thisweekmeta | 006. January 29, 2019

Am still playing a bit with the layout. Is everybody finding it readable enough? Easily perused? Etc.?

A selection of posts about fandom and money which have popped up lately:

Original post by cesperanza (linked previously)): Money and Networks.
Response by fairestcat (linked previously): On Fandom and the "culture of selling".
More discussion: arduinna; goss; niqaeli; oursin.
More historical context of fandom and money: Fanlore: Fandom and Profit.
Know of more links? (Maybe your own?) Drop 'em in the comments.

The Daily Duranie posted It's a Lonely Burning Question: "The thing is, and I’m going to be brutally open about this – the “It” list of fans, you know the ones – they tend to be at most of the shows, they always seem to know where and when to be, and how to get places that normal, everyday fans don’t – aren’t really on our reader list."

Function podcast posted Fn 11: Social Media, 20 Years Ago: "Anil sits down with some of the pioneers of the social web — Bruce Ableson (founder of Open Diary), Lisa Phillips (former senior system administrator at LiveJournal), and Andrew Smales (founder of Diaryland) — for an oral history about social media 20 years ago." Includes a transcript.

kara_mckay posted about reblogging and DW culture: "When anyone can interact with any content anyone produces, issues of personal and public become murky. In the days of old, very few people would have thought it okay for someone to go out of their way to find another user's journal and then abuse them for their content. It's a little different when your journal isn't really a journal, and isn't really personal."

Peter Rubin for Wired posted Photo Gallery: Our Favorite Cosplay From NYC's Black Comic Book Festival: "And while the cosplay stretched across cultures—attendees came styled as Sailor Moon, Kayako Saeki from The Grudge, Coming to America's Prince Akeem, and all manner of superheros—Williams says that there was no mistaking how more inclusive storytelling has changed the feeling among fans."

thewickling (Pillowfort) posted Do BNFs still exist?: "Does the concept of BNFs still exist in fandom? What does it mean to be a BNF then? How has the concept shifted over the years?"

Flashback - July 24, 2004

This meta/fandom history post was written in the early days of LiveJournal. It covers a bunch of topics: the changes in fandom discussion, public vs. private, discussion and ownership, BNFs ("Quick: When did the BNF = bad!wrong!evol concept first evolve? Answer: At the same time as the ability to see how many Friends a person has."), moving from mailing lists to other fandom spaces and the changes inherent in that, and more. It's a very good look at early 2000s fandom, fandom on LiveJournal, and the changes that happened in fandom around that time.

sophia_helix posted three years, three months, and 1,188 entries later: "So here we are. What makes Livejournal so drastically different?

Well, for starters, there's that self-selection thing. No longer are we blocking that hated listmate, or scanning for messages from the people we really like -- we now have the capacity put all those people in one place."

[Linked with permission from Original Poster.]

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

anneapocalypse

Thanks for the continued coverage of the conversation about fandom and monetizing! It's sort of fascinating to me how people are approaching this conversation—particularly how relatively few people are raising the legal concerns. It would be interesting to compare this to fan conversations about money and monetizing in earlier eras of fandom, particularly before AO3 existed, but I don't know whether such conversations could even be found now.

From:

thisweekmod

On the linked Fanlore page is a link to another page (Timeline of Fandom and Profit) which has a collection of yet more links (ha) where some of the discussions were saved/written about. There's some links back to the 1970s, even!

From:

anneapocalypse

Excellent, thanks for the tip!

From:

gunpowderandlove

I'm really enjoying this comm! Speaking of layout, how do you get those bullet points so close together? The way I'm doing it leaves me sooo much whitespace, and I find your way a lot more readable on mobile.

From:

runpunkrun

The trick is to jam the code all together in the HTML post editor. At least that's how I do it.

So instead of this:

[ul]
[li] list [/li]
[li] list [/li]
[li] list [/li]
[/ul]

Delete the returns between the list items so it looks like this:

[ul] [li] list [/li] [li] list [/li] [li] list [/li] [/ul]

But with angle brackets, of course. I can't get DW to show the raw code without actually turning it into a list.

From:

gunpowderandlove

that's it! Once I put everything on the same line, it showed up the way I wanted it to. Unfortunately for me I like typing out my code as I go, maybe I will have to use

thisweekmod's method and go with r markdown.

Thank you!!

From:

runpunkrun

Now I'm investigating markdown! I had no idea it worked on DW. Wait does it work in comments??

Answer: NO. It does not. That would be super userful.

From:

gunpowderandlove

What a strange new world.

I just found that out as well! I ended up making a little post about my thoughts about it, just so that I could include markdown formatting.

From:

jesse_the_k

Dreamwidth's original post editor and the reply editor (once you select "more options") offer a don't auto-format ticky box. (Can't find that control for new editor.)

In the HTML spec, newlines are supposed to be ignored. To make everyday writing easier, DW's editor respects newlines you type. That's why you get extra space when you separate the list items. When you check "don't auto-format," those newlines are ignored when posting.

The other thing auto-format provides is making totally plain links clickable. The HTML spec requires you to wrap a link: to create
https://example.com
you have to type
<a href="https://example.com">https://example.com</a>

Here's a bare link that the editor has magically made clickable:

https://example.com

visit: https://www.dreamwidth.org/beta to turn on the new "beta" better post editor

From:

gunpowderandlove

Oh this is awesome! Thank you for pointing that out.

From:

manna

If you want to show example HTML with the angled brackets, you can do it with HTML entities.

< gives you a <
> gives you a >
& gives you a &

So the HTML looks like this:

<ul>
<li>Cobb</li>
<li>Arthur</li>
<li>Ariadne</li>
<li>Eames</li>
</ul>

And displays like this:

<ul>
<li>Cobb</li>
<li>Arthur</li>
<li>Ariadne</li>
<li>Eames</li>
</ul>

But how did I get those HTML entities themselves to display without converting into characters, you ask?

I used the & entity to create the initial ampersand character! So that & in the previous sentence was coded as &amp;. And &amp;amp; displays as &amp; etc.

From:

runpunkrun

Ah, I knew I could do that, and forgot. What I was trying to do was get the "code" tag to work, but I guess it doesn't work on HTML itself, and I couldn't google around for one of those code boxes...because I don't know what they're called.

From:

thisweekmod

I use markdown to format posts, and I'm assuming there must be some inherent thing in the formatting that makes the list look like that.

jesse_the_k has a post about markdown formatting on her journal from earlier this month, and I used this cheatsheet for whatever she didn't cover.

From:

gunpowderandlove

You are blowing my mind right now. I had heard of people using markdown but I never realized you can code it right in, I thought people were using some kind of markdown program.

Thank you for linking these things to me!

From:

thisweekmod

I had never even HEARD of it before the beginning of January, but I'm LOVING it for formatting link posts specifically. Makes things way faster, I don't have to hand-code HTML or use a template. Markdown = ♥

From:

jesse_the_k

The cheatsheet you linked to is more modern than the initial basic spec, which Dreamwidth references.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

The good news: if you have a Markdown-literate editor (https://atom.io is free on Mac, Linux, Windows), you can still code in Markdown. Preview using the editor--then when things are groovy, ask the editor to create an HTML version.

Copy that into the DW post editor and you're good.

From:

falena

I still want to draw pink, sparkly hearts around this comm.

As for readability, the layout you chose works well on mobile too (!) and the post format is quite clear and easy to read, imo.

From:

goodbyebird

Seconding readability on mobile.

From:

thisweekmod

Yay! I'm glad the mobile version looks okay, too; I deliberately chose this theme because it said it was mobile-friendly.

From:

copperfyre

Thank you again for putting all this work in! I have nothing particularly intelligent to say about these links, but I am enjoying reading them.

I am finding it very readable, both on a computer and on my phone. I like the simple formatting, it's nice and restful!

From:

quinfirefrorefiddle

Oooh, the throwback entry is really interesting! That idea about having filters for your reading list is a flash forward to DW.

From:

yourlibrarian

Very readable, great selection, A++ would read again ;D

From:

runpunkrun

There's a conversation about monetizing fandom going on here, including a comment from me.

From:

saxonvoter

<3

Good links as always. Gonna listen to that podcast now and then reading the rest of the links.

From:

stellar_dust

Fansplaining had an episode about money in fandom last fall that might be worth linking to in the context of this ongoing discussion?

From:

tabaqui

I like it and it's easy for me to read and access. :D

From:

alasse_irena

Wow that was a real throwback in the flashbacks... And yet so many of the problems the same.

From:

kore

Wow, that podcast is really something. I had an OpenDiary! And yeah, I remember people posting VERY personal things there but typically under pseudonyms and not with their real names. LJ was much more social from the beginning, connecting you to networks of people, and a lot of people used their IRL names at the start -- a lot of them had come over from Usenet, where they also used their real names (and often, THEIR COLLEGE EMAIL ADDRESSES). I loved this part

One of the key differences we saw between LiveJournal and Open Diary was what Lisa described with LiveJournal where groups of people who knew each other would use it. Sort of like how Facebook is now was much more prevalent on air than Open Diary. Open Diary tended to be more people who are posting their personal things that they didn't wanna put somewhere else. And didn't necessarily invite their friends and family to come in [crosstalk 00:12:54].

AD: Back then your friends and family weren't necessarily online?

BA: They didn't have modems.