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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.

So I am really struggling with having the energy to do much in the evening beyond simple existence. I For the past week or so I have had some difficulty with appetite/stomach discomfort. It isn't that I have entirely lost my appetite, but I don't really have any kind of enthusiasm for most food that I usually have. I am glad that I am becoming less dependent on it for a source of emotional comfort, but I think that enjoying food is a normal function of being a human.

Some lessened appetite is welcome, but between that and the physical discomfort, I assume that maybe I have either encountered a mild virus or otherwise done something to my body that has caused the change. I'm not sure what, though.

It seems to be getting better, though I still had trouble deciding what to do for dinner, and that's usually one of the things that I look forward to during the day, given that my work hours make it so that I only have the energy to get on the computer or anything every few days and certainly not each evening. The time I am eating dinner is usually the only time I have with my conscious mind that is not getting ready for work, going to work, coming home from work, attending to hygiene, and trying to go to sleep.

I've started taking my antidepressant only every few days, trying to help myself feel more emotions and less deadened. It also seems to help with not sleeping quite as much. I don't actively notice a sedative effect with it, but I know it can have one. But that in itself is a gauntlet of learning how to have emotions again apart from survivable, dull contentment on the level of "This might as well happen."

Anyway, I have been enjoying getting in the habit of using dreamwidth more often and talking about more diverse topics on it. Thank you to anyone who is reading this that makes it feel less like screaming into a void.

The thing that I think makes so many people reluctant to take up dreamwidth/lj-style blogging (or to return to it as the case may be) is - more than anything else - the lack of instant gratification and feedback. Microblogging platforms teach us all to market ourselves and to view each and every sentence or paragraph as a product. I am not saying that these forms of blogging don't have their uses and that preferring a low-stress, almost-mindless sort of social media consumption is a bad thing. I use twitter pretty often.

But the more I do this and don't just mindlessly scroll through twitter, the more I feel like I have returned to a certain kind of brain-usage that had become increasingly difficult in my time as an avid tumblr user and, subsequently, a mostly-twitter-user. I mean it is no secret that twitter in particular is designed to cause addiction in much the same way a slot machine would, and tumblr alike with its endless scrolling mechanic created a never-ending accumulation of obligation to keep scrolling, to catch up every day.

Prior to my stint in the school-year from hell, 2017-2018, I was definitely addicted to the internet in various ways. The lack of signal and the desperate trying to keep my students who did have signal from blatantly watching Fortnite videos instead of listening to anything I occasionally got to try to teach them really broke that habit. And I could go on about that hellish experience even more, but I won't. Not good for my blood pressure since I do need to sleep tonight.

I think I have become more attached to my phone again here lately, but I think it's because a lot of the time it feels like my only portal to the world. But even with the itch to check this site or that site or to see if my best friend has emailed me an RP reply yet, my relationship with it feels fundamentally different from the way I felt during the vast majority of my time as a near-daily tumblr-user. And I wasn't even one of those who needed to finish my dash every day, because I knew it was a fool's errand.

I have been working on an (extended) 20in20 challenge over at lands_of_magic and it makes me feel so incredibly nostalgic. Honestly, I often find myself nostalgic for the last two years of high school but not always because of the social things I was doing in school itself. Sometimes, but I also miss just the time I spent with my thoughts, with my feelings. It developed my understanding of myself. I spent more time thinking about philosophical and religious things. I spent more time thinking about what and who I wanted to be. And as much as I think that was part of the formative stage I was in, I also think about how I think that a lot of the noise and compulsion to keep up, to keep consuming silences the ongoing process of just being with oneself or with a group of people to whom you have given at least tacit consent to communicate with you.

On twitter, a lack of notifications in response to your own posts or even your retweets (or reblogs on tumblr) gives a sense of failure. You need to try again, pull the lever, and hope that one of your friends will a) see it and be) respond to it. Whereas here, the occasional articulate response gives me reassurance that some of you are reading my posts some of the time, and your feedback (even when it as as short as a tweet) seems to matter more. There is a slower pace to this that reminds me of dial-up days, which didn't end for me until 2009. And while for heaven's sake I don't want to go back to that torture in terms of trying to DO anything with data, images, video, etc., I guess I do really relish going back to the pace at wish I felt pressured to process my feelings about things like fandom.

Fandom is a part of who I am. It is a subculture to which I really sincerely feel like I belong. I feel passionate about it, even if it is quiet passion some of the time. Sometimes it feels stupid, how much thought I put into it. People often want to insist that it is weird to be overly invested in fandom, or even that it might be blasphemous against one's religious beliefs or something, but I guess lately I have been thinking about how the professional sports community has started using the word "Fandom" too. And they can do that. It's weird, but it's a valid use of the word, and for better or worse, how many American Christians (no comment on sincerity or depth of belief implied here) watch games on Saturday or Sunday evenings.

And I guess my point here is that I am really happy to feel like maybe just spending time with my thoughts about my hobby and trying to be creative with it isn't just some relic of the past I have to keep being sadly nostalgic about.

I don't want dreamwidth to morph into something that retains a pace or demand for consumption similar to tumblr or twitter, but I really do wish that more people from the younger generations of fandom would give it a decent shot before giving up. I think that this experience is invaluable to learn to have conversations with yourself and with others and to have the two coincide without being erased by an untraceable sort of algorithm magic.