#might as well dabble in it

[lorefolked]

a sneak peek at another little something i'm working on ...

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

albus severus is the human embodiment of be gay do crime, in this essay I will-

[the--firevenus]

Uncontainable.

[eywaseclipse]

I want to do a poll for my art so I’d like to ask what you guys want to see. I’m just curious

[sorikkung]

so if i did nsfw art of hongjoong. hypothetically. would anyone be interested in seeing it,

[porschesbabydaddy]

Sugar baby Porsche. Clap if you agree

[hideyseek]

complaining about. acting technique in blood of youth under the cut

tbh, it's all fine / i can't really say for the most part. i am just Annoyed about how the actors are interrupting each other lol

like, im not an actor (AT ALL lmao)! i know so little! but oh god the pacing of the interrupting is killing me lol! there's a full beat, every time, between the speaker being cut off and the speaker who is interrupting and this keeps happening! sure, it breaks my immersion every time when the guy being interrupted stops talkong in order to be interrupted, yes, annoying for me but its tv, time passes. but worse (imo) this acting choice keeps reading as 'the character cutting themselves off' which is a totally different action than 'another character in the scene cutting them off' — totally different dynamic, totally different way to build tension in the scene!! aaargh, haha.

and the fixes for this are really straightforward! a note i have heard theater directors give a lot is "inhale a few words before your next line so you will be ready to talk" — this helps keep the pace of the scene (and in theater, prevents the runtime of the show from being longer than what's printed on the show programs ahaha). the other note i've often heard given is for the speaker being interrupted to have something in mind for the rest of the sentence — something they probably want to know for character work anyway (lol, i say as i frequently interrupt characters in fic BECAUSE i have no idea what i want then to say next, but that's beside my current point). again w this technique the goal is to eliminate that space of silence between the lines, and preserve that feeling of "being cut off" for the audience. but it's such an easy note to give, its just timing!

ok /rant

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

have I saved up enough gems for another character slot? no. but beta slots mean free dressup so here's a beta version of Flourish AU Mai.

say hello to Pact Admiral Mai Trin.

[byanyan]

the amount I've been hoarding away some of the memes I've seen on the dash over the last week or so is so not okay for someone with as many drafts as me ashfjdh

[zestydistress]

when you love a character so much you just decide they're The Father Figure™

[orcelito]

Oh tho. Despite being at a concert at a bar with easy opportunity to have drinks. I looked at the menu as if I was gonna order anything, then thought to myself, "You don't drink anymore, hon" and went "Oh, right" then just got water.

So???? Given how matter of fact that thought was, maybe I really am fully sober from alcohol now. Interesting thought.

[bluebudgie]

sorry the gw2 blogging will soon resume as usual but i've been having a serious case of jrpg music all day and subsequently i've been feeling ill about this man again

truly the incel of all time

[enigmaincrimson]

You find yourself in a strange place, beyond time, space, and all logic and reason. There is no sky here, no walls, no floor, or anything to speak of, just you and endless expanse of the void. Just being here almost feels like you are drowning in an unseen presence, like you could be crushed to nothing at any second.

Only one entity seems to reside in this place, a strange silver haired woman with pale blue eyes dressed in a simple skirt and blazer who seems to peer right through you with her unblinking gaze.

Her entire existence seemed to defy anything that could be seen. There should be no light, no time, or sanity, yet she glowed defiantly, like a beacon that could not be put out.

"Welcome to the halls of judgement, what do you plead?" Spoke the woman in cool, formal, yet soothing tones that seemed to fill the room with its resonance, despite the lack of ceiling, walls, let alone floor. The strange pressure seemed to surge with every syllable, almost like her entire existence is the only thing holding you together, let alone converse like you are.

Because I hate to say, she brought you back entirely on a whim and it's her choice whether or not you are to return to a fate worse than death.

[lattecodes]

considering getting into pixel art??

[moonlit-tulip]

If Tumblr falls, then Dreamwidth is my most likely candidate for replacement social platform among the current options I'm aware of. This is a pretty decent summary of why.

One other important factor, for me, which wasn't touched on hugely explicitly above: Dreamwidth is old and financially stable. They're the only social-media-ish platform I know of which has a well-provenly sustainable business model, of the sort which can wishstand events like this year's interest-rate-driven social-media-investor-crunch basically intact and without noticeable public reaction. Their site is built to be cheap to maintain; they maintain it off of user subscriptions (which grant access to those features which are relatively more expensive for them to maintain); they don't, as far as I'm aware, unstably overextend on speculative investor-money in the sort of way which produces results like the Reddit API disaster or Tumblr Live when the investor-money-well goes dry.

This is valuable! My impression of the tumblr community as a whole is that a lot of people are sort of desperately casting about in search of some sort of social-media approach which is actually stably sustainable, that won't run into the problems that the current generation of popular platforms are currently pretty much all concurrently running aground on. I wish the various aspiring developers of next-generation Clever Fancy Social-Media Models Which Avoid Those Problems the best of luck—I keep my eye on things like the Fediverse where I can, and hope some such enterprises actually manage to pull their thing off successfully—but Dreamwidth is the one that's already been around for a decade-and-a-half, whose ability to pull off a stable model is established and proven in a way that none of the modern up-and-comers are to nearly the same degree. And thus Dreamwidth is the one that I trust to continue to be around, long after the majority of the current experimental generation collapses.

Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?

To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:

Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3's abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.

In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)

Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn't sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.

Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.

The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!

The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!

We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.

Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).

So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.

Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.

Finally, we're recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just... not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.

Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.

Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.

Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.

[grecoromanyaoi]

the whole thing abt hermaphroditus specifically resting hermaphroditus is that ur supposed to walk around it and think 'oh pretty woman.... wait. PENIS???' which in our day at least dabbling in transmisogyny, if im being gentle. bc in our modern minds, that's a trans womans body. we know there r women who look like this. dare i say most ppl in the world know that there r women who look like this, even if only in theory, even if they dont consider them women.

however that was not the case in ancient times. before hrt and gender affirming surgeries, trans women didnt look like that. to them it was not a trans woman's body, it was an intersex body, and afaik someone being this "visually" intersex is EXTREMELY rare. it was so rare, they never even heard of anyone who looks like this irl. so rare and unexplained, so "unnatural" to the way they see the world, that it might as well be mythological. a figure that exists due to cosmic events, not bc of the inherent diversity of human biology.

its just so crazy to me that to the ppl who worshipped her n painted her n drew her n the original intended audience could only conceptualize her as an otherworldly mythical figure and to most ppl today who r even somewhat involved in popular culture or the trans community shes just like. a normal woman. we look at her and go 'yeah this celebrity/my friend/my girlfriend/i look like this'. isnt it amazing??

anyways i was in palazzo massimo today and they had a resting hermaphroditus properly placed within the space thank GAWD so here she is