#Dreamhart (IRC)

Continuing the surge of new features for the site, I’m pleased to introduce our dedicated IRC channel, #dreamhart on Mibbit.net. There’s a web-based IRC client available on the site here, and of course you can connect to it using any IRC client. I’ve also added a widget to the site, on the top of the right hand sidebar, which lets you know how many people are currently in the IRC channel. The count is not live, but updates once every five minutes so should provide a reasonable estimate of how active the channel is. I’m going to try to be in it as much as possible. If people want, I may even work towards setting a dedicated time (perhaps once a week?) that can be set aside for chatting.

Edit: We’ve had to move from Dalnet to Mibbit.net due to restrictions Dalnet places on the number of users who can connect through Mibbit clients. Anyone using the webclient should notice no real changes, anyone using their own IRC client should now direct themselves to irc.mibbit.net.

Edit: So, the widget for counting how many people were on the channel in IRC turned out to be unreliable. So far, I haven’t found a direct replacement for it, the best I can do at the moment is a count of how many people are using the mibbit widget to chat in the channel, rather than how many users are in the channel itself. I’m not sure that’s really useful, so my recommendation at the moment is if you care about how many people there are to chat with, sign onto the channel and check.

Again, with Style!

So, after a lot of trial and error (and swearing), I believe I have successfully managed to implement user-selectable styles for the site, even including the forums. So far, there are only two, but I may make more in the future if there are requests for specific changes. To select a style, go to the main page of the site and use the widget on the top of the left-hand sidebar. Just click the link, and that should do it for you. Your selection is stored as a cookie and should persist across sessions, as long as you’re using the same browser.

As always, let me know if you encounter any bugs, especially in the forums after this change. The css interactions were complex, and annoying. I think I’ve worked around all the major issues that came up, but I can’t be sure I’ve found everything just yet.

Field Guide to Otherkin: Survey Responses

Several years back, in October of 2005, I completed a survey conducted by Lupa as part of research for her book A Field Guide to Otherkin. In addition to emailing that survey to her, I posted it in a friends-locked entry in my livejournal, here: http://jarandhel.livejournal.com/191494.html

I’ve decided to make that entry public, and to republish my survey answers here. They have not been updated, these are my answers as they were six years ago, though I have modified the links of any resources referred to in order to point to their present locations. At some point, when I have time, I may write a second entry representing how I would respond to this survey if I took it again today.
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