Intro Post

[kerravonsen]

Howdy, friends and strangers!

This is my intro post. I figured I'd better have one.

This journal is a mix of fannish stuff, ponderings, computer geekery, craft and random cookery experiments. More personal posts are friends-locked, some with tighter filters than others. Things you should probably know about me:

• Despite my handle being "Kerr Avonsen", I am a female.
• I live in Australia, unlike most of the Internet.
• I follow Jesus the Christ, but I am neither a fundamentalist nor a liberal. (I'm not a Liberal either)
• I am a fan of both Media and Book SF&F.
• I am an artisan.
• I am a computer programmer.
• I have been on the internet since before the World Wide Web was invented.
• Thus, one can logically deduce that, unless I am a genius, I am over forty.
• I am not a genius.
• My Meyers-Briggs type is INTJ.
• I suffer from certain chronic illnesses, but those are usually discussed under friends-lock.

Where you can buy my work:

• My Print-on-Demand designs at RedBubble. (t-shirts, art prints, mugs, pillows, throw rugs etc etc)

Other sites:

• katspace.org: My huge sprawling personal website, which includes fan fiction, fan fiction reviews, art, and computer stuff.
• My entry on FanLore.

My journals:

• My Dreamwidth journal
• My Twitter page (not crossposted anywhere).
• My Instagram (usually crossposted to Twitter)
• My Mastodon
• I have, through necessity, joined Facebook, but I never post anything there.
• Likewise, I have a tumblr, but I never post anything there, or read anything there. It's just a placeholder.

My art sites:

• My craft gallery
• My Symbolic Jewellery

My fan fiction:

• All my fiction and poetry, on my personal website.
• My AO3 page, which contains my prose fan fiction but not my poetry.
• My fanfiction.net page, which contains my prose fan fiction but not my poetry.
• My Doctor Who fiction at A Teaspoon And An Open Mind.
• My Severus Snape/Hermione Granger fiction at Ashwinder, under the name of SnarkHunt.

My software:

• My Perl modules at CPAN.
• My user info at IkiWiki, which lists my IkiWiki modules.
• My user info at PmWiki, which lists my PmWiki modules.

Transformative Works Policy

If you wish to transform my work, I have Transformative Works Policy to clarify stuff in advance!

Other stuff

If you want to write fic for me, here is my Generic Ficathon Elaboration Post.

After you have friended/subscribed to me, I would appreciate it if you drop me a comment here, saying hello and what brought you here. No need to ask permission beforehand, but it would be nice to give me a note afterwards.

Comments

[thewayne]

OK, if you're crazy enough to write Perl AND contribute it to CPAN, you're definitely my flavor of crazy! I've written one serious production Perl program in my working career, a utility that parsed all of the SQL Server instances that I managed, sucked in their log, and filtered it Just So. Worked great up until SQL Server 2012, then they changed their file locking methodology and it broke. I might try it again in Python


While I don't write fanfic, I do read it occasionally. My wife is on AO3 as Quasar, she is well-known enough that she got a scholarship as a sort of GoH to a slash convention in Las Vegas a few years ago.

[thewayne]

Plus, you read Moira's blog, which is also a good recommendation for me.

[kerravonsen]

I don't think I do read Moira's blog...? It was Reynardo's blog that I was replying to your comment in...?

[thewayne]

Ah, you're correct. I ran in to someone on Moira Moore's blog who turned out to be a Canuck. Why I confused Canada with Australia, I have no idea. But Reynardo definitely seems like a cool person, I've enjoyed my limited conversations with her thus far.

[kerravonsen]

Why I confused Canada with Australia, I have no idea.

Because we are both Commonwealth nations, and both awesome. 8-)

[thewayne]

I totally agree on both being awesome. And both a little nuts. But that's ok as the USA is currently insane.

[kerravonsen]

(grin)
I do like Perl, I'm very comfortable with it. I haven't yet been tempted to use Python - I don't like the fact that it has significant whitespace.

I'm very not into slash, I'm afraid.

I'm likely to be posting a lot about craft right now; it's my Current Thing. 8-)

[thewayne]

I'm not in to slash either, but I accept it. I have no problem reading beyond the stuff that I don't care for. The coolest thing that I've read recently was a Torchwood/Galaxy Quest crossover where the Torchwood characters with all of their drama were the stars of the GC movie, it was a lot of fun.

I'm not keen on the significant whitespace of Python either, but I can live with it: I grew up early with COBOL and needing line continuation characters in column 72 (IIRC). Having said that, like Perl, I only wrote one COBOL program for work: it was a pivot table summary report on a Wang mini back in the very early '90s. I thought it was so cool that I could go in the computer room, pull up the program, and the moment I hit the Run PFkey the printer started printing!

I was easily amused back then, but I thought those Wangs were pretty nifty.

[kerravonsen]

The coolest thing that I've read recently was a Torchwood/Galaxy Quest crossover where the Torchwood characters with all of their drama were the stars of the GC movie, it was a lot of fun.

That does sound like a lot of fun! If it doesn't have slash in it, I'd like to read it. URL?

I grew up early with COBOL and needing line continuation characters in column 72 (IIRC).

Oh yeah. Early FORTRAN had that too, IIRC. A holdover from the days of punched cards, I think: you needed to indicate that the next card was a continuation of this statement, rather than a new statement.

Thankfully, while I learned COBOL at uni, I never had to interact with it professionally. I did have to deal with some FORTRAN at work; embedded into a C program which was an optimizer, and the heavy-lifting calculations were done in FORTRAN. We did eventually convert all the FORTRAN bits to C (one of the newbies was given that task; there was an auto-converter, but it only did 90% of the work; she had to go in and fix the last 10%). FORTRAN has one cool thing about it, IMHO: complex numbers are built-in.

I thought it was so cool that I could go in the computer room, pull up the program, and the moment I hit the Run PFkey the printer started printing!

My first "oh isn't this cool" moment came when I ran a BASIC program I'd written and it drew a circle on the screen. I could make the computer do what I told it to do! (grin). That was when I was in high school, in the '80s.

[thewayne]

At one time I could hold up an 80 column punch card and read the punches. I never had to work with punch cards, mine was the first year that they switched entirely to VDTs, KSR-33 teletypes, and Decwriter printer terminals. All with dial-up acoustic coupler modems!

I studied a bit of ForTran, I still have at least one of my books (at my parent's house). In grade 11, IIRC, I started taking college courses. My parent's house was a block from Central Avenue, the main drag, and I could take a bus about 10 miles downtown to the tech college building. My dad would pick me up at night. It was about the only thing that kept me sane in my junior and senior high school days.

Worst programming language that I learned at uni? RPG. I remember the teacher telling us "You will always get compile errors because the compiler has bugs. So go ahead and run the link/edit steps and try to execute the code." What a way to learn a language!

The Torchwood/Galaxy Quest is at
https://archiveofourown.org/works/5016871/chapters/11529721

It's relationship slashy, not explicitly sex slashy, if I recall correctly. The warnings don't say anything about sex. It was pretty much typical Torchwood.

Another excellent story that my wife came across on AO3 was Monstrous Fellowship, taking characters from Fellowship of the Rings and putting them in Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment. It was quite awesome. This might be beyond your slash comfort level, as I recall there were some mild explicit sex. I think most of the sex was Fade To Black, New Scene. It's at
https://archiveofourown.org/works/4205451/chapters/9502941

I loaded up the two stories on my iPadearly last year for my flight to Washington, DC, they were both of sufficient length to provide a lot of entertainment. I go to DC every year, and it was an excellent chance to read unusual things. I have dozens of books on my iPad, so I have huge variety available if I get bored with something. I don't take physical books with me when I travel as I have so much garbage to haul with me.

I started studying a book called Teach Your Kids Python, and they had an excellent approach. They start (after installing the system) with a sample program that uses the turtle library, which lets the program work as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch and draw things on the screen. I think that's an excellent way to teach programming, do something that gives a graphical feedback. The book goes on in to some much higher level subjects like objects and file I/O. A friend of mine unexpectedly landed a job teaching CS using Python, and I recommended the book to him.

Me, professionally I was a database guy. Basic business records keeping. Became a DBA, working pretty much exclusively with SQL Server and needing to learn some open source things, specifically I need to improve my MySQL knowledge and learn PostgreSQL and Hadoop.

[kerravonsen]

Thanks for the link to the Galaxy Quest story. I won't be reading the other one; explicit slash makes me queasy.

I set up a system where I download fanfic, convert it to EPUB, and put it onto my ebook reader. Much more convenient than trying to read it online.

[thewayne]

Regarding your download/convert to epub, I take it that you missed that you can directly download AO3 in epub format? That's what I do: download, copy to Dropbox, load directly in to iBooks on my iPad. I use Stanza for converting other things in to epub, but not from AO3.

I was very happy when I found that option!

[kerravonsen]

Oh, I know that AO3 has that option, but not all sites do, and the script I wrote downloads from many different fanfic sites.

[cat-sanctuary.livejournal.com]

Well...

I'm also a Christian.

I'm all the way on the I side, but right in the middle of the other three Meyers-Briggs scales...I think of *writing* as definitely a J-type brain activity, undoubtedly come across as a J writer, and appreciate other female J writers, but approach several other activities in more of a P way.

I like pictures but use a laptop that doesn't handle big (or moving, or spyware-enhanced) pictures efficiently.

I don't spend as much time on LJ as "a person who REally wanted to be a good LJ-friend" would do, don't follow a lot of people, and have followed mostly people who've become inactive or almost inactive on this site. So when I do open LJ my feed is full of my own stuff, which is boring and not an incentive to do justice to my LJ. (Pen-friend of our late Ozarque before the Internet existed, long-term e-friend of Ysabetwordsmith, fan of Pameladean, don't even e-know other LJers.)

So, if you don't mind, I think I *would* like to follow you...with fair warning that I don't open my own "friends" feed every day, or week. Maybe if it becomes more active I'll open it more often.

[kerravonsen]

Welcome!
I've noticed that there's less activity on LJ than there used to be; part of that is that many of my friends have moved over to Dreamwidth. I actually crosspost from there, but I do keep an eye on both.

Re: Love your print on demand designs but...

[kerravonsen]

I'm sorry to hear that! What products did you order? This is the first time I've heard a complaint about Redbubble products, and certainly the items I've purchased for myself (mugs, prints, t-shirts, masks) have all been fine. As for delivery time, what kind of delivery time were you expecting? We ARE in the middle of a global pandemic, remember. Everything is going to take longer.

[bewize]

Hello!

I've made my way here round-aboutly. I'm moving fic from LJ to AO3 (and crossposted to DW) and ran across fics I wrote for lj's version of multific. I was wondering if you might be persuadable to restart that community here again. I see it's here and I see that it was last updated in 2012.

I dropped out of fandom for like 10 years, but I would really like to get reinvested again. Thought it might be a fun way to do it. If I remember correctly, we signed up and posted 3-4 fics in progress then people got to vote?

[kerravonsen]

Hi!

You mean the finish-a-thon? I feel it served its purpose at the time but with things like PicoWriMo and What2Finish there doesn't seem to be much of a need for it. It was great fun at the time, but I'm not sure I could start it up again unless there were quite a few people who wanted me to, both writers and voters.

I just checked, and PicoWrimo https://picowrimo.livejournal.com/ is actually running right now!