Off the prompt "cuddles."

I have no compulsion to be prosaic and coherent about it. Have a chat log.

( Read more... )

In other news, the Bel in my head, the one who was foolish enough to marry Miles, has gotten stuck explaining to Nikki that one-night-stand with Ivan and differing sexual mores of Barrayar and Beta whilst avoiding Ekaterin's hairy eyeball. To my amusement and Miles's, the point at which Bel is like, "Okay, we're wandering out of kid-appropriate territory" is regarding, um, motivations. Miles is like, "huh?" and Bel snaps back, "Would you explain to a kid about your black moods?" Miles is sort of shocked to find that anyone else ever has black moods. Ekaterin and Nikki are mostly just confused. Somehow (I'm thinking Nikki) Ivan hears just enough about this conversation to confront Bel about "wait, just what kind of self-flagellation was I functioning as for you?" And then Bel facepalms a lot.

happydork wrote an interesting entry examining why her own writing didn't reflect the diversity of characters she wants to read about. I thought both the entry and the conversation it sparked were fascinating and I encourage you to go look at it and post your own thoughts because I want to see what more people think!

I look back at the last dozen stories I've written and find I have a similar problem with focusing on the love lives of white dudes despite my broader interests. I think for me the socialized programming to accept the white dude perspective as normative in fiction is something I have to think about to overcome even though my intellectual beliefs concern greater representation of a variety of perspectives in fiction, both fan and media, to the end of normalizing being a not-white/not-dude/not-assorted-currently-normative-states.

Stuff other than Final Cut and Quicktime I use in the course of vidding on my mac (and forget the names of between vids sometimes)

(most of these do way more than I do with it, yay multitools)

--MacTheRipper, for directly-off-the-dvd-minus-DRM rips (as opposed to transcodes)
--MPEGStreamClip--multipurpose, the two big things I do with it are fix broken timecode on DVD rip files (this is another form of DRM) and switch containers on final files for the interwebs (the free/trial DivX codec I use in Quicktime for my interwebs encodes pops out a .divx file, but I prefer to put that data in a .avi container, because that's like, fandom standard)
--xACT--converts .flac files to .aiffs or .wavs, which are more Final Cut friendly

And then of course codec packs so Quicktime and therefore Final Cut will read .avi episode files the internet provides (and if I didn't have that particular neead I would just watch everything in VLC):
--Perian (if you use mac's ichat videochat Perian interferes with it, but other than that is brilliant)
--DivX for making fandom-friendly interwebs final vid files (from Quicktime, because for some reason it doesn't play nice directly with Final Cut, even though in theory Final Cut is built on and has all the capabilities of Quicktime)

I am probably forgetting some things I use. There's something I don't need every time, like FFMpegX was the app we used to get a semi-useable file out of a very old realmedia file for remaster last year (and echan, if MpegStreamClip doesn't do what you want to your .flvs, you might try FFMpegX).

So this is, in part, the entry I didn't write all summer because it was stressing me the hell out. Then Vid Review happened this year and amazingly it was much less stressful than in previous years, so I'm finding my words.

Vid Review was a lot better than in previous years. The moderation was extremely important in that. Astolat and Flo were solid, organized, thoughtful moderators. I liked the set-up this year--they grouped vids into blocks of half a dozen or so, Character Studies (viewable with and without context), Relationship vids, Broader Themes, Comedy, and Lonely Hearts (didn't fit comfortably in other categories). They encouraged the audience to make connections between vids in categories and between categories and to comment on more than one vid at a time. So we stayed on time and finished around 11:55, without skipping over any vids, and--I think this is important, but to be fair, my vid was categorized in Comedy--grouping the comedy vids together prevented the usual savaging of comedy vids.

You see, Premieres is typically drama/angst-filled and beforehand everyone is excited that someone might have made a comedy to break up the tearfest and then afterward at Vid Review--in previous years--comedy vids got fairly uniformly shredded, and then people wondered why hardly anyone submitted comedy vids to Premieres. Gee, it might have been because Vid Review told people that comedy vids were unwelcome and only drama vids were valid Premieres vids.

THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN THIS YEAR. Like, no one even uttered the phrase "should have made the joke and got out." You do not understand how happy this makes me. That's a phrase that functions as a dismissal, because it closes the topic with supposed general wisdom instead of opening the topic, such as by saying what part of the joke was worth keeping and what part dragged, which is something people could actually talk about and might not agree on even if they did all think it could be shorter. And the fact that that phrase--and other old chestnuts--have been repeated year to year just means that they're soaked in context that new members don't get. That's why I think comments like "should have made the joke and got out" need to be unpacked and formed in specific for the vid in question rather than quoted as a general rule--because when quoted as general rules they function to alienate and dismiss vids that don't meet an invisible standard that is not acknowledged to exist.

And can I get a BOOYAH let me repeat THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN THIS YEAR.

There are a few people--and it seems to me to be a specific lineage of vidding geneaology--that prefer to speak in Vid Review only when they have something negative about a vid. Someone behind me, when told I was the vidder of one of the vids of current category, leaned forward to say that she had nothing to say about my vid, and she meant it as a compliment. This is an attitude I don't understand and that bothers me about Vid Review--and in previous years it was much more pervasive, in part because it seemed to be an attitude held by a moderator. I don't get it. I don't get why just because you CAN say negative things in Vid Review, you want to ONLY say negative things in Vid Review. It makes it sound like you don't like anything, because nobody can hear your silences about things you liked, or even things you didn't like or dislike but found intellectually interesting. I like it when Vid Review has commentary on what worked as well as what didn't, on what made people think and wonder. I don't think it needs to be balanced in the sense of 'be nice to every vid whether it deserves it or not,' I mean, 'why can't we be talking about the good that exists as well as the bad? I mean, we like vids, right?'

There were a couple of comments this year that made me wince a little, but overall, I feel like people did talk about what the liked as well as what they disliked, that the moderating emphasis on connections and comparisons got people thinking and talking in ways that were more fruitful, that opened things up instead of shutting things down.

So what I have determined is that by and large I don't want to read White Collar gen because some vast proportion of it is whumping. Kidnapped, beaten, drugged, forced to do crime, rescued non-romantically. Whumping. And I try to steer clear of those even when it's a romantic rescue, because the healing power of sex only occasionally does it for me and those versions frequently also have rape. I hate to say this, but oh fandom, why so predictable? I mean, sure, even the show used the formula, to which I say, show! stop reading so much fanfic! Or at least branch out a little.

I might be interested in reading gen for case fic, if someone were doing research or using an area of their expertise to write an interesting case that got solved without kidnappings and beatings, but mostly gen uses cases as backdrops for kidnappings and beatings, not as interesting subjects in their own right.

Whereas OT3 fanfiction a big gooey marshmallow land, and sure, there's some kidnappings and beatings but it's easier to skip past them and find stories where their biggest obstacle is failure to communicate their feelings adequately. I mean, I wrote gen with case pastede on yay, but I wrote gen in which I stole the entire plot from OT3 fanfiction, which I would like you to know takes talent and brain contortions.

(Has anyone been writing solid case fic sans whumping? I'll take recs.)

Of bunnies I'm currently fielding, Kryptonian Neal is very awake in my head, and that story is so very much an OT3 story that it has interstellar scale failure to communicate their feelings adequately. I feel certain there's actual plot going on in the background but no one wants to 'fess up and tell me what it is.

Also there's the one where Neal's entire life is high drama, not just the parts where he swallows handcuff keys. Shockingly I think this one may be the deeply slashy gen story of how Neal wants Peter to trust him and doesn't even try to use sex to accomplish that end.

It is also kind of hilarious how different my brain's fic space and vid space are in this fandom. It's like all my fic bunnies are totally my id writhing around on the floor (my id just happens to be all about the relationship drama and not about the kidnappings and beatings) and my vid bunnies are intellectual engagement (yes, even Pisco Bandito).

So we were reading Ebert's review of The Last Airbender, about how it's unrelenting bad, like, all aspects of it are bad, cinematographically speaking, and there's a line in the review about "The laws of chance suggest something should have gone right. Not here." It made me start wondering if someone had sabotaged the thing. And I was thinking, maybe the editor. Because you can sabotage a fucking lot in post. You can make the plot meanderingly arcless and awful with editing. You can make the actors look shitty by choosing mediocre to awful takes. You can fuck the effects. You can fuck the 3D. You can fuck a lot as the editor.

So we imdb'd and the editor of The Last Airbender is... the editor who did Spaceballs, Species, The Abyss, Titanic ETA: WHICH WON THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR EDITING /ETA, Terminator 2, King Arthur, and before he was master editor he got started through visual effects work, on Empire Strikes Back, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET (which I don't know if you remember this, but those effects were awesome shit at the time).

This guy knows how to edit and knows how to work with special effect heavy stuff. So yeah. This is my theory. The Last Airbender was deliberately sabotaged by its editor, Conrad Buff. Possibly by just by letting M. Night Shyamalan have whatever he asked for.

The Epistles of @mishacollins by jmtorres. Also on AO3.

This story is RPF/Supernatural as told via Misha Collins's twitter. It contains 37 tweets, 3,442 characters, bizarre pairings, dead animals, tentacles, pegging, twitter users both real and imagined used herein in an entirely fictional fashion, and the angelphone.

( Read more... )

So in the long saga of Supernatural women who die of either fire or being stabbed in the womb, we've caught a couple of exceptions in the season two finale two-parter, All Hell Breaks Loose. The lesbian is not stabbed or set on fire! She is hanged from the neck until dead. Ava is also not stabbed or set on fire! Jake snaps her neck. Lots of necks for girls in this episode.

On the other hand, there is one person in here who dies of stabbing. That would be Sam. And because he lacks a womb, he has to be taken from behind.

niqaeli wrote an entry about the blood, sweat and tears we put into the vid Long Spear. I helped.

(Long Spear was the Trek vid. Yeah.)

I wish people didn't feel like everything needed a pairing label. Also, just because you're slashing them in your own head, it doesn't necessarily come out that way in fic: Cas being a stalker is kind of canon, it's not necessarily a pairing thing. I say this because I am getting sort of frustrated at reading things that are supposedly a particular pairing and then nothing pairing-like happens. I've started getting excited at seeing NC-17 in the labels not because I'm particularly interested in reading about them having sex but because it means I can fairly reliably expect them to be having an actual relationship and not just burgers. Not that I'm not up for cute burger-eating fluff, but it's gen and it's misleading to claim it's not.

*sigh*

That... was disappointing.

( finale spoilers )

Dear fandom,

Really?

Affection and disappointment,
Juls



---

Sigh. So the vid I'm working on is going to piss some people off, if that was any indication. This doesn't deter me from making the vid; it does sort of make me want to fashion an insulting warning to pin to it ("Do not watch if you think Character X hung to the moon are are incapable of hearing about zir faults"?).

I went ego-deliciousing last night and found someone had written a blog entry about fan works as transformative, listing my Dollhouse vid She Walks as feminist critique and putting me in the company of a couple of vidders whose work I love and admire. So, you know, good things! Blushy good things!

By the way: if you left me a comment on She Walks and I never answered it, I apologize. I looked at that entry and realized I never answered any of the comments. I've never been in a place where I was at peace enough with that vid to converse about it much even to the extent of thanking people for feedback. I know it's like, five months later? But thank you.

I am currently trying to beat down the urge to make a second Dollhouse vid; I don't know that I have enough anger left in me. I do have backburnered a different, more hopeful vid that was going to be the spiritual successor of She Walks without being a Dollhouse vid at all; though "more hopeful" is sort of relative, since the source is all filmic dystopias and is meant to represent modern American society. But it's to be a vid about that moment when you get out. So maybe. I hope to finish that one someday.

But the Dollhouse vid bunny that's eating my brain now is actually threatening to become a full-on Jossverse critique, evil dead lesbians and crazy broken supergirls with protective father-figures and all. The song I've bunnied on would make it pretty much a direct missive to Whedon, with the "I" and the "you" and the repeated question. My main complaint about this is damn it, this is not what I do, I refuse to be the vidder who tries to make vast sweeping statements about vast sweeping canons. I will not follow up History of Trek Fandom vid with History of Jossverse vid nor with History of Whoniverse vid nor with More Than A Century of History of Fans Asking This Question: Holmes and Watson, Doin' It or Not? vid. I have vid bunnies for all of these concepts. Goddamnit I have learned my lesson, I will not be that vidder.

The thing is, I don't know how to address some of the problems in Dollhouse without pointing out that they're repeating patterns in Whedon's work. Maybe no one will notice BECAUSE ALL THE ACTORS ARE THE SAME FOREVER AND EVER? Ahem. Not that I want to mock his casting choices either.

I want to make my points... more pointed. No more grand, sweeping vids, as much as they eat my brain. So the Sherlock Holmes vid will not be the history of everything, it will be about the cannibalization and reinterpretation of the source under female gaze WHICH IS NOT GRAND AND SWEEPING AT ALL I promise you.

*headdesk*

eta so apparently I will be feminist critique vidder for oh, the next six billion years. Jeez. The last time I tried to make a classic slash vid it turned into a classic slash fandom vid. Hello, my name is Juls, and I have a problem with meta.

Earlier today I very much wanted to completely quit my life here and go back to Cali and move in with ysobel and cook her grill cheese and curry and falafel every week. We could make dorky Merlin vids and I could find somewhere to work part-time and pay me crap to support my food habit, but I could stop worrying about the rent money and spend the rest of the day being her wife and writing fanfic that might be optimistic? Reading fanfic. And her library. Heh. Unfortunately I couldn't bring the children with me and through a bizarre quirk of bureaucracy I'm medically uninsurable if I don't complete another year at [current university] here and I do, actually, have a few commitments here that I can't walk out on. But isn't it a pretty fantasy?

I stopped off at Borders tonight to pick up my brother's birthday present and ended up taking home a pretty notebook, because while I found the Loki book, I've actually used all the pages up and the binding's coming undone. So. New year, new book. Paperchase makes a lot of pretty notebooks but I ended up picking not the one I thought was the prettiest but the one that made me happiest. It is very silly. It is covered in shiny flowers that look like they were drawn by a five-year-old and then preserved with tin foil. I just officially wrote the first words in it. They are I'M A FREE BIT, BABY, because that's how we're rolling this year.

(I, I do not know why blasting Bad Romance in my car cheers me up as much as it does. But at least part of it has to do with the radio edit version of the CD I have cracking me the hell up. You can't stop the signal, guys! She's a free bit! Whee.)

This entry will consist primarily of quoting people off my droll who made me laugh tonight. It's Follow... Tuesday? Sure! Why not?

thedeadparrot: I discovered after doing this one that apparently I am introducing each person I quote. Um, thedeadparrot! I have followed her for so long that I forget what awesome thing she did to attract me. It might have been FMA fic? I sort of went on a spree when I was reading FMA fic.

I believe that we should not be ashamed of writing fanfic. Yeah, I write romance. Yeah, I even write porn. Yeah, I did this as a teenage girl. And yeah, I sometimes daydream about characters. None of this should mean that my writing -- our writing -- is automatically worth less than that of some fanboy who daydreams about being Paul Atreides and about things blowing up and writes a script about his daydreams and then gets it turned into a movie. I am looking at you, James Cameron.

thefourthvine: I could quote all of every entry of hers, every single one of them make me laugh. She's been watching TOS for the first time and it is hilaaaaaarious. If you do not actively hate small children, ask to be on her Earthling filter, it is cuteness and awesomeness and wonderfulness and total quirkiness (they started calling him Earthling in the womb when they couldn't decide on a name, and I am still not sure they ever did decide on a name, because one of her worries was that they would just keep continuing to call him Earthling in perpetuity if they started then, and, online at least, they have). But most of the time, thefourthvine writes recs. Sometimes her recs go off on tangents. Here is one:

Benton Fraser has porn. I just want to repeat that, because I think it's a brilliant concept that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting: Benton Fraser has porn. Yes, this story is just as good as it sounds like it must be.

But there is a down side to it, and it is this: after reading it, I could not stop imagining the porn collections of other fannish favorites. Rodney McKay likely has roughly a terabyte of porn, but really only uses three short clips and one still photo. He's just completist. Jim Kirk (Reboot) also has the terabyte of porn, but he's actually working his way through it - he jerks off to something new every time. It's all hot if you look at it the right way, you know? Batman's porn does not bear contemplation and is certainly not something I would ever want to see, so I am pleased and comforted to know that it is hidden somewhere no one will ever find it, and also it is designed to self-destruct if anyone besides Batman touches it. Clark Kent likes the underwear catalogs. He's never been able to bring himself to get turned on by anything more explicit; he's always afraid his mother will walk in. (Lex Luthor's porn, it goes without saying, is his extensive Clark Kent memorabilia collection.) Methos's porn is called his memory. Jack Harkness's porn is called everything in the world, because everything is hot. How can you put a plug in an outlet and not get turned on? And laundry! All those dirty clothes, shirts and pants and trousers all touching, writhing together: clearly the hottest thing ever.

dragonfly: I recently subscribed to her (? --my default assumption in fandom, though it occurs to me that in this case I don't actually know) because I am reading every White Collar fic under the sun, seriously, White Collar makes me happy like you wouldn't believe, every night I check del.icio.us to see if anyone has recced new White Collar fic, and, uh, I like hers. Yes. Also apparently we are both giant dorks who are trying to figure out where the hell Neal's radius is on googlemaps.

So Sunday I met with my writers' group and they were critiquing a chapter of Mom and my mystery book set in Arizona. The people around the table told me they wanted to know more about the Native Americans I had introduced. Could the main characters have more interaction with them? Were they going to show up later in the book? I said, uh, no, not really, but if they were really that interesting ... So we started talking about Chekhov's gun and how if you introduce a gun into a scene it needs to get used at some point. Likening my Native American characters to Chekhov's gun, I said, "So you're telling me if I introduce some Indians into the story, I have to shoot them."

Stunned looks followed by hoots of laughter all around. Er, that didn't come out right.

zvi is smart and opinionated and, I find, often leading serious discussions I find important and want to take part in. Also she started Ladies' Choice, an AO3 collection for stories in which women enjoy having sex and do not have shame about it. I could love her for this alone.

Helpful advice what I have learned from fanfiction: If I accidentally have sex with someone with whom I would, in actual point of fact, enjoy having an ongoing sexual or romantic relationship with, I should not hastily begin apologizing for the sex, calling it a mistake, or otherwise characterizing it negatively. Because if the other person had enjoyed having accidental sex with me and would have liked to intentionally have sex with me in the future, they certainly aren't going to say so after I declare that it was a terrible idea, having had sex with them.

And, uh, one more--I read this at about two o'clock in the morning so that totally means I read it tonight today. It might not have been on my droll, exactly? But I deeply wanted to share it with like five people immediately and none of them were online, so here we go. Homo Ex Machina by toft is Sherlock Holmes fic--apparently the 1984 version, which imdb informs me is the Jeremy Brett version, which I hear is very good; not having seen it, my brain is currently slotting in RDJ and Jude Law for all versions of Holmes and Watson. In any case! In this story, Holmes is anonymously notified that someone is writing and publishing smut about them. There's a manuscript and pages go everywhere and lines of lurid, purple description keep catching Watson's eye and he is dying of mortification because--because--oh my god, this is probably a story spoiler, but so is the quote I want to pull--because he wrote it. This is probably my favorite line of narrative in the whole piece:

What on earth could I say? Holmes, I accidentally published a pornographic novella in which you and I perform a number of illegal acts, and now I am being blackmailed into making it a serial?

Because oh my god accidentally yes he did. But the awesome of this story cannot be contained in any summary, because the reveals keep coming. Holmes is always six steps ahead of everyone, right? So you can be well-assured that Holmes has even better secrets. I deeply want to quote some of Holmes' dialogue from later in the story, but whoa story spoilers, and really, part of the deep, deep awesome of this story is every time you think you've turned the twist there's a bit more. I just have to say: OH HOLMES. (Yes, that is actaully very like OH DEAN. Who knew?)

jmtorres: I keep wondering if I could come off as just totally crazypants if I started writing about how Gaga's Bad Romance video is a lengthy discussion of heterosexuality as a meat market.

grey_bard: ( Not that crazy pants. )

ETA: Juls again. I also wanted to link to Neutra Face,a type-setting related parody of Lady Gaga's Poker Face. I found it hilarious myself, but at least one person I've shown it to has commented "That's so wrong," or "I didn't want to see that" which is a complaint I'd like to address. Why--because it features men affecting similar (female sexual) choreography to Lady Gaga? I think it's awesome because of that. I do want to see that, and I'm not even that into guys (I tend to like them pretty, when I like them at all). I want to see sexual expression being that fluid. That those guys had fun doing that--that's awesome.

Decide what this is about
Write a second verse yourself
~from Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

I would first like to say: I am really, actually shocked by how strong my feelings are about this episode. I, I don't even know.

I subscribe to the validity of multiple interpretations of a work. I think that this is the underpinning of most modern media fannish (largely female) interaction with our shows. I think it is foolish and irrelevant to tell someone they're interrogating the text wrong. I don't think there is a wrong way to interrogate the text, even if I disagree with your specific conclusions.

( spoilers to follow )

Are we still spoiler cutting for the reboot movie?

niqaeli and I went to see ST:Reboot for the, uh, seventh time. In addition to vid-related "covered in fangirls!" moments and our usual assorted fanwanks regarding Daddy's wink and sex on the bridge and how the f-bomb was clearly used, we, uh, developed a new theory.

( supernova my ass, also interstellar politics )

I am not anti-warning, I am merely bad at writing them.

Warnings I have issued in the past:

--Character undeath.
--Have I mentioned how I'm a bad person? (re: context of pairing.)
--My brain has wandered down twisty, ugly bits of stuff.
--Wow, so this is creeptastic fic here.
--Er. It's the apocalypse.
--I was challenged to write cuddlefic. Warnings for death.
--This fic is rated ELECTRICAL BANANA (quite rightly).
--Roy/*cough* fuckupedness. Post episode 25 (which is a warning within the fandom).

I cannot honestly promise I will be better or more specific in the future. I can say that in general, I do mark disturbing content when it disturbs me. Unfortunately I am ill-equipped to guess what else I should mark.

So you should probably assume I'm rather lax about warnings and comment to ask for specifics if I vague it up.

Star Trek linkspam III: the search for more money! Wow, I am not mixing my references at all. I haven't been keeping tabs open as religiously since ysobel saw the movie. I think this is most of the meaty stuff?

liviapenn writes about how Uhura's role expanded in the new movie, and Kirk, Spock, Bones and Uhura is the new OT4.

niqaeli did some compare and contrast on characters in Prime and Reboot.

butterfly has some meta and some fic recs. And more fic recs here. And even more.

In general I am not linking to fic at this point because of the sheer volume (other than mine mine you should go read mine), but I want to point out bravecows's The First Time, which is totally world-building exploration of race meta in fiction form.

beatrice_otter wrote about how the Vulcans will likely proceed, based on their culture.

niqaeli wrote about some non-obvious changes in reboot, such as Vulcan society and when Kirk as born.

seperis analyzed a lot of Reboot changes.

ysobel pokes at plotholes and timeline issues.

Discover Magazine posted a tangentially related Rules For Time Travelers.

catalysticat picspammed about Captain Pike and has made several posts about enlisted ranks in Starfleet.

DW comms: star_trek_flashfic, vulcanreforged
LJ comm: startrek_crack

zvi posts recs, Spock characterization spec. Also she wants to know how Uhura could have been more awesome, as she was already awesome. She has more fic recs. She's pissed at K/S fic that makes Uhura disappear.

coffeeandink has a list of reactions ranging from self-advertised shallow to deeper criticisms.

yahtzee63 has a talky Spock muse.

Journey to Drabble is a Star Trek Reboot Drabble Challenge.

kate dissected the movie score vs previous trek theme songs at a level waaay above my head.

Vids: (some of these I like a lot, some I consider to be conversation pieces)
--Closer v2, a remake of killabeez and tjonesy's TOS vid with Reboot footage
--Steady as She Goes, TOS vid for which I believe the premise is: the crew of the Enterprise will never have a successful relationship with anyone else, because they're all doing each other.
--Stuck to You, upbeat Kirk/Uhura/Spock OT3 vid.
--We Go Together, team vid for Reboot (works better at a metatextual level than a contextual level, in my opinion)
--Kobayashi Maru, about how Kirk and Spock are defined by so much death in Reboot

(Everyone knows why I say Part II: THE REVENGE, right? Everyone knows about Vulcan Love Slave Part II: THE REVENGE, right?)(PS: it's google-able.)

So it looks as if ysobel may have actually gone to see Star Trek: Reboot in the last day or so but hey I've been keeping like eighty tabs open in several windows to write this entry as soon as I had the spoons, so hey, more linkspam.

popculturezoo.com tries to figure out how much series canon this movie negated.

st_xi_kink has produced a lot of fic, as archived on delicious.

More LJ comms:
trekfics - says is for all iterations, banner is notably Reboot
trekanon - I don't actually understand this anon confession meme thing but hey there you go
kirk_mccoy - title "The Captain and the Doctor" confused me in a Whovian way for a minute there, but is actually re Kirk and McCoy, yes
trek_news - newsletter, may potentially be making me obsolete here
chekov_sulu - lieutenants and ensigns need love too?
newtrekslash - unabashedly all about the reboot
spock_uhura - another of those "TOS and new movie!" things, with lots of reboot pictures everywhere, gee I wonder what inspired you
startrek2009 - comm for talking about the new movie

sineala posts about more comms, links to my linkspam, causing internet-ending paradoxes

More DW comms:
startrek_reboot
chris_pine_daily
singularity

silviakundera posts vid and fic recs.

ethrosdemon has criticism of JJ Abrams re: his interview on Talk of the Nation.

taraljc posts 10 things everyone should know about Star trek (before trying to write pr0n based on the new movie), including which episodes and books to check out.

Relatedly, cofax7 posts remedial Trek for newbies.

darthmojo@wordpress talks about a lot of deleted scenes and script choices based on a Q&A with the screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

talitha78 made a vid called Poker Face.

ethrosdemon wants to know why we apply modern social norms to a story set centuries in the future.

apocalypsos spotted women in pants.

sparky77 has baby Chekov picspam.

sineala has telegram style squee.

grey_bard says, "I'm predisposed to like this movie because I liked original Trek and I universally hate Trek movies. Hold up, what?"

thedeadparrot found her love of classic K/S reinforced. She wrote about original flavor Spock.

Pro effects artist posted a combination of new and old Enterprise.

amireal fanwanks ST:ENT into/out of existence.

brokenbacktango found the IDIC.

ethrosdemon is amused at the summary of ST: Final Frontier.

bethos on a rewatching spree, in DS9.

ethrosdemon asks for ST links.

maryavatar has OMG OMG OMG for the movie.

theplaylist@blogspot's 9 Silly Things About Star Trek We Can't Help But Laugh At.

sineala was tempted by TOS episode DVDs.

sparky77 contemplates ST wingfic.

brokenbacktango informs us that Zachary Quinto will read you the novelization.

imadra_blue writes Sulu fic.

apocalypsos requests fic recs.

brokenbacktango found hilarious TAS clip.

quigonejinn liked the reboot, liked Vulcans and liiiiked Spock.

ann89103 fangirls and vents.

brokenbacktango with complaints on n00bs in the anon kink meme.

sfsignal asks if new ST movie will be good for science fiction in general.

kfmonkey@blogspot discusses revelatory vs transformative heroic arcs in hollywood scripts, Star Trek movie.

amireal would totally make out with Star Trek.

taraljc likes new Uhura, examines her role.

redscharlach is making mini icons.

sineala wrote Sulu/Chekov.

quigonejinn wrote Spock fic.

ellen_fremedon fanwanks the two Delta Vegas.

niqaeli has started rewatching TOS.

laurajv wrote fic about Spock and Sarek.

ingridmatthews likes the new pairing.

jmtorres wants to talk about specific references to TOS. LAZY-WEBBING FTW.

lizbee found Picard's scrapbook.

butterfly posts fic recs.

niqaeli talks about Kirk's special snowflake status.

niqaeli is rewatching TOS. If a science officer dies, is it still red-shirting?

niqaeli finds TOS Spock fascinatingly broken.

mecurtin has achieved star trekkin'.

ysobel (hi, love!) is totally not writing fic (and why not!). (Also in that entry: fanwank for making the macguffin more sensible.)

ysobel's first brush thoughts.

ysobel totally claimed to be half Vulcan as a child.

blueraccoon's exploding squee.

zvi is pissed about fic disappearing Uhura.

butterfly has a hotness deathmatch poll.

butterfly made a vid.

Wil Wheaton finds new movie spectacular.

Henry Jenkins was nearly a Klingon extra, part I and part II.

niqaeli points out the special of the stunned romulan on aisle 7 (broccoli test: pass with unexpected flying colors).

dayblaze wants slash recs.

niqaeli writes fic about Vulcan blood.

laurashapiro pissed off at 'bromance' rather than slash in mainstream media.

sarah was squeeful.

panthea has a comment re Kirk getting punched in the face.

niqaeli on obsessive tendencies.

niqaeli points to her delicious for ST fic finding.

io9 talks about a cut Shatner scene.

catalysticat wishes for more real space exploration, real military, real ethical, political, social, and religious issues.

abyssinia has a lot of problems with the new movie.

jooj has some links, especially re novels.

revolutionaryjo has fic recs.

seperis talks about the reboot, canonical AUS and how Trek and other shows have dealt with them in the past.

Wil Wheaton with embedded Onion video on how Trekkies bash new film as fun and watchable.

mecurtin, before having seen the movie, talked about the social and political milieu of the sixties vs now and Trek's relevance thereto.

Henry Jenkins with lots of interesting meta.

laurajv with 5 things you should know about (original flavor) Uhura and how awesome she is.

musesfool liked it! she even didn't hate Kirk!

zvi on dreamcasting women who didn't appear in this movie, in poll form.

Racialicious gives the movie a positive review despite some ridiculousness; thinks Uhura and Sulu did well in this version.

niqaeli has picspam of one of Karl Urban's previous roles. Prepare to giggle.

flourish understands where the K/S comes from now.

inarticulate is happy with Trek and with Uhura.

cesperanza questions casting a Korean as Sulu.

taraljc's star trek tag.

niqaeli is a bad person. She likes porn!.

niqaeli's love of space and science fiction and wanting it to be now.

butterfly's detailed list of adoration, re her third viewing.

minotaurs makes economic jokes out of the naming of Spock Prime.

niqaeli talks about Vulcan colonies and the nonexistence thereof.

niqaeli's early squee.



I WAS POTENTIALLY GOING TO POST MORE OF MY OWN REACTIONS BUT I HAVE TO GET OUT THE DOOR BY SIX TOMORROW MORNING TO CATCH A BUS SO I THINK I WILL SAVE MY ENERGY AND VID INSTEAD. Really, if I manage to get the vid done, vid should say every goddamn thing I want to say about this movie. Really.

I just went from being heart-warmed to being infuriated in three point one four seconds flat.

I watched this movie called Martian Child in which John Cusack plays a believably eccentric science fiction writer ("So instead of becoming a well-adjusted normal person, I became a sort of successful, deranged person. And I don't know which is better but it doesn't really matter because you don't get to choose," is one of the early lines, which is really so very true about being, well, any kind of fiction writer, I think). This writer adopts a kid who believes he's from Mars, and they have all sorts of touching life lessons about what it means to be human and how really, not going to float away, you are my son forever and ever.

It's sweet.

In the credits I saw it was based on a book by David Gerrold. I know David Gerrold's name, I recognize him as the guy who wrote that old Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles," I have a book on writing that he wrote that is full of the kind of that's so true of that line I quoted up there, like this method of expanding characterizations by imagining you're interviewing your characters, and this one time he didn't get much in the way of verbal response but his character did try to come over the table and knife him, which is certainly characterization information to explore. I haven't read as many of David Gerrold's novels as I'd like, but what I've seen of his work, I like. And I still do.

I wiki'd the movie to see what it had to say about the novel. It was, unshockingly, based partially on David Gerrold's real life experiences adopting a son. Here's the part that's pissing me the hell off:

David Gerrold is gay and out as gay and adopted a son as an out, gay man. There's two versions of his written story Martian Child: in the novelette, the protagonist's sexuality is not mentioned; in the novel, the protagonist is, like Gerrold, gay. In the movie? THEY STRIPPED THE GAY. They made the protagonist a widower, dead wife two years ago, plus a vague female love interest hanging around. They straightened him up! Polished the gay right off so they could make a fucking family-friendly flick.

FUCK YOU, HOLLYWOOD. FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.

I started designing the array Al's going to use to [end of series spoilers] in League of the Four-Fingered Alchemists story I'm writing, and I started noticing almost all the ordinary arrays in FMA have an even number of points--Al uses a six-pointed one pretty regularly; Roy's salamander array is based on a six-pointed star too, though with out the top and bottom points so it's actually four-pointed; the first array Al and Ed ever use is four-pointed... the only ones that are, say, five-pointed (and you'd think you'd see more pentacles, but no) are ah, [spoilery]. And I started getting into the geometry of the thing, and see, all the even-pointed arrays have symmetry along both horizontal and vertical axes--it's called Klein-four symmetry, and it also means that they all have 180 degree rotational symmetry. A five-pointed array, like the one Dante uses to [spoiler], or a seven-pointed array, like the one Ed modifies in [spoiler], will have other symmetries, but it won't have this Klein-four symmetry. I got into this whole theory about bound and unbound arrays and how even-pointed arrays write equivalent trade right into the diagram by their very design.

Then I got off on this tangent about Scar's phoenix tattoo versus the cross in the flammel and competing mythologies of ressurrection, and why Amestrian alchemists might consider human transmutation to be God's realm when they don't otherwise exhibit any sign of religion, the explanation of which involves *cough* Envy's origin, and I'll leave it at that.

Sometimes, I get too involved in these things...

p. s. sky_dark, your girlfriend doing arrays on all your walls was like, six times more useful to my insane analysis than anything else on the web, on account of exquisite exactitude.