incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

This is a post for G+ users who are trialing DW in light of G+'s upcoming shutdown.

• The create-entries beta is much more mobile-friendly. Turn it on here.
  • You can't use rich-text in the create-entries beta; however, you can use Markdown by putting "!markdown" (no quotes) on the first line by itself. In addition to the standard Markdown syntax, you can refer to someone's DW account by putting @ before their username.
• You can make the reading components of the site more mobile-friendly with solarbird's style.
• DW splits access--who reads your stuff--and subscriptions--who you read. If you need to go more fine-grained, you can grant partial access through circles and you can trim down your reading through filters.
• If you want people to plus-one your posts, you can copy-paste this poll code into the end of a post (EDIT: I didn't realize that creating polls is a paid feature, sorry!:
  <poll name='' isanon='no' whovote='all' whoview='all'>
  <poll-question type='radio'>
  +1?
  <poll-item>+1</poll-item>
  </poll-question>
  </poll>
• You can post by email (which can also use Markdown); turn it on and then check out the details.
• If you're writing from someplace that does bookmarklets, here's one for signal-boosting DW posts within DW.
• DW does host images, but the quota's so low that it's not really useful at this point.

Let me know if you have questions!

I've been meaning to move all my posting to Dreamwidth for a while, and now is as good a time as any. [*]

You don't need a Dreamwidth account to keep reading and commenting on my posts. Here's the deal:

1. All my posts will still appear here, cross-posted from Dreamwidth.
2. All the comments, however, will be at DW, because duplicated and separated conversations annoy me. The posts on LJ will have the number of comments on DW and a direct link to reply.
3. You can comment at DW in three ways:
   1. Get a DW account. Ask me for an invite code, or check out dw_codesharing.
   2. Use your LJ account through OpenID. Go here and enter "your-username.livejournal.com" in the box. Then you'll be asked to set and confirm an e-mail address (so you can get replies to comments).

      Using OpenID, you can read locked posts, comment, and subscribe to journals. You can even have up to six icons. You just can't post entries.

   3. Comment "anonymously", not logged in; you won't be able to do this on locked posts, though, because if you're not logged in you won't be able to see them.
4. I've done my best to duplicate the current list of people who can read locked posts from here to DW. If you have a DW account and I've listed your LJ account instead under "Access To" on my profile, do please let me know.

I prefer Dreamwidth because the people running it are much better at listening to what people want and not just dumping out new and ill-advised changes, because it's completely ad-free, and because it has a bunch of cool features (the one I never knew I needed until it happened is inline expansion of cut-tags on the reading page: click the little arrow and there the content is).

I think in sum this ought to make it exactly as easy to read and comment on my DW posts as on LJ. If there are specific things that make it less easy, I want you to tell me (comments on this post will remain open).

Questions?

[*] LJ now allows you to cross-post comments to FaceBook and Twitter, even if the comment is to a locked post, thereby making it substantially less work to violate someone's privacy, inadvertently or otherwise; and pingbacks now include excerpts from locked posts. You can opt out of sending or receiving pingbacks, but not of having other people cross-post comments from your locked posts.

I have at least two. Tell me a joke and one's yours. (If necessary, in the morning I will ask a random number generator.)

An extremely mixed bag, today:

Of the recent attempts at suppressing discussions of racism that I'm aware of, I think literally and repeatedly ripping down an entire protest display takes the cake. The poison-filled cake of racism, privilege, and oppression, that is. (This was a student protest at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities Dance Program, ripped down by other students, and the university administration's response was to call the destruction "the changes made by another group of individuals." And . . . nothing else. That would be the icing on this particular cake.)

(Edit: okay, my metaphor got away from me. The protest is actually about pervasive institutional problems, in which context the administration's non-response is more than just icing. But the ripping down (because it will help the discussion! Um, wtf, over?) just infuriates me.)

sparkymonster has a helpful summary with more. Support the students through their petition, passing the word about the protest, or joining this Facebook group.

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Baby sloth!

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tool_of_satan has an interesting thought on what gives LotR its quasi-mythic feel in this thread on the non-European epic fantasy post:

This is a complicated question, but I think part of the answer is Tolkien's use of deep time. Things that happened thousands of years ago have direct consequences that the characters need to deal with, and there are people around who were actually alive back then, mixing with the mortals. Furthermore, we (and the hobbits) are told much less than everything about the ancient people and events - the critical bits, of course, and there are allusions to many other things, but one ends up feeling there are many other stories that could be told, which I think helps make the ones that are told feel more real. (I haven't read the Silmarillion or any of the other posthumous volumes, I should note.)

(Underlined emphasis mine.)

For me, I suspect this may be a matter of the golden age being twelve: it's certainly de rigueur these days for epic fantasies to build or at least suggest elaborate historical and mythological backstories for their worlds, and I mostly feel like they're, well, there because they're de rigueur, and I'm not sure the underlined detail of the execution is enough to make the difference. But I'm also not very interested in epic fantasies now, so my reactions might have been different, back in the day.

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There's a reboot of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime and you can watch it free and legally, with official subtitles, at Funimation. (I recommend a downloader like Orbit, because the streaming is very rocky.) I've been watching but don't really have an opinion yet; it's based closely on the manga which I've been reading, so it's familiar enough that I don't know how it'd look to a new person or in comparison to the first anime. Well, okay, the first episode was filler and kinda dumb, but the manga rocks so I have hopes.

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Songs that make me happy lately: "Toe Jam," by the BPA featuring Dizzee Rascal & David Byrne (ETA: YouTube video of version we actually like; NSFW (but rather clever) for happy dancing naked people with black bars over women's breasts & people's pubic areas); and "Say Hey (I Love You)" by Michael Franti and Spearhead (choose song title in sidebar).

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I've also watched the pilot of Leverage and enjoyed it. I am morally certain that it was pitched as "Ocean's Eleven meets Robin Hood," and indeed the wish-fulfillment is blatant, but my love for capers is fierce, and I suspect that these lawless elites aren't going to be violent, which makes it easier for me to take. Note that the aired order is not the intended order; see this blog post from the creator for the proper order ('ware spoilers after that in the post).

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Two Dreamwidth invite codes; comment if you want one; if necessary, will pick at random and ask for e-mail.

(Decided against crossposting (and asking people to comment only there) until a few more wrinkles are ironed out. Am filtering out people here who are fully cross-posting, and have adjusted LJ "friends" list to try and match DW access/subscribe lists. Now going to look for missing subject pronouns. Goodnight, everybody.)