(That could turn out to be the beginning of a pretty sordid sentence, but it's not what it sounds like.)
Today was the first meeting of "The Harry Potter Club".* A lot of people turned up, including a handful of acquaintances I'd grouped under the loose category of, "I don't know you all that well but you seem like a nice person", who were suddenly expressing interest in the same thing I was. A raucous, if nerdy, time was had by all. AVPM was quoted. The HPA and Pottermore were discussed verbally instead of through keystrokes. Hufflepuff was lamented, jokingly.
As it turns out, there are people who like things I associate with the faceless hive of *the internet* who happen to be flesh-and-blood humans I go to school with. Today, for some reason, this struck me as strange. Call it the first rule of Fight Club/Tumblr/what-have-you, but *the internet* and *real life*, have, so far as I've been a part of them both, been separate circles. Especially considering I've never been to VidCon or anything that blatantly converges the two. Sure, there's Facebook for that, but some strange, pleasant coincidence lies in finding out that the majority of our collective appreciation of a series of books has led to the same things online, and that everyone in attendance has such a level of devotion to said books (and a level of internet-savvy...) to seek these things out. I don't really know, there's just something genuine about internet-fandom that I enjoyed seeing overlap into *real life*.
I've seen this genuineness turn sour a bit--and call me an elitist if you think I deserve it--via a few people who just seem to be trying too hard to integrate internet references into everyday conversation. Eg: "Me gusta."-- pronounced "mee gusta". (*Slight rant* This doesn't even have anything to do with the meme reference, if you had a basic grasp of the Spanish language you'd know the e is short.) And use of "You are such a n00b." as an insult. Maybe there's irony in these types of things that I'm not exactly getting, but it falls flat as a means of communication outside of *the internet*, and it wasn't even that clever on *the internet* to begin with.
* "That's just to not confuse the freshman, we're calling it Dumbledore's Army."
1 comment:
...I didn't know "me gusta" was pronounced like that. *somebody didn't learn anything in 4th grade Spanish*
I know what you mean... although I think it applied more to me back in the 7th grade when I was all popular on this Nancy Drew website and nobody of my friends knew about it than now, when most of my friends in real life use most of the same internet platforms that I do. SHRUG.
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