Anghraine

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

I'm cleaning up old tags because I'm finally running up against the max even for an upgraded account. And there was a period around 2012 when I'd started using tags on livejournal/Dreamwidth in a Tumblresque running-commentary-under-my-breath way even though 1) they don't work as well on LJ/DW in that way, because they're automatically alphabetized and 2) I wasn't likely to reuse those specific tags, so it's ultimately kind of a waste.

At the same time, I (obviously) prefer to preserve old posts and such as a kind of record of what I was doing and thinking and saying at the time (really putting the "journal" in livejournal!), so I haven't wanted to delete these Tumblr-style tags. They were part of what I was doing back then!

This is especially glaring for an admittedly very wanky series of posts I put together. For context, the liberal-leaning Star Wars blog fangirlblog had recently posted defenses of slave Leia and Padmé Amidala from an allegedly feminist perspective that were making the rounds at the time. I found both takes ... objectionable. It was difficult enough to put together a coherent response that I ended up simply recording myself reading it and responding in real time, and then transcribed that recording into text, ultimately spread across nine different posts. It's very 2012 in a lot of ways—including my much more overt hostility towards the prequels and the OP's extremely binary concept of gender—but also, I do still think the defenses of slave Leia (and even of Padmé in some ways) are short-sighted at best and deeply rooted in fucked-up concepts of gender at worst. In any case, I decided to preserve my tags before deleting them as organizational tags by making a new post (this one!) with the old tags listed.

Part 1: Intro (touches on gender, representation, diversity, marginalization of women in the OT and PT, and over-reliance on "Watsonian" or in-world explanations for choices made by overwhelmingly male creators in constructing narratives). Tagged: #ahoy false catch-22 #feminism marches on #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #strong female characters

Part 2: Slave Leia and constructed narratives. Tagged: #fanservice for great justice #reading comprehension failure #rotj makes me cry inside #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters

( Read more... )

One of the problems with following SF/F Twitter, aside from the general trash fire it can be, is that I'm continually reminded of the success of Certain People who were breathtakingly bigoted on LJ. I don't keep up enough to know if they ever apologized (or acknowledged) their shit, but just ... getting a pass from people who rush to denounce much more minor or nonexistent past wrongs grates constantly.