RivkaT

Observations on exams:

1. Okay, fine. Renewals and termination of transfers is rocket science. I will still test on it!
2. When the question has a female protagonist, most people use her first name. When the question has a male protagonist, most people use his last name. There’s even a correlation between people who mistake “Jo Harvelle” for a male (despite the use of the pronoun in the question) and use “Harvelle” instead of “Jo” to answer the question. Just submitted for your consideration.
3. Stop saying “arguably” or I will hurt you. Ok, I’ll just reduce your grade. Argue or do not argue; there is no arguably.

( Vaguely spoilery for BSG: )

Clay Shirky, whose essays are regularly referenced by people on LJ interested in how an online community functions, ( has a new book. )

The icon poll from last time reveals that the Rivkid is twice as popular as the nearest runner-up (I think so too!). In fact, my icons have a power law distribution in popularity, which is an entirely perfect result. Also, thank you so much, notreallyjordan and anonymous for the extra time! I know I haven’t been visibly around much this semester, but you have been an amazing refuge for me even when I’m not saying anything. I will attempt to perform similar acts of kindness, and also do more writing here.

A paragraph of text I love (wait for it):
The problem is that no matter how many monkeys are thrown into the background to provide eyecatching stunts of simian prowess, the person who has said the stupid thing has still said the stupid thing. The problem is that whether the injured party is diverted by monkey spectacle or not, the person who has said the stupid thing has still said the stupid thing. The problem is that when the earth burns up in a supernova flare and the monkeys that have taken over the world in ages past disassemble into atoms, the person who has said the stupid thing will still have said the stupid thing, although, admittedly, at that point it will mean significantly less to the injured party.

Unpopular fannish opinions, lexicography subset:( Read more... )

Next time, I hope, reviews. I have several stacked up and waiting!

In a few weeks, my paid account will expire, and I don't think I'm prepared to pay LJ for more time. The biggest pain, I think, will be the impending userpic dieoff/bottleneck. I need your help! I think my default and book review icons, both Wonder Woman-based, will stay. But which other 4 should I preserve? They are here. I don't promise to abide by the poll results, but I am really interested in your top picks. If you have any that you would bless me if I dumped, let me know that in comments.
( poll behind cut )

Here's the IP lawyer's reaction to this latest male-entitlement fantasy running around fandom:

"Open source" is a category mistake of the ugliest kind. The concept of open source, as with intellectual property generally, is based on the fact that my possession of a copy of a program doesn't interfere with your possession of a copy of the same program. Nor does my alteration of the program, and subsequent release of my alterations on the same terms, interfere with your possession and use of your copy. The general term for that is "nonrivalrous," and the fact that, in the absence of law, people can easily make copies without permission is "nonexcludability."

Who is supposed to be doing the open sourcing here? For those of us who aren't Cylons, there aren't many copies. Bodies are rivalrous (and this fellow's very professions of happiness at being granted access indicate that he knows this). And a big part of the project of feminism has been to establish excludability as women's fundamental right, when it hasn't been the default. To call for women's bodies to be "open source" is simultaneously to reject the authority of women over their bodies--a fragile enough authority already--and to commodify, to thingify, women's bodies into fungible copies: the neat trick of reducing us to our bodies and then denying us control over them. (In real open source, you don't get to say no to a user you don't like. That's kind of the point of open source: everybody gets to play. So when the ferret person is shocked that people are reading his proposal as coercive--well, even if there weren't the cultural background he's so madly denying, the concept he picked is at best wrongheaded and strikes me as quite revealing about the actual agenda.)

Open source is a great idea, but it's always important to ask who's supposed to be providing the free stuff. As I've said elsewhere, when you start to compare fields that get intellectual property protection (software, sculpture) with fields that don’t (fashion, cooking, sewing), it becomes uncomfortably obvious that our cultural policy has expected women’s endeavors to generate surplus creativity but has assumed that men’s endeavors require compensation, just as our society has expected women to do the hard work of raising children and keeping house out of love and duty but not expected men to show up at the factory for the same reasons. We are now asked to signal our voluntary provision of sexual healing, because apparently we control a valuable resource and it would be much nicer for men if they didn't have to pay, in any economic or noneconomic ways, for access to that resource. And it's important that we do the signalling, because if men had to signal that they wanted to be asked to touch our breasts, not many women would respond to the signal! Talk about an endowment effect. (Sorry, couldn't help it. It is quite interesting to see how intuitive behavioral economics is, especially for people who have reason to know--that is, people lower in various hierarchies.)

I tell you what: when you can code and/or otherwise reproduce my breasts without touching me, I'll consider what kind of license I might use for them.

Surfacing briefly to recommend--read it now!--the remix of my story Dabarim, Emet (the Bitter with the Sweet remix). A wonderful treatment of Jo, and a sharply observed take on the Winchesters, including their limited (but not entirely wrong) ethical world. And a nicely heroic ending, to boot. Dean/OC only, so pretty much safe for everyone, unlike my version.

I haven't given up on internet communication--at least, not by choice. It's just a rough semester. Some brief content:

1. Rewatch: I have such good childhood memories of Galactica 1980, and it is so, so bad. Kent McCord is one of the stars—Papa Crichton, if you don’t recognize the name—and it is extremely odd to hear that voice coming out of a younger man, saying much stupider things. I wonder what the actor thought of the difference between the two shows.

2. Department of I Know Exactly What You Mean, from Overheard in the Office: Frustrated lawyer on phone: I know they are [fangirls]! But I cannot draft a contract using only Venn diagrams, mathematic equations and animé references!

Content Policy folks, is this our new motto, Y/Y?

3. From the Straight Dope, a discussion of mithridatization: “Deliberately exposing yourself to incrementally greater doses of poison” – I must write a story with this title. Mithridates, he died old.

4. Awesome RPF of the Democratic convention, by a former West Wing writer.

5. Brutal review of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat:

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses….

God strike me dead if I'm joking about this….

His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

6. Here, have a slightly less brutal review:
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: Clear if repetitive (to the point that I felt condescended to) introduction to the basics of behavioral economics. This is the study of systematic biases in our thinking that prevent us from making rational decisions and, more importantly, open us up to manipulation by marketers (and politicians). How does a retailer sell a $3000 TV? It offers a $3500 TV that’s not worth $500 more – it won’t sell many of those, but it’ll sell a lot more $3000 TVs. A $2.50 painkiller works better than a $0.10 painkiller, because we expect expensive things to work better. “Free” promotions exert too much influence on our decisions – the difference between one cent and “free” is hugely different than the difference between one and two cents, and marketers can use this to manipulate us. Knowing about these biases doesn’t eliminate them, but it at least opens your eyes. Especially useful if you haven't heard the term "behavioral economics" before, but contained enough research results new to me that I only begrudge the condescension, not the rest of the time spent on the audiobook.

7. Coming soon: a poll on which 6 icons I should keep. Not until I named this icon ("RT beats up everyone") did I realize what River Tam and I had in common. Other than being able to kill with our brains, of course.

I did some XF recs at halfamoon a while back. And everyone who watches the Sarah Connor Chronicles should go read Jayne's Demon Hand episode tag! It has a very scary robot and a very scared human.

Law blog Concurring Opinions posts a four-part interview with BSG's Ron Moore & David Eick.

In other news: Still around, just very busy and tired. Running the ballot desk at a thousand-student speech tournament is a young woman's game, and I'm not quite recovered. More reviews to follow when I get a chance to write them up.

In the meantime, has anyone but me ever heard this story about rhetoric? If you have, could you provide a reference? It's a comparison of two classical orators. "When X spoke, the people said, 'How well he speaks!' When Y spoke, the people said, 'Let us go to war.'" I have determined that, in my reading, I want to go to war. Sure, you don't always have to choose, but often enough those are the options, and 99 times out of 100 I will choose story.

( digital innovation, big numbers, unpredictability, doctors )

( Lindholm, Kirstein, Monette & Bear )

Under Darkening Skies
Summary: The Winchesters take a job involving a demon-influenced woman and a powerful witch. Explicit heterosexual content (not, amazingly enough, involving Faith).  35,000 words.
Notes: Written for Sweet Charity for giandujakiss. This goes AU early in SPN Season 3 and right after the first “episode” of Buffy Season 8. Thanks to geekturnedvamp for beta and giandujakiss for accepting a shift in her scenario!

Read the whole story here.  

Sigh. Someday I will learn astolat's trick of posting the story at her site with the LJ comment link simultaneously with the posting of the LJ entry, but today is not that day. So here's the first part of my Sweet Charity story for giandujakiss.

Under Darkening Skies
Summary: The Winchesters take a job involving a demon-influenced woman and a powerful witch. Explicit heterosexual content (not, amazingly enough, involving Faith).
Word count: ~35,000.
Notes: Written for Sweet Charity for giandujakiss. This goes AU early in SPN Season 3 and right after the first “episode” of Buffy Season 8. Thanks to geekturnedvamp for beta and giandujakiss for accepting a shift in her scenario!

Edited: Read it here.

Subject line ganked from elements. ETA: corinna_5 made the Barbara Kruger icon.

ignazwisdom said a bunch of things I believe about the inevitable visibility of fandom. I feel the need for an easily findable set of voices offering a corrective to the hoary Spock Ears cliches of nonfannish reporting. cesperanza said we need to own the servers; astolat said we need persistence; others said many other beautiful things and shrift even made me cry. Here is my tiny attempt:

I support the OTW because fandom is so big and varied that attempts to control it through legal threats tend to strike like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky. It is terrifying, and it doesn't happen to fandom; it happens to specific fans. The risk is low, but that is small consolation to the recipient of a cease and desist letter – and too many people are afraid to play outside because of the low risk. In the past, I’ve worked with a number of fans who’ve received threat letters for fanworks, including people who probably would find each other’s (and my) fanfic puzzling at best and appalling at worst. They found me because they knew me, but there was no infrastructure. I want there to be an easy-to-find place for fans of any stripe to find information and assistance when the lightning strikes.

I support the OTW because I want there to be a multi-fandom archive that is nonprofit and persistent. I want the archive to be able to survive multiple changes in personnel; not to be dependent on a small group’s willingness to sustain the costs of hosting it in the long term; and to spend its money transparently, as required by US nonprofit law. I want an archive that accepts as much fannish content as possible. I want an archive that offers its software freely to anyone who wants to implement different rules for content. The archive won’t make everyone happy – “two fans, three opinions” is a good rule, except there are a lot more than two fans involved – but I love the idea that even the people it doesn’t make happy will have the option of using the software to make their own rules.

If you can, consider coming to code with us!

This post is part of Why I Joined OTW Week.

( Almond, Priest, Niffenegger, D.C. Noir )

My Yuletide stories:

Written for me, a delightful Have Spacesuit, Will Travel story in which Peewee grows up just as she should, with lovely details and a real Heinlein-meets-someone-who-can-write-women feel: Document 32 from the Russel Collection, on loan from the Franklin Institute, by Brown Betty.

I wrote two stories: Displacement, Eureka for Am, who asked for Nathan, Jack, beer, wings, a sporting event, and snark. Cheerleading’s a sporting event, right? Sadly, Am seems to be a dropout, but it was interesting to try Eureka, which has more charisma than it has any right to.

Your Pearly Whites, a Profit treat for serrico. I love Gail, and I love that she almost likes the things Profit makes her do.

Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with the BBC’s Jekyll, six delicious hours of cracked-out psychopathic goodness. E.g., Hyde: “Ever killed anyone, Benjamin?” Benjamin: “Not personally. I have people.” Hyde: “You’re missing out. It’s like sex, only there’s a winner.” Michelle Ryan (the new Bionic Woman) is gorgeous and morally ambiguous at best. The real attraction for me, though, is Dr. Jackman/Jekyll’s wife, Claire. In the first episode, she seemed clingy and useless to me. But I was wrong. She just knows what she wants – her husband, the father of her children – and she doesn’t care what stands in her way, fighting with wit and nerve. (Claire, rejecting Hyde’s claim that he isn’t her husband: “I married one man.” Hyde: “You miscounted.”) Some nice surprises, though a couple of them could have used some extra background, and I’m still mulling over the ending. Highly recommended!

Post-Yuletide rambling: It’s sort of relaxing that I’ll never improve on my first Yuletide story, the Heinlein pastiche. If I were a different person, perhaps with a year’s sabbatical, I might try to write out the whole thing – survival, discovery of an alien race of dubious intentions, trimphant return to Earth – but that’s just not where my energies are now.

( Review: Dan Solove on online reputation )

And for fun: If you had me under your command and could make me write anything, regardless of whether or not I know the fandom or if anybody even writes fic in that fandom and no matter how crack-addled it might be, what would you love to see me write?

I'm not actually going to write any of these (unless something strikes me), but I am curious.

My Onion horoscope, which knows of my writing woes: Crackling with the warmth of the season, a yuletide fire will quickly consume your helpless flesh.

For giandujakiss: I want to know what happened after the last two things in your Three Answers story. Either one, or both, will do!
( Don’t Ask )

for chase820: What would a plastic surgery consultation between Christian Troy and Lex Luthor sound like? I know Lex needs periodic maintenance, what with all the lingering side-effects of the meteor. I could see him traveling someplace out of the way to have it done, so Papa Luthor wouldn't catch on and see it as weakness.
( Kryp/Tuck )

for ladyagnew: Dean Winchester and Rabbi Simcha. They fight crime demons.
( (Don’t Fear) the Rabbi )

for shiba_inu: You just know that Lex, at some point, is going to attempt to breed a Kryptonian. Since the only possible male/female pair are cousins this opens a whole big box o' angst...
( Consanguinity )

for harriet_spy: BTVS, "the future is unwritten."
( Unfated )

for nestra: Scarecrow (Ambrose)/Tin Man (Cain)
( A Sorta Fairytale )

for jakrar: Nathan/Peter (note: ended up Nathan & Peter)
( Elevation )

And, for shelbyg, because it was too good to pass up: The Polytheist BSG fleet arrives at earth during a decidedly monotheistic holiday
( Tidings )

For lilian_cho: Smallville, thief!Lex

You can read the whole thing here.
( No Such AU, 7/7 )

for astolat: Sam/Dean, with kabbalah!
Dean gets a new hunting partner. Dean/OC, Sam/Dean. Sexual content.

You can read the whole thing here.

( Dabarim 8/8 )

for lilian_cho: Smallville, thief!Lex:

( No Such AU, 6/7 )