![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptTurns out I was wrong, it's not housekeeping, but introductions requested of us for the start of the series. Which usually means that the thing we can expect is "Hello, new people!"
So, if you haven't been here before, or if it's been a while, welcome, or welcome back. Hello again! (Worry not, Dreamwidth is the kind of place where if you've been away for a bit, you can, for the most part, pick back up where you left off and get back up to speed easily. Although, not necessarily by trying to go back through your reading page for long periods of time.) Perhaps in some version of this tale, I am a narrator, someone here to guide the story along and provide important details that cannot be determined solely through outside observation of the characters, their actions, and the dialogue. I'll note, though, that I am at best unreliable as a narrator, even of my own experiences, and so there may be things obvious to you, the reader, that I, the narrator, am unaware of.
My sticky post contains most of what I would like to see happen in my corner of Dreamwidth, and a little bit about me. It should serve as a starting point and an establishment of the floor on which to build relationships. Feel free to comment on it, or take the idea for yourselves. I am a person who does much better when the people around me have stated rules, as I am usually lost and confused in spaces that operate primarily on guessing rather than declaring or asking.
If you'd like to delve further into the spaces where I talk about myself, my head, my experiences, and make allusions, references, and puns that may or may not ping for you, based on your own experiences, there is an archive of December Days posts ready for you to look at. The most recent series wrapped yesterday, but the Tags page has all of them, although not in chronological order. Since they group around topics, I use the topic, or an esoteric reference to the topic, as the tag for each session of introspection and storytelling.
I tend to collect links, and then disgorge them on a half-monthly basis, give or take other things. Because the States is currently in a period of trying to outdo some of the worst behaviors of the most condemned people of history, a fair amount of those links are about the newest and latest ways they exercise creativity in cruelty, but there are other things involved. They usually float to the top and the bottom of the entry, the parts outside the cut tag. There's some stuff inside that's not d00m, but there's a higher concentration of it inside the cut.
I do write fic, and I don't particularly hide that, but I don't read as much of it as others, and I tend to have many fandoms that simmer, rather than one fandom that boils, and I don't do a lot of fandom-hopping, either. So I can probably listen to people talk about their fandoms and follow along, for the most part, but I am probably not the person who dives into the weeds in most places. What might be my most popular fannish contribution was a silly one-off story in the right fandom at the right time. What might be the most lasting contribution is having gone through the entirety of the currently-available Dragonriders of Pern series and looked at it with a lens of showing what kinds of ugliness happened while the authors wanted us to look at the dragons and imagine ourselves as brave and powerful dragonriders fighting a menace. Book club, as it were, happens off Dreamwidth, and there, too, is a fairly extensive archive of material if you like someone going through and commenting on books, as suggested by the small, but appreciative, audience.
I think that covers the highlights, so let's get to the actual question for today's challenge. Why am I doing this, and what am I hoping to gather from it? Some of doing this is habit, some of it is because I like the opportunity to introspect, or create, or otherwise engage with the community around. Primarily, though, I do this as an opportunity to invite other people into the space to have a look around and see if they like what they see, and also because it's a perfectly good excuse to go visiting others and discover new corners of Dreamwidth. Since DW doesn't have an algorithm, or an FYP, or any of the other discovery, surfacing, and shoveling technology that other social media does that's meant to give you "content" to "engage" with (and, surprise, surprise, is tuned so that you'll "engage" more with content you have strong negative reactions to), finding other people is usually done through communities, or challenges like this, or being introduced to someone else through a mutual friend. It's very lo-fi, as it were, and since we're engaging primarily here in text, rather than in pictures, video, or other multimedia content, I think there's a certain congruence that discovery is equally as analog and the primary mode of interaction is the comment, rather than the kudo. Having excuses to go around and see other people, and possibly find new friends is excellent. At the beginning of the calendar year, when people are housekeeping their digital spaces, and making decisions about what they might want to interact with further, or what they might want to cut back on, and in the spirit of celebration that we've managed to make it through to another turn of the calendar, having opportunities to feast and share, to talk of accomplishments, to encourage and support others in the building of habits, and to take stock of the direction things have gone, and choose either to continue as you have been or reorient toward another goal, that helps build community, as well.
The most common complaint you'll hear about Dreamwidth is that the lack of discovery features makes it hard to find your people, even as the lack of discovery features and the ads that accompany them is also the biggest benefit to using Dreamwidth. Those who have been around long enough to yearn for the thriving communities of Livejournal are unsure as to why Dreamwidth hasn't managed to achieve that same critical mass, but this may be one of those situations where you build your own community, and you find ways of linking up with other communities, and, well, there's a myriad of other social sites and places that you can go, especially for the kinds of interactions that are more real-time and multimedia-heavier. And that might feel like they're more private and intimate, even though that's not necessarily the case. Most of those sites don't have quite the same amount of privacy control that Dreamwidth offers, and they're more likely to let people come snooping without the requirements of the court order. Dreamwidth actively participates with Netchoice in the process of using the court and legal system to punch governments in the nose when they over-reach, and is very valuable to those efforts, as a social media site not backed by venture capital, but by people who believe in punching government overreach in the nose where possible, who like the medium of text as a primary interaction, and who are willing to consistently pay enough money to the site over time to keep it running. Dreamwidth is, in many ways, an experience unlike so many other sites, and especially not the popular ones, and it lends itself to certain modes of expression. Which is not to say that you have to be an essayist or long-winded to use Dreamwidth successfully. It's a perfectly fine shitposting platform, and it does equally as well with short entries as it does long ones. I think Dreamwidth operates on the same kind of principle that is often above the doorways of locker rooms in various sporting facilities around the world: "Those who stay will be champions." The initial start is rough, but once you have people and communities and entries, it functions perfectly well. You get to curate your experience effectively, and that's very much opposed to the ways that other social media sites operate.
So, welcome, welcome! Make yourself comfortable here on Dreamwidth, and to the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge. You may see me around, commenting and sharing, as a way of trying to find bonds, and as an invitation for you to do the same, here or elsewhere on the site.
(If it isn't clear by now, I also tend to go off on diversions and tangents while I'm telling stories. I think they're relevant, at least as context and flavor, even if they don't appear to be at first glance. Follow along, or not, as you like.)
Challenge #1
The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.
So, if you haven't been here before, or if it's been a while, welcome, or welcome back. Hello again! (Worry not, Dreamwidth is the kind of place where if you've been away for a bit, you can, for the most part, pick back up where you left off and get back up to speed easily. Although, not necessarily by trying to go back through your reading page for long periods of time.) Perhaps in some version of this tale, I am a narrator, someone here to guide the story along and provide important details that cannot be determined solely through outside observation of the characters, their actions, and the dialogue. I'll note, though, that I am at best unreliable as a narrator, even of my own experiences, and so there may be things obvious to you, the reader, that I, the narrator, am unaware of.
My sticky post contains most of what I would like to see happen in my corner of Dreamwidth, and a little bit about me. It should serve as a starting point and an establishment of the floor on which to build relationships. Feel free to comment on it, or take the idea for yourselves. I am a person who does much better when the people around me have stated rules, as I am usually lost and confused in spaces that operate primarily on guessing rather than declaring or asking.
If you'd like to delve further into the spaces where I talk about myself, my head, my experiences, and make allusions, references, and puns that may or may not ping for you, based on your own experiences, there is an archive of December Days posts ready for you to look at. The most recent series wrapped yesterday, but the Tags page has all of them, although not in chronological order. Since they group around topics, I use the topic, or an esoteric reference to the topic, as the tag for each session of introspection and storytelling.
I tend to collect links, and then disgorge them on a half-monthly basis, give or take other things. Because the States is currently in a period of trying to outdo some of the worst behaviors of the most condemned people of history, a fair amount of those links are about the newest and latest ways they exercise creativity in cruelty, but there are other things involved. They usually float to the top and the bottom of the entry, the parts outside the cut tag. There's some stuff inside that's not d00m, but there's a higher concentration of it inside the cut.
I do write fic, and I don't particularly hide that, but I don't read as much of it as others, and I tend to have many fandoms that simmer, rather than one fandom that boils, and I don't do a lot of fandom-hopping, either. So I can probably listen to people talk about their fandoms and follow along, for the most part, but I am probably not the person who dives into the weeds in most places. What might be my most popular fannish contribution was a silly one-off story in the right fandom at the right time. What might be the most lasting contribution is having gone through the entirety of the currently-available Dragonriders of Pern series and looked at it with a lens of showing what kinds of ugliness happened while the authors wanted us to look at the dragons and imagine ourselves as brave and powerful dragonriders fighting a menace. Book club, as it were, happens off Dreamwidth, and there, too, is a fairly extensive archive of material if you like someone going through and commenting on books, as suggested by the small, but appreciative, audience.
I think that covers the highlights, so let's get to the actual question for today's challenge. Why am I doing this, and what am I hoping to gather from it? Some of doing this is habit, some of it is because I like the opportunity to introspect, or create, or otherwise engage with the community around. Primarily, though, I do this as an opportunity to invite other people into the space to have a look around and see if they like what they see, and also because it's a perfectly good excuse to go visiting others and discover new corners of Dreamwidth. Since DW doesn't have an algorithm, or an FYP, or any of the other discovery, surfacing, and shoveling technology that other social media does that's meant to give you "content" to "engage" with (and, surprise, surprise, is tuned so that you'll "engage" more with content you have strong negative reactions to), finding other people is usually done through communities, or challenges like this, or being introduced to someone else through a mutual friend. It's very lo-fi, as it were, and since we're engaging primarily here in text, rather than in pictures, video, or other multimedia content, I think there's a certain congruence that discovery is equally as analog and the primary mode of interaction is the comment, rather than the kudo. Having excuses to go around and see other people, and possibly find new friends is excellent. At the beginning of the calendar year, when people are housekeeping their digital spaces, and making decisions about what they might want to interact with further, or what they might want to cut back on, and in the spirit of celebration that we've managed to make it through to another turn of the calendar, having opportunities to feast and share, to talk of accomplishments, to encourage and support others in the building of habits, and to take stock of the direction things have gone, and choose either to continue as you have been or reorient toward another goal, that helps build community, as well.
The most common complaint you'll hear about Dreamwidth is that the lack of discovery features makes it hard to find your people, even as the lack of discovery features and the ads that accompany them is also the biggest benefit to using Dreamwidth. Those who have been around long enough to yearn for the thriving communities of Livejournal are unsure as to why Dreamwidth hasn't managed to achieve that same critical mass, but this may be one of those situations where you build your own community, and you find ways of linking up with other communities, and, well, there's a myriad of other social sites and places that you can go, especially for the kinds of interactions that are more real-time and multimedia-heavier. And that might feel like they're more private and intimate, even though that's not necessarily the case. Most of those sites don't have quite the same amount of privacy control that Dreamwidth offers, and they're more likely to let people come snooping without the requirements of the court order. Dreamwidth actively participates with Netchoice in the process of using the court and legal system to punch governments in the nose when they over-reach, and is very valuable to those efforts, as a social media site not backed by venture capital, but by people who believe in punching government overreach in the nose where possible, who like the medium of text as a primary interaction, and who are willing to consistently pay enough money to the site over time to keep it running. Dreamwidth is, in many ways, an experience unlike so many other sites, and especially not the popular ones, and it lends itself to certain modes of expression. Which is not to say that you have to be an essayist or long-winded to use Dreamwidth successfully. It's a perfectly fine shitposting platform, and it does equally as well with short entries as it does long ones. I think Dreamwidth operates on the same kind of principle that is often above the doorways of locker rooms in various sporting facilities around the world: "Those who stay will be champions." The initial start is rough, but once you have people and communities and entries, it functions perfectly well. You get to curate your experience effectively, and that's very much opposed to the ways that other social media sites operate.
So, welcome, welcome! Make yourself comfortable here on Dreamwidth, and to the
snowflake_challenge. You may see me around, commenting and sharing, as a way of trying to find bonds, and as an invitation for you to do the same, here or elsewhere on the site.(If it isn't clear by now, I also tend to go off on diversions and tangents while I'm telling stories. I think they're relevant, at least as context and flavor, even if they don't appear to be at first glance. Follow along, or not, as you like.)
no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 05:57 am (UTC)