I believe in peace

Fandom-specific

[DCU] shadowvalkyrie: DCU musings: "Specifically, porn. [...] Even more specifically, kinky porn. And the discrepancy of why the Bruce/Tim variety tends to be a great deal more popular than the Bruce/Jason one."

[Torchwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer] firefly124: Okay, so everybody else has probably already read this AfterElton article (the article compared Torchwood and BtVS in regards to character death, and the post builds on that. I'm not being more specific because I'm unsure whether details about Torchwood's third season are still considered spoilers.)

General

thete1: "I know it's racist, Te, but the special effects look awesome!": "This has been on my mind -- harshing *my* squee -- since that first Transformers movie came out and so many of you were full of excuses about why you were going to see it anyway. Despite the racism."

In a post titled Saying Goodbye, yourlibrarian talks about important changes in TV, reality shows, the demise of the WB, and that the cause for the popularity decline in music games could be "a stranglehold on copyright".

cluegirl: Thoughts Contingent on Reader Entitlement; the fandom edition: "So what is it that makes us as readers so much more ready to be spiteful about work we DID NOT have to pay for? Other than the fact that we can, and the writer in question is unlikely to have highly paid lawyers who might give us a telling-off for acting like arseholes, I mean?"

skuf: Where's all the meta?: "Remember back in the day - e.g. 2006 - when [metafandom] issues were posted about every other day and had shitloads of links? What happened? Brainstorming: ..." (Cross-posted to DW, where the big discussion obviously seems to happen, but I decided to link the IJ version on principle.)

xie_xie_xie: metafandom and its discontents: "But the last three or four times I submitted a link, either mine or someone else's, either QAF-specific or "big picture" fandom meta, it was just ignored. I never knew if they just didn't like it, or didn't get it, or what the problem was."

I need to call Sara -- normally she starts calling my mother as soon as she thinks I'm home, but now the home phone is gone*, and I don't think she has my cell.

Anyway, last night I had my Christmas celebration at yuuo and kuchehexe's place, with mirisa_ardruna and her son. I got a Mars book (with red pen so I could add in new stuff) from Jen and Zanne, and a pair of fingerless gloves (my hands and feet get cold easily, even inside) from Kim. Jen and Zanne made dinner, so that was also nice -- we had bratwurst, sauerkraut and potatoes, with Kim's cookies and my fudge for dessert. We were going to watch a movie, but dinner ran late, so we just ended up hanging out.

I <3 my friends, by the way.

More writing today -- foolishly I agreed to pinch-hit for Yuletide, despite having defaulted on my primary claim. Mostly because the pinch-hit canon was shorter, and I had coincidentally re-read it recently, while my primary claim involved watching 20-some episodes of anime to make sure I had the voices right. I still have the idea, so I might do the primary claim as a New Year's Resolution.

(Plus, the pinch hit lets me do comedy, which is one of my favorite things to write.)

* Mom got rid of the landline once Ben graduated high school. She and Ben both have cell phones, and she was already using her cell for long-distance calls instead of paying for long-distance on the house phone. More and more it seems like that's the new trend.

So, travel wasn't that bad. I got about 2 hours of sleep on Tuesday, but I can never sleep well before a flight.

I got to the airport at 5:15, when my flight was due to leave at 6. Yes, I know the 'hour before you leave' rule, but the Ithaca airport is seriously small -- plus, the taxi was late. I got through security about the time the plane should have boarded, but I know better than to expect any 'first flight' from Ithaca to take off on time, especially in the winter.

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I am so glad I’m no longer living on my own any more.

 

Yesterday afternoon I went to the library to pick up some books for my grandmother and I must have left the lights on afterwards.  When I went to start the car this morning it was dead. 

 

If this had happened to me in Chicago I would have been shit out of luck (as they say).  I don’t know what I would have done, probably had to spend a couple $100 getting someone to come from a garage to jump start the car because most of my co-workers bike and most of the other people I know worked out of town and/or were clueless about starting a car.  As it was, I was able to call my father and he was able to get the car working again.  Really, this is one of those things that I know would have been a horrible situation if I was on my own (thinking of January 2008 when it was really cold and I couldn’t start my car… what a nightmare).

A great link on Top 10 Jewish Comic Characters.

Sadly does not include Kate Kane aka smokin' hot lesbian Batwoman. Still, a very good post.

Following post is political. You can disagree, or not, but keep things polite.

So, I saw this post on my feedreader today. For those of you who don't follow the link, it talks about a New York Emergency Room nurse who is suing her employer because she was required to assist in an emergency second trimester abortion. She claims that the hospital should have found another nurse to assist.

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I feel like I need to quote Cordelia Vorkosigan here -- a book character from Lois Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. She once said that she believed in a god and immortal souls, which meant that she always put people before ideas. Because if some part of people lived forever, they were more important than ideas, which didn't.

* Except maybe for people who cannot afford anything else, since ERs are obligated to treat everyone, regardless of payment ability. But my thought on Health Care are another rant entirely.

** Not funny. More along the lines of 'making me want to punch people.

Inglourious Basterds comes out on DVD today. Here's the review I've been fussing about with since August when I saw it in the theater--

Back in July I watched the film The Boy In the Striped Pajamas about the young son of a Nazi official who befriends a boy his own age interned at the concentration camp his father is in charge of. Reading over reviews of this movie, I found a recurrent complaint—that the Nazi’s were basically British. That is British actors, speaking English accented English. Not long after, looking up reviews of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie I ran across similar criticism—that German characters were being played by English and American actors speaking in their native accents.

Reading these reviews I remember wondering what level of authenticity would be satisfactory. Was it enough to give German characters German accents? Realistically shouldn’t they speak German with subtitles? Wouldn’t that alienate English speaking audiences?

In its way, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds came along and resolved these questions. Set in Nazi occupied France during the second World War, Inglourious Basterds not only portrays the different languages that are in play (German, French, English and some Italian) but shows them being wielded like Uma Thurman’s samurai sword in Kill Bill.

In many ways, Inglourious Basterds is not so much an action film as a linguistic film. Critics have called it talky, but that’s sort of the point. It’s about words, about language. The verbal interplay of the characters is as meticulously choreographed as the epic kung fu ballets of Kill Bill.

Yet ironically, the masters of the word in Inglourious Basterds are the Nazis. Christoph Waltz is absolutely stunning as Col. Hans Landa aka “The Jew Hunter”. Speaking German, French, English and Italian he dances verbal circles around all the other characters, from a French dairy farmer harboring Jews to the American commandos of the title.

Nearly as clever as Landa is Major Dieter Hellstrom (August Diehl), the Nazi officer who chances upon the covert meeting being held between German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), British film critic/spy Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and the two German speaking Basterds. Although Hicox is fluent in German, Hellstrom detects something amiss with his accent and ultimately reveals him by catching him in a minute faux paus. In the meantime, Hellstrom does a bang-up job playing a twenty questions sort of guessing game. He’s quite something. Did I mention he gets his testicles blown off? And Landa, for all his smarts gets a swastika rather brutally craved into his forehead.

I think that one of the points of Inglourious Basterds, is to cut through the cerebral and linguistic mind games of the Nazis with raw bravado and brutality. Tarantino sums this up nicely with a shot of a Nazi officer’s head being lined up against a baseball bat. Swing batter swing and suddenly the supposed superiority of the Uber men isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This seems to be what Tarantino wants to do, but I’m not quite sure that it works. The Basterds don’t seem at all heroic, just vicious. They seem to wallow in mayhem for its own sake, enjoying every minute of it. They’re a juvenile fantasy, stupid, brutal and largely incompetent when required to do anything more than bust heads. If the film had just been about them, I wouldn’t have liked it at all. Luckily the film is not so much about the Basterds as it is about a storyline that runs on a collision course with that of the title characters.

So the Basterds have the balls, the Nazi’s have the brains, but the heart and guts of Tarantino’s film belong to a young Jewish woman named Shosanna (Melanie Laurent). The last surviving member of her family (they are in hiding and discovered by Landa) Shosanna reinvents herself as the proprietor of a Paris cinema and becomes involved with Marcel, a black Frenchman.

Shosanna is a woman warrior willing to sacrifice herself for vengeance and to end the war. An amazing, blazing character. Marcel is right beside her, stoic and supporting. They are both the heart of the film, personifications of Tarantino’s love and devotion to women and blacks. Without them there is no film.

That’s the problem with Inglourious Basterds, 90% of it is bravado and theatrics and show. Only a small portion of it seems to be about what it’s about. It’s a fierce, radical film with entirely too much clever padding. As much as I love the scene in the basement bar and Christoph Waltz and his milk and cream and Dieter Hellstrom and King Kong it’s clever, it’s padding. It’s my baby Tarantino being boy rather than a man and cutting to the chase which is Shosanna and film and fire.

Dammit, I planned ahead. I started work in September, even. And yet I still have three gifts undone for the holidays, even assuming that I write off one gift as going out in January. In fact, the one gift I have done, I probably won't get the address for until tonight -- too late to mail it.

I am this close to asking all the folks I have gifts planned for if they'll accept an art commission (done by colored pencils, marker, or pen-and-ink, probably at Mom's kitchen table) with the promise that they will get their gift sometime before spring.

Okay, in cleaning out my apartment, I discovered duplicates of some Fullmetal Alchemist DVDs. Since I need space, I'm offering them for sale.

Fullmetal Alchemist Discs 1 and 2 -- $5 The printed material is a bit water-damaged and the booklet is missing, but the DVDs themselves are fine. Disc 1 contains episodes 1-4, and Disc 2 contains 5-8.

Fullmetal Alchemist Box Set 2 (Contains Disks 5-7/Episodes 17-28) -- $15 This is pretty much like new, except the plastic wrap came off.

I'll say a blanket $5 for shipping and handling. Also, I go out of town on Wednesday, so everything else will be shipped when I get back on the 4th of January.

If someone takes everything, I'll offer free shipping to that person.

Paypal is fine for sending payments -- I can give you my account if you're interested.

ETA: Got someone expressing interest.

So, I'm a fan of the Basara series of manga by Yumi Tamura*. While I'm told it was the thing for people my age and sex to have read growing up in Japan, and a full English translation exists, it never caught on in America, so the later volumes had tiny print runs. As a result, there's no copies left in online bookstores, and the secondary market is gone.

I managed to collect everything except volumes 19 and 20. Now I'm stuck. So, I place the call out to you, Intrepid LJ-ers. Find me these two volumes for under $20, and I will pay you half the price of the volume. Or draw you something -- your choice.

* It is my favorite example of 'shoujo manga' != suck.

[Babylon 5] spacelogic: meta: squicks and siblings: "Claudia Christian mentioned in a blog post the other day that a B5 director (...) had told her to play her scenes with Sheridan more "sexy and coquettish" and I had such a strong "EWNOGROSS" reaction that I had to step back and analyze why."

[Stargate/SGA] rood: On Stargate And Why It Will Never Be Among My Favourite Series: "And not only are the languages pure decoration and occasional plot device: the cultures are, too."

As part of her reply to a five-questions meme, the_rck responds to Does it feel weird being a 'mom' in fandom?

IJ-related:

Permanently Insane accounts are on sale throughout December, until January 3rd.

squeaky explained that the issues with email notifications are apparently caused by spammers using the site. Some sub threads deal with different email providers and how to circumvent their blocking of IJ messages. It also says that, if your account is being suspended by mistake, you should open a support request in the Abuse category.