diffrentcolours | The Friday Five: Dreamwidth / LiveJournal (Reply)

The Friday Five for 20 March 2026

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?

In 2000, a lot of the UK Goth scene ended up on LiveJournal. I tried my hand at blogging by hand-writing HTML on a shell account on a nerd friend's Solaris box in the States, but quickly realised that the comments and community were an important part. Partly I moved so I could post sickeningly cute comments on my then-gf's LJ. That... didn't end well. But I started my LJ in 2001.

I was a fairly late mover to Dreamwidth after LiveJournal started its long slide downwards; I didn't hit the migrate button until 2017, and I didn't delete my LJ account until 2018 when a then-coworker linked to it on work IRC. There were a lot of very cringe public entries from decades before I didn't particularly want to be associated with.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?

Other than thefridayfive, not many! DW never seemed to get the right critical mass for communities. I welcome suggestions!

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?

See above!

4. How did you pick your user name?

About the time I needed an LJ username, I was listening to a lot of The Velvet Underground, and the line "Different colours, made of tears" from Venus In Furs was stuck in my head. Unfortunately, that was one character too long for LJ usernames, so I had to elide a vowel. I'd never heard of the TV show "Diff'rent Strokes" before.

5. If you could change your user name, would you?

I don't think so. I have many usernames in many places, but I like this one here!