Daily Update
Sep. 4th, 2024 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrimettPain level - Moderate
Sometimes, in an effort to find more of a community on here, I browse random journals that list similar interests, as one does. But then I get phenomenally intimidated by the fact that a lot of them have hundreds upon hundreds of back-entries, and I'd feel weird about following them based on only a couple of recent entries; I feel like I ought to read so much more of what they talk about before I can justify adding them. But that takes a lot of time, and effort, and then I just get dispirited about it all and wonder if there's a point. Maybe I should just keep writing to myself, first and foremost.
I suppose I miss the blogging days of yore, when I used to have an easy time making friends and building a community because blogging was what we all did. No microblogging on social media, no Youtube or Tiktok or Twitch, just lots of writing and talking and commenting. Most people don't really do that anymore. I supposed it's all just the old fogeys of the Internet who keep up the practice now.
I miss the days of endless fanfic inspiration, of getting deeply into a video game or movie or book and just letting that be my life for a while. Staying up late because why shouldn't I? Being older now, and with limited time and energy reserves, I often feel like I need to budget my time wisely. If I spend time writing fanfic (writing anything, really, but I do miss being involved in fandom sometimes), then that pulls time away from reading. If I let my semi-obsessive nature out and spend 3 months deep-diving into a video game, then that's 3 months of not enjoying horror movies on the weekend, or not making progress on any art projects. Trying to prioritize the few most important things means everything else falls by the wayside.
I guess what it comes down to isn't me missing how the Internet used to be. It's missing how I used to be. When I could do all these things without a problem. If I had the mental and physical space for it, I could probably make videos for Youtube, stream games, make silly Tiktoks, binge-watch TV shows and write what-if fanfics about things that spark my interest, because I also want to do those things too. Blogging is easier, but it's not all I think I'd be capable of, if I weren't bogged down by chronic illness concerns.
Plus blogging like this, purely personal blogging where nobody's really concerned about the concept of Regular Content, means that if I get sick or tired or injured and don't do something on schedule, I don't feel like I'm letting an audience down. There's no attempted career riding on my ramblings here. I've seen people take breaks from content creation and come back to find that they practically have to build up their audience again. Not from scratch, but they didn't stay where they were before taking that break. People grew bored of the lack of content and went elsewhere, found new places to get what they were looking for. And that's fine. There's a lot out there, for lots of people. But it sucks knowing that the many things people say you can do from home, no matter what, and maybe build a career from, aren't things you can really stop doing if that career is what you're aiming for.
The Internet feels both too big and too small some days. I miss when that wasn't the case, too.
Phew, I sure am introspective this week! Maybe I need to talk a long walk and exhaust myself so that I stop being so concerned with the things I can't help.
Sometimes, in an effort to find more of a community on here, I browse random journals that list similar interests, as one does. But then I get phenomenally intimidated by the fact that a lot of them have hundreds upon hundreds of back-entries, and I'd feel weird about following them based on only a couple of recent entries; I feel like I ought to read so much more of what they talk about before I can justify adding them. But that takes a lot of time, and effort, and then I just get dispirited about it all and wonder if there's a point. Maybe I should just keep writing to myself, first and foremost.
I suppose I miss the blogging days of yore, when I used to have an easy time making friends and building a community because blogging was what we all did. No microblogging on social media, no Youtube or Tiktok or Twitch, just lots of writing and talking and commenting. Most people don't really do that anymore. I supposed it's all just the old fogeys of the Internet who keep up the practice now.
I miss the days of endless fanfic inspiration, of getting deeply into a video game or movie or book and just letting that be my life for a while. Staying up late because why shouldn't I? Being older now, and with limited time and energy reserves, I often feel like I need to budget my time wisely. If I spend time writing fanfic (writing anything, really, but I do miss being involved in fandom sometimes), then that pulls time away from reading. If I let my semi-obsessive nature out and spend 3 months deep-diving into a video game, then that's 3 months of not enjoying horror movies on the weekend, or not making progress on any art projects. Trying to prioritize the few most important things means everything else falls by the wayside.
I guess what it comes down to isn't me missing how the Internet used to be. It's missing how I used to be. When I could do all these things without a problem. If I had the mental and physical space for it, I could probably make videos for Youtube, stream games, make silly Tiktoks, binge-watch TV shows and write what-if fanfics about things that spark my interest, because I also want to do those things too. Blogging is easier, but it's not all I think I'd be capable of, if I weren't bogged down by chronic illness concerns.
Plus blogging like this, purely personal blogging where nobody's really concerned about the concept of Regular Content, means that if I get sick or tired or injured and don't do something on schedule, I don't feel like I'm letting an audience down. There's no attempted career riding on my ramblings here. I've seen people take breaks from content creation and come back to find that they practically have to build up their audience again. Not from scratch, but they didn't stay where they were before taking that break. People grew bored of the lack of content and went elsewhere, found new places to get what they were looking for. And that's fine. There's a lot out there, for lots of people. But it sucks knowing that the many things people say you can do from home, no matter what, and maybe build a career from, aren't things you can really stop doing if that career is what you're aiming for.
The Internet feels both too big and too small some days. I miss when that wasn't the case, too.
Phew, I sure am introspective this week! Maybe I need to talk a long walk and exhaust myself so that I stop being so concerned with the things I can't help.
no subject
on 2024-09-05 06:35 am (UTC)I have a lot of nostalgia for the heyday of Livejournal, how many people I met and struck up friendships with, as well as how constant my creative energy felt when I was a teenager and in my early 20s.
Like you, I think a lot of it is really more that I do miss *who I was* at that time... As an adult, working full time, I just don't have the energy and time to spend hours on the things I used to. It's a pretty perpetual theme on my own journal: I want to find opportunities to interact more with communities and be more social and connected online and in fandom... but I also want to write more... but I'm not reading nearly as much as I want... but I also haven't really gotten to play a video game in a long while... but I also want to do other creative things... and spend more time on home projects... but I want to watch some of the series and movies that do have active fandom community and that I think I would enjoy, but that's such a big time commitment...
So lol, I definitely empathize! I don't have a good answer, but it's hard to know there's so much you want to do, and just not enough time in the day to do it.
no subject
on 2024-09-05 10:37 am (UTC)Then again, I don't want to be an immortal chronically ill person. That would suck!
no subject
on 2024-09-05 01:43 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about missing who (I) used to be and how that was reflected in our worlds. LJ was one of the ONLY "social" outlets, unless you had a website (RIP GeoCities). I got into tumblr a few years ago after I started watching Shadow and Bone, but I had also joined a Discord of fans and that provided a LOT of the social energy that LJ would have done back in the day. (Never thought I'd be sitting here moaning the old days like my elders did when I was wee, but there's a lot of things I never thought would happen either. SO.)
Big hugs, and a toast to days gone by.
no subject
on 2024-09-06 10:45 am (UTC)no subject
on 2024-09-05 04:23 pm (UTC)I getcha. For me, I know that my bottleneck is just having things put in front of my eyeballs - following for me is PART OF the quality control step, because folks will show who they are as they continue to post. I figure if I don't follow someone because I haven't fully read up on them, then I could miss out and forget about them totally. If I follow and we end up not being compatible, then I can just unfollow, easy peasy. It's like flipping through the TV channels.
I sympathize with the desire for Ye Olde Good Olde Days of blogging. The diaspora into so many different channels and formats has really made it harder to follow everyone I might find interesting, and the fact that even if I follow them it's not necessarily in a way that allows conversation (like following an RSS feed of some other service I don't have an account on) makes it a different experience.
>I guess what it comes down to isn't me missing how the Internet used to be. It's missing how I used to be. When I could do all these things without a problem.
Oh, THIS^. I don't have the chronic illness aspect to deal with, but still, I feel ya. I look at my to-do list every now and then and go "...how many of these things are actually for me, things I'm doing because I want to and not because I HAVE TO or feel I have to to help/keep in touch with someone else? A lot less than I'd like!"
And re: Regular Content: ugh, I hate the way that algorithmed and short-form social media has shifted expectations. I mean, on platforms like this it doesn't mean as much: you follow someone, and if they disappear for awhile, they just stay on your follow list and pop up when they come back. It was only when not posting might actually make the platform show your post to fewer people that it became this unfun treadmill of "I have to do X, Y times a week, or this is all useless." And that treadmill as a job...I don't know, I know that some people make lots of money on it, but it always seems like either they turn it into a business that they have to hire other people to maintain production in a sustainable way, or they burn out trying to do it all themselves. It's not a system that one person can maintain, really.
Anyway...hi! :waves:
no subject
on 2024-09-06 10:52 am (UTC)That said, I'm the one trying to make regular daily posts on this blog a thing, so maybe I don't have much room to judge on that front. *sheepish*
no subject
on 2024-09-06 04:29 pm (UTC)But if I'm not paying? If someone is giving me something FOR FREE? I don't have expectations of them. If for some reason the platform makes it annoying to have a lot of slow/dead accounts on your follow list, then I might clean up if someone doesn't post for like a year or something, but honestly I tend not to even notice on my socials, because it's all a chronological feed anyway, and here and on Pillowfort I'm mostly keeping up with it. In fact, since I DO want to keep up with it and don't want that "keeping up" to take hours and hours each day, I sometimes AVOID high-posting journals, unless they manage to be entertaining all the time. It's the quality vs. quantity thing.
The people who demand that folks provide things every day, I usually am like, "...how are you keeping track of that? Why are you noticing? Why bother spending your time micromanaging your social feed to that degree? If you're looking for good content, who cares if it's coming every day or every week or every month?" Micromanaging who you follow seems like an inordinate amount of time spent exerting control that doesn't really mean anything - dump people into your follow list and so long as your follow list is entertaining you...why spend time messing with it?
Now, the question of "how much interaction do I want?" is more important, I think. Folks posting as a means of interaction, of course may want to post more, if they find that gets them the desired level of interaction. That makes sense. But trying to do so much content that you're not having fun anymore, just to serve a specific possible slice of audience is just setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.