vaznetti

So I had this idea that now that I am back to working part time, I would be able to get back online more. I would update here! Maybe I would do some memes! Maybe I would even write something! What I forgot was that the nature of part-time academic work is that you are in fact doing almost all the work in only half the time (because of childcare) for roughly a quarter of the pay. So what has actually happened is that since starting work, I haven't updated at all. I often don't check my personal email now for whole days. I owe people mail like you wouldn't believe.

Of course as I type this, (while Spartacus naps) I really should be writing a lecture instead.

Needless to say, I will not be doing yuletide this year. Although that may be for the best, because I keep hearing rumors about how Yuletide has been taken over by the crazy this year. That seems so bizarre to me -- I mean, yes, of course it drives everybody crazy, but not usually in the anonymous flaming and trolling kind of way.

In other news, I will probably watch Spooks, although this week I had to dodge in and out of the room ( spoilers )

At this point, I am kind of hoping I remember how to code for LJ, to avoid spoiling everyone in the world.

In other TV news, regarding Strictly, my hatred for Craig Kelly cannot be textually rendered. And although I have no idea who is voting for Anton and Laila, I'm glad that they are.

Anyway, Spartacus will be waking up any minute now, so I think I will go ahead and hit post!

Recently things have been very stressful, but here are two things that amuse me:

Spartacus continues to babble to himself lots and lots, and one of his current favorites is something that sounds suspiciously like "ogi-ogi-ogi-ogi." And I haven't even told him about SurveyFail!

Also, while we were away he finally started to get teeth. Now he has four, two at the bottom and two at the top -- but the two at the top are the ones next to the front teeth. I have taken to calling him my little vampire baby!

Status report: the office is packed; the shipping container is packed; the car is going to be sold tomorrow. I am giving up the keys to my office once I finish typing this.

We're having a three-day vacation in Iceland on the way home, so I'll see you all on the other side.

I realized just now, as I sat there trying to fill out the insurance valuation, that this is the third time I have moved over the Atlantic, and the fourth time I have moved from one country to another, and yet I have still not realized that the most sensible way to handle this kind of thing is to burn all your possessions and start from scratch in the new country.

And why does the valuation form have only a single item for books? Most of the value of what I'm sending is books.

cidercupcakes is hosting a female character deathmatch thingy here: Home Team 2009. Please go there and make sure Miss Piggy doesn't beat Marion Ravenwood in the first round. (Also: making me choose between Uhura and Sam Carter, or between Bones and CJ was very, very unfair.)

I happened across this BBC story about Islamic superhero comics a while ago, and thought other people on my friends list might find it interesting.

And finally, an academic work: The Aftermath of Character seems to be about the divergence between fanfic and other forms of fiction, except in the 18th century.

(Otherwise known as, "surely my friends list knows everything...")

OK, here's my problem. We're going back to Halifax next month, so that I can pack up my office, arrange for shipping to the UK, say goodbye, all that stuff. And obviously, we are taking Spartacus with us.

We don't have a car in the UK; we have a borrowed carseat, but Spartacus has just outgrown it, so we won't be taking it with us. I have a car in Halifax (which I'm planning to sell). My usual practice is to take a taxi from the airport to the city. Now, as far as I can tell, taxicabs are actually exempt from childseat laws in Canada (at least, they are in Ontario -- as so often, it's harder to find info on other provinces), but I am a little nervous on two counts -- first, that it's about a 20 minute trip, and second, that I have serious doubts that a taxi driver will take us without a carseat. Does anyone have advice or suggestions?

I've emailed a child stuff rental company about renting a carseat (and some other stuff) while we're there, but they don't seem to do airport dropoffs. I'm going to phone my usual cab company (if I can find their card!) and ask them for advice. I think I'll also email former colleagues with children back in Halifax to see what they suggest (and hope that someone would offer to come pick us up! but that seems unlikely). In the worst-case scenario, there's a shuttle bus to downtown hotels that I can take -- after all, we'll be taking a bus to the airport here, and that's a much longer trip. But generally, by the time I've arrived in the airport, I just want to get the rest of the way, and I suspect that Spartacus will feel the same.

(And yes, I know he'll be on the plane in our laps, but air travel is statistically much safer than car travel...)

Last night Spartacus' dinner included a roast beet, which I had just dug up from our garden a couple hours before I cooked it. For someone with as black a thumb as I have, that is a major accomplishment! It was huge! It looked like a real beet! He seemed to like it well enough, although it was not Spartacus' ideal meal; that would involve us leaving his food scattered all over the floor, preferably for about a day, so that he could crawl around and pick bits of old food up and eat them. In a really ideal world, he'd be naked.

The other thing about beets is that they let you know exactly how fast your child's digestive system is working.

* * *

Over the weekend I finished Anathem, by Neil Stephenson, and must have really liked it, because it was very long, and was about 80% taken up with the discussion of epistemology and ontology, with a side order of mathematics and quantum theory. And it was heavily influenced by Platonism, which I hate. And it was very much about the ideas, not the people in it. And yet I finished it and enjoyed it!

I also found it interesting in light of NS's gender issues -- because it really seems to me that he knows he has a problem with female characters, and is trying really really hard -- but he still gets caught out by his own presuppositions. ( spoilers )

It is quite nice to be watching a fannish TV show in real time again, since the closest I've come to that for the past year has probably been Primeval, and I only know a couple people who watch that. Whereas lots of people watch Torchwood! And I can read their posts! Yay! (My other appointment TV shows are things like Timmy Time and In the Night Garden. OMG, you guys, CBeebies is TOTAL CRACK! I think I enjoy these much more than Spartacus does.)

And not only that, but this Torchwood miniseries is really good. I haven't seen much of the show itself, because I didn't like the first few episodes, but I am definitely enjoying this season. ( cut for spoilers and general impressions )

Actually, my icon reminds me that Being Human was also watched by other people -- and it has been funny watching Merlin eat through fandom. But watching TV in more-or-less real time with other people is still one of the things I like best about fandom, and a lot of my disengagement and frustration over the past year have come from not being able to participate in that -- and only being able to read meta, not fic (because of spoilers), is a pretty horrible way to experience fandom. Not that I'll be requesting Timmy Time fic at Yuletide or anything, because I know where that would lead...

1. Warnings, since I see people posting their warnings policies.

I view this as mostly a "don't be an asshole" issue, so I try not to be an asshole; I checked my fic page and discovered that I did warn for the most obvious potential trigger-thing, an offscreen rape in an early XF story. My webpage has notation for sex or violence next to story listings. But I also do try to warn as little as possible, and I do expect my readers not to act like idiots. My feeling is that if you are reading an Alias story with a Syd/Lauren pairing, and the summary does not explicitly promise you fluffy bunnies, you should probably not be too surprised if the material contains skeevy power dynamics instead of fluffy bunnies.

I am really, really torn about warning for character death. Sometimes I have, and sometimes I haven't. Sometimes I want that warning as a reader, and sometimes I don't. These two statements are related.

So in short: I try not to be an asshole, and I hope that readers will not act like idiots. If you, the readers, feel that there's something in a story that ought to have a warning, let me know. I promise to listen to you. If you want to know before reading a story whether it contains something that will trigger you, you can always ask me.


2. The one thing I miss about Microsoft Outlook is the todo list function; I relied on it to keep organized at work. Now I need something like that, ideally an online service that I can keep open in a tab. I'd like it to prioritize by date and if possible to have tags for different categories of tasks. Does such a thing exist?


3. I suspect that the level of my irritation with the universe is directly related to the amount of sleep I've been getting -- or rather, not getting. But really, what happened to that hot, dry summer we were promised? The news was full of dire sunstroke warnings, until June hit and it became clear that we were actually having a warm-but-not-too-warm and moderately rainy summer. So much for global warming! I become more of a skeptic about that with every passing day, but see above re: lack of sleep.


4. I feel like I should say something about Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson both dying, but I'm not, because I can't think of anything. Is this post very grumpy? If so, I'm sorry. The internet is making me cranky these days.

1. I forgot to renew my paid LJ subscription, and am now wondering whether I ever will. The thing I miss most are my icons, of course; if I renew my paid subscription with the additional icons, will my old icons come back? Or have they been lost forever? (I think not, because they appear on my old posts, back when I used them all.)


2. OMG, I had all kinds of things to say, and now that I'm sitting here with the screen before me, I cannot remember what they were. This is so dumb.


3. One of them was that I received an irritating response (by a third party) to a comment I left somewhere. I have decided not to reply, because picking a fight with another LJ user in someone else's post about something totally irrelevant to the post itself is rude and tacky, but I totally want a cookie for not acting like a jerk. ::rolls eyes at self::


4. Oh, I know what else it was! Guys, I won a fanfic award! I was a runner up! I don't think I have ever won a fanfic award! Look, the proof is here at the bottom of the post! And it was for Like love we seldom keep, which honestly, I expected about eight people to be willing to read, because Marita Covarrubias/John Winchester is just never going to be a big crossover pairing. So I am very pleased about that.

That may be enough excitement for the moment.

Now that it's all over bar the wailing and gnashing of teeth...

( spoilers for the season under the cut )

In other media-related news, I am very sad that I have not seen the new Star Trek, and will not get a chance to do so in the foreseeable future, until it comes out on DVD. Of course, I also still haven't seen the last few episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles or any of season 4 of Supernatural, so it's not like Star Trek is special.

I am usually the last person to comment on lj about egregiously racist failures, so I am a little surprised not to have seen more posts about this; maybe I've been missing them. The archive is here, if you want to trace the discussion. Plenty of people there are far more thoughtful and eloquent than I could be.

If you're wondering, the short version, as encapsulated by me and my husband --
Me: Let's say you were an editor or publisher and were handed a novel where the Europeans got to the Americas and discovered that there were no humans there, but the megafauna had survived the Pleistocene dieout. Would you think (a) mammoths! saber-toothed tigers! cool! or (b) you know, wiping out all the Native Americans from your history and replacing them by literal wild dangerous beasts is deeply, deeply hinky.
Him: Hm. I guess the second thing.
Me: Yeah, you'd think, wouldn't you?

Or, more eloquently, by hermetic, Fundamentally, I cannot escape the idea that [writing such a book is] an act that results in real-world harm because it disappears peoples who have already been systematically removed physically, culturally, linguistically, and spiritually, from their own landscape. It completes their erasure.

Which pretty much says it all, I think. I have pretty high standards for "immoral" as applied to a work of literature, but this one is pushing them.

* * *

I have half-formed thoughts on alternate histories, and why I want to read them and almost always end up horribly disappointed; I guess it's that historical causality is too complex, and I end up waving my hands a lot and saying "but, but, but... once you've changed that, how do you end up there?" I don't have the same problem with fantasy, although most fantasy worlds don't work (historically, economically, whatever), but once people start playing with history my brain goes into overdrive.

I am also reminded of Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna, one of those books where the Roman Empire never falls; I remember it only vaguely, because it wasn't very good as a novel. It was more a collection of historical sketches, I think -- actually, it turns out that the book is a collection of short stories written over an number of years, which makes sense. But it seems relevant in this context, because IIRC Silverberg decided Christianity caused the fall of Rome, and to ensure that there were no Christians he short-circuited the Exodus: no Jews, no Judea, no Jesus, therefore no Christians. Except that actually there are Jews, still in Egypt, still waiting for the Exodus, which actually occurs in the final story -- in the punchline -- in spaceships. Which is what makes this book an entirely different proposition, I think: history isn't erased but postponed.

* * *

Off and on in comments about this I see people looking for books which deal with America, and American myth, and in this context I keep thinking of Michael Chabon's Summerland, which I read again while in San Francisco. Has anyone else read this book? and if not, why not? People who like (or want to like) Supernatural but wish ithad more folklore and fewer race and gender issues should read this book. I think baseball is boring, but I love it. Which is not to say that it gets everything right; I mean, I'm not qualified to say whether it gets anything right, as far as the inclusion of Native American characters goes. My outsider perspective is that Chabon is trying here and is not failing utterly, but other people may feel differently.

...and the scenes from next week, to which my reaction can be summed up with "OMG, have they gone completely mad?" (The answer being, obviously, yes: someone sat down in the writer's room and said, "Hey, this is a show about time travel. We have no limits!") And this is already a show which will make you turn to your watching-partner and say, in all seriousness, "If we were being hunted down by the private army of a power-mad civil servant, we wouldn't stop to have a random formal dinner in our poorly-constructed secret lair, would we?" The characters really are too dumb to live.

( some comments on the season so far )

I'm sure I had other things to say, but I've been writing this in dribs and drabs all day, so it's a bit disorganized. And now I must go see what kind of mashed food I can make for Spartacus.

I now exist, lemming-like, over on Dreamwidth under the same username: vaznetti. I considered going back to my original pseud (Vanzetti), but I kind of like the new one (OK, more than 5 years old, but you get the picture) because of its total uniqueness.

I am slowly adding people over there, as I have time to look for and find them, but I really have no idea what I'm going to use that account for. Possibly backup, possibly for more fannish material, should I ever start generating that again. I may unsubscribe there from people who are just crossposting, because I don't need to see the same posts twice. I'm definitely not going anywhere -- there are too many people here who are sticking around -- and historically, I have had problems maintaining two different journals. I may crosspost, though.

Basically, I am a big mass of indecision, now in two places!

...I am back from San Francisco, which was wonderful, and I will say more about all that later, I hope. But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that I have just started catching up on this season of Primeval, which started just after we left Oxford, and OMG! Best crack ever! Who else is watching this? Is it as hysterically crazy as I think? And when does Daniel Jackson make an appearance?

I really hope the rest of the episodes live up to the opener!

1. Happy Passover! Chag Sameach! We will be trying to balance Spartacus' recently-established bedtime routine with the seder; I'm not sure how well it's going to work. We will also probably try feeding him gefilte fish, if he's awake at the right time for it -- heck, he's liked everything else we've tried him on, including beets (a triumph of ambition over common sense in other respects).

2. All of a sudden I see posts about Dreamwidth everywhere. What's going on? Do I have to move? Are half my friends going to up sticks and move off LJ? I need time to get used to this!

3. We've been in SF for more than ten days, and have yet to turn on the television, largely due to the abovementioned bedtime routine -- but I don't seem to miss it. At some point I'll post about the reading I've managed.

4. But back in Oxford I found myself watching quite a lot of Gilmore Girls on daytime reruns -- since I never watched it when it was on. Emily is my favorite, but what I really want to know is where is all the Paris fic? Where are the stories where she uses her OCD powers for good for evil to take over the universe? Where are the unlikely crossovers where she pairs up with characters like Temperance Brennan or Lex Luthor (hahahahaha! no, really, it would be awesome)? Please tell me all this stuff exists out there somewhere!

This is the one about the vampire, the werewolf, and the ghost all walking into a bar sharing a house, and their wacky hijinks, complete with obligatory peasants with pitchforks (sort of). It was awesome, and has been renewed, and you should all watch it. My love for George cannot be textually rendered. Seriously. Also my love for Annie. I'm a little cooler toward Mitchell, because I feel that the vampire with a crisis of conscience is something I've seen before once or twice, and his relationship with Herrick was very Forever Knight -- except here Herrick is the cop, which I guess was a nice twist. So yes, although Mitchell and his issues drove the series plot, he didn't really interest me that much.

( a little more, with spoilers for episodes five and six in particular, under the cut )

I am so looking forward to series two.

In other news, I let Spartacus play with the keyboard this morning, since he often grabs for it. He promptly his some combination of keys which crashed the computer. ::rolls eyes::

I have not been following The Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, round whatever this is, already, but you should all read this post, by nextian:

What we have are, essentially, four books. We have the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim, our prophets and our poetry and the history we remember. We have the Talmud -- the Mishnah and the Gemarah -- and the commentary that sprung up around it, those footnotes that pile on footnotes and ideas that pile on ideas, divinely inspired or not. And we have the Torah, our beating heart.

Out of four books, you call three of them your own.

* * *

Every now and then, a well-meaning student or colleague will invite me to a Christian service -- evensong for the music, for example. And I will make some kind of excuse, which is nicer than saying what I really think, which is that sitting through a Christian service (for me) is like meeting someone who is wearing jewellery that belonged to your mother or grandmother, and was stolen years ago. Because that would make people uncomfortable, even though it's true: that history is there, it isn't dead.