General
oceana_ - On Recs - But there really are kinks that I find very very hot in fic, that even make me read bad fic (why, I ask, is kink fic often among the worst fic character-wise? - don't bother, I know the answer to that), kinks that I'm not willing to reveal in public. So if a fic is specifically about one of these kinks, so much so that everyone would know what I mean if I were to rec them, I won't.

executrix - Meta: Best in Show (Blanc des Blancs) - Perhaps there's a correlation between Warm Fuzziness and seeing fanfic as a distinctive game, with its own rules, and Cold Prickliness as seeing fanfic as the same kind of light reading as, say, detective stories or pro scifi? And therefore we're talking past each other, because, let's say, "longer nose" isn't a benefit in a pug or boxer show, but it is for greyhounds.

juliejordan in fanficrants untitled - Lately I've been making a real effort to read works of authors who I DON'T know, people who I have overlooked before because I was too comfortable with my favourite authors to read anything else, and a lot of the time, I've actually been very pleasently surprised rather than scarred for life.

juleskicks - A rare bit of fannish navel-gazing, as I seem to be in the mood for it this week. - So there is this tendency, in fandom, to hear no bad spoken of the things we love.

lunacy - [why psychopaths can love & other fictions] - There's a limit there-- you can say what you intended (as the writer), but you can't dictate beyond what the writing itself shows. If, in fact, the writing didn't follow your precise outlined ideas (the meta!story in the writer's head), then it may be bad writing, or it may be the nature of writing itself, but it's not like the meta!story therefore overwrites the actual story experienced by a given reader.

metamorphogenic - On fandom, gullibility and privacy, or O_o - Honestly, you'd think people would have better things to do than post fake stories about miscarriages, asking for kittens and lip-gloss (!!!) and apparently updating their Amazon wish-lists from their hospital bed.

liviapenn - Establishing one's fandom bona fides - If you're attempting to establish that you're a trustworthy person with sanity bona fides, the question shouldn't be: how many people from LJ have you met in RL? The question should be, how many people that are, in some way, *involved in your RL*, enough to know if you were lying about something-- are also on LJ?

merryish - Sockpuppetry 102: Beyond the Obvious - It takes a lot of time and energy to make fans care whether you live or die, especially with so many wounded birds out there competing for each other's pity and sympathy. Any fandom you wander into is likely to have at least one fan hovering profitably and eternally on the edge of death -- if it's a big fandom, like SGA or Harry Potter, probably two or three. It's a saturated market, and as anyone with any kind of business sense knows, the key to success in marketing is to differentiate yourself.

On Creating and Criticism
sigarilyo - tl;dr - No one's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to post your story right now. At least take the time to run your story through a spell checker or even read through the entire thing at least once after writing it down.

amanuensis1 - And no one ever says, "But I already have one of these!" - So here's my suggestion for the holidays: Give feedback.

astolat - vidding and imeem.com - I'd love it if we used imeem as our own AMV.org -- I mean, even if we still will want to provide high-quality downloadable versions of the vids, this could be a perfect central clearinghouse and a network for us to connect through.

hack_benjamin22 in sgapodfic - untitled - These are all the things I have learned while recording podfic and it occurs to me to me that some people may not know these things.

Polls, Questions, Other
lordsmerf - Internet pseudonyms, deviance, and community fragmentation - The topic is simple: it is widely considered (though generally unstated and unnoticed) socially deviant to use a name that is recognizably an internet pseudonym in face to face discussion. While people can probably get away with calling me 'Smerf', which could be a mundane nickname, addressing me as 'Lord Smerf' would be a bit odd. And it only gets worse if you've got numbers in there or if you've got a visible pun 'Miss Creant' or 'Smerf8301' for instance. I argue that this creates a barrier for the formation of communities that share internet and meat space equally.