Charmian's Journal

Am allllmost done with the translation of the artbook Saiunkoku story. (As usual, will be posted at the blog).

Some notes on random fictive tropes:

I loved the part in Book of the New Sun where there was the storytelling contest, and Severian puzzled over which stories were the best and by which criteria they should be judged and what each story really meant, and what the motivation of each teller was in telling it.

The reset ending in part 6 of a certain manga: it somehow interests me to essentially end as an AU and negate everything to create a "better world"?

Can the "and it was all a dream and they woke up" ending work well? For some reason I want to see someone pull it off.

So now DW has a population of over 1000. The average age seems quite a bit higher than on LJ.

ONTD on LJ has over 90,000 members. Man... Now that's a huge comm.

Speaking of comms, I was thinking that LJ comms are basically group blogs, but a group blog is not always what a community needs. It all depends what the topic of a community is. For things that are time dependent, or where the object of the discussion is to comment on the OP's post, group blogs work fairly well. Examples of this are gossip, and to some extent groups dedicated to sharing creative works (although there are downsides to the blogging format, and often such groups would also be well served by a non-time dependent CMS/gallery format), links sharing sites like mefi, news discussion groups, anything where there is quick obsolescence.

However... for a group designed for discussion, is that really the best format? If we're discussing a book series, where there is not frequent new information, isn't a forum in some was a better format? That way topics are bumped up to the top of the list depending on how many people reply to them, and older topics can retain their prominence on the forum if people find them relevant enough to keep posting to them. I think this format also helps newbies find older important discussions more easily. There might also be an end to annoying "hi, introducing myself" tendencies if there was a dedicated forum post for them pinned to the top.