mistressofmuses | Welcome to my journal!

Hello!

My journal is primarily a personal one, posting about the various things that interest me, as well as the things that happen in daily life.

I live in Colorado with my partner, Alex (whom I met on Livejournal, originally!)

I try to frequently share pictures when I've gone on hikes or other fun places. The doing things tag is probably the most comprehensive tag for these posts, but hiking will narrow it down to just hikes, and pictures will broaden it to anything that felt pic-worthy, even if it was just a quick walk in the neighborhood, or a garden, or a pet being cute.

I do frequently share pictures of or things about my pets. Currently I have two: Belladonna, a three year old pitbull; and Summer "Berry Mad" Refresher, a young Woodhouse's toad. Cyanide, our elderly pitbull, sadly passed away in June of this year.

I also post about writing fairly often, which is mostly lumped under the writing tag. I have a post here collecting summaries and links to all the fics I have shared.

I'm pretty firmly in the "hobby" writing camp; it isn't something I do professionally, nor am I likely to try to any time soon. I write a lot of fanfiction, but am trying to start devoting more time and energy to my original works as well.

Fandom-wise, I've nearly exclusively written Kingdom Hearts AUs focused on the "Destiny Trio"/SoRiKai OT3. (I haven't played a Kingdom Hearts game in more than a decade, and don't have the systems required for any of the newer ones, but I imprinted on the characters and just never stopped liking them!) I also wrote one Silent Hill fic that I'm quite proud of. Those two fandoms are a bit of a 180 from each other, I realize, haha.

Other fandoms that I'm more of a lurker in include: Good Omens, Zero Escape (999/Virtue's Last Reward/Zero Time Dilemma), Leverage [need to watch Redemption...], Captive Prince, Newsflesh, other Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant series, Yuri on Ice, Murderbot, Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm sure plenty of others I'm just failing to remember at the moment.

(I'm still sort of questing for my next fandom obsession, ha.)

I also watch a lot of horror movies. (Good horror is great, and bad horror is hilarious, so it tends to be win/win to pick some mediocre streaming offerings.) I used to have a blog reviewing horror movies, but despite years of intentions, I've never gotten back around to continuing that. Sporadically I share some thoughts!

I do still miss the heyday of Livejournal as a primary form of social media, and I know that Dreamwidth probably won't ever have that kind of critical mass... but I love that Dreamwidth is here, and I love that there are still people to connect with on a "slower" and more personal, long-form site.

Feel free to add me or comment below if you want to say hi! I'm always happy to find new friends.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello from another new user! I can't compare this place with Livejournal as I've never used it, but I started off my fannish social media experience on Mastodon, which has a similar "personal" feel, albeit faster-paced than here. There's something special about that kind of online connection!

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your fandoms, as my main ones are Sonic the Hedgehog, Transformers, and various webtoons, but I can relate to your experience of not having played a game as much, but loving the characters to the point that you still consider yourself part of the fandom.

Frankly, as fun as Sonic games are, I'm starting to prefer taking things slow and spending most of my spare time reinterpreting and reading others' takes on canon. I sometimes feel guilty for this, so it's promising to find someone who sees this transformation in a positive light.⭐

Just curious, but what brought you here? I know this site is more appealing for Livejournal users due to sharing the same code, but all the same this place is under the radar, and it appears rather inactive on a surface level.

Hi there!

I've actually been on Dreamwidth for many years at this point (this is just a new intro post, since the old one was a few years old!) My time here overlapped with my time on Livejournal for a while. Livejournal unfortunately went through a few big changes, with the company being sold and the general quality of the service declining. Dreamwidth was created using Livejournal's old code by someone who had worked there before it went to crap, and so it was an appealing place to jump to for a similar (but better!) experience.
It isn't terribly active, though there are people who are around regularly and some communities that have a lot of activity. I do sometimes wish it'd "take off" more as a hub for more people and communities, though I don't know that it's likely to ever happen. I think it is a much "older" style of site, and works very well for some things, but it's not as easy for say, visual media (it HAS internal image hosting, and you can obviously also link to externally hosted images, but it's not *as* seamless/effortless as instagram/twitter/bluesky/tumblr/etc. for sharing images, which is a lot of what people focus on.)

I have to confess I've never really understood Mastodon very well! I haven't really tried it, though I have some friends who really enjoy various instances over there. But I definitely agree! The more personal connections fostered by places like that, here, like people find in discord servers, etc. can be a lot more meaningful (or at least differently so) than the more ephemeral connections that some of the bigger social media sites really favor.

Sometimes the best thing a fandom does is provide a sandbox to play in! Even if you lose connection to the canon itself (or only care for certain incarnations and not others), sometimes having the characters and world to play with, to interpret, to *re*interpret, etc. is the part that lasts!

Not the OP (obvi) but I had a LJ from 2004 to... sometime later when a friend suggested that tumblr would suit me better. (spoiler alert: no. Not easy to link to older things, hostile to long form text, dreadfully unsuited to what I wanted it to do.) I got a DW in 2018 because at heart I'm a long-form text-based person. I don't use the space as a fandom aggregator (probably I have the olds) but more as a semi-public diary, so I don't notice the difficulties of fandom interaction here. It feels somewhat like LJ, but I'm looking through a lens of like twenty years and neither the internet nor I are in the same place we were back then.

Sounds like we started on LJ around the same time! I think 2004 is when I started mine, too. (Ah, embarrassing high school journalling, at least for me.)
Tumblr isn't terrible, and it's good for what it's good for, but it is NOT a replacement for the same type of thing as LJ at all!

Fair point about the internet and we as users being different. Things are so vastly different than they were 20 years ago. (One of the struggles of nostalgia... sometimes it feels like you miss the places that existed, but sometimes it's just that you aren't the person who inhabited them anymore.)

"It's just that you aren't the person who inhabited them anymore"... that's a lovely way to put it. But yeah, right in the feels. :)

Hi! I didn't know you met Alex on LJ! I also don't think I ever knew that Cy's full name was Cyanide, or that Bella's was Belladonna!

We did meet on LJ! That had to be back in... 2008? 2009? We were friends on there for a couple years before we decided we kinda wanted to be more, and then he came across country to visit me. :)

Well, Cy and Bella are pitbulls, so they have to have "dangerous" names! Lol. They don't often get called by their full names, admittedly.

Cy's part pitbull, too? I never realized.

Our previous dog Beau, who the adoption people said was a black lab/shepherd mix (LOL) was part pitbull, we're pretty sure.

Cy is also a pit! He had a more "pitty" look when he was younger and had a blockier head, haha. He had a mystery illness many years ago where he dropped a frightening amount of weight, and he lost so much muscle mass. He did regain most of it once he was finally well, but not on his head!

Both Cy and Bella are much more the "American Pit Bull Terrier" type, rather than the beefier looking "American Staffordshire Terriers," even though they're basically the same breed.

The breeds that adoption agencies and shelters assign to dogs can be hilarious sometimes! I know it's often just a wild guess, but sometimes I wonder how they pick 'em!

Stopping by from Snowflake. I really like this sticky! "Doing things" is great, and something I've considered posting about as well but I guess I always feel like by the time I get around to it it's old news?

I really love your fic directory post as well and the artwork that goes with each one. So nice!

Thank you!

I used to be terrible at posting my "doing things" posts, but I've found it's really nice for me to be able to look back at them. Even if they are sometimes days... weeks... a month or more... out of date, haha. Though I have gotten a little better at doing them in a timely fashion, too.

And thank you! I appreciate it!

Welcome to my journal!

Hi!

Re: Hi!

Re: Hi!

Re: Hi!

Re: Hi!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject