Musings on repetition
May. 27th, 2006 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm currently trying to figure out if things are getting more boring or if I'm just more bored.
Like, Fortean Times. Lately I haven't been reading the main articles, just the news clippings and strange deaths. Which I could pull from Yahoo anyways, mostly, so why am I still getting FT? I used to like it. Is it the change in editors? The change in schedule? Some change in focus? Or am I just bored with the bizarre?
Fortean issues get kind of samey after a while. I mean, okay, first time you see a rain of frogs, pretty freaky, but after a while? You end up realising we've got nothing but questions, and that in most areas this has been true for about a hundred years now, so answers are somewhat unlikely. Or, there are answers, but they don't go anywhere. Ghosts may or may not be 'real' in the sense of having some existence outside of a person's mind, and may or may not be 'real' in the sense of having something to do with dead people, but they definitely are 'real' in the sense that people experience them. Okay. Now what?
Write stories, yes, but that I could do with imagination even if it weren't any kind of real.
Then there's the kind of fandom meta I read a lot of lately. Same argue, over and over. Or sometimes it stays a discussion, which is more interesting. But stuff like 'fanfic - yaay or unyaay' or 'slash - gay or anti-gay' comes up over and over, and mostly people don't define their words, and often the same bits of famous incident come up over and over again without being any better researched, and it just gets... Old.
Sociology this week was about theories of the effects of media violence. Like, does it make little kids go out and kill. And its just the same there. The same bits of ancient research get pulled up in the yes argument, and the same objections to the ridiculous research get made every time, and it turns out people are basing theories on media reports and not on original evidence, and it turns out the media reports were in some way incomplete or plain wrong (shock horror!) and yet it gets even more frustrating than fandom arguments, for out of all this governments make policy. Based on absolute bollocks sometimes. And laws get made. Often unenforceable, ambiguous, stupid, contradictory laws. Where there were in fact plenty good laws in the first place.
I am rather glad that nobody can like blow a whistle at fandom and say no more this thing.
Except for governments.
Which fandom tries to ignore, but which are geting rather worrying around the edges.
I guess what bugs me is... All this seems like input only. Like, output makes no difference. Can say a thing many times, but still there will be many more times a thing needs saying, on account of there are six billion people in the world with widely varying backgrounds and imperfect memories. I don't have time to say any thing six billion times! Take a very long time, that would.
So all this reading is just input. Like... I'm getting the reading equivalent of fat, because all eating and never moving.
So logically, to make world less boring, I should do the reading equivalent of getting up and dancing. Which means, should write.
But. Writing remains sort of frustrating. I mean you can write about changing the world, but only very small parts of the world get changed, you know? And there is lots of dumb in the world.
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.
But the doing it many times to no effect is... What leads to grand gestures like NFA, I guess.
Women's work, traditionally, needs to be done every day. I'm not very good at that kind of work. No motivation.
This is why I end up with plans like 'win lottery, make movie'. Because big splash of a thing done.
Bet I'd still get sulky about how the world isn't changed though.
Like, Fortean Times. Lately I haven't been reading the main articles, just the news clippings and strange deaths. Which I could pull from Yahoo anyways, mostly, so why am I still getting FT? I used to like it. Is it the change in editors? The change in schedule? Some change in focus? Or am I just bored with the bizarre?
Fortean issues get kind of samey after a while. I mean, okay, first time you see a rain of frogs, pretty freaky, but after a while? You end up realising we've got nothing but questions, and that in most areas this has been true for about a hundred years now, so answers are somewhat unlikely. Or, there are answers, but they don't go anywhere. Ghosts may or may not be 'real' in the sense of having some existence outside of a person's mind, and may or may not be 'real' in the sense of having something to do with dead people, but they definitely are 'real' in the sense that people experience them. Okay. Now what?
Write stories, yes, but that I could do with imagination even if it weren't any kind of real.
Then there's the kind of fandom meta I read a lot of lately. Same argue, over and over. Or sometimes it stays a discussion, which is more interesting. But stuff like 'fanfic - yaay or unyaay' or 'slash - gay or anti-gay' comes up over and over, and mostly people don't define their words, and often the same bits of famous incident come up over and over again without being any better researched, and it just gets... Old.
Sociology this week was about theories of the effects of media violence. Like, does it make little kids go out and kill. And its just the same there. The same bits of ancient research get pulled up in the yes argument, and the same objections to the ridiculous research get made every time, and it turns out people are basing theories on media reports and not on original evidence, and it turns out the media reports were in some way incomplete or plain wrong (shock horror!) and yet it gets even more frustrating than fandom arguments, for out of all this governments make policy. Based on absolute bollocks sometimes. And laws get made. Often unenforceable, ambiguous, stupid, contradictory laws. Where there were in fact plenty good laws in the first place.
I am rather glad that nobody can like blow a whistle at fandom and say no more this thing.
Except for governments.
Which fandom tries to ignore, but which are geting rather worrying around the edges.
I guess what bugs me is... All this seems like input only. Like, output makes no difference. Can say a thing many times, but still there will be many more times a thing needs saying, on account of there are six billion people in the world with widely varying backgrounds and imperfect memories. I don't have time to say any thing six billion times! Take a very long time, that would.
So all this reading is just input. Like... I'm getting the reading equivalent of fat, because all eating and never moving.
So logically, to make world less boring, I should do the reading equivalent of getting up and dancing. Which means, should write.
But. Writing remains sort of frustrating. I mean you can write about changing the world, but only very small parts of the world get changed, you know? And there is lots of dumb in the world.
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.
But the doing it many times to no effect is... What leads to grand gestures like NFA, I guess.
Women's work, traditionally, needs to be done every day. I'm not very good at that kind of work. No motivation.
This is why I end up with plans like 'win lottery, make movie'. Because big splash of a thing done.
Bet I'd still get sulky about how the world isn't changed though.