Let’s hear it for lurkers

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cacopheny https://cacopheny.tumblr.com/post/633294374504153088/lets-hear-it-for-lurkers :

icouldwritebooks http://icouldwritebooks.tumblr.com/post/169657547260/lets-hear-it-for-lurkers :

laylainalaska http://laylainalaska.tumblr.com/post/157201293509/lets-hear-it-for-lurkers :

So apparently round umpty-zillion of “people are killing fandom by not commenting” is going around, and I’ve seen a few posts trashing people for lurking/viewing/reading instead of actively participating.

My journal and my fic has always been a lurker-friendly zone. I think lurkers are great and people can fight me on this. Here’s why:

We all started out as lurkers. Or at least most of us did. Come on. I’m sure some people out there must’ve jumped into fandom with both feet and started writing and commenting right away, and good for you if you did! But I sure didn’t. I lurked for YEARS. And even now, though I’ve been in fandom since before Y2K, whenever I get into a new fandom or a new social media platform, I still lurk. I hang out around the fringes for awhile to get a feeling for the place before starting to participate. Back in the mailing list/bulletin board days, it was usually recommended that people do that on purpose, watch and listen and learn the local lingo and social rules before diving in. So you know what? You are not doing anything wrong and you are not doing anything that most of the people you see out there commenting and creating and reccing things haven’t done themselves.

We all have lurker days, weeks, months …. Nobody is 100% “on” all the time. Participating in fandom (commenting, reccing, creating content, and so forth) is WORK. It may be fun work, but it still takes effort! Even if you’re sometimes very active in fandom, then you’ll have life fall on your head or the brain weasels flare up, and you won’t have the time and energy to give. Don’t feel guilty about not being able to give fandom your extra spoons. No one in fandom has a right to demand a single spoon from you that you don’t want to give.

Some of today’s lurkers may be your friends tomorrow. How do I know this? Because I’ve made friends with some of them myself! I’ve had people delurk in my comments to say hi after YEARS of reading my fanfic without saying a word. Which I am totally okay with, by the way. And some of these people are good friends today.

So, in conclusion:

• It is okay to feel too shy to come out of lurkerhood in fandom until you feel more comfortable there. It is fine, in fact, if you never do.
• It is okay to be too busy and have too few spoons to comment or create stuff. You still have a perfect right to be in fandom and read and reblog whatever you want.
• It is okay if you meant to comment on that fic or go back and press the kudos button but never got around to it.
• It is okay if you have too many accounts already and don’t want to create a new one just to comment/participate on a social media platform.
• It is okay if your personal situation (a stalker ex, controlling parents) makes it unsafe for you to create an account or comment on things.
• It is okay if you can’t or don’t want to comment or do any of the other things that constitute non-lurkerhood, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation for why.
• IT IS OKAY TO BE A LURKER.

This post is a good way to balance a lot of the “COMMENT ON FIC COMMENT COMMENT COMMENT” stuff that I post here. Content creators will always be happy to receive comments, and comments do in fact breed more content but… sometimes you can’t, and you aren’t obligated to. It’s fine to passively enjoy content for whatever reason.

I usually love to leave big long thoughtful comments

lately I have not had the brain to do it and I feel bad

but this is nice to be reminded of, that sometimes it’s okay not to do it

children’s book recs?

guess they're YA!, i have a whole list of stuff farmkid is too young for yet that will be perfect, but i figured i'd solicit input

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My older sister just sent out the annual “So, my children need Christmas presents” email, which I’m not wording well– it’s always a very flustered “ah crap you want me to tell you what they want and I need to come up with something” because she lives several hundred miles away and we don’t see one another very often and that was steadily improving as they got older and now it’s been eight months and probably we can’t cross state lines anytime soon 😭 but anyway.

She mentioned that the middle one, a boy of … 11? I think he just turned 11… is hard to shop for. He likes playing sports, mostly, and doesn’t like fashion or toys.

But he loves books. And she said she’d love more books for him. Currently, he loves Eragon and Harry Potter, and is making an attempt at the Lord of the Rings. (When Farmsister was his age, I read her the scary parts of the Two Towers, out loud, in a tent, by flashlight, and it was the most fun summer we ever had together, so. Yeah, I was 16; while all you were out partying, I studied the blade hobbits.) So I’ve got a few books in mind I might send for him, but I’d love some more recommendations.

And the other boy, he’s not that into fiction, and he’s just about to turn 13 and loves The Way Things Work type of books– but he’s learning French, and I was wondering if anyone had any recs for easy-to-read books in French that aren’t little kid books, you know? That one’s more of a long shot. (An easy-to-read book in French about how something works, even better, but like, how do you even look for that?)

(He, by the way, is flourishing in this pandemic– remote learning is perfect for him because he doesn’t get sucked into being a cut-up or acting out for attention, he doesn’t have to roll out of bed until 8:45 am, he gets to be by himself most of the time but his family is around so he’s not unattended [he’d frequently had to be a latchkey kid before and he hated that], he really can devote himself to learning what he’s interested in, and he’s just doing really well, which is fantastic, as most of the other kids I know are Not Doing So Great. He’s been studying French for a while but never cared until now; now he thinks it’s cool. Who knows! He’s on his own knowledge journey.)

The little girl is getting a doll and needs doll clothes so I’m super set on that, I just have to get off my ass and actually sew some things. And Farmkid probably will like doll clothes too so I’m just gonna roll with that.

on catholicism

took me fifteen years to get him to stop just leaving the water running straight down the drain the whole time he does the dishes, so like, this is progress, about the author, whining

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so I’ve been trying to come up with a good meta, even if it’s just a cracky one, about how Geralt of Rivia is the most Catholic character ever, but I haven’t been able to get my thoughts into any fun kind of order.

I have realized, though, that my dude definitely does dishes like a Catholic.

Hear me out, here. So he makes pasta, right? Strains the cooked pasta thru a colander, right? You could basically just wipe that down and put it in the dish drainer. But no. That wouldn’t be right. He sets it in the sink, then he takes the saucepan he made the sauce in, which is now full of grossness, and sets it INSIDE the colander, so that when it overflows, the colander will catch all the bits of tomato and grease and cheese. Then he finds another even dirtier dish somehow, and stacks that inside, and positions it so water will fall in there every time someone uses the sink. Then, and this is crucial, he leaves the whole mess for at least twelve hours, preferably longer. Ideally, he then stacks things on top of this mass that do not stack, so it’s precarious and there’s no way to rinse things off or see what’s in the sink and the whole situation just gets terrifying.

THEN, and only then, can he begin to wash dishes, and then he’s got to spend like an hour scrubbing all of the crusted shit out of the little holes in the colander. Because GOD FORBID you just wipe that out and put it in the dish drainer, or even leave it upside down so that it won’t wind up with a whole lot of shit puddled in it encrusting itself into those holes, or at least like, stack it on top of filthy dishes so it doesn’t get greasy. NO, it is NOT doing dishes if you don’t absolutely have to scrub every single surface of every single item because it is all uniformly encased in preferably-slightly-moldy filth. And he ABSOLUTELY can’t have things soaking in hot soapy water while he washes– NO– or under the spray of the rinsing so that they’ll repeatedly get rinsed before he gets around to washing them– NO! The only way to remove dirt (and the more dirt, the better, of course!) is to painstakingly scrub it out of there by hand, you CANNOT pre-soak things in any useful or meaningful way. It would mean you’re NOT SUFFERING ENOUGH.

I mean I’m kidding but listen I just had a really unpleasant hour or so just now and I had to vent somewhere.

teeth

horrible, it was fine, but it's, it's a thing, really tho, tw teeth, about the author

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So I’ve been a big weirdo about teeth for like, ever, totally by accident, and my semi-debut in the Witcher fandom https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/190893344556/another-wip-excerpt was Jaskier and Yennefer bullshitting about Witcher teeth, and I just wrote another story to tie up the ends of the Witcher teeth thing https://archiveofourown.org/works/27436687

and I just got some weird RL payback for it, I guess?

Anyway

I got home from work yesterday and Dude was cooking dinner. Not unusual, always nice. (I bitch about his inability to do dishes but he manages to cook just fine anyway.) He and I are talking, and after a moment he’s like “Oh,” and gets a funny look on his face.

“Oh?” I say.

“I found something,” he said, and turned to pick up something small. He held his hand out. “Hold out your hand,” he said, when I just sat there staring at him in sudden worry.

Gingerly, I put out my hand, palm-upward, and into my hand, he dropped

a human tooth, a molar, intact but with one of the roots snapped off about halfway down

“That was in the basement, on the floor,” he said.

(Let’s pause for a moment, and reflect on what a fucked-up thing that is to do. You’re with me here, right? Well, scratch that and reverse it, because:)

“Oh!” I said. “Yeah, that’s mine.” I recognized it.

I never had my wisdom teeth out because I have a weird genetic flaw, that Farmsister shares with me: some of our adult molars never came in. In my case, one of my 2-year molars had to be forcibly extracted when I was a teenager, because it was fusing to my jawbone. When they took it out, they broke one of the roots, or maybe it was dissolved, or maybe it’s still attached to my jawbone. Hard to say.

I now have a gap in my teeth, but it’s way back; I used to just not really have much on that side but then my wisdom tooth came in and filled in a lot, but it still doesn’t touch the tooth in front of it and there’s just a hole so I can’t eat almonds, it’s annoying.

“It goes here,” I said, and gestured.

“Why was it on the basement floor?” Dude asked, unreasonably.

“I mean,” I said, “they let me keep it, so I did, and it was in a little envelope in one of the boxes down there, and probably the envelope got damp and it fell out.”

So anyway. Warning for an image of an extracted human tooth! (no gore. i mean, if there was it’d be a neat trick, this thing came out of my head in probably 1992?)

there he is! my lil guy!

the dentist was like “don’t worry by the time she’s an adult dental implant technology will be so advanced she’ll just be able to get a new one put in and it’ll be no big deal” and little did he know that i wouldn’t ever see a dentist again once i was off my parents’ insurance because we live in a fucking hellscape third world country HA HA HA anyway

I am going to make a necklace out of it I think