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(no subject)

Hello, fellow travellers! Seeing as there are so many nice new faces (*waves*) I thought I might throw in my hat. I’ve been on LJ since 2004 but left around 2012 for DW.

Name:

liriaen (she/her, they/them)
Age: well old (52)

Interests and Hobbies: Obscure festivals for extreme music, discovering Europe on foot & by public transport, sitting in the sun and watching the world go by… Reading about the European Renaissance [I have a well-documented Borgia obsession, but I can't say I'm a fan of the various TV series; history is whoa enough I think :)] ... Fandom & writing - used to be Harry Potter and Blade of the Immortal, but for the past 15 years it’s mostly Renaissance RPF… Bible slash... Extreme metal music RPF... Art history RPF (Albrecht Dürer is very slashable!) …
I love books by William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco... and I think Michel Foucault is always right. Always. As are the First Dog on the Moon cartoons.
I love to listen to 15th/16th/17th century music (think Monteverdi, Desprez, Tallis)... music from Mali... music from the lowest pits of hell... drone, doom, black metal, a little death metal (nothing too technical; just gimme the dumb kind)... Nick Cave in his various permutations... post punk, hardcore, punk, neofolk, seriously nasty industrial, new wave, dark wave, oh and Benjamin Biolay can read the Paris phone book for me.
I post RL stuff interspersed with fic and idle musings, mostly in English, with occasional outbursts in German. I'll happily converse with you in English, German, but will also read French and Flemish. There will be copious swearing, uncouth subjects, crass humour and horrible music. So, what’s not to like?
My fics: are all here in my journal. Better and more recent ones are also at AO3 (I'm veeery slowly adding older writing there), a whole lot of antediluvian stuff in German is over at fanfiktion.de. There's also fanfiction.net which has fics even I had forgotten (with good reason, too).

Looking for: meeting open-minded people with a (dark) sense of humour and adventurous souls! If we share some interests, that would be spiffy, but no requirement. But but! Where are the history nuts? Come! PLEASE NO Trump-fans, antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, rightwingers, neoliberals, homophobes, terfs.

Anything else? I’m not supergood at selling myself here; back in the olden days (they mumble toothlessly) we used to meet on thriving fandom or special interests comms and take it from there; now the experience is so wholly different. Therefore, if in the course of things we find that we don’t really mix, or find little common ground: no hard feelings. :)

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I love nerding history! Not super well-read on anything except the 19th century (France especially, but I'm pretty into Danish history as well from the same period), but I take a wide interest in most things history related and love learning more, so can I friend you?

I would always love more European-centric friends to bounce off. I'm from Denmark, myself!

Fellow European history nerds right this way, please. :) It's all interconnected anyway, and one thing leads to another. Welcome!

Added you, and I'm up for the swearing and horrible music. I'm a 51 year old ex-Goth French-English person living in Norway who loves Black Metal and Handel sung by counter-tenors. I can read and understand a measure of German, but no longer have any ability to speak it as Norwegian comes out. GAH!

Superb! Welcome, welcome, have a glass of the tipple of your choice and let's go!

hi adding you you can see my sticky post for more info take care

back in the olden days (they mumble toothlessly) we used to meet on thriving fandom or special interests comms and take it from there; now the experience is so wholly different

I hear you!! I've been enjoying efforts like Community Thursdays to bring some life into comms again, which I think would help so much in making Dreamwidth feel more approachable and welcoming to newcomers. I've been doing a bit of Community Thursday activities since I read about the challenge, and I think that slowly it does make a difference! I hope more people pick it up, haha.

(The link to your 3 fanfiction profiles are broken, btw!)

Or is it because there are so many platforms now? What with tumblr and discord and n other forums, fandom has fractured and splintered in an almost kaleidoscop manner. - Ohhh, Community Thursdays sounds good! Must poke into that.

Thank you for letting me know about the links - gakh! Must fix.

The fragmentation of fandom spaces certainly hasn't helped!! I also heard from DW old timers that comms never really took off here. But when I invite people who are tired of the new platforms (because they can't keep up with the fast pace or toxicity or whatever), they have a hard time here because Dreamwidth isn't super fun when you're just subscribed to 1 or 2 people. So even though the slower pace format may work better for them, they rarely stick around. Active comms could help so much, both for activity on their reading page and meeting new people with similar interests.

Someone else also noted that many journals are friends-only these days, so coming in from the outside it looks like nothing's happening when there are actually discussions thriving out of sight.

But, yeah, I've stepped away from the newer social media platforms recently so I'm super motivated to help fellow fandom people new to dreamwidth understand how things work here and make a comfy spot for themselves, if they'd like :D

I like the Community Thursdays challenge because the threshold to participate are very low (e.g. comment on a comm post) but that's still super helpful (because if the people who post only ever get crickets back, they're going to stop). I hope you find it interesting, too!

The spouse and I discuss this so often, the whole "OMG what has happened to fandom where is everyone" conundrum, but as you put it so succinctly: essentially, we are fandom, and if we sit back on our haunches and wait for content to be thrown our way, we're in for a long and lonely wait, which is why I'm stoked at the Community Thursdays idea. Active comms still are the best meeting place, imho.

Hahaha, you're very kind describing my rambling as "succinct", thank you 😂 Discussing fandom and community and how things evolved and hearing people's thoughts around all of it is one of my favourite topics!

H-hello, I feel like I've been smacked around by your post, and enjoyed every impact. Michel Foucault IS always right, I'm hype to read your Borgia fics or recs sometime, and also it's fun to see someone's journal mention Cantarella.

"we used to meet on thriving fandom or special interests comms and take it from there; now the experience is so wholly different" ...Yeah! I've never thought to verbalize it as such, but that's exactly it. Gotta just.. do the best you can trying things out these days.

Oh, smacking means something resounded. Good! :D

I used to be so deliriously into Cantarella, it's not funny anymore! (I wrote so much Cantarella-fic in German, way back. Until Higuri-sensei pulled the "rocks fall, everyone dies" trick in the last two vol.s and broke my fannish heart.) But Cantarella was good to me: it propelled me deeper into all-things-Borgia, irretrievably so, thus all ended well. :) (I'll have to reupload some of my Cantarella-icons, I swear.)

Yes, I have a feeling it's become so difficult to strike friendships in comms, since many of them are sorely lacking in activity. But like

vriddy above pointed out, communities R US. Without our activity, things won't get better. So here's to that.

*shakes hand with you on Monsieur Michel* Very nice to meet you!

Oh man oh man. Cantarella was almost as formative for me as all the big name manga of my adolescence and it baffled me that it was neither popular nor anyone followed my recommendation to read it. When my little brother started playing Assassin's Creed II/Brotherhood, I was honestly a little shocked how much history and important figures I'd managed to retain from that series and the poking around on the web it had inspired because I was giving him a deadass history lesson every time I walked by the TV. :O

I never got my hands on the last volumes or read the ending, but that was probably for the best. After the really homoerotic first half, the later chapters were already starting to give off the sense that... I wouldn't like the end game. But that was kind of the era, I guess. Lots of manga would tease and fanservice gay pairings and then just pull the rug. (I'd argue moreso than now; I suspect bc people yell at creators more to either make things canon or shut up these days?) If you posted your fics to ff.net at the time, the likelihood is very high that I came across your fics and cried because I couldn't read them.

Wow, I'm experiencing very intense emotions right now. Wish I had my schedule cleared so I could throw a bridle on these feels and do some Cesare/Michelotto art. *shakes fist at projects piling up*

There, there, see, I had to rummage around my folder labelled "icons retired 2012" and fell down the Cantarella rabbit hole. I hear you on it being formative, oh yes. And good you never got around to the last volumes. They hurt. (I wrote some Cantarella in English back then, too, most of it is archived on ff.net and ao3, somewhat more history-leaning, or trying to weave Cantarella & facts, and some of them are rather *gulp* ... brutal.)

Assassin's Creed - never played that, but the scenarios they picked amused me to no end. :)

Say, do you know Souryo Fuyumi's "Cesare"? A 13 volume manga that ran from 2005 until last November (with many hiatuses and hiccups, oh the wait was desperate and painful). I have a feeling you might like it. Project Vinland is just about wrapping up scanlating it, so it's a good time to join the fun and binge it...

I'd love to see how you'd interpret either Cantarella's Cesare/Chiaro - or Fuyumi's Cesare/Miguel (their dynamic is just nwnffnqödlsddkä!).

No, I'd never heard of the Cesare manga! That sounds amazing. I love how Cesare is truly a gift that just keeps on giving. People just can't stop writing either directly about him or stealing parts of his life to embellish their fictional characters. Just can't stop! (And they can't stop making him hot.) I mean, he's in the middle of a whole colorful cast that captures the imagination, but people really do fixate on him specifically.

Cesare might not have conquered and controlled as big of a landmass as Alexander and Napoleon, which undermines him being obsessed over by the likes of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, but he had so much more crunchy, gritty pizazz in his neck of the woods. Especially the way things ended, at least the way the pacing of events is compressed together in hindsight on paper, his trajectory reads like a work of carefully plotted fiction/tragedy, much more than many other historical figures. That's just so neat? And cool? With enough centuries passing by, statistically you can't help eventually getting textbook tragedian Cesares (or comedic Casanovas) now and then, but it's still so unlikely that it captivates people.

~~My Cesare/Chiaro interpretation is everyone lives and nothing hurts, and more importantly Chiaro loves him back, romantically.~~ Suddenly sitting here thinking, jeez I hope it's not Cantarella that's responsible for my inability to shed my feral contentious obsession with unrequited tropes.

Thank you for sharing this - you can't imagine how much this means to me. I mean, meeting a fellow Cantarella sufferer, and discovering how important this lil manga was to you. For me as well.

And I couldn't express Cesare's attraction any better. There's animal magnetism alright. (And the fact that 515 years of maligning him couldn't blot out the fascination, the larger-than-life appeal.)

"everyone lives and nothing hurts... and Chiaro loves him back" - I could have died a happy person, had that come to pass. I shed so many tears, it's not funny anymore. I'm not sure if rereading Cantarella is a good idea, it might not have aged well, but that's no reason to disown the original experience.

Rereading older manga is almost never a good idea because many of them rely very heavily upon the popular tropes of their era to ensure their continued serialization/publication (except FMA, which is a masterpiece of both art and writing and holds up beautifully). But yeah! If it was a good time back then, that still means something.

And sometimes it's still fun to reread for that squirmy I-feel-younger feeling. :D

What I really need is like a really long solid slow-burn fixit fic, one that I give full permission to just diverge wildly from historical beats so long as the payoff is aces. I'd probably enjoy that more than rereading the manga. Just paste in some pretty images from the series in the right places and call it a day :D

<3 FMA is stellar on all counts. When we had the first lockdowns, the spouse read all 26 vol.s of FMA for the first time and was stunned - firstly, because of the unusual pacing (events unfolding slowly, almost in realtime) and secondly, because everything about it was timeless: there's little in the way of timemarkers to reveal when it was created.

That squirmy younger feeling? Oh yes. I miss that. The sudden heat under one's collar...

The very lovely

fffc comm had a fixit challenge last year that I was very seriously considering, Cantarella-wise, but then my health took a nosedive, and my concentration and writing mojo with it. Never too late, tho'!

Hello, I recently left LJ but wish I did it sooner. Planning to stay here though and have been updating each day so far I think. I like what you wrote here though and thought maybe reading your journal would help me to wake up a little or feel more alive. I'm a big fan of your 'PLEASE NO' section also. My journal is friends only so locked but I could add you if you wish to take a look and consider adding me back. I am also close to your age and live in Canada.

Oh, I'm not sure how I can be of help with the aliveness, I'm barely hanging on by my teeth, but as long as there is hope there is life indeed! :) Sure thing!
And I applaud your deep look into "who owns LJ" - many people were willing to overlook that for far too long.

When I posted here I always wished I had the nerve to say what you did about 'please no'. Since I can't deal but feared attack. I am all loving mainly and accepting of others but these days I felt conflict with that. Finally seems there are some people in this world I want to stay far away from.

I am sad I didn't keep up to the changes in ownership of LJ. I kept thinking it was just a couple Russian's trying to make a living. But the truth was so much worse. Seems we can't sleep these days, too much changes too quickly.

Your journal is your happy place, you set the rules, and you have domiciliary rights - so never fear!

I do like Renaissance/Baroque music and Malian/Azawadi music. Music from the depths of hell, well, does that include Merzbow? Because I do enjoy Merzbow.

Ohhhh Yoshitaka Amano! Haven't seen that one in a while <3 Merzbow is de rigueur in hell, I believe. (Along with a lot of Brighter Death Now.) For sure.

History nerding and bible slash are my favorite things. Can we be friends?

Absolutely! May I congratulate you on this exquisite combination of interests? ;)

Yes, of course! It's always best when you're congratulated by people who really appreciate the weird. :)

BIBLE SLASH! I don't write it, but I will read it and I love people that do. Really, that tells me all I need to know :D (Music fans always welcome though.) I'd love to add you!

There's still a readership? I'm pleasantly shocked! :D Added right back.

looks interesting! *subscribes*

Well met!

Scrolling through the addme and not seeing many close to my age, so happy to see you here. You sound super interesting and I love history stuff, and looks like I might just learn something from you, which makes you all the more interesting.

Learn something? Oi vej. I harbour serious doubts if there is anything one can learn from me. But if you can stomach a lot of very narrowly focused nerdery and unexpected railing at the heavens, you are welcome indeed!

I always feel the same, yet people seek me out to teach them about stuff. LOL.

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