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State of the Dreamwidth Blog
Hello all! Long time, no general chatter, huh?
As I've kind of mentioned on The Platform Previously Known As Twitter, I've been thinking about getting back into DW blogging. I took a hiatus from twitter for half of July and basically all of August, and I am still trying to use twitter only sparingly. Everyone talks about moving to another platform and seems to be looking for twitter-alikes, but I don't want a twitter-alike. What I've wanted for years is a mobile-friendly LJ-clone with better global tagging and tag searching, across both individual accounts and its version of communities. But we're never gonna get that, because most social media users don't want longform blogging, so here we are.
When I was the best at keeping up this blog, I updated once per week with what was basically a digest of my life's happenings over the past seven days. And while I'd love to have a record of how I spend my time that's a more specific and less dry than my calendar, I'm not really interested in putting myself quite so out there on the internet any more. These days, any life updates that are more than just glancingly personal will almost definitely have a friendslock.
Instead, there are two main things I want to blog about:
a.) A once-weekly update on my meal planning and batch cooking for that week.
My partner and I cook for several hours every Saturday, preparing main dishes and sides in advance for the upcoming week. We get a summer farm share from June-November and a winter farm share from (I believe) January-March. Using our farm produce like I am a contestant on Chopped, I pick recipes each week based on what will make best use of our ingredients. I'm the head chef; I pick the recipes, delegate tasks, manage time and the order in which things are done, do more fiddly cooking tasks and anything to do with seasoning. Yrin is the sous chef; he chops stuff, takes direction, does the majority of cleaning, and does basically any tedious task that I don't want to do. It works out great for everyone.
For entries about it, I'd like to type up a list of the menu items for the week, a list of the farm produce we got that week, link the recipes I'm using (I tend to modify them heavily, so this might be multiple recipes or a recipe that was more inspiration than something I actually followed), and describe the results. When we actually do this week to week, I write out the menu items on paper and pull up any recipes on my phone, but then I don't make note of modifications that I made to the recipes of how they turned out. So I think it would be fun to keep better track of that and to get to talk about the yummy things we're eating for the week.
-and-
b.) Informal essays about the various media I'm taking in and my feelings about it.
This is the actual real reason I want to pick my DW back up, rather than because of leaving twitter or to talk about cooking, lol. Since I've cut down on my social media use, all of my OPINIONS about books I'm reading and shows I'm watching and games I'm playing have backed up more in my head. I'll talk about them with individual people, but in bits and pieces that aren't necessarily all tied together. So I'd loooove to actually organize those thoughts in one place, in a hopefully-interesting-to-read form.
I'm thinking these would be less reviews and more op-ed kind of pieces. I don't want to do an objective write-up of No Man's Sky as a game. I want to list the four games I checked out from the library and describe what about each of them was annoying to me, specifically, and why I'm probably now going to pour a stupid amount of time into playing procedurally generated space exploration game No Man's Sky. I don't want to review the novel I've just read, I want to tell you about this stupid C-plot and why that made me, specifically, insane. But probably while sounding way too much like I'm falling sideways into actual literary analysis, lol. I think the kinds of things I want to say really might be helpful in the way a review is helpful, in letting you decide whether you do or don't want to try a piece of media. But while being hyper-specific in a way that will primarily just appeal to my friends.
So! That's basically what you can expect from me in the near future. We'll see how well I actually adhere to what's described and how long I manage to keep it up for -- I do better when there's actually stuff on my reading page to get me to spend more time on DW -- but I'm happy to maybe keep this blog better-updated in between exchange sign-ups, lol.
As I've kind of mentioned on The Platform Previously Known As Twitter, I've been thinking about getting back into DW blogging. I took a hiatus from twitter for half of July and basically all of August, and I am still trying to use twitter only sparingly. Everyone talks about moving to another platform and seems to be looking for twitter-alikes, but I don't want a twitter-alike. What I've wanted for years is a mobile-friendly LJ-clone with better global tagging and tag searching, across both individual accounts and its version of communities. But we're never gonna get that, because most social media users don't want longform blogging, so here we are.
When I was the best at keeping up this blog, I updated once per week with what was basically a digest of my life's happenings over the past seven days. And while I'd love to have a record of how I spend my time that's a more specific and less dry than my calendar, I'm not really interested in putting myself quite so out there on the internet any more. These days, any life updates that are more than just glancingly personal will almost definitely have a friendslock.
Instead, there are two main things I want to blog about:
a.) A once-weekly update on my meal planning and batch cooking for that week.
My partner and I cook for several hours every Saturday, preparing main dishes and sides in advance for the upcoming week. We get a summer farm share from June-November and a winter farm share from (I believe) January-March. Using our farm produce like I am a contestant on Chopped, I pick recipes each week based on what will make best use of our ingredients. I'm the head chef; I pick the recipes, delegate tasks, manage time and the order in which things are done, do more fiddly cooking tasks and anything to do with seasoning. Yrin is the sous chef; he chops stuff, takes direction, does the majority of cleaning, and does basically any tedious task that I don't want to do. It works out great for everyone.
For entries about it, I'd like to type up a list of the menu items for the week, a list of the farm produce we got that week, link the recipes I'm using (I tend to modify them heavily, so this might be multiple recipes or a recipe that was more inspiration than something I actually followed), and describe the results. When we actually do this week to week, I write out the menu items on paper and pull up any recipes on my phone, but then I don't make note of modifications that I made to the recipes of how they turned out. So I think it would be fun to keep better track of that and to get to talk about the yummy things we're eating for the week.
-and-
b.) Informal essays about the various media I'm taking in and my feelings about it.
This is the actual real reason I want to pick my DW back up, rather than because of leaving twitter or to talk about cooking, lol. Since I've cut down on my social media use, all of my OPINIONS about books I'm reading and shows I'm watching and games I'm playing have backed up more in my head. I'll talk about them with individual people, but in bits and pieces that aren't necessarily all tied together. So I'd loooove to actually organize those thoughts in one place, in a hopefully-interesting-to-read form.
I'm thinking these would be less reviews and more op-ed kind of pieces. I don't want to do an objective write-up of No Man's Sky as a game. I want to list the four games I checked out from the library and describe what about each of them was annoying to me, specifically, and why I'm probably now going to pour a stupid amount of time into playing procedurally generated space exploration game No Man's Sky. I don't want to review the novel I've just read, I want to tell you about this stupid C-plot and why that made me, specifically, insane. But probably while sounding way too much like I'm falling sideways into actual literary analysis, lol. I think the kinds of things I want to say really might be helpful in the way a review is helpful, in letting you decide whether you do or don't want to try a piece of media. But while being hyper-specific in a way that will primarily just appeal to my friends.
So! That's basically what you can expect from me in the near future. We'll see how well I actually adhere to what's described and how long I manage to keep it up for -- I do better when there's actually stuff on my reading page to get me to spend more time on DW -- but I'm happy to maybe keep this blog better-updated in between exchange sign-ups, lol.
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