(no subject)

[pearwaldorf]

Day 1

In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I find putting things in order very soothing. Which is both unsurprising (I have a library and information science degree) and hilarious if you know how messy I tend to be. For a while (three years) I did tag wrangling for AO3. I built the Destiny Guardian character tree from scratch and was working on getting the Mortal Kombat stuff into shape. As much as the AO3 thrives on volunteer labor, it is also hampered by it, and I got annoyed when some wranglers in Star Wars but also others made some stupid decisions that totally tanked discovery. Also, any code that requires this much manual labor to keep things in order really needs to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch. That's never going to happen, but I can dream.
Nowadays, I scratch that itch doing work for crtranscript, a fan project that captions episodes of Critical Role. Mostly I edit and timeset captions. It's a thing I'm damn proud to be part of, because it has such tangible benefits for so many people, and the work we do is professional caliber.

I also do a weekly cat care shift at a local shelter. Usually I'm in charge of the kittens, and the other person does the cats. It's very satisfying to see immediate results of the things I do, even if sometimes it results in unpleasant litterbox disasters. I enjoy watching the kittens become less shy and more outgoing, and spending time with the ones that are already friendly and well-socialized.

Lest you think I am nothing but virtuous, I also spend a great deal of time laying in bed playing stupid mobile games. Right now there's a lot of Angry Birds Match, and various Picross games (Two Eyes is my current favorite, Hungry Cat Picross is more difficult but you get a cat and unlockable customizations). They scratch the same sort of putting things in order itch the other things do, but with less positive impact.

Comments

[clachnaben]

tag-wrangling is such a...wierd/poorly designed part of the archive that seems to get talked about in waves. it's just so possible for one/a group of tag wranglers to make an unconsulted decision that's impossible to appeal. (see: the recent "Men's Hockey RPF" stuff). But I do sympathise with the original intent. I'm interested to know what you would do with it if you did have the power/time/effort/unlimited resource to design it from scratch?

[pearwaldorf]

I would hire somebody/a team who knew their shit to rewrite it. I know it's not a particularly satisfying answer, but I feel like part of knowing how to fix things is figuring out who the experts are and leaving it to them.

[coyoteclaw11]

Oh man I feel you so much!! I'm such a messy, messy person, but I devote so much time organizing like... completely pointless things. Like get my life in order? No, no I need to create, format, input, and organize and entire spreadsheet for my favorite petsim game.

It's really interesting to hear some of the behind the scenes of AO3 from a tag wrangler! The funniest part though is the Ao3 is still so far ahead of any fanfiction alternatives... still any improvements than can implement would be welcome!

Ahh I love picross! I'll have to check out that cat one... Last one I played was Luna? Yeah, Picross Luna. The graphics were really pretty~