Drowning Nor Waving

After eight years, I decided maybe it wasn't the best idea anymore to have my professional journal named after the elf from that MUD I was playing when I was fourteen.*

Which is to say that this LJ has been renamed to better reflect my more boring, bespectacled, round-ears self. I do this with a bit of sadness**, since I still remember when merriehaskell was fairmer and cmpriest was wicked_wish. But it was kinda time.

The $15 I just paid LJ for the privilege should ensure that there's an automatic forward on links, but y'know. Adjust links accordingly etc. etc.

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And in other news, I know I owe you guys a couple Iron Chef Farmshare posts, and will be doing that tonight or tomorrow morning. Honest.


*True fact, that. Also, if anyone's looking for me under that name by now, they've been trying for a really long time and probably won't be by.

**Prufrockian sadness, even!

Hi, folks. Hope you had a good week.

I am not quite reading flist yet -- I still have a great many things that need to be done by next Saturday, and I'm sort of easing into posting here, like one tests foods in an elimination diet -- but This Is Just To Say there will be posting this week.

This is also just to say that one of the first large consequences of the Week Off the Internet is that I just pared down my friendslist big time. By big time, I'm talking by about half: 140-odd people and communities.

I'm hoping this won't be a cause for upset for anyone. This has a great deal to do with how I've been managing my time and my general investment in Things Internet (and I still find myself uncomfortable with the idea of reading filters; sorry) and the fact that I want to change both those things. There is, sadly, really just too much Internet.

If you are bothered, I'm sorry for that. It was very easy for journals to be cut, and very, very hard to stay.

Thanks, folks.

Apparently there's a desire, if you are friends with an author and the author receives a negative or less than enthusiastic review and is upset and says so on their internet platform of choice, to jump straight to "Well, that reviewer (and all of their ilk!) drinks pee and eats small blonde children and farts anti-rainbows anyway! What do they know? Once I saw them doing this thing with a goat--well, I'll tell you about that in e-mail. Slur slur slur!"

Let me put forward that, in a genre like SFF where the writers are the reviewers are the editors are the people who work in marketing? That may not be a productive urge. Reader, it is guaranteed to offend and make others sad, and then we'll just have a cascading effect of entries where someone is sad. Also we could get into the thing where stuff that really stings is stuff that someone fears is true themselves, without an external source having to lend credence to it, so saying someone else is a poopyhead won't exactly help silence that little voice that is causing the distress.

So, well...can we do the thing where we're supportive to our friends without wailing on someone else, on the internet, in their full view? I like that thing better.

This has been a test of your Internet Broadcast System.

For various reasons, probably half of them biochemical (I have fallen down hard on the caffeine/sugar/sleep cycle front), I find myself feeling very quiet this week. I have things to say composed in my head, but they are private. Or, more accurately, they are for private conversations and spaces, and not so much for the internets.

I think this means I need a space to read books, get my diet and sleep cycle back on track, and...be quiet inside. For the half that's not biochemical.

Regular service will likely resume after the weekend.

Okay, sister married now. Wedding was very, very nice.

I can has an hawkwing_lb.

Maybe...see you more Wednesday-like? *g*

No, this is not about writing. Sorry. I have noticed people drifting out on that count, being my copious lack of talking about writing in the past few months. All I can say is that I'm really really stupidly busy right now, and once I'm settled into my still-fresh new dayjob and my sister's married off and my convocation's done (hello, autumn of major life changes) I will get back to the serious business of making books, yelling at them, and documenting this whole process for your pleasure.

This will be in approximately ten days to two weeks. Mark your calendars.

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In the meantime, had a stray thought last night about social media (while poking around Facebook between turns in the epic death battle Scrabble game I'm playing with matociquala, stillsostrange, and tanaise).

I wonder if, in about ten years, people will just stop changing their names upon marriage.

Why? Well, it's already on the way out in North America for various social reasons. But the question is, well, one of social networking. Name changes make it ridiculously difficult to locate someone in the Internetverse; it's your best search string, the centre of your unique identifier -- not the whole of it for most people, but the centre. If you don't already have the information of the change, it's not impossible to corroborate that this is, in fact, the same person; there's always marriage announcements, things like that. But it's considerably harder than it would be otherwise, and you rely on people's archiving, on persistence and luck.

In looking through friends-of-friendslists last night, it occurred to me that there are people from most of my life I may not get a chance to reconnect with anymore. They've married and changed their names, and tracking them down will be difficult at best. The unbroken paper trail, data trail, public narrative of one's life is severed, at least partially, when you change your name. It's the same reason we keep our old e-mail addresses or send out change-of-address massmail when we change them; that LJ thought to automatically redirect links from an old LJ name to the new one upon a change; that we tend to stick to the same online handles/identities. So people can find us. If they come looking, we are here.

What I'm betting is that for those of us who grew up (to a partial degree, even) with that sense of...being receptive to connection, of carefully maintaining our data trail with either an eye to privacy or narrative completeness?

That's going to soon be more important than the social statement that changing one's family name at marriage is.

Now I just wait ten or twenty years and find out if I'm right.

As spring (hopefully) comes on the hills and valleys, the thoughts of young writers turn to giving each other awards.

That is to say, the deadline for nominating for The Hugos is midnight on Saturday (for attendees of this or last year's Worldcon), and the deadline for nominating for the Aurora Awards is approaching -- March 17th (for Canadians).

Since the field of Canadian-authored works is narrower, there's a great list of Aurora-eligible (and other award-eligible) works at The Canadian SF Works Database, which I have touted before and will again as a brilliant little idea.

Nominate early, nominate...well, not often, but tell your friends to do it too.

And watch her post that PSA without once! mentioning her own work!

*dances offscreen with a top hat and cane*

I appear to have gone out drinking with the girls Saturday night and then woken up, groggy-eyed and confused, next to Someone Else's Sick the morning after.

(It is ksumnersmith's sick. I sincerely hope that if it's shacked up with me, it's at least left her alone.)

So I am feverish and headachy and full of snot and having intermittent difficulties with things like spelling and balance. If you need something from me, now is not the time it will be happening. You will be notified when service resumes.