Rodo's Journal

☞ I just had the worst day in about half a year. Which says something, considering that my good days are everybody else's worst days. It started totally promising, of course, with eumelkeks liking the Good Omens fic I wrote (it's in English, btw), Star Trek being delivered and hardly having any problems at all with shopping for groceries. I hadn't felt that good in weeks. And then I spent the rest of the day sobbing, hyperventilating and wishing I would die already. I hate my life (I realise it's the second time I said this today). *sigh* If you have any ideas how to cheer me up (since it's unlikely that I drop dead spontaneously), I'd be grateful. Cute animals don't work at all, though.

☞ In other (happier) news: The Archive of Our Own is going into open beta soon, and since I already have an account, I might get invites to share. Anybody interested or does my entire flist have an account already?

☞ Writing month project isn't going so well, obviously. I didn't write anything at all today.

☞ For those of you who have my phone number: don't call me unless you told me so via e-mail before. The phone is turned off for the time being. I try to avoid any incidences like the one that led to my breakdown today.

☞ Unrelated just plain weird phone stuff: I got an SMS by a couple who wanted to have hard SM sex with me. They apparently got the phone number off a toilet door at some rest stop at an autobahn. Either they mistyped the number or I really don't want to know who had my number before me. It isn't as funny as the woman who wanted to schedule a manicure with me and wouldn't let me tell her that I wasn't who she thought I was, though.

☞ Signed up for Yuletide.. Am simultaneously freaking out and really happy. Hope everything turns out alright. I would have signed up to write for more fandoms, but most of my anime/manga stuff is still at my mum's, so I wouldn't be able to reread it.

☞ How the hell could I possibly miss the creators of Hot Fuzz reccing slash fanfic? No, really. Btw, the recced story is really good.

☞ My writing project is going so so. I've 13:01:15 hours left. I'm not in much of a writing mood at the moment. I'm not really in a mood for anything at all, including eating, gaming, reading, watching TV, sleeping, being awake, going shopping ... well, you get the picture. I hate this time of the month.

☞ There are a ton of promising fan projects springing up everywhere, or so it seems to me. I want to participate in so many of them, but I'm not sure how much I can juggle. At least the Christmas related writing projects are temporary. Oh, and lian is looking for people interested in a shiny new OTW committee (post includes the loveliest tacky .gifs I've seen in a while) and the OTW in general is looking for volunteers. We're always glad to see new people. Really. Even if you don't have any experience.

☞ Kind of related: If you're interested in learning Python, a programming language, you might take a look at intro_to_cs, where we'll try to teach it to ourselves with the help of MIT's OpenCourseWare project. We'll start on lecture 1 on Monday, and you can participate once or twice a week, and if November doesn't work for you, maybe you'd like to start next year?

Okay, the obvious answer to this question would be: “Because not everybody in the world knows English and the AO3 is meant to be for everyone”, and that’s a good answer. It’s not the only answer, though. I know people who never learned English in school. I also know people who have difficulties learning languages and thus never really understood English. But generally speaking, I’m from a country where many, many people learned English in school (it’s compulsory for everyone in my state, for example), where many advertisements are in English, just like shop names, product names and many, many more. In theory, all these people should be able to navigate the archive.

( However, being surrounded by English all the time evidently doesn't mean people understand it. )

The topic of this post is one that has been on my mind for years, and this certainly isn’t the first attempt to write it all down. This post is about my very subjective experience in fandom, which, I believe, is not quite normal. I suppose all of you who are multifannish know at least to some degree what I am talking about, because essentially, I am talking about being in two fandoms at once. But while most people experience two fandoms as two different things they’re interested in, for me, it is the same thing, in two languages.

So I suppose this is where I should introduce myself: I am a German and German is my first language. I didn’t really start learning English until I was ten (so I am not really bilingual). I started writing fanfiction when I was seven. I discovered fandom when I started reading the AnimaniA when I was fourteen. I doubt more than a few of you ever touched that magazine, but I loved it. Buying the new issue was more fun than Christmas. I discovered online fandom when I was nineteen, googling Harry Potter and finding Animexx. A few months later, somebody posted the translation of this really great Harry Potter fanfic (or so I thought at the time – it was the Draco Trilogy), and I started reading it in English.

( That was five years ago, and since then, I spent time in English and in German fandom. )

This post is also available on Dreamwidth

For those of you who didn't know yet:

The beta version of Fanlore, the OTW's wiki has been launched.

My reaction for now: *points at icon*