Poll: Distraction Is Good

[thefourthvine]

I'm kind of - not too bright sometimes. For example, when I grabbed an oven rack to move it around without, um, checking to see if it was hot? That was a "not so bright" moment in my life, right there.

Also, ow.

So I want distraction, with a minimum of typing involved. It's time for a poll! With, ideally, lots of comments! Come on, people - please. Distract me.

(I do actually have a place I'm going with this, by the way - except for the last question, which is there solely because LJ is crazed tonight. I'm trying to find out what fans do and how they do it. Assuming the ice does its job, I'll have a meta post on this sometime in the distant, murky future. Probably.)

[Poll #830222]

Comments

[thefourthvine.livejournal.com]

Ooo! Fannish hive mind at work. And thank you for linking me to that. (It's particularly interesting because you focused on something I forgot. When I was writing this poll it just, um, totally slipped my mind that the majority of fans actually watch their canon. This says a lot about how I interact with fandoms, doesn't it?)

I take it your conflictedness about your gorillahood is in part because you don't know how to balance the time? (Or because you just plain don't have the time.) I mean, that's how the poll sounded.

For me, what I tend to lapse on is my friends list; when my time gets short - and it does that a lot - that's the first thing to go. And, of course, it helps that I am a chronic insomniac - I think more than half of all LJ fans are - and I don't watch TV at all. I spend the time I would normally spend sleeping and, presumably, watching TV on fandom.

So, did you come to any conclusions about dividing your time and being a happier gorilla?

[joandarck.livejournal.com]

When I was writing this poll it just, um, totally slipped my mind that the majority of fans actually watch their canon. This says a lot about how I interact with fandoms, doesn't it?

It does! Although I don't know if 'majority' is true. Watching canon is how most people become fans in the first place, presumably, but it seems like once you're in the culture, people often tend to stay just for chat and fic. But how focused you are on the source material does affect things like how you perceive canon vs. fanon, I think.

Re: being a gorilla, it's really more of an emotional conflict. Being a fan for me is obsession, an all-encompassing love. It's hard to give that to two or three sets of people and ideas at once. And once you get up to five or six, it turns into just sex, as it were - so much fun OMG, but no true involvement, and a bit frustrating that way.

But it's definitely the lack of time that lends it the urgency. If I were in college and had all summer to drift from one thing to another, I probably wouldn't worry about it. But trying to sneak fandom activity in at 2 a.m. (insomnia, check) and still hold down a steady job, it feels like every moment counts, and with so many choices, I have to consciously pick something to be absorbed in, and that's strange.

No solutions yet. I've just let fan things lapse for a while and been social, mostly. But been VERY stern about refusing to watch new shows, like this Slings & Arrows one hears so much about.