Anghraine

Digging up the links to so many DW tags got me wondering what tags I've actually used more than any others over here. It will probably look different after I'm done cross-posting, and maybe I'll check again then. But as of right now, the evening of 29 April 2024, this is every tag I've used over 100 times since my first post on 19 July 2009—

A. Tags used over 500 times:

1. #site: tumblr

This is far and away my most commonly used tag (used 1739 times), mainly because I've been cross-posting old Tumblr posts to Dreamwidth for years now, but also because I use it for every post referring to basically anything going on at Tumblr as well as the cross-posts.

2. #fandom: star wars

This feels like the "real" #1 tag, used 668 times and beating out all other fandoms (and indeed, everything). I suspect this is partly because I got into SW after making my DW account, but at a time when journal fandom was still quite active, so one of my most intense periods of SW fannishness was based here (or synced with lj, so the content is here as well). And then when you add in SW cross-posts and "overflow" material from Tumblr once Disney SW got kicking, especially after Rogue One, it's enough for the SW tag to jump ahead of every other tag but the Tumblr one.

3. #genre: meta

I periodically whine about feeling like I'm perceived more as a meta writer than a fic writer, even though I care more about fic and derive far more joy from it ... but I've tagged 667 posts with the meta tag and far less with any fic-related tag. In fairness, I originally conceived as "meta" as basically any post talking about a canon or fandom that wasn't fic, no matter how abrupt, so things I wouldn't really describe as "meta" these days fell under the tag until pretty recently. Even so, I've posted a lot more serious meta than fic!

4. #fandom: austen

The only surprise here is that this one wasn't even higher. I've tagged 640 posts with it over the years, and if you've followed me on Tumblr for awhile, you know there's only more coming. I'm pretty sure it'll beat out SW in the end for sheer quantity.

5. #fandom: middle-earth

While the previous three tags are clustered pretty closely together, there's a jump from the 640 Austen posts to a mere 505 Tolkien posts. This is partly because a bunch of my Tolkien stuff never made it onto Dreamwidth (that is, it happened on sites that are now dead or on lj before Dreamwidth was ever founded, or much later, was posted over at Tumblr and much of it hasn't made its way back over here). It's still one of my biggest fandoms, obviously; SW, Austen, and Tolkien will probably always be the Big Three for me.

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I talked on Tumblr awhile ago about how important my Internet friendships have been to me, especially the long-standing ones. I met a lot of my closest online friends either on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, or Tumblr, and quite a few at least have Dreamwidth accounts + Dreamwidth has played some role in our friendship. And I was trying to remember who I met when, in what context, and was like ... I could just skim my archive page and look, and figured it'd be fun to shout-out a few people! The list is not exhaustive, just a list of when I first met some people as clearly as I could tell.

For context: I was an early Dreamwidth adopter. Before Dreamwidth, I had been deeply entrenched in LJ fandom, and definitely preferred (and still prefer!) a LJ-like platform to things like Tumblr or Twitter. But, like many people, I had a lot of gripes with LJ itself. The idea of "LJ but with ethics, no Strikethrough threat, and no ads ever" sounded really appealing. A number of my LJ friends felt the same way, and I received my invite for the beta version of DW from my friendhl. So I've been here for a long time. According to Wikipedia, Dreamwidth went into beta on April 30, 2009, and left it in 2011. Meanwhile, I made my account on July 7th, 2009, and my first post here was on July 19th of that year.

So!

When I first made my blog in 2009, I mainly talked withhl andtree, whom I already knew from LJ and general Austen fandom circles, and withtulina, whom I met through our ff.net mutual admiration society.

I met a brand new Austen friend here on Dreamwidth, though:sixbeforelunch! For some reason, I thought we'd originally encountered each other later, but no, six has been here for the long haul.

The next year, I made two more friends primarily (as I recall) through Dreamwidth: catie56 andbiichan!

I was burning out on the forum-based Austen fandom circles around this time and very consciously selected a fandom that a) I could really sink my teeth into and b) was at least largely upfront about their drama: Star Wars. I originally crossposted a lot of SW fandom stuff from LJ but my activity was increasingly rooted in DW.

Meanwhile, 2011 was a truly hellish year for ace discourse on Tumblr. I was starting to dip my toes into Tumblr at the time, so I was angry and upset about a lot over there. But it was an incredibly good year on Dreamwidth! I stumbled over lotesse's SW fic early in the year and we ended up talking about both SW and other common fandoms and became longtime friends. In September, sathari joined the ongoing Star Wars party and really got what I was trying to do with my fic at the time, and we became friends too. And in November of 2011, I stumbled over sqbr's Austen art, got really excited about it, and as a result, we became good friends across a pretty wide variety of fandoms + fandom as a whole [ETA: actually, sqbr has reminded me that we first encountered each other prior to DW through common fandom friends, and re-reading the 2011 post, I clearly knew who they were, though we didn't directly interact over here until then; 2011 marked a really positive change in a number of my fandom relationships and that was one of the most significant].

I don't recall the exact context, but primeideal and beatrice_otter seem to have found me about 2012, and we're still having intriguing conversations now about different fandoms and original fiction! I already knew wyncatastrophe from LJ, and while we mostly talked via email and FB, some of our conversations started happening via Dreamwidth discussions and communities this year. This indirectly led to me writing a paper on Tolkien for a conference she was involved in (it wasn't a paper that already existed but actually written for that specific conference, and she helped guide me in the ins and outs of the submission process etc), which is the same paper that got me into grad school.

Speaking of ace discourse, I banded together with kaz later in that year, and found that we had even more in common than nuclear rage and sharing a birthday.

My DW social circle doesn't seem to have changed much for a few years after that, in part because I was mainly active on Tumblr and most of my friends were there as well. But I've always personally preferred DW and got somewhat back into the swing of things over here around 2015. I was super into The Borgias at the time (this would, in turn, get me into my PhD program!), which is what led to elperian following me on Tumblr and sticking around for Austen stuff and our very important Rogue One bonding (a tragic but blessed event!!!). I encountered sally_maria in a context I no longer recall, but it was definitely 2015, and was always glad for it. This also seems to be when I started chatting with lizbee on Tumblr and DW—first over Avatar, then SW, then basically anything we had in common.

Another fortuitous DW year was 2016 (otherwise not a great year for obvious US politics reasons, though I did get my MA). I think that brightlady_lise, slashmarks, and zero_pixel_count were all people I knew first from Tumblr, but ultimately talked more with over here.

2017 was pretty quiet in some ways, but elperian and I really started talking frequently over here around then! Then Tumblr made one of their patented terrible decisions in 2018 (the porn ban, maybe?) and I connected with a whole bunch of friends from Tumblr: meneltarma, rosaxx50, kungfunurse, chestnut_pod, stultiloquentia, shadaras, mosylu, incognitajones, and ncfan. All fantastic people from a fairly wide array of fandoms!

And in 2019, my friend rhodanum from Tumblr—we'd been on the same side of both ace discourse and villain discourse—relocated over here! A better place for both of us, to be sure.

Thanks to you all <3

One of the nice things about Pillowfort is I can change my icon without feeling existentially troubled

Tagged: #i changed this one [ETA 3/12/2024: i.e., my usual Tumblr icon since 2011 or so] for a brief while once and just had to go back #it wasn't Right #even though i chose this in a rush #but i just changed my j/c icon [ETA: Jyn/Cassian] to d/e [ETA: Darcy/Elizabeth] bc i'm on an austen kick right now and it's nice to see the new one #though it would be NICER if we could have icon collections and select them for individual posts *cough*

[ETA 3/12/2024: I'm kind of giggling at my obvious reference to Dreamwidth's icon supremacy. I don't think I even have my Tumblr icon (which is a greyscale promo image of Leia in ANH with her giant blaster) uploaded here. I do have 293 other ones, though, including the Pillowfort one I was talking about!]

Okay, this one is also weirdly, well, challenging!

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

It feels like I do that all the time, lol, but (even though I'm not posting in the community's comments—lingering shyness, I guess) I guess it can be handy to have in one place. Okay. I think I'll do this one as a bulleted list for convenience. Stuff about me:

• My name is Elizabeth (most people know me as Anghraine and a few know my family nickname, but any of these are fine).
• I'm in my 30s. (Still. Somehow.)
• I'm a PhD student in English literature, hopefully in my final semester. I complain about my dissertation pretty regularly.
• Like many people in fandom, I'm very opinionated, frequently about things that seem trivial to other people.
• I'm US American and politically a progressive Democrat.
• My home is the Pacific Northwest and love it dearly.
• I don't like most of my appearance, but I do have dark hair and grey eyes, which give me a bit of joy as a Tolkien fan.
• I'm a grey-ace lesbian & she/her or they/their pronouns are both fine. My sense of gender is both very clear (no intrinsic gender) and very muddy (AFAB and in the habit of alignment with women for various reasons, but it's complicated), so I tend to veer between "eh, whatever" and "????????" as far as gender goes.
• I have three parents—my mother, my (adoptive) father, my (biological) father, and since I have ties to all of them (though much stronger to the first two), it's not always clear which father I'm talking about. My adoptive father is Mexican-American and my bio father is Greek/Irish-American, both of which come up sometimes for family reasons.
• I don't talk about it a whole lot, but I was raised Mormon (by my mother and adoptive father), while my bio father is Catholic, and this has definitely impacted my particular experience of US Christianity. I'm personally agnostic.
• I'm bipolar and autistic, and relatedly, tend to veer between not doing much and super-intense posting.
• I've been active in fandom since about 2003, when I delurked at the Faramir/Éowyn Emyn Arnen forums (I also stealth shipped Faramir/Aragorn, but didn't admit it then :P). My main OTP is Elizabeth/Darcy (book versions). I also love the Star Wars OT (with the prequels and, some days, TFA+TLJ along for the ride) and Rogue One a lot (I've had various SW ships over the years, but nothing really compares to the greatness of Jyn/Cassian; my other SW faves are Luke, Anakin, and Leia). I only intermittently still talk about Legend of Korra, but it's never left my heart (Korra, Noatak/Amon, Tarrlok, and Kuvira <33333).
• It's not the only thing I do, but I especially love genderbending my favorite male characters to women.
• Dreamwidth is not the place I post most often, but it is my favorite place to post (icons, f-lock, normalizing long-form conversations...).

I'll admit that Tumblr's incompetence is occasionally kind of funny, because there are aspects of Dreamwidth I wouldn't have even thought to be grateful for if they weren't screwed up on Tumblr.

Today I was trying to remember my various specialized tags for the characters in my fic cross-post to Tumblr. I had to rely on memory because a) something they did awhile back made it so my previously used tags only sometimes pop up, and it seems as if it simply "forgot" most of them, and b) the use of site-wide tags in place of a functional search system is the whole reason I have specialized tags for organization on Tumblr.

I don't know if it's everyone's experience, but for me, Dreamwidth's tagging function remembers every tag I've ever used and I can just type the first few letters and click on the correct tag every. single. time. And the tags don't have to be specialized to avoid the attention of the entire fandom, because they're not a band-aid for the search function. "The tags work" is not something I would have always thought to be grateful for, but...

I'm backing up my Tumblr posts over here (however belatedly) because I'm afraid of losing them and the record they represent to me (seeing them and their dates helps me remember what I was doing and thinking about at those times!).

But also, the total lack of an algorithm pushing things on me—anything at all that doesn't come from people I've subscribed to—is such a relief. My anxiety drops by about 20 degrees just by using Dreamwidth more and everything else less.

I was backing up my professional/personal Twitter account to my writing Tumblr account, but Tumblr seems increasingly desperate, too. I'm not sure there really are many social media platforms left that seem at all stable.

Dreamwidth itself always has been, of course, but I'm not sure it's suited to this sort of account, and I guess there's Wordpress for a certain value of social media, which feels a bit weird given that it's a corporate cousin to Tumblr these days—but I hate navigating the block structure. So maybe I will just clean up my Dreamwidth quasi-mirror, but it's not exactly an interactive experience. IDK.

I don't know when it happened, but for years, I couldn't copy-paste Tumblr posts into the Rich Text editor without screwing up the formatting horribly, so I'd do it all in HTML. But that problem seems completely gone now and everything looks fine, so it must have gotten fixed at some point. Awesome!

I know Denise said that Dreamwidth activity jumped up after the Reddit thing, so I'm kind of curious if the uhhh decisions made at Twitter will have a similar effect. I don't expect DW to ever take off in a big way (and probably wouldn't want it to!) and I don't really welcome Twitter's ongoing self-immolation just because it was so sudden and has such outsized effects, but I'm not above enjoying more activity here/at Tumblr.

It's pretty cool to see other people building their own sites/other archive structures for fic, especially for backing up their own fic. I like the mixture of personal control and connectedness and icons on Dreamwidth, and I'm familiar with it, so I'm just using the Dreamwidth community function for my personal fic archive.

Theoretically, I'd think communities could also work if you wanted the space open for more than one author (like ye olde archives-by-invite, or even a broader, themed space), but there's less pre-established structure for fic specifically. I actually like the freedom to choose what "standard" tags and headers I'm going to use, but with some site structure built in. Others may not, though, so more power to people going with whatever suits their needs (and ideally, diffuses fandom activity).

If any of you are interested in creating a Dreamwidth account/community for archiving purposes, by the way, some of the site styles are kind of aesthetically dire, yes. But here are some that I personally like:

• Dark Blue by ninetydegrees—the one on my personal blog and the fic community; I've used it forever and find it very soothing.
• Simplicity by timeismymeasure—nice and clean.
• Too Much Wine by ninetydegrees—mostly for the convenient sidebar.
• Atlantic by ninetydegrees—similar design, but more "writerly" in some ways, if you want that vibe.
• Prose by timeismymeasure for Five AM—pleasant and elegant. I almost used it, but wanted more contrast.
• Právda by rising for Five AM—similar design IIRC, but more vivid. I considered it for Pride month (the coloring looks kind of rainbow-y), but the orange was just a bit much. Fun if you go for that, though.
• Pigeon Blue by dancing_serpent for Blanket—I prefer dark text on a light background, but I liked the look of this for the reverse.
• Marble IV by dancing_serpent—same issue with the light text/dark background, but I like the design.
• Neutral Good by timeasmymeasure for Practicality—another no-frills but pleasant one.

While I'm here, my own overly involved tag/organization structure for my Dreamwidth community fic archive (moirharad):
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