Mintleaf/Sylvi

Some day Photography Matthew is gonna pull the plug on Tumblr, which... yeah, that'll suck in and of itself, don't get me wrong...

but on top of that, the resulting influx of people moving to new sites like dreamwidth is gonna be the Slashdot effect of the decade. Servers are gonna be catching on absolute fire.

Entry inspired by how much more activity addme has been getting in the wake of cohost's end, famously a much smaller site than tumblr.

(via thefridayfive)

1. What are you hoping for in 2024?
I'd like politics not to go to hell. That'd be really nice, I think.

I'll also enjoy it if I can finally get on ADHD meds.

But no matter what happens, there will be a cat, and that's wonderful. =^_^=

2. What was your low point of 2023?
Well I got covid in February, so that was fucking unpleasant. I think I managed to avoid anything worse than that, though that's... not a great bar, considering I still feel like my brain is filled with sludge about it.

3. And your high point of 2023?
Have I mentioned the kitty? There is a cat in our house!

4. Do you make New Year’s resolutions or are they just a waste of time?
I've already resolved to flip off a bird and memorize a poem (possibly cheating by first writing that poem), but you do know they don't have to be boring stodgy Betterment Of The Self™ stuff, right? They can be fun resolutions like "eat many pasta shapes" or "try lots of new fruits". ... Anyway no, I don't habitually make new year's resolutions, but there've been interesting posts on my tumblr dash about it. Still thinking about a Fun Resolution, tbh. Maybe I'll look for interesting new varieties of bean to put in my chili and/or tacos.

5. Do you have any traditions for celebrating New Year’s Eve?
Not a one.

Been gathering links to do a link dump post

Just need to uhhhh

actually do that at some point

You may or may not have heard -

oh, I didn't do an artfight dump post here, did I? I'll have to do that in a moment.

Anyway. I've gotten into art and am drawing things, and I'm thinking about potential sites upon which to Post™ my draws.

Options currently under consideration and why I'm not using them immediately, by approximately most to least of how seriously I'm considering them:

• Tumblr: I'm trying to get off doomscrollable social media in general lately, and Tumblr in particular has a recurring problem of people just getting really mad en masse in ways that really get under my skin. And the management does have problems, people like to catastrophize about just how bad it is but it's still not nothing.
• Deviantart: Vague recollections of extremely unpopular management decisions lately? Can't rember the details, annoyingly. Also it's one of the few sites on the internet where the username "wingedcatgirl" already belongs to someone else, and their username policies make it essentially impossible that I will ever get it.
• Dreamwidth: I don't think this site is optimized for the purpose? It has image uploading (not that I need it) but it feels like an afterthought.
• Make your own website: I have no idea how to get people to pay attention if I do that.
• Just keep posting haphazardly to your discords and cubes: I mean I can, but it's kind of a pain. And anyway this isn't really what I mean by Posting™ it, y'know?
• Reddit: Honestly they would have been my first choice before they decided "hey let's jump directly down the enshittification slide by charging unreasonable fees for API use!"
• Use Artfight as an art-posting site: They have fairly tight restrictions on what kind of art can be posted because they are trying to do a fairly specific thing and this isn't that thing.
• Twitter: Tumblr but worse, even before elongated muskrat started making it his personal crusade to break everything as fast as possible.

Any thoughts and/or further options?

snagged this from althea_valara

1. What was the last dream that you had about?
Last one we've got written down is one that involved taking a lengthy impromptu road trip to a beach and only realizing after arriving that we forgot to bring a swimsuit. (We've definitely had other dreams since that one, but since we didn't write it down, it's lost to the void now...)

2. Does it hold any significant meaning to you?
I like swimming, I like gatherings, I worry about forgetting things? :shrug: Most of our dreams are pretty random.

3. Do you dream in color or black and white?
Color, definitely color. Not super vibrant, but you can't mistake it for monochrome. Or, well, maybe you could, but you'd be having totally different dreams, wouldn't you?

4. What is the most frightening dream you ever had?
I don't think I've ever had any real standout "frightening" dreams. More "upsetting". Like the time we dreamed of our web browser informing us that a friend had died. (Ridiculous invasion of privacy, 0/10 will not be recommending on the dream internet.)

5. Is there one dream that stays clear in your mind despite the fact it was more than a few years ago?
For the most part the only dreams I remember after more than like a day are the ones I write down, and even those sorta fall out of my mind until I look back at the written record. But one that's been sticking with me since I had it a year and some change ago. Platonic snuggle naptime with a friend while the group was out on a field trip. (And never mind that most of the group is adults and none of us are in any classes together.) I woke up first and played video games for a bit. There was a discussion of custom emoji for our discord server.

---

... speaking of dreams and sleeping, I really should do that, so good night. zzzzzzz

"why don't we use AI to clean out the oceans or do they all have to be scriptwriters" yeah sure just fucking run delete-plastic.exe real fucking quick. do you have literally any mental model of how ai actually works or is it just a convenient source of rage for you.

Randomly reminded of crabber dot net. Checked up on it to see if it was still "crab is tired. gonna sleep for a bit."

Which it is, but it now also points to a youtube retrospective by its creator on why it was created and why it went down. (And does not seem likely to come back, which is sad. But better than being left hanging indefinitely.)

Trying to get a roleplay thread started that doesn't lean on the same death-game premise we've been on for months, since people are getting burnt out on it - in the whole wide-ass world of RP, doing just one thing over and over is clearly gonna get dull eventually.

Problem is we're not really sure... what to make a thread about.

And it does have to be about something; there's already a Big Everything Sandbox thread and nobody uses it. People clearly want something more specific than "everyone is here, do whatever". (Heck, even in the cubes - four of the five "regular" channels have some gimmick to them, even if it's one people ignore half the time.)

We've come up with some ideas - magical girls, magical college, magical superheroes - and you can kinda see we have a bit of a one-track mind.

Any of y'all have any brilliant ideas? Or mediocre ones, we'll take those too.

The backstory:

A bunch of kids in the high school anime club decide to throw a birthday party for the little brother of one of the members:

• Hallie Mathews, a cat-ear-headband-wearing card game nerd with definitely the normal number of parents (our character!)
• Samantha "Sayaka" Dross, the self-proclaimed Eternal Knight
• Evan "Ikei" de Lune, a foreign exchange student from Japan
• Lillia Hartwell, Sayaka's sidekick
• Rose Rowell, approximately the only sane one
• Isaac, the one with the little brother
• James, the little brother
• Mary, who the GM compared to "Rena Ryuugu but" and the second half of that comparison is a spoiler 😁

They spend the prologue session grabbing the cake (two cakes, actually!) from a shopkeeper named Tony Spiders, nyooming around on heelies, and generally being very silly so everyone lets their guard down. (It's a horror campaign "inspired by Silent Hill, Corpse Party, and Weaver's Nan Quest series". This silliness isn't going to last.)

When they get back to school to set up the party, they somehow get thrown into an evil parallel version of the school, James is missing, Mary is talking nonsense, and there's this twisted monster chasing them around.

random thought that works like Your Turn to Die and Circle, with the premise of "buncha people locked in a box and forced to vote off who dies every round, and no you can't cleverdick your way out of this" could be read as an indictment of democracy/electoralism/voting

wonder whether they were intended as such :?