sideways | (no subject)

I did not write my January drabble. However, it's amnesty week over at

100words so I could make an early comeback. I don't know that I will, but I could.

I've done better at keeping up a daily routine of a word puzzle and some Duolingo every afternoon. It's not quite weaning me off spending so much time on my phone, but at least it's a slightly more cerebral past-time than some of the other apps I've tooled around with over the years. There is relaxing, and then there's just lying around and wondering where the time went.

Honestly, though, one of the best things for my general time management has been cutting back on Tumblr. I was one of those people who liked to catch up on my entire dash, but even though I never followed huge swathes of blogs as a result it could easily eat up forty-five minutes every morning. I ran late to work more than once simply because I wasn't at the end of my dash yet, and I had to get to the end. Somehow DW doesn't inspire quite the same need to see everything lest it be vanished forever into the abyss, probably because every single person I follow isn't throwing ten to sixty things into the feed every day.

I still flick through my fandom Tumblr account regularly - the people I follow there have largely been pared down to people I'm still interested in hearing news from even if I'm just the occasional quiet notif in their activity feed, and I still like much of the content I see - but it's been freeing to be...free. I sometimes miss the easy exposure-and-feedback mix that worked in my favour (short palatable fics travel well in the Tumblr stream), but I don't miss the mild stress of maintaining a fandom presence - and, theoretically, there's nothing that says I couldn't crosspost occasionally if I wanted to. I've found DW is holding my interest well enough now that I've expanded my reading circle, so I think it's coming out the victor in this brief struggle.

Which means I should probably bite the bullet and make the "I'm over here now, btw" post. Slightly awkward after an eight-month-long silence, but.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The invention of infinite scrolling was so bad for me. I'm glad you're liking DW at the moment though!

T'is the dash that never ends, it goes on and on and on and on and-

Dreamwidth's always been fairly nice, and the chiller vibe overall is a win.

What language are you working on, on Duolingo? I'm trying to push myself to get back to that!

Spanish! I studied it for a year as an elective yonks ago, so it seemed a good way to try and rekindle my fuzzy memories of the language. And if you give that owl half a chance, I'm sure it'll happily harass you. Endlessly. By every means possible :|

The owl has harassed me so much over the years, you don't even know. xD

Endless scrolling is my bane. I'm finding my interest in DW is also wavering a little, but I think that happened after throwing myself into writing full bore after a year off...

I'm glad you're getting more time, at least! Kudos on sticking with sup lingo... I should get back to that, too.

Wavering as in struggling to keep up with it / find reasons to post? I feel ya on trying to get rusted writing gears moving again, though.

No longer worrying about tags or my queue/drafts or anything has been - well, it's been nice. Very nice.

When I was very into a fandom it was good and I miss trading commentary with some of the people... But yeah. The point where I realised that it was increasingly feeling like a chore I was undertaking was a tipping point. Plus all the standard issues of crappy updates, still getting hit up by porn blogs, frustratingly bad faith discussions and widespread exchanges of misinformation - I might not have been terribly inconvenienced by The Great Anti-Porning but the whole fooferaw just hammered one more nail into the coffin of my already lacklustre considerations about how and when I should start posting there again.