so lots been going on
On Friday mom and I went to Kansas City. I spent way too much money on clothes, naturally. We found the Trader Joes and picked up a lot of frozen food. I got a pasta dish and an Indian dish. The croissants are yummy. Expensive, but worth the stop when we're out at Town Center Plaza since it's just catty-corner from the mall, in the same mall as Crate & Barrel.
We planned the Christmas party food and then I went home to watch KU blow out Towson by like 50 points. It gives me slim hope that we can pull an upset and beat Kentucky tomorrow. I don't have much hope for the Big 12 in general as, while they won on Friday, Oklahoma, KSU and Missouri all trailed at the half to teams they should have blown out.
Saturday's football was incredibly disappointing. KU blew a 21 point lead over Baylor only to lose by stupidly going for a two point conversion in overtime.
Sunday's church service was excellent. The topic was "The Haunted Church" which refers to people leaving their former religions with varying emotions from downright hatred to nostalgia. Jill, our minister, gave a wonderful sermon, one of her best. We also had over 90 people, including at least 10 visitors. Growth, growth, growth.
Then I went home to watch the Chiefs lose.
*sigh*
In the midst of all that came Yuletide nominations and the changes to AO3. Apparently both have led to massive amounts of bitching.
Now for AO3, while the gray background was annoying, I didn't seem to have any of the other problems people were complaining about. The margins are fine, the sentences don't wrap around or anything, the AO3 symbol doesn't intrude on my icon, the font is a good size. This was on my wide screen laptop and at work it's fine, too. Since they changed the default skin back to white I have no complaints and the font at work is actually larger than it was so I don't have to enlarge it. But, apparently, there were a lot of bugs for phones and tablets, so I'll concede that people have the right to complain. Still, unlike here at LJ, the coders at AO3 are very quick to respond to questions and complaints.
As for Yuletide...*sigh*. All three of my fandoms were approved with characters. I was the first to nominate in all of them and two of them have a couple other nominations. One doesn't. There's crossover in characters in the two that have more than one nomination so character lists are going to be limited. I'm not going to complain until I see how the matching goes. It could be a huge clusterfuck. Just skimming the spreadsheet of nominations there are very few that aren't unique. So, say I ask for a fic in a fandom that only I nominated...well, yeah, that ain't gonna work. In many of the fandoms I see I can write in or might request, some of the characters I'm comfortable with aren't there.
I'm all for restricting the number of nominations, though I would have gone with five, but restricting characters to four with the hope that others will nominate other characters to give you a wider selection, isn't a good plan. Apparently some people have tried to coordinate--you nominate ABCD characters and I'll nominate EFGH etc., but that's really not a good way to run a challenge, forcing the participants to work that hard to get enough characters. Some fandoms have huge numbers of characters. Not everyone is a member of the Yuletide comm or checks the spreadsheet religiously to see what characters have been approved already and not everyone has provided their info to the spreadsheet. The mods can't expect everyone to do that.
Example, I nominated Darkover. There are books spanning nearly 3000 years with hundreds of characters. There are some books I haven't read so I'm not comfortable writing any of the characters set in the time of the 100 Kingdoms for exmpale. Most everyone who has nominated has chosen Regis and Danilo as two of their characters.
On the other hand, I nominated Ringer which has about ten characters. I chose four; no one else has nominated this as far as I can see. Of course, not everyone provides their info to the spreadsheet, either. It's not required. And nominations aren't closed so there's still time.
It's going to be interesting. I have no clue what I'm going to ask for or offer to write in. I'm just going to wait and see when the final list goes up. I can already guess there'll be even more bitching.
The other one I nommed, by the way, was Terra Nova. I prefer to nominate, offer, and ask for fandoms that aren't so rare and out there that I'm the only one interested in them. I know some people have nominated such unique fandoms just to see if this will cause problems in the matching. I'm nowhere near that petty. But I also know that some people really want very rare and odd fandoms and they should have the hope to get a fic in one. It's quite possible that a lot of those people aren't going to be matchable. There's also a limit on the number of offers you can make (or last year it was a suggestion; I don't know if it'll be a definite requirement this year). I only offer to write in fandoms, mostly tv and a few books/movies. While I have degrees in history of various periods, I'm not interested in writing historical fiction with real characters unless its say in Eric Flint's 1632 series which has real people (Cromwell, Richelou etc.) along with fictional characters. And I'm not interested in writing about songs or the Bible or commercials or any manga/anime.
But I hope that there are enough willing to write them if people request them. I'll be requesting fandoms that I'm pretty sure I'll be matchable in.
Unless no one else nominates Ringer.
So, gonna be interesting when they try to match up.
I put up my holiday card poll last night. Please sign up. :)
And now it's lunch time...
We planned the Christmas party food and then I went home to watch KU blow out Towson by like 50 points. It gives me slim hope that we can pull an upset and beat Kentucky tomorrow. I don't have much hope for the Big 12 in general as, while they won on Friday, Oklahoma, KSU and Missouri all trailed at the half to teams they should have blown out.
Saturday's football was incredibly disappointing. KU blew a 21 point lead over Baylor only to lose by stupidly going for a two point conversion in overtime.
Sunday's church service was excellent. The topic was "The Haunted Church" which refers to people leaving their former religions with varying emotions from downright hatred to nostalgia. Jill, our minister, gave a wonderful sermon, one of her best. We also had over 90 people, including at least 10 visitors. Growth, growth, growth.
Then I went home to watch the Chiefs lose.
*sigh*
In the midst of all that came Yuletide nominations and the changes to AO3. Apparently both have led to massive amounts of bitching.
Now for AO3, while the gray background was annoying, I didn't seem to have any of the other problems people were complaining about. The margins are fine, the sentences don't wrap around or anything, the AO3 symbol doesn't intrude on my icon, the font is a good size. This was on my wide screen laptop and at work it's fine, too. Since they changed the default skin back to white I have no complaints and the font at work is actually larger than it was so I don't have to enlarge it. But, apparently, there were a lot of bugs for phones and tablets, so I'll concede that people have the right to complain. Still, unlike here at LJ, the coders at AO3 are very quick to respond to questions and complaints.
As for Yuletide...*sigh*. All three of my fandoms were approved with characters. I was the first to nominate in all of them and two of them have a couple other nominations. One doesn't. There's crossover in characters in the two that have more than one nomination so character lists are going to be limited. I'm not going to complain until I see how the matching goes. It could be a huge clusterfuck. Just skimming the spreadsheet of nominations there are very few that aren't unique. So, say I ask for a fic in a fandom that only I nominated...well, yeah, that ain't gonna work. In many of the fandoms I see I can write in or might request, some of the characters I'm comfortable with aren't there.
I'm all for restricting the number of nominations, though I would have gone with five, but restricting characters to four with the hope that others will nominate other characters to give you a wider selection, isn't a good plan. Apparently some people have tried to coordinate--you nominate ABCD characters and I'll nominate EFGH etc., but that's really not a good way to run a challenge, forcing the participants to work that hard to get enough characters. Some fandoms have huge numbers of characters. Not everyone is a member of the Yuletide comm or checks the spreadsheet religiously to see what characters have been approved already and not everyone has provided their info to the spreadsheet. The mods can't expect everyone to do that.
Example, I nominated Darkover. There are books spanning nearly 3000 years with hundreds of characters. There are some books I haven't read so I'm not comfortable writing any of the characters set in the time of the 100 Kingdoms for exmpale. Most everyone who has nominated has chosen Regis and Danilo as two of their characters.
On the other hand, I nominated Ringer which has about ten characters. I chose four; no one else has nominated this as far as I can see. Of course, not everyone provides their info to the spreadsheet, either. It's not required. And nominations aren't closed so there's still time.
It's going to be interesting. I have no clue what I'm going to ask for or offer to write in. I'm just going to wait and see when the final list goes up. I can already guess there'll be even more bitching.
The other one I nommed, by the way, was Terra Nova. I prefer to nominate, offer, and ask for fandoms that aren't so rare and out there that I'm the only one interested in them. I know some people have nominated such unique fandoms just to see if this will cause problems in the matching. I'm nowhere near that petty. But I also know that some people really want very rare and odd fandoms and they should have the hope to get a fic in one. It's quite possible that a lot of those people aren't going to be matchable. There's also a limit on the number of offers you can make (or last year it was a suggestion; I don't know if it'll be a definite requirement this year). I only offer to write in fandoms, mostly tv and a few books/movies. While I have degrees in history of various periods, I'm not interested in writing historical fiction with real characters unless its say in Eric Flint's 1632 series which has real people (Cromwell, Richelou etc.) along with fictional characters. And I'm not interested in writing about songs or the Bible or commercials or any manga/anime.
But I hope that there are enough willing to write them if people request them. I'll be requesting fandoms that I'm pretty sure I'll be matchable in.
Unless no one else nominates Ringer.
So, gonna be interesting when they try to match up.
I put up my holiday card poll last night. Please sign up. :)
And now it's lunch time...