Meals and meta

[jlh]

I've realized that since Idol ended I've posted very irregularly, so I'll try to put a few more of my thoughts here, even though it's summer so really, not many of us are posting OR commenting, but that's summer, isn't it?

I went out to a local pub for dinner last night with ali_wildgoose, and they were having a special, $5 for a pound of mussels. Along with a side order of green beans the meal was not only dee-lish and sort of early-60s retro, but also surprisingly filling, and good food for being so cheap.

I'm encouraged by the increasing amount of RPS meta on metafandom, but while that comm can often make me feel like an unwanted outlier (particularly in their slash discussions, which leave me with the thought that while I write slash I am not a slasher per se) fandomsecrets always makes me feel like I'm not alone. Seriously, I've become so addicted to that community in only a few short months! It's less that I have so many deep dark secrets that I daren't post or discuss, but more that I have things that I'm sure close friends are tired of hearing me whining about. That said, I've only posted one secret, and I'm not sure that I really have any more.

Hmm, I'm not sure this post was about anything, or encouraged participation. This might be why I haven't been posting lately!

Comments

[dana-kujan.livejournal.com]

...that comm can often make me feel like an unwanted outlier (particularly in their slash discussions, which leave me with the thought that while I write slash I am not a slasher per se)...

Why is that? (I stopped reading mf long ago, too many of the same names, too much friend pimping, tl;dr.)

By the way, I hauled off and created letmeshowuthem.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

HA, but what do you want us to do with this comm, o Dana of the back from the beach?

Well, cathexys is always yammering on about the slash aesthetic, which seems to be h/c, angsty, love that overcomes all odds, drama rama llama. I had known from my experience in HP fandom that while I did write het that slashers read, I also wrote slash that het people read—I'm not sure, though, if that was because I wasn't slashing Harry, but a minor character, and so I wasn't seen as a slasher necessarily. But that thing that people talk about that they want from slash, that they do think is different from just like, gay fiction? I've always been aware that I don't do that thing.

That said, cathexys is notorious for her overgeneralizations and I wish more people would call her on it. She creates a theoretical framework and then treats people who lie outside of it as outliers, or she just redefines her data set to exclude them, in a "if I'm not talking about you then I'm not talking about you" kind of way that seems sloppy to me. It's one thing to define your data set to remove the outliers, and another thing to do it with real actual people who see themselves as belonging to a certain group. Remember that huge fuss over that "Us" vid (or whatever it was called)? Or the endless bandom debates? Or the way that because MCR/FOB/P!ATD bandom intrigued that group of slashers suddenly RPS was okay?

Never mind that the het meta is always backing out of the slash meta. Hardly anyone talks about het as such, and I think it's less because there's anything to say and more because those acafen aren't interested in het, and why that's true, I'm not sure.

[illogicalvulcan.livejournal.com]

Ooo, tell me more about this local pub...

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It was Alchemy, on 5th ave and Bergen or something like that. Seriously, $5 mussels. And another place just down from that had cheap tapas specials on Monday nights. We should take advantage!