It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

11: Geocities

I made my first website on Geocities, and that probably tells you more than you wanted to know about how old I am.

The concept of Geocities was pretty genius, though. Less so the conceptualization of Geocities as divided into various neighborhoods, loosely based on what the person signing up for Geocities might make their website about, as it turns out that we didn't really need to map physical space onto virtual space. But the idea, basically, of offering someone a few megabytes of space to build whatever they wanted to, so long as they could provide the code (and so long as they ran Geocities' ads on all of their pages, because ad revenue is still the way that a lot of places think is the best way to get money - that, or venture capital.) There was no need for buying your own domain, or for learning how to administer a Linux system, or any of the other highly technical obstacles that would prevent most people from showing their own pages to the world. This was before blog software replaced the idea of having a personal page, and before content management software replaced them both. And so, people went off in every direction they could, bounded only by the restrictions on what the code could do and what things were permitted by the host. Things past what the sandbox of Geocities provided would be the kind of thing that you would get your own domain and hosting for, and therefore you'd learn all those things you weren't learning immediately by using Geocities.

The Web was not quite corporatized, and was not quite in the place where slick Javascript and CSS were considered standard parts of the Web experience. What you received, essentially, was an entire hodgepodge of material, based on how much the person creating the page wanted to learn the coding and how much the person making the page just wanted to get the content out. It was a time of great personality in pages, even if it also sometimes meant choices from the CGA era for text or backgrounds, or that you had to work with someone who didn't believe much in the paragraph tag, or the idea that a web page was designed for a specific resolution and wouldn't look right on any other resolution. Or that it was meant specifically for one browser over another, because it used tags that the one would recognize and others would not. It was a time of guestbooks and webrings and, I strongly suspect, an awful lot of fic archives. If I had been the kind of person who wrote and put their fic online at the time, it might very well have been a windfall to have 100MB of space to put all of my formatted HTML onto so that my epics would be readable, and possibly, I might collect the fic of others, too. It is also the era where search engines actually crawl and search, rather than some other purpose, and they would obey the instructions given to them in files like robots.txt. Discovery was still tough, of course, but people found ways of doing it all the same, through hypertext.

At that time, though, I used the space I had on Geocities as a sandbox to learn all kinds of things about HTML, and how to make links, and show images, and make images into links. I may have picked up a little CSS along the way, so as to make things more easy to control globally, and as well as to do things like use image files as my background for the page. Mostly, it was there as a personal page, constructed haphazardly, with plenty of animated GIFs, pictures from the Internet, and links to other places that I thought were interesting. A professional web designer's nightmare, in a phrase. But mostly it was articulating to myself what I wanted to do, and then looking on the Internet to see if someone else had done it, or if there was a keyword to zero in on, then consulting a reference work to find the appropriate tags and the appropriate place to put them, and then tweaking it until the rendered page actually looked and functioned the way I wanted it to. As I learned more, I put more of that learning into the pages that were there, sometimes adding new things, but often, refining what was there so that it was more specification-compliant and easier to handle later on. Even on the site that I have been neglectful of maintaining that holds my professional CV and as much of the presentation slides and commentary as I have stuffed into it, most of what I'm doing there is following my own template after having figured out the thing I wanted to do. At this point, I believe I've reintroduced frames to the site, because I don't want to have to recode the entire navigation into each page. It's likely the best solution I have for navigation involves Javascript in some way, but I am also the kind of person who wants their site to function properly without Javascript, and therefore I would have to learn how to encode a proper fallback from it.

This approach, "figure out what I want to do, then consult the reference works to figure out how it's done, then see if it actually does what I want, then refine it until it does" is probably much, much close to the actual process of people who code for a profession or a major hobby do, rather than the idea that I might have in my head of someone who, when presented with a programming problem, simply magicks the thing up out of the ether in a flurry of code and it works. (Well, hopefuly there's a test suite in there, too, but…) In the same way that I have a persistent belief that "real cooking" is not "following recipe" but instead "making delicious dishes from a basket of ingredients and your own knowledge", I have bought into some of the belief that "real coding" does not involve following recipe or template, unless you've developed the template yourself, too. That particular belief always gets mugged every time I start trying to get Home Assistant to do something new, or I decide that automation is the best way to do text string manipulation, because I can see how to do it in an automated manner, or when I need to push a change to a great number of records in a work system so that nobody has to do it by hand. (I tested that one on small batches first, because nobody wants to intentionally wreck production.) Or when I'm making changes to my professional website pages. Or the project that I built in one of my graduate school classes to pass a foundations course. The UI was terrible, but UI wasn't something I needed to think too hard about over functionality, and it was something I built for me (as well as an assignment).

For as much as I think of myself as a user, rather than a coder, if you start asking me what I mean by that, or start pushing on my self-imposed boundaries about where "real coding" starts and stops, you'll find all kinds of interesting treasures surface up as I start telling stories or start trying to justify how this thing that I did isn't really the thing it is, because it's someone else's code, tweaked to do the thing that I want it to do. Or because it's not elegant, polished, and efficient code like someone who knows what they're doing would turn out. I have ten thousand excuses to avoid taking credit for anything, or to admit that I might be practiced at or knowledgeable about something. The experiences of my childhood, and the mockery that accompanied when the supposedly perfect child made a mistake, has me perpetually looking out for the scythe and the reaper wielding it, the one ready to cut the tall plant for daring to peek its head above the others. I would say quiet competence is my sweet spot, except I also want to be recognized for the quality work that I do on a regular basis and not have it just be the expectation of me, unworthy of further comment other than "meets standards."

The older I've gotten, the more I realize that an excellent way of getting me to approach a problem or try to figure out how to make something work better is to present it to me as a sandbox, a puzzle, or some other thing where there's no pressure for the thing itself to be perfect or that it needs to be turned around in a short time. Something that is being solved for its own sake, and not because you have to provide the solution to a sudoku puzzle to your past self so that they can get out of the predicament they're in and survive long enough so they can become you and give the solution to themselves and generate a stable time loop. The less stakes there are in the situation, the more I feel like I can bring myself to bear on it, and not to get caught up in the twin weasels of "must be perfect to be seen by others" and "anything that fails will be viciously mocked." I realize this is maladaptive, and most other people do not suffer from these fears in their own lives, but it works, and therefore I do my best to make things as non-important in my head as I can, simply so that I can function in the moment.

I demonstrated that at work today, actually. There was a monitor at one of my locations that was rotating too easily in its housing, and so I tried to figure out what the problem was with it. Checked the screws and the like, and they were holding, and eventually, I concluded that, once I'd gotten the monitor off the clip that was holding it in place, that the bit that attached to the monitor and the clip was too loose, since I could spin it with my handss. There was a pair of pliers in the tool chest at the work site, so I tightened things up, and when we re-clipped the monitor on, it stopped wobbling so easy.

Thanks, Pops. Not just for the whole "can use hand tools" part, but for the bit where you encouraged me to think systematically about problems, to work methodically through possibilities, and to come to conclusions and test them to see if they're correct. You did exactly the thing you were supposed to do to help me achieve not only answers, but processes and analysis. Even though I really just wanted answers at the time, rather than to be led through a process of figuring out where my mistake was, or where I had overlooked something, or whether an assumption I was making was actually correct. It serves me well, just so long as I keep thinking of it as a puzzle rather than something of importance.

But also, if you are interested in the same sort of spirit, try Neocities, and maybe you can start building your own personal page or interest page or another fic archive.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

09: Instruction

One of the things that was not made clear about what my job would entail was that there would be all kinds of instruction going on with regard to the library's resources. I expected there to be some amount of helping people wring better results out of the databases, or making their search engine queries work better and with the way the engine expected things to work, because that's the sort of thing that I trained on as a professional, and it's not necessarily obvious to the people who are just starting to use databases and search operators how to maximize them for best effect. Or even to know how those operators work and how to put them together so that they will produce something useful. (Yes, despite the understanding that I was not going into either a K-12 or collegiate space, I still held the belief that sometimes someone would seek help from the public librarian about how to do those kinds of schoolwork parts.)

Reality has told me that while those are useful things, it's highly unlikely that the public library user will ever get to the point where they need database tips or search operator optimizations. In the era of slop-generation machines, and the unwanted, forcible integration of those slop-generating functions into things like search machines or other aspects of our technological lives, I imagine that search operators are going to be even less used by the general public as they seek answers for what they are looking for, and are willing to accept slop because it looks correct and reads confidently.

What I spend so very much of my public-facing time doing is instruction, absolutely, but it is instruction of the most basic forms of technology interaction. Our print system, as I lovingly refer to it, is "[z]-teen fiddly steps, all of which have to be done in the right order or it doesn't work." Divided into parts one and two, of course, where part one is ensuring the thing that is desired to be printed has been properly downloaded and is printing the correct thing, because many people want to print the preview that they're being shown on the screen and then are confused when what prints is the e-mail behind it, instead of the document they can see. Or they want to fill out a document and print it, but the document itself does not have fillable fields in it, so instead I end up walking them through the printing process and then through the scanner process so they can scan back the filled-out form and send it to the people who want it.

And sometimes just getting to the document itself can be a real pain. For example, I had a document sealed with Microsoft Azure locks, so it wouldn't open in Chrome at all. The Microsoft website said we had to open it in Edge, which we did, and then signed in, and then it kept telling us that we had to switch to the right profile to open it, even though we were signed in to the right profile on Edge.

So then we opened it in Acrobat Reader, and it spawned an Edge window to ask for permission to open it, and when permission was granted and all the appropriate sign-ins were completed, the window returned an error saying that there wasn't a necessary token available. Nuts. That seems like the rock and the hard place at this point.

But, going back to Acrobat Reader and letting the process finish and close the "Hey, we opened up a pop-up, let us know when you're done" notification that appeared, it turned out we had successfully authorized unlocking the document, and the person was able to print their paperwork from the VA that had been sealed with this Microsoft lock. I strongly suggest involuntary chastity torture be applied to the engineers that inflicted this nonsense on us and made it not work when we did it their way and errored when we did it the way they wanted us to.

Or the countless times where someone has asked me why their form isn't submitting or moving on to the next page, and I scan the document, and point at one thing, saying, "That thing. It needs it in this form." The offender is usually ringed in a small red box, and has some text explaining the problem, but unless that's what you know to look for when something is having an error, you can breeze right by it, because you put in the information that was wanted, why isn't it accepting it?

I have, at least twice, helped people them pull their LLM-generated resume and cover letter out of the interaction phase with the LLM and into an application. That was mostly just e-mailing themselves the chat transcript and then dumping the text into Word documents, but to someone who hasn't done this thing a hundred times every day as part of their work, they need to be walked through the process of giving the transcript a URL to ping against, e-mailing said URL to themselves (a thousand curses upon the engineer at Apple that thinks that "Share" is the right button to hide "Save" operations behind), and then opening the transcript from the URL, copying the text and pasting it into Word, at which point they could start styling it as they wished. I have a certain amount of revulsion about people using those tools to do this work, but I am also somewhat professionally prohibited from giving advice to people on how to build their resume, apart from helping them with formatting or showing them where the templates are that they can paste their information into. We have community partners that can help with that, but those kinds of things usually necessitate a trip to the local metropolis.

It's often software that I have to deal with in one way or another when I'm doing these kinds of instructions, whether it's helping someone take pictures of identity documents and them moving them directly off their iProduct onto the computer so they could then be uploaded to the right site in drag and drop. (Which was the easier way, honestly, than any other available to them.) Or teaching someone, and then letting them practice, how to transfer material from their Macintosh to a storage drive, so they could eliminate it from their iCloud storage. (If my deep loathing for the way that Apple products and iProducts handle things like storage and directories and where something actually is hasn't come through yet, I should probably shout it louder.) When I'm in the weekly "Tech Help" program, there are a lot of things that need explaining, like how to slide a camera cover and make it possible for the camera to work. Or saving documents. Connecting to the Wi-Fi. (And then, occasionally, the secret ways to make the captive portal work properly when it doesn't do it the first time around.) Or helping someone with the apps on their iProduct and doing things with them. It's all stuff that would likely be covered in a class, or learned through experience of use, if you had started either the class or the use when you were younger, but many of the people here have neither had the class nor the long practice, and so I and the other person in the program are helping people as they handwrite the procedure for the thing(s) they have come to the program to learn how to do. This is not a knock on older people - it's just the most effective way for them to retain the knowledge and be able to use it when they're not in the program. (I write stuff down all the time to remember it and seed myself with reminders to do or follow-up on things.)

There's just so much need for what I would consider to be basic instruction in the use of computers that has not been provided, or is only being provided through a paying course, or only provided through situations where someone has to travel to the local metropolis, or it's only offered once a month as a three hour intensive, because that partner is doing the same thing at all of our locations and exhausting your community partners by making them try to sate the insatiable is a bad idea.

Many of these situations are happening with time pressure, as well, because they're running out of computer time and the library is closing and they just need to get this thing done first, why isn't it working! And that kind of panic often makes instruction not possible as much as being very directive about what needs doing. And once the thing is done, the person no longer needs the instruction, because they don't expect to need to do it again.

I've also found that a fair number of the people who are in the library and need assistance with working with the computers fall into one of two camps. The first camp hates computers and the increasing electronic everything and wanting as little to do with it as possible. They have had bad experiences with computers, or bad experiences with people who have said they are good with computers and have not figured out how to avoid looking down their noses at the people who aren't, and they prefer human to human interactions rather than anything mediated by a computer. (They most likely would agree with the maxim "a computer cannot be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision," and then go forward into complaining about how everything has to be mediated through computers, automated assistants, and chatbots when all they want is a telephone number to talk to a human so that the problem can be fixed in five minutes. Because the human will understand what they want.) Much like my younger self, these are not people interested in instruction or in retaining the instructions, because they never want to have to do that thing ever again, period. With enough repetition, I suspect, much like my younger self, it will sink in and they will learn things, but also like my younger self, they will never stop being salty about having learned it in the first place. They are people who will accept the idea that computers are stupid, but they will blame the computer for being stupid when it is a PEBKAC error.

The second camp are people who have become afraid of computers. Those people have often been fed the scary stories about black-hat hackers, and stolen currency, identity theft, and the exfiltration and posting of data, botnets, and all of those things that do happen, absolutely. They also know that phishers and predators are using computers, deepfakery, synthesizers, viruses, and other such things to fool people into giving them sensitive information or to just take it without asking. So they don't like interacting with computers, either, but it's because they've been convinced by a steady stream of media stories that if they press one key wrong, or click in the wrong place, it will mean that they have given access to a criminal organization that will steal their identity and all their money and compromise all of their systems. These are people who are open to instruction, but only so far as it gives them an exact sequence of steps to faithfully replicate, and if at any point, something happens that is not in the sequence, or the sequence produces an error, they have a panic because it's not working like I said it would be. It's a brittle form, because the slightest deviation, or the change of a UI element, or any other such thing is enough to change the entire thing and now they're back to baseline worry that something catastrophic will happen if they deviate even the slightest bit from a known-safe procedure. These people will not accept the idea that computers are stupid, nor are they particularly keen to understand that because of this, the people designing computer software have figured out how to put in all sorts of guardrails around permanent decisions. I try to give this piece of wisdom for the afraid: "If the computer asks if you're sure, and you're not, click the 'cancel' button." (I also try to explain to them that most criminals aren't after them specifically, they're either after the data that the company has, and if they get that, there's nothing you could have done to stop it, or the part where a scammer is trying to get you to do something before you think about it, and so the best way to beat those is to take the information given, and then find some other way to contact the people they claim to be, and confirm with that. I know it doesn't always work, even on people who know that's what's going on, but I try. And so do our community partners.)

Because I do these pieces of instruction so often, I've become a very practiced hand at doing it, and guiding people with all sorts of devices or different scenarios successfully to the result they want. Often times they misattribute this to some form of brilliance, superior intellect, or supernatural beneficial aura that I have and they do not. I usually try to pop that bubble by being honest about how many times a day I do this, and if they had the same amount of experience I did, they'd be just as good at it. I don't think the bubble actually pops all that often, but it very much is having experience in the general form enough, and having seen several of the most common (and a few less common) ways that the process errors or goes slightly sideways that I can course-correct in the moment to keep someone on track. And that also sometimes means knowing when to let go of the part that's saying "they're not doing it right!" or "they're repeating this step unnecessarily!" and focus on making sure that the thing gets done in the end, regardless of whether it was done efficiently or elegantly. Because most of the time, I'm not going to see that person again and they're not going to come back to tell me about what happened because of what we did. They're not interested in perfection, they're interested in satisfaction, and therefore any job that is satisficing is a good job. (Even in some cases where I know that the thing that they want to do, and the thing that would be actually effective toward reaching their goals are two very different things, but they don't want help on doing the effective thing, they want help on doing the thing they want to.)

For example, I was helping someone work through making sure their emails all synced to an iProduct. One of the un-synchronizing accounts just needed to be removed and re-added, and it started syncing again. The other was an account that kept prompting for a password, which we couldn't actually find, remember, or make, but after trying all the things we could to get it work, the person mentioned that everything from this account that was complaining about not having a password forwarded to one of the accounts that was already on and synchronizing to the iProduct ([annoyed grunt]!) So I deleted that account from the phone, and lo and behold, no more password prompts. That doesn't help the underlying problem of not knowing the password to get into that account, but it does accomplish what was asked of me, and the person left happy that I had fixed the problem they wanted help with. Satisfaction achieved.

If I had more time with people, and could guide them through repeated attempts to do the same thing, especially those things that sometimes have slight variances, I could help them build the skills they need to be able to do the more general form of the thing they want to do, but I don't get that. I don't have that for programming time, and I don't have it for those interactions on the public service floor. The best I have is trying to steer someone toward one or the other resources that can help with this, because they know they'll have someone for a class period, or a video that they can watch infinitely until it clicks, or any of the other things that are really needed for any kind of learning that isn't just-in-time learning. For that to happen, the person has to be interested in learning the specifics and the general situations, and most of the people at the library, I suspect, don't want to learn the general pattern of a thing, they want to learn how to do the specific thing they want done and to move on.

What that usually means for me is a lot of repeat instruction. Even though when I signed on to do this job, I didn't think I was going to be doing a lot of teaching. (And I still recoil from being referred to as "Teacher" in any way. I don't have an education degree, please don't call me that.)

Sometimes, though, people do come back, or they do tell me about what happened after they interacted with me. I helped someone put together a huge zip file of pictures and video, then showed them how to upload it to Dropbox and provide a shareable link to those that needed to see it. Then they came back a few days later and needed to add a new picture to the file, so we did that, too, and re-uploaded and re-shared everything just to be sure that it would work properly.

Or they appreciate the care and the rest that goes into the instruction. I helped walk someone through the process of first signing into their e-mail (and walking through the steps for a recovery to make sure they could get in, and gleaning that the person who had set up the account had set themselves as the recovery e-mail and telephone number, which could have made the process a lot shorter—all things that I have done before, but that would (and did) throw someone who hasn't for a loop), and then helping them walk through getting their boarding pass printed and confirmations all sent to the right places. By the end of this process, I was complimented by the person saying "after you've shown me how to do this, I could teach someone else how to do it." Which is certainly a goal of mine when it comes to helping people do these things.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

07: Doppelganger

I am not the only person in the world with my name. I think the first time I realized this was when I was looking at the credits for Eek! the Cat (although I was much more a fan of the Terrible Thunder Lizards), and I saw my own name staring back at me, and went "Huh. That's cool. There's someone else out there in the world that has my name." It probably wasn't my exact name, middle and all, but it did teach me something important about names. (This does come up in my professional life, because the slips we use for holds use a portion of the name, and sometimes we have collisions that have to be handled. We also print some other things on the slip to prevent true collisions, but.)

And, occasionally, because I know that there are other people out there in the world with my name, I run my own name through the search engines and see what comes back from there. In this day and age, I am disappointed that someone who holds my namesake had significant academic credentials and is wasting them writing up books espousing nonsense positions that are all TERF and no substance. This is one of the places in my life where I recognize where the bar is, and am very glad that I'm getting well over that, even as governments around the world, including my own, seem determined to try and match that level or find new ways of digging underneath it. Blargh.

It is interesting, though, that despite the clear and obvious successes that I have with the way that I handle names in the process of creating and updating library records, my methods are not widely adopted or incorporated into the actual policy of the organization. Probably because the way I handle names is somewhat orthogonal to the way that the organization wants names handled. They are at least willing to acknowledge the possibility that the name a person will respond to most quickly is not necessarily the name that is on their identification, but they still seem to insist that if there's a difference between the two, we're supposed to record the name that's on the identification. If I inquired about the why, they'd probably mention something about the need to have the information on the identification in case of lost book charges or something like that. Our organization hasn't used collection agency services for years (this is a good thing), and so it's not like we need to send warrants, court orders, or process servers to someone looking for the reimbursement of our lost materials or other sorts of carceral enforcement mechanisms against people who lose books (which are often children, by the way.) And if someone's going to go to the trouble of trying to evade things to get multiple cards or to try and get rid of previous lost book charges aginst them, then they're probably putting in more effort than we really need to chase down. And, eventually, even the determined run out of aliases, or they get a little too known to the staff, who start pointing out that someone seems to be doing their best to run up lost book charges for whatever reason, and perhaps they will need to manage their other issues before receiving another card.

All of this is to say that a person's name should be whatever the person in front of me says it is, regardless of what's printed on identification or membership cards or other such things. And so, when I'm making library cards, I generally ask, "Is this the correct name for you?" and follow it up with "Is it spelled correctly?" if they say it is. I catch so many incorrect names this way, just by asking. There are some people who go by a nickname, there are some people who don't want to use their full names if they don't have to, some people go by what is supposedly their middle name, some people are either getting married or have stopped being married and therefore have a different last name, and I've seen a lot of people who are trying on new names in anticipation of possibly making other changes, or who are definitely on the way to making other changes and definitely want to use the correct name for themselves, even if they haven't yet had their identifying documents updated to reflect this. The best part about getting someone's name right by asking for it is that I can see the look on someone's face when they understand there's someone in front of them who is trying to get it right, and who is asking them about it, rather than assuming whatever's printed is correct. There are other people who seem genuinely confused about why I might be asking about it, but I'm sure a little bit of thinking about it will produce at least one of the situations I've talked about above, so they can understand why someone might ask. (Or maybe I'm being optimistic about how much people actually want to know the answers to things, or even whether they ask these kinds of questions.)

I've even heard it from my coworkers about how they think it's a good thing that I do these various things where I'm trying to make sure that I get the information. But I don't see a lot of that then getting put into practice. Perhaps because they're used to the routine they have, perhaps because they don't feel like they can deviate from a process that's been laid out in front of them about what needs to be collected. It's one of those things where if I had a useful pathway to the people who set the policy, and a belief that if we raised these kinds of issues with them, they'd listen and adjust based on the feedback they're being given, I'd probably do more advocacy for getting the official processes changed so that we can put down correct names for everyone in our library system. As it is, for some of those things, I have to invoke the Nick Fury rule about foolish rules.

And until then, I can at least have the knowledge and understanding that I'm still better than that other person who has my name and is wasting it by being a professional TERF.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

05: Capitalism

As soon as I decided that I was going to let other people into my life and have them partake of my resources, I failed at capitalism. This is offered not simply as a trite observation or a tautology, but as a condemnation of the system itself, because capitalism as a system is about hoarding and always trying to have your resources be used in a way that produces advantage to you, and usually, it demands that the advantage be financial in some manner. The person with the biggest bank account wins at capitalism, and therefore it can't be anything other than the height of folly to willingly share your resources with other people without expectation of being repaid or otherwise reimbursed for such a thing.

It's why we have corporations that allow humans to evade responsibility and accountability for actions intended to reinforce greed, hoarding, and scarcity, with bad results to everyone else who is caught in this amoral situation.

If I had, instead of taking up with the idea that I might want to have companionship in my life, decided that I was only going to live alone, with my books and my poetry to protect me, then I would not have encountered so many of the expenses that I have in this world, regarding vehicles, and mortgages, and repairs, and replacements, and so many other things. I would probably have a much more comfortable retirement position, and savings, and possibly be wistfully wishing that I could afford a mortgage on a house of my own, but for the entire and complete bubbling of real estate right after the last bubble exploded. Or I might be aggravated about the rent and the presence of all the condos driving the rent up further. Who knows. It certainly would seem like I would be in a far better position with regard to capital and the use thereof if I hadn't embarked upon the choices that I did.

It's possible I could have some of those things to myself at this point if I hadn't made the choices that I did about trying to make a bad relationship work, because I wanted to make it work and ignored signs that it wasn't doing so. And because, as the entries so far have hinted at, I'm not exactly brimming with self-confidence in any domain outside of a space that I have both expertise and a firm understanding of the problem. Except, I guess, in some places where I have the confidence of a mediocre white man and don't notice that I'm outside of my expertise. So, I made bad choices and then continued to suffer from them for a significant amount of time. My failures at capitalism are numerous.

But even before that point, I'd definitely been failing at capitalism before. I decided to go into a profession that requires graduate schooling and that doesn't pay for shit, because it's a profession that's been heavily feminized and therefore discounted and devalued. I took on significant debt for something that wasn't going to give me great returns from it. (And that has an entire awe section about how crass it is to expect to be properly compensated for the job that you do, because if you are in it for money, then you lack the passion and devotion to the profession and should go somewhere else.)

Even before that, of course, I was also making bad decisions at capitalism, choosing to go to the more expensive and prestigious university that had the graduate school I eventually wanted to go to, rather than taking the scholarship offer to a different school for my undergraduate experience and then to go into graduate school with the grades from there and have saved significant money along the way.

It's not hard to set my life up, at least from a certain point, as a series of failures of capitalism and making poor decisions about money and therefore, if I am in a situation where money is tight, stretched, or otherwise a source of stress for me, then it's completely my fault because I made poor decisions. This is the mode that I generally operate on in my life, because I've also internalized the belief that I am the only thing I can control and change in my life, and used it as a way of making sure that I blame myself for everything that happens that may be negative. Other people may have contributed to this, and some of them may, to outside observers, hold significant or even primary responsibility for the situation, but that's not usually something that I will admit to, because to do so would be to let go of the belief that I have total and complete control over my situation and therefore I can simply will myself into a better situation. This is the curse of being brought up in a society that believes I, by privilege of my assigned gender at birth and the membership I have in whiteness, should be the unquestioned ruler of everything around me that is neither my assigned gender at birth and/or those who are not permitted entry into whiteness. It then encourages me, through media accounts, advertisements, and other means to blame those people who are not me and not part of my group as the cause of my unhappiness and lack of comfort. From there, I'm supposed to either vote in politicians who promise to hurt them for having the gall to try and exist or take some part of the resource share that is rightfully mine or to engage in direct action to dominate, control, or remove resources from those other people who have been taking from me through their mere act of existence, or who have been "taking" from me because my government is redistributing my tax dollars to the "undeserving," instead of refunding them back to me to that I can use them more effectively and efficiently on myself.

The choices that I have made that are not according to the dictates of capitalism have had many other benefits for me, of course. As, presumably, they have for you. The decision to go to the more expensive university also came with several years of participation in campus life, including the marching band (where my face was on national television for a brief moment as I marched in a parade), intramural sport and refereeing such sport, which may have further cemented my interesting in the Olympic program, and in several of the things that are charmingly referred to as "non revenue-generating sports" that are equally as excellent to watch, if you have the opportunity), and it likely expedited the process of acceptance into graduate school (as well as giving me the opportunity to understand whether I could function at that level) by making it so that the reviewers were comparing the grades of their own institution, rather than trying to decide whether the other institution has sufficient academic rigor for them to believe that my good grades really do mean that I can hack it at that level.

Choosing the profession that I have, even knowing that the money wouldn't be great, has resulted, all the same, in plenty of opportunities for my mental health to stay good (as well as several opportunities for it to be regularly trashed). Doing programming for tinies is still a thing to look forward to and enjoy. Helping people find things and showing them that we have access to the materials they're interested in is helpful, and sometimes there's a fair amount of appreciation expressed for it. There's something satisfying about being able to help people work through their various issues regarding technology and using it for their purposes, even if there's also sometimes a fair amount of frustration expressed at various entities because they made things obtuse, or because they dumped a device on someone, made some statement about it being intuitive and not needing any learning, and then skipped town instead of supporting the device they had just thrust on someone. Sometimes we get back a little bit of our teens who have gone on to other situations and parts of their lives, and they come back and appreciate what we were trying to do with them, now that they're adults who have to deal with the life outside. And there are always people who use the resources and appreciate that we're still here, even as they are themselves confronting capitalism's failures of them. And doing the work I've done has had me met all kinds of wonderful people and attempt all kinds of things that I might not otherwise do, like practicing my art skills, or penning articles for publication, or presenting at various conferences about the intersections of my profession and the professions and careers of others. Often in a "we should be able to work better together" way, but that working together is often curtailed by lack of resources and by the often aggravating, but very true assertion that a public library that has to be heavily involved in making sure people have basic needs met is not able to sustain more complex and more interesting programming for the majority of their users. (Much as it would be cool to do some of those things.)

The decisions I have made about relationships and about wanting human companionship in my life have resulted in having a house that I can then use to help other people have a house and companionship in their lives. And in pets, who are often yell, but routinely are also love. They have proven to me that there are friends that I still had outside of a bad relationship, and that the worst things that I think about myself are often not as terrible as I might otherwise believe they are, or that what I think about myself is the shadow on the wall being cast by something much smaller and less terrible.

And that some things are forgivable. And that others can be worked through, or around, or with, in a way that results in the thing getting done, instead of a way that results in the thing getting done and me feeling terrible about my failure to be a normal human being who can do all the things that normal human beings do without needing additional assistance from outside sources. Or without building structures and systems of reminders and pathways so that whatever the last mistake is, it won't be made again, making sure that all the mistakes of the future are novel ones. So long, of course, as the system performs flawlessly and I remember to engage it at every juncture that I'm supposed to.

Having other people around can mean articulating to them the secret fears that you have, or the ways that things used to go in other situations, so that they understand why you are expecting them to do one thing, or that you want them to do one thing, because if they do that thing, that will signal to you that there are no further things that will be sprung upon you later.

And, despite all of those things that I have done capitalism wrong with…I keep surviving. I keep finding ways to make the money work, even if it makes me fret a lot about whether or not the whole enterprise is going to hold together long enough to succeed. To me, this seems like standard operations, but to others, it might suggest that there's some sort of financial wizardry involved in here, to keep rolling with life and still managing to stay afloat, even with all the things that have been in my way. To me, it's mostly just persistence and sometimes a fair amount of denying myself anything that might be fun.

The persistence part is probably to good one. The long bouts of self-denial, probably not. But, there's another way in which I'm failing at capitalism, by not choosing to extend myself out to as far on the margins as I can, either in hope of a great payoff or because money is meant for my happiness, and so I should spend it profligately.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

03: Chemistry

If you asked me about whether I can bake or cook, I would tell you no. If you then asked me whether I could follow a recipe, I'd tell you yes, and that I've successfully done it many times. When you point out that following recipe is literally the process of baking or cooking, I'll counter that with the idea that the sign of baking and cooking skill is somehow fixed in my head as being able to look at a basket of ingredients and understand how you could make a tasty meal with them, without the need to refer to recipe, only your own experience and technique. You can tell me that's a ridiculous standard to hold anyone to, and I'll agree with that, as well, and mention that my own head can be stubborn sometimes about what it thinks of as the baseline for being able to claim a skill. Because that kind of skill is not necessarily something that people who can follow recipes deliciously will ever develop, or necessarily desire to develop.

The domestic arts were not being taught that much in schools. There were classes with names like "life skills," which were often about learning how to balance a checkbook and keep track of your accounts, how to calculate what the additional costs of finance charges might be, including the one attached to a revolving credit account (more colloquially known as a credit card), and other skills that were meant to send us out into the world slightly less wide-eyed and terrified at the prospect that we no longer were bound to the school and would be considered, in the eyes of the law, contract or otherwise, as adults who could make life-changing decisions on our own. There were simulations about whether or not someone could live a month on the salary of the career they were thinking about going in to, which were also disguised ever so slightly as recruitment efforts to various places or career options, including the military. But at no point did I learn how to cook things while in school. I learned a little about it, using microwave technology and the conventional oven to do things like cook pot pies or make popcorn or other snack foods, but while I was a child, my stay-at-home mother handled the cooking, and while I was an undergraduate, I was on the dormitory meal plans, which covered most of my meals, and I could use some credit to have sandwiches or other such things for the one meal the dorm plan didn't cover. So, theoretically, I could avoid having to learn how to cook until I left the dormitories, and even then, I could have managed to avoid it by trading out cooking duties for other chores in the arrangements that I had while living with other college students. I didn't do that, but neither did I get much of an education in the arts of cooking and of shopping for myself. Not least because the last place I was in for graduate school had a strong infestation of ants, and those ants liked to turn up in insufficiently sealed cracker and cereal boxes. So I learned which foods not to buy because they attracted the ants to them.

Having left the tender illusions of schooling and moving myself to the Dragon Conspiracy Territory, with a job in hand, and soon, an apartment of my own, the lessons I had learned about frugality and making the dollar stretch meant that not only was I going to consider "eating out" to be a great luxury, it meant that I was going to have to cut back on the amount of already-prepared meals and foods and start using some of my spare time to cook up food that I would take for lunches to work. I had sandwich makings, and my indulgence, such that it was, was frozen pizza with a mozzarella cheese-filled outer crust, and some microwave meals for those nights when I was going to get home from work too tired to do much more than cook up that food and possibly vegetate or otherwise get caught up on the Internet's doings for the day.

(When I was in the relationship that hurt me, it was a point of pride for my ex that she did the cooking and feeding of me, and that I should not have to worry about it. Even when she was doing a fair amount of overspending the budget I vainly kept trying to set and explain to her that we had to adhere to, because my money was not infinite and I knew that if we got in the habit of overspending because she had money to draw on, it would hurt a lot when that money ran out completely. My attempts were all failures, because my ex was looking for excuses not to have to hold to limits and also told me that she believed anything other than a firm no was an invitation for her to more strongly argue her position. After telling me this, she would get unhappy and sulky when I switched to firm nos about things that I had been trying to use polite nos for. The no hadn't changed, but once she told me how to deliver it so that she would listen, that's what I used.)

However, 2dlife took, well, maybe not pity on me, but an interest, because C was skilled in the arts and was willing to teach someone who hadn't collected the necessary parts of being able to follow recipe and understand what techniques were being called for. This was meant both as skill-building and as lowering the intimidation factor toward cooking, because it's much harder to think of cooking as a daunting task when you can keep turning out delicious food by following the instructions in front of you. Under C's direction and instructional material, I made quiche. (The first one was perfect and delicious, and every quiche I made after that was chasing that first perfection. They were all still good, but they weren't exactly like the first perfect one.) I made braised chicken, and I made goulash, and stews, and I tried to make breaded, battered, and fried chicken, which didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, because while I'd made things, I hadn't made them to stick to the chunks of chicken I had as well as I wanted them to. And with each new item, I had learned new technique for preparation or cooking, to the point that by the time C was done walking me through things, I had a repertoire of things that I could make, depending on what I was in the mood for, and I could make them in sufficient quantities that they could serve as components for many different types of meals. The chicken went in lunches, but what accompanied the chicken changed throughout the week, so that I wouldn't get bored of it. And I still had the pizzas and microwave meals for variety and for those days where cooking just was not going to happen.

(Since the dishwasher in the apartment was broken, I also got very good at using the minimum number of pots and pans for these meals, because I dislike doing dishes by hand, and therefore would want to spend as little time on that as I could.)

Fast forward through the harmful relationship, and I am once again on my own and equipped with a kitchen to resume where I left off. Although by this time, C's dropped off the Internet, or at least LiveJournal, so I don't have the entries to refer back to again. What I do have, though, is the Internet itself, and so it's back to meal planning, figuring out what I want to make, and investing in a quality and sharp knife. Maki joined my repertoire of things I could make, and once again, the first one turned out beautifully, and many of the others turned out much less so. Presentation was not that important, however, because I was the one eating it, and therefore if it was delicious, it counted as a success. Shortly afterward, a long-distance relationship became a proximal one, and I returned to the more comfortable role of sous chef, doing prep work and assisting in cleanup while letting the person with confidence, skill, and practice do much of the main cooking work. My skills didn't atrophy, though, because these sessions had the same idea as C's in mind: I was learning things about how to gauge when something was done, I was handling preparation of various things, or at least the first stages of them, or being asked to watch them until they showed the signs of being done, and pretty often, I'd get the instructions on how something was done and the expectation that I would be able to turn out delicious food. And I succeeded in these matters, following recipe and instruction from someone who had the skills to look at a basket of things and figure out something delicious from them.

I'd still tell you no if you asked if I could cook, though. Even though there is one memorable instance in my cooking career where I may have shown up some people who did not have the necessary skills to prepare the food they had obtained for a gathering. Their chef had flaked on them, and so, because I was hungry and I knew how to make the food they wanted to serve, with one pan, a sharp knife, a silicone spatula, time, and spite, I made delicious food. There was definitely some incredulity that someone could just do something like that, but as someone who had trained with C's braised chicken and making C's quiche recipe, the food in question for the gathering was well within my capacity. And there were no complaints about the food that had been promised actually appearing, and being delicious.

(There is a story on my father's side of the family about one of the uncles taking over cooking and baking duties for my grandmother on that side as the cancer that eventually killed her (fuck cancer forever) made her no longer able to handle those duties. "I ain't heard no one complain," he said, when Grandma was trying to help him do things better. Being a person of sharp wit, she replied, "Are you still listening?")

As time has gone on, and other people have joined up with the household, cooking duties have been spread out and sometimes individualized, and sometimes not. I know that I've prepared the red beans and rice specialty from a housemate from recipe and direction, to excellent results, and I have been at last co-head chef for several years of the November feast and its requirements. This year, I flew solo on the November feast, and it was all delicious, and those who partook of the feast all agreed that it was delicious as well, so I suspect that means my cooking skills have significantly leveled up from what they were when I was just starting out with C, both for stunt chefery and feast chefery. I certainly have confidence at this point that I can follow recipe and turn out delicious things. (Chicken carbonara, oh, goodness, that was good, even if it was fiddly as fuck to get right.)

In the other half of chemistry class, most of what I'd learned how to do before University days were no-bakes and other items that required blending, but not necessarily baking and monitoring things until they were properly done, based on both the time that the recipe said and the eyeballing or toothpicking skills needed to ascertain when something is truly done and ready. The shutdown and shift to virtual services gave me a golden opportunity to practice skills that I had been self-conscious about (including art skills like drawing and crafting that I mentioned in the previous entry), and when I suggested to my co-presenters to try kitchen sciences with our child cohort, with the supervision of their adults, they were enthused about it. Which meant rustling up recipes for baked goods that could go from creation to full bake in approximately an hour, and then, live and in front of children and my co-presenter, actually doing the mixing, proving, rising, preparation, and baking for these objects. Shortbread first, then scones, pretzels, biscuits, pizzas, all different kinds of dough with different requirements of time, temperature, kneading, and the rest. I couldn't believe it when the shortbread came out of the oven and was delicious. I didn't believe I could do it well the first time. Some of the recipes I did a practice run with to make sure that they actually would go in the time that they claimed, and even the practice runs turned out well. As with the other things that I had made, I tried to emphasize to the children that if it was delicious, it was a success, no matter whether it looked perfect or not. Because the things I made were not uniform, perfectly-stamped objects all arranged in a row. They were different sizes, some a little looser or tighter than others, and showcased just how much of an amateur I was, and how much I was learning alongside them at doing this. But they were delicious, and the ones the kids made were delicious, as well.

I have had to learn how to adjust my spicing preferences to others' tastes, and to learn when to lean hard into spicing and when to have a lighter touch with it. But I am no longer intimidated by recipe, and the person I consider the cook in the household has been pointing out to me that I am already at the phase of making delicious food based on vaguer instructions than recipe, so I appear to be moving forward in skill and practice, so it's possible for me to make small diversions and adjustments to recipe based on the kitchen I'm in, and the taste of what I want. So, within a narrow band of possible parameters, and with instructions to hand, I can cook and bake, which is a lot more than I could do many years ago.

Let's begin with finally understanding how the Dresden Codex is able to calculate eclipses with exacting accuracy.

Alice Wong, ceaseless activist and person who wanted us to really look at not just the body, but the person behind it, and who often wanted us to know about things that weren't necessarily meant for "polite company" about it, has died. She knew it would happen eventually, but we were always hoping she'd pen a few more things for us to chew upon.

Having banned them completely outside of research studies for the under-18 crowd, the UK is announcing a large-scale clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers in the under-18 cohort. Presumably so they can have their own conclusions about how safe and effective they are, even if that kind of conclusion is unlikely to be tolerated by the ministers who want to use it as a further cudgel.

We must once again stress that all things that are natural are not necessarily good for you, and that people who want to charge you money to give you no information about how to safely have birth, and who will actively encourage you not to seek appropriate care and assistance in the case of complications or emergencies are not trustworthy nor should they receive any kind of money at all. Of course, they're not advertising themselves that way, so it can be harder to spot the fakery until you're in it, and since it also preys upon the vulnerable, it may not be something that you notice is fakery or a problem until something terrible and tragic happens.

Even if the way that can be named is not the eternal Way, being able to identify and label your emotional states can go a significant way toward regulating them.

( The usual: USPol, technological terrors and failures, and the rest )

Last out, the right to say no, and how the increased automation of things that need a human touch continues to erode that right, not the people directing the greater automation necessarily believe that the people they're automating were human in the first place, and the way that tools become integrated into the human experience, and how accepting things like the stochastic parrots in their current form only benefits the people who want to continue the dehumanization process.

And, of course, the Dreamwidth December points sale is on! Support the site with paid services, get 10% of your order in points that you can use to make a later purchase cheaper or free. And if you already have paid services and want Dreamwidth to continue as the best LJ fork created, and to also routinely assist in punching governments in the nose when they try to impose poorly-thought-out laws and rules under the guise of protecting children from adults, consider wither turning communities into paid accounts, adding icon slots, or playing Paid Account Fairy and using the function that allows you to gift paid time to a specific person or to a random active user of the site.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Good day. Let's begin with 144 hours of DDR to make a record.

Early hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.

If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.

The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.

Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.

( There's more inside, about people who have made cruelty the point and disclaim any responsibility of care for what they've created. )

Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.

And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

[The folks at holly_poly wanted a little exchange primer for people who haven't done things before, and since I'm helping out a little bit on their socials side, I thought I'd put one together, based on my extensive experience over the years in participating. If you've never taken part in one, I highly recommend it, they're fun. And if you have additional information to contribute, please do!]


So, you're thinking about participating in a fandom exchange, and you're not entirely sure how this process all goes? Don't worry. Here's a walkthrough of what exchange participation looks like, from the first parts of nominations to the joys of reveals. Since a fair number of exchanges are run on the Archive of Our Own, this guide assumes you already have an account there to sign up with. If not, they're free to get, but they might take a little while to get to you in the queue, so getting one now, before the meat of an exchange starts, will ensure that you're ready to participate.

Let's get into it with the first phase of an exchange - nominations.

Nominations

Nominations is the part of the exchange where you get to suggest what kinds of things should be included in the exchange's tag set. Nominating does not obligate you to sign up afterward, but a lot of people will if their nominations get through because then they know they'll have something they'll be excited to write about. Most nominations are also finite, so even if you're brimming with things you want to see, you'll only get to put in so many into the tag set.

Nominations have to fit the exchange's focus and format. For something that's just a general exchange, anything might be possible, but most exchanges focus on specific fandoms, characters, situations, or relationships. Holly Poly, for example, is a polyamory-focused exchange. Holly Poly nominations must include more than two entities in them, otherwise it wouldn't be a polyamorous relationship. And since it's about polyamory, they want "/"-type relationships that are romantic or sexual, rather than "&"-type relationships that are platonic and don't have romantic or sexual components to them. If I Fics, I Sits, however, says that anything can be done, so long as there's a cat in the relationship, since it's focused on cats.

Where possible, try to use the canonical tag on AO3 for nominating. Two things to remember when you're doing nominations for Holly Poly or any other exchange hosted on AO3:

1. AO3 does not do ship names, so if what you want is Zutaraang, you have to put in "Zuko/Katara/Aang." Yes, they make you spell it out.
2. All canonical AO3 ships are in alphabetical order, by last name, if the character has one, and by their only name if not, so that Zutaraang relationship is in the AO3 database as "Aang/Katara/Zuko". The autocomplete can try to help you some if you put in at least one of the participants, but you'll have to wade through the dropdown to get to the thing you want if AO3 thinks you're looking for something else first.

Make sure you also check anything the exchange mod has posted about any deviations they might be making from AO3 canonical tags for their exchange. Sometimes a tag tries to slide into another place and the mod has to change the tag to make it stay in place, or separate shows / games set in the same continuity are being combined into a single universe tag. Or exchange moderators will ask you to nominate the most specific version of the character or relationship as possible, because characters and their relationships do change between media adaptations, and sometimes fans have strong opinions about which version they want to see.

Once you've nominated, keep your eyes out for any "clarifications" posts, because those happen when the exchange moderators detail the problems they're having with nominations. It can be something as simple as having nominated characters and relationships under the incorrect fandom, and sometimes it's as complex as trying to disambiguate which of the six canonical versions of a spandex-clad superhero was intended in a nomination, or whether it will be up to the people signing up to work it out for themselves which one they want. If you're the nominator, then you get to provide additional information to help the moderators place your nomination correctly. Moderators will also usually provide a threat to make sure that information comes in a timely manner, with the idea that either a nomination will be selected to be something, or the nomination will be rejected from the tagset, if clarifying information doesn't arrive by the deadline.

Signups

Set some time aside when it's time to do sign-ups.

More than that.

Still more.

Why? Because unless you're here only for the things you nominated and nothing else, you're going to want to spend some time looking at the tag set. Even if you are here just for the things you nominated and nothing else, you want to look at the tag set. There are a lot of gems in there, from properties you haven't thought of in years, or other popular things, or pairings that you might not have thought of initially, but there's a germ of an idea in your head about what you could write if you were assigned that, and now you're interested.

I'd also look in on the Crossovers and the Original Works tags, if you want to see some of the really fun ways that people imagine relationships and what kinds of worlds they envision or want to collide together. Original Works is also where a lot of the Omegaverse prompts live, but even if you're not an Omegaverse fan, some of the prompts in there can be creative sparks without having to try and figure out how to make existing characters work with it.

If you don't have enough from your nominations and the tag set by itself, some people start looking at the sign-up summaries, once they're posted, to see what other people have posted in their optional details field. It's still true that Optional Details Are Optional, but hearing someone describe what they do and don't want to happen in a work can help someone decide whether they want to offer that combination, or possibly stay away from it if the person who is offering it has Do Not Wants that would conflict if they were assigned that recipient.

Between nominations, tag set looking, and sign-up summary reading, it should be possible to build enough things to request and offer that meet the minimum requirements the exchange has set forth. So let's look at the sign-up form. It's split into two major sections: requests (what you would like to get) and offers (what you're willing to make for a potential recipient). There's a minimum number of each that you'll have to provide to successfully sign up for the exchange. The AO3 matching code works better with more options than fewer, so signing up with as much as you can is preferable to signing up with the minimums, but you should always only sign up with things you'll want to create or receive. The AO3 matching algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor, and if you put in something that you're only half-hearted about, it will ensure that you match with your recipient or your gifter on that thing and nothing else.

On the requests side, the form will ask you for what fandom your request is in, then what relationship(s) from that fandom you're requesting. Both fandom and relationships should match exactly what's in the tag set, or your sign-up will be rejected with errors. The autocomplete dropdown will try to help you get the exact tag from the tag set, but on those rare occasions where the dropdown isn't helpful, copying and pasting the tag exactly as it is from the tagset should still allow it to go through.

After that, choose from the tickyboxes about what kind of thing you would like to receive. Common items there are fic (written), art (still drawings and/or comics,), vids (video content, usually re-cut footage set to music or some other audio track), and podfic (an audio track recorded by the gifter or the gifter and others). Most exchanges, if they're not specifically about vids or podfic, will usually just have fic and art in this space.

After saying which fandom you want, which relationship(s) you want, and what form you'd like to receive a gift in, there's the Optional Details section. The first rule about Optional Details is that they are optional. The person who is creating for you is not obligated to follow any of your optional details, but many people who are looking to make gifts will find those details useful to give them a direction to go in. A good reason to provide optional details in some form is that if you don't, the person gifting you the work is likely to write what they will enjoy, and there's no guarantee that your tastes will line up completely, even if you match in the algorithm. If you don't leave anything as a guide, you are tempting fate, and if I haven't mentioned it enough already, the AO3 algorithm has the Bastard's sense of humor and will give you someone who can complete an assignment that fulfills all the requirements and may not be anything like what you wanted.

The one exception usually granted to the Optional Details Are Optional (ODAO) rule is the Do Not Wants (DNW). Do Not Wants are the stuff that if it appears in a gift work will sour it immediately and permanently, no matter how well it's done, how tastefully it might be done, or how small the quantity of it is. You know people who have allergies so severe that they go into anaphylaxis even at the slightest inclusion of an ingredient in their meal or the presence of it in their environment? That thing that causes them such problems is a Do Not Want. It's poor form to use your Do Not Wants to box your gifter in to giving you something that is extra-tailored to you, if those things really aren't Do Not Wants, and some exchanges will say explicitly that they won't enforce Do Not Wants they consider unreasonable. Better to say what you do want and hope your gifter will follow that and leave the Do Not Wants for those specific things that will just turn you off the gift completely.

In your Optional Details, you can also indicate whether you'd like to receive treats, works created by someone other than your assigned gifter that otherwise meet the requirements of the exchange. Treats are generally pretty neat to receive, but sometimes a person doesn't want them, for their own reasons. If you do want treats, you'll also want to make sure that your AO3 account preferences have "Allow anyone to gift me works" checked, or any possible treats will fizzle.

The last field on the requests side is a place to link to your "Dear Creator" letter. Some people find it easier to put all of their optional details into a single entry, whether on Dreamwidth or Tumblr or somewhere else, and then point their gifter to that letter for things like what they like, what they dislike, possible prompts for their gifter to work off of, and the like. The "Dear Creator" letter is considered to be part of the Optional Details, and many times, exchange moderators say they won't enforce any Do Not Wants in a creator letter, because the letter itself is not required to be read, so make sure that you put your DNWs in the Optional Details box, just to be safe.

Okay, time for the offers side. The offers side works mostly the same way as the requests side, with choosing a fandom, relationship(s), and media, but for what you want to offer to someone else. Same rules apply about only offering what you want to create, because the AO3 matching algorithm is even more perverse on this side of the sheet than it is for request matches. It will almost unerringly choose the one that you were least enthusiastic about. The optional details field may still be Optional Details, but in some places it's re-titled as "Notes to Mods." This may be a place where you can mention if there are particular users that you don't want to match with, for whatever reasons you may have for this. There's no guarantees that such preferences can be accommodated, but those who are forewarned will do their best.

Once you've made your sign-up list and put in your details, click submit and wait. If you've forgotten something, or AO3 balks at something, the sign-up form will return, with highlighted spots where the errors are. If you succeed, you'll go to the sign-up summary page, and you'll see your own sign-up now in the list for other people to peruse and see if they can gather anything from your sign-up to assist their own.

Your Assignment

In normal circumstances, the AO3 algorithms will generate matches in such a way that every valid sign-up set will have one match of a fandom/pairing/medium trio in their requests with a fandom/pairing/medium trio in someone else's offers. In rare situations, a sign-up's request set may have no matches in anyone's offer set, or might only be able to match with someone who has already been matched with someone. In such rare cases, the moderators will reach out to the unmatched user and ask if they want to add requests to their sign-up. Adding additional requests and re-running matching often reshuffles everything so that everyone is matched. On the occasion that someone isn't matchable and doesn't change their sign-up, they'll usually head to the pinch hit list.

In any case, after matching, you should receive an e-mail from AO3 with your assignment for the exchange. Your recipient has matched you on at least one fandom/pairing/medium trio. Sometimes it's only one, sometimes there's more than one compatible match in the set. Your responsibility, once you have an assignment, is to produce a new work that meets one of the requests on the list, avoids the stated DNWs, and is sufficiently long/detailed to meet the requirements of the exchange. You don't necessarily have to create the thing that you matched on if something else catches your fancy, but you do have to create something off the request list put in front of you. The match is there to make sure there's at least one thing on the list that you said you wanted to create and they said they wanted to receive.

Your assignment is a secret.

Your assignment is a secret.

Because there's a good chance that you're in the same social spaces as your recipient, and you don't want to spoil the surprise! Even oblique hints about what you're creating might be enough for your recipient to deduce that you're their gifter. Run silent, run secret. The secret period extends from your assignment through the reveals of the works to the point where the authors of the works are revealed. Therefore, in your assignment, you cannot use the Notes or any other means to identify yourself as the creator of the work. Not even obliquely. Don't talk about the work anywhere during the anonymous period. Don't reveal who your recipient is.

If you have questions about your assignment, or need clarification on anything, contact your exchange moderators. If needed, they'll relay your question to your recipient, usually with some obfuscation in the form of other relevant questions to their sign-up and requests so as not to tip off the recipient about which of the things being asked about is the important one. Then they'll relay the response back to you.

Your assignment also comes with a deadline. Your completed work that conforms to the requirements of the exchange must be submitted to AO3 before the time posted as the deadline. The deadline is often something like midnight or 11:59pm on a specific day, but check the time zone. If it's UTC, that may mean you have more (or less) time than you think. I generally try to have my assignment done and submitted the day before the stated day of the deadline, just so that I don't potentially trip over any time zone issues.

To fulfill your assignment, you'll need to log in to AO3, and then choose "My Assignments" or "Assignments". You'll be presented with a list of all the exchanges you've received an assignment for. Scroll to the right assignment and click "Fulfill". At this point, you'll be taken to the AO3 New Work page, with a couple of key details already filled in about what exchange you are submitting this to, and who the gift recipient will be for the work. Everything else you fill in just as you would for any other AO3 work, with one exception. AO3's anonymity mask does not extend to series. If you put your work as part of a series, your recipient can click on the series title and be brought to the series page, with the author of the series unmasked, spoiling the anonymity. Series must be edited in after the anonymous author period expires.

If you know you're not going to get something done in time, or that you can't make the requirements, on your assignment page, there's a "Default" button next to the "fulfill" button. Most exchanges have a "no-fault default" deadline around a week before the deadline. Defaulting on your assignment means that you're saying you're not going to be able to complete something on time that meets the requirements. It happens, whether it's the well of creativity running completely dry, or life events conspiring to ensure that you have no time to complete your assignment, or any other reason. If you're not going to make it, and you know you're not going to make it, hit the default button as soon as you're sure. Doing it before the default deadline usually means you won't incur any penalty or be required to do make-up work before you can sign up for the next incarnation of the exchange. Default after the default deadline, or miss the assignment deadline, or turn something in that doesn't meet the requirements or hits someone's Do Not Wants will also likely incur a default, and there's a strong likelihood that you'll have to sit out an exchange round, or complete your assignment properly and give it as a gift, or otherwise pay a penalty of some sort before you're allowed to sign up again. Eject at the earliest point you are certain you can't complete the assignment to avoid being penalized for it.

Pinch-Hits

("Pinch hits" here refers to the baseball practice of substituting a different batter for the scheduled batter in the lineup, usually because the pinch hitter will have a higher chance of successfully getting on base and generating scoring potential.)

Every unmatchable assignment and recipient who has their gifter default and who has not defaulted themselves gets put on a list of people who need to have someone give them a gift. (Most exchanges run on the rule of "If you complete your assignment and gift someone else a work, then you must also receive at least one gift work based on your own requests.") This is the pinch hit list. ("Initial" pinch hits are unmatchable assignments, and "post-deadline" pinch hits are those that happen after the assignment deadline.)

Pinch hits are usually posted to a specific place, and will contain the entire requests portion of the sign-up for all interested parties to look at and make decisions about. Pinch-hitters are not limited to those who have signed up, but those who have signed up can collect pinch hits. (There may be a rule that you have to have completed and submitted your assignment before you can have a pinch hit assigned to you.) Initial pinch hits and early defaults will usually have the same deadline imposed on the pinch-hitter as regular assignments. As the assignment deadline approaches, pinch-hit deadlines will start to move past the initial deadline, but they will try to stay close to it. Pinch-hitters are often very good at turning around works quickly, sometimes because they see the request and go "oh, I know exactly what to do with that."

This may seem obvious, but no, you cannot pick up your own pinch hit. Even if it seems like that would be the easiest and most effective way of making sure it gets filled.

Betas

No, not the Omegaverse ones. Beta-readers.

It's not required, but it is recommended that if you have the time to do so, you run your assignment's draft form(s) past another pair of eyes to catch things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG) errors, to have someone with lived experience in a specific community read the work to make sure that it doesn't perpetuate awful stereotypes about that community (sensitivity reading), or to see if the plot coheres and the timelines work, and the characterization makes sense for the fandom, and other such things that will improve the quality of the end product. There may be channels and places where you can make these requests, but remember, your assignment is secret. You cannot directly advertise for a beta because you might be tipping off your recipient with your request.

The Yuletide exchange has created the "hippo" system to deal with the necessities of keeping assignments secret while also getting beta requests publicized, and most other exchanges use a similar system. The "hippo" is usually someone with a specific role, whose purpose is to obfuscate who is making the beta request. Use private messaging to tell the hippo the important details of who your recipient is, what you need for your work, how long the work is, and what the turnaround time you need for the betaing is. Longer turnaround times have higher success rates, because most hippos are also working on assignments. The hippo will then make a post to the channel / community, passing along those details and asking for interested parties to message them directly and privately with their interest. On the high likelihood that the recipient offers to beta, so long as there are others willing to offer and one of them is selected, the hippo can politely decline the recipient with the excuse of "another's offer has been accepted," preserving the anonymity of the exchange, with the recipient none the wiser that they've offered to beta their own gift.

If you can, getting a beta reader / viewer is helpful and often can make the final product stronger. But it does require you to be more on top of your assignments such that you can take advantage of the extra time for polish. For some people, this will be impossible, which is why betas are usually recommended rather than required for your gift works.

Reveals!

Once everyone who has completed an assignment has a gift, the deadline has passed, and the exchange maintainers and moderators have checked and made sure that all of the gifts themselves meet the requirements of the exchange, the works are released!

However! The authors of the works are not. This is to preserve a period of time where the recipient, the participants, and any and all interested parties can enjoy the works without having their enjoyment influenced by whether or not the creator is well-known, a Big Name, a Professional Name using a pseudonym, or any other factors where the prestige of the person doing the work might overshadow the work and the work's enjoyment itself. During the anonymous period, any comments on the work by the work author will be noted as "Anonymous Creator."

In the rare case where a work is incomplete and was not caught by the exchange maintainers, or steps on a Do Not Want and wasn't caught by the exchange maintainers, let the exchange maintainers know as soon as possible! That will likely produce an emergency pinch hit need, but everyone is supposed to have a gift that meets the requirements and avoids the Do Not Wants.

By accident, I did a work that trod upon a Do Not Want. The recipient let the exchange creators know, and in this case, thought the work was excellent and accepted it and enjoyed it, but still let the maintainers know, so that I was duly chastised about it. I did offer to write something that would not be that, but it was not required of me. When I wrote something that hadn't been requested by a recipient, and they pointed this out, I wrote something that did match, with a certain amount of cussing out my inability to read. These things do happen, and they are often accidents, so giving the opportunity to make things right as soon as possible is the best thing for everyone.

If you have received a gift that conforms to the requirements of the exchange, it is customary to leave an indication that you have viewed/listened to the work that someone has gifted you. For some exchanges, more may be required of you, such as leaving a comment on the gift work, but the customary indication of something having been enjoyed, even if without any further comment, is the kudos button. Comments are lovely and very much appreciated by creators, but we also know that sometimes the recipient doesn't have anything to say, or doesn't feel like they can put it down in a coherent comment. All the same, please do indicate that you have at least viewed/listened to the work in question.

Once you've gone through your gift work (or works), then it's time to explore the rest of the collection! There might be more things in there with your favorite fandoms and ships, or you might discover a new ship or fandom to check out by reading the works in the collection. While the anonymous author period is still going on, you won't know who made it, but sometimes it's a good challenge to try and get through as much as you can before the author reveals happen.

Some writers also take this opportunity to manually set the date of publication for their work. In a fast-moving fandom or a popular ship, things can fall off the first page of "Arranged By Date" very quickly. With the period of time between when something is submitted and when reveals of works are, a work might finally appear on page two or three once reveals happen. Generally, if a work is being re-dated from the original submnission date, it can be brought forward to the reveal date of the works, so it will have the opportunity to at least exist for a little while on the front page. (For less popular ships, even with the delay, the work might still be the top of the first page. You never know.)

Author Reveals!

Usually seven days after the works are revealed, the author anonymity period ends, and you can see who all the writers were. That might mean that you have some new people to follow and subscribe to. At the point the author anonymity ends, all the people who have subscriptions to you will also be notified that you've written something new, and the rest of AO3 will have the opportunity to see it regularly, instead of in the anonymous period.

With the reveal of the authors, the exchange is usually finished, with the exception of any post-event question and answer sessions or feedback requests. There's all the stories to be enjoyed, the comments and kudos to be had, and the brainstorming for what you might want to write about next time around. Or to go off with a fistful of new fandoms and possible pairings and canons to look at.

Congratulations for participating in the exchange!

The Document Foundation, responsible for the LibreOffice suite of office tools, posted a blog post in anticipation of the end of Windows 10 support with 10 reasons to ditch Windows and go to Linux instead. I appreciate their advocacy for such things, but I think their ten reasons are not actually good ones for the adoption of Linux, but realizing this means that I'm probably going to have to put down a blog post about it, rather than a social media quip. So, here we go once again, and I'm going to once again be a regular Linux user about this, rather than some superuser sysadmin.

( It's a Not Top Ten List more than a Top Ten List )

Let's begin with an academic paper exploring the way that online puppygirl culture embodies a rejection of those things used as markers of human success because of the way that the highly transfeminine nature of puppygirls are usually denied the full markers of humanity based on their transness. The author notes at the end the limitations around embracing inhumanity for persons who have been and continue to be treated as inhuman based on their skin colors and perceived origins, and that the relative homogeneity of participants in online puppygirl culture and media often gives them blinkers in places they could stand to be more inclusive. I enjoyed reading it, perhaps you will, too.

The still-apparently-novel concept that people who have systems tuned toward novelty and curiosity might be beneficial to current society (instead of only the hunter-gatherers) and that environments made for others are not helpful to them.

The Archive of Our Own reminds us that they are dealing with an influx of spam accounts that leave generic praise comments and then offer to discuss off-site things like making fanart for your story. Part of it is that such commercial solicitation is barred on the Archive, but the easiest way to spot it, other than the invitation offsite, is that the comment itself doesn't have anything specific about the story. It's usually posted to the most recent story that's available. And some of these spammers are creating AO3 accounts to spam with, so disabling guest comments won't necessarily protect you from receiving them.

Nostalgia for times where scarcity required planning and people got a certain thrill out of the act of chasing things and not knowing whether their selections would turn out to be good ones. I am more inclined not to be nostalgic for that, but to be annoyed at the way that the expertise of the record clerk, the librarian, and the bookstore buyer are being devalued in favor of machines that their promoters claim have intelligence and can do all of those things a human can do, and better.

Robert Redford, actor, director, and well-known environmental activist, has left the world at 89 years of age. He is also responsible for the body that produces the annual Sundance Film Festival.

Anonymous art creators have unveiled a statue of the current administrator and known child trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, celebrating their friendship, and using the text of the administrator's birthday note to Epstein as commentary. You know, that text that strongly suggests that the two of them share an interest in pederasty and molestation of women and young girls, buttressed by some of the public statements the administrator has made about his interest in such. (As well as having been found liable for sexual assault earlier on in his life.)

( EA acquisitions, foolishness and buffoonery, and the usual issues that come with having the unqualified promoted well beyond their incompetence inside )

Last out, the ways in which our understanding of classical Greek depends on the surviving texts that we have to work with, and therefore while sometimes a word does mean dildo, other times, it does not.

Yacht Club Games on the development of modes for Shovel Knight that allow for different-bodied designs and pronoun usage, and a good decision made by them to decouple body designs and gendered pronouns.

And a story of corvids who help break the cages around their fellows. Be gay, do crow. And, perhaps, show solidarity by demonstrating how foolish it is to require girls to declare they're "biological females" before they can play in sport. (While the article quotes someone saying it's foolish not only require girls to do this and not boys, and that girls teams are suffering because they can't field enough affirmed players, the real meat is from the teachers saying it's not fair to require this, and the athletes who are also choosing not to participate because of fairness issues.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)