hot off the meat truck!

I've been trying to post to DW more and go on Twitter less, because I'm starting to feel like, in terms of fandom and the internet in general... that you can be where the action is, or you can have sanity, but you can't have both. There's simply too many of us. That's why dogpiles and pretty much everything else is worse, right? Because it's not five or ten or even twenty people yelling at you, it's hundreds or even thousands. Our brains simply weren't built to handle this.

It's been an adjustment, trying to actually write posts again here, whereas on Twitter I could just shart out any thought I was having (usually negative ones) with zero effort. Writing a post is harder, so I'm doing it less... and maybe that's... good? Idk. I know I used to post a lot more when DW/LJ weren't de facto dead and it was the only way to engage (at least in my fandom neck of the woods).

I admit I am enjoying Tumblr post-porn-ban... the porn ban was terrible, and I hate it, but my dash was always too overwhelming in the Before Times. I think it also took me this long to realize that I basically only want my current obsessions on my dash, for the most part, instead of a firehose of everything, so yeah, a decade in and I finally have a mostly-my-current-fandom (Critical Role, at the moment) Tumblr dash experience. I wish you could have a side-dash along when you made a side-blog? I guess that's what tags are, and honestly that's how I generally use the site, especially before -- ignore my dash and just look at the fandom tags.

It's tough, I miss the LJ/DW heyday, it was my preferred mode of fannish engagement and it's been gone for about a decade or more now. I'm kind of hoping that, for those of us Olds that do miss it, if we just kind of... come back here? And let our friends know that we're back here? Than maybe we can cobble together an experience that we enjoy. Like, use Tumblr for reblogging pretty art and pictures, use DW for text-based non-real-time threaded conversations and kink memes and rec lists (remember those?) and community, use Discord for real-time chat (that's where everybody is now anyway), ditch Twitter completely? Since it's... terrible? (This obviously doesn't work if you're an artist. I got no ideas for you, guys, I'm sorry. Unfettered free unlimited image and video uploads are the name of the game now, and it's also kind of killing us, because only for-profit companies can afford that kind of thing, which means we're always in thrall to them, which is bad for fandom, and life.)

This doesn't even touch on the Weird Puritan Thing that's eaten fandom over the past decade or so. Allegedly the pendulum is already swinging back to Yay Edgy Shit on Tumblr, though I'm not sure in what fandoms. Bullying is never going away, it's always been with us and maybe always will... it's just extra aggravating to a lot of us to see the language taken from our values twisted in this way, plus "lol you simply don't know how to read canon correctly, clearly Harry/Hermione is superior" is a lot less hurtful than "lol you're a pedophile".

I just feel like... I mean, there's nothing wrong with Olds like me making secret discord servers that are impossible to find in order to dodge the Junior Anti-Sex League, but... maybe we can also... hang out... here?

I recently saw the argument, and I think I agree with it, that all fandom fights, whether they have a faux-progressive-actually-regressive gloss on them or not, have always been about actual material goods. Kind of like most fights irl, I guess. That interpretation of the source material you hate gets a toehold? The fanon from it spreads and there's less fanfic for you to read that you enjoy. That interpretation of the ship that you hate? Same thing. That video game OC is more popular than yours? It's getting more fanart than you. It was startling to me, because this is the internet, right? It's boundless. You can always be the change, you can always write the fic you want to write or draw the art you want to draw, right? But not all of us are comfortable in our writing or drawing abilities, being the change can be exhausting and... idk, I think the anonymous person who said that was onto something. All of this is just paraphrasing them, btw, none of it is original to me.

Anyway, this has been really incoherent, good night and good luck.