Archive for: September, 2008

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Heroes

Sep 30 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Things That Made Me Happy

  • Sylar as “one of them” on a Company team
  • The way he had little flashes of vulnerability when Angela spoke to him.
  • Despite the fact that Angela insists he’s not the son of a watchmaker, the clocks just keep ticking.
  • The way Sylar totally saw through Noah’s bre’er rabbit plan AND sample from the Buffet of Doom. Cos Super Shockwave Sylar? I’m turned on.
  • The way Sandra had no problem simply telling Meredith to stuff it, clearly and without rancor, as often as necessary.
  • The way the Haitian is back and hopefully going into ass-kicking mode. Also, isn’t Jimmy Jean-Louis an outstandingly beautiful specimen of man?
  • The way Meredith forced Claire to admit that her need to fight and be a superhero isn’t altruistic.
  • The way this episode was Mohinder-free!


Things That Made Me Unhappy

  • Hiro’s pathological, crippling naivete. At one point Christopher said, “Yeah, Ando! Who wouldn’t want to shoot Hiro with red lightning!?” I know I want to.
  • The actress who plays Daphne needs to try harder or maybe not so hard or something. She’s got a nice rack, but every time she opens her mouth it’s just all wrong.
  • The way Matt is totally, 100% pointless.
  • When Evil!Future!Peter tells you, Current!Emo!Peter, “You have to listen to me!” maybe you should listen, dude. Since now EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER ON THE SHOW EXCEPT MAYBE CHARLES DEVEAUX HAS ASKED YOU TO JUST LISTEN. Yet you don’t. Why is that?

Really, I need someone to explain to me how they keep writing the same path for the two supposedly “main” characters as if they’re incapable of learning or growing. Hiro just keeps being wacky, and naive, and like he’s in some kind of Dan Akroyd buddy comedy, except Dan Akroyd + Ando would actually get stuff done. Peter just keeps winging it based on his feelings, going against the advice of everybody, all the time, to the detriment of the entire space-time continuum. I mean, how are you that stupid and still walking upright?

I contrast this with Meredith and Claire and Meredith’s insistence that Claire admit that she wants revenge against Sylar as much as she wants to achieve some noble sort of purpose. Which makes the Meredith-Claire mentor relationship deeper and more realistic than the Claude-Peter relationship ever was. Peter insists, constantly, that he’s being perfectly, magnanimously altruistic. That he just wants to help people. And his insistence on this sham of selflessness constantly wrecks everything and it’s only through the less-pleasant, nick-of-time actions of others that he hasn’t caused the world to end like three times now.

Kring’s fanservice is clear at this point, and I applaud him being up front about it. Where are the people that think Peter is awesome? Who think Hiro’s hero’s journey is anything other than laughable? who think Parkman serves any purpose at all at this point? I cannot believe they exist!

7 responses so far

Now It’s a Convox

Sep 29 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery, Recovering English Major

Just in case you were worried that Anathem is all slines and buttes and liver-eating:

“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”

“Great!”

“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

That quieted her down for a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

“That’d be great.”

They have the protractor because they need to make a 2000 mile journey to somewhere they’re not entirely sure about. Raz, the main character, buys what amounts to a sweet GPS system, only to find that it doesn’t work because all the nav satellites are down. He’s traveling with Barb, a fid younger than he is and Fraa Jad, a Millenarian and old man, who hasn’t been out of the concent in decades.

“The aliens are jamming the nav satellites,” I announced.

“Or maybe they just shot them down!” said Barb.

“Let’s buy a sextant then,” suggested Fraa Jad.

“Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him.

“Let’s build one then.”

“I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.”

He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.”

“In the present age, this continent is covered by a sense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced.

“Oh,” said Fraa Jad.

“Between that and this”– I waved the cartabla–”we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.”

Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component of his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him. “Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store.

“No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.”

7 responses so far

Run!

Sep 25 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession, Surgically Altered

Did I tell you all I’ve started running? I have. Chez talked me into joining a Couch to 10k group. I’ve been running with that group for five weeks and am now consistently running 2.5 miles. It takes me upwards of 30 to 40 minutes, but I’m doing it.

The Coach, Danny, is very inspirational. Well worth the money I paid him, and I don’t think we’re even halfway into the program yet. His general theme is, “Yes, you can!” Which seems simple enough. But oh, it’s deceptive simplicity. There was something about the smell of the first meeting– asphalt, grass, and humidity– that made me think of high school and of marching band. Prescient, because about the minute it got hard, I sort of reverted to high school mentality.

Until two weeks ago, I had never run a mile. There were gym classes and all that nonsense, but I’d never actually run the whole mile. Because when it got uncomfortable, I sort of just said screw it and stopped. “Screw it” contains, for me and in this case, a lot of ideas. This is too hard. This hurts. I don’t like this. I’m no good at this. I shouldn’t have to do this. I don’t need to do this. Stop making me do this. I hate this. And on and on, you dig?

So when, after the first couple runs, we started building up, and it started to get hard, I had the screw this feeling. The first night I ran a mile, on my own (and against Danny’s prescription for that week/day), I had the screw this feeling. I continue to have the screw this feeling. And I remind myself that I’m not a snotty 16 year old anymore and to get over myself, because I can, in fact, do it.

Is running 2.5 miles now too hard? No. I’ve done it almost every day for the last week plus. Does it hurt? Yes, in many ways, not all of which are related to my lungs or leg muscles. But so what? I’ve hurt before and I’ll hurt again and it doesn’t hurt as bad as it used to and I’ve hurt worse. Do I like it? Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Am I any good? Goodness doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is I run from point a to point b and back again. Should I have to do this? I can do anything I want. I choose to do this. I choose to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Do I need to do this? All I need is to exercise and there are lots of options out there. I choose running because it was, for so long, something I longed for as intensely as I feared it. May I stop? Certainly, at the end of the miles. Do I hate it? No.

What comes through for me, in replying to my inner teenaged fat girl (hereinafter “MITFG”), is that I choose. I choose this for me now. Last night I missed the start time for the group run. I chose to make new friends and go on a 3 mile run/walk with them. I could have freaked out and beaten myself up over not getting it exactly right. I chose to tell that part of me to shut up. When my new friends turned out to be much faster than I was, just as I knew they would be, there was a real MITFG moment when I want to think poorly of them, to demonize them so I could feel better about not being able to keep up. I chose to remember that they encouraged me to come with them, spoke with me and told me about themselves, and included me. No need to cast this all revenge of the nerds.

It made me think that surgery has changed my mind as much as it’s changed my body. And I’ve hit a point lately where I can see that those changes have been significant. And although it hasn’t shut MITFG girl up, it’s given me enough confidence and authority to tell her to pipe down already.

Some runs are good and some runs are bad. Some are really hard and none of them are precisely easy. But all of them are possible. I can.

3 responses so far

No Longer Optimistic

Sep 24 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

I just finished writing my Representative (Artur Davis) and half of my senators (Jeff Sessions) to let them know how much I would love for them not to vote for the Paulson Plan. The other half of my Senators, Richard Shelby, has a web site that has been killed to death. Probably because he’s the ranking Republican on the Banking committee. Luckily he can still be reached via the committee website.

Also, I would like props for not using phrases like, “Holy crap, y’all, this is not the only option!” and “don’t make me have to come up there and beat you!” Even though that’s what I kind of wanted to say.

Three great things I’ve read on it just today are showing more and more how this nonsense has been upwards of 10 years in the making, and took the concerted effort of lots and lots of people reaching across party lines to hook up a huge gravy train that is now broke-down busted.

First, because I think Newt Gingrich is a smart guy with a lot of smart ideas bolstered by the ability to think more than five minutes in either direction of now: Kill the Paulson Plan. Hard. from the Capital Commerce blog at U.S. News and World Report:

He recently chatted with economic historian Alan Meltzer who advocated doing nothing rather than implanting the Paulson Plan. Meltzer apparently joked to Gingrich that this was about the third time he had seen Wall Street scream “the apocalypse was nigh” only to have the economy keep right on chugging along.

Second, because I enjoy the apologetic yet spiteful tone: Credit is Not a Civil Right from The Corner:

In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus “creditworthiness” was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness. Because, after all, isn’t everyone entitled to credit?

And finally, leap frogging from that last one: The Diversity Recession, or How Affirmative Action Helped Cause the Housing Crisis at Taki’s Magazine:

More than a negligible amount of the blame for the mortgage meltdown can be traced back to multiculturalism: government-mandated affirmative-action lending, demographic change, illegal immigration, and the mind-numbing effects of political correctness.

The chickens have finally come home to roost.

And that one goes on at length, and makes analogies between this crisis and the Dot Com bubble.

This is just where I’m at today. I’m absolutely not through learning about this. But the multiculturalism angle absolutely cooks my noodle. How to stop people from discriminating against non-whites? Discriminate for them! Yeah, that’ll work! If we just try hard enough, we can totally remake reality!

And lest you be tempted to lose your sense of humor and call my a hillbilly fuckwad, please to examine Lots of People Could Use a Cash Infusion by Tom Brokaw, via Honu Girl:

Barney “Big Un” Baumgartner of Windblown, Wyo., invited the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department to take over his business, The Big Un 24 Hour Tow Service and Trophy Taxidermy.

In a handwritten press release, Mr. Baumgartner explained that with winter and hunting season coming on, the good citizens of Windblown would be without his vital services unless he found a way to deal with his escalating debts, fast.

“This is not just about me or my neighbors in Windblown. Heck, we get three or four tourists and out-of-state hunters here every 10 days or so. What if they need a tow or a trophy mount? The consequences are too great to contemplate,” Mr. Baumgartner explained.

7 responses so far

Heroes Returns!

Sep 23 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

My favorite parts of the two-episode opener of Volume 3: Villains from last night. And several paragraphs making fun of Mohinder. And spoilers, obviously!

8 responses so far

Aut, Vlor, Mathic

Sep 19 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom, Lexpionage, Recovering English Major

From the Goodreads 10 Questions with Neal Stephenson interview:

I’m hoping that the book is accessible to habitual science fiction readers and non-science fiction readers alike. One of the skills that science fiction readers develop, after reading a few thousand science fiction novels, is picking up the details of a new world through a kind of osmosis. They just plunge and start reading. Unfamiliar names and words appear. Undeterred, they plow ahead. Slowly their subconscious mind assembles a picture of the world. By page 100 or so, they know the meanings of all those words. Every kid in America knows the meanings of words like horcrux and Wizengamot that are used in the Harry Potter novels. But there are also many readers who are more accustomed to books in which every word can be looked up in a dictionary, and they find it distracting or even annoying to encounter new terms in a work of fiction. For them, I included a glossary. Use it or not depending on what sort of reader you are.

Hear that? Let’s just jump in there. We used to not know what Legilimency was, who the Bene Gesserit were, or even that there was such a thing as The Force. And we’ll be 3,700 years ahead of the curve!

3 responses so far

This Smells Like Math

Sep 18 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom, Geekery, Recovering English Major

Y’all, look how Doc spent his vacation and his precious, precious minutes with Mr. Neal Stephenson:

Anathem, by Mr Neal Stephenson

From the first few pages, just so you can get a sense of the scope of things:

Today’s liturgy was something to do with developments in finite group theorics that had taken place about thirteen hundred years ago and that had caused their originator, Saunt Bly, to be Thrown Back by his Warden Regulant and to live out the remainder of his days on top of a butte surrounded by slines who worshipped him as a god. He even inspired them to stop consuming blithe, whereupon they became surly, killed him, and ate his liver out of a misconception that this was where he did this thinking.

I know, right?!

With its mate, The System of the World:

Two of 'em!

And finally, Ford didn’t seem to be too interested in this book. But Arthur was. She can recognize some genius, and wanted to show it her fuzzy tummy:

Arthur, fuzzy tummy, special books

The novel itself is kicking my ass, but it’s kicking it in a really good way, all covered in autographs and Doc love.

9 responses so far

Also Trite and Sophomoric!

Sep 16 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

I can’t blog lately. I think about it a lot. I talk to people a lot. But then I fire up notepad or similar, like this, and come up with nothing. So couple things about that:

  1. The galaxy will keep spinning if I never blog another word. A double-take is the best response I might get for protracted silence. So I’m not going to wallow or navel gaze.
  2. Read something this weekend about the evolution of small-scale, personal blogging. You essentially brand yourself and around that brand grows a community. Unless there’s a huge shift upward, you’re bound to that brand, and to that community. So not blogging is neglecting a community.

Which is the crux of why I feel bad and guilty for not blogging. Because I like you all very much and enjoy talking to you about everything under the sun. I started blogging because I wanted to be part of a big, new conversation. And that’s still mostly the reason. It’s very Natalie Dee, “I’ve come from the Internet! And I’m not leaving until everybody knows my opinion about everything!”

But my opinions are pedestrian and predictable. Sarah, etc. is occasionally interesting, occasionally banal. Ugh. Here’s a banal list of things I’d like to talk about, but can’t, because of the banality:

  • It’s been a year since I had surgery. Wow.
  • I jog now. Chez convinced me to join her running group and now I run. Last week, on my year surgery anniversary, I ran a mile for the first time in my life. The next day, I ran two.
  • When I run, I find it easiest to get in a sort of not-feeling-the-pain zone if I think about writing Firefly fanfiction.
  • Still desperately, freakishly in love with Severus Snape
  • I finally got that Married to the Sea Shakespeare tshirt. I put it on and thought, post-surgery, all things considered, I still have a pretty nice rack. Then I considered taking a pic and putting it up. Then I thought, ew, who wants to see my boobs?
  • I suck at twittering. Eesh.

See how banal!? I know it. I’m so embarrassed. I’ll try again tomorrow.

6 responses so far

Inside This Event Horizon

Sep 12 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

A couple days ago Shadowhelm and I had an interesting talk about religion and aliens. That is, would proof of extraterrestrial life cause a religious person to question his or her fundamental belief system. Combine that with all the wonder and terror at the mere switching on of the CERN Large Hadron collider and it’s a strange time to be a Christian and a science groupie.

Really, science groupie is all I am. I am so fascinated by it. And I love to read about it and to listen to people talk about it. If I spent more time with my television, it would often be tuned to Discovery. I don’t actually know much about it in depth. I can remember basic chemical formulas and the classification system and I know what the six varieties of quarks are, but that’s about it. And I’m a Christian.

And these things are not, nor have they ever been, mutually exclusive.

I don’t have a grand unifying theory of it, nor much to say at all. I just want to pick up what I perceived from that earlier discussion. That is, since when does “Christian” equal anti-science. And what is anti-science? I mean, I’m sure there are people out there who are all, “Man, gravity doesn’t exist!” just like the strict creationists who go through all sort of intellectual twister games to arrive at the loony idea that man and dinosaur lived side by side. But I though they were all filed under the rubric “crackpot,” you know?

I imagine that there needs to be some sort of triumphant moment for these people who think that faith in Christ comes with automatic disdain for science. Like a Christian would be presented with evidence of the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event and have to suddenly reconcile it with the Great Flood and not be able to and BOOM! all those sanctified brains fly everywhere. And the cleanup is a bitch.

It doesn’t bother me at all. It doesn’t horrify me that the earth is several billion years old or older than that should we discover more proof. “But God created the earth in 7 days!” Okey-dokey. If God created everything, that means God created Time. I think that, as the author of the universe, He exists outside space-time and is therefore not bound by the constraints we’ve placed on it, so far as we understand it. What’s a day to God? It could be 24 hours. Or it could be 240 million years. This is me thinking like an English major, now. If you want to get an idea across to someone, you put it in language they’ll understand. Like, “on the second day, God said, ‘let there be light’.” If there were a bunch of scientific notation about waves and particles and parsecs and ever-expanding curves, well, couple things. First, that would be awesome. Second, would anybody have understood any of it? Ever? I think it’s a bit like giving a toddler an idea of a thing– how to bounce a ball, how to color inside the lines, how to tie his shoes– and then stepping back and watching that child figure it out. Understanding is a wonderful thing. Understanding within the triumph of discovery is magnificient.

I’m not out to prove anything. I’m not trying to convince you. I can’t convince you; I may as well try to convince you your favorite color should be yellow, because it is mine. Just letting you know one perspective on Religion and Teh Science. Every time science makes a new discovery (or I learn about an old one), I just understand it as best I can; I don’t agonize over what it means for my relationship with my Savior. Our universe is sublimely beautiful in its construction and evolution. And processes that make and remake and shape our planet and its life forms is graceful beyond words. It is all infinitely minute and infinitely immense and growing and dying all the time. I think it takes just as much faith to believe that something so astounding and perfect happened as a result of the most random set of conditions and coincidences and continues on that same whoops-if-maybe path.

7 responses so far

Harry Potter and the Transformative Works Test

Sep 10 2008 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Since we had an interesting discussion about it a few months ago, I thought we might like to revsit the Harry Potter Lexicon Trial, now that the verdict is out. It favors Rowling. The judge writes:

While the Lexicon, in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the Lexicon’s purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled.

No Fair Use: Rowling Wins Copyright Spat Over H.P. Lexicon

I wish I had the patience to read the whole decision, but it seems to come down to the Fair Use Doctrine and the addition of meaningful commentary. And the Lexicon really has none. Nor is it merely a concordance, connecting topics across several books. It’s more like an index, with a bonus summary paragraph for each topic. And I suppose it’s that summary paragraph that does it in.

The ruling will probably not, it seems, require copyright holders to crack down on minorly transformative works, especially those works made by fans. Unless you try to make a profit on them, in which case, get out the scales and pile source in one pan and transformation and commentary in the other.

Honu Girl and I were talking about things yesterday and she and I are both glad it’s over, for Steve Vander Ark’s sake if no one else’s. Many prominent portions of the fan community have excoriated him, which I think is near to reprehensible and smacks of sucking up to JK Rowling more than actually wanting to set precedent for fair use in transformative works. That one should hate Vander Ark was worn as a badge and a symbol of membership in a community. Since when is hate a fandom value? Or is it only okay to hate if it means JKR might give you a hug and her blessing and a gushing forward for your own book of narcissistic claptrap Harry Potter History.

RDR will, of course, appeal. And Vander Ark will have little recourse but to endure it. And I hope he can do so with even a sliver of grace, just to prove that his intent was never malicious, nor was he milking his connections for dastardly profit. He’s a fan whose fan-work moved outside his control. Sad and disappointing certainly, but not worth demonizing the poor man over.

5 responses so far

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