flemmings | (no subject)

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I now have my new ten-year passport, with grave doubts that I'll ever get to use it. But it's handsome enough, with pale colour illos of Canuck this-n-thats backgrounding each page. I wonder if I have the eastern Canada version, because it seems awfully heavy on eastern Canada Stuff: Quebec City, Halifax, Newfoundland. One page for 'the Prairies'; possibly Nellie McClung as prairie content, though she was born in Ontario; the west coast nonexistent AFAICS.

My cousin's kid makes a dish by putting uncooked vegetables under a chicken which she then slow-roasts for several hours. Tried this the other day; wish I'd doubled the veg part because yum so good. (Would still have parboiled the little potatoes.) Cooked up a bunch of veg yesterday with the chicken bits I don't care for- drumsticks and legs mainly- but didn't get a chance to eat because an afternoon with the Little Girls turned into dinner with The Little Girls. Lunch tomorrow if no one calls me in to work.

The owner of the saiyuki_yaoi ML has been asking if anyone's still in the fandom to warrant keeping the ML alive. Went and looked at the archive, which is not laid out as usefully as it used to be. Was reminded of those busy days when MLs were in swing, and why I used to feel there were a lot more people in my life than there are now. Five or six posts a day with several people chiming in made you feel part of a group conversation; not even active LJ communities do that, and most are far from active. Fandom doesn't just fragment, it narrows: down to 140 characters thrown into the void. Interaction is the essence of fandom, but where does that happen?

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My parents do roast chicken with the vegetables under the chicken in the oven, but they do parboil the potatoes first. Mmm, roast potatoes...

I know what you mean about the interaction. Where is it these days?

My problem with roast potatoes (yumm) is that the really good ones require meat, usually expensive and often of a kind I don't much care for. A steer should not have to die to give me my lovely spuds.

Then again, what fandoms have we left?

Tumblr is as active as ever, and the interaction tools have actually improved. Well, one can install XKit, which makes the comments inbox somewhat usable, and there is now username tagging in posts, and there are ways to do memes and such. If one was able to manage the Pitas blog era one can manage this IMO. I would say the major social difference with regard to the LJ era is there are no communities, which means no ability to schism in the wake of fandom wank -- everyone is stuck with everyone else in the public tags and reblog threads. This is an upside or a downside depending on how you see it.

I fear

flemmings would have to update her browser, though. XD

I mean, I still see people say "where is everybody" from time to time, and I can't stress this enough: Fandom is on Tumblr now. There's a couple of other big sites but the interactive core of what we would recognize as media Fandom and anime Fandom is Tumblr. It's what LJ was in 2005. The entire generation of teen/20s fandom-ers know nothing but Tumblr, and LJ is to them what Usenet/MLs were to LJers in their 20s.

Chrome handles your Tumblr just fine, but I still don't see scads of comments and still can't tell when it's you talking or you quoting someone else talking, which to me is an incredible downside of the thing. 'Improved' doesn't make it 'easy.' Unless the idea is not to have dialogue, as on the MLs or LJs, but 'you fanpoodling in your little corner and I in mine', as in pitas, with the option of clicking 'like' by reblogging the thing or whatever the Tumblr term is for that. Still an awful lack of conversation for my tastes.

If you're looking at my Tumblr logged out from minimoonstar.tumblr.com, that's a misleading view of what the site is capable of, I'm afraid -- when you log in you get a dashboard view, and all the native comments/likes are in line there under the posts, Facebook style. (The ones on my public Tumblr theme aren't the native comments, they're a Discus integration which is something else altogether. XD;) The XKit add on also allows you to reply directly to comments by generating a new post, which is then visible to everyone who's followed you. You also have a notifications view, and an inbox view for direct messages which can be responded to privately or publicly. As with LJ, there are also ways to perma-link a tag so you can filter posts (everyone's posts, your own posts, etc.).

At this point it doesn't have less functionality than LJ does, you just have to be logged in for almost all of it. (Some public Tumblr themes give you the ability to see reblogs and comments, but I'm afraid mine, which is old, doesn't -- I should probably change that.)

Also my fan Tumblr is actually this one: http://genufa.tumblr.com/ though I'm not sure there is much there to interest you at the moment. XD It has a different theme, though, where you can at least see the text of native comments, vis: http://genufa.tumblr.com/post/99081528850/the-upside-of-hannibal-tv-series-fic#notes

Yes, I see the comment on the Hannibal post. And the previous one I see the 919 'so-and-so liked this' comments. If I understand you correctly, it all looks different if you have a tumblr account and are logged in? and too bad if you don't and aren't.

The tech side of it is indeed for 20-somethings and not for grandmothers.

Well -- all social media sites these days want you to log in, or how are they supposed to count you as a user for investors. XD It's a tradeoff of sorts because once you're in there's much less in the way of privacy controls. LJ was about half and half "social media" and "blogging platform", but the divide is very clear now. Social media is about generating and consuming content for the ppl /in/ the site. Blogging platforms are for publishing. And, of course, everything is designed for phones and tablets, more and more.

Here are some screencaps of what it looks like on the inside:
http://andrewnewson.co.uk/blog/2014/1/10/how-to-post-on-tumblr
http://soyouwanttotrytintin.tumblr.com/post/55805092755
http://waltzy.tumblr.com/post/86412936858/xkit-extension-introducing-retags-retags-is

I actually think it's a lot easier to learn to use than LJ was? Almost everything is designed these days for "regular" folks, rather than tech-savvy ones. But LJ at its very core runs on the comforting "Internet forum" permanent post + comments model, which the modern social media sites mostly don't.

Edited 2014-10-06 23:26 (UTC)

I guess I'm akumademo a blogger then. Social media leans towards surface and reflex. I can see how you could include blogger posts on your tumblr, but then it seems- going by your examples- you're still hit with a list of 3,419 likes in the Notes while (I assume?) looking for an actual reply. Even FB keeps like and comment separate.

Well... it depends? XD You're notified separately in an activity feed when someone responds directly to something you posted. If you reblog something very popular, you're not notified of the thousands of likes or whatever that it gets if it's not someone who liked your iteration of it. I have as many active people friended on Tumblr as I've ever had on LJ, and I get the same level of response -- a few likes and replies per post. It's a red-letter day if I get 20 likes on a post, so scrolling isn't usually a problem. I'm sure it looks quite different for the kids who have 3000 followers and a post queue that runs every 15 minutes (I suspect they ignore inline notes entirely and only pay attention to direct inbox messages).

Where you might scroll is when you encounter a popular fan meta post or something like that, where you're exhaustively interested in reading everyone's reblogs. But after a while, one does the exact same thing one did on LJ, which is to identify the people with something interesting to say, and read their Tumblr directly. And Tumblr allows you to block the annoying people or their posts outright, which LJ never did.

There's also something my friend Tom (a research agency guy) identified, which is that the "best" version of a popular post -- the one with the most amusing/instructive additions -- is the one that gets picked up and reblogged. So you might see the same content repeatedly, but the effect as time passes is that the post is communally "edited" into a better form than the original. But this is something that's difficult to explain if you don't see it in action.

I mean, of course the functionality is different. Change is inevitable. What I'm trying to explain is that once you learn to use it, and the toolkit becomes invisible to you, the experience is much the same. It hasn't gotten shallower, or more yelling-into-the-void-y, or less wanky, or even younger or older -- half the folks I follow migrated from LJ in the first place, who were teens/20s when LJ was in its heyday, and the rest ranges from high schoolers to Diane Duane. Fandom is fandom. XD

Edited 2014-10-07 13:36 (UTC)

I've changed my main Tumblr's theme to a slightly more modern one that shows you the native notes on the same page as the Disqus comments. The links seem a bit small to me, though -- let me know if it's OK.

Not at all sure what the difference is between native notes and Disqus comments, but whatever links there are look fine to me. Then again, I'm still at 800x600. ^_^

The Disqus comments, which are the ones generated from the comment field on the post that you see in the logged-out view, are only visible from that page in the logged-out view (and in my own Disqus account -- it's actually an entirely different social media thing! I see all Disqus comments made to/by me across sites. My Tumblr has Disqus, the AV Club has Disqus, all those comments are saved in the same place as far as I'm concerned.) But I won't see the Disqus comment in my Tumblr view, and neither will anyone else. You can see the Tumblr notes on the logged-out post page, but you can't make any unless you log in.

My head hurts.

You have to be logged out to see Disqus comments but you have to be logged in to make Tumblr comments. Isn't that a lot of work, switching back and forth? You can see your own Disqus comments in a separate Disqus account but not under the entry they belong to. Maybe it's different when you're using the thing but just from the description it seems counter-intuitive as all get out.

I don't have to be logged out to see Disqus comments -- but I would normally not access the post page as you are; I spend most of my time in the Tumblr dashboard view.

It is entirely counter-intuitive. XD I'm selling you on Tumblr because I would much rather you (and a couple of other people) register an account there and comment within Tumblr itself. You'll find it easier and I'll find it easier. Disqus is an add-on courtesy for LJ holdouts (since I don't really blog for an audience of strangers who stumble onto my site); it doesn't belong to Tumblr, so Tumblr can't do more than it has, which is allow you to enable it on the post page.

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