(no subject)

[eldabe]

So, I'm planning a Social Media Break.

Whenever I'm bored (aka...a lot) I just pop open tumblr or sometimes twitter or even AITA on reddit to just get a quick hit of serotonin or something to keep my brain churning along. I do very occasionally doomscroll, but really I haven't logged into twitter since 2019 and I raaaarely go to my tumblr dash, so-oh wait! I do scroll facebook! I'm only offbeat sometimes.

Basically like, I'm not loving how social media can really get me down a lot. It's a little like roulette - is this time going to be a cool fanart or meta on a fandom I like, or the first step down a four day anxiety spiral? Such fun! I also wonder if the anxiety spiral is part of what is killing my ability to work on my own fic, which has been a major struggle for, um, years now. (Other options include: Pandemic, and Hell Job. I left Hell Job, and I can't do much about the pandemic, so you know, this seems worth a try.)

But as social media has become my automatic boredom cure, I'm literally gathering up a bunch of things to DO when I would just open a new tumblr tab. I've downloaded more mobile games for my phone, I've bought some KJ Charles ebooks that I know I can just open and browse, I'm getting romance novel and fic recs from friends (feel free to leave any in the comments!) and I'm just trying to find new quick and mobile Solutions To Boredom. Wish me luck?

I'll probably keep coming to Dreamwidth as my experience here has always been entirely different. Ha, maybe I'll even post more! And like, I'll follow links to social media stuff and all, I'm not cutting myself off from friends or anything. I'm just trying to modify my own habits. Let's see how it goes!

Comments

[eldabe]

Oh thank you!!!

I might like...um...come back to you in two months to see about setting as RSS feed up? If you have the energy to answer a lot of dumb questions. Because this sounds like an amazing amazing solution but I honestly need to just gather up the energy to do it. (Right now I'm cleaning up my tabs. My 500+ tabs. It's...a project?)

Oh! Oh! You're in MDZS fandom!!! Okay okay if you could give me a primer that would be amazing. The costumes look so cool! The tiny little boy in all the gifs is adorable! I have zero idea what this fandom is and it's everywhere!

And thank you for the recs! I know enough Flash I can muddle through and one friend has been poking me to watch Legends of Tomorrow (I hear Booster Gold showed up so I might have no choice now haha).

A modern SPORT AU one of my favorite genres I love it already thank you thank you!!! Downloading now!

[lannamichaels]

I'll be happy to chat in a couple months about RSS feeds! To find them in tumblr, just add /rss to the end of the URL, which you can also do off specific tags (ex: https://lannamichaels.tumblr.com/tagged/discworld/rss is the RSS feed of my discworld tag) but yeah, quiteRSS had a huge learning curve for me to figure out how to do anything at all with the filters.

MDZS, okay, so, basic summary. Wei Ying = Wei Wuxian = Yiling patriarch. Lan Zhan = Lan Wangji = Hanguang-jun. My general rule of thumb when reading via osmosis for AT LEAST six months was if I didn't recognize someone's name, they were a bastard of Jin Guangshan, this served me well even though he only has three bastard children (Qin Su, Jin Guangyao/Meng Yao, and Mo Xuanyu)

WWX is the protag. LWJ is the love interest. WWX grew up in the Jiang sect after his parents are Tragically Killed, he lived on the street for a while when he was young and has some trauma about it. LWJ has an older brother, Lan Xichen/Lan Huan. When WWX and LWJ are teenagers, WWX and a bunch of other folks go to the Lan sect to learn stuff, WWX and LWJ meet. WWX thinks they don't like each other. LWJ falls in love.

There is then quest stuff and war stuff. WWX donates his golden core to Jiang Cheng/Jiang Wanyin and can no longer cultivate the normal way. The assembled anti-Wen folks beat the Wen folks and the remnants of the Wen clan are put into death camps. WWX is the only non-Wen person who objects to this. WWX then goes off with Wen folks: Wen Qing and Wen Ning/Wen Qionglin. No one is happy about this, so they do war on WWX. WWX is doing demonic cultivation, which backfires on him and kills him.

The only Wen left is Wen Yuan, who becomes Lan Sizhui. (Wen Ning is a zombie.)

We then fast-forward 13 years. Mo Xuanyu (bastard son of JGS, half brother of JGY) decides that, in order to get revenge on his asshole family, he's going to offer up his body to WWX. WWX is now reborn in a new body and has a revenge quest to complete. Which he does, and then he ends up happily ever after with LWJ. (difference from MDZS and The Untamed: in the Untamed, WWX somehow manages to keep his original body due to something something something.)

Other people to know:
The Jiangs: Jiang Cheng/Jiang Wanyin and Jiang Yanli are WWX's sect siblings. Jiang Fengmian is WWX's parents' old friend and took him in, against the wishes of his wife, Madam Yu, who doesn't like WWX.

Other Lans: Lan Qiren, LWJ's uncle. Lan Jingyi: one of the juniors, Sizhui's friend.

Other Jins: Jin Zixuan, who married Jiang Yanli. Jin Ling/Jin Rulan, their son. Jin Zixun, a forgettable villain, whose name I am sure is much more easy to tell about from his cousin's in the original text ;) Jin Guangyao, the villain in the current day part of the story.

Wens: Wen Ruohan, the villain in the backstory part of the story.

Nies: Nie Mingjue, who is the Nie sect leader in the backstory. Nie Huaisang, who is his younger brother is the Nie sect leader in the current.

The Yi city arc people: A-Qing, Xiao Xingchen, Song Lan, and Xue Yang. Frankly I never cared about them. They exist and there's some narrative parallels, but I, uh, never cared about them. In MDZS, they are only in the current day part of the story. The Untamed moved some of it (?) to backstory.


Very helpful wiki, considering people have multiple names and titles: https://modao-zushi.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters

[eldabe]

Yeah, the trick would be to figure out the tags because without them, I might as well use my current method of using tumblr (which is just...go to individual tumblr pages and scroll back until I hit where I read before and/or stress out and close the tab. It's not a great method! But it's mine!) So yes, thank you, I will get back to you!

And oh no that summary was...a lot haha. Ok ok, I'm going to try to read it again. I might just jump into the fics and see how it goes haha. Hey, it's worked in other fandoms!

[lannamichaels]

The killer feature of using RSS is that it moves the tags to the top. So if I click on a post, even before all the images load, I can see if it's tagged anything I care about, or specifically don't care about, and move on. Which unfortunately does not help if people don't tag :( But it does mean I can really easily skip posts, like when everyone and their sideblog is spreading around the exact same post, I can either pass it by or scroll to the bottom of the post to see if anything is added. I've been thinking about doing a tutorial post, I should probably get around to that.

One thing I should mention since I linked to that baseball fic! I've seen in some modern AUs, including that one, where they decide that, for the purposes of the fic, some people aren't related. So Jin Ling shows up in that fic but isn't Jiang Yanli's kid.

MDZS is great for reading with no-fandom-knowledge except for all the multiple names/titles issues, and those don't show up much in modern AUs. But yeah for just reading for osmosis, characters named Jiang = sect relative of WWX. Lan = sect relative of LWJ. Jin = the rich folks. Nie = they use sabers. Wen = some are evil, some are WWX's friends.

[lannamichaels]

(For you in two months, because I did finally get around to the tutorial by the power of procrastinating on other things: https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1247797.html )

[eldabe]

THANK YOU!! I know I don't have the spoons for this right now but I really really cannot thank you enough!!