Jukebox 2016 wrap-up

[morbane]

The creator names have been revealed on Jukebox 2016 works.

Thank you very much to everyone for taking part! Thank you particularly to hhertzof, Measured_Words, and Nary, for tag wrangling, to lalalalalawhy, Measured_Words, merryghoul, Missy, Sumi, thedevilchicken, and Zdenka, for pinch hitting, and to lanalucy and within_a_dream for offering to beta read.

There was a short anon period this year; works have really only been available for a brief time. Although the year's challenge is over, I know I haven't seen everything that interests me yet, and I hope others will continue to view and/or comment along with me.


As usual, I really enjoyed running this, and I am always pleased when new people join in, or previous participants return.

The times of day, and days of the week, on which deadlines or other important things happened, generally worked well for me. Did anyone have any thoughts on that? If I don't hear any suggestions, I'll probably make next year's schedule very similar, other commitments permitting. Was the creation period long enough for you?

I'm still struggling with guidelines for art, and we had fewer artists this year to weigh in, I know. There are problems with using pixel size as a guideline - it's so arbitrary, and the dimensions I picked could even be irritatingly large on some screens. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I could also use some help with the design and layout of the comm. Web design is really not my strong suit, and I know that neither the LJ nor the DW side are the prettiest and best organised they could be.

Only one person asked me to beta this year! That's fewer than usual... I know some people don't use betas, and other people ask their friends or partners to be their regular betas. I encourage getting feedback on your work before submitting it as a gift, but I hesitate to make it mandatory. Anyway: is there anything I can do to make it easier to find, or be, a beta?

If you have any comments on these thoughts, or other aspects of the exchange, please feel welcome to add them.

Oh, and one last, fun question: are there any songs from this year's tag set that you particularly hope people nominate next year? Or, any new nominations you're thinking of for next year?

Remember this post is also on LJ.


ETA: I will probably have 6 or 7 nominations per person next year instead of 8 - I think people enjoyed 8, but it's more work for me and matching was not as close as in previous years. I will also probably start the exchange sliiiightly earlier, offline commitments permitting, as Easter is much later in 2017 so I won't be planning around it.

Comments

[extrapenguin]

The exchange timeline and deadlines worked for me, though I am a fast writer. The only way to really improve the experience for me would be to have it be less on top of Space Swap, though that's more at my end of things. :P

Re: art, a lot of exchanges mandate "clean sketches on nonlined paper" or "finished graphic". Perhaps see if something like that would be more to your liking on art rules?

On layout design, the greatest problems imo are that the grey is too light and the background is too contrasty. Fix those, and you're fine to go. (Maybe make the red less eye-searing while you're at it, too.)

I got my betas by asking friends and Yulechat, and I imagine a lot of other people did so, too. I'd think that a lot of people are slightly hesitant to have a stranger beta their fic, and thus go knocking on the doors of any usual betas they have.

In preparation of next year, I've started making a text file with basically my entire music library, sorted by keyword. Currently, I'm thinking about Stratovarius' Stand My Ground, and I'll nom at least one villainess song, which might be either Maija Vilkkumaa's Satumaa-tango or Delain's Mother Machine.

[morbane]

Thanks for the visual feedback! I'm not sure I follow all of it - when you say the grey is too light but the background is too contrasty, isn't that a contradiction? If the grey were darker the contrast would be greater, surely?

I'm also sticking with existing Dreamwidth and LiveJournal templates. Do you have any you could recommend?

I'd think that a lot of people are slightly hesitant to have a stranger beta their fic. Yeah, maybe that's so. But beta posts have been a thing in all the exchanges I've done, and I don't know what makes the model work or not. Is someone in Yulechat so much less a stranger?

I may be biased because I've had very good experiences asking volunteer strangers to beta for me.

Maybe for original art that would work. I don't think 'finished graphic' is clear enough - I need something to cite that isn't just my subjective opinion against another's.

[extrapenguin]

The background image is too contrasty. It's got black and white, and it distracts the eye from the important stuff, ie. the actual content.

The grey that's found on the headers of stuff (background of the "Page Summary" bit etc) is too visually close to the white of the text area backgrounds, and should be darker. The alternative to this is to bring the red closer to the white, but I feel that making the grey darker would be better.

The current template is fine.

[morbane]

Ahhhh, the background images! Okay, thanks, I can definitely play with that.

It's a little more difficult to play with the grey on the background of the template, because that comes from the template.

[extrapenguin]

Go to https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/ then select jukebox-fest instead of morbane from the dropdown at the top, then click "Customize your theme" from the box on the right. Click "Colors" in the link bar on the left, and play with the hex codes. I think "Entry title background color" might be what you're looking for, though you may have to hunt around a bit.

[senmut]

I just want to shout out to ALL of you. I really hate when life gets in the way of handling my commitments, but you all were awesome.

I think, if life hadn't whammied me, everything was smooth as silk on the timing and dates and days.

+totters with old-person cane+ I think I need to find a few peeps who like older music, LOL. Or Learn More Newer Music.

Again, all of you were wonderful, mods, creators, and supporters!

[raspberryhunter]

*high-fives you with old-fogey cane* Ha! You know, I always try to nominate some art songs (I don't know much about the genre, but I do love them) but I just had zero time during nominations this year and didn't get to it.

[morbane]

*hugs*

And heh. Please keep on with older music! I'm afraid my range of favoured music only really goes back to the 60s, but I'll keep nominating at least from then. And though I'm glad people nominate modern pop and surf the wave of exciting things that have just been released, I'm glad when there's a variety of genres. I would be sad if people thought this were an exchange that was exclusively the domain of The Last Decade in Indie Rock or whatever.

[ardyforshort]

The timeline worked fine for me this year!

I agree with what extrapenguin says about betas. I think this challenge has a unique situation in that it is essentially original fiction we're creating here, so lots of the ways that people find betas for traditional fanfic exchanges don't quite work, so I think that plays into the fact that people don't go looking for betas among fellow challenge participants.

I still have so much fic to read and so much music to listen to, I haven't even started thinking about next year!

Thanks for moderating and making sure everyone has a good time. I had a ball!

[morbane]

I'm glad several things worked for you!

Hm. I wonder if I should encourage betas to list their favourite types of fiction (or art/podfic expertise areas?).

[raspberryhunter]

Thank you so much! This is such a great exchange; I look forward to it all year :)

The shorter anon period worked for me (is it actually the case that there were fewer actual words written besides the 40k monster this year than last year, or am i just making that up?) but I do have one thing that would have made things easier for me: if I had had access to the playlist before the repository had opened (say, around the due date). I really like to listen to the songs before I read the story, and that was a little tough because I can't listen so much on the weekends (which is TOTALLY a me thing, ha). It would also give me something to get excited about on the ramp-up to opening the collection :)

It is wonderful of you to provide the playlist at all so I REALLY don't want to sound like I'm coming across as being demanding about this; I'm more than happy to have one at all, and as I said I know this particular problem is a me-thing. And I know that at the due date not all the stories are in, so this would necessitate adding to it, and it's probably the busy season mod-wise as well. So I'd totally understand if you didn't want to do it this way. But since you asked for comments... :)

I really appreciate the creation period being as long as it is. I need that time, not so much because I necessarily take that long to write but because I sometimes have to juggle other things going on :)

Also: man, I thought Zdenka was going to nom some art songs! I'll make sure to nom a couple next year. I felt that the pre-1950 era was very underrepresented this time around :)

[morbane]

You don't sound demanding! Hm. I could probably do that. It's not hard to add a few songs to the end of a playlist, and this year I made a point of adding them in the order the related works were submitted to the collection. Just after the due date would work.

I'm glad other parts worked for you!

I may take the anon period back up to 5 days next year. 4 was a little too short for me, even if the reveal happens in my long weekend.

[seekingferret]

If I decide to sign up by random number generator next year, please stop me.

[morbane]

I will remind you of your words.

[dhampyresa]

I really enjoyed the exchange this year, thanks for running it!

[morbane]

I'm glad! You're very welcome.