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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 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.
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