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Challenge #5 is looking for the good times and the happy things.
I jokingly refer to myself as a Great Old One of the Internet, because I was here in the era of the Web on dial-up, but I know that I'm not actually an Elder God, since there were plenty of groups and bulletin boards that predate the Web. Similarly, there are plenty of fandom Elder Gods who have done their things before me and before the Web, sharing stories and community with each other. It doesn't feel like I'm all that old, or that I've seen all that much, in comparison with the people who were here before me, but then I get reminded at work about being institutional knowledge, or I see some of the responses that tell me old wars are repackaged for new fandoms, and I recognize that while history rarely repeats, it often rhymes, and a sign of age and wisdom is recognizing when it's happening again.
If I pursue that line of thinking too much further, though, it gets mired in how so many things that were not good about the past either never left or are on their way around again, as new generations join up and start making the same mistakes of the past. (There's a certain amount of "we moved to a new platform, not all of the people who were there followed us, so now we have to gain that wisdom again" that happens, but there are a few things that I thought settled matters that are apparently unsettled and continue to plague the fandom.)
( Happy stories, then. )
Yeah. There have been a fair number of happy things involved by sticking with fandoms and with working the exchange circuit and otherwise sharing my time and creativity with other people. It seems like one of them that was recent (Yuletide 2023) was all the people who laughed, liked, or found an e-mail from a department chair about the upcoming doctoral defense by snake fight eerily accurate to some of their own higher education experiences, even though they're not obligated to fight any reptiles, large or small, to obtain their own advanced degrees. And one that still gets lots of nice comments was a Fandom Trumps Hate bit where one of the characters had a disabling event, but eventually adapted and found a girlfriend out of it, once the girlfriend was willing to see past the bitchy front she put up. (The comments are often about how good the treatment of the disability was and how true to character everyone remained even with this change in events, which I like very much, since the prompt I picked up was about a disabling event and what came from it.)
Sometimes it is worth celebrating the wins, even though I know that my brain is not going to hold on to them long or think of them as the results of what I did, rather than some other thing that was fully out of my control, or a manifestation of Beginner's Luck. I could always use more help with the celebration of good things, or of people saying good things about me that they believe genuinely.
Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom. […]
Fandom can be a highly meaningful experience for many! We'd love to hear about how being part of a fandom has helped your life change for the better. Have you made any cherished memories or connections? Does fandom bring you joy? Tell us about the ways that fandom has helped you.
I jokingly refer to myself as a Great Old One of the Internet, because I was here in the era of the Web on dial-up, but I know that I'm not actually an Elder God, since there were plenty of groups and bulletin boards that predate the Web. Similarly, there are plenty of fandom Elder Gods who have done their things before me and before the Web, sharing stories and community with each other. It doesn't feel like I'm all that old, or that I've seen all that much, in comparison with the people who were here before me, but then I get reminded at work about being institutional knowledge, or I see some of the responses that tell me old wars are repackaged for new fandoms, and I recognize that while history rarely repeats, it often rhymes, and a sign of age and wisdom is recognizing when it's happening again.
If I pursue that line of thinking too much further, though, it gets mired in how so many things that were not good about the past either never left or are on their way around again, as new generations join up and start making the same mistakes of the past. (There's a certain amount of "we moved to a new platform, not all of the people who were there followed us, so now we have to gain that wisdom again" that happens, but there are a few things that I thought settled matters that are apparently unsettled and continue to plague the fandom.)
( Happy stories, then. )
Yeah. There have been a fair number of happy things involved by sticking with fandoms and with working the exchange circuit and otherwise sharing my time and creativity with other people. It seems like one of them that was recent (Yuletide 2023) was all the people who laughed, liked, or found an e-mail from a department chair about the upcoming doctoral defense by snake fight eerily accurate to some of their own higher education experiences, even though they're not obligated to fight any reptiles, large or small, to obtain their own advanced degrees. And one that still gets lots of nice comments was a Fandom Trumps Hate bit where one of the characters had a disabling event, but eventually adapted and found a girlfriend out of it, once the girlfriend was willing to see past the bitchy front she put up. (The comments are often about how good the treatment of the disability was and how true to character everyone remained even with this change in events, which I like very much, since the prompt I picked up was about a disabling event and what came from it.)
Sometimes it is worth celebrating the wins, even though I know that my brain is not going to hold on to them long or think of them as the results of what I did, rather than some other thing that was fully out of my control, or a manifestation of Beginner's Luck. I could always use more help with the celebration of good things, or of people saying good things about me that they believe genuinely.
