MM.

Red chai tea is some good shit.

And now for pie.

ETA: Pie put off in favor of cleaning. It'll have to be my reward later. Four loads of laundry. Bwah.

ETA2: Red chai is also EXCELLENT chilled. Not iced, because iced tea is watered-down shit, but stick it in the 'fridge for a few hours and ♥.

Feeling very meta today.

"The word 'fandom' needs to stop existing."

It doesn't really matter where I got this. It's quite likely I'll never cross internet paths with the person who wrote it in my entire online career. I still feel like writing about it.

One of the many things I've learned from translating is that the individual word is not important. It's a front, an often imperfect representation of a broader concept. The act of translation, so far as I can tell, is to deconstruct words into their base concepts, and then to reconstruct that concept in the destination language. More pertinent to this discussion: the act of understanding is simply that first step, the deconstruction of words into nebulous internal concepts.

If this is true, then writing about any particular concept by definition is a reconstruction of the concept back into words. Sometimes I think the definition of skillful writing is a series of words that hints around a concept, bringing the reader's mind to approximate the same concept going through the writer's without the benefit of direct telepathy.

Oh yes. I was going to talk about fandom, before the idea that the erasure of a single word from the common lexicon would be at all effective managed to distract me.

I made a new friend the other day. (=D) She added me on last.fm some time ago, based on our common interest in Final Fantasy music. I was of course perfectly happy to add her back, but didn't think much of it as I don't actually use that site more than twice a month. Last week, though, she commented on a friend's journal and I recognized the screenname. Curious, I checked out her journal- and discovered some of the most consistently excellent and original FF6 artwork I'd ever seen. Icyites, you've seen it too. Hot shit. I ask her "Have you ever been to Icy's? We do arts!"

She responds "I go to Icy's for the translation."

First of all, XD <3 ♥ with an omg on top. But once I had finished blushing like a schoolgirl, I thought to myself, this is fandom.

And I like it here.

Aaaand that's probably ten times more thought than was put into the original remark! Go me.

...Also, I failed at boiled eggs today. Somebody revoke my cooking license.