Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

A couple years ago, I decided to stop doing Fandom Snowflake (snowflake_challenge) because many of the prompts, while awesome, repeated from year to year, and I'd just gotten all I could from them. But this year, they are killing it with the prompts. Four have been posted, and I want to do them all. (Yes, this is a plug to go check them out if you are not familiar with them or if you, like me, stepped away at some point!)

I'm doing Day Three: Scream into the Void here:

I know Snowflake is sunshine and rainbows and singing from the rooftops all the lovely and brilliant that is being in a fandom. But, let’s be honest. Sometimes--like with other things--there are sucky parts, heartbreak parts and just plain UGH parts. Rather than holding onto those slights and resentments, or burying them and pretending they don’t exist, just to have them slowly and almost imperceptibly seep into the rest of the challenges this month, why don’t we just let it all out?

So I'm going to go all deprived-toddler-in-the-candy-aisle about Tolkien fanfic fandom's disappearing archives. I want to clarify at the outset that I am not screaming about archivists who gave up or even "abandoned" their archives, even those who are popularly looked at kinda like >.> for doing so. Rather, I'd like to pound my tiny fists about the forces of fandom and the internet and, what the hell, the whole goddamn universe that have landed us where we are.

And where is that, exactly?? I was able to find three Tolkien-specific fanfiction archives that had five or more stories posted to them in the year 2022: the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, Stories of Arda, and the Valar Guild. Three. THREE. Tolkien Fanfiction and Open Scrolls Archive at least had a story posted to them in 2022, and nine sites remain available online but haven't had anything new for at least a year. Kudos on them for staying open but that's also pretty fucking sad that no one sees them as more than artifacts.

Back in October, I posted a preliminary archive timeline that was part of a roundtable I presented on at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. ( Read more... )

I'm putting the rest behind the cut because it's strongly opinionated and I don't want to unwillingly subject anyone to my rantishness.

Comments are welcome, as always, but I ask that people be polite (to me and all others) and keep in mind that this is my opinion and my journal and, yes, I need to rant sometimes in my journal.

( Dumbledore Is Gay?! )

I always hear women extolling the virtues of girlfriends and the power of girlfriendship, and frankly, I'm beginning to wonder what I'm missing. Because I have tried oh-so-hard to have girlfriends, and it never works. I just spent the whole weekend in the company of myself or with my husband and our guy friends, attempting to avoid my supposed "girlfriend" as much as possible.

( On Girlfriends )

Today, I was surfing the 'net at work and actually being productive in a way that might have real-life tangible benefits, looking for examples of punctuation errors that can lead to embarassing misunderstandings for a writing sample that I was doing. As is often the case with surfing the Internet, I ended up reading something completely unrelated to my original topic and far more interesting.

Most know Lynne Truss as the author the no-nonsense approach to grammar Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Incidentally, that book was the reason that I ended up on her site, ended up clicking a link to her other book, Talk to the Hand, and ended up spending nearly an hour reading the introduction that is posted on her homepage.

Talk to the Hand is about the loss of politeness and subsequent overwhelming rise of rudeness in modern society. Even just reading the introduction, a lot of sense was made for me on points that had before been a bit baffling or simply beyond categorization.

( It Takes a Village... )

This is an entry that--timewise--I cannot afford. But it's my lunchtime, so screw it. I'm indulging.

( Just a Flat-Out Rant )

I had jury duty today. (For those of you who don't live in the good ol' USA and therefore have no need to have knowledge of our judicial process--if anything that slow can be called a "process"--jury duty involves random selection from a list of registered voters and drivers. It is basically considered to be one of the banes of life: a pleasing combination of boring and inconvenient. Oh! But they pay you $10 a day, which makes it very worthwhile to miss a day of work, especially if you don't get paid time off.

(Which, believe me, if I didn't get paid for the day I took for jury duty, I would have been out of the state this week.)

But, I do, so alas, I did my civic duty and went.

It was...interesting.

They kicked things off by showing us a video about jury duty. It was all grand-sounding and called "Your Turn to Serve" and included personal testimonials from jurors, beginning with how inconvenienced they felt and ending with--literally--testaments along the lines of, "This was such a wonderful experience! I can't wait to do it again!" (Seriously, one woman said that.)

I laughed through the whole thing.

I felt really bad about that. Well, not really bad; I felt a miniscule amount of badness because some underpaid bureaucrat (like myself) is probably so freakin' proud of that thing. I was thinking, "Do people actually buy this?" Yes, well, I suppose they do. They've bought worse.

After that, we sat. I finished a Joyce Carol Oates collection of horror stories called The Collector of Hearts (highly recommended to those of you out there who like darkfic), started the Chronicles of Narnia (which I want finished before the movie comes out), and wrote my brainstorm list for Nelyo's first official staff meeting (which means Bobby and me sitting on the couch in our PJs and probably eating some evol snack with a hockey game in the background, chatting about the imminent candy biz.) After two hours went by, the head guy (don't know what his position is actually called) came in and told us that no jury trials were going to be held today, and so we would be excused.

(Likely, I would have been excused anyway. The one trial that might have been a jury trial was a criminal case. I work for a law enforcement agency devoted to locking up parole violators. Really, I don't have much of a "cop mentality"--I'm just a statistician after all--but they don't need to know that this is one matter on which I am fairly unbiased. They see "Warrant Unit" and goodbye....)

So for two-and-a-half hours of work, I made ten dollars (four dollars an hour, yay! less than the legal minimum!) and got to go home early and work on my NaNo story.

Which because I know everyone is waiting with bated breath, is up to *exactly* 34,500 words. You don't need to tell me that I'm a sick person. I know I am.

( Mini Rant (cut for verbal badness) )

To my U.S. friends, please read and heed:

( September 1 Is Gasoline Boycott Day! )

( Dawn's Thoughts (WARNING: You might find these politically inflammatory. If you are one of those people who thinks that being patriotic means being a blind sheep, and you can't take criticism of our leadership, then DON'T READ IT )