Freckles & Doubt

Campus has been formally closed until Sunday, while students march on campus and academics march on Parliament and students and academics disagree, generally politely, on why they should be marching and what's actually a realistic demand. It's like a slow-moving, disruptive and unusually verbose dramatisation of the generation gap, with occasional police presence. I am imitating the action of the Harry Potter, which is to stay in my room keeping very quiet and pretending I don't exist.

Recent interesting discoveries: student mass action is both a fatigue trigger and a source of more subliminal stress than I was aware of. Last night I actually had a sleep-walking dream, for the first time in years. A very tall man in flowing, fragmented, cream-coloured robes, like a cross between a Grecian statue and Rey from Star Wars, came through the wall above my bed, and I woke up with my heart pounding, trying to hold him back by main force. I don't think he was actively trying to hurt me, but he was very definitely present and invasive and insisting on being heard. I resent that in my bedroom at three in the morning. I'm picky about who occupies that space. Sometimes the cats don't even qualify.

I am, however, particularly delighted to note the pleasantly insane existence of what3words, which purports to identify a 3m square anywhere on the planet in three easy to remember words, and stuff all these postcodes or GPS, anyway. As far as I can work out, at least a portion of my house sits firmly in my subject line. I am somewhat delighted.

oh god I can't believe it, the evil magic of Tumblr has ended up addicting me to an online webcomic about cute American college boys playing hockey. The American version of hockey, i.e. on ice. Ngozi's Check, Please! is weirdly poignant, bizarrely socially aware and basically adorable, mostly because Bitty (small cute gay Southern boy who bakes), and because of the locus of well-intentioned awkward anxiety that is Jack. The comic and fan responses to same have inexorably infected my Tumblr feed over the last couple of months. The fanfic is lovely. Of all the things I ever thought I'd find myself doing, enjoying web comics about cute American college boys playing hockey significantly doesn't make the list in any way at all.

As revenge, because it's my only defence against this sort of thing, I shall proceed to dissect it ruthlessly, and with maximum use of polysyllables. I think the thing appeals not just because it's well written and beautifully drawn, but because it self-consciously appropriates and subverts the classically heteronormative and traditionally ideologically ugly setting of the frat house. The male sports team/frat house is a homosocial space whose construction generally implies sexism, toxic masculinity, profanity and all-out grossness, but Ngozi's version of it is resolutely and redeemingly utopian. There's enough grossness and profanity to be vaguely realistic, but the stereotypes are lovingly deconstructed: homosociability is mutually supportive, socially aware, irreverent without being destructive. This reaches its apotheosis in Shitty, the team's Gender Studies wonk and part-time nudist, because apparently "Every hockey team should have a hipster who wears floral snapbacks and shouts about the ironies of male sexuality in the American collegiate Greek system while waiting in line for the pong table to free up." Characters rip into each other cheerfully, both on and off the ice, but the teasing is free of malice. Bitty's gay identity is open, and unquestioningly supported by the team; his endearing personality, which is approximately what you'd get if Tintin embraced the twink stereotype slightly more flamboyantly while more or less continuously baking pie, exists in beautiful relief against the far more macho vibe of the rest of the team.

Part of what Ngozi is doing here, I think, is to present as primary text something which has the sensibility of fan fiction straight off the bat; like slash fic, it posits male relationships in an idealised mode, one in which homoerotic elements, whether literal or subtextual, are celebrated rather than being denied, by the characters and setting as well as the writer. (The college setting is the fictional Samwell, presented as being the most queer-friendly campus in America.) The comic is thus inherently self-aware, existing in dialogue not only with its own raft of external texts (character Twitter feeds, the writer's blog with additional comics, headcanons and occasional character Q&As) but with the whole fanfic paradigm itself. Quite my favourite bit of the series is Johnson the existential goalie, who's a minor character whose hobbies include "breaking the fourth wall": anything he says is metacommentary on his own and the other characters' existences as comic book characters, and he cheerfully acknowledges his own purpose as a device for furthering various narrative arcs. The really good fanfic has him popping in to comment on the difference between his own characterisation in and out of canon. It makes my narrative-fondling toes curl in girly glee.

So, weird but true: I have to admit to enjoying web comics about cute American college boys playing hockey. Because life's odd like that. In a good way.

well, then. Happy new year. 2016. A year, as the Goon Show would have it, of months, and one which adds up to 9, a number of which I've always been fond for random aesthetic reasons. (Curvy. And three threes). I hope this is a good omen. I didn't do the annual scorecard retrospective last year, because I was submerged in depression at the start of 2015 and not really blogging, so as has become traditional, I'm going to catch up by doing them both at once.

2014 was about change, in a lot of ways: moving out of a 15-year shared space, a new boss at work who radically redefined both my working conditions and my sense of safety, and the opening of a lot of major cans of heavily suppressed worms in the therapy process. In fact, safety nets were removed in 2014 to rather dramatic extents. It's probably not surprising that 2014 was quite bad for the depression. I'm not good at change. It frightens me, and I tend to sit in a rut in order to avoid it, and I find it more stressful than energising. But if the two-year comparison has done anything, it's been to realise that I can do change if necessary (and if prodded properly, and I still owe Jo beyond belief for lending me the energy and direction to shepherd me through the move); and more importantly, it can be exciting and energising. At the beginning of 2014 I resolved, above all, to try and be happy, and while it's been a two-year process with patchy results, I think I'm starting to achieve that. If 2014 was about change, 2015 was about adapting, moving forward.

So, here's the scorecard, with its usual random set of juxtapositions.

Things achieved by me in 2014: a break-up with my Evil Landlord, in the domicile rather than the friendship sense; an autonomous home filled with the basic furniture and appliances for daily life; an autonomous life in which I control all my own adult-related decisions; a chapter in a major book on fairy-tale film; something resembling a start on a theoretical engagement with the existence of African fairy tale within my personal academic paradigm (this is actually rather major); some crowbars applied to crack open deep-seated problems in therapy.

Things achieved by me in 2015: a new cat. A refinement of my home space beyond the basics, in a way that has made it feel particularly mine. A new set of work responsibilities (I now head a student engagement cluster, for what that's worth) and, after careful manipulation, a working relationship with my new boss. A negotiation of a major political melt-down on campus, during which I think I helped students measurably and was able to give free rein to my organisational bent. An emergence from the chrysalis of therapy and anti-depressants into a more stand-alone existence, although I suspect my wings are still drying.

Losses: Philip&Jo, who fled the country, and who are not an absolute loss because the internet, but whom I miss. My sweet and mentally disabled Aunt Jane, sadly, from cancer, but also mercifully quickly and while she was with my mother in the UK rather than being in Zim. Golux, about whom I am still sad. (Also, I discover, Ounce, who was never technically mine, but with whom I lived for a decade or so, and for whose shadowy, flighty insecurities I had a fondness not untinged with guilt. He had the same thing Fish did, cancer on the roof of his mouth; the EL had to have him put down just before Christmas. It's been a bad year for kitties chez EL, they're down to Todal, who remains in reasonable health, albeit very skinny, despite some sort of fairly major kidney problem.)

Things discovered by me in 2014: Inquisition, Death Cab for Cutie, living alone, really loving living alone, mocha cheesecake, Bed On Bricks, morally ambiguous honey badgers, Agents of Shield, comparative chocolate digestive anthropology, memory-scrambling anaesthetic drugs, 2048 with Sherlock and otters, building bookshelves with Jo, Moxibay side-effects, Parade's End.

Things discovered by me in 2015: Fallout, Sunless Seas, epic container gardening, growing things from bulbs and seed, Dragon Age fanfic, office politicking skills, makeshift racerback bras, the corrosive properties of lemon juice, electric toothbrushes, hipster cats-eye spectacle frames, reading the service agreement properly, Amelia Peabody, the limitations of the therapy process, Mallory Ortberg, Frère's, cauliflower and sweetcorn soup, Daredevil, clipping my cats' claws myself, Wellbutrin side-effects, Flow, Windows 10.

Things rediscovered by me in 2015: my brain not on drugs; long hair; dreaming; being happy.

If I'm making resolutions, which I don't think I am in any formal way, it's to try and continue being happy; to look for positive ways to change. Because apparently it's possible.

(My subject line is quoting ABBA, unashamedly, because new year always earworms me with that song for days).

Yesterday, as I wandered vaguely around the faculty office, a colleague bumped into me, did a double take, and said, "I like your glasses ... Um, have you always worn glasses?" This was a little disconcerting. I have incredibly bad eyesight (-8.5 in one eye, -3.5 in the other) and gave up on contact lenses about a decade ago, as they actively irritate my eyes (Apparently I have little bumps on the inside of my eyelid. Go figure.) As a result I have worn glasses continuously for as long as she's known me, which is for over two years now, during which time she's occupied the office next to mine. They've simply never registered.

What she's responding to is my new glasses, which I wore for the first time yesterday. I've hitherto gone for fairly minimal sort of frames which more or less disappear on my face - thin metal rims, small lenses. I can't do that any more, because the prescription is strong enough and the resulting lenses thick enough that they can't go into narrow-rimmed frames, and I no longer have the disposable income necessary to pay the R6000-odd additional cost for having the lenses thinned. It's hipster thick frames, or nothing. We managed, by dint of trying on half the frames in the shop and several the nice man dug out from the back room, to make the lenses a bit larger by using a cats-eye shape, which cuts out the really thick outer bit, and which I incidentally like rather a lot.

This was also, however, a philosophical decision for which I probably blame several years of intensive therapy. I've always minimised my glasses before, because they make me feel frumpy and unattractive. But hipster frames are very in at the moment, they're all over the media and it's rubbed my nose in the fact that they actually work. They make a statement - yes, these are glasses, aren't they cool? as opposed to please-pretend-I'm-not-wearing-them. I wandered into the optician determined to go for larger glasses with thicker frames and damn the torpedoes, and so I have. This augurs a certain degree of increased self-confidence from two years ago, when I ordered the last pair, and I am modestly proud of this. So, presumably, is my therapist.

I would post a selfie, but really.

Some early impressions of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I have played for about six hours today, with a break in the middle to go and upgrade my computer. (New graphics card, more RAM, now it doesn't give everyone plastic hair and the graphics have stopped with the momentary freezing. The fact that I am in a stage of life where I can randomly and wantonly go and spend a couple of thousand rand on an essentially inessential upgrade just because I feel like it, still fills me with wonder.)

1. Inquisition pretty. And far more open-world, hooray.
   
2. Story interesting, world-building ditto. Thedas politics is always pleasingly chewy.
   
3. Combat seriously unpleasant. They've done away with auto-attack and click to move, which means you have to button-mash horribly. In my case, particularly horribly, because I suck at it.
   
4. ALL CODICES AND JOURNAL ENTRIES ARE IN ALL CAPS IT'S DRIVING ME COMPLETELY ROUND THE TWIST!
   
5. I have played for six hours and just finished the intro section. I'm not sure what this bodes, but it definitely bodes.

In a completely characteristic attack of the Cosmic Wossnames, my weekend is filled with social commitments. Notwithstanding this minor impediment, I should imagine that further dispatches from the inquisitorial front will almost certainly follow.

(My car music has moved on to the Eurythmics, which is appropriate given my fondness for her kick-butt contralto and my inevitable gaming tendency to play kick-butt women. Hence subject line.)

That brief radio interview I did about fanfic a while back? The interviewer wanted some examples of good fanfic, because he didn't believe me when I said some fanfic was better than the original text. I never got around to sending him any recs, being as how I was somewhat depressed at the time, but this is one of the recs I should have sent him: dirgewithoutmusic's "We must unite inside her walls or we'll crumble from within" series. Harry Potter; meditations on some of the more marginal female characters and their House characteristics: a remedial, redemptive and deeply political project of enormous insight and sophistication. Beautifully written. The Andromeda one has just made me cry, although to be fair most of the rest of them did, too. If Rowling thought about her characters like this HP would be a great and profound work of literature instead of merely an enjoyable, apposite and popular one.

Dragon Age: Inquisition comes out at the end of November, and in the twitchy, anticipatory interim, having played Origins and II obsessively for a few months, I need something to fill the void. This has led to some slightly experimental gaming, most recently: Gone Home, and Papo & Yo.



Gone Home was a tip from Jo: it isn't really a game so much as it's an interactive narrative that requires you to construct the story, bit by bit, from the information you find. You're returning to visit your family, but when you arrive, no-one's there. You wander around the house looking at things, and the pattern of events emerges gradually from the information you're given. It's not hugely sophisticated, but the sense of agency you have in building up the narrative is satisfying, and it plays very nicely with narrative expectation and trope. You continually skirt markers of horror or tragedy or melodrama, and then skitter away again; I kept thinking I knew what was going on, only to realise that it wasn't doing the clichéd thing I'd thought it was. Also, it's a period piece, deliberately pre-cell-phones or internet; it's frankly amazing to realise the nostalgic emotional charge behind a mix tape. This was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours of not-quite-gaming. Recommended.



I picked up Papo & Yo from a mention on Anna Sarkesian's excellent Tropes vs Women series, where she deconstructs the nastier misogynies of computer games; this was a counter-example. Papo & Yo is a puzzle game with minor platformer elements, although fortunately the bits where you have to jump between floating things are minimal and only gave me a few minutes of annoyance. (I'm incredibly bad at jumping between floating things, or pillars, or anything where you have to land neatly on a small area and then take off again. I think my real-life klutz tendencies give me Issues).

The game follows a young Brazilian boy as he negotiates a dreamlike urban setting made up of slum-like shacks but largely devoid of people, and curiously pastel and beautiful; his companion, a giant monster, is alternately oblivious and monstrous, and operates as a deliberate, poignant and extremely effective metaphor for child abuse by an alcoholic father-figure. The monster is both the challenge and part of the problem; you occasionally negotiate the puzzles by manipulating the monster so you can use his weight to trigger pressure plates, or bounce off his stomach, but he becomes a flaming, rampaging, horrible thing under the influence of the alcohol-metaphor. It's a fascinating playing experience because the occasional violence is entirely non-instrumental in game terms - you are thrown around and trampled but damage is not recorded in any formal way - yet is somehow infinitely more awful and disturbing than the more concrete and conventional kind which whittles down your hit-points.

Despite this, the game utterly charmed me. Its puzzles are entertaining and frequently whimsical, with glowing bits of string pulling buildings around and houses randomly growing legs or wings; its mood is gentle and full of a child-like delight and wonder at its own environment; and its conclusion, the exact antithesis of a boss-battle, is thoughtful and genuine enough to have moved me to tears. I loved this. Loved, loved, loved it. Play it if you're into puzzle games and haven't already; the PC version is on Steam. wolverine_nun, I'm probably looking at you.

(I am horrified to note, from my subject line, that the musical Chess appears to have imprinted me in early teenagerhood and cannot be eradicated. Stupid ridiculously catchy Abba writers.)

The memory-scrambling drugs are very weird. I was in surgery for the better part of an hour, but I recollect it as a sort of muddled series of highlights lasting no more than a couple of minutes, and including a vague sense that at some point having local anaesthetic injected was painful, but no actual memory of the pain. Which is, in fact, exactly what the nice surgeon promised.

Also, the memory-scrambling drugs are apparently stimulating to the dream centres. Last night I dreamed, in vivid detail, that I was running an interactive, semi-LARP performance of The Sound of Music, with frequent pauses for the audience to suggest alternatives to the plot. For some reason Ben Whishaw was playing the illegitimate son of the father-figure, as a mute who communicated entirely by mime. I woke myself up with the realisation that (a) having Sherlock Holmes deducing characters is an incredibly good narrative short-cut for packing in background information (although with absolutely no idea what the hell he was actually doing in The Sound of Music), and (b) that the whole thing was a much more complicated challenge than I'd expected in terms of possible plot complexities, resulting in the inescapable conclusion that the skills of the actors concerned were absolutely not up to the improvisation needed.

"Minor surgery" is apparently not as minor as all that. The surgeon's nice nurse lady laughed gently at the idea that I might go back to work today, and put me off until Monday. The prime selection of stitches down the back of my thigh isn't actually painful, although they pull a little when I move, and necessitate some odd sitting positions. Mostly, though, I'm realising that she's right - I went out to the chemist briefly this morning, and I'm suddenly dead on my feet. Right, yes, they cut chunks out of me. Small chunks, but I think my body is entitled to object a bit.

Pacific Rim fascinated me for months before I'd even seen it - not because it's giant monsters trashing Tokyo (which I love) or Guillermo del Toro (who I also love) or at least a partial departure from Americanised Hollywood gender and race tropes (which I crave), but because of the fan response. My Tumblr feed is full of fandoms, skewing heavily comic book, Tolkien and TV show, and a substantial chunk of them seem to have embraced jaegers and kaiju and pilots in the drift with an instantaneous, full-on investment which is strangely heart-warming. Watching the film last night was an exercise in happy recognition, as though I'd become a fan of the film before I'd even seen it via a sort of dizzy second-hand joy.

This is particularly fascinating because it's not a conventionally great film. I have to admit that my enjoyment of it was severely compromised by Nu-Metro's traditionally ham-fisted and overstated attitude to sound production: films at Canal Walk are habitually both over-loud and shockingly badly balanced, so that you can't hear the dialogue properly because of the way the sound effects and music have stunned your ear canals. This blunted the film's effect, I think, so that it felt more like a big/loud/stupid monster blockbuster than it actually is - I'm strangely looking forward to seeing it again on DVD, preferably Blu-Ray and a nice big HD TV, so that I can escape both the noise assault and the manifest irritations of 3D glasses while still enjoying the spectacle. (I can't wear contact lenses. My long-distance sight is appalling. Glasses over glasses for 3D purposes are distractingly annoying, and I kick myself that I left seeing the film too late for it to be available on circuit in 2D). The noise thing is particularly problematical because the film's subtleties and appeals, of which it has surprisingly many, are entirely in the fact that it's a character-driven narrative. This is the anti-Transformers: while it has giant robots and monsters and lots of bashing, it's not about the special effects, but about a heart and soul which are quintessentially humanist.

The film's genesis is specifically in the traditional Japanese kaiju and mecha narratives, which are explicitly recreated with a nice balance of nostalgia with evangelism: del Toro hopes to introduce these stories he loves to a whole new generation. The plot itself is very simple, and is laid out via rather pedestrian exposition in the first ten minutes of the film: Earth is invaded by giant (as in Godzilla-sized) reptilian monsters who arrive, rather than from outer space, via an inter-dimensional rift on the floor of the Pacific. This means that they crawl out of the ocean to trash cities on the Pacific rim, in the approved kaiju style, to be beaten back by equally giant metal humanoids who are driven by two human pilots through a sort of rig thing which translates their movements to the mechanism's. Because the size and complexity of the mecha are too great for a single human brain, pilots are neurologically linked to manage it in tandem through a process called the drift. Shenanigans ensue.

And really, looking back at that simple summary, that's exactly why it works - exactly why it isn't the flash-bang Michael-Bay emptiness of Transformers. The kaiju threat attacks the Pacific Rim, which means it's international: cities have their own jaegers, so pilots in the film are Russian and Chinese and Australian as well as white and black and Asian and American, but the response is a co-ordinated one, not Amurrica Saves the World. The theme of co-operation continues in the drift, which is about compatibility and connection as well as co-operation, but it's interpreted in interestingly diverse ways - pilots include teams who are father/son or siblings as well as a married couple, so it's not just about Teh Romance. The central team has the expected white male American point-of-view character, but his partner Mako is female and Japanese, she kicks butt in a remarkably non-sexualised fashion (the stick-fighting scenes are simply cool), and their relationship is actually interpretable as sibling as much as romantic. The visual design of the film is spectacular and at times surprisingly subtle (see this very interesting fan analysis), but, unlike Transformers, it's not just about action spectacle. You feel connected to these characters: it's easy to distinguish jaeger from jaeger not only in their names and colours and differentiated abilities, but because their pilot teams are so distinctive, often solely because of visual and action cues rather than dialogue, and because the mecha in the end represents the individuals, it doesn't replace them.

These twin poles of diversity and connection are, I think, why this film speaks so powerfully to a fan audience, whose drive is always towards empathy and identification. The international nature of the team as much as the mechanism of the drift celebrate the idea of community, of diverse individuals joining together in the service of a shared experience and goal. That's what fandom is. And over and over again, the kind of fan who loves this film and saw it multiple times on circuit and is producing fan-art and fanfic and in-depth discussion about it, says upfront that it's because they can find themselves in it. Unlike the traditional Hollywood action blockbuster, it doesn't present for your identification only the heroic white American male and his adoring and skimpily-clad white women. Its motivating force is about internal drive rather than external stereotype; the film itself, and the attitude of its creators (as in the del Toro interview given by the director himself to a Tumblr fan community) recognise, reify and celebrate the importance of communal rather than individual action. This is why, despite its action focus and its sometimes clunky and minimalist dialogue and plot, Pacific Rim is anything but simplistic, and why it's ultimately absolutely worthy of the director who also created Pan's Labyrinth: it rises above its apparent limitations to speak an emotional language of exceptional power and grace. As a film about giant metal machines battling giant reptilian monsters it absolutely delivers, but actually it's about people, and what people can do together rather than apart. We need more of these. Hollywood has become very bad at them. It's nice to know it can be done.

I am inexpressibly charmed both by the article on useless machines BoingBoing linked today, and by the article's last line. There is absolutely no logical reason to build either a machine that only turns itself off or a remote-controlled duck, and the concept is thus enormously attractive. I disagree with Arthur C. Clarke, who apparently wrote (as per the above article), that "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing — absolutely nothing — except switch itself off." It's not sinister. It's a beautifully concise expression of absolute and bloody-minded dedication to function in the face of all odds - what the article calls "purposeless purity". It's about identity, or at least about something about identity that I instinctively feel is important.

On a slightly less abstract note, these are very beautiful re-imaginings of contemporary films as artefacts of another time. I'd totally adore to watch Peter Sellars in Groundhog Day, and I need this Fritz Lang 2001 poster on my wall.