Fockets of Fun

PROPAGANDA:

[Leon]

"he needs an excuse to get a break from work and he would look so beautiful pregnant. 🫃🏼 bonus points if its a B.O.W baby."

"Give me that handsome man. Will take him as a young man or as a grey fox in the newest game . Give him an excuse to retire his knees hurt. He would have a lil girl and name her something cute."

"Everything I have ever learned about this man is from friends who like putting him in situations so I thought I’d do my part."

"Top 3 most breedable men in the franchise without a doubt. His emo phase during Vendetta needs to be studied bc I fear he was either in postpartum depression or on his cycle."

Leon propaganda from last season

[Dean]

"He killed Hitler, he deserves it."

"He's so breedable, and he'd love it so much."

"He’d be hotter and that's enough."

"THE OG OMEGA!"

"He’s called himself Sam's mother, he said he’s nesting, he’s great with kids. He is The Omega, out of all of his sex scenes he has never been on top, he gets disproportionately flustered when men flirt with him as opposed to women. He deserves to be pregnant and eat pie and relax for once damn it."

"Look at his face and you simply cannot deny that man needs to be pregnant. He’s The Omega tm."

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

Clearly you guys like danger, have you never heard of

All right, so straw boater and Panama hats became trendy in the U.S. in the late 19th century, but it was considered “bad form” for men in cities to wear them.  It later became more “acceptable” for men to wear these specific hats ONLY during summer.  By the early 20th century, there was like an unwritten “rule” that they had to stop wearing straw hats and start wearing felt or other types of hats on September 15.  This is already kind of weirdly specific, but, y’know, etiquette rules surrounding attire are known to BE weirdly specific, so fine.  But here’s where it gets full on wacky.

According to Wikipedia, it became a Thing in North American cities for teens to literally accost any man wearing a straw hat on or after September 15, knock his hat off, and stomp on it to destroy it.  It was also “socially acceptable” for stockbrokers (i.e. grown-ass adults) to destroy each other’s straw hats, but NOT acceptable for any other adult strangers to do it to each other.  It became so much of a tradition that newspapers would print warnings close to the date reminding people to switch hats.  Basically men wearing straw hats after the designated date would at minimum risk ridicule, but might also have their head smacked and their property destroyed by Youths.  And this “hat bashing” was apparently fine and dandy from both legal and social perspectives so long as it happened after September 15.

BUT THEN.

On September 13, 1922, a group of teens in New York City decided to begin their shenanigans two days early, and knocked off and stomped the hats of some factory workers.  When they moved on, and tried this with a group of dock workers, however, the “more innocuous stomping” turned into a “brawl” because these men weren’t having any of this nonsense and fought back.  More people were pulled into the fighting, which eventually blocked traffic on a nearby bridge and had to be broken up by police.

But that was not the end of it!  It seems that events “escalated” and continued into the following day!  On the evening of September 14, “teenagers prowled the streets wielding large sticks, sometimes with a nail driven through the top, looking for pedestrians wearing straw hats and beating those who resisted.”  THIS IS A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED.  Men wearing straw hats still within the completely arbitrary acceptability period were getting beaten up by roving gangs of children with clubs.  Several people were hospitalized.  According to one man who had his hat stolen on Amsterdam Avenue, there were upwards of 1,000 kids there stealing and destroying boaters and Panamas.  Police eventually started making arrests (some teens even attacked cops and stomped their hats).

Most of the youths who got arrested were punished with fines, but at least one kid was sentenced to three days in jail by the circumstantially-hilariously-named Magistrate Peter A. Hatting.  Some boys younger than fifteen had their parents called in and were “spanked ignominiously” at a police station at a cop’s order.

Across much of the world, umbrellas are simply used to shield people from the rain or to shade them from the sun. And while visitors to Japan may see many locals using them for these purposes, parasols also serve a far more powerful role in Japanese culture: they're spiritual vessels. According to Tatsuo Danjyo, Professor Emeritus of humanities at Beppu University in Japan's Ōita prefecture, Japanese tradition holds that certain objects – including umbrellas – can serve as yorishiro (an object that attracts gods or spirits). This belief is deeply rooted in history. Umbrellas first appeared in Japan between the 9th and 11th Centuries, but instead of shielding people from the weather, they served as symbols of spiritual or political power. Early umbrellas, such as the long-handled sashikake-gasa, were reserved for religious and political figures and were held by attendants over the elite.

And I remember someone tracked down the actual article and discovered that (a) the authors were Indian, and (b) the answer was actually a super cool exploration of how Indian cookery uses spices to create contrasting flavours, unlike almost every other cuisine, which tries to pair similar/harmonising flavours.

it intrigues me how some people are so focused on calling out racism that they inadvertently circle back into having a white-centric mindset, just instead of glorification, it's demonization to the point of not reading what's being said or even who said it. i wonder if it's related to journalism speak and how people assume based on the writing style or think that the news site,,, indicates the journalist's whiteness? i don't know.

there's something about the fact this happened enough times that two instances are noted in this post, two journalists of specific cultures making articles explaining an aspect of their culture, but something about the wording or the site it's hosted on or SOMETHING made people immediately assume a white person wrote it out of ignorance or hate. it makes me wonder how many other articles detailing real history or culture were ignored because the author was assumed white.

it confuses me more when it's white people saying these things. if you cared so much about the potential racism of what's being said/written, wouldn't you want to know exactly what it is they're saying so that you can think critically about the author's intent, motivation, and background in relation to the article? or to at the very least see who the author is if you plan to form an opinion on their work?

on the other hand i can kind of understand it from the standpoint of "white people historically appropriate cultures they get their hands on and colonize the shit out of things" so it's not like i blame people of colour for being on-guard about the idea of white people writing about "why does this culture do this?" or "why is this culture's food/invention/status so good?", but if you don't know who wrote what you're criticizing you might, as the last reblog said, erase the work and cultural discussion of journalists of colour aiming to share their experiences and history.

(that aren’t the Pilot Metro or Lamy Safari) 

(So you never have to ask me for recs again)

New to fountain pens? Long-time enthusiast? No matter, you’re probably sick of hearing about the Lamy Safari and the Pilot Metropolitan (or Pilot MR in certain markets) and their respective merits as beginner fountain pens. It feels like every other day someone asks for suggestions for their first fountain pen, and inevitably the recommendations for either of those two come flooding in.  

It’s not without reason. I’m guilty too—the Lamy Safari is still one of my favourite pens of all time (and I will still recommend it), and the Metropolitan is just about the safest bet you can make on a fountain pen when you’re just getting started.  

That being said, there are a ton of other pens out there, and I feel like newbies sometimes miss out on pens they might like better. So, to help further our collective horizons, here are 22 OTHER fountain pens for absolute beginners.  With links!

All under $30.  

For shimmer inks, Diamine is really well known for well-behaved shimmers. I have a bunch of theirs, they’re always rarely clog and are generally well priced and a great all-around option.

I am also really enjoying Wearingeul Inks! They have a lot of pretty shimmers (with great names XD) I’ve used their “The Great Sage Heaven’s Equal” for a while now with no problems.

Robert Oster is another brand with, in my experience, good shimmers.

Sailor doesn’t have a lot of shimmers, but they have a lot of gorgeous, very well-behaved inks. Their dual-shading inks are definitely worth checking out. (I am at the moment kinda preferring dual shading to shimmer, partially because they’re easier to clean out of pens and less likely to clog.)

Troublemaker Inks can be hard to find but they have some GORGEOUS inks, both intense colors and cool dual-shading. They make my favorite muddy green - Hanging Rice.

If you want to check out in-depth ink reviews, Mountain of Ink is hard to beat. A lot of people do ink reviews but I appreciate MoI’s consistent review format and the sheer number of reviews she’s done. That said, you will definitely end up with a terrifyingly long shopping list, which brings me to my next point…

Vanness Pens has the best selection of inks in the US. They’re my go-to for inks! It’s pretty much always worth it to buy a sample before committing to a whole bottle.

Also good: JetPens, Yoseka Stationery, Enigma Stationery. (Avoid Goulet Pens, they turned out to be super fundamentalist Christian and one of the pastors of the church the owners helped found compared LGBTQ people to murderers.)

(Also avoid Noodler’s inks, the owner is racist, antisemitic, anti-vaxx, and his inks sometimes damage pens.)

Inks I Have Issues With (Aside from the Aforementioned Noodler’s):

De Atramentis copper shimmers: so pretty. Sooooo prone to clogging 🫠 they’re utterly gorgeous but they’re also the only inks I have used which instantly clogged my TWSBI pens. They’re very pretty in dip pens but don’t waste your money on them for fountain pens, imo.

Ferris Wheel Press has gorgeous packaging but they’re also kinda notorious for being dry inks. A lot of people feel they’re more about the packaging than the actual product (influencer brand ugh.) Also they’ve used AI, their pens are repackaged Fuliwen pens that they charge too much for, and they are doing a Harry Potter collab -_-

absolutely get yourself the little test vials of ink which are extremely useful for testing out colours without spending huge amounts of money - and also get different papers! Different inks behave differently on Rhodia / Clairefountain / Leuchtturm / Midori / Tomoe River. I like getting small notepads for inks testing and shopping lists. Avoid Moleskin, they suck.

get yourself a cartridge converter and this syringe-like instrument for easy loading and cleaning:

my current favourite inks are J.Herbin Turquoise de Perse, Diamine Racing Green, Barock 1920 Sepia and KWZ Sheen Machine

(Also I didn't know that about Ferris Wheel press, what a bummer!)