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

This is the last post on my list of posts to write because I didn't realize I needed to write it until after I'd been thinking about the others, but it turns out to be really important for me to get down before I start the others, so here it goes.

( You might know I ramble a lot. Click here if you're up for that. )

Well, the point of this long post is simple. This is a behavior that, for better or worse, I despise in other people. I despise it more in myself. If you catch me talking about a sociological theory as if it were more than that, as if it were a literal understanding of social realities, then please smack me.

I'll continue using those theories and models to try to explain and understand human behavior, but I'd appreciate your help in making sure I don't forget that they're only models. As they say: "the map is not the territory". As an abstraction designed to help humans get a grasp on something it is useful, but never forget that reality is way weirder and more detailed.

Thanks,
Ana

My friend Nikki linked me to this last night, and I had to share it.



You can watch a higher-def version on YouTube itself, if you feel up to it.

And, because I can't just post something without commentary (otherwise you'd suspect it wasn't me)...

It strikes me that this is a very stereotypically fanboyish thing to do. The divide between traditionally fanboy things and traditionally fangirl things still fascinates me to no end. As always the terms are problematic because they're not really gender-essential. After all, I'm a guy who tends to be more interested in fangirl-ish pursuits, and I know plenty of females who do the fanboy thing.

That said, I feel like there are two fairly distinct categories here, and while they're not gender-essential they are heavily weighted toward one gender or another. (I'd say that most of the stuff I'm involved in is 90%+ female populated, and that the more fanboy-y stuff is 90%+ male populated, but that's anecdotal...)

It's interestingly not a difference in medium. There's a lot of vidding going on, after all. But the forms it takes are pretty... not rigid, but very recognizable. By far the vast majority of vidding is basically modified music video work at its core. (I obviously need to read up on AMV production since it seems like the same thing, but I've always thought of it as male-dominated...) Anyway, I don't expect to see a lot of guys producing, for instance, SPN vids. But at the same time I don't expect to see a lot of gals producing fake trailers. (I first ran into this phenomenon by accident when I stumbled upon a bunch of Teen Titans Season Six trailers which are all, as far as I can tell, produced by guys...)

Anyway, I don't really have anything of value to say, it's just musing. I suggest you ignore the rambling and focus on the awesomeness of the trailer...

Can't just post links,
Ana

I go through long bouts of not following my flist, as many of you know, and the most recent one has been about three weeks. Basically since the week immediately preceding the ITP Winter Show. My holidays have been just that busy...

There were finals. Then show prep. Then the show itself. Then show breakdown. This was followed immediately by visits from some Bostonites. And upon their leave-taking my sisters arrived for a week. We played tourist for five days, hung out and caught up (I haven't seen them since Labor Day), and I put them on a plane Dec 26.

At this point my time became mine again, but I was so far behind that I had that whole inertia problem: No way did I want to commit to reading approximately two and a half weeks of flist backlog. So as of today, and with the new year, I start clean. So if there's something I should know about that happened since about Dec 7 or so, let me know. Otherwise assume I missed it.

With that out of the way, it's time for a scattershot of life-updates. Just what you've been waiting for! There's a lot, so I recommend skimming and/or simply skipping to the parts you care about.

( 2008 in review )

( Wasington, DC in 2009 )

( Possible 2009 book circle )

( Topics I hope to write about soon )

( Could you do me a favor? (Please Read This One!) )

And with all that long-winded rambling out of the way... Happy New Year. I love you all, and I thank you for sharing your lives with me during the past 12 months. It means a lot to me.

Hugs for everyone,
Ana

I suppose I should have mentioned this earlier for planning purposes, but I'm really lazy, so you get this now.

For those who might happen to be interested, there's a pretty neat thing going on at my program this week. Every semester, at the end, there's a Show to showcase all of the projects that people have been working on for the semester. There's a big list of projects being shown over here at the ITP Winter Show 2008 page.

Wednesday and Thursday nights from 5pm to 9pm in Manhattan at 721 Broadway on the 4th floor, there is the show. It's open to the public, but if anyone wants a tour of the floor and the projects, let me know and I'll be glad to show you around.

Um... that's it!
Ana

If you are in the book circle and you are not one of the following people, you need to email me ASAP to confirm. Even if you left me a comment, I need your email. So toss me one with a note that, yes, you are going to play with us, and your rough region of residence (city, state, or even rough area of the country are good enough for me to plan the order of things).

You are cool if you are: djcati, sleightofhand, wanderlustlover, or requiem2adream. Everyone else? I need an email. Just send it to rushin.doll at the place with the gmail. You're not in trouble quite yet, but it's coming soon.

Remember I'd like to see books in the mail by December 23 if possible, and that means you need to know where to send them a week before that (again, if possible), and that means I need to be organizing now.

So do email me.

Edit: For personal record keeping, and public accounting, here's who's in the circle by my records and who needs to confirm with email:

Has emailed me:
djcati
wanderlustlover
requiem2adream
sleightofhand
bookelfe
miswired_zero
wickedtrue
trelali

Still waiting on:
genarti
sandrylene
allovernow

Please?
Ana

I'm doing a meme. That's rare.

I will then proceed to analyze the social dynamics of this meme. Yeah... I can tell you're shocked.

At my request, gramarye1971 asked me some questions.

( So you can skip it )

If you want some questions of your own, feel free to ask for them.

( And now for the analysis... )

So if you want some questions of your own, feel free to ask for them. Just be aware that I may be slow in getting them to you. I am, after all, very slow.

Memetically,
Ana