Scratch marks

We're halfway through January and I'm yet to post anything here in the way of greeting 2019. Funny how on my other blog, the one that has my real name on it, I burned through my self-imposed quota in less than two weeks. Not that it matters to anyone but myself. And you know what? After expecting to have little activity and making no less than 12 posts in my first month here, skipping this one entirely would barely start balancing things a little.

Still, that's not like me. It's just that over the holidays I've done little in the way of writing, which I aim to make my focus on DreamWidth. Switching tracks did me a lot of good, too. Getting my fill of a whole other hobby will keep my mind off it for a while, not to mention all the problems I pushed out of the way.

Oh, it turns out by now I follow a dozen blogs here. Of them, three or four post link collections with some regularity. This is an important thing to do on a vast, overwhelming internet that's mostly drowning in noise. Maybe I should post some of my own browser bookmarks, too; better than letting them link-rot. And there's a lot of stuff I'd rather keep pseudonymous. Not just for safety reasons.

Human identity is complicated. It grows and shifts; we collect new ones over the years. And nowadays they are increasingly distributed, what with all the memories we have to keep outboard in a world indescribably bigger and more complex than the one our brains evolved in. Some people are amazingly good at putting themselves into different mindsets entirely whenever they like. I can only seem to do it when writing fiction, and even then much of myself (whatever one may call "self") seeps into my characters. Still, having a variety of environments to hang out in helps with that. My blogging has grown considerably in both volume and quality since I started spreading out again more deliberately.

See you around soon, then, hopefully with something more substantial.

So, after 24h spent here, I have a better idea of how things work, and there's even more to like than it's possible to spot from afar:

• Instead of likes or favorites there are memories, that we're expected to tag and label. That encourages thoughtfulness.
• Cut tags have an end, so they can be in the middle of a post and you can have more than one per post.
• People actually know about cut tags and use them liberally for a change.
• Technically-minded people can pop the hood open and do a lot of advanced stuff if they like.
• The entire website is incredibly lightweight. See below, but still, it matters.

More generally, Dreamwidth dares to be different, and that's awesome. You'll say it's because the ancient codebase solidified before modern conventions. All right then. Let's just say everything old is new again and leave it at that.