Newcomers to Dreamwidth

Hello, everyone! I'm Socchan, and I run moodthemeinayear.

For those of you who are new to Dreamwidth-style blogging, you may have noticed a field where you can input your mood when you make a post: You can select a given mood from a drop-down menu or enter a custom mood in a separate field. If you select a mood from the drop-down menu, you'll notice that it adds a little graphic to your post, themed after the mood you've chosen. This is called a "Mood Theme", and if you have a paid account, you can make and use a custom one!

Custom mood themes can be a lot of fun; you can use screencaps or gifs from your favorite show or comics, draw fanart of your favorite characters, or even do original art! If you go the original art route, you can even submit it to be an official Dreamwidth mood theme that will be available for everyone to use, no paid account required!

While there are a total of 132 possible mood images to make, mood theme images have a hierarchical structure, where one image can represent many moods. If you want a better idea of how that works, I recommend taking a look at the Chasy's Animexpress hierarchical mood tree; you can see pretty easily how a mood like "Frustrated" gets its image from "Angry".

Since the moods are structured like this, you only need a bare minimum of 15 images to have a picture for every mood. If you want more variety, there are another 19 higher level moods that branch off into other moods, for a total of 34 moods total.

In addition to running the full 132 mood set at three moods a week (with regular one-week breaks), Mood Theme in a Year also runs a Minimal Mood Theme track parallel to it, with the base 15 moods plus the three second-level moods that have the most images associated with them, to min-max your mood image diversity. If you want a fairly diverse mood theme but don't want to go for a whole year, this is a pretty efficient way to go about it! The current run of the Minimal Mood Theme track started on Monday, and goes through December 1st, with the usual three moods a week; it's the last Minimal Mood track run this year, so if you miss any moods or want to include extras, you'll have the rest of December to make more. And if you want to go for the whole shebang, the mood calendar will be starting over again on January 1st!

If you want more information on how to make or use a custom mood theme, or about Mood Theme in a Year itself, feel free to drop me a comment here, at moodthemeinayear, or via DM, and I'll do my best to help sort things out!