Finding friends and things to do on Dreamwidth

I made a different post about this at an earlier time, but honestly, I think I can do better now.

Anyway! One of the things that sucks about moving social media and/or blogging platforms is not knowing if there will be enough activity for you at the new place. Be it from old friends, new friends, or interactive communities, there's a lot of ways you could find activity at a new place, but finding at least two of those categories can be tricky in itself.

Luckily, Dreamwidth has a few shortcuts for you already!

Adding new people to your reading page and finding new friends:

Getting started on Dreamwidth:

Things to do on Dreamwidth:

Fandom things to do on Dreamwidth:

Anything else?

And that's all I can think of at the moment! This should help you get started at least, and help fill out your reading page a bit.

If you still have questions or want to do more, you can check out my Dreamwidth 101 tag; I'm also happy to at least try to answer any questions myself. I'm pretty sure I've got a few "Dreamwidth for Tumblrites" guides linked in my Dreamwidth 101 section, if nothing else...

Very annoy when this happens

Where’s that post that says how tumblr is able to identify experiences that we don’t bring up, but are quite universal

Every time I read the “Toph is a bad example of a disabled character because of her bending.” I want to Physically leap over a table and then flip that table because NO!!!! You do not understand!!!

Toph’s bending is assistive technology!!! It’s a medical aid!!!!!

Toph’s bending allows her to full access her world the same way my mobility aids do, or my medication does. There are times when due to inaccessible surroundings that her aids are rendered harder or impossible to use. Not unlike my own greatest enemy, stairs. However, when she is fully accommodated she’s able to be just as successful and thrive just as much as an able-bodied person albeit differently. Which is the ultimate goal of assistive technology.

Toph’s parents also tried to limit her bending because they saw her as dependent upon them, which is a great example of how society denies disabled people access to assistive technology.

A lot of people have a weird (ableist) assumption that if you show a disabled person being in any way competent, like Edward Elric, Solid Snake, Bentley, Darth Vader or Hiccup, it somehow negates the fact they’re actually disabled

Toph and Edward Elric really work for me because I never once felt like the writers forgot they were disabled. Edward is constantly repairing his prosthetics. Toph can’t read or use her aids on certain surfaces. And these aren’t things that show up once and then never again - they’re constantly referenced through the shows.

Particularly love the scene atop the airship where Toph is rendered thoroughly blind by her standing on an unbendable surface, and Sokka offers her his arm for stability. 

It’s so subtle but illustrates how her friends support Toph without treating her as helpless.

On April 11, 1912, the RMS Carpathia sets sail from New York City, bound for Gibraltar and other Mediterranean ports. On board are 743 passengers, about 240 crew members, and one stowaway demon.

On the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, carrying approximately 1,317 passengers, 885 crew members, and one trouble magnet of an angel, hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Cue history’s most daring, famous, and perilous nautical rescue in maritime history.

Words: 12,232

Status: Complete

Rating: Teen and Up Audiences

@canolacrush

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.

I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.

I honestly hadn't stopped to think about this until I saw this post... I used to think people would get annoyed if they were notified everytime someone posted a comment on their art. I never thought about it being like fanfiction and that they might appreciate comments. Frick, that means I'm part of the problem on here. Thats gotta change.

Every tag, every comment, every reblog with some kind of reaction/opinion or even just one word. All of these things are precious to creators!

I spent countless hours reading and rereading tags full of love people left under my art. All the people i could gift a laugh to or even inspire with something I made mean more to me then you could ever know.

It's what makes me proud of my art!

And to think that you could have enjoyed my art in silence and I would have never known.

A very special shout out to the person who tagged "these mcgriddles make me want to shit so bad" on fanart in 2013 I think about you once a day

I love every comment I get on my art! It's so nice to see people interacting with what has taken me hours to make. Even if your comment takes a couple seconds to write out it makes my day that you took time to do it :)

op: ktmly. humans are such beautiful creatures

the house i grew up in was a little bit of a fixer upper. for the first 19 years, my dad just sort of slowly fixed it, but pretty early on in college, he came into a large amount of cash and decided to just do the whole thing at once. so he rented a different house for like, 2 months that was just a block down from us, and then got a bunch of contractors to fix original house ASAP. it was kind of crazy, but it compressed many years of work into like, three months.

the sitting in a new house for three months was actually pretty fun. and i shouldnt really complain at all (staying at home while in college is a sweet deal)

but.

but. my parents are fairly hard of hearing, and their bedroom in the old house was in the furthest possible annex from everyone else. wheras in the rental it was just in the middle of the house. so without going into details, i was extremely aware that my parents were having sex like, eight times a day. my dad had just retired and i guess they were celebrating, which is great i guess, having parents that really like each other is way better than the alternative, but also, it did make me envy their deafness. i kept headphones on for so long that year i got literal ear calluses.

at the same time, the house my buddy from the shoe incident grew up in flooded. turbo flooded. they burst like, two pipes at once and the damage was so severe they had to redo all the flooring and all the drywall. his family actually had homeowners insurance, which is either incredible or suspicious for a family that used the drained pool in their backyard to store rusty scrap metal. so insurance was handling the work, but in the meantime, they were crammed into a very small hotel room space. we did the math on it then, it averaged about 80 square feet a person.

so one day i got home, and i was chilling, and then six rolled around, and apparently six o'clock was sex o'clock because my parents decided to flex their cardio. i grabbed my headphones and prayed that god would do for me what he did for beethoven, but that failed to work, and then seven rolled around and my parents were still at it, which again, very impressive, but was pushing me to swap out judas for mozart in those prayers. there's a definitive point where you stop praying to be deaf and instead pray that god could take you to a nice field and pop you like a gore-balloon.

i was about five minutes away from that point when my friend called me and basically said i have been stuck in a 500 square foot space with 6 people and i didn't have many marbles to start but what few i had are gone. please. if we are friends, if we were ever friends, take me out of here just for a moment.

and i was still pretty mad at him, but i had pity on the poor guy. also helped that i was desperate to leave the house. so i drove the chickenshitmobile to the hotel and i picked him up, and then we did our normal hangout activity, which was go to food city and buy produce. his normal house was, on a good day, nasty, and his backyard was, as i stated before, mostly used to store mosquito larvae and rusty metal, so what we'd always done before was just walk to the grocery store a half block away and leer at vegetables.

so we did that and it was like old times again. they had some radishes that were expired, so i could buy like, literally an entire grocery bag of them for about $5. so i did. i really like radishes. he got a coconut because he liked fruit and beating things with hammers.

which probably would've been great except we didn't have a hammer, so instead we spent about 30 minutes stomping itike it owed us money. when it finally cracked we cheered like we just got the winning touchball at the superdome and then he ate some of the flesh, and i ate some of the radishes, and we admired the black, starless sky of the city before i took him back to his hotel room.

and then we got pulled over.

i forgot to turn my lights on because the street all around the food city was ludicrously well lit. so it went from being pretty bright, to pretty bright and flashy, then i pulled into a parking lot and a cop came to ask us for IDs which is where everything went to shit:

i’d forgotten my license at home. 

the cop was was actually kind of chill about it - he said he could get by with just an address. except i did not know my address. i hadn't memorized the new one yet. so i told the cop, my house is getting remodeled, i don't know my address right now. and then he went to my friend, and my friend said the exact same thing. house getting remodeled, staying somewhere else, no address, sowwwwwwy.

now the cop genuinely didn't know what to do. he went back to his car, and i was stressed that i was about to get into HUGE trouble so i started eating the radishes and my buddy started eating more of his coconut, and we actually managed to eat like a quarter of both before the cop came back. we ate enough produce that he could smell something weird in the air, and he asked what the smell was, and i said radishes, and my buddy said coconut, and the cop said which, and then we produced a large bag of droopy radishes and an absolutely brutalized coconut, and the cop was just like

so my buddy tried explaining how he was sharing a 500 square foot apartment with 6 people and wanted a fruit he could fight with power tools, and i tried explaining how i'd actually tried buying my parents like, board games and puzzles and stuff but nothing worked - the only thing my parents seemed to like doing right now was each other, and we both went on long enough and pathetically enough that the cop eventually went:

ok. stop.

and we stopped.

and he said do you know why i pulled you over?

and i said, because of my headlights, and my friend (who is hispanic) and the cop both looked at me like like i was the dumbest person in the entire world. and then the cop said no. that's why i'm allowed to pull you over. i checked your car because this neighborhood has a terrible sex trafficking problem, and i pull over every car i can to make sure no one is buying or selling sex. and you two are obviously doing neither. now i could give you, like, four tickets right now, but that would do nothing to make this area safer, so just turn your lights on, go home, drive safe, and try to be less stupid in the future.

and i said okay but i was thinking, you know, damn, this is just how i live man, i don't have a hidden third gear i can shift into. people can't just get smarter because it would be convenient. it's always convenient to be smart. i am literally trying my best.

but i didn't say anything because i was, slowly, learning how to filter what i said. instead i nodded and the cop left then i dropped my buddy off, and the last thing he said was said he owed me for responding to his SOS. I said he owed me for a lot of things, and he agreed that was true. then i drove home with my lights on, 5 under the speed limit, and arrived to a peaceful quiet home. I could’ve wept with relief but instead I went to bed.

the relief was short lived. i was woken up at 6 am by my parents. i swore, and then i prayed, and when i did not explode, i swore again. then i got up to make breakfast before my first class.

Since it's watermelon season!

My grandfather used to grow watermelons, among other things, and he told me about most of this, especially the orange spot. Those are the absolute best!

My most popular post ever is getting likes again, so that means it's getting close to watermelon season!!

[ID:

*screencap of a tiktok by @sarahinyellow featuring a lightskinned person sitting at their laptop with a bag of potato chips and a bottle of diet coke*

“diet culture will demonize any food that isn’t “clean” but EVERY food can have a benefit for you

Diet Coke is somehow the only thing that stops my migraines, and it reminds me of my best friend. Cape Cod potato chips are my go to salty snack and I live 10 minutes from the factory, so they make me feel cool.

Food is more than fuel. It’s memories and satisfaction and tradition and home and culture.

There’s nothing evil about that.”

END ID]

this was one of the number one things my eating disorder therapist stressed the most and it’s helped drastically. this is so important.

Not a Fairy Tale Kiss, Chapter 65

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Avenger!OFC (2nd person POV)

This Chapter word count: 2.1k ~ Total Story count: 157k ~ This chapter is rated Mature. Chapters will be posted every Tuesday and Friday until the story is complete.

Summary: When you and Bucky are both accidentally hit with sex pollen while on a mission, you're determined to keep your relationship status at friendship, even if you’d like it to be more. Even if you think he feels the same. Even if you accidentally end up pregnant. Even if it kills you.

(Spoiler Alert: it might actually kill you. Good luck with that.)

Trigger warnings include discussion of abortion, failed pregnancies, deaths of both mom & baby--not the MC! Full warnings on AO3. Happy ending is guaranteed, despite warnings. Please see AO3 for full A/N and tags.

Chapter Summary: In which you are discovered, and a plan is made.

You do love it when Steve curses. Though maybe not at you. Find out what happens after he's done cursing on AO3.

"It’ll be fine" is what people say before everything is definitely not fine

Right up there with "what could possibly go wrong?" 😉

Thanks for the reblog! ❤️❤️❤️

The Golden Girls – 5.26: The Presidents Coming! The Presidents Coming!

"You're a human being and you're doing your best. Steve gave people something to believe in, but you... you give them something to aspire to."

When the health food store unionized, something wild happened that I thought was just a goofy one-off, but makes more sense now.

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

There were enough of us to be like "Absolutely the fuck not," and put a stop to it, but I was absolutely flummoxed that people involved in a union would say that out loud. Working with more leftists now, it makes sense.

I think it was coming from a background that viewed labor as necessary to accomplish anything, but advocated for the equitable distribution of the gains made by labor... and then being thrown in with people who just thought labor was icky.

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

But I want to eat off of clean plates. So somebody is going to have to touch/clean those plates. And I respect that person and want them to be able to afford to live.

Those people sound like a guy I'd make up to be mad at.

I mean, that job definitely had a Truman Show vibe. If they hadn't been in-person interactions, I'd think I was getting trolled.

Just to put a bow on it:

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

When I explained holiday scheduling (time off requests granted in order of seniority, shifts assigned in reverse order of seniority). Someone was angry and said that time off requests potentially being denied "wasn't in the spirit of the union". When I pointed out that our departments made like 30% of our annual revenue between Thanksgiving and New Years and that required production staff to be working, they said that we just needed to create a class of positions ineligible for the bargaining unit that wouldn't be able to request time off. (Which again, most of us figured we'd just rotate holidays or something, but assumed that some holiday production was mandatory.)

I was on leftie tiktok (as a creator) for a bit and I saw this attitude there as well. I specifically remember one argument around cleaners where someone said that employing a cleaner was, like, ethically bad, and that "after the revolution" we wouldn't have cleaners.

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

I think people on the left thinking about forms of labour can sometimes be worse than people on the right. People who have taken these positions generally just conceptualise them as something you need to do to get by, and there are particular employers where these positions are degrading but in general the jobs themselves aren't.

Yeah, that really sums it up. There's stuff that needs to get done, so I'll never be of the opinion that it's degrading work. I worked in kitchens for a long time, and every other position is reliant on having clean dishes, so nobody can really be "above" washing dishes. The shitty thing about washing dishes or busing tables is how people treat the people doing it. The work itself is vital.

And some of those jobs are like, sure, you can throw almost any warm body at it and get it done adequately, but you still run into people where you're like "Holy shit, you're good at this."

People doing a job most people don't want to do should be paid MORE in order to get people to do it. That's how it would work if we weren't mired in a schema assuming that less-frequently-desired jobs are the province of people who "can't do better" and "deserve" poverty because they have less value as people.

“my ship kissed!” “my ship held hands!!!” okay. well. my ship had holes in it and was doomed to sink from the very moment of its departure. my ship flipped and drowned all the passengers. my ship had a sail that only faced windward. my ship’s home had always been at the bottom of the ocean floor. my ship is stained with barnacles and prone to heavy winds. my ship’s dock isnt waiting for it to return. And they still didnt fuck even once

#my ship might not be canon but god the fics are Pulitzer worthy#your ship might be canon but the writing won a razzy#we are not the same @anonymississippi you cannot leave that in the tags

Not a Fairy Tale Kiss, Chapter 65

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Avenger!OFC (2nd person POV)

This Chapter word count: 2.1k ~ Total Story count: 157k ~ This chapter is rated Mature. Chapters will be posted every Tuesday and Friday until the story is complete.

Summary: When you and Bucky are both accidentally hit with sex pollen while on a mission, you're determined to keep your relationship status at friendship, even if you’d like it to be more. Even if you think he feels the same. Even if you accidentally end up pregnant. Even if it kills you.

(Spoiler Alert: it might actually kill you. Good luck with that.)

Trigger warnings include discussion of abortion, failed pregnancies, deaths of both mom & baby--not the MC! Full warnings on AO3. Happy ending is guaranteed, despite warnings. Please see AO3 for full A/N and tags.

Chapter Summary: In which you are discovered, and a plan is made.

You do love it when Steve curses. Though maybe not at you. Find out what happens after he's done cursing on AO3.