i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

you guys, last night i spent an hour lying on the floor of the living room watching footage of various university marching bands on youtube. (if you follow my del.icio.us, you already know this. i would apologize, except i don't want to, because, you know, kind of amazing.) i have such a kink for marching drumlines, i cannot even tell you. the chunk of the 2006 (?) tour where panic! had that drumline? i have watched probably more than 50 bad, shaky videos of that on youtube, just to watch spencer smith and brendon urie pound out marching cadences.

(that sounds really dirty. um.)

(also, the interesting thing about that -- panic!'s concert drumline, i mean, not how dirty my mind is, my dirty mind is entirely run-of-the-mill -- is that i know brendon canonically marched in a line in high school, and you can tell, because spencer's a better drummer, but he still plays the marching snare like he plays his kit, with his elbows all over the place. brendon's not as good a drummer, technically speaking, but he's got the marching carriage down perfectly; bden's entirely self-contained, and if spencer marched in a real line, he'd take somebody's eye out with those elbows. tsk, tsk, spencer smith the fifth.)

(dude, i would totally sell my baby with patrick stump to have footage of bob bryar, high school era, marching in a line. JESUS CHRIST ON A YUGOSLAVIAN WATER BUFFALO, WOULD THAT BE HOT. i feel patrick would agree, and not mind the loss of the baby. much. we could always make another one.)

wait. what was my point? i can't even remember. drumlines, you guys. they're awesome. there's not enough good footage of them on youtube. that's what i did with my monday night. that, and watched the trainwreck that was wake forest/iowa. the drumlines were more awesome.

this footage -- shot across the snare line of the ucla band -- is entirely made of awesome. and hott. and awesome.

ETA: not that i think it's likely, but metafandom, please don't link this.

ETA2: you guys, i'm a little overwhelmed by all the comments on this post; i'm reading them and enjoying them immensely (thank you so much for sharing your stories with me) but i can't keep up with answering them at the rate you're going. if i don't respond directly to your comment, please don't be offended -- i have read every one of them and appreciated them all. and thank you doubly for keeping discussion (and it's been super interesting!) polite and bloodless; please keep it up, and don't worry about spamming my comments. i'm enjoying this even as i can't respond.

reading friendsfriends last night, i saw a couple of female media fans make sweeping generalizations about modern sports fandoms: that they aren't "real" fandoms, not like media fandoms are, or our livejournal-based rps fandoms (which, you know, often include sports rps; where does that fall on this spectrum of "real"?).


they were comments that i am absolutely certain were not meant to hurt, though they were clearly meant to generalize, and then i sort of maybe had a little bit of a meltdown in an im window at quicknow over this topic. because those comments did hurt me, because they marginalized fandoms about which i am deeply, deeply passionate -- and fandoms which i have always, since before i knew what media fandom was, considered fandoms.

( this got long, but i hope you'll read it anyway )