Libre.Town - New and Improved

[Memory]

Just posting here again to give an update on Libre Town!

Since I created this thread, many things have changed and new content has been added! Therefore, I want to give an overview or a little tourist guide here:

• The landing page holds a small introduction to what the site is, the changelog, friends' badges, and also a fun little marquee scrolling regularly changing in-universe news headlines!
• In About Me, you can read about the web gardener - me - who I am, why I am doing this and where to contact me.
• In Thoughts, you can find a bunch of blog posts mostly about the site, my personal life and emotions, my identity, my journey on the web, and various thoughts I have about the world and my life.
• If you're feeling particularly spicy, the Hot Takes section has a bunch of specialty blog posts that are not personal thoughts but much rather opinions; I thought it was neater to put them there instead.
• Shrines are like personal fan pages of your own interests and hobbies - right now, there's two of them, one for the constructed language Toki Pona, and the other one about my relation to music!
• The Music Room shrine lists an obscure band of the month with an example song liked, but also holds Vinyl Ventures: a blog post format where I take a piece of music from my physical collection and react to it with song-by-song first impressions and opinions! Check out this review of Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues, for example!
• The Creative page holds links to special sub pages I have for different kinds of ways I get creative (see below), but also a cool 88x31 badges collection that I made myself and are free to use.
• One of the creative sub pages, cooking / recipes, holds, as you can imagine, vegetarian recipes that I like to cook. This is quite empty so far but I will post more recipes as time goes on!
• Another, the Writing page, holds links to all kinds of fiction that I write - mostly fan fiction, but also some original fiction, including a short description, a word count and so on.
• Finally, under Development, you can find programs and scripts I program; like TCal, the calorie counter written in Tcl/Tk!
• The Links page is a neatly categorized rainbow link list where you can find all kinds of cool websites, resources and in the future perhaps webrings too. Maybe yours is listed too (if not, ask me)!
• It's also mobile optimized these days and has a better font!

I have plenty of more plans for the site; I want to add content to the different categories of course and the existing pages, but I also want to implement a guest book, a little weather system, personality quizzes and more! I want Libre Town to grow into a real little town over time and I'd be stoked if you'd be along for the ride.

Please give Libre Town a visit and if you want, add the button to your page! :) It'd mean a lot to me; my homepage is my only way of socializing online and I'd be super happy if my homepage is fun or inspiring to some people! Feedback is always welcome.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Love the redesign! I just wanted to say that I think the Vinyl Ventures project you're doing is really neat, and I'm excited to see more reviews as you put them up. It kind of recreates that feeling I have when I go digging through thrift shops and antique stores--sort of like treasure hunting!

[Memory]

Love the redesign! I just wanted to say that I think the Vinyl Ventures project you're doing is really neat, and I'm excited to see more reviews as you put them up. It kind of recreates that feeling I have when I go digging through thrift shops and antique stores--sort of like treasure hunting!

Funnily enough that's the same feeling I get writing them.

These records have been gifted to me by my dad almost all at once, and I have never had the chance to actually sit down and make memories with any of them, so this is what should change that. I basically have a thrift store grab bag at home, but they're all mine and I don't have to pay for them!

[Memory]

I have added a special seasonal page for the upcoming meteorological beginning of the spring season:

Check it out! It has a countdown to March 20th, a photo gallery, badges, mini recipes, ...

CLICK ME

[Memory]

A new blog post is upon us, this time about how I tried and failed so many times to abandon social media, until finally finding solace in the web revival.

It might resonate with a lot of you; who knows.

Check it out. :3

[sig]

It might resonate with a lot of you; who knows.

You're right, it does! Especially the bit about the Fediverse, I'm hanging around there a bit still but it's become increasingly obvious that it's just Twitter 2: Now Without Algorithms!(tm). It's a good article, thanks for sharing!

[Memory]

It's a good article, thanks for sharing!

[doubleincision]

A new blog post is upon us, this time about how I tried and failed so many times to abandon social media, until finally finding solace in the web revival.

It might resonate with a lot of you; who knows.

Check it out. :3

the section of this post about the difficulties of maintaining relationships without social media, as a queer person, was a very good read because i'm just enough older than you to be in a different age demographic (i'm 29), so i was fortunate to experience the pre-Twitterization of online queer life in my formative years. in my experience it absolutely was easier to find and maintain friendships with fellow queer people ten years ago— i literally met my husband because we hung around the same online fandom space and then started talking on Skype over a decade ago. and he still talks to people he met on Gaia ~20 years ago! back then we used things like DeviantArt and Livejournal, and later Tumblr, to find fandom friends, so you had to put at least a LITTLE effort into your posting (yes, even on Tumblr, because Tumblr was very different 10+ years ago lol) and then if you found a person you particularly enjoyed talking to you would chat one-on-one with each other with Skype or some other IM program. in fandom spaces it was common to collaborate on art or fanfic together; there were many ways you could draw or write collaboratively back then. that's how my husband and i got to know each other   typically you didn't even know too much about the other person being queer, at first, or you didn't know at all. sometimes they themselves wouldn't even know they were queer yet! all of that came with time, as your friendship with someone deepened, you naturally would share more personal things like that with each other. but in fandom spaces, typically you'd be discussing things like shipping, and if you found a friend who shipped the same gay pairings that you did it sort of pre-established your friendship as a "safe space" so it made it easier to talk about your own queer identity.

i think that behavior you brought up—the way platforms like Twitter encourage users to broadcast a crafted image of themselves with a series of labels and snarky

Hot Takes

, rather than actually talking to people—is hugely detrimental to queer people. the "clever, poignant comeback" style of discussion you described literally makes me want to jump into an industrial woodchipper. like, it's bad for everyone, but as queer people, it's already so daunting a task to connect with others like us that the antisocial behavior on sites like Twitter is absolute poison. we cannot connect with each other meaningfully if we aren't willing and able to really talk, to exchange information and ideas and feelings with each other, to be present in each other's lives as more than just a curated collection of opinions and black-and-white crowdthinking and ironic snark.

also, i can't speak on other Fediverse platforms b/c i haven't used them, but i agree that Mastodon isn't an instant solution to all of the problems with social media, like it sometimes gets hyped up to be. i saw someone subtweeting some other user on Mastodon today and i was like...wait...this is literally the same antisocial crap that makes Twitter suck, why are we doing it here if this is supposed to be the healthy alternative? subtweeting isn't Better just because you changed the wording to "subtooting" lmao. a problem i see with Mastodon is that it has amazing potential to not be like Twitter, because you can make longer-form posts with it, but it's too similar to Twitter for people to feel motivated to not treat it like Twitter 2: Electric Boogaloo.

[Memory]

thank you all so much for the positive feedback! 

fun fact by the way, the visual design of Libre Town is inspired heavily by the looks of 90s window manager "TWM" (Tom's Window Manager). :)

Check it out:




I think you can see the resemblance, no?