Cleolinda everywhere

Okay, by "a while" I didn't mean "a year"; it just turned out that way.

Basically, I was not only dealing with about two years of depression--I ended up having surprise spinal surgery this January. After three ERs' worth of travails, I was diagnosed with a herniated lumbar disc and... got to wait a month to get on the operating schedule. And then it snowed, and the surgery got moved back another week while I was curled up in bed screaming occasionally. It was that kind of ordeal. I'm about three months out from my discectomy now, and it's one of those "excellent recovery, slow as fuck" kind of things. I'm still working on walking evenly, for example, due to nerve damage in my leg. My primary care checkup was this morning, and I went on about how all that's currently going for a small thread. 

A few minutes ago I posted The Twelve Threads of Sithmas--a completed Star Wars rewatch that's pretty much the closest thing to entertaining content that I've posted in a while. Then I realized that I'd gotten several new Twitter followers who knew nothing about me other than "doesn't shut up about Star Wars" (I don't even usually go here!), so I introduced myself a little:
 

@cleolinda: I also now have new followers who have no idea that space fantasy isn’t my usual beat, so, uh.... welcome, this is gonna be fun. I’m clawing my way out of a two-year bipolar depression and I have lots of half-finished projects! Also I like vampires a lot.

@cleolinda: I was on Livejournal for 13 years because I was too lazy to get a Real Blog, but then had to leave (Russian ownership, long story) and set up camp on my Dreamwidth mirror. That’s where the master Star Wars post will be.

@cleolinda: I have spent a long time trying to figure out what a Patreon could look like. “$1/month if you’d like a low key way to support, most/all work is public” looks like it’s becoming a feasible model.

@cleolinda: I have a semi-dormant Tumblr I might start using again. I tend to cross-link for everyone’s update convenience. I’m also looking into Pillowfort, tell me how that’s going if you’re on there.

@cleolinda: If you’ve just started following me, you haven’t heard me never shutting up about my surprise spinal surgery this past [January]! That was exciting and life-altering! Good times. It’s honestly kind of jump-started me after two years of doldrums? You take what you can get.

So the whole thing has been kind of tough but also helpful. I'm not quite rebuilding from scratch, but sometimes it feels like it. But having to rebuild so much physically has honestly made it emotionally easier to rebuild things online? Like, "okay, starting over is what we're doing now, it's cool." I want to get back more to just personal journaling, talking (even briefly) about stuff that's going on and not, you know, going a year between entries. I'm trying to ramp down my own self-inflicted pressure to produce POLISHED CONTENT and just get back to being around. I also like looking around at various platforms and figuring out fun things you can do with them--like the Star Wars livetweet/discussion, which wouldn't have been possible anywhere else. There's a lot of loose ends I'll have to figure out in terms of functionally moving from Livejournal while still keeping the entries online--link rot is the worst--but I'm just going to have to work on those as we go.

As a side note, I'm screening comments just because I don't have the spoons to moderate them at the moment. Like, I didn't have the spoons before, but HOO BUDDY did I completely reevaluate my concept of "spoons" after I spent two months unable to even get up and down stairs. I'll elaborate on my commenting policy later, but when I do start unscreening, it's basically "Feel free to express disagreement with me, but you can be civil or you can have fun somewhere else," same as it always was.

I would have mentioned it yesterday if I'd known we were going to reveal it so soon: foresthouse and I have inherited the hostship of Made of Fail.

I've still got a couple more things up my sleeve, accompanied by a growing anxiety that I'm not going to be able to handle all of it during Seasonal Depression Depressive Season, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, I figure.

I'm doing well at this point, but I want people to know exactly what's going on. I have a project I've been working on currently, and that's basically what's put me permanently behind (conversely, the recaps--to be honest--have gotten me behind on that project as well). There's some stress/anxiety about IRL issues that I'm dealing with as well, the usual chronic health issues, allergies and weather headaches, so on and so forth. But what's really been happening is that I've been hypomanic for several weeks now--not unusual this time of year, but as I get older, the bipolar II is shading more towards bipolar I, the hypomania into mania, and it's becoming actively uncomfortable. Too focused to focus, don't want to sleep, don't want to eat, oversensitive and hot-tempered. So after a lot of discussion with my psych, we've decided to try reducing my Zoloft (one of three medications I take in mild doses).

I tried to do this before a few years ago, and it ended badly. ( trigger warning, I guess )

Ironically, it was right in the middle of writing that recap that we decided to reduce the Zoloft; I made that decision knowing that it might be a pretty hellish experience... all over again. But the mania was getting to the point where it's hard to concentrate and therefore hard to write or work, and so the risk seems worth it; maybe my brain chemistry is different now, maybe what I need has changed. In seasonal terms, this is a pretty good time to try it--the increasing sunlight and general frequency of "up" episodes may be able to counteract any possible side-effect depression. So I want you guys to know that this is what I'm doing. And you know what? A week into it, it seems to be going pretty well. I'm still "up," but in a milder way; I'm less hot-tempered generally (which in turn helps my blood pressure) and I'm able to eat and sleep better. The reactive depression still might sneak up on me, so I'm trying to watch that very carefully.

So, as a side note, you need to know how things are going to work around here. We've started doing open discussion posts for the show, so people can talk about it as it airs in the U.S., but since I'm over on Twitter to help the ratings, I can't participate a whole lot or monitor/moderate the discussion all that well. But I try to keep up with it. Given that the most recent episodes have been a bit controversial, I'll tell you my approach to moderating preemptively so that we can move forward with clarity. Here's how it works--has always worked--around here:

1) If a thread gets contentious or unpleasant, I will tell people to ease up, drop it, or take it somewhere else. This is an "everyone walks away, no one gets hurt" warning. Sometimes I freeze a thread to save everyone from themselves. If it got really unpleasant, I might screen the thread entirely. I have never held this against anyone. While I try to give new commenters the benefit of the doubt, I tend to assume more good faith of long-time readers I recognize and cut them more slack, because if you've only recently wandered in, I don't know what your intentions are. I find that thought process to be a reasonable way to cope with my inability to read minds. That said, I have only rarely had to intervene at all, so you don't have to get nervous about this. This has always been my policy, and nothing has changed in that regard.

2) If you give me attitude or keep going after I have directly told you to drop it, I will tell you to knock it off. This is a genuine warning. Take it seriously.

3) If you argue that warning or give me further attitude, I will either tell you to cut it out one more time or I will ban you right there, depending on how badly it escalated.

4) Abusive comments are an automatic ban. This hasn't happened in a long time, though. I will discuss with anyone who can be civil, polite, and rational, but I'm not going to be sucked into rules-lawyering or passive-aggressive logic circles. If I ask you to stop for any reason and you don't, you get those 2-3 chances and then I'm done, because life is too short and my blood pressure is too high.

5) It's my journal. You don't have an absolute right to comment here. I am unmoved by arguments that telling people to express themselves in a civil fashion is unfair or mean or refusing to allow disagreement or infringing on your First Amendment Rights Omg. I am not the U.S. government, so I don't give a shit. Put it this way: if I don't want to deal with you, I explicitly tell you that I don't want to deal with you, and you insist that I deal with you, I will Deal With You. That said, I am RIDICULOUSLY PATIENT most of the time. If I think a commenter essentially means well and we can straighten this out, I will risk my blood pressure and give it a shot.

So on top of this basic policy, I may have to deal with a severe depressive episode (hopefully not; knock on wood) in the near future. Yeah, it's taking me longer than I'd like to finish things; I feel bad about that generally, and "why didn't you write this other thing instead" and "are you ever going to finish that other thing" and "I hope you finish it this century"-type comments are gonna hit a hot button for me, probably in part because they do hit a guilty nerve. Like, I admit that. And after ten years of people often treating me like a vending machine (THAT SLOT IS NOT FOR QUARTERS), yeah, it builds up, and it's gonna get to me beyond what seems like a reasonable proportion, and I try not to overreact to comments that are meant well; my apologies if I have. On the other hand, focusing on "do your best and it is what it is, fear is the mind-killer, keep on livin,' etc." means that I also feel calmer about falling behind than I usually do. I'm trying to give people extra benefit of the doubt to make up for my own sensitivity right now, but conversely, I need people to not test my patience, because that's a test you're gonna fail. I love y'all and feel that I have one of the best commenter sections on the whole wide internet, and I want to keep it pleasant for your sake as well as mine. We are currently doing fine; I just need you to help me out going forward, because I don't know where "forward" is going to take me.

So this happened:




\o/

Meanwhile, here are the songs that get stuck in your head when you are sick in bed and helpless to do anything about it. Like too sick to even get on Twitter and rid yourself of whichever song by inflicting it on others. Yeah. It was pretty bad.

( Read more... )

Usually it was about this point that I would ask for more Aleve and pass out again.

Meanwhile, I am still mulling over what to do about the Dracula recaps, because I am straight-up loath to give up on them. I had a project I just finished out of SHEER GODDAMNED CUSSEDNESS, and on the whole, I liked it enough that I'd kind of like ~Finishing Things~ to be how I roll from now on. At the same time, I have learned--both from my own experience and the very, very painful experience of other people I know--that sometimes you have to know when to fold 'em. And somewhere between the two, I have to remind myself that this is the internet, where you can do just about anything any way you want to do it, and there's no reason I can't try to get this done by taking a completely different approach. I just don't know what that approach is yet--

OH! Official notice: For reasons just discussed, I will not be liveblogging the Golden Globes on Sunday. I'm thinking about doing sort of a judicious live-tweeting combined with collecting the best tweets I see and putting them together on Storify. I've done liveblogs of award shows since--Jesus, I don't know, 2001 or 2002? I feel like I need to move on from a format that exhaustive at this point, given the massive widespread availability of videos, recaps, tweets, other liveblogs, etc. I don't know--the way I look at it is, if I try less labor-intensive formats, maybe I'll be around more often. So we'll see.

The CafePress store is live, as mentioned yesterday at ridiculous length. I have tweaked all the description problems, half of which were caused by me fixing the original problems.

To summarize: Marc Vuletich, bless him, did some artwork for Team Sparklepire and Team Fursplode designs:




And I did some text-based designs for "I Drive Like a Cullen (I Speed with a Whiny Teen)"; "Talk to Your Kids About Vampires (And Drugs If You Have the Time)," a general vampire comment I once made; and "Vampire control is a serious problem that affects us all...," a paragraph from one of the Varney recaps. ( Read more... )

This is what I have spent the last, I don't know, five days or so working on, and for once in my life (or at least a very long while), I feel somewhat accomplished. I'm still trying to get writing-type work done, but I'm also going to start looking into other designs to put up next month. (The current designs aren't going anywhere.) I want to get some non-Twilight-parody designs up, so I think I'm going to try to work on something with cousins, Romans, matches, polar bears, and/or ponies next. A My Hideous Repast/Furious Kitten concert t-shirt is probably going to be a major design project, so that'll be a while. Also, my mother has given me the all-clear to use pictures of Sam, if y'all would be interested in some Petite Lap Bear magnets or something.

Okay, more housekeeping.

The new layout: For those of you just joining us, the goal was to make the layout, particularly the comment posting boxes, more accessible to anyone with visual impairment. I threw "November Day" up here just to have something clean and legible for the Oscar liveblog, but... now I actually like it. I went through every single other layout LJ offers, tested more than a dozen of them full-size, and kept coming back to this one. In fact, I don't even think I want to go back to Component now; it looks cluttered and small in comparison. Problem: This layout does not have an option to change any of the colors. So we're staying with it in teal for this week, and then foresthouse and I are going to work on the CSS code over the weekend and shift all the hex codes to purple hues. I had a few people who said they liked the teal better (if it weren't an issue of persona, I'd actually be perfectly happy with it myself), but I also had people who were touchingly distraught at my non-purple existence. So we'll at least see what it looks like changed, live, so we can tweak it. Here's what a screencap of the current layout looks like with the hue shifted in Photoshop and lightened/desaturated a bit, both a warm purple and a cool purple:

( POLL TIME )


On the upside, my parents are both down for the count with a third iteration of Death Blarg, but somehow, I have managed to dodge it this time. I am hoping that better health and weather will lead to an improved awesomosity forecast.

That said, we had a freak hailstorm yesterday:



A quick linkspam: ( Read more... )

Okay. I have had a couple of requests to make the layout here more accessible to the visually impaired, which is completely reasonable. Namely, the comment-input area, which is usually purple text on a purple background. Please understand that there was never a moment in my life where I said, "You know what would be really readable? Purple on purple." But the way the Component theme is set up, certain... uh... components are bundled together. If you choose a color for one element, other elements automatically take on that color as well. So in choosing the overall layout, I ended up with those colors for the comments. I wasn't particularly thrilled with it, but since I have fairly good vision and didn't know any better, my thought was, "Eh, what're you gonna do," than "Wait, people actually cannot see this." 

But I can't change those separately from the rest of the layout on the simple version of the customization page. So when I change it to something legible, we end up with half the entire journal in white. Which is what you're looking at now.

Now, my understanding is that if you delve into the CSS, you can customize it more specifically. When we have time to deal with that, we will; foresthouse has done some website design and can hash it out for me. Maybe she can magic some bold font in there for me as well. Tonight, I just want to make sure that people can see to make comments for the Oscar liveblogs. 

I love my purple, but honestly, if people can't read it, I may just redo the layout to something entirely different. Which is not something I have been particularly itching to do or looking for an excuse to change up--I'm a creature of habit. I don't like change much. But... people can't read it. I have to do something. My point in bringing this up is not to be all Look what a noble martyr I am; it's to say that things may stay kind of ugly and half-finished around here until I can hash out something that suits me. When you've had a layout long enough, you start to think of it as your face, I guess--kind of the way it's hard to get new glasses, because it's like changing your nose or something. And I also kind of dread the inevitable, well-meant comments of, "Well, the purple's kind of crappy anyway, I've never liked it, so changing it will be great!" Yeah, but it was my purple. It was who I was as a blogger. But part of blogging is people being able to read it, so... [insert Deal With It macros here], and what-all.


ETA: I have now also disabled custom commenting pages. Does that make a legibility difference?

ETA: I'm trying a different layout altogether for the moment--hang on while I reenable custom commenting just so I can see what it even looks like.

ETA: Okay, I think I have settled on November Day (Minimalism) as the theme I like (you should be looking at it now). In fact, but for my missing background, I think I like it better than Component. (The calendar is particularly jaunty.) Problem: It has no options to change the colors.

I really like this shade of blue. I actually wear it a good bit in real life. But... I can't teal. I purple. I've been purpling for nearly eight years now. It's what I do. But until we can figure out a way around this, I'm keeping November Day up with custom commenting enabled (not the default blue/white LJ style). However, if you are reading this through your LJ account, you can view everything in your own style as well.

... is a combination of options I mentioned in the previous entry, having weighed various considerations and y'all's feedback, etc. What I'm going to try is this:

1) Continue posting things, like the suggested Varney commentary, in smaller increments, and for free. That way, everyone gets to read it, and I continue to benefit from any incoming traffic I get from people recommending things to others. If this turns out to not be the best idea, I can always switch to a pay-only model.

2) When we've got a good bit of content accumulated--like, say, Volume 1 of Varney--I'll put it up as an e-book/bound book to buy at Lulu, if anyone wants that. Kind of like a trade paperback in comics. I may do that for a couple of other things as well; people said they wanted to buy hard copies of the Twilight entries.

3) I'm trying to revive the Cafe Press store; we're working on some designs. One of the things I used to do was put up a number of little things--stickers, magnets--so I would get the markup but you could afford a larger variety of designs. I feel kind of weird to think that "Cleolinda Industries" is getting to be less and less of an offhand joke, but... I don't know. Most people probably think I'm crazy for not doing this sooner.

And finally: it only took me seven years to do it, but voila: a tip jar.

So. Um. Here is a magical dollhouse. Thank you for your time.





Oh! I nearly forgot. Tonner just got the Marvel license. This should be interesting.

Okay, so--I haven't checked my site stats in forever. Like at least a year, maybe two or three. But I've continued to put the little graphic on my journal(s) (I put the same one on both this and m15m, so they're both counted together), just in case I ever wanted to look. Well, I got curious. Maybe I've cracked 20,000, I thought. That would be pretty cool.

( Not what I expected )

Have done a little spring cleaning over on my user profile--when Greatest Journal went down, it took some of my graphics down with it. Revised my user interests a little, added some OMG RECAPS HERE buttons, and as soon as I can think of something for a Cleoland graphic, I'll put one there, too. (My Occupation: Girl banner--and my default user icon--come from some fabulous Marguerite Sauvage artwork that I lost when my previous computer crashed, and she doesn't have those particular pieces on her own site anymore. I would kill to find that older artwork of hers.)

(She did artwork for French Nancy Drew, you guys!)

Hm. So... today's Journal Birthmonth flashback will be... ah! Let's do Cleo Sue.

Meanwhile, I must decide whether to sleep or start working on the third True Blood recap. Decisions, decisions.

P.S. Sookie has a flavor and it's MOON PIES, winning with 40% of the vote.