Freckles & Doubt

One of the academics with whom I correspond about complicated credit transfer issues insists on addressing me as "Julia", which is not actually my name. For some reason this gives me fits of the giggles. My slightly insane Uncle Bill, back in his bachelor days when I was still in high school, had a particularly tremendous upper-crust English-rose girlfriend called Julia, pronounced "Juliah!". She is responsible for my lifelong habit of making mashed potato with the skins left on, which I do for reasons of health and because I like a bit of texture in my mashed potato, but which I suspect she did for reasons of sheer flakiness. The first time she met the family she swanned into our house, took a quick look around the kitchen, and announced, with that sort of tally-ho British vigour, "What a wonderful kitchen! I'm going to make bread!". Which she proceeded immediately to do, having arrived with a bag of flour for this purpose. She was, I think, quite mad, but very entertaining, and accounts almost entirely for any amused resonances I have with the name, even erroneously applied to me.

Apart from randomised giggling, my day has also been lightened by the student who has just hugged me enthusiastically, after I wrote her a letter asking Financial Aid to pay for a course on the grounds that its late addition wasn't her fault. (Which it partially was, she should have checked her registration, but it's a lot of money and these kids get desperate, and she asked very nicely.) She was very grateful, and I am feeling the warm glow of Being Useful And Appreciated, which this job is actually quite good for, at least in fits and starts.

I cannot lie, I am also deriving ongoing amusement from Windows 10's desperate, transparent and utterly doomed attempt to rebrand Internet Explorer. It would be endearing if Explorer wasn't the hissing and byword it is, and if its true form weren't evident so horribly through the glitzy design surface of Edge. It's not even a nice try.

Things you do not expect to see on a respectable campus while trotting off to the library for your important pile of Girly Swot books (subset: crash course in African cinema): live horses. Six of them. Tethered in the shade against the columns of the old Student's Union, peaceably chomping. There's something fairly major filming on campus at the moment, the place has been a madhouse: the stairs have sprouted fake extra columns and exotic greenery and weird screens positioned with arcane precision. I parked my car next to and partially under a giant cherry-picker boom sort of thing this morning, and there are approximately three million acres of random, presumably desperately important cabling snaking down the avenue, tended by skinny grip types in Bauhaus t-shirts. Actual African film, in fact. Curiously appropriate.

It's too bloody hot for serious thought (what's with February heatwaves before Christmas? Not Cricket), so have a random linkery round-up, I need to clear these tabs.

• If you go to the UK Vogue page and type the Konami code, extremely entertaining things happen when you keep on hitting A. Random internet easter eggs ftw.
  
• For some demented reason this ridiculous Boba Fett love story really amuses me, possibly because of the way the sarlacc is drawn. The rancor BFF one is also cute.
  
• Sherlock fandom is in a tizzy because of the Caitlin Moran faux pas (I never liked the wretched woman, her book is actively irritating) - she had the inexpressibly tone-deaf bad taste to pressure/trick the lead actors into reading erotic fanfic aloud at a screening. Daily Dot has a good summary. It really isn't safe these days to try and taunt subcultures you perceive as geeky and pitiable, they end up having way more power and self-awareness than you expect. I cannot help but be amused, though, at the cosmic inevitability of Moran attempting to sabotage Sherlock and failing dismally. It is, after all, simply an enactment of the Doyle plot. (Sebastian Moran is Moriarty's sniper sidekick in canon, if your Sherlock geekery is a bit rusty).
  
• Random fanfic recc! I am currently actually re-reading The Least of All Possible Mistakes, which is a rather well-written and often laugh-out-loud funny Sherlock fic featuring a Sherlock given to entertaining tantrums and a Mycroft/gender-swapped-Lestrade relationship which is both amusing and real. The fandom fascination with Mycroft fascinates me. I blame Mark Gatiss entirely.

I finally sent out the Boxing Day braai email last night, after more than average levels of procrastination and forgettory. If you weren't on the list but usually are it's probably because of my cheese-brain, please drop me a reproachful line.

The subject line is the Konami Code, which as a concept and a catch-phrase as well as a random bit of esoterica has always amused the hell out of me.

Today I appear to have bullied my therapist, been excessively nice to a string of students, and taken a flamethrower to my Intray Of Doom, which was starting to achieve sentience via the compaction heating of its organic layers. This appears to be guilt in operation, not least because I am now badly overdue on one paper submission and slightly overdue on the other, but spent the last few days playing Morrowind nonetheless. In mitigation, Monday afternoon through to the Wednesday public holiday (yay workers!) was rendered more than usually null and void by a lovely gastric bug, which means I'm still pale and nauseous and inclined to dry crackers and staring moodily into my tea. However, the weasel-like cunning of my Cunning Plan is now revealed: having a monthly Acknowledgement of Intellectual Debts post is a free and ready-made theme about which I don't have to think very hard, so hooray!

Things Wot I Have Referenced In April:

• 4th April: "how do you like your blueeyed boy / Mister Death?". This is, of course, e e cummings, the poem without a formal title, but usually referenced as "Buffalo Bill's". I have an unremitting adoration for e e cummings, I love the jerky, fragmented life and colour and convoluted wit of his poems. This one talks about heroism with a wry, partially deflating tone which makes that last line, the one I quote, amazingly complex. The post was talking about the Iain Banks cancer news; like Buffalo Bill, Banks seems to me to be inherently associated with death, and with a dark and deconstructive sense of heroism.
  
• 5th April: "worlds collide and days are dark". I'm quoting the lyrics to Adele's "Skyfall", in the post reviewing the movie. I remain unimpressed by the movie, but I still love that song, and the quote covers both the clash of genres and the descent into Gothic which I found in the film.
  
• 11th April: "one day in spring I'll take him down to the road". Belle & Sebastian lyrics, to "Dog on Wheels". Beautifully appropriate to a post about those little ambulatory robots in the park.
  
• 19th April: "a truth universally acknowledged". The post was being madly enthused about The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; anyone who didn't recognise the quote from the opening sentence of Austen's Pride and Prejudice should jolly well be ashamed.
  
• 22nd April: "I'm getting too old for this sort of thing". Star Wars, Obi-Wan. Of course. Slightly lateral given that the clip in the post was Harrison Ford, but he's really getting old.
  
• 28th April: "Drive-in Saturday". Title of the David Bowie song, not entirely thematically appropriate. In retrospect, "Science Fiction Double Feature" would have conveyed more of the movie club multiple-film sense without the resonances of weird post-apocalyptic desexualisation, but on the other hand I was talking about Iron Sky...

Today's subject line, incidentally, a quote from Wil Wheaton, from this lovely meditation on geekery or nerdery and what it actually means. He's right: it's about the intensity of the connection: that the actual object of all that affection is purely secondary, which is why geeks can flock together even if they variously represent DC and Marvel, or Star Wars and Star Trek. Given that this subject-line roundup has referenced a good proportion of my nerdy loves (poetry, Gothic, Belle & Sebastian, Austen, online narrative, Star Wars, David Bowie), it felt appropriate.

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.

Today is the first time I've ever wished I was in a different faculty. Various flavours of science department must be all bouncy and gleeful today about the Higgs boson confirmation, but Humanities trundles on obliviously. I keep having to restrain myself from babbling about it enthusiastically to confused History professors. Sigh. Also, I am a sad geek. This photo of Professor Higgs all vindicated and overcome with emotion made me weepy.

I seem to have allowed the start of the month to slide past without acknowledging my intellectual debts. Horrors! (Although not as much of the month as I thought, given that I've resolutely and erroneously dated all the forms I've signed today for the 6th July). Nonetheless, herewith.

• 1st June. Goon Show, The Moon Show, which is magnificently silly and which I did, for once, actually mention in the post.
  
• 4th June. Not actually a quote. Apparently I am too capable of originality.
  
• 8th June. Ernest Bramah, The Wallet of Kai Lung, via, as a commenter perspicaciously pointed out, Dorothy Sayers. (Lord Peter was another very early girlhood crush. But did lead me to Kai Lung, who I likewise adore on the Master Li principle).
  
• 13th June. Mordin Solus from Mass Effect 2. The beautiful and inevitable logic of making Salarians sing Gilbert and Sullivan patter-song makes me extremely happy. Also, the rhymes in the filk are clever.
  
• 15th June. I am quoting Toto. In a post linking to Toto covers and confessing an enjoyment of "Africa". So sue me.
  
• 16th June. Isaac Watts, although I am still heartily kicking myself that I didn't construct the post more intelligently and use the Lewis Carroll crocodile instead.
  
• 22nd June. I am rectifying the Lewis Carroll omission by quoting the White Knight's Song, quite one of my favourite pieces of dreamy nonsense poetry.
  
• 23rd June. Only a quote if you consider me to be quoting myself on previous birthdays. I think I may adopt this as an official birthday tradition.
  
• 26th June. Oh, dear. I am guilty of using as a subject line the title of one of the Call of Cthulhu modules I wrote with Bumpycat. This is possibly unduly narcissistic. Sorry.
  
• 27th June. Title of a work I've always liked by a French artist, and thus linked to the post on umpteen levels, including using the actual work as an illustration.
  
• 28th June. Egregious and unnecessary pun on a proverbial phrase.

Alas, no David Bowie. They may have to revoke my fan licence.

It tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the Internet, popular technology and the thought processes of the geek tribe that when BoingBoing posts a link to a slinky on a treadmill, it seems a natural, right and inevitable thing. Because if you have a slinky, and a treadmill, and a camera, and YouTube, why wouldn't you? It's some kind of Darwinian thought selection. The niche exists, therefore it must be filled.

Also, while inevitable, it's also bizarre and wayward enough to make me seriously happy. And the video is, for some reason, mesmerising.



I am working happily at home today, with rain drumming on the windows, a cat and a heater on my feet, a continuous cup of Earl Grey, a blissful lack of student interruptions, and a consciousness of the rearguard action all this is fighting against the sinus infection which is bumbling around somewhere in the middle distance, plotting its takeover. I have sprungclent my inbox, answered about forty emails, written a review of a paper, taken an Advil, and am about to play a righteous half-hour of Mass Effect over my lunch-break before I write up notes from three different meetings. All is right with the world.

My car is jerking my chain. I got into it yesterday at lunchtime preparatory to going out for a lunch date, turned the key, and it made a sort of throaty, angsty coughing noise, like Darth Vadar choking on a bread roll, and refused to start. Repeats, threats, sobs, curses and hitting the battery with my shoe had no effect. I staggered back inside (very Sidded again, not quite functional) and cancelled the lunch date in a fit of aargh-can't-deal. This morning I got into the car in a sort of last-ditch attempt to prove conclusively that I wasn't hallucinating before phoning the tow truck, turned the key, and the engine leaped merrily into life with what I can only describe as callous insouciance. It started fine after work today. It remains to be seen whether it will continue to start (a) when I try to go out to my game in about ten minutes, (b) when I try to go home at the end of my game, or (c) in time for work tomorrow. News at 11. I just hope it holds out until I'm on leave on Thursday and Friday, when I can sling it at my tame mechanic without the need to also wend my way campuswards.

In other news, the backlash from two months of insane productivity and absurd hours has raised its inevitable head. (I see a backlash as a sort of purple feline thing with a long tail and an attitude, and a lot of very sharp teeth. It grins.) I did very little at work on Friday, bar the weird politics, and nothing today except for a very dull timetable meeting. Today, I have to be fair, was because I incautiously discovered Questionable Content, and have been trotting through its back archive in a state of high glee and frequent giggling. It's pleasingly off-the-wall, with considerably more of a dark and ironic edge than other favourites like Scary-Go-Round, and I deeply love its hipsterishness and flights of insane fancy. I am also slightly staggered to discover that I probably know the music of approximately half of the bands he references. I think I'm technically too old for indie music cred. On the other hand the writer shares my conviction that Bowie's Outside is a highly underrated album and actually one of his best, so possibly it's an inevitable confluence and I should just relax and go with it.

Now I shall go and spend the evening being a steampunky lady disguised as an actress as part of her plot to become a Pirate Queen. Last session someone gave me a parrot. I have high hopes for tonight.

The Evil Landlord subscribes quite cheerfully to a number of geeky programmer stereotypes, and has most recently taken to buying himself a Lego set in celebration every time a major client project goes live. This has rebounded into my life in the form of a Lego Death Star sitting in the living room for a couple of days (Lego Luke! too cute!), and the Prince of Persia set, deconstructed, set temptingly down on the dining room table.

I never played with Lego as a kid. When I was a child the country I lived in was Rhodesia, which was under UN sanctions on account of its bloody-minded self-determination and general "up yours" to the British Empire. This meant that, even if my parents hadn't been relatively impecunious government researchers, fancy toys simply weren't readily available. I played with Fisher Price and Barbies in the homes of school friends whose parents were wealthy enough to go on South African holidays and spend money on toys. (I hasten to add that I don't feel deprived in the least; I had a wonderful childhood in all the right ways, full of books and animals and huge gardens and imagination and a protected experience of the bush). Lego, however, was a "boy" thing and I and my sister were very girly girls, so at best, my experience of Lego was a few blocks at random and in passing from the brothers of friends. The first time I ever sat down with a full Lego set and constructed it by the book from the ground up was last weekend.

I never quite understood the geek fondness for Lego, but the whole thing has fallen into place with the inevitable, satistfying "click" of a Lego brick mating with the correct fellow. I completely get it now. There is an enormously Zen and calming pleasure in the process: the shapes fit together so cunningly, the logic is so inexorable, the sense of participating in the creation of harmonious structure is so satisfying. It's been a completely bloody week, and I've been exhausted and stressed to a perfectly ridiculous extent. Staggering home at 7pm to sit down for half an hour to fit blocks together has been absurdly healing. Even with the Evil Landlord wandering into the kitchen every now and then to make derogatory remarks to the cats about having a seven-year-old in the house.

There are two and a half sections of the Prince of Persia palace completed. I look forward to the rest with great pleasure. I am developing almost instantaneous Lego snobberies (the giant prefabricated plastic shapes are cheating! blocks or nothing!) and am fiendishly plotting to give the Evil Landlord Lego sets for Christmas and birthdays for the forseeable future. It got me. I'm a convert. It may just keep me sane.

Observe the extreme self-control with which I refrain from making some sort of lame subject-line pun about pilgrimage, or something. Although it was: I've been looking forward to Scott Pilgrim for months, on account of (a) hopeless Brian Lee O'Malley fangirling, (b) hopeless Edgar Wright fangirling, and (c) general nerdy indy-music video-game fangirling.

So, first off: wheee! I am somewhat thoroughly immersed in the comic books, having read the whole series three times since August, when I bought them in a bizarre and distributed acquisition spree across two airports, three bookshops and the length, lingth and longth of Britain. I <3 Edgar Wright. The mood, tone and feel of the film is pitch-perfect; it's almost impeccably cast, cleverly scripted, and the editing and cinematography are always competent and occasionally bloody marvellous. It's in spirit and very largely in plot an extremely faithful adaptation, with whole chunks of dialogue and framing of shots stolen wholesale from the comics. It made me giggle with unseemly glee rather often. (Particularly, for some reason, in the first Sex Bob-Omb song. I don't know if it was simply the dreadful Canal Walk sound, but the whole thing came across with the absolutely perfect incoherent repetitive garage-band distort. It made me very happy.)

( Here be spoilers or whatever. For both film and comics. )

Quibbling aside, however, I loved this movie - I loved its speed, its ability to mimic the comics in a narrative construction which is all about inconsequential juxapositions, its faithful visual renditions not only of characters but of all the video-game nods and elements. I loved the over-the-top framing of the fight choreography and the way that the film didn't fulfil my fear that they'd disrupt its central fantasy conceit, that Scott Pilgrim can kick anyone's butt. (So many contemporary fantasy films bog down in "The Hero Acquires His Skills". It's trite. The comics make me very happy in their complete refusal to examine how it is that Scott does what he does). I loved the music. The music made me nostalgic for my days in a garage band, and I've never even been in a garage band.

This is one for the DVD collection. I shall happily re-watch it whenever I want to break out my delusion that Hollywood can make movies which are sensitive to their source material, and are able to embody the happy, essentially innocent fantasy of a world in which the extra geeky dimensions are unquestioned and joyously real. Or whatever.

I've come late to Star Trek. Neither the original series nor Next Gen was ever on TV when I had access to a TV; the Evil Landlord and I watched some Deep Space Nine when it trickled through to SA, but only in a desultory sort of fashion, and I don't remember much of it. I'm not sure why borrowing first_fallen's complete STNG set and proceeding to watch it in an unholy gulp over several months should have had the effect of putting me into warp drive in the direction of helpless, geeky fandom, but it has, and there we have it. I knew the die was cast when the simple action of Spock teaching Data the Vulcan nerve pinch caused me an exquisite, inexplicable, fangirly joy. It's over. I'm a Trekkie. Alas.

Of course, the whole thing was more or less sparked by my discovery, over vastly circuitous sf fandom routes (possibly via the Whatever), of Wil Wheaton's blog. I have an unholy fascination for the Wesley Crusher phenomenon: for the incredible outpouring of fan hatred which managed to pillory not only the character, but the unfortunate actor, who seems to be a likeable sort of person who really didn't deserve that. I'm a few episodes into Season 5, and of course Wesley has now left, to "go to the Academy", but really for the shattered teen actor to hie him off into the middle distance and try to regain some sort of self-esteem. It's all rather unfair: being a teenager is a poisonous enough experience without legions of geeky sf fans craning over your shoulder and insisting not only that your character's a dweeb, but that you are.

But I have to ask myself, even in strictly narrative terms - what the hell was going on here? I mean, yes, the writing in the first couple of seasons was really very clunky, and Wesley didn't exactly shine as an example of logical plot decisions, character development or emotional coherence. But then again, nor did anyone else. Honestly, I spent about the first season and a half dropping stitches in my knitting while shouting enraged instructions at the screen - for heaven's sake, beam them out of there! or use your empath! or why the hell are you putting a teenager into that situation? it makes no sense! And I have ranted elsewhere about the dialogue. Good grief. But these generalised problems don't seem to have generated the frenzy of frothing hatred that poor Wesley did. Putting an immature and inexperienced kid, however intelligent, onto the bridge is dodgy, but I think there's more going on here, and most of it is about fan identification.

See, Wesley is a geek. He's written as super-intelligent, accomplished and precocious; he solves problems adults can't. It's not realistic in many ways, but it's no more unrealistic than other aspects of the series, which really abandons all sorts of logic in the pursuit of both story and budget. (The stand-alone episodes drive me crazy: Significant Person or Moment introduced for an episode arc will vanish without a trace with the closing credits, never to be seen again despite the fact that really they should continue to affect the Enterprise and its inhabitants. Like Worf's bonded brother. Bleah). Wesley being a geek shouldn't be any more of a problem than Worf never being able to win a fight, and it particularly shouldn't be a problem given that the bulk of the viewers are themselves geeky science-fondling types. And Wes is not written as an arrogant smart-arse: he's an eager kid, probably intended as a rather endearing point of identification for geeky types whose reaction to the Enterprise would be an identical wide-eyed wonder, because all this spaceship science is just so cool.

And this, I think, is where the problem lies. However badly he's written, the root of the Wesley Crusher problem is not the fact that the character is unlikeable or unrealistic. It's actually a problem of over-identification, not failure of identification. I think too many geeky Trekkies see themselves in Wesley, and they find it excruciating to watch - oh god Wesley is where I would like to be, bumming around on the bridge with an enormous grin on his face, and he's completely dorky and has no right to be there. He both embodies and dramatises the fact of the watcher's own eternal exclusion from the bridge. The revulsion is thus because he represents the watcher too closely, at least the kind of watcher who spends a lot of time at Star Trek conventions. I think it's significant that, at least anecdotally, a lot of female Trek fans seem to really like Wesley. They don't have to watch themselves, and cringe, knowing full well that if given half a chance they'd be babbling just as excruciatingly about the ways in which matter and antimatter could be aligned even more efficiently in Dilithium crystals. (They might well so babble, but at least they're not watching themselves).

I don't like Next Gen as much without Wesley. There's a gap on the bridge, and I'm very aware that the writers partially created it by being really very bad at finding a realistic place for a teenaged geek in Star Trek - but only partially. In fact, the fans created it by being intolerant and incredibly cruel, and that intolerance is directly and slightly unforgiveably about the whole unhappy, marginal geek package - about insecurity. It's sad. I wish it had gone differently. I like Wesley, and he didn't deserve that.

And in broader terms, the whole Trek thing's bloody annoying. Now I'm going to have to re-watch the recent Star Trek movie and see if I actually like it any more than I did now that I'm all Trekkified. Phooey.