athos77

One thing I love about fanfic is that it's a shortcut to storytelling. So, like, you pick up a new novel, not part of a series or anything, and you start to read. And you have to map out the entire milieu in your brain: these are the main characters, these are their relationships, this is their backstory, these are the things you need to remember about the location or politics or whatever else there is.

You spend all this time absorbing all this information and learning to really care about the characters and following events as they unfold and then -- it just ends. And then you pick up another story and you have to do the whole thing all over again.

The nice thing about fanfic is that you can skip all the universe-setting stuff: you can (generally) assume that a reader will know the characters, relationships, back stories, etc etc etc. You can literally start a story with the line "Dudley chased Harry down the street" and not have to explain who Harry is, who Dudley is, why Dudley is chasing Harry, why Harry can't avoid or hide from Dudley's attention, why Harry's best option is to run, vaguely how old Harry and Dudley are, why Harry can't get someone to help him - hell, you even know it's summertime. Fanfic is a shortcut to storytelling, enabling both the reader and the writer to get to the meat of the story without (necessarily) needing to faff about explaining and trying to remember all sorts of details.

There was some era where teachers were telling students that the main thing was to get their stuff down on paper and they could work on format later. Which lead to a truly horrendous period where all the newbie writers were releasing stories full of mis-spellings, no punctuation or paragraphs, constantly shifting verbs and POVs, lack of plot, horrible characterization, etc etc etc. Think of every single writing crime you know of, and these stories were full of them.

And you'd very gently write them and suggest maybe punctuation would make it easier to read, or one sentence shouldn't take up two pages, or actually naming the character who was doing or saying something instead of just expecting the reader to pull it telepathically outv of the ether. And they'd get all defensive, "Well it's MY story and everyone else has liked it and doing all that stuff just slows me down and the important thing is just to get the thing down". You'd suggest maybe they could use a beta reader, but no that was too much work as well.

I had to give up on entire (small) fandoms because the writers simply. Could. Not. Write. I'm really glad that era seems to be over.

So: I used to read gen fic. When I talked about fanfic with my fan friends, I always said I liked the characters and the relationships. They continually tried to get me to try slash fic, and I would, I really tried: I'd find stories in the fandoms I was in featuring 'my' pairing and I'd try them ... and honestly, they were crap. I could not believe my fan friends were reading such poor quality stories!!

Then a friend sent me a gen zine for my birthday. It had three big stories in it, two of which were my big fandoms, the third some show I'd never heard of before, but I read the story anyway. And if was fantastic. I immediately wrote everyone I knew asking if they knew of any other stories, and another friend loaned me a different gen zine. Another long story, really really good I immediately decided that I was a fan of this show, the fic was great!

So I wrote my friends again and it was at this point that I found out that, somehow or other, I had managed to read the only two gen stories in the entire fandom - absolutely everything else was slash.

But I loved my new fandom so I decided to "tolerate" the slash - but it was good too!

It was much later, after going through more fandoms than I care to think about, that I realized that for most fandoms (though not all!), but that the really good stories in many fandoms are either mostly slash or mostly gen. So the gen fandoms I loved the fic on - I loved the fic because the good writers in those fandoms were writing gen. And the slash fandoms I got into - I lived the fic there because the good writers were writing slash.

Nowadays I wander freely back and forth, depending on what shows attract my interest. And sometimes I'll be reading gen and sometimes slash, but I end up reading one or the other because that's where the good writers in that fandom are.

Which is a really long-winded way of saying that, maybe it's the fandoms you're in that you're ending up with stories that don't interest you. It does happen!

Run a VPN on the device so it's harder to figure out where it connects to the Internet. Leave it at work or home or, if you must travel with it, keep it turned off.

See if you can friend or follow people in foreign countries and who don't speak English.

Well, the only way you'll know if it's too niche is by asking and seeing what the responses are. If posting on lemmy doesn't get you enough information, you might try posting on reddit, they bring the information back here tob possibly help others in similar situations. I mean, I've left reddit, but if my cat's health was potentially at risk, I'd ask anyplace I could get a decent answer.

For your fish, maybe try [email protected]

Our open office of five desks and 3-5 people was on the second floor; right outside our office was a short hall of 3 individual offices, but the people in the offices were often out of the office. We'd mostly all worked together for years by then, got along well, and were pretty informal.

We had an absolutely wonderful (if slightly ditzy) girl named Chrissy join the office one summer, fresh out of high school. She liked to dress up very stylishly - not like office wear, but like a popular cheerleader might wear to class, if that makes sense?

Anyway, we're in the office one day, and Chrissy ducks out, then comes back in like one minute later, face absolutely flaming red. We ask what's wrong and she could only stammer in response. She eventually got herself under control and said:

She'd stepped out to run some papers downstairs and, as she left the office, she felt her pantyhose start to sag, so she quickly ducked into one of the side offices, pulled up her skirt, and pulled her hose back up to the top of her thighs. When she looked up, there was a window-washer hanging off the side of the building, slowly and calmly wiping his squeegee back and forth across the window, looking directly at her and smiling kindly. She stared at him, mouth open, while he continued his slow, calm, almost meditative squgeeing across the window. As soon as her mind processed "unexpected man outside second floor window", she bolted back to us.

It was literally like something directly out of a sitcom.

I've been hanging out in imgur, which is generally nice for memes and cats, and kbin for news. It's been surprisingly effective.

Where else would one eat pie?!

So, question: they're obviously doing this to try to avoid being sued for the data breach. But they ToS aren't retroactive, right? So someone could agree to arbitration but still sue them?

I thought of people with locked-in syndrome.

It's a natural instinct for them to chew at plants, so I agree with the cat grass suggestion s. If there's one particular cat that's the problem, ask the vet to check it's teeth at it's next checkup: sometimes they chew more plants when there's buildup or something wrong with their teeth.