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Life: Katsucon, Media Consumption, and Longing for Springtime
Remember when tumblr shot itself in the foot in December and lots of people were talking about coming to dreamwidth? That didn't really happen, huh? I kind of miss my LJ days, when one day of posts meant hitting the "go back 20 entries" button because I couldn't fit everything my friends had written on one page. I miss having more stuff to read from my friends.
On the other hand, I probably am the majority of some of y'all's reading pages and for that I can pretend to be sorry. (I'm not sure I am very sorry.)
I really am starting to lose the thread of things. It's almost March and I miss the sun so much, I'm so sick of it being winter. It's really starting to show in my mood and my organization, and I just feel so disconnected from everything. I'm sure it's not the only factor but it finally sunk in with me that oh, right, exercise really helps my mood and I haven't been doing anything worth mentioning in weeks and weeks.
In news that isn't me being sad because it's cold and gray, some more general life updates:
Conventions: Katsucon was the weekend directly after Valentine's Day! I had such an amazing time seeing so many friends, both newer online friends I'd never met in person before and old friends I hadn't seen in years, as well as everyone in between. I won't do a lengthy con report but I did want to hash out a quick timeline of my con, just for my own memory.
Thursday I drove down with Samy and Em, got situated in the room, got our badges, and spent the evening hanging out with friends in the atrium. We all turned in fairly early for con.
Friday was a slow morning with friends followed by 90 almost-uninterrupted minutes of jubeat in the game room right when it opened at 12:30. Lunch from Potbelly's with many friends, eaten out on the fake grass to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather. More friend time until about 7pm followed by a run through of artist's alley with Yrin, a bit of decompressing in the room, then lining to see the cosplay burlesque with Samy, June, and Em, which was AMAZING as always.
Saturday was jubeat with Yrin right when the game room opened at 8am, for about another uninterrupted 90 minutes. Breakfast, then dealer's with Em which took us like... At least a solid two hours (much of that time spent by me at the doujin booths laughing at their stock). Lunch was Mediterranean and dinner was Potbelly's again and everything in between was good social time with friends. We had the usual Saturday night sports friend puddle at the far end of the second floor hall, past games and around the corner, until about two in the morning.
Sunday was, as always, "scramble about saying goodbye to all your friends!!" day. Sarah had the idea of setting up outside the game room and just letting a revolving door of friends pass by to hang out and say goodbye, which was really nice. Yrin and I made a last run through AA, played a last couple rounds of jubeat, and lingered until security literally herded the remains of our group out of the con center around 4pm. And afterward we got ramen for dinner in DC with Ciry! A very good con all around.
Also Yrin got to experience the true extent of my terrifying, illuminati, "how do we keep running into so many of your friends purely by chance, how many people do you know??" powers and it was delightful. I am truly too extrovert to live.
Socializing: Now that con is over, I am trying to make ordinary, casual social plans so I'll be less sad and lonely, lol. At some point Psiten and I will go dancing, March 20th-25th I will be in Boston to visit Yrin, and the first weekend in April, Sage will come down from Delaware to visit me.
An interesting side effect of con was my longtime friends NOT doing that "I haven't seen you in so long and after this we should TOTALLY start hanging out like ALL THE TIME!!" thing that people do. We acknowledged that we're busy adults and it's hard for us to coordinate plans but we're also really glad that we can still be friends after all these years, even going long stretches without seeing each other. That said... I do really want to coordinate to see Killian and Liz, since our schedules WILL line up if we plan in advance, and I want to see Maggie sometime in March if her work stops being ridiculous. I miss... Friends.
Social Media: Tomorrow marks the end of my two-month trial of being on twitter only once per week. My verdict remains "this seems to be good for me, because even if I often feel lonely during the day, the alternative where I mindlessly scroll twitter during every free moment doesn't make me feel any better." On the other hand... This is the point where I intended to review my experiment and potentially make changes, and I've been turning around the idea of designating Wednesday evenings as a second twitter-online time, just so I'm a bit more accessible. Maybe I will try that for March?
Exercise: I've been crying for weeks about how I can't bike in winter and starting to really go stir-crazy about it, so I went out this Sunday. It rained in the morning but by afternoon it was 55F and sunny and so I dragged myself outside to just, bike a sad little five miles around my lake. The changes in atmospheric pressure make my head feel like it's going to explode so it was an Incredibly Painful bike ride but I'm still really happy I went out. And maybe soon it'll be nice enough for me to bike without the cold and air pressure making me die!!
Games: I've burnt out on console games/Disgaea again and have started playing a new predatory mobage which isn't even a rhythm game, which basically translates to "wow I am depressed, I guess!" (the mobage is the kind of match three where you drag items around a field and combine them into fancier and fancier versions of that class of item, pyramid-scheme style. It's very satisfying but also VERY predatory, the way it incentivizes spending money is so seamlessly integrated with the gameplay that it does seem hard to resist. I've been watching my meager stock of free paid currency slowly deplete with extreme trepidation. I refuse to buy any, I refuse.)
Roleplay: For another mark in the "I have taken a depressive downturn" category, I started RPing more around Christmas and got to the point of having four good threads, each with a different person. We might not write more than one post a week but it felt like I'd finally gotten to this satisfying point where that was just enough activity to keep me excited and engaged. And then katsucon happened and afterward I'd lost all will to RP? Or rather... I'm still kind of tempted to start back up the pokemon RP a friend and I were supposed to do, so I'm a little worried it's hypmic I lost interest in, since all my existing threads were hypmic. I think I might be fine if I just give it a week or two but I feel bad making people wait quite so long, it sucks.
Television: Ah, the one form of media consumption that is still easy for my sad, tired brain. I have now seen two seasons of One Day at A Time, a few more episodes of Criminal Minds and NCIS, oh and I watched the entire first season of The Umbrella Academy and LOVED IT. So much of that show is laser-targeted to me, from the robot mom, to Five's mannequin girlfriend, to Klaus'... Everything, especially being horny about torture and his little, mmmmmm, field trip having occurred at all, to Sam's entire existence as a tentacle ghost. (As well as the fact that you borderline cannot ship ANYTHING which is not in some way Problematique, be it because of incest, age gaps, or you choosing to ship Vanya with Leonard, the creepy Nice Guy abuser.) And time travel is a huge factor of the plot, which is SUPER my jam. It was suuuuuch a good watch and I'd love to chat with friends about it.
Literature: I continue to read a ton, mostly because my ereader is my phone fidget app in lieu of twitter. I'm still reading Too Like the Lightning but I just... Could not handle so much of the 18th century novel format all at once, even if the book is very fascinating, so I'm taking a break and have begun reading An Unkindness of Ghosts. I am reeeeally enjoying it, the worldbuilding is fascinating and the style of prose is very to my taste. I love how effortlessly and invisibly the narrative reads; I admire what Ada Palmer has done with Too Like the Lightning, stylistically, but the entire conceit of the book makes the narrative style an active focus. This book is an excellent switch-off from the Palmer book simply because it's the opposite for me.
Writing: I mentioned back in maybe November that I would not think about Space AU until the new year and that I wanted to finish one small original project before resuming work on Space AU. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and I even have begun to miss working on it, but I feel like I really NEED to write something else first, both as a palate cleanse of sorts and to work up to committing to such a large project again. The problem has been: picking something original I care about enough to actually work on and finish.
I've been experiencing a lot of... Doubt, more or less, about my writing lately. I've wanted to "finish" with fandom for years now so I could return to original work without distraction but I didn't imagine it happening like this: with me bitter and resentful with fandom at large, and not wanting to write fic not because I've said everything I need to say for a while, but because I hate the idea of providing free entertainment to judgmental assholes who would rip me apart for my fictional interests if they knew the full extent of what I like. Instead of being excited to start on original projects as the only thing on my plate, I feel kind of empty and lost.
I've taught myself that my writing needs to have a purpose. With fandom it's easy; I write fic to share ideas. A lot of my fanfiction is meta-disguised-as-story, is my way of showcasing what I like about the characters and how I think about the canon. With original work, I'm not REALLY interested in writing for publication but short of that, I feel like I don't know why I'm writing. Doing it purely for my own entertainment isn't sufficient; I've always viewed writing as kind of... A way of sharing your mind with others. Even if my audience is only a small circle of friends, having an audience is an important feature of the writing process, for me.
And I'm really aware that even if I set out to write for publication, the sorts of stories I want to tell don't have a lot of publication potential. I've been heartened by all the fiction I've read in the past half-year that talks about gender identity and sexuality and non-standard relationships, but the problem is that besides those things, I write about age gaps and incest and consent issues and the last thing in particular I understand to be Really Hard To Sell. I just... Want to write weird nasty kinky smut and share it with interested individuals, but I haven't figured out a good way to do that and it's sapped a lot of my motivation.
Anyway.
The point here is, I posted a writing meme on Saturday designed for character creation, and created an incredibly self indulgent mini-cast of four characters. And then I wrote something. It's really silly that as flimsy a purpose as "it's for a meme and I told people on twitter I'd write something, so I will" works for me, but... Apparently it does and I'll fucking take it!! Anything to have a little motivation, lol.
I know I'm too contrary and headstrong to take commissions, even just original porn commissions, but maybe I can figure out how to trap my dumb lizard brain into writing things that it likes via this sort of external motivation. I want to write one snippet to highlight each of my four characters and then at least just one larger thing establishing three of them as an OT3, and then maybe after that I'll even work on space AU.
Boy, this started getting long, huh? It wasn't even TOO BAD but then I needed to dump all my gross complicated unhappy writing feelings and Here We Are. I'm thinking I may want to start doing weekly life updates again? I don't have THAT MUCH going on week to week but... They'd be shorter and I'd have more mental space to cry about the media I've been consuming.
Other odds and ends... I'm excited about the announcement of eighth gen of pokemon! New main series pokemon game for switch!! I totally bought my switch at least half for pokemon let's go, I'm so fucking ready. And Kay is running Valentine's Lockers again this year (even if it sounds like this one is more like White Day Lockers, with the timeframe, lol) and I signed up for that. I'm not sure whether I'll really... Successfully make fic for anybody, but I hope I can entice someone into feeding me hypmic content and I may at least drop a few meta-essays into lockers for people who share fandoms with me.
I'm really frazzled and sick of it being winter and just kind of... Feeling like I'm in this state of Waiting to be properly happy again, but. I'm not unhappy. I feel like I wrap every entry up this way, with a little pep talk assuring myself that I am doing my best and that everything is okay. And it's kind of trite and silly but hey... Whatever works? Spring will come, the sun will rise again, and I will still be here because I am too goddamn stubborn to allow for anything else. ♥
On the other hand, I probably am the majority of some of y'all's reading pages and for that I can pretend to be sorry. (I'm not sure I am very sorry.)
I really am starting to lose the thread of things. It's almost March and I miss the sun so much, I'm so sick of it being winter. It's really starting to show in my mood and my organization, and I just feel so disconnected from everything. I'm sure it's not the only factor but it finally sunk in with me that oh, right, exercise really helps my mood and I haven't been doing anything worth mentioning in weeks and weeks.
In news that isn't me being sad because it's cold and gray, some more general life updates:
Conventions: Katsucon was the weekend directly after Valentine's Day! I had such an amazing time seeing so many friends, both newer online friends I'd never met in person before and old friends I hadn't seen in years, as well as everyone in between. I won't do a lengthy con report but I did want to hash out a quick timeline of my con, just for my own memory.
Thursday I drove down with Samy and Em, got situated in the room, got our badges, and spent the evening hanging out with friends in the atrium. We all turned in fairly early for con.
Friday was a slow morning with friends followed by 90 almost-uninterrupted minutes of jubeat in the game room right when it opened at 12:30. Lunch from Potbelly's with many friends, eaten out on the fake grass to enjoy the unseasonably warm weather. More friend time until about 7pm followed by a run through of artist's alley with Yrin, a bit of decompressing in the room, then lining to see the cosplay burlesque with Samy, June, and Em, which was AMAZING as always.
Saturday was jubeat with Yrin right when the game room opened at 8am, for about another uninterrupted 90 minutes. Breakfast, then dealer's with Em which took us like... At least a solid two hours (much of that time spent by me at the doujin booths laughing at their stock). Lunch was Mediterranean and dinner was Potbelly's again and everything in between was good social time with friends. We had the usual Saturday night sports friend puddle at the far end of the second floor hall, past games and around the corner, until about two in the morning.
Sunday was, as always, "scramble about saying goodbye to all your friends!!" day. Sarah had the idea of setting up outside the game room and just letting a revolving door of friends pass by to hang out and say goodbye, which was really nice. Yrin and I made a last run through AA, played a last couple rounds of jubeat, and lingered until security literally herded the remains of our group out of the con center around 4pm. And afterward we got ramen for dinner in DC with Ciry! A very good con all around.
Also Yrin got to experience the true extent of my terrifying, illuminati, "how do we keep running into so many of your friends purely by chance, how many people do you know??" powers and it was delightful. I am truly too extrovert to live.
Socializing: Now that con is over, I am trying to make ordinary, casual social plans so I'll be less sad and lonely, lol. At some point Psiten and I will go dancing, March 20th-25th I will be in Boston to visit Yrin, and the first weekend in April, Sage will come down from Delaware to visit me.
An interesting side effect of con was my longtime friends NOT doing that "I haven't seen you in so long and after this we should TOTALLY start hanging out like ALL THE TIME!!" thing that people do. We acknowledged that we're busy adults and it's hard for us to coordinate plans but we're also really glad that we can still be friends after all these years, even going long stretches without seeing each other. That said... I do really want to coordinate to see Killian and Liz, since our schedules WILL line up if we plan in advance, and I want to see Maggie sometime in March if her work stops being ridiculous. I miss... Friends.
Social Media: Tomorrow marks the end of my two-month trial of being on twitter only once per week. My verdict remains "this seems to be good for me, because even if I often feel lonely during the day, the alternative where I mindlessly scroll twitter during every free moment doesn't make me feel any better." On the other hand... This is the point where I intended to review my experiment and potentially make changes, and I've been turning around the idea of designating Wednesday evenings as a second twitter-online time, just so I'm a bit more accessible. Maybe I will try that for March?
Exercise: I've been crying for weeks about how I can't bike in winter and starting to really go stir-crazy about it, so I went out this Sunday. It rained in the morning but by afternoon it was 55F and sunny and so I dragged myself outside to just, bike a sad little five miles around my lake. The changes in atmospheric pressure make my head feel like it's going to explode so it was an Incredibly Painful bike ride but I'm still really happy I went out. And maybe soon it'll be nice enough for me to bike without the cold and air pressure making me die!!
Games: I've burnt out on console games/Disgaea again and have started playing a new predatory mobage which isn't even a rhythm game, which basically translates to "wow I am depressed, I guess!" (the mobage is the kind of match three where you drag items around a field and combine them into fancier and fancier versions of that class of item, pyramid-scheme style. It's very satisfying but also VERY predatory, the way it incentivizes spending money is so seamlessly integrated with the gameplay that it does seem hard to resist. I've been watching my meager stock of free paid currency slowly deplete with extreme trepidation. I refuse to buy any, I refuse.)
Roleplay: For another mark in the "I have taken a depressive downturn" category, I started RPing more around Christmas and got to the point of having four good threads, each with a different person. We might not write more than one post a week but it felt like I'd finally gotten to this satisfying point where that was just enough activity to keep me excited and engaged. And then katsucon happened and afterward I'd lost all will to RP? Or rather... I'm still kind of tempted to start back up the pokemon RP a friend and I were supposed to do, so I'm a little worried it's hypmic I lost interest in, since all my existing threads were hypmic. I think I might be fine if I just give it a week or two but I feel bad making people wait quite so long, it sucks.
Television: Ah, the one form of media consumption that is still easy for my sad, tired brain. I have now seen two seasons of One Day at A Time, a few more episodes of Criminal Minds and NCIS, oh and I watched the entire first season of The Umbrella Academy and LOVED IT. So much of that show is laser-targeted to me, from the robot mom, to Five's mannequin girlfriend, to Klaus'... Everything, especially being horny about torture and his little, mmmmmm, field trip having occurred at all, to Sam's entire existence as a tentacle ghost. (As well as the fact that you borderline cannot ship ANYTHING which is not in some way Problematique, be it because of incest, age gaps, or you choosing to ship Vanya with Leonard, the creepy Nice Guy abuser.) And time travel is a huge factor of the plot, which is SUPER my jam. It was suuuuuch a good watch and I'd love to chat with friends about it.
Literature: I continue to read a ton, mostly because my ereader is my phone fidget app in lieu of twitter. I'm still reading Too Like the Lightning but I just... Could not handle so much of the 18th century novel format all at once, even if the book is very fascinating, so I'm taking a break and have begun reading An Unkindness of Ghosts. I am reeeeally enjoying it, the worldbuilding is fascinating and the style of prose is very to my taste. I love how effortlessly and invisibly the narrative reads; I admire what Ada Palmer has done with Too Like the Lightning, stylistically, but the entire conceit of the book makes the narrative style an active focus. This book is an excellent switch-off from the Palmer book simply because it's the opposite for me.
Writing: I mentioned back in maybe November that I would not think about Space AU until the new year and that I wanted to finish one small original project before resuming work on Space AU. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and I even have begun to miss working on it, but I feel like I really NEED to write something else first, both as a palate cleanse of sorts and to work up to committing to such a large project again. The problem has been: picking something original I care about enough to actually work on and finish.
I've been experiencing a lot of... Doubt, more or less, about my writing lately. I've wanted to "finish" with fandom for years now so I could return to original work without distraction but I didn't imagine it happening like this: with me bitter and resentful with fandom at large, and not wanting to write fic not because I've said everything I need to say for a while, but because I hate the idea of providing free entertainment to judgmental assholes who would rip me apart for my fictional interests if they knew the full extent of what I like. Instead of being excited to start on original projects as the only thing on my plate, I feel kind of empty and lost.
I've taught myself that my writing needs to have a purpose. With fandom it's easy; I write fic to share ideas. A lot of my fanfiction is meta-disguised-as-story, is my way of showcasing what I like about the characters and how I think about the canon. With original work, I'm not REALLY interested in writing for publication but short of that, I feel like I don't know why I'm writing. Doing it purely for my own entertainment isn't sufficient; I've always viewed writing as kind of... A way of sharing your mind with others. Even if my audience is only a small circle of friends, having an audience is an important feature of the writing process, for me.
And I'm really aware that even if I set out to write for publication, the sorts of stories I want to tell don't have a lot of publication potential. I've been heartened by all the fiction I've read in the past half-year that talks about gender identity and sexuality and non-standard relationships, but the problem is that besides those things, I write about age gaps and incest and consent issues and the last thing in particular I understand to be Really Hard To Sell. I just... Want to write weird nasty kinky smut and share it with interested individuals, but I haven't figured out a good way to do that and it's sapped a lot of my motivation.
Anyway.
The point here is, I posted a writing meme on Saturday designed for character creation, and created an incredibly self indulgent mini-cast of four characters. And then I wrote something. It's really silly that as flimsy a purpose as "it's for a meme and I told people on twitter I'd write something, so I will" works for me, but... Apparently it does and I'll fucking take it!! Anything to have a little motivation, lol.
I know I'm too contrary and headstrong to take commissions, even just original porn commissions, but maybe I can figure out how to trap my dumb lizard brain into writing things that it likes via this sort of external motivation. I want to write one snippet to highlight each of my four characters and then at least just one larger thing establishing three of them as an OT3, and then maybe after that I'll even work on space AU.
Boy, this started getting long, huh? It wasn't even TOO BAD but then I needed to dump all my gross complicated unhappy writing feelings and Here We Are. I'm thinking I may want to start doing weekly life updates again? I don't have THAT MUCH going on week to week but... They'd be shorter and I'd have more mental space to cry about the media I've been consuming.
Other odds and ends... I'm excited about the announcement of eighth gen of pokemon! New main series pokemon game for switch!! I totally bought my switch at least half for pokemon let's go, I'm so fucking ready. And Kay is running Valentine's Lockers again this year (even if it sounds like this one is more like White Day Lockers, with the timeframe, lol) and I signed up for that. I'm not sure whether I'll really... Successfully make fic for anybody, but I hope I can entice someone into feeding me hypmic content and I may at least drop a few meta-essays into lockers for people who share fandoms with me.
I'm really frazzled and sick of it being winter and just kind of... Feeling like I'm in this state of Waiting to be properly happy again, but. I'm not unhappy. I feel like I wrap every entry up this way, with a little pep talk assuring myself that I am doing my best and that everything is okay. And it's kind of trite and silly but hey... Whatever works? Spring will come, the sun will rise again, and I will still be here because I am too goddamn stubborn to allow for anything else. ♥