Wow and Flutter - A Catchup Ramble
Aug. 27th, 2012 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanEverytime I settle down to write one of these, something else comes up and I get distracted from my distraction.
1. Last Monday, when I felt like I was simply drowning in a tide of disaffection, I asked for hugs - something I don't normally do - and it seemed like everyone just glommed me. THANK YOU, I really, really needed it. The situation isn't resolved yet. It has to do with my house sale - the buyer is Not a Nice Person, Instead She Is Greedy and Nasty(tm). "Thank you" is very easy to say - but it is heartfelt. Your outpouring of love and compassion is so greatly appreciated.
2. The Post Ep Dish...where do I begin? I love doing the Dish. I love it even more now that I don't simply squee in realtime, but let myself enjoy the episode and then do my write-up after it initially airs. I do the Dish because I want to share my thoughts and I want to hear your opinions, too. But sometimes, I also want to just enjoy the episode for what it is (even if it's flawed). Last week, as I closed my post, I asked that people don't harsh my squee.
Almost everyone who commented, even those comments that weren't as unremittingly squeeful, understood what I meant by that and respected it. There were a few comments that I thought were a little too harsh (given my request for contributors to be harshless), but they were from fans I know from prior exchanges on the Dish (and thus were sort of expected).
But on Saturday - five days after the episode aired, someone I have no prior contact with left a response that was the equivalent of a turd in a bowl of flour. S/he basically commented about how s/he hated the episode and that s/he didn't care at all about Mozzie's backstory, and fast forwarded through the episode, then deleted it.
Harsh and unpleasant and frankly, quite unnecessary. I took a while to consider my reply and politely asked the commenter if s/he had read the entired Dish, including my request to avoid negative comments. The reply I received kind of startled me. In sum, s/he said that s/he was merely repeated what other people had said - and I hadn't replied to other people's "squee quashing." There was some other, less pleasant words in there too, and the comment ended:
And I will leave with one last thing.........I HATE Sara!
Which honestly made me lol and lol and lol some more. And I deleted it (and the original comment) and banned the account, which is probably useless anyway, since this "contributor" left these comments from an old and pretty much empty account (i.e., 16 comments over 4 years, no friends - all of which which screams "strawman"), or as an Anon.
Now, you may ask, why am I spending so much of my energy (limited as it may be) on this incident (when I haven't even gotten to respond to the positive comments on last week's Dish)? Well, because it bothers me from several perspectives.
I've been doing the Post Ep Dish in one form or another since early in Season Two, and it's a real source of pleasure for me - to share my thoughts, to have fellow fans comment back and exchange ideas. It's a community I love, and that I'm bringing people together at my journal is another source of joy (I love when people have their own conversations inside the Dish).
But there are moments of displeasure too. I like Sara Ellis, and I have made no attempt to hide that fact. I've asked people to respect that, and for the Dish for 4.04 - Parting Shots - I even noted that I'd delete comments I thought were bashing. (I was tempted, but I didn't).
I loved last week's episode, for all of its flaws (and long time followers of the Dish know how I love picking at the flaws and errors), and when I asked that contributors not spoil my joy, I really meant it. Last week was a bad time for me (see point 1 above) and I needed the pleasure that WC gave me.
I don't intend the Post Ep Dish to merely be an echo chamber of my own perceptions - I truly want to hear different points of view. But I also do want people to respect my wishes too. If you know I like Sara Ellis, writing a comment that she ruined the episode and you fast forwarded through her scenes isn't going to engage me. Same for what happened last week with the comment I ultimately deleted.
Am I being unreasonable to expect contributors to respect the occasional limits I put on the Dish? If I say, give me "your thinky and not-so-thinky thoughts" and then say don't bash, don't not be negative, am I contradicting myself?
I don't want to f-lock the Dish, and I don't want to ban anon comments, but I also don't want to feel bad about content on my own LJ.
Sigh (told you this was going to be a tl;dr).
3. My White Collar Big Bang is approaching completion.
Full drafts are due on the 1st, and that's definitely achievable. It's going to be about 23-25k of pure Hurt/Comfort. I don't think I've ever written quite so much with quite so little plot.
Am I happy with it? Yes - most definitely. It's an idea that I've been toying around with for almost a year. I started it last January, got a few hundred words down and abandoned it. I picked it up again for the WCPairings exchanged, wrote about 10k before realizing that it wasn't what my prompter wanted to read and set it aside. After withdrawing from the WCBB, I realized I still could submit a story (I'd just forego having an artist).
The only other thing I'm going to say at this point is that I probably won't be writing anymore physical H/C for a long, long time. Between this and The Next Six Days, I'm pretty burned out on the genre.
4. Moving ... The problems I'm having with my buyer have pushed my moving date forward to mid-September. I had hoped to be in my new home before the High Holy Days, but that probably isn't going to happen.
My nephew, who I've watched go from being a difficult toddler, to a troubled boy to an even more troubled teenager, has actually become a lovely young man.
He's been coming over on the weekends and helping me clean out the basement - or more accurately, he's been cleaning out the basement, I just point to the things that have to be thrown out. I've tried to give him money, but he won't take it. He has taken things that I'd otherwise have thrown away - he considers that payment enough.
Yesterday, my goal was to clean out my father's workbench. My dad was a very organized man, and he wasn't a packrat. Except when it came to nuts and bolts and screws and stuff like that. His workbench was an accumulation of a lifetime of spare parts. I filled six trash barrels with stuff he'd saved but never had any use for. (I have kept some of the hand tools that were in salvagable condition - more for nostalgia than any real need).
Truthfully, for the past year, I'd been avoiding the workbench because there were a lot of memories tied up with it. When we moved here, my dad took the content of his original workbench from the house I grew up in, and I remembered working side by side with him as a little girl.
So, I couldn't just randomly throw stuff out - I had to go through every box and bin, and it did pay off. I found a little bit of treasure. Well, to be honest, I'm probably the only person who'd think it was treasure.
I have an antique chandelier with hand-cut lead crystal pendants -ten-inch long prisms that end in a golfball-sized starburst. Sixteen years ago, when we moved into this place, one of the pendants broke - split at the point where the prism became the starburst. I know my dad had tried to fix it - with crazy glue, with epoxy, with a glue gun, but you can't really fix crystral or glass like that. About a decade ago, I rescued the starburst part of the crystal from the workbench, but could never find the prism. Not until yesterday, when I discovered it in the bottom of a bucket of junk - and miraculously undamaged.
Of course, I had a bit of a panic attack when I couldn't immediately put my hands on the starburst - but I did find it. And I still don't know how to fix it! There are places that supply Austrian crystal replacement pendants, but for obvious reasons, I'm not going to be able to find the exact same pendant and would need to replace all of them (obvious in that the chandelier is 100+ years old. And even if I found the exact same pattern, it wouldn't look right - old crystal has a much higher lead content and adding a newly manufactured pendant would be like using a piece of broken glass to replace the diamond in your engagement ring).
In the scheme of things, it sounds really kind of silly. But finding it gave me a bit of unalloyed happiness in a morning filled with melancholy.
5. I have a dear friend, we used to work together, and for years we've said that it feels like it's just about a week between Memorial Day and Labor Day - with the Fourth of July on Wednesday. This summer has gone extremely quickly - wasn't it just last week that I was talking about the butterflies having sex in the sapling outside my office window? (And they were huge hawkmoths, not butterflies, btw). It also feels like it's been summer forever - maybe because I've been in a state of anticipation and transition since early June. So - it's Labor Day next Monday and I'm still waiting to start my life again.
Sigh, again. I STILL need hugs.
I have gone on way, way too long, even for a pre-announced tl;dr. And as I promised, the bonus Bomer.
Thanks for listening.
1. Last Monday, when I felt like I was simply drowning in a tide of disaffection, I asked for hugs - something I don't normally do - and it seemed like everyone just glommed me. THANK YOU, I really, really needed it. The situation isn't resolved yet. It has to do with my house sale - the buyer is Not a Nice Person, Instead She Is Greedy and Nasty(tm). "Thank you" is very easy to say - but it is heartfelt. Your outpouring of love and compassion is so greatly appreciated.
2. The Post Ep Dish...where do I begin? I love doing the Dish. I love it even more now that I don't simply squee in realtime, but let myself enjoy the episode and then do my write-up after it initially airs. I do the Dish because I want to share my thoughts and I want to hear your opinions, too. But sometimes, I also want to just enjoy the episode for what it is (even if it's flawed). Last week, as I closed my post, I asked that people don't harsh my squee.
Almost everyone who commented, even those comments that weren't as unremittingly squeeful, understood what I meant by that and respected it. There were a few comments that I thought were a little too harsh (given my request for contributors to be harshless), but they were from fans I know from prior exchanges on the Dish (and thus were sort of expected).
But on Saturday - five days after the episode aired, someone I have no prior contact with left a response that was the equivalent of a turd in a bowl of flour. S/he basically commented about how s/he hated the episode and that s/he didn't care at all about Mozzie's backstory, and fast forwarded through the episode, then deleted it.
Harsh and unpleasant and frankly, quite unnecessary. I took a while to consider my reply and politely asked the commenter if s/he had read the entired Dish, including my request to avoid negative comments. The reply I received kind of startled me. In sum, s/he said that s/he was merely repeated what other people had said - and I hadn't replied to other people's "squee quashing." There was some other, less pleasant words in there too, and the comment ended:
And I will leave with one last thing.........I HATE Sara!
Which honestly made me lol and lol and lol some more. And I deleted it (and the original comment) and banned the account, which is probably useless anyway, since this "contributor" left these comments from an old and pretty much empty account (i.e., 16 comments over 4 years, no friends - all of which which screams "strawman"), or as an Anon.
Now, you may ask, why am I spending so much of my energy (limited as it may be) on this incident (when I haven't even gotten to respond to the positive comments on last week's Dish)? Well, because it bothers me from several perspectives.
I've been doing the Post Ep Dish in one form or another since early in Season Two, and it's a real source of pleasure for me - to share my thoughts, to have fellow fans comment back and exchange ideas. It's a community I love, and that I'm bringing people together at my journal is another source of joy (I love when people have their own conversations inside the Dish).
But there are moments of displeasure too. I like Sara Ellis, and I have made no attempt to hide that fact. I've asked people to respect that, and for the Dish for 4.04 - Parting Shots - I even noted that I'd delete comments I thought were bashing. (I was tempted, but I didn't).
I loved last week's episode, for all of its flaws (and long time followers of the Dish know how I love picking at the flaws and errors), and when I asked that contributors not spoil my joy, I really meant it. Last week was a bad time for me (see point 1 above) and I needed the pleasure that WC gave me.
I don't intend the Post Ep Dish to merely be an echo chamber of my own perceptions - I truly want to hear different points of view. But I also do want people to respect my wishes too. If you know I like Sara Ellis, writing a comment that she ruined the episode and you fast forwarded through her scenes isn't going to engage me. Same for what happened last week with the comment I ultimately deleted.
Am I being unreasonable to expect contributors to respect the occasional limits I put on the Dish? If I say, give me "your thinky and not-so-thinky thoughts" and then say don't bash, don't not be negative, am I contradicting myself?
I don't want to f-lock the Dish, and I don't want to ban anon comments, but I also don't want to feel bad about content on my own LJ.
Sigh (told you this was going to be a tl;dr).
3. My White Collar Big Bang is approaching completion.
Full drafts are due on the 1st, and that's definitely achievable. It's going to be about 23-25k of pure Hurt/Comfort. I don't think I've ever written quite so much with quite so little plot.
Am I happy with it? Yes - most definitely. It's an idea that I've been toying around with for almost a year. I started it last January, got a few hundred words down and abandoned it. I picked it up again for the WCPairings exchanged, wrote about 10k before realizing that it wasn't what my prompter wanted to read and set it aside. After withdrawing from the WCBB, I realized I still could submit a story (I'd just forego having an artist).
The only other thing I'm going to say at this point is that I probably won't be writing anymore physical H/C for a long, long time. Between this and The Next Six Days, I'm pretty burned out on the genre.
4. Moving ... The problems I'm having with my buyer have pushed my moving date forward to mid-September. I had hoped to be in my new home before the High Holy Days, but that probably isn't going to happen.
My nephew, who I've watched go from being a difficult toddler, to a troubled boy to an even more troubled teenager, has actually become a lovely young man.
He's been coming over on the weekends and helping me clean out the basement - or more accurately, he's been cleaning out the basement, I just point to the things that have to be thrown out. I've tried to give him money, but he won't take it. He has taken things that I'd otherwise have thrown away - he considers that payment enough.
Yesterday, my goal was to clean out my father's workbench. My dad was a very organized man, and he wasn't a packrat. Except when it came to nuts and bolts and screws and stuff like that. His workbench was an accumulation of a lifetime of spare parts. I filled six trash barrels with stuff he'd saved but never had any use for. (I have kept some of the hand tools that were in salvagable condition - more for nostalgia than any real need).
Truthfully, for the past year, I'd been avoiding the workbench because there were a lot of memories tied up with it. When we moved here, my dad took the content of his original workbench from the house I grew up in, and I remembered working side by side with him as a little girl.
So, I couldn't just randomly throw stuff out - I had to go through every box and bin, and it did pay off. I found a little bit of treasure. Well, to be honest, I'm probably the only person who'd think it was treasure.
I have an antique chandelier with hand-cut lead crystal pendants -ten-inch long prisms that end in a golfball-sized starburst. Sixteen years ago, when we moved into this place, one of the pendants broke - split at the point where the prism became the starburst. I know my dad had tried to fix it - with crazy glue, with epoxy, with a glue gun, but you can't really fix crystral or glass like that. About a decade ago, I rescued the starburst part of the crystal from the workbench, but could never find the prism. Not until yesterday, when I discovered it in the bottom of a bucket of junk - and miraculously undamaged.
Of course, I had a bit of a panic attack when I couldn't immediately put my hands on the starburst - but I did find it. And I still don't know how to fix it! There are places that supply Austrian crystal replacement pendants, but for obvious reasons, I'm not going to be able to find the exact same pendant and would need to replace all of them (obvious in that the chandelier is 100+ years old. And even if I found the exact same pattern, it wouldn't look right - old crystal has a much higher lead content and adding a newly manufactured pendant would be like using a piece of broken glass to replace the diamond in your engagement ring).
In the scheme of things, it sounds really kind of silly. But finding it gave me a bit of unalloyed happiness in a morning filled with melancholy.
5. I have a dear friend, we used to work together, and for years we've said that it feels like it's just about a week between Memorial Day and Labor Day - with the Fourth of July on Wednesday. This summer has gone extremely quickly - wasn't it just last week that I was talking about the butterflies having sex in the sapling outside my office window? (And they were huge hawkmoths, not butterflies, btw). It also feels like it's been summer forever - maybe because I've been in a state of anticipation and transition since early June. So - it's Labor Day next Monday and I'm still waiting to start my life again.
Sigh, again. I STILL need hugs.
I have gone on way, way too long, even for a pre-announced tl;dr. And as I promised, the bonus Bomer.
Thanks for listening.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 03:15 pm (UTC)Almost every day I encounter people who I could kick to the moon for their bad manners. They seem to have never known a good breeding. In Germany we have a saying that means so much as "Driven through your breeding with a train".
And thanks for your nice words! Yeah, I just love the show and the cast and I love to talk about them. I'm truly addicted.
P.S.: Just realized that it was already episode 4x6 and not 4x5.