helenic

I have two more DW invite codes - leave a comment if you're interested.

Not first come first served this time, I'm afraid. I'd rather give them to people who actually intend to use the service to blog, not people who just want to squat the username. I reserve the right to give preference to people whose blogs I am particularly interested in reading.

Edit: All taken now - to the writers of two of my favourite LJs, hoorah.

I'm excited about Dreamwidth, for all the reasons listed here and more. Denny has been involved with the beta phase of the site, and has been trying to get me to submit some site designs or journal themes. I'm well up for this in principle, but time is sadly the limiting factor. I'm still hoping to send something to them, but I haven't had the chance yet.

Either way, Denny has very generously let me have his first invite code. I need to use it soonish, as he can't get any more til I've signed up. I don't think I want to disembark to Dreamwidth entirely. I've got a permanent LJ account and an awful lot of history on this site. My first LJ account was created in 2001, and I've been writing in libellum for over six years. When I post publicly, my readership is quite impressive, particularly once people start linking my posts. It's a very useful forum if I want to say anything important.

On the other hand, I haven't used it for personal journalling for over six months now. That wasn't a deliberate decision. It was a combination of two things: lack of time, particularly once I started the Job of Doom, and then entered the current crazy career phase I'm now in, juggling five or six simultaneous work tracks per week. The other factor was the extent to which I used libellum as a professional blog when I was still trying to live off my art. After using it as a marketing tool, it was harder to go back to using it the way I used to.

So I'm not abandoning LJ. But I do want to support the Dreamwidth project. At the moment, it looks like it would make most sense to continue to use libellum as a public blog, for political debate and advertising my art and design work, and use a new Dreamwidth account for private journalling.

What I'm stuck on is username. Libellum has never been a 'nick' - it's the name of this journal, exactly as if I'd named a paper journal. Calling a new journal the same thing would be pointless. I don't really have a constant nick for use online, but the closest thing to it is helenic, which was my original idea for the Dreamwidth account. (Pun on "Hellenic" and "Helen nick", geddit?)

However, I've just discovered that helen is still available on Dreamwidth. Which would be really cool, in an early adopter sort of way. I doubt I'm going to get the chance to be Helen on many sites, so I should probably grab the opportunity. But bizarrely, helenic feels more "me". I've never been "Helen" online, mostly because it's never available but partly because I know a few Helens and I'm rarely the default one; if friends refer to me it's usually as "Helen L" or "Helen (libellum)". I don't identify with the name particularly, and I don't feel I have more right to it than any other Helens who might want Dreamwidth accounts.

This is coming out sounding far more foolish a question than it did in my head. Ah well. I put it to you, o wise flist:

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