writing without engagement (once more with feeling)

So waaaaay back in 2019, I wrote a post about wanting to blog without chasing engagement— rewinding back to the old days of LiveJournal where long-form was king and the Algorithm? I didn’t know ‘er.

Over this summer and early fall I’ve been updating my site, moving things around, reposting old stuff from other platforms… and thinking about ways to hack my own post-writing habits to make it easier to dance around the Executive Dysfunction Disco. And what with one thing and another, I remembered… LJ ICONS.

Anybody else remember them? These days most of the social or microblogging cultures either have changeable names disconnected from the username (allowing for stuff like “spooky” names for Halloween) and/or static profile pics, which are more visually distinct on mobile interfaces than usernames (AND are often actual photos of the user, because we live in a digital panopticon hellscape we climb into daily of our own free will).

LiveJournal usernames, on the other hand, were prominent, unchangeable, and a key feature in the threaded commenting culture that made LJ fantastic and distinctive. Furthermore, the height of LJ’s popularity was during the (tragic) transition from internet anonymity to meatspace Facebook bullshit, so personal photos as profile icons weren’t exactly de rigueur for the common user. Icons, not names, were the disconnected identifier of the time– and so users could have a lot of fun switching them around on a post-by-post (or comment-by-comment) basis to fit their mood, tldr a comment, show their allegiance to this or that cultural moment… In that text-heavy environment, icons were less about identity and more about punctuation.

In the bits of LJ I played around in, they were also often part of the fannish gift culture and a fascinatingly constrained art form– one that doesn’t really exist anymore, unfortunately. You can see examples in my header here, which is composed of only a few of the (VERY) many icons I had saved to my account. Some I made, some I was given, and some were freebies from icon makers and icon community accounts.

I was noodling around the question of why I can write text posts with no header image on platforms like tumblr but feel awkward doing so on WordPress, and my current theory is that it comes down to the aesthetic of the theme’s template. Right now I’m using a modified version of the Baskerville 2 theme, which sort of requires “featured” art at the top of a post or there’s weird white space. The problem with featured art, though, is that it represents just the sliiiiightest pause in the writing process, right at the start of a draft, and it can be enough of an ADHD stumbling block to derail me for hours if not, uh, forever.

So I figured, why not fit an old idea into a new space?

I have my Minor Hours and Small Thoughts header, as well as the Minor Thoughts– and I’m still likely to keep finding art to announce new fiction and whatnot. But otherwise? I think I’m going to enjoy rekindling my use of tldr “and now, this” art going forward.

(And if it sucks? Well… who am I writing this for, anyway? As long as I’m having a good time, then what better measure of success can there be? I’ll take any I can get, and may we all be so fortunate in the days ahead.)