Sometimes I laugh at my friend Mary. She has this thing about being an empath and various things along those lines. Often I laugh at her but every now and again something connects and I think she might be right.
Today has been one of those days. When I’m not feeling well and so not in work I do two things as standard. I leave my phone off and I block pretty much everyone on IM. I leave open family and a few close friends and that’s about it. It’s just so that I can get on with not working really so that if I want to just fuck around online for a while I don’t get bothered. Most people can’t tell that I’m not at my desk if I’m online and an annoying number of people use my home IM in work. (Note that doesn’t mean my friends, it’s just the people who assume it’s my work im…like those nice pro net people for example).
Anyway after that little aside its’ been one of those days because two people got in touch out of the blue. Both of whom had something related to them in that spiel last night and both of whom passed through (or sat rock steady in) my thoughts for a while.
Strange.
Family are starting to report in. I’ve heard from several of my cousins today and they are running through the photos. Hopefully I’ll have them all labeled soon. Some of them are excellent photographs in themselves. Others just astound me, the amount the world has changed since the middle of last century is just plain astounding.
Work tomorrow. Queen Adreena in the evening and then it’s Thursday and everything should settle back into it’s swing. Hurrah.
Fandom, god I hate fandoms. They really hack me off every now and again. Sometimes I just want to go somewhere and read something about a show I like. And I do, I use the very sane All TV alongside the V and it’s good stuff. The Buffy nerds go OTT every now and again but at the end of the day a) I’m one of them and b) they get slapped down. But in general, there is no fandom there, it’s just a few people hanging out talking about a show they like.
Every now and again I poke my head around LJ for stuff and it pisses me off every time. There is a time and a place for fandom, it’s your early teens. Every single other part of it needs to just grow the fuck up. None of it is worth it, none of it. It actually doesn’t take long to learn this. I don’t know what it was for me. I don’t know if it was just the time where I was seeing such a change in my life, moving to London being the big one there and striking out on my own as they say. I still like everything I liked, I still like Star Trek and I probably always will but my god no-one has to live with the trappings that seemed to come with it. There is nothing that I care about enough to go out and watch episodes at a con or a meeting or anything like that. If I can’t get them through current channels then I’ll just get them from a friend or wait and enjoy a DVD box set.
That has me thinking. I always thought, and it was a common viewpoint at the time…at least I thought it was but what did I really know back then…that the Dublin meetings all died off because of lack of advertising and so lack of new blood.
In hindsight that was wrong. There is no new blood. There was an artificial bump because of Buffy but that soon died. There is no killer app for it, there was somewhat of one within the social scene but that didn’t mean paying into a hall, that meant paying at the bar for a drink and ya know socialising.
I wonder if perhaps in the long run, those friends of mine did me a favour. I wonder if that was a start of some sort, a wake up call?
I don’t know. I know that I had fun and I never lost any money on it and I have some good memories and I still have some good friends. At the end of the day, you know I really can’t complain about that. What’s more I’ve gained some friends or perhaps regained but certainly built a real friendship with some people from back then in recent years and I’m very very grateful for that. It’s funny that whole thing still when I think about it. It’s not often, I’ll just see something or my I’ll pass by the cons section within my bookmarks and that’s that.
It’s all good as they say, it’s all good.
Don’t even get me started on fucking fanfic, at least when we throw ‘Mary Sue’ ism’s at Ellis or the like they are getting paid to write. The best thing ever about fanfic came from a discussion on the V where one of the regs was telling the story of a fic circle his wife ran in. There was an argument about someone having used a character someone else created within their permission and the following quote is attributed:
“It is not acceptable to use someone else’s character EVER. They don’t belong to you. It’s unprofessional and nobody who would call themselves a writer should EVER do steal someone else’s characters for their own stories.”
The mind fucking boggles, BOGGLES! And yet (watch me tar here) that is how I would see most fanfic writers. Ok it’s a very broad taring but ya know what fuck it. If you have a story to tell about two characters and it’s a *good enough* story, you should be able to write it around two original characters. Is that so hard? I’m sure there are talented writers out there doing fanfic, it’s just such a waste.
So, on that one, to sum up and in short; grow the fuck up children!
– That all started as a little bullet point…it carried on.
– Yet again, I was going to bed hours ago and I wanted to get the first couple of paragraphs down and it just carried on.
– Sometimes I have no idea where my head is at or what brings it there. It just seems to flow along wherever it wants to. I don’t know what strikes it off, or what makes the connections but all of a sudden boom, all of my thoughts are consumed and I don’t know how to get out of it.
– 24 is bag loads of awesome. So stupid, so much fun. I must go and write some fanfic now about the continuing adventures of Jack Bruce Bauer Banner!
– See how I worked a nerdy joke in there? It’s not mine, I stole it from All TV it was probably Dan, he’s funny like that.
– You know, I was actually thinking about going to a con earlier today. Nothing in specific and not to the actual con, but to the bar if some of the old crowd were going along. I must have been having a mad moment.
– And I hit a browser window for a break for a mo and the mood has just gone and died.
To sleep, perchance to dream…