Revision as of 22:14, 17 April 2009

The Dreamwidth project has some jargon in common use that may not be familiar to the general public. While these are not official terms that you should know, or necessarily Dreamwidth-specific, general explanations or definitions may be helpful.

Words

• Alton Brown anal nachos: Alton Brown's perhaps unnecessarily fussy recipe for nachos. (From IRC. You really had to be there.)

• BNF: Big Name Fan. All the conflicting definitions seem to boil down to "someone famous within fandom".

• butterfinger: Mark branched out into fanfiction.

• cat macros: Images of cats with funny captions. Sometimes used as a form of protest and/or mockery.

• fandom: A general term for a community of people who are fans of things, such as "sports fandom", or "Star Trek fandom". When used without qualification, it often (but not always) refers to science fiction and fantasy book and media fandom.

• nipplegate: A controversial LiveJournal event.

•  !pleh: 'Help!' spelled backwards.

• spoons: WTF Spoons

• strikethrough: A controversial LiveJournal event.

• twix: Mark branched out into fanfiction.

• zilch: An addictive dice-rolling game, with a computer that cheats. Can be found in IRC, in #zilch. For all mentions of Zilch, developers take 1d6 hit to productivity.

Technical

• Beta: Contrary to the precedent set by things like Gmail, "beta" actually means "we expect that stuff is going to be broken, that's why it's not out of beta yet".

• ESN: Event-Subscription-Notification, the original development name for what eventually became the inbox/notification system.

• Green: a technical support question without an answer (or without an answer that has been reviewed and approved by senior support).

• RTE: Rich Text Editor, something that lets you add formatting to text as well as just do plain text. Contrast with HTML editor (plain text, although you can type in HTML formatting manually). LJ's RTE gathered a lot of dislike from LJ volunteers.

• WTF/Project WTF: Rather than "What The F---", this is Watch-Trust-Friend(s), the project of splitting LiveJournal's original Friends into Watch/Trust (this eventually became Read/Access).

People

• Staff Page

• Brad Brad Fitzpatrick is the original creator of LiveJournal. While he is not affiliated with the Dreamwidth project, if someone name-drops "Brad", it's probably him.

• Mark is xb95
• Rahaeli, or rah, is also known as Denise, D, and synecdochic

Other Resources

• Jargon File Many words from a gentler, more precise era of technology, although some are still in use today.
• Urban Dictionary Let the reader beware.