Notes from the Tundra

Out of Town

2006-09-09T01:03:20Z

Tonight Charles and I are going to the coast for our annual anniversary trip - a little earlier than usual this year, and also possibly a little bit longer, due to a fortuitously timed field work assignment which, if it comes through, will allow me to sponge off of Charles' employers for that much-coveted "one more day." I'll be back sometime in the middle of next week.

I've been in one of Those Moods lately, the sort of brain-fried state of mind in which stringing together words becomes unreasonably difficult, and reading anything more complex than Goodnight Moon a total trial. So instead, I've been playing Civilization and browsing fanvids on YouTube, which for some reason my computer can handle, even though it usually chokes on video.

I've also been watching loads of ancient Doctor Who. I miss quarries. Why does the new series never shoot scenes in quarries? The quarries were one of the best things about the show! I understand that the production values have improved and all that, but really, that's no reason to abandon everything about the old aesthetic.

At least someone on Youtube understands the repetitive yet soothing beauty of the overused shooting location.

The most perfect killing machine ever devised...

Must go pack now.

Tracking the Zeitgeist, Made Easy

2006-09-05T23:28:10Z

OMG! I've just noticed the addition of a TRACKING BUTTON on the comments threads of people's livejournals! Could this be? Is it true? Have they finally implemented a way to subscribe to comments threads?

If this really is a new feature and not just a cruel hoax, I will love Six Apart for ever and ever and ever.

Well. Until they do something else that I don't like, that is. I mean, let's not get carried away here.

*
There's always something rather humbling about seeing outpourings of internet grief - and the accompanying wankery - over the death of some celebrity you've never even heard of before.

It does seem that many people on livejournal were indeed sad yesterday. They are now, however, beginning to become a bit less sad.

No. No, really. I have PROOF!

You can track the livejounal zeitgeist yourself at the Moodgrapher. I found the Global Events page particularly interesting.

*
In other news, I just had my first experience with, er, authorized nitrous oxide use at the dentist today.

I highly recommend it. It's far more enjoyable than those little restaurant canisters that we used to empty into balloons and then inhale back in college. Best of all, the silly-looking equipment all belongs to the dentist, so you don't have to go desperately looking for a place to hide it away whenever a potentially disapproving person comes into your room.

I do not recommend root scaling, however. Really. Not even for the nitrous. Floss, children! Floss! And don't take up smoking - it's hell on your gums.

Secrets of the Elkins! Now Revealed!

2006-08-31T15:07:53Z

Thank you all for the birthday wishes. I had a low-key day, which is precisely the way I like it, and then was taken out for dinner, which I also like. Kim and Sydney baked me a cake with pretty blue frosting. Mmmmmm. Frosting. Then, just to ensure that I not forget that my body is aging, the fates decreed that I should come down with a cold. Mmmmm. Sinus headache.

I hadn't realized until last week's Pluto discussions how many of the people I know here on livejournal were astrology buffs. So, as a way of thanking you all for the lovely birthday greetings, I offer up

Yes, that's right. Interpret this puppy properly, and you'll know precisely how to manipulate me.

Steve Update and Kitty Picspam

2006-08-29T03:22:46Z

happy_potterer asked about Steve, the starved black kitty we took in earlier this summer.

He's still with us. Our vet told us about a cat refuge place that said they were willing to take him, even though they also said that they're up to their ears in FIV-positive males, but I really don't want to send him there. He's so affectionate, such a very people-oriented cat, that I just can't bring myself to send him to live someplace where he wouldn't get a lot of personal attention. I'd much rather try to find him a real home, with people who will give him the affection that he so clearly craves.

We've been putting off looking, though, mainly because things keep coming up that make us think it would be best to hold off for a while longer. First, we wanted to get him checked over, to make sure that he was completely parasite-free, and to get him up to date on all of his shots. Then we wanted to get him neutered, and of course, it only seemed fair to give him some time to recover after that! Then we were waiting to hear back on the more complicated blood test results, to make sure that he was really FIV-positive (which alas, he is). And then we were holding off until all of his scrapes and scratches and sores from his time outdoors healed up more completely. Although he doesn't have any obvious injuries anymore, he was still sort of scabby and lumpy for a while. It wasn't very nice to touch, and I felt that he'd have a much better chance of seeming like an attractive option to prospective adopters if we waited until all of those nasty patches had cleared up, and also until he'd fattened up a bit more.

I think, though, that we've now pretty much run out of excuses for looking for a new home for Steve. I suspect that maybe at this point, we're just procrastinating because we've grown rather attached to him. I know that some part of my mind is still vacillating over the question of whether we really could integrate him into our household, or whether Radclyffe the bully cat would pick a fight with him and thereby get herself infected. We really should make a decision one way or the other, though: it's just not fair to Steve to make him live in the TV room just because we're all too wimpy and lethargic and indecisive and prone to procrastination ever to make firm decisions about things. It is a pretty big room, but still: I wouldn't want to live my entire life in there, if I were a cat. Steve seemed quite content with it when he was still recovering from starving half to death, but now that he's getting healthier and moving around a lot more, he needs considerably more space.

In other cat news, because I am a sad, sad fannish stereotype, I've now uploaded some pictures of my cats, just so that I can share them with you! Aren't you just thrilled?

I don't have any recent ones of Steve, but here's an older one of him stretching his poor stiff hind legs:

The vet says that the stiffness in his hips and hind legs is most likely due to malnutrition, and that they'll probably be that way for the rest of his life. It's unfortunate from a cosmetic point of view, but since it doesn't seem to prevent him from jumping high up onto the bookshelf whenever he wants to get away from people, I'm not too concerned about it. It just makes him look a bit gimpy and awkward, that's all.

This is Radclyffe, our territorial and sometimes downright bullying little cat:

She's the one I'm most worried about fighting with Steve. She is also a total show-off for the camera:

Mosley, on the other hand, is not at all aggressive, and tends to get along well with other cats.

In fact, he and Steve accidentally wound up together one day when someone left a door open, and they seemed to be getting along splendidly. He's very shy, though, so I don't have many pictures of him. (And yes, he really does usually have that "Hi! I'm actually dead and stuffed, and my eyes are made of glass!" look to him. He really is alive, though. Really!)

There are a couple more catpics in my LJ Scrapbook, which I have only this weekend figured out how to use. Because I am always very up-to-date that way.

A Bad Week For Astronomers

2006-08-26T04:58:32Z

planetpluto has now been deleted and purged.

Boy, those astronomers really are hard core, aren't they? Stalwart men of science! Unflinching in the face of sentimental public opinion! Just like Galileo when he—

Huh? What?

Oh.

The end of the process of breaking down the reality structure of normal consciousness

2006-08-24T15:56:37Z

It is decided.

The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

I should like to offer my sincere condolences to those born under the sign of Scorpio, whose ruling planet is now a planet no more.

Cheer up, little Scorpios! At least you still have a ruler of your own. We Virgos have always had to share ours with those damned Geminis.

Anyway, perhaps it is best simply to think of it as an evolutionary process.

Pluto is the outermost planet of the solar system, and the end of the process of breaking down the reality structure of normal consciousness begun by Uranus. Pluto supplies the energy for the evolutionary process whereby outmoded or dysfunctional entities are transformed through death and rebirth into new ones higher on the evolutionary path. This outmoded entity is often a part of our ego with which we are identified, and without which we feel we cannot live.

So you see?

All for the best, really.

ETA:
Reading further down on that astrological website, I have now also discovered that "Pluto rules the black race." Oh, dear.

I wonder which planet rules the racists?

Vox

2006-08-20T21:01:09Z

Okay, so now I have a Vox account. I admit that I got it primarily because I wanted to reserve 'Elkins,' a name that tends to go fast. (I didn't manage to snag it on Livejournal, nor on Gmail, so I thought that I'd better hustle if I wanted to reserve it on Vox.) 'Skelkins' isn't the worst username in the world, I suppose, but it always reminds me of Skeletor, and honestly, if I'm going to be associated with some 1980s cartoon villain, I'd much rather it be Cobra Commander.

I realize that this system is still in beta, but I'm already finding myself hoping that people won't wind up migrating over there from LJ. I don't think that I like it very much. For one thing, every last page on the entire damned site gives me a horizontal scroll-bar. Fixed width? Fixed width that averages at over twenty words of text a line? What kind of crappy web design is that? Furthermore, there's no way to modify even my own blog to make it suitable for viewing on my equipment. Do you have any idea how tiny and unreadable everything becomes for me if I turn my screen resolution up above 800 x 600? Have mercy, Six Apart! Some of us are both old and poor!

I'm not too fond of the rigidity of the site overall. I've become accustomed to having some ability to customize things [1], but it seems that there's very little on Vox that the users are allowed to tinker with. I'm hoping that perhaps that's something they intend to address once the system is out of beta: if nothing else, it would be really nice to be able to apply personalized CSS sheets to the layouts.

The text editor is also rather a nuisance. It doesn't accept HTML. At all. Instead, there are these cute little buttons that you're supposed to click on to do various things. This is extremely annoying. For one thing, like most so-called "user friendly" systems, it's totally counter-intuitive (why do computer nerds always assume that we Luddites will find pressing random buttons an easier way to accomplish things than typing? Using a keyboard is not an obscure skill! Really! It's not!). For another, it means that I can't type something up in Notepad ahead of time and then just cut'n'paste it into the little box, because there's no way for me to do the mark-up off-site. Of course, some might say that this is all for the best—I do tend to go overboard with my italics—but it's still a right pain in the ass.

Also—and I do know how very petty this sounds—I just fucking hate the word 'blog.' Always have, and at this point, I'm beginning to suspect that I always will.

The photo hosting looks pretty nifty, though, as does some of the multi-media stuff. And I think that the "Collections" function, which allows you to associate a group of items of diverse media (posts, images, books, sound files, video), is very cool. It seems to me that it would be an ideal way to put together an on-line travelogue, or a running account of any long-term project with a heavy visual or multimedia element. I also appreciate how easy they've made it to insert images into posts: unlike basic HTML tags, inserting images into text in a way that looks halfway decent is actually not easy coding for Luddites to learn, so the WYSIWYG editor does seem like a real improvement there.

I also like the ability to call up all recent posts on the system which have been assigned a particular tag. That's how tagging really ought to work on a closed system. Sadly, I suspect that if Vox ever becomes as enormous as Livejournal, it will quickly become too unwieldy to be of much practical use, just like Technorati and del.icio.us have become.

Finally, I think that the comments system is a fantastic improvement over Livejournal's. It is, in fact, everything that I've always wanted LJ's comments to be. Not only does the blog sidebar have a "Recent Comments" section, but you can also keep an eye on all threads on which you have yourself commented throughout the site. Once you have commented on someone else's blog, you are provided with a list of all subsequent comments to that same item, allowing you to follow the conversation. That's precisely the feature that I've always wanted to see on Livejournal, not least of which because it does away with the hideous redundancies of LJ's threading system. Now if only they built in email notifications to that particular feature, Vox's commenting system would be just about perfect, IMO.

Anyway, I have no idea what, if anything, I might end up using the Vox account for, but at least now I've staked my claim.

1 Which reminds me. I hate this journal's layout. I think I shall do something with it, and in the meantime revert to plain, nice soothing Refried Paper. [back]

A Quick Plug

2006-08-12T09:27:50Z

Why the hell didn't anyone think to tell me until now that mike_smith is reading another Harry Potter book? And he's doing Prisoner of Azkaban, no less! And best of all, he's now discovered tags! Yay!

If you missed Smith's chapter discussions of HBP from last summer, they can now be found in their entirety on his website over here, or you could go the tag route and read them on his livejournal. A word of warning, though: here be yellow! And a word of advice: control-A (or ?style=mine if you're reading on LJ) can really help quite a bit with the retinal strain.

One of the things that I really like about Mike Smith's read-throughs--aside from the fact that he's just a funny, funny writer--is that they're such a refreshing antidote to the inescapable batshittery of the Harry Potter fandom. It's a bit like having been institutionalized for years on end, and then finally getting out and having a conversation with someone who isn't suffering from tardive dyskinesia. It's not until that moment that you realize how accustomed you've become to all of the tics and twitches and stammers, the tongue-rolls and lip-picks and eye-darts, the sentences left to trail away unfinished. It's not that the people on the outside even necessarily say things that are any less wacky than the people on the inside do. It's that they manage to say them without simultaneously exhibiting all of the tell-tale signs of having been force-fed one too many gulps of liquid Haldol from one too many tiny Dixie cups.

Book Meme

2006-08-08T13:40:31Z

I don't usually go for the memes, but since I was tagged by joyliveshere, I guess I'll play along. She asked me to:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest. Do people really keep books in closets? I keep them on pretty much any flat surface, but closets are for shoes!
6. Tag five people.

This is sort of funny, really, because the only other meme that I think I've ever done on this LJ was also one of these Erisian 5-23 book memes, one that Amy tagged me for over two years ago now. For some strange reason--probably a strange reason that goes by the name of Kip--that one then wormed its way into the blogosphere, where it became quite popular with the poliblog set, many of whom had apparently never seen a livejournal meme before and who seemed to find it quite unaccountably fascinating. What that meant was that for ages and ages, every time I Vanity Googled my username (What? Oh, come on, now! You all do it too! You know you do!) I'd come across all of these links to things like Slashdot and Memepool, as well as to a zillion posts by various random bloggers who thought it was really cool to try to trace the meme back to its source. This was of course rather annoying, because who the hell wants to have to wade through all of that while vanity surfing? I was looking for people talking about me, dammit, not about some bog-standard livejournal meme!

What? Oh, right. The meme.

Okay. The nearest book to me right now is a copy of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, which I got from Amazon just last week and is sitting on my desk right next to the computer. It's very good so far - I'd definitely recommend it. It's also written by, like, people who actually hang out on livejournal and stuff, which is very cool, and of course they've all used their real life names, which is even cooler in a way, because it means that I don't have the slightest idea who most of them are on LJ. This in turn means that I'll now get to entertain myself by wondering, every time I stumble across some fan on livejournal who seems reasonably articulate and academically-minded and interested in 'meta,' whether they might actually be one of the contributors to this book! Doesn't that sound like a fun game? I think it does!

Why, yes. I am rather easily amused.

Also, rather easily distracted. So, right. The meme.

Page 123, the sixth through eighth sentences:

"In the Middle Ages, for example, cultured people were expected to have a knowledge of a shared allegorical code, which then allowed a compressed, multilayered reading, such as the four levels of textual fruition (literal, moral, allegoric, and anagogic) famously detailed by Dante in the second book of his Convivio.

"Once such shared knowledge is lost, subsequent readers have to perform interpretive feats, and much scholarship has sought to clarify the lost layers of allegorical meanings. In later times, poets wishing to exploit this technique have had considerably more trouble than their medieval colleagues because they were confronted with the lack of a common cultural frame of reference that was congruent with their message."

So there you go.

As for tagging my own five people...oh, I don't want to put anyone on the spot. How about anyone who wants to play can just feel free do so, eh? And let's just hope that this isn't like one of those chain letters where if you break the rules, then the universe will smack you down with untold calamities.

In other news, I'm still alive, and have been totally obsessing on Doctor Who. Maybe I'll even get around to writing something about it some day. Right now, though? Reading.

Steve

2006-07-23T19:02:59Z

One day while I was away on my vacation, my housemate Ampersand came home from work to find a woman sitting on one of the chairs in our garden, petting a strange cat.

Amp vaguely recognized the woman. She had once lived in the dodgy apartment complex next door, but had moved to another state quite a few months ago. She was not someone he had ever particularly expected to see again, certainly not someone he would have expected to find lounging about on one of the cheap plastic chairs on our patio.

"Hey!" she announced, as he walked through the gate. "I found Steve living in your alleyway!"

This was a trifle...alarming, really, until it became clear that Steve was the name of the cat. The woman claimed that Steve had been her feline companion for eight years, that she had left him behind when she had moved, and that now she wanted us to take care of him for her, "just until I can come back for him."

"Well, uh, okay," said Amp. "When do you think that will be?"

"November?" suggested the woman.

When Amp asked, as I suppose that any reasonable person would, why she didn't want to take him home with her now, she explained that it was because she didn't have a cat carrier.

I should probably mention, by the way, that we live a short easy walk from a superstore, one which certainly carries such things in their pet section.

But Amp, being a nice sort, decided to give the woman our cat carrier instead. After rummaging through various closets and not being able to locate it, however (it was in my bedroom closet, where somehow he just didn't think to look), the woman seemed to decide that that just settled it then -- no cat carrier, therefore we were going to have to take care of her cat.

Because, you know, it's not as if you can actually keep a cat in a cardboard box or something, just long enough to drive to the shop and buy a cat carrier.

Anyway, eventually I gather that they worked out a compromise whereby Amp promised that we'd take good care of Steve until we could find him a new home, and in exchange the woman would agree to stop pretending that she was ever actually planning on coming back for him, when it was painfully obvious that she intended to do no such thing.

Or, uh, something like that, at any rate. I wasn't there for the conversation, so I'm just going by what I've been told.

So now we have a new feline housemate, living in quarantine in the rec room until we can be sure he's not carrying anything that might infect our other cats.

Steve was suffering from malnourishment and neglect when we first took him in. He was painfully thin, and his fur had that dull, mangy, raggedy look that usually accompanies starvation in animals. He seemed to have given up on washing himself, and I can't blame him for that in the slightest - he was covered with fleas and flea dirt. I wouldn't want that on my tongue either. His hind legs seemed a little stiff, too, as if maybe he'd hurt himself at some point and never quite recovered properly. All the same, he seems like a lovely cat, friendly and affectionate, and not at all aggressive.

Here's a picture of Steve taken some time last week.

As you can see, he's still thin and a bit banged up in places, although his coat is now beginning to regain its shine. He eats a tremendous amount of food each day. I suspect he'll fill out in time.

The woman who foisted Steve off on us insisted that he had been living with her, in her apartment, for eight years. There are a couple of things that seem a bit off about that story, really.

First of all, Steve is a tom. What sort of person keeps an unneutered male cat as an indoor pet in a small urban apartment for years on end?

Second, and far more strangely, when we took him to the vet, the vet told us that she would indeed be very much surprised if Steve were more than two years old. Three tops. But definitely not eight.

So either this woman is so dim that she couldn't even distinguish a cat she'd known and lived with for eight years from some completely other cat, or she's just completely deranged. Maybe she never really had a cat in the first place. Or maybe the guilt of having left her cat behind when she moved gnawed and gnawed away at her delicate psyche until it has now finally driven her to delusions. Perhaps she is now cursed to see "Steve" everywhere she goes, just like in that Edgar Allen Poe story, or the song we used to sing in elementary school, the one about the cat who came back, the very next day, he couldn't stay away away away away--

Then, of course, I suppose it could just be that this was her sneaky little way of tricking us into taking under our wing a feral cat that she had noticed and felt rather sorry for.

In any case, we're taking care of him now.

Running my hands over Steve's fur and feeling his painfully protruding pelvic bones, I sometimes feel a sense of helpless anger at whoever it was who chose to abandon him in our alleyway. He's obviously accustomed to people, and also to living indoors. He shows no interest in getting back outside. He knew immediately what the litterbox was and what it was for. And not only doesn't he mind being handled, he actively seeks out human contact. Whenever I'm in the room where we've quarantined him, he crawls into my lap; if I'm lying down, he'll climb on top of me. He seems eager to socialize with our other cats, too, and not at all in an aggressive way; I think he just wants some company. I know this may be anthropomorphizing horribly, but he really does give me the impression that he has been profoundly lonely.

Stupid pet abandoners.

Unfortunately, the vet says that he also very likely has FIV. We're having the blood work done to make sure, but if he does test positive, we probably really can't keep him. We already have two healthy cats, and we can't run the risk that he might infect them. We'd have to keep him locked up in the rec room for the rest of his life, which just doesn't seem fair to him somehow.

So anyone in Portland want to adopt a very sweet-tempered young cat?

Paranoia in Online Fandom: CMC, Girls' Aggression, and Overanalyzing the Texts

2006-07-17T02:05:25Z

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet:    Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet:    Between who?
Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet:    Slanders, sir...

Lately I seem to be thinking a great deal about the particular type of paranoiac thinking that often seems to characterize fandom interactions, and which most particularly seems always to rear its head whenever people become involved in on-line kerfuffles or disputes.

For example, I've noticed in the past that whenever I find myself in an on-line circle in which there's a lot of hostility going on, I can sometimes get into this compulsive habit of reading and re-reading posts and emails, subjecting passages of text to a kind of hyperactive scrutiny, as if searching them for some hidden or coded meaning. I used to think that I was the only one neurotic and paranoid enough to find myself doing this from time to time, but after talking to so many other people who recognize this behavior in themselves, I've come to believe that it's actually quite a common reaction to internet kerfuffles.

I've also noticed that there's a distinct tendency for people embroiled in a dispute to act as if they believe that there are these vast and sinister on-line "conspiracies" going on, even when actually there aren't. We see this tendency even more in fandom, I think, where you sometimes hear people talking about "minions" and "Inner Circles" and "cadres" and things like that, or likening people's on-line social behavior to remarkably Godwin-ish things (Nazism, slavery, war-time resistance, war-time treachery, etc.), with no apparent sense of irony at all.

My assumption about this paranoia and the behavior that it engenders always used to be that it was simply a side-effect of the nature of CMC itself. The other week, however, while I was at the beach, I read a book someone had recommended to me on the subject of girls' particular modes of aggression--Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons--and it was really shocking to me just how well many of the things that this book described were things that I strongly associate with online fandom dynamics. That in turn has made me wonder to what extent much of the "paranoiac" behavior that I've been seeing in on-line fandom might be an artifact not only of CMC, but also of the predominantly female demographics of the fandom circles in which I've travelled.

I also find myself wondering lately to what extent fandom itself, even aside from its gender demographics, might serve to reinforce certain types of paranoiac behavior due to nothing more than its own particular hermeneutics. It seems to me that fandom both valorizes and demands certain ways of interacting with source texts which may be inherently psychologically problematic once they are also extended to apply to the "text" of fandom and its participants, or to the "text" of the real world.

So if anyone really wants to hear it, here are some quite rambling thoughts on

Paranoia and CMC

Rosencrantz: What are you playing at?
Guildenstern: Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

One of the things that always comes up whenever people talk about computer-mediated communication is that it is what Media Richness Theory refers to as a "lean" medium, one in which many of the channels that ordinarily facilitate interpersonal communication are filtered out or absent. Face-to-face communication is considered a "rich" medium, because it offers a number of different channels along which meaning can be conveyed: verbal articulation, vocal intonation, body language, facial expression, etc. In CMC, on the other hand, only the channel of verbal articulation is available to carry meaning from one person to another.

Lean media present a number of well-known and often-discussed obstacles to communication, but I think that this aspect of CMC is likely to become even more greatly exaggerated whenever people quarrel, because when we're feeling adrenaline-charged - as we tend to be when we get into fights or feel ourselves to be under threat - then it's a fairly natural response for us to try to narrow down our focus, to hone in quite acutely on whatever the expected sources of danger might be. In an argument or fight, the expected sources of danger are the other people involved: they're what your attention is going to be focused on (which is part of why initiating aggression is so often labelled as an "attention-getting" behavior).

In face-to-face interaction, this heightened focus might manifest itself as a greater attentiveness to another person's facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and so forth, as well as to the actual words they use. On the internet, however, the only thing that serves to represent that other person is text. The words have no competition, so to speak. In on-line disputes, the words become the sole focus available to the hyper-attentive combatant.

I think that the somewhat paranoiac over-analysis of internet texts which people often engage in while embroiled in on-line kerfuffles may be to some extent simply an inevitable response to this fact. I also think that when we are involved in disputes, and therefore feeling particularly desperate for knowledge, the limited meanings we can reasonably deduce from our texts are sometimes just not seen as enough, and that this can lead us into an even further manifestation of paranoiac behavior.

Guildenstern:
We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

When the sole focus of the hyper-attentive combatant, the text, does not seem to suffice, when it does not seem to be carrying enough intrinsic meaning to satisfy the reader's desire for knowledge, then the reader may sometimes choose to compensate by...well, to put it bluntly, by making things up: imagined conspiracies, for example, or invented motives --anything to plug the inevitable gaps which always exist in text, gaps which while they ordinarily might not even register as significant, in the heat of battle can suddenly come to seem far too dangerous to allow to remain as lacunae. Uncertainty is very threatening - so threatening, in fact, that sometimes people prefer to contend even with imagined threats than to suffer the uncertainty of not knowing whether there's really any existing threat at all. That's the underlying paradox of the paranoiac delusion.

In fact, I see this phenomenon as very closely related to the operative dynamic of fandom itself. In fandom, people are similarly engaged in making things up in order to fill the gaps of some given text. Also in fandom, just as in internet disputes, the text in question is granted an unusually high degree of attention and focus by the reader -- often far more focus than the text in question can really properly sustain, which is a large part of what makes the insertion of fan-created meaning so appealing in the first place.

The difference, however, is that the hyper-attention of fandom is usually something that we enter into on purpose and as a means of pleasure, rather than subconsciously and as a defensive response to some (real or imagined) personal threat. It is therefore an enjoyable type of "delusion," unlike true paranoia, which is nearly always both frightening and stressful.

Paranoia and Feminine Modes of Aggression

OPHELIA: O you must wear your rue with a difference.

I also think that the predominantly female demographic of many on-line fandom circles might also play a role in this fandom tendency to paranoia due to the particular modes of aggression which girls and women are socialized to favor, modes which themselves tend to encourage a type of paranoid thinking.

One of the chief premises of Odd Girl Out is that because girls are so strongly socialized against showing aggression at all, they learn to display their aggression in ways designed to allow a very high degree of "plausible deniability," as well as to fly under the radar of both authority figures and uninvolved parties. In this way, Simmons argues, girls can both have their cake and eat it too: they can be as hostile and aggressive as they want to be, while still maintaining a facade of an appropriately "feminine" well-meaning innocence.

So instead of overt acts of aggression, like loud teasing and physical violence, instead you often see girls using things like anonymous letters, whispering and gossip campaigns, insinuation and innuendo, dirty looks (the "Stink-Eye"), subtle acts of exclusion, and physical attacks which can be very easily passed off as accidental, like foot-tripping, or knocking someone down by pretending to 'accidentally' bump into her in a crowded school corridor or cafeteria. All of these acts of aggression are ones which school authorities and uninvolved parties are unlikely even to notice (although their intended target most certainly will!), and which can also be readily and easily explained away as innocent misunderstandings by the perpetrator, should she ever be confronted directly about her behavior. ("What? I was just looking at her!" "I didn't say anything!" "Well, I didn't mean that!" "For heaven's sake, it's only a joke!" "I'm sorry, of course I would have invited you, but I thought that your mom didn't allow you to go roller skating and so I didn't want to make you feel bad!" And so forth.) When girls do engage in forthright aggression, they usually choose to do so by "ganging up," carefully mobilizing allied forces before they initiate hostilities. This may also be seen as a response to socialization against aggression: after all, if one only ever expresses hostility as a part of a large group, then no single individual ever needs to bear all that much responsibility for the aggressive behavior; those who engage in group hostility can also often rationalize their behavior as a kind of communal or populist endeavor, rather than as plain old-fashioned bullying.

One of the things that this book described really well, I thought, was how particularly emotionally damaging these kinds of deniable acts of aggression can be to their targets, for the very reason that they seem almost perfectly designed to instill paranoia in otherwise sane individuals.

There's definitely a "Gaslighting" effect to aggression which is so often denied: it serves to make the target doubt her own perception of reality. If it seems as if someone is trying to hurt you, but when confronted the person in question denies that this was at all the intent, then how do you respond? Whom do you trust? After all, you could have misinterpreted, or overreacted; and since it's quite often a purported "friend" aggressing against you in this fashion, you really wouldn't want to level a false accusation. Yet it's hard for the target of, say, an extended whispering campaign to avoid the conclusion that people really are out to get her because...well, because actually? They are.

"Even paranoids have enemies." --Golda Meir (attributed)

Of course, one can argue that it's not really paranoia if they really are out to get you -- but in the absence of any hard evidence that ones perceptions are correct, I think that the distinction between paranoid delusion and accurate perception can actually become quite hazy. To believe something in the absence of any proof, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is still a mark of disordered thinking, whether the "delusion" turns out to be correct or not. Because it's often so hard to articulate what the "proof" of these feminine modes of aggression really is, while a denial is far more concrete and straight-forward, deniable modes of aggression act to make their targets doubt their own sanity.

Nor is this even necessarily an accidental side-effect of many of these acts of aggression. On the contrary, some of these acts are quite explicitly intended to foster paranoia in their targets. The reason that an anonymous letter, for example (or a comment on an "anonymeme," for that matter), is so devastating is precisely the suspicion it awakens in its target that perhaps the author might be someone known to her, maybe even someone who is pretending to be her friend even while secretly wishing her harm. That's not an incidental effect of the poison pen at all; it is precisely its intended purpose. Many stereotypically feminine forms of aggression are designed to operate in just this manner: they cause harm to their victims by instilling in them an unbearable sense of social unease, of social suspicion and mistrust. Of paranoia.

Because of this, and also because these modes of aggression are often so very subtle, their use actively encourages people to hyper-analyze their social environments, to try to "read things into" all of their social interactions. There's not nearly as much room for misunderstanding in a fistfight as there is in a dirty look, or in the slight turning away of bodies when a girl who has been targeted for exclusion enters a room. These are shows of aggression which already need to be 'translated' in order to be properly understood; if you can't perform this act of translation, then you will have no idea what is really going on. Girls learn to spend a lot of their time and mental energy trying to analyze and to second-guess the behavior of the people around them precisely because within their social milieus, this is often a relevant social skill. In the world of the girls' clique, somebody who takes things at face value, who does not engage in that kind of constant analysis, isn't really "normal" at all; she's a social moron.

I think paranoia can be instructive in the right doses. Paranoia is a skill. -John Shirley

So I think that this, too, is likely a huge contributing factor to the development of paranoia within those fandom circles in which the social mechanics of "girl clique dynamics" hold sway. Certainly my experience with people's behavior within the Harry Potter fandom bears remarkable similarity to the way that Simmons describes the dynamics she observed in adolescent girls' social milieus: the cliques, the back-biting, the obsession with 'popularity,' the power-grubbing and its attendant sycophancy, the faction-forming, the preference for expressing aggression in groups rather than individually, the anonymous attacks, even the "eating our own"...it's all there. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the paranoia which Simmons describes as the natural result of these feminine modes of aggression should come to colonize the thinking of those who engage with fandom subcultures in which these sorts of aggressive behaviors run rampant.

Paranoia and the Hermeneutics of Fandom

“Fandom celebrates not exceptional texts but rather exceptional readings (though its interpretive practices make it impossible to maintain a clear or precise distinction between the two).” -Henry Jenkins

Another thing I've been thinking about lately, when it comes to paranoia within fandom circles, is the extent to which many of the behaviors which seem so dysfunctional when they are applied to other fans, or to fandom in general, are actually very much the same as the expected ways in which we relate to the source text and its characters when we engage in fannish activity.

I already mentioned up above the way that filling the gaps in the text by means of imagination and invention--something which is often taken to a rather neurotic extreme when it is done to other fans' letters or posts--is actually a fundamental part of what fandom is all about. That's what we do in fandom. We "read too much into" the text. We "over-analyse" it. We invent, we create, we insert, we recontextualize. We speculate. These are the modes of engaging with text that fandom both values and valorizes.

All of these playful ways of interacting with a text can be quite enjoyable when they're applied to a work of fiction. When applied to the real world, however, that same approach can all too easily become dysfunctional, damaging. It is, after all, one which bears a remarkable family relationship to the particular cognitive patterns of paranoid schizophrenia.

Indeed, I think that there's often a decidedly paranoiac tinge even to the kind of things that fans often most enjoy reading into their texts. Speculation about seemingly-innocuous characters actually being Ever So Evil seem popular across fandoms; fanwank about elaborate conspiratorial plots going on behind the scenes also frequently pop up in many different fandoms. Even good old slash, I think, can to some extent be viewed as a slightly paranoid way of reading a text: fans put on their "slash goggles" to enable them to see previously hidden "subtext." This entire idea--that What You See Is Not All That's Really There, that there is in fact an entire universe of hidden meaning embedded or coded in the source text--is quite similar to the way that the real world often starts to appear to people who are on the verge of a schizoid psychotic break (or who are the protagonists of a Philip K. Dick novel -- the difference between schizophrenic delusion and gnostic revelation can also be a rather shaky one, at times).

Again, I'm not saying that fan engagement is itself psychotic or unhealthy, by any means. It isn't, any more than any form of imaginative engagement is psychotic. But I think that there's a significant difference between entering into this kind of cognitive functioning deliberately, for pleasure (or to achieve revelatory insight, for that matter), and entering into it unconsciously and without intent, as an instinctive and defensive reaction to some perceived threat.

I also think that there's a significant difference between applying this sort of thinking to a fictional text and applying it to the real world, and this is where I believe that the hyper-performative nature of on-line fandom identity can play a significant role in leading to fandom dysfunction. In the wake of the MsScribe incident, I saw a lot of commentary along the lines of "We're all sockpuppets here!"...except that the problem is that we aren't really completely, are we? A cyborg isn't the same thing as a robot: our on-line identities are not utterly artificial, but are hybrids of the fictional and the real. "Elkins" may not be precisely the same construct as the actual person who is typing these words, yet what you are reading are nonetheless that real person's opinions, not merely the opinions of her persona.

Yet just as fandom's interpretive practices sometimes make it impossible to "maintain a clear or precise distinction" between text and reading, so I think that the fandom subculture's performative practices can often make it difficult for us to maintain clear or precise distinctions between our fictional and our real selves. A few days ago, I remarked in a comment elsewhere that:

Many of the disputes involving "fandom gossip" often seem to me to be quite similar to the sort of interpretative disputes we have over characters in fandom, even down to the detail of people quoting X's published words at each other to "prove" that X is Ever So Evil, or Totally A Wanker, or Really Well-Intentioned and Good At Heart, or whatever. The big difference, of course, is that unlike fictional characters, on-line personae are (usually) so closely related to the real people behind them that - all abstract discourses about the performative nature of on-line communication aside - they really effectively are those real people, and can therefore genuinely have their feelings hurt.

Of course, I think that most people do recognize, on some level at least, that even on-line personalities are attached to real people, people who can genuinely have their feelings hurt. Yet it still seems to be very difficult for us to refrain from talking about other fans in precisely the same ways that we talk about the fictional characters of our source texts. Some people even identify fandom itself--the meta-construct, the subculture, or sometimes even just its gossip ("Fandom Wank Is Now My Fandom!")--as their "fandom." But if fandom itself is your 'fandom,' in that you're applying the particular hermeneutics of fandom to it and its participants, as if it were a fictional source text and its 'characters' fictional people, then I think that itself can lead to a certain degree of dysfunction, not least of which because the hermeneutics of fandom are in so many ways barely distinguishable from the cognitive patterns of schizoid paranoia itself.

So to some extent, I believe that interactions within on-line fandom might be unusually prone to paranoiac cognitive patterns simply because those cognitive patterns are what we have been taught: over-analyzing the text is what fandom encourages us to do. Or, perhaps, it goes the other way: perhaps people prone to overanalyzing are those most likely to have been drawn to fandom in the first place, as it is a place where that form of thinking is a valued skill. Either way, though, it comes down to much the same problem in the end:

We're all paranoids here.

ETA:
Okay, while I think that the thread which devolved into a back-and-forth about one particular recent fandom kerfuffle was, indeed, an excellent illustration of many of the things I was talking about in this post, I also don't think that it was doing anything particularly beneficial for either the two people directly involved or for the overall discussion. I've therefore now screened that thread. There are plenty of other places you can go, if you want to continue to try to hash things out on that topic.

If people could refrain from getting into back-and-forths on the specifics of any recent fandom kerfuffles from now on in the comments here, I'd greatly appreciate that. It's not that I don't think that those conversations can never be beneficial; it's just that I really don't think this is the place for it. Thanks.

Home

2006-07-11T18:48:14Z

I've returned home, only to find that my internet connection has, for no discernable reason, become e-x-c-r-u-c-i-a-t-i-n-g-l-y s---l---o---o---o---w---w---w---w---w. And I do mean slow. Not slow as in "just like ye olde days of the 56K modem" slow. No, no, no. We're talking slow as in, "thirty minutes just to log on to my gmail account" slow here.

So once we finally got through to the cable guy, he said that the problem was something to do with our house's connection, gave a technobabble explanation that none of us really properly understood, and then promised to send someone out to fix it at the earliest opportunity.

The "earliest opportunity," in this case, being Thursday.

Rather annoying, that.

Hot

2006-06-26T16:57:40Z

I'm in North Carolina, visiting my in-laws. I had grits for breakfast, and I'm covered in sweat. Christ, but it's hot and muggy in the south. Seriously, how do people who live here stand it? I think I'd have to spend six months out of every year inside if I lived here. And then I'd bankrupt myself running the AC.

My internet access will likely be limited for the next couple of weeks, and particularly next week, when we'll be at the beach. So if we've been having a conversation somewhere, please know that I'm not ignoring you, nor have I vanished for another 6-moonth hiatus. I'm just not likely to be on-line very much.

Oh, right. I have this journal.

2006-06-20T01:59:41Z

This seems as good a time as any to say that I'm alive.

So if anyone was really terribly worried about the Portland
Father's Day Massacre, rest assured: we still don't own waterfront property.

Alas.

Not much else to report. I've planted some stuff in the garden, and dug up beds and excavated out paths and things like that. I built a grape arbor this past spring, and amazingly enough, it hasn't fallen on top of anyone yet. I took a rather long internet break...but then, surely everyone's used to my abrupt disappearances and extended absences by now? I still haven't seen the GoF movie, although I believe that it's now available on our cable TV. I've been watching the new Doctor Who, and feeling annoyed at being a season behind everyone else in the world. And I'm incredibly peeved that HBO has decided to cancel Deadwood after this season, because I love it to bits, and it's really quite rare for me to find television shows that I love to bits.

I have a purring cat in my lap.

That's about it, really.

11-11

2005-11-11T13:38:05Z

The Next War

The long war had ended.
Its miseries had grown faded.
Deaf men became difficult to talk to,
Heroes became bores.
Those alchemists
Who had converted blood into gold
Had grown elderly.
But they held a meeting,
Saying,
'We think perhaps we ought
To put up tombs
Or erect altars
To those brave lads
Who were so willingly burnt,
Or blinded,
Or maimed,
Who lost all likeness to a living thing,
Or were blown to bleeding patches of flesh
For our sakes.
It would look well.
Or we might even educate the children.'
But the richest of these wizards
Coughed gently;
And he said:

'I have always been to the front
-In private enterprise-,
I yield in public spirit
To no man.
I think yours is a very good idea
-A capital idea-
And not too costly . . .
But it seems to me
That the cause for which we fought
Is again endangered.
What more fitting memorial for the fallen
Than that their children
Should fall for the same cause?'

Rushing eagerly into the street,
The kindly old gentlemen cried
To the young:
'Will you sacrifice
Through your lethargy
What your fathers died to gain ?
The world must be made safe for the young!'
And the children
Went. . . .

(1940)

—Osbert Sitwell, veteran of the 'War to End All Wars'

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

"Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

"So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things."

(1972)

—Kurt Vonnegut, veteran of World War II, from Breakfast of Champions

I've never been terribly good with babies...

2005-10-28T02:53:36Z

jakesquid has just totally made my day.

Click this link. Go on. I dare ya!

But whatever you do, DON'T CLICK THIS ONE! IT IS FORBIDDEN! DON'T DO IT! YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED! NO!

St. Crispin's Day, is it?

2005-10-26T02:11:41Z

It's St. Crispin's Day again, and that means that it's time for everyone on livejournal to post a really well-known English poem about patriotism and war. Hooray!

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Oh, wait. Was that the wrong really well-known English poem about patriotism and war?

Gosh.

Sorry about that.

Return to the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth

2005-10-11T01:31:43Z

Rebecca of Hitherby Dragons (syndicated on livejournal as hitherbydragons) has returned to her "Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth" arc this week.

Well, color me psyched! Everything that Rebecca writes on Hitherby Dragons is breathtakingly awesome, but I was particularly fond of the House of Saints story (which Rebecca herself identified as "darker" than her usual fare - I guess I'm just a Goth at heart), and it occurs to me that Harry Potter people, who comprise most of my friends list, might have a particular fondness for these stories as well.

So, I plug.

The Houses were born of Vladimir's hubris.

His "sorting hat" reshaped the students of his school into five distinct Houses. It changed their nature. It subjected them to the rules of their House. It committed a crime against their humanity.

Thus Peter, of the House of Saints, interceded for others even unto his death.

And Cheryl, of the House of Dreams, lives with lightning in her mind.

And Sid, of the House of Torment, hurt until he died.

And Saul, of the House of Hunger, has become a beast.

Their story began with House of Saints, here. But there are truths the saints would never know.

—Standing In the Storm: the Keepers' House

I'm particularly pleased that this story looks to be focused on that "yellow-cap house." They were quite mysterious in the last one, and I confess that I was feeling hopelessly curious about them.

The first Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth story, House of Saints ("House of Saints is the story of a hat that dares sort men"), was written back in August. It's about ten episodes long, and starts here.

An excerpt:

"This trend is unsettling," says Peter. "I count just three of us in our good and gentle House, while the numbers of the evil green hats grow."

Bethany makes a sour face. "I do not trust this," she says. "Is it possible that we are suffering delusion?"

"Hm?" Peter asks.

"Our minds have been altered," says Bethany. "Could there be an insidious tainting of our perceptions, making us reject the House of Hunger just because they wear green hats and eat people?"

"Surely the sorting hat wouldn't lie to us about moral issues," Saul protests.

Okay, okay, so I'm emphasizing the HP riffs, and I'm doing it purely in the hopes of getting you all hooked. But there's a lot more to it that. It's—

Oh, hell. Just go read it. Seriously. Do. It's brilliant stuff.

Fun With Referral Logs

2005-10-10T05:22:40Z

Referral logs are often a source of merriment to me, but I don't usually see much need to share that mirth with others. I tend to feel that "aren't my referral logs funny?" journal entries fall into the same category as IM log transcripts and role-playing game session anecdotes: they are indeed sometimes quite amusing to others. . . but only very occasionally so.

So I'll spare you all the hilarity of the usual pornographic search strings that regularly land people at my website. I am a bit curious about this recent development, though.

These are the Google Search Strings that are accounting for around 90% of the traffic I'm getting this week:

"Why I dislike the twins"
"Weasley twins are bullies"
Weasley twins bullying
authorial intent twins bullying Rowling
"Harry Potter series" "Weasley Twins" bullying
What does it mean that the Weasley Twins are bullies?

Okay. Now, it's not that I don't usually get a few hits every now and again from people Googling around in search of stuff on the Weasley Twins and bullying. It usually accounts for a handful of pings a day. But this is truly unusual, so now I feel compelled to ask: Is there some huge discussion of the Twins and bullying going on somewhere this week? Or something else that might account for the sudden upsurge of interest in this topic?

Does anyone have any ideas?

ETA: Indeed, it's quite possibly due to The Witching Hour, which has a presentation on the subject of bullying. Thanks, David!

Some Serenity Thoughts

2005-10-09T00:59:24Z

anaid_rabbit asked me why I didn't like Serenity, or to be more accurate (as I didn't dislike the movie), why my reaction to it was pretty much a "meh." I started typing out a response, but since it got longish, I've decided to post it here instead. There are no major spoilers here, but the extremely spoiler-averse (with whom I sympathize, as I am one of them myself) might still consider it something they wouldn't want to see, so I've placed it behind a cut.

This is not really a review at all. It's more a rambling musing on how I feel about the practice of taking a serialized work of fiction that began in one medium, and then concluding or continuing it in an entirely different one.

First off, a disclaimer. I've not yet seen the movie in its final form. When I saw it in a sneak preview showing last spring, it still wasn't completely finished. Specifically, some of the soundtrack hadn't yet been completed, and one or two of the special effects were still in the works. All the same, I would say that what I saw was sufficiently complete to give me a pretty good feel for the movie: it was a very nearly completed product when I saw it, and honestly, I'm not terribly attuned to special effects anyway (I had to ask friends afterwards what precisely it was that was missing - I never would have noticed anything amiss had I not been told about it beforehand).

Second off, another disclaimer. I really loved Firefly the TV show. I followed it avidly when it was first aired, I was pissed as hell when it was cancelled, my household snatched up the DVD when it first came out, I've rewatched the episodes a bunch of times, and I've even done that fannish thing where you sit down a friend in front of the TV and play the show for them in the hopes that you might get them hooked.

In other words, yeah, I was kinda fangirlish about this show.

So. Now that's out of the way...

A friend of ours came over last night and was complaining about Serenity. She didn't like the movie. It pissed her off, largely due to Certain Spoilerish Plot Events That Those Who Have Seen The Film Can No Doubt Guess.

So we were talking about her response, and in the course of the conversation, some of my housemates seemed rather surprised when it emerged that while I didn't share our friend's reaction, I hadn't been all that crazy about the movie either. I suppose it makes sense that this surprised them: after all, I did attend the sneak preview with them, I said nice things about the film afterwards, I did enjoy the film. But in the larger course of things, it didn't really make me happy. It left me feeling cranky and dissatisfied - and it did so not because it wasn't a good movie, but rather, simply because it was a movie.

And a movie is not a television show.

There's a Slate.com article which has been extensively cited over the past week or so, in which Seth Stevenson claims that Whedon should stick to television, that his particular story-telling skills are not nearly so applicable to the big screen as they are to the small. (Warning: this article does contain explicit spoilers. An excerpt:

"Perhaps Whedon figures he now has the clout to control a movie set. But I think his skills—imagining every nook and cranny of an intricate fictional universe; conjuring an ensemble of nuanced characters with complex, long-running relationships—are actually far better suited to television."

I'm not sure if that's entirely fair to Whedon. I'm willing to wait and see what his most recent film projects are like before I assume that he's a one-medium wonder.

I do think, though, that the above quotation works well to explain why Serenity didn't work all that well for me. The movie wasn't really about any of the things that I cared about in the television series. It couldn't have been, really. Because, you see, it was a movie. And movies aren't about "complex, long-running relationships." They can't be. They're far too short for that.

In spite of the fact that television serials and films share many production concerns, they're not really at all the same story-telling medium. They do not handle plot arcs in the same fashion. They are paced very differently. A film has somewhere between ninety minutes to three hours to do whatever it is that it's going to do. A television serial, on the other hand, can spin out its season-long plot arc over more than twelve hours of air time; it can leave that plot arc to simmer on a back burner during episodes which foreground the episodic plot; it can even, if the show is successful enough to last for many seasons, continue to deal with the consequences and reverberations and resonances of the season arc for years and years to come.

And while I'm aware that in certain circles this brands me a total Philistine, I really like television serials. They're really hard to get right - much harder, I think, than films are to get right - and because of that, the crap ratio is indeed appalling. There do exist a number of what one might consider "flawless" films: films in which everything, for lack of a better term, works. I don't believe that there has ever been a flawless television serial. Juggling the demands of the episodic with the demands of the longer-running narrative arc is just too incredibly difficult: even when it's done unusually well, there are still always so many misfires and mistakes and pacing SNAFUs and just plain bad decisions. A certain degree of tolerance of pure and utter crap is required of fans of this medium, which is perhaps what accounts for our reputation as hopelessly tasteless and unsophisticated.

Yet, in spite of all of that, I really like the television serial as a medium. I wish there were more people who could do it better, because while the quality is on the whole lower, the story-telling medium itself is one that I personally prefer to the tighter, sparser medium of the film.

So perhaps this is the reason that, unlike most fans of the Firefly television show, I was not particularly thrilled to hear about the production of Serenity. On the one hand, I was excited by the idea that if the film were successful, that might convince a network to bring back the show. On the other, though, I had this sinking feeling that what the movie would in fact be would be an attempt to bring closure to some of Firefly's long-running plot arcs...in a two hour format. To "moviefy" it, as it were.

And I just wasn't particularly keen on that idea, to tell you the truth. Because no matter how skillfully done the movie might have been, I feared that to me, it would feel like a rush job.

Which, indeed, it did.

None of which is to say that Serenity wasn't a strong film. I've been told by many people who had never even seen the TV show that they really enjoyed it, and of course, many, many Firefly fans didn't share my sense of "meh" about the film at all.

But I just didn't like the leap to a new medium. I didn't want to see plot lines smushed up into a two-hour format when they had been set up to unravel over the course of several seasons. It was changing pacing mid-course, and I found it jarring. For me, it was a bit as if Rowling decided that instead of writing the last book of the Harry Potter series, she was just going to make it as a movie instead. If that happened, then I doubt it would really matter to me how kick-ass the resulting film might be. I would still feel a bit disappointed and out-of-sorts about it.

ETA: The exceptionally spoiler-averse should be aware that there are some spoilers in the comments.

90 to 9

2005-10-06T22:14:40Z

Thank you for the anniversary wishes! We got back from our trip Tuesday night, but I'm only now getting caught up on what everyone has been up to. I'll likely post a boring trip summary later on, complete with vacation snapshots. Because we all know how everyone loves being subjected to other people's vacation snapshots. Oh yes.

Although as some of you have probably noticed, human rights issues take up a good deal of my mental and emotional energy these days, I'd resolved not to post about them here anymore. There are numerous reasons for that, but perhaps the most basic of them are: I am not particularly articulate on the subject, I don't really enjoy writing about it, and I don't think that I or anyone else derives any benefit from my attempting to do so. Today, though, I'm making an exception.

These are the nine members of the US Senate who voted against the anti-torture amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill:

Wayne Allard, of Colorado

Christopher Bond, of Missouri

Tom Coburn, of Oklahoma

Thad Cochran, of Mississippi

John Cornyn, of Texas

James Inhofe, of Oklahoma

Pat Roberts, of Kansas

Jeff Sessions, of Alabama

Ted Stevens, of Alaska

I do not feel in the least bit congratulatory over the passage of this amendment. I am far too disgusted by the fact that this political move was even necessary, that this was something that had to be added on in a backdoor fashion to a defense appropriations bill. There is nothing exciting or joyful about that: it is an occasion for shame.

Nonetheless, I did feel a certain need to put the names of those who objected up here, to see them written in black and white, to be able to look at the list and tell myself: "These nine men publicly support torture. Yet they will not be shunned. They will continue to break bread with people who consider themselves decent folk. They will continue to be the movers and shakers of this nation."

There's really very little point in my writing about this crap on my boring and rarely-used on-line journal. I'm not even entirely sure why I find myself doing so.

It ought to be written in blood.

Wedding Wishes and Memery

2005-09-26T06:57:40Z

I did something horrid to my back this week and so missed a wedding yesterday. Congratulations, heron61, teaotter and amberite! I saw the pictures, and everything looked beautiful. Hoping you're recovering well from all the stress and planning and whatnot, and can now get down to the business of, y'know, enjoying your lives together.

* * * * *

I have been around and reading, just too brain-fogged to write anything substantive myself. Everyone I know seems to be going crazy for the memes lately, though, so just for the record: my cute animal was a Turtle, my political affiliation was Socialist (whatta surprise, eh?), and my nerd/geek/dork rating was "Outcast Genius" (yeah, that's the one with the picture of Bill Gates).

My "Buffy Character" result was Adam. I seem to remember that Adam was a sociopathic and megalomaniacal murderer. A smart one, though, so, err... Yay me?

As for the movie meme, I've been enjoying finding out what movies people like and reading what they have to say about them. The guessing-from-stills game, though, is a really difficult exercise for me, mainly because I have a lot of trouble recognizing faces out of context. Just so that I don't feel as if I'm contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion, though, here is my favorite page on prosopagnosia, which is what they call it when you've got a neurological condition which impairs your ability to perceive or understand faces. (It has a lot of pictures, so if you're on a slow connection, it might take some time to load.)

I don't have nearly as severe a case as the woman who runs that website does, and over the years I've largely learned to compensate for it, but as a child, it was bad enough to cause me quite a few problems. The inability to tell brown-pony-tail-haired friend from brown-pony-tail-haired foe is not much of a social asset on the playground, and my habit of mistaking strange adults for my parents on a regular basis probably didn't do much to foster a healthy family dynamic either. These days, fortunately, it mainly only troubles me when trying to tell characters apart when watching TV shows and movies.

* * * * *

My thoughts have been with everyone in the path of the hurricane this week. I hope that you're all still holding up all right.

I believe the term is "gafiated"

2005-09-14T01:34:33Z

So, um, yeah. Been away for a while.

With old-fashioned print journals, there always came a day when it was time to lock the old one away in a drawer somewhere, pop down to the shop, and pick up a new one to scribble in.

These on-line equivalents, though, with their uneasy blend of public and private status, make that process rather more complicated. So I've settled for just locking all the old entries. If there's something you regret no longer having access to - because you've linked to it, or because you wrote something brill in the comments, or whatever - just let me know, and I'll unlock it again.

* * * * *

Sometimes I worry that I may be in danger of turning into Aljo Svoboda.

For some reason I recall Aljo Svoboda. When I first got involved in fandom in the early seventies I seem to remember reading a lot of locs and even some articles by Aljo and his only subject (in my memory at least - for all I know I could've read 2 locs and inflated them in my mind) was gafiation. He either wrote that he was about to gafiate, or that he had recently gafiated or been gafiated for a long time or explained why he had gafiated, or why he was going to remain gafiated, extolled the advantages of being gafiated, and described what it felt like to be a gafiate. This went on for years, possibly thanks to the slow schedules of many paper zines. Also, possibly due to the vagaries of when the locs appeared (or maybe not) Aljo managed to exist simultaneously in every imaginable state of gafiation all at once.

From my point of view, admittedly as a lowly neofan, Aljo's sole claim to being a fan was that he was gafiated. In other words he was a fan because he claimed he wasn't.

I've always admired his audacity. There is a certain sense to it. There are lots of people who aren't fans. When you come down to it, practically everyone in the world isn't a fan. And they're just...not.

But if you notice you're not a fan...then you're a fan.

-- Groggy's Journal
March 12, 2005
link

So it would seem.

At the risk of sounding unconscionably Svobodan, though, I do have to say that I found reading new HP canon far more enjoyable as a gafiate than I found it as a fan - and I don't think that this was really due to HPB being a better novel than OotP. I think it's just that, for me, all of the obsessive speculation about future canon that characterizes the HP fandom really does interfere with my enjoyment of the books.

Then, it also rather interfered with my enjoyment of the fandom. But more on that later, perhaps.

Anyway, from browsing about LJ, I get the impression that a number of people found their enjoyment of the most recent HP book somewhat tarnished by the fandom lead-up to its release. I can certainly sympathize with that: I had the same experience with OotP, and I also seem to remember that a number of old-timers experienced precisely the same phenomenon when GoF came out,

I'm beginning to think that for a certain type of reader, it might be wise policy to disassociate from the fandom altogether for several months prior to the release of new canon. You can always come back to it later.

In fact, if you're like me, you probably won't be able to stay away.

Especially because...dude! The wank! Oh my God, the wank!

I mean, yeah, sure, I guess the book was cool and all, but it's really the meta that I find is luring me back. I have nothing all that much to say about the novel itself, but the wankstorm surrounding the novel's release?

God help me. I want to analyze it.

* * * * *

I also sort of wanted to share this with anyone who is still reading this journal.

Cheer up, Emo Author!

I somehow really doubt that it was the, er, artist's intent, as it were, for that painting to crack me up.

But hey. I take my yuks where I can find them.

Corvids (II -- Jays)

2004-05-24T10:14:11Z

here_be_dragons points out that hyenas are not purely scavengers, nor lions purely predators. Fair enough, and for that matter, ravens aren't purely scavengers either. The charge that they kill newborn lambs is often written off as slander, but in Ravens In Winter (a book I'd happily recommend to any corvid fans, by the way), Bernd Heinrich claims that they have been observed driving newborns away from their mothers, presumably to facilitate their death by hunger and exposure. They'll also kill and eat smaller birds, although it's not their favored food, and in the north, they have a happy working relationship with the wolves: the ravens alert the wolves to prey; in exchange they get both the carrion itself and the advantage of the wolves' nice sharp pointy teeth (ravens' bills, while strong, are often not strong enough to rip open the hide of a dead mammal).

So they're not exactly innocents on the food chain -- except, of course, insofar as any animal can be said to be.

Crows and jays will also eat anything, but they're particularly notorious for nest-robbing. One theory is that crows may actually need the calcium they get from egg shells for the development and maintenance of their own beaks. They also eat the shells of their own eggs, although only after their young have been safely hatched.

All the same, the corvids do seem to get a bad rap at times. Take blue jays, for example.

Blue is a color not all that often found in plants and animals. When it does appear, we monkey people usually value it highly. We fill our gardens with blue flowers: delphiniums, bellflowers, larkspur, veronica. One of the more commonly heard horicultural complaints is that there is a lack of flowers that are a really "true" blue: most 'blue' flowers edge towards the violet side of the spectrum. Rose breeders have spent centuries and unknown amounts of money in search of the elusive blue rose. Even very common roadside wildflowers, like Bachelor's Buttons, often earn special status as garden plants simply by virtue of being pure blue.

And we like blue in animals, too. People with tropical aquaria are drawn to blue gouramis, to fancy guppies with blue in their tails, to the flourescent red-and-blue neon and cardinal tetras. Birds with blue plumage are usually prized as ornamental exotica: peacocks, parrots, birds of paradise. Even the proverbial "blue bird of happiness" is a blue bird.

And yet the poor old Blue Jay, Cyanocitta cristata, is scorned.

Now isn't that odd?

I mean, just look at him, will you? What a handsome bird, with that distinguished crest, and the black markings to frame his face, those horizontal bands on his tail, the almost irridescent pattern of varying shades of blue along his wings. (close-up.) Yet where I grew up, people didn't like the jays at all, and would often go to great lengths to try to chase them off, or at least to keep them away from their feeders.

My mother was one of these people. She couldn't stand seeing the jays come to feed. "They chase away the other birds," she would say.

Well, yes. That's true. They often did do that. But they did it so very entertainingly! A favorite trick of the blue jay is to swoop down upon a bird feeder while imitating the call of a red-tailed hawk. The other birds panic and scatter, and the jays then settle in for a right old feast, usually taking a huge gulletful of seed with them for good measure when they go. Jays, like crows, are hoarders: they stash excess food away for hard times -- and in doing so, often help oak tree stands to spread uphill.

All the same, the bullying behavior of the jays never seemed to me really to account for the degree of hostility people felt towards them. The littler birds always came back once the jays were glutted, and honestly, where I grew up there just weren't very many small birds with any color to them at all, far less many who could complete with the visual drama of the jays. One striking exception, the bright red cardinals, were only a little bit smaller than the jays, and they were even more aggressive: they were every last bit as bullying to the smaller birds as the jays were, and yet I never once heard my mother--or anyone else, for that matter--complaining when the cardinals would come by to chase away everyone else and then gorge themselves silly at the feeder.

As a child, I was obsessed by Blue Jay feathers, which are not actually blue at all, but reflective: they appear to be blue because they reflect only the blue part of the spectrum. If you crumple a feather violently enough, it will lose its reflective qualities and turn white. I found this unaccountably disturbing and fascinating as a child, and attempted -- with no success at all, I might add -- to impress upon my peers how totally and gob-smackingly cool it was. This probably helps to explain some of my lack of childhood popularity: I was that weird kid who was always trying to shove a blue jay feather in your face and then rumple it, all the while babbling about how see? it isn't really blue at all! See?

Nobody ever stuck around for the full demonstration. I can't imagine why not.

Here on the West Coast, we don't have blue jays. The usual claim is that out here, their dark cousins the Steller's Jays take their place, but this isn't really accurate: the Steller's Jay, while very beautiful, is also rather shy about built-up areas. They far prefer evergreen forests. I don't think that I've ever seen one here in Portland.

The jay which really is our local equivalent of the good old Blue Jay of my youth is instead Aphelocoma californica, the Western Scrub-Jay.

It took me a little while to warm to these guys, honestly. What blue they have is very bright indeed -- at least here in Portland, where we get the brighter-colored coastal variety -- but I missed the overall blueness of the good old familiar eastern Blue Jays. And they have no crests! And that buffy-greyish color on their breasts really can sometimes look more than a little dingy, as if the birds are just desperately in need of a good wash.

Now that I'm over my culture shock, though, I've come to really love these birds. They're a tiny bit bigger than Blue Jays, and they seem more intelligent -- although that could be an illusion created by the fact that they are very relaxed and curious about people, and also that they spend a good deal of time on the ground, which does make them seem more mammalian, more human. When one takes a particular interest in something, it will usually hop down onto the ground and approach it cautiously, stretching out its head until its entire body is elongated. This habit makes them look lanky and awkward and endearing, like good-natured teenaged boys.

Most startlingly of all, though, they actually have a melodious song, although they sing it only rarely. The "Whisper Song" of the Scrub-Jay is weirdly beautiful, a bit like a mockingbird with touches of nightingale influence. Most uncorvidlike, that! But not at all unwelcome, especially since they still have all of the positive traits that I associate with the corvids: intellect, curiousity, sociability.

At times, Scrub Jays can be almost hopelessly personable.

A few years ago, I developed a very friendly relationship with our resident jay while out digging out a garden bed. He perched on top of the rose arbor to watch me work, and whenever I stopped to take a break (which was often: the ground was stony, and I am weak), he would hop down instantly to gobble up all of the creepy-crawlies I had unearthed. When I was ready to start digging again, he'd hop back up onto the arbor and continue to watch.

It was a very nice symbiosis we had going there: the jay got food dug up for him, and in exchange, I got the reassurance that far fewer creepy-crawlies were going to be trying to squirm their way down inside my gloves -- a reassurance that I found particularly welcome since this bit of ground seemed to be occupied by an unreasonable number of most unpleasant-looking centipedish creatures. They were apparently very good eating -- the jay focused his attention exclusively on them; I did not once see him take an earthworm or any other beneficial soil-dweller -- but I really hadn't liked the looks of 'em. No sirree. Not one bit. I was not at all displeased to see them becoming bird food.

What really amazed me about the jay was how very bold he was. The arbor on which he perched was not really very high at all, and I was digging right next to it. When I'd stop to take a break, I'd sit down in a lawn chair only a couple of feet away from where he was pecking and gobbling down centipedes. Yet he seemed utterly unconcerned about my presence, and once he even strutted over to the basin of the fountain right next to the chair in which I was sitting to take a drink. He was close enough to me that I could see the pulse in his throat when he raised his head to swallow.

After that day, the jay often hung around me when I was outside -- hoping, no doubt, that I might dig up more centipedes for him. I found him very good company, but his fearlessness worried me. Our two cats were both allowed outdoors, and one of them had already proven himself more than capable of killing a bird. But whether because the jay was too smart to hang around when the cats were out, or whether because he was too big for the cats to want to mess with him, he never seemed to come to any harm.

I rather miss the Scrub Jay, actually. Perhaps when I finally get around to digging up garden beds here in the new house, I can make friends with another one.

And if not, I have it on very good authority that the one thing no self-respecting Scrub Jay can resist is...

PEANUTS!

So I suppose that I could try to lure the jays over to hang out at my place by putting out some peanutty goodness for them.

Assuming, that is, that the crows won't mob them.

Corvids (I)

2004-05-23T20:57:23Z

Birds are a much happier subject than torture!

I'm often reluctant to discuss my fondness for the family corvidae, in part due to overexposure to the sort of young woman who dyes her hair black, changes her name to 'Morrighan,' spells magic 'majik,' and claims Raven as her OMGOMGAnimalSpirit!!111! I have no beef with neo-paganism, mind, but nuevo shamanism is very trendy these days, and I...well. I live on the West Coast.

I do love the corvids, though, and I confess to feeling a certain sense of companionable connection to them. They make me happy in a way that few birds do. I like reading about them, I like seeing them around, and I'm insanely jealous of here_be_dragons, who can see ravens in her back yard.

Ravens are glorious. I once spent an entire day in the Tower of London, in part because I was so entranced by the ravens that it was literally hours before I could tear myself away from them to look at anything else. Later in the day, I had a woman tourist with a largish family complaining to me about the steep admission price, and about the behavior of her adolescent son. "Thirty-five quid they charged us for this," she complained. "And all he wants to do is stare at those birds." I blushed and mumbled something incoherent, and shuffled away.

Sadly, ravens don't care much at all for the population density where I live. They're rarely seen in Portland, unlike the crows and the jays, who are more comfortable with city life.

here_be_dragons wrote:

I was disappointed to learn that all the above-mentioned birds are inauspicious from a feng shui point of view. I can sort of understand why (if you really want to know, I'll be happy to explain), but I feel bad for them - once again, getting a bad rap. After all, we *need* the scavengers. Just think how stinky and cluttered with carrion our world would be without hem. ::grin::

Yeeeeeeeessss. Yes. Well, that doesn't surprise me, I suppose. It's probably difficult not to develop a reputation as a bird of ill-omen when one of your more notable characteristics is the ability to scope out from afar choice opportunities for feeding off carrion.

Of course, one could ponder what it means for us as a species that we tend to vilify the creatures who predict, announce, and then clean up the carnage, while praising to the skies those who actually created it. We do seem overall to like predators far better than scavengers: we admire lions while despising hyenas; raptors are considered "noble," even though they are for the most part abysmally stupid birds, while the intelligent and personable corvids reap our hostility and our mistrust.

There is, I feel, an analogy to the state of our contemporary political discourse lurking somewhere in the background here, but as I have promised myself to try to stop stressing over all of the things I am finding infuriating about punditry of late, I shall refrain from exploring that line of thought any further.

At any rate, people intimately familiar with battlefields do, I suppose, have sound emotional reasons for fearing and disliking the corvids. Agriculturalists and herdsman aren't usually too crazy about them either. Hunters and gatherers not prone to killing each other in mass numbers, on the other hand, tend to be rather favorably inclined towards them: the indigenous coastal peoples of the Pacific Northwest were very partial to the corvidae, as were many of the tribes of Alaska and northern Canada.

As neither agriculturalist nor herdsman nor hunter nor gatherer -- nor someone all that likely ever to find herself on a battlefield, thank God -- I like the corvids because they are smart and squabbling and gregarious and sociable and adaptable, because their social interactions are interesting to watch, because they are large enough to observe well at a distance, because they relate well to humans, because they help to keep the streets clean of roadkill.

I do not pretend for a moment that my affection for the family is any less rooted in my own cultural identity than anyone else's historical associations have been. It occurs to me that my feelings about the corvids are actually perfectly congruent with my own anthropological designation, which although I'm sure it has a technical name, I might simply call "21st century Western urban."

Elkins