![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hiddenramenUgh. I've only been back on Twitter for a couple of days, so I've mostly been trying to just like... get the lay of the land, and see what the fandom looks like since I stepped back.
It's been about six months, a little over, and once they saw my name back on the screen, a few former mutuals were quick to reach out and assure me with a sympathetic tone that fandom was a lot more relaxed than it was six months ago. A lot of the bad actors got bored and floated away, the energy seemed to change. And they're right, I think: it did change.
But it's easy to see what actually happened, when you pick apart the archaeology of the wound: the blood got too deep, the viciousness swelled over, and everyone broke off into little camps to protect themselves from what seemed like a neverending bloodbath. The wounds are still there, though—festered and scarring, just scabbed over—and it's easy to see them if you look.
The air of exhaustion and jadedness. The snide remarks that demarcate territory or assert an allegiance, things like "novel-canon dynamics enthusiast" or "cql-only" or "pro-ship" or "freaks don't interact." People loudly, outwardly labeling themselves as kink-friendly, as sex-positive, as horny, in an obvious defensive gesture, lamb's blood on the doorway, meant to ward away the looming spectre of a fight you know is coming. You're begging it not to, though. You're trying to keep the devil out of the house.
The peace and quietude that my friends assured me had come is certainly present, but it's clear that it was bought and paid for with the flesh-carved fractalization of the community. Everyone splintered off into small, insular friend groups of five to maybe fifteen, occasionally and begrudgingly brushing elbows across dozens of scattered Discord servers, and all of them are somewhat mistrustful of outsiders.
It's... sad, honestly. It's not the kind of fandom I remember fondly from when I was younger. And I know they say, "There's no such thing as good fandoms these days, only good friends." and they're right, they are, but there's also this sort of grief around how fandom used to be about friends. Fandom feels so lonely and atomized on Twitter, so isolating and corporatized and splintered.
I hate that this is what we became. I hate that I was a part of it, in a way.
I keep typing up a thread about why I left abruptly, maintained contact with almost no one, and stayed away for six months, and I end up just... deleting it, honestly, because I don't want to bring the devil to my doorstep, either. I don't want to do or say anything that might break what feels like a Cold War-esque armistice that looms tenuously over the entire fandom.
In a sense, I don't owe anyone an explanation.
In truth, though, I owe one to myself.
This might be self-indulgent, and it's sure as fuck going to be long, but honestly, the whole vibe of Dreamwidth feels self-indulgent, and like hell am I ever posting something like this on Twitter lmfao. I do want to post something like this, though. For me, even if no one reads it.
So here we go, I guess.
I entered the MDZS fandom (on Twitter, at least) in January of 2020.
Before that, I'd been involved with the Naruto fandom for a year or so (which is admittedly cringey to say, but was actually a pretty positive experience overall, and I don't feel any real shame over it). I always enjoyed Tumblr fandom, and I'd garnered a few thousand followers over there posting Ambien-fueled, long-winded metas about narrative structures and ninja politics. I was working a stupidly stressful gig at the time, so it was nice to have something dumb to do on my downtime, or on my phone while I was waiting for a call.
I'd also made some really, genuinely good friends in a close-knit Discord for a sideship, most of whom I still have to this day, and it was through Naruto Tumblr—which had large overlaps with other different anime fandoms—that I first encountered the MDZS donghua. That was my introduction to the series, and I was quickly obsessed with it. I loved the complexity of the politics and the relationships.
I watched the donghua twice, then read the book to find out how it ended: I tried CQL, originally didn't like it, gave it a 5-episode chance and then got hooked after the flashback started. By the time I joined Twitter, I had read the book twice, seen the donghua about three times, and seen CQL twice-through.
I was also, pretty crucially to the story, in one of the worst depressive bouts of my life.
A lot of that depression centered around the fact that I had decided, formally, to attempt extricating myself from the world of campaign staffing—a world I'd been involved with, in varying capacities, since I was just 17 years old. A lot of things went into that decision: a hospitalizing mental breakdown I had in the Summer of 2018, followed by a boyfriend's relapse into heroin (a drug he later overdosed on), followed by me taking a single suitcase and a 5-day Greyhound trip to chase a job 3000 miles away, sleeping on couches for months, doing outreach and marketing campaigns for a 5 billion dollar company at the same time I was doing press management for a brutal municipal slugfest.
In 2019, just a little over a year after I'd moved out to the West Coast, I... couldn't take it anymore. I realized how much of my constant moving (I'd never lived in the same place for more than 9 months since I was 18 years old, and by that point, I was nearly 24) had been a desperate attempt to outrun a lot of personal demons. I realized that my job—working campaigns in the capacity that I was—wasn't healthy. I was also, at the time, newly entering into a relationship with a woman I'd had an ongoing flirtation with for five years, and the looming idea of a serious relationship made thoughts of leaving campaign work all the more significant.
The problem—and, I guess, the important part of that—was that campaign work is a... special beast. Campaigns run on cycles, lasting anywhere from six to eighteen months, which means that every six to eighteen months—and sometimes, even sooner—you have to find a new job from scratch. There's no job security, nothing even remotely like job security, and no jobs are ever, ever posted anywhere. The entire industry runs solely and completely through word of mouth, and if you want to work in the field, that's the first thing you learn.
For that reason, maintaining a large, well-cultivated social sphere of potential job offers is practical, and necessary, but not necessarily kind or nurturing in terms of relationships. It's not a kind industry, in the end. Your whole social sphere ends up being people you worked with, or friends of people you worked with, and you maintain those relationships actively, as a part of your job, because you have to.
And it works out, in a way, because you don't have time to make or nurture friendships outside of your job. You're working 80-100 hour weeks most of the time, often underpaid and sure as hell underappreciated, and the job requires you to pack up and move once or twice (or more) a year, often forced to live in cramped roommate situations with other staffers, or to sleep three to a cramped spare bedroom for months at a time. It takes a toll on your social life, because it is your social life—it's honestly all you have, and that's not even counting the various ways that it affects your mental health.
Most people don't last more than three years in campaign work before they burn out, often in a blaze: I, for reference, was involved in politics for about seven.
That's what makes leaving politics so hard, honestly—the life is structured in a way that makes it very in-or-out. Either you're in the life or you're not, and if you're not, then you're completely out. Your friend groups no longer have the energy to keep up with you, because they have to spend that rare, precious energy and time on relationships that they need. You're effectively cut off from your social sphere, and you've never had the time or capacity to build anything outside of the life, so you're just. Drifting.
That's where I was—and specifically, that's where I was mentally—when I first entered into the MDZS fandom on Twitter.
A lot of what I wanted out of MDZS Twitter was a feeling of community, of friendship, of connection-making, at a point in my life when I was more isolated than I'd ever felt in my life. So, I went about that by commenting on fics and following authors. I tried to build a new house for myself to replace what I'd lost.
And I ended up just... burnt out and exhausted, by the end of it. I tore myself apart trying to build a house out of rotten wood, and then I'd just feel gutted when the walls inevitably cracked.
Everyone around me was constantly at war with each other over whatever the weekly (or daily) discourse was, and it honestly felt like the only way we all bonded. You made your friends based on who you were in the trenches with, and that wasn't just me—it felt like most people did that, at the time. Your friends weren't the people you had fun with, or had conversations with: they were the people you commiserated with.
That's not a healthy way to approach relationships in a good mindset—let alone in the mindset I was in.
I was never like, cancelled or anything, I'll get that out of the way firsthand. I never did anything terrible, as far as I'm aware. But I think I did participate in the brutally toxic environment that fandom was at the time.
I liked to think of myself as a neutral party, as far as the "culture war" of it all went—I hate the dichotomization, the overgeneralization and sweeping arguments on both sides, and I never identified with either the "antis" or the "pro-shippers." I have complex opinions on the topic, informed by a lot of reading: most of which, in fact, I did during my hiatus. I read a lot of philosophy books on the ethics of fiction, on the history of the Comics Code Authority, on the concept of ethical criticism (The Jaws Argument, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, etc). I wanted to do the reading that I hadn't done before, out of guilt and a desire to form genuine opinions, of my own, totally independently of any need for any one person or one group to like me. It was great, actually—highly recommend that.
None of that is the point, though.
I had friends on both sides, and I was constantly threading a needle trying to keep everyone happy, trying to avoid getting cannibalized as I tried my best never to step on any landmines. I desperately wanted to be liked, to have this huge network of friends to bandage the gaping buckshot hole in my chest that leaving campaigns left in me, and I just... I let bad faith arguments play out in front of me, and I knew it, and I didn't stop it. I saw people couching vicious personal attacks in social justice language, on both sides, and I didn't stop it. I'd participate in discourse without giving the issues the kind of critical thought, consideration, and kindness that I consider a standard for myself, just because I was hungry for the feeling of validation and camaraderie when someone agreed with me, when I said the right thing.
It made me a coward, to put it simply. A coward—a meaner, stupider version of myself—and a person I didn't like.
I was so, so anxious, all the time, and the discourse just seemed like it was getting worse. All the time, incessantly, worse and worse. The sex-negativity started to get worse and worse, too, and so did the homophobia, and I was paralyzed. I felt trapped by it, like I couldn't breathe: I just kept thinking, "What are we doing? What am I a part of?"
And eventually, I woke up one day and realized that, despite all of that work, despite all of that anxiety... I was still lonely. I hated half of my "friends," I lived in paranoid, anxious fear of the day when I failed to thread the needle, or when I had the wrong opinion and my friend group cannibalized me, and I kept having to package certain aspects of myself to maintain the balance.
My autistic hyperfixations that made me too excited ("not normal") about things; my sex-positivity, which I've always been proud of; my history with and interest in kink scenes, which was constantly scrutinized, insulted, and questioned in extremely invasive ways (and like, I willingly talk about enemas, and about blowjob ER trips: if I'm saying something was invasive, hoo boy).
My age, my degree, my expertise, my history in politics—all of it was a source of anxiety, a source of discourse and scrutiny at various points. Hell, I had people at multiple points comb through my likes, and the accounts I followed, and DM my "friends" with lists of my transgressions—I was following problematic people, I had commented on a tweet by someone who had written problematic content. I was friends with "weirdos."
One of my best friends—a gay man, who at the time was president of a gay non-profit doing real, tangible work—retweeted some porn art drawn about a BL manga (and it was like, tame! A little gooey for my tastes, sure, but to each his own!) and I got DMs asking me why I was following "fujos." It was a nightmare, honestly, every single day. And one day I just... didn't want to do it anymore.
So I didn't.
I deleted my account, took a hiatus from fandom altogether (for the most part, anyway), and like. Touched leaves. I changed antidepressants, went through a cycle of more rigorous therapy. I got a new, non-campaigning job. I worked on my art. I made new friends.
After awhile, though, when I was done being honestly and genuinely legitimately triggered holy shit??? by even the slightest whiff of discourse, I decided that I actually... well, missed fandom. Not the fandom I'd been in on Twitter, but the kind of fandoms I'd been in as a teenager, back when I'd had fun. I'm a nerd, I want to infodump and dissect and geek out about nerd shit with other nerds, y'know? And I missed that. I missed writing fic. I missed meeting people who were into the same nerdy shit as me.
I'd read cool fic and think, "Man, I really want to be friends with this author!" and then I'd have a moment where I realized that that would mean being in The Fandom again. Another part of me was embarrassed at the thought of meeting the people I'd known in fandom, because they'd seen me at what was legitimately probably the most cowardly, catty version of myself I've ever been. I wanted to apologize, or to insist that that wasn't who I am, I promise, I swear. Would you like to talk to my therapist she'll vouch for me I swear she will—
And eventually—after more therapy, because therapy is sexy, kids—I decided that I was in a place where I wanted to try again. I wanted to do it differently, this time—I wanted to be kinder, to be more careful. I wanted to make real friends, I wanted to have fun. So... that's what I'm doing this time. I'm being as cringey as I want to, I'm being as kind as I can. I don't want to fight anymore, I want to make things. I want to talk to people about things that we both love. .
It's been about six months, a little over, and once they saw my name back on the screen, a few former mutuals were quick to reach out and assure me with a sympathetic tone that fandom was a lot more relaxed than it was six months ago. A lot of the bad actors got bored and floated away, the energy seemed to change. And they're right, I think: it did change.
But it's easy to see what actually happened, when you pick apart the archaeology of the wound: the blood got too deep, the viciousness swelled over, and everyone broke off into little camps to protect themselves from what seemed like a neverending bloodbath. The wounds are still there, though—festered and scarring, just scabbed over—and it's easy to see them if you look.
The air of exhaustion and jadedness. The snide remarks that demarcate territory or assert an allegiance, things like "novel-canon dynamics enthusiast" or "cql-only" or "pro-ship" or "freaks don't interact." People loudly, outwardly labeling themselves as kink-friendly, as sex-positive, as horny, in an obvious defensive gesture, lamb's blood on the doorway, meant to ward away the looming spectre of a fight you know is coming. You're begging it not to, though. You're trying to keep the devil out of the house.
The peace and quietude that my friends assured me had come is certainly present, but it's clear that it was bought and paid for with the flesh-carved fractalization of the community. Everyone splintered off into small, insular friend groups of five to maybe fifteen, occasionally and begrudgingly brushing elbows across dozens of scattered Discord servers, and all of them are somewhat mistrustful of outsiders.
It's... sad, honestly. It's not the kind of fandom I remember fondly from when I was younger. And I know they say, "There's no such thing as good fandoms these days, only good friends." and they're right, they are, but there's also this sort of grief around how fandom used to be about friends. Fandom feels so lonely and atomized on Twitter, so isolating and corporatized and splintered.
I hate that this is what we became. I hate that I was a part of it, in a way.
I keep typing up a thread about why I left abruptly, maintained contact with almost no one, and stayed away for six months, and I end up just... deleting it, honestly, because I don't want to bring the devil to my doorstep, either. I don't want to do or say anything that might break what feels like a Cold War-esque armistice that looms tenuously over the entire fandom.
In a sense, I don't owe anyone an explanation.
In truth, though, I owe one to myself.
This might be self-indulgent, and it's sure as fuck going to be long, but honestly, the whole vibe of Dreamwidth feels self-indulgent, and like hell am I ever posting something like this on Twitter lmfao. I do want to post something like this, though. For me, even if no one reads it.
So here we go, I guess.
I entered the MDZS fandom (on Twitter, at least) in January of 2020.
Before that, I'd been involved with the Naruto fandom for a year or so (which is admittedly cringey to say, but was actually a pretty positive experience overall, and I don't feel any real shame over it). I always enjoyed Tumblr fandom, and I'd garnered a few thousand followers over there posting Ambien-fueled, long-winded metas about narrative structures and ninja politics. I was working a stupidly stressful gig at the time, so it was nice to have something dumb to do on my downtime, or on my phone while I was waiting for a call.
I'd also made some really, genuinely good friends in a close-knit Discord for a sideship, most of whom I still have to this day, and it was through Naruto Tumblr—which had large overlaps with other different anime fandoms—that I first encountered the MDZS donghua. That was my introduction to the series, and I was quickly obsessed with it. I loved the complexity of the politics and the relationships.
I watched the donghua twice, then read the book to find out how it ended: I tried CQL, originally didn't like it, gave it a 5-episode chance and then got hooked after the flashback started. By the time I joined Twitter, I had read the book twice, seen the donghua about three times, and seen CQL twice-through.
I was also, pretty crucially to the story, in one of the worst depressive bouts of my life.
A lot of that depression centered around the fact that I had decided, formally, to attempt extricating myself from the world of campaign staffing—a world I'd been involved with, in varying capacities, since I was just 17 years old. A lot of things went into that decision: a hospitalizing mental breakdown I had in the Summer of 2018, followed by a boyfriend's relapse into heroin (a drug he later overdosed on), followed by me taking a single suitcase and a 5-day Greyhound trip to chase a job 3000 miles away, sleeping on couches for months, doing outreach and marketing campaigns for a 5 billion dollar company at the same time I was doing press management for a brutal municipal slugfest.
In 2019, just a little over a year after I'd moved out to the West Coast, I... couldn't take it anymore. I realized how much of my constant moving (I'd never lived in the same place for more than 9 months since I was 18 years old, and by that point, I was nearly 24) had been a desperate attempt to outrun a lot of personal demons. I realized that my job—working campaigns in the capacity that I was—wasn't healthy. I was also, at the time, newly entering into a relationship with a woman I'd had an ongoing flirtation with for five years, and the looming idea of a serious relationship made thoughts of leaving campaign work all the more significant.
The problem—and, I guess, the important part of that—was that campaign work is a... special beast. Campaigns run on cycles, lasting anywhere from six to eighteen months, which means that every six to eighteen months—and sometimes, even sooner—you have to find a new job from scratch. There's no job security, nothing even remotely like job security, and no jobs are ever, ever posted anywhere. The entire industry runs solely and completely through word of mouth, and if you want to work in the field, that's the first thing you learn.
For that reason, maintaining a large, well-cultivated social sphere of potential job offers is practical, and necessary, but not necessarily kind or nurturing in terms of relationships. It's not a kind industry, in the end. Your whole social sphere ends up being people you worked with, or friends of people you worked with, and you maintain those relationships actively, as a part of your job, because you have to.
And it works out, in a way, because you don't have time to make or nurture friendships outside of your job. You're working 80-100 hour weeks most of the time, often underpaid and sure as hell underappreciated, and the job requires you to pack up and move once or twice (or more) a year, often forced to live in cramped roommate situations with other staffers, or to sleep three to a cramped spare bedroom for months at a time. It takes a toll on your social life, because it is your social life—it's honestly all you have, and that's not even counting the various ways that it affects your mental health.
Most people don't last more than three years in campaign work before they burn out, often in a blaze: I, for reference, was involved in politics for about seven.
That's what makes leaving politics so hard, honestly—the life is structured in a way that makes it very in-or-out. Either you're in the life or you're not, and if you're not, then you're completely out. Your friend groups no longer have the energy to keep up with you, because they have to spend that rare, precious energy and time on relationships that they need. You're effectively cut off from your social sphere, and you've never had the time or capacity to build anything outside of the life, so you're just. Drifting.
That's where I was—and specifically, that's where I was mentally—when I first entered into the MDZS fandom on Twitter.
A lot of what I wanted out of MDZS Twitter was a feeling of community, of friendship, of connection-making, at a point in my life when I was more isolated than I'd ever felt in my life. So, I went about that by commenting on fics and following authors. I tried to build a new house for myself to replace what I'd lost.
And I ended up just... burnt out and exhausted, by the end of it. I tore myself apart trying to build a house out of rotten wood, and then I'd just feel gutted when the walls inevitably cracked.
Everyone around me was constantly at war with each other over whatever the weekly (or daily) discourse was, and it honestly felt like the only way we all bonded. You made your friends based on who you were in the trenches with, and that wasn't just me—it felt like most people did that, at the time. Your friends weren't the people you had fun with, or had conversations with: they were the people you commiserated with.
That's not a healthy way to approach relationships in a good mindset—let alone in the mindset I was in.
I was never like, cancelled or anything, I'll get that out of the way firsthand. I never did anything terrible, as far as I'm aware. But I think I did participate in the brutally toxic environment that fandom was at the time.
I liked to think of myself as a neutral party, as far as the "culture war" of it all went—I hate the dichotomization, the overgeneralization and sweeping arguments on both sides, and I never identified with either the "antis" or the "pro-shippers." I have complex opinions on the topic, informed by a lot of reading: most of which, in fact, I did during my hiatus. I read a lot of philosophy books on the ethics of fiction, on the history of the Comics Code Authority, on the concept of ethical criticism (The Jaws Argument, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, etc). I wanted to do the reading that I hadn't done before, out of guilt and a desire to form genuine opinions, of my own, totally independently of any need for any one person or one group to like me. It was great, actually—highly recommend that.
None of that is the point, though.
I had friends on both sides, and I was constantly threading a needle trying to keep everyone happy, trying to avoid getting cannibalized as I tried my best never to step on any landmines. I desperately wanted to be liked, to have this huge network of friends to bandage the gaping buckshot hole in my chest that leaving campaigns left in me, and I just... I let bad faith arguments play out in front of me, and I knew it, and I didn't stop it. I saw people couching vicious personal attacks in social justice language, on both sides, and I didn't stop it. I'd participate in discourse without giving the issues the kind of critical thought, consideration, and kindness that I consider a standard for myself, just because I was hungry for the feeling of validation and camaraderie when someone agreed with me, when I said the right thing.
It made me a coward, to put it simply. A coward—a meaner, stupider version of myself—and a person I didn't like.
I was so, so anxious, all the time, and the discourse just seemed like it was getting worse. All the time, incessantly, worse and worse. The sex-negativity started to get worse and worse, too, and so did the homophobia, and I was paralyzed. I felt trapped by it, like I couldn't breathe: I just kept thinking, "What are we doing? What am I a part of?"
And eventually, I woke up one day and realized that, despite all of that work, despite all of that anxiety... I was still lonely. I hated half of my "friends," I lived in paranoid, anxious fear of the day when I failed to thread the needle, or when I had the wrong opinion and my friend group cannibalized me, and I kept having to package certain aspects of myself to maintain the balance.
My autistic hyperfixations that made me too excited ("not normal") about things; my sex-positivity, which I've always been proud of; my history with and interest in kink scenes, which was constantly scrutinized, insulted, and questioned in extremely invasive ways (and like, I willingly talk about enemas, and about blowjob ER trips: if I'm saying something was invasive, hoo boy).
My age, my degree, my expertise, my history in politics—all of it was a source of anxiety, a source of discourse and scrutiny at various points. Hell, I had people at multiple points comb through my likes, and the accounts I followed, and DM my "friends" with lists of my transgressions—I was following problematic people, I had commented on a tweet by someone who had written problematic content. I was friends with "weirdos."
One of my best friends—a gay man, who at the time was president of a gay non-profit doing real, tangible work—retweeted some porn art drawn about a BL manga (and it was like, tame! A little gooey for my tastes, sure, but to each his own!) and I got DMs asking me why I was following "fujos." It was a nightmare, honestly, every single day. And one day I just... didn't want to do it anymore.
So I didn't.
I deleted my account, took a hiatus from fandom altogether (for the most part, anyway), and like. Touched leaves. I changed antidepressants, went through a cycle of more rigorous therapy. I got a new, non-campaigning job. I worked on my art. I made new friends.
After awhile, though, when I was done being honestly and genuinely legitimately triggered holy shit??? by even the slightest whiff of discourse, I decided that I actually... well, missed fandom. Not the fandom I'd been in on Twitter, but the kind of fandoms I'd been in as a teenager, back when I'd had fun. I'm a nerd, I want to infodump and dissect and geek out about nerd shit with other nerds, y'know? And I missed that. I missed writing fic. I missed meeting people who were into the same nerdy shit as me.
I'd read cool fic and think, "Man, I really want to be friends with this author!" and then I'd have a moment where I realized that that would mean being in The Fandom again. Another part of me was embarrassed at the thought of meeting the people I'd known in fandom, because they'd seen me at what was legitimately probably the most cowardly, catty version of myself I've ever been. I wanted to apologize, or to insist that that wasn't who I am, I promise, I swear. Would you like to talk to my therapist she'll vouch for me I swear she will—
And eventually—after more therapy, because therapy is sexy, kids—I decided that I was in a place where I wanted to try again. I wanted to do it differently, this time—I wanted to be kinder, to be more careful. I wanted to make real friends, I wanted to have fun. So... that's what I'm doing this time. I'm being as cringey as I want to, I'm being as kind as I can. I don't want to fight anymore, I want to make things. I want to talk to people about things that we both love. .
I think part of my like, excitement over the idea of Dreamwidth making a comeback is the fact that 1) Dreamwidth has never given me therapy bills, thank you very much, and 2) Twitter still sucks for fandom. The algorithm, the lack of content control, the incessant discourse that all of those things create. It would be nice, I think, to congregate in a place like this, where everything's quieter, where everyone's older. Where you can talk to each other, y'know? Like people.
Anyway, this post was so fucking long lmao: it's literally like 2.8k words. I've subjected everyone to enough, I am done for the day. I wanted to say all of this stuff for closure purposes, for me, and I did. And I do feel better, actually—that was cathartic.
Now I'm going to go chug half a pot of coffee and read about Palpatine's son and the robot mining union while I slack off at work.
Have a good morning, everyone!
no subject
Date: 2021-03-17 01:43 pm (UTC)The vaguetweeting really does kill me, though. It's one of my absolute most-loathed things about Twitter. I guess it's good that people are aware of how fractured fandom is nowadays, though, and how people are just constantly having totally different experiences and conversations without realizing it.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-19 02:12 pm (UTC)I mean...I like and retweet stuff all the time. But I recognize that Iām abandoning some of those critical thinking processes, and I appreciate that this platform is forcing me to think through things a little more and exercise those parts of my brain again!