Fatter dragons and more porn.

Random stuff I'm thinking about

2009-11-30T00:51:24Z

1. Is it just me, or did Legend of the Seeker kick it up a notch in the past two episodes and start decreasing the pretty:interesting ratio? (While arguably getting prettier, even!)

2. Consider, if you will, that the all-male lawyers at this Texas firm saw nothing wrong with the images appearing on their website. (Possibly triggery for sexual abuse/child abuse.) I actually believe very strongly that we need defense lawyers who specialize in crimes for which even defending an accused is excoriated—but this isn’t the way to do it.

3. Now for something completely different. I am a technological incompetent with a CMS on my website and a planned move to a new webhost. Anybody have recommendations for cheap assistance doing the move? And by assistance, I mean: somebody to whom I could trust with my site password and have the thing moved? Because the semester is so crazy, we’re probably looking at a move in early 2010.
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So far behind

2009-11-21T03:28:27Z

Still taking Eight Crazy Nights prompts; Thuvia, I’ll hold a space for you unless you tell me otherwise.

Week-old TV thoughts (boy am I behind: this is not a good semester for fannish activities for me!):

The Real Ghostbusters: Color me shocked that it’s the fanboys who “manned up” when lives were at stake, and that the fangirl’s courage was both undermined and ignored: notice that she did demonstrate the same courage as Demian and Barnes, only without having access to rock salt and lighter fluid or any other weapon, because God forbid Dean give the girl on the front line the iron poker—I mean, she might use it to defend herself or something. I understand why they chose to show mostly boys, but that just makes Becky and the (nameless?) fangirl the only representation of girls you have, and that’s icky.

That said, I was so primed to cringe, and am inured enough to the show’s fear of girl germs (let’s presume that the female ghost is to blame! What could go wrong?), that I enjoyed some parts of it that weren’t actively smacking me in the face. I did love the meta on what Dean “feels” about having fans, since of course Dean doesn’t “feel” anything; but then the actor does go to cons and probably does feel these things, or things sort of like Dean’s discomfort, so that was kind of twisty. Dean's right within the narrative, but wrong without, and I do like that. And I also liked the moment where the fangirl got a good look at Dean and changed her attitude: the show exploits the pretty plenty, but I don’t recall another acknowledgement within the narrative that Sam and Dean get away with a huge amount of stuff—and not just with sexual/romantic conquests, but with people they want help/information from--because they’re so good-looking.

Fringe: It takes courage to redo Pusher, and I liked it! I wish I had thinkier thoughts about this show, but I’m still stuck on worshiping the ground Olivia walks on. comments on DW

Eight Crazy Nights: seeking prompts

2009-11-18T05:17:36Z

It's getting towards that time of year--less than a month to Hanukkah. So prompt me for my Eight Crazy Nights of fic posting. You might get a snippet, you might get a longer story. Available fandoms are at least: SPN, Chuck, Fringe, SV, BtVS, XF, The Inside, and you're welcome to try your luck with anything else. Multiple prompts welcome, though I will try to fill at least one of everyone's before circling back around. Prompts need not be Hanukkah-themed.

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Reviews and a SPN rec

2009-11-15T15:08:13Z

Fic rec: Mistaken for Strangers, by bellatemple . As an acafan I couldn't not love it. And if you think about the SPN-fan relationship as indicated by the show, the title gets even better.

Patricia Briggs, Hunting Ground: Still working out the tensions in their relationship, Anna and Charles go to a key meeting with the European werewolves in Seattle, moderated by a powerful fae who just happens to be one of Charles’ former lovers. There’s shopping, a wolf who thinks he’s the reincarnation of King Arthur, another Omega wolf, and a French madwolf who starts stalking Anna, et cetera. It’s a good adventure, and it’s really nice to see people who love each other but still have serious problems working through those problems, but the series fundamentally doesn’t move me.

Ilona Andrews, Silent Blade: Novella about an assassin whose latest (and final) assignment is to kill the man who ruined her life many years ago. Because of the length, a lot of the worldbuilding was reduced to telling, and it was all rather too romancey for me. But the new Andrews novel just arrived, so I’m looking forward to that one!

Storm Constantine, Sea Dragon Heir: When a seaside kingdom is conquered, its dragon gods are made to submit to the conquerers as well. Generations later, the heirs are still struggling with their subservience. There was a lot of high drama—not to mention brother/sister passion--that I might have been really into when I was reading Anne McCaffrey, and it was definitely nice that it was far from obvious that anyone was on the side of Right, but ultimately the characters didn’t move me.

Louis Sachar, Holes: Sent to juvenile work camp to dig holes for a crime he didn’t commit, Stanley Yelnats has to figure out how to survive the desert, the supervisors, and his campmates. The answers come both from reaching out and from his own family history. Wry and satisfying YA; I thought its Newbery medal was well-deserved.

C.J. Cherryh, Hammerfall: In a world ruled by the Ila, a rebel against her is cast out of his father’s tribe when his madness is revealed—madness that sends visions of the East. Given over to the Ila, he’s ordered to lead a mission to the East to discover the source of his (and many others’) madness. As with much Cherryh, this is intricate and cold. The people are mostly rigid with honor. I didn’t understand why the source of the madness did so much damage—given the explanation, the extent to which the madness incapacitated people seemed counterproductive and unjustified within the narrative world, useful more for producing angst and tension than for doing what the source intended. So that lingering question made the book even harder for me to enjoy.
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Dear Yuletide Author:

2009-11-15T01:34:32Z

First, thanks so much! I’m pretty catholic in my tastes, and I really appreciate finding stories in a rare fandom. As indicated by my fairly vague prompts, I focus most on character. I love plot, but I also love angst and hijinks. Other things I like: flawed heroes, the Gift of the Magi, getting the thing that you want the most except that it’s broken, banter, love strong enough to rock the world, trust, betrayal, power games, bodyswap, genderswap, sex pollen, consequences, telling the truth in a way that the hearer doesn’t believe it, characters who think they’re lying but aren’t, shaggy dog stories, love and blood and rhetoric, and so on. I do not mind unhappy endings; I love melodrama and characters who defy melodrama. Pretty much the only thing I don’t like: bashing female characters.

Mildred Ames - Anna to the Infinite Power

As I said, more than anything I want Anna/Rowan, but I’ll be happy with anything that has Anna struggling to become herself, or achieving herself. Angst and schmoop both welcomed.

Chuck

I listed Chuck, Ellie, Casey and Sarah because they’re the ones who really grab me, each in their different ways. A Sarah/Chuck/Casey adventure would be great (with or without sex, though heaven knows I wouldn’t mind the sex), or an “Ellie finds out” story played any way you want, from angsty to hilarious.

The Middleman (tv)

I’m here for the snappy dialogue and loopy plots. Go nuts! But if you want to do a different tone than the show, that’s also awesome; I’d just ask for the snappy banter to remain. comments on DW

Open Beta! And books!

2009-11-14T17:56:29Z

Hey, so I have an Archive of Our Own invite code—first come, first served. [ETA: and, taken, but if you want the next one I get let me know.]

Randall P. Bezanson, Art and Freedom of Speech: Bezanson examines key modern cases involving or implicating the regulation of art, arguing that courts have rather comprehensively failed to come to grips with the noncognitive, emotional and aesthetic meaning of art, and have tried to deal with it according to precedents from the cool, logical medium of print, with the result being incoherence. Oddly to me, Bezanson doesn’t have much to say about the special power of images compared to words, though he does talk about performance with respect to dance. I also really did not understand his stance that some religious people's deeply felt pain of seeing blasphemy (e.g., Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ) is not fundamentally different from the fear felt by African-Americans seeing a burning cross, because they all perceive threats to their selves. I've felt threat to my self-concept--it totally sucked--and I've felt physical threat--and I know which one the law ought to regulate. The book is a little repetitive (a byproduct of being stitched together out of essays, I suspect) and raises a lot more questions than it answers, but they’re good questions. It turns out to be really very hard to explain why the First Amendment protects art—and yet we generally feel quite strongly that it does. Bezanson deserves credit for taking the arguments seriously.

Robert Spector, The Mom & Pop Store: How the Unsung Heroes of the American Economy Are Surviving and Thriving: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. Spector grew up working for the family butcher shop, and so the topic of the small business is close to his heart. The book is a celebration of the community values and hard work of mom & pop stores (or mom & mom, or father & son, etc.), but it is pretty shallow, skipping from business to business and sometimes even from country to country with sweet stories but little analysis. People work hard and change the store to survive; they get help from loyal customers who appreciate the detailed knowledge and service the small store can provide. Spector brushes up against the topic of failure, but it would have been a better book if it had attempted to distinguish success stories from failures, because in the end I don’t really know why these businesses thrived/continue to thrive—I don’t know how hard the failures worked or how much individualized service they provided.

Though Spector assumes (and says a couple of times) that small businesses have to deliver better quality to survive, and complains about the red tape that makes it hard for small businesses to compete, he doesn’t do much to prove the existence of that quality as a general rule. In fact, one of the small businesses in his family’s history was selling fake honey at a farmer’s market, sugar and water and coloring mixed together and labeled as the product of bees. It’s not that I think that Wal-Mart’s suppliers wouldn’t do that too if they could get away with it; I’m sure they would and even do. But there are reasons that red tape developed, and it’s kind of odd to say that small businesses have to be honest or they’ll go out of business—trusting the free market—and then also not like massive chains which are themselves products of the relatively free market/consumer choices. (Though he does make the good point that once a business gets big it can buy itself favorable treatment, which is a political problem and possibly a reason to like mom & pop stores regardless of whether you think they directly offer better products and services.)

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Mostly fannish

2009-11-10T14:02:32Z

1. Deep fannish thought of the day: Nobody ever inquires into the identificatory position of the guy watching lesbian (quote unquote) porn—we don’t talk about him as torn between the positions “do I want to do her or do I want to be her?” (Are we that uncomfortable with women in the subject position "director"?)

2. Just saw a Chuck spoiler that didn’t make me happy, but probably worse is that nobody knows when the show is coming back! Not until sometime in 2010, it appears, but at least NBC ordered six more episodes, making a 19-episode season (hunh?). And yet they still have the actors doing NBC promos—guys, if you have them working, why not show their work? Also, PSA to new-minted White Collar fans: Matthew Bomer is a recurring guest star in S1&2 of Chuck; yet another reason to watch the show!

3. For someone who didn’t notice the credits, surprise Charisma Carpenter was surprising! So, like the other actors, I guess she concluded that given how bad the dialogue is, the best bet was just to deliver it in the flattest way possible, eh?

4. Coffee and Consent: From Until Someone Wakes Up, a play written by Carolyn Levy and a group of Macalester College students:

Waiter: Would you like some coffee?
Woman: Yes, please.
Waiter: Just say when. (Starts to pour.)
Woman: There. (He keeps pouring.) That's fine. (He pours.) Stop! (She grabs the pot; there is coffee everywhere.)
Waiter: Yes, ma'am.
Woman: Well, why didn't you stop pouring?
Waiter: Oh, I wasn't sure you meant it.
Woman: Look, of course I meant it! I have coffee all over my lap! You nearly burned me!
Waiter: Forgive me, ma'am, but you certainly looked thirsty. I thought you wanted more.
Woman: But -
Waiter: And you must admit, you did let me start to pour. comments on DW

Great post on interactivity in Heroes, SPN, and Castle

2009-11-08T16:13:06Z

... and what it means for fans, from serrico . Read it here! My emotional reaction to what SPN is doing with fans has largely been negative, but I don't think that invalidates it as storytelling (just makes the storytellers jerks, and ties in with their other gender issues, but that's a whole 'nother thing). Jayne's analysis is really useful as categorization and explanation of why Heroes feels so cold in its interactivity even as it's doing everything Henry Jenkins is selling as the future of entertainment.
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Pure genius

2009-11-02T15:31:54Z

More and less intelligent queries to Google, as shown through Google Suggest. Though this Slate story has an even better one, comparing "how 2 ..." with "how might one ..."
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Fiction and T-Rexes

2009-11-01T04:57:02Z

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin: Not too long from now, while privileged twins and their housekeeper’s son are watching, the stars go out. The Earth is sealed off from the rest of the universe, nearly stopped in time, as the solar system ages around it, with incomprehensible technology keeping an illusion of the sun in place so that most life goes on—at least until the sun dies, which will be within about 50 subjective years. Wilson can’t decide whether he cares more about the human reactions to impending extinction or the science, and, with his chilly narrator, he never made me connect with the characters. I see why it won the Hugo: it really does try Big Ideas, and it’s not indifferent to the fact that sf is made with people; it just didn’t gel for me.

Josh Bazell, Beat the Reaper: High concept! Our narrator is a former Mafia hitman, now in witness protection as a doctor in training, who begins his day by demonstrating to a mugger exactly why he picked the wrong guy in scrubs to assault, confiscating the guy’s gun (this becomes important later, as you might imagine), dallying with a cute drug rep, and lecturing on all aspects of the hospital experience in a world-weary tone. We slowly learn more of his backstory—the tragedy that impelled him into the Mob, and the reasons he got out (too heavy on evil to be called tragic, at least for him). When the wrong patient recognizes him, he needs to rely on his medical and his criminal expertise to survive. Contains a scene so gory that it makes me nauseated just recalling it; exploitatively compelling. Is this why people like Chuck Palahniuk? I enjoyed it, but I feel a little dirty admitting that.

Jordan Castillo Price, Among the Living: ebook, available at the author’s site. There’s also a big chunk available as a free preview. Victor is a PsyCop and Jacob is a regular cop with a PsyCop partner of his own. Victor’s special talent, talking to the dead, distresses him so much he regularly doses himself with serious drugs to numb his sensitivity. Jacob hooks up with him (they’re having sex only a few pages in!) and then they immediately get caught up in a murder investigation that seems to involve the paranormal. It moved a little fast for me—I never really got why Jacob was so into Victor so fast, especially given Victor’s self-description as sloppy druggie—but I can see why slash fans might like Price’s work.

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals: For reasons of the sort that generally occur in Ankh-Morpork, the professors at UU have to field a football team. Ridcully and Stibbons both do their best to deal with the resulting messes. Meanwhile, there’s a new fellow working as a candle dribbler at UU, whose secret might be enough to get him and a lot of other people killed. I don’t know why this didn’t move me much—the gentle romance between two sensible people was the kind of thing I ordinarily find delightful. Maybe it was the sports thing; I just don’t get it, and I don’t know enough about UK rowdy culture to appreciate what Pratchett was sending up.

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Fannish freecycle?

2009-10-24T17:17:29Z

So I have two pairs of size 8 Ann Taylor pants, suitable for work, one a sort of dark red brick color cotton blend and one charcoal wool blend, that I won't be wearing again anytime soon. I'd freecycle them, but if there's a US fan out there who wants them, I'd like to hear from you!

ETA: Taken pending address.

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Sick sad world

2009-10-24T16:53:07Z

Loopy on meds and cycling between sweats and chills, so sad. But I have a report on The Sex Files: (1) sex between random people = not a turn-on for me; Mulder's hand hovering over the doorknob to Scully's room, wanting to see her but afraid to reach out = a turn-on; (2) bad actors desperately trying to remember the obviously-more-complex-than-they're-used-to dialogue sometimes, though only sometimes, come off with a pretty good Mulderish/Scullyish flat affect. Other times it's just funny. (3) When Mulder watched porn, as is his wont, they actually showed the porn, for an extended period. (4) The final M/S scene was played differently than the other sex scenes, like they really loved each other but for some reason had to try all these different positions and have a money shot the first time.

Anyway, I offer you the credits and first post-credit sequence, no sex at all, but the visuals and music are creditable versions of the real thing. External shots of the FBI building!
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Swinging by briefly

2009-10-17T00:13:29Z

Perceptive observers alerted me to the existence of The Sex Files, which apparently has a real plot along with its Mulder/Scully action; Scully looks a lot like GA, at least in the tiny pictures. I have the DVD now and will report back on whether the Truth is In There. Visual porn rarely works for me, but perhaps M&S can change my mind. Or some other organ.

Funny law review typo of the day: “they cloak themselves in the mantel of protectors of the innocent.” Sounds painful. Or at least requiring superheroic strength.
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OTW drive!

2009-10-14T00:31:58Z

So, we own the servers now, and we're a month away from Open Beta on the Archive of Our Own. There's no better time to donate to the OTW. Not only is it tax-deductible in the US (consult your tax laws elsewhere), but now we have tchotchkes! general_jinjur made some great illustrations of the mug in use. Here are three of my favorite things together: Hamlet, women in the arts, and the OTW!

Be like Sarah (though probably not like Hamlet): get yours now!

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Reviews: fiction-ish

2009-10-11T14:56:15Z

I wrote for three and a half hours on Friday! It felt awesome. This semester has been kicking my butt, for reasons I can't figure out.

Pat Conroy, South of Broad: The Prince of Tides is one of my favorite books; the dinner party scene gets me at least as turned on as it does Lowenstein. So I hope it’s not incredibly faint praise to say that this book was better when it was The Prince of Tides. Conroy works some variations on his themes—here, the violent father is someone other than the narrator’s, but the brilliantly vicious mother isn’t; the older brother is a suicide before the story begins; and the narrator is positioned in the middle of Charleston society, managing to bring together blacks, poor whites, and the highest caliber of whites according to Charleston’s rigid system. Set in 1989 and in the late 60s/early 70s, it follows a group of friends, lovers, and frenemies who met in their last year of high school—two kids new in town, three orphans, three of the white aristocracy, and the black and white cocaptains of the public high school football team. As usual, the narrator is sympathetic to gays, worships the mysteries of women, and opposes racist acts by others. If I found the lyrical descriptions of the South and the other characters a little overwrought, it’s only because, even with the terrifying Comedian-like father of two of the characters—a Monroe-esque movie star and her AIDS-stricken brother—the story never really approached the Gothic peaks of The Prince of Tides.

William Sleator, Marco’s Millions: Younger-skewing YA about Marco and his younger sister Lily who discover something very strange in the basement: a gateway to another world, where time moves more slowly and the alien inhabitants insist they need Lily to save them, but Marco can’t be sure they’re trustworthy. A distinctive Sleator feature is that the right course of action is generally unclear, even at the end. Sleator ends kind of in the middle of the story; there’s a sequel.

Randall Munroe, xkcd, Vol. 0: A collection of xkcd cartoons, including the mouseover text, with marginalia , some of which form a puzzle I didn’t even bother to try figuring out. Cute and I felt good supporting the site.

Alex Irvine, Supernatural: John Winchester's Journal: Sloppy tie-in--John Winchester's not much of a writer, and there are fragments of mystical texts and lists of supernatural creatures interspersed throughout, along with his yearly ruminations on his anniversary, the boys' birthdays, and the date of Mary's death. Even with all the angst, I got no sense of his character, and I thought some of the information was inconsistent with what we've seen (e.g., John sending Dean on extended solo hunts before Sam left, which seems to contradict the Pilot; information in the journal that one would think Dean and Sam would have read long before they figured stuff out on the show). Oh well.

Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams, Worlds That Weren’t: Four alternate history novellas. The first has Socrates participating in a successful campaign against Sparta. The second posits a near-extinction event in the nineteenth century, leading to a renewed British Empire run out of India and an America returned mostly to wilderness, full of cannibals and Americans who speak in painful dialect. The third features a female mercenary in a fifteenth-century Turkish Empire fighting with/for the followers of the Green Christ and having visions of the future. And the fourth sends Nietzsche to America where he participates in the shootout at the OK Corrall. Frankly, I didn’t see the point, though maybe it was all just residual irritation from the dialect.
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Pop quiz

2009-10-08T00:07:57Z

Without knowing anything else about him, can you discern whether Justice Scalia is a member of the dominant religion?

[Scalia] looks particularly queasy when Peter Eliasberg—the ACLU lawyer whose client objects to crosses on government land—suggests partway through the morning that perhaps a less controversial World War I memorial might consist of "a statue of a soldier which would honor all of the people who fought for America in World War I and not just the Christians."

"The cross doesn't honor non-Christians who fought in the war?" Scalia asks, stunned. "A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins," replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.

"It's erected as a war memorial!" replies Scalia. "I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead."

Eliasberg dares to correct him: "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead the cross honors are the Christian war dead," thunders Scalia. "I think that's an outrageous conclusion!"

Aside from the awesomeness of the choice of ACLU lawyer here, I ... got nothing. How is one to communicate across this divide?

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Nonfiction: positive thinking, race and property, copyright and the movies

2009-10-05T12:59:14Z

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America: Free LibraryThing advance reviewer book! Ehrenreich is an entertaining writer with a provocative and fairly persuasive thesis set forth in the book: positive thinking is an individualizing, disempowering concept that leads people to ignore real challenges, for example breast cancer—she starts out with a harrowing look at the culture of pink in the context of her own diagnosis. She’s not always on target—spot the logical problem in the following two consecutive sentences: “To my knowledge, no one knows how antidepressant use affects people’s responses to happiness surveys: do respondents report being happy because the drugs make them feel happy or do they report being unhappy because they know they are dependent on drugs to make them feel that way? Without our heavy use of antidepressants, Americans would likely rank far lower in the happiness rankings than we currently do.”

She does then make the useful point that failure to anticipate 9/11 was not a failure of imagination, as some have stated, given the information available about planned attacks. “[T]here was plenty of imagination at work—imagining an invulnerable nation and an ever-booming economy—there was simply no ability or inclination to imagine the worst.” The positive thinking worldview also slots really well into blaming the victims of misfortune for whining and bringing negative happenings on themselves—there’s an appalling quote from Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) that tsunamis affect only people “on the same frequency as the event.” Positive thinking, by contrast, is supposed to bring us material rewards, regardless of their consequences for other people. And part of the positive thinking advice is to avoid news or other engagement with the problems of the world, and instead treat belief as reality, making unpleasant facts like Iraqi intransigiency or global warming into things that can be wished away. So we end up with politicians and businesspeople who are ruthless without being realistic.

Ehrenreich ends with a ringing endorsement of the scientific method. Science, she posits, is sociable: it’s based on the communicability of premises and replicability of results by other people. The alternative is that you alone validate reality, and that’s a trap. “Why spend so much time working on the self when there is so much real work to be done?”

David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America: Over the course of the twentieth century, the federal government oversaw a massive intervention into the housing market that was deliberately structured, from the beginning, on the assumption that whites should be suburban homeowners and blacks should not be. This allowed whites, collectively, to build huge amounts of government-backed wealth and at the same time to tell themselves that their successes were the result of the free market, which naturally required the exclusion of blacks because blacks were, by definition, bad for property values, like other kinds of blight. By denying blacks credit and opportunity to purchase homes at the highly subsidized federal rates, and diverting resources from the cities to the suburbs, government policies worsened, solidified, and naturalized the economic and social disparities they purported only to acknowledge neutrally. At the same time, public housing was resource-starved and strangled, like low-income housing more generally, as unwarranted government intervention into the free market. Is anyone reminded of “get the government’s hands off my Medicare”? If you believe in the existence of white privilege, his restating of how it (1) existed and (2) was made to seem like the natural result of economic laws gets repetitive, but sometimes repetition is necessary, given the collective desire to forget.

Michael C. Donaldson, Clearance and Copyright: Everything You Need to Know for Film and Television: Written for the layperson, this book offers explanations and step by step guides, including model forms, for a producer trying to get a film made. I thought it was clear and helpful, though I disagreed with some of the things Donaldson said about trademark—he doesn’t seem to be aware that federal dilution law doesn’t apply to depictions of trademarks in a film, unless you’re using the mark as a trademark for the film itself—and he also usually errs on the side of caution, which is understandable but sad. He’s a big proponent of claiming fair use for documentaries though, which is great.
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Lifehacking and SPN

2009-10-04T23:45:38Z

I think amalthia shared this with me: add tabs (like in Firefox) to Microsoft Office. I've only had it for a week and I adore it.

Future-Dean called now-Dean “Dean,” while now-Dean couldn’t manage to reciprocate, because future-Dean didn’t think of himself as really being Dean any more, and now-Dean sensed the same thing. Dean who gives up on Sam is not Dean, even if he’s also not Michael.

Other: I both loved future-leader Dean and hated that SPN managed to fuck that up because of SPN’s reflexive sexism: Dean was a leader of men, not a leader, which is stupid in ways that Dean should know better than to be stupid. If Risa is one of your soldiers, you don’t fuck around with her in the first place, much less then fuck around on her. I can barely accept that he did it because he knew he was going after Lucifer and didn’t plan on anybody surviving and thus did one more shitty thing to prove that he wasn’t worth caring about, (and that she wasn’t either,) but still it irked me. Dean and Cas as bitter exes, however, pleased me greatly. Nonetheless, I like Castiel a great deal more than Misha Collins (please don’t hurt me!) and agree with Dean that Castiel should never change.
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SPN and rage (separate)

2009-10-01T02:07:42Z

(1) In my own personal canon, Dean lit the fire, then said the snarky line that would have notified Raphael that it was time to escape had Raphael had the brains of a five-year-old child. Oh well—lucky for Dean and Castiel that Raphael hadn’t read the Evil Overlord rules! (2) On the other hand, when Sam heard “Don’t think we won’t be back” and snapped out “Don’t think I won’t be here,” that was both hot and possibly the best badass line of the series yet.

Compare the rationality of these statements: (1) If we extradite child rapists, we allow the extradition of political dissidents. (2) If we prosecute child rapists, we allow the prosecution of political dissidents. I mean, what distinguishing principles could possibly be available to a democratic society? It’s a slippery slope, people! Also, giandujakiss is so right to call rape culture a “Somebody Else’s Problem” field.
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Killing time

2009-09-28T00:40:15Z

I decided to write up a list of vids I never get tired of, trying to limit myself to one per fandom except SPN, which means a large number got excluded. It’s also interesting to see which from my old recs post have become “rewatch a lot” vids. I’m definitely trending to faster cuts, but I still love my emo porn.

Angel, Jesus Walks, mimisere: Gunn! That is all.

BSG, Southside, bop_radar : Before it ended so badly, there was all this: I pick up my friends and we go for a ride. The editing, the connections to the lyrics—everything I loved about BSG. (Ensemble.)

Chuck, Creator, talitha78 : Sarah is awesome at what she does, and she knows it. So does this vid.

Dark Angel, One War (We Do What We're Told), giandujakiss : Actually convinced me to buy the DVDs, when the presence of Jensen Ackles couldn’t. (Ensemble.)

Doctor Who, Handlebars, Seah and Margie: I start to get shivers at “I can make anybody go to prison just because I don’t like ‘em.” Though really all the lyric matches are excellent, from the platypus to “my tower secure/my cause is noble.”

Farscape, The Masochism Tango, KOBA-TV: It’s Aeryn and John’s song!

Firefly, Play Dead, littleheaven70: The effects really work well with River’s POV.

Heroes, Desert Rose, Beth/CG: Beautiful and evocative, like the first season. (Peter-centric with a dash of Mohinder)

Highlander, Raven in the Storm, killa and Carol S. (password protected, contact the vidders): Uses dissolves to create a narrative that sweeps you through the vid—I’ve actually watched this enough to find the few cuts in there, though as with Rope you won’t notice them unless you’re watching for them. I love the lyric matches as well, especially “my foot will be there in your door/though I can walk through walls and windows.” (Methos)

Iron Man, Handlebars, deejay : Yeah, it’s a good song about the seductions and abuses of power, and it works really well for Tony too. The visual pun of “no resistance” is of particular note.

Legend of the Seeker, Bedtime Story, hollywoodgrrl : Successful recruiter vid for me! The girl who looks like the damsel in distress at first? Really, really isn’t, as you will see. Beautifully shot series—I think it’s filmed in New Zealand—with characters, props and costumes as gorgeous as the setting. No promises on dialogue, sadly, but that’s what vids are for.

Multi (Buffy TV/movie, Bring It On movies, Heroes), CanDelight, jescaflowne: Be a cheerleader, save the world. Physicality and cameraderie: what I love about cheerleading.

Multi (SCC, BSG), Unnatural Selection, charmax : Excellent use of text to enhance the images and music. And the devil is Six!

Multi (lots), The Reckoning, Astandra Lay: A cinematic survey of shows that mostly pass the Bechdel test, kiss or kill edition.

QaFUS, Battleflag/The Dangers of Over-Shipping, sisabet: Okay, hot.

RPV (Britney Spears), Piece of Me, obsessive24 : You’re implicated too. (I could actually do a whole reading of how this vid critiques the official vid and transforms the song’s aggressive “piece of me” into a horrific offering of self for dissection.)

Smallville, Winning Sometimes, bipolypesca: Lex has a cunning plan. I like the way the mythology enters into the interpersonal game, with all SV’s lovely Kryptonian artifacts deployed.

Bonus Smallville: I Want Your Sex, by eisakay : Ah, first season and the Gayest Looks of the Episode, plus some naked torsos inserted. (Clark/Lex)

Star Trek, You’re So Vain, T’Jonesy: Perfectly edited and therefore hilarious, but also manages to tap into the emotional power of the song: Kirk gives away the things he loves! And one of them is Spock! (not online, sadly)

SGA, Hello, merry : Great “meet Atlantis” vid, with the music really evoking both deep space and the sea, as well as the mysteries of exploration.

SPN is my current obsession so I couldn’t pick just one.

Castiel: A Charming Man, giandujakiss : Castiel should be scary, and in this vid, he is—no matter what he might feel for Dean, he has his own agenda. The vid also manages to say great stuff about Sam and Dean just on the way.

Dean: Sea Lion, lithiumdoll : So painful an analysis of all Dean has surrendered I have to be in the right mood to watch it; sometimes it hurts too much.

Sam: Prelude 12:21, wolfpup: all Sam’s losses.

Sam/Dean: If we keep living this fast, no one will have time to die, Melissa: Excellent serious use of the musical equivalent of the Kuleshov effect—the right music/soundscape, plus I think slowing down the clips on occasion, produces a highly sexualized (not just romantic) meaning for the visuals; that move is common enough in humor vids but less common in serious ones.

The Road So Far: An Eye for an Eye, thandie : S4—run, but you sure can’t hide. Really ominous music that fits the angels and demons narrative.

XF, Clear the Area, astartexx: Scully! You are Mulder’s human credential. And I still love you beyond reason (even if Olivia Dunham has built on your model into something I kind of like more). (Mulder/Scully)
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Recent reading

2009-09-21T03:23:52Z

Marc Acito, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater: It’s the 1983-84 school year and Edward Zanni of Hoboken has to figure out how to get into, and then to pay for, Juilliard when his father insists that he’ll only pay for a business major. Fortunately, he’s got friends; unfortunately, their ideas tend towards the felonious. A bunch of comic setpieces strung together with bare connective tissue. The characters were all trying too hard to be charming, which makes them typical teens but no more fun for that. Bonus for varying sexualities among the teens, but points off for a 2004 novel in which Edward’s 1984 observations are way too precious (Madonna’s a flash in the pan, what does that Matthew Broderick fellow have that I don’t, etc.).

David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly: Speaking of the 80s, Hwang’s play was written the same year the Supreme Court upheld a law criminalizing homosexual sodomy. (It was performed a couple of years later.) It’s the story of a French diplomat who fell in love with a Chinese opera singer, who for twenty years he believed was a woman. (He never knew that the women’s roles were played by male singers in traditional Beijing opera.) It’s about Orientalism and sexual myths, cultural divides and gender divides, the lies we tell ourselves about other people in order to tell ourselves lies about ourselves, and it felt (sadly) fresh and true over twenty years later.

Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon’s Lexicon: This is what I wanted the Rob Thurman books to be. Brennan has the fannish DNA, and also the book’s cover appears to feature young Tom Welling, so, bonus. Nick is the taciturn, snappish younger brother, protective of his physically weaker but smarter older brother Alan. They’re on the run from demons because their mother—who hates Rebel-With-a-Cause Nick—stole something very valuable from a powerful magician; magicians raise demons and use them to gain power. When a brother and sister seek the brothers’ help with a demon problem of their own, Alan’s compassion puts all of them in terrible danger, and many secrets are revealed. The mythology is cool—I’d read another book in the series just to learn what the heck is up with demons—and the big reveal, though not that hard to figure out, is terrifically satisfying. Highly recommended.

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, & Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream: Anti-sprawl polemic, with plenty of pictures and statistics to make the case that building bigger houses further out is killing us—and this was well before the mortgage crisis! The authors tout New Urbanism instead, which relies on control-freak design to mix uses and make sure neighborhoods “feel” like neighborhoods. Good popular writing about designing the built environment, and persuasive pictures of suburban deadness versus urban/new urban liveliness; though the authors’ proposals are at least as manipulative as Coca-Cola ads, they’re manipulating you for a good purpose. comments on DW

SPN 5x2

2009-09-18T15:33:18Z

1. Did anyone else find it delicious that, had Sam given in to the urge, they might have figured out much earlier that they were being played, when he couldn't taste demon in the blood? Just me, then.

2. I loved barkley 's observation that Dean's unburdening himself of his most valued possessions is a self-protective move: get rid of everything that matters and maybe he won't have any weaknesses to be exploited. After all this time, Dean, you've finally figured out how to be John! Also, if anyone on the show notices that Dean is recapitulating Sam's arc, accepting isolation to gain strength, I will be very pleased.

3. I liked the XF-esque music cue right after the XF reference.

4. I want much, much Dean/Ellen and Castiel/Dean porn about how empty Dean feels now. Thanks!

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Nonfiction

2009-09-17T19:42:50Z

Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates: If this book were half as good as the title, it would be awesome. Sadly, it’s extremely repetitive and uses really crude rational actor economics. There’s still some fun stuff about how pirates governed themselves, why pirates were democratically governed among themselves, why pirates were so violent to those who resisted piracy, etc. But I can’t recommend a book that says (1) government is coercive by nature, which is its distinctive feature; (2) private organizations like condo associations are not coercive, because you can decide not to follow their rules and leave (ignoring that what ultimately puts you to that choice is that the government will enforce the property/contract rights of the condo); and (3) because people can leave the jurisdiction of a government, governments are subject to Tiebout competition. (2) doesn’t make much sense under any circumstances, but it’s laughable to say all three things in a single argument. Also, Leeson is a big proponent of the idea that racial (and other) discrimination won't happen because if you can hire a discriminated-against person cheaper you'll have an economic advantage, which will eventually eliminate discrimination among economically rational employers, which is a position much like disbelieving infant baptism. And, particularly annoying to me, he misunderstands the nature of a trademark, claiming that the Jolly Roger was a trademark even though multiple pirates used it; at most it was something like a geographic indication.

Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children: Got this after reading the cover story in Newsweek, which is a condensed and misleadingly headlined version of the race chapter, basically “what white liberal guilt gets wrong and how it teaches white children to be aversive racists when parents think it’s teaching colorblindness.” Very interesting; the lessons are going to be very hard to implement. Other chapters cover topics like the often counterproductive effects of praise, the truth about lying, sibling relationships, and other topics where current research sometimes matches conventional wisdom and sometimes veers far away from it. I liked it a lot.

Augusten Burroughs, Dry: Running with Scissors is Burrough's memoir of his extremely fucked-up childhood, and this book is about his alcoholism, with occasional PSTD-like flashbacks to some of those childhood memories. He works in advertising and drinks constantly; his employers stage an intervention; he goes to rehab and does really well with it, until he doesn't. It reads pretty honest, and I got a sense of what he meant when he talked about struggling to feel his own emotions--he's believable not understanding when he's in love and struggling with whether he can trust what he thinks he's feeling.

A.B. McKillop, The Spinster and the Prophet: H.G. Wells, Florence Deeks, and the Case of the Plagiarized Text: Florence Deeks spent years writing a history of the world focused on women’s role. H.G. Wells spent a couple of months writing a history of the world; when he wrote about women, it was disparagingly, which was of a piece with his treatment of them in real life. How did Wells manage to write a best-seller of several hundred thousand words, never having written history before, in such a short time that he had to have averaged thousands of words a day? Well, McKillop makes a good circumstantial case that he leaned heavily on Deeks’s unpublished manuscript, which she’d sent to Wells’s Canadian publishers, who hung on to it for a really long time before rejecting it and returned it to her dogeared and dirty. Deeks spent years and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars on her ultimately futile lawsuit—futile because she was a spinster and he was a well-respected author, as well as futile because the similarities were very much in idea rather than expression, and only copying expression can lead to legal liability. But it was clear throughout that narratives of hysterical women were more important than what actually happened to that manuscript. As a copyright minimalist, I found myself unwilling to call what Wells did infringement, but I’d join in the plagiarism conclusion.
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Reviews: random fiction

2009-09-15T01:00:58Z

K.J. Parker, The Company: I’m pretty sure I hate Parker’s worldview, which structures the plots of her work and paints a picture of humanity as universally selfish, wretched and petty, with love only making people worse and heroism an illusion. However, there’s this:

She was looking at him. “If he wants you to go off somewhere with him, will you go?”
“Of course not,” he replied too quickly. “My life’s here now, and besides, I’m through with all that.” ….
[H]e’d never really lied to Enyo, not that he could remember. ….
If he wants me to go off somewhere with him—well, of course. Immediately, without hesitation, if needs be, without stopping to put on his shoes. That went without saying. But the situation would never arise, since what could General Teuche Kenessin possibly want him for? Where the case is so hypothetical as to be absurd, normal criteria of truth and falsehood can’t be made to apply. He was sure she realised that. It was like asking him, if there was a fire and you could only save one of us, me or it, which would it be? To which the answer was, that’s why I don’t keep it here.

So: beautifully constructed prose about horrible characters. Justice doesn’t exist; claims to justice are always self-interested and fundamentally unbelievable. Luck is always bad, unless it’s good only because someone else gets horribly hurt, thus serving the interests of the POV character. Parker paints gorgeous portraits of charnel houses. This one’s about war veterans who go off to an island to try to create their own society. It doesn’t go well. I have three more books by Parker, but I’m not sure I’m even going to try. I know Thuvia disagrees with my original "maybe Parker is trying to say something about societies without God," but now I'm wondering if these books are the cry of someone who doesn't believe in God and therefore thinks that there is no grace, kind of the opposite of Joss Whedon's take on Objects in Space.

Shannon Hale & Dean Hale, illus. Nathan Hale, Rapunzel's Revenge: Cute graphic novel rewriting Rapunzel as a story of a girl rescuing herself, in a Wild West-themed setting where her long hair turns into lassos/whips.

Radclyffe, Above All, Honor: She's a tough Secret Service agent with a tragic past. She's the president's closeted daughter who hates being surveilled. They don't exactly fight crime, but they do fall in love, with lots of sex with other people to try to avoid emotional entanglement. It was basically a standard explicit romance with bonus casual sex, though I'm not sure whether the constant references to the (butch) agent's "hardness" was a trope of lesbian erotica or merely this author's tic.

Diana Wynne Jones, The Merlin Conspiracy: Multiple worlds linked by magic; teens struggling with big powers and fighting adult conspiracies and dismissals; barely a decent adult woman to be found (there is a wise old crone, at least); parents who are sometimes awful for no reason and sometimes busy running the world, which is not always that big a step above--it's reasonably standard Jones, with some people turning out to be very different from who they initially seemed to be. I can't say I was drawn in, but I think younger RT might have liked it more.

Quote:
Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to. I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me.
H.G. Wells, Secret Places of the Heart
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Rage!

2009-09-12T02:50:43Z

Ok, apparently I'm in a mood to post bits of my reading. Here is the stupidest thing I've read in a law review in a while:

The Harry Potter series of books, for example, are works of pure fancy. These books certainly deal with issues of human nature-- addressing subjects like the struggle between good and evil, self-awareness, and coming of age--but they are set in a parallel universe. They make no explicit attempt to address important social or political topics, and as such they should be free from subsequent use [for purposes of fair use analysis].

Such is the case with many works of fantasy, as well as most works of genre fiction. Genre fiction (horror, mystery, romance) is typically about the plot of the story or about the main character's experience within the setting developed in the story. These works deal with human nature but generally lack social commentary. Romance novels, for example, deal with love, lust, romance, and human relationships. These works, however, are largely divorced from the issues and problems of the real world.

Hi, author? Most contemporary literary theory and several entire genres would like to talk to you out back. Romance in particular is curious about your experience of the real world. Well, "curious" is one way to put it.
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