yonmei

12:57 pm: It is a truth not sufficiently acknowledged...
...that no one ever sees themselves as the villain: no one ever thinks of themselves as the bully.

Healthcheck warning: this leads to Kathryn Cramer's website via HideMyURL

In other, more pleasant thoughts, it has occurred to me that there is a lovely meme to be had comparing fandoms to cake.

The manly moustachio'd fandoms of the 1970s and 1980s are chocolate cake, solid and multilayered with thick chocolate frosting and sandwiched with more chocolate.

(The Professionals has an unexpected chocolate-ginger layer that involves Gordon Jackson/Cowley. Bodie and Doyle are chocolate cake even though neither of them have moustaches.)

House is a series of green tea vegan cupcakes with rosewater icing and little silver balls, though attempts keep being made to stir it in a more normal direction.

What is your fandom? What is its representative cake?




(This post wants you to know *bouncing up and down a little* that it was inspired by jekesta's RiptideIsLove multifandom vid, which is all about being in love with a fandom so much you can't really think about any of the rest. Or anything else. Really. It is (the fanvid, not this post) deep and meaningful and clever and funny and cute and full of Avons, or at least one Avon.)

Tags: cake, fannishness, racefail 09, silly memes

11:42 am: I'm not really a comics fan...
...but I shall miss scans_daily.

I was sorry Peter David decided to shut down Scans Daily on Livejournal for his own petty pleasure.

I was delighted that this meant I get to browse through daily scans and SD commentary on IJ.

I'm ... kinda mis that SD is now chuntering off to bloody Denise Paolucci's pet site, but:

It's a lovely community of people and they pick joyous comic-book pics. If I were capable of becoming a comics fan, scans_daily would make me into one.

*waves goodbye*

Tags: fannishness

11:01 am: Five Favourite TV series
Meme gacked from alixtii: Pick five of your favourite shows, in no particular order, before you read the below questions, then answer them!

1. Blake's 7
2. Doctor Who
3. M*A*S*H
4. House
5. West Wing

( Q&A )



Tags: blake's 7, doctor who, fannishness, house md, hugh laurie, lists, m*a*s*h, meme, slash, someone died, tv addiction, west wing

04:02 pm: Having a sense of proportion
I am no longer a Quaker - haven't been for over 20 years. (Discovering I am an atheist, to my mind, pretty much terminates being a Quaker.)

But I retain the Quaker sense that one should try to live one's life with consistent values - this is why I am banned from Livejournal.

But... what this goes along with, is - though I can try to live my life with consistent ethics in all matters - I do not think that every issue has the same value. Certainly not just because it's happening to me.

I could quit Livejournal, and refuse to join Dreamwidth, because I detest the idea promoted that motherhood is obscene - the idea, upheld by LJ Abuse when headed by Denise Paolucci, that a photo of a baby breastfeeding is more obscene that a soft-porn shot of a woman with artfully blurred nipples, and it's more important to ban such images from Livejournal than it is to ban people who post cartoony images of women being tortured.

My quitting Livejournal and refusing to join Dreamwidth is a decision that primarily affects only me. Insofar as it affects anyone else, it encourages the promotion of fandom and friendship across journalsites - for diversity and decentralisation: which I also think are good things.

I think the discrimination against mothers and the sexualisation of women's bodies implicit in the Livejournal ban is an important issue: I do not, compared with many other things I care about, think Livejournal's ban and rewriting of the rules was ever a particularly important issue - it mattered to me (and possibly to others who friended me) on a personal level.

This is a rambly post which may become a more coherent one about broader issues, once I've thought things through a bit more.

I'm just thinking: these issues that we bump into all the time in fandom space (the neuroscientists who thought fans were lab rats, the sexist guys who have problems with Scans Daily being slash fan space, the anti-slash fans who want to make sure we know they're sure their heroes can't be gay, whether Spike is a hero or a villain or just another blond with a tortured gaze, if Doctor 10 was a Doctor Gone Wrong for mindwiping instead of saving Donna... they all relate to larger issues (except maybe Spike) but they're not, in and of themselves, important. Except maybe the anti-slash fans when they were noisy, but they seem to have quieted down a lot of recent years.) But sometimes (like recently - not someone on my flist or likely to be reading this) you run into someone who seems to have lost track of that, who's got the impression that if it matters to them it's of Global Importance.

Which is disturbing, really.



Tags: fannishness, join us on the outside, lj abuse did what???, slash

10:36 pm: Twenty-nine years ago I became a Fan
I probably would have become a fan anyway. Certainly once I stopped being a solitary fan and discovered fandom I found a whole world where, for the first time that I recall, I actually fitted in. (Coming out was actually a very similiar experience.) On the Easter weekend in 1983, I stood in queues at Longleat at the Doctor Who Celebration (a thoroughly commercial, run-for-the-profit, fans-are-the-audience convention) and discovered ... well, that queues I had expected to be dull weren't. That was my discovery of fandom.

But the moment when I became a fan, all by myself, not knowing there was or ever would be anyone else out there like me - oddly enough, I can pinpoint that almost to the minute. It was about 8pm, Tuesday 30th March, 1980. I was, as I did sporadically, watching a skiffy TV series with my brother and a couple of his friends: and I got caught up in it... and the spaceship was destroyed, and Vila escaped with Orac, and Avon... smiled.

Over the credits, they announced there would be a new series returning in the autumn. (Didn't come back till 1981, but... I was hooked.)

Via metafandom, a post from a (relative) newbie on "what would it have been like to be there for Major Fannish Events"?

In 1981, I watched the fourth season of Blake's 7: "Orbit" would have been a "Major Fannish Moment" if only I'd known about fandom then, and "Blake" was another - after both, I spent days writing in my journal, which is fortunately not available online. Or to anyone, thank-you-very-much. In 1983, the 4th season was repeated after a letter campaign to bring it back: - we had a VCR by then, and do you remember how expensive VHS videotapes used to be? I bought two of them, and would have bought four to have the whole season if I could have afforded it: and found a connection, via Tony Attwood's B7 programme guide, to B7 fandom - not long at all after I had been to Longleat. 1983 was the year I found fandom: but at 8pm, Tuesday 30th March, 2010, it will be 30 years to the hour since I became a fan.

When did you become a fan?



Tags: fannishness

10:36 pm: Le weekend: and watching AI:AI
I'm extending the weekend with TOIL tomorrow for Pride last Saturday. It's time I took it. But. I have spent a weekend doing Not Very Much, not even housework.

I have a bunch of things Not Working at the moment: my landline is not working properly: one of the TV boxes is not working (which I suspect is probably Bob's doing, since she used to like to sleep on it: on the other hand I've had it since February 2004, so it wouldn't be impossible that it's just stopped working) and neither my VCR nor my DVD player are working properly (I suspect with both it's the remote controls rather than the players, but the problem with modern technology is that once the remote controls go, the boxes are no longer very usable: and my broadban Internet connection is dead - though Virgin Media were making noises about how "our engineers are aware of the fault and fixing it!" I'm posting this via my T-Mobile dongle. (Also, though this is hardly on the same level of Not Working, two of my cute baby dragons died - and again after they'd had enough clicks and views to grow up. Bah.)

I am watching AI: Artificial Intelligence, and thinking about the Keptverse. (Which is, if you haven't been following, the AU North America in which debt and birth slavery exist - and in which it is legal for parents to sell their minor children into slavery, developed by poisontaster.)

The first half hour or so of AI:AI is about Monica, a woman who cannot get over the death of her son - because technically he isn't dead: he's deep-frozen, in stasis. So her husband buys her a very expensive toy - a mecha, a humanoid robot, shaped like a small boy, with the functional capacity to be bonded permanently to its owner - to thereafter behave as if it had an emotional attachment to its "parent". Which does, in fact, console the woman enormously - she can love and play with her mecha "boy" . But then the woman's son can be awakened and cured.

...and it turns into the story of a Pinocchio. The toy who wants to be a real boy. Which the real son makes clear to the toy by having his mother read the story to him. (Also, of course, because the film-maker wouldn't count on an American audience remembering Pinocchio unless it was associated.)

But, watching it, I thought it would be easy - if poisontaster weren't against any fanfic that isn't RPF written in this universe - to write a fannish retake on the film. Because it is a story about slavery - if you can say that an intelligent toy is enslaved.

It's not something poisontaster deals with directly in the Keptverse: and darkrose only indirectly: what if a couple who wanted a child/didn't want one - the same kind of ambiguous emotional state Monica's in when her son is frozen - instead of adopting a baby, bought one... and then got their real child back? Old enough - as Monica's son is in the film - to know that the toy isn't his brother, but something bought for his mother to play with, a substitute child.

I don't think it's a story I want to write: it's very nearly unbearable as it is, and it becomes worse when I think about how it changes if the mecha toy is actually a human who is abandoned. "You won't understand the reasons, but I have to leave you here." - "Is it a game? When will you come back for me?"

Monica drives out of the story then. She is really still so completely emotionally screwed up that she fails in all possible directions to be a convincing character. I mean really: doing this to her mecha toy makes sense neither if she's fully aware it's a mecha, nor if on some level she thinks he's a real boy. Gigolo Joe walks into the story then - a mecha programmed to be the best possible lover, a toy who becomes the toy's parent.

AI:AI is about what happens when you create intelligent machines and treat them like things: in a sense, it already is a Keptverse story....




Tags: fanfic, fannishness, films

11:16 pm: I first came to Gotham City on the trail of the killers of my father...
Look at the lovely drabble cmshaw writed for me!

Here.



Tags: due south, fannishness

11:59 pm: Okay, so: the character list meme!
Hmmm, when xkcd is just depressing and even lolcats don't do more than raise a smile...


moar funny pictures

I need distracting. And lexin was doing it! (Listing characters, I mean, obviously)

I have made a list of 15 fictional characters.

Ask me questions about one or more of these characters by number, and I will respond (eventually...) with an answer.





Tags: fannishness, lists, meme, xkcd

11:23 pm: The list of characters
( the list )

Tags: fannishness, lists

08:38 am: Shipwar in the Iliad!
Support me on this one: the canon pairing is Achilles / Paris, right?



Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, fannishness

12:26 pm: Special shells... a fannish meme
Infected by elke_tanzer: I wish you all well, every day... whether you have found and kept one shiny pebble, or whether you find and discard shells until you find a specific matched set that you will carry for years, or whether one day you have a special rock and the next you have a special shell and the third day you have a special piece of driftwood, or whether you, like me, have so darned many rocks and shells and pieces of driftwood poking out of every pocket that you're seriously considering carrying a multicompartmentalized duffle bag next time you visit the beach... or somehow rearranging your life so you can just live on the beach surrounded by all the rocks and shells and pieces of driftwood in existence.

While I am sitting on the couch much like a potato with a dodgy ankle:

Tell me why you love a fandom: I will squee and tell you why I love one of my fandoms.



Tags: ankle hurts me, dragon eggs need clicky, fannishness, meme

12:29 pm: Website to remember for Redemption
Next February. I'm just thinking ahead.

I'm going to make a batch of gluten-free cupcakes and a batch of vegan cupcakes before I go (Thursday night), and pack in a couple of airtight containers, and bring a box of gluten-free icing sugar and a bottle of lemon juice to make Dead Simple Icing to put on the cakes, Saturday morning, for the market Saturday afternoon, and so I can tell which are gluten-free and which are vegan, decorate them with gluten-free sweeties and vegan sweeties. From the useful sugary website I just linked to, or some other one.

Plus, if I have room, some cake for the Friday night room party.

Tags: baking, cake, fannishness, redemption

08:48 am: OTW: continues
OTW finally did something that you don't have to have a livejournal account to get involved in! The fan history wiki they said they'd set up last year.

In a swift pass through: the registration form is nice and clear, the use of "Gardener" is a little twee, I like the anti-bot arithmetic field, and the layout looks fine. Have not yet done anything other than register, but somehow I doubt I'll ever want to be a "Gardener" (the pretty fannish flowers! ooo!)

Tags: fannish snark, fannishness

07:56 pm: Fannish Meme: Comment with a fandom
Comment with a fandom and I shall tell you...

1. The first character I fell in love with:
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now:
3. The character everyone else loves that I don't:
4. The character I love that everyone else hates:
5. The character I would shag anytime:
6. The character I'd want to be like:
7. The character I'd slap:
8. A pairing that I love:
9. A pairing that I despise:
10. Favorite character:
11. Slash story I never expect anyone to write for me but I'd love them if they did:
12. Song for fanvid that no one will ever make:
13. Who are your five favorite characters?
14. Who are your five least favorite characters?
15. What are your five favorite pairings?

Tags: fannishness, meme meme meme

10:04 am: NewWho: ( Why it's good that Donna's story ended the way it did )
It's not.

Much has changed about the Doctor over the years but much has remained the same. Despite the superficial differences in appearance, at heart, or rather at hearts (the Doctor has two) his character is remarkably consistent.

He is still impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him.

The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly.

In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero.

Having the Doctor ( spoiler for NewWho S4 finale ) just give up.

For anyone coming here who doesn't usually read my journal, I wrote about this at more length on feministsf the blog.

Tags: doctor who, fannishness, i am an angry feminist

01:44 pm: No, not just sour grapes
I have a Youtube account: every video uploaded to it is my own copyrighted material.

I use Youtube to watch vids: primarily, I use it to watch Johnny Cash sing. (Occasionally, Willie Nelson.)

As of last Tuesday, Viacom gets to know exactly what my viewing patterns are. And yours. And everyone's.

"To build its case, Viacom asked for a list of all the login IDs belonging to YouTube's users, along with the company's log of which videos they watched, when, and from which IP (Internet Protocol) address. With that logging database, it hopes to show that its copyright content is of more interest to YouTube's users than video created by the users themselves." - link

So an American judge got to make an order that handed over identifying data about people living outside the US to an American corporation which is minded to really, really, annoy the people who used to be its customer base. Well, if you're still on Livejournal, you should be used to that. To quote someone else: "Now every part of the world is subject to US law. Except Guantanamo Bay."

"That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason (DMCA notices or user-initiated deletions). Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely 'speculative.'" - link

Simon Davies does a big I Told You So: "Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger." link

I was recommended to the Tor Project to improve your privacy online.

I was interested to see if Organisation for Transformative Works had anything to say about this, but they don't.

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, cool things people do with software, evil american politics, fannishness, youtube videos

06:40 pm: Yay! What? Oh...
Back awhile ago, I noticed that bethbethbeth had announced yet another OTW thingie in her journal, and as I was (a) fairly busy and (b) had decided just to avoid OTW stuff in order not to snark about it being LJ-only, I didn't click on the link.

Then RL/non-online Stuff Happened - really, um, lots of stuff, including but not limited to a major work event and my back going out, and so when bethbethbeth lambasted me for not joining the new IJ OTW-community and explained that yes, uniquely and newly and unlike all other OTW stuff this was not limited to LJ-people only...

...and I literally did not have the time or the energy to even go look at it. (Well, briefly, I did: except I was actually soaking up Scottish sun/writing a crossover story instead. Not really sorry, either.)

But this evening, I thought: I now have three days free! I can join the new OTW community! I can find out what was happening! I can make comments!

...er. It turns out it was a strictly time-limited community, intended to be open to the IJ-public for six days or so, and I missed it.

(I did join it anyway. I can at least see what they were talking about, and if they decide to do it again I'll be there.)

Tags: fannishness, i write fanfic, just my life really

10:39 am: This is Scotland
I am sitting outdoors in a gloriously green garden, in warm sunlight. My feet are bare and if I'd thought to pack them I would be wearing shorts.

(My back feels lots better: I kept telling people "sore but normal" yesterday, when it was still worrying me, but it really is today.)

I should be writing a complex and and sarcastic story involving House and a flock of other characters, not all of them ducklings or Wilson, but somehow I can't focus on that.

Hey ho for mayhem, angst, torture, suicide, and despair! I think I can focus on that.

Tags: fannishness, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, write write write

03:25 pm: Class on TV
I am still thinking about a comment alixtii made on her journal. Just out of interest, what's your impression, imaginary Internet people, of the difference between class representation on British TV and American TV?

Never mind (for the moment) how you yourself define upper, middle, and working class: what shows currently (or historically) on British TV portrayed which classes, and which ones did you watch? And what is the difference between this and American TV?

Tags: blake's 7, bob, class, doctor who, fannishness, m*a*s*h, tv addiction

08:52 am: 80sficapalooza - Star Wars: "Winning without words"
Well, this is pretty much all dragovianknight's fault. Really it is. Having proposed eight or nine prompts for 80s fandoms, I really had to claim something - but it had to be something for the beginning of the month because I'm going to be fiendishly busy by the end of it. ...and also, I'm not writing MacGyver fanfic for anyone who can't spell MacGyver. So that left me with just one possible prompt, and... er, yes.

I'll post it on my journal once it's no longer the 3rd of May. (Mine is the first story up for the day...)

Tags: fannishness, slash slash slashity slash, star wars, write write write