Beyond Selidor

I'm not doing snowflake_challenge this year, but the most recent prompt has been inspiring some wonderful responses on my reading page, so I thought I'd steal it for today's open thread:

What are some things that fandom has given you?

( My answer )

If you've already answered this question in your own journals due to snowflake_challenge, please feel free to link rather than rewriting the whole thing. And if you haven't answered this yet, please do tell me in the comments, if you have something to say.

When it comes to background music, I tend to cycle through the same collection of about fifty artists/albums/playlists/performances, depending on my mood, and this week seems to have been the time to return to Tiësto's epic, 4-hour-long DJ set from Copenhagen in 2007. I've had it on continuous repeat every day at work, and have just paused playing it again while preparing tonight's dinner — it's great for motivation when it comes to getting things done. I love the whole set, but honestly, the moments between 2.17.56-2.28.00 just get into my sinews and bones, and when the stream gets to that point, I find myself scrolling back, and replaying, and replaying over and over again.



This is one of the performances about which I have severe concert regret about not having attended — although given that I still lived in Australia at the time, it's highly unlikely I would ever have made it to Copenhagen, even if Tiësto had been on my musical radar those days. And at least I did have the opportunity to see this live set in 2010, and it ended up being one of my most memorable live music experiences, so there's that.

A few hours ago today, as the result of diving down a particular internet rabbit hole, I was reminded of a song with which I'd been briefly obsessed, back during the years I was a PhD student and spent most of my days at home, alone, writing, listening to music — frequently the same songs on continuous repeat for hours. I don't own physical copies of music any more — I haven't owned a device that could play CDs for years, and I finally cleared out my 1990s CD collection from my mum's house when I was in Australia in April. I don't own digital copies either — I used to have an extensive digital library of uploaded CDs and playlists (about which, more later), but that vanished at some point when the hard drive of my current computer had to be replaced in 2014 — and I don't listen to stuff on Spotify either. So basically the way I listen to music now, and have done since 2014, is to go to Youtube, and search for the album, live set, song, or playlist, and play it.

Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.

These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.

Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.

Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).

I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.

I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow it's been more than a month since I last posted on Dreamwidth, and several weeks since I last logged in. I'll try to read back over people's posts, but may not manage to work through the full backlog.

*

The main reason I've been so absent from these parts is that my mother came to visit. Due to the pandemic, this is the first time we've seen each other in person since June 2019 (whereas before she'd come over once a year, and I'd go back to Australia around every two years; the latter I've now not done since April 2018). She stayed for a month, and it was absolutely marvellous.

The big highlight of her visit (beyond just seeing her and being able to have conversations unmediated by a screen) was spending two weeks travelling around the Amalfi coast in Italy. Usually when Mum visits we do a hiking trip, walking from place to place for about a week, normally in the UK. This year, she was adamant that she wanted to spend time somewhere it was guaranteed to be warm and sunny (which in the UK is definitely not guaranteed), I suggested Amalfi, and she found a company that organised the itinerary and accommodation for self-guided hiking.

I don't want to give a blow-by-blow description, but suffice it to say that we started in Amalfi, ended up in Sorrento (with a side trip to Capri), and it was absolutely extraordinary. The hiking terrain is extremely mountainous, and the routes, while not particularly long by our standards (the longest was about 14km), were very tough and challenging, and we learned early on that if the tour company's route description designated the route 'medium,' we would find it hard, and 'easy' was for us medium. (One 'medium' route began with a climb up 1000 stone steps up the side of a mountain, for example.) The hotels we stayed in were all very nice, we ate extremely well, and, best of all for both of us was the swimming — whether in outdoor rooftop hotel pools, or in swimming holes off the rocks at the foot of cliffs, the beach that was essentially attached to our hotel in Positano — which we managed to do every single day. It's hard to explain, but the ocean has such a different quality in different parts of the world — the look and feel of the water, the way it moves. It's so restorative to the soul to swim in the sea, particularly if it is as beautiful as it is in that part of Italy. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen the photos, and if you haven't, please feel free to have a look — ronnidolorosa is the username.

(Another bizarre highlight of the trip was randomly bumping into my Canadian sraffie friend alexiepedia, whom I hadn't seen in person since 2011 or so. We both realised from Instagram we were in the same part of the world, were messaging to arrange to meet up for a drink, and eventually realised that not only were we all staying in Anacapri, but that we were literally eating meals simultaneously at two different sections of the same restaurant.)

After returning from our adventures, Mum stayed with us for another two weeks, with all of us working (she's a radio journalist and had arranged interviews with various people in Cambridge and London for one of her programs), going for walks, and us showing her all our favourite spots in Ely — as we moved house and city last year, all this was new to her. She's just returned to Australia, and I miss her already, but given we're all going to be in New York in a few months for a wedding, and Matthias and I will hopefully be visiting Australia over Christmas, at least the gaps between seeing each other will be much, much less.

*

Inevitably, I've picked a day to return to Dreamwidth when Britain's domestic politics resemble an Armando Ianucci script. It's been a weird 48 hours.

This weekend, I have swum a total of 3.5km in two days. I made the decision to book swimming sessions at the outdoor pool in Cambridge on both days — knowing that the weather would be really hot — and I am very pleased that I did so.

I had been planning to swim my normal 1km on Saturday and then stop, but I got to that point and felt I might as well swim another 500m, so I did. And then today my feeling was that if I'd managed 1.5km I may as well just push through to 2km, especially since it was so hot and I was in no hurry to get out of the water. I've never swum 2km in one go in my entire life, and I'm kind of shocked at how easy it was, especially since I haven't really done any swimming since August last year.

(For those to whom such things are meaningful and relevant, I swim freestyle, and the pool is 90m in length.)

Onwards to the fandom meme.

( Days 11-13 )

( The other days )

Welcome back to another Friday open thread — the second-last for the year! Today's prompt is from likeadeuce:

Talk about the process of making friends or what takes a connection from casual to friendship.

( My answer behind the cut )

What about you?

I have no words, and I must grieve.

For me, it is memories and feelings that burn, a sense of childhood place.

The city where I grew up, that surreal, planned, charged landscape, is so filled with smoke that its air quality is the worst in the world. An elderly resident died due to the smoke-filled air.

The city where I last lived, where most of my family came from (as much as any non-Indigenous Australian can claim to come from), where most of them live, was over 48 degrees Celcius in places yesterday. It's surrounded by a ring of fire. It's dangerous to use air conditioning as it will bring smoke into the house. Fires furher out have damaged power stations, meaning power outages.

They are not just dots on a map, they are friends marking themselves safe (Bega, Batlow, Tathra), relatives who lost their home to fire two years ago on the verge of losing it again (Falls Creek), my homes away from home, where I learnt to swim and learnt to live in and with the ocean, where my whole hometown decamped every summer, gone in minutes (Broulee, Mossy Point, Batemans Bay, Moruya, Ulladalla, Tilba, Lakes Entrance/Lake Tyers, on and on and on, down the south coast of NSW, with forays into East Gippsland), where my paternal grandparents built a home among the trees and lyrebird song (Picton), where my aunt and cousins swelter in the blistering heat, watching the fire front creep closer (Blue Mountains), where I hiked and learnt my smallness (Kosciuszko National Park).

And I am inordinately fortunate compared to most others. I am not one of the half-billion animals killed or billions of plants destroyed. My home is not under threat. Almost all of my family live in inner-city Sydney or Melbourne, and most of my friends and relatives live in urban areas. They are safe — for now.

'My' prime minister (though I did not vote for his government) spent this national catastrophe frolicking on the beach in Hawaii. Then he returned and spent New Year's Eve drinking champagne at his Sydney Harbour waterfront residence with cricketers, claiming, on more than one occasion, that the 'feats' of the cricket team would be sufficient to lift our spirits. (A cricket match in Canberra had to be cancelled due to smoke, way back when Scotty From Marketing was still frolicking in Hawaii.) Former fire chiefs begged for help and damned the government for showing 'no moral leadership' when it came to climate change. Finally shamed into doing something, the government announced emergency measures in the form of a party political ad, which initially had a prominent Donate button. These donations did not go to the fire services, nor to any other charities doing vital work — instead they went to the governing Liberal Party's coffers!. (I have to admit this was the point at which I was truly lost for words.) Instead of taking a shred of moral responsibility, government ministers have contemptuously mocked victims of the fires ('they probably voted Green,' 'they're just unemployed meth addicts') for not showing proper gratitude and deference to the prime minister when he finally graced their burnt-out towns with his presence. There is a concerted effort in the right-wing press and among other, darker corners of the internet to generate a conspiracy theory whereby arsonists, or 'greenies' and red tape from environmental policies have caused these fires, because they lack the decency to examine their own souls, to walk back three decades of climate change denial, coal-fondling greed, and their own contempt for both Indigenous and/or academic expertise.

(I am fearful, in fact, that when — if? — these fires are extinguished, those responsible will walk away with no culpability. I want to hang the shame of it around their necks like an albatross that they can never be rid of. I want the journalists and voters of Australia to haunt them like a Greek chorus, crying shame, shame until they are hounded out of office. They should be forced to wander a wasteland of ruined buildings and blackened treestumps, covered with ash of penitence and shame that can never be removed.)

My words are all burnt out, dried up, ash in my mouth. Read the words of others, who say what I cannot: 'Quiet Australians', a poem written last night, through tears, choking through smoke, by my beloved lowercasename. Read First Dog on the Moon's most recent piece, The pain and terror of these bushfires cannot be held in a single human heart.

Witness us, in the wasteland.

This weekend was absolutely baking in Cambridge, at least by UK standards, and I finally had enough time to head over to the fantastic outdoor pool to swim some laps. This pool is always a bit of a challenge — I tend to only swim when I'm in Australia (which generally happens every two or three years), and this pool is 90 metres long. It's also unheated, which means the first lap makes my lungs seize up. While I can quite comfortably swim fifty metres without difficulty, even after a year-long pause from swimming, 90 metres has me panting like a lifelong smoker by the end of the length. Nevertheless, I managed 900 metres on Saturday, and 990 today, arriving at opening time in order to beat the crowds. It got easier by the end, so I really need to try to maintain a regular routine of swimming throughout the summer to keep my lung capacity up.

Other than swimming, I've spent most of the weekend putting the finishing touches on my Night on Fic Mountain assignment, which took me very much outside my comfort zone. I'm happy with the overall result, so let's hope my recipient is too.

I've been making my way through the selected works of those nominated for Best Editor Hugo Awards, but it's starting to feel like a chore, especially for those editors whose tastes really do not align with my own, and I think I've made up my mind as to how to vote in these categories anyway. I'll stick up another discussion post in the next couple of days for the editor and zine categories, and it would be great to see what others of you voting in the Hugos feel about the nominees.

One of my dearest friends, the fabulous lowercasename has created a new social network, which from an initial poke around seems to combine the best bits of Dreamwidth (communities and personal blogs, filtered levels of access) with the best bits of Tumblr (a feature fairly similar to the reblog one, but only available on posts public to all users, not friends-locked ones), plus no ads and no selling of users' data. I'm quite happy with the community and platform here at Dreamwidth, but over the years I've lost touch with many people who first welcomed me online, as they moved away from our original forums and onto platforms where I wasn't interested in following, and this new site looks like it might be a good way to hang out with them. I'm not sure about the scalability of the site, but lowercasename has been upfront about the fact that if it becomes too expensive to maintain without income from ads or selling data, he will shut the site down before doing either of those things.

If you're interested in joining, the platform is called Sweet, and I'm dolorosa over there. If you join, do let me know, and feel free to add me.

I came across this book meme a while ago, and had been waiting until I had a clear month or so to complete it. It looks like it will be a lot of fun, so feel free to steal it and do the meme yourself if you'd like.

Day one is a tough one: favourite book from childhood.

Now, depending on how old I was when you asked me this question, the answer would change quite a bit. I am a fairly loyal reader, and even in childhood I tended to have long stretches of time where a particular book was my favourite — and these can roughly be set out as follows:

( Books behind the cut )

As I said before, I can talk about favourite childhood books forever, and would love to hear about yours, or discuss any of my favourites, in the comments.

( The other days )

On this day, ten years ago, I migrated to the UK. Because I have never been capable of making any change in my life without surrounding myself in a sea of quotes from literature, at the time I quoted one of my favourite works of literature: far from my home/ is the country I have reached, and that quote has proved itself true in many senses over the past ten years.

Although when I made that initial choice to migrate, I had been terrified, in actual fact all I was committing to was nine months spent in Cambridge working on an MPhil. There was no guarantee that anything longer-term would eventuate. But I was twenty-three years old — and a very young twenty-three at that, having only lived away from the family home for a total of six months of my entire life up to that point — and the distance, and the drastic change terrified me. And I have described my decision to migrate in the past as a desperate last throw of the dice — because I had been having a terrible time of it in Australia in the five years since I turned eighteen, moving through a fog of situational depression that I couldn't see a way out of. I had spent those first five years of adulthood completely overwhelmed by the weight of this depression, which manifested in a kind of dull fear, and a fear above all that I was incapable of being happy as an adult. (As an aside, I'm always astonished that anyone who knew or met me during those years has stuck around, because I was a nightmare.) And so the decision to migrate was a kind of test for myself: if I couldn't be happy and make this work, it would never happen. You can see why I was terrified.

I don't know what sort of magic there is in the disgusting, calcified Cambridge water, but nine months and an MPhil turned into five years and a PhD, and eight years and citizenship, and suddenly here I am, and a decade has passed. During that time I gave up on two career paths, and found my calling, acquired two degrees (and, like a glutton for punishment, am literally starting the first classes for yet another degree this very day), fell in love, and out of love, and in love again, got married, found a home, and lost that home in a wave of grief in June 2016 on the very same morning that the British passport that would make my permanent home in this country possible (the document that would, quite literally, make it possible for me to remain) was delivered. Yes, the referendum destroyed my sense of home as being a physical place, a country, and I won't make that mistake again. But above all things, what I learnt in these past ten years (good years, bad years, growing years) is that home is not and cannot be a country (those let you down), but rather it is other people. It is thanks to those other people — the generous, kind and supportive friends I made almost immediately in Cambridge, the open-hearted friends and family members I'd left behind in Australia, and the vast, international community of internet people I've met along the way, whose compassion and patience is boundless — that I feel what I was not able to feel when I left Australia in 2008: safe, happy, and comfortable in my own skin as an adult human being. You are home. You brought me home.