I have never owned a notebook I was 100% comfortable with

[synergic]

Family vacation is coming up. I have been moodswinging pretty horribly about this out of sheer nerves! Some of it obviously comes from the fact that I have never brought anyone home to my family before, and that is all I'm going to say about that here. But I've been thinking it over, and a lot of the worry is actually from a completely different

Comments

[alioth]

It's funny, i have that same feeling. But i have even less to show than you do, since i'm not even working, and i don't have the dolls or the websites or sketchbooks or anything else

[synergic]

My family is actually not critical at all, and yet somehow I grew up being super-introverted about pretty much everything I do with my life. I could probably analyze the heck out of that.

.... also YEAH WHAT'S UP WITH THAT LJ RP THING?

[alioth]

O we are so full of neuroses.

RP is like...the dirty little secret hobby of the interwebs. So much judging over something so harmless and fun! Possibly because explaining it often involves the word 'pretend', and pretending is BAD. Or. Something. I don't quite understand my own sense of shame, and no one i've ever asked about it has anything to say other than scoffing and being all 'well that's weeeeird'. Playing pretend has an expiration date, i guess? Oops.

[synergic]

I think there is a bigger stigma on playing around in other people's sandboxes than playing pretend, maybe. I at least am the same way about my fandom websites.... Maybe it comes back to that productivity thing.

And you know, I would like to balance fandom and non-fandom more. And the art with the ... rp-type-writing. Personally, not just because of outside pressure. (I think. Hard to say.)

[alioth]

Maybe, but maybe not. I don't think people outside the activity consider, say, dungeons and dragons players much ahead of the game than we are, and those are original characters in a (at least potentially original setting. There's definitely a lot of value judgments that can be made inside the 'community', as it were, about the difference in creativity between playing with an original character and about playing someone else's character, but i'm not sure they come up so much in the outside perspective

[synergic]

It also depends on the people involved, I'd say. No one seems surprised that my 19-year-old brother plays WoW, for example, whereas for me I feel like even announcing something like that would be awkward. It is also possible I'm just a more awkward person in that regard.

Collaborative work is certainly a large chunk, if not the main! This is actually also something I enjoy about illustration.

The last time I was actively posting my work (which was... 4 years ago now, lord) I had very different styles for fandom and academic work. My school was very into the idea that an illustrator should be a jack-of-all-trades and not pin themselves down too much, stylistically, and fandom felt like the opposite. In retrospect, I think that my school was a little wrong to reverse-pigeonhole us like that. And fandom would probably have been a lot more open than I felt it would be to experimentation (those pesky internal issues again.) Anyway at the time I felt very stretched in opposite directions but the whole thing. I don't think that would

[lady_ganesh]

(I suspect there's also that gulf between how male-dominated hobbies are perceived and female-dominated hobbies are-- fantasy leagues are pretty mainstream, but fanfiction? WTH IS THAT CRAZY STUFF.)

[synergic]

Not to mention There Are No Girls On The Internet.

[lady_ganesh]

Obviously.