eruthros

Listen you guys I don't know if I've mentioned this six or twelve times before but I love it here at dreamwidth! I am so glad I moved and found this great space and subscribed to all sorts of great new people.

I am so thrilled we moved kink_bingo here last year -- like, I just last week had an Official Conversation with denise where I was like, hey, our new round won't be opening for six more weeks, but I just wanted to see if we could get more invite codes in case people from lj want to play! And she was like, no problem, here you go, let us know if you need any more, we value your community. And they'll mention kinky and sex-positive groups in dw_news posts, and they'll stand up for our legal rights to talk about the things we talk about! I just! Guys! I feel like I have found a safe space.

Anyway, I got started thinking about that because telesilla asked me "So I, of course, LOVE kink_bingo and I'm just wondering why you & TWW started it up and if you had any idea that it would get to be a huge as it is now."

I can't remember how we decided to start it up, or where we got the idea, so I asked Twings if she remembered, and she doesn't either. But knowing how conversations with Twings go, I imagine that it was probably something along the lines of:
"I wish there were more kink fic!"
"Yeah! Also I am sad that some kinks are often marked as icky -- what is up with that, fandom!"
"Yeah! We should have a challenge. To have more kink fic! For all kinds of kink!"
for some reason we think of bingo here for reasons that neither of us can recall, seriously, bingo, who knows, but I do recall googling to look for bingo terminology for kinds of bingos
"Okay, let's make a list of kinks! I'll write them down as we go."
"Okay! Let's see: bondage and humiliation and sensory deprivation and..."
I also recall getting to about eighty kinks and then running out of brainstorming power and ending up with three separate sensory deprivation kinks, IDEK.
Twings: I will ask my journal if anyone would be interested in playing! If there are twenty people, we'll make a community!
eruthros: Oh cool! I will make some cards in photoshop!
finis

So, we had no idea it was going to be huge -- in fact, when I showed Twings how I was making the cards I remember that she asked me if I would be okay with making as many as sixty of them in a month, in case people wanted second or third cards. *facepalm* The first year I was making all the cards by hand in photoshop (reading off of a randomizer) until I left the country and then Twings made the rest of them, and last year we both made some in advance -- "only sixty people said they were interested in playing again on dreamwidth, and we're moving to dreamwidth which is new and smaller, let's make 200 cards in advance so we have backups!" we said -- and then we both made more and then I switched to doing them in imagemagick and typing all the kink names. I think we gave out something like 700 last year.

I am continually surprised by the number of people who are interested, because in the first round I thought maybe twenty people would play! And that's also why the rules have gotten clearer and more detailed as we've gone on -- the first time we did it, we were like "ho hum, twenty people, all people we know" so we didn't even alphabetize the kink list. It's even kinda funnily at the worst time of year for both of us -- I'm usually out of the country with almost no internet in the summer, and Twings is often travelling -- but we accidentally started in late May and we did it twice, so!

And it was also weird for me because I didn't have a fannish-only lj -- my lj was more fannish before my sister gave my whole family the url, and then I started having to flock/filter fannish stuff a lot. So I felt like I couldn't talk about kink bingo on lj, but I wanted to talk about it all the time. Especially since one of the things running the community has done is transform kinks I have that I used to be vaguely and uneasily ashamed of¹ into things that I do want to talk about and feel comfortable talking about. I knew intellectually that putting the kinks all together on cards would be YKINMYBYKIOK and put kinks on equal footing, but I didn't really think it would make me feel this much more comfortable about talking about kink, this much less squicked by the kinks I don't share -- like, I'm much more able to take kinks and say, this isn't my kink right now, but what if I put it in a different context, what if I do it as powerplay, what if ... And even better, now I feel like I have a space here to talk about that sort of thing!² Because I have moved to dreamwidth! And y'all are here! And this post comes full circle.

Also: eeeeee one month til the next round opens aaaaah I have so much to do before then!

¹In a not hot way.

²Though mostly I'm not right now because I'm dealing with the kink-pseudo-wiki instead, oh my god, why is it so huge, it needs to stop. Also seriously if anyone can think of a clip for orgasm denial or object penetration or piercings/needleplay -- there must be a clip for needleplay that I've just blanked on, right -- that would be awesome.

"I don't see any differences between lj and dw! It's just a social pressure thing! That's why everyone is moving!"

I wanted to leave lj, because of things like strikethrough. I wanted to leave lj, because I couldn't stand the ad-culture and what it was doing to the site. I wanted to leave lj, because I don't feel welcome there. But I stayed for ages. I stayed when there was ij, and gj, and journalfen. I stayed when all the options were site clones. I only moved when someone offered me a fandom-welcome, no-ads, fork.

And I thought, oh, well, it'll take a while for me to settle in there. I'll have to get used to the differences in the interface. I'll have to get used to the way the menus have moved. Everything will seem a little wrong, but I'll put up with it for a while, because I really do want to move. So, eruthros, I told myself, be prepared to have it take a little while for dreamwidth to seem like the right place to be.

It took thirty seconds.

Here is the moment at which I fell in love with dreamwidth: three boxes down in the edit-profile page, when I clicked on the gender box, and found not just "unspecified" and "male" and "female," but "rather not say" and "other" and "male" and "female."

And I have been falling in love with dreamwidth ever since. I fell in love with dw over the accessibility concerns that led them to put a description box for every icon, so you can tell screenreader users what they're looking at. I fell in love with dw over the menu placements, which I find so intuitive that it now makes it hard for me to find things on lj, a site I have used for nearly eight years. I fell in love with dw when they made the post and comment lengths longer, because it meant they were thinking about their users and what their users wanted.

This is not a social pressure thing. This is not because my friends are moving -- some of them haven't, or won't, and I will continue to read them on lj. This is because I feel comfortable here. This is because, every time I do something on dreamwidth, I find that it's easy, or inclusive, or accessible. I find that they've thought about how users want to use this space. This is because there is a difference. And I love it.

If you, like me, find dreamwidth's zesty style unpleasant to read, you might be interested in a dreamwidth-specific style=mine bookmarklet. There's the style=mine text up on the navigation bar, but I often scroll halfway down a page before realizing that if the story is that long, I really need a different style now -- this is easier for me than scrolling up and scrolling back down again.

If you have the same behaviors, make a bookmark and put this in the location field:

javascript:if(location.hostname.indexOf('dreamwidth.org')%20>=%200){location.search+=(location.search?'&':'?')+'style=mine';}

After you save, hitting it should do your reload.

***

Also, if you are not a fan of the current styles, there's a new style -- transmogrified -- which permits more color change.

Or there's this really easy to follow style import guide. It took me about five minutes, and I find styles really confusing, so!

And, there's even a new site scheme for vertical-scheme folks, which you can switch to at the display section of your manage account page. I don't like the fonts much, as one of them is unattractive and the other forces a lot of white space at the top of my display, but I like the colors and I have been using Vertigo on lj so I'm used to the vertical-scheme layout.

I just realized that I've got some old flocked-not-filtered posts with my name and other personal information in them, so I'm going to take most folks off the grants-access list until I finish going through my imported lj entries and deleting/unflocking as appropriate. (I'm already in mid-2003! Or, to put it another way, I'm only in mid-2003!)

And after that, I dunno. I'm still trying to think through how I plan to use dreamwidth, and what it means to the grants-access front. I understand "subscribing," and I know what I want to subscribe to. But grants-access -- well, I'm not planning to flock anything, really. So, what does it mean to grant access to something that isn't there? And why should I be deciding who I would, theoretically, let read about my work day, if I were to write about said work day, when I plan to do no such thing? So I'm not sure what grants-access means to me.

I'd appreciate thoughts on this, btw, because I'm trying to figure out how to use grants-access, and what it means to other people to be granted access.

ETA: for full disclosure and all, I do filter. Usually either away from someone (see: birthdays) or to someone in particular (see: cooperative projects, reminders, etc).