summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2019-01-29 10:17 pm
summercomfort) wrote2019-01-29 10:17 pm
(no subject)
Hoosband's been out of town since Friday, and it's been ... pretty tiring. I mean, Rutabaga's a good kid, and bedtime isn't actually that bad. It's just that by this morning's "Rutabaga dawdles while I panic about getting to work on time", it's been 5 days. Plus I miss the human interaction with Hoosband after I put her to bed. I'm really looking forward to him getting home tomorrow night! (His flight got canceled so he had to reschedule to an airport that's 2 hours away. :/)
Yesterday was a coworker's birthday and there was a celebration that I didn't know about, which I feel like I should have? He and I started together but then for some reason he decided to stop talking to me? Maybe I offended him in some way? It's so frustrating at work when everyone else around me seems to be going to the same out-of-school event and I only ever hear about it while they talk about it nearby. I know it's because I'm not on the cool people groupchat, but: frustrating nonetheless.
And there's this expectation to know everyone's spouse's names??? and I'm like "I grew up in a culture where knowing the relationship is the important thing, plus I'm name blind anyway."
And then today a kid in Advisory was like "I think we should be more sensitive when talking about religions in history class" and I'm like "well, we're doing it from the historical perspective, and I didn't see anyone complaining when we talked about Confucianism or Daoism" and they're like "Well those are Philosophies" and I'm like "I'm approaching Christianity and Judaism that way, too. I'm not touching doctrinal belief." And they're like "but it's still different".
And it just made me really frustrated because .... I'm at a school where you call teachers by their first names -- which, if I consider Confucianism to be my religion, would be against my religion. And then I went downstairs to get food at the cafeteria and today it was a crappy attempt at chow mein, so I go to the salad bar, and I was like ... "no, I can't eat the same salad for the 200th time." Having to figure out which raw vegetables will fulfill my veggie quota is always the hardest part of work lunch.
I think the tl;dr of this is that the fact of "I'm not part of the mainstream culture" just hit me particularly badly in the last two days. (Plus I read a podcast transcript that was basically "Twitter is the place for fandom, DW is not worth the effort", and the example they point to for DW is not worth the effort is the reblog kerfluffle, which ... look, I was part of the thing and I'm still here. I want to be here. Please don't use me as an example of why people shouldn't migrate here.)
I think some of my frustration and discombobulation has to do with the fact that my current fandom interaction/activities is very different from the established patterns of the last 2 years, so it's not fulfilling the same needs. One of those square peg round hole situations.
I need to write a rec for someone, so no time to do a more thorough reflection right now, but:
Before Nov 2018, I'd:
- check the trashmeme every day to satisfy my fic reading desires
- check tumblr for ~5 minutes whenever I want a dose of that tumblr exuberance
- be on a few slow slacks that kept me updated on stuff like trailer releases
- do some mod-related work about once a week -- mostly because organizing spreadsheets gives a great sense of achievement
- draw a lot
Now I:
- check my DW reading page every day
--- this generates a bunch of open tabs, half of which are articles and the other half are fics
--- this also generates a desire to write meta and serious posts
- the slow slacks have gotten slower, while the discords have picked up. There isn't really a happy medium for me of chatroom style interaction
- I don't check tumblr because I'm still bitter about them deleting my entire account. (but the other night I went there and I laughed more in 5 minutes of scrolling than I did all week, so... maybe I should add a few tumblr feeds?? I tried twitter but it's too much?????)
- just started going to hubzilla yesterday???
- stopped visiting trashmeme -- I don't know why????
- I haven't drawn or done mod work in more than a week. Once again, I don't know why?????
Like, obviously I need to consolidate, but in which direction?
Yesterday was a coworker's birthday and there was a celebration that I didn't know about, which I feel like I should have? He and I started together but then for some reason he decided to stop talking to me? Maybe I offended him in some way? It's so frustrating at work when everyone else around me seems to be going to the same out-of-school event and I only ever hear about it while they talk about it nearby. I know it's because I'm not on the cool people groupchat, but: frustrating nonetheless.
And there's this expectation to know everyone's spouse's names??? and I'm like "I grew up in a culture where knowing the relationship is the important thing, plus I'm name blind anyway."
And then today a kid in Advisory was like "I think we should be more sensitive when talking about religions in history class" and I'm like "well, we're doing it from the historical perspective, and I didn't see anyone complaining when we talked about Confucianism or Daoism" and they're like "Well those are Philosophies" and I'm like "I'm approaching Christianity and Judaism that way, too. I'm not touching doctrinal belief." And they're like "but it's still different".
And it just made me really frustrated because .... I'm at a school where you call teachers by their first names -- which, if I consider Confucianism to be my religion, would be against my religion. And then I went downstairs to get food at the cafeteria and today it was a crappy attempt at chow mein, so I go to the salad bar, and I was like ... "no, I can't eat the same salad for the 200th time." Having to figure out which raw vegetables will fulfill my veggie quota is always the hardest part of work lunch.
I think the tl;dr of this is that the fact of "I'm not part of the mainstream culture" just hit me particularly badly in the last two days. (Plus I read a podcast transcript that was basically "Twitter is the place for fandom, DW is not worth the effort", and the example they point to for DW is not worth the effort is the reblog kerfluffle, which ... look, I was part of the thing and I'm still here. I want to be here. Please don't use me as an example of why people shouldn't migrate here.)
I think some of my frustration and discombobulation has to do with the fact that my current fandom interaction/activities is very different from the established patterns of the last 2 years, so it's not fulfilling the same needs. One of those square peg round hole situations.
I need to write a rec for someone, so no time to do a more thorough reflection right now, but:
Before Nov 2018, I'd:
- check the trashmeme every day to satisfy my fic reading desires
- check tumblr for ~5 minutes whenever I want a dose of that tumblr exuberance
- be on a few slow slacks that kept me updated on stuff like trailer releases
- do some mod-related work about once a week -- mostly because organizing spreadsheets gives a great sense of achievement
- draw a lot
Now I:
- check my DW reading page every day
--- this generates a bunch of open tabs, half of which are articles and the other half are fics
--- this also generates a desire to write meta and serious posts
- the slow slacks have gotten slower, while the discords have picked up. There isn't really a happy medium for me of chatroom style interaction
- I don't check tumblr because I'm still bitter about them deleting my entire account. (but the other night I went there and I laughed more in 5 minutes of scrolling than I did all week, so... maybe I should add a few tumblr feeds?? I tried twitter but it's too much?????)
- just started going to hubzilla yesterday???
- stopped visiting trashmeme -- I don't know why????
- I haven't drawn or done mod work in more than a week. Once again, I don't know why?????
Like, obviously I need to consolidate, but in which direction?
no subject
I dislike Twitter for many reasons, namely that the problems on tumblr (the porn bits, the neo nazis, the MRAs, the misogyny, homophobia, transphobia etc) are even MORE concentrated on Twitter. I've already experienced those on 'real life' Twitter and I don't even want to imagine how awful those would be in a relatively anonymous fandom space.
As for the reblogging issue, I love the idea of coding in a thumbnail with a link to the art, or coding links in. Plus you learn a bit of coding... Nothing wrong with that. It's not as easy but I think that extra step also makes it harder to steal art or accidentally reblog from someone who reposted rather than the original source. As an academic I'm a big fan of citing your sources. Sure, maybe this method doesn't move as fast and you don't get as much quick exposure as on Twitter but.. I'd rather know people put in some effort, and actually checked for the (hopefully) originally source, instead of pushing a button and forgetting about it.
I've adjusted fairly well to Discord but it can get overwhelming so at this point I'm just not backreading if there are too many unread messages. I love Slack as a workspace, but the one I'm in is not super supportive or active (and kind of cliquey) so I've dropped off of that one too...i check tumblr occasionally still but it's a dead space. So yeah...I don't have the answer, I do hope more people come into DW because the content is richer and I'll probably just hang out on discord for the time being.
I found that being offline from the social fandom spaces and concentrating on my writing (and that HTP art) actually helped me a lot.
no subject