female dissenting nipples @tenlittlebullets@fandom.ink

spotted IRL in Somerville, Massachusetts, which probably has more otherkin than southerners per capita

my pronouns are y'all

On a scale of one to ten, my ability to suffer fools is at negative fifteen, my ability to not lose my entire shit at dumb things that strike a nerve is maybe negative five, and my ability to tell the difference is... not high enough to make good decisions. I've, uh, I've been trying to severely limit my internet time. For health reasons.

Fun observations about being off ADHD meds: there is a whole nexus of restless/impatient/discontent feelings the meds suppress, and having them back has caused several unexpected side effects. Like a temporary improvement in my ability to see housework that needs doing and be dissatisfied enough to fix it. Also, apparently, a lot of anger. Like, a lot. Like, maybe I should've been more in touch with those feelings *before* I lost any shred of pharmaceutically-assisted chill I ever possessed.

BTW, you could write a wild-ass grad thesis on how the demise of scarcity affects barter economies based on the seismic shifts in bootleg trading, circa 2004-2012, as bandwidth became cheap, file lockers became ubiquitous, and affordable recording devices became more and more high-quality and concealable. The drama was *constant* and full of flat-out cosmic brain bullshit, it was amazing.

Also this can probably be gathered from context but still needs saying: this is not all about the offhand remark in a Discord server last night, this discourse has been festering for years now and it's built up into a giant berserk button for me. Hence ranting in a sidechannel to keep myself from going in and starting (mostly undeserved) shit.

tl;dr stop using descriptive observations of subcultural divides to create prescriptive expectations of how things should work within those subcultures. And be super fucking wary of how the whole thing is gendered, because it's easy to hurt people and even easier to make lazy generalizations that resonate but are plain incorrect. The most rabidly curatorial collectors I've ever known are the women and mostly-not-straight men who record and trade musical theater bootlegs. Factor that in or STFU.

You think a guy building a TARDIS in his garage isn't a creative work? You think it can be accomplished without the detailed stats and screencaps compiled by the autistic nerds who "just collect facts and parrot canon"? You think fanfiction and fanart haven't existed in a symbiotic relationship all along with wikis, transcript and screencap collections, guides, meta, and both in-universe and wider-world research geekery? Fandom infrastructure is curatorial, and y'all couldn't exist without it.

Coming back to the curatorial/transformative discourse now that I'm less grouchy--yes, there is a cultural split between a more female-heavy, creative-work-heavy fandom subculture and its opposite number. But *both* creative and curative activities have *always* existed within both "sides," and they have always had a symbiotic relationship. Noting the cultural split is VERY DIFFERENT from treating the distinction as categorical, and no good will ever come of the latter.