The Farmstead

So, I got my invite... Apparently I have to sign up with either a facebook or a Twitter account. No possibility of creating an independent account. 'But we will ALWAYS let you control sharing', I am promised.

Yeah, there is very little more likely to make me say 'eff off' to a service than that.

The question now is whether I make a dummy Twitter account just to be allowed on another site... Right now I think I'm too affronted.

*iz miffed*

ETA: Clicking on the 'sign up with Twitter page' it takes me to an app page on Twitter which says:

This application will be able to: Read Tweets from your timeline, See who you follow, and follow new people, Update your profile, Post Tweets for you.

This application will not be able to: Access your direct messages, See your Twitter password.

Well, isn't that nice it wouldn't be able to get at my password? !! Never mind it would have access to pretty much anything someone with the password could do anyway.

I really cannot bear this creeping process of people joining up the web. It's all to create richer baskets of demographics data to raise the price of advertising, yet the whole thing is so disingenuously presented in the patronising idea that people find it too complicated to have multiple log-ins: 'we require facebook and Twitter to make it easier to find people you know and reduce spam,' it says. I mean, come on: I don't want to find people I know and your site is proper bugged if your small start-up is getting so much spam that you have to piggyback off the user-screening of something so widespread as Twitter.

Do not get me started on Google's bullshit and the patronising messages they've started putting at every point of user engagement.

/rant

On the BBC: [ETA: or at least it was when I posted this; they seem to have edited it out of the article now]

The prime minister will say that too much of the debate about the alternative vote (AV) has so far been dominated by "scientific" evaluation of the two systems' merits.

"But for me, politics shouldn't be some mind-bending exercise. It's about what you feel in your gut - about the values you hold dear and the beliefs you instinctively have," he will say.

"And I just feel it, in my gut, that AV is wrong."

Getting past the question of how you can value or believe in writing an X instead of a 1 with any sort of dearness or instinct, that is some seriously offensive bullshit you're spinning. Fear change! Fear science! (Never mind the government's continual argument that science is the only valuable academic discipline anyway; I can see where this is going...) This is even worse than your mindless modelling of an economy on a household budget. (Most households I know don't pay themselves; you're not our daddy working down the office.)

Grumble.

(I have another post about some fic I wrote for sb_fag_ends, but the plan is to write a bit more, and it doesn't really belong in this post anyway. But I'll write that at some point.)

I have a deadline on Wednesday, so, as might be considered my MO, I've somewhat lost the will to work (have an essay, but can't work out how to make it any better; I finish things far too ahead of time, it's a thing), but have nevertheless essentially checked out of the world. To the point I was on the phone to my mum and seemed to think she would understand if I started talking about my essay (which she had been reading) in terms of two sections before and after the volta... Because, of course, that sort of conceptualisation's visible outside my brain.

Anyway, my checking out last weekend and this Friday/Saturday has essentially resulted in a draft seasonal_spuffy fic - 16,000 words even. ( Just in case you don't want to know... )

Though various flips and wriggles across cyberspace (/my DW netork), I came across this post, where someone I don't know quoted somebody else I don't know saying the line:

"[A]ll literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction."

On the one hand, this is a very nice sentiment and, you know, in the context of the qualifying definition Michael Chabon provides, true. On the other, however, I find myself yet again amused/annoyed that apparently the Greeks were actually divinely inspired in the verve and originality of their literature. Or maybe this guy is just a really big fan of Catullus or something, but, if we play the averages, I suspect he might probably hang with the crowd that thinks Terence's Menander 'translations' were completely unchanged in their move to Latin and Ennius' tragedies just copied the oldies despite making drastic changes even in the fragments we have.

But none of those are major parts of the Western textual canon! you might say. The Aeneid is just making a big point, because everybody's heard of it! Apart from the fact that every fifth century tragedian was essentially writing fanfic too, and, oh yes, yet again we see Homer as The Original Source Text Of All Texts Ever. Because, you know, the Muse actually came down and told Homer what to say: 'he' was completely free of all outside influences - it was only when the Aeneid came along that the fanfic began. Uh huh.

...

I'm not even sure why I'm ranting about this. I love Homer and all his cleverdick ways (and he, whoever he was/were-in-the-plural-creators, really was a clever bastard), but, for heaven's sake, if everything from the Aeneid onwards is fanfic, then the Iliad and the Odyssey bloody were too.

IN OTHER NEWS: What do you think my fic says about my id?

Hello! Berlin was lovely - noticeably different from when I visited two years ago (Starbucks and McDonalds seem to have made inroads, yet at the same time Bio-Essen (organic food) seems to be making further strides, with Bionade way more expectable than some sort of equivalent over here), but also, to my tourist's eyes, familiarly different in the way's it's been to me since 2006.

I'd love to hear from the Germans on my flist about their thoughts on Ostalgie( ... )

But if we're talking about over-intellectualising, I might as well mention the comics. Because I'm still annoyed about the sexualised marketing of Buffy; I'm annoyed that the big!climactic!drama is a sex scene instead of a boss fight (this can be done well, but I don't understand how sex instead of fighting has been built as a thematic point in the season; as it is it just feels like the female narrative ending in sex once again, especially since this is selling itself as a retconned climax to all the seasons - and, hey, apparently sex and power are bad for women too; two birds with one remarkably unsubversive stone, eh, Joss?); I'm annoyed that the TwilightZone is symbolically represented by people wearing sheets (because you know what, Joss, the Ancient World is not that different to this one; you aren't that safe); I'm annoyed the Slayer mythos has been divorced from all the human bullshit that made it so believable and relevant, to be replaced by some sort of bizarre sentient Nature god; I'm annoyed by the solipsism that Earth is of central importance to the Universe, because what is solipsism if not the fount of faily privilege?

Though, thinking about it, I think I'm mostly annoyed that the annoyance I feel, no matter how extreme, cannot compare to how passionately I once enjoyed watching the show. :(

ALTHOUGH, making myself read - DID YOU SEE HOW SATSU PUT DAWN IN CHARGE? Feel the chemistry, my friends. :P There are some characters I still care about, OK?

*has potentially unpopular opinion*

For some reason, I've been writing a lot of 'what I know' recently - places I've been and experiences I've had. None of them have been exact situations that I've lived, but compared with the usual stabbing in the dark I'd say we're in 'what I know' territory. The thing is, I don't think it's made me write any better than I might have done otherwise. Certain aspects have certainly been easier, but to me it's doesn't feel like the words have come out with any new sense of sparkling truth to them.

It's led me to realising what I thought was possibly true for a while: I really don't get on with 'write what you know' as a maxim. It might work for novels, because people probably have more to say about what they know, but in fandom, where you're having to work with someone else's world, I don't think it's particularly useful. The Buffyverse is almost completely alien to me - I've never been to California; the relationships aren't like ones I've been in, either familial, romantic or between friends; I've certainly never interacted with a vampire. Short of drastically changing the verse in some way, or limiting myself to writing outside the canon characters, I'm almost always writing what I don't know. But I don't think it's put me at a particular disadvantage. (That's not to say I don't bring things in that I do know about, because I do, but I equally toss in utterly random crap because it serves the story. I don't think one should be preferable to the other.)

And, more than that, I can't help but feel that 'write what you know' gives people the excuse not to branch out from their own experience - or, at lease, people with normative life experiences anyway. Because, with TV (etc.) the way it is, a lot of people are going to be forced to write what they don't know if they want to write fic. 'Write what you know' might as well be 'write what we know (but only if you can pretend that you know it)'. It rubs me up the wrong way.

For example, I always thought that I shouldn't write any graphic sex scenes until I had, you know, had sex. But then I came to realise I wasn't intending to do that in either the near or distant future, whereas I was writing fic where sex could be an extremely crucial moment in the story (mostly unpublished stuff but the point still stands). So I started writing what I didn't know and, really, that made my writing better.

Basically, why encourage people to limit themselves unnecessarily? I'm not saying that it might not be a useful suggestion in moderation, but I wish it wouldn't be seen as some sort of universal truth of what makes good writing.

fiercelydreamed is doing a fantastic job at queerlygen (do come an join in, it's going to be great - I can tell these things), so this shouldn't be read as any sort of indictment of her and certainly isn't a call for people to come and 'help me out' in any way. The whole issue I'm going to talk about it is ongoing, so really this post will likely become irrelevant very quickly; I'm mostly making it because, if I don't, then it will be running round my head for the rest of the day and drive me up the wall.

( Asexuality 101, abridged, with minor rantiness. )