University, dreams and reality shows [06 May 2012|05:54am] [ mood | thoughtful ] Currently in the middle of my final exams, which mark the end of my academic career for now. I'm having one on Monday and another on Tuesday so I'm pretty packed with studying, but right now I'm having my late-night noodles and the textbook is big and hard to maneuver while eating, so. I've always generally enjoyed school, but I'm honestly pretty glad I'm about to take a break from it. One reason is that my academic performance has been declining in recent years and that kind of drives me nuts. I don't think that it's the subjects getting harder so much as that I'm a pretty lazy and disorganized person by nature and the main reason this used not to hinder me is that I'm also a very rule-abiding person by nature. When attendance was mandatory, I'd damn well attend no matter how little sleep I'd had the previous night, but now that it's not, I've increasingly not bothered with the whole waking-up-early thing, and the part of me that tells me I should show up because I've barely showed up to any lectures this term doesn't have much of a say, probably because I've just spent too long being able to get good grades with minimal effort on my part. And I used to learn perhaps the most from attending every lecture and listening to the teacher and getting and remembering what they said, but now that I have a laptop and nobody objects if I bring it to lectures and am on the Internet the whole lecture instead of listening to the teacher, I'm going to do that, even when it's completely against my better judgement. Even when I've explicitly decided, "Okay, I'm going to be actually listening now, because this sounds important." There's a break when the teacher is writing something down or looking for a file on the computer, and ten minutes later I realize I'm writing a long debating post on a forum and now I have no idea what the teacher is talking about anymore. Similarly, the fact not all my subjects have mandatory homework problems or intermittent quizzes tends to mean I just don't study until a couple of days before the finals, at all. I tell myself, "Oh, I should really study for this," or, "I should really take a look at those problems they told us to look at, even if I don't have to turn them in," but it just doesn't work; there are too many interesting things on the Internet, even when nothing interesting is actually happening on the Internet. I still do just as well on the subjects that do have weekly homework problems that force me to keep up with what's going on, but the more lenient ones just leave me lagging behind and then trying to read the textbook when the final exam is too close to ignore. And even when I'm trying to read the textbook and am really aware that I have no idea in hell what's been going on in this subject and that the textbook is six hundred pages and the test is in two days, I will still get distracted by the Internet. I will be thinking "Okay, what the hell, self, this is ridiculous, go study right now," at the same time as some other part of my brain somehow decides that since nothing is going on at any of the forums I've been refreshing for the past ten minutes, I should go kill the time that I know perfectly well I don't have on TV Tropes. The fact I manage to still actually do quite well by any objective measure on said finals doesn't really help. (See? I just finished eating and yet here I still am typing this instead of reading my terrible software engineering textbook that I haven't so much as looked at since the previous course that also used it. I am ridiculous.) There may be a later time in my life where I can go back to studying and do it in a sane way, but right now I really appreciate just being able to take a break from the whole thing and working instead. The money is a nice bonus. I love my monies. ( Dreams, with rambling about reality TV ) And now to get back to studying like a sensible person. Although actually by now I should probably just go to sleep already. post comment

Food and bodily autonomy [11 Apr 2012|03:30am] [ mood | tired ] There is a lot of food that I don't like, to varying degrees. There is food (like lettuce) that I really don't care for and generally wouldn't eat unprompted, but which I don't especially mind so I may politely eat at least some of it anyway if you put it on my plate; there is food (like sushi) that I've never tasted but which I have no desire to because I just really don't like the idea; there is food (like most fruit) that repulses me utterly to the point where I wouldn't eat it if you paid me for it. I'm not just averse to trying new food in general; I'm quite willing to taste food that at a glance appears likely to be perfectly pleasant, but I avoid what I know isn't and what I suspect isn't. I know I'm unusually picky, and I do my best not to be obnoxious about it. If food that I don't want to eat is served, I just silently don't eat it. I won't ask or expect you to serve up something else just for me; it's me being quirky and that's my problem, not yours. I'm used to just not eating, or eating very little, if I find myself faced with food I don't want to eat. At summer camp when I was twelve, I'd generally miss at least one meal per day, because either they'd be serving fruit as an afternoon snack or there was cocoa soup for dinner or whatever. I sat there and sucked it up and went hungry until there was something I did want. I'm sure that's not healthy, but that was my choice and I faced the consequences without complaint because that was what my choice meant and I knew that when I made it. I think that's a pretty mature way to deal with having weird quirks, personally: deal with it yourself, don't make anyone else suffer for it, and don't complain about the consequences of your own choices. But people almost invariably react to it with "Oh, still?", "When are you going to grow out of that?", "But that's disrespectful to the cook!" The general societal attitude towards food is that everybody is supposed to be willing to eat everything, or at least everything that most other people are willing to eat, and that if you don't you're just being weird and childish and disrespectful. And God forbid you visit another culture and don't eat whatever they eat without complaint; that's just bigotry. ( So what about the concept of bodily autonomy? Cut for length and talk of sex and genitalia. ) 1 comment|post comment

Random stuff [18 Mar 2012|01:09pm] [ mood | blah ] I dreamt that psychmoonshadow had posted a new fanfic and that negrek talked about it in some Authors' Café thread, referring to Psychic as "him". So I was like "...Psychic is a she" and Negrek was like "I thought he used 'he' more now?" and I was all "what Psychic is transitioning why have I not heard of this?!" Then it all turned out to be some kind of misunderstanding. The other day I also dreamt about Bella and Edward from Twilight roleplaying BBC Sherlock and John. Not in bed (well, maybe that too) but just sort of on a daily basis. There was more to it but that image is the only part that actually stuck because what. I had this strange experience the other day where all of a sudden I thought of the line "Have I been had...?" Not the most specific line, but I knew I was thinking of a very specific instance of it in some work of fiction. I remembered the character who said it was villainous but that I really liked that character and especially this particular scene, and that their face was kind of obscured at the time, and that it was shortly followed by the activation of some kind of a trap that I was pretty sure was an explosion. I felt like the character died as a result, although something didn't feel quite right about that. And I knew it was in a medium composed of text and images, because I was sure the line was written down whereas you could see the character and the explosion and all that. But despite that I quite clearly remembered all these details, I could not remember exactly what it was from or what character it was. I couldn't stop thinking about it for at least half an hour, just because I knew I really liked this character and scene and all that and it bugged me massively that I couldn't remember the actual scene when I could remember all these specifics about the scene. At first the text-and-images thing made me think it had to be from a comic of some sort, so I started mentally working through every comic I'd read that could even remotely plausibly be it, but to no avail. Eventually, as this was completely preventing me from managing to sleep, I frustratedly wondered what the heck else it could be than a comic - the line was written and not spoken so that ruled out movies and TV shows, and it had to be visual so it wasn't a book. And the video games I'd been playing recently had voice acting... except, I realized, on the DS. And then I realized, wait, I really like Ghost Trick. And then it took a moment to untangle everything I actually knew from the false image that had been building up in my head in the time I'd spent thinking about it, before I realized it was the scene where you-know-who-if-you've-played-the-game is possessing Kamila. (The face-obscured thing I remembered was because of her fringe covering her eyes.) Mission accomplished! Then it took me about five minutes' recovery time to get over the fact I'd figured it out and be able to think of something else again. 1 comment|post comment

New contest [21 Jan 2012|10:23pm] [ mood | contemplative ] So. I really enjoyed judging the Perspective contest on Serebii. I love reviewing; I just have a hard time getting the motivation to actually read anything or a sensible way to decide what I should try to review, and I tend to take so long to complete a decent review of things with a fair amount of problems that the fic is dead by the time I'm halfway through. Judging contests completely takes care of all of those problems: it gives me a set number of things to read, the fics are submitted specifically for judging so there is no such thing as them "dying" while I'm finishing, and it gives me a clear incentive to actually read these specific fics. I was a bit nervous about judging a contest before the contest started because I wasn't sure how well the motivational part would actually work (I tried taking review requests once and that failed horribly at that part), but as it turned out it really did; the fact it was a contest made me way enthusiastic about reading the entries and working on the reviews. Moreover, I discovered I really like doing contest-style reviews: reading the entries many times, having time to really think about what works and doesn't work about them and why, and being able to comment only brifely and in a summarized sense on grammar/spelling/typos/general writing issues is more enjoyable to me than the kind of quote-by-quote stuff I usually do (which is more helpful for the author thanks to being more specific - that's why I do it - but gets tedious to write fast when there's a lot of issues to correct). So, in short, I want to do more contest judging. And to do that, we need another contest. Which means we need a theme. (Also judges other than me - Negrek, would you be game? Anyone else reading this happen to be interested and an experienced reviewer?) Some of the theme ideas that have been thrown around in my musings and conversations on the subject that I still remember (I'm pretty sure Psychic came up with some suggestions when we talked but I can't for the life of me remember them now, argh): - Twist endings. I have no idea how well this would actually work. In part, the very idea of a twist ending contest kind of spoils it because then you know there's going to be a twist ending of some sort. Roald Dahl did manage to write a book (books?) of short stories with surprise endings that were explicitly announced as such... but on the other hand, whether the average Serebiigoer has any hope of pulling that off well is a lot more dubious. - Trainer POV. Kind of a parallel to the Pokémon POV contest - the idea would then be to write short stories exploring the experiences of trainers the way that the Pokémon POV contest was intended to explore the experiences of Pokémon. Again, don't know how well it would actually work. Maybe it should have a rule that the subject of the story must be about routine trainer stuff, just so the stories won't all just be novelizations of specific events from the games. Then again... - Novelization. Maybe getting people to envision specific events from the games could be interesting in itself. A bit of a risk here that most of the entries would just fail at adding anything to the basic "event from a video game in prose format" thing, though. - Interpretations of the world. opal suggested this: it would be about expanding upon things that aren't properly established in canon. So something like Curse would be a valid entry, for instance, because it makes up an explanation for how the move Curse works, why it's different for Ghost-types, and so on. Or it could explain something on a larger scale than that, like the system of government or whatever. I like this idea; it sounds like it could result in interesting entries, at least. - Reusing one of the genre themes we had years ago. It's not like many of the authors who were around for the horror/romance/humour contests way back when are still around, and if they are they've probably developed as writers since, so it's not as if it would just result in a repeat of that contest. Still seems a bit boring, but eh. What do people think? Any other ideas? 10 comments|post comment

Pills [11 Jan 2012|11:38am] [ mood | hungry ] I've always had a difficult time with pills. My gag reflex is very sensitive and becomes extremely suspicious when some hard object is being forced down my gullet, no matter how much water I try to hide it in. Sometime when I was twelve or so I just barely managed to take half a headache pill; for years that was it, as far as non-chewable pills went. I was hesitant about the birth control pill, until I discovered to my delight that the pills were tiny, hard, rounded pellets with no taste whatsoever that my gag reflex, it turned out, had no objection to. Awesome. Anything bigger than that, however, and things get a lot more difficult. It depends on the size, shape and texture of the pill - I can usually coax down smooth capsules that happen to be very narrow, provided I orient them right, which helps for headaches - but on the whole, pills don't agree with me. So I wasn't especially keen on vitamin pills when my dad decided to buy me some after an unusual bout of illness, but whatever. We asked the pharmacist if they had any that were easy to take, by being chewable, decent-tasting, small, etc. She pointed to the children's vitamins. When we asked for adult dosages, we were pointed to a large selection of predictably humongous (to me) tablets that I knew there wasn't a chance in hell I could swallow. We asked if they were chewable. The pharmacist said sure, yeah, in theory. We picked an opaque bottle in the hope its tablets might be slightly smaller than the ones we saw in the see-through ones (they weren't), then went on our way. So a couple of days later I went to attempt to take my first vitamin pill. I first tried to swallow it; that had no hope of working. Then I tried to chew it very quickly. The moment I did so, the most vile taste in the known universe burst forth, and my stomach twitched in horror and sacrified half of my breakfast to get whatever poison I was attempting to eat as far away as possible. I didn't try again for a couple of days after this. Then I tried cutting the tablet into smaller pieces with a knife. This gives the already rough-surfaced tablets sharp edges that just love to hook onto some part of my tongue or the back of my throat, but it at least makes them small enough that I can potentially wash them down with enough water if I manage to place them far enough on the back of my tongue first. The problem is that as soon as one of the pieces does get stuck in my mouth somewhere, my gag reflex goes into paranoid overdrive, forces me to cough it up, and subsequently refuses to let even the tiniest pieces through with any amount of water. I've learned it's no use even continuing to try to down any more of the stupid pill after that. So currently I'm taking some irregular amount ranging between one sixth of a vitamin tablet and one vitamin tablet minus all the powdery residue that gets left behind when you try to cut it into pieces. It does not get easier. Why in God's name has it not occurred to anyone that adults might also appreciate pills that are something approaching edible? 4 comments|post comment

Debates [04 Jan 2012|04:46am] [ mood | annoyed ] The more internet arguments I read, the more frustrated I become with how prevalent it is for people to not properly understand their opponent's point of view. I don't just mean when sensible positions are attacked based on a misunderstanding. I also mean when an ignorant position is attacked with arguments that are true but fail to actually look at what the person said and figure out where their ignorant position comes from. People see an ignorant statement, are appalled and bamboozled by it, and decide that the reason the other person said that must be that They Are Stupid, or They Are Sexist, or They're Just Jealous, or whatever. Then they reply under that assumption. The OP gets defensive and can weasel out of it because the people aren't addressing quite what they were thinking. The other side becomes even more convinced that The OP Is Stupid, or The OP Is Sexist, or The OP Is Just Jealous, and makes even more flabbergasted comments. Lather, rinse and repeat. It usually isn't that hard to understand where people are coming from - the core of where their ideology comes from - even when you think that they are completely and idiotically wrong. It usually isn't that hard to see what you actually need to tell them. Maybe they won't listen even when somebody responds to them with something that really cuts to the core of their argument. But all too often, nobody, or at least barely anybody, actually does that. Instead of responding to what the opponent is really saying, people respond to a stereotype of people who say stuff somewhat like the opponent, and are then puzzled to find the opponent claims to have been misrepresented or misunderstood. Like this. Of course PZ Myers is right that Ben Radford is being ridiculous about girls preferring pink because their dolls have pink skin. But his responses are never quite in line with what Ben was saying. What Ben is actually trying to say - or at least it seems fairly obvious to me that that's what he's actually trying to say - is that because most dolls' skin is something vaguely pinkish, girls grow to have a natural preference for colors that are somewhere on the vaguely pinkish side of the spectrum, and that therefore of course girls' toys are pink, and it has nothing to do with marketing or society having arbitrarily decided pink is for girls, and complaining about gendered color-coding in toys is stupid. Of course that's a silly argument, just like the rest of his arguments. But when PZ and other people respond to that silly argument, they keep insinuating that Ben Radford thinks pink girls' toys are the same color as dolls' skin. While it does lead to amusing image illustrations, that's just willingly interpreting his comments to be even sillier than they are in reality. They're plenty silly even if you don't do that. You don't need to ridicule his supposed inability to recognize the difference between beige and pink to counter his points. And what's more is that if you keep doing that, you're giving him an excuse to say you're the ones being thick and not getting his argument. You're giving him a perfect opportunity to respond with an irrelevant distraction instead of owning up to the many silly things about what he actually said. People are very eager to jump on any opportunity to interpret their opponent as believing something obviously untrue - disregarding the fact that there are very, very, very few people out there in the world who believe things that are anywhere near that obviously untrue, and if it looks like somebody is saying they believe things that are that obviously untrue, it's probably a misunderstanding (whether that's their fault or yours). Or to interpret their opponent as otherwise thinking something that seems plainly indefensible from an intellectual, moral or legal perspective - it's a sort of shortcut to "winning" the argument. In the process, though, they completely forget to regard their opponents as human beings, listen to them as human beings or attempt to understand their thought process as human beings - specifically, human beings that can also recognize such plainly indefensible statements. And the result is a mess of back-and-forth shouting matches where everyone seems to be competing about who can misunderstand the other side in the most ludicrous way. Really, this is just a facet of the wider principle where people are dramatically overeager to dismiss other people as just being stupid or evil or ignorant instead of realizing they're people like themselves and probably do and think things for pretty similar reasons as they themselves might. tl;dr: Why do people not get other people. 2 comments|post comment

Forgiveness [27 Dec 2011|12:53pm] [ mood | pensive ] I bumped into this post yesterday and kind of cringed at it. Let's start with a bit of a disclaimer: I don't have the faintest idea about the particular case that he's talking about. I've never heard of this guy. I have no idea how sincere he is or whether he actually ought to be forgiven. But when people say something like... The ideas that forgiveness and redemption are things we should be granting, that we have the power to grant, that all they require is confession and repentance, that they are things we have a duty to grant each other–those all seem to me to come out of a system of cultural values deeply invested in Christianity, with its emphasis on redemption and repentance. There is, of course, some good to be said of those ideas, but they are also ideas that should be interrogated, because they can be used as an excuse to celebrate abusers and silencing their victims. There are people whom I feel no need to forgive, both personally and in a political sense. Many people felt no need to forgive Christopher Hitchens. Nobody has a right to forgiveness from anybody, and forgiveness in and of itself is not necessarily a virtue. ...that just wigs me out. My philosophy on ethics is, you could say, pretty big on forgiveness. More specifically, I believe that it is unproductive and absurd to condemn people for the character of their past selves, because their past selves no longer exist. If the part of the character of the past self you have a problem with is still present in the present self, of course, condemn away - but why hold a grudge against somebody for something that simply is not part of who they presently are? The difficulty, of course, is figuring out whether that is actually the case or if they just want you think so. Of course. I acknowledge that fully and the fact that you can't really tell and that being too forgiving makes you extremely easy to exploit. All those are perfectly valid points. And this Schwyzer guy may well still be a predator. But the thing is it doesn't appear PZ Myers or the EG he quotes are actually concerned that Schwyzer isn't sincere and will prey on students again. Or if they are, they at least don't consider it important enough to be a centerpiece of their argument. They just find the idea of forgiving somebody who has done what he has generally preposterous. And of course, by pointing out forgiveness is a Christian idea, obviously we atheists should not buy into that tripe, right? I find the way that EG frames forgiveness in the quote above bizarre. She speaks of it as a supposed "duty", a "virtue", that she "feels no need" to forgive certain people, as if forgiving somebody is a favor you do for them to be nice, a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can choose to hand over to another Monopoly player if you feel like it because it's not as if you'd ever need it yourself. And, okay, I suppose some interpretations of forgiveness really are something like that. But that's not my idea of forgiveness, nor is it the kind of forgiveness actually at stake in a case like this. That type of forgiveness is simply to be at peace, reassured that they won't do wrong anymore, being able to let go of the hatred and suspicion you felt for them before because you genuinely believe you don't need them anymore. It's more about your own peace of mind than theirs. Maybe you're honestly still suspicious that this guy might sleep with students again. Fair enough. Then you definitely shouldn't "forgive" him. But if you're not? Why on earth don't you? Why do you prefer to live with the grudge, with the hatred and fear and suspicion, if you don't actually believe it is grounded in anything anymore? I am a victim of bullying. One of the perpetrators e-mailed me a while ago to apologize for his behaviour. And I completely cannot wrap my head around how anyone would choose to prolong their own suffering and hurt by responding "You're not entitled to anything from me; I have no duty to forgive you." If there were reason to think he didn't necessarily mean it, sure, but really, who doesn't change completely between the ages of fourteen and twenty? Of course you don't have a "duty" to forgive - but why don't you want to? I arranged a meeting with that boy at a café, where he filled me in on what's been going on in his life and we discussed future plans and computer science and geekdom. It was great. I have nothing but goodwill towards that boy today and I wouldn't want it any other way. I would love nothing more than confirmation that I can forgive my other bullies, too. It would be freeing and awesome. And I know many other victims don't see it that way and relish the opportunity to be able to say no to that request, but that still puzzles me and makes me sad. 1 comment|post comment

Stuff [12 Dec 2011|07:57pm] [ mood | tired ] ( Death ) ( Late to the Elevatorgate party; trigger warning for mentions of rape ) 2 comments|post comment

Dream [27 Nov 2011|04:28pm] [ mood | bored ] Had a lot of silly dreams I posted on Twitter, but one of them had detail I remember that doesn't quite fit into 140 characters. Basically it was this sci-fi short story. By Jim Butcher, though that isn't important; I just remember I picked it up because it had his name on it. It was basically about a crew on a spaceship, consisting of several people. I think the narrator was some other character, but the one I actually remember stuff about was actually a kenshi from Heroes VI, i.e. a samurai-naga, though he just had some normal role on the ship. He had this code of honor or something that meant he wasn't allowed to have sex, but for one reason or another he had slept with this girl on the crew anyway, and now she was pregnant. Worse yet, she claimed to be against abortion, which made him really freak because then she would have the child and it would be a half-naga (because humans and nagas can totally breed) so it would be obvious it was his. He spent most of the story being internally tortured about this, even as the crew was captured by giant hostile aliens who put them into some kind of a freezing chamber or something (I don't remember the plot, okay; apparently I was too busy remembering the soap opera parts). Then as they were there and slowly dying, some other crew member who apparently knew about the pregnancy revealed the truth to everyone and the naga-guy went nuts and attacked him. However, that guy apparently remembered some time way back that the whole crew was supposed to take abortion pills (even the guys; I have no idea) and at that point that girl had been perfectly fine with it and laughing about it. This caused her to confess that actually she wasn't opposed to abortion; she just wanted to have his child because she was in love with him. Then the dream got derailed because apparently at this point the word "feiein" (pronounced fai-in) was used to describe the naga-guy's position (standing with folded arms) and then it became about me trying to use that word in TQftL. The end. post comment

Three Dreams [15 Nov 2011|09:55am] [ mood | amused ] So I had three vaguely interesting dreams last night. The first was about the Perspective contest on Serebii (which, for the uninformed, has been going on for more than a year and people have been getting pretty impatient for the results). Basically, I suddenly realized that there were two additional judges I'd completely failed to take into account up until then: xX_Saber_Xx (who in the dream always posted in orange), and some random dude I'd never heard of with a shiny Umbreon avatar who always posted in blue and made a lot of spelling/grammar errors. Just as Psychic was about to finish her reviews, I discovered that the guy with the Umbreon avatar hadn't even started reading the entries yet, and that xX_Saber_Xx had posted a long post in the contest thread about how the reason the contest judging has taken so long was that the entries were all so terrible that it was impossible to place them, and the inevitable drama had commenced (mostly consisting of people being really sorry for being such awful writers and writing lengthy wallowing posts about it, oddly enough). The second was about me discovering that there was a new Pokémon TV show called "Pokémon: Valley of the ______" (can't remember the last word). It was basically original fantasy that happened to involve Pokémon; there were no humans, just various sapient Pokémon species and then this dominant race of bipedal crocodile-like amphibians that could sometimes do magic or something, and the particular episode I watched involved the main characters on the run from the amphibian king, making their way around a half-underwater amphibian city. As I watched it I was really impressed with the story, characters and worldbuilding and was like "Hey, this is Avatar-quality stuff." Which is probably why the third dream was about this ATLA AU where Zuko's family had been good all along and were fighting against the evil versions of themselves while Sozin was the Big Bad. And it was interactive so I was some random firebender helping them out, except because I had never done this before I didn't really know how to firebend and spent the whole episode hiding or trying to light falling leaves on fire by doing some really complex motion with my fingers that Zuko kept trying to teach me to do right. post comment

Websites [05 Nov 2011|12:16am] [ mood | tired ] Everybody is irritated by ads on websites, so it's not unusual that I am too (as I've written about before). What is somewhat less common is my annoyance with concepts like search engine optimization. I take almost the same glee in marking unsolicited "We can improve your website's SEO!" e-mails as spam as I do in turning down people who want to put ads on my site. Unlike ads, SEO really is a legitimately useful concept; it just irritates the hell out of me and gives me the same kind of ick feeling as ads do. I think it's just that it's a marketing concept. When people in real life hear about my Pokémon website being reasonably popular, you wouldn't believe how often the first question I get is whether I have ads on it. Web design advice is uncannily often about how one can get more clicks or members or rate higher on Google, where to place ads in order for them to get the most possible exposure, and so on. And every couple of months I get some sort of a probably-automated e-mail from some random company that insists my Pokémon website is obviously lacking because it does not have profiles on major social networking websites and its SEO score could be improved. I think this is because a whole lot of people seem to think of websites mainly as a marketing tool. An attitude like mine would just confuse them: surely, they must think, getting the largest possible number of visitors/members/ad clicks is the whole point of having a website? I think of websites as an art form. Maybe that's silly of me, but I do; that's why I've written all those sections on how to make a website not just popular or usable but good, and why I give out detailed critiques on websites the way I'd review a piece of fiction. SEO, when pushed as a general principle the way it is, bugs me because it simply assumes that websites are primarily for duping people into clicking links to them. Search engine optimization is about how to force your content to be more popular without actually making it any better - the very antithesis of art. The way it's treated as a universal goal for websites is like sending out letters to filmmakers - not just Hollywood filmmakers, but indie filmmakers and hobbyist filmmakers as well - advising them that they can improve their box office results by having the main actress take off her top in at least one scene and offering to assist them with that. Sound advice, maybe - but really? tl;dr Websites are art, SEO spam is irritating, I hate marketing, blah blah blah. post comment

Death [22 Oct 2011|10:44pm] [ mood | blank ] My step-grandfather is dead - still alive in a technical sense, on a respirator at a hospital, but dead in every sense that means anything. I say step-grandfather because he is my father's stepfather and I never actually called him my grandfather, but it's not a meaningful distinction - he married my grandma long before I was born, and my actual paternal grandfather is alive and well with his second wife, so it wasn't that I wouldn't have accepted him as Grandpa. It was just always Grandma and Bói and Grandpa and Sigrún (which conveniently excised any confusion about terminology, since my maternal grandparents both died before I was born), and as far as I was concerned "Grandpa" was just a word, a word that meant "father of my parent" and not "stepfather of my parent". It never occurred to me to call him Grandpa just because he served the exact role in my life that he would have if he were related to me by blood. But in a way he was my favorite grandparent, in the more inclusive sense. He would tell jokes. He'd do tricks. He'd cheat at cards and laughingly challenge us to catch him doing it. He loved kids, talking to them and entertaining them. He had a gift for telling stories from his life (especially his student years in Germany) and making them funny and engaging. He was just generally fun to be around. It was painful to me when I discovered a few years ago that he was a little homophobic, in an I'm-fine-with-them-but-they-should-keep-it-to-themselves way, and that he believed some women who accused a bishop of sexually assaulting them were all lying; when I was little I thought he was pretty much the Most Awesome Person Ever and it was heartbreaking to feel that image crack a little. I loved him very much anyway, and that could never change. ( On how it happened and my feelings on it. ) 1 comment|post comment

The Night Shift [27 Aug 2011|02:03pm] [ mood | sick ] I've been rewatching my favorite Icelandic TV series (and very possibly favorite Icelandic work of fiction, period), Næturvaktin (recently shown subtitled on BBC4 as The Night Shift). Well, technically I've been rewatching its differently-titled sequels, because I rewatched the original series a while ago, but that's not the point because it's really one solid story. I've for a long time tried to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this series so brilliant. I knew it was in the characterization; I knew it was something to do with the level of psychological insight behind the three main characters. But the thing is I've watched a lot of shows with really good characterization and I've never been quite sure if that's the full extent of why this one stands out so strongly among them. ( Then it occurred to me the other day that this may be the only TV series I have ever seen that really runs on subtlety. ) Apparently an American remake is in the works. Even aside from the bizarre changes it supposedly makes to the characters (Daníel is apparently a playboy and Georg is a survivalist??), I have no faith that an Americanized version could possibly retain any of the subtlety that actually makes the series so great. Maybe it would still be funny - but American TV series would never expect the viewer to develop an intimate psychological understanding of the characters that they need to use to get why things are happening the way they are. Also, Georg wouldn't be played by the Mayor of Reykjavík, which automatically makes everything he does ten times more hilarious in hindsight. 4 comments|post comment

Hunger Dream [13 Aug 2011|02:45pm] [ mood | amused ] I dreamt about being with a party of adventurers in some kind of pseudo-fantasy video game-ish setting, doing something resembling a sidequest. Basically a little starving girl came to us and said something about not having been able to solve a task to obtain a lot of food that involved climbing to the top of this bell tower, ringing the bell and then solving some puzzles. So basically we went there, and this old woman was the gatekeeper to the bell tower. She explained the task to us and that the goal was to get the food within some set amount of time and then basically left us to it. We started out at the bottom of the tower, where there were scattered barrels, chairs and other objects that I presumed we were supposed to use as steps to get to the top of the tower. However, when I started to climb (we'd decided, to save time, that I'd go to the top and ring the bell while the others started solving the puzzles near the bottom), I realized to my surprise that though the staircase was steep, no part of it was collapsed or otherwise really needed improvised steps. I managed to get to the top in just a couple of minutes and ring the bell, expecting monsters to come out of the shadow or something to make the task harder, but nope. Puzzled, I headed back down the stairs. After just a flight or two, I bumped into the old woman, except for some reason she had changed to a young man, or maybe she'd been a young man in disguise all along or something. I commented on how weird it was that all the chairs and stuff were there if we didn't need to use it, and was being pretty proud of having gotten up and rung the bell in under two minutes, but he looked rather unimpressed and told me I'd really done a very poor job of it, adding in spiteful tones that we were typical pampered upper-class people who'd never really lacked food. That was when it suddenly dawned on me that somebody who was really starving would have opened the barrels to see what was inside, not just dismissed them as something to step on, and the task was to find the food, with no mention of ringing the bell or doing the puzzles to begin with; the barrels were probably full of food and that was the food we were supposed to find. Then as I was running down to confirm my theory, I woke up. Also there were some sheep all of a sudden. But I'm still sure I was right. I think dreaming this must have something to do with Farla's Hunger Games reviews, where she keeps pointing out where the main character doesn't act like somebody who's really been starving. post comment

Ponies, kids' shows, and feminism [10 Aug 2011|12:58pm] [ mood | blah ] Yesterday Shadey and I went and watched the first ten or so episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the show everybody on the internet is obsessed with except those who cannot possibly understand why everybody else is making such a big deal of it. ( My verdict is... well. ) 5 comments|post comment

Penn & Teller Get Killed [25 Jul 2011|02:51am] [ mood | amused ] Remember when I wrote an unimaginably lengthy post rambling about my love for District 9 while unnecessarily retelling the whole movie? Well, I'm going to do that again, if not quite as lengthily. This time the subject is the little-known 1989 black comedy Penn & Teller Get Killed. ( Spoilers abound, even aside from the part where Penn and Teller do, in fact, get killed. ) post comment

Characters [27 Jun 2011|04:43am] [ mood | tired ] So I was catching up with Fandomsecrets and happened upon this secret, which was about a subject I found interesting so I started typing out a reply to it. Then when I tried to post it I realized it had actually hit the character limit, and since it's yesterday's post anyway I couldn't be bothered to split it into two for posting when nobody's going to read it anyway. So instead, so I wouldn't just have to delete the whole aimless ramble I spent way, way too long typing out, I figured I might as well post it here instead. I talk about my characters deciding to do something I never expected or whatever all the time. In fact, I go a step farther in that I always speak of "realizing" or "discovering" rather than "deciding" that a character has this or that psychological trait or backstory element. And I'm sure to someone like you this must sound absolutely nuts. However. I am perfectly aware that obviously I'm making it all up. It's just that the making doesn't happen on a conscious level in my mind. I write characters using the neural circuitry of empathy in my brain, i.e. by simulating the other mind, not by deciding at my own convenience that this is what the character is going to do now. I have attempted to do the latter, but it feels extremely hollow and wrong. A large part of the thrill of writing for me comes from that empathetic simulation of fictional people and watching how they interact as the simulation runs. And sometimes, when I'm writing, the simulated minds make a decision that I hadn't anticipated before actually running the simulation. Sometimes I'd planned to have certain things happen but the way a conversation ends up playing out, as I simulate it, changes the characters' state of mind in a different way than I'd thought and therefore the simulation doesn't proceed the way I'd wanted it to. It's still all in my head. It's still my empathy circuit doing the simulation. But there is also a real sense in which the simulated mind is refusing to cooperate when it fails to do what I'd previously thought it was going to do. Sometimes I have genuine trouble getting the simulation to result in what I'd planned as the result. Sometimes that means I have to work backwards, change something about the previous circumstances, take another path offered by the simulation at some earlier point in order to change the priors and thus the outcome. Other times I realize that the actual outcome of the simulation is more interesting than what I'd previously planned and just run with it. I also operate on instinct when characterizing my characters; instead of writing up sheets of information about who they are and what they're like beforehand, the character's fictional "mind" tends to emerge inside the simulation as I write, within some very rough predetermined parameters, and then I spend a while as I write that new mind analyzing its behaviour, imagining possible psychological causes for it, trying to pin down their personality, until suddenly something clicks into place. And when it does click, I feel like that has been the truth about the character all along, and my mental simulation of the character becomes more precise and refined as I become able to enter more detailed initial parameters into the simulation. This is exactly the same thing I do with characters who interest me in other fiction: I analyze their behaviour, investigate possible causes, and suddenly something clicks into place that makes everything fit together and I feel like I've discovered the truth. Why does my brain think there is such a thing as a "truth" behind fictional characters? Because a good chunk of it is dedicated to figuring people out in order to simulate and predict their future behaviour more accurately, and that circuitry really doesn't care whether the parameters you plug into it represent real people or fictional characters. The social need for simulating other human beings accurately is very possibly one of the reasons our brains evolved to be so complex in the first place. My first impulse for writing a character is to "get in character", simulate their mind to see what they do, and then simply write down the result of the simulation; only occasionally do I feel like I'm making a decision in the ordinary conscious sense. So tl;dr I don't think there is anything weird or delusional about speaking of characters as if they make decisions on their own, because at least in my case that describes the process that's going on in my brain more accurately than "I decided the original plan was OOC so I changed it." I'm a bit more wary of claims that the characters actually talk to you because that would mean continuously simulating them-as-voices-in-your-head instead of just when writing them, but I'd assume most people mean such things metaphorically rather than literally. (The simulation thing, however, means I really wouldn't call "the characters didn't do what I wanted them to" a metaphor so much as a slight simplification of the high-level cognitive processes going on.) 2 comments|post comment

Dream [04 Jun 2011|01:42pm] [ mood | nerdy ] Oh, look. I haven't stopped posting dreams. So basically, I dreamt that I had a lucid dream. The framing dream was about being on an Expo trip with opal and my dad (for some reason), chancing upon Dannichu in the middle of London, meeting my best friend and going on a mountainhike. At some point here I bumped into this work of modern art consisting of two chairs stuck together, loosing one of the chairs so that it fell onto the ground. Everybody was really mad at me for this and told me to put it back. When I tried to do that, it fell again because there were no places for it to attach. This made everyone even more livid. I exasperatedly tried to explain to opal that you can't order somebody to do something they don't know how to do and then get angry when they don't do it well enough, but it didn't do much good. Whatever. So we got on this coach, eventually, and for some reason I was carrying a really fluffy pink duvet and fell asleep, resulting in a lucid dream about walking around London. As usual when I have lucid dreams, I quickly went "Ooh, I'm aware I'm dreaming! Let's go try to get something exciting to happen!" so I picked a random house and walked in. There were stairs just beyond the door and as I walked up a little girl came out of the apartment at the top of the stairs, looking distraught. She looked at me and said, "So this is all a dream? All of it?" I wasn't sure what to say other than, "Yeah." "Whose?" "Mine!" I said, grinning a little. She didn't find it as amusing. Accusingly, she continued to ask me, "So this is all in your head? I'm all in your head?" and I just answered, "Yep," starting to find this all a little unsettling. I was coming up the stairs trying to calm her when suddenly she took out a huge machete and swung it at me. I managed to dodge into her apartment; there her grandmother was hiding, apparently from me, and when I entered she took out a machete as well, threatening me. As I was wondering why these people hated me so much, I suddenly realized that I was the Tenth Doctor (yes, I've been watching Doctor Who lately) and that by dreaming up this universe, I had inadvertently doomed all these people living in it, who might not be real but were conscious and could feel existential fear. (At some point here the dream kind of became third person, in that I was looking at the Doctor from the outside even though I was still thinking his thoughts, so I'm going to switch the narration to third person. Bear with me here.) So the Doctor fled out of the house, still being chased by the murderous little girl, and ran into this town square of sorts, which I remembered seeing earlier in the dream. Suddenly he realized that the statues around the square were all cybermen (they'd taken off the distinctive square part of their helmets to disguise themselves) and they had killed or mind-controlled all the people already; there basically wasn't any way to save them. A soldier with a sword ran up to attack the little girl, and the Doctor unthinkingly turned around to help her by grabbing the hand holding the machete and steering her to swing it at the soldier's hand so he would drop the weapon. Then, leaving the soldier behind, he dragged the little girl with him into a ditch by the roadside, knowing they'd be followed and discovered in a matter of seconds. He'd taken the machete and started to vent his frustration and despair by driving it into the ground, breaking into sobs at the realization that it was over and he couldn't save this world and was probably going to die. Except then L from Death Note peeked over the top of the ditch and explained that the world would be saved anyway. Unfortunately the details of the explanation slipped away from me when I woke up but I think it made sense somehow. So then I woke up, expecting to find myself sleeping on the coach with the pink duvet, but actually I was in Shadey's bed and this vaguely confused me for a second. post comment

Icelandic literature [31 May 2011|01:33pm] [ mood | thoughtful ] I watched a movie on the plane to London, an Icelandic one. It was an okay movie; its main problem was that it was based on a bad book. I guess there wasn't much it could have done about that. Which is a little funny because it is actually pretty classic as far as Icelandic youth novels go. In addition to the recent movie, it's also been set up as a musical, and it was mandatory reading for Icelandic class in eighth grade. I hated it then, but after the movie came out I decided I might give it the benefit of the doubt because a) mandatory reading tends to ruin books, and b) I was twelve at the time, found sex gross and was really not prepared for being forced to read a book about horny teenagers knocking each other up. So when I saw it was available on the plane, I thought why not give this book a second chance. As it turned out, seeing it only reinforced my original opinion: nothing happens in it. Or, more specifically, the whole book is just a series of disconnected events it completely fails to make the reader care about, and even though many of them are on paper pretty dramatic the book just somehow manages to make them meaningless and dull. Basically, it's about this insufferably annoying and pretentious sixteen-year-old who thinks he is the greatest poet of all time and really has the hots for his female classmate. At the beginning of the story he and his friends are dabbling in alchemy, convinced that some medieval guy had made gold out of human feces. Then his friend's mom finds out about it and puts an end to it (but doesn't actually punish them in any way), and it's never brought up again. That sort of exemplifies how this story goes: things happen and then they just sort of end and are never brought up again and don't matter. Later the main character gets jealous because his crush is always with this other guy, but then it turns out there's nothing actually going on between them. Then suddenly his crush knocks on his window in the middle of the night and tries to jump his bones, but he doesn't have any condoms. He goes to buy some but when he gets back she's gone. Then she invites him on a trip to a summerhouse with his friends, and they end up having sex there anyway. He is monumentally stupid and uninformed about the concept of consent and starts humping her again when she's half-asleep, without a condom. Turns out she gets pregnant and angry but still doesn't really hate him. Then she has an abortion. After acting vaguely miffed (but only vaguely) the main character runs off to work on a boat with a guy he knows. Nothing happens there. He comes back. He tries to help his friend cheat the standardized tests at the end of tenth grade. It doesn't work. Oh well. Then after a few more pointless events he is still an insufferably annoying and pretentious sixteen-year-old who does not appear to have learned anything or changed in any substantial way. There is no sense of conflict at any point; whenever there is a problem it is unceremoniously disposed of and the main character never appears to be in real distress of any kind. This is sort of a common theme in modern Icelandic literature, I find. For some reason Icelandic writers have this idea that a book isn't a real book if it has a central conflict; generally they're just this series of events, usually very depressing ones, to which the characters don't really react in any interesting way. Occasionally they're amusing, but there is almost never any sense of story. If they can be described as being about anything, they're about some broad topic like "the horrible lives of [insert subset of people here] living in [insert place here] in [insert time period here]". Perhaps that's why the characters are so universally dull: the story is never about them, but merely about some generalized type of people they're supposed to represent. The characters never drive the story. Mostly they just get thrown around by the random happenings the author chooses to put them through and react to everything with the same dull "Oh. Well, that was sad." non-emotion. I will admit that I don't actually read much modern Icelandic literature. Mostly I've gotten this impression from mandatory reading at various stages of schooling and this has turned me off trying to read much of the rest (and, to be fair, the summaries I've read on the backs of serious books (as opposed to mystery novels and the like) tend to overwhelmingly suggest something similar). But it really seems to say something when these supposed gems of my culture universally fail at setting up tension or interesting characters or generally anything. I genuinely don't understand how people can love these books. Being amused by them, sure; appreciating the point they're making, I guess; but then people go "oh, that's such a great book!" and I'm left puzzled because there is no story and I can't begin to comprehend how you could actively like a novel that has no central conflict whatsoever, no tension and completely static characters. Maybe that's why Iceland had a mystery novel craze a few years back. There aren't enough books where something actually happens. post comment

NaNo [17 May 2011|11:30am] [ mood | tired ] Maybe I should do a rough draft of the rewrite of Morphic for NaNoWriMo this year. I mean, on the one hand, trying to improve something by writing it again except more rushed sounds like a pretty horrible idea. But on the other hand, NaNo would give me a deadline to map out a more sensible way for the plot to go beforehand (which I intend to do but am always too lazy to get started), it would not take years and years like it will undoubtedly take if I do the rewrite at my normal pace, and doing it in a month would help me not forget half of the things I said in the earlier chapters by the time I get to the later ones (wargh inconsistencies staring me in the face how does everyone read the fic without noticing and how did I write it without noticing). From the other side of things, unlike Scyther's Story, Morphic is just the right length for NaNoWriMo (it's just under 55,000 words in the current incarnation). I also unhealthily adore writing it, for some reason even more so now after finishing it, so I don't think mustering the enthusiasm to throw up 1667 words a day should be a problem. (I love Razor/Stormblade/Shadowdart and all, but Scyther's Story bumps into a lot of "how do I describe this in a way that makes it vaguely intelligible what's actually going on" issues in addition to the fact it has a lot of timeskips and transitions that are really awkward to handle; this is mostly what held me back last November. I don't remember having much of this sort of problem with Morphic, though this could partly be thanks to the fact it lacks any real indicator of how much time is passing to begin with.) The main drawback is that, again unlike Scyther's Story, there are pretty large chunks here and there that I'm reasonably satisfied with and would want to reuse, which would be cheating. But I don't need to do NaNo formally anyway and I'm pretty sure they don't really want you to be rewriting an older story for it anyway so not cheating is kind of a lost cause. Also, I like the idea of getting a decent excuse to spend half my day writing something with Dave in it for a month. Because currently I really don't have a decent excuse. 2 comments|post comment

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