The boring rants of a lazy nerd

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Fandom - Censorship?

There are 131 missing author ids on sugarquill.net. They represent the 131 authors who were deleted, either for technical reasons or for not complying with something. I know of Kokopelli, and of Alec & Teri. I think some other were tossed out with Alec & Teri. Who else? What were the causes? I suspect canon interpretation fundamentalism. Or is this something one does not speak about in polite company?

TV - House 1x12 "Sports Medicine"

Oh, I get it. Cute innocent young doctor dating physically and emotionally crippled obnoxious over-confident (though it's well deserved) old doctor. Of course RJA is all over it.

Movie - "Mean Girls"

I've pirated and watched this movie. I've used keeping up with current trends as an excuse to ogle seventeen year-old starlets playing sixteen year old starlet wannabes.

The movie was bad in a crude humor, overuse of cliches, over the top kind of way, and it was good in a predictable good-vs.-evil kind of way, and it almost made up for it. Like candy that you know is not good for you, but you eat anyway, because your taste buds say "yum!".
The nerdcore was adorable. Ok, that sounded gay. It is cool that nerdcore is getting into mainstream.

It was both sad and predictable that success contributed to the lead actress' personal problems.

From a review of the DVD on Amazon:

If anything, the grownups-especially the school principal, played by Tim Meadows, of whom the picture needs much more-tend to nudge these pushy teen-agers into the wings. The movie, produced by Lorne Michaels and directed by Mark Waters, is often funny, but it was conceived by people who are plainly wiser and more worldly than their target audience, and there's something about that discrepancy that, you know, totally sucks. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

That's the problem with mass entertainment - they have a brilliant anthropological study of contemporary female highschool cliques, and they have to film slapstick comedy to try and make their point. I think it aimed too wide and missed.

Edit, 2006-05-11: I've watched Heathers because most reviews mentioned it. It needs to be watched with an audience and 80s clothes are a huge WTF, but yeah, Mean Girls is definitely a Heathers remake. They exchanged the horror for slapstick trying to retain the black humor, but as I already said it didn't quite work out.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

TV - House 1x11 - Detox

I was watching the girlfriend Pam throughout the episode going "who is that?" in my head. And then I clicked through the credits and it's Lilly Kane! She's good looking, and then I see she's more than a year younger than I am! I'm getting old. Did House have a massage or a masseuse? Good acting.

Monday, April 17, 2006

FFDB - Working (Almost) Prototype

So, there's a bunch of pretty bad Python code that encodes the screen-scraped index of a very nice fanfic archive. I wish to fix as many things in the prototype stage. So, while I can fix the Ridiculously Redundant Recording of URLs by myself, I need some help with defining some of the metadata.

  1. What is the Correct Way of writing a ship name? Is it Harry/Hermione or Hermione/Harry? Are both ok? Are they the same? What is The Rule? Is it ordered by gender, or focus? What if the entire story is written from an OFC's point of view, should it be Harry/Mary or Mary/Harry? Would Harry marry Mary? I would be very merry should Harry marry Mary! Some people seem to care about such things.
  2. How do I map whatever some sites list as a fic's "genre" into something resembling literary genres (obviously, a story may fit more than one)? Because we know that despite being based on Contemporary Fantasy, the fan fiction varies greatly, from (teen-)melodrama to comic, heroic, romantic, erotic and even high fantasy. Some of what is specified in the archives just means mood (fluff, angst) rather than theme and convention (chick lit, legal thriller), which is confusing. All you people with degrees in English and whatever, have any lecture notes about genre studies? Epistemology geeks? (that's you, Ben!)

Edit: I completely forgot all non-prose (though I personally doubt the artistic merit of so called song fics, I am but a plebe and am willing to let history decide), and the vast amounts of farce (intended or not) as well as the token bit of genuine irony. Also, the fandom is an introspective (or just plain antagonistic) bunch and thus we have fan fiction about fan fiction, which lacking a better name, I'll call "arsficia". *snort*

Edit #2: from the findings of a depraved perv:

“This is really a wonderful thing, Harry,” I said, utterly sincerely. I slid my thumb across the tip.

He gave a breathless laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I like it.”

I don't know why, but I find it very funny.

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Life - Passover

I have to say my aunt's kugel rules!

While reading the Wikipedia article on shark jumping, I've clicked to Northern Exposure (that was a good show!) and then Rob Morrow. Did you know he and his wife called their first daughter Tu?

Monday, April 10, 2006

Update

  • I've finished reading Glory Season. It was great. He has built a believable world within the constraints he'd set for himself, and the run of the mill plot offsets the intriguing setting admirably. The ending was kind of artificial, and it's a very hard sell, because so few men will read it and so few women read sci-fi. I'm sure I've missed lots of references. Looks like it doesn't have a following online, though to me it just begs for fan fiction (no, I won't attempt to write any). Brin has very professionally skirted around sex, amazingly well actually. R.: The cover has suffered substantial damage, I'm looking into replacement opportunities.
    Edit: procured, at very reasonable price, two personalized and signed beautiful hardcovers directly from author (see author's web page, seems author's wife handles shipping and handling). Am very happy with impulse shopping decision. R. seemed to like hers, making it even better.
  • I watch the first season of House M.D. as it downloads, late as usual. It's good. Kudos RJA for watching the good stuff! It's the third series I've followed her, not disappointed yet. I hope I'm not in danger of becoming a little RJA clone, LOL. The rude sarcastic guy everybody hates but must tolerate because he's so competent, does he always have a beautiful soul? Maybe he's just a bastard. Or there might be hope for me yet. Oh, that girl doctor is hot.
  • I've watched two episodes of Veronica Mars. It's BH 90210 all over again. rm -rf /mnt/series/veronica_mars
  • Watched three episodes of The Unit. rm -rf /mnt/series/the_unit
  • Today I've seen a guy walking a furry white Akita. Looked almost like a Samoyed. Great looking dog!
  • Since the birthday meme is making the rounds again, I'll let you know I share birthdays with Johnny Carson and Weird Al Yankovic, and both the Parliament of Great Britain and the United Nations General Assembly first convened on that date. Oh, and Brutus killed himself because he has lost a battle to Mark Antony and Octavian. So, a good date over all, I think.
  • My Python project has reached a complexity level where it seizes being a hack and requires actual design. That has made it less fun, but I'm struggling through it in the hope of building something useful. What fan fiction archive would you most like to search/filter using better searching and filtering than what they provide? I can make it happen.

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