(no subject)

i feel like coming out as a detester of crackfic.  it's somewhat ironic, actually, because i often enjoy badfic and read it for amusement.  and i've always liked crackfic before.  i enjoy it as crack and not as normal fic, but in general i've been fine with that.  what's been making me cranky lately is that i prefer real fic, dammit, and the ratio of crack:real is getting too high for me.  now i can't enjoy the crack properly because it's just boring by comparison to the real fic which i can wistfully imagine enjoying. 

i'm mostly talking about sga fandom, here, which is the one i'm principally involved in.  and my preferences are different in every fandom, so it's not like i've actually gone off crackfic as a whole.  but wow, am i past fed up with it here.

it may be that there's something specific about the canon that lowers my crack tolerance.  as i said, my preferences are different in every fandom.  i wonder if it has something to do with the hefty dose of fantasy that's already inherent in a canon that's stuffed with star trek-esque pseudoscience and has a very deep fount of potential deus ex machinae in the form of the ancients.  i love my pseudoscience and the mixture of fantasy and hard sf elements and the cynical contemporary reactions of the main characters when they're stuffed into these plots and situations.  i'm right there with everyone else on the coolness of the fact that, with this canon, you can believably pull off almost anything.  perhaps what makes it especially annoying in this fandom is that going even beyond canon's levels of improbability seems, to me... unnecessarily greedy.  i mean, it's so improbable already--can it be that your thirst for the improbable (or your reliance on the large wiggle room provided by the expansion of probability) is so great that the quantity of it in canon doesn't satisfy you? 

trains and childhood memories

you know what'd be really cool?  to take a train somewhere.  i haven't ridden a train since i was in japan, in july 2000. 

there's a train track a block from here; the freeway curves around to run parallel to it and the passenger trains go by in full view of our livingroom window.  it's not nearly as loud as the freight trains that would go past on the tracks a block from my childhood home. 

i've walked the dog along the fence next to the tracks lots of times, and the train has overtaken us several of them.  they come up suddenly, move faster, are gone sooner. 

the tracks a block from my parents' house intersect the street, but they're screened with trees to either side, and a deep ditch runs just along the edge of them, on the near side at least.  there's pebbles and sometimes water in the bottom of it and it takes a bit of effort to scuffle down the bank, and the sides rise over your head at first.  there's thick weeds and, if i remember right, a bit of poison ivy round the edges.  you can find old bits of iron, pieces that have gone flying off the trucks and the wheels, sometimes rusted so thickly they flake off all over your hands.  they look decades old, perhaps a century or more, but they probably aren't really.  ( cut for length. )