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

[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.