Fandom Snowflake 10 - We require more vespene gas

In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing?

Well, I touched briefly on this in Snowflake 02 - the Phenomenal Cosmic Power bit of being an information professional is that once you understand the structure and organization method of any given system, you can basically find anything, assuming that it's been indexed properly. The Internet being what it is, though, it may surface inferior resources at first pass when the search is just starting and generate a lot of frustration.

Here's a problem of the Internet and many other resources - keyword searching by itself is intuitive, but inefficient. Because keyword searches match the words themselves, and not their context. Natural language processing techniques and deliberate exclusion of common words from search results helps to make our keywords a little bit better, but for the most part, just typing in words isn't going to cut it, unless those words are in a unique combination that will point at a useful resource. Just typing in words will usually run a Boolean OR or Boolean AND search, looking just to see whether the words are there on the page and nothing more.

Google, for example, offers site search operators that will help you do more specific things with their engine. Which is nice.

What if, though, you could search the Internet in the same way that you can search academic resource databases like DIALOG? (Every librarian reading this is freely allowed to wince or make any other gesture of pain - many learned the power of searching on that system, often by cursing out the system for returning exactly what was requested and offering no help on how to make the search better. That DIALOG charges by how long you are connected in addition to any other elements you actually printed meant many hours of query construction went into building one excellent search, to be run and its records retrieved, selected, and printed as fast as humanly possible.) Some engines have wildcard or truncation support, most have "exact phrase" support, but very few, if any, handle proximity operations.

To supplement knowledge of the inner workings of search, it helps to know the terminology of what you're looking for. Sometimes, the whole point of the search is to find the right terms, which then yield the desired results. And for that, there are more than a few resources available.

Wikis tend to accrue lots of knowledge through their nature as "anyone can edit" devices. Any fandom that has been around long enough will likely coalesce around a few resources that manage to become encyclopedic and definitive through the luck of having an active group of contributors. In active shows and fandoms, the out-of-universe material is handled by Wikipedia, the in-universe material handled by a thematically-named wiki, and the meta handled by TVTropes. In older items, or finished series, both in and out of universe material may be handled or migrated over to static webpages, possibly with a forum attached for discussion, to archive the things that won't be kept on Wikipedia.

This isn't any sort of absolute rule, of course, but using those three items in combination with each other will probably net enough terminology to then go out to a search engine and sweep the wider world of fandom to find the details, speculation and fic that you want.

As for what engine I use, I've basically switched off Google as my primary search entity because I much prefer the bang syntax of DuckDuckGo that lets me search various sites directly instead of having to go out to their site, find their search bar, and then search that way. I also like that their results also include spaces for images and videos as well as text pages. DDG is a great engine with many helpful features, and can be best used in conjunction with learning a little bit on the Internet about how search engines work, so that you can structure your queries to include the most important information and use the appropriate operators to get the results you want. (Content creators: please don't neglect your metadata, your alt tags, or your semantic markup. It makes it easier for the engines to find you and put you in the place you want to be.)

As for hanging out and squeeing and actual fannish behavior, I'm pretty much Elsewhere, whether it's friends' spaces or websites devoted to deconstruction and review. The Slacktiverse has a nice list of assorted reviews and deconstructions.

So, mostly, my resources for you are things to help you search, wherever you may be searching, so as to more quickly find the perfect resource for yourself. Hopefully it's helpful.

Holiday Cheer? - 20 December 02015 - 10 January 02016

Starting, as befits the time, holiday-related cheer, epic holiday music, a mash-up of ballet and burlesque, cats that are ready for holiday cheer, cookie recipes, and marshmallow cats.

Then a reminder that the festivities and their accompanying social obligations are not a universal good for everyone.

A lack of motivation may be due to inefficient brain connections causing more energy and work to be expended in the decision-making process.

The skills acquired in one's hobbies and fannish interests are potentially worth putting on one's resume and being used to acquire jobs.

Fanfiction is a great gift to give during the holidays, and plenty of other times, too. If your traditional role is the filling of stomachs, there are plenty of delicious projects to create.

Having read a lot of books in a year, a librarian learns a lot about the art of reading books. #1 is essential.

Surviving the dark means finding beauty in it - having a big social group to do things with doesn't hurt, either. It may involve discarding or modifying tradition to the point that it seems unrecognizable. or it might be taking refuge with the other people who aren't celebrating. It could even involve poking some gentle fun at half-hearted attempts to celebrate or finding a prediction from the past that looks laughable today. As it turns out, there may be a genetic component to how strongly you feel your emotions.

Methods of disposing of holiday trees other than the landfill.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar focuses on the similarities of the Christians and the Muslims with regard to their December celebration. The United States House of Representatives decided to focus on similarities, too, in passing visa discrimination that would bar people from getting approval if one of their parents is classified as from a forbidden area, even if that parent has never lived in that place and neither has the child.

Something very unhappy indeed - a grand jury did not indict the officer that shot a child playing with a toy gun in a park, because they believed the police saw a threat and reacted appropriately to it. Black Lives Still Matter, and protesters filled the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport.

Black women need a more diverse representation in video games.

After being refused the care she needed, and refusing to leave until she received it, a woman died in the custody of the police called to remove her from the hospital. The number of failures compounds exponentially.

Learn from the ways structure benefits those more privileged than you, so that you can avoid replicating their mistakes in your own space.

Pastafarians in New Zealand area now able to perform wedding ceremonies. Rejoice.

A blog that replaces guns in the hands of Republicans with dildoes. Makes sense to me why someone might want to put the sex-negative death dealers in a different light.

Because they could not talk about the film before it released, cast members of The Force Awakens had to resort to other things to get through their interviews. Carrie Fisher and her dog, Gary, acquit themselves very funnily in this Good Morning America interview. Which is good, because otherwise she would have to cut somebody for their insistence that weight loss was necessary for her to go back to Star Wars. Actually, several people might have to be sliced to ribbons for those body comments.

Carrie Fisher also gives interviews as good as she takes them.

Having been in a movie that was all about black bodies, and lots of conversations about beautiful black bodies, Lupita Nyong'o chose a role where it would only be her voice on display.

A style guide to various forms of grammar and capitalization with regard to the Star Wars franchise.

If you are so inspired, there are lots of academies to learn lightsaber as a martial art.

J. J. Abrams says The Force Awakens looks like A New Hope in the skeleton, but all the rest of the body is different.

George Lucas owes a lot of the success of his films to his first wife, but most of the official Lucas* data on her has been scrubbed after the divorce.

To understand and write in any genre, a grounding in the works considered classics is useful. I'm not going to say necessary, as the article-writer does, because I think there is something to be said about writing the book first, and then letting the agents wrangle what genre, if any, to sell it under.

Because emoji originated in Japan, the pictures follow Japanese grammar - which makes it more difficult for English writers trying to tell stories in pictures.

Many women suffer from issues of their pelvic floors moving, displacing their organs and causing pain and other issues. Also, the many ways that women avoided pregnancy and childbirth that don't involve hormonal birth control.

The care that Japan takes for all aspects of life includes significant thought about toilets and restrooms.

Gender politics in Panem - balanced representation and trope distribution, and quite a bit of characters behaving in the binary-opposite stereotype. Which is a lot better than the way television writes white women and casts minority women in those roles.

When observed from the outside, the United States has several obvious and glaring shortcomings in how it treats women compared to other nations.

The election of the Liberals to Canada's Parliament has a lot of people hopeful about the damage that Trudeau can undo.

Lots of countries other than the United States got goodies into their public domains this January. The U.S.? Bupkis.

For adults, a parody of Les Miserables. For children, a lesson on how you can tell someone's emotions by looking at their faces and bodies. This is the Sesame Workshop at work. They would probably also have a field day with words whose contexts determine one of their potentially conflicting meanings. And they might enjoy menu ordering by Venn diagram, which, I admit, looks really good.

How much do we give of ourselves out into the universe for others to appreciate? What do we keep tucked in close, and does it prevent us from doing what we love? How many of the things on this list are things we worry about daily?

Facebook fails to grasp that the name someone chooses for themselves is their real name, refuses to rescind their policy, despite meeting somewhere that has many reasons and examples to show them that they are wrong.

The high stress environment of poverty and neighbourhoods with high visible poverty make their residents heavier, because the stress triggers the survival instinct to hoard energy.

The downfall of the website known as the Silk Road, in a very longform piece from Wired.

The Kitty Convict Project asks indoor cat owners to put orange on their cats, so that if they get out, others will recognize the cats as lost rather than feral.

Popularity is the wrong metric to measure books by, as is great amounts of sales.

What we think of as clutter now may be priceless family and cultural artifacts to those who succeed us, which may mean that decluttering might not be the way to go. Decluttering does make you feel better about yourself, though.

The unexpected success of the KitKat chocolate bar in Japan, with chefs producing bars with different flavoring as a high-end chocolate. Also, chocolate slices. Which is nearly the opposite of food plating decisions that are, at best, strange.

Art from people-made beach debris, of which there appears to be a rather inexhaustible supply. Art of the waves that batter a lighthouse in Wales, which are pictures of the majesty of nature. As are the angry waves of Lake Erie.

An MIT hydrogel looks like it could be used to encase sensors, which could make for smart bandages. Harvard has a collection of historical pigments for art conservation. Ibuprofen patches for direct application of pain relief without some of the side effects of pills. London has a dedicated team of gaslamp lighting, extinguishing, and repair for the few remaining streetlights lit by gas.

The men who try to mansplain Lolita to a woman know not the way that they are totally missing the point of both the novel and their explanations. After all, books about women don't win awards, so taking that contempt into the world around them suits those men just fine, stupid as it is. There's plenty of bullshit to go around, anyway and lots of people looking for any reason to take someone out of context. Or to give reductionist advice about the presentation of women's speech (and packaging it as an app) while ignoring that it's women that are the problem for misogynists, not their speech. (To which no less a luminary than Albert Einstein offers advice on the matter, too one Mme. Curie: "Don't read it if you don't want to." We think he might also have said to not feed the trolls, too.)

Working at a job considered beneath most people helps get rid of the idea that there are jobs beneath most people.

A list of excellent graphic novels, all written and many drawn by women. Also, why you should read romance novels, and why doors are always important in stories involving children.

Jessica Jones suffers from the injury violating morals and social contracts inflicts on victims in addition to their physical trauma. Despite that, Jones never quite gets to go all the way into the kind of character she would be if her backstory was played out realistically. And the show itself engages in some problematic treatment of fat women.

To see someone have a take on the trauma of Steve Rogers, The creator of American Captain may have just the thing for you.

The cartomantic origins of the Tarot are a bit murky, but they definitely turned what are otherwise playing cards into something very different.

Lipstick - the history of, up until recently, poisoning yourself with lead to look prettier.

Human beds with pet beds built into their bases, the very rare sea sapphire, icons of television without their suits fully on, cat fish, cows at play, an egg candle that reveals a dinosaur as it burns, adorable pictures of dogs, a video of common holiday items that are not good for pets, a different video of a seahorse giving birth, the possibility of pet jellyfish, facts about hagfish, folding wetted paper to make animals with curved lines, a tiger-goat friendship, green turtles, a Maine coon and their small human, an unexpected sea otter gives birth, comedic wildlife photographs, smiling, happy cats, a herd of elephants that will walk through a hotel to get to the mango tree they have been eating the fruit of for generations, creatures named after Star Wars characters, and cats at kami shrines.

Random facts from books read, a mushroom trip can shift your personality, and advice on how to read aloud to an intimate partner.

Last for tonight, as befits the post, little lies are practice for big, necessary ones, a thing that only DEATH could know, which is contrasted with truths that are difficult to keep in mind. And Christmas has more than its fair share of those who punish the naughty as well as reward the nice, cats that devour the lazy who don't have anything new, as well as plenty of stories of ghosts and spirits.