hmpf

Has LJ been assimilated?

Okay... I guess that means I have to migrate my journal to Dreamwidth now. *sigh* One more task I don't really have the time for.

Arrrgh.

fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow discussions to stay in the public eye, and thus stay *active* longer, whereas on LJ a discussion will drop off people's friends page pretty quickly, turning discussions into quick, transitory, blink-and-you'll-miss-them things. (Sure, those people who noticed and joined the discussion when it popped up on their friends page often keep at it for days - but on a forum, a new contributor might discover it months after it started, and bring it back to the top by posting to it, and *everyone who contributed until then would notice*, and the discussion would be revitalised. A good LJ discussion goes on for days; a good forum discussion can go on for months.) And archives are much more suited for presenting fan-made content, esp. fanfic, because they don't require the potential reader to first learn about the individual LJs of three or four dozen writers and then search those LJs for fic; also, archives usually allow searching for different categories of fic, *and* they keep stuff accessible. Etc.

But, my general reservations about fandom's near-complete move to LJ (and f-locked LJs, for that matter) aside, my issue here is mainly with fanfic. I find the posting of fic to LJ and *only* to LJ, as seems increasinbly the practice in fandom, a bit antisocial, to be honest. (After turning into one of the official naysayers of Life On Mars fandom, I am now working on discrediting myself in fandom at large... ;-)) And I don't *understand* the attitude behind it, either. I mean, *why* would people not want their fic to find the widest possible readership? And how can they not care if it will still be easily accessible to new readers in a year or two?

The cynical part of me can't help wondering if there's a tendency to move away from fandom as a community and treat it as merely a tool for instant, personal gratification. I.e. as soon as you've posted a fic to your LJ and received an amount of feedback for that fic, you move on to the next fic for which you will get feedback in turn, and old fics become uninteresting simply because they don't generate large amounts of feedback anymore - so why bother keeping them easily accessible? That readers who come into the fandom later might still want read those older fics just doesn't matter, because the gratification to the writer is negligible, and the reader's gratification simply doesn't figure into the equation.

As I said, it's the cynical part of me that came up with that explanation.

Well, no matter what the reasons, it seems to me that the decentralised, dispersed nature of fandom on LJ is a good way to make sure that, instead of amassing a wonderful, huge collective treasure of fanworks for 'later generations' of fen to discover and enjoy, most of our work will simply disappear into obscurity and relative 'un-findability' fairly soon after it's posted.

Am I the only one who finds that perspective a bit sad?

(Also, I dislike the tendency for fandom to happen in a - however slightly extended - big 'NOW' for the personal reason of often being stressed out of my mind. The fact that fandom - discussions, fics, everything - seems to happen so quickly now, and requires you to constantly stay on top of things because you'll never be able to *find* the good stuff again if you don't notice it immediately when it's posted is a considerable additional stress factor. Which is sad, because I'd much rather 'do' fandom at my leisure, and I'm a naturally slow person. So, instead of 'doing' fandom at my own pace, I tend to go into hyperactive fannish phases when I manage to keep up with things for a few months, and then drop out of everything completely for months in turn. Needless to say, that way I hardly know what's happening anymore, and miss most of the good fic, debate etc.)

I've been out of the meta game for ages, so I don't know if this has been discussed on metafandom, recently or at all. If anyone remembers related discussions and can point me there, that would be much appreciated. I'm mostly interested in the question of why people aren't interested in keeping stuff accessible, because that is something I really, truly do not 'get'. So, if anyone can explain that mindset to me... I'm really curious about it.

for posting so much, and mostly so much useless stuff recently. I don't know why I do it. Maybe it relieves the stress; or maybe I'm just making up for the Lost Year or something. Anyway, I'm sorry I'm sort of spamming your flists at the moment. I'm sure it's only a phase. I hope you haven't all moved me to the 'too many posts, don't read' filter by now. ;-)

Secondly, I have a question about LJ that's been bothering me for a while: is it just me, or is LJ very, very slow, and completely unreachable a lot of the times you're trying to post/read your flist/access your memories? I'm wondering if there's some sort of weird Hmpf-LJ-incompatibility thing going on here because I never see anyone else complaining about it. But for me, LJ is a major time waster, not so much because I spend so much time on here but rather because I seem to spend at least half of that time just waiting for pages to load, and getting error messages again and again and again. It drives me crazy! (ETA: And this is not a recent problem; it's been that way at least since I took up regular posting again earlier this year.)

To test my LJ-cutting skills, here's a snippet from the fic I'm currently writing:

( Read more... )

And to test my linking skills, here are some interesting people:

ailanreanter is the person I'm sharing my webspace with.

ankae is evil. Hehe.

creatorschilde is a BABE, a christian, and a fanfic writer.

dunkle_feuer is a BABE, a HP slash writer, and has given me a place to stay on several occasions.

elbatsnud is a BABE (do I begin to see a pattern here?), a fic writer, and lives in Germany, too!

forestgreen is my granddaughter. Sort of. (Seen any FS lately???)

melee187 is a maleBABE.

selenak introduced me to Blake's 7. I reciprocated by introducing her to FS.

starryvelvetsky is, you guessed it, a BABE. And a fic writer. And a web design goddess.

veritykindle surprise-friended me, which I only discovered quite a while after the fact! ;-)

And I don't love them, either. First I tried to download two versions of the standard LiveJournal client for Windows, and the download was aborted repeatedly, until I gave up. Then I tried to download LochJournal instead, 'cause Kadira told me she used it as well, and the download worked fine. But alas, the program crashes every time I try to upload an entry. So for now, I'm back to writing online. Well, we're about to get a flatrate, so it won't matter anymore, soon, whether I write offline or online.

Anyway. I remembered what I meant to write yesterday. It was this:

Something's seriously wrong with my priorities. I have a nice craft I studied for three and a half years; I have two really nice study subjects; one should think I have more than enough worthwhile areas to potentially excel in. And yet, yesterday it occurred to me that my greatest ambition at the moment is to become a really, really good fanfic writer. Sheesh, talk about useless ambitions. Why couldn't I rather be ambitious about making jewellery or about becoming a good archaeologist?

(Self analysis unit kicking in) I'm ambitious about writing good fanfic because I probably feel that that is a goal that I can attain. It won't be *easy*, but it seems manageable. I want to make great jewellery and become a good archaeologist, too, but somehow, these goals don't seem so attainable. So, I'm afraid of failure in the more 'useful' areas of my life I might concentrate on, and therefore I transfer all my ambition to an area that seems relatively safe and easy. (Self analysis unit shutting off)

Gee, that was easy. Now what do I do about that?

***

So, what else to tell about my life today? Saw a nice movie yesterday with one of new roommates (Elling - catch it if you like slightly strange movies about slightly strange people), then spent way too much time online afterwards, which resulted in my sleeping through half the day today. When I finally got out of bed, I went to an expo about the celts with a few fellow students, then went to a café with them. Unfortunately, we were two hours late for breakfast... breakfast being served until 3 p.m. in that particular café... *g*
Had a drink with my former roommate in the evening, which was unexpectedly nice. Got invited to her birthday party as well, which was also unexpected. I had moved out with the distinct impression that she was glad to be rid of me. However, it seems that maybe that was just a result of her having a really bad time with her then-boyfriend.
So, got home at about nine in the evening, slightly tipsy (beer on an empty stomach is *not* really a good idea, although it *does* make an otherwise boring walk to the station a lot more exciting), and did some laundry and made a great lasagna (a feat I was complimented for nicely by one of my roommates who seems to like my cooking). And now I'm just about ready to go to bed, and dream nice Farscape dreams. ;-)