Another thought as I am watching some episodes of Buffy is that this is a few years before 2005 Doctor Who. Anthony Stewart Head guest-starred as an evil headmaster in an episode of Doctor Who S2, so there's obviously some cross-media/universe awareness there on RTD's part.

I remember back when I was a tween/teenager when I first developed a passing interesting in Buffy that a friend of mine who was a couple years older explained to me the underlying image/concept that supposedly inspired Buffy's character. Basically, it was supposed to be a subversion of the cutesy, popular blonde girl being dumb and incompetent and the first one to die in the horror genre.

While I'm long-since over Joss Whedon tooting his own horn about how he mastered and graduated feminism, I still think that's an interesting vibe, and I wonder if Rose Tyler is also greatly inspired by that. I know that one thing that went into inspiring Rose was her working class background and that she was a character who belonged "on a British soap opera," at the time, but Doctor Who dabbles in a lot of horror elements while softening them in the conclusion.

I definitely think that there's at least some food for thought there, though.

So, in all this thinking about social media presence and the act of consuming versus engaging with content*, I have been sort of thinking about my way forward in trying to feel content with my online presence. kara_mckay gave me a pillowfort invitation key! And there is absolutely nothing on my page yet, but here it is: https://www.pillowfort.social/somenewdisaster

(*Thank you for such a good response to that! It is really encouraging about Dreamwidth as a platform to get a robust response to a post. It is easy to forget what that feels like on some of the more "modern" socmed sites, so it just makes me all the more determined to try to make continued presence here work.)

One thing I have noticed on pillowfort, and I am not sure if it is a bug or just a current necessity, is that you do have the option to change both your sort of divider color and your page background color, but when you are logged out the background color change doesn't show? I guess I'll try to ask somebody there when I start trying to do anything with it.

I have had another uneventful and slightly discouraging Saturday. I slept most of it away quite literally, and we are now into the wee hours of Sunday. Not that it matters very much as long as I can drag myself out of bed for work on Monday, but I always feel so energized late Friday evening. Then I come home and find myself unable to do everything that I intended to do, and so I do something else, and before I know it I have powered through past-midnight, and my body just collapses to recover. This morning was kind of weird. I awakened pretty soundly around 9:30 and I was awake and even did some laundry, but I went back to sleep around 11:00 until just before 3:00 P.M. It is weird how good my body clock has gotten here, because before I even looked at my phone I knew it had to be approaching 3:00. This meant that I didn't eat a bite of anything until 5:00, and this is how I always end up eating only one meal on the weekends.

Anyway, for all my frustration with this lack of work-life balance, today marks the two week countdown until I will be taking the arduous trek to the airport and boarding a plane back for America. I will be in transit for almost 24 hours. The flight to Atlanta from Narita is about 12-13 hours, and I have a six hour layover in Atlanta before boarding a plane back to my regional airport sometime around 10:00 P.M. local. The flight from ATL to TRI is only like 45 minutes which is just a weird experience.

The specific pleasant surprise I wanted to talk about was about response to meta-writing. About a year ago (according to xkit's timestamp), I started a sideblog on tumblr called prixmiumcontent where I intended to start writing frequent meta articles about stuff I was watching. I started, as I usually would, with Doctor Who and got three episodes in before the stark difference in the response I was getting to a gifset-per-episode and the meta posts themselves. It's hilarious honestly in how much it proves many points I have tried to make about modern social media. And right now, I only have Gimp to make gifs and it is just an altogether more difficult process than with Photoshop.

After the December 2018 tumblr TOS change, I basically just braced myself for the End of Tumblr. I made this account, and I started trying to resign myself to the notion that tumblr was not what I had once enjoyed and never would be again. The dream was dead. I archived my blog that I had used the entire time, and I used a utility someone had created to download my entire blog for fear of losing that time capsule of my life much like I lost most access to my various LiveJournals. (That file is hilariously huge and lives on an external harddrive. Not a bad idea, honestly, but it was a thing to do.) So this project fell by the wayside.

Earlier this year, when I saw that tumblr had, in fact, not toppled completely, I made a new account with the intention of lurking but being able to save things and post things from time to time. I wanted a smaller following and a smaller dash, and thus far I have achieved those goals, but the issue is that because so many people are clout-chasing and/or facing information overload, it is hard to find mutuals on tumblr anymore who engage in kind. The Fate/Type Moon fandom has always seemed kind of image-heavy and not very talkative, and when I got really into Good Omens I found interesting blogs to follow, but for all the fandom's talk of being really open and friendly and nice, I honestly have never experienced it on tumblr or twitter. I am not bad-mouthing anyone on tumblr, but I have experienced people on twitter being very exclusionary, reactionary, and probably some other -aries if you don't meet their exact definition of what progressive and far ENOUGH left is, by a constantly shifting definition. Again, I am not talking about the fandom as a whole but just... whatever it is, it doesn't want me to be active in it.

(I'm trying to get to the pleasant surprise, I swear.)

So after I made my new tumblr account, I remembered prixmiumcontent and, since it was a sideblog, went back into my old account and gave my new account admin and posting rights and all of that, too. The result of this is that while I have the tumblr app on my phone, I hardly ever do ANYTHING with the new-personal-blog I made there. This may or may not ever change. Sometimes I get the impulse that it is sad? But other times I feel like the detox being effective is pretty great. But this means that sometimes, phone apps being the little drug dealers that they are, tumblr's app tries to suck me back in. YOU HAVE NOTIFICATIONS. SO-AND-SO MADE A GREAT POST. WE NOTICED [X] IS YOUR FAVORITE BECAUSE YOU DON'T FOLLOW ANYONE ELSE. And so on. But the vast majority of my notifications are actually from the sideblog, and mostly reblogs of the gifsets I made for the first three episodes of Doctor Who.

But in the midst of all that, when I mistakenly tapped rather than cleared a tumblr-begging notifcation on my phone, I found this: https://chelnah-the-egghead.tumblr.com/post/189265229590/doctor-who-the-unquiet-dead-s01e03

It is so sweet. It is short and simple, and this is literally all the engagement I need to feel like I am not just screaming into a void when I try to make something for an audience rather than for myself alone. To be fair, when I write meta I am usually doing it in part for myself under the theory that reading blog entries will be faster than binging a series again when I want to reference stuff for fanfic more quickly than a month from now.

Anyway, I think I may try to cross-post these meta posts and continue to use this sideblog in that case? I am not sure yet, but it is at least encouraging that someone finds it interesting.

Title: Earth Girls
Prompt: Time Loops
Fandom: Doctor Who
Character/Pair: Clara Oswald & Missy
Words: 2282
Rating: G
Summary: Clara remembers when the Daleks existed. In their absence, another enemy has taken their place, and she turns to the only Gallifreyan who remembers her for help.

[Everything is the same except the Daleks are actively replaced (in power or importance or existence) by the Incubators from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.]
Warnings: Vague spoilers for Madoka, I guess?


Title: The Promise of Tomorrow
Prompt: Happy Ending
Fandom: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Character/Pair: Miki Sayaka/Sakura Kyouko
Words: 608
Rating: T
Summary: Sayaka knows that it can't last forever.
Warnings: Rebellion-related?


Title: Fidelity
Prompt: Trust and Vows
Fandom: White Collar
Character/Pair: Peter Burke/Neal Caffrey; Peter Burke/Elizabeth Burke
Words: 1415
Rating: T
Summary: Peter comes home to confess.
Warnings: Infidelity-related but also pre-OT3.

Because I am lazy, I just copy-pasted the text from the post to the community.

I need some more icons. Specifically, I need a Doctor Who one, but it is way too difficult to choose just one character or pairing? I guess I would pick Clara if I had to choose the companion I projected onto the most, but I don't necessarily LIKE her more than everyone else. And I am sort of in an early New Who mood. But that is making me feel all kinds of weird. Will come back to that in a second.

Japan is 13 hours ahead of Eastern Time right now (eff daylight savings idk what anything is), which meant that I thought that I might still stand a chance of churning out some shitty ficlets that wouldn't even resemble short fics so much as disembodied paragraphs to finish up my trope_bingo card. But then I awakened at like 3:30 in the morning, feeling like it might kill me but still feeling compelled. Then on a prayer I checked the community, and there was a surprise extension of one week due to the host thinking they may not have reliable internet access to close up the round.

I am happy and even more determined to give it a good go. I am definitely mostly staying home this weekend.

I went back to Osaka to see my friends again, even though I really did not want to spend the money. I am glad I went. I ended up being able to provide some moral support during another crisis they were having about being able to stay together here in Japan. Since this is in public, I won't go into too many details, but even though it was expensive it felt like I "should" have been there.

However, I am DEFINITELY staying home for a while when I am not at work. My schedule this semester has been so flippin' weird. We will have only had four weeks out of twelve where we actually attended five days, and we have already had one. I am off this coming Monday again, and then it is three full weeks after that plus two days? Then I am done. Which is wild.

I still do not know what I am going to be doing for a job come January... Anyone who wants to help me brainstorm about that is free. I really want to find a teaching job in the States, but that seems just really difficult to swing given that I can't just up and move without a guarantee of a safe and reasonable place to live. That is one reason it kind of seems like EFL is the only viable option even though it sorta sucks to be on the other side of the world from everyone.

Anyway, I am really pleased that I got the extension on the bingo card.

My Good Omens feelings are still going strong, but given my best friend's sudden resurgent interest in it, I have finally been revisiting the beginning of New Who. And it makes me happy, but it also gives me this lingering, weird sense of melancholy. I am not quite sure why, but thinking about it and other fandoms I was into even as few as four or five years ago primarily makes me feel a bit like I wasted a lot of time. I feel like I used to have more robust and creative ideas that I should have gotten down rather than being pulled along by life. It makes me feel wrung out, and I feel like I see the reflection of a person that I used to be when I revisit these things. And I guess I get nervous that my gained "maturity" isn't ever gonna help me way that lost energy could have if I had used it in time. Also, I feel like that I have always been a reasonably "critical" fan, but in today's climate, I feel like I am just waiting for someone to pounce on me or my interests. It feels like fandom has become a reason to bully people, and it makes me cringe inside. I hope that I can stick to this little blogging experience and keep my head down and make some personal friendships that aren't based on agreeing with the groupthink consensus.

Speaking of groupthink, this is an entirely different thing but this playlist is great if you want a way to make sense of the way your internet friends end up getting radicalized by the Alt Right and how your seemingly kind but conservative family members seem to just kind of blindly abide fascism even if they would never outright agree with fascists:

"The Alt-Right Playbook: Introduction" (Watch on YouTube)

link to full playlist

I will probably comment about this later, but the video "How to Radicalize a Normie" is something that I would like to bring up with people who judge me for wanting Grant Ward to be redeemed. Yeah, it was not necessarily any one person's JOB to redeem him, but the show touted this whole rhetoric of how they were all about getting to people in time, and yet there was always this whispered subtitle ("except Grant Ward").

Since Good Omens took my interest, I have been using my newer tumblr (now located at indulgentcrowley surprise, surprise) some. I guess that in a way, it feels like the easy thing to do go get a lot of visually thoughtful content poured into my eyeballs, but the older a fan I get the more I despise the constantly-updating, never-gratifying experience of the tumblr dashboard. In the past, I have enjoyed twitter in spite of that, but that was mostly as a way to interact with my friends. Now that I don't have a ton to say about our common interests, even that seems to be hard to engage with. It doesn't really seem like a fandom platform to me. Every time I post in a fandom tag, I get no responses except possibly months later. It seems to be, moreso than tumblr, a platform where only trending stuff matters at all except among your mutuals.

In other news, I decided to give watching Merlin a half-assed shot. It was my LIFE back in 2010 or 2011, but then I somehow didn't quite make it through the last season. I think I remember why I didn't finish the series the first time around. First off is my weird aversion to watching shows while they are currently airing. This has less to do with impatience and a desire to binge-watch all the time as it does with the fact that specifically week-to-week TV show style fandom discourse has always exhausted me when I experienced it as a present-age fan.

Merllin was my main fandom when I made the jump from LJ to tumblr back in 2011, I recall. I started using tumblr on spring break from university that year after a conversation with a friend who had switched over while I was lamenting how LJ comms were slowing down. And now look at where we are.

Back in the LJ days of being a part of fandom, I felt like it was more possible to feel a more personal connection to being a part of whatever pocket of fandom one found oneself in, for better and worse. I experienced both the good and that bad of it in Doctor Who fandom, and specifically Doctor/Rose fandom. When I was on LJ, I was part of a comm called time_and_chips which was primarily a shippy comm but which also pretty openly welcomed those who were just their for gen Doctor and Rose content. I was about sixteen at the time, and so this environment was a good one to get in on, while I also wanted more fervently and miserably shippy content.

That's when I found oh_she_knows. One has to be logged on to see the actual post, but they have a "Vouching Post." I think I recall that this got even more scrutinizing when I was last involved with it. Basically, it was a Doctor/Rose shipping only community. Initially, it seemed like a "safe" space for those who really intensely shipped the Doctor and Rose and didn't want to have the bummer of that person who would always swoop in and be like "I think this scene just means they're really good friends fam" (though fam wouldn't come into vogue for many years, you get the idea). However, I got into Doctor Who after S2 had completed but before S3 began airing. See, therein would lie the problem.

Apparently there was at one point some user who used to be fandom notorious for pouncing on any and all content that pertained to Rose to preach the gospel of how much better Martha was and how trashy Rose was. I really don't know if Martha had even appeared outside trailers when this happened, but it may have only occurred once S3 started airing. If that is the case, then it makes the latter comm's existence seem a little bit more petty than I remember feeling at the time.

Once nice thing about being in OSK (as we referred to it) was that every Saturday night (I think it was Saturday - it may have been Friday give me a break it was like 2007 and 2008 that I was around it) we had a scheduled AIM chat. It was a sort of type-it-in and you knew it'd be there situation because back then chatrooms were sort of summoned that way rather than necessarily always extant. But it was nice knowing that it would be there but that you didn't HAVE to be the whole time or every week.

People didn't take it for granted, and so people were much more likely to be personally invested in the chatroom's content and presence. And that is sort of one thing I miss about pre-tumblr fandom. It really feels like tumblr was the watershed moment when everything was Always On to the point that it became more impersonal out of necessity. Now no one really wants to hear of that kind of organizing, even with the reemergence of chatrooms like that through Discord Servers or whatever. There isn't any sense of scarcity, so there are a lot of basically silent servers for niche interests, which is sad.

However, when S3 finally did start airing, I became less and less comfortable with OSK. First of all, their obsession with Vouching new members seemed to become less about making sure that one wasn't there to troll us and more with how much of a purist one was. I don't remember a lot about the specifics of our chats except that it was encouraging to me as a teenager that so many of my fellow fans were people who had become young women with husbands and even sometimes kids who seemed reasonably responsible in continuing to participate in fandom. But I do remember the specific moment when I started to feel that maybe I didn't belong in their clique, no matter how much I shipped Doctor/Rose at the time.

Back then, we would sort of group-watch, but it wasn't required to be in-tandem to count. Where dial-up hadn't completely gone away and streaming video to share with each other hadn't really come into vogue, most of us torrented episodes. I did it on dial-up overnight or, worse, even taped it airing on SciFi. Those were the days. Anyway, I just remember there being this moment when one of them said that Martha was okay but that she was like cake and Rose was like pie, and that someone who'd tasted pie would never choose cake. And for me, that was a slow deal-breaker set into motion. At the time I just sort of argued with it a bit, but then it settled in how much they were not willing to accept Martha as even a character due to their allegiance to the Doctor/Rose ship and the one-itis of it. And it occurred to me even as a sixteen year old how much of a slippery slope that was about racism, even when it wasn't intended as a racist sentiment.

And anyway, I bring all of that up just to point out that while it wasn't all good, I miss that it was even possible for me to have those experiences - good and bad - as opposed to just having this overwhelmed feeling of never being enough. Even now, I still feel like I am catching up and have been for the past five or ten years.

I really like that i have at least somewhat gotten back into this format of blogging, but it also feels quiet and hard to make a lot of really fandom-y posts. I just feel to brain-gunked a lot of the time to say a lot about things even when I am into them. I need to find a quiet in my spirit to let me create. I also reallllllly need to learn to create more concise stuff. I have been working on what was meant to be a oneshot and it's well over 4k probably, and I honestly wish I knew HOW to get in and get out as far as oneshots are concerned.

I want to participate damn it.

Anyway, Merlin is so camp and silly and cute. I just wish that it weren't SO Magneto Was Right toward the end.

Edit: Looking back on LJ, there was a time when underscores weren't viewed as "losing" or "lame" pre-tumblr and I forgot. Even when 15 characters was all you had to work with. Wow.