L.J. Writes

For the Pride Fanwork Prompt Fest on queerly_beloved, prompt is by fred_mouse. Posted here to be linked in a reply because of content warning (mention of marital rape/reluctant sex).

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice
Pairing: Elizabeth Darcy/Charlotte Collins
Prompt: stepping out
Summary: Elizabeth's friend Charlotte's happy news leads to a less happy revelation and a long-overdue talk between the friends.
Bisexual Elizabeth and lesbian Charlotte, emotion, angst, and fluff. Lightly implied bisexual Mr. Darcy and former Darcy/Wickham.

( Mention of marital rape/reluctant sex )

It's no secret that Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, is far from the most beloved Austenian heroine. Fanny has been called a moralistic prude who gets everything by doing nothing. She is evidently deemed not to be liberated and feminist enough, seeing how she was replaced in two different movie adaptations by laughing, athletic, and outgoing heroines who bear little resemblance to her original character.

( How do I love Fanny? Let me count the ways )

These days, other than spending minimum time on Tumblr to chat with friends and queue up posts, my main hangouts are here on Dreamwidth and over on Mastodon, specifically the Fandom.ink instance run by our lovely mod alisx. Though my longform stuff is obviously here and I love commenting and interacting with people in thoughtful ways, the place where I spend the most time online is definitely the Mastodon instance, with its cozy community, nearly real-time interactions, and old-school forum feel.

I think one of the things that keep me coming back to Mastodon, in addition to the factors mentioned in my review of the platform, is something I only mentioned in passing in that post because I had so much else to go into: The content warning.

The content warning (CW) is much like the fold or the cut in blogging software, complete with a text label that you can put on a post to tell you what's behind the cut. People can click on the 'read more' button to unfold the post and see the rest of it, if they so choose. Users can also choose to unfold content warnings by default.

( In which I wax lyrical about the CW )

April was a busy week, but since most of it was for projects that will pay off later I'm now not only broke but tired as well. XD At least I'm looking forward to some paydays starting in May, and I appreciate that my contacts are giving me work. We're finally getting out of the lean months!

( A rejection and an acceptance )

There isn't much I miss from my stay on Tumblr and it's a great relief to spend more time on Dreamwidth-- and, these days, my feed reader. However, there are still some functions that Tumblr has and Dreamwidth lacks, like a draft folder and the ability to queue posts.

Tumblr aside, I also found myself wanting to keep local copies of my posts and to compose them in an editor with more robust functions, such as live Markdown preview, than the DW editor offers. I like the new DW beta editor but it's still not an actual text editor, nor does it write to my own machine without an extra step like copy-paste.

So I figured, why not set it up on my computer? It seemed simple enough with Dreamwidth's post by email function and Terminal on Mac. It took me longer than I thought to get it working reliably because there were a few different components to it, like Postfix, Bash, and Launchd.

I wrote this documentation both as a note to myself and a reference for anyone who wants something similar. With a little modification I think this setup could be used for other operating systems like Linux distros and other blogging platforms that support post-by-email, such as Wordpress.

( Step-by-step instructions )