every martyr in this jungle

Like everyone else this morning, I woke up to the new Delicious, a stunning example of what happens when you throw a bunch of money and developers at a problem that doesn't exist, while doing zero audience research to figure out how your service was being used. Having been largely out of fandom for about five years, when SGA was still The One Fandom and lived on LJ, before ToS fuckery and fannish migration and Delicious's role still in its infancy, the scope of what has been lost wasn't entirely clear to me until walkingshadow spent a good chunk of her day explaining it patiently through her seething rage.

But despite not having nearly as much invested in Delicious as most of you, the impact of its spectacular implosion is another setback on what is ( my already haphazard wade back into fandom. )

But even in this fragmented new world, Delicious seemed to be last place on the internet that everyone still went. The simplicity of its privacy settings was a revelation - things were either private or public; no friendslists, no filters, no barriers to fannish entry. Just click on a tag and lose yourself for a few hours. I'd venture that had to do a lot with Delicious's success in fostering what could arguably have been the largest fannish community space since the LJ schism (and why I have reservations about the picket fences evident in Pinboard's "introvert sharing" philosophy, though that seems to be where the fannish tide is drifting.) Delicious was accessible even to someone brand new to fandom, or someone like me who may as well be. Wasn't the reason we all used Delicious because it was a massive public park that all corners of fandom played in, where the little bold number of how many times something has been bookmarked meant something?

But what's done is done, and fandom has every reason to find a new berth. And hey, AO3 rose out of a dark moment too, so maybe this will all eventually be for the best. But as someone still trying to find her footing, this didn't help my already fragile grasp of the new fannish geography.

Yada yada yada, life is busy and stringing sentences together is hard. I sometimes feel like my job uses up all my literary creativity, which is ironic given that journalism school mostly consists of sapping it all away until you're writing declarative sentences of 35 words or less, and any modifiers are a strict 10 points from Gryffindor.

Humane Society - smilebackwards (R, Charles/Erik)

This story is what I imagine a hug would feel like if you could write it. The synopsis is that Erik is turned into a kitten and Charles takes him in, and yesterday I wouldn't have said that I would read such a thing, let alone like it, and still look at myself in the mirror, but this fandom has pretty much demolished all my preconceived notions.

ETA: OMG you guys, all the evens I cannot, Charles and Erik in a meadow.

Say that it's mere "brotherhood" or "friendship" if you will. But when the Bad Thing (sob) happens at the end of X-Men: First Class, Erik doesn't respond exactly like a buddy. He passionately drops 500 missiles, clutches Charles to his chest, homicidally freaks out at everyone else on the beach and then basically proposes marriage ("I want you by my side") — all while looking like he wants to kill himself. -E! Online

It's been a month now, since seeing First Class, and every day I think, this is the one where I can put into words what I love so much about Charles/Erik. But then I read shmoopy telepathic sex while they're having breakfast with the kids and love it just as much as the one where humanity is winning the war and Charles takes the other dose of Hank's serum and has his vengeance. There's just nothing I can say no to in this fandom. I'm sure that will change, but right now, it's pure, fervent love. My newest source of joy is mcfassy - gorgeous pictures, avid commenters, amazing RPF. Also, Advanced interviewing techniques with James McAvoy, which involves dodgeball and KISSING THE MALE INTERVIEWER WHAT. How does this EXIST? Also, I need a minute in my bunk with the visual of his shaggy hair and those black jeans. I think my folder of McAvoy pics is already larger than the one of my cats. o.O

ishtar79 has been scanning and recapping the comics canon of Charles and Erik's Big Gay Love, which has always been big and gay. When Charles "ascends", for lack of a better word, he asks Erik to take over as headmaster! And a thousand other little revelations.

Had a request for first-time fic involving "anguish and pent-up desire" from saturn92103, and kind of fumbled the ball because ( when one person is telepathic and the other one loves you just the way you are, it's hard to complicate the attraction. )

I'm working up the guts to watch Atonement. We bought it on a DVD binge for the same reason that Crash was on Netflix's top 50 rentals for years - it's a movie you're "supposed" to see. McAvoy and his beautiful mouth might be worth the pain. [ETA: Saw a trailer for The Conspirator and UNF, fuck me sideways with that American accent and beard.]

Speaking of trailers, Deathly Hallows part deux gave me goosebumps. The battle of Hogwarts is going to be EPIC, idec that they invented the courtyard duel between Harry and Voldemort along with half the other scenes. Having seen the film already, DanRad would have us believe that Alan Rickman gave what he modestly calls "the greatest performance of his career", and god the trailer made me hope that this will be Snape's movie as much as it was his book. He was my favorite before it became mainstream fashion, because even during the first book I scratched my head to say, "Why does Dumbledore allow a Death Eater to teach the next generations of wizards, but won't give him the Defense Against the Dark Arts post?" And say whatever else you want about JK Rowling's writing or the series, but she made good on his potential, and for that nothing else matters. The films have not done him much justice - I'm still bitter that he didn't get his "Blocked again and again, and again until you learn to keep your mouth shut and your mind closed, Potter!" line in Half-Blood Prince. I hope this one will be different.

I don't talk about Warcraft much, but my guild kicked in the teeth of every Tier 11 end-game boss before 4.2 dropped, including a one-shot of Al'Akir, so we've proven that we're ready for Firelands. We made a few half-hearted attempts at Shannox this week, but personally, I spent most of the raid time gawking - I didn't play in the time of outdoor world bosses, and while Firelands is a proper raid instance (so no unleashing Doom Lord Kazzak to lay waste to Stormwind) there is sky and no walls and everything feels a little more dangerous.

PS. Tell me that living in a decommissioned Titan missile site in Colorado wouldn't be awesome. Half-mile corridors! Cold War-era control panels! Blast doors! If we had the money, this would totally happen.

Catching up with an established fandom like X-Men, even with a decent chunk of its canon rewritten by First Class, is exhausting, to the point that I'm so busy reading everyone else's thoughts and fic and looking at art and GIFs and Texts from Xavier Academy that 7 a.m. sneaks up and I collapse into bed with no room for my own thoughts in my head. But sometimes, ideas stick, and they pull together other bits of information, so instead of one giant This Fandom Is Not Only Highly Sexy But Morally Complex post, I'll try to frame issues in the context they came across my desk.

( As interesting as it was to see Erik pulled toward the 'good' side, it would've been nice to see Charles pulled the other way, to be tempted by the possibility of remaking the world with Erik instead of waiting for it to accept mutants. )