Some reasons why today has sucked a wee bit.

I am not feeling great. I slept for fourteen hours and am still sleeeeeepy. And I keep falling over. And I don't want to do anything except sit around and mope and watch Doctor Who. It is not a fun state of being. Well, maybe it is because I'm not doing any work, but still. I'm sure I will wake up with a start some time next week and realise I have to stay awake for three days to get through everything I'm not doing now, but, y'know. Never mind.

So I have been reading my flist most of the day, and it's making me a little bit angry but mostly very sad. Every single post is about, of course, the current LJ/Warriors of Innocence/chan kerfuffle. I don't really want to discuss the freedom-of-speech issue, nor the difference between fiction and reality and such like, because a) see above and b) it's all been said. I'm just sad because I have this horrible sense that I always get, after a while: I'm in a subculture. We're all a subculture. And for people like us, there's never the feeling that aha, my hobby, my friends, part of the shaping influences on my life, are guaranteed, are legitimate and publically endorsed. No group I've ever been a part of ever has been. Which is okay, most of the time, when we're just being loudly fannish in our corner - you can be safe in the knowledge that what you do and say and consume and create is, in its way, a tiny part of a paradigm being subverted, you know? By being part of fandom, you engage in a tiny bit of activism, a tiny bit of waving the flag and telling the world we're here, we matter.

But then most of the time I forget that. Warriors For Innocence are all very well - there are always extremists running about being crazy - and LJ, too, is covering its own arse from potential prosecution, so I can't blame it outright. But I wish LJ Abuse would make a concrete statement, define what is illegal and what isn't, and for god's sake explain why Lolita reading groups and abuse-survivor groups are being deleted. None of this arbitrary pandering to the wishes of an outside group over its own users. The problem, I guess, is that we're a subculture, and sometimes the bad guys win.

Sometimes the bad guys win. I really hope this blows over without damaging LJ-based fandom permanently. That may be misplaced optimism. But I hope so.

I am not deleting my journal, its posts, its interests, for the record. None of them are affected anyway, I think; I'm not one for the porn, underage or not. (Which isn't to say I've never read it.) But even if I were, I wouldn't be deleting. I'd be exporting and sitting tight.

And because I am a fangirl, and I engage in my own culture, a couple of links:

fandom_counts - a community which aims, plain and simple, to count every fannish person on LJ. All you have to do to be counted is join. It's at 6525 as I post this.

And, greatest fun ever: The Rodney McKay Backhanded Compliments Meme, provided by the lovely rue_du_hoquet. First there was the John Sheppard version (the Thing We Don't Talk or Hug About Meme), and now, there is a space to tell all your friends how you'd prefer spending time with them to, say, death by fire! It's awesome.

Also in news of the awesome, Claire and I spotted two of our tutors wandering down Broad Street holding hands. There was squee. It isn't wrong to fangirl your tutors, is it? Is it?

And now, because I am ILL and MISERABLE, I leave you to watch Gridlock for the twentieth second time. Woooooe. Thankfully, yesterday I realised I hadn't taken a shower, done my laundry, tidied my room or bought any food in a decidedly skanky length of time, and proceeded to do all those things, and now I can go to bed and be mopey in peace.

Ohhhh, and we didn't get onto University Challenge! Twenty-eight teams were picked, out of a hundred and something, and our captain got told that we came twenty-ninth.

WOE.