It’s been 5,000 years, it’s the old song and dance, w/e, okay. Rather than make any ambitious promises or speculation about activity henceforth, I am simply going to drop things on my mind as they come, and if this happens more frequently, cool! If it doesn’t, then this is certainly a post that exists.
colors have been muted to avoid eyestrain; original neon in the clickthrough above & FR link below
Lil headshot to celebrate the 11th(?!) birthday of my character-design-guy Zero, and with that the completion of his Flight Rising version \o/
+Since this is the second time I’ve posted portraits for dragon bios here (first two were back in 2019), here’s some other people who got drawn in the interim~
( image-heavy, some bright colors )
Unrelatedly to all that, reconfigured my tags the other day; top-level is a catch-all, sub-levels for finer categorization as warranted. Got rid of a bunch of minor groupings that I don’t anticipate using again any time soon (e.g. liveblogs of shows I’m not fannishly into). Also, all these Imgur-hosted pictures are broken links waiting to happen, but I’ll deal with that if/when it happens…. Images posted within this year have alt text (also visible on hover), at least. (later-day edit: ok now there’s hover text, whoops)
That is all \o/
(dva = 2)
1.
Been a couple weeks since I started poking around here again, intentionally taking things slow… not subscribing to or commenting on too much, because I am very prone to notification overwhelm and subsequent social burnout. The original idea was to slowly get more active, as a “reward” for sticking with Dw for $arbitraryPeriodOfTime, but I actually like this slower pace a lot! It hasn’t induced the “bored → refresh page → devour whatever’s there → repeat” cycle, and that’s a good thing in my easily-fixated book.
Also means that when I do login here (it is very nice to be able to access my Reading Page logged-out), I do so with the Intention of engaging (leaving and/or replying to some comments, maybe subscribing to or at least poking around somewhere new), and it feels extremely chill and good.
1a.
I don’t really know what I’m doing here, either with my own journal or in general, but maybe that’s a weird mindset to be approaching this whole thing with anyway. Is it a neutral/pleasant experience? Have I already ~interacted with new people~, which was half (ok maybe more than half lbr) the impetus for dusting off this account in the first place? Yes to both! There need be no further Grand Purpose.
1b.
Have I mentioned I like absurdism, optimistic nihilism, that sort of thing? I do. The idea that life doesn’t make any inherent sense, doesn’t mean anything more than whatever we want it to mean, is ironically the most sensible and meaningful approach to me. Personally. Insert fifty disclaimers here about how this is not saying I think it is The Best Philosophy Which Everyone Should Follow; it just meshes nice with my personal cocktail of neuroses and beliefs :>
2.
Reeling this back to Dreamwidth, I do admittedly feel a little out of step with all the heavy fic focus, giant walls of fandoms and ships… these! are not! “Inherently Bad”! things!!! tumblr did a small number on my willingness to assume people on the internet assume good faith, yeah.
By sheer coincidence I am very heavily Into Something right now, and have been since early 2023, and also writing fanfic for it! (Not shipfic, per say, although close interpersonal relationships are a heavy focus and that’s a whole ’nother ramble.) But like, I don’t have an Ao3 account, I kinda just sit in my own corner drawing and writing not-prose for things that catch my interest for months on end, and usually I do not feel like I have the brain space for another potential fixation until the current one ebbs.
Idk where I was going with this, but maybe I’ll ramble about The Fic more???
3.
Oh, ig a good reason to figure out What To Do With This Journal is that I have a website, and a blog that ostensibly I update ~monthly. I actually have not done that because I keep wanting to update other pages on the site but Not Doing That, which clogs everything in an arbitrary bottleneck for -checks watch- It Has Been Four Months. Hm.
Uhh something something DW journal for XYZ, website-blog for ABC? Actual website is better for less-ephemeral things, but I’ve got good faith in Dreamwidth’s longevity so it’s kinda moot. Comments (and lack thereof, on my site) are the biggest thing, ig. “This must be a Professional Complete Post (with citations and award nominations)™” perfectionismitis applies regardless. Hmmmm.
Lil smorgasbord of a post today:
1.
Quick shout-out to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vriddy’s Dreamwidth tips tag, there’s a bunch of stuff here that I wanna go through more thoroughly later >:Oc Also linking this comment with more nifty-looking resources, while I’m here.
2.
The current Sunshine Challenge prompt is a flower canonically associated with my current Favorite Character of All Time, hello????? (“current favorite of all time” = I am prone to getting hyperfixated on media/specific characters for a prolonged period of time, and even after my active interest moves on they will continue to be very special to me. “blorbo” is the slang du jour for this, I think)
I don’t know if I’ll actually Do Something for that, seeing as I’m gonna run through the game again soon and it will almost definitely devour my every waking thought anew, but impeccable coincidence here.
3.
Back on the Dreamwidth note, oh my god, it took me this long to realize I can still effectively follow tumblr people here via RSS. (No tags, alas, but still!!)
Explore > Feeds > Add Feed > https://blog-name.tumblr.com/rss, and it seems to work with specific tags too: https://blog-name.tumblr.com/tagged/tag/rss
I do kinda wish I could hide that on my Dw profile (if I had the options I’d make the entire People tab & Reading page private; I know this isn’t exactly Social Media™ but I’ve gotten used to that info being something only the blogger knows, feels weird to have public*), but more importantly: Dreamwidth! can be! a glorified! feed reader!!!! I’ve been wanting to figure out/use RSS for ages but never felt like digging through the various reader programs, figured I didn’t want to keep up-to-date on enough things to warrant it anyway, but like. Bam, surprise, Dw has been here all along. 🤯, honestly!!
edit: Found more nifty info on how RSS feed work around here!
*3a.
[citation needed] for this entire spitball, but come to think of it, I wonder if public ~circles from (presumably, I have zero firsthand experience with it) the LiveJournal era is a big part of why those nice “mind your own business” norms rose in the first place? Like, you don’t want other people to judge you for what you read/who you talk to, do unto others, all good.
Obviously this did/does not apply to Twitter but that’s its own hellscape.
Idk! I only ever used Tumblr, where (I think?) likes used to be private by default and, although the default theme had a Following section in the sidebar, it wasn’t hard to get rid of! So the norm I got used to was that that info was none of anyone else’s business. Not saying this as a better/worse comparison or judgment, just thought it was an interesting difference. I wonder if private defaults make people more or less cagy about their interests?
~
To je sve! (That is all!)
(…I will probably keep gratuitously sprinkling (probably-)wonky Croatian through my posts, it’s fun to show off. “no bilingual people talk like that” however a-flyleafs georg, who is learning language adn butchers hrvatski a thousand times a day,)
winterfish
