elz

( Season Finale )

On the subject of fall TV, who expected One Tree Hill of all shows to be getting renewed for a ninth season? I actually thought it had ended a year or so ago. And here's hoping SMG's new series doesn't suck. It sounds a bit... high-concept, which doesn't usually work out.

I keep starting posts and then failing to finish them, so maybe I should just aim to say less.

Community: ...some weeks, it's like this show is being broadcast from inside my brain. A++

Doctor Who: quite intrigued by the season's setup. My emotional investment in Amy and Rory as characters is much, much higher than my emotional investment in Eleven and River, but that's been working out well enough for me so far.

Game of Thrones: I haven't had a tv all year, and I didn't miss it until this show premiered. I finally read the whole book series last month, and I'm loving the adaptation.

( quick thoughts on episode 4 )

I have a bunch of Dreamwidth invite codes that I keep forgetting to post to the DW codesharing community - here they are, should they be useful to anyone!

EXJ3SXQR3YN2DAAAAGX2
C56XK5ECT4G5RAAAAGX3
5Y4YQD9NYQGTYAAAAGX4
QW7DE6783ZGNWAAAAGX5
JSTWW5A8DV4ZZAAAAGX6

( more codes )

I also have one AO3 invite, if anyone wants it. And lookit, there's a new, unofficial AO3 community on DW: ao3some

I'm elz at LJ and DW and elzj at Twitter and Tumblr, although I've never really used my Tumblr account. At some point, I think I just got social networking fatigue, where the energy required to figure out the posting and following etiquette on 12 different platforms and to decide what to post where began to exceed the energy I had to devote to it. At the moment, my most active account is on github.

I've been on Livejournal since 2002 - I'm sympathetic to what they're going through right now, and it would be terrible for fandom if the site ever went down permanently. But downtime is always a good reminder that you can never have too many backups of your data, and a reminder of how fragile online connections and history can be. Earlier in the year, I was going through some HP recs, and it's scary how many of those links are already broken and how much fic has already disappeared. As the kind of person who's always going back to reread old books and stories and watch movies I've seen a dozen times before, I get depressed by the idea of art, fiction and discussion just... going away.

OTW is having its March membership/fundraising drive!



Optimus Prime is counting on you.

Disclaimer: Optimus Prime did not personally approve this message. But I'd like to think he would.

Etsy users irked after buyers, purchases exposed to the world

I've bought things from Etsy, and I had no idea they had done this. Nothing I've ever bought there is remotely embarrassing, but jeez - who expects to have to opt out of "show my purchases to everyone" on an online store?

For the record, you can reclaim your privacy by updating your settings, but until you do so manually, your name, email, purchases and favorites are all public and searchable.

I'm catching up with two seasons of Warehouse 13. Claudia Donovan is my very favorite. That is all.

(Okay, also, when you've only previously seen the actor as Lord John Marbury, it's really hard to take McPherson seriously as an evil archnemesis. And the episode with Sean Maher and Jewel Staite is super cute.)

Anybody in the DC area interested in doing some moviegoing this weekend? There are, unusually, a bunch of things I'd really like to go see: The King's Speech, True Grit, Tangled. Possibly Black Swan. At some point, I need to pick one to start with.

I also need to do some long-delayed furniture shopping this weekend. And generally go kick around the city, since rumor has it that the weather will be nice, and I think I'm already developing cabin fever.

Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Equitable Agency - 16,000 words! Encyclopedia Brown! Awesomesauce! *flails a lot*

The better-performing Yuletide backup: http://archiveofourown.org/static/collections/yuletide2010/fandoms

(The Fandoms bit in the header is both a link and a dropdown menu.)

Those pages actually won't be going poof, so it's fine to link to them, and if you're trying to access a story on the regular archive and unable to get through, you can just stick the '/static/' bit in front of 'collections' in the url. They're also not adding to the hit count in real time, but we have a plan to go back and credit the story with the hits that it gets.

Also:
Chromatic Yuletide 2010
due South Seekrit Santa Exchange 2010

Deploy day at AO3 today! We're upgrading from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9, from Rails 2 to Rails 3, and from Apache and Passenger to Nginx and Unicorn. We're also replacing our authorization and authentication systems, changing our html parsing and sanitizing, and updating/replacing a whole bunch of third-party plugins and gems, as well as updating nearly every file in the codebase to work with the new version of Rails. The site will be down for an extended period of time while all the underlying software is switched over.

So, that's not stressful at all, haha! On the plus side: unicorns!

Basically, the number of users and works and the amount of traffic keeps increasing, and we hope to do some hardware upgrades, but in the meantime, we're doing what we can to improve performance and maintainability. (Plug: if you happen to know a lot about MySQL or memcached and you'd like to help us improve our system, we will love you and throw roses at your feet!) An enormous amount of work has gone into this deploy, and I feel like I did barely any of it - yay, team! And the yuletiders who've been helping out with testing are beyond awesome.

My goal for the next couple of weeks: see how much I can get done in terms of filtering and browsing. The filters are both unwieldy and a big drain on performance, so we've been looking to replace them for ages, and the upgrade should facilitate that. And we've been brainstorming about browsing for eons as well - its time has come! *resolve face* I try to use the archive as much as I can, and those things drive me crazy as well. Maybe more so than other people, even, since I stop to yell at myself every time I get frustrated. :)