DragonCon 2006 (I totally forgot I’d taken these photos!)

I (just a bit belatedly!) posted my photos from DragonCon 2006.

I’m generally a terrible photographer, but I get lucky sometimes. These ended up being some of my favorite photos that I’ve taken:

( The Method from Godhead and Sarah from the Cruxshadows )

There’s also photos of the Cruxshadows, Godhead, Voltaire, George Romero, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau, Billy West, random pirates, the Snape trial, R2-D2, and lots of random convention stuff. If you’re interested.

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. Please comment there.

Non-Spoilery Spec for Doctor Who Series Four and the Doctor’s Character Arc

In an attempt to preserve my squee, I’m pretty much avoiding Doctor Who fandom right now. Both because I still can’t believe the negativity of much of the fandom, and because there are spoilers everywhere. I’m still unspoiled for anything but casting, yay!

In retrospect, it’s pretty apparent how much being spoiled sucked the fun out of Buffy fandom. It became all about the destination rather than the journey. And it took all the hope and possibility away, since I already knew the conclusion. (And when you know the conclusion is that your favorite character dies, and, oh yeah, COOKIE DOUGH, what’s the point of even watching the rest? :P)

Anyway, I did read some nifty meta about the Tenth Doctor (it’s got casting spoilers and there’s an episode title spoiler in the comments). She’s got some interesting thoughts about the Doctor’s struggle to find his role in the universe. (Her conclusion is shippier than mine would be, but it’s still very insightful.)

It got me thinking about the Doctor’s character arc in series four. His story so far has been about recovering from the trauma of the Time War, reconnecting with other people, and dealing with the responsibility inherent in being one of the most powerful beings in the universe (all with varying degrees of success). The two issues central to the Doctor’s life are his need to connect with others and his responsibility to protect the universe (especially now that the other Time Lords are gone). Is he doomed to “Lonely God” status forever? Does he have to “settle down” in order to develop meaningful relationships with others? Or can he find a way to balance both?

( series four spec; no spoilers beyond VotD )

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. Please comment there.

It worked!

antennapedia fixed LJ Migrate so I was able to copy all of my entries from my LiveJournal to my InsaneJournal. They’ve got everything: tags, moods, music, userpics. Now my IJ is an exact duplicate of my LJ (minus comments, alas, but those are duplicated on my Wordpress blog). Yay!

Now that I’ve gone back and tagged my entire journal, I’m slightly horrified at the most used tags. 73 posts about Spike, 54 posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and only 42 posts about Doctor Who? This imbalance clearly needs to be remedied. :P

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. Please comment there.

Simultaneous Cross-Posting Between LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, and WordPress

I, um. I think I figured out how to cross-post my WordPress blog entries to LiveJournal and InsaneJournal simultaneously.

I took LiveJournal Crossposter, duplicated the file, renamed most instances of “LiveJournal” to “InsaneJournal,” installed it as a new plug-in, filled in my information, and it seems to be… working. That is, cross-posting to both. I tried creating an new entry, editing it, and deleting it, and my changes were reflected on all three sites.

Obvious flaw: if edit an old entry that’s not cross-posted, or only cross-posted to one journal, it’ll cross-post it to whichever journal that it wasn’t already cross-posted to. You can disable this by checking the box telling it not to cross-post to that journal when you’re on the edit entry page.

Nifty benefit: you can have different settings for each journal. For example, I’m telling it to allow comments on InsaneJournal, but not on LiveJournal. You can also cross-post entries to one journal but not the other; just check or uncheck the appropriate boxes.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert. For all I know this could blow up your journal. Back everything up first. (But I’m using it and it seems to be working.)

Crazy thoughts: you could, in theory, duplicate the file again and use it to cross-post to Journalfen. Or DeadJournal. Or any other LJ clone. You could (also in theory) use it to copy your entire journal to any of those services (it has a built-in ability to duplicate your entire journal on the new site when you first install the plug-in). And then any time you edited an entry, your changes would be reflected everywhere.

If you want to try this, you need:

* A WordPress blog hosted on your own server. (Free.)
* LiveJournal Crossposter, located here. (Free.)
* InsaneJournal Crossposter, located here. (Free.)

Let me know if you try it.

(Thank god this is distracting me from the Doctor Who spoilers. Three more days!)

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. Please leave any comments there.