User:CarrieVS

Hi!

A bit about me
This user has gotten fed up with userboxes.

I'm female, just in case you want to use pronouns; British, if anyone's interested; and I use serial commas, which occasionally end up having to be serial semicolons (I use semicolons and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Punctuation is your friend).

I'm a software developer in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and an occasional writer of fiction; I am technically an author already, but one short story published in an anthology, by default after placing fourth in a very small contest, doesn't feel much more like it counts than a small amount of fanfiction does. I also dabble in various arts and crafts (currently knitting).

I am a Christian, and as such I love you. I do not hate anyone, nor will I ever seek revenge or refuse to forgive. If there is ever anything I can do to help you out, I would be more than happy to.

I am shy and introverted. I may appear stand-offish because I am unsure what to say or whether to say anything. However please do not be afraid to talk to me; I do not bite, and I do appreciate social contact even if I am usually too nervous to start it. I'm not good at picking up on social cues - though situations with text-only communication, such as Wikipedia and indeed most of the internet, are a great leveler and one reason I like being here - so I can sometimes misread situations and accidentally offend people or otherwise make a bl**dy fool of myself.

Contributions
Not much yet.

I'm a fairly small-scale editor, and I mostly fix typos, repair DAB links and revert obvious vandalism, whenever I see them. I've helped in the past with Disambiguation pages with links - it's mechanical enough not to worry I'm ruining Wikipedia, but needs enough thought to remain interesting. And you get your name on a leaderboard.

Occasionally I foray into actual content: the pinnacle of my efforts so far is one line on Walking with Dinosaurs and squiffing around a couple of pictures on Lolcats.

Subpages
THINK before you link: an essay on not just slapping square brackets round things and hoping for the best.

Languages
I am a native speaker of British English. I am also a fairly fluent speaker of USAlien, which is a perfectly good language and there's nothing wrong with it.

I also speak basic French, which I am gradually forgetting as the time since I was at school increases.

Barnstar in Spirit
I love the idea of barnstars and cookies and similar things, but as I am one of the shyer species of wikifauna and am rarely certain that such advances would be welcome. If you've had some friendly interaction with me, please be assured that it was appreciated, and your astral userpage is now adorned with a barnstar-in-spirit.

Finding me elsewhere
My username is my real name (first name, middle and last initials, anyway), and also my usual internet handle. If you see a CarrieVS elsewhere, it might well be me. Or it might not - the one on Twitter, for instance, is not me. If it has a picture of a grumpy-looking tortoiseshell cat or a threadbare cuddly lion, it is almost certainly me. If it has a different picture, it is almost certainly not. If it has no picture, it might be.

If you do bump into me elsewhere, feel free to say hi; I'm usually pleased to meet people, and if you're someone I've met here, we've probably not had much opportunity to do anything other than talk shop, owing to the multitude of things that Wikipedia is not.

Some places where you might potentially encounter me

 * under this name:
 * TV Tropes - it's good fun over there. In many ways I like the more formal atmosphere of Wikipedia, but it does get a little stuffy in here sometimes. Over there there is no such thing as notability, works pages are a free launch, and you can even make pages for unpublished works, secure in the knowledge that no-one will read them.
 * FanFiction.net - I enjoy reading a little fanfiction from time to time; I have perpetrated a little of my own (Discworld) in the past, and occasionally still dabble.


 * Twitter, as @carrievseymour - feel free to follow me; I don't guarantee to follow back, but I will unless you're boring, annoying, or tweet mainly in a language I don't understand.
 * Facebook, simply under my full name. The one with the cat is my personal page, and I do not accept friend requests from people I do not know in real life. The one with the lion is my author page, but I haven't figured out what to do with it yet. Any others are not me.

Committted identity
Hopefully I will never have to use this, but it's best to be on the safe side, don't you think?