No Surface All Feeling

New dreamwidth layout/style!

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:11:54 GMT

Got distracted while I'm supposed to be working... I've updated my dreamwidth theme to something way more minimal lol. This should be easier to maintain/modify maybe? idk.

I might add an automatic light/dark mode (that adapts to what your system settings are). Ideally I'd want a button you can toggle like on my website but alas... no custom javascript on dreamwidth (that I know of...?).

I forgot how much of a pain it is to add images to posts on here. Can't be bothered to upload a screenshot of the new layout and do a before/after atm... I guess visit my blog and see the changes?

Pretty happy with this.

Also wow I need to update my pinned post... need to mention Alan Wake or I'll die!!!

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Ohh I'm thinking about writing blog posts

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:17:51 GMT

Hello! It's been a while.

I'm dreadful at writing blog posts. I have a weird tendency to lose patience with myself (aka "oh my god why do I bother trying to put this into writing when I could just write a very casual thread on my private Twitter account and it'd be sooo much faster and I want the immediate feedback of my friends interacting with it anyway" syndrome) which means I may have a lot of unpublished half-written drafts for blog posts that then gather dust because I lost interest/patience/etc with whatever it was I'm writing about.

As someone who's always felt a little uncomfortable with the 'essay' format, I usually find myself frustrated at my strange lack of ability to get to a nice and clean Conclusion. Something that ties everything together. That's the other advantage of stream-of-consciousness social media thread formatting: you don't necessarily need to arrive to a neat end-point. There is a certain freedom to the format of the thread, that you can always slap a direct addendum to it if you so desired: the new thoughts you write are in direct conversation (literally!) with your previous thoughts. A real marvel of modern technology.

But Twitter is dead to me now, and with it my access to unfiltered private rambling. I just can't justify contributing to the cultural weight, even in such insignificant and private ways, of a fascist billionaire who's currently taking over the US government in possibly the most cringe and annoying coup ever known to man. Anyway, Twitter alternatives are either VERY public by design (no private accounts on Bluesky for now, maybe forever?), OR frustratingly hard to set up (I'd absolutely start a Mastodon instance if it was easier to do and I didn't have to pay money for it that I do not have), OR specific cases of not wanting to join some stranger's niche fandom-oriented Mastodon instance because I'm not that committed to being a gatecrasher with opinions. Lol.

Which brings us to Dreamwidth, again. It's weird because I don't necessarily have an active audience on here, or any other fandom platform these days because I'm wildly inconsistent in how I post (gone are the days of COVID lockdown posting when I had endless time to write very opinionated posts about TF2 characters!) and people simply forget you exist when you don't post regularly. Not that I can blame them, really.

So yeah. Could it be... could it be that we're so back?

Anyway, I really need to make notes for Things I Want To Write About... for now, I'll start here:

It turns out I have this big draft for a guide to writing Aussie accents in fanfics, specifically about Sniper TF2. I could finish this? Maybe it'd be useful to someone sometime in the future?
I want to write about my favourite ship dynamics, and my love for non-standard relationships (i.e. dynamics that aren't just They Have A Crush On Each Other Then They Start Dating, although I wouldn't necessarily say that is the most popular format for ships depending on where you go). I love one-sided pining, I love broken-up relationships, I love friends-with-benefits-but-it's-complicated...
Some vague rambling about making fanart/writing fanfic in the social media age... I see people apologising for NOT posting regularly enough so often... I do it too! And I don't think it's very good for all of us! Aaahhh! lol

I don't know how consistent I will be with these posts. Again, I'm shit at these things, forgive me if I never end up delivering any of the above Post Ideas. I've got a busy life outside of fandom and over the years the fandom stuff has just taken a backseat. Life goes on, etc.

But it doesn't hurt to try!

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New website dropped!

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 06:39:02 GMT

I have a website now! Well, I always had a website, but it was a very bare-bones landing page for like, at least a year or so that just linked to my socials or whatever.

I always intended to make it into something more standalone and truly personal... and last week I was like fuck it, I'm gonna procrastinate on my actual real-life obligations and do this instead (and, I mean, if I do web dev in my normal regular ol' job as well, maybe this constitutes as "practicing"... maybe)!

The result!

No templates, just me writing everything from scratch, aggressively putting things in flexboxes, and making it all look good.

I'm so happy with how it looks. I don't care much for 90s/2000s nostalgic aesthetics (just not my thing, also not very good for accessibility IMO), so instead I went for something older: late-70s computer interfaces, which also inspired the design of the Pipboy in the Fallout series and the computer terminal in Alien: Isolation.

A few design notes I thought of while designing this:

Responsive design above all... I wanted this website to look as good on mobile as if you looked at it on your computer screen. The number of people who only access the internet through their smartphone is increasing, and, well, why not make the experience of looking at your website comfortable for everyone?
If you really LOVE looking at my profiles on various customisable spaces (namely here, and Tumblr), you'll notice I use the same colour palette on all these places. It's just neat to keep it consistent and I just really love this colours together lol? Very understated but also feels very Me. What more do you need?
I think the sidebar menu is what I'm proudest of! The "tree view" for the subnavigation links and the big buttons are so fun.

Anyway, I've still got a few pages to make, and I'm excited to keep working on it! I had forgotten how rewarding it is to just make something for fun outside of like, social media validation points.

Of course, nice comments are always nice to see, as you can see the really nice things people left in my guestbook! Turns out I can have my cake and eat it too, for this specific situation.

Go check it out if you haven't yet!

You can even follow me on neocities for updates and such. Let's be friends on there!

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We're all freaks to them anyway: On consumerism and sex negativity in media

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:05:51 GMT

Last night I was reading a series of tweets by film critics Jessica Ritchey and Matt Zoller Seitz (who I look up to a lot!). I could really repost the entire thread by Ritchey but for the sake of brevity, here's an excerpt:

Neoliberalism always needs to justify things for profit. "Why is this here? This doesn't serve the plot." Neoliberalism is terrified of pleasure for pleasure's sake. The idea that you have a sex scene because it's hot. Because you have a right to pleasure.

And here's this from Zoller Seitz:

People have been taught to “consume” things that are given to them immediately and often that were produced under exploitative circumstances — and they also hate the artist who made them for calling them art and insisting they have intrinsic value apart from being “property.”

It got me thinking a lot about sex negativity in media fueling consumerism, and as Ritchey says in her thread, how this "culture-wide phobia of sex which in turn is becoming a useful vector for the increasing spread of fascism".

Much like a lot of fairly reasonable takes on culture online, this one received plenty of whataboutist replies, which drives me crazy.

I often think about the current trend in mainstream media where "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny" as a symptom of capitalism and more specifically consumerist neoliberalism: the infantilisation of the audience.

( 1. Capitalism and audience infantilisation )

( 2. Sex positivity )

( 3. Sex negativity )

Conclusion

What I want to end on with this... fairly lengthy post, is this:

Sex is normal. Not having sex is also normal.
Queer love and sex is especially beautiful, because we live in a world where everyone tries to pretend it doesn't exist.
Any pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake (whether sexual or not!) is a wonderful expression of human nature at its most affirming, inherently anti-capitalist and anti-fascist.

People, especially queer people who want to make art about sex, or even just talk openly about it, are rightfully frustrated at the current climate in which they're accused of the most horrid shit for even mentioning sex, or their frustration with the current climate! And it sucks that some of the negativity comes from within the queer community!

If you think that the expression of this frustration on is somehow "shaming" or not inclusive enough of asexuals or normie queers or whatever... I think you need to examine a little closer what it is you're actually ashamed of or uncomfortable with, and ask yourself why you resent queer people who enjoy sex.

We live in an age where people are more and more afraid and ashamed of sex. A lot of people pushing for this shift hold a lot of power, and their first scapegoat will always be the people they see as deviating from the norms they were uncritically conditioned in. That's queer people, obviously including asexuals. Whether you like sex or not doesn't matter to them, we're all freaks anyway.

There is always time to unlearn capitalist, cis-heteronormative conditioning.

There is always time to examine your own biases and understanding them.

There is always time to realise that someone's genuine joy, pleasure, and love is not an attack on you but something to be celebrated, even if it's not a type of joy, pleasure, and love you personally practice.

Finally, there is always time to engage with art in earnest. Stop using marketing words like "content" and "consuming media" and you're already halfway there.

And then, I swear, it gets so much better.

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What I'm up to, stuff I want to do / June 2023

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 13:34:57 GMT

Right, let's get into this.

I've hit a bit of a lull in my uh, fandom activities, lately. Haven't been as active, mostly because of life stuff and being a generally busy person, although there are contributing factors such as my increasing frustration with social media platforms (hence my branching out into attempting to write longer blog posts again in parallel to the micro-blogging of it all).

This said I'm feeling full of creative energy again now! And I wanna talk about the projects I'm rotating in my big ol' noggin'! I have a tendency to juggle many projects at once, and sometimes it's quite hard to keep track of... so hopefully actually writing this stuff down in organised lists will be helpful.

My "ongoing projects" fit into roughly two categories: active and dormant. I function exactly like a volcano.

Active projects

This is the stuff I'm literally currently working on right now, the stuff most likely to be completed soon.

( Active projects )

Dormant Projects

These are the ones that are very dear to me but I'm letting them simmer in my head for a little bit because I care about them a lot and I want them to be great. OR these are simply things I want to do that I will eventually get to do, just not right now.

( Dormant projects )

I'm so excited about all these, and excited to share more about them. Also feels like this slow-going posting style fits my current pace a lot.

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About

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 12:46:43 GMT

Hello! My name is cc (pronounced see-see, spelt in lowercase please and thank you). Some people sometimes call me by my screen name debtdeath which is always kinda funny. I don't mind it though.

I was born in 1994, I live in Australia. You can use whatever pronouns you want to refer to me.

In this blog you will find me talking about:

my main "fandoms": Team Fortress 2 (TF2), Yakuza/Like A Dragon/Ryu Ga Gotoku (RGG)
working on things: fics, fanart, websites and other web projects
what I'm watching, reading, listening to
internet culture, fandom culture, media and media literacy
being a grumpy old millennial

General disclaimer: This blog is mainly adult-oriented. While any explicit content will be properly tagged and hidden "under the cut" in a given post, please take the necessary precautions and avoid this content if you are a minor or do not want to see it.

While the fandoms I'm currently ostensibly socially active in and creating fanwork for are Team Fortress 2 and the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, I have a whole lot of interests. I don't really do short-lived "hyperfixations": if I like something enough to post about it, you'd better believe I'll come back to it regularly.

( Blog ethos and etiquette )

( Links )

( Favourites )

I may add more to this post as I go. In the meantime, welcome!

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