Welcome!

Hello everyone,

If you've made it here, awesome! I go by Faye, generally, but sometimes Dayle, L, or any modification of my ridiculous username you can come up with (if you go with Dream, I'm going to sound like a stripper but like, fine, that's cool, I've answered to worse). At some point, I should probably come up with something that's easier to say.

I'm pretty excited about the move back to this kind of a format for fandom and other related things. I am longform at heart. I'm over on AO3 as inanhourofdreaming, and twitter as inanhourofdream. I have been known as other, far more embarrassing things in the past that I'm going to go ahead and never admit to again. Don't worry, you probably didn't know me. I will likely share fandom and writing stuff here, possibly also life stuff, and whatever else I currently find interesting.

Please feel free to comment and interact here. My only rule is don't be a huge dick.

Fandom and Flow

So I have been thinking about fandom and why we do fandom and what we get out of it. I also just finished reading Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book about human happiness, and the specific states of mind that bring people the most lasting and most satisfying kind of happiness. And so why not write a little about it and how it plays into fandom on my first legit Dreamwidth post? (Hello, longform, my old friend…)

So, here’s the basic principle: people, according to MC, are most happy with themselves, who they are, and their general state of mind, at or after the point at which they have succeeded at something they have focused on intently, often to the point where they hyper-focus or reach a state of disconnect with the world outside of the activity they are completing. And, for a variety of reasons, people actually end up in this state most often in a work setting – mostly because the average person does not spend much of their free time challenging themselves like they do at work. They zone out watching tv, or do some other mindless activity. Which, I mean…fine, yeah? We all want to loaf sometimes.

BUT. ( Read More... )