I did in fact stop in at Home Depot last night to pick up a new light bulb for my bathroom (everyone I mentioned this to was surprised but it's not like they carry 3 ft. long fluorescent bulbs in Duane Reade. Or maybe they do and I just can't find them), and then when I climbed up onto the toilet to install it, I discovered that the reason the old one wasn't working was that it had somehow slipped free of the socket. I guess all the construction in the hallway shook it loose? I dunno, but I pushed it back in and it was fine. Fiat lux etc. So now I have an extra bulb. *hands* It only cost me $12 and an extra 20 minutes on my commute home, so I can't complain too much.
In other news, I've filled up my library hold list with a bunch of non-fiction - I find the library is best for that since some of those books are very expensive, even as ebooks - but I can't help but wonder what a recommendation algorithm would make of it. I guess history and baseball and space? Which would not be an inaccurate description of some of my interests, I guess.
Work is speeding towards inevitable chaos. I know I keep vague blogging about it - a practice I cordially despise when other people do it (because I want to know goddammit) but which I don't have the energy to not do right now - but the long and short of it is that we have our quarterly board meeting and our annual fundraising event on back to back evenings in June, and while the former makes up the bulk of my job, the latter is something I've only ever been tangentially involved in until now, so it is taking up all of my time and then some, even the time I generally need for the board stuff. It's not hard stuff, just time consuming and all-pervasive, and as the timeline shortens, it's only going to get worse.
Fannishly, I just want to read things that are tailor-made to my interests and I'm not really going out of my way to look for them, so I'm mostly just rereading stuff I already know I love. I could complain about fandom not catering to my specific whims, but who couldn't? So I won't. I did see that there's a lot of talk about fan entitlement lately, both in terms of Marvel's current nonsense and also the umpteenth iteration of the feedback debate within fandom and on the former I just roll my eyes because I saw the source of that one article that got people's backs up and I don't expect any better from that quarter, and on the latter I just shake my head, because scolding people for not leaving (more? better? idek) feedback has never and will never work. Yes, some people will be motivated by guilt but ugh, that always makes me think of the fans who threaten to pull their work down because they're not appreciated enough (it's a direct line from that to "I won't post the next chapter if I don't get X comments") and I have no time or use for that nonsense on any forum and I don't care who is pulling it.
Has there been a switch from people leaving comments to people leaving kudos? I would say yes? But I also learned a long time ago to manage my expectations when it comes to feedback. I can rarely predict what will garner attention and what won't (I'm told my experiences aren't generally in line with other people's and that does not surprise me), and I almost never think about it during the writing itself, so I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do regardless of what other people do once I post. *hands*
There's always going to be someone who gets more/better whatever and I just can't let myself think about that or I'd never write/post anything ever again. I love getting comments and kudos, though I am terrible at responding in a timely fashion sometimes, which probably makes some people less likely to leave more in the future, but that's just one more thing I can't control. What I can do is make recommendations and hope people follow them and give feedback, and I can post my own work and hope people like it enough to respond. While many of the friendships I've made in my time in fandom have been through giving and receiving feedback comments, that no longer seems to be the model on which the fannish community (which fannish community? idek - I feel like it's so much more diffuse these days) is based, and for me, it's much harder to make those connections on other platforms, though I have met some lovely people via tumblr etc., it's much harder to sustain those connections once we've moved to different fandoms. But that is probably mostly me because I am terrible at believing people actually want to talk to me? So I rarely reach out first. But I am always happy to chat/reply/whatever the current thing is, if I knew what it was.
I don't even know where I was going with this and now work is demanding my attention again. So I guess all I really have to say is do your thing. Make fanworks, leave feedback of the sort that is most comfortable for you, be excellent to each other, and try not to be a dick. It's not that hard. That's all there really is to it.
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