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I just got a paid account again after letting mine lapse for about a year. I had meant to do it ages ago, but I just haven't been spending a lot of time genuinely thinking when I'm online lately. I go through phases of having a burst of creative energy, but for the most part I spend all my energy at work. The thing is, it's not miserable exactly. Most days my job is bearable to enjoyable. I still wish that I had more fannish and personal creative energy more consistently, though.

I mean, it's hard to blame anyone for feeling a kind of cloud of dread, even while bearing in mind and praying for those who are actually suffering living in a war zone and other things right now.

In the interest of fannish preservation, I saw some stuff today of certain people panicking about backing up LiveJournal stuff before Russian internet goes totally offline or state-locked. There were responses to the posts about how the need to back up LJ fandom history or lose it has been known for a decade or more and that there have already been substantial efforts to do so.

When dreamwidth and tumblr were both in their first days of fandom relevance, I pushed for dreamwidth to my friends before pretty photosets hooked me into tumblr for years.

Lately, I've spent more time on tumblr than I have in years, because I am very selective with what I follow and mostly run a "personal" that's a lot of pictures of animals, niche humor, low-stakes reference posts, and fandoms I don't have enough energy to devote a lot of time to and a YuGiOh blog. Years back, I liked hving the big mishmash of everything, but these days the focus helps me to get into a less "professional" headspace and not to worry about things so much. It's not like either get a lot of traction.

Today, half the internet went down. According to a tumblr post I saw it was because some kind of API (I don't know what that is) called Chromium (based on the name, I'm assuming it belongs to google) went down and lots and lots of websites use it. However, tumblr and (as far as I know) dreamwidth trucked on.

Recently, tumblr has introduced a "pay for ad-free" subscription at $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. This resulted in a lot of users spewing vitriol at a lot of them and a lot of digital tongue-sticking-out at the fact that most tumblr users use some kind of browser extension to block almost all of their attempts at ad-based monetization and "relevance" beyond what users themselves curate. And I get the reaction, but at the same time, as tumblr seems to be becoming more and more relaxed on the whole NSFW ban that caused so much migration and disaffection with it in the first place, I think it is amazing to see them moving a little closer toward a "users as customer" instead of a "users as product" model which is the main appeal of this website.

I think they both serve different, if occasionally concurrent purposes, and I bought a dreamwidth paid account for a year at the same time I bought a tumblr one. That might be about $70 for a lot of nothing, but I feel like since I finally got a month where I'm not dead broke, it was worth "voting with my wallet" about thi kind of internet.

I'm also interested in playing with neocities if I ever get inspiration to do something with it.

I'm on Spring Break this week, and I'd like to write something fannish during it. So far the most fun-thing I've done is play Genshin (f2p) though. My best friend really likes it, and it's nice to share interests.