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cw: animal death Update on little Charles: Apparently they administered morphine before the euthanasia medication and while that kicked in they let my parents pet him and feed him an ice cream sandwich. And after he was very high and half asleep, only then they gave him that, and my stepmom held him and Dad petted him until he stopped breathing.
In other news, I am thinking about the way being in fandom is just a lot less like being "in" anything and isn't really as fun anymore and how it is connected to the general state of the world.
When coming to this website to make this post, I noticed the site announcement about restrictions on Dreamwidth in Georgia and in my home state of Tennessee. I'm really proud to be on this website and paying a pittance a year to help them keep fighting good fights like this. I don't post here as much as I could, though, because years in the bigger ocean of tumblr and twitter have kind of made me wind down my sense of having anything to say.
I know it's a weird combination of the violence inherent to capitalism and just my brain getting older, but I remember having the ability to daydream all day long in school, writing fic snippets in my notebooks, while also continuing to keep good grades in my classes. I used to be creative and itching to share stuff. There was something about the internet being a place I had to manage to get access to that created a kind of goal at the end, but I still don't think it's "dopamine addiction" or whatever that's causing the main problem. I think it's just the sense that there are little campfires everywhere -- or one big bonfire here and there -- but around them, nobody is actually gathered to listen. People are just there to add fuel to the fire and be angry and hurt that no one is looking at the sparks they added. I'm to blame as is everyone else.
I do try to engage with other people's fanwork and stuff, but it seems like it rarely becomes a two-way street anymore.
You don't have to be friends with everyone you meet in fandom, but I know that back in the LJ and even early tumblr days, there was a sense of knowing who hung around in your neck of the woods. Maybe you didn't always, always engage in reciprocity of comments and reading, but there was enough overlap that there was an excitement to sharing stories and stuff. It was a form of conversation and positing ideas. Now, it's just part of an attention economy where everyone is broke and starving.
I don't know what exactly I did to direct the YouTube algorithm to feed me down this specific rabbit hole, but the other night I found this channel called![[youtube.com profile]](https://youtube.com/favicon.ico)
DarwinsLab. I can't speak for his past videos, but I watched the most recent tree about the nature of dreams, psychedelics, and the uncanny valley respectively. I really enjoyed them, and it felt a little bit like a slight reach backward into what the internet was like and "for" when I was in university and spending all that precious time I could've been forging IRL connections being on the internet (half-joking). It reminds me of Vsauce and watching everymanHYBRID and Marble Hornets and, strangely connected, YuGiOh The Abridged Series. There was a sense of creativity and conversation in those things that I often feel is not present even in the independent or self-made YouTube "content" I often fill my brain with.
When I was back in America for a few weeks, I rarely turned on YouTube, I noticed. Sometimes, I sat in total silence. Other times, I watched the actual TV my parents pay for, lying with little Charlie on the couch while parents were out. There was silence, and it was mostly bearable, though the first night of three that my parents went out of town while I was there (so I could dogsit our little buddy, them having no idea he'd be gone in a month), the house being so much larger than my little apartment kind of made me feel a little insecure like there might be something else hiding in the shadows or another room.
Here in Japan, I listen to YouTube and podcasts a ridiculous amount of the time. I enjoy them, most of the time. I enjoy learning, even when it's just on the level of following a story. Learning the trivia and beats of a true crime case that is common knowledge along with a little editorializing, etc. I have to have some kind of speech-sound to fall asleep here, and I don't know why. I would sometimes turn it on when I was back in the States, but I never actually comprehended more than five minutes of it before passing out.
I think it has something to do with the fact that all of my comprehensible conversations and interactions with human speech are at work here. There's a part of my brain that is just starved for something that feels both personal and novel. And yet, I'm noticing, that I have started to tune out toward the end of podcasts and videos that I normally wouldn't have lately. Then again, I've just suffered a loss, however distant and small compared to a human life. I know that what I'm experiencing at this very moment might not be some super representative aspect of my personhood.
When I try to listen to the part of me that's zoned out, to interrogate why, I find that it's that creative urge in the background begging me to be the one to make something. Only, I spent the whole time I was home trying to give myself space to create something, and the best I did was 15 seconds of simple video editing or so that is nowhere near finished that I may never go back and finish. I couldn't write anything, and I dunno why.
Except, I kinda do. It feels like there's no point to write anything lately. I feel a little bit less pessimistic about this than I did a week ago. I finally got one comment on the Trigun fic I posted recently. Only, I know that back in the past, I would have been able to find a space in which to talk about the aspect of the story that made me write that fic, even if the person didn't fully read my fic themselves, and if I got lucky they might, and that's what I'm missing.
Which brings me back to the YouTube algorithm.
Somehow, in connection with this and other stuff I watch sometimes, it brought me to this video:
It is an interesting take on a lot of things, and my petty connection to my own sense of being unmoored is much smaller than the bigger issues of white grievance replacing the personality and redirecting suburban white anger into fascism. However, one of the things she talks about up front is that Eminem was kind of one of the last release valves for a subculture of young white suburban people that held a space that allowed them to share experience, express anger, and be transgressive or rebellious in a way that was able to both acknowledge their legitimate grievances against those in power and the apparatuses in the mainstream that held them down while also being self-aware of their own privilege in the landscape of a genre of music that was pioneered by Black people. She talks about how she was once a big fan of Eminem, became very critical, and then came back around to the idea that while she doesn't want to absolve him of all the "problematic" elements of his writing and body of work that maybe the flaws and anger and transgression present within his work are representative of the functions of a lot of former subcultures that used to allow young (white otherwise, though the white people are most relevant to her concern in the video) people to help identify themselves in opposition to the mainstream.
I remember being in the fringes of Eminem-enjoying and the weird cathartic rush I got when I learned how to contextually use the "f-word" as an intensifier and was brave enough to do it in a venting rant to a friend over the phone in hushed tones as a tween. I grew up at the intersection of parents who were just really responsible given their means for the most part and "white trash," so there was a certain aspect of that that spoke to me when it was coming out and cool. And I remember that kind of word-of-mouth and slow-transmission of culture that was based on who you happened to have access to.
I also think about the fact that had it not been for my cousin giving me a copy of Shounen Jump he'd worn out as a mousepad after reading it a couple times then telling me about a person he met with a screenname based on YuYu Hakusho in an Unreal Tournament chatroom that I should try to message on a lark who then got freaked out like I might be lying about who I was and how I got their username that I would not, in any way, be who I am today.
Even the dial-up internet had the character of being a decentralized place but where you could, through others, eventually discover things.
The centralized, mainstream, social media internet actively bottlenecks all of that experience and most of it feeds it through an algorithm that serves to make the user and the people similar to and adjacent to the user's habits more like themselves instead of helping to change them in any way.
And while there's this narrative of wanting to embrace who you are, to not let others change you, the thing is that being able to "try lives on" used to be a more natural part of reality than it is now. The kids growing up with social media now are more terrified of being cringe than being anything else. ~Back in my day~, there was a sense that choosing how one wanted to be cringe and learning the rules and not being a "poser" but being fully sincere in your efforts to conform to this type of cringe was a feature of adolescence.
And I think that this connects to what is dying about fandom. Fandom was, at one point, a series of subcultures. Certain fandoms had certain rules, certain conventions (of both kinds), and certain online communities that had idiosyncratic rules and expectations.
Now, you have to cast your bait and line out into the murky depths of a tag or search term and hope that maybe someone who matches your weirdness might see it. There are all these arguments about "purity" versus being as weird and kinky as you want to be and everything in between, and I think this kind of thing is partly because there is no sub in the fandom subcultures anymore, so people keep trying to make the mainstream vibe into what they're most comfortable with. Whereas, in the past, people would just make their own little community about that thing that included 5-20 core members and others who came along to join and that was enough.
And, selfishly, it is SO hard to be creative in this environment where I know that everyone is too overstimulated to care or views me and my attention as competition rather than having a handful of people I can trust to at least care that I had something to say.
In other news, I am thinking about the way being in fandom is just a lot less like being "in" anything and isn't really as fun anymore and how it is connected to the general state of the world.
When coming to this website to make this post, I noticed the site announcement about restrictions on Dreamwidth in Georgia and in my home state of Tennessee. I'm really proud to be on this website and paying a pittance a year to help them keep fighting good fights like this. I don't post here as much as I could, though, because years in the bigger ocean of tumblr and twitter have kind of made me wind down my sense of having anything to say.
I know it's a weird combination of the violence inherent to capitalism and just my brain getting older, but I remember having the ability to daydream all day long in school, writing fic snippets in my notebooks, while also continuing to keep good grades in my classes. I used to be creative and itching to share stuff. There was something about the internet being a place I had to manage to get access to that created a kind of goal at the end, but I still don't think it's "dopamine addiction" or whatever that's causing the main problem. I think it's just the sense that there are little campfires everywhere -- or one big bonfire here and there -- but around them, nobody is actually gathered to listen. People are just there to add fuel to the fire and be angry and hurt that no one is looking at the sparks they added. I'm to blame as is everyone else.
I do try to engage with other people's fanwork and stuff, but it seems like it rarely becomes a two-way street anymore.
You don't have to be friends with everyone you meet in fandom, but I know that back in the LJ and even early tumblr days, there was a sense of knowing who hung around in your neck of the woods. Maybe you didn't always, always engage in reciprocity of comments and reading, but there was enough overlap that there was an excitement to sharing stories and stuff. It was a form of conversation and positing ideas. Now, it's just part of an attention economy where everyone is broke and starving.
I don't know what exactly I did to direct the YouTube algorithm to feed me down this specific rabbit hole, but the other night I found this channel called
When I was back in America for a few weeks, I rarely turned on YouTube, I noticed. Sometimes, I sat in total silence. Other times, I watched the actual TV my parents pay for, lying with little Charlie on the couch while parents were out. There was silence, and it was mostly bearable, though the first night of three that my parents went out of town while I was there (so I could dogsit our little buddy, them having no idea he'd be gone in a month), the house being so much larger than my little apartment kind of made me feel a little insecure like there might be something else hiding in the shadows or another room.
Here in Japan, I listen to YouTube and podcasts a ridiculous amount of the time. I enjoy them, most of the time. I enjoy learning, even when it's just on the level of following a story. Learning the trivia and beats of a true crime case that is common knowledge along with a little editorializing, etc. I have to have some kind of speech-sound to fall asleep here, and I don't know why. I would sometimes turn it on when I was back in the States, but I never actually comprehended more than five minutes of it before passing out.
I think it has something to do with the fact that all of my comprehensible conversations and interactions with human speech are at work here. There's a part of my brain that is just starved for something that feels both personal and novel. And yet, I'm noticing, that I have started to tune out toward the end of podcasts and videos that I normally wouldn't have lately. Then again, I've just suffered a loss, however distant and small compared to a human life. I know that what I'm experiencing at this very moment might not be some super representative aspect of my personhood.
When I try to listen to the part of me that's zoned out, to interrogate why, I find that it's that creative urge in the background begging me to be the one to make something. Only, I spent the whole time I was home trying to give myself space to create something, and the best I did was 15 seconds of simple video editing or so that is nowhere near finished that I may never go back and finish. I couldn't write anything, and I dunno why.
Except, I kinda do. It feels like there's no point to write anything lately. I feel a little bit less pessimistic about this than I did a week ago. I finally got one comment on the Trigun fic I posted recently. Only, I know that back in the past, I would have been able to find a space in which to talk about the aspect of the story that made me write that fic, even if the person didn't fully read my fic themselves, and if I got lucky they might, and that's what I'm missing.
Which brings me back to the YouTube algorithm.
Somehow, in connection with this and other stuff I watch sometimes, it brought me to this video:
It is an interesting take on a lot of things, and my petty connection to my own sense of being unmoored is much smaller than the bigger issues of white grievance replacing the personality and redirecting suburban white anger into fascism. However, one of the things she talks about up front is that Eminem was kind of one of the last release valves for a subculture of young white suburban people that held a space that allowed them to share experience, express anger, and be transgressive or rebellious in a way that was able to both acknowledge their legitimate grievances against those in power and the apparatuses in the mainstream that held them down while also being self-aware of their own privilege in the landscape of a genre of music that was pioneered by Black people. She talks about how she was once a big fan of Eminem, became very critical, and then came back around to the idea that while she doesn't want to absolve him of all the "problematic" elements of his writing and body of work that maybe the flaws and anger and transgression present within his work are representative of the functions of a lot of former subcultures that used to allow young (white otherwise, though the white people are most relevant to her concern in the video) people to help identify themselves in opposition to the mainstream.
I remember being in the fringes of Eminem-enjoying and the weird cathartic rush I got when I learned how to contextually use the "f-word" as an intensifier and was brave enough to do it in a venting rant to a friend over the phone in hushed tones as a tween. I grew up at the intersection of parents who were just really responsible given their means for the most part and "white trash," so there was a certain aspect of that that spoke to me when it was coming out and cool. And I remember that kind of word-of-mouth and slow-transmission of culture that was based on who you happened to have access to.
I also think about the fact that had it not been for my cousin giving me a copy of Shounen Jump he'd worn out as a mousepad after reading it a couple times then telling me about a person he met with a screenname based on YuYu Hakusho in an Unreal Tournament chatroom that I should try to message on a lark who then got freaked out like I might be lying about who I was and how I got their username that I would not, in any way, be who I am today.
Even the dial-up internet had the character of being a decentralized place but where you could, through others, eventually discover things.
The centralized, mainstream, social media internet actively bottlenecks all of that experience and most of it feeds it through an algorithm that serves to make the user and the people similar to and adjacent to the user's habits more like themselves instead of helping to change them in any way.
And while there's this narrative of wanting to embrace who you are, to not let others change you, the thing is that being able to "try lives on" used to be a more natural part of reality than it is now. The kids growing up with social media now are more terrified of being cringe than being anything else. ~Back in my day~, there was a sense that choosing how one wanted to be cringe and learning the rules and not being a "poser" but being fully sincere in your efforts to conform to this type of cringe was a feature of adolescence.
And I think that this connects to what is dying about fandom. Fandom was, at one point, a series of subcultures. Certain fandoms had certain rules, certain conventions (of both kinds), and certain online communities that had idiosyncratic rules and expectations.
Now, you have to cast your bait and line out into the murky depths of a tag or search term and hope that maybe someone who matches your weirdness might see it. There are all these arguments about "purity" versus being as weird and kinky as you want to be and everything in between, and I think this kind of thing is partly because there is no sub in the fandom subcultures anymore, so people keep trying to make the mainstream vibe into what they're most comfortable with. Whereas, in the past, people would just make their own little community about that thing that included 5-20 core members and others who came along to join and that was enough.
And, selfishly, it is SO hard to be creative in this environment where I know that everyone is too overstimulated to care or views me and my attention as competition rather than having a handful of people I can trust to at least care that I had something to say.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 11:02 am (UTC)From:Its success and its 'going mainstream' has certainly changed it.
I wish you all the best in finding a community for your fic! I just piddle along here on DW and never embraced Tumblr or Twitter, but nowadays I see a lot of people finding a more manageable experience and better fannish relationships on Discord.
I am glad Charlie's end was peaceful.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 11:24 am (UTC)From:That video I shared kind of talks about this with regard to subcultures and, like, the anger of youth.
I think about things like wikia being bought and being made into a profit machine even though people still use it and stuff as an element of this. And while I think there are a lot of different elements at play, the fact that dreamwidth especially but tumblr to a lesser extent are resisting the algorithmification of everything is the only reason they survive as any kind of anti-clout-chasing corner of the internet. Like, tumblr is definitely in a weird middle ground because the biggest part of its userbase goes up in arms every time they try to monetize it in those ways, so the current owners have tried taking some pages out of the dreamwidth book after we (the users) cost Yahoo some millions of dollars in lost equity without being taken offline...
I miss when it was about sharing love for a shared interest instead of yelling over each other.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 02:52 pm (UTC)From:I am grateful there are places like DW that are resisting the enshittification of ther internet that is all around.
I was all for AO3 and was there at the beginning, but it's so huge now that of course it has lost the feeling it had at first.
LJ was great for me because the fic and the community and the readers and writers were all there in one place. It's very very different now. Wishing you the best.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-04 02:25 am (UTC)From:It's interesting that you have to have something playing while in Japan. My first thought was definitely that you wanted to surround yourself by the familiar when everything else in your life demonstrably wasn't. A little touch of home, so to speak. Especially while in Japan, which I get the impression doesn't embrace outsiders all that well, on the whole. It's easy to feel "outside" of it all.
God, the changes in fandom really depress me. The thing that gets me is the people who want more "purity" in their fandom spaces TRIED to create their own ao3 clone, but they couldn't agree on what should be allowed and what shouldn't. So their negativity and moralism end up in regular fandom spaces, and I'm so tired of it. Luckily, I haven't had much direct contact with them - the occasional tumblr post will scroll by talking about it, and that's about it. Then again, I'm not in any of the BIG active fandoms at the moment, and that probably insulates me. I miss the days of the fourth wall, where "Don't like Don't Read" was the law of the land. I think you're definitely right in that it's because fandom is no longer a 'sub' culture, and now that it's more mainstream, people want it to be more palatable toward the general populace. And that was never fandom's aim - it was the place for the 'freaks' and the kinksters, for anyone who wanted to explore something society said they shouldn't have an interest in. Not that those were the be all of fandom: it was also a place people could come together to talk and read about characters/worlds they love or just...write two characters falling in love, no kink or weirdness or whatever involved. And now it's all about consuming content, algorithms, and yes, a competition to be seen and heard.
I've been really lucky, I think. My lack of interest in any of the current "it" fandoms means the discord servers I'm in are small and fun, with little to no drama. But that's another piece, I think: fandom is now so spread out. On LJ it was so centralized, and now there's tumblr, twitter, bluesky, discord, and ao3. It's hard to feel like you have a community when it's spread out like that.
I feel like I just went on and on and said nothing at all 😂
no subject
Date: 2025-09-07 07:25 am (UTC)From:But no no I appreciate your commentary!
What kinds of fandoms are you into lately?
no subject
Date: 2025-09-07 11:32 pm (UTC)From:This is a great way of putting it. It's hard to find your people when they're on specific sites, in specific....cliques, lets say. Heck, I'm in a couple servers that were posted on tumblr once, and never mentioned again, so they're damn near impossible to find unless you a). happened to see the post on tumblr or b). know someone already in it.
I'm still really into Fullmetal Alchemist, but I think that's more because nothing else has caught my fancy, tbh. I'm thinking of (finally!!) watching Yuri on Ice because there's tons of fic. I just want something shiny & new, with tons of fic to read!! But nothing is grabbing me fannishly...
What about you?
no subject
Date: 2025-09-05 03:56 am (UTC)From:I 100% agree that it feels like a struggle to find a real online community these days. I like "being in the loop" to some extent, but right now I'm also trying to figure out how I can curate my own spaces instead of being funneled into, as you say, the bottleneck of centralized social media.
Even though I don't think we currently share fandoms, I am interested in conversations with other fannish people, and just hearing what people are working on or thinking about.
Which is all to say--if you ever do want to post here about what made you write a certain fic, or even just more reflections on how hard it is to be creative, I'd be interested in reading it.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-07 07:26 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2025-09-07 08:49 pm (UTC)From: