A Pleasant Surprise
Nov. 30th, 2019 11:50 amSo, in all this thinking about social media presence and the act of consuming versus engaging with content*, I have been sort of thinking about my way forward in trying to feel content with my online presence. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kara_mckay gave me a pillowfort invitation key! And there is absolutely nothing on my page yet, but here it is: https://www.pillowfort.social/somenewdisaster
(*Thank you for such a good response to that! It is really encouraging about Dreamwidth as a platform to get a robust response to a post. It is easy to forget what that feels like on some of the more "modern" socmed sites, so it just makes me all the more determined to try to make continued presence here work.)
One thing I have noticed on pillowfort, and I am not sure if it is a bug or just a current necessity, is that you do have the option to change both your sort of divider color and your page background color, but when you are logged out the background color change doesn't show? I guess I'll try to ask somebody there when I start trying to do anything with it.
I have had another uneventful and slightly discouraging Saturday. I slept most of it away quite literally, and we are now into the wee hours of Sunday. Not that it matters very much as long as I can drag myself out of bed for work on Monday, but I always feel so energized late Friday evening. Then I come home and find myself unable to do everything that I intended to do, and so I do something else, and before I know it I have powered through past-midnight, and my body just collapses to recover. This morning was kind of weird. I awakened pretty soundly around 9:30 and I was awake and even did some laundry, but I went back to sleep around 11:00 until just before 3:00 P.M. It is weird how good my body clock has gotten here, because before I even looked at my phone I knew it had to be approaching 3:00. This meant that I didn't eat a bite of anything until 5:00, and this is how I always end up eating only one meal on the weekends.
Anyway, for all my frustration with this lack of work-life balance, today marks the two week countdown until I will be taking the arduous trek to the airport and boarding a plane back for America. I will be in transit for almost 24 hours. The flight to Atlanta from Narita is about 12-13 hours, and I have a six hour layover in Atlanta before boarding a plane back to my regional airport sometime around 10:00 P.M. local. The flight from ATL to TRI is only like 45 minutes which is just a weird experience.
The specific pleasant surprise I wanted to talk about was about response to meta-writing. About a year ago (according to xkit's timestamp), I started a sideblog on tumblr called![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
prixmiumcontent where I intended to start writing frequent meta articles about stuff I was watching. I started, as I usually would, with Doctor Who and got three episodes in before the stark difference in the response I was getting to a gifset-per-episode and the meta posts themselves. It's hilarious honestly in how much it proves many points I have tried to make about modern social media. And right now, I only have Gimp to make gifs and it is just an altogether more difficult process than with Photoshop.
After the December 2018 tumblr TOS change, I basically just braced myself for the End of Tumblr. I made this account, and I started trying to resign myself to the notion that tumblr was not what I had once enjoyed and never would be again. The dream was dead. I archived my blog that I had used the entire time, and I used a utility someone had created to download my entire blog for fear of losing that time capsule of my life much like I lost most access to my various LiveJournals. (That file is hilariously huge and lives on an external harddrive. Not a bad idea, honestly, but it was a thing to do.) So this project fell by the wayside.
Earlier this year, when I saw that tumblr had, in fact, not toppled completely, I made a new account with the intention of lurking but being able to save things and post things from time to time. I wanted a smaller following and a smaller dash, and thus far I have achieved those goals, but the issue is that because so many people are clout-chasing and/or facing information overload, it is hard to find mutuals on tumblr anymore who engage in kind. The Fate/Type Moon fandom has always seemed kind of image-heavy and not very talkative, and when I got really into Good Omens I found interesting blogs to follow, but for all the fandom's talk of being really open and friendly and nice, I honestly have never experienced it on tumblr or twitter. I am not bad-mouthing anyone on tumblr, but I have experienced people on twitter being very exclusionary, reactionary, and probably some other -aries if you don't meet their exact definition of what progressive and far ENOUGH left is, by a constantly shifting definition. Again, I am not talking about the fandom as a whole but just... whatever it is, it doesn't want me to be active in it.
(I'm trying to get to the pleasant surprise, I swear.)
So after I made my new tumblr account, I rememberedprixmiumcontent and, since it was a sideblog, went back into my old account and gave my new account admin and posting rights and all of that, too. The result of this is that while I have the tumblr app on my phone, I hardly ever do ANYTHING with the new-personal-blog I made there. This may or may not ever change. Sometimes I get the impulse that it is sad? But other times I feel like the detox being effective is pretty great. But this means that sometimes, phone apps being the little drug dealers that they are, tumblr's app tries to suck me back in. YOU HAVE NOTIFICATIONS. SO-AND-SO MADE A GREAT POST. WE NOTICED [X] IS YOUR FAVORITE BECAUSE YOU DON'T FOLLOW ANYONE ELSE. And so on. But the vast majority of my notifications are actually from the sideblog, and mostly reblogs of the gifsets I made for the first three episodes of Doctor Who.
But in the midst of all that, when I mistakenly tapped rather than cleared a tumblr-begging notifcation on my phone, I found this: https://chelnah-the-egghead.tumblr.com/post/189265229590/doctor-who-the-unquiet-dead-s01e03
It is so sweet. It is short and simple, and this is literally all the engagement I need to feel like I am not just screaming into a void when I try to make something for an audience rather than for myself alone. To be fair, when I write meta I am usually doing it in part for myself under the theory that reading blog entries will be faster than binging a series again when I want to reference stuff for fanfic more quickly than a month from now.
Anyway, I think I may try to cross-post these meta posts and continue to use this sideblog in that case? I am not sure yet, but it is at least encouraging that someone finds it interesting.
kara_mckay gave me a pillowfort invitation key! And there is absolutely nothing on my page yet, but here it is: https://www.pillowfort.social/somenewdisaster (*Thank you for such a good response to that! It is really encouraging about Dreamwidth as a platform to get a robust response to a post. It is easy to forget what that feels like on some of the more "modern" socmed sites, so it just makes me all the more determined to try to make continued presence here work.)
One thing I have noticed on pillowfort, and I am not sure if it is a bug or just a current necessity, is that you do have the option to change both your sort of divider color and your page background color, but when you are logged out the background color change doesn't show? I guess I'll try to ask somebody there when I start trying to do anything with it.
I have had another uneventful and slightly discouraging Saturday. I slept most of it away quite literally, and we are now into the wee hours of Sunday. Not that it matters very much as long as I can drag myself out of bed for work on Monday, but I always feel so energized late Friday evening. Then I come home and find myself unable to do everything that I intended to do, and so I do something else, and before I know it I have powered through past-midnight, and my body just collapses to recover. This morning was kind of weird. I awakened pretty soundly around 9:30 and I was awake and even did some laundry, but I went back to sleep around 11:00 until just before 3:00 P.M. It is weird how good my body clock has gotten here, because before I even looked at my phone I knew it had to be approaching 3:00. This meant that I didn't eat a bite of anything until 5:00, and this is how I always end up eating only one meal on the weekends.
Anyway, for all my frustration with this lack of work-life balance, today marks the two week countdown until I will be taking the arduous trek to the airport and boarding a plane back for America. I will be in transit for almost 24 hours. The flight to Atlanta from Narita is about 12-13 hours, and I have a six hour layover in Atlanta before boarding a plane back to my regional airport sometime around 10:00 P.M. local. The flight from ATL to TRI is only like 45 minutes which is just a weird experience.
The specific pleasant surprise I wanted to talk about was about response to meta-writing. About a year ago (according to xkit's timestamp), I started a sideblog on tumblr called
After the December 2018 tumblr TOS change, I basically just braced myself for the End of Tumblr. I made this account, and I started trying to resign myself to the notion that tumblr was not what I had once enjoyed and never would be again. The dream was dead. I archived my blog that I had used the entire time, and I used a utility someone had created to download my entire blog for fear of losing that time capsule of my life much like I lost most access to my various LiveJournals. (That file is hilariously huge and lives on an external harddrive. Not a bad idea, honestly, but it was a thing to do.) So this project fell by the wayside.
Earlier this year, when I saw that tumblr had, in fact, not toppled completely, I made a new account with the intention of lurking but being able to save things and post things from time to time. I wanted a smaller following and a smaller dash, and thus far I have achieved those goals, but the issue is that because so many people are clout-chasing and/or facing information overload, it is hard to find mutuals on tumblr anymore who engage in kind. The Fate/Type Moon fandom has always seemed kind of image-heavy and not very talkative, and when I got really into Good Omens I found interesting blogs to follow, but for all the fandom's talk of being really open and friendly and nice, I honestly have never experienced it on tumblr or twitter. I am not bad-mouthing anyone on tumblr, but I have experienced people on twitter being very exclusionary, reactionary, and probably some other -aries if you don't meet their exact definition of what progressive and far ENOUGH left is, by a constantly shifting definition. Again, I am not talking about the fandom as a whole but just... whatever it is, it doesn't want me to be active in it.
(I'm trying to get to the pleasant surprise, I swear.)
So after I made my new tumblr account, I remembered
But in the midst of all that, when I mistakenly tapped rather than cleared a tumblr-begging notifcation on my phone, I found this: https://chelnah-the-egghead.tumblr.com/post/189265229590/doctor-who-the-unquiet-dead-s01e03
It is so sweet. It is short and simple, and this is literally all the engagement I need to feel like I am not just screaming into a void when I try to make something for an audience rather than for myself alone. To be fair, when I write meta I am usually doing it in part for myself under the theory that reading blog entries will be faster than binging a series again when I want to reference stuff for fanfic more quickly than a month from now.
Anyway, I think I may try to cross-post these meta posts and continue to use this sideblog in that case? I am not sure yet, but it is at least encouraging that someone finds it interesting.
