Tonight Charles and I are going to the coast for our annual anniversary trip - a little earlier than usual this year, and also possibly a little bit longer, due to a fortuitously timed field work assignment which, if it comes through, will allow me to sponge off of Charles' employers for that much-coveted "one more day." I'll be back sometime in the middle of next week.

I've been in one of Those Moods lately, the sort of brain-fried state of mind in which stringing together words becomes unreasonably difficult, and reading anything more complex than Goodnight Moon a total trial. So instead, I've been playing Civilization and browsing fanvids on YouTube, which for some reason my computer can handle, even though it usually chokes on video.

I've also been watching loads of ancient Doctor Who. I miss quarries. Why does the new series never shoot scenes in quarries? The quarries were one of the best things about the show! I understand that the production values have improved and all that, but really, that's no reason to abandon everything about the old aesthetic.

At least someone on Youtube understands the repetitive yet soothing beauty of the overused shooting location.

The most perfect killing machine ever devised...

Must go pack now.

Why the hell didn't anyone think to tell me until now that mike_smith is reading another Harry Potter book? And he's doing Prisoner of Azkaban, no less! And best of all, he's now discovered tags! Yay!

If you missed Smith's chapter discussions of HBP from last summer, they can now be found in their entirety on his website over here, or you could go the tag route and read them on his livejournal. A word of warning, though: here be yellow! And a word of advice: control-A (or ?style=mine if you're reading on LJ) can really help quite a bit with the retinal strain.

One of the things that I really like about Mike Smith's read-throughs--aside from the fact that he's just a funny, funny writer--is that they're such a refreshing antidote to the inescapable batshittery of the Harry Potter fandom. It's a bit like having been institutionalized for years on end, and then finally getting out and having a conversation with someone who isn't suffering from tardive dyskinesia. It's not until that moment that you realize how accustomed you've become to all of the tics and twitches and stammers, the tongue-rolls and lip-picks and eye-darts, the sentences left to trail away unfinished. It's not that the people on the outside even necessarily say things that are any less wacky than the people on the inside do. It's that they manage to say them without simultaneously exhibiting all of the tell-tale signs of having been force-fed one too many gulps of liquid Haldol from one too many tiny Dixie cups.

Polonius:  What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet:    Words, words, words.
Polonius:  What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet:    Between who?
Polonius:  I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet:    Slanders, sir...

Lately I seem to be thinking a great deal about the particular type of paranoiac thinking that often seems to characterize fandom interactions, and which most particularly seems always to rear its head whenever people become involved in on-line kerfuffles or disputes.

For example, I've noticed in the past that whenever I find myself in an on-line circle in which there's a lot of hostility going on, I can sometimes get into this compulsive habit of reading and re-reading posts and emails, subjecting passages of text to a kind of hyperactive scrutiny, as if searching them for some hidden or coded meaning. I used to think that I was the only one neurotic and paranoid enough to find myself doing this from time to time, but after talking to so many other people who recognize this behavior in themselves, I've come to believe that it's actually quite a common reaction to internet kerfuffles.

I've also noticed that there's a distinct tendency for people embroiled in a dispute to act as if they believe that there are these vast and sinister on-line "conspiracies" going on, even when actually there aren't. We see this tendency even more in fandom, I think, where you sometimes hear people talking about "minions" and "Inner Circles" and "cadres" and things like that, or likening people's on-line social behavior to remarkably Godwin-ish things (Nazism, slavery, war-time resistance, war-time treachery, etc.), with no apparent sense of irony at all.

My assumption about this paranoia and the behavior that it engenders always used to be that it was simply a side-effect of the nature of CMC itself. The other week, however, while I was at the beach, I read a book someone had recommended to me on the subject of girls' particular modes of aggression--Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons--and it was really shocking to me just how well many of the things that this book described were things that I strongly associate with online fandom dynamics. That in turn has made me wonder to what extent much of the "paranoiac" behavior that I've been seeing in on-line fandom might be an artifact not only of CMC, but also of the predominantly female demographics of the fandom circles in which I've travelled.

I also find myself wondering lately to what extent fandom itself, even aside from its gender demographics, might serve to reinforce certain types of paranoiac behavior due to nothing more than its own particular hermeneutics. It seems to me that fandom both valorizes and demands certain ways of interacting with source texts which may be inherently psychologically problematic once they are also extended to apply to the "text" of fandom and its participants, or to the "text" of the real world.

So if anyone really wants to hear it, here are some quite rambling thoughts on

( Paranoia and CMC )

( Paranoia and Feminine Modes of Aggression )

( Paranoia and the Hermeneutics of Fandom )

We're all paranoids here.


ETA:
Okay, while I think that the thread which devolved into a back-and-forth about one particular recent fandom kerfuffle was, indeed, an excellent illustration of many of the things I was talking about in this post, I also don't think that it was doing anything particularly beneficial for either the two people directly involved or for the overall discussion. I've therefore now screened that thread. There are plenty of other places you can go, if you want to continue to try to hash things out on that topic.

If people could refrain from getting into back-and-forths on the specifics of any recent fandom kerfuffles from now on in the comments here, I'd greatly appreciate that. It's not that I don't think that those conversations can never be beneficial; it's just that I really don't think this is the place for it. Thanks.

Referral logs are often a source of merriment to me, but I don't usually see much need to share that mirth with others. I tend to feel that "aren't my referral logs funny?" journal entries fall into the same category as IM log transcripts and role-playing game session anecdotes: they are indeed sometimes quite amusing to others. . . but only very occasionally so.

So I'll spare you all the hilarity of the usual pornographic search strings that regularly land people at my website. I am a bit curious about this recent development, though.

These are the Google Search Strings that are accounting for around 90% of the traffic I'm getting this week:

"Why I dislike the twins"
"Weasley twins are bullies"
Weasley twins bullying
authorial intent twins bullying Rowling
"Harry Potter series" "Weasley Twins" bullying
What does it mean that the Weasley Twins are bullies?

Okay. Now, it's not that I don't usually get a few hits every now and again from people Googling around in search of stuff on the Weasley Twins and bullying. It usually accounts for a handful of pings a day. But this is truly unusual, so now I feel compelled to ask: Is there some huge discussion of the Twins and bullying going on somewhere this week? Or something else that might account for the sudden upsurge of interest in this topic?

Does anyone have any ideas?

ETA: Indeed, it's quite possibly due to The Witching Hour, which has a presentation on the subject of bullying. Thanks, David!

anaid_rabbit asked me why I didn't like Serenity, or to be more accurate (as I didn't dislike the movie), why my reaction to it was pretty much a "meh." I started typing out a response, but since it got longish, I've decided to post it here instead. There are no major spoilers here, but the extremely spoiler-averse (with whom I sympathize, as I am one of them myself) might still consider it something they wouldn't want to see, so I've placed it behind a cut.

This is not really a review at all. It's more a rambling musing on how I feel about the practice of taking a serialized work of fiction that began in one medium, and then concluding or continuing it in an entirely different one.

( Some Very Rambly Serenity Thoughts )

ETA: The exceptionally spoiler-averse should be aware that there are some spoilers in the comments.

So, um, yeah. Been away for a while.

With old-fashioned print journals, there always came a day when it was time to lock the old one away in a drawer somewhere, pop down to the shop, and pick up a new one to scribble in.

These on-line equivalents, though, with their uneasy blend of public and private status, make that process rather more complicated. So I've settled for just locking all the old entries. If there's something you regret no longer having access to - because you've linked to it, or because you wrote something brill in the comments, or whatever - just let me know, and I'll unlock it again.

* * * * *

Sometimes I worry that I may be in danger of turning into Aljo Svoboda.

For some reason I recall Aljo Svoboda. When I first got involved in fandom in the early seventies I seem to remember reading a lot of locs and even some articles by Aljo and his only subject (in my memory at least - for all I know I could've read 2 locs and inflated them in my mind) was gafiation. He either wrote that he was about to gafiate, or that he had recently gafiated or been gafiated for a long time or explained why he had gafiated, or why he was going to remain gafiated, extolled the advantages of being gafiated, and described what it felt like to be a gafiate. This went on for years, possibly thanks to the slow schedules of many paper zines. Also, possibly due to the vagaries of when the locs appeared (or maybe not) Aljo managed to exist simultaneously in every imaginable state of gafiation all at once.

From my point of view, admittedly as a lowly neofan, Aljo's sole claim to being a fan was that he was gafiated. In other words he was a fan because he claimed he wasn't.

I've always admired his audacity. There is a certain sense to it. There are lots of people who aren't fans. When you come down to it, practically everyone in the world isn't a fan. And they're just...not.

But if you notice you're not a fan...then you're a fan.

-- Groggy's Journal
March 12, 2005
link

So it would seem.

At the risk of sounding unconscionably Svobodan, though, I do have to say that I found reading new HP canon far more enjoyable as a gafiate than I found it as a fan - and I don't think that this was really due to HPB being a better novel than OotP. I think it's just that, for me, all of the obsessive speculation about future canon that characterizes the HP fandom really does interfere with my enjoyment of the books.

Then, it also rather interfered with my enjoyment of the fandom. But more on that later, perhaps.

Anyway, from browsing about LJ, I get the impression that a number of people found their enjoyment of the most recent HP book somewhat tarnished by the fandom lead-up to its release. I can certainly sympathize with that: I had the same experience with OotP, and I also seem to remember that a number of old-timers experienced precisely the same phenomenon when GoF came out,

I'm beginning to think that for a certain type of reader, it might be wise policy to disassociate from the fandom altogether for several months prior to the release of new canon. You can always come back to it later.

In fact, if you're like me, you probably won't be able to stay away.

Especially because...dude! The wank! Oh my God, the wank!

I mean, yeah, sure, I guess the book was cool and all, but it's really the meta that I find is luring me back. I have nothing all that much to say about the novel itself, but the wankstorm surrounding the novel's release?

God help me. I want to analyze it.

* * * * *

I also sort of wanted to share this with anyone who is still reading this journal.

Cheer up, Emo Author!

I somehow really doubt that it was the, er, artist's intent, as it were, for that painting to crack me up.

But hey. I take my yuks where I can find them.