March 1st, 2010 by Brianna
When I first heard about fan fiction, I thought it was the Worst. Idea. Ever. By a long shot. Why not be original?, I thought. It seemed so… dishonest, almost like stealing. And slash (actually, shipping generally) seemed to be downright obnoxious. The characters are author’s, right?
Then, of course, I learned about textual analysis, and the whole concept that each reader constructs their own reading of each work, only truly applying to them. Fine. But still – fan-fiction’s different, right?
Not so much. On the off chance that you still can’t stand it (or want to convince someone else), here are some thoughts:
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Tags: fanfiction
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January 26th, 2010 by Brianna
The disaster in Haiti (as seen by those in the rest of the world, of course) is winding down. The government is giving up on searching and moving toward rebuilding. The media frenzy is nearly over – no headlines, few articles on the front pages of websites and papers. Even more – people aren’t talking much about Haiti any more, and although I don’t know, I imagine donations are on their way down, too.
I could say that in reality, the disaster is far from over, that we still need to support Haitians, etc. And it would be true – at least to a point.
But in all honesty, Haiti will be okay – as much as it can be. The damage is already done. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and the country destroyed. The humanitarian groups are finally in place, and all the rich foreign governments are involved. The disaster relief machinery is in place, it’s all downhill (or is that uphill?) from here.
And it’s too late to really do anything, because this disaster wasn’t really caused by the earthquake.
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Tags: disaster, haiti
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June 28th, 2009 by Brianna
Happy Pride to teh Internets, all three of you.
And no, I’m not dead, just busy. I’ll hopefully start posting semi-regularly again soon!
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April 27th, 2009 by Brianna
But hey… how else are you going to sell spam-based products?
Tags: random
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April 17th, 2009 by Brianna
A couple of random thoughts….
Firstly, I felt rather moved today at seeing several dozen other students observing the Day of Silence today. Apparently some people actually care, even amongst the hyper-conservative environment we have here here.
Second, I really hope someone gets to the bottom of this whole ‘amazonfail’ debacle. I find it very hard to believe that they would ever intentionally derank LGBT books. (Especially when they didn’t derank many other, extremely vulgar books, both gay and straight) This has all the markings of an attack. It happened over easter weekend, for goodness sake! They’re calling it a glitch – but they won’t really know what happened until they go through all the logs, which could take weeks. For that matter, the logs may not even exist at this point, and if it was some ‘report as offensive’ feature that is responsible, it may be impossible to ever really know. Amazon is an enormous website, after all. It might even be nothing but a typo in a script somewhere, unbalancing an automated flagging spider.
And yet, there’s this. Which, if accurate, means that they’ve been ignoring the problem for a while. And that amazon is understaffed with lazy bums. Which is expected, but disgusting. I don’t think it’s worth boycotting them at the moment, but I’d really like to know more.
Tags: amazon, books
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April 13th, 2009 by Brianna
I like to complain about art snobs on occasion. And I like to think that I’m not one. But I’ve been having a minor problem lately with regard to two things: electronica and modern country. Here’s why:
I listened to a bunch of older country this weekend while digitizing some vinyl (and wrote a FWF post about one song), and I think I’m learning to enjoy it, just a little. I’m concerned though – the songs I like best are the most ‘rock’ like and the most ‘folk’ like. I still can’t stand the stereotypes. And I still think that modern country is unbearably whiny! Perhaps it’s just not my aesthetic. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it… Then again, I have noticed that the ‘bored’ aspect of country heightens the impact of some songs (think calm and soothing), so maybe I just need to listen until I get understand the ‘whiny’ aspect too.
On to electronica – I actually like electronic music as a whole, I really do. It’s just one particular aspect that’s driving me nuts: the highly altered voices. It’s those effects that sound rather like a voice is being used to set the pitch for another instrument, together with just enough of the original voice to still form words. I assume it’s done with some kind of complex comb filter, etc., but it sounds to me like somebody’s being tortured! Which is not a nice musical sound. At all.
Gah. I’m getting the shivers just thinking about it. Maybe I’ll never learn to like it. Maybe that’s okay…
Tags: art snobs, music
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March 17th, 2009 by Brianna
I never thought of this until just now, but Oasis in Sluggy Freelance could be a character in Dollhouse!
It’s kind of uncanny. And here I thought that Dollhouse was really original… Oasis has a sort of weird past, involving strange operations. She has her mind altered by a creepy corporation. She can’t control herself when it comes to the thing that are put into her head. And now, apparently, she’s trying to break free of the mind control, via meditation. If the guy who knows how to do the mind wipe died on Dollhouse, it would be almost exactly the same.
Hey – why don’t they make Sluggy into a TV show? That would be pretty cool.
Tags: Dollhouse, webcomics
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March 11th, 2009 by Brianna
Connecting the output of a chip to two inputs, where the chip doesn’t drive enough current for both inputs, may cause undefined behavior. Even if one of the input chips is fried.
I just love debugging hardware.
(The fried chip in question was bonded to the PCB – I couldn’t remove it, so I just cut the traces. Everything worked fine after that!)
Why is the chip fried, you ask? It’s because I’m an idiot, and connected Vcc and ground in reverse.
I’m trying to come up with some deep philosophic insight from this experience, but I’m mostly just frustrated…
Tags: computers, electronics
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March 3rd, 2009 by Brianna
At some point, I’m going to have to write a full comparison of Sugar Rush and South of Nowhere.
On further watching – Sugar Rush really is SoN on acid. I still don’t feel like rooting for any particular couple, but Kim is much more identifiable than I thought, and I do want her to find love. But the really interesting bit comes at the end of season 1, when they decide to run away from home. SoN did the same thing, only… not.
In SoN they ran away, the car ran out of gas, they hid in a restaurant, called the dad, and were threatened by a conveniently placed pervert (or was it an imaginary pervert?). It was all very after-school-specially.
Moral: Don’t run away from home.
In Sugar Rush, they run away, drive like idiots with no apparent repercussions, rent an obscenely expensive hotel room with the mom’s credit card, and have sex all night before the police manage to track them down.
Moral: Uhh…. Credit card theft rocks?
Yeah.
Honestly, I wouldn’t want my kids (should I ever have them) to watch Sugar Rush before they turn at least 17 or so. SoN is obviously more teen-appropriate. Still – there’s no denying that Sugar Rush is more realisticish (relatively speaking), and much more exciting.
Moral: British People are Crazy (and mildly cool).
Tags: musings, reviews, Sugar Rush, tv
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February 18th, 2009 by Brianna
I find the subject quite fascinating! First, a little story you already know:
Once there were ordinary websites (okay, there were other things first, but that’s beside the point). After a while, the media people caught on, and made sites about their products. But by this time, media pioneers and bored teenagers had started blogging. Blogging was different for a while, but soon many of biggest blogs were written by corporations. So the bored teenagers et al moved to myspace and facebook, but the media companies followed them there, too. Around this time (roughly), online video caught on, and the line between producer and consumer began to blur.
Anyway, myspace wasn’t so cool anymore, or at least was too much trouble. So the bored teenagers moved to text messages and twitter. And now, twitter is being adopted by online and offline mediaish personalities. And the president. Not to mention every celebrity ever. Since I thoroughly hate twitter, this makes me sad… but I guess I’ll have to get used to it.
The latest twist: Anyone but Me, the best web series yet is twittering live from the set. And I’ll bet others are doing it too. Which is… cool, I guess, but I can’t help but feel we’re a long, long way from those ‘making of’ segments on the tail end of VHS movies. Or even from, say, Lord of the Rings special features. Where will it end? How close will the media get to the consumer?
I can see it now:
autowin: @MamaC: thefarmmakeup just said Betty showed up on set. Make them leave!
MamaC: what does everyone else think?
The Entire World: DO IT!!!
Okay, maybe that would be rather awesome…
Tags: internet, media, tv
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