Nanila's subscription meme
Mar. 21st, 2014 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSeveral people have linked to nanila's Subscription meme. It looks like a good thing, partly cos it's full of people I know at second degree, and partly because it seems to be strongly slanted towards people who post about a range of topics including their lives, which is exactly the sort of people I want more of in my DW circle. Also I think her questions would be a good intro to who I am anyway.
People in this journal
I talk quite a lot about my close friends, many of whom have LJ or DW accounts so you can find out about them in their own words. Probably I most often mentionhatam_soferet, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel, doseybat and angelofthenorth. I also have a husband, jack. Other people who appear frequently are my three sibs, known by their aliases Screwy (philosopher brother), Thuggish Poet (poet brother) and P'tite Soeur (chef sister). And I sometimes refer to my minion, which is a joke name for my PhD student; in real life I regard her as a colleague who happens to be less experienced than me, not as a servant!
About my job
I'm a university lecturer. You can probably figure out quite easily where I work but I'm trying to keep at least a nominal veil between my online and my professional identity. My institution is small but fairly reputable, and takes both teaching and research fairly seriously, which is why I have a contract which actually states that I spend 50% of my time teaching biology to first and second year undergraduates, and 50% of my time researching cancer cells. I've been in this job just under 5 years, and I really enjoy both aspects of it, though the researchy bit contains a whole lot more begging for money and trying to make the meagre amount I have stretch than I'd like.
Some random facts
I'm not very good at random facts! Have some non-random facts: I have hair long enough to sit on. I feel happiest when I drink at least 4-5 litres of tea a day. I have lived in England, Scotland and Sweden and I'm now back in England, though a very different part of the country from where I grew up. I'm just about the most extroverted person I know; I really really like getting to know new people and having conversations with them.
Things I like to do
My main hobbies are reading and blogging; I read about 50 books a year, nearly all novels and about half SF/F and most of the rest litfic or mainstream stuff, and I try to review most of them in this journal. I spend most of my "free" time reading and having conversations on DW.
Mostly my idea of fun is spending time with friends, but activities I particularly enjoy doing in company include playing board games (especially Eurogames) or bridge, hiking / hillwalking as long as it's not too hardcore, and English or Scottish folk dancing. I don't get as many opportunities as I'd like for walking and dancing, but I do enjoy them occasionally.
I'm also Jewish and fairly deeply involved in the Jewish community. At the moment I'm about the most religiously knowledgeable person in a tiny community, a situation I've found myself in really quite often over the last 20 years, so I lead services and organize events and do some education, primarily at the moment teaching two boys aged 9 and 12.
Fandom
Not really? I think of myself as a meta-fan; I'm very interested in fandom as a community and follow a lot of big fandom discussions. Well, two communities, really, I'm on the edge of book SF / congoing fandom, for example I'm planning to go to Worldcon this year and I have quite a few friends who are more deeply engaged than I am, and I'm also interested in online media fandom. But I'm not personally very fannish, I don't write and rarely read fanfic.
Social media usage
I've been blogging regularly on LJ from 2003 to 2009 and here since then. I usually post two or three times a week, and try to at least loosely followsiderea's community building recipe – I try to keep up fairly frequent posting, with pointers to interesting content elsewhere if I don't have time to say anything original, and a reasonable balance of just writing journal entries about what's going on in my life versus thinky discussion types of posts. I'm a ridiculous power user of DW and I even sometimes write code.
I have a Twitter account![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
individeweal and a Tumblr ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
individeweal, but neither site really suits me; my natural format is thousand-word essays and I really enjoy having detailed discussions where people can post long, thinky comments.
Subscriptions, access and commenting
Anyone is welcome to subscribe. I think of this as mainly a public-facing blog, in the mid 2000s style, so I am always glad for new readers. I also welcome any comments you feel moved to make, though there's no obligation, lurkers are welcome too! I allow anon comments and I usually only delete comments if they are obvious spam or mere invective without any meaningful content. Also I don't take it personally if people want to read for a while and then unsubscribe. If you do have a problem with something I've said then I'd be grateful to know about it, but if it's just changing online habits, no worries.
I grant access to people I have some kind of fairly longstanding connection with, though I'm fairly unbiased whether that's based on internet discussions or in person meetings. I post no more than a couple of access-locked posts a month and they're usually not interesting to anyone other than my own personal friends. Things like potentially identifying stuff about family or work, basically.
What I’d like to get from my participation here
I am interested in subscribing to journals roughly like mine in structure, ie with a mix of personal and thinky content, less so those that are purely fannish or purely personal diaries. I don't comment as often as I would ideally like, but I do read every single post by every person I subscribe to. I definitely like subscribing to people who are different to me as well as people who have obvious points in common.
nanila's Subscription meme. It looks like a good thing, partly cos it's full of people I know at second degree, and partly because it seems to be strongly slanted towards people who post about a range of topics including their lives, which is exactly the sort of people I want more of in my DW circle. Also I think her questions would be a good intro to who I am anyway.People in this journal
I talk quite a lot about my close friends, many of whom have LJ or DW accounts so you can find out about them in their own words. Probably I most often mention
hatam_soferet, rysmiel, doseybat and angelofthenorth. I also have a husband, jack. Other people who appear frequently are my three sibs, known by their aliases Screwy (philosopher brother), Thuggish Poet (poet brother) and P'tite Soeur (chef sister). And I sometimes refer to my minion, which is a joke name for my PhD student; in real life I regard her as a colleague who happens to be less experienced than me, not as a servant!About my job
I'm a university lecturer. You can probably figure out quite easily where I work but I'm trying to keep at least a nominal veil between my online and my professional identity. My institution is small but fairly reputable, and takes both teaching and research fairly seriously, which is why I have a contract which actually states that I spend 50% of my time teaching biology to first and second year undergraduates, and 50% of my time researching cancer cells. I've been in this job just under 5 years, and I really enjoy both aspects of it, though the researchy bit contains a whole lot more begging for money and trying to make the meagre amount I have stretch than I'd like.
Some random facts
I'm not very good at random facts! Have some non-random facts: I have hair long enough to sit on. I feel happiest when I drink at least 4-5 litres of tea a day. I have lived in England, Scotland and Sweden and I'm now back in England, though a very different part of the country from where I grew up. I'm just about the most extroverted person I know; I really really like getting to know new people and having conversations with them.
Things I like to do
My main hobbies are reading and blogging; I read about 50 books a year, nearly all novels and about half SF/F and most of the rest litfic or mainstream stuff, and I try to review most of them in this journal. I spend most of my "free" time reading and having conversations on DW.
Mostly my idea of fun is spending time with friends, but activities I particularly enjoy doing in company include playing board games (especially Eurogames) or bridge, hiking / hillwalking as long as it's not too hardcore, and English or Scottish folk dancing. I don't get as many opportunities as I'd like for walking and dancing, but I do enjoy them occasionally.
I'm also Jewish and fairly deeply involved in the Jewish community. At the moment I'm about the most religiously knowledgeable person in a tiny community, a situation I've found myself in really quite often over the last 20 years, so I lead services and organize events and do some education, primarily at the moment teaching two boys aged 9 and 12.
Fandom
Not really? I think of myself as a meta-fan; I'm very interested in fandom as a community and follow a lot of big fandom discussions. Well, two communities, really, I'm on the edge of book SF / congoing fandom, for example I'm planning to go to Worldcon this year and I have quite a few friends who are more deeply engaged than I am, and I'm also interested in online media fandom. But I'm not personally very fannish, I don't write and rarely read fanfic.
Social media usage
I've been blogging regularly on LJ from 2003 to 2009 and here since then. I usually post two or three times a week, and try to at least loosely follow
siderea's community building recipe – I try to keep up fairly frequent posting, with pointers to interesting content elsewhere if I don't have time to say anything original, and a reasonable balance of just writing journal entries about what's going on in my life versus thinky discussion types of posts. I'm a ridiculous power user of DW and I even sometimes write code.I have a Twitter account
Subscriptions, access and commenting
Anyone is welcome to subscribe. I think of this as mainly a public-facing blog, in the mid 2000s style, so I am always glad for new readers. I also welcome any comments you feel moved to make, though there's no obligation, lurkers are welcome too! I allow anon comments and I usually only delete comments if they are obvious spam or mere invective without any meaningful content. Also I don't take it personally if people want to read for a while and then unsubscribe. If you do have a problem with something I've said then I'd be grateful to know about it, but if it's just changing online habits, no worries.
I grant access to people I have some kind of fairly longstanding connection with, though I'm fairly unbiased whether that's based on internet discussions or in person meetings. I post no more than a couple of access-locked posts a month and they're usually not interesting to anyone other than my own personal friends. Things like potentially identifying stuff about family or work, basically.
What I’d like to get from my participation here
I am interested in subscribing to journals roughly like mine in structure, ie with a mix of personal and thinky content, less so those that are purely fannish or purely personal diaries. I don't comment as often as I would ideally like, but I do read every single post by every person I subscribe to. I definitely like subscribing to people who are different to me as well as people who have obvious points in common.
