#dreamwidth blog post

[rubberbandballqueen]

this feels so incredibly fucking cursed

#i don't think i've let my queue run out here since i like. possibly since i learned there was a queue #the worm speaks #it makes me feel a little bad too bc i've mentioned this before but the main reason i'm letting my queue run dry is just in case #i need to pack up my whole blog on a dime n don't have to let my queue run empty #since we all know about these Trying Times on the site... //sighs #started playing around more w/dreamwidth today tho!!! i also remembered that since tumblr blogs all have an rss feed #i can subscribe to those from dreamwidth which makes it a Very Appealing option to me now #i do miss talking in the tags tho... special part of tumblr posting ;__;

[anghraine]

I really wanted to try and do the full Snowflake Challenge at Dreamwidth this year, which I've never managed to do before, but other things kept piling up etc and one of the challenges took up a disproportionate amount of time (#11, create a fanwork—I wrote a 2.5k prologue for the Mass Effect/P&P AU). And I kind of had wanted to prove to myself that I could stick to something, even something very low-stakes and self-indulgent, and carry it through to the end by Jan 31st.

And I did it! I was behind (thanks, #11) but I simply refused to go to sleep until I'd finished, despite being both tired and sick. I posted the prologue at Dreamwidth and then speedran the last four challenges and wrapped up #15 just around midnight.

I'm ridiculously proud of myself, lol.

#i'm also being very strong and not posting the fic anywhere except dreamwidth until it's done #we'll see how far my discipline extends #but still. i did a thing! #anghraine babbles #snowflake challenge #deep blogging #fic talk #fic talk: commander elizabeth bennet au

[thisbluespirit]

New seasonal challenge up at TARDIS Library, the Dreamwidth Doctor Who reccing community!

Simply comment in the sign-up post, receive 5 random characters (we have lists for New Who, Classic Who & various spin-offs you can choose from), then rec 5+ fanworks for at least 1 of those characters at the comm to complete the challenge, receive a banner, and share the love for some excellent fannish creative endeavours!

You will need a Dreamwidth account to post recs to the community, but they're free to sign-up for, with no strings attached, if you'd like to take part. <3

#tardis library #tardis_library #dreamwidth #reccing #reblog to promote #doctor who #classic who #new who #big finish #torchwood #sarah jane adventures #edas #vnas #all welcome #you can comment to any post without an account #and if you can set up a feed you should be able to find ways to follow along #but you will need an account to make posts #but as i said #this is free and easy #and we have a template post to c+p #& if you have any trouble i will try to help as best i can as mod. <3 #(old school blogging style is weird but it is the best kind for creating this also as a lasting searchable archive of recs so worth doing)

[inimitablereel]

the star paths: an At the Feet of the Sun festivid

commentary below the cut

So this was my first time making a vid for a book, and I've got a lot to say about the process...

Around the time of the festivids submission deadline I got persistently mildly sick and was coping by rereading a lot of Victoria Goddard books (actually not At the Feet of the Sun, I hadn't gotten there yet) and also trying to think of vid ideas while I was lying in bed coughing. Exactly one person (Tafadhali) requested Nine Worlds for festivids and more specifically requested the Lays of the Hearthfire subseries, so I knew I was trying to focus on those specific books.

A brief digression on my general conception of book vids: The two book vids I'd seen before this year's festivids that stuck in my mind were absternr's Nona the Ninth vid and Rhea's Machineries of Empires vid, both of which are great and I'd highly recommend watching if you've read the corresponding books. They both throw in a lot of different concepts from their worlds in ways that I assume aren't necessarily tied to a specific moment in canon (like a pile of skulls for nona the ninth or troop dynamics for machineries of empires), to put together the overall sense of that really complicated worldbuilding. So you have a vid that conceptually starts from specific characters or beats and then spirals outwards to have a full picture of what the vidder thinks the book is about. (To be clear, this is my reading, not a conversation I've had with the vidders, though I did talk to absternr about Barbie World in the very beginning idea generating phase.) So to make a book vid, I had this sense that I needed a really specific concept and to do a fair amount of storyboarding for what was my main idea and what other things about the book I wanted to pull in. I'm calling this discussion of book vids a digression because that's... not quite what I did here. A lot of the key concepts of Hands of the Emperor are not terribly visual (though if you have an idea of how to vid Kip achieves universal basic income, I'd love to see it). When I started trying to think of a key concept/emotional center of either the worldbuilding or Cliopher as a character that was easier to make visual, I came up with the corn sorting in At the Feet of the Sun. From there I thought, well, why not just do the whole section where Kip travels to the Sky Ocean? It's a really visual part of the book and also just going with here are the things that happened in this part of the book in order is a storyboard already built perfectly for me, without any planning required.

(I think you could also definitely make a more conceptual Kip character study vid starting from that corn sorting scene and his journey into the cave of his heart and spiraling out into scenes from his different lives. I hadn't really considered this option when I was coming up with vid ideas... I think you'd probably want to do a Kip faceclaim (and possibly also one for the emperor), which I was avoiding because I didn't want to go find actors. Unless you count a small child, an old man, and a beaver as a faceclaim?)

Once I'd gotten the idea to do a Sky Ocean themed vid, I didn't really think it would work? I'm a little afraid of book vids (stil honestly, I don't know if I'll make another one, though I had fun with this one), and I wasn't sure it'd be interesting to watch or long enough to be a full vid. This was a festivids treat, so I didn't have a length requirement, even though I ended up hitting over a minute anyways, but I just wasn't sure I had enough content to be interesting. From memory 8 months after having read the book, I was only coming up with like 3 scenes from the Sky Ocean trip from memory 8 months after having read the book (the corn sorting, the stair climbing, and I already knew I wanted to end with the new island, even though it's not quite in the sky ocean section). So I went through and reread the section of the book and highlighted every visual description of a moment, sort of color coded by how important I thought it was to include things. I ended up with 28 things highlighted, but as I kept going I highlighted less and less once I realized there were definitely going to be enough moments to include. (Also the reread portion of the vidding process was happening while I was still feeling pretty bad, atfots is a good thing to read while sick but that doesn't necessarily facilitate obsessive highlighting.)

28 highlighted passages turned into a list of 10 visuals I definitely wanted to find and 15 things I might or might not include (which in the end I included half of). This list was basically 20ish tiny research projects for me. Almost everything I'd written down from the star paths had a corresponding real world thing, but not everything was easy to find a video instead of still images, which would be harder to make into a nice vid. (The things I couldn't find a real version of were Kip's coral firepot - firepots are super real, but traditional ones are earthen not coral, and mostly I was finding lots of videos of modern things for grilling parties - and the kinds of birds at the sea witch's island, boobies with white feathers and black feet - they're kind of close to juvenile masked boobies? But I assume they were intentionally chosen to be a nonexistent bird since they're definitely magic.) I wanted to get the right specific types of animals, but those were all pretty easy to find. The HoTE support group discord was (unknowingly) helpful in my attempts to find the right kind of boat - I went searching through chat history and ended up on this New Zealand museum page, which has great images but I wanted videos (and I knew I needed boat building) so I started searching for types of boats and ended up at https://www.vaka.org, which had multiple whole documentaries that were super useful (and a major part of the footage for this project). In general I was trying to deep dive enough to get something that was Right but not really looking for any particular images for anything or to spend too too long on any of these mini research projects. The harder to find videos were actually the ones I started with because they're so specific to the book and fairytale-esque - e.g. there's lots and lots of videos of corn, but not a lot of sorting it by color into baskets. (You can find videos of corn piles, apparently a way people store corn is just kind of leaving it in a big pile, but it wasn't really visually appealing or something that said sorting to me.) I couldn't find anything close to what I really wanted for carrying Kip carrying the basket of mud up the stairs, so I split it out into three separate ideas: basket backpacks (which I didn't end up including), carrying mud (which gets you videos of beavers, I guess no one else wants mud), and climbing stairs (weirdly hard to find for such a common activity, I kept getting how to install stair lights which is not quite the right visual, before I started looking up stair climbing races, which was better).

My vidsong was also a little research project. Since I had such a strong narrative outline (by stealing it from the book), I didn't feel like I needed the song to be saying anything specific, so I wanted it to be some kind of Polynesian music, preferably something sort of thematically about journeys. While I was still trying to decide whether to do the vid, I asked on the discord if there was a real world equivalent of the Lays, and Victoria Goddard answered and pointed me at the band I ended up using, Te Vaka. I also listened to a bunch of smithsonian folkways and someone's Poly Jams🌺 spotify playlist before deciding that literally the first song I had found from Te Vaka on youtube was such a bop that I couldn't not use it. And it's about dancing and community, which is perfect for Kip!

This wasn't a project where I did any particularly complicated video editing. I think I went from having a zillion youtube videos downloaded (and one hour long documentary) to having a full vid in a day? Mostly I just put things in the order they happened in the book trying to beat match the music more or less and breaking things up with shots of sailing the vaha. My one still image editing thing is I did put in some clamshells on the island at the end, but I did that in davinci resolve, which is the video editing software I use, without breaking out photoshop or anything. (The first draft of my vid had somewhat more and more obvious clamshells, but my beta said it was a little awkward, so it's hopefully more subtle now.) I had originally thought about doing some color editing to make things look more magical, but honestly coming from the northern hemisphere all these shots of sunshine over oceans are pretty magical looking as is in January (and I didn't want to do the extra work :p)

This description of process would be incomplete without saying that rattyjol responded to my discord message asking for someone to look at a slightly secret visual fanwork and reassured me that it was obvious to someone other than me what was even happening in this vid.

#atfots #my vids #I was fully planning on doing commentary on dreamwidth if I did it at all #and I might crosspost if this is the sort of thing people care about? but like I live here and this is my space to ramble at will #I hope some of this is interesting but if not that's okay it is My Blog #this is also my rationale behind posting this now in the middle of the night when I've just finished it: it's My Blog

[mejomonster]

In case tumblr ever does go down, im mejomonster on twitter insta discord too. Please add me

#rant #ill be messaging and asking for contacts latwr #the thing is. i saw ffnet slowly break and yeah. no support does eventually mean break. #and im frustrated both to need to go backup thousands of posts and contacts #but also. tumblr is rhe only hobby social media right now structured to encourage long blog type community conversations #on twitter i cant post long liveblogs or meta and you cant respond to them long #i cant retweet with tag commentary to add to a convo without pushing on the authors words #i cant tag my art in a way thats well organized on a site #instagram is SHIT for reblogs and visibility. as an artist twitter is the only viable #social media to get exposure. and since its less organized using tags? you cant use it for an archive as well #dreamwidth from what i understand is mlre like livejournal so. its also not #great for helping new possible friends find you and converse #its like journal comments #and tumblr tags allow for strangers to find my posts and really interact and befriend me #and also allow me to organize ny own blog. in a way wordpress does NOT #in a way twitter does not. and to gef more exposure and followers than i ever could with wordpress or dreamwidth. #there is no adequate replacement site for tumblrs features as far as i can tell #maybe twitter for art promotion. but thats it #and i dont qant to be on elon musks broken twitter. #discord isnt open chill conversation with 800 ppl on my blog and curious browsers #its more like aim chat

[devinwolfi]

screaming crying throwing up trying to upload images to dreamwidth

#html is besting me in battle this time #there is not even a youtube tutorial and all those tumblr to dreamwidth blog posts that are all the same post do not mention it

[tornadodyke]

howwwwww did the class sections i need get filled completely up when registration isn't even open yet. like. girl. what. OKAYYYY THIS IS FINE WHATEVERRRRRR

#should be interesting trying to negotiate my availability at work. i'm already looking at remote internships that pay better anyway #i have to have an internship ANYWAY because i have got to get. my fucking foot in the door somehow. the fact that a lot of them are remote #and have flexible hours and pay almost $10/hr more than what i'm making rn are just bonuses #LIKE I DON'T FORSEE THERE BEING A PROBLEM TRYING TO CHANGE MY AVAILABILITY?? BECAUSE I'M ONE OF THE ONLY COMPETENT PEOPLE IN MY DEPARTMENT #AND THEY'RE VERY AWARE OF THAT??? BUT WORKING IN-PERSON WHILE TRYING TO ALSO HANDLE THE HEAVY ASS WORKLOAD I'M GONNA HAVE IN MY CLASSES #(WHICH IS LIKE. CALCULUS I. DISCRETE MATH 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO. COMPSCI 2. AND TWO OTHER CLASSES (EASY)) #HOO BOY. AND I /NEED/ INTERNSHIPS ANYWAY. #i need to go complain about this in a giant blog post on my dreamwidth actually tumblr tags aren't good enough at this point

[stillflight]

I am going to eat an illicit mango and go to bed. I will see if anyone responded probably tomorrow afternoon or evening.

#blog stuff #i'm thinking 'cause like. I have a Secret Dreamwidth™ where I feel freer to post whatever I want but I feel like it's a ''waste'' to #post 1 sentence remarks #and my Public Tumblr™ where short posts are totally fine but I feel like it's ''annoying'' to ''spam'' #Ugh. ocd. goodnight

[shownusfool]

just saw official tumblr emporium crab day shirts *sobs and cries* YALL ARE SO STUPID STOP GIVING THIS SITE MONEY ITS NOT YOUR FRIEND YALL ARE SO DUMB

#if all goes to hell find me with a blog on idk livejournal or dreamwidth i can’t take it anymore #if i dont have either then find me on like the washington post i just cannot stand the state of the internet anymore #ppl will just hand money to this pos website that only supports u if youre a bigot #lets tell tumblr we don’t like these changes STOP POURING MONEY INTO THE SITE THEN LIKE LITERALLY STOP GIVING THE SITE MONEY ITS NOT HARD #THERE ARE SO MANY BETTER THINGS TO PUT MONEY INTO INTO THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DEMAND CHANGE THIS UGH #everyday reading comprehension lowers and the user experience decreases and if you have any brain cells at all you just hafta watch it go #also the shirts are ugly #andddd i hate that emporium ads keep on coming to me no matter how many times i report them or block them

[casekt]

#audio #I'm going to take my corset off. and go to sleep (real please god real) #I want to edit some big long blog posts I have for dreamwidth but I can do that AFTER I SLEEP AHHHH

[happyfunzies]

I’ve been blogging more on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal recently for more “professional” things, I suppose.

It’s certainly a new experience, for sure, and I hope I’m getting some things down. I’ve decided to only tag my stuff when I deem necessary since there’s ZERO point in trying to tag for things that won’t get seen in the first place. (I do tag NSFW & “inappropriate” posts, keep in mind — I’m just failing to see why I should tag casual posts ig (maybe ‘cuz I’m lazy).

Anyways, to keep y’all up-to-date, I’m currently attempting to draw more in Adobe Fresco & Photoshop! It’s a lot of fun once you get used to the software, I have to say. I wouldn’t recommend for beginners to use Photoshop, but Fresco could be good! Depends, I would say, because you’d have to be at a good understanding of general art programs to understand this. FireAlpaca has improved drastically, and I would argue that it’s extremely fit for beginners! It even has a Timelapse feature now!

#adobe #photoshop #adobe photoshop #adobe fresco #fresco #livejournal #dreamwidth #blogging #blog #blog post #might cross-post to livejournal & dreamwidth later

[laughingmagi]

Watched Velvet Goldmine again and I feel creatively refreshed and reset. I've legit seen this movie well over a hundred times, and it still hits that emotional and aesthetic cord just right for me. Even more so as I've grown older. I think, though it did shape me in deep, fundamental ways as a person, at sixteen or seventeen, whenever it was I first watched it, I was nowhere near mature enough to properly appreciate it.

#lmao the fanfic i wrote for the fandom is testament to that #I've tried writing fanfic since i've become older and wiser #not sure if my last attempt was successful since I deleted it at some point #I had posted it on fanfiction.net since I think it was before Ao3 had become a thing #There are posts about them on my Dreamwidth but not cross posted and instead linked back to the ff.net posts (which are now gone) #well I think there was a smutty one on the blog because ff.net is a bit picky about that sort of thing and I didn't feel like risking it #it was not good iirc #so maybe its good that they were lost to time #ooc; #tbd prolly #okay no more bullshit maybe only two people care about lmao

[smellslikebot]

how to keep following people when a major social platform implodes

(...and you don't want to join 20 new websites)

First, get an RSS reader*-- here are some free options:

Desktop: Feedbro (browser extension), Fraidycat** (browser extension/web), Thunderbird, Dreamwidth (web)

Android: Feeder

iOS/Mac: NetNewsWire

You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.

Some feed URLs for social media/other sites:

Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)

Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public

Mastodon: Use instance.url/@­username.rss

Deviantart: Info here

Spacehey: Info here

Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="

Reddit: Info here

Lemmy: At the top of a community's main page, there's a small RSS link next to where you sort posts/comments.

Some additions thanks to @innumerablewounds:

Dreamwidth: https://username.dreamwidth.org/rss (users can opt out of this).

Ao3: Tags have an "RSS Feed" button.

Bluesky: Add /rss to the end of a URL.

Neocities: https://neocities.org/site/username.rss

Sites that won't work all that great:

Twitter: Feedbro and Fraidycat** may be able to use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) Public Nitter instances are dead/dying, and Twitter is now very hostile to pretty much anything that makes it easy to generate an RSS feed. For popular accounts, try this workaround using Google News...?

Instagram: Feedbro may be able to use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Check Feedbro's "scan interval" setting-- you could be rate limited or temporarily IP banned from Instagram if it makes requests too often!

Facebook: Feedbro may be able to use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs, but see the warnings for Instagram.

Threads: Come on.

Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).

*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file. **Fraidycat's intended use is following a lot of people across different sites, so it's well-suited for this post and I'd recommend keeping an eye on it-- but I didn't recommend it initially because I had some issues with it, and it hasn't been updated in a while. The last time I used it, it didn't have a setting to change how often it makes requests to websites, causing me to get IP banned from Twitter and Instagram...

#silly storie #twitter #rss #long post

[rosemirmir]

I was very attached to my previous icon, but I wanna switch it up

#this was an icon gifted to me for an icon fest on dreamwidth! #I'll see how i feel about this icon on here or if ill use a different one i was gifted #icon is by sweetdecay on dreamwidth and the credits on the blog have been updated #linky posts

[ao3commentoftheday]

Hey!

This is something that's been rolling around in my head for a while, and I'm wondering if you or any of your followers have experience with getting back into writing after illness.

I've been chronically ill for a long time. My symptoms vary a lot depending on external circumstances. From about 2019-2021 or so, I was updating an AU about once a month and having an absolute blast with it...then my health hit a stumbling block. Then it hit another, and another.

I'm now at a point where the stumbling blocks don't seem to be going away anytime soon. I'm starting to feel the mental health effects of not having the spoons to work writing into my day.

I spent the past couple years trying to let myself lie fallow and be kind with my brain when my body needs so much help. I'm at a point where even when I WANT to write, it feels like it's been so long I've almost forgotten how. I'm stalled on all my WIPs from that AU, but it doesn't feel like writer's block so much as it feels like writer's atrophy. I miss it terribly, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting back on my feet.

Thank you for everything you've given our community over the years! 💜💜

*hugs* that's a rough spot to be in, and I hope that we can offer you some ways to get out of it. I'll offer some suggestions from my own experience with a change in health status, but I'm really hopeful that the rest of the blog have some tips to share as well.

Don't hold yourself up to your previous standards. Your abilities have changed, and you should take that into account. If you used to be able to write for 2 hours and now you can only manage 10 minutes, don't see that as a failure. 10 minutes is now your success point. If you used to be able to manage 100K stories with intricate plots and now you find it a challenge to write a straightforward oneshot? Then finishing that oneshot is an accomplishment to be proud of.

If the way you used to do things doesn't work, don't keep trying to do them that way. If you used to type onto a laptop but now staring at the screen makes you feel exhausted? Try dictating into your phone and using speech to text to transcribe it. Then you can go through and edit what's already there. If you used to write at a desk but now sitting up for long periods wears you out? Try tapping it out on your phone in bed. You can't focus for long periods the way that you used to? Turn on the TV and write during commercial breaks.

Don't try to pick up right where you left off. You need to get yourself back in writing shape before you can take on a story that's already halfway written. Those WIPs will still be there, even if you start off with a ficlet or a missing moment or a post-episode coda etc. Start off small. Use ideas or plots that are easier for you to write. Get back into the swing of it before you try to tackle a big project again.

As you try to write something and you find yourself unable to, take a moment and try to identify what the hard part is. Are you having trouble finding words? Are you in an uncomfortable position? Is the device you're using annoying you or difficult to work with? For each problem you can identify, see if you can find an accommodation for it - and look to see if other people have had to accommodate the same issue before you. It's very likely that they have.

I'll stop here and let the spoonies share their thoughts in the notes. I look forward to picking up some advice for myself too ❤️

You can find this question and answer over on Dreamwidth as well, if you'd like to join the conversation over there.

#asks and answers