If only there were a fannish personals site.

[rsadelle]

It's been so long since I last made a new friend that I just don't know how to do it anymore. I don't know how to find people I might want to be friends with (Digression: In the Slashdot article on Yahoo! picking up blogging and social networking services, someone commented that they're really moving into LJ's territory, which reminded me of friendsfriends. Every time I look at it, I think, "What on Earth do you people find interesting about those people?"), and even if I did, (a) what's to say they would want to make new friends and (b) I wouldn't know how to go about making friends with them.

A fannish personals site would go a long way toward solving my problems.

Het-friendly slasher, mid-twenties, seeks same for friendship, episode commentary, and possible beta. Likes: Buffy, Freddie Prinze Jr. movies, BDSM. Dislikes: Pairing names, NSync, misogyny.

Comments

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Well, I seem to remember some sort of personals site or part of a site set up for ... I want to say Smalville fans, but it could've been another show. Maybe someone should set that up. ("Freaky-het-friendly slasher, mid-twenties, seeks same for friendship, episode commentary, possible beta, and all-night rambling/plotting sessions. Likes: antagonist pairings, violence in sex, genderfuckery. Dislikes: kink for the sake of shocking, MPREG, homophobia/mysoginy(/transphobia).")

[meacoustic.livejournal.com]

*insert mpreg joke here*

[rsadelle]

Liking genderfuckery and disliking mpreg seems contradictory to me.

[meacoustic.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me. (Pairing names, blagh!)

I made an entry once about how the people on my flist fall into groups: the people I am close friends with, which generally goes beyond fandom but there is kind of that weird divide between the people who I was fandom-friends with first and the people I know from Parkside (there's only a few of them); the people who are on my flist for fannish-content reasons and not much else; and journals I just like to read regardless of fannish content, although I usually start reading them for fannish content and then end up reading for a variety of other reasons. A lot of people fall into more than one of these groups.

I tend to drop the people who are only there for fannish-content reasons more often than any of the other groups, but I rarely drop people because I've gone beyond reading for fannish reasons and just generally like reading whatever they post.

I, too, look at friendsfriends sometimes and and amazed at who other people have friended.

As for finding a beta-reader - is it just me, or does it seem to have become harder to find someone?

I hope you know that I am always willing to do a read-through for you even if it's not a fandom I am really familiar with.

[rsadelle]

I friend people if and only if I want to read every post they make. (Or, you know, such a high ratio that it might as well be every one.) Generally, this means friends--mostly people I met through fandom, but a couple of people from college, some of whom have fannish tendencies--and people in whatever fandom I'm interested who post primarily fic. I don't know how to make the leap from fellow fan to friend.

One of the comments in that Slashdot article was talking about what is more or less the problem with friendsfriends. They said they find social networking based on friends of friends pretty worthless, whereas social networking based on common interests is much more useful. I've been thinking about something similar. I could go see what the local LGBT center is like, but just because someone is a lesbian doesn't mean I'm going to want to be friends with her. Now, if there were a local fan center, that would make more sense to me.

(The subject of beta reading has become very long. It's getting its own LJ entry.)