The 35th Precinct

Another day, and my carefully-husbanded trust continues to swirl the drain. Yay!

The world has changed so much so quickly, and I have a profound sense of dislocation. The language has changed its morphemes and phonemes in subtle ways that I cannot grasp enough to speak comfortably, let alone fluently. For instance, did you know that if you leave anything but gushing, uncritical praise for a fic or piece of fanart, you're being rude and damaging to innocent strangers, and you're the type of person they don't want clapping their filthy, unworthy eyes on their pure labor of love? I didn't either until I saw that bit of fannish wisdom while scrolling through Tumblr.

When did that happen? When I got into fandom, lo, these many years ago, it was understood that you did so at your own risk. Anybody was free to write anything and post it, but you had to accept that not everyone would like it, and that some of them would tell you so, some bluntly, some outright cruelly. It might hurt to be told your baby was an ugly lump of DNW, but them's the breaks, kid. Toughen up and realize that life doesn't love you. If you want to join the scrum and scramble, then you have to take the inevitable cuts and bruises.

Not anymore, though. Nope. Now, you have to ask permission to leave feedback that isn't unbridled fawning. And I don't mean flames. I mean things like, Interesting plot, but there are some grammatical errors that make this hard to read or Did you mean to make Character A so cold and unbending? Nope. Thoughtless words like that are right out, you selfish boor.

I-what? I'm sorry, if you put your work online, you run the risk of someone telling you they don't like it. That's the way life works. Fandom points and laughs and hurls rotten tomatoes at profic writers when they throw a strop about less-than-glowing reviews, but its members expect to be insulated from analysis and criticism of their own output. The hypocrisy is stunning, and I cordially invite those pantywaists to get fucked, especially since those same people snivel about not getting the reviews they deserve for their hard work. And by reviews, they mean a loving, worshipful tongue bath.

Fuck that noise.

If concrit isn't wanted because it might damage someone's delicate psyche, then I'll be damned if I'll ever leave another review because I'm not going to waste hours agonizing over every word that isn't, I worship at your altar, o, exalted one. Even I love this isn't safe; I said that once, and the person stopped writing the story because that was too much pressure. For fuck's sake. If the future of humankind is in the hands of these whinging, onion-skinned morons, we might as well pack it in because, you slack-jawed kiddos, life only gets harder from here.

I spruced up my userinfo. It's remained unchanged for years, and most of the banners for the various big bangs and fic communities have become broken links to nowhere. So I swept them all away. I never intended to, of course; when I posted them, I expected they would sit there until LJ itself vanished into the void, a visual history of where I've been in fandom and what I've offered to it.

But fandom is fickle and ever-changing, and it doesn't remember or care about dead fandoms like CSI or fifteen-year-old fics spawned by long-forgotten fic challenges. Hell, it barely cares about fic written last month for extant fandoms. So why cling to things that don't matter anymore or maybe never did? No one is going to clamor for my ancient Jim Brass fic because they were drawn in by an outdated banner and a link on a site few visit these days. No one wants to know the ficcing history of a lonely hermit plodding along in small dead or moribund fandoms. So away with them, these useless mementos no one will miss when they're gone. One less thing for Roomie to do when age, time, and indifference finally win.

One of the many things for which I will never forgive the Trump administration is its pathetic confirmation of my darkest surmises about human nature. The next time somebody bleats at me that tired old song about Americans being mostly fundamentally good, I'm just going to point to the Gofundme for the border wall, which has been up for three days and raised $3+ million. People begging for insulin can't meet their goals, but by God, this Christian nation can pass the collection plate to keep dirty foreigners out. Americans love nothing more deeply than their cherished hatreds.

After fighting with the new post editor for half an hour yesterday over an LJ cut, I've reverted to the old HTML editor. I've aged out of the interface learning curve, it seems, and while it might be clunky to the younger generations, there's something constant and comforting about it to me. My fingers remember the rhythm, and I still get that surge of accomplishment when it turns out right.

Being set in my crotchety, Web 1.0 ways might also explain why, despite my best efforts, I give not a damn about Pillowfort, but it's more likely that I do care because no one else does. Despite the initial fannish surge when Tumblr donned its Reverend Dimsdale pants, there's almost no activity on my feed. I suspect there won't be until Tumblr officially dies, and then there will be a truculent exodus to wherever will take them.

I'm making a concerted effort to use Pillowfort, but I'm not optimistic. Most of the userbase skews decidedly young, and the communication methods are no so different that I feel like a relic of a bygone age, speaking a language lost to time. Fandom is now so visual that trying to chat is an exercise in frustration. A few nights ago, I tried to chat with a mutual who offered to listen to my ficcing travails. I spoke in complete sentences. She spoke in action tags and emojis and monosyllables. What am I supposed to do with those things? It's quite possible I am just a dreadful bore, cloistered as I am in my hermitage with no one with whom to practice conversational arts, but the next night, I had a perfectly lovely(and comprehensible)chat with someone in my age bracket.

I suspect another handicap is that I have no desire to share copious personal details online(I say as I resume the ancient practice of blogging 1.0)and establish my righteous bonafides by reblogging or reposting every myopic thinkpiece, polemic, and foaming jeremiad against the unpardonable sin du jour. Not to mention the numberless, pathetic panhandling post from the purportedly downtrodden that pop up every few weeks with suspicious regularity. I am too old to pretend a zealous rage at every looming shadow of possible injustice and too jaded to be so idealistically credulous and to jealous of my hard-won critical thinking skills to run with the howling mob. The joys of fandom are familiar and ageless; its methods are not, and I am groping for purchase in a foreign landscape.

Speaking of familiar and comfortable things, I'm rewatching Supernatural S1 for the third time. Dean still holds my heart, but Sam's whining, doe-eyed entitlement has become more obvious and harder to ignore. I like Sam, or rather, the intent of him. He's soft-hearted and smart and idealistic and hopeful and a necessary antidote to the grinding cynicism of Dean, who's been beaten down by a lifetime of denying himself in order to be the good soldier, but he's also selfish and spoiled and often painfully oblivious to the fact not everything is about what he wants or needs, and that Dean is more than just a handy amanuensis with which to fulfill those needs. He seems pathologically incapable of seeing Dean as a person with an existence, history, and mental landscape outside of being Dean, big brother. Even as early as "Skin", when his college buddy, Brady, gets accused of murder, he expects Dean to drop everything and do what he wants, and never mind the potential case Dean had lined up or the grim prospect of driving another 400 miles. All because Sam has a hunch based on nothing but his panicky hope that his friend isn't a murderous whackjob, that his idyllic Stanford life isn't tainted by the unpleasant reality of a murderer in its midst.

And Dean, because he is a good soldier and wants to be a good big brother, goes along, because he's been told from the time he was four that Sam is the only one who matters.

I set up a Pillowfort account last night. It's still so sparsely populated that there's not much to see, and it's layout screams early 90s California hip, but it has potential to be a snug enclave free of The Impressionable Children Who Need to Be Shielded from the Amoral Porn Peddlers, according to the frothing antis. At the very least, I won't get booted from the site for the unpardonable crime of talking about dicks and boobs and what people like to do with them behind closed doors.

Oh, story time:

Fandom is great. I have been in fandom for a long, long time, and I have written fic for most of that time. I freely admit that a lot of my fic is wish-fulfillment/self-insert stuff with disabled characters who get to be loved/desired/the hero/whatever. It’s fun and passes the time, and some people enjoy it and write that they learned about disability or had disabled people humanized.

Most people who don’t like OCs just roll their eyes and move on, but I have gotten so much nastiness whenever the story strays into the romantic or sexual. It’s not realistic that Character X would desire disabled!OC because Reasons That Are Totally Not Ableist. But Character X would fuck the gelatinous space blob or the alien with no discernible sex organs or their brother or their mirror selves. But not disabled people. That’s just a stretch too far.

The worst rageout I ever got came when I paired John Kennex, an amputee cop from Almost Human, with an OFC with CP. Mind you, at this point they were just two disabled people who met in the hallway of his building. No fucking, no pining, no lust, just two disabled people keeping each other midnight company because they didn’t want to be alone. Oh, my Lord, what abomination had I wrought? Having John make friends and possibly admire the beauty of a disabled woman was just like someone boning their AA sponsor. It was horrible. It was a recipe for disaster.

When I took issue with the gross assumption that disabled people were too psychologically damaged to get into a relationship with each other and pointed out that even if they were, it was their right to do so, just like the numberless able couples in fic, how the wrath did flow. I was called an ableist piece of shit(ableist because I failed to see the similarities between John and a drug addict), scum, an asshole. The torrent of invective was so bad that I did what I have never done before or since and deleted the review, though I saved a copy to a locked blog post.

Few things have made me angrier. My silly fantasies were being held to a higher standard of verisimilitude than those of able people. I was being told that it was actively dangerous for a character to be interested or involved with people with my disability and discouraged from pursuing it because it made people uncomfortable. And when I protested, I was berated because I had not shown the proper deference to physically-able opinion on the love and fucking proclivities of two fictional physically-disabled people.

Able people are allowed to indulge in fantasies without boundaries, but disabled people have to stay within “realistic” parameters, which to the abled mind means nothing more than chaste pining and noble suffering.



Also story time:

A Tumblr acquaintance and I were talking about Karl Urban and his current nasty habit of canceling cons with very little notice. Earlier this week, he canceled a date at Fedcon in Germany…and promptly signed on for Wizard World Philly the same weekend. Fedcon fans were understandably hurt and angry, and the acquaintance was one of those disappointed. She’s been torqued since it happened, and I can’t blame her. I know how badly it sucks to look forward to a happy meeting, only to have it ripped away after weeks or months of imagining how it will go. He’s canceled three times on cons I planned to attend for him, and I sulked every time. It’s human, and disappointment rarely presents us at our best. So I can’t fault the pique.

But after days of her stewing and petty meme-posting calling him a dick and not a man for canceling on Fedcon because the studio called him in to begin filming in Philadelphia, I finally stuck my oar in the water and suggested that he had no choice but to cancel because work comes first, and that maybe he took the Philly con dates because a huge chunk of the LOTR cast was going to be there and he saw a chance to make dosh, meet fans, hang with friends and fulfill his professional commitments.

Nope. Somehow taking that con after professional obligations made him bail on Fedcon was an insult to the fans who had paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to see him. He should have nobly declined the opportunity presented by Wizard World Philly and the chance to see his friends and make some side bank in deference to those fans in Germany who wouldn’t have seen him anyway because work beckoned.

When I pointed out that he had to work, she claimed that was a lie. Was he shooting in Philadelphia at the time in question? Well, yes, but he was still a filthy, heartless liar because he’d told Fedcon he’d be shooting then. Did she not tell me herself as a film student that most films shot Monday through Friday, which meant that theoretically, he would be available Saturday and Sunday? Well, yes, but that only proved that he could’ve made Germany if he really wanted to. If he truly gave a fuck about his fans, he should’ve left immediately after shooting on Friday, taken a nine-hour flight to Germany, gone without sleep if need be because hey, that’s what actors do, spent a handful of hours at the con on Saturday, and then gone right back to Philadelphia.

While I boggled at the sheer selfishness of this crackpot scenario, I tried to tell her that such a schedule was predicated on nothing going wrong, and it was also incredibly cruel. Did she really want to meet someone who hadn’t slept? And then I uttered what I suspect were the fatal words. “He had to WORK. You’re acting like he went to Aruba just to piss on you.”

And then it came. This young woman, with whom I had been on cordial terms, and who had previously used my experience with Karl as part of her appreciation video, exploded. She told me that my fondness for him had clouded my judgment, and that furthermore, the experience I so cherished, that has cheered me on bad days, was a front. Karl was an actor. Was I really so naive to think he actually cared? Actors at cons don’t care. They just want the money. I could live in my Karl Urban fantasy world, but she was “done with me.” And that was that. Blocked.

The implication was, of course, that Karl had behaved as kindly as he had during our meeting and done the things he had, not because he was a good man who wanted me to have a good experience and make my day brighter, but because he pitied me, and I, in my starry-eyed, addled, pathetic crippledom, had construed it as something deeper.

For him, there was nothing deeper. It was a con encounter and photo op. The end. And that’s all it should be for him, really. But for me, it was something deeper and sweeter, because it was a rare moment of being treated with the same consideration as everybody else. I was a person to him, not a burden. I needed and cherished that, and hold it sacred.

But nope. It couldn’t be left to me. I had pissed this person off my disagreeing, so I had to pay. She had to make sure I didn’t dare matter to anyone. So she did her level best to sully what I held so dear. Because she could, and because that would teach me to know my place.

The best part? Even though she made sure to hammer home the fact that he was an actor who didn’t give a fuck, she’s still chasing him to cons in hopes of her own experience. Because it will be different with her, you see. He will actually mean what he does and says to her, because she actually matters.

She’s actually human.

So, yeah, able people get mad because they don’t see us as human, with the same hopes, needs, and dreams as them, but as some lesser being that they suffer to let live among them on their charitable forbearance, and if we transgress those boundaries in any way, then we are forgetting our place and need to be returned to it by whatever means necessary.

One thousand and seventy-three words today.

LJ is dead, Jim. I've been here for eleven years, and I never expected it to wither as it has. People will always want to write and talk and post their thoughts and share their art. They'll always want to be part of a social circle.

Not here, they don't. This place is a VFW on the outskirts of the desert that smells of cheap booze and old soldiers and slow decay. Tumblr might be vapid, but at least it's alive. I've interacted more in the last week than I have on LJ in the past year. Nothing deep or momentous, but it's there. I call out, and voices answer, even if it's only a passing greeting.

It's a nice feeling.

One thousand one hundred and ten words today.

Dear AH fandom,



Give it up. The corpse is dead and rotting. We're well past the resurrection stage. Write fic, post art, make GIFS, but stop haranguing the poor phone drones at Netflix. It would be different if the actors wanted to continue, but when one of the leads has publicly stated he's not sorry it ended, the show is dead, Jim.

The sacred keys to Castle Asshole have been duly delivered. My aunt was kind enough to give me one of her old reversible hats, so now I have a summer hat.

I made a few new Karl Urban puzzles on Jigsaw planet last night, and then I finished a chapter of my ST:AOS WIP, which has been posted to both AO3 and FFN.Net.

Protip: If you enjoy writing and want to keep doing it, do not read writing advice or pet peeves threads on memes. No matter what tactics a writer uses to complete their work to the best of their abilities, they will irritate someone. Take a few weeks between updates? OMG, that's too long, it kills the momentum. Try to post quickly to sustain interest? OMG, it's choppy and sloppy and riddled with errors. Too much dialogue, not enough dialogue, too slow, too abrupt, too spare, too florid, too much porn, not enough porn, where's the angst and manpain?

That extends to feedback, too. OMG, you posted a note in the header asking for feedback and inviting crit? Don't tell me what to do! Just for that, I'm not even going to leave kudos, you entitlement whore. Don't explicitly invite comments and feedback? OMG, I'm too intimidated to click kudos. You should let me know what you want. Whyyyyyy aren't you psychic and attuned to my every neeeed?

Fandom has always been a haven for the awkward and shy, but damn if entitlement rot hasn't neared terminal proportions.

One thousand two hundred and twenty-nine words today.

Today, I have been pondering the lovemaking and marriage rituals of vampire priests who would like to bind themselves to another before God but know the Church will never accept their union as legitimate.

I have also considered hungry, needy, first-time-after-coma-and-limb-amputation sex.

Fandom is a weird and wonderful place.