I can't lie, I totally felt a twinge of sadness when I heard about Panic at the Disco breaking up. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, EITHER! This is similar to when I recently found out Socks the cat, as in Bill Clinton's presidential pet, died. (Ahaha, apparently he has his own wiki article.) For some inexplicable reason it made me do a little :( on the inside because despite my total non-interest, I used to hear about it a lot! The ~end of an era~ and all that.

While I'm being honest, I completely camped out on the spnanonymous thing ALL AFTERNOON yesterday. I am a huge sucker for anonymous memes, and I mean that in the least wanky way possible. I don't like to sit around and bitch about people (well, any more than anyone else does), but I am always fascinated by how that kind of forum turns into a place to just... talk. I would never normally enter into a Dean/Castiel shipping debate with anyone, but for some reason I found myself doing exactly that over there. And it was fun! I didn't have to feel like I would be branded some kind of squee-harshing wanker or whatever if I said something that people didn't agree with.

It's really quite sad to me that fandom has reached a point where being honest and direct seem to go hand in hand with alienating people and being That Guy. I remember back in Ye Olden Days, when fandom was structured around impersonal forums of communication rather than FOLLOWING EACH OTHER'S LIVES, that kind of thing was totally par for the course. You rarely ever saw a mentality of, "Oh, god, not another Person/Person shipper, STFU! Get out of my fandom!" unless the people involved were particularly crazy. I would actively engage in shipping arguments and character-defending arguments with people on eGroups (HAHA that's going back) without ever feeling like those sometimes violent differences of opinion meant we... couldn't agree on anything at all. But I'm constantly seeing people (uh, sometimes on said anonymous memes) getting griped about and sometimes called out for their vocal/vehement standpoints on things.

None of that is SPN-specific, obviously, it's just kind of a general theme in today's LJ-centric fandom universe. As someone with a laundry list of unpopular opinions that's about a MILE LONG, I usually feel like I should can it rather than open up. It's my journal and I can cry if I want to, but there's always that feeling like if I post saying "DEAN/CASTIEL IS A BREATH OF FRESH AIR, PLS STOP WHINING ABOUT HOW THESE SHIPPERS ARE RUINING YOUR FANDOM" people are going to huff and defriend me and I will be left only with Dean/Castiel fans to talk to.

Is this my imagination?? It might be, but I feel like I see this kind of thing all the time. It's the nature of Doing Fandom in such a way that your "friends" are a list of people tuned into every passing thought or fancy that you might want to share. The argument or justification would appear to be, "Well, if you are a Dean/Castiel fan and I am revolted by that pairing, why would I want to read your LJ and hear you squee about it and post picspams and stories that will make me sad?" Which makes sense, but seems like epic fail on some kind of basic we-are-social-human-beings level. I mean, see above: even though I never read those particular posts in detail, I saw so much Panic at the Disco related stuff on my flist a few years ago that their passing makes me empathize with friends who REALLY DO care about them. And it's okay that I had to scroll a bunch.

I feel like I should add a disclaimer here that I actually have never read Dean/Castiel and probably never will. HAHA, this is my point.



ETA: I think another important factor at work in this is the popularity thing. In days prior to LJ I don't think anyone was worried about rocking the boat because there wasn't this ~consequence~ of seeing its ramifications in actual numbers. This makes it more understandable, I guess, because everyone just wants to be liked. AND BE A BNF.

And now, a meme.

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

austen gave me Jo Harvelle, the Jonas Brothers, Dexter, brother relationships, and iced coffee.

( Haha, RAMBLE MUCH? )



Oh yeah, happy 4th of July! :D

MAN. I moved to the Bay Area about... oh, a week and a half ago, and today I took the rapid transit into San Francisco for the first time. sdglkhsdg It was pretty amazing, but incredibly overwhelming, also. The stop I got off at (I was meeting friends) was smack-dab in the middle of a questionable part of town. I spent about forty-five minutes chilling outside the station, talking to HOMELESS CRAZY PEOPLE about, among other things: pet coyotes, poetry slams, hospital visits, what it's like to kill a man, and Joni Mitchell's Blue album. LOL WHAT. The guy who brought up that last one then performed an impromptu rendition of "California" for me while we sat there. Can I get back on the turnip truck, please?

I have come to realize in the last few days that taking time off from college is not as liberating as you might think. It is in some ways, but in others it just ups the ante of stress that much more. I keep feeling like I should be figuring things out, reading important books, and Doing Stuff, and instead I'm just kind of kicking around. I still have another two months before I'm officially eating up ~time off~ and not just enjoying summer vacation, but still. I'm going through one of those periods where I keep asking myself "what am I doing with my life??" Answer: IDK! Talking to homeless people, I guess!

I'm also working on a couple of fics. I have reams and reams of half-finished stuff sitting around on my computer from the last six months, but I think I'm finally making some progress, which is exciting. I signed up for whenthewarsover as a kind of personal challenge, because fluffy fic has never been my strong point. I have fretted before about a fic being "too schmoopy" because it ended with Sam and Dean being happy. \o/ So curtainfic is something I would like to do once, at least. It feels good to be back in the groove of writing again. I had actually forgotten what it's like to sit down and have ideas and words flow, instead of stuttering out. This is good!

Jumping topics completely, I feel like my LJ universe is way too small.

Poll #1424585 Sharing is caring.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Tell me something about you!

SO, it's my birthday. I'm now twenty-three. \o/

I have a curious love/hate relationship with birthdays in general. Maybe it's because of the summer thing -- they were never that big of a deal when I was a kid because no one was around to come to a party. Vacation time! Everyone was at their grandparents' in Florida or whatever. So since age six or so they've never been that remarkable. But everyone always seems to feel like they have to make a huge fuss...? I dunno. My poor mom is always trying to come up with a really fun thing for us to do, or something awesome to get me, but it always ends up with dinner at an Italian restaurant and some new clothes. Which I am TOTALLY GOOD with and seems special to me, but other people seem oddly disappointed by it. So I wind up having to get REALLY ENTHUSIASTIC and putting on a show of what an UNUSUALLY GOOD TIME I'm having. In my experience birthdays are a lot like funerals in that they are actually for everyone else involved.

Just bringing a dose of sunshine to the occasion. :)

Anyway, this year I decided to treat myself to PICTURES OF DEAN! I am convinced that he has never looked as pretty as in It's a Terrible Life (his hair! HIS HAIR!), so behold:

( MINI PICSPAM. )

HAY WORLD. I think I'm more or less back. It's officially summer vacation (\o/) and I'm taking a much-needed semester off this fall. I'm so, so ready to hang up my lurker hat.

Given that it's been awhile, I'm doing some upkeep around here. It looks like there are some people on my flist I don't have any areas of overlap with anymore, fandom/interest-wise, and I'm juggling some newer fandoms myself. So, there will be some pruning happening, and y'all are obviously more than welcome to do the same with me. It's clearly nothing personal -- I've genuinely enjoyed following all of you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a burgeoning fascination with the Jonas Brothers that might interfere with our continuing relationship. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

( Oscars spoilers, if that matters. )

Anyway. I watched the SPN promo that's making the rounds. I don't really have any thoughts on it, other than a general feeling of... being glad it's hiatus right now and I still have time to rewatch this season and figure out how I feel. And just a bone-deep awareness that this show has come SO FAR and really is its own s4 beast at this point.

Perhaps because of this, I've become completely obsessed with J2 again. It's kind of nice -- and really, a luxury I often take for granted -- that this fandom has a secondary one attached to it, because that way you can shift gears without really uprooting. Literally, for the last week or so, every night I open a ton of tabs of EPIC J2 AUs and then sit in bed and read. I'm pretty sure at this rate I've read them ALL -- dentists, cowboys, clergymen, college students, rock stars. It's like a really fucked up Village People. And kind of makes me want to write that Burger King AU I used to talk about.

I signed up for Big Bang this year, which is kind of ridiculous. It's something I've always wanted to do and always been too afraid to, with good reason. I'm awful at committing to writing things, and the process of it is always so sporadic. And yet here I am, trying to write 20k. \o/ WE'LL SEE HOW THIS GOES...

Unfortunately, writing J2 always makes me really wish for some kind of centralized J2 resource. Is there anything like that out there that I'm unaware of? Because I would kill -- I would take down a fucking mastodon for a timeline of events in the J2 relationship. Con appearances, movie filmings, shit like that. I feel like it's something that could be done fairly easily by someone with a lot of interviews at their fingertips. I just always get this knee-jerk uncomfortable feeling when it comes to writing about real people, with solid facts tying them to places, and just making things up as I go along. LIFE.

I have vague memories of someone on my flist talking about a J2 Pineapple Express AU. DOES THIS EXIST? IT REALLY NEEDS TO EXIST.

It doesn't even have to follow the plot of the movie. I just want an AU where they both have really lame lives and one deals weed, and they realize that they are BFFF and make out. That would make me so happy.

I have had spnnewsletter on my flist since I don't even remember when. Early 2007? Yet lately I get a shock every time I look at it and it says something like: "Edition 1,004". WHAT. Have we really been here that long? aslkdjf It blows my mind.

Maybe I am just feeling particularly navel-gazy because it was exactly a year ago today I went on fandom hiatus and started at my new college. Right around New Year's I went through my fic tag to figure out how much I had written this year. It was THREE THINGS. It's not terribly surprising, I guess, because my head has definitely not been in the game this last year, but JEEZ. I wrote around seventeen fics in 2007, one of which was over 40.000 words. I suppose part of that was the shine of being in a new fandom and falling in love with new characters and the whole open SPN universe, but it's weird. I'm still having a hard time realizing that I've been so disconnected. S3 feels like a pipe dream or something, in a lot of ways.

I've always felt that for me, fanfiction is a way to better delve into something that I care about. I can't count the times I've walked out of a movie theater and been like OH MY GOD I WANNA WRITE FIC ABOUT THAT! Because for some reason that's just how my brain is; if I love it, I want to write fic about it. It's a way to sort through my understanding of it and start to uncover what about any given thing sparks that fannish passion. Even when constructing a fictional universe, 90% of what's going on there is self-examination in that I have to keep asking myself, "What are MY opinions about this character? How do I think he is motivated? What do I see lurking in the shadows of these relationships?" I think that's why I'm only ever inspired to write fic. Original stories aren't something I really have fun with or think about, because to me they're a totally different beast. I'd much rather play with something someone else has given me, and get to change my mind later and write the exact opposite in another story if the mood strikes me, than have to tell one definitive story.

For whatever reason, s3 of SPN didn't get much attention from me in terms of fic, and I think that's why it feels so distant to me. I never tried to figure out what was going on with characters like Bela because I never sat down and tried to write them. I still feel like my writing mojo is kind of gone at this point, but lately I've been jotting down little s4 snippets and realizing what a difference it makes in my investment. I kind of loved "Family Remains", even though in the grand scheme of things it wasn't an epic episode or anything -- probably just because I've been forcing myself to think deeply about the Winchesters again and their place in the world.

UHHHH I don't know how I just got so tl;dr about such a random subject. When I started this entry it was to talk about "Family Remains". I GUESS I'LL DO THAT NOW.

( Thoughts on 4.11 and Dean and stuff... )

Dean/Castiel. Roleplaying as Edward and Bella from Twilight.

Okay, I've changed my mind. You win. blindfold_spn is just wrong.