I write things sometimes. Occasionally. Every blue moon or so. Creator and mod for Freeruka Week, Otayuri Week, and a bunch of others. Petshop of Horrors fan, Leon Orcot stan, and general rarepair enthusiast! Salty af.
okay now that i’m getting into new fandoms i should probably do some sort of. pinned post.
anyway, hi, i’m howl! you’ll likely know me from my dives into niche fandoms, rare pairs, archiving, or running fandom events! i go by howlingmoonrise basically everywhere (dreamwidth, twitter, bsky) but mainly only use tumblr.
@howlingmoonrise (this one) is the blog i do fandom interactions with! my writing and personal stuff also goes on here. i don’t reblog most other things here for organizational reasons, except for petshop of horrors.
my main blog @commandersya is wherebasically all my other fandom reblogs go - so if you’re looking for SCTIR, spirealm/kod, etc, anything that’s not an original of mine or a reply is reblogged on there instead!
i love talking about my blorbos so feel free to send me asks or prompts anytime, though no promises on anything related to getting writing done :’)
My piece for I did back in april of 2024 for @petshopofhorrorszine “Sweet Tooth” that is a free to download passion project of a zine full of wonderful stuff by fans for fans! I’m posting about this waaaaay delayed since the zine’s been released a while ago but if you haven’t yet, check it out! ;-)~*☆
I know this post is for a very small audience here on Tumblr but some of my oldest friends I met on LiveJournal are still here, so I’m making it anyway just in case.
But there have been some changes at LJ recently that do not bode well at all. Rahaeli made a thread about it on bsky with some more worrying details. For a bit of background on this, LJ is surprisingly big in Russia. Like way more than on the western side, and it’s been owned by a Russian company for a long time now (it wasn’t always - there was a big controversy when LJ got sold to the Russians back in the day).
The Russian side of LJ dropped a very big change on Dec 29th without warning on their users, essentially making it so they’d have to register their ID or bank info with LJ to post or comment. Any posts from people outside of Russia, or without Cyrillic services turned on, are invisible and can’t be interacted with by people inside Russia. It’s nearly impossible to turn Cyrillic services on if you’re not in Russia either, so there’s a big wall now between both sets of users. Rahaeli speculates that this could mean the Russian company that owns LJ could be considering selling off or just shutting down the western side of LJ soon, thus why they’re sectioning it off. There’s been no mention of this on the western LJ news comms or anything which is also worrying.
Fandom’s moved on from LJ now, but that doesn’t mean that a large chunk of old fandom didn’t take place there before, and if LJ does go down then tons of fic, fanart, meta, communities, kinkmemes, discussions, rp, goes down with it. Everything up in smoke! I think people underestimate sometimes just how much stuff went on there. LJ being dead is much different than LJ being gone… the thought of it really disappearing after all this time breaks my heart. I’ve spent so much of my life there, even after everyone else left. ;_;
But how to do your backups? Dreamwidth is an easy answer as an LJ clone, with an automated importer that’ll snag all your stuff and move it over for you. Another tool I’ve been using is ljArchive, specifically this fork of it which will also save comments and communities, although it won’t get userpics. There’s also LJ Archivr, although that one costs money, and I think some others are mentioned in the bsky thread. Whatever you pick, I’d do it sooner than later.
Seeing a post about LJ possibly shutting down, and I was thinking about all the fics and recs and meta that haven’t been posted elsewhere. A lot of people who got into fandoms later don’t know how much good stuff was never put on Ao3. Would just be sad to lose all that.
I assume the post you saw was linking to Denise’s thread. Your options are to import to DW (if it’s your own LJ account or a community you own) or to buy ViddersAdmin’s program, which sounds like it can grab coms, including all of a kinkmeme’s comment threads. It doesn’t sound like it can grab locked posts, but I’m not sure.
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I hope this lights a fire under people’s asses to save things. Personally, I got very tired after nobody gave two shits about yahoo groups.
People for whom LJ was peak fandom can work on saving LJ content.
The ArchiveTeam (team behind most of the large website archives on archive.org) is working on setting up a LiveJournal archive process.
writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like “how do i transition between this moment and the next?” and then i just dont touch it for 6 months
