Skipping a couple days here.

Okay. Here we go:


Day 5

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

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Today's assignment is Joy. Self-care. What do I do that gives me joy?

I hate to be a downer but man, what a bad year and what a bad month to ask that.
I usually find my joy by going to the gym. Lifting weights, testing and cultivating my body. I wasn't always a sports girl, but when I was high-school age, my Dad was alarmed by my crappy endurance when making me run stairs as punishment, and had me and my brother put on swim team. This proved to be a good decision. Now I can swim away from danger, and I got a love of high-heart rate, monotonous activity.
In college, I rowed crew. That wasn't so much joy, as pride in shared misery. After college, I lifted weights. I love being strong. I need it for my job.
When I left the sticks to work in the big city, I took Krav Maga and Jiujitsu. I don't plan to pursue Krav into the higher, grab-the-gun-from-the-bad-guy levels, but it was invaluable experience for writing. Jiujitsu, though, I wanted to stick with. There's a lot to learn there, and a much more relaxed atmosphere.
Two months ago I damaged some cartilage in my knee and found out I have a meniscal tear. I'm doing physical therapy. Low-impact exercise. I can't sit down on the floor from standing position because the cartilage clicks whenever I bend my knee half-way through. I used to do pistol squats as part of my routine workout. This sounds stupid, because I'm still basically able-bodied, but I lost something. I lost the ability to sit down in a damn chair without using my hands or lower myself crosslegged to the ground.
Maybe I'll get it back, maybe my knee will smooth out. But articular cartilage doesn't come back. It just depends on how big the damaged area is.
So basically, what makes me happy is work. I like fixing people's problems and ferreting out what's causing them.
Also I enjoy cooking and target-shooting and walking my dog. I should probably be able to jog with him eventually. I hope. And I love writing and researching. Looking back on what I've written and being satisfied for bringing it into the world.

Yesterday I took in the back and sides of Ghost Rider Jacket.

( Warning for bad sewing techniques ahead: )

I have never done one of these things before, but I might as well; everyone's throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. Ask me anything about my Fandom Journey from the below list of questions. Or copy the whole thing to your journal and I'll ask you. Maybe I'll pick some of my own if I get bored. IDK. Could be fun.

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Fandom: The Tick (Amazon Original Series)
Length: I dunno, 300 words?
Pairing: Dot/Overkill
Rating: G

Prompt:( Read more... )

It took me a long time to love tumblr. Even now, as the site withers away after severing itself from its fertile lifestream, I am laughing my ass off.

tumblr was the website that made me hook my modem up to one of those automatic security light timers and plug that in to a power outlet behind my couch. If fanfiction was Internet heroin, tumblr was Internet methamphetamine. There was ALWAYS something new. ALWAYS a journal someone had updated (because that's how you use tumblr when you refuse to make an account there for two years, you just flick from suggested web address to suggested web address in your browser bar. Which means I got to appreciate everybody's themes.) When I finally signed myself up and started following people, HOLY COW there's now an hour's worth of posts to scroll through twice a day.

And that's all I did, pretty much. Scroll, reblog. Scroll, scroll, like.

Posting on tumblr, you wonder: is anyone listening? Is anyone there? There is all this activity, but it never touches me! Perhaps it never will. It is alienating and disinhibiting. tumblr has been described as "screaming into the void" and the void every now and then screams back.

tumblr served no pragmatic function well. It is difficult to search through and find old posts you have tagged, impossible to organize them without reading them in their whole as a mess of pictures and colors. It is impossible to carry out a rational conversation -- but easy for waves of enthusiasm or hatred to sweep across the entire tumblr network. Easy to share pictures of missing children, inevitably lacking the dates they went missing. Easy to share rumors, lies, wickedly clever fan-comics. Your money, power, or righteousness mean nothing on tumblr: only virality.

tumblr was the id of the Internet. A great subconscious continually boiling with irrational passions. An asocial social network.

I find it strange, and beautiful, that with the demise of tumblr, users are turning to far more social and accountable forums to keep in contact: chatrooms. Dreamwidth. Pillowfort. Twitter. Possibly Mastodon or novel platforms. We have managed to form social bonds in an architecture that is actively hostile to conversation.

tumblr was an interesting phenomenon that was totally unlike anything Fandom had access to before. It was an absolute boon to fanartists and vidders and it provided the most mindlessly addictive Internet experience I have ever had, for good or ill. I hope we take the strengths of tumblr into account when shaping new platforms for pseudonymous social activity.

One of many reasons I love this character is that the design is SO WEIRD. Like all good art, the comic takes a while to get used to, and this Ghost Rider is part of that. Look at this thing. Just.

Ok, since Danny Ketch/Noble Kale hit the comic scene in the nineties with the black leather and spikes, that’s become the Iconic Ghost Rider Design. Completely supplanting Johnny Blaze’s old black-or-blue racing jumpsuit, which wasn’t really Ghost Rider’s gear so much as Johnny clinging to his glory days; after transforming, Ghost Rider was just a burning skeleton that wore whatever Johnny was wearing–though it would find and put on the racing leathers because it thought they were the only cool thing Johnny owned. But now since the 2000's Johnny has spikes. He never used to have spikes. Everybody has spikes. What?

Anyway, this is new and old at the same time. This is a return to Ghost Rider’s costume being a functional piece of gear -- protective clothing designed for use with the vehicle. And it’s a different look. It’s sleek. Robbie’s a young man, he’s not bulky. For a Ghost Rider, he’s sneaky. It fits. There’s nothing extra on here.

And the skull. The most obvious piece of weirdness.

This looks like what you’d get if you asked THE CAR to design the next Ghost Rider. Like,

“Okay, here we go. Humans have teeth, there’s the teeth. Then–exposed parts! There’s the human’s front bumper! There’s the rims! Chrome everything, except the back of the skull–paint it black!
“Fire! We can’t have fire coming out every which way, that’s not healthy. We need dedicated vents! A front blower! Exhaust vents in the back! When he’s really running hot, occasionally fire might leak out the mouth-hole!
“Oh, and the clothing. Gotta be real special. A racing jumpsuit! Leather! Kevlar! Steel! What’s a zipper? We don’t need those!
“Oh, boy, this is gonna be badass! That’s how you make a Ghost Rider!”

Like, okay, Car. You do you.

(I headcanon, and the comic strongly implies, that since Robbie died, he came back as an extension of the car. He is the car. His ghost form looks like it’s made out of the car. Is his human body even real? When he’s threatened, we haven’t seen the car teleport to him, but when the car gets jacked, he burns up out of a sound sleep and teleports literally into the metal of the car. I think the car has the most weight in this symbiosis.)