Snowflake Challenge Day 10

[alexcat]

Day 10
In your own space, post a rec for fannish and/or creative resources and spaces. Tell us where you go to dig up canon facts for your fandom, or where you get all the juicy details about your favorite ship. Where do you like to hang out and squee like a squeeing thing? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I have several fandoms so where I go varies.

Tolkien: The Source! I also have some reference books here at home. I google and real all the entries on someone obscure usually.

Babylon 5:
The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5.
The Babylon Project(wikia).

For squeeing, we still squee a little at OEAM, which is the Lj community for Of elves and Men, whic is actually a multiofandom site which will be going to a self jupload format this year.

I need to learn how to use Tumblr as well... any advice?

Comments

[venusinthenight]

Re Tumblr, I think a great thing to do to get a feel for it is to go to tumblr.com/tagged/(fandom or interest here), to see what's what.

And somewhere out there has to be a sort of basic guide to using Tumblr.

That said, to a certain point, it isn't too dissimilar from using Livejournal or Dreamwidth. You find blogs to follow that you like, and their posts/reblogs show up on your dashboard, much like they'd show up on your Read/Friends list here or on LJ. The biggest difference is that -- aside from reblogging someone and adding commentary, or going to a person's ask box, or leaving a user a message -- there is no real commenting system, so interacting with users can be tricky (it is doable, though). There are a handful of blogs that use Disqus, but they're few and far between.

A few rules of thumb...

* Don't tag your hate. Unfortunately, there are those out there who cannot differentiate between actual hate and constructive criticism, but yeah. Many Tumblr users go in the tags to squee, so seeing a negative post for them would be a killjoy.

Tumblr tracks the first five tags in a post. If you want to post something you don't want tracked in the main tag, but you want to find it on your own Tumblr for future reference, post a bit of rambling in your first five tags, or just count each tag, and tag the thing sixth. (For example, I'll do something like #un #deux #trois #quatre #cinq #(fandom). I like to count in French; it's more interesting.)

* Tag rambling is very much a thing. Sometimes if someone reads a really good analysis/meta post, they may go on a tag ramble. Or if someone reads a post they disagree with but don't want to clutter up with a bunch of reblogs, they'll rant in the tags. Sometimes said tags get copied-and-pasted into others' reblogs.

* Never. Delete. Original. Captions. This is a bit of an annoyance, IMO. If an artist posts a work (fannish or not) and captions it with a link to their website or social media, leave it alone if you opt to reblog it. Same thing if someone posts an image description as a caption, which some people do for accessibility reasons. That stuff's important.

* Download new-xkit-extension immediately. It has so many Tumblr hacks available to make using the site more pleasant. For me and many others, the most useful one is Blacklist. You can blacklist certain tags or words from appearing on your dashboard. You can also whitelist things.

I hope that helps at least a little! :)

[alexcat]

Thank you so much! You have no idea how much this should help me. Many people I know use Tumblr and I have an account but just never could figure out what to do. This should get me going.

[turlough]

It's fantastic that the Lurker's Guide is still online!