I'm way too happy that Of Thwarted Plans has been nominated for Best Voyeurism and One Harry Potter, Please (If Possible, Seduced and Ready) has been nominated for Best Kiss. (Thank you, charry_lover16 (and someone else, perhaps? Idk.)

So if you agree with this and want to spend a minute seconding the nominations, please do so.

OKAY, I'm LYING. It'll take MORE than a minute. See, in order to second the nominations, you'll have to:

1. Join smutasticawards and wait for your membership request to be approved (which it won't be unless you have an age statement on your profile).

2. And then you'll have to comment here and vote, the trick being: This isn't a poll! You'll have to type your seconding in a special format provided on the page.

So, y'know, go second if you REALLY love me and/or my stories. (Oh HELL! I'll be happy with the nominations and will say no more on this subject.) Alternatively (or, in addition to), go vote for some other H/D author. (They are dominating the Best BDSM category. LOL!) Of course, you're not allowed to vote for a non-HD story.

I'M KIDDING!

Well, I don't plan to move and I think most people who are getting accounts don't plan to do that either, but I must confess I do love that this thing exists. Apparently, there are some differences, but at this point, I don't understand them. BUT I like it because:

1. Hey, it's a shiny new toy!

2. Because I really don't like InsaneJournal and I do like the thought of having a back-up account.

3. Also, these guys are so cute. Their enthusiasm is contagious. They say:

We know we can never be all things to all people, and we're not going to try. We are, however, hoping to be the best option available for people who want to make things and share them with other people, and we want you to have confidence in our operations and our decisions.

We believe that you should always be able to figure out why we make the decisions we make. We'll communicate with you, openly and honestly, as people and not as a corporate face. We'll make our decisions and our process as transparent as possible, and look for community feedback and opinions at all stages. We think you should always know what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what we hope to accomplish.

We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don't own you or your content -- we hope that you'll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.

We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it's possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship -- and we're committed to showing you what we're taking in, what we're spending, and where the money's going.

Bolding mine. I want to snuggle them.

4. I love their Diversity Statement. They say:

We're also committed to the ideals of free speech and diversity.

Of course, we are bound to obey the law, and this will sometimes mean that we will have to remove some content to keep the service viable. We will do this only when necessary though, and take care to explain why whenever we do. Beyond that we do not believe in censorship, and will not place limits on your creativity based on what is deemed "normal" or "comfortable".

5. Guess some people bitched at them about LJ but they are very professional about it:

We also would like to request that people, when talking about Dreamwidth and the Dreamwidth project, concentrate on what we do offer, not what we don't. It's tempting for a lot of people to describe Dreamwidth in terms of "not LiveJournal", and that makes us sad, because Mark and I both worked on LiveJournal for years and many of our close friends and former colleagues still work or volunteer there. We ask everyone to remember that Dreamwidth wouldn't exist without the hard work that everyone put into LiveJournal over the last ten years, and also remember that we don't intend for LiveJournal/Dreamwidth to be an either/or option. Many people are quite comfortable choosing both.

It's also worth repeating, I think, that Dreamwidth is not a fandom project. While we are very welcoming of fandom, we are not fandom-exclusive or even fandom-focused. We hope to build a broad, diverse, creative community from all walks of life and all groups of interests.

6. SHINY NEW TOY!

Of course, Dreamwidth Studios will open to the public on the evening of April 30, 2009. At that time, you can create an account with an invite code from an existing user, or purchase a paid account.

If you wanna get an account before April 30, here are two possibilities:

1.) Beg friends for an invite code. (It's likely they don't actually have it.)

2.) Or open an OpenID account because: we've been handing out invites in a bunch of ways: to random people who are subscribed to our mailing lists, to random people who have set and validated an email address on their OpenID account, to existing users for them to hand out, etc, etc.

We're sending out between 50-75 invites a day as we try to push that traffic upwards. Most days, we're using the "validated OpenID accounts" method of distributing invites, and we're choosing from that set randomly every day.

Just in case this needs saying, to open an OpenID account:

1. While logged in your LJ account log in with OpenID.

2. Type username.livejournal.com into Your OpenID URL box. (Obviously replace username with your LJ username.)

3. Set your email address. And is absolutely essential that you CONFIRM your email address.


Furthermore:

Rest assured, as soon as April 30 rolls around, everyone with a Dreamwidth account will have a ton of invite codes to give out, everyone who's subscribed to one of our mailing lists or has set and validated an email address on their OpenID account will get an invite code that they can use if they want to, and if you absolutely can't find an invite code to use, you'll be able to create a paid account for as little as $3 for one month (and, if you choose not to keep paying us after that, the account will continue to exist as a free account after it expires).

So everyone who wants a DW account should be able to get it.