"Placet" - archive/comm update

I'm very fond of my ThinkPad, but its O/S doesn't tend to handle installations well, and when I tried to load Python earlier tonight (in order to take advantage of a LJ community migration tool), it basically choked. I'm not sure I would have been technically adept enough to see the process through, so it's probably just as well.

At any rate, via old-fashioned copy-and-paste, all my placet drabbles and ficlets are now archived on IJ as well as LJ, and the links on the the master timeline will remain connected to Cat's posts to the LJ comm unless/until she reposts them to IJ. The most recent story is Response and Responsibility (originally posted 27 July).

a rant

At the moment, I am tired of fandom being characterized as weird, maniacal, and crazy, both among our own and in the larger world. Aside from the fact that fandom is not and has never been a monolithic entity, I just don't believe spending time on derivative stories and/or art is any weirder or inappropriate than mainstream society's collective devotion to watching a bunch of males in unflattering clothing beating up on each other or whaling on plastic projectiles. Both sets of activities induce pleasure, pain, glee, and wild surges of hope and adrenalin among fans, and they bore, baffle, and/or trigger resentment in those who are not.

I enjoy sports myself. I lettered in track and cross-country in high school, I had a season pass to Michigan Stadium during graduate school, and when the Bulls won their first championship, I saw it on tv as it happened and then stayed up watching my fellow Chicagoans literally dancing for joy in the parking lot across from my apartment.

That said, you'll never hear me claim that being a White Sox fan is a hobby for the rational (and I'm married to a man who roots for the Yankees. The WOE!). I'm also coming to believe that making kids practice in full pads in this weather ought to rate as some form of abuse. [Another Southerner and I were talking about one team local to him a couple of weeks ago, and he said, "And the thing is, they're not even that good." On the saner end of the spectrum, some of the schools in one of the counties next to mine are delaying tonight's games by thirty minutes to wait out the heat.] As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to pontificate about fandom's objectification of imaginary minors, I'm going to have trouble taking them seriously unless they can tell me how their principles apply to athletic prodigies -- say, for instance, gymnasts -- and other child performers (and if the argument falls back on artistic/inspirational merit, well, that's an age-old impasse, isn't it).

And, as many of you know, I don't even write about underage characters 98% of the time. And there are Kentucky fans who don't paint their faces blue on a routine basis or shoot out newspaper boxes when the team gets sanctioned. Even so, I do have some fondness for the, er, more expressive participants in both HP and sports fandom -- I mean, yeah, sometimes they're rude or mean or gross or shrill, but they're also often hilarious and inventive and wildly entertaining. But when they're written or spoken of as representative of all of us? It makes me annoyed and tired. Not because I'm saner or morally superior to them, but because they aren't me, and I never did particularly take well to being ignored. If people are going to generalize about fandom, I want them to include or at least acknowledge my kind in their considerations.

Naturally, I'd prefer that people refrain from generalizing altogether, but that would truly be veering into realms of unreality (not to mention hurling stones from my glass cave), and this is already longer than I meant for it to be. :-/

[/cantankerous]