Sock It to Me

cw: animal death Update on little Charles: Apparently they administered morphine before the euthanasia medication and while that kicked in they let my parents pet him and feed him an ice cream sandwich. And after he was very high and half asleep, only then they gave him that, and my stepmom held him and Dad petted him until he stopped breathing.

In other news, I am thinking about the way being in fandom is just a lot less like being "in" anything and isn't really as fun anymore and how it is connected to the general state of the world.

When coming to this website to make this post, I noticed the site announcement about restrictions on Dreamwidth in Georgia and in my home state of Tennessee. I'm really proud to be on this website and paying a pittance a year to help them keep fighting good fights like this. I don't post here as much as I could, though, because years in the bigger ocean of tumblr and twitter have kind of made me wind down my sense of having anything to say.

I know it's a weird combination of the violence inherent to capitalism and just my brain getting older, but I remember having the ability to daydream all day long in school, writing fic snippets in my notebooks, while also continuing to keep good grades in my classes. I used to be creative and itching to share stuff. There was something about the internet being a place I had to manage to get access to that created a kind of goal at the end, but I still don't think it's "dopamine addiction" or whatever that's causing the main problem. I think it's just the sense that there are little campfires everywhere -- or one big bonfire here and there -- but around them, nobody is actually gathered to listen. People are just there to add fuel to the fire and be angry and hurt that no one is looking at the sparks they added. I'm to blame as is everyone else.

I do try to engage with other people's fanwork and stuff, but it seems like it rarely becomes a two-way street anymore.

You don't have to be friends with everyone you meet in fandom, but I know that back in the LJ and even early tumblr days, there was a sense of knowing who hung around in your neck of the woods. Maybe you didn't always, always engage in reciprocity of comments and reading, but there was enough overlap that there was an excitement to sharing stories and stuff. It was a form of conversation and positing ideas. Now, it's just part of an attention economy where everyone is broke and starving.

I don't know what exactly I did to direct the YouTube algorithm to feed me down this specific rabbit hole, but the other night I found this channel called DarwinsLab. I can't speak for his past videos, but I watched the most recent tree about the nature of dreams, psychedelics, and the uncanny valley respectively. I really enjoyed them, and it felt a little bit like a slight reach backward into what the internet was like and "for" when I was in university and spending all that precious time I could've been forging IRL connections being on the internet (half-joking). It reminds me of Vsauce and watching everymanHYBRID and Marble Hornets and, strangely connected, YuGiOh The Abridged Series. There was a sense of creativity and conversation in those things that I often feel is not present even in the independent or self-made YouTube "content" I often fill my brain with.

When I was back in America for a few weeks, I rarely turned on YouTube, I noticed. Sometimes, I sat in total silence. Other times, I watched the actual TV my parents pay for, lying with little Charlie on the couch while parents were out. There was silence, and it was mostly bearable, though the first night of three that my parents went out of town while I was there (so I could dogsit our little buddy, them having no idea he'd be gone in a month), the house being so much larger than my little apartment kind of made me feel a little insecure like there might be something else hiding in the shadows or another room.

Here in Japan, I listen to YouTube and podcasts a ridiculous amount of the time. I enjoy them, most of the time. I enjoy learning, even when it's just on the level of following a story. Learning the trivia and beats of a true crime case that is common knowledge along with a little editorializing, etc. I have to have some kind of speech-sound to fall asleep here, and I don't know why. I would sometimes turn it on when I was back in the States, but I never actually comprehended more than five minutes of it before passing out.

I think it has something to do with the fact that all of my comprehensible conversations and interactions with human speech are at work here. There's a part of my brain that is just starved for something that feels both personal and novel. And yet, I'm noticing, that I have started to tune out toward the end of podcasts and videos that I normally wouldn't have lately. Then again, I've just suffered a loss, however distant and small compared to a human life. I know that what I'm experiencing at this very moment might not be some super representative aspect of my personhood.

When I try to listen to the part of me that's zoned out, to interrogate why, I find that it's that creative urge in the background begging me to be the one to make something. Only, I spent the whole time I was home trying to give myself space to create something, and the best I did was 15 seconds of simple video editing or so that is nowhere near finished that I may never go back and finish. I couldn't write anything, and I dunno why.

Except, I kinda do. It feels like there's no point to write anything lately. I feel a little bit less pessimistic about this than I did a week ago. I finally got one comment on the Trigun fic I posted recently. Only, I know that back in the past, I would have been able to find a space in which to talk about the aspect of the story that made me write that fic, even if the person didn't fully read my fic themselves, and if I got lucky they might, and that's what I'm missing.

Which brings me back to the YouTube algorithm.

Somehow, in connection with this and other stuff I watch sometimes, it brought me to this video:

Watch on YouTube

It is an interesting take on a lot of things, and my petty connection to my own sense of being unmoored is much smaller than the bigger issues of white grievance replacing the personality and redirecting suburban white anger into fascism. However, one of the things she talks about up front is that Eminem was kind of one of the last release valves for a subculture of young white suburban people that held a space that allowed them to share experience, express anger, and be transgressive or rebellious in a way that was able to both acknowledge their legitimate grievances against those in power and the apparatuses in the mainstream that held them down while also being self-aware of their own privilege in the landscape of a genre of music that was pioneered by Black people. She talks about how she was once a big fan of Eminem, became very critical, and then came back around to the idea that while she doesn't want to absolve him of all the "problematic" elements of his writing and body of work that maybe the flaws and anger and transgression present within his work are representative of the functions of a lot of former subcultures that used to allow young (white otherwise, though the white people are most relevant to her concern in the video) people to help identify themselves in opposition to the mainstream.

I remember being in the fringes of Eminem-enjoying and the weird cathartic rush I got when I learned how to contextually use the "f-word" as an intensifier and was brave enough to do it in a venting rant to a friend over the phone in hushed tones as a tween. I grew up at the intersection of parents who were just really responsible given their means for the most part and "white trash," so there was a certain aspect of that that spoke to me when it was coming out and cool. And I remember that kind of word-of-mouth and slow-transmission of culture that was based on who you happened to have access to.

I also think about the fact that had it not been for my cousin giving me a copy of Shounen Jump he'd worn out as a mousepad after reading it a couple times then telling me about a person he met with a screenname based on YuYu Hakusho in an Unreal Tournament chatroom that I should try to message on a lark who then got freaked out like I might be lying about who I was and how I got their username that I would not, in any way, be who I am today.

Even the dial-up internet had the character of being a decentralized place but where you could, through others, eventually discover things.

The centralized, mainstream, social media internet actively bottlenecks all of that experience and most of it feeds it through an algorithm that serves to make the user and the people similar to and adjacent to the user's habits more like themselves instead of helping to change them in any way.

And while there's this narrative of wanting to embrace who you are, to not let others change you, the thing is that being able to "try lives on" used to be a more natural part of reality than it is now. The kids growing up with social media now are more terrified of being cringe than being anything else. ~Back in my day~, there was a sense that choosing how one wanted to be cringe and learning the rules and not being a "poser" but being fully sincere in your efforts to conform to this type of cringe was a feature of adolescence.

And I think that this connects to what is dying about fandom. Fandom was, at one point, a series of subcultures. Certain fandoms had certain rules, certain conventions (of both kinds), and certain online communities that had idiosyncratic rules and expectations.

Now, you have to cast your bait and line out into the murky depths of a tag or search term and hope that maybe someone who matches your weirdness might see it. There are all these arguments about "purity" versus being as weird and kinky as you want to be and everything in between, and I think this kind of thing is partly because there is no sub in the fandom subcultures anymore, so people keep trying to make the mainstream vibe into what they're most comfortable with. Whereas, in the past, people would just make their own little community about that thing that included 5-20 core members and others who came along to join and that was enough.

And, selfishly, it is SO hard to be creative in this environment where I know that everyone is too overstimulated to care or views me and my attention as competition rather than having a handful of people I can trust to at least care that I had something to say.