Unsolicited Advice

So, I have a Kindle. (I actually have several Kindles, but sidetracking myself on the second sentence would be a new record, so we're going to leave that for now.) I get a lot of ebooks from the public library, both because I got tired of hauling 20 lbs of dead tree back and forth and because sometimes I need to feed my brain something new at 3am when nothing's open. Amazon keeps a closer eye on me than the NSA and Santa Claus combined, so naturally whenever I open the Kindle Library, they do their best to sell me something I want. A few weeks ago, the New Releases lineup showed me a book called Red Side Story , by Jasper Fforde. Though Jasper Fforde is probably better known for the Thursday Next books, Red Side Story is the second book in his Chromatacia series, the first of which, Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron , I read and loved quite a long time ago. It's been fifteen years since that one came out, and I had frankly given up in despair. Red Side Story is als...

I've found a new podcast to binge. It's called "Computer Game Evolution", written, edited, produced and distributed as a one-man show by someone who's opted to go by "Tim". It's a very witty, very thorough exploration of how video games got to be what they are, starting in the pre-history of computers when all your tedious calculations were done by hand, and sometimes by post. His intro trailer mentions that he defended a doctoral thesis having something to do with video games, so my guess is that this is the director's cut audiobook of his dissertation, now with 400% of the snark his advisor made him edit out. Tim declines to say where he's from. His accent is distinctly East Slavic, although I admit I don't know enough about the languages in that family to distinguish between them from just their traces in his English. He also mentions that as much as he'd love to take donations for the podcast, he can't, as they don't work ...

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an...

I finished Boston Legal  while home with a migraine last night, so now it's time for me to talk about it at excruciating length. Spoilers, I guess, if you've been meaning to watch that for the past twelve years and somehow still haven't gotten around to it.

I've spiraled down into the part of the Netflix queue where it's all "that one thing someone told me to watch that one time," which I added to the list to make them stop bugging me about it. Why didn't anybody tell me that Boston Legal  was this completely bonkers? It caught my attention because I've been watching through Star Trek  trying to work out how the costumes are put together (with haste and a kind of mad genius, out of the cheapest fabrics available), and I vaguely remembered that Shatner was (is?) still a jobbing actor. I didn't watch it when it was on actual TV; the promos made it look like a straight-up legal drama, and one can only mainline so many Law & Order  clones. This thing is brilliant . It has a reality-defying lunacy one rarely finds outside of manga. It contains the trope-naming character for Bunny Ears Lawyer, in fact, an archetype that I had assumed came from something Japanese, because that's the sort of thing they do. Al...

The history of slashfic as the internet knows it today, is in large part, the history of Star Trek . Queer readings of literature have existed since approximately five minutes after literature did; Frederic Wertham interviewed gay men in the '40s who read Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson as a couple, fans have been speculating about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson forever, and I'm sure there was a bard somewhere in ancient Sumer who was renowned for their smutty stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But Kirk and Spock were the first couple to go "mainstream", at least on the convention circuit, with stories and essays on the topic published, samizdat -style, in mimeographed fanzines. The term "slash", in fact, comes from the punctuation in "K/S", which is what the stores and 'zines were marked. Star Trek is unusual in that it's a science-fiction property based very much in the ideals of the 1960s that has survived into an era when many of the t...

Fandom frightens me sometimes. Often, if we're honest. I've been digging around for the Sherlock Holmes project I mentioned before, and one of the things I ran into is The Johnlock Conspiracy . For those who don't know, this was a movement among fans of the BBC's 2010 series Sherlock  who contended that the series was building up to a Big Damn Gay Kiss between the leads at the end, which was theoretically the conclusion of series 4. Lots of people contributed, but this particular lady seems to have been the biggest and most thorough, having contributed a 40-some-odd episode analysis of the show, via YouTube. Shit like this terrifies me. There's nothing wrong with her character analysis. Her take on the significance and motivation behind what the characters say and do on screen is completely valid. I think she's 100% right in some areas, particularly Moriarty. Jim Moriarty's obsession with Sherlock is both disturbingly sexual in tone, and disturbingly indicat...

[Addendum to the earlier note--] Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy , that'll definitely tell you. The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actu...

A (fixable, yet annoying) bank snafu has just occurred in my life. None of you want to hear about my bank, so I am going to rave about an internet thing which is simultaneously unimportant to the fate of the cosmos, and absolutely vital to many people. It will be long and contain many digressions and footnotes and spoilers for comics you may not have read and potentially movies that are not out yet. You have been warned. I've been going through a lot of Captain America fanfic lately.  

As I mentioned yesterday, you will never convince me that Captain America: The Winter Soldier  is not the story of Steve Rogers going out to rescue the love of his life. Don't believe me? Go watch both of those movies again, while mentally swapping the roles of Peggy and Bucky. Peggy becomes the childhood friend and protector who watches over Steve until he kind of accidentally succeeds in enlisting and gets Vita-Ray'd by Dr Erskine. Bucky is the mysterious and awesome government agent who sweeps Steve off into the war effort and keeps an eye on him until he gets the chance to prove that he really is made for more than star-spangled dance numbers. Friend Peggy goes missing, gets rescued, has one-liners about his new size, snipes for him on missions; then gets peevish that suddenly Steve is spending all of his time with the cool kids, and she's been busted from beloved caretaker down to ensemble support. Agent Bucky finds Steve canoodling with the WACs and WAVES and Wrens ...

The First Doctor: William Hartnell First serial: 100,000 BC Last serial: The Tenth Planet Costume details: A gentleman's day wear from roughly the Victorian era, with an appropriate shoulder-length hairstyle. Frock coat with astrakhan collar and karakul hat, dark cloak, long scarf. Wears an ornate ring on one finger. Companions: Susan , Ian Chesterton , Barbara Wright , Vicki , Steven Taylor , Katarina , Dodo Chaplet , Polly , Ben Jackson At first glance, the First Doctor is egotistical and imperious. At second glance, he's egotistical, imperious, and also flubs his lines a lot. This is because the Doctor was not initially supposed to be the focus character of the show. Originally, the show that we know as Doctor Who  was conceived of as less a science-fiction serial, and more of an edutainment program -- you will notice, if you watch the very early stories, that they're rather heavy on history, and comparatively light on stuntmen in giant rubber suits. The audien...

The audio drama, I feel, is an underrated format these days. Video killed the radio star a long time ago, I guess. I walk very nearly everywhere, and I need something to keep my brain occupied while my feet move; this is absolutely vital because, left unsupervised, I quite frequently wind up chattering to and with myself while I move. Not out loud, you understand -- I am mad, but not ostentatiously so -- but the internal monologue can go weird and suddenly depressing places without something suitable to prime the pump. There are a variety of podcasts that I use for that, and for blocking out obnoxious roommate noises when I'm trying to sleep, and the obvious assortment of audiobooks from Librivox, but there are also pieces of purpose-produced fiction that help pass the time on the train. One of the go-to collections are the various ranges of audioplays from Big Finish Productions, a British company who specializes in such. Big Finish is apparently run by nerds who are genuinely...

One of the many things I love about Takumi Shuu, the guy responsible for the Ace Attorney games is that he is a devout worshipper at the First Universal Church of Chekov's Gun. Nothing  ever goes away in these games. If the dialogue draws your attention to it, it'll be important. Maybe not now, but later, and then again  when you least expect it. And he has a knack for making it impossible to distinguish between a running joke -- there are several, one of which involves an argument over ladders vs stepladders that Maya and Phoenix have been having for three games now -- and a truly vital piece of evidence until the moment you need it. Some things are both. Pearl's chronic inability to spell is a critical point in not just two separate cases, but two separate games . One of the iconic moments in the games, which has risen to "spoony bard" status among fans, is when Phoenix cracks open a murder case by demanding to cross examine a parrot. For example, in Case 1-1...

I am nothing if not a masochist when it comes to hammering Japanese into my brain, and lately I've needed things to think about that are not related to insurance and paperwork, so I have re-started poking at the Ace Attorney  games -- or, more properly, the Gyakuten Saiban  games. The DS games are remakes of the GBA games and conveniently also contain an English script if I get too fed up with things, although you can't switch back and forth in the same save file, and the English text in the Japanese release has enough typos to rival some of Taito's classic 'quarity tlansration' efforts, from back in the day. Still. It's interesting. The localizations were done astonishingly well, considering Capcom basically released the first one in the US on a whim. As expressive as the English is, though, there are a lot of things in Japanese that just don't come across, because there simply do not exist any equivalents. One of the most basic ones, and usually very r...