Old Web

[ghoulmouse]

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).

Comments

[vriddy]

Despite being keenly aware that the numbers, gamification, etc were terrible for me, it took me ages to shake off the need for quantifiable feedback, for seeing numbers and wanting them to be big (I talked about it a couple of times before). It's so weird how the sites hook us even when we think/know we don't like it. "I want lots of likes/notes/retweets/reblogs/shares/whatever!!"... but also "I don't want it too much, or not from too big accounts, because actually that makes my life objectively worse." I've never gone viral though (for the best!!), can't imagine what it's like if you've actually seen those numbers go big. Good luck re-adapting/relearning!

That cross-stitch is so cool and SO TINY omg :D :D

[ghoulmouse]

I can't complain too bad, my ultra-viral post was maybe the least controversial thing ever, so I mostly just got swamped with thousands of notifications and hundreds of people being like "You win the internets!" or pointing out the typo or explaining that I used "objectively" wrong because I said something was "objectively cooler" and being cool is inherently subjective (it's called a joke). Someone also posted a kind of cool piece of fanart and I opened a ko-fi and linked to it and got enough tips to get like, a burger. So that was nice. Maybe the least stressful viral experience it was possible to have and it was still averaged out to being a huge fucking annoyance.

And yet, when I think something like "I should post a list of my favorite horror games", my immediate reaction is like..."who cares lol". Well, I mean. I care.

And thank you! Cross stitch is a good thing to do with your hands, and I just love the tiny tiny stuff. It's so satisfying and cute.

[cora]

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.

The hardest part for me is working to curate my own content like some kind of savage from 2002 😂

With reddit's nonsense going on, I am hoping other...for lack of a better term "NPCs" migrate over here and open up communities, revive communities, or add a bit more life. I was active on reddit, but more as a commenter rather than a genuine content creator or someone who shared links, hence "NPC."

Otherwise, I'm pretty much going to 'Explore' and finding people based on the 'Latest' tags. I'm also checking for cool people in the comments section. I'll rebuild my 'go here for dopamine' content stream, it's just going to take a while. It's healthier to build it manually anyways.

[ghoulmouse]

Despite Reddit's negative reputation it had a huge swathe of really good communities (the RPGMaker subreddit is way nicer than the RPGMaker official forums, for example). "NPC" sounds kinda negative but on the other hand it might be a good term for someone who mostly just responds to other people's posts but is still important for making the world feel alive :)

Honestly I need to rebuild my ability to obtain dopamine from stuff that's not constant low-level online attention, so...yeah, this is nice. I feel like my fandom interests are maybe a little out of sync with the DW crowd but, that's really always been the case, so. Guess I can always just build stuff if there's nothing here.

[cora]

I genuinely never understood the reddit hate. I've only ever gotten the 'hive mind' rising up against me twice (and that was pretty recently - once for having the audacity to google search wrong or google's algorithms gave me the wrong information, and the second time for having the audacity to point out people are providing content to reddit for free - and also, I am a Premium user until my subscription ends for good in July/August, so no, I don't think I am/was being entitled for wanting to have a say in how reddit gets its money).

I hear you on the "I get my dopamine from social media" front. At a glance, we don't seem to have anything in common in our interest tags, so I'm at a loss as to what to try to recommend 😅 If you are interested in getting into knitting, get_knitted is pretty active and chill. There's a daily check in, people don't always (or even frequently) talk about their knitting projects. One person talks about their gardening project. If you are interested in cosplaying as a knitter, you could sneak in and just respond back to the daily check in/daily check in comments. Fake it until you make it. We seem to either be Internet Old or Internet Chill demographic around these parts, so it seems unlikely anyone would ever call you out on "Wait a second...you aren't into yarn crafts! How did you get here?!" Plenty of people did a similar thing with religion for centuries. "I go to church because Bill goes to church and I want to talk to Bill. Bill goes to talk to God. That's nice for Bill, not my thing, but Bill's good people."

There is a journals and planners community if you're into ye olde fashioned pen and paper writing (journalsandplanners. Otherwise I've been pretty much going to Dreamwidth > Explore > Latest, grabbing a tag, looking at recent post, and then checking people out to see if we'll click and I should add them to my circle to read posts from them (that's how I found this post actually).

[lassarina]

I love the Edward profile! and yeah the attention thing is very real. I posted a drabble to a fandom I'm not really in and was baffled at the amount of interaction vs the average for FF fandoms.