Freckles & Doubt

Teh Internets have recently been all agog about yet another in the long line of tragically misogynistic assaults on female fans by men from within the fantasy/sf/comics world. There's this utterly weird thing that goes on at cons, with certain male geeky types getting their Superman boxers in a twist because attractive female geeks in costume cannot possibly be "real" geeks and are, as far as I can make out in their somewhat incoherent argument, simply doing it for the attention. Or being deliberately and callously unattainable. Or something. Not a lot of logic here, and rather a lot of evidence that a very specific subset of the male geeky type is hopelessly defensive and bristly about "their" fandom, and moreover has absolutely no idea how to deal with the mere fact of attractive women within their "safe" space. Or the idea of anyone seeing "their" fandom in different terms - you see further outbreaks of this kind of thing in the assaults on female fanfic writers who have the temerity to slash comic-book characters, which are now "ruined" for the "real" fans. Or something. I can't even. (See here for specific examples and commentary, as well as a surgically accurate attack on the objectification of women in comic-book art).

At any rate, while there's a beautiful deconstruction of the Tony Harris misogyny here, my favourite response is, as often seems to be the case, Scalzi's: the gut-boy analogy is exquisitely withering and certain turns of phrase made me choke, as is traditional, on my Earl Grey. It's just fortunate that for every certain kind of male geeky type there is an equal and opposite male geeky type, probably because physics. Thank FSM.

I also can't help wondering if the whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that con fandoms tend to be around fantastic texts, which trend heavily to the symbolic and thus the idealised and reductionist, so that in the faint scrabblings of the demented fan-brain the concept of "fan" has the same inviolably perfect status as "Batman". Or, in other words, as I spent a happy half-hour explaining to my nice therapist the other day, because superheroes are actually about the idealisation of both identity and agency, and to a greater or lesser degree of dysfunction, being a hopeless fan is about as close as any of us are ever going to get.

Surprising and unpleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling:

1. Lufthansa won't let you check in online. Apparently they work on a database system which is orthogonal to the entirety of the known universe, and you're screwed if you have connections on another airline.
   
2. Despite the giant leg of the journey being two hours shorter and there being a lot more breaks from all the sitting, the CT-JHB-Europe journey is actually far more exhausting than a 12-hour one without the breaks.
   
3. Frankfurt airport, which is a giant, rambling, incoherent monstrosity blessed with a profound lack of logic in its systems, an incessant stream of simultaneous arrivals and departures in the same traffic streams, and a shy and reticent approach to bathrooms which tucks small iterations into highly obscure corners at infrequent intervals.
   
4. Germany. It wouldn't give me any money (and for sheer unadulterated terror, try facing an ATM screen which says "YOU HAVE EXCEEDED YOUR PERMITTED WITHDRAWAL LIMIT" which you've accessed in pursuit of drawing Euro, which you didn't bring any of with you, and which you will need in order to get from Brussels to Ghent. Fortunately Belgium is apparently happy to let me draw Euro to my heart's content). In a parallel process, Germany didn't recognise my cellphone, whereas Belgium has contentedly connected me to a network of some sort which is allowing the delivery (currently) only of spam SMSes, but hey.
   
5. The Belgian public transport system, which is large and ubiquitous and probably goes absolutely anywhere you may want to, but is almost entirely opaque to outsiders.
   
6. In fact, the ease of the two Scotland trips in terms of negotiating unfamiliar transport systems was horribly unrepresentative. I'd judge that it's probably going to take about two years of not moving much before the mere mention of overseas conferences no longer has me reflexively clinging to Cape Town by the teeth and fingernails.
   
7. A sudden, unheralded and entirely horrible mouthful of coconut in an innocuous-appearing slab of cake and custard on the Jhb/Frankfurt leg. Also, attempting to watch Mirror, Mirror in a spirit of fairy-tale theoretical enquiry, and discovering that it's a bizarre agglomeration of stylisation, slapstick and lack of adequately defined reason for existence.
   
8. The slightly disconcerting experience of trying to sit down in my seat for the Frankfurt/Brussels trip and almost falling over the giant, hairy, sandal-clad feet of the white-robe-wearing gentleman of undisclosed but passionate religious conviction who had stuck his feet through into my footspace from the seat behind. I suspect his knees were double-jointed, I wouldn't have thought that particular invasion was a physical possibility despite the obvious length of his legs.
   
9. Discovering that my hotel doesn't have a tea-tray in my bedroom, which its Australian franchise cousins did, thereby blindsiding me nastily. I am too buggered to leave my room in search of tea, and the withdrawal headache is starting to mount. (Mental and psychic health dictates that I do not drink the corrosive fluid labelled "tea" on aircraft or in airports).
   
10. Ghent's weather. Apparently when they say "heatwave" they mean it. I have brought almost entirely the wrong clothes.

Surprising and pleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling:

1. Despite three connections across three countries, my luggage arrived safely in Brussels in an obviously more calm and collected state than I did.
   
2. Lovely mostly-English-speaking random Belgians who rescued me at most of the most radical onsets of confusion and doubt in my ham-fisted attempts to navigate the public transport system.
   
3. Instant wireless connection to 5 days of free access and unlimited bandwidth in aforementioned hotel. I have almost forgiven them for the tea.

Unsurprising and unpleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling: I am utterly buggered despite having napped for four hours immediately upon hitting my hotel (eventually, after missing the tram stop and having to walk back), and have while negotiating train steps with a heavy suitcase, managed to land the wretched thing solidly on my left baby toe, which is blue and swollen as a result. However, through my rather glazed and exhausted state Ghent seems to be pretty, and the countryside is lovely and green and given to outbreaks of aesthetically pleasing buildings in interesting brick. I have high hopes both of the conference tomorrow, and of acquiring sufficient sleep both to enjoy it, and to give something resembling a coherent paper. But, memo to self, chance to talk shop with colleagues notwithstanding, next year I say it with journal submissions rather than in person.

Circumstances of late have conspired to give me a sudden need to be Randomly Feminist. This is mostly about a confluence of recent articles bouncing hither and yon across the 'net, but last night I also dreamed I had a massive argument with Tony Stark about my complete refusal to wear high heels, so there's that.

• This is Bruce Sterling's Alan Turing Centenary speech, which boingboing linked to in a general "hooray Bruce Sterling Seminal SF Writer" sort of way, thereby causing me momentary insecurity and confusion. Because, while I kinda see what Sterling is trying to do there in terms of his address to Turing's marginal identity and the complexity of identity in the context of the Turing test, I also spent two days going "Huh?" and trying to work out what I was missing that boingboing obviously got. Boingboing is usually pretty sussed on gender issues, and it weirded me out that they linked without comment when I found Sterling's argument so problematical in its unthinking assumption of pretty reactionary ideas about gender identity.
  
  On the whole, I think I blame boingboing for not being more alert. You can't ask the question “can a computational system be a woman?” without first asking the question "what is a woman?", i.e. addressing the issues of stereotype and patriarchy and acculturation over biology and what have you. This is, I think, what Sterling is really trying to do, in suggesting that you can't expect machine consciousness to develop without lived experience, but he signally fails to do it in any sort of way which shows awareness of his own limited sense of "feminine identity". The paragraph which really got my goat:
  
  

  The two women are going to feel deep sympathy and solidarity with this tortured, alien creature who so much wants to be a woman, while having zero chance of ever having a woman’s lived experience. This entity is a woman who will never be beloved, was never a daughter, sister, wife or mother. This woman never nurtured anyone, never had so much as a pet cat. She never danced, never sang a song, never felt the sun on her skin, could not comfort a weeping child, could not weep at the graveside of her parents, never got a smile, a compliment, never saw her own face in the mirror…

  Because clearly women are all about emotion and nurture and beauty and mirrors and an experience of marginality. Only women are wounded, and might therefore empathise with a subject machine intelligence. And more horribly, only women have "identity" which is separated in some sense from intelligence or cognition - i.e. highlighting the importance of identity in cognition is done by talking about female identity, not male, because male cognitive identity is naturalised. In his efforts to problematise the idea of identity, Sterling basically re-enacts the "men do intelligence, women do emotion" trope as an extremely troubling binary assumption.
  
  And who the hell is Sterling to start defining "a woman's lived experience"? Why is a woman's experience necessarily about dancing and mirrors and comforting children? Can't our experience also encompass joy in simultaneous equations and running a business and driving fast cars? The world at large has never paid attention to the "woman" part of Turing's question because it's either, if you address it as Sterling does, a bloody stupid question, or, if you address it properly, it requires that you identify a machine intelligence by its ability to imbibe, digest and construct itself via about two thousand years of global culture and power relations shaping biological function as they impact on its moment of creation as a consciousness. Which may have been Turing's point, and is certainly the point Sterling is trying to make, but I don't think Sterling actually gets why it's such a tricky one, or why his own blithe assumptions about identity (and gender and hormones, oy vey) are so incomplete.
  
  Also, to assume that a gay man is necessarily either "feminine" or "effeminate" is quite horrifyingly unthinking. And appears to have no real point. Honestly, as pumeza and Confluency pointed out on Twitter, the main problem with his speech is that its argument is completely incoherent.
  
  
• So, to balance things out a bit, have Nora Ephron's 1996 Wellesley commencement speech. Which kicks butt, or more specifically, stomps blinkered post-feminism righteously into the mud. By way of an antidote paragraph:
  
  

  One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: Every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: Get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn't serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you—whether or not you believe in abortion.

  When a highly-regarded science fiction writer, a member of a usually thoughtful and politically aware group, makes stupid stereotypical assumptions about gender identity, it's a kick in the damned teeth, is what it is. Kick back. Also, mourn Nora Ephron. She knew.

(Edited 2/07 to clarify a couple of points in which my own incoherence was annoying me.)

Lo these many moons ago, strawberryfrog introduced me to the Phryne Fisher mystery stories by Kerry Greenwood. A couple of years later, after some slightly addictive behaviour involving Loot, my credit card and my burning desire to read more, I have the whole collection, or at least those that are still in print. In my usual spirit, i.e. with my apparent and not particularly subliminal need to infect those in my immediate vicinity with whatever cultural effusions currently grab my attention, I shall now proceed to babble about them.

Kerry Greenwood is an Australian writer and the books are set in Australia, mostly Melbourne, which is a city I loved utterly after a two-day stay. And they're period pieces, 1920s, mid-Wars, which you can gather from the beautiful artwork here reproduced. (I love their covers. Striking, and minimalist, and absolutely atmospheric). Also, the books are well-researched: I am always obscurely cheered by an author who lists her references at the end of her novel. 1920s Australia is fascinating, both in comparison to the 1920s literature I'm more familiar with, which is very British (P.G. Wodehouse et al), and in its identity as a colonial space with resonances with our own South African history and experience. And the setting is shown with some really quite acute and occasionally nasty political realism. They're never actually gritty, but the stories dally repeatedly not only with murder but with abuse, rape, torture, poverty, back-street abortions, child slavery and the occasional severed ear.

Phryne herself is a beautifully-constructed icon, offering a fascinating balance between the above grittiness, and wish fulfilment (she's young, beautiful, rich, aristocratic, efficient and Bohemian). I like her because she's kick-butt effective at what she does, but also because she's a poster kid for various political manifestations of which I heartily approve. There is something of a Utopian gloss on her activities, which don't really have the serious social repercussions they ought to have, but they're nonetheless heartwarming. I think the Australian context is possibly less repressive than it would be in England, but there is still enormous prejudice against the Jews, Chinese, Socialists, prostitutes, anarchists, homosexuals, Bohemian poets, circus folk and various other categories of individual she cheerfully associates with and, in many cases, has ecstatic sex with. In the 1920s, Bohemianism notwithstanding, she's doing it all in the teeth of considerable social disapproval, which she either blithely ignores, or the perpetrators of which she confronts head-on in order to wrest them to less bigoted behaviour by sheer force of personality.

Above all, Phryne is a feminist icon. Not only does she represent agency and political awareness, but her sexuality is defined in terms which are directly appropriated from a particularly male stereotype which affirms the value of pleasure without either exclusivity or attachment. The stories are well-written detective pieces - and the Wodehouse echoes are in more than the setting, there are occasional phrases which, if not quite in the Performing Flea category, are neat and witty enough to make me laugh out loud - but they also chronicle Phryne's unabashed and wholehearted dalliances with a long string of beautiful young men. She's a vamp, and proud of it. The vamping doesn't in any way impair her intellectual and physical efficiency: she's a very cat-like creature, selfish, fastidious and hedonistic at the same time, and capable of being absolutely merciless when appropriate.

This multivalent strength, while rather rose-tinted, is also nicely rationalised. One of the huge attractions of the setting to me is the way in which it weaves the First World War into Phryne's life. Her origins and childhood are in lower-class Australian life; the wholesale swathes the war cut into the British population raises Phryne's family to nobility and wealth by dint of killing off all the other heirs. But she's an extremely reluctant aristocrat in many ways, and runs away from suitable marriages in order to, at the age of seventeen, drive an ambulance in the trenches. The blood and slaughter, and her need to deal with it in order to do an essential job, tempers her: she's a sprung steel construction in many ways, and you can see how she's earned that strength. She then refines it by hanging around Bohemian Paris for a couple of years as an artists model, while incidentally being taught street-fighting by Les Apaches. When she roughs up Australian wharfies who deserve it, you don't feel that it's too far-fetched.

This is not serious reading; it's detective pulp, and proud of it. But it's enormously pleasurable reading, not just because of the appeal of its main character and the rag-tag band of eccentrics which make up her world, but because of its unexpected historical and political layering. The feline creature which these novels represent may be unrealistically beautiful and effective, but she has teeth.

I've just run an ongoing orientation workshop, which entailed being in the venue early to set up data projectors and what have you. (We insert the usual ritual cursing aimed at my Cherished Institution's classroom "facilities" unit, which mostly facilitates frustration and despair). While I was waiting for the start of the session students were doing the usual student thing, which is to trickle in gradually (this process takes place from about ten minutes before the start of the lecture until about ten minutes after it's under way). I was struck, though, by the ongoing silence in the venue even as the numbers built. Surely students should be chatting to each other while they wait? They certainly have no problem chatting during the lecture itself.

And, of course, the answer is because almost every student is sitting in their seat in the modern attitude of techno-prayer, hands folded, head bowed, thumbs working busily as they send SMSes or read their email or whatever. It's visually quite a striking trend, looking up at the raked seats. Also, almost every student walks into the venue with their phone in their hand, presumably because they've been texting as they walk. Cellphones and their ilk have become communication and identity prosthetics, an integral part of both daily function and of self-construction. I am, because I text. Existence is only proven and affirmed in virtual space. And they say cyberspace isn't real. Hah.

I seem to have missed the cellphone thing, it's an occasionally handy tool rather than an integral part of my functioning, but I think the internet is absolutely a prosthetic self to me. I suspect I've never acquired the cellphone habit because both my work and my home paradigms are fairly sedentary - if I had the kind of job where I was more than ten metres away from my computer at any given time, I'd probably be giving my thumbs repetitive strain injury with the best of them. I become very, very twitchy if internet-deprived for more than a few hours.

But I mourn what we've lost, which is time. Time in the sense of extended focus, communication in anything other than bite-sized chunks. My students write increasingly terrible essays as the years go by, because you don't learn the skills of sustained argument and marshalling the logical flow of a large chunk of text by reading instant messages. And this is why they argue that blogging is dying, and maybe it is. No time, no attention to spare. TL;DR. All those words.

I like words, and I think they're happier in stupendous, horizon-filling herds.

I could swear the Daily Voice billboard this morning read "MY SHEEP LOVES COFFEE." If I didn't misread it, which is entirely possible before my first cup of tea, then it's a beautiful example of the perfect tabloid balance between inconsequential and surreal.

Having survived more or less unscathed the hideous first half of the week (the run-up to the print deadlines), I am now embroiled in counting student sign-ups to our orientation programmes. This process, over the last few years, has been a surprising insight into shifting internet trends. Four years ago student personal emails were all Hotmail and Yahoo. These days there's a lone Yahoo every now and then, but Hotmail appears to be dead. Everyone's using Gmail. Literally, probably half the cohort. If this is a worldwide trend, then I actually hate to think of the number of personal lives that are being conducted through a single site. If it Goes Evil it could paralyse half the world. (There's also a weird thing that looks like @ymail.com, which I tend to read as poor student writing for @gmail.com, but in fact it's a sneaky iteration of Yahoo, setting out to ride Gmail's coat-tails and deliberately confuse everyone).

Of course, it's also a not so lovely insight into what I like to categorise affectionately as the Student Dingbat Problem. They have an option, this year, of signing up for a programme online, or sending us a slip. The slip has written across it, in big capitals, "PLEASE ONLY FILL THIS IN IF YOU DO NOT HAVE INTERNET ACCESS!" They are also cautioned, on the slip and in the online signup instructions, NOT to do both. I've only weeded out, oh, twenty or thirty duplications out of a cohort of 1400, so I suppose we can congratulate ourselves that only about 2% of the cream of our youth are unable to follow instructions. It's more than that, though, because my programme sizes shrink dramatically once I weed out the duplications in online signup. Which also warns them, in giant block capitals, not to sign up more than once. The Prime Dingbat for the afternoon is the one who signed up three times online, and also faxed us his slip, blown up to giant size, twice. He was clearly rather insecure about his orientation place. Sigh.

You would also not believe how many of them mis-type their own email address into the online sign-up. Gah.

The subject line is, of course, from Goats. Goats is well known to reconcile readers to a deterministic universe. (Its currently completely indeterminate ending I have to forgive because the labyrinthine complexity of the plot at its end point is so extreme that I suspect the authors have retired, exhausted and defeated by the need for conclusion).

This is an interesting, if slightly superficial, article from New Scientist about game transfer phenomenon, which is effectively the response to real life as though you're in a computer game. The article drifts off a bit into burble about visual hallucinations, but what really caught me was the writer's description of their own experience driving icy roads and pulling out of a vehicle slide by instinctively using a move from a computer driving game.

Embedding yourself in a computer game for extended periods can have really weird real-life effects, particularly if you're tired and a bit spacey - after the Dragon Age marathons earlier this year, I would catch myself coming out of a social interchange or work interaction and thinking, "Hell, that didn't go well, I need to reload and make different conversation choices". A sort of mental groping for the escape key to access the menus. But it particularly interests me because I think there are similar effects with non-computer gaming, specifically roleplaying.

About fourteen years ago I was the victim of an armed robbery/home invasion; the guy barged into the house, waving a gun, when bumpycat opened the door to him, and proceeded to tie up both of us and force me around the house at gunpoint, demanding I show him where all the valuable goods were. (A bit doomed; this was back in the impecunious grad student days, and there really wasn't much of value in the house). Fortunately the burglar slamming the door behind him had set off the house alarm; I'd heard the fracas at the front door and, while half asleep, was able to answer the phone for about three seconds when the armed response company phoned to check, and tell them to come quickly. Which they did; but there was an incredibly surreal moment when the armed response guy, receiving no answer from the front door, came round to the bedroom window, to see me, half naked and with my hands tied behind my back, kneeling on the floor. (I'd just woken up, and was wearing only a dressing gown, which had fallen down around my waist. I still remember the puzzled, slightly embarrassed tone of voice in which the guy asked "Is everything all right, ma'am?" I think he was afraid he'd interrupted kinky sex games).

The burglar, hearing the knock at the door, had moved himself out of line of sight by putting his back up against the wall next to the window, keeping the gun trained on me; he'd hissed at me to send the armed response away or he'd shoot me. The interesting thing is that I still have a very vivid memory of exactly how I reacted, which was to suddenly see the whole thing like a hastily sketched roleplaying tac-map - room layout like this, threat here, ally out there, these are your resources, what do you do? It was an astonishingly clear mental image, I can still see it in my head. I reacted exactly as I would have done in, for example, a cyberpunk scenario with rumint putting us through the wringer again: tactically, and with an analytic calm which detached me from the situation in exactly the same way you are detached while gaming. However emotionally invested you are in the moment, there's always a meta level of thinking about what's happening. I told the armed response guy that there was a burglar with a gun, but he'd gone round the back of the house. The armed response guy promptly rushed off after him, allowing the burglar to leave via the front door without actually shooting anyone. It was very neat. Serious experience points there.

The thing is, the response wasn't just about using gaming tools; it was, effectively, for those few vital seconds, to access the game mindset and, vitally, reflexes. I didn't have to think about it; there was no conscious decision of "OK, let's think tactically now." I think you have to be a lot more experienced with having guns pointed at you in real life to be able to consciously employ tactical thought in that sort of situation. I didn't have to; the gaming reflexes kicked in. I honestly don't think I would have been able to respond as cogently if I hadn't had that experience behind me, and that mindset to access.

I'm playing through Skyrim at the moment as an archer. It would be fascinating to see if the repetitive experience of focus/draw/aim in firing a computer game bow actually had any measurable effect on my extremely basic real-life archery skill. But in a more global sense, shouldn't the in-game experience of a tactical approach to efficiently completing quests give me more facility with real-life goals? I might attain a job I actually wanted if I collected all these journal articles before speaking to the key person at the other end of the map. And, to return to the tabletop issue: we played Fiasco! last night. The reflex in Fiasco! is towards making each particular scene punchy, cinematic and dramatic, with a slant towards disaster. If there's any logic in the world, habitual Fiasco! players should be self-destructive drama queens. Probably it's a good thing we don't play more often.

A brief vignette from an actual telephone conversation recently conducted:

(INT, administrative office. Desk cluttered with papers, cat pictures on the wall, steaming cup of Earl Grey desk right. EXTEMPORANEA discovered at desk, gazing at computer screen clogged with FEC rules, with furrowed brow).

PHONE: *rings*
ME: Hello, extemporanea speaking.
STUDENT (in slow, sleepy tones): Um, hello, I'm phoning to find out if you've received an email.
*Long pause. Further amplification is not forthcoming.*
ME (with commendable patience): I receive several dozen emails a day. What was it about, and when did you send it?
STUDENT (vaguely): About five minutes ago.
*Another long pause. Tumbleweeds.*
ME (patience clearly eroding): Which email are you referring to?
STUDENT: I sent it from my Gmail account.
ME (now thoroughly exasperated): Who am I speaking to?
STUDENT (with soul's-awakening realisation): Oh. Oh, yes. *gives actual name and details, stumbling over name as though it's actually an alias. I deal with his reasonably simple problem, put down phone, sigh.*

(INT. now features visible chew marks on the desk).

I still haven't received the actual email.

By way of distraction, this Nando's ad is making its way around my Twitter feed and environs, although actually I first saw it on nimnod's blog. It's pure, unadulterated comedy genius, and causes me to laugh unexpectedly every time I remember it, which given the tenor of my week (hideous) is a definite bonus.

Oh, dear, it's that time of year again: the time when a giant fun-run of some sort comes pounding past my bedroom window at 6am on a Sunday, causing really quite transcendent quantities of sleepy swearing, and a wistful longing for caltrops. They never bloody warn us about it, possibly in perfectly rational fear of the caltrop response. The road outside is all festooned with cheery, inspirational billboards inciting runners to greater heights in the name of health and charity, which as far as I'm concerned they absolutely don't need, being ridiculously cheery as it is. Nothing like wakening from a sound slumber to the strains of pounding feet, panting, and loud, jolly interchanges of exhortation and mutual support. Bastards. On the other hand, about half of the posters opposite our gate appear to have been ripped from their backing, which suggests that some of the runners find the slogans the precise opposite of inspirational. Heh.

It was all doubly ironic this year, as I'd just hung a new curtain in one half of my bedroom window, its darker fabric a deliberate attempt to cut out more light so I can sleep later in the mornings. Doomed. Sod's law for you.

Right, annual mini-rant over. I shall now return to the bosom of Dragon Age II, which I have rediscovered under the twin spurs of not enough sleep/concomitant lack of brain, and vague political interest. I'm playing a male Hawke, as I'm interested in seeing how it changes companion and NPC interactions. Today's fascinating geo-political ramification: apparently I'm much happier with playing non-Lawful-Good if the avatar is male. This is undoubtedly about reduced levels of identification, I caught myself thinking "Gosh, this guy looks like a bit of a bastard, let's go with the smugglers this time round." Hmmm. I suspect Anders gets knifed, too, if I last that long. Fascinating.

In other news, the house smells deliciously of gammon simmering in cider, in preparation for ham rolls to have with popcorn movies this evening. Rude awakenings notwithstanding, I am having a Good Day.

The Avengers trailer has been tabbed in my browser for about four days, which means it auto-plays every time I boot up and load the browser, forcing me to watch it yet again. Oh, fiddlesticks. Oh, darn. All those lovely men being superheroic and flip with authentic Joss Whedon dialogue. Daily. Oh, woe is me. Of course, a superhero movie doesn't have to be particularly intelligent or actually good in any way to make me ridiculously happy (viz. the Fantastic Four Secret Shame), but I'm really looking forward to this one. Apart from Scarlett, who's just a pain.

So, update on the Great French Bank Account Fiasco! I attribute solely to this recent experience my sudden need to re-read Going Postal, which I did yesterday, possibly in morbid fascination with successful cons. Last week's unsuccessful attempt to illegally boost EUR4150 from my account has been superceded by this week's perfectly successful removal of EUR4150 from my account. (This bastard is nothing if not consistent). The bank are being very sweet about it and managed, after much scurrying, to reverse it yesterday, but apparently the thrice-accursed spawn of financial evil (the thief, not the bank. The bank are lovely) actually sent them a hard copy transfer request with all the correct banking details and (drumroll!) my correct signature. This is, to say the least, disturbing. We seem to have ruled out Eric the Hedge-Trimmer, the nice policeman assures me that said Eric has been righteously incarcerated for the last two weeks, so unless he's part of a Ring, it's probably not him.

What it is, is someone who has laid hands on enough of my private documentation to include both a bank statement and a signature, a conundrum which my immersion in Ngaio Marsh and her ilk is responding to by causing a little-used detective gene to come to attention. The availability of my signature is not surprising, I must sign several thousand pieces of paper every year in pursuit of my legitimate admin activities, but its coincidence with the bank statement is considerably curiouser. The bank statement must have come from my study, or from the postal service before it came anywhere near me - I don't carry those around. (I still think it's mostly likely that someone nicked it from the postbox outside our gate). The signature could have come out of something in our recycling, I suppose. Both together could have been accumulated by a half-hour spent sitting outside our house sifting the recycling in conjunction with rifling the postbox, but it would have been rather obvious. Both could also have been lifted off my desk, but I don't really see how. (Apart from anything else, the giant pile in my inbox is giant, and frequently weighed down by the Hobbit). I am gently revolving a third theory, that both were the result of someone digging around on the hard drive of my old computer, the one which was stolen a couple of years ago. But I really don't think the French bank details were ever on there; hell, they're not on the current one, which means it's not even that my nice new wireless wossname has allowed someone to hack me. In the immortal words of Detritus, it a mystery.

The whole thing is causing me (in addition to the moments of incandescent rage, because how bloody dare he) to become horribly paranoid, and to spread that paranoia around a lot. Anything that goes into recycling, for example, is going to be shredded into teeny tiny bits. All correspondence at all about anything whatsoever is going to go to the box number, not the postbox. I've put another padlock on the postbox, in a futile stable-door-horse-bolted sort of gesture, but I don't trust it. I shall discuss with the nice bank people the possibility of simply shifting the whole bang shoot to another bank account, although that's going to be a royal pain in the butt. But I ask you, nice witterers: do you know where your bank account details go? what bits of paper are innocently being recycled? Can you say you are safe? she says in the thrilling tones of a bad drama trailer or an insurance sales pitch. It happened to me! it could happen to you!

And while we're at it, are you making sure you exercise your feet on long plane journeys, too? My mother didn't raise me to be a cautionary tale, but if it's a gig that ends up being any use to anyone else, I'll take it.