I still do but had to friends-lock it. But I miss it a lot. :(((
Haaaaad?
I don’t use it as much now because my friends are all in different fandoms, but if you joined fandom only in the Tumblr/Twitter era YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE MISSING.
1. Threaded comments that don’t have to be replied to with a whole separate post
2. Profile pages so you could find out about a person and also check out their followers to see if you know people in common/find other people into what you’re into
3. Communities for fic, and newsletter communities for fandoms that rounded up daily news (actor stuff, pics, videos, etc)
4. Much better signal to noise ratio (not seeing the same thing 15 times or having to install xkit just to make your dash readable and filter out fandoms you aren’t in)
5. Just a way, way more grounded sense of where and who people are, instead of shouting into a crowded room all the time
This is my third go-around with Tumblr and fandom, and it’s only manageable now because I’m following hardly anyone (sorry guys). I really cannot wait until somebody makes something that combines the ease of image-posting on Tumblr with the actual content of LJ, because I feel like this place encourages you to be silent.
Shhh, don’t make an original text post, no one wants to read that, especially if it’s just about your personal life (which you couldn’t lock/filter anyhow). Shhh, don’t add text to that reblog, just hide your comments down in the tags, where people have to scroll to see them. Shhh, all you can contribute is a picture of an actor that’s probably already been posted with six different edits to the tag. Just reblog, baby.
I love fandom and fans and it makes me so sad, too, to see what’s been my culture for going on 20 years now get eroded and lost. I don’t know where fandom will be in another 20 years but I’m guessing the history of my chunk of it (Usenet, mailing lists, personal websites, LJ) won’t get carried on.
All, all, all of this. I still have my LJ, have a DW account, too, and use them every day. TALKING - what is it? Tumblr is for pretties, LJ is for conversation.
I still use my LJ but it’s only during the summer for a specific fandom. I’m still bitter about the migration.
I have a lifetime (permanent? whatever it was called) account over at LJ and I never use it but I still miss it every. single. time. I get sucked into a lot of tumblr usage. Scroll up there and read that numbered list and you will likely understand why. I can’t ever find stuff here.
And so this, dear readers, is why I will be forever bitter, and forever sad, because LJ wasn’t perfect (so many reasons it wasn’t, SO MANY, remember the censoring and the Russians and, just, EVERYTHING that was so irritating?) but it’s where I learned how to do fandom, and my way of doing fandom will forever be informed by that structure, and I’m just… not over it.
Canadian Tire reported the most important piece of sports journalism of the decade when they tracked down the guy who clearly spent his adolescence gently boning Jonathan Toews in a shack next to Lake Winnipeg, and that’s still not as great a story as the one I’m about to tell you about Eric Bittle and Jack Zimmermann.
PRIMER: ERIC BITTLE / JACK ZIMMERMANN
Once upon a time, when I was a tender babe entering the woods of Hockey RPF with nary a clue in my head as to how much I was going to eventually care about which hockey dude was fictionally boning which other hockey dude and whose hair was the worst, half of fandom was like “Jonathan Toews! Patrick Kane!!” and the other end of the cesspool of fandom was all “SIDNEY CROSBY!! EVGENI MALKIN!!!” I am not here to contest that Crosby and Malkin are tenderly making love every night in Crosby’s ridic Pittsburgh manse, mostly because hello, I have eyes, but I am here to make the gentle suggestion that in a world where we can dream about a Gagner-Tavares Future Hockey Dynasty we need to acknowledge the most beautiful of the shamefully unrecognized We Grew Up to Hockey Good Together ships, which is to say: Eric Bittle/Jack Zimmermann.
BUT WAIT, you cry. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BITTLE/ZIMMERMANN? LITERALLY NOBODY CARES BRO.
That’s fair. Individually you’ve probably heard of them, if only because Zimmermann is the kind of second-gen hockey royalty that you’d nominate to be put on Canadian currency and Bittle is seriously the cutest human being on the face of the fucking planet. People like to argue about whether or not Jeff Skinner is made of real live unicorns but nobody argues about Eric Bittle because if you have eyes you have seen the truth.
I am totally not responding to your messages right now! WHAT AN ASSHOLE.
Well, yes, obviously, but also: this weekend was the end of 2 solid weeks of travel for me, as well as the launch of the book, and I am so DONE with being social that I can barely think straight. I am exhausted in pretty much all the ways a person can be and right now, even the minimal social effort of responding to very kind messages (and sending out my own) is just a little bit more than this outgoing introvert type can bear.
So please: feel free to think I am an asshole if you need to, that’s fine, but please don’t take it even a little bit personally or wonder what the fuck you did (I have met you, tumblr; I AM you, and I know how you think). It’s not you, it’s 100% me; I am turtling mega hard right now and I will be back to tell you how awesome you are.
IF you listen to pop culture podcasts, and if you listen to one that dropped a new episode today, and if in that episode you heard a “favorite TV Carries” segment about 20 minutes in that was actually a happy birthday wish, then congratulations: you have discovered my family’s birthday card for me.
So THAT was surprising and I am still blushing in my car for some reason.
I know we have seen a zillion better photos of the crowd yesterday after the last performance, but I wanted to go ahead and share this one because… I just wanted to.
I only took 2 pictures this weekend: one of my Playbill from Hamilton, and this. We were in the front row so we were slow to leave, plus we popped down to the bathroom, PLUS Rae kept getting stopped to talk to people, so by the time we made it out of the theater this was the view from the front door.
We were inside the cafe next door when he came out, and I wish I had managed to get a photo of him standing on the car from in there, complete with all the people crowding into their windows in the hotel across the street. It was hot as balls out there and I was so impressed that so many people stayed and waited.
There was a time when we used to dread summers because that’s when assholery was peaking; the show was on hiatus and school was out and the kids just had nothing to keep them busy besides being deliberately, actively hateful. It always took a while for them to find other shit to do besides just poke at people because they felt sad and empty and bored.
I’m seeing it happen now, today, I guess because book tour and Hedwig are done. I have seen three separate hostile, bitchy, pointless attacks on friends and y’all: I follow nobody, I’m barely on tumblr, so if I have seen three, you know there are a shitton more.
Maybe a good idea to keep your anon turned off for a while. Be careful out there.
Hey, guys, heads-up: My XMFC Cherik fic “Anarchy in the U.K.” is going to be taken offline in one month. If you want to read it, re-read it, download it, etc., act now! I’ll post other reminders between now and August 15. Please reblog and help me spread the word, because I want to give its readers in the fandom plenty of time. The story is going away for what I personally consider the best of reasons, but it is going away. So I want to make sure the people who loved the story and sent me so much good energy and support while I was working on it are covered. Thanks to every single one of you who’s given AITUK some love. You’ll never know how much it means.
High-school friends gather at the home of one of their own for a week of wedding prep and reminiscing. For New York essayist Aaron, it means more than just helping with the dresses and the cake, it means facing his ex, Nik, who broke his heart. The two have been in and out of each other’s lives since they were scared, shy high-school boys stumbling their way around a passion they couldn’t live without. Now, as they are on the brink of adulthood, Nik is committed to winning Aaron back. Longing to let himself love Nik once more but not wanting to get hurt again, Aaron is hesitant to let Nik back into his life, but he isn’t hesitant at all about letting Nik into his bed. The scenes between Nik and Aaron as they define and redefine their relationship over the course of a week in the humid, salty Texas setting are passionate and honest. A strong supporting cast rounds out this solid and sizzling NA romance, which resonates with the amorphous time between finishing college and venturing out into the real world and the choices we make to be with the ones we love.
Getting to my computer to write fix its like a seasoned and retired hermit soldier breaking open the old shed of weapons when they’re called in to rescue someone because they’re only ones that can do it..
We’re all sitting here in our little cabins with the small gardens we’ve been tending for years, sipping whiskey on the back porch and watching the...