mostly void, partially stars

not feeling very human atm

Fri, 09 May 2025 11:50:30 GMT

Real life is a bit of a pain. My mood swings wildly, as does my opinion of what I should currently do with my life. I haven't been very talkative online as a result of this and of a trip I took at the beginning of the month with the girlfriend (long weekend here in Italy!)
I finally got around to set up my kobo so it syncs my wallabag articles via wallabako and it's a blast. It's still a bit buggy for me but I have an ancient Kobo Aura HD that gets very few firmware updates nowadays, so maybe it's that.
Someone is researching fans' opinion of AI (via fansurveys)
femgiftboxes (fest focused on female characters) still has some participants without gifts

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I'll actually be pretty sad when tumblr dies

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:49:09 GMT

I know we're all joking about the curse finally lifting but it's the only "modern" social media site I get genuine enjoyment out of. And for all that I praise dreamwidth and mastodon to every fandom person I meet, there's a kind of visual fandom experience that only tumlblr is- I can't even say "optimized for," as tumblr is not optimized for anything. Mostly gif gazing. TikTok is for videos and Instagram is for carousels. Fanartists will migrate to even more inhospitable lands but I have survived that before. But where will I go to have narrative parallels highlighted via gifset juxtaposition? Where will I be graced with the sight of my blorbo covered in blood like I am graced by a freshly bloomed flower on my morning walk? Are you telling me I'll have to rewatch my shows??? Unthinkable.

(Not that I think tumblr doesn't have the addictive and enshittified social media features. I've looked up by an hour-long tumblr session with the same kind of malaise tiktok scrolling gives me, but overall the good has always outweighed the bad.)

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community thursday 13.03.25

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 22:13:24 GMT

Doing the Community Thursday challenge originally started by goodbyebird: On Thursdays I'll make an effort to engage with communities on dw in one way or another, be it by commenting, posting, reccing, and so on.

Linked some art and a poem over at recthething
Left a comment with my current reads at booknook
Opened the monthly thread + left some comments and replies at digitalminimalism

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my community thursday is that i founded one: promo for digitalminimalism

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 19:38:05 GMT

digitalminimalism is a community for people who want to re-evaluate, to varying extents, the space technology takes up in their life. This might mean spending less time binge-watching streaming shows, decluttering their smartphone from time-sucking apps or doing more things the analog way. The reasons for doing this are as varied as the rules people set for themselves: to feel more present in the moment, to curb bad coping mechanisms, to stop creating value for predatory companies with shady privacy practices.

I wanted to make a few more posts in the community myself before sharing it but I figured that if I kept waiting I'd be my usual self and never get around to it. There are very few rules (which can be summed up with "don't be a dick") in the profile section and a recurring monthly general chat post.

Why?

This has been one of my big fixations of late and my attempt at finding online community for it (which I realize is ironic) have gone... less than well. There was a worrying amount of alt-right-adjacent ideology, but my fault for thinking to try reddit and discord servers of youtubers, of all things. I just want to share pictures of my new flip phone with people who aren't white supremacists, man.

It might die in four months or never even taking off. But for now here it is!

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End-of-Year Reading Meme 2024

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:16:37 GMT

In 2024:

I Read: I was very bad at counting this past year, but it's gotta be about a dozen of things I read willingly + another dozen read for work/study reasons, which I tend not to consider towards my "reading goal."
My Reading Goal: 2024 was the year I switched between three different logging methods, from digital to analog and across various bookwyrm instances, so I didn't have a goal per se. I was very much below my average of past years however, so not too satisfied with that ):
I Challenged Myself: I tried to read more novels written (not translated) in my native language
A New Genre I Attempted: Not exactly "new," but I started reading graphic novels/memoirs again
An Author New-to-me in 2024 I Really Enjoyed: Luciano Bianciardi! Both incredibly funny and soul-crushing.
My Favorite Book of the Year: I always have trouble picking out favourite books, but it has to be either The Left Hand of Darkness or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Books I Read in 2024 That I Recommend: As above, plus most of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (the first three, for sure) and It's a Hard Life by Bianciardi.

In 2025:

My Reading Goal: I'm aiming for a book a week, which will be more or less feasible depending on how much I'll have to work this year.
I'm Going to Challenge Myself: I don't really do structured challenges, except that I'm always sort of trying to tick off books from the Gilmore Girls reading list, but let's say that that's more of a multi-year type of project.
My TBR List: I have a partial log of what I want to read on what has now turned into a 800+ line Excel spreadsheet...
Books I'm Especially Interested in Reading in 2025: Definitely more Le Guin, which is the most embarrassing gap I have in my knowledge of SFF. I also slept on The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which I shouldn't have.
A Book Coming Out in 2025 That I'm Excited About: Alecto the Ninth, should it get a 2025 release date. Besides that, I'm not reading many sagas, and I usually don't keep up to date with specific authors as to know with a ton of advance when they're coming out with a new book. I'm also just very slow at catching up with what I set my eyes on. Maybe the new Torrey Peters, but I won't rush to the shop to get it.
Other Book-Related News for 2025 I'm Interested In: The Raven Cycle graphic novel adaptation is coming out this year, which doesn't really register as a new release for me, but it's something I might even pre-order, even if only out of nostalgia and not genuine enthusiasm. Like, I'm sure it'll be great, they picked a beloved fanartist for it (best case scenario), and I'm sure I'll have an amazing time reading it, but I'm definitely not waiting for it with the same energy as I did with any Stiefvater-related property five years ago.

crosspost from booknook

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regrettably very attracted to jensen ackles as soldier boy

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 12:49:09 GMT

sort-of relevant news

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is shutting down next November 😭 Everything will technically move to a paid offline version of the app with no leaf tickets or microtransactions, which on paper is great, but I'm waiting to see how much content will actually make the cut to see whether I should cry or be happy. Also no more friends and visiting their camps which ): which is a bummer for an Animal Crossing game, a franchise that's always been about connectivity.
Automattic will move all Tumblrs to a WordPress backend 👀 Very curious to see whether this will make tumblr better or wordpress worse.

link dump

a11yawareness is a mastodon account sharing tidbits on accessibility in web development.
Finally getting around to tinkering with FreshRSS and there's so many settings I need to explore!!! I wish I could convince everyone to switch to RSS readers for their news but alas. I use the instance 32-Bit Cafe provides for free and you can read it on mobile via the webapp or a mobile app that supports Google Reader API. I've just set up ReadYou for this purpose, which is also FOSS and has a very pleasing material design UI.

media log

I was in a state after coming back from the holidays so I, huh, binged all of The Boys in like a week. It was fun and I love Karl Urban. He's perfectly cast, as is Anthony Starr and I'd say up until season 4 the plot is pretty tight and entertaining. S4 is a bit meandering and the shows's biggest flaw (thinking that simply referencing real life events in a superhero show counts as satire) is front and center. High production value but to think this is doing something novel with the themes/genre is definitely a stretch. This level of edgy was maybe vaguely subversive in the 90s, but this is coming from someone who could never get into Garth Ennis. Also, I thought AO3 would be full of Butcher/Homelander but it isn't?

I also saw Nightmare Alley, which was underwhelming but gorgeous, so definitely my least favourite of the Del Toro movies I've seen.

I've done quite a bit of reading, so I'll update on that with a dedicated post.

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i can't seem to get the cut working on this

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 21:16:47 GMT

I think I've definitely settled on making these compilation posts rather than posting links/things as I come across them. I want my overall internet experience to feel slower, so it makes sense that the rhythm at which I spew out content into the world should also slow down. Not that I'd been doing much posting these past few months but still -- I should aim for less fedi, less DW, less tumblr, or at least a more thoughtful version of them. Now that I'm on holiday I've been forced to think again about my relationship with my phone and I don't like what I see (30 hours weekly screen time).

And speaking of slowness and internet and social media --

articles that hit lately

You; Sitting With Yourself – time spent offline: There weren’t enough tips, tools, tricks in the world, no amount of gimmicks that could save me from the thing that kept me running back to the noise, to the avatars: I disliked myself. which ended up reminding me of -
How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss: A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself. If there’s something you’re worried or upset about, you can simply hide behind your phone and it will all go away.
Why do we use social media? - by Max Read: As everyone who’s had pain in their thumb from scrolling knows, the actual point of “screen time” is the time part--the hours it allows you to numbly burn up. There’s no “more efficient” version of social media because you can’t pass time any more quickly.

(emphasis mine)

sort-of relevant news

Internet Archive "glitch" deletes years of user data and accounts | Hacker News or: Literally My Number One Fear. I don't keep anything worth salvaging in mine but apparently this fucks up the discoverability of certain files (uploads don't seem to have been deleted). And also, well, it just raises questions about how safe IA storage is.
I totally missed that someone spent thousands on fraudulent votes to rig the Hugos. They haven't shared the name fo the finalist favored because they can't establish whether they were aware of anything but I'll be 👀 looking (also, I mean. who spends thousands on rigging an award for someone they don't have a connection with unless it's some 4D chess move to try and get them disqualified?)

media log but it's just me complaining about TUA S4 for 800+ words

So I wasn't in love with season 3, but that was still an entertaining watch compared to season 4.

I haven't looked into whether this was affected by the strikes but it must have been given it's 1) set during Christmas but coming out in August and 2) a total mess, writing-wise.

It's a GoT situation in the sense that they're working having exhausted everything from the comics except I don't think that alone should mean this much of a drop in quality, given how much material they already had to come up with independently for previous seasons. I got into this with low expectations and really, the character arcs are non-existent, it's full of filler when it should be tying up lose hands and heading towards a conclusion, but I was sort of braced for all of that. The worst thing about it is that it's just not fun to watch.

The jokes are bad, the dialogue is cliched, absolutely nothing makes you care what's going to happen next. If I'm not given any emotional closure or a coherent plot that builds towards a satisfying ending then the hijinks should be entertaining, like they still sort of were in S3. But here you just keep asking yourself why we're spending time on Allison and Claire having to rescue Klaus from a Satanist pimp when it's less than 90 minutes from wrap up.

Speaking of, I think this season takes the cake when it comes to "situations we put Klaus in that should be dramatic but we're only mining them for jokes." And like, TUA the comic is full of black humour, but the Klaus stuff has often felt like such a tonal shift in the show, what with Robert Sheehan playing him progressively more one-dimensional and cartoonish and nothing sticking to him anymore, be it sexual violence or death or what-have-you. Either go full Pulp Fiction or find a balance.

Unless the point of having them all dick around while Ben was mind-melding with the color from outer space was to further drive home that they're mostly useless as superheroes? Which, I think would be a moderately stupid authorial choice for a variety of reasons but at least it would be a choice. I can't tell whether any of what I got out of this season re: the characters was intentional or not. I think the writers simply didn't know what was left to do with most of them, see: the obligatory troubled marriage plotline with the only established couple left standing or how Luther and Diego magically turned into even more of a pair of fools than they had in S3.

Really, I hate when people compare media properties to fic disparagingly, but this was TUA crackfic. Of the kind where Baby Shark is played four times and according to the author this should be enough to make you laugh. There's some good ideas in it, like the Mandela/Umbrella effect cult, but half of them are still recycled from material that worked in past seasons, kind of like in Stranger Things S4, e.g: Gene and Jean as the quirky murder duo/Hazel and Cha Cha of the hour, Five and Lila stuck in the timeline subway. You get glimpses of what this season should feel like, mostly in the first few episodes, with the G&J intro or the Girl in the Squid concept or everyone still having, like, actual human problems and emotions but it all feels like an echo of the og TUA show, which had already amped up the cheese and the love drama on the story compared to the comics. Really, what's up with the amount of unnecessary romance on this show? The cult is right, this is the wrong timeline and the way to tell them apart is that the good ones have talking monkeys in them.
Also, again, I was already over expecting much character development or plot from this show. My requirements when it comes to plot consistency for TUA are like only two steps above those I have for Doctor Who. It's fine if the extent of Allison's powers changes based on vibes, so long as the vibes are good. But oh my god, Viktor's whole plan for rescuing Ben was to extract the marigold particles from his body and yet when it turns out they all have to die because they're filled with marigold, he doesn't even try to offer to try?? hello???? Like not even two lines of dialogue between him and Five to get an intra-episode continuity issue out of the way. Are we a superhero show or what.

I wasn't even mad about the oh-we-have-to-sacrifice-ourselves ending, that felt like a pretty obvious possible conclusion, but everything about how we got there was so lazy and unsatisfying. Oh, and the final scene with the good timeline being that long shot in a plain green field with two seconds of narration has strong "we ran out of money" energy.

Originally I closed this post with a bunch of thoughts on Neil Gaiman but I think I might like to keep those in a separate, locked post. Partially because it ended up being more personal than I thought it would and partially because it focuses on fan response, which is already dominating the discussion too much at a time when we still don't even have a public statement from the guy and half the SFF world is pretending nothing's happened. Like, it's impossible to keep up with the news browsing the Neil Gaiman tag on tumblr because of the amount of GO fans talking about what this means for their enjoyment/follow up seasons of the show and I don't feel like adding to that energy. But also I'm going to have to vomit my thoughts somewhere at some point or I might implode. So friend-lock it is.

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too cranky to come up with a title

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 18:52:42 GMT

links first

I think everyone and their mom has heard about the sexual assault accusations against Neil Gaiman by now, but muccamukk has a great roundup post with all the most relevant links, including transcripts of all podcast episodes.
How to disable the new advertising feature that's on by default in Mozilla Firefox
A neocities shrine with some HQ vintage SFF book covers

media log

I'm caught up on season 2 of Interview with the Vampire (and rewatched the first) and I still can't believe this got greenlit. Some exec was like "Ah, yes, the Gay Vampire Sex Extended Universe, we're pouring a ton of money into that, we're making it one of our juggernaut productions" and so far it seems to be working. I love what an established fandom can do -- which is ironic, since I have yet to spot a VC book fan who likes the show. I *would* consider myself a VC book fan, but it's been so long since I've read them. My only holiday plan was actually to reread them all at the beach, but so far 1) I haven't found the box they've been exiled to, and 2) it's been raining since I got here.

I've been reading manuscripts for a publisher as a side gig, which has slowed down my reading for pleasure. I'd finally started Maurice before my latest assignments because, no nicer way to say it, I feel like I've been exposed to too many contemporary novels lately and I needed a detox via something from an era when we still believed in the value of descriptions and SAT words (I may be using this word incorrectly because I come from a country without SATs). Also every single one of my friend told me to read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which I'm finally doing and it's totally living up to the hype for me. I love reading about cerebral obsessive people not talking about their feelings and if you're like this too you may want to check it out.

Also, my new TV-as-background-noise of choice is Friends, because it's on legal streaming and it's got a ton of seasons, and I realized I somehow Mandela Effect'd myself in remembering Chandler Bing as a nice guy, which he isn't at all on rewatch. Huh.

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someone help me budget this, my website is dying

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 11:14:50 GMT

Hey. Long time no see. And I'm unsure whether I should start posting again right now since I'll be going through some major life changes that might leave me with very little free time to be consistent with it (maybe I'll write my first friends-locked post about this) but I had some links piling up in my drafts.

said links

the_bi_ballerina posted a fandom-focused guide to cybersafety
Curlie - The Collector of URLs is a human-curated directory of links for various purposes. I'm hopeful of seeing more projects like this spring up with the current rise in AI-generated SEO-bait content polluting every other search result.
GoblinTools is a set of single-purpose tools to help neurodivergent people with things like better evaluating the tone of a text and breaking down a task into smaller steps. I've only tried it out a few times but it seems pretty neat.

sort-of-relevant news

A write-up on Cohost by @lori@hackers.town which takes a look at the financials and sustainability of the site. I'll admit I'm sharing this having basically skimmed 2/3 of the math, because what was most concerning/entertaining for me was stuff like one of the owners posting publicly about Cloudflare making a mistake and never billing them or the encouraging parasocial bonding in order to be less accountable to your users (whether intentionally or just by having internalized the behaviour of certain online communities). I'm trying to focus on the "funny internet drama" side of things in order not to get depressed once again about how a fundamental part of our digital life is a money pit impossible to sustain without VC funding and predatory privacy practices. There's more personal thoughts on lori's mastodon and cohost if you like me enjoy reading in-depth about intra-community drama of communities you're not actually part of.
Gumroad bans "pornographic" content, intended as content primarily for "sexual titillation" which is very easy to distinguish from content that only incidentally titillates, I'm sure /s
I stopped reading it years ago but as a guy of wlw experience it was still sad to read that Autostraddle is probably shutting down

media log

My girlfriend got me hooked on BoJack Horseman (have to start season 3) and I've been catching up on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel after having dropped it years ago (I think pre-pandemic? wow) (I have about two episodes left). When I first watched it I binged three seasons and was very into it right from the start, so maybe because of that initial enthusiasm the flaws of the show (basically the same ones as Gilmore Girls) got particularly grating for me very fast. But I was surprised at how entertaining I'm finding it now, probably getting into it more resigned about what the lows of the Palladinos look like (for the record they're still one of my favourite team of writers on television and I'll certainly be watching that new ballet show they're working on).
I'm also reading Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who's far from my favourite author prose-wise but who always comes up with great premises and characters so gets a pass on everything else. I like novels with precise aesthetic ideas and that give me a glimpse in what are clearly the author's hyperfixations, which has been true of what I've read of hers so far. I'm also finally this ridiculous knowledge gap of mine that was never having read Dykes to Watch Out For save for the few strips that often get reposted online (I know). It's hilarious and everyone should read it.

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End OTW Racism initiative

Fri, 12 May 2023 19:07:51 GMT

from end-otw-racism:

OTW needs to act on racist harassment & abuse on AO3. Read our manifesto & join our two-week action on AO3 from May 17-31, 2023 to #EndOTWRacism!

tbh already changed my propic as I'm likely to forget by the 17th

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twitter will start purging inactive accounts

Wed, 10 May 2023 19:48:06 GMT

From TechCrunch:

Twitter is purging inactive accounts on its platform, which may free up a number of long-coveted usernames, according to recent tweets by owner Elon Musk. Though Twitter for years has promised to put more usernames back into rotation, it hadn’t yet made any large-scale effort to do so, despite having an inactive account policy in place that suggests Twitter’s users should log in at least every 30 days to keep accounts from being permanently removed.

According to Musk, Twitter’s purge is more conservative than that policy states. Instead, he says the company is purging accounts that have had “no activity at all for several years,” while also warning users that the result of the purge may mean users’ follower counts drop.

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the friday five for april 14

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 18:19:16 GMT

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).

questions @ thefridayfive

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yet more changes around here

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 22:19:37 GMT

After some thought, I realized I liked the idea of locked entries for 1) the occasional vent post that I still feel the need to occasionally make on tumblr, except I have the wisdom of age now telling me I should never put those on tumblr again, and 2) anything that gives away too much info about my whereabouts/medical history/line of work, etc. I technically already do this on masto (where I've turned on automated post deletion, highly recommend), but sometimes a lady needs more than 500 characters (and making a lot of posts that hit character limit is clearly working against the UI, anyway).

The way I'm going about this is I'm granting access to subs I'm also subbed to, but I don't expect mutualhood (do we say mutual on dreamwidth?) to mean anyone has to necessarily interact with these new shiny locked entries, I'm the kind of vent blogger who's satisfied with just releasing them in the wild. This said, obviously no hard feelings if you don't want it and ask me to revoke it - which if I understand correctly I can only do myself?

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pinboard guy thinks trans people are overreacting to j.k. rowling

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 20:00:25 GMT

Which he felt the need to talk about on the Pinboard official account

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snowflake challenge #2

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 14:57:26 GMT

Challenge #2 In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom

I got stuck on this because I feel like all the fandoms I main'd this past year are 1) already massively popular and 2) if I started actually writing a manifesto for any of them (but let's face it, mostly for Steve/Eddie) it'd probably reach dissertation length, so I never quite found the strength to start.

There is however an animated series that gave me an existential crisis (positive) and almost made me cry in front of my mom, even though I wouldn't say I'm in the fandom for it: Tear Along the Dotted Lines. It's a Netflix show but an Italian production, which means the international crowd didn't get bombarded with it when opening the app so you might have missed it even though it's been out a little more than a year (it's also available on all the best pirate sites near you, obviously).

Zero is a thirty-something cartoonist from Rome dealing with your classic millennial woes, which fundamentally amount to struggling to grow up and find your place in the world when all the milestones you're supposed to be hitting don't happen. The six-episode show follows him on a trip out of town with his friends and the personification of his conscience, a talking armadillo, and that's about how much I can say without spoiling the experience. It's mostly a comedy show, then it gets too real. It deals with grief and feeling directionless and behind everyone else and not knowing how to value the relationships in your life, which means it's probably either not for you because you're done with all of that or just what you need to watch right now, depending on how many friends of your age are starting to get mortgages and children. I belong to the second group, so it's one of my favourite things I watched in 2021.

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two tiny boosts

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 19:28:21 GMT

~~new year, new resolution to start posting more~~

fandomtrees - gifting fest where people write out their preferences and receive fic/art/recs in return - still has a few people with less than the objective of two gifts per participant, in case any of you had some free time available. I'm very bummed about not finishing the one-shot I wanted to write for this one but I managed to catch both the regular flu and likely-covid during the holidays on top of everything else because that's just my luck. Also, like every year, snowflake_challenge is upon us! It's a low-stakes blogging (mostly) challenge focused on fandom positivity and engagement and especially if you're a DW newbie it's a great way to get posting, so I recommend checking it out.

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wake up babe new litany against fear just dropped

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 14:51:58 GMT

"I must not reply. Bad takes are the mind-killer. Bad takes are the little death that brings total obliteration. I will scroll past the take. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. When the take has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." mxdshipwreck

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Mon, 07 Nov 2022 12:11:11 GMT

Have some very 2014 humanized tumblr/twitter slash fanart that you'll totally see on the next Rec Center anyway
Did you know there's a Fandom Wiki proxy that lets you browse a much more readable version of the site without all the annoying videos and ads (much like nitter does with twitter)? It's called Breezewiki and there's instructions on how to set it up so that you're automatically redirected when opening Fandom links.
I found out about this on cohost, which I signed up for but still can't post on because I'm in no-posting jail (and expect to stay there for a bit, it seems to be overtaken by twitter expats like everything else). EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, there's been some concerns about the site's ToS and their overall management, so give it a try at your own risk.
Speaking of, fandom.ink is also quite busy and so applications have been disabled, but existing users (that's-a me) can still invite you if you'd like an account
EDIT: forgot I also wanted to share this cool photoset code. De-tumblr'd tumblr photosets for everybody!

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TIL free twitter rss feeds are still a thing (sort of)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 21:08:53 GMT

Hello friends, did you know you can still get Twitter RSS feeds for free by using Nitter? Which is a cool open-source Twitter front-end that you can use to browse the evil bird site without being tracked, you can even run your own instance if you’re a nerd. If the people you need to follow are less than 23 you can build the url like nitter(.)net/user1,user2,user3 and get a single feed (or a bunch of feeds that are groups of 23, I guess). You can’t have any kind of Nitter account, it’s just an alternative way to read the website in the unfortunate case you still have a bunch of cool Twitter people you’d like not to lose track of, not a Twitter alternative (look into Mastodon instances for that). There’s even some neat browser extensions that will automatically turn all your Twitter urls into Nitter ones (usually together with similar sites for other privacy-destroying websites like Reddit and Instagram). Enjoy.

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snowflake challenge: day 2

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 15:22:38 GMT

snowflake_challenge #2 In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Alright, the more I think about it, the more I actually do have some goals for this year:

Engage in fandom more meaningfully instead of doomscrolling so much. I need to stop leaving my headcanons and meta to languish in my drafts and start prioritizing writing and discussions instead of the quick dopamine shot of scrolling through Pinterest or hate-reading someone's Twitter.
Make my profiles more accessible. I should finally learn how to write good image descriptions in different situations! I'm mostly interested in properly researching how people want fanart captioned, because I feel like regular accessibility guidelines aren't really geared towards something like fandom.
Talk to people more. I'm awful and I leave fandom and irl friends on read all the time, then wonder why I'm the one who struggles making connections the most. Not something that will be fixed in a single year, but still.
EDIT ~~I knew I'd forget the most important one:~~ Stop waiting too long before commenting on fics! You know if you wait too long you're just going to forget about it forever!!!

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Snowflake Challenge - Day 5

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 13:26:27 GMT

I don't have enough stuff up to do Day 1 properly, I can't pick a single meaningful work for Day 2, and I already wrote some resolutions as I should've done for Day 3. Day 4 will come in a few days when I have more spoons.

Day 5 - In your own space, post recs for at least three fanworks that you did not create. (snowflake_challenge)
I tried not to include anything insanely popular and decided to limit myself to only one work per fandom. All of these are in my perpetual list of absolute favorites and deserve more hits/kudos/comments than they already got.

Friday by boxoftheskyking (The Raven Cycle, Adam/Gansey, Mature, 9k): From this great prompt from ninnieamee: "Gansey dies. Cue Groundhog Day/Peggy Sue shenanigans for the character of your choice as they try to figure out the one course of events that prevents the death." Adam tries to save Gansey twenty-one times.

This was just heartbreaking and splendidly-written. It aligns perfectly with my vision of the characters and their relationship, has a plot that actually involves magic in a prominent role, and deals with a theme that I think isn't often talked about in a satisfactory way in fandom (Gansey's suicidal tendencies).

Been Here Before by tuesdaysgone (RPF My Chemical Romance, Frank/Gerard, Explicit, 22k): Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge took off faster than My Chemical Romance could have imagined. Gerard's downward spiral was even faster. He hit rock bottom, got sober, and moved across the country to Portland practically as soon as he'd detoxed, leaving his band and his relationship with Frank behind. Four years later, he's still clean. His graphic novel is a surprise smash hit. And he's avoided New Jersey until now. However, everything he left unresolved is still there. Gerard knows he needs forgiveness. When he sees Frank again, he realizes he needs much more than that.

One of my first MCR fics. Excruciating, will always hold a special place in my heart.

Thursdays by mintleaftea (Heroes of Olympus, Jason/Nico, Not Rated, 10k): AKA The Cruise!AU. When bartender Jason Grace befriends wizard-for-hire/performance magician Nico di Angelo, he can say with almost 100 percent certainty that his life of biweekly paychecks and cheap beers is behind him.

This is a series of standalones set in the same universe, so I suggest looking at the tag for it in the author's Tumblr and read everything. Lots of fun and enough clever ideas to write an original trilogy.

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guestbook

Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:50:58 GMT

— INFO & GUESTBOOK —

SUBSCRIPTIONS. Unless the other party asks for it in their profile/pin, I usually sub without interacting first, which you can take to mean I read some of your posts and found them interesting. Statistically speaking, I probably found you through clicking a lot of links on old comms.

ACCESS POLICY. Most of my journal entries aren't f-locked. I give access to mutual subs and if you give me access yourself I'll usually reciprocate, but locked posts are very rare and mostly used to hide stuff that I feel give away too much personal info (I'm growing progressively more privacy-minded with age), which often means complaining about real life.

COMMENTS. In general, you can leave comments on every entry, no matter how old, because I probably still want to hear what you have to say on this thing I thought about in January of 2023. If you recently subscribed and just feel like saying "hi", feel free to leave a comment under this post. I'll say "hi" back!

code by tessisamess

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