Hello to the small hobby club-sized population that is my follower base, as well as whoever stumbles upon this post. I just wanted to say I'm still alive and still plan to use this place, I just went a long time without making a decent drawing because of Reasons.

But while I've been absent here, I've been rather active on Dreamwidth. (This is my account, by the way.) I've been so active there that I tried to type that link with HTML xD I'm not super used to Markdown... Which DW has, I just don't use it. Anyways, I can tell you for sure that in about 2 weeks you'll be seeing me again. Why? Because right now on Dreamwidth is Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, where participants try to be more active and make content that isn't to be shared anywhere else. So on my DW blog there is, so far, 2 drawings by me that I won't be sharing until the event is over. Take a look if you want :3 If not, you'll be seeing it soon enough. I haven't been perusing this site in the meantime because I felt bad doing so without any (new) art of my own to share.

What is Dreamwidth? Many people don't know. It's a fork of LiveJournal, which you may have heard of before. It's a journal or blogging site, a staple of web 2.0, which is much quieter these days due to the rise of microblogging (and Tumblr). LiveJournal is still a site you can use, but it's under Russian management now and has LGBT+phobic policies. Dreamwidth was created in response to said changes years ago, and it's still going strong. It's not some new upstart website, it has a fairly long history of 17 years and staff who are very honest about what's going on behind the scenes.

One thing that keeps people from DW is that sharing images isn't easy. There are ways to circumvent this (which I go into detail about in the New to Dreamwidth? post linked in my sticky/"pinned"), but it's a bit more trouble compared to other, sleeker sites, so I imagine it scares many people away. Thus, I'd say a sizeable fraction of DW users are writers and novel enjoyers.

I was thinking about this, and figured there is no way visual artists just suffered until Pixiv and/or Twitter came around. Then I realized that DeviantArt is old as dirt. It's 25 years old, in fact. One year younger than LiveJournal. I don't know if DeviantArt had journals from the start, but if it did that would explain everything. People focused on the visual arts simply used DA as their LJ/DW. And Sheezy.art is an art* community with journals too.

I really like DW for many many reasons, so I'm not going to switch to using Sheezy.art as my main blogging site or anything. But I have to consider recommending it to people who like blogging but are artists, if they consider DW not up to their standard... Just add the ability to share multiple images per upload and we'll be golden. Cara and other sites like that can feel too professional, but this place is pretty chill. It can stay chill if that same yapping energy is brought here too. See, I'm doing it right now. DW has got me used to this sort of thing. Can't do this on Bluesky!!

Well, I'll see you all in a few weeks. Bye now.

*I feel obligated to mention that you can post original literature on this site too.