Tenured Fangirl -- the fullmetal analyst

A comment on grammar and Suede

2008-07-24T01:26:47Z

It is really creepy when people refer to themselves in the third person, especially when they use a nickname.

Mamma Mia!

2008-07-20T11:11:09Z

Well, I loved the music. I enjoyed the cast. I sometimes enjoyed the direction. And I hated the story. At the beginning of the movie I started to worry that it was going to be about two sets of three silly women, but thankfully the bridesmaids fell away, and it ended up being about three silly women, three gorgeous middle-aged men, and one confused bride. My favorite aspect of the movie was actually the Greek chorus, and my favorite number was "The Dancing Queen" as it turned into a joyful revival of The Bacchae. Other than that, it was just too frothy for me. No substance. Yeah, I know. It's vain to ask for substance from a musical based on ABBA songs.

The painful pause

2008-07-16T23:24:33Z

Have you noticed that reality shows have gone to a practice I call the "painful pause"? Some unfortunate person is waiting anxiously for an expert verdict. The expert begins the sentence, "I would list your house at...", "the contestant going home this week will be ...", and then cut to closeups of the anxious party for a good ten seconds before the expert is permitted to finish his or her sentence and make the anxious supplicant wonderfully happy or desperately unhappy. That artificially drawn out pause is starting to get annoying, especially on HGTV.

Some manga aren't for old people

2008-07-16T23:05:16Z

I'm in the middle of Samurai Deeper Kyo #29, and it's a great issue, with some major events, but I'm struggling to read it. Old people like me who need bifocals have a really hard time with the tiny print used for speech balloons. More commentary on the plot later, once I've managed to finish reading it with my glasses off and the book up to my nose.

Poker in the multiverse

2008-07-13T02:06:41Z

Every once in a while you run into a fic of such joy, it must be recommended. Such a one is sam_storyteller's The Royal Society. No matter what your fandom, you will love this fic.

Sick and annoyed

2008-07-03T15:08:38Z

I have a sinus infection, complete with nausea, and a business trip to Denver coming up (flight at 6 am Sunday). I have basically two days to feel better.

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

2008-06-28T01:42:47Z

Okay, there are twenty minutes to go, and I am freaked out so far beyond what is reasonable for my age and occupation.

Doctor Who meme

2008-06-26T16:53:39Z

Via nebroadwe, When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your LJ.

As much as I like classic Who, I have to go with:

"People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect. But actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff."

Because that timey-wimey stuff gives me so much trouble.

Fan fic writing peeves

2008-06-18T17:57:04Z

Perhaps it's the writing teacher coming out in me, but I'm finding some stylistic errors in writing are really starting to annoy me, even in otherwise well-written stories.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Don't become addicted to the thesaurus. Don't use a fancy word in your writing if you wouldn't use it in your speech, and you're not sure if it means what you're using it to mean.
Spell check won't recognize when you use the wrong word -- if u wont too right well, no witch word best fits you're usage.
Know how to punctuate speech, especially when one character is addressing another: "Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more." Pay attention to your commas.
Know your apostrophes. Don't use apostrophe's for plural noun's or verb tense's. That's wrong, and it's irritating. Only use apostrophes for possessives (except for its, their and your) and contractions.
Speaking of verb tenses, used properly, a verb tense signals the relationship of an action to time. In English time is signaled by the use of the auxiliary verb be or have with a verb participle. A phrase like "he was sat" just doesn't work in English.
Proofread carefully to make sure all your words are there. It's not unusual read a fic in which a preposition or other little word like that never made it the page.

Other writing problems are a function of forgetting to visualize the characters in the setting. Suppose you're working with a character in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, and he has lost an arm or an eye by that point in the story. The writer needs to keep track of how many eyes and arms the character has, not having Kurogane look soulfully into Fai's eyes and put his arms around him, if at that point Kurogane only has one arm and Fai only has one eye. (CLAMP characters do tend to lose anatomy along the way, don't they?) Or perhaps another set of characters have gone camping. The emo boy ought to be having his nightmare in a sleeping bag, not sheets and blankets.

Here I am at 45

2008-06-14T13:57:09Z

Well, today's my birthday. It's funny how the multiples of 5 always feel like such milestones. I'm sitting here at 45 feeling a sort of anticipatory tension, as though I'm waiting for something I know is imminent but I don't know what it is. My plans for today were mundane--doing laundry, that sort of thing--but now that the day is here, I don't want to. I want to do something different and special, but I don't know what. There isn't really anything going on locally to do.

The 8th Doctor

2008-06-02T01:48:11Z

I've been decluttering lately, and in the process, I found and culled my collection of home-recorded videotapes. Among the tapes I found was the Doctor Who movie from 1996 starring Paul McGann. I just watched it, and given my recent obsession with the Russell T. Davies era, I thought I'd comment.

The movie opens with the 7th doctor, played by Sylvester McCoy, getting shot in San Francisco, an unwitting victim of a gang war. He is taken to a hospital where his x-rays and his heart rate befuddle the responding physicians, who call in cardiologist Dr. Grace Holloway. She takes him into surgery, only to kill him by blundering through his inhuman anatomy. He wakes up in the morgue in the body of Paul McGann.

The 7th doctor had been transporting the remains of the Master back to Gallifrey, but the Tardis crashed. The Master's undead state permits him to escape and take over the body of an EMT played by Eric Roberts. He then plots to transfer himself into the Doctor, obtaining his remaining incarnations (the Master having used up his own). He intends to do this with the help of the Chinese-American teen, getting the boy to open the Eye of Harmony within the Tardis (which for some reason unexplained requires a human eye to look into it). The opening of the Eye resets the future of Earth to stop with the turn of the millennium -- at midnight New Year's Eve 1999.

So some odd elements. The Tardis has been given far more decor than previously seen or seen since, looking rather like a gentleman's library. The doctor is mentioned as being half-human on his mother's side, something I don't thing was ever mentioned before or since.

Another interesting element -- Grace as the doctor's companion for the episode. Like Martha, she is a confident, competent doctor, but she is a full-fledged cardiologist, not a medical student. She is also kissed by the Doctor three times.

A final odd element that was really quite jarring -- this doctor exploited his time knowledge, randomly giving very specific advice to people he comes across.

More later as I process the film more. Perhaps I'll watch it again.

Geriatric adventures

2008-05-24T00:35:12Z

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this afternoon, and while it was a rollicking adventure, I hope they don't make any more. It was nostalgia upon nostalgia. Meta-nostalgia in fact, given that the series was nostalgic to begin with. But even so, only Karen Allen's character returned from earlier films, although Denholm Elliott's character was present as a statue, and Sean Connery's Henry Jones Sr. was present in a photograph. Guess the eternal life granted by the Holy Grail was theological rather than physical after all. I'd have liked to have seen John Rhys-Davies as Sallah again. But it all seemed frankly old in too many ways, from the actors to the story. You knew there'd be a point at which characters would be covered by some gross creepy-crawlies (very very creepy and effective); it was only a question of what skin-crawling phobia they'd pick this time around. (I'll admit that I did shut my eyes very firmly during one scene, which makes me shudder even thinking of it.)

Shia LaBeouf is pretty and all "teen idol" in a Richie Cunningham dressed as Arthur Fonzarelli sort of way, but without any other young folks in the cast once the scene shifts to Peru, he seems somehow misplaced. By the time the main cast end up at the temple his purpose seems to give a hand to Karen Allen or John Hurt lest they fall over while tramping up and down the stairs.

Cate Blanchett seemed to be having fun as a Soviet dominatrix. That gray jumpsuit made it clear just how slender she is, and it left me feeling more than a bit envious. I used to be slim once upon a time decades ago when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on my first date.

I didn't mean to be writing such a negative review; I just find myself feeling a bit discontented over the film, feeling as though it didn't take me anywhere new. Even the premise was a hearkening back to my '70s youth when I read Erich von Daniken. Yes, it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours, but it didn't have anything more than that to give, just half-reconstructed nostalgia for a time when nostalgia seemed to mean something.

Memage

2008-04-25T14:59:47Z

What type of Fae are you?

Study to be a ninja at your local community college!

2008-04-22T12:55:52Z

Any anime fan who's ever had anything to do with college requirements and/ or teaching will love this one.

http://insidehighered.com/views/blogs/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/the_pre_ninja_program

Old, fat and frumpy

2008-04-18T22:36:20Z

I'm feeling rather low this weekend. It has been a hard week on the job, and I have no life to come home to, so I'm feeling pretty down. I'm tired of meeting after meeting. Tomorrow I'll go see The Forbidden Kingdom. I've been collecting variations on the Monkey King, so I'm looking forward to it. I may even try to do some shopping to find something just a little bit less frumpy than what I've been wearing.

The Shinigami Professor

2008-04-11T21:59:01Z

I'm not sure what it says about me that my grad students give me Ryuk figures and plushies.

(Am I that scary?)

Yay for the Appalachian supermodel!

2008-04-05T17:06:03Z

I'm not completely sure I want to admit to watching Bravo's Make Me a Supermodel, but having watched it, I do want to comment on the winner Holly. I'm really glad the girl from far southwest Virginia won, in spite of her "regional accent". For one thing, she's incredibly beautiful, clearly the most beautiful on the show. For another, she treated modeling like a profession that she was studying and preparing for. Most of the other contestants, especially the men, seemed as though someone had told them "You're so gorgeous. You should be a model," and so they were doing the show out of a sense of ego. Holly, in contrast, had clearly studied the fashion industry, knew who the major players were, knew what kind of poses were being looked for, and knew that she wanted modeling as a career, not just as affirmation of her beauty. And that showed up in just how much she wanted it. One of the best things about her was the way she would fangirl over specific people in the industry, and the others would be clueless over who that beautiful model in that room happened to be. So, Holly? Good for you! You've made southwest Virginia proud!

Rather insane theoretical idea

2008-03-30T14:51:38Z

squee in relation to jouissance as described in French theory (Barthes, Kristeva)

And she's who I wanted to be when I was 14!

2008-03-27T17:46:13Z

When I was 14, I chose her as my role model. Guess I succeeded!

Which Classic Female Literary Character Are you?

You're Elizabeth Bennett of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen!
Take this quiz!

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Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2007

2008-03-27T02:07:09Z

as collected and reported by the Intellectual Property caucus of the Conference on College Composition and Communication can be found at http://ccccip.org/files/TopIP2007Collection.pdf.

Yay!

2008-03-15T15:36:02Z

Two good things for today:

1. I've lost 11 pounds! I need to lose quite a bit more, but it's really a good feeling to see my weight headed down. That orthopedic surgery I had last May has really made a difference in terms of my mobility, and that's a big part of the weight loss.

2. My electrical work is done, including my whirlpool bath. I actually had the bathtub installed a couple of years ago, but I'd never gotten around to hooking up the electricity so that the jets work, and now it's done. I also had the electrician install two light fixtures, a ceiling fan and a wired-in smoke detector. So that finishes one project that has been on my mind for quite a while.

Fair Use and amateur video online

2008-03-02T21:26:40Z

I need to write a short article about the report Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi of the Center for Social Media at American University, but I'm having trouble getting started. So in the spirit of social media, I'll use my lj as a way to get started.

The report describes a study of online videos posted to Youtube and other places with regard to their use of copyrighted materials and the extent to which such videos' use of copyrighted material could be considered under the Fair Use clause of copyright law. Aufderheide and Jaszi claim that in spite of the inclination of copyright holders to ask for a wide range of videos using copyrighted material to be removed from such sites, especially under the DMCA, many videos fall under Fair Use, even if they quote extensively from copyrighted material, either because they involve parody, critique or are sufficiently transformative.

Aufderheide and Jaszi identify nine categories of use of copyrighted material in amateur video that may, in a given instance, be defensible as fair use:

satire and parody
negative or critical commentary
positive commentary
quoting for discussion
illustration or example
incidental use
video diaries
archiving
pastiche/collage

They collect examples of each category and link their top five for each category at the website. They distinguish between videos with no copyrighted content, videos with no apparent transformative content (what they call "DVR to the world" and videos with transformed content. It seems to me that fansubs would fall in a gray area between the latter, depending on whether we consider the addition of subtitles to be sufficiently transformative. I think a case could be made for fansubs of an anime unlikely to be subbed, but not for something that has been or is likely to be licensed. Anime music videos would seem to fall in either the positive commentary or the pastiche/collage categories.

One of their arguments is that amateur video producers don't know what is covered by fair use, and that media producers deliberately provide misinformation on the subject, treating any use of copyrighted material as an infringement: "Thus, a significant set of creative practices is potentially both legal and at risk of curtailment by currently discussed ways to control online piracy and theft of copyrighted works" (1).

Larger issues extend beyond video to other practices that use copyrighted material, such as fan fiction and icon-making. Another issue is that even though amateur video makers see no profit, they post their videos to profit-making sites hosted by commercial providers.

An important quote: "Online video making is part of a much larger process in which the people formerly known as audiences of mass media or consumers of popular culture are asserting themselves as participants in culture-making" (5).

Edited to add more ideas

A concert I'd like to go to

2008-02-22T21:27:00Z

It looks like Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will be performing together in Roanoke on June 2. I'm a big fan of Alison Krauss, and that's a pair I'd love to see in concert. Now, to figure who to talk into going with me. None of my friends are really into her music, and the likelihood of me having a date is slim.

Top two are Chii and Yuuko?

2008-02-17T14:49:56Z

Who is your inner CLAMP character?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Chii

According to results, you are most like Chii from Chobits. Innocent, adorable and fresh, you love learning new things and exploring the world, even though it might get you in to trouble from time to time. You are happy in your own little world, and you feel best when you are able to show those around you how much you care. Just remember to "recharge" yourself from time to time and you'll be just fine.

Chii

79%

Yuuko

71%

Kamui

63%

Watanuki

58%

Seishirou

58%

Kurogane

58%

Kero-chan

54%

Miyuki-chan

54%

Sakura

54%

Fai

46%

Hokuto

46%

Obsessive compulsive

2008-02-10T23:49:50Z

Ever since I had a flat tire in Kentucky this past Thanksgiving, I've developed an obsessive compulsive anxiety over my tires. I often find myself checking them. This evening after running over some glass near the mall, I became even more panicky. But I'm home now, and the front tire that looked low isn't flat. So I guess I'm okay, but it's funny the things a person can obsess over.

Oh, BTW, the reason I haven't been posting much is that I've been snowed under at work. I'm just plain exhausted.