DreamWidth is where it's at, you guys!

Last weekend, I had the fun experience of attending a small literary science fiction convention (which ran Friday night through Sunday).

Although I did know a lot of people at the con, none of them were heading out for lunch at the same time that I was on Saturday, so I ended up having lunch with a total stranger. And that was great! We chatted about our interests and our histories; we discovered lots of commonalities and interesting differences. At the end of lunch, I asked if she was interested in staying in touch, and she asked me if I was on social media. I said, "Um, I don't do Facebook, but I do have a sort of online journal..." and she said, "Well, I have a journal too, on a platform called DreamWidth." (!!) So we added each other to our circles.

And then at the after-party on Sunday night, I ended up in a long, delightful conversation about fanfic and slash with two more people who were total strangers to me, and this time I wasn't even surprised at the end when I asked about keeping in touch, and they both volunteered their DreamWidth names.

(Hello, new friends!)

I mean, strictly speaking I guess it's not that surprising that people who have a lot of other things in common with me also turn out to like the same online journal platform that I like. But collecting three new DreamWidth contacts in two days through in-person interactions definitely made me feel like DreamWidth is a major part of fandom now!

To infinity, and beyond!

A little while ago, somebody in my circles posted about how they're taking a class in metaphysics for fun. They mentioned that the concept of different sizes of infinity had come up recently in their class, and that they found the concept really cool but that it had been presented too briefly for them to really understand what was going on with the math (particularly Cantor's diagonalization proof of the uncountability of the reals). So I popped in and said, basically, "I can explain that stuff!" and they said, essentially "Hooray, please do!" and so I did!

I had so much fun writing it up, I figured I'd share it here too for posterity. Maybe there are other people in my circles who are also interested in infinity! (In particular, I just found out that my little brother has started reading this journal, and I know that he's into math and not into fanfic, so let's just say that I'm throwing him a bone.)


( Here there be math. )

Yahoo groups shutdown: my progress in history-preservation

First of all, morgandawn's post seems to be emerging as a central organizing/info point, so I'll link to it again: Yahoo Groups Shutting Down - Dec 14, 2019 (UPDATED)

As you'll recall, my particular urgent interest in this is that I'm the list admin for a fannish Yahoo group. The list hasn't been active for a very long time, but I'd hate to see its history disappear.

So here's what I've done so far:

1) I've downloaded all the messages, files, and photos for the fannish group for which I am the admin. I used PG Offline. I subsequently exported the message data in all of the formats which the program offered. I also discovered that I could open the .db3 file with SQLiteStudio, a free and open-source program. So I am satisfied that the data is now safe (on my hard drive at least).

2) I've reached out to the Open Doors project. I've been in communication with a volunteer. In a message they sent me a few hours ago, they mentioned "We are also working on a news post with more information which we hope will be posted within the next day or two." So that's good to know, and I'll watch for that.

3) I made a user account at Fanlore, and created a page for the group: RatBoat. It was pretty easy, actually!

In a way it was surprising that the page didn't already exist, since a lot of related entities did already have pages. The founders of the list had a page, the fanzines the list was originally created to talk about had a page, the archive that all fics posted to the list were archived to had a page—but the list did not have a page! Well, now it does.

I wasn't able to footnote anything, since the info I entered was all based on the messages from the list, which are not linkable. The fact that I coincidentally re-read the entire message log in a fit of nostalgia literally three weeks ago was helpful, though!

4) I made a DreamWidth community for the fandom: once_a_thief. I mean, why not? Sure the mailing list has been dead for many years, but I figured I should at least make a place where people could go, if they wanted to.

5) I sent a message to the mailing list itself, to let any members who are still receiving messages know what's going on.

Text of my message, for the record:( Read more... )

And that's about all that I can think of to do, for now! There's still very much the question of what I should/can do with the whole archive, but I think that I'm going to wait quietly for a bit and see what emerges in terms of community standards for archiving. There's the question of the fic, and of the conversation logs, and there are some image files, too.