Geek. Fangirl. A place for stuff and nonsense.
At the moment, expect to see a lot of Dragon Age and Avengers, mixed with a little Vampire Diaries, Doctor Who, and Game of Thrones/ASoIaF. And musicians, always musicians.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
And in other news … there was a post somewhere on my dashboard yesterday debating whether reblogging your own fic/art is acceptable, or whether it’s just annoying and makes people stop following you.
Here’s the thing - most days, I don’t actually get to read my entire dashboard in the morning. I go to bed relatively early, in internet terms, and sleep for 7-ish hours. The overnight hours in the US seem to be the busiest posting time on Tumblr, so by the time I wake up, I can have 50+ pages to get through. More, on a really busy day. I have an hour to surf the internet before I go to work; I get up early in order to allow both me and the roommate enough hot water to shower before we leave. An hour is not enough time to get through 50+ pages of Tumblr *and* my email *and* LJ *and* Twitter. So I usually don’t get all the way back through Tumblr on any given morning.
Then, in the evening, if I’ve had a busy afternoon at work and had to ignore the internet for several hours, I’m in the same position. Sometimes I have a couple of hours to catch up on the internet when I get home. Sometimes I don’t. So I may or may not read everything.
The point is, I miss things. And my taste in fanworks is slightly off the beaten path - the things I love aren’t always the things that get reblogged 50 times, things that I see a dozen times as I scroll back through my dashboard. A lot of times, the fanworks I want to read/see are the ones that only get 8 notes; if someone posts in that space where I just give up and move on, chances are good that I won’t ever see it. I follow a lot of people, and it would take even more time to say “oh, hey, who’s might have posted something I’m interested in?” and go look at each individual Tumblr. I miss things. It sucks, but it’s a tradeoff for being able to follow so many awesome people.
When someone reblogs something they posted in the middle of the night, or in the middle of the day, or whenever, it can be AWESOME for me. I don’t have to miss it! It appears again on my dashboard! I see absolutely nothing wrong in judicious advertising of your work. You’re proud of it! You want to make sure people see it! If you post something at midnight your time, reposting it at noon is a good opportunity to make sure those on a different schedule than you get the chance to see it. I don’t see why that’s a bad thing.
(When you get to someone reposting their own work four, five times … well, there’s a fine line between advertising and looking desperate. Not everyone draws the line in the same place, but you have to take your audience into account. Are the people you might draw in with that fourth reblog worth the people who might roll their eyes and unfollow/Savior you when they see it? Everyone’s answer is different, and no one’s answer is wrong. Just make sure you know to ask yourself the question.)
What I’m trying to say is … go ahead! Reblog your work! Advertising yourself is nothing to be ashamed of. Not everyone on Tumblr is on the same reading schedule, and sometimes a judicious reblog can expose your work to people who might otherwise miss it. Be careful, though, of overexposure. But if someone’s that offended over seeing your post twice … well, that person’s probably not your intended audience anyway.
A little bit of babble about where my head is at right now, while I wait for my hair dye to set. (Because it’s easier to touch-type without my glasses than it is to read.) Not depressed, just thoughtful.
This post has been going around today, which I identify with a whole lot. I don’t feel like I can claim it entirely - I wasn’t fat until I was an adult, so those particular cultural stigmas didn’t apply to me during my formative years - but it made me think a lot about my own issues with sexuality and my own attractiveness.
Below is … well, a lot more frank about my feelings about this topic than I usually am. I usually avoid talking about these things for a lot of reasons, but it felt like a day to be open and let a bit of it out.
Lots of personal stuff below the jump. Just FYI.
Rambling today, because I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing all week.
There’s always some kind of discussion/vague argument going around about writing/creating for yourself versus creating for an audience. There are those who say “you should always create for yourself! If you’re not, you’re doing it totally wrong!” And there are those who say “When you’re an artist, of course you’re creating for an audience, it’s a human urge to want acknowledgement for the things you create!” As with pretty much every argument everywhere, my feelings about this have come to lie somewhere in the middle of these two. (It’s the eternal curse of being a Libra: always occupying the middle ground, never getting the pleasure of feeling righteous about one side or another. Heh.)
