c'est what

* So I ran away to northern New South Wales for my birthday, and it was p. much great. I skipped out on Melbourne's heatwave and spent a week drinking gin and playing 500 with my mum, kicking through rainforest creeks in the rain, watching old episodes of Leverage, attacking my fingers with a guitar and lounging about in the sunshine on my dad's yacht (this is such a misleading statement: it is a yacht and it's awesome, but he built it himself over a span of about 3 decades and is now spending more than he can afford to moor it, but it's so stupidly exciting to finally see it out on the water with the sail unfurled). Check it out, I am no longer a twenty-something. I am ... mostly cool with this.

(I spent the weeks leading up to my birthday thinking about my early twenties, and realising that I am so glad I'm not there anymore. I had a lot of fun, it was so much better than being a teenager, it was amazing really, but fuck I made everything so much harder than it needed to be. Everything. Everything was harder than it needed to be, all of these imaginary neuroses and insecurities and just working out how the fuck to do things. It's so much easier to be me now. And I'm so much less of a tool.)

* I haven't played guitar regularly since my early twenties. I picked it up again about a week and a half ago and promptly spent fifteen minutes tuning it on the wrong fret, welp. Then I spent the next five days tormenting my poor callus-less fingertips with unforgiving steel strings, and now I have calluses again. Thin ones, but it's amazing, last night I played until I felt like doing something else rather than until my fingers hurt too much to use. It still hurt a little to type afterwards, I suffer for my art etc, where art = sitting against the headboard of my bed strumming Leonard Cohen songs with a little hiccup pause before every F. I really hope I keep up with it, it would be great to be more than "a bit of". A bit of a singer, a bit of a guitarist, a bit of a keyboard player, a bit of a songwriter. I don't aspire to be more than a social musician, but I'd like to be that.

* I do want to write songs again. I used to do it all the time, and ... I think I've forgotten how? That seems like such a strange thing to forget.

* Fannishly my main activity seems to be linking, lately. Reccing at fancake or updating hellsyeshomestuckfemslash and kudostest. The hellsyes tumblr is a bi-weekly newsletter of new Homestuck f/f fic and I honestly have so little idea why I'm doing it. It's picked up 50 or 60 followers (... hi gloss? ♥) since I started it so I guess people are finding it useful, but I'm not totally sure why? Almost all Homestuck fic is posted at AO3 or occasionally on the kink meme (or on tumblr, but there's no good way to track new tumblr fic, so I don't bother), so it's really just an AO3 scrape, which anybody could get for themselves by going there and having a look, every few days.

I started it mostly because ... well, I have low impulse control when it comes to starting side blogs, and because I was thinking again about how incredibly un-useful I find femslash_today. It should be such a great resource, but the fact that they don't include summaries - and I understand that space would be an issue - makes it impossible to tell if something is worth clicking through to. I'm not going to click through to 46 stories every day**, in case there's something cool in a fandom I don't follow. So I thought, with a single fandom, even a prolific and femslash-friendly one like Homestuck, you could include summaries and content tags and it wouldn't be very much work to keep up at all. Which it isn't, honestly, but 85% of everything is terrible and it's killing me to meticulously archive titles and summaries with grammatical errors and horrible punctuation decisions and gratuitous fourteen-year-old angst, a little bit. I've been trying to calculate when is too soon to advertise for a new mod to take it over basically since the day after I set it up.

** Wow, I just checked the comm for the first time in a while, and their daily lists have shrunk so much. What happened there?

The kudostest pinboard is much cooler, in my opinion, but also apparently massively less appealing to people who aren't me? In that it has exactly three followers, one of whom is blottingtheink. I actually started it on tumblr as another roundup newsletter, but it picked up no followers at all no matter how I tagged it, so I moved it to pinboard where I could tell myself that at least it might be useful in the future, as an archive or for stats.

It's basically a skim of all f/f fic posted to AO3 (in all fandoms) that picks up about a 10% or above ratio of kudoses to hits in the first few days. It's not any kind of absolute quality test - some fandoms are much more kudos-happy than others, and some fandoms are so small you can't get any kind of data at all in the first few days, and people are much more likely to kudos a drabble than a novella, and I still haven't worked out a good formula for multi-chapter works, and etc but all the same, kudos/hitcount is the best objective quality test we have available. And if you're into femslash you pretty much have to be multi-fannish, at least if you only want to read good fic. So it feels like a potentially cool resource? Idk, I'm still evaluating.

* I am writing a little. I have I guess about 3000 words of 1D high school clichefic (oh noes drunken kissing at a party does it ~mean anything) and probably about the same of John/Karkat Hogwarts clichefic (oh noes potions mishap now they can't let go of each other). Plus various other bits and pieces. I had a vague plan to write something for Femslash February, but I couldn't get excited enough about any of my ideas. It would be cool to not work on tiny little ficlets, in any case; I haven't posted longer fic in a frighteningly long time. Homestuck doesn't seem to inspire length in me, only eternally remixed character interactions in bite-sized pieces.