My paper is mostly finished, actually, but I’m still applying to school and have the dreaded grading — as well as coming up with a syllabus for next semester.  So I’m not actually writing a long post, I’m simply linking you to one.

A lot of people, recently, seem to be writing about the nature of the otakusphere.  I would link you to all of them, but I don’t remember them all.  I haven’t particularly bothered, as I really view my place, at Super Fanicom and the otakusphere generally, as the doggedly-obsessed one who starts discussing Derrida at cocktail parties (yes, Friday night, what’s your point?).  Self-reflection would take time away from writing about minutiae.  Also it would require me to have a vague understanding of the miniature society we’re all a part of, and like the bigger version, I’m just not paying attention.

Anyway.  Instead of trying to make something up, I’m telling you to just read this post.  Not only does it seem good, and true, and all those things our Gurren Lagann tells us to appreciate — it also came next in my rss after a sweet post about Forrest Ackerman, who has just died recently.  So, the post in question isn’t specifically about anime, but then again, neither is Derrida.  Here’s a bit of it if you haven’t already clicked over:

Fandom’s about not being alone anymore. Maybe you started as a fan-inna-box, two hundred miles from the nearest con and farther still to the nearest fan, but you came here to find friends, and to share your squee, and to create things together, and to say, “I was here, and I loved this thing, and these are the people who will remember me.”

So if you want to know what I think the otakusphere is, there.  I’m pointing to that.  Go, and frolic.