Cassandra

It's like someone got all their ideas from bad 80s SF novels.

We made it thru this week. Great job. Proud of you.

Now for some free advice from Aunt Mo:

If you are in touch w folks via DMs on any platform, DISCUSS NOTHING IMPORTANT THERE. If you ever want to discuss (via text or call) anything that is sensitive/personal at all, I am begging you: USE SIGNAL

Seen on a banner over the DC beltway: "live like you're dying"

Holy shit, that's in driving distance from Oregon!

An open wooden porch described by log supports, behind which a cheerful array of rooms rest. In front, a courtyard with variously shaped chairs alongside a very lush pond full of lilies and surrounded by various aquatic plantlife.

A crossroads in a maze of fern, raw redwood, and cobbled walls.

A quarter-circle of neck-deep, hammered copper tub sits in a corner of a redwood and earthen alcove studded with clusters of ferns.

A concrete path winds between earthen walls almost entirely covered in brilliant green ferns. An archway of cobbled-together redwood lies at one end - to the side, a clawfoot bathtub lurks amidst the ferns.

I am a very content if overcooked noodle. www.frontporchinn.net

Symmetry!

Thank you. My fingers are crossed that flying Nevada to Massachusetts will be too expensive given the holiday.

My great aunt just died. wonderful human. Funeral this Friday, gotta fly to Boston. Faint chance my Falangist father or my MAGA-ass uncle will make it. Rest of the family? Great. Nuclear family? Can I declare a Mulligan?

thank you! Oh, that's near Axe Man, isn't it?

Ignore me, the street sign is right there.

Wait hold on where in the Twin Cities is this? I need to add this to my next visit's itinerary.

A red tabby cat lounges across a fuzzy blanket, paws outstretched before himself and claws spread wide as he kneads,

He lounge.

A small green frog on the outside of a beige front door.

Recent wildlife is confused.

The Greater North American Cable Seeking Backhoe is drawn to the vibrations emitted by a website experiencing extra high traffic. It is known.

Goose meme. Thesis statement: “Dude only food being tariffed is fancy foreign stuff, not something most people use” Goose: Where are coffee beans grown? Goose chasing human in a puffy parka: I SAID WHERE ARE COFFEE BEANS GROWN

I loved these books when I was a teenager! They had such great vibes and worldbuilding, and Mouse is amazing.

Anyway. Dunno what to do about fandom. But as for me? I hope I'm never the smartest person in the room. If I am, time to find another room.

But that's the thing. If you're the smartest person in the room, and you got comfy there - why would you ever, really, adapt?

And it's not like this is new, right? The Internet's been around going on half a century now.

Folks are no longer just at a party where a bore is talking a room of twenty to thirty people to sleep, or in a function space doing the same with one hundred. There's thousands of people watching. Thousands of people who are real sick of the supposed smartest person in the room being an ass.

The assumptions of the previous ability to pull one over by claiming technical error, by saying it was just that one crazy lady - by relying on ridiculous, obscure, maddening procedure to bore one out of process - well, it just doesn't hold anymore.

Everything moves faster now, including the speed of fans of previous and current generations to converge on information.

And, well, the Hugo's, right? It's always been big, but it's always been somewhere else. Face to face gossip is impermanent, only goes so far, and the amateur press zine backbone, phone calls, and SMOFs who travel a lot between cities only goes so far.

Instead of a couple hundred people in a local city knowing you're a shit, and one or two talking about it, the local con-runners doing nothing, saying something, and getting shouted down, and then marginalized, you now have half a chance of people realizing "hey something's fucky"

There's an awful lot of fans of older generations who grew with the Internet and understood what it meant but I think there's also a lot who fundamentally failed to grasp how fast information moves. Or didn't bother thinking through the consequences.

When the room is a couple medium-sized ballrooms, that's fine, maybe? But fandom got bigger. Got better at communicating. And then the Internet came along.

You have a lot of people who are baseline clever banging up against other clever folks, but also settling into being comfy, and not growing, and getting comfy in being the smartest person in the room.

I sometimes wonder if half of fandom's problem isn't that it became an echo chamber which reified small fish in small ponds, and as the ponds became more of a watershed, the fish refused to adapt to the wider environs.