cool comms

I've been meaning to do a Follow Friday post. These are posts to help people find interesting things to read on Dreamwidth. You can read all the public posts on the followfriday feed. Yesterday I used that to find this great post of links to communities by elke_tanzer. Check it out, because there are probably a lot more communities relevant to your interests there than here! There's also dw_community_promo for Dreamwidth communities that exist already and create_my_comm for ones that don't but totally should.

I've never really had trouble finding interesting things to read on Dreamwidth, but I've had more of a challenge finding active and friendly spaces to interact with people, especially as someone who doesn't usually participate in meta discussions. And last week a good friend of mine from LJ was saying that they felt generally intimidated by Dreamwidth for similar reasons. So! Here are some communities that I think of as good places for getting to know people. I would love it if you'd tell me about others.

My favorite place on Dreamwidth is camelot_fleet, the Merlin multishippers community. (OTPers and gen fans are welcome too, honestly, just come.) Most of the friends I have in Merlin fandom are people I met at their weekend parties and half my Merlin fics were written for prompts there. It's also a great place for discussion, art, challenges, hugs, and tea. The theme of tomorrow's party will be "Welcome the Newbies", so it's a great time to stop in if you haven't before.

homeeconomics101! Post about domestic difficulties! Share your wisdom! Join in weekly or weekend decluttering challenges! This comm was just founded in January and has new people joining in all the time.

runners got started back in May of last year and had gone kind of quiet over the winter, but it seems to be picking up again with a bunch of new members this month. I like that some people there are just starting out with the first week of the Couch to 5K program and others regularly run marathons.

I'm not practicing yoga these days, but people who are might appreciate sun_salutation, which looks to be very active right now and also nicely balanced across different ability levels.

(Um, I was going to talk about some individuals here, but I'm feeling awkward about that, so maybe I'll leave it for another Friday!)

And finally, an LJ link for one of my favorite ficathons! lgbtfest is open for prompts until March 24. This is "a fest for fanfic that focuses on the experience of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This fest is multi-fandom and open to stories about any characters you want to write as LGBT, whether they're canonically LGBT or not." Check out the rules and then leave some prompts (especially Merlin ones pls!)! The mods will collate all the prompts for us and then there will be claiming and then there will be fic!

Shutter Island?

I loved seeing Alice in Wonderland on Tuesday! I saw it without the 3D and I think that's just as well, there was so much interesting to look at I don't know how well I would have handled an extra dimension. Mostly though I loved the character of Alice and her getting to be the protagonist, in contrast to what happens with women in most of the things I've watched lately.

Okay, here is a version of a post I meant to make two weeks ago: tomorrow I might meet some people to see another movie, Shutter Island. (That other thing I mentioned is going to happen on Sunday instead.) Have any of you seen this? I can't decide whether I should go. I have a big crush Mark Ruffalo and I like Leo DiCaprio okay. More importantly I have a big kink for stories about insane asylums and such (my longest fic is about Frodo getting shut up in one omg - that doesn't even make sense but I wrote it anyway because I'm that obsessed).

On the other hand I don't usually handle horror movies well. Too scary, and I am a big wimp! I walked out of the theater halfway through I Am Legend because I couldn't handle the tension. And the gore was probably the main reason I finally quit watching Supernatural (though the misogyny and racism were also wearing!). Sometimes even the vampirism in Being Human is a bit much for me. There are a few scary movies I have liked - 28 Days Later, Zodiac (&hearts Mark Ruffalo!), Silence of the Lambs, the sequel Red Dragon even though it wasn't as good. I don't know! What should I do, f-list??