wherein Liz is annoyed at her seasonal job

Today is my first day back at Not the IRS, the tax prep company I do seasonal work for. It's a two-hour shift and absolutely nothing is going to happen, because nobody has their tax documents yet, but it's January so we're open just in case. (Very occasionally we do get somebody who's received a tax notice of some sort and wants advice, or somebody dropping by to schedule an appointment for February, but that's about it.)

Not the IRS has always blocked various websites on their office computers. Some of that is for electronic security reasons, but mostly it's to stop people from websurfing when we could be doing company-approved things instead.

This year, they have blocked Gmail. Not Google itself -- search engines are too necessary for research to block -- but all ancillary services associated with Google are unavailable.

They tried this a couple years ago but backed off when people screamed bloody murder about losing access to personal communications. I guess now they figure everyone has a smartphone so they can get away with it? In any case, this means I can't email writing projects to myself anymore, to pick at during my downtime. *sigh* I guess I can make private Dreamwidth posts and write in those, but that's such a pain.

...

In other news, church went well! We have a new adding machine (to replace the one that broke last week) so I and my partner got the offering counted efficiently and I was back in the kitchen before too many dirty dishes had piled up. It was also a small service, which undoubtedly helped on that front. I brought banana bread, which was devoured appreciatively. :)

Now I am going to poke around some proprietary software to get a feel for this tax season's updates, after which I may try writing or I may just pull out my Kindle and see what I have stored on there that's currently unfinished.

Snowflake Challenge, Day 2

snowflake_challenge Day 2: In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

Let's see...

Well, in one sense I have always been fannish, by which I mean I get really into some stories and want to both expand on them/embroider around their edges/play the what-if game (creative fandom), and to know and organize everything about them (curatorial fandom). But I didn't know fan-communities were a thing until I was in college, and I got into them by way of Harry Potter fanfiction, so I have always "done" fandom in online media-fandom/fic-writing style rather than more old-school convention-attending style. To this day I don't think I've met another fan in person, in the sense of getting to know someone online and then meeting up. (I have met people in brickspace and discovered that we were both fannish, but that's different.)

Anyway, around my 20th birthday I was having a depressive episode and had been blocked on my original writing for a while, and I accidentally fell down an internet hole and discovered fanfiction. I believe it was by way of googling stuff about LotR, which led me to Cassandra Claire's Very Secret Diaries, which led me to her HP fic, which led me to HP fandom more generally, and it kind of spiraled on from there.

I wrote my first fic in April 2002 sort of as a meta argument, on the theory that the best way to criticize a badly handled idea is to do it better oneself, and never really got out of the habit. That spiraled into other fandoms as well, obviously.

My first fannish sites were LiveJournal, ff.net, FictionAlley, Yahoo Groups, and... oh god, that was back in the day when there were still half a million personal sites and tiny two- or four-author archives all scattered around the internet. Not that we're all that much more consolidated now, but at least there's AO3. *wry*

I have done my best to sit out most fandom convulsions, since I have long been of the opinion that if any community is making you unhappy, you should move to sections that have fewer assholes.

Eighteen years on, I am still having fun, so I think I'm doing all right. :)