BWAH! [cries copious tears.]

You'd have also watched DB with me, dude!

Also: how to keep up with the flist: I read the same 15 people's posts every day. Everyone else, I read fairly randomly, based on their subject lines. Not very fair, I'm sure, but it's the only way I can think of to keep up with the 200+ LJs on my flist. Do I feel badly? Sometimes - then I remember that beyond about 15 people, the rest are there only because they want to read the ficrecs, they're not really interested in me or my life.

I don't know how to write long. I realized this weekend that how long my fic is is actually inversely proportional to its length. I don't know what that means.

I don't know why I like Harry/Draco either.

Jo is a secondary character on Supernatural. Her father was a hunter who used to be friends with Sam and Dean's father. See icon.

Henry Jenkins - chair of the Comparative Media Studies Department at MIT - probably the biggest name in studies of our kind of fan culture. Or did you mean you don't understand the hoopla about him? Either way, Kita's right. See Femme for more.

I keep up with things by having a very boring job that forces me to read porn inself defence so that I don't poke my eyes out with paperclips to avoid writing form letters. I don't know about other people.

You don't understand Spike?

I know the answers to some of these questions but I am very tired.

Henry Jenkins is like the poster child for fanacademics. He wrote the first "big" book about media fandom back before zee internets. It's called Textual Poachers. In the dedications he said that proceeds from the book would go to sending his slasher wife to cons.

I know how to write short fanfic, but I don't know how to tell you how to do it. How do you write long fanfics that aren't really just strings of v. short fanfics?

I see a list and I get all OCD about *having* to answer it...

Short fanfic (around 3000 words) is really fun for me - I love it when I get an idea for an intense emotional scene, and then flesh it out. But really short drabbles (100 words) give me hives; I can't boil it down that concentrated.

For all my images, I put them in my Photobucket acct and then use the "img src=, etc." html tag.

I have a pretty small f-list, so it's easy to keep up.

There are teens in the house, and they have some kind of weird radar about what macros are funny. I just steal from them.

I know you struck it out, but I use Paintshop Pro. We got a free (legal) download of an old version, which I used for a long time. Then someone bought me a newer version (10 I believe) for about $40. Sometimes I wish I had the old one back.

Jo from Little Women? (LOL, I'm clueless too.)

Harry/Draco probably appeals because of something I observed when our kids were little. Whenever they'd get into scrapes, it was always with kids whom they played with the most often. IOW, an enemy is in some ways very close to a close friend. Sometimes animosity can come from feelings of closeness. That's why British public school stories are probably so full of slashy possibilities.

I have no radar for gossip either.

I learned a lot from the very knowledgeable people responding to this post! Although I still don't know what flangst is. I like your theory that it has something to do with flan -- which I don't care for either. We can start a club, if you like.

I find it weird that those icons are called macros. As a programmer, I think a macro should actively DO something. Not just sit there as passive text. (A macro in Excel, Access, or other such programs is a recorded sequence of actions which can be saved and "replayed" as needed.)

Ha! Sound of Music Sparta! I can't believe how well it went together. I missed the man boobs and abs though... (:

Popsicle.

People are so helpful! I opened this earlier and read it now and was all prepared to do all kinds of helpful answers or "yeah, I don't get that either", but then I refreshed and people have come along and explained things I needed explained as well! :)

I didn't understand what you meant by formats that wouldn't be able to be uploaded onto Photobucket, but I read your comments and I think now I do...

I keep up with my flist because I remain relatively invisible/unpopular and keep it small! I can go away for several days and come back and actually catch most of the relevant stuff I missed in a few hours.

I agree with the person who commented that it's weird that things like cat macros are called macros. Where does that come from? I'm not even a programmer but I took a course on Excel and kind of learned what a macro is in that context, and it doesn't translate into funny cat pictures...

What do you mean by "people not being able to post"? Like... they push submit and it won't submit, or like they're restraining themselves from posting things they want to post because of censorship?

Online videos is easy peasy... do you mean like realplayer/windows media/quicktime? Normally when you come across a page with those videos, they'll automatically redirect you to the download site... otherwise they're pretty easy to find on Google... they all have official sites.

I also didn't understand what you meant by not understanding betas, but I read your comments and yes! I mean, I feel like I've had some good betas in Buffy fandom over time that I can now count on, but when I dip my toes into new fandoms, I get so lost. For example I've written a few little fics for The Office, a fandom in which I know pretty much no one, and you go looking for betas and there are websites that have like a list of people that have in the past said they would be willing to beta, but do you just... pick one and email them? Based on their username alone and what minimal things they have to say in their profile? It's very bizarre and uncomfortable and I end up hemming and hawing and eventually either not posting at all or posting un-beta'ed, which is BAD.

I'm now going to read explanations in your comments that I may have missed on first skim-through, and I'm upset that flangst doesn't appear to be crossed off yet, because that word confuses me greatly!

You gots questions? I gots some answers.

DDOS attacks.

Think of a server as an airport hub. So everything goes into the hub and then everything flies back out of the hub. When you post a message to me, you don't actually send it to me - you send it to the LJ server (the LJ hub, so to speak) and then LJ sends it to me. Now imagine, there's traffic jam. Instead of the 200 incoming messages that LJ can handle in an hour (in reality, it's way more, but lets keep this simple), 2000 messages come in. LJ has no way to handle this other than canceling messages (like airports canceling flights). Most of the 2000 messages it's canceling are garbage, sent in to deliberately overload the server, but some are legit. If it's a legitimate uptick in messaging, than LJ would go out and purchase another server, but it isn't. It's a group trying to close the airport.

Does that make it clear? Feel free to ask for more specifics. I'm not a network person, but I've picked up useless knowledge over the years.

How to write short fic - specifically a drabble.

This is how I wrote Sparing the Rod, this weeks OoS effort.

First I need to get a very, very specific visual in my head. This weeks topic was "strike" and what I finally settled on was Dru talking to a child whose throat she had ripped out. Then I think of what the flow should be. So I wanted Dru to complain that the child had spilled jam all over her dress (it turns out it's actually blood), I knew Spike would say that the child wasn't going to answer, Dru would explain that she felt spanking was wrong and then we finally get the description of the child sitting there, dead with her throat ripped out.

My first attempt was 116 words. I deleted one entire sentence and still had 8 words to cut. I rewrote one small part (originally I had written that the child's "eyes were shut tight and mouth wide open", I changed it to eyes and mouth opened wide) and got it down to exactly 100.

The big key is you want to pick one tiny moment and keep things very, very focused.

Keeping up with flists.

Now that I suddenly have to work every second of the day (i didn't eat lunch until 3:30 PM last week to give you an idea), I've been having days where I don't log on to LJ period. So, I no longer keep up with anything except a permanent headache.

flangst. My definition of flangst is an angsty story where the angst is manufactured and is easily overcome (normally in one of those long speechy shouting matches.) Then the hero and heroine fall into each others arms and everythig is peachy.

hy I didn't find a plane ticket to NYC for an earlier dayW

how people find out people are talking about them when said people are not talking to them. It's not that I don't like gossip. It's that I don't understand it. I literally seem to have trouble paying attention to anything not aimed straight at me with a missile launcher.

Gossip is something you are either attuned to or not. A lot of it comes down to social attitudes, I reckon. I come from a small village, so gossip is part of our social structure to a huge extent - it provides the support system, the social bonds that tie us together, and thus becomes a form of currency. If you aren't part of the gossip network then you are on your own if something goes wrong, and who wants that. And I tend to unconsciously carry those attitudes over to LJ. Where they come head to head with people with an urban attitude who view gossip as some sort of intrusion on their privacy. But I'm not just a peasant but a militant peasant so my response to urban attitudes involves two fingers.

But on LJ it is simple - if something turns up on my flist that I don't understand I will ask around and follow links until I have a decent context for it. It doesn't take much time. I would say the strikethrough kerfuffle shows that gossip can spread on LJ at almost the same speed as it does in our village, which is quite impressive. The only time I have found people bitching specifically about me it was not so much behind my back, since I wouldn't call a public post of someone on my flist as behind my back (although I have a feeling they were stupid enough to think it was), but if they did talk about me anywhere else I suppose I would pick up on it the same way as any other sort of gossip.

I love when you post questions I'm too lazy to ask. Only problem is being too lazy to read all the replies! No, I'm kidding. I knew some of it already, but some is very helpful.

And of course I assume you want to know my own thoughts about stuff people have already answered. Naturally.

*I use Photoshop. Mr. D had a copy from somewhere, and I can't remember what I originally started using it for but it's become indispensable. Both for my photography hobby (mostly to correct for stuff that happens to photos during scanning) and my new interest in art (the poto and dog portraits I've done). I'm always learning something else it can do.

*I write short fanfic not because I sit down and say "hey, this fic will be short!" but because usually my fic impulse is to explain one little thing, or explore an idea, and I do not want to put in the energy to put it in its own world. So all my stuff on ff.n was born out of a germ of an idea that I did not connect with anything else. I think this goes back to some discussions we've had about what we're trying to do when we write, rather than a technique.

*I'd like to tell you how I found Henry Jenkins. Years ago, when I was in college, I heard a quote somewhere about how fanfiction is what happens when corporations own our popular heroes. I was enchanted by it, and wrote it down somewhere with Jenkins' name, but forgot who he was. I kept that quote in mind, though. When I found LJ and joined, my interest in fan dynamics exploded, and I was reintroduced.

*I haven't kept up with my flist lately, because of being gone. And getting back into keeping up has been difficult. But usually I ignore most community stuff and filter for personal journals and read them at work. I don't read everything, but most people, yeah.

*Cat macros, which I lump in with lolspeak and CAPSLOCKING: I cannot explain why this cracks my shit up. But it does. Repeatedly. Intellectually I know it's stupid, but I can't stop laughing. Especially now that I've found

loltheorists. I've also made some.

*Someone up there said something about gossip attention was a personal trait. I lack it in all areas of my life; stuff goes down at work that I have no notion of until someone pulls me aside and says "I can't believe you said that! Didn't you know ______?!" Online it's even harder, I think.

*You like Harry/Dracy because you're just as human and perverse as the rest of us. It just shows itself in bizarre ways.

*Spike. I would like to get some of that. Tell me how when you find out.

I miss Spike.

*I read "most emoticons" as "most emotions." Which frankly was less sad to me than it probably should have been.

Oh my god. That video is amazing. As much as I disliked the movie (300), it's more than worth it for all the humor that's come out of it.

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