Cuda

Ao3 bookmarks are cool. I know I'm not the only person who knows this, I'm sure everyone does, because my favorite thing to do after checking through the stories of someone who commented on my stuff and/or left a kudo, is to go through their bookmarks and see what they like.

The problem with Ao3 bookmarks? They're underutilized! At least in my opinion!

They give me that little space to write a paragraph about what I love about the story, I am totally gonna do it. I love that I can bookmark a story for later, and then go back and edit the bookmark to include some actual content when I have a minute. I bookmark things as much to get other people to maybe read them as to be able to find them later, plus I had a blast during my brief stint as a movie review writer for a friend's local news blog.

I strive never to be spoilery, either about the story or about canon, but to try and write something magnetic enough to convince someone - maybe even someone outside the fandom - to come in and give it a read.

Dunno, may be the marketing viewpoint that's been practically knocked into my head over the years from my job. Whatever the reason, I frakkin' love it. It's great, low-energy fun for me, especially when I'm frustrated and stuck on a story of my own and need a break.

In less happy news - my new computer is currently in the repair shop, and has been thus since Monday. ARGH. PRAYING I get a phonecall from them soon, or else I'm going to be calling them Monday. I mean, I have a backup, but I have not been able to do much of anything other than work on stories and surf the net because it's just not fast enough. Hence my blog looking funny. I'm working on a kickass Castiel/Jack Harkness header, but unfortunately, Photoshop is on the OTHER computer.

In MORE happy news - we finally know what the Head Crab was! It was an abnormal blood vessel. I had my six-week followup on Tuesday, and today I had one final test done for neurosurgery: a precautionary MRA to map the circulation in my brain and make sure everything is working okay, post-surgery. I'm actually relieved to have that done, even though they had to stick an IV in my arm. Good grief, I am so sick of IVs. But at least they had it out in less than an hour.

Got a followup appointment with the ophthalmology department in December, and then hopefully I'll be able to start driving again. This whole 'no driving because you had a seizure' business is just utter shit, let me tell you. I'm an independent critter, I hate having to ask for help and rely on other people to show up when they say they will to pick me up. On the plus side, as a means to avoid unnecessary calls for rides, I've been walking my happy ass to things a lot more. I'm in a bad location for walking to shopping centers, but I can definitely go post a letter without any help.

Heh, who wants a letter? I'd write you! I've got a blue mailbox to walk to now!

Since I already did my post-week deprogramming on Thursday afternoon and Friday, I still have almost two whole days to fill, so I decided to investigate Archive Of Our Own now that the major stress of Yuletide is over. Now I can check out the cool tools, and not just panic over 'omg did I post to the right collection?!'

The first thing I did was mess around with Pseuds. My primary pseud is Scylla, which is appropriate because yeah, that's basically my callsign in every fandom I write in, even if I have different usernames. But I also went and created pseuds for Bardicsidhe and Cuda, since the former is my FFN name and linked to the Yu-Gi-Oh fandom, and the latter is STILL the name I plan to use for my F&F stuff.

The neat part about pseuds - and what I was worried over until I actually started fiddling with them - is that the psued isn't standalone. In parenthesis next to it is my primary one, so someone could potentially google work by bardicsidhe and would know that I have other, non-Yu-Gi-Oh work as well. Seems like a nice way to group and archive all of our fiction without having it spread all over the Internet, linked by a series of bookmarks and favorites.

I really like the tag system, too. The tags are pretty widely varied both for the fandoms and the miscellaneous tags. I had no problem finding the fandom tags I was looking for OTHER than the ones I used for Yuletide. That magnificently huge fandom/character list could well be because of Yuletide but regardless, is pretty awesome in general. I keep hearing the term 'tag wrangler' being bandied about, and now that I see just how the system works, I'm pretty darn grateful to them for their hard work here.

The labeling system is nice, the notes and summary system is nice, the whole place is pretty darn flexible but really tailored to writers, rather than bloggers - as Livejournal, Blogspot, and others logically would be.

I like it. I think that it was a wise choice for Yuletide to move there, all things considered. And for the sake of my sanity, I'll be consolidating a lot of my fic there in the future.