girlbosse aux pieds d'argile

For years I've been trying to cut out on my mindless scrolling habit by spending weeks offline cold turkey, but I found I was not especially happier or more productive when doing that. As a lonely person who likes looking at stuff other people make, I really do like the internet. I've tried to quit it thinking that it would make me go back to the boundless creativity of my teens, drawing or writing or researching new things every time I'm on the computer, but... I was already online then. Much more dependent on my online communities that I am now, even, really. So I realized that by thinking the solution was to quit being online at all, I was looking at it the wrong way.

I think what I'm done with is... What social media has become? This kind of "Nexus". Where every app and website is a little bit of everything. You have a tumblr, an insta, a bluesky, but all of them have your everything on them. Your friends, movie reviews, politics, your enemies, art, music. So you just open those various hubs and don't get to decide what you experience on them. Even on tumblr, where the community takes pride on the absence of an algorithm, you're still at the mercy of a feed.

I think the internet had this feeling of wonder and actually doing something creative and productive as a child, not because people have gotten dumber, not because "oooohhhh no one comments on fic anymore"... But because it used to be so much more deliberate. I did not have one single button called "internet" that I would press that would decide for me whether the next hour would be spent on reading geopolitics news, watching music videos, or participating in discourse about fandoms I'm not even in. I had bookmarks folders, with various websites, and I would consciously decide what I was going to do on the internet that day. Sometimes it was reading history wikipedia pages. Sometimes it was the ace attorney roleplay forum.

So, I know how to reduce my screentime, but that's not helping me. Maybe trying to emulate that to make my screentime more deliberate might? I don't think I want to be on social media as a whole person anymore. I want to be "online" but I'm starting to really pinpoint how different what I want is from what websites like tumblr or the alternatives sell me.

So first of all I'm actually happy at the prospect of having a blog. Not an account on a feed of various blogs, but an actual adress that you can consult and read long-form customizable posts that I can make the way I fancy. If I want to share something nice I saw, I can do it the humane way, by typing, on the blog, "check out this cool thing I saw". I was excited as a teen when reblog and retweets started being a thing and you could turn your own blog into a mush of your own posts and other's but... The novelty has run off. I don't want to do it that way unless it's for specific topics anymore.

https://monalizard.dreamwidth.org/ : I've had a lot of fun lately writing down and formatting those long "best of 2025" lists and I think I want to utilize my dreamwidth account a lot more, basically for the stuff I used to use this account or twitter or discord for: media recs, talking about my recent interests, food pics and recipes, all of that. I like that I can link those to anyone with or without an account and it reads as a standalone web page, without the clutter of the constant reminder that thousands of other people are talking and you are missing out on them.

If something I want to post on there might dox me or have my face in it, I can even lock it for only my friends to see. U guys remember twitter circles? Among many cool things, dreamwidth has that. I'm going to do a little bit of dreamwidth propaganda now, even though I know most people here won't be interested in that kind of platform. Personally it would make me happy to see more friends on there because long form original posting is truly what I preferred to see from my tumblr mutuals here. Over the past few years it feels like 90% of my dash is opinions from popular people who are not you. And maybe everyone is getting something out of that. But I want to hear from youuu. Well and even if you don't use it if you make a dreamwidth account and befriend me you'll be able to see the locked posts when I make them ;)

But in the meantime I guess I will check on my mutuals, from all those platforms, the old-fashioned way: folders with your blogs in them in my firefox navbar, once in a while when I feel "oh I wonder what X is up to lately" i pull you up in a little tab and see what you've been posting. I think if you're my tumblr mutual it won't change much from what it used to be. Like I'm talking a lot right now but nothing particularily crazy is happening.

I made a new tumblr account but specifically only for touhou. I'll curate a touhou-only dash on there and then tumblr will become "the booksmark I click when I want to see touhou stuff", making it like a speciality website instead of a hodgepodge I doomscroll.

I like the potential tumblr has with personnalized themes and image hosting for making smaller "blog" projects so I still want to use it for that. I'd like to make a blog that's just my landscape pics, for instance. Maybe a nolwenn blog too. I'm working on some cute custom themes for those.

The second I started pondering "what if instead of centralizing my internet presence on one carrd + a bunch of general social media accounts I saw it as various little isolated projects" so many ideas popped in my head. I want to make a website for free animation ressources with all my toon boom scripts and code snippets. I want to post my original short stories somewhere else than ao3 and make little booklets with them to hand out IRL. Maybe I can conquer my fear of recording myself singing and make a small unlisted youtube channel full of covers. Just thinking about it the internet became exciting again. I hope I can find the free time to do at least one or two of those and I will update about it I guess here or on my dreamwidth.