adventures in fangirl

I think it's funny that my tagline for this site is "adventures in fangirl (and not very adventurous)" because it's also been almost 4 years since I last posted anything here. I'm just not much of a longform sort of social media girlie I guess. But it's also the last day or so of browsing period for Fandom Trumps Hate 2025, and I just made the promos for that last night. And I'm on board now as timer and encoder to a GL show (that I got hooked up with here on dreamwidth!). And I have been journaling, theoretically, since the start of the year. (Almost three months, if you count my several weeks of not journaling at all.)

So I guess I have some updates is what I'm trying to say. Some things to lay down and catch this journal up on. I mean, why not.

The most timely thing is what I said already, that I put up two offerings for FTH 2025, and they're both for podfic. I did offer one fanart piece last year and felt bad about it and procrastinated so hard that I just...figured I would not offer fanart for a bit. It's been really hard to make myself sit down and find time to do art.


And here, have a tumblr promo link and bluesky promo link.

Other fannish things I've been up to here and there:

• I made a neocities site where I made a fangirl's cv.and migrated my Untamed guide to. I started an Ateez one as well but it isn't finished and I haven't touched it in a couple months.
• the duckling watchalong group is going into its fifth year somehow. We've watched the Untamed I think a total of 4 or 5 times? Bringing new folks into it each time. We're rolling like a katamari ball and still going strong. Maybe a dozen folks on zoom every week. But we've only just moved into watching Word of Honor, and this'll be the longest single series we've committed to in between Untamed watches at 36 episodes. (The Untamed is 50 eps so that alone takes half a year.)
• I'm also in another less regular watchalong group that's also been going since 2020. Since before the duckling watch started actually (the joke was that I'm the mama duck leading people through the Untamed, hence duckling watch), and it's only a handful of us. I think 6? But we usually can't meet more than once a month unfortunately. But it's a good group. We've watched Supernatural (with a watch guide), Stranger Things, Squid Game, and now Star Trek TOS. At this point it's unclear if we're only sticking to S-names for fun or for real.
• I recently volunteered as a subtitle timer and encoder for a subtitle project, which I'm pretty excited about. I only just joined the discord server for organizing it tonight and have just downloaded the raws.
• I'm mostly on discord and bluesky these days, and I'm headlong into a kpop group (Ateez). It's a funny thing to think about that I wasn't into them at all really when I last posted, but I've been in Ateez fandom for a couple years now and have spent...thousands of dollars at this point. On albums, merch, and going to concerts. I've managed to see them six times, five times at their solo concerts (DC, LA x2, Chicago x2 summer 2024).

Fandom feels both escapist and necessary. The world is on fire. I journal when I can and most of it is parenting angst, wondering what kind of kids I'm raising and if I'm doing right by them. If I'm missing anything, if they'll somehow grow up with issues and complexes and the kind of loneliness and anger that drives people into rightwing moral cesspools. Them being half Asian from my side won't protect them from white supremacy. They are sweet kids, and I want them to stay sweet. I spend a lot of time thinking about this, and hoping I'm doing enough.

The other day, Anarfea DMed me on my personal instagram (I have a fandom one I'm on a lot more) because she had a dream about me and she wanted to know how I was, if I was going to 221b con. That's the plan, and so far this year was still meant to be the last one. We're all hoping it's not, and hoping something else will fill its void if it does go under. It's only a few weeks away, and the plane disasters as of late have been making me wary about traveling. It feels selfish to want to go. But I think I've treated a lot of fandom community things in the last couple years as important to go, because we don't know when we'll be able to go again. Will that comfort my kids if I die in a plane crash though? I doubt it.

My thoughts are all over the place, I suppose. Just in general. I think anyone reading this will be unsurprised to learn that my weekly therapy sessions are like this, slippery and wandering. Most recently, there's been a lot of sleep deprivation involved. A sleep schedule that's so properly fucked that I'm awake at 5 and 6am most days. And this past weekend I still had to be up at 8 or 9 or 10am. I've not been sleeping for longer than 3-4 hour stretches for several days now. It's hard to tell what's ADHD from the inside-out and what's sleep deprivation from the outside-in, making me only about half as functional as I could be. My memory is pretty shot, and I can't tell if that's mommy brain or not, but I seem to recall having a poor memory from before I had the kids. It's not easy to tease apart any of it, it's all just sort of. Soup.

Even before the inauguration, I was having a really terrible 2025. The month of January lasted approximately seven years. I had the flu (the whole family did, in phases), I had a terrible incident with a completely off-his-face drunk Marc, I had jury duty while I had the flu, and got a $95 ticket that I still haven't paid for parking in a truck loading zone. But originally. Originally, at the end of December / early January, I had this idea that I wanted to do some things for myself. On something of a schedule even. Something as close to a new year's resolution as I've ever made, as I'm terrible with those.

• daily: language lesson. Lots to choose from but ASL, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Japanese.
• weekly: 1) write and 2) stretch/exercise. Ideally more like 2-4x per week, but I didn't make a schedule between daily and weekly.
• monthly: finish a piece of art or craft. Anything, like art or podfic or fic or a bracelet. Whatever
• quarterly: publish something to ao3. "Feels like a stretch goal" is what I wrote about that to in the journal.

I guess I just feel like I should write it down, lest I forget that I even had those goals. That I had the idea once that these were my priorities, that this is what I wanted to spend my time on, what I wanted to get done. And I guess that's why I wrote anything here at all. Just to mark down what I was thinking at 3am once. Four years from the last time I decided to write down that I did something. I've done things in the meantime, even if I forget them.

The way the backs of my eyes hurt feels like an indefensible, naked statement: the world's a poorer place. It feels indulgent and laden with guilt. Here we are, here we always are, in between other deaths, people with less success and shorter lives, close and far away. It feels selfish to mourn sometimes, preposterous to take one loss and stretch it across so much. But there's only so much mass in the universe, and it feels like a colossal waste that atoms, that have taken such balletic pains to collide and form stars and decay and become an individual person, should be undone just like that. A whole person, vanished.

I don't believe in god. I have a hard time with the sentiment that hopefully he's at peace now. I have a hard time with oblivion being okay.

Robin Williams died the day after my dad's birthday. He's always been the same age as my mom; I think of that whenever I see his birth year. I have more memories of laughing with him than I do with my own dad, for all that my dad lived for 4 years longer. What that says about me or him or my family life is probably telling of something.

I have a hard time with oblivion.

It has been several years since I had a livejournal account. I can't even remember my first account, but it must have been about 1999 or 2000, I want to say. It was definitely before college, which I started in 2001.

I really almost can't believe I'm back. I don't feel facetious at all in saying that this feels like I've picked up a long under-control drug habit after many years on the wagon. And I promise I've never had substance abuse issues, but man, I've had internet codependence issues for just about all my adult life. That sort of thing was kind of shunned at one point in my life, but nowadays I think people don't judge you anymore for it. It's normal. It's not just nerds who are like this. (I'll confess I think of many of the people on tumblr as one of the cool kids, and I envy that they get social media in an age of geek chic.)

But this nigh uncomfortable nostalgia trip is something I feel is fairly unique to the generation that discovered the internet, as opposed to the generation just after mine that was basically born into it. (Insert Bane reference here.)

Or maybe I'm talking out of my ass because I'm sleep deprived. Maybe it's not generational at all; maybe it's just personal. All those years ago...livejournal in particular was not a positive place for me. I feel like over the years, I've forged the internet to be a much more positive place for me. But it used to be nothing but a bottomless trough of post-pubescent angst. Not because of anything inherent in it, but this place was one of solace and anger and grief that life wasn't what I wanted it to be, and nothing at all resembling squee. It was shelter, and very often just an echo chamber for my personal venting. I was so depressed and angry. It saddens me just to think about it.

Now I'm anxious, but I don't think rage issues and depression are the name of the game anymore. That's something like progress.

I checked out some of my old accounts. Skimmed, because so much of it was still really painful to go back to. I found an old tagline of mine that I remember using often, across many account moves. "My name is Caroline. I live in New York. Everything else is a work in progress." Thirteen years later and this is still the case. I guess I never expected any different. I was never going to turn out like some kind of cake, but the surprise really is that life feels very circular indeed. Back on lj of all places. Caroline, this is your life.

In future, friends, I might put personal posts like this one in a friends-only bubble. It's strange the things we share with the world, the walls we put up. Personal posts on an ostensibly fannish existence livejournal. I'm mostly anonymous to my fandom friends, even though many of you actually talk to me more often than some real life friends, and you are privy to the nightblogging world of my mind and you know my kinks and preoccupations. The shape of my privacy in this world seems strange and I'm making it up as I go along. But for now, chalk it up to the sleep deprivation. Another thing that hasn't changed in my adult life.