Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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2:49 pm - Reclaiming Meme
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jlh has designated this "Let's Reclaim Some Shit Day."
Iow: What are the things that people frequently rant about that you actually rather like? ,
She started with first person narration (which is something I tend to think I don't like before I remember that plenty of books and stories I love are written in it), established relationship stories (I HATE the attitude on TV now, especially, where as soon as a couple is together people start thinking they need to break up or else it's not interesting--wtf?) and sitcoms (my version of comfort food! Yay!).
The idea is to just say the things you like, when you've heard people argue that they suck or have just dismissed them, hopefully not as an inspiration for snarking about why you shouldn't like it.
( So I tried to think of some... )
current mood:  thoughtful
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Saturday, November 21st, 2009
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5:20 pm - Top Grossing Movie Meme
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OMG, another movie meme! I have seen practically everything in the Academy Awards Best Picture list at this point, except for 3 or 4. I have a feeling I'll do terribly on this one, which are the top-grossing movies of all time. Gakked from jlh.
( Top grossing movies )
current mood:  mellow
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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1:23 pm - Being Human
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This is related to a discussion in another lj, but I realized it was really a tangent, so I thought I'd put it here. The discussion was about all-human AUs, where fanfic authors take non-human characters and make them human due to the setting. For instance, if you have everybody from Star Trek in high school, Spock might be an exchange student from some other country, but he's not half Vulcan. Likewise, Castiel isn't an angel, Spike isn't a vampire, Frodo isn't a hobbit, Zuko isn't a fire bender, etc. It's taking fantasy or sci-fi characters and putting them in a real world settings. Many people don't really see the point in that--which I can understand, even if I like those stories. If a character has an alien mindset, the logical question is, how can s/he be the same character without that alien mindset?
Which led me to an answer that's not really relevent to that discussion, which is ( that they're actually human to begin with. )
current mood: thoughtful
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Friday, November 13th, 2009
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11:46 am - Girls Don't Get It
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As many on my f'list have been talking about, there were some disappointing things in SPN last night, including a glaring one along gender lines. It actually relates to my last post about the exhibit I saw on scenes from American life. I mentioned that I learned that women's shallow attraction to material things was a popular subject in the nineteenth century, shown in different ways in the pictures I saw. One picture, for instance, showed an "image peddler" showing his wares to a family. The women admired a bowl full of plaster fruit (decorative fluff) while the man looked at a bust of George Washington (serious history!).
( One might think we hadn't come far since then to judge by SPN last night...spoilers within for The Real Ghostbusters. )
current mood:  disappointed
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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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10:14 pm - The Met and Fanart
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I feel like I haven't been on lj for years. I have been checking in, but I can off the top of my head think of many posts that I read, wanted to comment on, but didn't get a chance to at the time and they are now lost forever.
One cool thing that I did instead of lj was going to a few exhibits at the Met--one was on paintings called American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and the other, which sort of makes a theme, was looking at the photographs of Robert Frank from The Americans. ( They were both really cool-some big images inside. )
current mood: calm
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Friday, October 16th, 2009
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2:12 pm - Dicks With Wings
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Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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2:39 pm - Bat-rant probably of interest to the very few
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There's not that many things comics can do to piss me off. Okay, maybe there's plenty, but I'm usually pretty forgiving and try to see the comics writer's pov about why they did things or put a good spin on it. There is, however, one thing that is a personal peeve that makes it unforgivable in my book. ( Spoilers for Batgirl #3 )
In short, stop it.
current mood:  enraged
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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
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5:23 pm - Peggy and Duck and Don and Pete
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I've never talked about Mad Men here but I've been getting into this big discussion about this week's ep and just how much of a jerk Don was with Peggy (answer: a big one!). I wrote this response about the contrasting scenes between Don/Peggy and Duck/Peggy, and figured I'd put it up here if anyone who watches the show is interested.
( Spoilers for Seven Twenty-Three )
current mood:  enthralled
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Thursday, September 17th, 2009
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9:05 pm - Salieri-ish thoughts
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I was talking to somebody today about a certain kind of story. We had totally different reactions to it, and it made me realize that it probably said something about how I felt about life or something?
( No spoilers for anything, really. )
current mood: thoughtful
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Sunday, September 13th, 2009
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3:07 pm - Bats in Mourning
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There was another Dick/Tim intense discussion in the Batbooks last week, and I continue to like the way they're dealing with Bruce's death in the Bat-family, with Tim being the one member not coping. But it got me thinking about how the writers now seem to really be ready to focus the family around mourning--and understand that death is not just death itself but all loss and change and how it’s dealt with. ( Lots more stuff inside. )
current mood: impressed
current music: Red Robin #4
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Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
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12:00 pm - In defense of school assigments
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So there was this article about a middle school teacher who, instead of assigning a book for the class to read, told every kid to pick a book they wanted. And this led to, among other things, a blog post that stood up against class-assigned reading. The post contained a lot of criticisms of school-assigned lit that I'd heard before, and some of them really annoy me. So I'm writing my defense of school assignments. Warning: my defense is probably about as long as some of those assignments! ( Am I the only person who liked books she was assigned in school? )
current mood: annoyed
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Thursday, August 27th, 2009
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8:31 pm - O Death
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Whoa. That meme thing apparently really exhausted me because I haven't posted since then. I feel like I have, but it's been mostly commenting. Also I ate so much food this weekend I sort of needed to curl up and digest it like a python. It was good food.
I went to a cool exhibit recently about Japanese mandalas and avatars. Also an exhibit on EXTREEEEME mammals. Biggest mammal ever, smallest ever (that we know of) and randomly crazy things. I actually did not know just how amazing bats are. I knew that they were very old, evolutionarily speaking, but they make up a huge percentage of total mammal species. (And some are dying out in the current possibly sixth great extinction).
There are no flying marsupials, btw. They think maybe because they all have to have powerful arms at birth to crawl to their milk source. Bats are the only flying mammal.
So there's my fun fact for the day.
In something more fandom-related, I've been thinking today about one of my favorite things about the modern age. I watched a preview for Supernatural's new season and naturally my first thought was--who is that who's singing that cool version of O Death in that preview? Since I live in 2009, my question was asked right there in the comments. The first answer was false, sending people to iTunes to try out a version of the song that was not right. A second google search found somebody who had uploaded the audio of the preview. And now, days after it went up, the CW has apparently put up a download link to the song they used with the currect singer. It's Jen Titius, btw.
I can remember so many times when I was a kid going crazy wishing I could have things like that. I've always been a big movie soundtrack person, but I've really liked the way in recent years TV shows have started coming out with soundtracks--HBO's particularly good at this. But this is like the Internet at its best. There's a commercial, CW realizes people are clamoring for the song, and they can give it to them so they do. I feel like if I went back in time that would be one of the things it would be hard to get used to again--that and not being able to look up information from where I'm sitting.
Sometimes it's good to appreciate the technology you have now.
current mood: satisfied
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Sunday, August 9th, 2009
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7:35 pm - Top Five Meme Answers
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Friday, August 7th, 2009
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3:14 pm - This meme looks fun
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From jlh though apparently it's making the rounds:
Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! Some people have come up with some creative ones. And I will answer them all in a new post.
Because I am sure you are all dying to know! Or more like I am dying to know because I have no clue what you will ask. I can't promise I won't dither about them all endlessly, though.
current mood:  curious
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
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10:49 am - Demonic Book rec!
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Somebody on my f'list today, when I mentioned that she hadn't known that Sarah Rees Brennan's book had been released. And it has been! And I have read it! And more people should know about it!
Many of you are probably already familiar with Sarah's work in fanfiction and the things that made her fic great? Are totally on display here. ( More on The Demon's Lexicon within--maybe some mild spoilers but trying not to spoil! )
In summary: the book is a lot more fun than what I just wrote about it. Check it out!
current mood: impressed
current music: Demon's Lexicon
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Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
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8:29 pm - How the other size dates...
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Wow--it feels like I just posted here but it was a while ago. There was just a lot of discussion on the Geek Shame post that was great.
Speaking of shame, I was thinking of that post last night when I somehow ended up watching the premiere of that show More to Love. If you don't know, MTL is The Bachelor, where a bunch of women compete for the love of a single guy, only this time with bigger women and a bigger man. Get it? The "More To Love" is a reference to weight. ( Unfortunately almost everything in the show was a reference to weight. )
current mood: sad
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Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
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12:59 pm - Fandom Shame
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Regularly on F!S somebody posts a secret about how they've made it out of fandom and discovered that elusive "real life" by walking out their front door into the sunshine and it's awesome. And even though they denied it before, now they can admit that their time spent in fandom always really was a pathetic way of hiding from real life. Now that they don't care about fandom anymore (phew!) they can post that .jpeg to tell other people about it. It's almost as if you're not truly not a nerd anymore if you don't make it clear to other nerds that you find them pitiable now.
( And it makes me wonder, do other hobbies have this much shame involved? )
current mood:  embarrassed
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Friday, July 10th, 2009
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11:01 am - On the appeal of bad boys and girls
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A discussion I was reading brought up the question: "Is having a character you can relate to/identify with/root for necessary to your enjoyment of a show?" in the context of some viewers saying that they no longer enjoyed Weeds because there were no longer any likable characters and they could no longer root for Nancy. Other people listed shows that they watched where they never felt like they identified with anyone--The Sopranos, for instance--and didn't want to, but still loved the show. One person said they felt it was a particularly American thing to base enjoyment of a show on the show fitting into their own moral beliefs. I'm not sure if that's true or not. It's probably more a sign of a particular personality than a nationality.
There are probably more shows on now than ever before with explicitly "bad" characters. One would think these shows required an audience who liked characters who didn’t share their morality, but they seem to also attract a large number of people who think the characters do share their morality until they do something really bad and the illusion is broken (and the writers may be accused of making the character rape the dog/cross the moral event horizon).
More concrete examples within. ( Probably spoilers inside for Seinfeld, Weeds, Dexter...Hopefully you don't have to follow the shows to follow the post. )
Short version: do you prefer characters you can stand behind as good, even if you have to overlook some of their behavior to think of them that way? Are there certain characters you've liked where this worked and other characters where it didn't work? And if so, why do you think?
current mood: thoughtful
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Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
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4:29 pm - Damian Wayne again--sorry!
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Okay, so B&R #2 came out and I liked plenty in it, but I was trying to explain to somebody the one wrong note that constantly pulls me out of the story in this series. Last issue Alfred was randomly talking about how Damian had inherited his father's courage and desire to do right; this week Alfred explains that Damian came to Gotham because his brief moments of contact with Bruce showed him a better, nobler way to live one's life. ( This continues to bug me. )
current mood: discontent
current music: Batman & Robin #2
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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
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11:27 pm - On warnings
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Having just read a bunch of posts on warnings in fics that didn't actually cover my own feelings about them? I thought I would share them!
A lot of the discussion has centered around triggers, which I think is important, but even as someone who doesn't think of herself as really having any triggers, warnings are still important to me. ( Just as they are in non-fanfic )
current mood: indifferent
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anxious
exhausted