Plant your hope with good seeds

I'm so out of practice writing things! So I'm going to challenge myself to write a teeny little thing for each of my summer mini-challenge thing, even though it's no longer summer. Oh well!

Speaking of which, I'm looking for a new layout for my DW and probably my LJ as well. It's officially fall, guys! OFFICIALLY FALL. It's still hot here which kinda of sucks but you know, whatever. It's fine. It'll get cooler eventually. I hope we have an actual winter this year.

I spent sometime this morning logged into my old email address and refamiliarizing myself with my old fandom spaces (from about 2002-2005) and being nostalgic. Which is something I feel the need to do from time to time, because fandom was awesome when it was the Most Important Thing going on in my life. I know I can never really go back to that (and I'm unsure whether I would even want to) but it's nice to read about. What a little dweeb I was, back then. <3

A friend of mine challenged me to draw myself as a witch so I took about a minute to sketch this out:


SPEAKING OF WHICH, the same friend and I are going to be participating in Inktober this year! GOOD LUCK TO US BOTH. Is anyone else going to be participating? It's a lot of fun and since I'm much more practiced with watercolors and wet media, I think I'll be able to include bottled ink this year, instead of just pens. I'm pretty excited. :3 I'm not going to work from a list of Halloween prompts this time (let's face it, the best way to draw every day is by including fandom stuff, at least for me) so I think I'll just work on whatever I want and let the ideas flow. |D

I'll try to remember to post here, it's just so much easier to post to tumblr and instagram from my phone. ;;;; Damn it, DW, get with the times!

Also, because I don't want to create a new post, yesterday was my Dad's birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad! I love you and miss you so much. <3

imperion and I were being nostalgic last night. Well, okay, I'm perpetually nostalgic and haunt the Wayback Machine like a late 90s/early 2000s ghost, looking up old pages and crying over What Use to Be. It's kind of pathetic, frankly, but that's besides the point. Sparky and I were being nostalgic and sharing our favorite old sites. I was delighted to find that one site that I adored, Bishonenink, was reopened as Bishink! But so many fanfic archives that I used go to are gone. And so many personal webpages, oh man.

I mean, it makes sense! People moved on, the internet grew up. Automated archives make things easier for everyone. Social media grew and fandom seems to have mostly flocked to that. I have a twitter account (rarely used) and a tumblr account (very often used!). I still have a journal (at dreamwidth!). It's not like I've refused to get with the times. But for all the social media that's used, fandom seems so much more fractured that it used to. Even with individual sites and no twitter/skype/what have you, it felt so much more like a community of nerds back then. People seemed much more willing to email each other and sign guestbooks and actually talk about things. Now it feels more like we're just...a number, something to be collected, to boost friend counts and subscriber lists. Which, I mean, sure LJ was very much the same, but with commenting and threads, at least conversations could be had. Now that fandom is primarily on tumblr, things are so...distant. And that seems to work for a lot of people (and I'm genuinely glad for those people!) but I feel pretty adrift.

But anyway. Fandom is different and I am not. And I think that might be the problem, ultimately. As I near 30 (less than a month!) I think maybe my problem is that I'm still longing for the way things used to be instead of dealing with the fact that fandom may not be the thing for me anymore. Maybe I should just. Stop trying so much with it. Give up the ghost. Still watch and read and play - and hell, even write and draw - the things that I want, but give up expecting to interact with fandom. Just focus on the things I want to do instead of trying so hard to be a part of something I'm not sure I want to be a part of anymore.

Another, somewhat shameful problem I have, is that I visit these old websites and I see what the old webmasters are up to and...they've all grown up and moved on. Which is...dumb to be surprised about???? Not everyone wants to be stuck in the early 2000s, Nan, people want to create new projects and have careers and have things happening in their lives. And I know, logically, that I am also an adult and also have things going on in my life. I have a ridiculously awesome painting series happening! I just flew out to Texas to spend time with family! I have an awesome support system of friends - both online and off, if you're reading this, you're great! - who are interested in me and what I'm doing and supportive and excited for me!

But I don't know. I don't know what my problem is. Fandom has always been so important to me. It feels weird that it's not so important anymore. I think I want it to be important because it always has been, but it might actually be a crutch that I'm using that's actively holding me back. Maybe? I don't know.

I think I need to just fold myself into a new project. Maybe that's what I'll do. Maybe that's my actual problem. Feeling adrift creatively, rather than pouring my efforts into a central thing.

Today my workload is: working at regular job from 9am-6pm, going to my boss's house and taking care of her pets (she's out of town), and then going to my sister's shop and deep cleaning everything. It's a long day. I also have to work tomorrow. (｡•́︿•̀｡)

But! I have Friday off, so that's a thing right? Right. Happy thoughts. ;3;

Still thinking about participating in spook_me. I want to write a haunted house story, set in a cold wilderness! Thanks for the inspiration, Until Dawn. XD I just need a fandom that would work well for that. I could possibly make MCU work and have Steve, Natasha, and Sam looking for Bucky and find themselves trapped in a house for a night or so. :\a idk though. Writing a bunch of teenagers would probably be easier for that kind of setting.