March 16, 2005

• Do you mean this Live Journal entry?
• I think the point is that, ten years ago, not many people had heard of this "web" thing, much less considered that it would be an ideal place to publish their new Senate Slash fic featuring a hott locker-room threesome between Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Ken Salazar (D-CO). More people doing it ---> more weirdness. Just look at the explosion in numbers of blogs being created; you could equally well say that there's been an increase in the strangeness of people's diaries over the past ten years. Possibly you could make a case that greater opportunity leads to more outrageous behaviour (would all those bloggers have been keeping diaries anyway? Would so many of them have adopted personas and characteristics in their diaries that aren't fully representative of their real-life personalities?). But I think, by and large, people are just as strange as they always were. They're just more public about it now. On the link itself - why am I not surprised at the frequency with which Ian Thorpe and Michael Phelps are featured there?...
• That's as creepy as $Country Idol slash. Fictional characters sure, but real people?
• In 1990 there was an official (maybe) porn movie for the world cup. It is supposed to be a marvellous story of Italy's triumphant march to the title.
• Applies to a lot of things. Everyone knows of hobbies that they'd never have heard about were it not for the web. I think it's a combination of things. I think a lot of these people would have been having impure thoughts while watching the Games on their own anyway, even without the internet. Perhaps most of them. But what the net brings them is encouragement, through feedback by peers, and in the case of fanfiction, a framework/venue in which to play with their oddnessessess. Which, of course, goes back to peer feedback, and having a supportive audience. And of course, the web allows us, random passersby, to witness all of this. I think some of it would have existed without the internet - there are little print magazines/newsletters/'zines for all manner of Very Odd Things - but it certainly makes things easier for the few who are out there, and it makes it open to random observers to come by and shake their heads and laugh. That said, I'm not about to yell about it, because the fact that these people can congregate also means that I can congregate with people who like to sew, or shoot the breeze about dorky movies, or, say, post links to interesting things on the web and then make amusing taglines out of the ensuing comments. ...but yes, people will make porn out of literally everything, and that's just the sort of thing you just have to acknowledge and live with when you wander around online.
• I wonder how often the term "Thorpedo" is used.
• One of my friends used to play Tom DeLay in a GreatestJournal (LiveJournal clone) RPG called "Good to Be in DC", which sprang out of the JohnxJohn (Kerry/Edwards slashy appreciation) community on LiveJournal. I can't speak for the Olympic fanficcers, but the Good to Be in DC crew, who were all RPing real-life political and media figures, including explicit sexual situations, are doing in part because it is Wrong. The farcical Wrongness is part of the appeal. I mean really, the thought of hot man-on-man action between Tom DeLay and Donald Rumsfeld in Rumsfeld's Pentagon office is Wrong. But it's also freaking hilarious. And I say that as someone who doesn't really get slash.
• The more the madder?
• Those sites are a lot like AA meetings. Only no one admits that he has problem. That said, I still dig the Swedish womens swim team. I guess I need a strong woman to protect me :-)
• MCT: thorpedo
• A discussion of slash fiction courtesy of Making Light. Well worth reading. Plus links at the bottom. A guide to writing sex scenes.
• RPS (real person slash) and real person fic in general is sort of the bastard child of fandom. Lots of mainstream fandom types, like myself, who are doing wildly weird things, do get on the RPS people's backs. But it's tricky. Definitely, as stated above, a case of the Internet letting all these weirdnesses be available (though don't try telling someone who does RPS - especially in the LoTR fandom - that they're weird. Bad move). Personally one of the issues I have is that discussion of RPS tends to focus only on slash, when I have just as much of a problem with het real person fic. It's kind of ooky to me the way people get more upset about the slash. I don't really like the idea of putting real people into these situations generally, whether it's heterosexual or homosexual. Unless it's for the fun and snark, like immlass said, even though I don't do it myself.
• Dumb statement: I didn't know slash was homosexual-only. I thought it implied any sexual relationship. Now I know better.
• I am sad that this has nothing to do with Slash Rose, the coolest and bestest guitarist EVAR!!! Shut up.
• That's okay, tracicle - probably better to not be aware of how ridiculous all this stuff is. ;)
• Out of curiosity, I googled "meaty thorpedo," "throbbing thorpedo," and "dripping thorpedo," and to my disappointment, there were no hits.
• It's defined differently by different groups of people, so don't feel too bad on that count, either. This is incredibly niche slang, after all. ..."slash," I mean, not "thorpedo."
• True that, though I think slash=gay is the most popular formulation these days. (At least in the circles I run in). And if there had been hits for "meaty thorpedo", I would have expected an FPP out of that. Yowza. ;)
• I don't read or create slash (I tried both and it just didn't work). But I dig some of the slash swag and the mentality - the cute little screen caps and the icons that some folks go to the effort of making and freely distributing. Or maybe the appeal for me is just limited to the Simon/Seacrest stuff. Sometimes I like watching American Idol or CNN and taking in a subtextual show in addition to the surface one. As I once explained it...In essence, a veritable Harlequin romance is playing itself out week after week on national tv with a supposed singing contest as its background setting. Will Cowell's cranky disposition be conquered by Seacrest's good-natured exuberance? (Their very names evoke the rakes and rarefied passion of Regency romance.) Will Ryan be seduced by Simon's sinister side? Tune in next week to find out...Ditto for Lou Dobbs and Richard Quest or whoever I catch on CNN that night.
• That's true; I'm just sayin'. And "looking for subtext" gets to be a sport in itself, like finding pictures in cloud formations or Rorshach blots. It's not necessarily insisting what is, but playing with the notion of what could be, what else the text might mean given different starting assumptions. Of course, that's assuming that one isn't deathly serious about it, like some people can be don't get me started.
• alcarilinque stroked stirfry's arm and fluttered his long, dark eyelashes. "Take me," he whispered, "take me now, here in this very thread". stirfry belched loudly. "Uh, OK, but I think there's people watchin' ... "
• Juan Antonio Samaranch unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. He unfastened his trousers, and pulled them down, then his underpants, teasing Beijing with his eyes. His long, stiff penis stood proudly to attention, and Beijing knelt before him smiling. "Light it" Juan Antonio commanded. "Light my olympic baton".
• "Well?" commanded tracicle. "What have you done now?" "I've been bad, monkeybashi - very bad" said quidnunc hesitantly. "I wrote slash fiction in that thread and ... I ... I need to be punished". tracicle sneered at him, and, reaching for the button marked BAN USER, asked: "You know what happens to bad monkeys, don't you?" "Oh ... oh ... oooooh," quidnunc sighed ecstatically.
• OMG, quidnunc! You didn't! *eyes agog*
• *hoses down quidnunc*
• Quid, that was a very personal and private moment between the two of us. I'm hurt that you'd tell the world this way.
• Y'all should have been inside my head last summer. I had it all worked out between the Thorpedo and how he would initiate Phelps into the wonders of the swimming Olympic brethren. Van den Hoogenthingie played the bitch. Oooh, it was hot. There's a website devoted to this.
• sorry about that I got a little carried away there