feel the goddamned love, fandom or otherwise.

I got my new laptop over the weekend. I'd originally thought, when my older laptop got kind of electrocuted, that I'd just buy a reasonable facsimile to it through auction and not spend the money on a newer, sexier one. And yet. Here I am with my new computer, which I've named Harriet. I won't bore you with the specs, and you can thank me for that later, but I will say this: Harriet is, as Big Star would say, a mover. She is, as The Commodores would say, a brick house. She is mighty, mighty.

Over the past couple of days, I've been installing applications and restoring backups, and I've got back some of the nice little applications that I've missed, and I was just thinking tonight as I browsed around, setting bookmarks and the like, how much I had missed, missed, missed my Opera browser, with its tidy little tabs and its superior download manager and its popup blockers, when I very coincidentally happened to run across this article.

Now, I have loved opera long time. It's been my preferred browser for ages, and I happen to agree with all the nice things that Paul Boutin has to say about it. But if I didn't, I would still be in love with the idea of being able to voice-command my browser to read Harry/Snape porn to me in a computer-voice deadpan. I would love it for that alone, even if it were otherwise the worst browser in the whole world.

And speaking of fanfiction. Even before I took a break from the fandom, I had long since stopped reading fanfic except on specific, very strong recommendation. I mean, it's kind of hard to find the time to just jump in and read, in a fandom as huge as HP, or at least it always has been for me, and that was true even before I got all burnt out. But, you know, I guess my break did me some good, because using cursive's and dahlia_777's recent reviews as a jumping-off start, I've been wading around knee-deep in archives and fics whenever I get a chance, and having an absolute blast. I can't remember the last time I read a fic with anything approaching the near-uncritical delight I'm feeling for all sorts of stories, right now. I can't remember the last time I stayed up scrolling until 3 a.m. because I couldn't bear to go to sleep without knowing how the story ended. I can't remember a time since maybe the first few months I joined fandom--God, was it really over three years ago?--when I was this excited, finding new stories I liked.

It feels absolutely wonderful. It feels so wonderful that maybe this time around I'll leave feedback, but I feel I shouldn't make reckless promises.