RivkaT

1. It makes me sad that among Wolfram Alpha's easter eggs is not "how old Cary Grant?" Google, by contrast, gets the answer right off.

2. Rewatching Serenity, I noticed three instances where extradiegetic titles turned into diegetic images--the Universal logo/Earth-that-Was, the movie title/the side of Serenity, and Haven/the entrance to Haven. I'm used to extradiegetic music moving into (or out of) the diegesis, but is it common for images to do this? This made me think about the extent to which, as one of the articles I recently read argues, the fact that we can now treat film pretty much the way we treat sound in terms of mixing, manipulation, etc. is affecting editors' and directors' sense of possibility for images.

3. Fellow parents! You know how in Dora the Explorer there’s always that creepy moment where Dora turns to the screen and waits unblinkingly for the audience to answer her question “What did you like best?” (My kids never answer; does anyone?) Z. suggests it would be engagingly disturbing to edit together ten or twelve of those moments, and I heartily agree. Maybe with the following quotes integrated in:
( In Dora's case )

(Post title taken from actual grading story I was told by a professor who shall not be named.) Grading today; confronted with an exam bearing a note that the examinee had not noticed Part 3 until the end of the (8-hour) exam, and thus had not provided an answer, ensuring a pretty bad grade given that the question was worth 35% of the grade. I feel horrible for the student, but mainly I think because my embarrassment squick’s been triggered. Here is what I did beforehand: I announced there’d be three sections in class, each with a different format: short answer, essay, fact pattern. I posted the exam instructions on the course site before the exam; the instructions specify that there are three parts and set forth the percentages. On the exam itself, those instructions are repeated. On each question, the points available are marked at the beginning. The exam has “page X of Y” on each page. The third part took up several pages—it even had pictures, for pete’s sake! It’s an exam disaster, to be sure, and I do feel sorry for the kid. But sorry with a lot of argh attached.

( fiction: YA fantasy, Regency paranormal, and Patricia Briggs )

Things that I am enjoying:

Haagen-Dasz’s “Five” ice cream: five ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and one flavor. Coffee and mint are excellent, very soft and creamy and still lower-fat than many others, and I look forward to brown sugar if I ever get tired of coffee.

Harper’s Island: Cheesy and soapy and unrepentantly gory, with plenty of familiar faces and a promise that at least one person will die every episode and the killer will be revealed at the end of the short season: guilty pleasure.

Fringe: yahtzee’s enjoyment finally got me to mainline the first season over the past few days. It took me a few episodes to get into the story of how FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and her father-and-son team of science geniuses investigate unusual happenings related to something called The Pattern. (The father has been released from a mental hospital into his son’s custody at the request of the FBI, because he’s the expert on the “fringe” science at issue in The Pattern. A special unit in the FBI has divined the existence of The Pattern before Olivia shows up, but doesn’t know much more than that.) The “science” is laughable almost even by X-Files standards. But! There’s Olivia.

( Why I heart Olivia Dunham, and thus Fringe )

Not Awesome: giandujakiss has posted about this before, but here’s another version of the story of the former head of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), who warned everyone about the need for regulation of complex derivatives and was derided, ignored, and stripped of power. Why? Some of the culprits say it was her tone:

Some of the other regulators have said they had problems with Born’s personal style and found her hard to work with. “I thought it was counterproductive. If you want to move forward ... you engage with parties in a constructive way,” Rubin told the Washington Post. “My recollection was ... this was done in a more strident way.” Levitt says Born was “characterized as being abrasive.”

Her supporters, while acknowledging that Born can be uncompromising when she believes she is right, say those are excuses of people who simply did not want to hear what she had to say.

“She was serious, professional, and she held her ground against those who were not sympathetic to her position,” says Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who was a top aide to Born at the CFTC. “I don’t think that the failure to be ‘charming’ should be translated into a depiction of stridency.”

Others find a whiff of sexism in the pushback. “The messenger wore a skirt,” says Marna Tucker, a senior partner at Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell in D.C. and a longtime friend of Born’s. “Could Alan Greenspan take that?”

A whiff of sexism? You think?

Briefly:

1. OK, fess up: which one of you was driving the red car in my neighborhood with the license plate “FANFIC”?

2. My husband sends notes to our kids, for future reference. Recently: “Dear Rivkid, It was very progressive of you to request ‘King & King,’ the same-sex-marriage fairy tale, for your bedtime story tonight. It would have been even more progressive had you not referred to the book as ‘The Two Queens.’”

But most importantly: I love feedback. I want to make it as likely as possible that people will leave feedback on my stories. So, what to do about crossposting? This is my first use of DW's poll feature, for a Very Important Poll.

Administrivia: (1) Fixed the link to the previous Impala stories -- they changed the internal organization of the AO3 just after I posted and the redirect doesn’t work on series, woe. (2) I’ve got some of those DW invite codes for anyone who wants. (3) Now I just need someone to explain to me in very small words how to jigger with the colors of my journal. (4) Ooh, and maybe add a banner! Of course then I would need a banner. I’ve never even managed to add a banner to my LJ.

Best comment on the Kindle I’ve seen so far: “I love my readers and I want them to read my stuff,” he said. “I’d write it out longhand for them if necessary.” I feel you, novelist Cliff Cleave. I feel you.

Chuck! I thought I could not love you more! Happily I was mistaken! ( Spoilers for season (season, I tell you!) finale: )

1. Here’s a kind of funny thing: google “begin optional trim.” It’s kind of comforting to know that, no matter how embarrassing your mistake, a couple of thousand people out there have made it too.

2. Confused RT is confused ( (Dreamwidth blather): )

3. Another quote for the SPN essay I’m not writing:

Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim 71 (2000): “Consider that the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States). These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest.” (And hey, whoa, an intelligible Butler quote!)

4. ( Law book! )

1. How badly I’m flailing this semester: haven’t seen last week’s SPN yet. Eighteen zillion reaction posts bookmarked for later.

2. Thanks to giandujakiss and liv_512 for the party hats!

3. When coping strategies collide: The local grocery store has a friendly dragon mascot. The store brought in a person dressed as said friendly mascot. My children were terrified. To reassure himself after they fled, 1.0 kept repeating “pretend dragon.” Only problem: every time he said “dragon,” 2.0 burst into tears.

4. rhea314 made a podfic of my Clark/Lex story Rainbow Sign!

5. I do not know Psych. But I didn’t feel I needed to for talitha78’s Gus vid “White” and Nerdy (Weird Al song). It’s a response to RaceFail and, I think, a sharp commentary on Weird Al and how his performance of “white and nerdy” depends on a racial contrast we’d usually find quite ugly but apparently excuse because (white) nerds are funny.

Things that make me happy:

1. jadelennox on Ada Lovelace Day and women in programming.

2. I am slogging through my SV story at about ten words a day, but I know how it ends at last, and so I put myself up for auction at Sweet Charity! I am offering:

A story, at least 1000 words but possibly a fair amount longer (past auction stories are in the 15,000-25,000 range). Fandoms: SPN, Chuck; SV or crossovers with anything I know by negotiation--I will try Buffy, SCC, or almost anything else if I think I can make it work. Gen, het, slash--again, I'll try almost anything, though my strength is taking standard tropes and putting a bit of a topspin on them.

3. I am almost caught up on professional reading, and hope to give away a bunch of fiction soon. This will include three Marjorie Liu books:

( sadly, not a rave review )

Z. found it:

Important poll on Sci-Fi’s rebranding as SyFy: was the focus group just fucking with Sci-Fi?

( I've been reading Frances Lee Ansley, Race and the Core Curriculum in Legal Education )

Wow, is that subject my life, or what?

It’s the OTW’s membership drive again, and I’ve already seen several posts from people who did better than I can on how a noncommercial archive with an infrastructure behind it is a good thing to have—I think of it as “when you have to go there, they have to take you in” though of course we want you even if you don’t have to go there! And there are all the other projects too—Fanlore and Open Doors and Vidding History. And the policies are written and betaed by fans: fan-friendly and human-readable is our goal; even our Privacy Policy has fans! So please, if you can, check it out and consider donating and becoming a member.

And now for something completely different: ( funnier if you're a lawyer )

And finally, late to this meme, but here are ( single sentences from WIPs: )

popfantastic’s post was really helpful to me, as a distillation of other things I’ve seen around. I have been having many of the standard white woman’s reactions to the recent discussions and fights about race in sff. I’m becoming inured to the use of “fail,” but I still cringe a little at it. And this is connected to what I’ve been trying to think about, which is how I can try to be better at my day job on issues of race. Here, my responsibilities are those of a citizen. Out there, I’m a teacher, and I don’t know how to be an ally in that role, or even how to avoid being an active part of the problem. I’ve read Beverly Tatum, which I felt helped me some, but I’m still searching for more help with graduate-level teaching.

Substance-wise, property and IP are chock-full of situations in which race, class, and gender are outcome-determinative, sometimes blatantly and sometimes less visibly, and I try to talk about those, but where I really fall down is knowing how to teach students who don’t share my background. Historically I’ve focused on increasing class participation by students of color (I’m likely to overestimate how often they participate if I’m just guessing), and it’s uncomfortable to think about other work I need to be doing. Property (the class) generally begins with conquest: Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court justified the dispossession of natives on a variety of grounds. This is a big truth of property (the concept), but I taught it badly this time, and probably in ways that silenced people differentially. What I heard was students reaching the cynical conclusion “it’s all about power,” and the cynicism feels like my failure because I want them to see possibilities for change, even if it is all about power and even if pessimism is often justified. I have no idea what I didn’t hear from students who didn’t speak. I really appreciate what I've learned here, and I only hope I can figure out how to learn more in class.

Thanks for the virtual gift, anonymous!

Sweeney Todd fic! The Keys to the Kingdom, by athousandwinds

Fic that is also meta: in the future, fanfic will be different (Sam/Jess/Dean, kinda sorta), by ciaan. I have Thoughts about this scenario—I hope there will still be fanfic of the kind I recognize, but as soon as I saw this I thought: of course this will happen.

And finally:

Me: Gmail’s new offline browsing has a “Flaky Connection Mode.”

Z: I think I spend most of my life in Flaky Connection Mode.

Me: Me too.

My Yuletide story was a character piece, Michaela Dupont from Anna to the Infinite Power.

Fannish things I have recently loved:

Sarah Walker vid, Creator, by talitha78.

linabean’s poem taken from snippets from sgastoryfinders.

…
the one where
McKay
is turned into a puppy!!!
It ends up
with John and Rodney together

I'm almost sure
I didn't imagine it.
I know it's out there

I'm looking for a story
Please?

John is very politely (with guns) asking
I am looking for a fic

See also trinity_clare’s riff on William Carlos Williams in the comments:
I have read
the stories
that were in
the comm

and which
you were probably
saving
as bookmarks

Forgive me
they were del.icio.us
so slashy
and so hot

And then there’s the additional material, not McShep, which is funny but also seems to me to serve as a critique of the pairing-centeredness of so much fandom, especially when it’s two white guys at the center.

Jayne Leitch, Dearly Divided: SPN/Dexter, Dean & Deb. I don’t know Dexter, but the SPN plot—oh, Dean. (Also, oh, Sam.)

( short reviews: Pratchett, King, After School Nightmare, Eternal Sabbath )

Quick query on behalf of my dad, before I post the last bit of Eight Crazy Nights. He writes:

I once (within the past decade) read a "science fiction" novel -- I guess that's the genre -- in which an important plot theme was this:  A person needing money sold a small body part, and prospered, but also found the sale altruistically satisfying.  So, part by part, he sold off major body parts, to the point where he was reduced to a torso and head carried around by his close friend.  In the end, a recipient of one of the body parts invents a technique for perfectly replacing lost body parts, so the donor is at the book's end restored to a full complement of body parts, mostly "artificial."  Now, here's the question:  Have you a clue about how to identify the novel?  I googled "science fiction plots donation body parts" and didn't get anything useful in the first four or five screens.  Is there a listserv/blog to which I might submit an inquiry?  Any other thoughts?

Can anyone help?

Okay, I have this nifty CMS on my site, but I've screwed it up somehow. I can add and delete stories, but when I try to edit them I get the message "You don't have permission to access /cms/index.php on this server." Not sure how this can be true, because I still have adding/deleting access, but apparently it is. Does anyone have an idea about how a CMS-ignorant person might go about fixing the problem?

So, early Saturday morning I fell down a flight of stairs while holding 2.0. She was hit on the head, as was I. Z. was out of town; 1.0 was watching but doesn’t seem to have been traumatized. Many hours and one CT scan later, 2.0 was declared fine, and I started feeling the pain. I have no memory of the accident, but the bruising suggests I hit a bunch of steps in a bunch of places. Ow.

Today 1.0 had an asthma attack and now has four separate prescriptions, plus a steroid shot. He’s holding up like a trooper, but still not pleased.

Anyway, I’d love to be cheered up: comment porn, links to places you get your SPN recommendations, anything that is making you smile.

( Dear Yuletide writer! )

I swear I’ll be gracious in a little bit, but right now my main thought is: I was worried about the early Virginia returns, and then I looked up the county by county reporting and realized that, while real Virginia had been counted, fake Virginia had not yet had its say.

Random fannish things:

ricadonna made a little greeting card for the Bowiebharata! Spike/Buffy and snark: good times.

( My unpublished letter to the NYT on Terrence Rafferty's recent horror review: )

( Not SPN, just Halloween. )

Not content to consider me not a real American (and gee, that’s historically unprecedented and not at all scary), the McCain campaign doesn’t think I’m a real Virginian either. [Edited to correct misattribution.] I believe I will let my real Virginia vote express what I think of that. Also, my new icon’s going to hang around for the next few weeks. Incidentally, I voted early (other US folks, check out Vote for Change to see where/whether you can too). My husband asked if I didn’t want to wait. He: “Something might happen to change your mind.” Me: “… Demonic possession?”

( Wild Adapter and After School Nightmare )