So I’m going to bed because I have work, but I was thinking earlier at work that I’d really like to have a few more texting buddies. I have a job where I have actual things to do, so it’s not like I’m just idle and available all day, but often there is a three hour or so stretch where I’m kind of stuck doing something slow and mind-numbing for which the pace is kind of negotiable.
I have Skype mobile and also if I have known you for a while I’m willing to share my phone number for texting.
If you’re interested (in talking about fandom, writing, your day, anything) when we both have daytime downtime that would be cool. Just send me a fanmail (or ask just fanmail is easy to keep and can’t accidentally be published) with any questions or your contact info!
So there was a fad of doing these [see link below] (a little more strongly a while ago than now) but like with multiple personality profiling types like astrological sign + meyers-briggs + some other stuff like Hogwarts house and so on. Does anyone ahve any examples of what I’m talking about they could link me to? I don’t care what fandom really! Just want a couple of nice references if anyone knows any:
Gonna work on my about page a little then make a gifset I think I need to be creative-ish in a way other than writing so I can unclog my writing. Talk to me a little bit?
I think I am probably going to stay with this URL for a long, long time if I ever change it again. So while there are some I wanna keep, I am thinking about majorly weeding out my URLs. Some might just get unceremoniously deleted, but I have a few really cool ones that I might offer in some organized giveaway thing at some point soon. I still do care about the MCU, but I have way too many MCU URLs and given the way certain things disappointed me and went I kind of don’t necessarily want every single one anymore. Some of them are super amazing that I got them, I feel, though, so Idk I feel there should be some ceremony with giving them up.
Some good news happened today but I'm anxious about adjusting to working full time when I get a start date. Thank you for those who offered help and support toward the mope post last night.
So I don’t know if anyone actually pays any attention to my tumblr anymore or if 747 of you just haven’t unfollowed yet, but just a thing I want to mention on this Friday night. I haven’t been on here much lately because when I am on tumblr it’s mostly been on my RP blog, which is going well but tonight I haven’t even been able to focus on that.
I guess, lately, I just don’t know what to do with this blog. Before I stopped being on here as much, the people who interacted with me had dwindled to the people I can talk to on skype or something anyway. Which is fine, but it just removes motivation to try to be a good blog runner when your efforts seem mostly in vain.
I’ve also been having this weird issue where THIS PARTICULAR FIREFOX PROFILE runs like molasses and I have no idea why because the others aren’t like that. I’m assuming it’s the tags taking up memory but trying to cull them is such a job. I am a tag hoarder and no one can cure me. But maybe I will just close them because that’s the biggest thing I wanted to complain about: lack of full interest in things.
It’s not that I am COMPLETELY disinterested in things. To say that would be hyperbole and obviously untrue since I have a revolving door of fandom interests that are pretty obvious. However, it’s like try as I might, I feel unfulfilled and minimally involved with most things I used to enjoy lately. I’ve actually spent some time cleaning up my old LJ thinking I might use it again or something, but there’s little point since there are so few people who actually use it anymore. But I guess I just hate the fact that it feels like that for all the positivity culture where everyone yells ‘if you’re reading this you’re cute’ there is very little in the way of personal engagement and what there is feels uncomfortable. And looking back at LJ, I can see why. An LJ blog could run for several years with only a couple hundred posts accumulating. A successful LJer might have 200 friends at peak. On tumblr, 200 is just getting started and running your way up from there is a constant pursuit. I once read a statistic on how many people a human is capable of meaningfully knowing at any given time. I don’t remember what it was, but it was way below a thousand. So, I mean, if you think of followers more like a web of connection -- some of them you know, some of them know those people, some of them are far off branches -- then that’s really cool but the notion of your followers all being your friends can only be true in the sense of general human good will if you run a ‘successful’ blog.
And then there’s content. tumblr has a specific culture (that varies from fandom to fandom and between blog type a little but I know the parts of tumblr I know take me with a grain of salt) about when it is and isn’t appropriate or expected to comment or offer feedback on something. To be such a user-unfriendly site these days, I see people trying to manipulate it to have relationships with other users. I run an RP blog, so obviously it’s good for some types of back and forth. However, I just think about all the posts people make about unnecessary comments on photosets and things like that. And while I have adopted the party line about that type of thing and ‘get it ‘ on some level, thinking about it bothers me. Like, while xkit still works at all, we have tag viewer - most of us - and before I had xkit I used to manually check the tags on reblogs of my posts. We look for commentary on our posts, but when they’re spreading around on reblogs, unless they’re really insightful and we agree, when tend to find it embarrassing or annoying. And, just, think about that. We think that the fact that someone commented on our work is annoying. And on an aesthetic level, yes, tumblr is made for isolation in that way. And people love their minimalist minimalism with themes and I’m not sure what that’s about, but it’s not my purpose to judge. My point is, I only barely remember when LJ was a near-daily part of my life, but what I do remember is that it involved cultivating some kind of mutual recognition of the people on your friends list. On tumblr, we establish all these arbitrary ways of filtering and vetting our followers or which blogs we follow, so much of the time. And while on this website it actually seems like the only particularly appropriate way to get access to the content you want, it just seems like that after several years, the anonymity combined with the pressure of maintaining a followable blog has started to get to me.
And maybe it’s a change in life stage. The few friends I have who remained LJ-only or LJ-preferring tended to be the older crowd - people who were a decade older than me or more, at times. And think part of that has to do with the way a generation above mine learned to use the internet as a utility and a conduit to communicate with others - more like a phone than a life. And I’m not intending to regress or revert back into the idea that ‘internet culture’ isn’t a good, amazing, highly interesting thing at its best. The problem is, I feel I have become increasingly isolated from the things that once made internet and fandom feel like they were good for me.
There’s a somewhat anxious part of me that is concerned this is just some type of ‘growing up’ against my will thing happening. That I’m just tired of the whippersnappers and their instagram and all this kind of thing. But really, if it is some element of that, it isn’t that I don’t still enjoy fandom. It’s just that the way it operates has changed. As I mentioned above, there is the fact that personal conversation is really only acceptable or initiated if it’s ‘meaningful.’ And of course it’s like that when everyone has or seeks to have hundreds and possibly thousands of followers. One has to find a way to filter contact somehow when there are that many people involved. But that’s the thing - tumblr is becoming more and more exhausting to me.
Isolation. High volume. Constant maintenance. An increasingly user-unfriendly interface. Loneliness. The downer that comes when a fandom interest shifts from a popular one to something somewhat more obscure, the way it makes it show so garishly that your friends are often more conversational partners about particular topics than personally involved with your life. And sure, casual friendships, watercooler talk, all of that is fine. But if any of this has to do with ‘growing up’ I think it’s a little more insidious and slightly less arrogant than that. I think it has to do with the personal life changes that happened when I graduated college and during the semester before.
I stopped living on campus my last semester, so commuting and going to class and coming home was often all I did. I didn’t have personal connection to a roommate, and I didn’t ave the very quiet and minimal tasks of maintaining a living space for only me. Instead, I had home and the constant dog maintenance and the parental honey-doing. I don’t have a room that is suitable for going off to myself in. I don’t have space for personal possessions other than setting my laptop down somewhere. The only time I get to be alone-alone at home is after my parents have gone to bed and I’m still downstairs awake. It has made my sleep cycle extremely sporadic and my general stress levels much, much higher. And yet I can’t afford anything else.
The constantly-chasing of poverty never stops. I can’t justify pleasure-related expenditures. I don’t really want material things that much because I don’t have room to store them, but I like things like going to movies or restaurants just to break the monotony, and I know those are luxuries but I simply cannot afford them - and as I mentioned, I don’t have any kind of safe space to go create entertainment for myself.
So I am often exhausted by the never being alone thing, and yet I am constantly alone. I don’t have ANY peer friends here that bother with me anymore and even if I have people nearby who MIGHT interact with me, I don’t know how to approach anyone. I am on lay off for the summer and I’m looking for a new job, but so far I haven’t found anything. When I was working, I had no CONSISTENT coworkers except a few office people who learned my name at particular schools, and now that I’m out of sight I’m certainly out of mind.
No new people come into my life anymore. Ever. For better or worse, it just doesn’t happen. And so, I guess I started relying on fandom in a different way. My emotional involvement with it was really high for a while, and I was able to produce content and be passionate and gain followers and interaction through that. But as things have become more and more critical (in good and negative ways) in fandom, I find that I have less and less to contribute or to say.
And the thing I was originally gonna make a small comment about but allowed it to become a small essay was how I value my own creative input so much less right now. I used to relate songs to characters or ships every time I heard them. Now I still passively do, but it’s not really satisfying in any way anymore. I often save them because I plan to make fanmixes or something like that, but I haven’t done anything like that in probably more than a year. And now, when I consider making photosets, it’s not just that I’m uninspired -- it’s that when I think of a song or quotation to pit on it, I am beyond humiliated about the idea. I don’t value my own input anymore to the point that it’s literally embarrassing.
I often type comments on things or messages and then delete them. I just have run out of things to say, and I know it’s probably just stress and frustration leaking over into this, but it is taking my outlets from me one at a time. I feel overwhelmed by so many things, and yet like I never get to DO anything. And it seems like if things keep going the way they are, I’ll want to do even less.
My queue is gonna run out today, and it’s mainly been running this blog for a while (at a slow trickle of three posts a day). Sometime I’ll get around to filling it but in the meantime it’s not that I’m any less present than I already was less-present. I imagine I might be around a bit more on this blog after the school year / my work contract is over, quivering in fear.
