Intro post

Feb. 2nd, 2020 08:57 pm
sailorptah: Animated waterfall. (fountain), By <lj user="deadflowers5">
My active journal is the one you're looking at. My active blog is [profile] erinptah (Humanist + Humorist on Wordpress). Locked personal posts are found here on DW; weekly roundups of all the fanworks I've posted around the Internet are on Wordpress. All other content is mirrored between both.

But I'm A Cat Person is a webcomic about magical shifting battle monsters and the humans who are just trying to get on with their lives. Updates M-W-F, with periodic contests and freebies mixed in. Check it out. And don't miss the archives of And Shine Heaven Now, the world's second-most-popular Hellsing-related comic.

Other places I update regularly are [personal profile] ptahrrific (fanfiction and mixes), sailorptah@dA ([fan]art), and F@#k Yeah, Iambic Pentameter @ tumblr (rhymes, memes, and miscellaneous reblogs). You can keep up with all of the above via Facebook as well.
sailorptah: Two women kissing, under the text "COLLEGE graduate, and still a LESBIAN." (college lesbian), 2010/05/22.  Art is from Maka-Maka.
Lesbian Megathread! A massive list of every fandom and canon people could think of offhand "that has: 1. Canon lesbians! and/or 2. Notable femslashy subtext, and/or 3. A fandom with a lot of femslash!"

First fanfic you ever wrote? Adorable. Later, stories of how people found their way into fandom/LJ.

Favorite lines, from the inspirational to the awesomely silly.

From video game fandoms: how to write fic with protagonists who are silent in canon.

Favorite kinds of AUs, and best and worst fandoms for creating them. The latter thread makes a nice observation about "fandoms where it's fun to write the characters in AUs" and "fandoms where it's fun to write the setting as a base AU for other characters."

Your fandom's lovable quirks. Tales of ESL fandoms.
sailorptah: Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman. (madoka), By me, text from Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?, images from Madoka.
Got a NicoNico account this afternoon, and jumped right in to the livestreaming as soon as it opened (half an hour before the show began, just to give us all time to warm up). There's a sidebar for the last few hundred comments (25 minutes to go, visitor count is 7,777), and so far it's a grand mix of PMMM spoilers, not-quite-related spoilers (Joan of Arc dies! Snape kills Dumbledore! Darth Vader is Luke's father!), pervy comments, MLP references, crossovers, 4chan memes, shipfights, and someone capslocking the Pokemon song.

I have iffy feelings about the dub based on the trailer. Too much fake-high-voices. We will see if that holds up as the episode goes on.

Fifteen minutes to go. Visitor count: 8,903.

Ten minutes to go. 10,819. "Would you give your laifu for your waifu?" / earnest debate over whether Homura is Anthy or Utena / now there's Rickrolling / someone keeps C&Ping "GIRLS CAN'T LOVE GIRLS" / "DO NOT THROW SOULS" / someone says this is the Director's Cut, will have to see if I can spot it / "Spoiler: Jesus is a magical girl."

Cutting from this point on, because there will be spoilers. )
sailorptah: Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman. (madoka), By me, text from Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?, images from Madoka.
Live screening of the first episode of the Madoka Magic dub begins in just under half an hour!

Liveblogging this like a boss. *nods*
sailorptah: Don't forget.  Always, somewhere, someone is fighting for you.  As long as you remember her, you are not alone. (You Are Not Alone), By me, text from Puella Magi Madoka Magica
preview

Original layout using this Creative-Commons-licensed Manhattan panorama. Screenshot is of the version with the old image; live preview has the new image.

Live preview | Screenshot

Title: New York Evening
Credit to: [personal profile] sailorptah
Base style: Tabula Rasa
Type: Full layout in CSS
Best resolution: 1024x768+
Tested in: Firefox, Chrome
Features: customizable, fixed width, 2 columns






To use:
  1. Go to Select Journal Style and set your theme to one of the Tabula Rasa styles: 2 columns, sidebar on the right.

  2. Go to Customize Journal Style: Custom CSS, untick Use layout's stylesheet(s), and copy the contents of the above textarea into Use embedded CSS.

  3. Save and enjoy!


* I have more layouts in mind, but am running out of journals to showcase them on. If you install this layout and are willing to let me use your journal as the new "Live Preview" link, please let me know!

DW updates~

Feb. 4th, 2012 05:35 pm
sailorptah: You are interrogating this kitten from the wrong perspective. (Kitten)
DW now has OpenID claiming! So you can take imported comments associated with your LJ account and permanently attach them to your DW account. Mmmm, streamlining.

I didn't notice when this happened, but at some point they also implemented reading filters for your flist. A lot of my fic comms -- not to mention the mahou shoujo feeds from other fic sites (chronicled at [community profile] frillsofjustice) -- are now shunted off onto their own filter, so I can keep up with the rest of my reading list during busy times without generating zillions of "to read later" tabs.

There will be a personal-stuff update post...soon? Maybe? It's been kind of an exhausting week. But all to the good, no worries.
sailorptah: Sir Integra: keeping vampires from eating your dumb ass since junior high. (Integra), Credit unknown.
A case study of the perils of online identity, stark racial philosophies, and presumption. Short version: anon fest fic is praised for its Desi cultural reclamation and insider knowledge; the author turns out to be white; the praise is amended with something borderline backhanded. Look, we all agree that there are things privileged people can't pull off -- but when you bank almost everything ("99.9% sure") on a white author not being white, that's a pretty clear sign that your expectations may be due for revising.

Spinoff to the above: the vocabulary for identity-based categories of fiction. How do we circumscribe "fiction by women/queer people/people of ethnicity X", and what happens in the places where it doesn't overlap with "fiction that is supportive of women/queer people/people of ethnicity X"?

Femslash-seeker has a gut reaction against genderswapped m/m, offers it up for discussion. A lovely non-hostile discussion emerges about how people approach femslash and/or genderswap of all types.

The calling cards of harmful social-justice-painted crusading. Key themes: caring more about the fight than the cause, using buzzwords as shortcuts to flatten complicated topics, being unwilling to accept nuance or shades of grey. Which is not to say the meme itself is immune. The problems and proper usages of "educate yourself".

Meta and advice on writing sex. And the usual round of complaints about how there aren't enough f/f sex-writing guides. The few attempts I've seen either got shot down by "giving advice on how to write sex with generic women would be an infringement on my personal body!" or never made it beyond "Part 1: Diagram Of The Clitoris."

The oldest things people have complained about being spoiled for? Sherlock doesn't even come close. Other examples include Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus Rex, and the Trojan horse.
sailorptah: Sailor Moon faces down Galaxia (sailor moon), By mochi_iconage
Megaupload, the Hong Kong-based site I've been using for large-file storage (including fanmixes and fanvids), is down. The US government has messed with their DNS info, meaning the URL no longer works, and while theoretically it's still accessible by IP address, that's given me nothing but timeout errors.

Several people involved with running and promoting the website have been arrested in New Zealand, to be extradited to the US. It's still not entirely clear how solid the charges are with respect to (a) US law and (b) our extradition treaty with NZ.

Anonymous has lost no time in firing back, hacking involved sites (from the Department of Justice to the RIAA) right and left.

Here's a pretty good breakdown of the case as it stands, and this FFA thread is keeping tabs on new updates as they hit. Will probably be out-of-date within the next eight hours, but I'm going to be offline for much of the weekend. If you're reading this from The Future, do hit up Google to see what's happened since.

And for anyone who wants to complain that this, like PIPA or SOPA, is part of the Epic Battle between good moral people and Those Darn Pirates, let me drop a few timely links: PIPA co-sponsors and supporters violating copyright on the Internet and the author of SOPA violating copyright on the Internet.
sailorptah: Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman. (madoka), By me, text from Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?, images from Madoka.
preview

Import of the Sweet Blossoms theme on Wordpress.

Live preview | Screenshot

Title: Sweet Blossoms
Credit to: [personal profile] sailorptah
Base style: Tabula Rasa
Type: Full layout in CSS
Best resolution: 1024x768+
Tested in: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome
Features: customizable, fixed width, 2 columns




To use:
  1. Go to Select Journal Style and set your theme to one of the Tabula Rasa styles: 2 columns, sidebar on the right.

  2. Go to Customize Journal Style: Custom CSS, untick Use layout's stylesheet(s), and copy the contents of the above textarea into Use embedded CSS.

  3. Save and enjoy!


* I have more layouts in mind, but am running out of journals to showcase them on. If you install this layout and are willing to let me use your journal as the new "Live Preview" link, please let me know!
sailorptah: Sir Integra: keeping vampires from eating your dumb ass since junior high. (Integra), Credit unknown.
preview

Layout code modified from Just An Illusion by [personal profile] fania at [community profile] mentahelada.
Art by Kohta Hirano from the Hellsing manga.
Color scheme and graphics by yours truly.

Live preview | Screenshot

Title: Gunshots & Ashes
Credit to: [community profile] mentahelada & Kohta Hirano
Base style: Transmogrified
Type: Full layout in CSS
Best resolution: 1024x768+
Tested in: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome
Features: customizable, fixed width, 2 columns




To use:
  1. Go to Select Journal Style and set your theme to one of the Transmogrified styles.

  2. Go to Customize Journal Style: Custom CSS, untick Use layout's stylesheet(s), and copy the contents of the above textarea into Use embedded CSS.

  3. Save and enjoy!


* I have more layouts in mind, but am running out of journals to showcase them on. If you install this layout and are willing to let me use your journal as the new "Live Preview" link, please let me know!
sailorptah: Animated waterfall. (fountain), By <lj user="deadflowers5">
preview

Layout code modified from the DW-modified Elegant Grunge layout by Alis Dee ([personal profile] dee).
Color scheme and some graphics by yours truly.

Live preview | Screenshot

Title: Open Skies
Credit to: Mostly [personal profile] dee, frankly.
Base style: Transmogrified
Type: Full layout in CSS
Best resolution: 1024x768+
Tested in: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome
Features: customizable, fixed width, 2 columns




To use:
  1. Go to Select Journal Style, make sure you have a Reading Page Title chosen, and set your theme to one of the Transmogrified styles.

  2. Go to Customize Journal Style: Text and set Link text to read comments to 1 // #. Repeat with Link text to read comments on a friends view entry.

  3. Go to Customize Journal Style: Custom CSS, untick Use layout's stylesheet(s), and copy the contents of the above textarea into Use embedded CSS.

  4. Save and enjoy!


ETA: Code has been tweaked thanks to testing from [personal profile] valiha (details in comments). New version Open Skies 1.1 is now in the textarea above.

* I have more layouts in mind, but am running out of journals to showcase them on. If you install this layout and are willing to let me use your journal as the new "Live Preview" link, please let me know!
sailorptah: Waldo and Carmen Sandiego. (waldo-carmen), By angel_gidget on LJ
How to talk about gender with first graders in a way that gets them thinking and not bullying.

Musings on fantasy armor versus female figures, as crafted by someone who actually makes armor.

A history of Chicago's underground abortion services in the years before Roe v. Wade.

A cryptographer takes a closer look at Biblical Greek and inadvertently discovers that Paul's only clear condemnation of homosexuality...was a mistranslation.

Debunking the myth that pre-colonial Africa had no homosexuality. With research!

The tensions faced by a mixed-race family.

How do you keep a language from dying out? Make it available to text in, as is being done with the Mande family of West African languages and hopefully plenty more to come.

Next time someone tells you they support traditional marriage, send them this link: records of Christian same-sex weddings from the 300s through the 1600s.
sailorptah: Don't forget.  Always, somewhere, someone is fighting for you.  As long as you remember her, you are not alone. (You Are Not Alone), By me, text from Puella Magi Madoka Magica
The bad news: The [profile] femmeslash_bang draft deadline, as well as the artist/story matching period, were supposed to be weeks ago. The mods have gone MIA.

The good news: In spite of the amazing disappearing deadlines, my WIP is still making progress. I got on an unexpected writing spree the past couple of days (possibly because I have at least three other things to procrstinate on), and am up to 21,000 words -- over the Big Bang minimum, even though the plot will probably demand about 40K more before it's properly over.

I just have so many feelings about these characters, you guys. Madoka, she doesn't even realize it, but when the chips are down she's clever, and so much more resourceful than she gives herself credit for. Sayaka's crazy-brave, and I mean that exactly: she looks fearless because she's reckless, and laughs off dangerous situations to cover the fact that she's compelled to dive into them, for reasons she probably doesn't even consciously recognize. And Homura, tragic woobie of my heart. The version I'm writing is hanging by the thinnest of threads, and isn't going to get a break any time soon.

Working title is Persephone. The rhythm would be better if it were slightly longer, but all the variations I've thought of (Persephone's Wish? Persephone's Choice?) sound too simplistic, too obvious.

The related news: I'm also currently illustrating a story in [community profile] polybigbang, which is maybe the fifth Big Bang I've been an artist for. I've seen people get upset that the rhetoric around Big Bangs tends to favor writers -- "this is a challenge where I get free art as a reward for writing such a big long story," for instance, rather than something more balanced. And, yeah, I wouldn't begrudge anyone who's put off by that.

The thing is, when I sign up as an artist, the thought process is something like "this is a challenge where I get free art prompts for doing absolutely nothing!" If both writer and artist are approaching it as a way of using the other, it evens out in the end.

I do miss the prospect of being guaranteed art for Persephone, but I don't think I'll hold the story in reserve until another yuri-friendly Big Bang comes around. With all the cliffhangers, it's probably better suited to chapter-by-chapter posting anyway. *fly hands, mad scientist laugh*
sailorptah: Sailor Moon faces down Galaxia (sailor moon), By mochi_iconage
Every journal where I forward-dated a post to be an introduction now has to be updated...I always set them to 2012 XD

It's also high time to clear out all my remaining FFA links (although not nearly all my tabs) from last year. Ring in the new!

Professions roll call, in which people discuss how accurately their jobs are portrayed in fiction. The best subthread is from the archaeologist: "And yeah, pop culture totally gets that one right. You would not believe how many Nazis I have to punch just to get on site...."

Thoughts on the general fannish shift to anonmemes. There's the usual debate over whether dogpiling in social-justice drag is a common problem or overblown, plus a couple of other theories.

The other kind of fannish conversation it's hard to have non-anon: on the social dynamics of BNFdom and friendship.

More on Madoka.

Existential flame war rides again. And once more. And in shorter and more seasonal doses.

A discussion of fanmixes, longer than previous ones the meme has tried to raise up.

Replace a word or syllable in your favorite quote with "pants".
sailorptah: Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman. (madoka), By me, text from Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?, images from Madoka.
The latest [site community profile] dw_news post has lots of information for people who just moved from a certain other journaling site, as well as exciting updates in general. This welcome-link pack by [personal profile] rydra_wong has a shortlist of good official stuff to follow.

FFA thread with translation of LJ's comment announcement, with discussion. Though that's the main inspiration for the current wave of moves, it would be nice if people were more aware of recent security and staff issues, with similar reports going back years.

A tutorial for setting up LJ layouts with your DW account, made simple. Check out [community profile] dreamwidthlayouts for other pretty options.

For people still on LJ, if you want a simple replica of the old comment look (say, if you're running a kink meme): FFA has code that does it smoothly and prettily. XMen_FirstKink has worked out similar code as well. If anyone has recs for other such layouts, please leave links!
sailorptah: Cranes (christmas), By <lj user="jai">
A joyous Yule, festive Christma-Hanu-Rama-Ka-Dona-Kwanzaa, and merry Joelmas to one and all!

Enjoy your vacations and pumpkin pie :D
sailorptah: Cranes (christmas), By <lj user="jai">
Spending the holidays with the family, marathoning the box set of all the Harry Potter movies and being lightly mauled by Ziggy Stardust (that's the cat). Good times.


2011 First Lines Meme:

January: I've come to the conviction that nobody actually manufactures New Year's commemorative spectacles or paper hats. They spring forth fully formed once any given party is in full swing, in a kind of celebratory parthenogenesis.

February: Another round of poems - all in one thread this time. (One of them is seventeenth-century tentacle porn. In couplets. No, really.)

March: Continued from yesterday's post: the conclusion of the adventures of The Steamypuff Girls.

April: Anyone have recommendations for good sites where you can sell used books? (And hopefully DVDs, CDs, etcetera.)

May: For example: several anons from extremely small towns tl;dr about the experience of growing up there.

June: This is a topic I've been pondering a lot recently. It's probably a natural result of following a bunch of Issue-based fandom comms, rec lists, and fests...but honestly, what spurred the post was a bunch of summaries that looked intriguing and thoughtful, leading into fics that were just bad.

July: Just spent my evening finishing off the ebook for But I'm A Cat Person #1, then the rest of the night promoting it everywhere I can.

August: Back in the land of the Internet after almost a week of sporadic access. Computer is groaning under the weight of all the tabs I have open, poor thing.

September: I've applied to grad school for library science, starting in the spring semester of 2012.

October: FFA's reputation in other Internet spaces. Very through-a-glass-darkly. Thread was frozen over contentious discussion of triggering events on other communities, so do tread carefully.

November: The OTW is the topic of the moment, with Yuletide and board elections on the horizon; and I'm glad the meme is around, because now that [community profile] metafandom is dead I have no good source for roundups of this stuff.

December: (To the tune of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen)
God Rest Ye, Unitarians


Will do the same meme for [personal profile] ptahrrific soonish.
sailorptah: Birds in a cage. (Birds), By <user name="motoric">
Two things:

1) The mods of [livejournal.com profile] femmeslash_bang appear to have evaporated. I brought 15,000 words to this ball and have no one to tango with.

On the other hand, maybe this is for the best. I'll have time to give the plot the thorough attention it deserves, and be able to space out the posting rather than dumping tens of thousands of words on the fandom all at once.

2) Due to a misreading of the rules, it turns out my most recent (and final) set of [community profile] hc_bingo fills was not in fact a complete set. A quick reshuffling turned it into 4/5 of an ordinary straight line bingo...but now I have to come up with a "heat stroke" fill, and finish it within the next ten days.

So, um. Requests, anyone?

February 2012

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