Ponderosa’s blog

Although I am freshly suspended from LiveJournal, I still have this lovely space to fill with my amateur but charming cartoon, which I am sure will be extra hilarious to certain members of my neighbourhood.

The other day maiki asked in regards to etiquette and protocol... "So, how is it done in other social networking sites that you belong to? ...What value do you derive from social networking sites? ...Why do you socialize in your way?"

I've been thinking about this, in part because I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to use this space for. In the beginning, my social interaction on the internet was for gaming and participate in related communities, whether that was bbs roleplaying, MUD related mailing lists, or, as I recall in fond nostalgia, how back in the day all the cool kids who played Myth 2 eventually moved off the forums and hung around chatting on Hotlink servers.

With the way MUDs and such work in general, I've always had multiple usernames, because I've always had multiple characters. Still, there was always the sense that the people I befriended knew that Tarrant and Senkouji were both "me". Besides having a penchant for playing male characters in the first place, I've always been leery of letting other gamers know that I'm female because, well, I've always hated being treated like I either need a handicap or deserved sweet equipment from the start. Due to this vague sort of identity splicing, over the years I ran into more than one awkward moment of "omg, you're a girl?" and the other person either reacting as if it was some sort of betrayal or becoming uncomfortably attached to me. Anyway, eventually, when I'd been playing Myth 2 nightly instead of dungeon crawling, I had a singular account under the name Mara Jade, so there were fewer gender-issues, and a far more concrete "identity" when it came to interacting with the community.

I did go back to MUDding after that, but it wasn't long before I fell into yaoi/slash fandom subculture, decided for once to not use a username related to a favourite character, and that's where I've been for six years. In fandom as Ponderosa, I've moved from website archive interaction, to mailing lists and forums, and then to LiveJournal, where slash fandom seems to have congregated in general. And there's no way to condense the protocols therein without a full essay on the subject and then some. Most of my online interaction is related to fandom in some way, and I've never bothered keeping a blog to do anything beyond share my writing/art, enjoy what others have produced, and enthuse about being a media junkie with people who wear the same tinted goggles as myself.

Essentially, this is how and why I socialise online, and this is how and why I'm not sure what to do with this space. It feels redundant to me to crosspost, and since the persons whom I've followed here aren't really a part of my subculture, it hardly seems necessary to wax lyrical about who I'd love to see banging who in which fictional universe.

So, anyhow, I have a lot of yarn and on top of my many projects, I'm making an afghan out of granny squares. I will eventually assembled it into the world map version of Edward from FFIV.  If I get Jay to help me search the loft in the garage for more yarn, I'm hoping to find some nice goldenrod or mustard colours so I can also do Black Mage. ^^

Having more friends who I see both in person and on chat/blogs/lj, and as my irritation with deviant art and someone reporting me for impersonating myself is still fresh, I'm coming into the problem with more frequency that the lines between my online and offline persona are clashing.

Being a student again, I'm not currently in a position where I have any real issues with job versus online activities, nor am I closeted about my preference for fanfiction and porn in general. (Not that I necessarily want most of the people who know me to read my porn or anything, but that's a different issue.) I've never really had to deal with this before, though, so I feel like I'm in some sort of awkward adolescent stage for internet users.

I suppose since I'm doing freelance work, and that's what I had been doing before my grandmother died and before going back to school, I feel like I can no longer easily make a divide between work/play. My art skills have improved so vastly that I'm faced with the decision to use what I draw for fun and fandom only in those circles and not in my portfolio, or to combine the results of my hobby with what I do professionally and sit down and come to terms with how that makes me feel to not being able to separate those parts of my life anymore.

By nature, much of what I draw/write says a lot about me, and although I rarely have problems with people knowing my preferences/orientation/quirks/what have you, when it comes to a prospective client, do they really need to know what my issues are by skimming a few months worth of posts? Part of me is of course worried about what ifs, particularly while trying to save money before heading to art school and the glory of debt, but maybe I'm being fearful and not wanting to take a bigger step towards being a more honest and open person. I can't tell.