One for Sorrow

Regularly on F!S somebody posts a secret about how they've made it out of fandom and discovered that elusive "real life" by walking out their front door into the sunshine and it's awesome. And even though they denied it before, now they can admit that their time spent in fandom always really was a pathetic way of hiding from real life. Now that they don't care about fandom anymore (phew!) they can post that .jpeg to tell other people about it. It's almost as if you're not truly not a nerd anymore if you don't make it clear to other nerds that you find them pitiable now.

( And it makes me wonder, do other hobbies have this much shame involved? )

( Had to do this quiz. )

I think I lost a week somewhere lj-wise. Don't know how that happened. I have had a week of new experiences, which is always good. I went to a Juilliard concert, which I didn't know they had. Then tried a new tea at Alice's Teacup--Monk's blend. Nice and strong.

Finally, last night I went to "My Name is a Blackbird," a one-woman improvised dance piece, which was awesome. Then went out with the one woman of the piece and others, which was cool. There was good bar food. Good by my standards, that is, which I always appreciate. I’m not sure if anybody got a chance to taste the tater tots I was shoveling them in so fast.

I've been eyeing Dreamwidth with interest and hoping to remember to friend people who are there if I ever get over there. But it has got me thinking about a lot of things I've been reading about all these new social sites. We had this meeting at work about Twitter where it was explained to us that Twitter is all about finding people with social credit, proved by their many followers etc. The whole thing completely confuses me, this whole subset of internet users that use Facebook status and Twitter as incredibly important chances to fail or succeed at being witty and cool.

It makes me feel like the internet has for so long been associated with geeks and the socially inept (whether that's true or not, that's the stereotype) and now we're seeing the results of years of desperate brainstorming to find a way to make it a place where "popular people" can reign supreme again. ( Cutting because it looks like I might have more to say about this after all. )

You know, I'm listening to this guy on The Daily Show talk about how the Internet is so awful and...well, he obviously has read a lot of stuff because he's referring to stuff that goes on "these threads" and all, but honestly he just doesn't really seem to get it.

I think after all this time I've gotten to the point that the minute somebody starts saying things like "but where are you? You're just sitting at home in front of your computer! You're no one going nowhere and doing nothing! Talking to somebody on the phone is totally personal, but this is talking to phantoms!" I just have to dismiss them as people who don't get the Internet. I'm as interested as the next person in discussing the differences in Internet relationships and RL relationships, but if you're just waving your hand vaguely and saying, "It's like talking to a ghost!" then get back to me when you have a problem beyond just feeling weird about something new and different.

His suggestion that we project onto other people on the 'net because we can't see them is interesting and I think there could be some truth in that, but it's obviously not *all* people do when conversing on the 'net--nor is it something nobody does in person.

Sometimes it just strikes me that I'm pretty sure when I was a kid and people complained about TV they probably would have touted the superiority of the written word. Look at all that old correspondence that famous people used to write in the last century. So eloquent and impressive, is letter-writing." And now it's "You're talking to somebody but they're not actually in front of you! You can't see them-communicating through the written word doesn't work!"

I also find it ironic that he mentioned that story about the mother who drove the kid down the street to suicide with a fake Internet persona, just because the guy's obviously focusing on the fake Internet persona and not mentioning that this was actually a neighborhood feud that spilled onto the Internet. Iow, yes the Internet offered her a way to torment the girl while hiding behind a fake persona, but the problem was created face to face. In fact, a lot of big wanks look like weird neighborhood brawls--especially if your neighborhood was Salem, Mass. 1692.

Disaster at work today. I was trying to catch up on my flist, and was in the middle of shusu's post. I read this link from New York Magazine she had about kids, the internet and the loss of privacy. And then, just when I went back to her lj...dun dun DUNNN! My computer announced my company's security was blocking livejournal! In fact, it was blocking everything, including our own website. By the end of the day a lot of the sites were back, but none of the ones I go to ever. It's kind of frightening. Yipes.

I'm really hoping this is something they're working on, but if it isn't I'm going to be seriously working on my web schedule. I might be doing my DTCLs at night--at least, uploading them then.

But since the last bit of lj I saw was shusu's article she was nice enough to post, instead of just replying I thought about it all day and now have a lot of stuff to dump out. ( And here I go! )

I was reading a bunch of different things today, including kaiz's post on taking fanfic out of context and it got me thinking about just the general self-conscious nature of fandom, and the way that people can, in ways I don't think people always do in other groups, refer to some sort of way we're supposed to be interacting but aren't. That sounds confusing, but what I mean is, for instance, in "real life" if you're having a conversation about something, there's only limited situations where you can try to redirect the conversation on the grounds that it would be better to talk about something else. It always surprises me a bit when I see it in fandom--and I see it in every fandom--because the nature of fandom seems to be that it's a group of people who just need to talk about something for no other reason than they need to talk about it. The only goal of fandom discussion is the discussion itself, so you can't really go off-track. Yet the word “fan” has become something associated with positive appreciation and that’s it.

The kind of redirecting I'm talking about, in my experience, maybe because my own way of being a fan is to take a canon in my teeth and worry it like a terrier, is the requests to ( talk about happy thoughts. )

I was just taking this poll about fandom, which is pretty interesting. There are a number of questions asking how you would feel if you found out someone in fandom turned out to be a different age or gender than you thought them to be, and ( how you would feel if they had lied about these things. )

You know those lists people do about how to write fanfic? With the do's and don't's? Usually I think they're probably just not going to be helpful because even the best rules are broken sometimes, and besides which they usually start moving into a territory where it's more what that particular person likes rather than what's good writing all the time.

In spite of that, I found myself wondering what list I would do for Meta, since I don't write fanfic. Consider it my own personal wish-list for meta conversation, though I don't actually think these aspects of good meta are as subjective as "good writing." It's more of a logic thing.

I’m using examples from HP, but it really applies to any fandom. Also, the examples I’m using for HP are mostly stuff I’m making up. They aren’t veiled references to any particular essay or theory, though I’ve seen examples of all of them. In fact, one example I thought I made up I just saw being seriously argued, so there you go.

( Sister Magpie's Meta Commandments )

This is what happens when I post quickly before running off. I seem to have made a post I have no memory of. Well, I mean, I remember making it but the responses are all about something completely different. Iow, what I thought I was talking about was completely different from what I actually said.

The responses are all really interesting so that's all good. I just don't know how to respond to most of them except that they're interesting on their own. So I just wanted to say I'm enjoying the discussion and if it seems like I'm uncharacteristically quiet in it I'm not ignoring it, I'm just listening.

It seems like in the past few days I've run across an awful lot of posts explaining how people other than the poster think. Boy, I love posts like that (not) ( especially when they're explaining me. )

In the discussions on the last post there was a lot of discussion on interacting socially and creating art, and it made me think about the ever-present angst in fandom about BNFs and popularity.

( I don't know where I'm going to go with this, but come along if you like. )