fox

I've thought about it and thought about it, and I can't possibly sign up for Yuletide this year. There's so little I can focus on, and it's not the time to be adding things.

I hope you all have a great Yuletide, and I'll see you next time.

This is what happens when I commit too hard to a metaphor after lunch.

Over in yuletide_admin, there's been some slight confusion about the new three-nominations rule (down from six). Trying to be helpful, I commented:

You had to offer at least three, and had to request at least three (with an option for four), and they didn't have to be the same - so with up to six nominations there was the potential for 33-50% of fandoms by volume to be nominated but not both offered and requested, and possibly nominated and neither offered nor requested, which took up lots of byte-crunching time. (The percentage of nominated-but-otherwise-ignored fandoms - which I may go ahead and call, like, Ross Perot Fandoms, or something - was never quite that high, of course, but you get the idea.) The new system simply requires us all to do our narrowing-down a little sooner.

Pleased with the Ross Perot thing, I pinged ellen_fremedon here at work to tell her about my own cleverness - how are people going to laugh at your jokes, after all, if you don't make sure they heard them - and this happened:

me: I have coined a new phrase! Ross Perot Fandoms!
ellen: Cracky weird but oddly compelling fandoms that spring up and draw attention away from established juggernauts?
me: Heh. I was actually going for Fandoms people nominate and then pay no further attention to, but your thing isn't bad either. Those, I'd probably call Ralph Nader Fandoms.
ellen: Ooh. Yes.

And after a few more minutes' conversation, we had the following list (with all apologies to our non-US friends, because I realize this is a very -centric list).

Ross Perot fandoms - Fandoms people nominate and then pay no further attention to.

Ralph Nader fandoms - Cracky weird but oddly compelling fandoms that spring up and draw attention away from established juggernauts.

Dennis Kucinich fandoms - The tiny little fandoms you nominate year after year, confident that someday someone will write them. Or, in the alternative, that you nominate year after year in the full expectation that they will generate nothing, but you keep nominating them in order to talk about them and keep others aware they exist.

Sarah Palin fandoms - The fandoms that have been allowed, despite not actually qualifying, under the occasional "brand-new" or "first-year" exception, which everybody knows will never be considered again but can't stop talking about while they're the hot new thing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger fandoms - Harry Potter, Twilight, Star Wars, etc.: not. eligible. Please stop asking.

Jimmy Carter fandoms - Previously-non-obscure fandoms that have been off the air or otherwise out of production for ten years or more. You thought they'd disappeared, but they just keep coming back.