Tag Archives: dreamwidth

2025 off to a truly nauseating start

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After this week’s release of the more thoroughly researched article laying out the absolutely horrific details of Neil Gaiman’s (alleged) sex crimes, I remembered I actually still had an old user icon of him and Amanda Palmer from well over a decade ago still sitting around among my other Dreamwidth icons (and LJ icons too, as it turned out). So, that’s been deleted now, on both sites.

While I was in there I ended up culling about 80 or 90 other icons, largely from fandoms I’m not really all that into anymore. I may end up purging more later, but it was nice to free up the space. I might use the freed up slots to house more Good Omens icons.

Good Omens is still very close to my heart and I intend to remain in the fandom, but I’m treating it as a Terry Pratchett property — which is what the Terry Pratchett Estate seems to be doing, as well. All the other Gaiman books I owned have been purged from my shelves. My friend Lenn was a bigger Gaiman fan than I was and she’s done the same thing.

Two sequential screencaps from "The Simpsons" in which the town of Springfield have gathered at the train station to collectively ensure that a man they've tied to a chair (and then tied the chair to a train car) really does leave town with the train. In the original Simpsons episode, it was the man who originally bore the name Seymour Skinner (before Principal Skinner took on his identity). In this image, however, Neil Gaiman's head has been pasted over Mr Skinner's, so that it looks like it was Mr Gaiman that the town of Springfield has securely strapped down to send away. The top image is a closeup of the tied-up Gaiman, captioned with him appearing to say, "But I wrote Good Omens!" In the bottom image, we see everyone watching the train pull away with Gaiman on it, with Homer / Springfield as a whole replying, "And we thank Terry Pratchett for it. Now, don't come back!"

Thinking out loud about website things

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When I first started working on a website for myself, my plan was to use WordPress’ functionality but to give it a theme I built myself. I wanted to go really old-school, yesterweb style with its appearance, while still embracing the flexibility of having a CMS / blogging software running in the background.

I started trying to build that site theme, but it languished for well over a year. I’m fairly competent with HTML and CSS, but once you throw PHP or anything else beyond that into the mix, I start getting confused. And given how few spoons I have these days, I just haven’t been particularly keen on trying to puzzle my way through skinning a WordPress site from scratch.

But the more the big social media platforms lurch towards collapse and/or destroy the mental health of everyone using them, the more I find myself still wanting that little space of my own on the internet where I can just . . . share whatever I like, in whatever format I like, in a space that I control. So I decided to just grab a super old, ridiculously basic but still attractive (to me at least) pre-made WordPress theme and restart from there. I’ll customize that as I go along, and over time maybe I’ll keep plugging away at the from-scratch theme on a test server or something until I have something ready to go live. A customized pre-made WordPress theme still gives me a lot more options for fun and self-expression than most social media sites.

And since now I have the beginnings of a website that doesn’t just look like a jumble of text, I’m feeling a lot more inclined to actually work on adding content to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to open it for public viewing soon.

One thing I’m hoping to get more into with the blog side of things, aside from just getting back into the habit of blogging more in general, is including little bits of microblogging here and there. I know my posts tend to run long, but I actually am capable of brevity, too! It’s just that I rarely felt comfortable enough on most other platforms to put my thoughts out there. It’s different on my website, though: it’s not a content mill, it’s just my cosy space on the internet, where likely most of the people reading and interacting will be people I’m already friends with (and anyone who isn’t friendly can be easily deleted and ignored.)

I want to get into sharing content I like from other sites via embed or screenshot, too. I tend to use the social media profiles I do still use as a kind of social bookmarking tool: mostly just reblogging interesting things from other people on that platform rather than creating content of my own. I’d like to still include that social sharing aspect on my website, in such a way that I can collect things from any other platform and gather them here.

I’m still trying to decide whether to use embeds or screencaps or a mix of both. Embeds are easier, more accessible, and make proper attribution a snap, but who even knows if anything I share from Twitter will still be there in 5 years’ time? Screencaps would serve as a more permanent archival tool, but they’re more work to capture, upload, make accessible to people with visual impairments, and link back to the original post/creator.

(I do also wonder how well embeds will work on Dreamwidth crossposts.)

I’ll probably start with embeds and see how well they work, and maybe try to make a habit of screencapping anything I embed as a “just in case” measure.

If I really do get super into the reposting/content sharing from other platforms, I’ll likely refrain from crossposting everything to Dreamwidth just to avoid spamming my mutuals.

Oof that was a weird Memento Mori

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I received an email from LiveJournal letting me know that I’d gotten a badge because my journal with them is, as of this past New Year’s Eve, officially 18 years old.

My old LJ is now old enough to vote. That . . . feels very strange.

Notably, I was 18 when I first registered the account, so my LiveJournal is also now officially half my age.

I don’t use my LiveJournal anymore, and haven’t since 2009ish. I posted a final message to it on New Year’s Eve, 2013 (its 10 year anniversary) to direct anyone who might stumble across it to my Dreamwith, then set all but that message and my very first post to Private and logged out for good. I sometimes think about logging back in just to delete all the posts that are set to Private, but I don’t want to have to agree to LJ’s “new” (since years ago) Terms of Service in order to do that.

(I also briefly logged in a couple of years ago just to change the password for security reasons. I was thankfully able to do that without accepting the TOS.)

If I wasn’t concerned about keeping a claim on my username over there, and about stubbornly holding on to an account I paid to get Permanent Account status on, I would probably delete it entirely. But since I am, it means I’m still going to get very occasional emails from them. At least, to my old gmail account that I don’t really use any more. 😆

It was also interesting to see the wording of the message:

“On this day, in 2003 you have registered in LiveJournal! Share this news with your friends!”

The awkward grammar tells me they probably don’t have an English-language office at all anymore. Not that this matters to me in any way, it just . . . is sort of interesting to see, considering LJ’s history.

It did at least get me thinking about my Dreamwidth and my website and journal again, though. I’ve kept putting off finishing the website largely because other projects keep taking priority, but also because I’m still crawling out of 2021’s depression-based lethargy and brain fog. I actually still have a couple of writing projects on the go that I need to get back to and finish before I’ll feel comfortable diving into working on my website again, but it’s the first time in a few months that I’ve felt really motivated to work on my website or do any journaling/blogging again.

I am hoping to get back to it this year. I don’t have high hopes that 2022 will look overly different from 2021 in terms of the pandemic or anything surrounding it, but I kind of feel hopeful about things slowly improving a little where my own mental health and goals are concerned. Aside from getting hit by a nasty bug (which may or may not have been COVID — I tested negative, but everyone else around me is now sick and showing suspiciously COVID-y symptoms. Won’t know for sure until my dad gets his test results, I suppose), I’ve had a fair bit more mental clarity and energy since being on the mend than I’ve had in months. Which still isn’t a lot, but is an improvement.

I really want to get to the point where I am merrily maintaining the majority of my public-facing internet presence and projects on my website(s), and journaling regularly again. I think it would help my mental health. Social media in its current form has not been good for my or anyone else’s mental health, and I’d like to return to the kind of internet life I had back before Facebook existed, because I know that made me happier. Discord, and the small communities I’ve been part of through it, has been helping a lot with that, but having a website and blog as my home base would help make up the other half of that enjoyment.

It just means doing a fair bit of CSS first. Haven’t been able to muster the patience for it yet. But I will. 🙂

Hello and a little test

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I’m finally getting around to setting up a personal website for myself, and if you’re reading this from Dreamwidth, this post is actually part of that process! This site is WordPress-based, although I’ll be designing the look of it pretty much from scratch and going with a more retro, early-2000s sort of theme for it. At the moment I’m still getting everything set up, though, so it just has a default theme and . . . not a lot of content. Yet. 🥰

The nice part about having WordPress running behind it is that I can (via plugin) set it up to auto-crosspost to Dreamwidth! 🤩 A good many other social media sites as well, actually, although Dreamwidth was my first priority and the only site I have hooked up to my blog at the moment. Ideally, my website will be my central hub and “home” on the internet, and all my other social media activity will branch from there. My Dreamwidth (and the LiveJournal archive I imported to it when I moved over) holds so much of my history, though, so I want to keep a very close tie between the two blogs. If everything works out as it should, it’ll likely mean I’ll be posting more actively to my Dreamwidth going forward.

I’ve already done a test of the plugin’s crossposting functionality and it does work, but that was an auto-generated test post by the plugin itself and I deleted it seconds afterward. This post is largely to test how a real post ends up formatting between the two sites, but also is a genuine update I felt was worth sharing: I’m building a new internet home for myself, I’m including my Dreamwidth in that plan because it’s important to me, and I’m excited to re-embrace that old-web ethic of making your own space from scratch and letting it be a total hub of self-expression. My plan includes fan shrines. It’s going to be so much fun! 🥰

More later, but for now I need to start actually laying out the site itself.