New Exciting Dreamwidth Meta

I am about 50% of the way through fixing my Dreamwidth Circle to include people's DW names instead of their LJ names if I am certain that they have moved over. It's exhausting! And removing the people who are ACTUALLY DEAD or who I have irreversibly lost contact with (i.e. they haven't logged into LJ since 2003) is emotionally draining.

If you are reading this but are not already in my Circle because your name is different here than it was on LJ, please let me know. Also all of my old filters are messed up, I literally cannot remember who used to have access to what, so if you happen to have a bookmarked post which you can't read any more, let me know and I'll filter you back in. I'm a little tempted to simply delete ALL of my old filters and start again, but I have around 25 of the things - they must have been useful for something!

I also need to remind myself how the S2 system works, and port over my old LJ style if it's actually S2. I can't remember whether I ever got around to switching from S1 to S2! I quite like the default Dreamwidth style that I'm using at the moment, apart from all of the titles being in BLOCK CAPITALS. I am the sort of person who even likes to put her own name in lower case, so all of these BLOCK CAPITALS are quite SHOUTY and I don't like my own journal SHOUTING at me.

In related news, I need to set up a custom mood scheme because I don't like any of the defaults. I *like* my rainbow faces over at LJ, okay?! Might have to commission someone who can sprite to create a custom mood scheme for me. That's not actually a bad idea...

Edit: Ye gods, this is depressing. Apparently it's livejournal's 18th birthday. I could cry.

Dinner with a Good Friend and Total Strangers

Yesterday was a little surreal. First of all, a friend who I've known for 15+ years outed themselves as non-binary and planning to start a medical transition approximately 5 hours before we were due to meet in person. Of course, I have no problems whatsoever with a person changing their name and pronoun (as I said, sometimes I feel like the only person in the bi/poly community who isn't non-binary or genderqueer*)- but I usually expect to find out a bit sooner than the day we're meeting for the first time in seven months! It helps to practice the new name and pronoun for a bit by myself so I don't accidentally blurt out the wrong one with the person present.

As it was, I blurted out the wrong name within minutes, and didn't even mean to - I was trying to say "Grant", but my stupid noun aphasia (caused by high doses of venlafaxine, which is otherwise a really good medication for me) cut in and substituted the friend's old name. Just great. Fortunately, friend has indeed known me for 15+ years and has been aware of what my mental health is like when inadequately medicated, and could agree that annoying side-effect beats the state I used to be in.

Then the friend (who may out themselves here if they wish) and I went out for dinner with Shifty and two of his cow-orkers. They were all hideously late owing to their charity work being extremely disorganised, and I was very glad I wasn't sitting in the restaurant by myself. The cow-orkers asked how Shifty and I had met, we started talking about Elder Scrolls Online and the UESP Guild, and it turned out that one of the cow-orkers has been using the UESP wiki since Oblivion (2006). And he was basically fanboying at me for running the UESP Guild and knowing the site owner.

Meanwhile, my friend was talking about their wife and girlfriend, and I was talking about Grant and "my husband, Richard". I mentioned things like when the three of us go out for dinner, how they always pick the same thing and then one of them has to switch so they can try more dishes - that they don't just have the same taste in women. While not explicitly at any stage using words like "polyamory" or "open relationship".

The dinner was nice and it was not too stressful, but I was feeling pretty wiped out by the end. I seem to be fighting some sort of throat infection, which is attempting to ruin my holiday and can sod off any time now.

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*I am bigender rather than non-binary or genderqueer, so I am female except when I'm not. I have somewhere between a few hours and a few days of raging gender dysphoria per month where my entire body is Wrong, and the (actually bi but scared of women) gay man in the back of my head comes out. And the rest of the time it's just fine and I want to be addressed as "she/her" and recognised as A Female Geek Doing Nerdy Things. The conclusion I've come to is that my social and political gender is female, but my sexual gender is male.