Arctic Light

July rolled in cool and rainy. After a string of hot dry weeks, I'm glad; we really need the rain. The smoke has been terrible - I should caveat this by saying that we are in absolutely no wildfire danger ourselves and these are mostly burning in unpopulated areas, but there are large fires to the north, to the south, and a small one to the east, so we're getting massive amounts of smoke from almost every direction. The rain knocked down both the smoke and the fires, and it's pretty clean out there right now, which is nice. It's supposed to rain all week, and I welcome it.

However, it's not great weather to be outside in, and the garden (which I got nicely weeded over the past few days) mostly takes care of itself when it's wet, so I decided to spend some time this evening dealing with what we might call "the AO3 inbox situation."

I read and love and wallow in every comment I get, but actually answering them is sort of ... a problem. It was about to cross over 7600 unread (read: unresponded-to) comments, and I decided that since I'm clearly not getting very far at tackling it from the front end, I would tackle it from the back. I am OBVIOUSLY not going to go back and answer comments from 15 years ago, and I have no emotional attachment to most of those fics anymore, so mass-deleting comments shouldn't be too much of a problem. And at least I could knock it down from that end and maybe get it into a more manageable state, on a similar principle to how it's easier to keep a mostly clean-ish house clean than to cleaning one that's a complete mess to begin with. With the inbox filtered by unread messages, I went back to the very last page, and started deleting.

It's so interesting to go that far back! I can see the point where my inbox-keeping really went off the rails, because the first few pages of unreads were just replies to my own comments on other people's fic from 2009-10, but my comment housekeeping started to take a nosedive when I got medium-fandom-popular in White Collar in 2012-13, and then I got into Captain America in 2014 and it went off the rails completely and never recovered. In a way it's a relief to just accept that I am not going to answer multiple pages of comments on fic from ten years ago and delete the notifications, with a few trips down memory lane along the way.

Lots of "account deleted," lots of names from old fandoms that I vaguely remember. Early appearances by people I didn't realize that I had interacted with so long ago. People I used to be close to who vanished from my life completely. Fandoms I had literally forgotten I was ever in, or at least that I was ever in them to the point of writing and commenting on fic for it. (Legends of Tomorrow took me so off guard that I had to click through to the fic itself to even remember who those character names were!) Fandoms I miss, regular commenters I miss, regular commenters I don't miss ... (There was one person in White Collar who used to comment on every single one of my fics primarily to tell me how much she disliked Peter. But she seemed to actually like my fic! It was deeply weird and I don't mind one tiny bit nuking all of those that I never got around to answering.)

And it's interesting how some fandoms were so much more meaningful and, I guess, formative for me that they don't seem nearly as long ago as ones that came after them - like, technically I know that I fell into Guardians of the Galaxy after Agent Carter (2017 vs 2015, more or less), but Agent Carter seems so much more recent and so ... there, still, in my head, whereas Guardians I just seem to have floated through without feeling like it made all that much of an impression. It was fun, but when it was gone it was gone, whereas I still like to go back and reread even my earliest AC fic now and again.

I knocked it down from 7600 to 3950 comments* and made it to mid-2019, and I'm starting to get into fandoms I have more of an emotional attachment to, which makes it harder to ruthlessly delete page by page; there's more of an urge to stop and reread things and respond to some of the longer comments and so forth. Which isn't bad, but does slow me down a lot. I did save a few comments along the way (early appearances of people I'm friends with now, long meaty back-and-forths about character meta, that sort of thing). It was also just fun to be reminded of the enjoyment I've had over the years. There were certainly ups and downs, fortunately the comment record doesn't preserve most of the worse parts, but on the whole, what a nice way to spend a rainy evening. <3

*Now 3200 2930 because I deleted a bunch more, but at the risk of finding quite a lot of fic I want to reread...