female dissenting nipples @tenlittlebullets@fandom.ink

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.

if this all sounds like moon language to you, GOOD, the entire subject is buried under like six different levels of bullshit that need to be explained to make it comprehensible. But when someone else who's been down this bullshit rabbit hole starts up about it, it's one of my guaranteed, bulletproof rage buttons.

PRETENDING CURATORIAL ACTIVITIES ARE SOMEHOW ALIEN AND SEPARATE FROM TRANSFORMATIVE FANDOM IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FUCKING FEEL BAD IF YOU DO IT. There are broad patterns but stop fucking reifying a thing that doesn't need you enforcing its brand-spanking-newly-invented gender roles against women who don't neatly fit your transformative-only box. Also 99% of "~curatorial~ fandom is inferior" boils down to gratuitous shitting on autistic traits, so just fucking stop.

Uggghhh someone in one of my Discord servers casually brought up the curatorial vs transformative fandom split as a Thing, a specifically and rigidly gendered Thing, and just sort of assumed everyone Knew as a given that precious pure girl fandom is inherently uncomfortable with anything that gets those alien fact-collecting cooties all over it. In the context of a wiki that is maintained for and by an ur-transformative-fandom clique. Lord fucking preserve me from going in and flipping tables.

Q: Why are you Like This(TM)

A: When I was in my teens I got into a fight with the gender binary and lost. The terms of the peace treaty are that I will perform femininity if and only if I get to go full Morticia Addams. Do not endanger the peace treaty.

OK, I will cease whining about the weather, since that apparently just means I'm issuing a challenge for it to get even weirder. -2 on Saturday morning (we were spared the worst of the cold snap). 59 Monday afternoon. Confusing as fuck, but at least I got to see girls walking around downtown in sundresses while surrounded by piles of snow taller than they were. God bless New England.

Ah fuck, I've hit the part of the Americans rewatch that just makes me want to take up smoking again all the time. Both because Keri Russell + smoking = hot, and because all the character torment makes me go "damn I need a cigarette after watching this."