Chalcedony Jade @chalcedony@octodon.social

[DW: https://chalcedony-px4.dreamwidth.org/48631.html]
[Feeling: curious]

Where's the good probably-sorta-furry(??) sites for multiple-sorts-of-creative-works browsing/uploading/casual-community nowadays?

We were poking at Weasyl, since that's what our predecessor used, but we haven't gotten any response from support so far re how their specifically forbidding separate accounts for “changing username for aesthetic purposes” might interact with us being sequentials. We can't delete our predecessor's account (only void its profile), and if they ever contested that we were the “same person” switching names aesthetically and merged it into a hypothetical account of ours, that'd be a disaster. So having a presence there seems Unsafe. I'm not sure how much I like their model-conformism leanings anyway…

FurAffinity, no, I think not. DeviantArt I vaguely recall hearing mixed/sketchy things about.

There might be a Dreamwidth community or a creativity-focused Mastodon instance that'd be good, but that's not the same thing.

I mean it's not like we have anything to upload right _now_ anyway, but…

♪ SYNERGYYYYY ♪ @..@

My phone attempts to substitute 'spellbinding' for 'worldbuilding'.

It's not wrong.

[DW: https://chalcedony-px4.dreamwidth.org/47675.html]
[Feeling: weird]
[Hearing: not the below, now, thankfully?]

Oh dear. It is… a music video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

(Normality (such as it is) will hopefully resume soon. It's been a Week. X..X)

[DW: https://chalcedony-px4.dreamwidth.org/47058.html]
[Feeling: mildly cheerful, somehow]
[Hearing: Daniel Ingram—Open Up Your Eyes—MLP: The Movie (2017) OST (m. a.)]

*slooowwake*

Wait, hang on, this feels weird, what time is it—oh, heck. Didn't I set my alarm? What's going on?

Oh. I set the time, for my alarm, and then I forgot to push the “ON” switch. *facepawww*

*scritch scratch dream journal* MFW using an index card to draw staff lines in your dream journal because initial fragment of credits music from movie-format dream.

MSFW scratching out the treble clef in favor of an ALTO CLEF after using a pitch tuner and realizing the range is slightly easier to cram into the little notebook that way. *gasp* *shock* >..> ^..^; (Maybe I shouldn't have done that, honestly, it would only have been one ledger line, but look, it's our dream journal, so…)

One of the reasons I like paper, really.

The dream itself was in a Trek-like universe, with a ship of humans on a mission to supposedly negotiate with / help uplift a nascent AI-sort-of-creature on a moon (I think it was the Moon around Earth, but I don't remember), but the actual orders from above were to gain intelligence about it, and slightly cripple its development, enough to keep it in a subservient position—not actually harm it but just kinda box it in, partly out of fear and partly out of wanting to control the resources it had access to. Don't remember whether everyone on board knew that at first, or if it was mostly a secret, but either way, once the majority of the crew realize both what's going on and that their target is actually friendly and childlike, they decide to uplift it to independence instead, and work together to optimize its resource extraction further than it could have on its own.

So they're on their way back to the moon, maybe to finalize the deal before someone else (who's realized they've gone off-script) can sabotage it, maybe fighting off internal sabotage and/or various other problems along the way. There's this scene near the end of the trip with “our photon torpedos are armed and stuck behind our shields, and we can't drop the shields while in hyperspace, and they're about to detonate and blow us up!” which is implied to have happened because someone on board who was friendly to the “takeover” plan forced it, and they resolve that by dropping out just in time and at just the right angle so that when they drop the shields, the torpedos hit some other hostile communication probes which were approaching the target anyway, giving them a nice fireworks show to set the ending against.

The ending dialogue implies that the human government is kind of sad and ashamed that they didn't get what they wanted (and that their plot was revealed), but they're mostly accepting defeat gracefully now that it's already happened. The benevolent crew are just happy that it was resolved without any real violence, pointing out that the way they've arranged things leaves the newly formed lunar AI microstate with a large resource surplus and some interesting hybrid technology, which it will still be happy to share with the humans, just not under such nasty terms. Flow into credits in a manner vaguely similar to the 2017 pony movie.

So that was kinda neat. ^..^

Please download us and install us on everything you can so we can form the ultimate bird dragon army while you are not looking

"Pretending to be human is the worst," the werewolf said.
"I know what you mean," the barman said.
"You had me fooled. What are you?"
"Me."
#MicroFiction #tootfic #smallstories

"What did the wolves howl?" Earth asked.
"Nothing," Moon said.
"But you blushed?"
"..they called me large, round, and beautiful."
"You are."
#MicroFiction #tootfic #smallstories

[DW: https://chalcedony-px4.dreamwidth.org/46248.html]

(Text adjusted for Mastodon. Addendum for here: the model here doesn't support any of these distinctions directly, which means we're kinda stuck. It's possible we need to go to the multiple-topical-accounts approach, but the lack of a threading model makes “followers-only” a disaster anyway for anything that's not purely one-way, so it's unclear what this would provide as of yet. Full text is being cross-posted because other people may appreciate this perspective and/or have useful suggestions for what to do in our circumstances here.)

Anything we post on sites that support access control (mainly Dreamwidth) with sensitivity level 2 (Private) *must not* be repeated or replied to by any less-restrictive channel, as a baseline. Explicit permission overrides this.

To repeat the sensitivity level list from our profile:

s0: Public. Link/quote freely.
s1: Unlisted. Use some discretion and don't broadcast too far.
s2: Private. Ask before repeating things to others.

A “c” (compartment) tag is a hint to be aware that only part of our circle is trusted with enough discretion, shared context, or some similar characteristic for things in that compartment. Compartments are tagged using code names; the mapping is defined in https://chalcedony-px4.dreamwidth.org/32323.html [s1]. “s1 + compartment” means that the definition of discretion should take the compartment into account, but the content itself is not all that sensitive. “s2 + compartment” is the most restrictive.

The easiest way is to keep everything within the same thread, thus giving it the same visibility as the parent post; if you're reading there, that's the natural thing to do anyway. If you want to take things elsewhere, you have to be much more careful. In particular, Mastodon's visibility model can lead to surprising and damaging consequences for anything non-public.

Always feel free to ask first if you're not sure.

Places where feedback might be useful:

Currently, we assign compartment access heuristically when inducting people into our access lists, rather than requiring explicit opt-ins, on the grounds that being careful with private-group communication is something people already need to know how to do, and often these people already have a history of being willing to engage on related matters. Dealing with “they don't want to read about that now” is handled using topic tags and cuts. Should we move to requiring explicit opt-ins for everything? If so, should that be applied retroactively?

Suggestions are also invited re making this easier to read/understand/deal with, ideally without: (a) causing the subject line to stretch to infinity, adding verbose preambles which people will get tired of reading, or similar; (b) removing or greatly impeding our ability to show most things to only some people, and different things to different sets of some people; (c) requiring us to impute a bunch of implicit obligation to people (haven't fully unpacked this part); etc. etc.

… anything else that occurs to you, with slightly more caution. Figuring out how to deal with what seems from here to be a reasonable set of social needs, when relevant digital implications have ~no habitual penetration, is an ongoing problem, and there's presumably a lot we can't see.