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September 22nd, 2008
 | 06:44 pm - OMG
The Curse of the Golden Flower
...starring...
Gong Li's Cleavage
Seriously.
Oh. My. God. this was the most nonsensical, bizarre, style-over-substance (or anything meaningful) movie ever. Where was the ending? What were Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat THINKING when they signed on?
And also, the kungfu choreography was horrendous. As was the psychedelic, drug-induced decor (glowing, swirly rainbow columns?).
I want of want to try replicating T'ang Dynasty boobage, though, although I suspect that it was more artistic license than tailoring reality, based on what little I know of general Chinese patterning techniques.
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September 21st, 2008
| 10:58 am - OMFG
Neil Gaiman's blog: scroll down to his comment on a Good Omens cover.
....
!!!
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September 20th, 2008
 | 10:27 pm - Oooh
The first issue of OTW's journal is out, and it looks interesting. I actually followed the papers I read pretty well (keep in mind that the last time I read anything resembling literary criticism was in high school), although I can't compare it to other journals in the same field (I normally read science for work and history for fun, and just about anything is easier than wading through history papers from the 60s with Chinese characters I can't read every few words. Yes, I have weird-ass hobbies).
I hope there will be more non-academic meta published! I think fans who don't have the academic backgrounds "typical" in fan/media studies can bring a lot of interesting perspectives (and with less jargon...sorry, fan studies folks!), and as much as I enjoy reading those on LJ, it would be cool if they were easier to find for academics so we can affect the academic perspective.
But so far it looks pretty cool.
And I have to admit, I'd like to see more close-reading of fannish works. Which reminds me, I keep meaning to post about ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) torch's Phantom Menace stories.
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August 25th, 2008
| 09:37 am - Heh
penknife has an interesting post on soulbonding.
Anyway, I kind of want to see soulbonded werebeaver crackfic now. They're monogamous and mate for life...and they'll kill their teenagers if they don't move out. Literally.
But what fandom needs werebeavers?
(Man, werebeavers would be SUCH a pest to urban planners. Mysterious gnawings of wooden supports!)
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August 20th, 2008
| 10:06 pm - Mamma Mia!
It helps that I love ABBA, but
( In which there are spoilers and femslashy speculation! )
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August 18th, 2008
| 01:11 pm - Inappropriate word choice time!
"slices of auburn hair"
I just cannot visualize that.
In other news, food poisoning sucks.
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August 5th, 2008
| 10:09 pm - Thinky Hellboy thoughts
I may have to see this movie again.
( Spoilers! )
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| 01:32 am - Hellboy 2
Just saw it. Liked it very much.
Shallow thoughts: hello, quasievil half-naked wet elf prince martial arts porn.
Um, so if anyone has recs for incesty Nuada/Nuala, I am all over that.
Less shallow thoughts later.
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July 31st, 2008
| 05:53 pm - Oh, Fanfiction.net...
You always freak me out. Currently, by the proliferation of Heath Ledger!Joker/Mary Sue stories. O_o
What.
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July 30th, 2008
| 06:37 pm - Privilege revisited
Okay, I said a lot of stupid wrong things from a position of uncriticized privilege. I am sorry. I appreciate the privilege-check, and my fragile feelings appreciate as well that y'all were so nice about it. I am wrong, you are right (although I still think information-sharing can be a way of fighting privilege, and I probably should have left it all at that).
Hopefully I have received all of the major points; if there's anything else I've missed, please do point it out. However, I don't receive email comments on this LJ, so after it drifts off the top few posts I may not see new comments right away.
...plus I kind of want to get back to the happy squee parts of fandom and not wallow too much further in my being a jackass.
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 | 11:57 am - And now for something that does not involve me being a jackass...
Top 15 Unintentionally Funny Comic Book Panels (The Batman ones are particularly facepalm-inducing.)
Adorable fanart of human lesbian Wall-E and EVE (I showed this to the boyfriend, who was befuddled: "I think they meant us to see them as a boy and girl. I mean, EVE looked like a giant dildo." ME: "Wouldn't that make her male? Anyway, that's not the point." For someone who's worse about slashing inappropriate media than I am, he can be very silly sometimes.)
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July 29th, 2008
| 11:19 am - Information accessibility and privileged information
ETA the Second, July 30: Okay, I said a lot of stupid wrong things from a position of uncriticized privilege. I appreciate the privilege-check, and my fragile feelings appreciate as well that y'all were so nice about it. I am wrong, you are right (although I still think information-sharing can be a way of fighting privilege, and I probably should have left it all at that).
( In Which I Am A Jackass: left up because I think deleting the post would be even more jackassy, but points made by many commenters ARE received and taken to heart. )
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July 28th, 2008
| 12:20 am - Hmm
So, about 19.1% of my fic passes all of the Bechdel Test (two + named women, talk to each other about something other than men); another 7.4% have two female characters who either don't talk to each other or only talk about men; the remaining 73.5% have one or no female characters. Most of the ones that pass are femslash.
Part of this is an artifact of two things: one, I started with boyslash, and two, I didn't start writing ensemble pieces until recently, so many of my stories only have one or two characters in them (pretty much none of my gen stories about women passed).
What I think this illustrates is that the Bechdel Test isn't a magical litmus; it's a question to think about. It doesn't automatically tell you whether a story is feminist or not--I think most of my writing is feminist, even if it doesn't always have a lot of female characters.
Also, I have an addiction to Excel.
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July 27th, 2008
| 12:16 pm - History
ithiliana has an interesting post on history. It is from an academic standpoint, because she's an academic, but I don't think she's trying to argue that the academic way is the only way, simply that it's not a bad idea to look critically at the concept of history, and that academia has formed a code of ethics for doing historical work and codes of ethics are good things.
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July 25th, 2008
| 10:00 pm - A quick note on wikis and vandalism
I keep seeing people say that removing incorrect information without replacing it with correct information is vandalism on any wiki, including Wikipedia.
Well, I occasionally edit Wikipedia articles, and I frequently read talk pages to find out what's going into the articles.
Removing incorrect information is not vandalism, provided you note in the change log that you removed incorrect information (just as you would correcting a typo, rewriting something unclear, adding a section, etc.). Wikipedia, like any decent wiki (and yes, I think Wikipedia's pretty awesome, and generally more reliable than not, although of course I don't recommend citing it in serious works), does NOT prefer wrong information to no information. And it doesn't encourage slapping a "citation needed" tag on information you know to be wrong rather than removing it.
Incidentally, on Wikipedia talk pages, editors frequently have courteous debates over what to include and how to phrase it (and yes, sometimes the debates are not courteous, and sometimes there are trolls, and the "Evolution" article will probably be locked against edits FOREVER). In general, pages get edited by consensus on the talk page, not by editors with opposing views having back-and-forth edit wars.*
See, if you want to include a bunch of random opinions and non-factual material along with the factual, you want an Everything2 model, not a wiki one (and I love E2, and have an account there; it's addictive). However, even E2 has a certain level of quality control--writeups do get nuked for lack of content, not adding anything new, being too personal and better suited to one's diary node.
*Note that it's possible I have an inflated view of Wikipedia's general courtesy level, since I mostly poke around in the taxonomy pages, where people are generally not emotionally vested in whether some insect belongs in this family or that. However, I AM sure that Wikipedia does not consider deleting incorrect information to be vandalism. I also note that you can't always replace incorrect information with "correct" information, nor is there reason to. If you are removing the statement, "In 2005, Hillary Clinton visited Mars," it is kind of dumb to replace it with "Hillary Clinton has never been to Mars."
Links:
Wikipedia (like I need to include this)
Wookieepedia (Star Wars wiki; a fandom-specific wiki done very well)
Everything2 (not a wiki, but somewhat related)
And gratuitously, the growing Tamora Pierce wiki, which I really should contribute to more.
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July 24th, 2008
| 08:54 pm - Comfort reading
Okay, so: I have this weird thing where I read porn in fandoms I know little about for comfort reading. At the moment, those fandoms are Stargate: Atlantis and The Sentinel.
1) Would watching SGA enhance or detract from my enjoyment of snarky porn?
2) Would SGA make my head explode? Keep in mind that pretty much every episode of SG-1 I've seen makes me shriek at the TV screen (EVIL VIOLENCE-INDUCING HISTAMINES WTF!!!). If SGA is campier, I'm probably okay.
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July 23rd, 2008
| 10:47 pm - OH WTF
Via jacquez, Laura Hale/Partly Bouncy/etc. does a video pitch on her business.
It is really, really painful, both for the bullshit level and for the poor pitching skills.
Closing comments because I don't really want to discuss her or this debacle further, but I think the video should be seen more widely.
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| 08:33 pm - Dr. Horrible
( Spoilers )
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July 21st, 2008
| 07:29 am - Livejournal = fandom
I don't think LJ equals fandom--I started out on message boards, and then email lists (when Y!Groups was OneList).
However, the fact that every lists I was active on is now dead dead dead except for the occasional spammer, and the message boards I hung out on are long gone, including their parent sites (including one fairly large Star Wars fan site I will always miss) -- well, huh, it sure makes it hard for me to participate OUTSIDE LJ or similar sites. Maybe it would be easier if I did the popular fandom thing, but I don't.
Oddly, with other hobbies I do, both LJ and Y!Groups are equally active, and not even very redundant. It's not that both models of social interaction can't coexist.
I do intend to continue having an off-LJ website, though, and I definitely read fic on other people's sites. And I still use Fanfiction.net on occasion, but I've never found it to be very good for social interaction. It's the social aspect of fandom that I use LJ for, and I'd still be using Y!Groups as well if all my teeny fandom lists weren't dead.
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July 19th, 2008
| 09:24 pm - My thoughts on yaoi yowie
Today I was listening to NPR. They were talking about comic books graphic novels. During this, they brought up Persepolis (which I'm currently reading, and it's great), and said it covered Satrapi's study in France (actually, it was a French school in Vienna).
They also talking about those crazy manga, which are so hard to define because, liek, they have multiple genres! Wow! Including those crazy, impossible-to-describe school stories!
One of these genres is "yowie," which is about "relationships between gay men." Obviously it has a "narrow market," but it's sold quite well among American women.
Yeah, pervy pervy fandom is so in the closet. Frankly, I think the current level of reporting about fandom is so bad that public perception can only improve as fandom becomes more visible (and most people will still go "wtf, losers!" kind of like they do about comic book fans and anime otaku and scrapbookers).
P.S. I love you, NPR, I do, but seriously: not the best reporting. Satrapi in France (or did they change that in the movie? I haven't seen it)? "Yowie"? How hard is it to find a Japanese person to pronounce it? Or, you know, check Wikipedia?
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