paraka

Guys, megaupload has been shut down. D:

Yes, there was a lot of pirated files up there, but worse, there was also a lot of fannish works up there.

I've said this a couple different places and at different times, but if anyone wants a fannish home to host their fanworks (podfic, vids, art, whatever) I'm happy to share my webspace. I host things for a number of people already. And would be happy to host for others too.

( Details )

I'm seriously offering this to any fan, you don't need to know me to take me up on the offer. :)

ETA: Because some people have asked, there is some statistics tracking available if you want to host with me. Here's an example of what the stats page looks like.
People are also free to use the space to make an actual webpage if they like (rather than just hosting files there). My default is to set people up with an FTP account but if you want something with My SQL or something we can talk. :)

ETA2: I'm actually out of town this weekend. I will have internet access to answer questions and/or set up accounts, it just might take me a bit before I can answer.

ETA3: This offer is still open to anyone. If you'd like to take me up on it, can you please leave me an email address so I can forward the info to you. Also, please let me know if you'd like the website to have a different name than your journal name (otherwise I'll default to your journal name).

Fandom Supports Scarleteen!
scarleteenfans
Scarleteen.com has been the premier online sexuality resource for young people worldwide since 1998. Countless members of various fandoms have used information from Scarleteen when making fanworks, as well as in our own lives. They were there when we needed them. Now they need us.
Offer or bid on fanworks to support the best sex ed site on the web!


The awesome garden_hoe21 is running this comm, and while I'm not sure if I'm going to offer anything (I still owe adamaddict_rh a podfic from January) it's definitely worth checking out!

Anyone who follows me on Twitter was there with me last Tuesday (and probably joined in) on my huge moaning/wailing/flailing over the "new Delicious".

I knew that the Delicious take over was happening and I was pretty wary about any changes, but I never imagined that the changes would be so drastic so fast. God.

This is such a huge loss to fandom. Delicious as it is right now is completely unusable for most fans. See this post by kronos999 for the details. I know that Delicious plans to bring back a lot of the missing features but who knows how long that'll take, or how good the new old features will be?

As seperis said, "This isn't the equivalent of either time we got new management at LJ--and Livejournal, you realize you are officially going to be many people's new perfect standard of changeover, right? No, seriously, you are. People are going to be saying how awesome and wonderful and sensitive you were!"

To make matters worse, there isn't really a Delicious clone for people to flock to (like we did to GJ/IJ/DW). There's Pinboard, which seems like the site with the best features and has a fandom friendly owner, however fandom is never going to fully embrace a site without free accounts. Too many people won't be able to afford it or can't pay for things online. A lot just won't pay/put the money out there. Others, who are lurkers won't adapt to it (because they won't pay for something that they're not adding content to).

Diigo is free and is similar to Delicious, however they censor links posted to their site.

AO3 has it's bookmarking, but even they have said that they're not a viable alternative at the moment. There's also the fact that AO3 is a little too fannish. I want something a little more flexible from a social bookmarking site. There are a lot of things that I use fannishly that aren't specifically fanish. Like useful sites for researching fic ideas or meta that applies to fandom but isn't written by fandom. Or hell, just the random bookmarks I want to add that aren't related to fandom at all.

There are other Delicious-like options, but they just feel so off to me, and seem much more focused on web 2.0 where pictures or video supersede things link tag visibility.

There've been a couple places where people have talked about building a fandom Delicious, most of which have centralized to working with the Slash Report team. I'm really seriously considering joining their efforts (I'm not really a coder but I'm a good organizer!) but I need to examine my time commitments before I fully commit.

Back in December, when news of Delicious being "sunset"ed surfaced, my roommate kronos999 started seriously talking about building a fannish Delicious (which she dubbed "fic.ticio.us" in her head). She started researching and learning about new kinds of code (she does have programming experience, just not much with web programming - She's since joined the team headed by Slash Report).

We (kronos999, our other roommate diurnal_lee and I) also spent a lot of time in the months after that first announcement talking about what we'd want a fannish Delicious to have. Everything from basic functionality all the way to pie-in-the-sky-what-we'd-add-if-we-won-the-lottery-and-could-hire-a-team-of-coders-full-time.

We've had many conversations about it but, with what happened to Delicious, we thought it'd be a good idea to actually get them organized and written down. Our living room is currently filled with multicoloured sticky notes and whiteboards covered in ideas (in a spectrum of do-ability). :P

So, without further ado, here's our ideas. Please feel free to throw in your own ideas, or talk about any of our ideas that don't work for you in the comments.

( Basic, Must-Have Features )

The above features would ideally be there for rollout. Delicious already had most of those features and I'm sure there will be other basic features that Delicious had that I'm forgetting that would be included too (although feel free to remind me what they are). The next sections are add ons. Some could be implemented rather easily, others are OMG amazing features that for practical purposes are almost impossible (at the moment!).

( Advanced Features )

So yeah, those were the features we thought up. What do you think?

I actually started writing this email while in the airport on my way to Vividcon and even then it was super late! I think it's time I finally post it :P

So back in June cantarina emailed me that a couple podfic fangirls were having a get together, and would I be interested in joining them. That was kind of in the middle of my work stress so I welcomed the excuse to get away and said "hell yes!"

The only problem was that the get together was being held on a Wednesday 5 hours from where I live.

( Getting the Time Off )

( Podfic Fangirls! )

So, back in January, I made a post with my podficcing plans for the year.

I... haven’t exactly kept to that schedule very well, but I thought that since we’re now about halfway through the year, that I’d update my plans and list what I’ve done.

( Accomplishments (so far) )

( Things Currently on my Plate )

( Things I Will Definitely Do, but Haven’t Started Yet )

( Things That Will Probably Get Done, but Also Haven’t Been Started Yet )

Based on my original schedule I was planning on podficcing 13 podfics this year for a total of ~20 hours. According to the schedule, by tomorrow, I was supposed to have podficced 9 podfics at ~12 hours. In reality I’ve podficced 12 podfics for a total of ~8 hours. Which... doesn’t actually look that far off from schedule, but 4 hours of podfic is a big difference. I’ve got to get my rear in gear and keep on top of this!

I actually started this post on Friday but was including a section titled "Things I Would Like To Do, But Unless I Win The Lottery I’m Unlikely To Get Done Any Time Soon (If Ever)" but it was sooooo long, like probably at around 50 fics when I gave up and deleted it because, yeah, at that point it was getting kind of pointless. Still, I would like to podfic some Cook/Archie fics, there’s a sad lack of S7 podfic. :(

It feels like forever since I've made an actual, non-podfic post. Although, I can't really call this post a non-podfic one :P

Just an FYI, I've mostly been hanging out on Twitter lately, if you're on there and want to follow me, I'm @paraka12.

I've been feeling kind of stressed lately and oddly enough, half of that has been fandom related, with the other half being work related.

( Work Stuff )

( Podfic Meta Stuff )

( Podbang Woes )

( NaNoWrimo )

( Halloween (with pics!) )

Last year I dressed up as Donna Noble for the party, this year, I'm totally going as Adam Lambert :D When kronos999 was trying to think of what to go as, I suggested she wear plaid and we could go as Kradam but then we decided she was too tall to be Kris (I'm 5'5" she's 5'10" - taller than Kris :P).

It seems like forever since I've made a post just for the sake of posting. I haven't really been on LJ that much in the past year. I have been pretty active in Twitter if anyone wants to friend me there (I'm paraka12 over there).

I'm seriously thinking of giving up any claim to the thought of a RL from now until the end of the year and just devoting myself entirely to fannish things. God. I have issues with over commiting. Seriously.

Fannish things I'm currently working on:
-Running multipodicity (things are kinda of quiet right now, but I'm anticipating some crazy pinch hits near it's end)

-Signed up for podbang. Twice *winces* I did it last year and it was awesome. Although this year I'm pretty much only into Kradam but I signed up as part of grou slashpad so I'm likely going to have to do something non-AI for that one.

-I offered myself up over at help_pakistan

-Still slowly working on (this is not) a statement (seperis mentioned tonight that she has about 50k written in sequels, so if I plan on podficing this 'verse, I better get my ass in gear). I'm hoping that when I go back to this I can get it to move a little more smoothly. I was having trouble getting some of the dialogue to work, since things that were easy to follow visually were getting a bit confusing in the podfic, but I spoke to seperis about it at Vividcon and she gave me the go ahead to make edits to the text where needed. Yay! for extra dialog tags.

-I've also started to podfic Husband Revealing Magical Lemonade. When I asked permission, I mentioned I probably wouldn't have time until December/January but I just couldn't wait to get started.

-I've somehow managed to start organizing a multi person anthology podfic of oldspice_kinkmeme fics. *blinks*

-Slashpad is also slowly working on a 100+K SGA podfic. I have no idea when it'll be done though. At this rate? Never.

-I spent last night trolling through the lastes aianonlovefest prompts and picking a couple interesting ones out and may try my hand at one of them to get me into the groove of writing fic because next weekend is 3 day novel! and I think I'm going to try and get some of that Kradam love at first sight touch fic written.


So yes, I have a lot of fannish stuff on the go right now :S So when, at work, my boss sent out an email asking for people to do overtime, I just deleted it. Then she pulled me aside and was all "but you're the best at this, are you sure you can't make some time?" And because I have issues with over commiting, I agreed to take on an extra project for over time. Except I have no time for it! The only day this week I could do it was today. I was given about 200 lines to crossrefernce. In the two hours of overtime I did today, I got about 10 lines done. Kill me now. This project needs to be done next week and at this rate I'd have to give up sleep to get it done. But that's not everything. Monday, I'm leaving for Guelph straight after work because on Tuesday raxhel is defending her Master's thesis! Which means I have Tuesday off. And Wednesday is the first day I'm volunteering at a place called Voice Print. So it's due Friday and I'll be able to work on it Thursday.
*sigh* Which means I'll likely spend this Sunday at work (I can't go in Saturday since I'm having friends over for a party).

Seriously, I'm so screwed.

So every once in a while I remember that I can check out my website stats and end trolling through them out of curiosity. It's always interesting, for example to see why certain sites link to you. Or to see what kind of search terms were used to find your site. Some of them can be really wierd. Like someone found my site using the search term fruit head photo WTF? I don't even know why that search term would point towards my site. *iz confuzzled*

Or while looking through the referrer links I saw that one lead back to a rec of one of my vids. It was an older rec for one of my more obscure vids and as I read it, it made me wonder if I had seen the rec before, only to hit the comments and find out I was like the only one to comment on the rec :P

And, since I'm looking at stats, I took a look at my YouTube stats as well. YouTube has such different standards when it comes to vids than LJ that it always kind of boggles my mind. On LJ my most popular vid, by far was Hurt. While Hurt doesn't do badly over there (unlike, say my Vance vid or Open Your Eyes), it's not really that popular either.
On the other hand, the two vids that I put together in the most slap dash way (there were deadlines involved and two due at once!) are my most popular ones. Justin's Hair at almost 80K views and Lovers at almost 40K views (and that's saying something since YouTube took it down for copyright violations like 2 years ago). God, had I known that Hair was going to turn out to be so popular, I definitely would have taken greater care when making it. It kind of makes me cringe to think that that's the vid I'm most... "famous" for.

So, I love me some podfic. I listen to it a lot at work. So this morning I was going through the new podfics that have been posted since yesterday (why yes, I download daily, that might be why I have over 30GBs of it on my work computer) and saw that someone (or rather, a group of someones) did a podfic of Misha Collin's Twitter posts.

Oh fandom and Misha, never stop being awesome :D

(I haven't listened to it yet, so I can't tell you how good it is, but just the idea seems awesome to me :P)