My 5 Five Favorite Fandom Cliches  (for xanzpet )

1. Amnesia.  I love memory loss that starts everybody from a blank slate (and of course the resulting attraction that they never consciously acknowledged totally comes to the fore.)  So much love!
2. Soul bound.  Primarily I love it for Buffy/Giles, but ye gods I can't forget the great Tabaqui Spike/Xander fic Changes either.
3. Epistolary.  Give me letters, notes, diaries, emails (although I do prefer there to be something other than 100s of emails).  But... love.
4. Giles as a kinky sod who knows what he's doing in the bedroom and is comfortable with himself and his partner once he's made the decision that he wants them.  Gah.
   
5. Spike can bite even with the chip as long as someone wants him to.  I like it when Spike bites.  Nummy.
   

My 5 Favorite Board Games (for entrenous88 )

1. Cranium.  You get the mix of everything all in one game, and it goes fast.
2. Scattergories.  Even though it takes like three rounds for my brain to get into it, and even though every time the buzzer goes off I jump, it's great.
3. Uno.  Ok, it's not quite a board game, but it gets really hilarous when you start making alliances to crush the person with the least cards.
4. Apples to Apples.  Again, I know, it's a card gameish thing, but I'm always amused by it, so on it goes.  Best to play with as perverse as brains as possible though.
   
5. The Buffy Board Game.  Ha.  This is when I knew I was a fan, when I loved this game beyond reason.  Sadly people in my house will not play it with me - they say it's quite boring and I'm just gaga.
   

finally, for xanzpet again, my thoughts on the power of tabloid media in this country.  Because they're two different things, I think.  On the one hand, there's spectacle and spectatorship, and I am a half-hearted consumer of the spectacle.  I come home some days and ask Neil & D what happened in the tabloid world.  I take prurient satisfaction in hearing someone is a train wreck, and I'm trying to be honest here and actually say so.  I like shaking my head and thinking, Oh, those coke whores. 

But that's not what Xanzpet actually asked - he asked what I thought about the power of this same media (and here I think of things like TMZ, thesuperficial, the fact that even my local newspaper has, mixed in with it's bulletin posts about the world news --you know, the fires, crashes, goverment change, etc--  entries on Sandra Bullock's new baby and  some other star's time in prison).  Frankly, it freaks me the fuck out.  The day I opened a US Weekly (I think) and saw a pictures of actress and other celebrities doing "normal" things with the caption "They're just like us!" and discovered it wasn't ironic and that it was a segment in every issue I shuddered in horror.  The thing is, the coverage is a mix of the most extreme and self-involved behavior together with the quotidian, the every day.  And I believe it does have a profound effect to combine both of those constantly.  Because for every picture where we see Paris Hilton drinking her Starbucks latte, and then see her tweaked at the end of the night, it sets up a bridge - she can do both, she can be both.  I do believe that, once people see this kind of thing, that "She can" becomes, somehow, "I can".  The fact that more and more "news" outlets feel the need to both comment on and perpetuate this kind of gossip as news amplifies the problem.  But they're just giving people what they want, right?