2023-07-16 13:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spaceprincessecho
spaceprincessechoHi everyone. I'm Echo, though depending on how you got here you may also know me as Professor Vining, Active Historian for Mission: Zodiac. I'm here on Dreamwidth for a few reasons, and I'm offering this post as an explanation of what you can expect from me.
First off, the modern internet is... not good. I was a teen in the 90s, and I think the general structure of the web in the late 90s/early 00s was much better than the walled garden corporate hellscape we have going on now. As a follow-on point, I feel like social media is a bit in the process of collapse. Facebook has been largely unusable for years due to a combination of the ad density and algorithmic timeline. Twitter has been in a sometimes-funny death spiral since Elon Musk took over. I have a lot of hope for Bluesky, but currently there's a bit of a kerfluffle over how much of a perfect techno-libertarian you can be with regards to moderation, and I'm uncertain if it's going to survive this intact. I had a lovely time on Tumblr in the mid-10s, but they made some misguided choices with regards to handling adult material, and I've lost just about everyone I used to know there; the nice people I have been able to find again don't feel quite the same. Instagram and Tik Tok are all pictures and video, and as you'll be able to tell after only a short time here, I'm all about typing words. Also, I'm kinda bad at social media. I'm not really a 'poster' or 'influencer', as it were, and I tend to spend a lot of time on there just reading my feed, sharing funny memes, and leaving weird and/or flirtations comments on my friends' posts. And every few years I think to myself, 'Gosh I miss Livejournal.' So here I am, reaching for a version of the world that doesn't really exist anymore, but I think we can try for a little while anyway.
The other thing is, as alluded to from the introductory paragraph, I'm a writer. It used to be short stories with the occasional poem, now a lot of my effort goes into tabletop roleplaying games. My main work is Professor Vining's Guide to the Mythic Age, a fantasy setting. I'm working on putting it in multiple game systems, including one of my own design called Dreams of a Mythic Age. I've been tinkering with some version of the setting and/or game system for close to 20 years now, so various parts of it are in different stages of completion. I'll discuss what I'm working on and what I'm thinking here, and I invite any comments and input into my design process that you'd like to offer. When things are (basically) done, I'll put them up on my website, http://missionzodiac.neocities.org . Because, pursuant to issues in the second paragraph, wasn't it nice when we all had our own little websites?
First off, the modern internet is... not good. I was a teen in the 90s, and I think the general structure of the web in the late 90s/early 00s was much better than the walled garden corporate hellscape we have going on now. As a follow-on point, I feel like social media is a bit in the process of collapse. Facebook has been largely unusable for years due to a combination of the ad density and algorithmic timeline. Twitter has been in a sometimes-funny death spiral since Elon Musk took over. I have a lot of hope for Bluesky, but currently there's a bit of a kerfluffle over how much of a perfect techno-libertarian you can be with regards to moderation, and I'm uncertain if it's going to survive this intact. I had a lovely time on Tumblr in the mid-10s, but they made some misguided choices with regards to handling adult material, and I've lost just about everyone I used to know there; the nice people I have been able to find again don't feel quite the same. Instagram and Tik Tok are all pictures and video, and as you'll be able to tell after only a short time here, I'm all about typing words. Also, I'm kinda bad at social media. I'm not really a 'poster' or 'influencer', as it were, and I tend to spend a lot of time on there just reading my feed, sharing funny memes, and leaving weird and/or flirtations comments on my friends' posts. And every few years I think to myself, 'Gosh I miss Livejournal.' So here I am, reaching for a version of the world that doesn't really exist anymore, but I think we can try for a little while anyway.
The other thing is, as alluded to from the introductory paragraph, I'm a writer. It used to be short stories with the occasional poem, now a lot of my effort goes into tabletop roleplaying games. My main work is Professor Vining's Guide to the Mythic Age, a fantasy setting. I'm working on putting it in multiple game systems, including one of my own design called Dreams of a Mythic Age. I've been tinkering with some version of the setting and/or game system for close to 20 years now, so various parts of it are in different stages of completion. I'll discuss what I'm working on and what I'm thinking here, and I invite any comments and input into my design process that you'd like to offer. When things are (basically) done, I'll put them up on my website, http://missionzodiac.neocities.org . Because, pursuant to issues in the second paragraph, wasn't it nice when we all had our own little websites?
