Jun. 22nd, 2023

Old Web

Jun. 22nd, 2023 12:16 am
ghoulmouse: ([Kemetic] Venerable Ibis)
Thinking a lot lately about...I dunno, the old internet.

Returning to DW it's on one hand nice to just post stuff but it's really hard to shake the Social Media obsession with attention that's buried into my subconscious by now. Given that the one time I had something REALLY take off on twitter, like to an absurd degree, it made the site utterly unusable for two months, I don't even know WHY I feel like it's important that a ton of people read, or even WANT to read what I post.

(When I say "to an absurd degree," I mean that an extremely offhand joke I made somehow got more retweets than the dril "blocked, blocked, none of you are free from sin" post. Like somewhere in the high 5 figure range, last I checked, and that's not counting the screenshots of the stupid thing that got circulated on Tumblr and even Facebook to the tune of 100k notes. It had a typo in it. Just IMAGINE my mentions, and by the way at the time muting a post's notifications broke when it hit a certain threshold.)

I want to just kinda, make stuff again. Part of me is afraid I won't ever TALK to anyone again that way, though. And I do like talking to people, directly to people, even though I'm terrifically socially anxious in real life to the extent that it sometimes takes me multiple MONTHS of psyching myself up to go somewhere to talk to people. I do it anyway, sometimes, to the best of my ability, but I'm sadly also not good at keeping up connections.

Ideally, of course, you can have venues for interaction as well as personal spaces where you can just show off things that you create, that are important to you, regardless of who is listening (because it's YOURS first and foremost), but. I am also functionally incapable of regulating my attention and the mechanics of modern social media do not make it any easier.

Anyway, to try out the DW image uploading stuff, here's a picture of some cross stitch I've done. I've been decreasing the scale at which I do these because, I don't know tiny things are cute. On the right is I guess a "normal" cross stitch (16 count aida fabric, I think) of Flowey from Undertale, using a pattern from the Undertale cross stitch book which I highly recommend for beginners, actually. On the left is Edward's SNES/SFC menu portrait, which I just did right from the pixel art, on...I don't remember exactly but you can see that it is very small.


Alt key for general scale. (It's a thumbnail, how oldschool).

(also don't mind all the bunny fur)

I keep making these things but I have no idea what to do with them honestly.

The Flowey thing is actually a pincushion and it has one of the creepy disintegrating Flowey faces on the other side. Edward's menu portrait I just...like a lot, it's one of the only ones with a noticeably non-neutral expression, and I think the strong profile is cute. It doesn't have a purpose, it just sits on my desk cluttering the space up, next to other projects I've done of Alphys (Undertale), the Rowdy Mouse (Earthbound), and uhhh the get out frog (ancient, localized internet meme).
ghoulmouse: ([Octopath Traveler] Cyrus Albright)
Where does one even crosspost fanfic on Dreamwidth these days? Mostly video game stuff for me but occasional like...other things. A lot of my output lately is r18 because, as it happens that is fun and people like it, but I've also got what is probably going to turn out to be an extremely long and convoluted AU fic in the wings. FFXIV putting in a dungeon called "Fell Court of Troia" just kind of reignited this bizarre FF4 AU idea that has sat in the back of my head for probably well on a decade now and I think I'm, like, actually in a position to write it with the influx of new ideas (and actually kind of looking forward to working on it which is nice).

Roughed out the first couple scenes of it and I'm leading off with some graphic bone-breaking and drowning peril. You know, to really bring in the readers. My search history is all like "compound fracture recovery time" "broken knee complications" "drowning victim first aid" "broken rib effect on breathing" "traumatic shock".

Also it wasn't fully relevant because FF4 clearly features all kinds of fantastical healing procedures, but I looked up what one did for a compound fracture prior to the advent of modern medicine and...well, I don't know why I expected the answer to be anything but "chop it off and call a priest," lol.

My posting will probably slow down once I run out of pent-up things to say. I feel like this is an annoying rate.