I went back and forth about whether or not to write one of these since I don't think I did last year, but the one I read from my requester was actually quite helpful so I figured... why not?

First off, I want to make it clear that no one should be feeling any pressure. Many, many people are probably quite willing to point out just how easy I am, and that means that I love just about anything. Just writing something even remotely inspired by a prompt of mine is guaranteed to make me happy, nay: giddy.

That said, I suppose I can talk a bit about my personal taste given the highly likely possibility that you don't know me.

I tend to spend most of my time trundling around gen-land. I am deeply in love with deep relationships. Romantic or not, I just love seeing people who are deeply comfortable with one another interacting. If you can nail that sort of deeply comfortable familiarity thing, then it really doesn't matter to me what else happens.

Alternatively, I like first encounters for relationships canons show to be deep. How do two people first talk to each other when we have the inevitability of their deep connection as a known end point? I eat that stuff up.

But, back to the first point: I love just about everything. Write something you love, and chances are I'll love it too.

I do love Yuletide,
Ana

There are very few advertisements that I see and just get angry about. Of course most of the ones I do get pissed at make me angry because of the content of the ad. The embedded cultural nonsense it draws on, or the wrong image it presents, or whatever.

There is, as far as I know, only one type of advertisement is for a product that makes me angry just to think about it and which pumps tremendous amounts of money into advertising so that it's everywhere. And that's the lottery.

State lotteries are weird entities that are politically supported and opposed by the groups I'd normally expect to do the opposite. Despite being incredibly regressive in the wealth redistribution sense (that is to say that costs fall disproportionately on those who can least afford it) it is generally supported by liberal-leaning political groups and generally opposed by conservative-leaning groups. Most state lotteries are used to support education, so I suppose that accounts for the liberal support (who doesn't support education, after all?). And obviously the moral conservatives are going to be upset about the whole gambling aspect, but... this post is really about me getting upset and needing to vent, so...

Lotteries are regressive because (in the US) they derive about 45% of their revenue from people who did not complete high school and about 50% from people making under $25k a year (with half of that coming from people making under $10k a year). There's obvious overlap between education and income levels, of course, but basically lotteries are funded at an incredibly disproportionate rate by the poor and undereducated (and that doesn't even get into the racial demographics, which are awful as well).

I actually even get extra pissed off because most people don't really care. Which, to be honest, is probably how most people feel about their central political issues, so me crusading would probably be a bit hypocritical of me.

Anyway, I just needed to yell a bit as the lottery just kicked off a new advertising campaign and every time I see it I get rage-y.

Huzzah for venting,
Ana

I spend a lot of time tooling around Hulu watching random stuff. And I have learned that, somehow, I missed Baccano when it was airing.

It is a work of utter genius. It is a story about stories (shades of Princess Tutu), with an amazing cast and hysterical humor. I'm only two episodes in, and I'm still getting a feel for it, but... I can definitely recommend it already.

It's on Hulu for free until the end of the month. (Actually, that's an extremely clever marketing system on the part of Funimation. Release a full series for a month. Chances are a lot of people will watch it and like it who never would have picked it up otherwise, and a lot of people will see part of it and not finish it and it'll be in the back of their mind when they randomly see it in a store. I'd love to know how effective it turned out to be for them...)

Edited to add: Also? Baccano has some of the best episode titles ever. My favorite so far is "The Vice President Doesn't Say Anything About the Possibility of Him Being the Main Character". Or maybe "The Rail Tracer Covertly, Repeatedly Slaughters Inside the Coaches". Or... well... I love most of them.

Recommendingly,
Ana

For context: we've been reading a lot of theoretical work about the structure of stories and narratives for my Collective Storytelling class. Most of them have been interesting, and at the moment I'm working my way through chapter 2 of Roger Schank's Tell Me a Story which I'm finding quite interesting. With his discussion of second-hand stories and thoughts about how retransmission of narratives from one person to another tends to change their emphasis (and over time their meaning, think of the game "telephone") in the back of my mind, I was struck by something as I caught up with my flist today. There are a number of memes in there and I got to thinking about copy/pasting.

On the one hand, perfect digital copyability is a huge shift in the way we handle media. It's so much easier to quote someone and to distribute information that I think our culture is still reeling in shock from the change in capabilities. So while this post is mostly a bit of nostalgic longing for earlier times, it's not that I don't love copyability. Because I do. It's just...

It seems to remove some of the personal touch from things. I was thinking that it would be so awesome if I saw four people posting the same meme to their journal, but they were writing them in their own words. Picking out the bits that interested them most, remixing them to be personally compelling. It's in that sort of personal customization of a wide-spread phenomenon that you can learn a lot about someone, and I think that sort of thing is super-cool (it's one of the things I find compelling about fanfic: it's intensely personal).

So that was my thought for the day: I love the digital world's ability to copy and paste, but a tiny part of me wishes that people had to type up their own text for a meme they wanted to do. That would force them to evolve rapidly, and make them so revealing in how they're framed rather than just in how they're answered. i mean, I know over the long term memes evolve as they get remixed by people and repropagated in new forms, but... I don't know, I guess I wish they were more personal.

What about you folks? Do you prefer the uniformity that memes on LJ sets up? Because I have to admit there's something compelling about dozens of people you know all doing the exact same thing...

Thinky-face,
Ana

Which is a fancy way of saying: I was doing some reading on the train today and I was struck by a question... What would it be like if we had an extensive class of fiction media which didn't give us a real-time sense of our progress.

If you're reading a book and there's this tense scene in which the main character might die, but there are two hundred pages left, you know that they won't (well, for some given sense of "know", there are always subversions). Or if you're watching a TV show and you get 35 minutes in and you're not sure how things are going to resolve, you can be pretty sure you'll get some sort of rushed resolution all at once (again, exceptions, but...).

What I'm basically talking about is the way that the packages our stories come in (books, known-length video, text in a browser which you can glance at the vertical scroll bar to gauge your progress through) provide a lot of meta-knowledge about the narrative. Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that sort of knowledge, and it can even be comforting.

Films, of course, do not end up bound to this, especially as the variety of film lengths continues to increase, but I at least check the running time before a film starts, so even there I often have a sense of my place in the story.

This strikes me as interesting because I've become so used to it that when my expectations are broken I find it extremely jarring. I remember the first time I saw Blood: The Last Vampire as an example of this. I was expecting it to be a 90 minute film, so when it ended around minute 45 I was taken aback. I almost felt betrayed as my expectations were shown to be false. But it was also an amazing experience. The jarring meta-level expectation violation added something interesting to the story somehow.

There's definitely comfort, familiarity, and just plain something good to be said, for the predictability of narrative vehicles. It helps us organize where the story is and what's going on in our heads. So this isn't me railing against all of this.

But I do find myself curious: what sorts of crazy experiments and experiences would we have access to if there were a format that didn't give us that? If we watched video narrative without knowing how long they were, or if there were text objects that didn't telegraph our distance from the end?

Random today, apparently,
Ana

Well. Hello, LJ. It has been some time, has it not? While my posting history shows that I've been offline since early July, the truth is that my LJ habits have been sporadic since sometime in February of this year. This was due primarily to my class load being crazy and me just having a lot to do. Prior to that I was rather diligent about keeping up with my flist even if I wasn't posting, but I haven't really checked it at all in the past three or four months.

So since school did a rather bang-up job of driving me away, I have to admit that it's highly amusing to me that it is school which is driving me back. I am working on no less than three different projects, in three different classes, which will strongly benefit from reintegrating myself with my LJ community. (Quick note: upon extensive discussion, and a rereading of this post, it strikes me that these two sentences, the second one especially, are incredibly misleading. I'm going to try writing what I meant differently. That part is in italics, just so you can follow what's changed. This is not an attempt to excuse myself, but rather an attempt to say what I wanted to say, if that makes sense.) So school has basically been a major factor in my absence from LJ. Which has been sad. I love my LJ friends, for years I managed to read every post you all made even when I was silent for long periods, and finding myself with so many demands on my time that I couldn't keep up with peoples' lives was a sad realization. Which means that I'm super-excited by this semester. In addition to having a ton of awesome classes, I have three separate projects lined up in three separate classes that basically mean that school time is LJ time. I can read and write and talk without feeling guilty about 'skipping out' on school stuff. Thus I'm hoping that for the rest of the semester (at the least) I'll be back to my old habits. Two of them [the projects] you'll hear more about later, but for now I'm going to talk about the most pressing one.

See, I'm taking this class called Collective Storytelling, and two weeks in it's already rocking my socks off. A lot of people here at school know that I'm the fandom and fanfic person, so none of them have been surprised by my level of excitement. I feel like I have a ton to offer the class because I've been thinking about the nature of storytelling in groups for at least the last three or four years, while most of the others are relatively new to the idea (which is cool, especially since most of them are taking decidedly non-fannish approaches).

Anyway, as befits such a class (in my opinion, at least) we've started off with fanfiction. There's been a lot of interesting discussion about what it is, how it works, why people do it, and the various things that most outsiders want to know. But it's been respectful and curious, which has made it a ton of fun.

All of that, however, is background for the real point of this post. See, our homework assignment for this week (due Wednesday) is to write a 700+ word piece of fanfic to share with the class. Most of the others are having trouble figuring out where to start, and ironically so am I. After all, I have many fandoms, and that gives me many options.

So I come to you, h font of good fannish ideas: which of these three is the best choice for prompting some interesting discussion about collective storytelling? 1) A piece of fanfic for a major media property, something at least some of my classmates will know. 2) A piece of fanfic of an obscure media property, something that they probably won't recognize. 3) A piece of fanfic based on a panfandom roleplaying game. (That third strikes me as especially compelling as it gets into some of the interestingly deeply-layered nature of fannish idea construction.)

Tell me! Tell me!

Only online to demand things from you,
Ana

So I'd known the July 4 was this weekend, but as with many holiday sorts of things the implications of this hadn't really struck me. See, it's a holiday weekend. A i>three day</i> weekend for many of us crazy Americans. This doesn't matter so much for me because, well, I'm pretty familiar with my schedule and when I get time off and what I can do with it.

But then I realized that this is a three day weekend for other people too. I blame my last job in dispatch for the lack of awareness as we didn't have holidays so I'm not used to them synchronizing across people. The next realization was that I don't actually have plans for said weekend.

So it occurs to me to ask: anyone care for a visit? Yeah, it's spur of the moment, but if you've got a comfy couch and a not-packed weekend (the former more likely than the latter, I suspect) let me know. Maybe I can swing out your way!

(You're all lucky that I suppressed the urge to make this a 2000 word essay on the way that shifting information technology tools have allowed for much more efficient ad hoc travel planning.)

I do love travel,
Ana

I don't tend to do memes that float around the internet. Mostly this is due to the fact that I'm just really contrary and the idea of "following along with the crowd" makes me bristle irrationally (I mean, sometimes the crowd is doing something smart like fleeing a burning building and not doing so just to be contrary... well...)

But this one's actually pretty interesting to me. First of all, it's contrary all on its own, which plays to my strength, and second of all I suspect it may spark some fun conversations. So, what the heck, I'll give it a shot.

Name a fandom, and I'll give you the scoop on at least three of my unpopular opinions related to that fandom.

At this point the list of fandoms I'm familiar with is so large as to be silly. So you can toss something out there and I'll probably have at least a few things to say. And if I don't? I can make something up! It'll be great! I'll talk about how the film version of the fandom that has no film is clearly superior to whatever the original media was.

Yep,
Ana

While I was visiting the old family homestead back in May I went back through some of my old stored materials, just idly seeing what I had decided to save when I was young. And lo, I discovered some amazing things. Old papers, old sheet music, some of my earliest attempts at board game design... Simply put, I discovered some of my earliest, and worst, creative output. It was great.

The most exciting things I discovered were paper hard copies of some of my old (really old) fiction. Some of these were hard copies that I figured I had in storage somewhere because they'd been written on notebook paper, and I probably have a hundred pounds of such papers here and there. Still, rediscovering them gave me a chance to digitize them, and that's great. But the true treasure is one I'm going to share part of with you today.

From the time I was about 11 to the time I was about 14 I did a lot of work on computers. I wrote no less than four truly awful text-based adventure games and untold numbers of opening chapters for various science fiction epics. During those three or four years everything I did was saved on a single dark blue 3.5" diskette. It had a graph-lined sticker label on it with a number of things crossed out and "My Stuff" written in my sloppy handwriting. And somewhere along the way, I lost it.

I lost it at a time when I wasn't all that invested in the creative side of myself (being much more interested in developing technical skills), so I had plenty of time to get used to the idea before my creative side experienced a resurgence. So I've only ever felt disappointed that it wasn't there. But while I going through storage I found something. Not the disk, sadly, but apparently I had printed out some of that early fiction. And today you will be given a sample.

I don't actually know when this was written. I have to assume I was 12 or 13 at the time. That would have put me in Bandung where I was just discovering computer programming and interesting math, but my creative side was still runniung strong. I was reading a lot of scifi at the time (having just discovered the Star Wars work of Zahn and Stackpole and devouring some of Heinlein's lighter work), but I can't quite pin down what I was reading that influenced "The War Begins". TWB (this is fandom, so everything gets an acronym, even my terrible pre-teen writing) was intended to be a great space opera epic. I didn't recognize a difference between space opera and science fiction at the time, but looking back I was definitely going for space opera. I suspect, though can't say for sure, that I was trying to write some sort of cross between Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings as there's a ragtag rebel organization fighting a One True Evil.

Now, since this is me and I can't stop doing analysis, well... I'll be doing it here too. Behind the cut is Chapter One of TWB along with my own commentary. I point out things that are attempts to play with tropes I loved then and those I love now. I may not always know what I was trying to do all those years ago, but that's okay!

( The War Begins - Chapter 1: A New Assignment )

I also have the second chapter of TWB which is actually worse than this one. I think I'll pull something else out of my archives before I smack you with that one, so you can wait in eager anticipation for a level of awesome you can only imagine.

I post this because it amuses me, but I welcome both commentary and counter-posting of your own early stuff. Because, really, if we can't find amusement and education from our own early work, well... what's the point?

Man I was terrible,
Ana

This is a long post about why social network migrations are so difficult to execute. It might get technical in places, but I'm going to be working on keeping it accessible. Of course considering that this is me we're talking about you can be virtually guaranteed that one thing it won't be is short. My most recent bout of thinking on the subject has been inspired by Dreamwidth. It's not a service I use, but it is one I think is neat. Especially the way it's set forth its goals and what those goals are. In some ways I hope they succeed in becoming a major hub for fandom, even if they never did answer that email I sent way back when...

Anyway, while Dreamwidth kicked off this round of thought on my part, migration patterns are part of my general fascination with social network topology so I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm going to be drawing some terms and concepts from the more technical edges of the field, but I'm hoping to make them relatively understandable. And if you've got questions or I explain something poorly, let me know.

Prior to 1999 mediated groups basically fell into two categories: groups with centers and groups with edges. The lines between the two can be blurry, but the essentials are pretty simple. Membership in a center-based group is contingent upon being located near that center. The group of all "New Yorkers" is a good example of this. A person's membership in the group is based on their relationship with the center (New York) rather than with other group members, but common membership does matter and does signify important points of relationship between the members. Centered groups may sort members by proximity to the center (in our New Yorkers example you might have people in Brooklyn and people in Manhattan). Edges, on the other hand, determine membership in the group through delineation. Being a student at a specific school is less about how close (or far) you are in relation to that school and more about whether or not you're in their records as a student. Someone who takes internet classes from the other side of the planet is a student while someone who works on campus might not be.

( 2000 words of introductory and sketchily-explained network topology theory goes here )

While I could spend another thousand words talking about the technological and social frameworks Dreamwidth depends on to do this, I'm going to refrain. Instead I'm just going to say that what they're doing is extremely clever. It allows them to grow symbiotically with LJ. They don't have to generate their own explosive growth curve in order to produce a large enough membership to be self-sustaining. This is brilliant and clever and many other positive adjectives besides. And it may be the only way migrations can happen, I don't know.

All I know for sure is that it's going to be a ton of fun to watch. At least if you're into this sort of thing. And I am in a big way.

Interesting times!
Ana

So I woke up this morning and checked my email and thought to myself "Huh... now there's someone I don't hear from very often..." So I take a look and the message is all "Happy birthday!". And I blink, and frown, and suddenly remember that my birthday is near the end of May. And I think to myself that yesterday might really have been the 23rd.

Huh.

Now I'm wondering if it's a sign of lameness that I don't have epic birthday plans. I don't even have cake (though I might bake cookies). It's not that I actually feel socially insecure, but a body does wonder sometimes.

Oddly bemused,
Ana

If you guessed me, then you can have a shiny foil sticker star!

So on the recommendation of a friend of mine I asked Clay for an internship, so I am officially working with one of the smartest people I've met doing some of the coolest stuff ever. One of the first things I'm doing is this big number-crunching project which gives me an excuse to finally get around to building a web-crawling data-mining server. So parts are on order for a 64-bit dual-core monstrosity with 8GB of RAM. I'm psyched.

On top of that, while I was back in Alabama earlier this week I went through some old papers and stuff and discovered that I apparently stored hard copies of some very old writing of mine. Stuff I thought had been lost forever when the ancient 3.5" floppy they were on vanished in a move. Those lovely, lovely bits of awfulness are now nicely digitized in google.docs and I'm sure you'll be seeing them whenever I'm feeling bored throughout the summer. You should be excited! The awfulness is the sort that's super-amusing! I know I had fun rereading the.

And if all that wasn't enough, I'm apparently spending a week in South Africa working with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research field testing the results of our UNICEF class.

And here I thought this summer might turn out to be boring.

So super-excited,
Ana

This semester has been crazy busy in a way that has driven me from LJ almost completely. I haven't read my flist in at least a month, and you've clearly seen my low posting frequency. Hopefully this summer is going to change that as I have a bit more time on my hands, but we'll see. If you see me on AIM or something feel free to poke me about whether or not I've read my flist. I could use some help getting back into the habit, I suspect.

Anyway, this is the next major post I was working on before the semester started. I actually wrote much of it on the bus to and from DC back in January (which was a great trip, thanks a bunch, crazy DC peeps!), so it's a bit dated, but I feel like the ideas are still solid. I'm also working on a rather fascinating (if I do say so myself) post on social network migrations and the serious difficulty Dreamwidth is going to find itself facing. It's the same difficulty that every attempted large-scale migration from LJ has faced: the decentralized network model LJ is built on. You can look forward to an exciting discussion of centered, edged, and horizoned social network maps and a brief overview of social "neighborhoods". It'll be fun!

I had originally intended to roll this topic in with my last post (note that the first draft of this post was written back in January, so the "last post" at the time was the one on play motivation and generational gaps) since they actually sort of tie together, but ultimately I decided I'd be better off splitting them. And after the discussion last time, I feel that it turned out I was right. You don't have to remember the last post, really (and I'd be surprised if you did), to get what I'm talking about here, but in my head the two are very closely tied together. They each feed into the other, so it's not that one led to the next, but thinking about the two together helped me a lot with each individually. But enough preamble.

Continuing my tradition of trying to completely telegraph my point, there's a concept it will be quite helpful to understand if you want to get involved in the discussion (and as always I love discussion, on this topic more than on previous ones even since I'm less sure of my ideas). The concept in question is that of psychological flow states (thanks Wikipedia!). For the link-resistant (such as myself) here's the pertinent bit of the summary from Wikipedia:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. ...

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the zone, or in the groove.

( Only about 2000 words or so, don't you feel lucky? )

To wrap this thing up, I want to toss out a few questions. There is the inevitable "hey, does this sound right/reasonable to you?", but when I'm making a post I feel like that can pretty much be assume to be implicit. The other ones are about how you experience flow yourself. Is it something you find you get better at dropping into and out of with practice? Do you tend to work in flow states at the character level, or the thematic level, or something else altogether? Do you even think flow is a useful way to think about RP, and if so are there some neat things it explains that I haven't thought of yet?

I want to knooooow...

Back in LJ,
Ana

I rather neglected this last semester, and I felt really bad about it afterward because it was a pretty awesome event. Thus, while I'm still mostly not on LJ, I am signing in to mention it.

The ITP Spring Show 2009 is in two weeks. If you're in NYC I highly recommend you swinging by for at least an hour or so just to see the craziness. It's sort of like a temporary high-density museum of technology, art, and insanity. On Sunday May 10 between 2 and 6 and then again on Monday May 11 between 5 and 9 the floor will be open to the public. The collection of stuff is pretty much guaranteed to be all over the place, but in a way that means it's virtually impossible not to find at least one thing that's well worth your time.

The winter show had at least five different extremely thought-provoking projects, and at least as many which were just plain fun. So if you can squeeze it into your schedule I promise you'll enjoy it. Or I'll refund your money! (Which is one of those great promises to make when things are free.)

Hoping you can make it,
Ana

There's a lot that can be said about the newest trade paperback collection of The Red Star (confusingly titled "Sword of Lies Book 1"), but let me get this out of the way first: I bought it and have absolutely zero regrets for having done so. But by now you should all be fully aware that I'm obsessed with the canon. Pretty much anything I buy is well worth the money spent to me, and while I'm going to try to temper my review with some sort of objectivity, just remember who's talking.

It's also worth mentioning that Christian Gossett contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in a comped copy of the book in order to review it. I was sort of floored by the offer. I mean, talk about flattering! Of course I already had a copy on reserve down at Forbidden Planet, and I already planned to write a review on it (as yet another chance to get people addicted), so while I did give him an address to send me an extra copy if he wanted to, I payed for one as well. Considering how expensive the book is (which I'll discuss below a bit), I'm sort of glad I did it this way. Part of the review of any book with a price tag like this one has got to consider price, and paying out of pocket keeps me honest in that regard. The short version is: I love this book.

( And now, a review. Complete with pictures! )

Ultimately I feel like the money I spent was well worth it. It's an excellent book full of more of The Red Star goodness, and it's extremely well executed. It's also an expensive book, and that's a concern for a lot of people. If you've read and enjoyed The Red Star in the past, then you'll enjoy this one too. If you've never really gotten into it, this one makes a decent place to get started primarily because of the time-jumping. Even long-time readers will spend much of their time meeting new characters, so there's a degree to which you can figure out what's going on well enough to get a good feel for things. I recommend it for anyone. I just wish it were cheaper.

Always loving new canon,
Ana

In some senses I suppose this was bound to happen eventually, but the specific way that it's happened is actually rather interesting.

See, "Anastasia Mitrevski" is a pseudonym. This comes as no surprise, I'm sure. Part of the reason I established it was that I am fascinated by identity. I won't delve into the philosophy or sociology of it all here, but basically legal identity is no more valid than other identity in any strict sense. All that makes it "legal" is that a hugely larger segment of society (virtually all of it) has agreed to share information about it. Governments issue cards in that name, banks track debt and accounts in that name, all these people who have no social ties to you will still give a legal name cachet because that's what we've agreed to do.

But within specific social circles, say a circle of friends, the legal name is no more or less useful than any other name. Further, within specific limits the social circles in which a name has cachet can be expanded. When people introduces me to their friends as "Ana" then, with those new people, "Ana" has more weight than my legal name. This has led to some interesting situations in which social circles collide, like that time when someone was worried about having enough time to see "Ana" and "[My Legal Name]" while I was in town. This has happened more than once: do I comment on a blog post about fandom as "Ana" or as "[legal name], a guy who knows your cousin"?

Confusions aside for the moment (don't worry, they're coming back), those circles can be expanded. I could start a new blog tomorrow and be faced with the choice of which identity I'd rather further. For quite some time it's been my intention to one day expand "Ana"s identity out of the purely social circles into something more professional, probably academic. It's been idle thinking, the ethical considerations are mostly unconsidered so far, but there's an existing and significant history of pseudonymous publishing in academia, and I thought that'd be interesting to pursue.

Of course I thought I'd have plenty of time to work through all of this, but life being life, some sort of decision has sort of been forced on me.

( Because this is already too rambly... )

...

Huh. I have some of the weirdest dilemmas...
Ana

I'm not usually one for memes, but this one is at least somewhat interesting. In addition to serving as prompt for my own meta, it does so no less than three times. Once when I make little comments on the copy-pasted list under the cut, again when I see who asks about which characters, and finally when I actually answer.

Though I suppose it's possible that I'll only get the one round of meta out in the case that no one actually wants any info from me, but I can live with that.

( Without further ado... )

This post also serves as a sort of chance to get the brain juices flowing because I have a non-trivial post I expect to make sometime today. It should be interesting!

Meme-ishly,
Ana

While I haven't been keeping precise track, I'm pretty sure that until about half an hour ago I was starting on week eight of not checking my flist. I blame school, but mostly in a good way. It's been fun if insane, and getting insaner.

Hopefully I'll be around more and be more diligent about making time to keep up with all the people I really care about. That's you all, by the way. So apologies for the things I've missed, and here's hoping all's well.

For context, here's my semester in summary:

Big Games class. A lot of reading. Designing one big game, organizing an in-class session of tabletop roleplaying (using a modified version of The Pool), designing a sport, and now prep for mid-terms (a fully playable street game). Tons of fun, and not as much work as it might seem at first glance, primarily because of my background in games.

UNICEF class. The class opened with tons of reading and pitching seven ideas for development in four weeks. We've finally transitioned to actual project development which is good, but at our meeting last week our project got some much-needed criticism/suggestion stuff that may have just exploded the workload by a factor of three or four. What was a manageable project may now be a mad scramble to deliver something in seven weeks. Have a meeting this afternoon with UNICEF programmers about our project.

Mobile Media class. Super-rocking. We're doing a group project built around the idea of micro-payments for charitable giving which has us rather excited. We have a semi-functional prototype and will be working on more as the semester progresses. If all goes well we might even try to set up a non-profit and start looking for financial backing. Because the idea is just that cool.

Social Facts class. By far the most academic. Tons of reading, some paper writing, and a whole lot of discussion about things that are true only because we all agree they are. Stuff like "that dollar bill will pay for things" and "your degree matters". It's so up my alley it's not even funny.

Assistive Technologies internship. This one's exciting too. We're working on communication devices for learning-disabled kids with a focus on doing things significantly cheaper than the current niche market allows for. As it stands, fairly basic devices cost well over $1,000. We're working on open-source software platforms in the hope of making these things affordable. We'll see how that goes.

So that's my life. How's yours?
Ana

Most of you probably know by now that I spend a lot of time, some might say too much, thinking about the social dynamics that surround online RP. A lot of those dynamics can be generalized to fandom at large, but some of them can't. Today's topic is, I think, one that doesn't generalize well outside of various RP communities.

One of the things I've been mulling over for the past two years or so is the seeming generational gap of play at Milliways. Obviously there are a number of generational gaps, but the big one that I feel that I've identified is centered around people who entered the game in late 2005 or later (based almost entirely anecdotally on talking to people who joined the game within about 12 months of me). For lack of a better term, I tend to think of those players who are still around who joined before that as "old timers".

While I realize that the time frame I've selected is pretty arbitrary, I do feel (again, based on anecdotal observation) that it's nonetheless valid. The reason for this is that I observe relatively little cross-generational mixing. That is, the old timers play together a lot, and newer people play together a lot, and while there is some overlap, it's not very pronounced.

( And now I babble and extrapolate from too little data... )

The result of all this is that you ended up with a sort of generational divide within the game that's based upon tendency toward slowtime. I, for instance, use it a lot and find it extremely useful. However, and again I'm being anecdotal, my experience suggests that it's the old timers who are most likely to drop slowtime threads. A few of them I've talked to about this have said that they just don't enjoy slowtime. It's not all that compatible with their play style.

It is important to remember that like most discussions of social groups, this is mostly about tendency. There are old timers who love slowtime and there are newbies who hate it. I'm not trying to make up any absolute categories. That said, I do think these are trends, and strong ones.

This post has two points, and neither of them is to aportion blame. No one, in fact, is at fault here. The first thing I want to do is point out that this is simply a stylistic difference. Some people play better one way, and some people play better another. The fact that the two groups do not often play with each other is not a comment about hostile relations at all.

The second thing I want to do in this post is solicit some feedback. Obviously the feedback I'm most looking for is from milliways_barers, but if you've got something to say then speak up. I'd be especially interested to hear from the "old timers". Does this seem accurate? Does it make sense? Or am I generalizing from far too small a pool of experience?

Inform me!
Ana

I feel that the post title needs some explanation before we dive into things. I use the term "clique" under some amount of protest. On the one hand, it is the commonly used term for the phenomenon that is part of what I want to address, but on the other hand it has these huge connotations of elitism and malicious exclusion. I want to talk about the one without talking about the other here because the point of this post is that elitism and malicious exclusion are not a major part of the sort of clique I'm interested in.

Additionally, when I talk about "flist caps" I'm not talking about the hard number limit that the LJ software implements. What I'm talking about instead is the way that people tend to self cap their flists. I'll be delving into this topic in a bit more detail, but the overview idea is that as your flist grows, people have to be more interesting to be added to it than they did earlier on.

Also, a caution/warning/something: cliques are something I have significant emotional difficulty with. While my academic background gives me a pretty strong understanding of what's going on from a sociological standpoint, and I know intellectually that there's no malice involved, this does not stop me from feeling slighted and hurt when I think about cliques. It is possible that some of that will bleed into my writing, and I just wanted to say that if it does you should consider it venting rather than serious complaint. If that makes sense (and I hope it will when I'm done).

( And without further ado, I babble for nearly 3000 words. For those who think in page counts, that's 10 pages double-spaced. )

To sum up: because of limited attention, the importance of timing when it comes to forming social bonds, and the emergent effects of homophily the fact that someone doesn't friend you or invite you to join their group or whatever is not necessarily a comment on how much they like you (or don't). It can be of course. It's possible that I don't friend someone because I just don't care to read what they write. But it's just as possible that the timing was just off. That if only I'd encountered them earlier then we'd be fast friends.



*: I tell myself this over and over whenever I'm feeling socially snubbed. It's not that people don't think I'm awesome, or that they don't want to hang out with me. It's just one of those timing things.

Taking deep breaths and reminding myself that people like me,
Ana