(no subject)

 Holmes' initial greeting to a complete stranger is "Watch! I can cut my finger open and bleed into a solution and make it change colour! Isn't it amazing!?" and that is a HUGE forensic chemistry mood, this is something every forensic chemistry major and I would do. In a heartbeat. 

Fandom musings

Allow me to take you on a journey. This is a shorter journey than some peoples' but I'd like to take you on it all the same.

2008. Little me (high school, so young, so naive) wants to be a Fan of things on the internet. Fanfiction.net is around, but it's a bit odd, and the good fic is few and far between. Also, I'm raised real conservative so high school me is afraid of, y'know, searching FF.net for anything even close to explicit.

Enter quizilla. Quizilla* isn't even around anymore, I don't think, but it was a quiz-taking site. Ostensibly. If one peeked underneath the shiny veneer of Buzzfeed-like "what type of alien are you?" quizzes, one would find something entirely different.

Lemons.

Now, for the uninitiated, this means smut. Not hard smut, but smut all the same. You'd take a quiz titled something like "Which HP character would you fall in love with if you were Hermione?" And then at the end it would be like "DRACO MALFOY" or whatever character the author shipped Hermione with. And then the description, rather than being a description of you, would instead be a whole little fic of Hermione/Draco.

I spent hours on this site. Hours. Because it was the only place that had this stuff readily available, easily searchable, just there to be read and enjoyed. Eventually it cracked down on the lemons, and then suddenly FF.net was inundated with new fic - people migrated over, taking their smutty, smutty fic with them.

FF.net didn't like that. They cracked down, and so did LJ, pretty close in timing as I remember. So then a lot of fandom shifted to tumblr.

Tumblr changed the game majorly. It's not built for fandom, it's hardly built for communication at all. I once saw tumblr described as "shrieking into the void hoping someone shrieked back," and that is very true, but also, it's ideal for lurkers to 'participate' without participating. The one major upside to tumblr is that you can reblog and support an artist/writer/opinion without adding anything new to it. It's passive participation, but it boosts the sphere of the original creator. 

I like pillowfort and dreamwidth, but I feel like pillowfort is going to attract more people because it has that ability. DW is great for constant interaction but if I really agree with a post or I really like a piece of art, I can't boost it without creating my own post, when what I really want to do is just present the original post to those who subscribe to me. 

Anyway, this doesn't have a huge point. It's just a musing on how fandom and migration changes and shifts, and no matter how much sites are not built to host its content - such as a QUIZ SITE - fandom always finds a way to be enthusiastic about things. 

*Edit: I got "quizlet" mixed up with the actual website name, "quizilla".