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"At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment."
So, I turned 40. It was pretty great. I'm happy with where my life is right now: a job I love, a lovely environ I continue to enjoy exploring, starting up this year's Wars Outdoors: The Empire Strikes Back in the Park.
I'm still flailing a LOT when it comes to fandom and how to do it. I am still active in DWRP. I've joined the local Sherlockian scion society (my fandom name is "Play-acting Busybody") and I've been accepted to speak at Left-Coast Sherlockian Symposium.
But I don't know how to do this anymore. I keep hearing everyone's going to twitter, okay, fine. But I can't find any guide to doing so as someone coming from a really different medium. Do I use my own name? (Doing so is weird because PORN but not doing so erases my primary fannish contribution at this stage, which is my acting/producing and very public.) Where do I find "my" people? How do I avoid all the shit I don't want to see? (I don't mean blacklisted stuff--I mean just endless ads and retweets I cannot care less about.) I feel like in other communities, there are/were "guides for n00bs" or something. I can't find anything about how to access this space in a way that makes sense. And I've had an account for years--so obviously it hasn't been intuitive for me at all.
Anyway, yeah, I sound like a curmudgeon, and see above re: 40, but believe me I'm as tired of bemoaning the state of fandom as anyone is of hearing it.
I'm still flailing a LOT when it comes to fandom and how to do it. I am still active in DWRP. I've joined the local Sherlockian scion society (my fandom name is "Play-acting Busybody") and I've been accepted to speak at Left-Coast Sherlockian Symposium.
But I don't know how to do this anymore. I keep hearing everyone's going to twitter, okay, fine. But I can't find any guide to doing so as someone coming from a really different medium. Do I use my own name? (Doing so is weird because PORN but not doing so erases my primary fannish contribution at this stage, which is my acting/producing and very public.) Where do I find "my" people? How do I avoid all the shit I don't want to see? (I don't mean blacklisted stuff--I mean just endless ads and retweets I cannot care less about.) I feel like in other communities, there are/were "guides for n00bs" or something. I can't find anything about how to access this space in a way that makes sense. And I've had an account for years--so obviously it hasn't been intuitive for me at all.
Anyway, yeah, I sound like a curmudgeon, and see above re: 40, but believe me I'm as tired of bemoaning the state of fandom as anyone is of hearing it.
no subject
Your Twitter problems are super relatable.
I've had a Twitter forever, and lurk there sporadically. When I joined I wasn't sure how professional I needed it to be, and kept avoiding making any sort of guideline for myself, so I never got in the habit of tweeting or even locating and following people. My reading list is really haphazard. I keep telling myself to just dive in and be fannish AND editor...ish, because screw it, but now it's like this weird little hurdle to get over. I dunno, brains are dumb.
no subject
I guess I'm struggling with two issues: the question of the need for anonymity (I have written pron under this here pseudonym, including RPF) and the question of what I want from fandom/community. I'm not currently creating fanworks that can be shared online, really. And I'm not currently obsessed with a single fandom. I want a group (amorphous, perhaps?) that likes a lot of the things I do and wants to talk about them and interact with them in some of the ways I do.
For me, tumblr liking did not = interaction with the text, so it never worked well for me. For good or for ill, I need to be recognized as existing and contributing--I don't do well when I think I'm being "ignored" whether or not that's actually the case. So to me, that wasn't what I wanted from fandom--that was reiteration of pieces of the canons I liked, but what was added?
Twitter is probably a lot of the same, but it's what people are talking about, now.
But what do I want? And why can't I just go in as my_daroga and have fun? Well, part of it is that I feel that over the past many years, my circles have collided. Through cons and local groups and theater, I've friended folks I know IRL. Now, I don't want to shove my Shatner/Nimoy at them, for sure. But it also feels weird to totally separate my lived nerd experience from my online nerd experience when there feels like SO MUCH overlap.
I guess I'm looking for... if not reassurance, at least a discussion about how to navigate that. We're so used to pseudonymity here, and I get it, but I'm also out there IRL being a big old nerd.
Edit: Thinking about this a little more... I think what I want is a place where I can "safely" be myself but also get more into the things I love that you can with casual acquaintance. And I *think* I'd be ok with that being psuedonomynous except for how my circle has, of late, absorbed so many people who came to me through nerdly but real life channels?
Part of this is just the "where is it?" aspect of fandom. I know that even in the glory days of LJ, we got "in" through one fandom or another, but it felt relatively easy (for me, at that time) to find a circle where we variously shared our lives and loves. I discovered new fandoms, but also was able to get out thoughts about my relationships or my job, or whatever. Okay, so now I hear "find a private discord server to talk about Yuri" or whatever, and I don't know if that's what I want.
Anyway I'm just rambling, trying to work this out for myself. I cannot tell whether it's a me thing or a fandom thing or a bad intersection of my brain + where fandom is right now. So thanks for at least letting me feel like I'm not entirey alone!