elz

( YAAAAAAAAY )

And while I'm at it: Cabin in the Woods was also very enjoyable, in a very, very different sort of way. I'm pretty thrilled that Avengers is making buckets of money and Joss will hopefully get more opportunities to make things that don't get cancelled or shelved.

\o/

Great video on SOPA/PIPA:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

And some bizarro-world quotes from the MPAA on the matter:

Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.

So just to be clear, when the MPAA bribes Congress for the right to censor the internet, it's totally cool. When you black out your own site, that's an abuse of power!

Do remember to call your senators if you're in the US! This is some serious stuff with some potentially awful ramifications.

Posting here instead of as a comment on yuletide-admin because of length! These are all in the main collection.

( Yuletide works with 0 or 1 comments )

I'm really not up to reading anything about anything at this point (I'm building a blanket fort and hunkering down with this season of Merlin), but here are some fun behind-the-scenes stats from AO3:

• In October 2011, AO3 had almost 500,000 unique visitors and almost 19 million pageviews. Right now, there are over 2,600 people in our invite queue. (We hope to lower that soon!)
• We started doing self-hosted analytics in July, and the average number of pageviews per day has almost tripled just since then. We hit about 860,000 in a 24-hour period this Sunday, which was up from about 760,000 the Sunday before.
• Traffic is always highest on Sundays. Posting is generally more evenly distributed across the week, although it is a little higher on weekends.
• The most popular fandom on the site (by traffic) is Homestuck, and it has been for as long as I've been checking the stats.
• The fandom with the most works is (unsurprisingly) Harry Potter, with 15,495.
• If you want to rack up the hits, write a long Sherlock or XMFC AU WIP. Bonus points for mpreg or kidfic!
• Relatedly (apart from the mpreg, as far as I know), abundantlyqueer's Two Two Bravo Baker is its own phenomenon, with over 1,800 comments and almost 80,000 hits.
• About half the users of the archive (13,000) have posted at least one work.
• There are 602 works over 100,000 words long. The longest work in the site is 863,000+ words. And that one's a WIP! (Glass Houses by Viridian5 in Weiß Kreuz fandom)
• In addition to 25,000 users and 245,000 works, the site is home to 230,000 bookmarks and 10,000 series. There are about 200,000 tags in our system, of which about 100,000 are official versions.
• AO3 includes works written in 24 different languages, from Spanish (1,400+) and Russian (600+), to Latin (5) and Esperanto (10).
• Kudos were introduced on the archive last December, and in that time, people have left 1.1 million of them for one another! ♥

You may or may not know this, but in addition to founding OTW, Naomi Novik is also one of the most prolific coders behind the Archive of Our Own - she's been responsible for (among other things) the importing code, which allows you to migrate works over from other sites, the downloading code (omnomnom, delicious mobi files!), and the collections and gift exchange features, she's helped speed up the performance of the site by integrating new technologies, and over the last few months, she's put an enormous amount of time into a new tag set and nominations system, which should improve our internal processes by taking a lot of burdens off our tag wrangling team and which will also offer challenge runners a wider array of options. She's currently working with one of our front-end coders to revamp the site structure and appearance to make it more flexible and more accessible (this is coming soon!).

I've been working with Naomi for almost four years now, and she's been incredibly dedicated to the organization, especially given her other responsibilities - she checked into the coders' chatroom from the hospital while IN LABOR. She has a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm for fandom, and she's extremely effective at getting things done. She's also been on the OTW board previously, from 2007 to 2010, before taking a year off after having a baby, so she's familiar with the challenges and the workload - a lot of new board members get burned out, so having a couple of veterans in the mix is definitely a good thing. We currently have one board member who's been on since the beginning, two who started this year, and four open slots; five of the six candidates would be new to the board, and three of the six have experience as OTW committee chairs (Julia, Lucy and Naomi).

On a more personal note, I think that there were a lot of challenges this year that came out of not having any of our senior technical staff on the board: you're left with a game of telephone between board members and the organization's biggest project, which leaves a lot of room for miscommunication. And even when communication is flowing smoothly, I think it's as useful to have someone on the board who can speak authoritatively about the technical options and challenges associated with hosting/preserving fanworks and video as it is to have board members with legal and financial expertise. I also value the fact that she'll tell me when bad code or a bad idea could be better - that's not always an enviable task, but it's essential when we're trying to make the best tools for users. And she's been incredibly encouraging to me, as someone who didn't know anyone when I initially volunteered and who has come a long way with coding.

Basically, Naomi gets a lot done, I really enjoy working with her, and without her, none of the rest of us would be here. So that's my first recommendation. :)

Okay, I ended up creating the community I was posting about the other day:

fandev_central @ Dreamwidth

Feel free to ping me with any ideas!

So with the ongoing delicious fail, there are a lot of conversations out there about building our own version, and one thing that got me thinking about was how useful it might be to have group for developers/programmers/sysadmins in fandom so that it's easier for people to find each other when these sorts of "let's just build it ourselves!" projects come up and for people to ask for/share advice about projects they're currently working on.

So, two questions:

a) Would you be interested in such a thing?

b) If so, what would be the most useful format? DW community, website, forum, IRC channel, Google group, something else, more than one of the above? I'm happy to set something up - a DW comm would be easy, but would people use it?

So I experienced my first earthquake today! That was a bit unsettling - the office was definitely shaking quite a bit, and a few things did fall and smash, although thankfully no one was hurt. Having grown up in the NY area (I'm in DC now), the only real thing I know about earthquakes is that if we ever have a significant one, we're just all going to die, because things aren't built to withstand them on the east coast. Earthquake preparedness was thus never really big on the agenda. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on, and then I pretty much just stared at the light fixture wobbling over my head while attempting to determine when things were bad enough to warrant ducking under my desk. It ended before I figured that out. I did put my laptop away, lest anything fall on it, indicating that my priorities may be a little bit skewed.

The rest of the afternoon wasn't terribly productive, but we did have post-earthquake cupcakes. It took me over an hour to get home on the metro, but I had my Kindle with me, and the train wasn't crowded, so I can't complain.

So I'm catching up with fandom this evening, and I happened to be reading some posts about Game of Thrones and then watching thingswithwings excellent mainpain vid and reading her meta post about it, and it got me to thinking.

( Book spoilers for ASOIAF )

Note to self: go find a good Arya icon.