Unsolicited Advice

One of the reasons I'm not immediately impressed with Elementary is that I feel it's missing an important element which has been an integral part of the Holmes/Watson relationship in all its successful forms. They're setting Holmes and Joan Watson up in this semi-adversarial bicker-yourselves-friends dynamic, which is lamentably common in television drama, and which I am sick to death of seeing. (They also seem to be setting her up to be the Woman Who Fixes Him, which annoys me more, but that's another rant altogether.) It seems to me that they have missed the point of why this particular relationship is famous. There is much snark about slash in Sherlock . Downey and Law are playing it up intentionally (in the words of one critic: "It's a decent yaoi fanfic.") in their films. What Doyle was actually writing between Holmes and Watson was a kind of relationship not much seen, or at least not much acknowledged today, what was known as a "romantic fri...

If anyone was wondering where I get some of the supplemental stuff for Sherlock , there are actually a small collection of tie-in sites for the series online. Aside from a few scattered things on the BBC site itself -- which tend to not work for US fans without a proxy -- there are also a tiny set of mock blogs and other sites set up in sort of mini-ARG fashion. The most useful one, of course, is John's blog , but from there you can also get to Sherlock's site (the same one John admitted finding in "A Study In Pink" when he looked Sherlock up, and the one Sherlock posts his answers to in "The Great Game") and Molly's blog, and a few other things. John's blog is from whence the fandom gets a lot of things like the name of John's therapist, and some tantalizing bits of write-up about unaired cases. I don't know who's behind it, but the general accuracy to the on-screen stuff suggests that it's Gatiss and Moffatt, or one of the other f...

Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, I have now seen the pilot for Elementary . Not. Impressed.

ARGH. Lifehacker is publishing articles on how to use hand gestures to read someone's inner soul or some other kind of garbage like that. I really want them to stop doing this, because they're always goddamn wrong . A description of hand gestures, removed from their behavioral, cultural, and situation context means  absolutely fucking nothing . The only thing that you can reliably get from hand gestures without knowing anything about the person, where they're from, or the situation they're in, is indicators of which is their dominant hand. Really. That is it . And you still have to know what you're doing for that. The most useful way to winnow handedness out is to use right-handed-ness as your null hypothesis and watch for what's wrong on that basis. Wrist watches are a good start but provide both false negatives and false positives, as I've known people of both sorts who wear their watch against custom on their dominant hand, Moggie (right-handed) actua...

So the premiere of CBS' Elementary goes out tonight, and like Han Solo before me, I've got a bad feeling about this. I have no complaints about the cast. Nobody makes me cringe. Jonny Lee Miller is actually quite a respected thespian, if mostly unknown in America, and in fact was recently on stage with Benedict Cumberbatch, switching off the roles of the mad doctor and the Creature in Frankenstein . Lucy Liu gets a lot of undeserved crit, mostly for doing fluffy pop things, but she isn't a bad actress. I have not, however seen her in anything serious enough to evaluate whether she's a good enough actress to save a crap script, which I suspect is going to be the problem here. I have serious misgivings about the combination of "female Watson" and "American network television". I don't object to a female Watson per se ; in the Victorian originals, the constraints of military service and medical school meant that Watson pretty much had to be a w...

Going to need a cocktail dress soon -- moreover, one that's easy-on, easy-off. (Quick costume change and not ruining my makeup. Get your mind out of the gutter. Unless you're a particularly hot smart boy, in which case had you considered coming to RAW Provocations ?) Considering chopping this one off above the knee. Thoughts?   No worries about sacrificing art; it's a $15 dress from Ross. It's synthetic stretch, so a rolled hem would keep it from shredding, if it had any tendencies to come apart in the first place. The skirt is full enough to wear over a rockabilly petticoat, although the waist is just short of empire, so I'm not sure how that would look.

One of the banes of the modern Watson's existence, in Sherlock , is that the public at large are constantly mistaking him for Sherlock's date. It happens from the very start; when they go to look at the apartment, Mrs. Hudson mentions that there's a second bedroom upstairs "if you'll be needing it", and when they use a restaurant as cover for a stakeout, the owner offers to get the table a candle on the grounds that it's more romantic. The sheer repetition is what pushes it into funny territory -- and then out of funny territory again in places, like when John's erstwhile girlfriend starts believing it -- and the fact that two of the first people to make the mistake are people who have evidently known Sherlock much longer than he has make John squirm a bit and make a most awkward, but very diplomatic, attempt to ask Sherlock if he is being flirted with and failed to notice. The attempt to clarify makes Sherlock wonder if John has been flirting and h...

It is a running joke in the Holmes canon -- or, alternately, one of Holmes' pet peeves -- that other people wonder what he sees in the world, and he protests that he sees exactly what they do, he just makes something of it. You see, he says (especially to Watson), but you do not observe . I'm generally less crabby about it, but his protest is largely true. People see a lot of things, every day, that they just don't treat as real observations. The thing goes into their brain, rattles around in there, and apparently hits nothing on its way back into the pile of unsorted sensory impressions. It's not even that people don't see what happens, although that's sometimes the case. They just don't ever think about why that happened, or how the world got this way. I'm going to keep using Sherlock for examples. Aside from thinking that the cast is quite talented, that the writing is fantastic, and that clips are easy to come by on YouTube, I have this sneaking...

Well, that was disappointing. I bother to actually watch the Emmys and nobody I was rooting for won anything. Although I was unaware that Dame Maggie Smith was up for something -- good for her! I don't watch Downton Abbey , but she's a pretty awesome person. You don't get to be a Lady of a Certain Age and still be on television without being a damn sight sharper than people give you credit for, and people give her credit for a lot. I am generally puzzled at the lack of fuss made over the Sherlock people, to be honest. I didn't even expect the fuss to be for Sherlock -- both of the leads are currently working on a massive, long-awaited, endlessly hyped fantasy movie adaptation of a classic piece of literature, which follows a trilogy of like from the same director, and will probably gross about as much as Avengers . The bobblehead doing interviews on the red carpet asked Stephen Colbert what he thought about The Hobbit , and inexplicably didn't go scare up the ac...

Have been going through the press junket for Sherlock again, as if this is going to help them win an armload of awards tonight. (Must find a live blog or webcast -- the apartment is currently without a TV and we never did have cable.) Honestly, if they're going to keep stubbornly not giving Cumberbatch a BAFTA for anything, he ought to at least have an Emmy or a Globe or something for his mantelpiece. Or an Oscar. Although for that he'll probably have to be in a major story-driven movie where he's not upstaged by the horse. (No, I haven't seen War Horse . I'm told it came out excellently and I know he's done a lot of interviews for it with internet-favorite Loki Tom Hiddleston, but I try to stay away from depressing things where loads of animals die.) (Also, I've seen said interviews, and god you'd never guess he was the older one. Hiddleston is my age; Cumberbatch is in his mid-30s somewhere. He's just got this perpetual air of '12-year-o...

I am pleased to point out that Sherlock is up for ALL THE EMMYS next Sunday. Not kidding -- I think they've hit everything they're qualified for in the Miniseries category. Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Writing, Best Directing, Best Cinematography, Best Sound/Mixing, Best Costuming, Best Casting, probably Best Craft Services for all I know, I only check when shows I care about start winning things. (For non-estadounidenses, the Emmys are basically the Oscars for TV. Foreign actors win things like Emmys and Golden Globes for American television productions fairly often -- Hugh Laurie has a pair of Globes for House , f'r instance, and his first acceptance speech confused an awful lot of people who didn't know he's from the original Cambridge -- but it's not very common for productions outside of North America to sweep nominations like that, much less win anything. The only reason Sherlock qualifies is that it was widely aired on public broadcasting ...

Time for some translation work. (I hope. Please don't anyone wring my neck over this. I mean well.) I'm sure that all of you who received an ASD diagnosis as a child were lectured endlessly on Sally-Anne and the "theory of mind". You probably gathered from all the repetition that the whole ToM thing was of extraordinary importance to allistic people, and that they considered a lack of it to be a very serious deficit, even if you didn't particularly care. From their perspective, it would be. Allistics spend endless hours fretting over what other allistic people think. Entire industries exist -- advice columns, self-help books, psychology -- dedicated to taking money in exchange for telling people how to figure out what the bloody blue fuck other people are thinking, and now to make them think what you want them to without them noticing. "What other people think of me" dictates most of their daily interactions. It is so overbearing that there's als...

The neuropsychiatric profession is still being unhelpful. One of my commenters -- whose blog says she's a doctoral student working with linguistic impairments, so she probably ought to know -- has at least taken a stab at explaining what the practical difference between stimming and self-soothing behavior is. It explains some things, but still doesn't make much inherent sense. Why is dope-slapping not an appropriate punishment for persistent, hypocritical intellectual inconsistency? Starkly repetitive reflex behavior, even in the rigid way Tonia outlines, is characteristic of a lot of people of various levels of both neurotypicality and neuroatypicality. Dermo- and trichotillomaniacs will often pick at the same spot over and over again until there's a scar there, and oneichyophagics gnaw off the same nails over and over. Even the whole-body rocking motion that's used as shorthand for "deeply autistic" by lazy screenwriters is known in allistics -- it's...

The last echoes of the viral discussion of creep-tastic-ness seem to be trailing off around the interwebs. Several people, I note, have mentioned that they hate seeing the "but what if they don't know any better" protest that sometimes comes up when online communities argue over whether it's appropriate to give anyone the label 'creepy' based strictly on outward behavior -- often it's followed by the assertion that people who have social disadvantages like autism or cultural ignorance or Horrible Paralyzing Social Awkwardness Syndrome (HPSAS) are in more danger from creepers than the general public, but strangely, no one ever mentions why that might be. It seems to be one of those curious everyday agnosonosiae: Either it's never occurred to you, or you suffer from it and it's true, although you can't articulate why. Much has been made on the internet of something called the "Dunning-Kruger Effect". It stems from a Cornell study cal...

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Why can you never give me a straight answer on anything? I wanted to know exactly what constitutes "stimming". As far as I can tell, you think it is "a thing autistic people do". Then you include "engages in stereotypies, also known as stimming" as one of the diagnostic signs of autism. Do you not see the problem here? The only reason you have not won an award for Least Helpful Help Ever Invented is because I once played Final Fantasy Tactics , and the tutorial for that game includes the sentence, "An item is an item tat is used in battle." PSX-era Squaresoft translation work sets a low bar, neuropsychiatric profession. A very low bar. I don't know if anyone's told you, but this is not a limbo contest. I also cannot get you to tell me the specific dividing line between stimming and other forms of stress-relieving behavior. As near as I can make out, the difference comes down to whether the doctor doing the evaluation thinks you'...

I have been reading a variety of blogs on autism. These are written by actual autistic people, and are a damn sight more helpful than other things that come up with you Google. I am very angry again. I am, at this very moment, using scrap wood, old flatware and leftover bailing twine to construct entirely new genres of heretofore unimagined profanity, which I am probably going to unleash on the next person who thinks brain-weird makes someone not a proper human being. This is making me particularly inclined to throttle someone. With my VERY UNQUIET HANDS, tyvm. It's an article written by someone who has undergone what I gather is a particularly pernicious form of behavioral training applied often to autistic children whose stims are predominantly manual -- basically, shouting QUIET HANDS! at them whenever they start touching things, and then punishing them if they can't immediately smack their hands down on their lap in plain view and keep them there. Cops ask you to d...

Seawallglen asks: [W]hat are your thoughts on Dame Helen [Mirren]? Is she one of a precious few sex-positive figures in the film industry, or does she in fact have self-hating views that undermine her feminist cred to an unacceptable degree? Oof. I may be the wrong person to ask about "feminist cred". I think 'feminist' is an adjective, not an achievement. What's that you say? You think women are also valid human beings? Well, okay, 'grats on figuring out civilization? It's like demanding a trophy for getting all the way to work this morning without punching anyone on the bus. Some days, and with some people, this does indeed take a lot of effort, but you exert that effort because it is expected of you in an orderly society, not because you're a super-special Beacon Of Holy Shining Goodness. I also don't know many specifics about what's going on internally in feminist politics right now. I avoid it, despite being of a generally feminist...