in the wrong line

Travel is complete. Jet lag is zombie-fying. Might take me a few days to get myself back into a routine including online communications & stuff. Voting tomorrow though!! Yay! I missed the last General Election because my overseas ballot didn't get mailed, so I am very happy and excited to be voting tomorrow. \o/ Also, Glee on Thursday!

Bah! I am usually good at patience, but waiting for the 4x04 torrent right now is exceedingly uncomfortable. But, I managed to stay away from all sources of potential actual spoilers while the episode was airing. Spent my time cleaning things, but now that's done, it's back to waiting while everyone else knows what's happened and I don't.

I've fallen a bit behind with both writing and comment replies this week (distracted by the DNC), so I'll be getting to things a bit later than I'd like while I focus on getting my latest (but apparently not last) chapter of ITWOS done.

I have a draft, but it sucks, and it looks like I'm not going to have any trouble getting to 8 parts to satisfy my Fibonacci pattern. :) I swear, finishing this fic is like approaching an asymptote. Or, it's like there's this weird decompression algorithm my brain runs every time I go from outline to prose. To think I thought it was only going to be ~20K at most when I started! Oh my god.

Oh! And! ( Very brief Kurt wardrobe meta )

Maybe I've simply been on the internet far too long (I remember when images were the newest, bleeding edge browser feature!), but when tagging came about on livejournal, I thought it was awesome. Then Twitter did the hashtags, and that was neat-o (especially when google picked it up with G+, too), and tumblr has its system (which I don't fully understand), and AO3 implemented tagging awesomely too--it's great to help you find the fics you're looking for. I love that you can nest tags on Dreamwidth (presumably lj has this too), and it's a really great way to organize and make accessible content for readers and users--and yourself.

Except now it seems like people have lost the plot and forgot what tags are actually for. They're for organizing and flagging data, so when people put commentary in their tags, or use their tags for a summary, or pretty much tag things with any single use tag they will never use again (and neither will anyone else), it's bad practice and unhelpful and it makes me a little bit cranky. A good tag has semantic content: it's descriptive and helpful and points the reader to the content it describes, and it has the potential to be used more than once.

I say all this knowing full well I'm terrible about tagging consistently, and I can get all kinds of dysfunctionally obsessive about it, but I do try.

ETA this is mostly in response to seeing tumblr style tagging on AO3.

Seriously though, I am way too prone to this:( XKCD: Duty Calls )

I am giving myself a deadline for finishing ITWOS: I want it done before the season 4 premiere. I know once it's finished, I'll be spending some time doing a final edit to pull up its socks and fix continuity problems and maybe organize it into chapters instead of the unwieldy mess it is presently, but by September, I don't want to still be writing new prose for it. So, fingers crossed!

( and other blather )

What is this web design trend of low contrast pastel text on pastel backgrounds in tiny tiny fonts? Has no one heard of accessibility in good web design? I mean, it's an improvement on neon purple cursive fonts on dark, repeating, non-tiling background images with animated torches bracketing every header tag, but still. It's 2012, folks should know better.

Argh, my eyes. To writers who do this where they post stories? You're reducing your potential readership.

My brain has been an absolute disaster area the past week or so. Still troubleshooting the problems, but things feel like they are slowly going in the right direction.

Anyway, caught up with both new episodes as of this morning, and pretty much loved both uncritically. Not that there weren't things to critique, they just left me in a happy place I don't wish to disturb too much, because Glee is -- at least in part -- to me about that happy place, opening yourself up to joy.

( mostly personal thoughts )

...is weird. I feel simultaneously overexposed and drowned out. Weirdness. I'm still not sure how it works. Does it work?

Trying to psyche myself up to go write an intro post and properly join openingyourselfuptojoy because there are cool, smart, nice people there. I just have so much anxiety about Glee fandom generally. Possibly because the first Glee comm I stumbled upon & erroneously thought was some kind of hub for Glee fans was the ONTD Glee comm on lj. Oi. It just made me sad and sadder and scared.

Courage, Self!