the friday five for april 14

2023-04-14T18:19:16Z

1. What fandom(s) do you follow on Dreamwidth? I think DW as a whole is more about "fandom as a fandom" now, but I still compulsively subscribe to all the communities that talk about media/ships I'm into (e.g: steve_and_eddie and kjc_fans among others). I've often wondered what it'd take to turn back journal sites into the primary fandom hubs they were pre-2010s, although obviously I'm still fine with them existing as they do (although I wish we'd make use of communities a bit more). That might just be impossible in a post-reblog internet landscape, also. I do enjoy meta/pan-fandom talk quite a lot, anyway, so what I'm most excited to keep up with is more in the camp of meta_warehouse and fancake rather than my regular fandoms.

2. Where else do you follow those fandoms? I'm on tumblr + discord and I get to know about the interesting stuff on twitter/tiktok (which is unfortunately a lot according to my taste, particularly when it comes to fanart) via discord servers, which is a sweet deal as I never have to experience anything else coming from those websites. Tumblr often tests my limits but I'm too attached to it to properly let go - it's shaped such a chunk of my humor and aesthetics, plus I might have been way less left wing and way more cisgender without it, so! An improvement on all fronts.

3. Have you ever met up with fannish friends? I routinely get a bit melancholic over the fact that I didn't strike up strong fandom friendships when I was younger and now it's probably not going to happen. It sort of feels like a thing that has to happen by a certain age threshold and I only ever had fannish close acquaintances (which I obviously deeply appreciate). And then I see some drama happen in fandom spaces about friendship groups disbanding over problematic ships and think it's probably for the best, given that the space I would've made friends in was discourse-era tumblr.

4. When there's a question on a 'find a fic' community, are you likely to help find the fic or do you hope someone else will know it? My days of being so well-read in my fandoms I could be help find fics are way behind me, especially since I spent the last few years in juggernaut slash ships holding grudges against established fanon. I used to be so good at this with frerard, though.

5. Did you customize/tweak your DW home page or are you using one of the basic options? Got too excited for a second before realizing this meant my journal style, whoops (although I could fidget with my DW home via Stylus but I have too much theming on the back burner already, starting with my personal site). And yes, it's sort of customized: I started from a style I liked and tweaked it a bit so that it wouldn't look so much like a preset, as my nostalgia goggles never extended to the basic themes you find on journal sites I'm afraid. I tried to use one of those very tumblr-looking ones coded by the relatively small graphic community you can find on here, but something feels wrong about having a journal site that has post-2013 graphic design ideas. I'm still not too happy with what I have right now, though, particularly my profile code (open to suggestions of codes you enjoy).

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the friday five for april 14