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latam is a new community for people to come together to talk about latinamerican music, films, food, culture, fandom, and more!Everyone's welcome, no matter where you're posting from! And you can also post in your language (official languages of the community are Spanish, Portuguese and English!)
Come make friends! We have a friending meme going on right now :)
malymin posting in newcomersI'm working on a post that discusses use of color in a series' character designs and peripheral media, so I have to embed lots of images in order to make my point. I've been designing "photosets" by hand using css and html. The simplest way for me to make these image sets is to have a grid of images, where all the images in a row shrink and grow to match the width of the visible post-space.
However, some images, even if placed in a "photoset" with this technique, still stretch a page vertically quite badly. For example, a full image of a character standing in place with no background is often very vertical. This ends up visually "overwhelming" the text, which I don't want to do. Yes, putting the image under a cut prevents it from being annoying in reading page and journal-page views, but I also want the image to look nice while visible, and not overwhelm the paragraphs above and below it.
Is there any common etiquette for the maximum height (in pixels) of an embedded in-post image in a post published to a community?
teres posting in newcomers( More technical tips this time. )
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There is a parking lot visible in the photo, I will note. That said, this is not the usual parking lot photo from when I travel.
San Diego is lovely. But then, when is it not. We will be in it only briefly before setting sail on this year’s installment of the JoCo Cruise. Try to have fun without us for a week.
Oh, and happy equinox! Spring is here. Thank God.
— JS
scalziwhatever_feedHey, everyone! You may remember my post from 2024 over my friend Jon R. Mohr’s album he released that summer, Bioluminescent Soundwaves. Well, I’m happy to report that Jon has come out with a brand new song, Death is a Beautiful Cobalt Blue.
This eleven-minute composure featuring the vocals of Julie Elven is a piece that comes from deep within Mohr’s very soul, as it is the result of years of stress and existential crises. He mentions that this work is inspired by T. J. Lea’s story, “I Bought My Wife a Life Extension Plan,” which he listened to the audio drama of in January 2025.
According to Mohr, the story really spoke to him and was practically a mirror to him and his wife, who was diagnosed with POTS back in 2023.
Following the diagnosis, her job let her go, and each following job failed to accommodate her medical needs appropriately. Between the medical stress, job insecurity, financial complications, and facing the physical struggles of POTS, the couple experienced their fair share of breakdowns and emotional turmoil.
Within this story, Mohr says it entailed the most beautiful depiction of death he’d ever heard, and it brought him comfort. He decided then and there that he’d believe in this version of the afterlife, even if it made no sense, because all that mattered was that it brought him comfort, and that works for him.
Things are much better now, with Mohr’s wife having a great remote job and a better handle on her physical symptoms, plus the two of them are closer than ever. The journey through all of this made Mohr truly appreciate friends, family, and the simple things in life.
In Mohr’s own words:
“Death Is a Beautiful Cobalt Blue is the result of all of that. It’s an exaltation of life, loss, beauty, and grief. It doesn’t shame or try to hide pain or the negative aspects of life. It welcomes all of it, because I feel so lucky to be able to experience all these things and truly know what makes life worth living. I also consider myself very lucky to both know what intense happiness and intense pain feel like. Because all of it is life. THIS, now, is all I can guarantee to be true and real.”
So, there you have it. A baring of a composer’s soul and struggles, as well as his joys and comforts. I hope you enjoy it, it really is quite beautiful.
Don’t forget to follow Jon on Instagram, and have a great day!
-AMS
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Krissy and I are on our way to the JoCo Cruise, and as you can tell, we are excited! Well, I am excited, Krissy is, as ever, tolerant. Also I have brought a tiny ukulele, because, after all, is it really a vacation without a tiny ukulele?
Don’t expect too much from me over the next week. Don’t worry, Athena will be around and posting good stuff. As for me, my plan is to get on a boat and not look at the rest of the world for a while. It’s a good plan, which is why I do it annually.
— JS
soc_puppet posting in newcomersOne of the things that has made Tumblr wildly popular with fandom is its unlimited image hosting capacity. Content, Tumblr eventually put limits on, but number of total images (rather than images per post) and size of images? Not so much.
Unfortunately, that's one of the big reasons why Tumblr is basically hemorrhaging money: Because data is expensive, and image data is much more so than text data, mainly because it's a lot more data. That number just goes up with gifs and videos, the former especially being a favorite on Tumblr.
The ways to get money to run a social media site on the internet are basically venture capitol (the investors will want their money back someday, somehow), selling user data (doesn't everyone love ads and hate privacy?), and users directly paying for services (in this economy?).
Dreamwidth started from a foundation of prioritizing privacy and user freedom, and that meant that they compromised on image hosting in order for their users to truly be the main focus of this site. A dedicated user base pays to keep Dreamwidth running, and while there's a price rise on the horizon, we've managed to keep Dreamwidth's doors open with just our own money for sixteen years now.
So what does this have to do with icons? Well, with the limited image hosting options in Dreamwidth's budget, they're one of the main ways we use images at all—and Dreamwidth users make the most of them!
( Hold up; what exactly IS an icon? And what do you mean by 'make the most of them'? )
( How do I get and upload icons? )
Is that it?
Well, it's everything I can think of, at any rate! But you might have questions that I haven't covered. This is a great place to ask them! I may not have the answers, but odds are decent that someone here will be able to point you in the right direction.
One last favor before I go...
Dreamwidth users, if you've got favorite icons, show them off in the comments! I think it would be great to be able to share examples of just how fun and creative we can get with this medium, and this seems like the perfect opportunity 😉 Reply to your own comment if you have more than one, or to other people if the icon fits, so it's not just a mass of top-level comments.
As for any newcomers, if this post gets enough comments, you may get a chance to try out another one of Dreamwidth's features; at 50 comments, comment threads will collapse to keep loading time down and limit data transfer costs. Towards the topmost comment, at the bottom of the comment below which everything gets folded up, there's a clickable option to Expand the thread. This will open up and display all of the comments below that for you! The thread will collapse back down if you click away, though.
If this post doesn't get that many comments but you still want to try it out, I'd recommend checking the latest post at
dw_news. (Incidentally, if you have a Paid account, there's an option to expand all the comment threads at once at the top of the comment section. Pretty neat, yeah?)Thanks, everyone, and I hope this post was helpful! I'm going to go collapse for a while now 😅
Edit: I've added a clarification about which icons will be kept if you go from a paid account to a free account with more than 15 icons.
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Like two peas in a time travel pod, archivist and author Katy Rawdon teamed up with Hugo-award winning editor Lynne M. Thomas to craft the perfect time travel narrative. Take a closer look at famous time travel stories from all across the globe in The Infinite Loop: Archives and Time Travel in the Popular Imagination, with a foreword from one such writer herself, Connie Willis.
KATY RAWDON (a.k.a. KATY JAMES):
Archives are made of time. Time is made of archives. Archives are where time gets mixed up, turned around, and pulled apart.
I have always been obsessed with time, frustrated with it, wanting to tear at it and see what’s behind and underneath it. No doubt that’s why I became an archivist some thirty years ago, so that I could look at the physical remnants of time and preserve them, see what’s missing, and organize and interpret time’s leftovers for people who, wisely, do not think about time all the… time.
When I was approached to submit an idea (a big idea!) for a book series jointly published by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) called Archival Futures – a series that tackles big ideas around the archival profession – there was only one possible topic for me to write about: time.
While the phrase “archives are like time travel” is thrown around a lot, I knew the relationship between historical records and time was far more complicated. Archives reinforce and challenge our very conceptions of time, of what has happened, of what will happen, of what is truth and what is unknowable. The evidence of archives can be used to demonstrate how the past is so much more faceted than the narrow stories of history we tend to tell ourselves and others. Archives can also be selectively wielded as propaganda, or erased to allow for falsehoods to sprout and flourish in the empty spaces. Time can be illustrated, illuminated, rendered invisible, or constructed in new ways using the material items created in the course of history.
Unfortunately, all of this turned out to be so complicated that the series’ word limit of 50,000 was never going to cover it, as I painfully discovered while writing the book proposal.
I am forever grateful that the inimitable Lynne M. Thomas stepped into my creative mess and provided direction: Why not analyze the depiction of both archives and time travel in popular narratives (books, television, movies, etc.) and see what we could unearth? As a romance author (Katy James) as well as an archivist (Katy Rawdon), I was more than happy to spend time in fictional worlds in order to better understand my non-fictional archivist profession.
It turns out that we unearthed a lot – about cultural views regarding time and time travel, the popular perception of archives and archivists, and the ways current archival theory and practice intersect (or don’t) with ideas about time and time travel.
How does time work? How is it understood by different people and cultures? How do archives help or hinder our understanding of the past (and future)? How can popular narratives about time travel and archives guide archivists to shift their methods to a more expansive, inclusive, transparent approach? How can archival workers apply current archival theory and practice to all of the above ideas to better serve their communities and increase the use of archives?
Researching this book and synthesizing all of the swirling concepts was a real mind-twister of an exercise, trying to write our expansive, big ideas while keeping it succinct and legible for archivists and general readers alike.
We hope we’ve succeeded.
LYNNE M. THOMAS:
Sometimes, if you’re very lucky, the right project turns up at exactly the right time. As a professional rare book librarian, twelve-time Hugo Award winning SFF editor and podcaster, and massive Doctor Who fan, I had a moment of “I was literally made for this” when Katy explained her concept for the book to me and asked me to join her. My initial contribution was more or less “but what if we add Doctor Who examples to make all this time stuff understandable,” and then … we got excited. Because when you have the chance to dive deep into a particular rabbit hole that looks perfect for you specifically, you lean hard into your personal weird.
Time travel stories often feature archives to prove the narrative truth of characters’ experiences. The main character goes into a locked room full of dusty boxes, and immediately finds the one piece of documentary evidence they need to solve their problem, or make sense of their experiences. And yet archivists—the people tasked with organizing and running archives—are almost always invisible or nonexistent in these very same narratives. When we do show up…well, it feels like writers haven’t talked to an archivist lately.
That…bothered us. It turns out, when you have professional archivists and librarians who are also active writers and editors in science fiction, we have thoughts and opinions about how archivists and librarians are portrayed (or not) in fiction and nonfiction. But we thought, maybe we’re seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist, it’s just that “red car syndrome” thing where experts pay more attention to the areas of their expertise in the narratives than non-experts do. So… we checked. We looked at dozens of time travel stories across novels, comics, television series, and films. We discuss Doctor Who, of course, but also Loki, Star Wars, works by Connie Willis (who wrote our foreword), Octavia Butler, Jodi Taylor, Rivers Solomon, Deborah Harkness, and H.G. Wells, among many, many more. We also looked at a whole lot of archival literature—how archivists and librarians talk about themselves, their professions, and their work to one another. And because we are both academic librarians, we laid out our findings in a peer-reviewed book.
What we learned is that there’s a massive divide between what pop culture thinks we do, and what we actually do, and the even greater divide between the level of resources pop culture thinks we have, and what we actually have…and we posit multiple ways to close those gaps.
The Infinite Loop is where archives and pop culture’s image of archives meet and have a long overdue chat. Our hope is that these conversations will lead to archivists being better able to explain what we do, and have that knowledge spread far and wide across popular culture. Ideally, with some time travel stories that feature archivists as main characters. It’s well past time.
The Infinite Loop: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Inkwood Books
Author socials: Katy’s Bluesky|Katy’s Instagram|Katy’s Website|Lynne’s Bluesky|Lynne’s Instagram|Lynne’s Website
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The legal firm that is apparently handling at least some of the Anthropic Copyright Settlement case has started sending out notifications of some sort to presumably affected parties. Small problem: Some of these were sent not to the addresses of the presumably affected parties, but to mine.
I have not opened these notifications, as they are not addressed to me, so I don’t know what’s in them or what they say, and I will be henceforth disposing of these notifications unopened. However, if you are Jody Lynn Nye, Sarah Hoyt, Eric S. Brown, Christopher Smith, or the estate of Eric Flint, please be aware that JND Legal Administration is trying to inform you of something (probably that you have works that are eligible to be part of the class action suit).
I have contacted the firm in question and told them about these incorrect addresses and, for the avoidance of doubt, also informed them at no other affected author than me lives at my address. Hopefully that will take. That said, I would not be surprised if I get more notifications, not for me. What a wonderful age of information we live in.
— JS
probablynotbees posting in newcomersHello all!
I'm very new to Dreamwidth (showed up with the latest wave of Tumblr ex-pats) but thinking about using it to post some of my media-criticism thoughts that I've been collecting in a private journal for the last year or so.
However, I want to make sure I can tag these appropriately, so I have some questions.
1. What's the etiquette for posting tagging discussion of a piece of media that paints it in a negative light?
On Tumblr, it's often considered rude to bash something in its main tag, so if I wanted to make a post criticizing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I'd tag it something like #mcu hate so that it doesn't show up in the main #mcu tag where people are trying to enjoy their thing.
(I'm primarily asking because I have some quite critical pieces about Harry Potter.)
2. Does Dreamwidth allow users to block tags? Is this something I should anticipate when tagging entries?
On Tumblr I'd tag something like #eating disorder / to hide it from people who are avoiding that topic, including the slash so that the tag isn't searchable (on my own blog or in general). Is that a thing here?
I think that's all I've got for now, but I'll probably think of more later.
soc_puppet posting in newcomersTogether with figuring out what to even post, one of the things that sucks about moving social media and/or blogging platforms is not knowing if there will be enough activity for you at the new place. Be it from old friends, new friends, or interactive communities, there’s a lot of ways you could find activity at a new place, but finding at least two of those categories can be tricky in itself.
Luckily, Dreamwidth has a few shortcuts for you already!
Adding new people to your reading page and finding new friends:
addme: Straight up a place to find new “mutuals” on Dreamwidth, with no particular focus; a good place to start!addme_fandom: Same as above, but with a specific fandom focus! Interested in a particular fandom right now and want more people to talk about it with? Here’s a good place to find fellow fans!findingfriends: Similar to the addme communities but with a more in-depth approach, including things like posting style and what sort of interactions you’re looking for. Takes more brain power than the addme comms, but I imagine that the connections result in a higher level of compatibility.Newcomers' Introduction and Friending Meme: A very in-depth adding meme, hosted by
newcomers! Includes a spot near the top for other platforms you're on, so it might be useful for finding Tumblr mutuals.fandomcalendar: This is a community dedicated to announcing fandom events, which can include fandom-specific friending memes. (I’ll be linking this one again later, as well.)Getting started on Dreamwidth:
newcomers: A community dedicated specifically to helping Dreamwdth newcomers find their way around on a new site! I believe it was launched around the time Cohost was being shut down, so a lot of the people there now are Cohost “refugees”, but it’s still a good place to start.the_great_tumblr_purge: A community dedicated specifically to Tumblr refugees, started around the time of the new content restrictions in 2018. If you've got questions specific to being former Tumblr user, this might be a good place to ask them, though Newcomers is also happy to help.dw_news: The official Dreamwidth news community. I highly recommend following this one and the next one, which will help you keep up with what’s going on around Dreamwidth. DW News typically only posts a few times a year, but maybe that’ll change if a bunch of new users come by...dw_maintenance: Keep up with the mechanical goings-on at Dreamwidth! If there’s a planned site outage or if DW is updating code, you can find out more here; if there’s something funky going on at Dreamwidth but the site is generally still usable, it’s also a good place to check.dw_advocacy: Want to know more about how Dreamwidth is fighting for our rights? Follow this community to keep tabs on what bad bills Dreamwidth and NetChoice are battling, and if there's anything you can do to help!Things to do on Dreamwidth:
dw_community_promo: The official Dreamwidth community for promoting Dreamwidth communities! People will promote new communities here, as well as events going on in established communities. A good place to find out about new things in general.followfriday: A place to share links to check out once a week. Did you find a cool community that you want more people to know about? Link it in the comments here! The host, ysabetwordsmith, shares a themed post every week with posts, events, and communities related to said theme.justcreate: A place where you can talk about things you’re working on. There’s a weekly check-in/reporting post, but sometimes people also organize body doubling sessions and other productivity-boosting things.queerly_beloved: An anti-exclusionist queer space to get together and talk about all things queer, including intersectional matters. Hosts a weekly recommendations thread, but more and other content is very welcome!allbingo: Do you like filling out bingo cards for just about anything? This community is for all things bingo cards, fandom related and otherwise! Put together a bingo card for making mood themes, post topics, or even bird watching (featuring your local feathered friends), and share your results!Fandom things to do on Dreamwidth:
fandomcalendar: I linked this above, and I’m linking it again: Want to know about fandom events that are going on at Dreamwidth? This is a good place to do it! It’ll also fill up your reading page in a hurry; you might be surprised at how many events are going on at Dreamwidth, or are at least connected there!fictional_fans: A community for all fans and fandoms. If you’ve got a post you want to make about fandom in general, or a specific fandom that doesn’t have its own community, this might be a good place to check out.fandom_on_dw: Pretty much the same as above, honestly, but it’s good that there’s more than one place that hosts this kind of thing!Anything else?
Search Interests: Individuals and communities can have lists of things they’re “interested in”. If more than one person has that thing listed, it may turn into a hyperlink that you can click to find other accounts with! You can also use the Search Interests function pretty much the same way. Simply type “cats” into the search bar, hit enter, and a bunch of accounts that have “cats” listed as an interest will pop up! Click through the various tabs at the top to separate accounts out into individual users, communities, and more.
The Latest Things Page: Literally the latest things posted publicly anywhere on Dreamwidth. There’s a list of commonly used tags at the top, if you want to narrow things down at all, but in the mean time, it can be pretty neat to see what J. Random Dreamwidth User just posted about! This is about the closest Dreamwidth gets to surfing random tags on Tumblr.
The Explore Tab: Useful links for Dreamwidth in general. In addition to linking to the Latest Things Page, it can take you to a random account, the FAQ page, and more! Worth checking out if you’re feeling lost.
Most Useful Communities list, as curated by
ysabetwordsmith; this has a lot of other options that I either didn't know about, or didn't feel like I had room to include; this post is already longer than I like to go without a cut tag or two 😅The comments on this post: People in this community are pretty helpful, and that includes sharing their own suggestions in the comments! If you have something specific you're looking for, you might even ask for help here; who knows, we might just have a good lead for you!
And that’s all I can think of at the moment! This should help you get started at least, and help fill out your reading page a bit.
soc_puppet posting in newcomersDreamwidth has given all users a certain amount of image storage to use: Free users get 500 MB, Paid users get 1.5 GB, and Premium Paid users get 3 GB.
There's two ways to upload images directly to Dreamwidth.
The first option has a fair number of steps, but it's the one I know the most about and the one I'm best able to help with.
( Option One )
The second option is to post an image by email, which I have to admit I haven't tried myself yet.
For Option Two, the first thing you need to know here is that it's possible to post to Dreamwidth by email;
silvercat17 wrote the tutorial I used to set it up, but you can also use Dreamwidth's official FAQ entries about it over here. If you post an entry by email, you can attach an image as a file to the email, and it will automatically be uploaded to Dreamwidth and included in the post! It won't necessarily have any particular title or description included, though, so you may want to visit Manage Images to edit that.And those are the basics of uploading images to Dreamwidth! Culturally, Dreamwidth users tend to either share larger images as a thumbnail, or to put them under a cut (Dreamwidth's "Read More"), but otherwise this should cover what you need to know.
But maybe I'm wrong about that! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments of this post, and I'll do my best to clear things up (and then edit the post to include the information). You can also check Dreamwidth's official Media FAQ and see if your question is answered there.
Edit: With thanks to
teres for the help!I'd also like to note that you can share images on Dreamwidth that are hosted elsewhere, but not all image hosting sites have the same positive attitude that Dreamwidth does about NSFW art. If you do a lot of art and not all of it is NSFW, you may decide to host your SFW art elsewhere, and save your Dreamwidth storage for the stuff you can't host elsewhere.
oceangrey posting in dw_community_promowarrington_runcorn_ntdp is a new fan-run community focused on the music of electronic project Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan.Anyone is free to join, even those who have never listened before! Although if that is you, I'd recommend checking out the project's Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and Youtube to get acquainted :D
Discussion on the community will include, but is not limited to, avourite songs/albums/album artwork, physical media, how you discovered the music, recommendations for similar music, etc.
The current rules are pretty standard: no harassment/discrimination against any other Dreamwidth users; no NSFW/explicit content unless it's directly connected to the community's theme; and please keep any posts/comments on topic as much as possible. Anything else can be decided on in the future.
I (
oceangrey) am the current only moderator/admin, but if anyone else wants a similar role just message me or comment on the community's pinned post!