![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Popping an acetaminophen before we begin.
I am suffering menstrually today - face hurts, back hurts, don't like it. I came home and took a long nap, took a shower, and have been antisocial about getting on Discord this evening. Not that I'm ever actually off Discord, but it's a matter of paying attention to it, isn't it?
I've been bopping around on the first few posts of![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
addme_fandom and finding that a lot of tumblr refugees who are new to this format of website don't know what the difference in subscribe and access are, so I wrote an explanation that I gave to a couple of people. I'm gonna copy-paste it here and probably over on the community I made for similar resources: tumblrmigration. I don't know why, but I'm really enthusiastic about helping people get on-board with this type of fandom and internet participation as I can. Here is the blurb:
Now on to other things...
Yesterday, the school I'm working for was out for "snow" which was nowhere to be seen except in the mountains. I live in the American South, so this just happens sometimes, though apparently we are actually getting a winter storm that might impact more than a few hundred people this weekend. I'm good with that for a few days as long as the power stays on. While I was off for a random day, I drove over to try an Indian restaurant in another city over. I'd had Indian food in Toronto before and also from frozen dinner boxes, but I'd never eaten at the particular restaurant I went to. It was nice, but I found that I later had a headache and that my hair smelled of the spices so much that I had to shower for a second time in a day. It's not even that it was an unpleasant smell, but I get migraines, and I'm especially sensitive at this time of the month. I'm actually wondering if that's why I still have a headache.
Some things are tasty but disagree with me.
Today I meant to take it easy on food, but my dad convinced me to meet him for barbecue, oops.
I like food a little more than I would like to like food.
I finally put an icon to use as a default here. I picked Skye|Daisy because I love her very much, she is wonderful to look at, and I liked the color scheme and doodles the iconmaker chose. (It is credited on my icons page.) I like Agents of SHIELD, but I am only just now watching Season 2 without giving up on it. I watched the first season not long after it had aired, and I loved it. Then, when that fall season of TV shows came up, I tried to keep up week by week with those that were airing on channels I had access to. It drove me insane, though. I couldn't always get unfettered access to the television, living with my parents, and I found that the anticipation and schedule-holding and wrangling always made for disappointment. I can't quite explain it, but being on the clock for something like a tv show just made it... worse. My second-time attempting to watch Season 2, I understand more what they were going for, and when I watch I enjoy it a lot more. At the time, though, I didn't catch every moment or detail that I needed to, there was always some sense that I was watching a stupid show and hogging the television, tumblr was literally NEVER happy with the outcome, and I felt like a lot of the decisions that were being made either came out of left-field or denied foreshadowing just for the sake of being disappointing.
I was a SkyeWard shipper who was having my hopes of redemption and resolution dashed every single week. At first, the fans I followed were hopeful and insistent. Then, over time, thy became disillusioned. Some left the fandom. Some switched sides entirely and reacted by insisting the SkyeWard was abusive now and that they wanted no part of it, per the burgeoning tumblr-purity-culture requirements. For a while, I fell into the latter category to an extent, but I'm not even sure I ever fully believed it? There certainly is a complicated relationship I have with the SkyeWard type dynamic. There are complex reasons that things like it and Reylo appeal to me, and I grapple with the stuff that sort of bothers me about the very thing I love so much. But I don't see it as like a moral flaw? More than anything, I think that I was still swept up in the current of wanting to be a conscientious and critical viewer, and more and more tumblr was dictating what opinions one had to form as a result of doing that. It created a sense of anxiety and shame associated with still liking suddenly problematic thing, as if catharsis hasn't always been a part of things. (This is not to say that there aren't still things I distance myself from because of their being genuinely "problematic," but I think the tumblr purity culture bar is set too high and in the wrong places a lot of the time.)
I was embarrassed, and so I espoused what felt like the only way to really cope with how disappointed, let-down, upset, and whatever else I was.
Revisiting it, I honestly don't see what exactly I was reacting so negatively to, even though it certainly didn't go the way I had hoped (and still vainly hope at the screen). I became amenable to the idea of revisiting AOS at my best friend's suggestion almost entirely because of seeing gifs of Season 4 existing. I still greatly anticipate watching Framework!Skyeward even though it is going to break my heart.
Transitional non-sequitur: Did you know that teachers often use a program called Skyward (no e) to keep attendance and grades online? Well now you do. It results in many, many typos for me. I literally just did it again when trying to tell you about it.
Anyway, I don't really have room to talk about every one of my main fandom interests in this one post. As you can see, I'm not always the most concise person (though I do have a twitter! - here:![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
prixofheroes). My other big thing that I don't seem to be able to talk enough about to anyone who is remotely interested (or even tolerant) is YuGiOh. Specifically, the original anime/story/manga which has, in the wake of there being others, been titled YuGiOh Duel Monsters for clarity.
It's honestly a bit strange how I came back into it and what a blessing it's been in terms of its overall impact on my recent state of being. I was at the peak target demographic, turning 13 not too long after YuGiOh (the card game) hit its stride in my peer group. (I remember this because a friend invited me to come with him to a YuGiOh card tournament on my thirteenth birthday.) However, despite trying to learn the card game, I found that I wasn't able to devote all the time I needed to in order to "get it" without giving up something else that was important to me (writing, mostly, but also drama classes I took at a community center and stuff.) However, I was super into the anime and the manga (published in the American Shounen Jump) and the story. I got this illicit thrill by going to the card shop even when I didn't play to see the boys I was friends with and to call their "YuGiOh cards" "Duel Monsters" cards because it gave me this sort of lowkey LARPing vibe.
My childhood best friend (who is still a friend, though we've been more reconnecting lately over YuGiOh - one of those blessings - than consistently in contact and distinguishing her from best friend made as an adult) and I were mutual story-rather-than-card-liking oddballs, but during that part of our lives, she moved to California with her family. Life rolled on, and I got into other fandoms bit by bit. YuGiOh stuck around in the forefront for a while, but as my card-playing friends cared less and less about the anime, I had fewer and fewer ways to remain engaged. The investment began to just feel frustrating. Then some other shiny thing caught my eye, and it just sort of fell into dormancy in the back of my mind.
Then sometime when I was in high school, LittleKuriboh (![[youtube.com profile]](https://youtube.com/favicon.ico)
CardGamesFTW) came along with his YuGiOh: The Abridged Series. Now, I'm not exactly sure how I watched it or when I first watched it, because I had dial-up internet at home all the way through moving at 18. I think I did leech some neighbors' wifi on my first laptop, but it worked only intermittently and I had to be sitting in this VERY SPECIFIC SPOT on my bed and the weather had to be right for it to work. Sorry neighbor of the past, if it bothered you, but I was just trying to read message boards and watch early YouTube...
Anyway, YGOTAS was magical. It made me laugh and laugh and laugh. The thing is, it absolutely rips this little story apart, but it puts it back together again without taking away any of the love that LK obviously feels for it. It is merciless parody, but it has a genuine affection at its soul that positively impacted (I hope) my sense of humor forever at that very formative time in my life.
I also have struggled with depression since 13-14 in particular if not before. Again, I can sort of date it because I remember sort of hitting this wall with depression at one point in my early teens where I remember just lying in bed crying and crying and crying without knowing why. I think I'd been sick for a while with some normal cold or flu kind of deal, but the increased lethargy and silence and boredom all sort of ate through my tolerance of whatever building depression I had, and I just broke for a bit. I remember trying to console myself, trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and one of the ways that I tried to do this was by listening to music. I turned on the CD player by my bed, I filtered through radio stations. I had the "Music to Duel By" YuGiOh soundtrack thing, and in the jewel case there were these stickers that I refused to use but neatly kept inside. The largest one was a sticker of Yami Yugi, whom I had the biggest crush in the universe on, and I remember looking at this sticker and trying to get myself to lapse into comforting maladaptive fandom daydreaming (my habit of composing fic in my head I've had forever and ever). And there I was, staring at my emo hair anime husband as a teenager, and he did nothing for me! I put him away again and started bawling.
But YGOTAS took something that has that sort of catalyst moment for me and made it into something comforting, positive, and bright all over again. Of course, some of the jokes haven't aged well. (There are a couple of trans-related jokes that make me wince early on.) However, I think that it is obvious from his continued contributions to and presence inf andom and internet culture in general that LK is willing to learn and grow and has only helpful and kind intentions. I don't know him personally or anything. (He did like a tweet I made @ him the other day and it made my day, because I am a small peon who thrives on validation.) But I just... really admire him.
Anyway, I kept watching YGOTAS for a while, but sometime around the point when I had stopped watching the dubbed anime as a child, I also stopped watching the Abridged Series for some reason? I honestly don't know how or why that happened. Maybe I lost interest because I thought I would no longer have context. Maybe I was too busy/depressed/obsessed with something else. Whatever the case was, I recently picked it up about where I remembered leaving off. Then I was reminded at how much strange, earnest investment that LK manages to elicit from me about these parody-versions of these characters. I genuinely want to read and write about them! I want to think about how they're doing when they're not on screen. And they're JOKES. So bit by bit, I got sucked into trying to remember the actual lore, the actual story, and the actual characterizations that these simplified and sillier versions represent. So that's how I ended up back into YuGiOh. I'm currently working on a fic series that is based on a lot of things including my memory and growing understanding of the actual canon and upon things the Abridged Series has made me think and feel while also working through the subbed anime to see what exactly was lost in translation.
I really want to read the manga too if I can find an stomach it. (It's a lot more dark and even gory at times.)
Anyway, YuGiOh the Abridged Series is fantastic and joy-inducing, badly-aged jokes disclaimer withstanding. Whether you love YuGiOh already or have never seen it, you might enjoy giving it a chance. It'll make you laugh, probably, and if you like it but never watched YuGiOh, maybe you could check out the real thing!
I am suffering menstrually today - face hurts, back hurts, don't like it. I came home and took a long nap, took a shower, and have been antisocial about getting on Discord this evening. Not that I'm ever actually off Discord, but it's a matter of paying attention to it, isn't it?
I've been bopping around on the first few posts of
addme_fandom and finding that a lot of tumblr refugees who are new to this format of website don't know what the difference in subscribe and access are, so I wrote an explanation that I gave to a couple of people. I'm gonna copy-paste it here and probably over on the community I made for similar resources: tumblrmigration. I don't know why, but I'm really enthusiastic about helping people get on-board with this type of fandom and internet participation as I can. Here is the blurb: Dreamwidth lets you control what is on your "Reading Page" (which is the closest thing to a 'dash' you have here - it shows the most recent 1000 entries from the last 14 days, so it DOES eventually end) and who gets to read what you post with a few different settings you can learn to manage.
You can subscribe which means that you get to read all the public posts on that journal on your Reading Page.
You can grant access which means that you are giving that journal permission to read journal entries which you mark as Access List Only (I think, something like that) on the privacy setting down near the post button. This was an update of an old LJ thing where you could make stuff "Friends Only."
You can make even more strange access filters if you like over time. Like, I dunno, "only friends with an unhealthy obsession with cheese" or "friends who aren't afraid of spiders."
In the case of communities, like this one, tat have open membership, you can join without subscribing, which is what I did, so that my Reading Page won't be just posts from this community even though I want to be associated with it and easily access it.
You can see a bunch of helpful stuff on your own profile page that might help you understand this stuff further!
Now on to other things...
Yesterday, the school I'm working for was out for "snow" which was nowhere to be seen except in the mountains. I live in the American South, so this just happens sometimes, though apparently we are actually getting a winter storm that might impact more than a few hundred people this weekend. I'm good with that for a few days as long as the power stays on. While I was off for a random day, I drove over to try an Indian restaurant in another city over. I'd had Indian food in Toronto before and also from frozen dinner boxes, but I'd never eaten at the particular restaurant I went to. It was nice, but I found that I later had a headache and that my hair smelled of the spices so much that I had to shower for a second time in a day. It's not even that it was an unpleasant smell, but I get migraines, and I'm especially sensitive at this time of the month. I'm actually wondering if that's why I still have a headache.
Some things are tasty but disagree with me.
Today I meant to take it easy on food, but my dad convinced me to meet him for barbecue, oops.
I like food a little more than I would like to like food.
I finally put an icon to use as a default here. I picked Skye|Daisy because I love her very much, she is wonderful to look at, and I liked the color scheme and doodles the iconmaker chose. (It is credited on my icons page.) I like Agents of SHIELD, but I am only just now watching Season 2 without giving up on it. I watched the first season not long after it had aired, and I loved it. Then, when that fall season of TV shows came up, I tried to keep up week by week with those that were airing on channels I had access to. It drove me insane, though. I couldn't always get unfettered access to the television, living with my parents, and I found that the anticipation and schedule-holding and wrangling always made for disappointment. I can't quite explain it, but being on the clock for something like a tv show just made it... worse. My second-time attempting to watch Season 2, I understand more what they were going for, and when I watch I enjoy it a lot more. At the time, though, I didn't catch every moment or detail that I needed to, there was always some sense that I was watching a stupid show and hogging the television, tumblr was literally NEVER happy with the outcome, and I felt like a lot of the decisions that were being made either came out of left-field or denied foreshadowing just for the sake of being disappointing.
I was a SkyeWard shipper who was having my hopes of redemption and resolution dashed every single week. At first, the fans I followed were hopeful and insistent. Then, over time, thy became disillusioned. Some left the fandom. Some switched sides entirely and reacted by insisting the SkyeWard was abusive now and that they wanted no part of it, per the burgeoning tumblr-purity-culture requirements. For a while, I fell into the latter category to an extent, but I'm not even sure I ever fully believed it? There certainly is a complicated relationship I have with the SkyeWard type dynamic. There are complex reasons that things like it and Reylo appeal to me, and I grapple with the stuff that sort of bothers me about the very thing I love so much. But I don't see it as like a moral flaw? More than anything, I think that I was still swept up in the current of wanting to be a conscientious and critical viewer, and more and more tumblr was dictating what opinions one had to form as a result of doing that. It created a sense of anxiety and shame associated with still liking suddenly problematic thing, as if catharsis hasn't always been a part of things. (This is not to say that there aren't still things I distance myself from because of their being genuinely "problematic," but I think the tumblr purity culture bar is set too high and in the wrong places a lot of the time.)
I was embarrassed, and so I espoused what felt like the only way to really cope with how disappointed, let-down, upset, and whatever else I was.
Revisiting it, I honestly don't see what exactly I was reacting so negatively to, even though it certainly didn't go the way I had hoped (and still vainly hope at the screen). I became amenable to the idea of revisiting AOS at my best friend's suggestion almost entirely because of seeing gifs of Season 4 existing. I still greatly anticipate watching Framework!Skyeward even though it is going to break my heart.
Transitional non-sequitur: Did you know that teachers often use a program called Skyward (no e) to keep attendance and grades online? Well now you do. It results in many, many typos for me. I literally just did it again when trying to tell you about it.
Anyway, I don't really have room to talk about every one of my main fandom interests in this one post. As you can see, I'm not always the most concise person (though I do have a twitter! - here:
It's honestly a bit strange how I came back into it and what a blessing it's been in terms of its overall impact on my recent state of being. I was at the peak target demographic, turning 13 not too long after YuGiOh (the card game) hit its stride in my peer group. (I remember this because a friend invited me to come with him to a YuGiOh card tournament on my thirteenth birthday.) However, despite trying to learn the card game, I found that I wasn't able to devote all the time I needed to in order to "get it" without giving up something else that was important to me (writing, mostly, but also drama classes I took at a community center and stuff.) However, I was super into the anime and the manga (published in the American Shounen Jump) and the story. I got this illicit thrill by going to the card shop even when I didn't play to see the boys I was friends with and to call their "YuGiOh cards" "Duel Monsters" cards because it gave me this sort of lowkey LARPing vibe.
My childhood best friend (who is still a friend, though we've been more reconnecting lately over YuGiOh - one of those blessings - than consistently in contact and distinguishing her from best friend made as an adult) and I were mutual story-rather-than-card-liking oddballs, but during that part of our lives, she moved to California with her family. Life rolled on, and I got into other fandoms bit by bit. YuGiOh stuck around in the forefront for a while, but as my card-playing friends cared less and less about the anime, I had fewer and fewer ways to remain engaged. The investment began to just feel frustrating. Then some other shiny thing caught my eye, and it just sort of fell into dormancy in the back of my mind.
Then sometime when I was in high school, LittleKuriboh (
Anyway, YGOTAS was magical. It made me laugh and laugh and laugh. The thing is, it absolutely rips this little story apart, but it puts it back together again without taking away any of the love that LK obviously feels for it. It is merciless parody, but it has a genuine affection at its soul that positively impacted (I hope) my sense of humor forever at that very formative time in my life.
I also have struggled with depression since 13-14 in particular if not before. Again, I can sort of date it because I remember sort of hitting this wall with depression at one point in my early teens where I remember just lying in bed crying and crying and crying without knowing why. I think I'd been sick for a while with some normal cold or flu kind of deal, but the increased lethargy and silence and boredom all sort of ate through my tolerance of whatever building depression I had, and I just broke for a bit. I remember trying to console myself, trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and one of the ways that I tried to do this was by listening to music. I turned on the CD player by my bed, I filtered through radio stations. I had the "Music to Duel By" YuGiOh soundtrack thing, and in the jewel case there were these stickers that I refused to use but neatly kept inside. The largest one was a sticker of Yami Yugi, whom I had the biggest crush in the universe on, and I remember looking at this sticker and trying to get myself to lapse into comforting maladaptive fandom daydreaming (my habit of composing fic in my head I've had forever and ever). And there I was, staring at my emo hair anime husband as a teenager, and he did nothing for me! I put him away again and started bawling.
But YGOTAS took something that has that sort of catalyst moment for me and made it into something comforting, positive, and bright all over again. Of course, some of the jokes haven't aged well. (There are a couple of trans-related jokes that make me wince early on.) However, I think that it is obvious from his continued contributions to and presence inf andom and internet culture in general that LK is willing to learn and grow and has only helpful and kind intentions. I don't know him personally or anything. (He did like a tweet I made @ him the other day and it made my day, because I am a small peon who thrives on validation.) But I just... really admire him.
Anyway, I kept watching YGOTAS for a while, but sometime around the point when I had stopped watching the dubbed anime as a child, I also stopped watching the Abridged Series for some reason? I honestly don't know how or why that happened. Maybe I lost interest because I thought I would no longer have context. Maybe I was too busy/depressed/obsessed with something else. Whatever the case was, I recently picked it up about where I remembered leaving off. Then I was reminded at how much strange, earnest investment that LK manages to elicit from me about these parody-versions of these characters. I genuinely want to read and write about them! I want to think about how they're doing when they're not on screen. And they're JOKES. So bit by bit, I got sucked into trying to remember the actual lore, the actual story, and the actual characterizations that these simplified and sillier versions represent. So that's how I ended up back into YuGiOh. I'm currently working on a fic series that is based on a lot of things including my memory and growing understanding of the actual canon and upon things the Abridged Series has made me think and feel while also working through the subbed anime to see what exactly was lost in translation.
I really want to read the manga too if I can find an stomach it. (It's a lot more dark and even gory at times.)
Anyway, YuGiOh the Abridged Series is fantastic and joy-inducing, badly-aged jokes disclaimer withstanding. Whether you love YuGiOh already or have never seen it, you might enjoy giving it a chance. It'll make you laugh, probably, and if you like it but never watched YuGiOh, maybe you could check out the real thing!
