7 Days, 7 Stories: Day 1 — April 21st

🕮 Day #1 on getyourwordsout.

Please enjoy this short story about a lost alien. :)

---

( Read more... )

---

7 Days, 7 Stories

---

I've been missing the unhinged creativity of having zero story, only vibes, so I was thinking I'd do some fun little warm-up type noodly short story sketches over the course of a week, for the Get Your Words Out challenge for April. (The challenge post is over here.)

• Day 1: April 21st — Tourist Ba-teka (Short Story)
• Day 2: April 22nd — 3 Sentence Batfic: Hallucination
• Day 3: April 23rd
• Day 4: April 24th
• Day 5: April 25th
• Day 6: April 26th
• Day 7: April 27th

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 19th

❄ Challenge #11 on snowflake_challenge.

---

Favorite Trope

Oh, man. Let me tell you about my favorite-upon-most-favorite trope...

Where You Go, I Go

Definition: the trope where one character is dedicated to another to extremity, and has no conflict within themself in doing so. Their loyalty to their chosen is a core character trait and is founded on (usually) some flavor of love or (sometimes) some flavor of duty or other ideal. Many of their goals and actions are driven by this dedication. Adversity doesn't matter, because they have chosen to give their loyalty (and/or love), irrevocably, sometimes after having realized they made the wrong choice prior and rectifying their mistake. The trope does not require romantic love; platonic and familial love can back this kind of loyalty just as strongly. Sometimes called and/or associated with Loyalty Kink, especially in fic tags.

I've actually done a whole write-up of this before, over here on fandomentanglement, where I called this concept 'The Steadfast' and described it as a character archetype. The bones of this post are a remix of that original tumblr post, since that one was written a while back and focused on explaining what I was talking about. This remix is intended to be more personal, as befits a DW journal.



---


To begin, then, the "Where You Go, I Go," trope/archetype is everywhere in all of my favorite media. The no-chill loyalty dynamic is just so delicious, and I love seeing how it manifests with different characters in their various worlds. To help explain why, I'd like to start with some of my deep lore. These are my first encounters with this loyal and steadfast companion trope, and the ones that shaped my love for this character dynamic as I chewed my way through the fantasy section of my local library:

Joscelin Verreuil (The Kushiel books by Jacqueline Carey) — Joscelin is, first and foremost, my ideal for this trope/archetype. He's the OG and his characterizations shaped the standard to which I hold other characters. Within the Kushiel books, Joscelin forsakes his entire order of warrior-monks for the sake of the sacred prostitute Phedre, becoming her consort and protector. He “will … stand at the crossroads and choose, choose again and again…” to stay with her. The core of these characters' culture also wraps around the thematic words of "Love as Thou Wilt," and epic, steadfast love and loyalty permeates the narrative in many different flavors beyond Joscelin, as well. (And the books are quite good. I'd recommend the original trilogy.)

Achmed (Symphony of the Ages by Elizabeth Hayden) — Achmed was one half of my very first OTP before I knew what an OTP was. He is not the series' romantic lead—though he wouldn't mind shifting that dynamic (and neither would I, the actual romantic lead made me wrinkle my nose)—and he is specifically described as considering it more important for him to be at the lead's side, supporting her, than it is for them to be romantically entangled. The books use imagery as him being the other side of the main character's coin, the dark to her light. The books are essentially what would today be called "romantasy power fantasies," but I was in precisely right teen-girl demographic when I read them to fixate hard upon the unconditional loyalty of it all.

Daemon Saetan SaDiablo (The Black Jewels by Anne Bishop) — These were my favorite books for a long time, but please do not read them. They are very dark fantasy with a laundry list of content warnings. Good and evil magic cockrings are, no shit, major plot elements. ACOTAR's sex-slavery sections are fanfic of the Black Jewels. So. With that disclaimer in mind, see Daemon, the embodiment of steadfast loyalty and dedicated service. He would carve his heart out upon request, without hesitation, if required of the person he's chosen to dedicate himself to. And he...basically does during the course of the books, offering the life and the family he's built with full knowledge of what he's sacrificing. This unconditional loyalty shows up in more than just him, though. These books are wrapped around this trope with every character, and it's baked into the worldbuilding—and it's then subsequently taken to a very fanfic-esque biological extremes, as you do. These books are. Intensely problematic, but you have to understand that if they were to be tagged, Ao3 style, they are very much idfic and/or Dead Dove. I honestly have no idea how they got published.



---




~Aromantic Interlude~

Tangentially relevant: I'm aromantic. For me, romantic love is very much "sounds fake, but okay." In its stead, I present to you the concept of 'Where You Go, I Go,' based on a love that could be of any flavor at its base. So you start there, building this love and loyalty from the ground up, choosing again and again. Every choice then takes you deeper into a kind of essential faith, leaving love everything but helpless and hopeless because it's wrapped around your own agency. There are roots and foundations, tested even before they had sunken deep enough to be unassailable, so once they are that deep? Well. There's a reason it's called unconditional, after all. And, if it's a choice, and you choose to flavor this kind of unconditional as romantic? Well, there's no such thing as falling out of love, because your feet have always been right there on the ground every step of the way.

So yeah! If you can show me a romance narrative that's based in this? I'm sold on it, forever. I'll also believe it, where I honestly do not buy two random assholes 'falling in love' because they were in vague proximity. What nonsense (lol).



Service Kink Interlude

I really can't consider myself to have given a full overview of this trope without touching on the concept of the service kink. This is the idea of service to another, but as an end in and of itself. And not necessarily a sexual one, either, since the service may be literal (as in 'acts of service,' like the love language) or more metaphorical in the sense of support, obedience, or subordinancy. With this in mind, 'Where You Go, I Go,' as a trope, can very easily become a power exchange dynamic. While there can be mutual loyalty, and there often is, it's not a requirement, so you end up with an 'offering up' of loyalty. The loyal person is willing to do anything for the one they've chosen to be loyal to, whether at their request or not. This exchange dynamic can range from very vanilla to heavy BDSM D/s—and the 'service' aspect can be on either side of the slash, too. You can just as easily have the one with the dom-vibes offering their loyalty in acts of service as you can have the one having sub-vibes acting in support. Daemon Sadi (above) is illustrated as a submissive service top and Hanguang-jun's mission in life (below) is to spoil the shit out of his resurrected husband.



---


Where my early favorites are all book characters, my perennial favorite unconditionally loyal characters come from (mostly) TV and movies, since my tastes have shifted as I've grown older. That, and I plunged into fandom, where visual media is easier to rapidly share and has unified visuals, which suited tumblr's format. For some fandoms, too, I was drawn to them because I saw this 'Where You Go, I Go' trope being played with in fanworks.

Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun (The Untamed & Mo Dao Zu Shi) — Hanguang-jun is the character that made me realize that I had a favorite trope at all, and that trope was this. He dedicates himself to the main character, his future husband, with his whole heart and soul, finally reunited after the other's death and resurrection. (This...isn't a spoiler. The MC's resurrection kicks off both the book and the show.) He offers what is very much a 'you and me against the world' declaration, and this loyalty comes after Hanguang-jun fuckin' up, making a series of grievous mistakes, and realizing that the only thing he wants is to be steadfast, both soon enough and earnestly enough, to keep the one he loves safe. After over a decade of grieving his mistakes and growing some maturity, sure, but he does get there in the end. The Untamed (TV show) goes for epic high romance, while the book (MDZS) goes for the two leads being puzzle pieces fitting together, but both iterations offer this type of unconditional dynamic and it's delightful.

James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes (Marvel Cinematic Universe) — Of course, Bucky loves Steve, regardless if you ship them. Their relationship is defined by Bucky's unconditional loyalty with their whole, "Till the end of the line," thing. In his faith, Bucky sticks around in a war that's visibly eating him alive and ends up in what is essentially Hell on Earth as he follows his best friend right off a cliff. It's deeply compelling, and the way they wrap the narrative of that first movie he's in around this emotional core gives it an emotional heft and weight that the superhero genre of movies struggles to reach naturally otherwise.

Merlin (BBC Merlin) — Merlin and Arthur are paired as counterparts by the dragon in the basement from the very first episode, and they grow to be epic companions. The show repeatedly offers that this is Destiny for them, that they're two sides of the same coin, etc. and so on. Merlin, very early, drinks poison for Arthur and never gets any less ride-or-die, despite the trauma and his fatalistic love-hate relationship with Destiny. Merlin's fatal flaw is that he loves too well and to exclusion, and many of his many mistakes in the show are because he's doing everything he can for Arthur with absolutely zero trust and communication with anyone at all, let alone Arthur himself. It's an unconditional loyalty that drives the show and causes about half of the problems that then need to be solved, as the consequences compound upon themselves over the course of the show's various seasons, leaving this trope a positive trait with often very negative outcomes. (Fascinating!)

Hardison & Eliot (Leverage) — These two are two-thirds of the OT3 of my heart. Hardison, because he will wait for goddamned ever for their third, Parker. He gives her space to be herself, offers to go at her pace in their developing relationship, and makes sure to embody patience and support. Eliot because he basically marries them both at the end with ‘until my dying day,' and up until that point is always watching their backs, making sure they're happy, healthy, and fed, and going above and beyond as they all shift from teammates into found family. They all go through so much for each other, but these two especially are just there in the background, doing their thing and holding each other and Parker up.



---


Over the last few years, I've also added several fandom, some of which I drifted into because of reading fic canonblind. Either a crossover caught my fancy, or I found a time travel fixit that was too intriguing to pass up. Here are a couple of the characters from those that I've started to follow around even though my canon experience is...limited, for various reasons:

Cody | CC-2224 (Star Wars: Clone Wars) - So. So this is primarily because of fanon, I'm not gonna lie. I haven't ever been able to actually get through the Clone Wars show, for as much as I enjoy Star Wars. (I have tried!) But there are a lot of fics that focus on Cody's dedication to Obi-wan Kenobi, and they're solid and coherent enough that I am less concerned with how true to canon they are and more about how much I enjoy reading them. Beyond just Cody, however, there's also a very strong loyalty dynamic between the Jedi General and their Clones within all the fic. And the deeper that dynamic goes into unconditional loyalty, the more fucked up the ending to the Clone Wars is. It's the kind of incredible narrative angst that has spawned an entire subgenre of fic that I will eat with a spoon if given half a chance. And with so many examples of Jedi-and-Clone, the relationships between them span all kinds of familial, platonic, and romantic. It's like this fic genre was made specifically for me.

The Batfam (Batman. Sort of.) - Honestly? The Batfam in any kind of cohesive sense is almost entirely fanon, but it's also a very large genre of fanon. I've read enough canon to know that it does have roots in canon, partially and in pieces, and each of those examples has been carefully hoarded and then tucked into the greater fabric of what could have been, would would have been, might have been, and what is in this version, specifically. Shared between a lot of this genre's works is a frankencanon cobbled-together out of necessity, because DC's actual comics canon physically can't agree with itself, and that foundation of near-canon is predicated on the idea that these characters are all unholy amounts of dysfunctional but will go above-and-beyond for each other when the chips are down. Which is. Wow! I want to hoard that like a dragon. The Batfam ranges from suitably grimdark ala some of the more recent comic issues to very much Wayne Family Adventures (a webcomic criticized from 'being too fanficcy' in that the characters actually interact and seem to like one another, lol). But the high stakes, anything-for-my-family kind of loyalty really drew me in—and keeps drawing me into new corners of the fic genre as I find new fics to enjoy.



---


There are many more characters that I'm very fond of that illustrate some aspect of the 'Where You Go, I Go' trope, but that haven't taken over my entire brain. If I were to start listing those and trying to take canon apart to illustrate to you where this trope comes into play for each of them, we'd be here all day. But each canon and character have something to them: a bit of narrative, a snippet of dialogue, an arc word or two. Something shared and repeated and doubled-down on. This love, loyalty, and dedication is meant. It's deliberate and an intrinsic part of these characters canons, for better or worse.

At the end of the day, it's the unconditional part that really gets me, I think. The refusal to break faith. I realized some time ago that this is my version of the soulbond trope. There is someone out there (found family, a partner, something else) who either you can choose or who chooses you. It's not fate, it's choice. It's being stubborn to the nth degree, but as a virtue, where it would be so much easier to simply...not be dedicated. It's actions speaking louder than words. It's being there, always.

And that's why 'Where You Go, I Go' is my favorite trope.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 5th

❄ Challenge #3 on snowflake_challenge.

---

A Fannish Opinion that has Changed Over Time

My opinions about fan things are usually pretty chill, and now that I'm older, I let them evolve on their own, so the ones I can really think about Changing (capital-letter changing) were both back when I first encountered online fandom in any sort of fannish community sense. I have a small one and a big one, both related to me first starting to write fic, and both kind of took me by surprise. :)

• Johnlock with a rule!63 Sherlock:
  
  I wrote a fic for BBC Sherlock based on a kinkmeme prompt that was basically a romance novel prompt. Since, at the time, I had been reading an exorbitant amount of Victorian-era romance novels, I decided to tackle it.
  
  The first half of the opinion change is starts with the fact that, at the time, I thought it would be easiest to gender-swap Sherlock. I think the swap went rather well, all things considered. The writing of the fic was a fun and interesting challenge to make sure that Sherlock was IC while having such a fundamental shift in background. Plus, I got to build her genderbent friends, who were minor characters in canon. Thing is: would I do the same genderbending thing now? Absolutely not. I would zero percent try to make Sherlock a girl in any future fics, if I was ever drawn to writing for the fandom for whatever bizarre reason. The prompt allowed for het, and I made it het to cleave closer to the formula I was using, but honestly, doing the same now strikes me as...hrm. I don't like to read made-het fics in any of the fandoms I've since encountered and enjoyed. I find them unnecessary and often a bit too self-inserty for my reading pleasure. So I'm in the strange position of looking at something I wrote and do enjoy rereading and knowing that I would never voluntarily read it if I found it in the wild. If I wrote it again, I'd honestly probably make gender a nonissue within the narrative, or just have an outright ABO world. A half-step more worldbuilding for a little less unnecessary het. (Even if it did turn out well, and it's a fun read, imho.)
  
  The second half of the opinion change, however, is what really sideswiped me. I absolutely no longer ship Johnlock. I just...don't. I had to force the characters together enough that I was like, 'Wow, I *barely* believe this, and I'm the one who made it plausible.' And if I was writing a romance novel where I'm making sure they fit together so they do feel like a reasonable couple, then canon is not giving me nearly enough to believe it anymore. Not when the characters are such assholes, by design. A good asshole character can make a wonderful ship partner, but now--especially in retrospect; poor BBC Sherlock fandom--these were not good asshole characters. They were just assholes and I don't want them near each other anymore. Give me a good old-fashioned Watson from an earlier canon.
  
  
• Fic, and me writing it:
  
  Okay, this one's hilarious, but when I first got obsessed with Doctor Who and went hunting More, I encountered fic, and had a whole crisis about 'writing in someone else's world.' I was drawn to do so, but also: why would I do that?! I wrote only rp and original fiction up until that point, and Pern (and McCafferey's attitudes towards fic) had sort of shaped my concepts of 'but you can't write the characters like the author writes them...' So I was sitting there, staring at the idea of trying to write someone else's characters. Wasn't that like...inherently wrong or something? (Lol)
  
  I ended up reading a lot of Marvel, actually, until my brain settled out into a: oh, these canons are basically fanfic anyways. Especially Marvel and Doctor Who. And then I felt 100% less concerned about writing someone else's characters, because I wasn't, was I? I was ingesting the characters and making them my own, to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell, that was in conversation with canon in a unique and interesting way. Fic was fun *because* of canon, because there was a whole substrate that I could reference and draw on and interpret and reflect. Delicious. I'm honestly drawn to these type of long-standing fic-like canons, because they're big enough to have been contributed to by many different authors. I honestly find it a little difficult to fic smaller canons, because I haven't seen the core of the character interpreted through different lenses--something I both love and find useful in my own writing endeavors.
  
  So eventually fic became its own Thing in my head. Which is also very funny, because in one of my writer's groups, a friend wrote fic of one of *my* stories. Which was. A Very Wild Experience. I had to become cool with a lot of things very fast. It also helped me realize some of the fundamental reasons that people tackle transformative works, especially fic, and settle into the idea that I really just wanted to write so much of it.

Fandom Snowflake Challenge — January 1st

❄ Challenge #1 on snowflake_challenge.

---

Updating My Fandom Info

With the prompt so free-form, I've decided to do a bit of a fannish overview, and then update the bits and pieces in my journal stickies and profile. :) So, without further ado:

Hello! I primarily go by Desiderii while on the greater internet and in fandom spaces, so named after one of old lunar maria, Mare Desiderii, the Sea of Desire. Mare Desiderii does not actually exist, but was an artifact of the tech used to photograph it in the 1950s, which I find deeply romantic. On Dreamwidth and Plurk, I'm Axael, mostly because the 'desiderii' journal was taken, and Axael was the name of my WoW character at the time, short for Axael Roxe. Elsewhere, I've also been Jazz and Zel and a handful of others, depending on what I needed a name for. I joined tumblr with Desiderii, however, so that's the name I've stuck with for fandom.

I primarily fangirl on Ao3, nowadays, reading fic and posting with desiderii. When I do go on social media, I have spent most of my fan-related time on tumblr (fandomentanglement and desideriific) and plurk (axael). I also like to drop into conventions, especially local ones. I may-or-may not cosplay for them, but I love window-shopping the Expo Hall and poking around Artists' Alley.

As for my 'fan backstory,' beyond the usual accumulation of merch and a bit of fan art, my being a fan mostly came out through writing. Specifically, I did a great deal of roleplay in canons where it was very easy to create an in-world Original Character. I was very enthusiastic on Neopets (*fond*) and found many an Avidgamers (and later Proboards) forum site. My most fervent love in rp platforms, however, will always be MUD/MUSH/MOOs (Mu*). On various Mu*, I dipped my toes into Tolkien, Wheel of Time, and--above all--Dragonriders of Pern. I played on Harper's Tale, a Pern MOO, for years. I spent most of my college years on there, puttering about as a dragonrider. My character's dragon is still on the HT site, even, so even just recounting this is making me feel deeply nostalgic.

With most of my fannish behavior being poured into RP, I pretty much stayed in my own little fandom niche, moving from Pern to Black Jewels RP, until about... Well, somewhere between June 2010 and January 2012, according to the creation dates on my various tumblrs. I discovered Doctor Who during that time and devoured as much of it as I could. Became a little obsessed, hunted for more, found fic, then Ao3, and then threw myself into the fandom community right during the 2012 tumblr heyday. My fandom before that was mostly quiet and personal and of limited interest to anyone else. Posting up fic and engaging with other fans about the stuff we liked (outside of rp) just about blew my socks off. It was so much fun. I ended up writing a handful of various fic, did a BBC Merlin Big Bang in 2013, and that clinched it. Fic was my new fandom niche.

Nowadays, because I both write relatively slowly and also split my time writing original fiction and/or editing others' original fiction, I post a new fic only a handful of times a year. I do, however, read just an absolutely ridiculous quantity of others' work. Back during the plague, I began just always having a fic to read open on my phone and at this point it's habit. When I need a moment of downtime, I'm more likely to read a little snippet of fic than I am to open a phone game.

Although my fandom contribution focus is mostly written, I often dabble in creating song playlists that revolve around characters, themes, or narrative storylines. (Here's a character-focused one from my Marvel phase, Aw, Tony, No (Youtube Playlist).) I especially love creating playlists for others--for fics or just because. Further than that, I also knit (I've knitted two 16ft 4th Doctor scarves), and do a bit of cosplay (I've attempted a She-Hulk, and I'd love to work up a proper Xena).

I also do still RP sometimes, though I haven't in a couple of years due to my focus on original creative writing. When I do, I mostly do so here on DW as part of the DWRP community. I'm still faintly bemused that people mostly RP canon characters here, since I came up in the Pern RP tradition where it was highly encouraged to RP a fandom OC.

My current fandom of choice is Batfam, which, I think, as a genre of fics, could generously be called canon-influenced. DC's comics canon is a disaster wrapped around sparks of brilliance and fanon has, IMHO, codified things into a more-or-less stable scaffolding. I do also write Black Jewels fusions, BBC Merlin, MDZS/Untamed, and Marvel. Also Books of the Raksura, Stargate, Leverage, The Sentinel, and Teen Wolf. Adding to that, I read a lot of Star Wars (a lot of Star Wars), ATLA, and anything from miscellaneous canons that catches my fancy with Time Travel, Mutual Pining, or Crack Treated Seriously.

I have a bookmark collection on Ao3, since the other places I was keeping my reclists are defunct. It's here at Desiderii's Panfandom Recommendations. I'm a multi-shipper and a polyshipper with only a handful of squicks, so I do have some smut recced, but my tastes in fic trend towards action/adventure and gen. Even with my last bookmark being from two years ago (and I definitely need to update, there is no recent Batfam or Star Wars in there...), I rec everything in that collection.

Of my own stuff, I'd recommend, Newest to Oldest:
• The Blessing of Decay (Batman, Gen, 19k)
• The Messenger (MXTX Polyamory Flash Exchange 2020, MDZS/Untamed Frankencanon, 3Zun, 14k)
• A Landslide Begins With A Single Pebble (Yuletide 2013, Books of the Raksura, Gen, 2k)
• Candle, Cup, and Casket (PaperLegends 2013, BBC Merlin, Merthur, 234k)
• The Unexpected Key (Kinkmeme fill 2013, BBC Sherlock, Johnlock with a rule63!Sherlock, 66k)

Currently, I'm working on a handful of Batfam fics, and some very self-indulgent fusions and crossovers. The next thing I intend to post is the third installment of my Cryptid Batfam series. I also have a Batman/Stargate crossover fic that I'm actively working on and a healthy handful of WIPs in a range of fandoms that I stare at wistfully every few months before getting back to my original fiction. If I can manage it, though, this year I'd like to finally figure out how to rewrite the last chapter of Fire Safety (the Avengers + a Dragon Egg). It's only been ten years. It's fine.

I think that's mostly it! This has been an incredibly fun walk down memory lane for me, and I'm half-inclined to go see how Harper's Tale is doing. Either that or program my own MUSH, just for fun. If you've any fic recs in any of the fandoms I've mentioned, please hit me up. I love getting links passed my way. <3

I read anecdata's post On Learning New Skills and it send me down a mental tangent about how I treat knowledge. And in the spirit of trying to actually use this journal as a journal like I used my lj in days of yore, I figured I'd try and get some of my thoughts out.

So.

I subscribe to the All Knowledge is Worth Having maxim, and there's a subset of that knowledge that I consider "life skills" or "casual knowledge" that will improve people's lives if they have it. Not just the facts and figures, all the physics and math and art and history and biology, etc and so on which is of course important, but more important is how all of those fit together. How all those pieces function as part of a whole. That's what I consider casual knowledge. Knowing a tiny bit of everything useful.

And something I consider deeply important.

Part of this is because I like to have breadth of knowledge and that's something I prioritize. (And moreso now that I'm older and doing it deliberately.) I very rarely do in-depth knowledge dives. This is something I was considering after reading anecdata's post and how hard it is to the knowledge dives. Because yeah, it is hard, but also...I don't need to do them, because a deep-dive isn't actually a goal of mine. I'm honestly more interested in knowing how all the disparate bits of knowledge function as a machine together, cross-discipline, than focusing on learning one thing.

Which isn't to say that I don't focus. I do and will. I've focused a great deal on the skills surrounding writing/editing, for example. And some of my recurring hobbies I'll do brief deep-dives when required, but for passing interests, no. I'll skate over the top of an interest for a while, learning as much as I can, and then move on. And a lot of the time I'll just...focus for long enough to accomplish a goal and that's it.

And I was thinking about it and I think part of is that, backgroundy-wise, I've got a theatre degree that I've often joked about as not a degree in art but a degree in everything. (Especially when well-meaning relatives ask what on earth I can do with a theatre degree. Answer: literally everything and I am absolutely not exaggerating.) My rationale: it's much easier to suspend disbelief when you're accurate about the stuff you're portraying aka when you reach a certain baseline verisimilitude. I consider it a Kitchen Sink degree.

Because that's sort of what I consider my theatre degree to have taught me on a practical level: how to fake anything I want. That and how to spot-research in-depth, with citations. (I considered doing dramaturgy, but stage management was a bit more fun.) So now that I do editing/writing, that sort of...comes in handy? Because a good chunk of writing is research just good enough to fake it, and knowing where the line is of how in-depth you actually need to go.

Plus, breadth is honestly preferable for writing, imho, because, well. You need to know how everything all fits together. And theatre is writing with an audience you can see and feel the reactions of, which is the best form of immediate feedback I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. AND and this breadth comes in handy when editing, especially, because being able to speak knowledgeably about literally any random subject an author is trying to tackle is basically a requirement. So I learn to find the similarities in topics and How Stuff Works so that you can crack open anything and how to ask intelligent questions when you know the basics off a 101 youtube video. It's that delicious feeling of knowing enough about everything you need to know about (or knowing you can find out)--at least enough to know when something's off-kilter.

I'm not sure I have an actual point, but just that...I don't think it's a bad thing to pick up and set aside interests without gaining a level of mastery to them. And that in some cases not gaining mastery is actually a preferred outcome for every random thing that I find interest in. Being casually interested in something is fine. If I'm more interested in it than casually, I'll find myself coming back later to learn more.