jlh | Stuff I love!

Sometimes I get a little wistful, even woeful, when it seems like the big new thing isn't really my thing. And oddly, on the other side of that, I'm very shy to be like, "I like this thing that isn't the big thing" for a variety of reasons that at the end of the day aren't that interesting.* So instead, and as a sort of answer to a conversation

ziggy1278 and I were having last night:

A LIST OF STUFF I LOVE

On TV

90s sitcoms: Friends, Frasier, Will & Grace, Mad About You, Anything But Love, Night Court, Seinfeld, Caroline and the City, Murphy Brown
Stuff on PBS: American Experience, Nova, Frontline, Masterpiece Theater
Cooking shows: Julia Child, Caprial Pence, The Frugal Gourmet, Jacques Pepin especially with Claudine, Good Eats, Nigella Lawson, Great Chefs of many cities
Mysteries: the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, the David Suchet Hercule Poirot, the Harriet Walter/Edward Petherbridge Lord Peter, Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Campion, Cadfael, Murder in Suburbia
Old movie channels: Weird late 60s capers on Fox Movie Channel, RKO musicals on AMC back when AMC was actually good, almost anything on TCM but especially Silent Sundays, Saturday nights on PBS, weekend afternoons before the onset of the infomercial. I break for black & white.
In fandom
Small ships and small fandoms, like Rymon and Seamus/Dean. They're smaller, but they're nicer, they're less wanky, they love love love the pairing, there's no crazy hierarchies but rather everyone brings their own talents, and even though we get less of what we love, man, do we love what we get. flaming_potato and deamus, I love you guys.
Yuletide, especially for the fandoms that don't even have a community. It's so free of the freaking out over numbers of comments and all the other drama and stress that pervades other fic exchanges. You can't be crazy specific, and you don't even want to be because mostly, you just want a fic to exist about that character in that canon. You can write without a horrible weight on your shoulders, because you got to pick the canons that you'd love to write. Your response has so much more to do with the canon and the timing than what you've done—I have a huge pile of comments on last year's HIMYM fic because that fandom was just about to take off; I have many fewer on this year's Broken Hearts Club fic because fewer people are aware of the movie. And it's fun to see what other people's requests have brought forth, like that amazing Grindhouse fic this year.
The two small fandom comms I'm on, fandom_of_one and smallfandomfest, for the same reasons. It's nice that there's a way for people to communicate about smaller fandoms. Also, whenever someone pimps a smaller fandom on fandomsecrets. It's just lovely when fandom can bring people together instead of dividing them into camps.
The increasing RPF meta on metafandom. The increasing meta about all kinds of things on metafandom that isn't just the latest dustup among the multifandom genre slash crowd.
The increasing conversation about race in fandom, and how it's spread, and how fewer and fewer people bitch about the harsh to their squee or how we're just here to have fun or any of that bullshit. Thank god for deadbrowalking.
On LJ just generally
People talking about things they love, whether I love those things or not. It's fun to watch other people going through and talking about it, because it's just fun to watch people like something. And it reminds me that we don't all love the same things, which is really pretty brilliant and easy to forget in the rush to make communities over the things we do share.
People posting music, on audiography or just on their journals.
Movie reviews! Posts about the books you've read! Media talk in general!

What do you love?

*(highlight to read) I used to hang out with a crowd that behind the scenes could be very bitchy about what people posted about, in that "omg so-and-so posts endlessly about show-I-don't-care-about, so tiresome!" The idea was that one's LJ was there to provide entertainment for one's fans via a distant witty façade. I could never achieve that, because I am neither witty nor do I have sycophantic fangirls hanging on my every word—though I think the above list of things that I love shows why; I don't like the things fangirls like, don't write the angsty stories they crave, and don't provide the entertainment to them that they want. Of course, most of these people have also left fandom well behind them, some with something of an air of contempt, and certainly don't write fanfiction anymore. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think I can really even try to come up to their standards anymore. Which I never did, anyway. And while some of those people are on LJ sometimes, I'm pretty sure none of them still read mine.
But I still flinch, reflexively, when I decide to post about something. Is it entertaining? Is it likely that the people on my flist, many of whom are hard core genre fans, care about these other things I like? I don't think it was until I got more involved with Idol fandom, and started posting about Idol regularly, and met other people that way, that I felt more confident about posting about other things, too.