The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: CortJstr on December 08, 2006, 01:51:24 pm
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http://raysmuckles.blogspot.com/2006/12/smallest-party-ever.html
Ray owns earbuds? Usually he avoids such low class trappings. I can only assume that these were the first ones ever created or are gold plated or something. Or perhaps the classic red and blue earbuds that came with Gameboys.
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Yeah, I would have assumed Ray owns a pair of sleek, $1200 Bose over-ear headphones. The man can catch you off guard sometimes.
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goddamn. this makes me miss my old headphones. they were hell of retro looking, and I had had them since I was in 6th grade.
they broke because they were extremely well made, with the exclusion of this one joint that was like a 2 mm thick piece of plastic. which snapped.
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Fuck old school headphones. My in ear heapphones are the best damn headphones i've ever known. I've never had any $1200 dollar headphones, but for $50 these are like 10 times more awesome than the $60 pair of old school phones I used to own.
~Paul
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yeah, I mean, earbuds are kind of known as being way better in 90% of ways. Be serious. I just liked those ones because they made my ears hot, and were huge, and I used to play my guitar through them. You can't do that so well with earbuds (shorter cable? they fall out if you "rock out?")
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yeah, I mean, earbuds are kind of known as being way better in 90% of ways. Be serious. I just liked those ones because they made my ears hot, and were huge, and I used to play my guitar through them. You can't do that so well with earbuds (shorter cable? they fall out if you "rock out?")
in-ear > regular headphones > concetrating on headphone jack > pencils > earbuds
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Ok, I get ya Cort. Yeah, earbuds suck the most.
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that's weird.
I was just looking at the cover of this album. (http://fusionanomaly.net/buttholesurferselectriclarryland.jpg)
and then you mentioned pencils. You know, haha.
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I have a pair of $40 Sony in-ear headphones. They've served me great. The only real drawback is the occasional need to clean my earwax out of them. Can't really blame Sony for my waxy ears, though, can I?
Or can I?
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Ray probably just had the earbuds laying around from some purchase where the earbuds came gratis and... he didn't throw them out because he thought he'd give them to Beef or a young child in Africa who can afford an iPod but not headphones (these sorts of people exist in Ray's head) and... y'know... he promptly forgot about having saved them.
Only when he was looking to throw his one-man "no one appreciates my opulence" pity party did he find the earbuds and consider them a perfect piece in his "one-minute of without".
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man, I am worried about Phillipe and who he is going to use this PDF to talk to.
also: I really enjoyed the thing about Phillipe being put to bed by the baby. Um, how did I miss that?
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man, I am worried about Phillipe and who he is going to use this PDF to talk to.
also: I really enjoyed the thing about Phillipe being put to bed by the baby. Um, how did I miss that?
I blame Blogger's chronically out of date RSS feed for that. It still doesn't show Philippe's newest entry as existing at all.
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Nice Pete should talk to my friend, who once admitted in a DT class that he thought plastic grew on trees. That is the kind of plastic a man can understand.
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Molly's new blog just backs up my view that Molly's blog is the best. Her second paragraph is amazing:
Ran into Lyle when I was picking up a little thingie of Jägermeister for Beef (he loves to drink an airplane bottle of Jäger and spout his mouth off to the 'Tech Corner' of the local evening news). Lyle's Christmas plans? Apparently he's got some new band with the supremely discomforting Nice Pete, and they'd forgotten about Christmas. At the realization of an upcoming holiday, Lyle brightened and placed his bottle of Old Postman back on the shelf in favor of Jack Daniels.
( http://mollysanders.blogspot.com/2006/12/achewood-list-december-19-2006.html )
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Oh Pat, the classes with Arthur seem for naught, your intense road rage may be the end for you. But seriously, some rough language coupled with some equally rough chuckles makes for a delectable entry from Pat.
"YOUR C*NT IS REAL ESTATE AND ITALIANS THROW FOOD AT YOUR MIND!", does that have some sort of hidden meaning, is it some new colloquial expression floating around in the mean streets of Pat's mind, or is it just the most offensive thing Pat could think of at the time? The more I read it the more I can see the tiny furious wheels in Pat's mind. First he attacks her most sacred feminine area, a logical move, and what better way than to imply that sums of money are being exchanged for the deed to your hoochie-coochie. Second he attacks her mind, clearly he also expresses his low opinion of Italian cuisine. Pat may see Italian cuisine as base due to it's "ubiquity" (e.g. Chef Boyardee), hence he implies that her mind also exhibits promiscuity in that it accepts anything that's thrown at it, even things which many might consider low-class.
Damn, that was some intense thinkin', must be from trying to induce lucid dreaming.
http://journeyintoreason.blogspot.com/
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I would've gone with "kinky synergy" but maybe Ray doesn't know that word.
And Pat needs a grammar lesson. "System Of A Down" indeed. Tsk tsk.
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I would've gone with "kinky synergy" but maybe Ray doesn't know that word.
I think "kinky synthesis" is funnier, though. It sounds like a procedure from one of those sci-fi porno films from the '70's -- you know, like Space Thing? Something they have to do when they can't find enough cumlithium crystals to get the warp drive (er... "sex warp drive") going again.
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I still have a little "thingie" of Jagermeister I got for my birthday last year. It's about half full, the first sip having been taken when I first got it. Never did finish it. That stuff is the Gateway to Terrible Things.
Also, what the heck is a Napoleon's?
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I want a subscription to the Hollandaise of the Month Club.
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I want a subscription to the Hollandaise of the Month Club.
This sounded tasted before it occurred to me that either I'd be receiving an uncooked egg product through the mail or that I'd be doing some of the cooking myself. I doubt either option would lead to deliciousness.
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How do you know they don't have a chef come to your house? Ray would settle for nothing less.
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http://chrisonstad.blogspot.com/2006/12/happy-new-year-2007.html
I've always pictured it as pulling the offending driver out through the window, then pummelling him, rather than flipping over the car. But I know of what he speaks.
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The majority of pedestrian accidents are not because of driver error. Just sayin'
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The majority of pedestrian accidents are not because of driver error. Just sayin'
'EY! EYYYYY! I'm walkin' 'ere!
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I saw a fight - a literal fistfight - last weekend because a driver turned left through a crosswalk while a couple was walking through said crosswalk. The driver did have a green light but the pedestrians had a clear, solid "Walk" signal. Advantage: Pedestrians.
This happened late at night in an area with more bars than good sense. The walking dude, who I'll call Irish Thug because that's what he looked like, dodged the car but stood in front of it when the driver stopped. Irish Thug helpfully pointed at the crosswalk light, still in his favor, and loudly explained that he and his girlfriend had the right-of-way. I don't know what the driver said, but he apparently wanted to finish his thought enough to warrant putting the car into reverse and backing toward the pedestrian couple as they continued to the opposite corner of the curb.
Irish Thug took that as a show of hostility and the frat-guy posturing began. (Mind you, the traffic lights have turned by now and this little argument is blocking progress through the intersection in any direction.) Irish Thug started his gangsta handwaving, Driver opened his car door, Thug approached the car, Driver started to get out, Thug got a little running start and KICKED THE DRIVER'S DOOR CLOSED. Then the driver put his car into park and got out, revealing that he's probably six inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter than the Thug, who is all too delighted to take advantage of the mismatch. He starts swinging at the driver and they both tumble to the street. Pedestrian Girlfriend is shreiking at Irish Thug to STOP STOP STOP!! and passers-by are all just kind of gawking because it's still one of those weak flailing fights rather than a full-on brawl with fists to the face. A few phones are poised to dial 911 (do you call 911 for a fight like that, or do you wait until someone is bloody or knocked out?).
Dudes are rolling around on the street, girlfriend is wailing at the wanton display of ultraviolence, a parked car blocks the intersection. Finally, some guy runs up out of nowhere and separates the fighters. Irish Thug walks away as I applaud silently. Driver gets back into his car and drives away knowing that a few people watched him get beat down for being an inconsiderate jerkoff who couldn't just apologize for his mistake and move on.
So yeah, right-of-way goes to the pedestrian in the crosswalk, even if you have a green light.
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That story just made my morning!
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So yeah, right-of-way goes to the pedestrian in the crosswalk, even if you have a green light.
So the car had a green light and the pedestrian also had a green light (or whatever colour 'WALK' is)?
Oh lordy, America is a country with all the safety features switched off!
Plus they were both probably carrying concealed automatic weapons...
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This happens when someone is walking and a driver is turning.
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I have a story that begins the same way as turbo ninja's -- driver turning left through a crosswalk, both driver (some dude) and pedestrian (me) having green/walk lights. When I saw the car coming I shrieked and jumped back melodramatically, and immediately felt silly. "Oh man," I thought, "anyone who saw that must think I'm completely high strung and paranoid. Obviously the car would have stopped." And then it hit the woman who'd been walking right next to me.
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I have a story that begins the same way as turbo ninja's -- driver turning left through a crosswalk, both driver (some dude) and pedestrian (me) having green/walk lights. When I saw the car coming I shrieked and jumped back melodramatically, and immediately felt silly. "Oh man," I thought, "anyone who saw that must think I'm completely high strung and paranoid. Obviously the car would have stopped." And then it hit the woman who'd been walking right next to me.
You're right, pedestrians DO have the right-of-way. But it's too goddamned dangerous to assume so. You don't wanna sacrifice your body to prove a point. I always assume that they don't see me when I'm a ped. I almost got hit plenty of times when I was attending graduate school.
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This happens when someone is walking and a driver is turning.
In my cantree, if a pedestrian crossing has a green light, and a car also has a green light to drive through that crossing then, basically, something is broken. I may be misreading the original scenario but it sounded like the traffic system was giving both parties the go-ahead to move. "Metal and Flesh - I call on you to mingle violently!" It was saying.
So, in Amurickey - is there some element of overlapping green-lights which is regarded as normal workings of the system? Sounds like the kind of thing Lex Luthor would pull to keep Superman occupied during nefarious deeds.
Let's see...
Per capita road deaths in 2003
USA: 14
UK: 6
Ooh.
Elf-Traffic-Core:
THE CHAOS LIGHTS FLASHED GREEN TO STEEL AND MEAT
EMBRACE IN DEATH UPON THE BLOOD SLICK STREET
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I saw a fight - a literal fistfight - last weekend because a driver turned left through a crosswalk while a couple was walking through said crosswalk. The driver did have a green light but the pedestrians had a clear, solid "Walk" signal. Advantage: Pedestrians.
In my cantree, if a pedestrian crossing has a green light, and a car also has a green light to drive through that crossing then, basically, something is broken. I may be misreading the original scenario but it sounded like the traffic system was giving both parties the go-ahead to move. "Metal and Flesh - I call on you to mingle violently!" It was saying.
Basically, yes it was. But, here in the United States, we understand the system. If a driver has a turn only light, then the crosslight will not give go ahead. However, if a driver is turning on a green-yeild, both the driver and pedestrian have a green signal, but the driver must wait on the pedestrian as part of the yeild observation. Basically, if it is a place with lots of walkers it is generally fine, if it is a place with few walkers I could see it being dangerous. I doubt this has much to do with per capita road deaths. In Dallas there are like 3-5 shootings a day due to road rage (at least according to people I know from Dallas, which is way to many), and I bet the U.S. has more mugging that end in death, etc.
Also, your stat is kind of bullshit. What does it mean? 14 deaths per thousand deaths? per hundred thousand deaths? per million? Or is it a ranking. Like USA is 14th and UK is 6. Then what does that mean? Is that ranking in order of good or bad? See, I don't doubt that the UK has safer roads, but I do wonder what the fuck that means.
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Definition of 'per capita.' (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/percapita)
Education.
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I understand that it adjust to the number of people in the country, but that still does not make that make since.
Alright, it makes since, in a 14/6 ratio of deaths caused by road incident per average population (then, is that like to the deaths or compared to the population at whole?), but what are those numbers relative to? It could also be a ranking still, as I have nothing to that reads otherwise. I guess it helps to prove the point, but at least one more piece of info should be there.
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Also, your stat is kind of bullshit.
Please, I didnt mean to drive over your toe with my intended-to-be-non-confrontational post. I suppose deaths-per-person-mile might be an interesting stat.
One thing I have learned from that explanation with the Lights and the Yielding and the Turning and the Glavin is that I am too damn stupid to be a pedestrian in the USA.
Hugs!
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but what are those numbers relative to?
Hmm, whether it's maybe per 10,000 people or something? The relative ratios are meaningful I guess - i.e: about 3 times more deadly in the USA than the UK. I will re-google...
[hold music]
...it's per 100,000 people.
Edit: per vehicle miles it's much closer in the two (both really fine) countries.
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The point of a per capita statistic is to allow you to make comparisons between populations of different size. The 100,000 figure doesn't mean anything special - you could figure it in terms of another number.
This seems like a clear explanation: http://www.robertniles.com/stats/percap.shtml (http://www.robertniles.com/stats/percap.shtml)
But enough with the education already, it is only distracting us from the real issue - it's January! Why don't the cartoon cats update their damn blogs?
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The 100,000 figure doesn't mean anything special - you could figure it in terms of another number.
I suppose true 'per capita' (deaths per head of population) value would be 14/100,000 - that's 140 micronoggins to use the SI unit.
But enough with the education already
I agree and am slapping myself around the face as I type yet another tedious non-achewood-related digression.
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lfm-- I always want to have a gun in order to do reverse-road-rage. For instance, yesterday a my girlfriend apparently accidentally cut a guy off. Did he honk? No. Did he flick her off? No. He followed her until the next red light, pulled up next to her, rolled down her window, gestured for her to roll down her window, and then started cussing at her. SHE IS AN EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE GIRL, YOU OLD ASSHOLE! Jesus, people.
Basically I hate when people assume others are purposely being dicks. But I hate it more when people go far out of their way to be assholes. Get a hold of yourselves, people.
My fantasy is to get a little paint-ball pistol, and shoot people who do stuff like this. And then say "next time, it won't be a paint-ball, jackass."
(I wouldn't actually go out and get a real gun, it would just be a teach a lesson.)
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Nice fantasy, until asshole dude assaults you 'cause he knows you ain't lethally armed now.
This conversation today has been beautiful but I think we need cat-blog grist for the mill.
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oh man, I totally did not think of that angle. Fuck.
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Solution: Have Both
First: Paint-Ball
Second: Display real firearm while screaming NEEEEEEEXT TIME FUUUUUCKER!
Finale: Flee police/jail.
'stad needs Ray to write up his new year party when the hangover ends or I'm going to make up my own.
Holy shit I never threatened fan-fic before. Y'all's bad influences.
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Holy shit I never threatened fan-fic before.
The threat of "fan-fiction" as the final and most cruel option, as a sort of internet mutually-assured-destruction no-win proposition, is a fine (and indeed, can-worthy) idea. I am surprised I've never heard such a notion before. It is so elegant and effective that it could only be called effelgant.
One imagines a cowboy riding a collection of Sam/Al "Quantum Leap" fan-fiction down from the bombay doors of a B52, in stark black-and-white, yipping and screaming as though he had done The Best Thing Ever while he was actually damning us all.
Dr. Strangeblog or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Slash.
The naive belief that he's winning a war while... actually... the moment his bomb explodes, countermeasures will be enacted destroying all major cities and clouding the world in despair forever.
P'CHOO... there goes Los Angeles in a sickening wave of Voyager/Galactica crossover where Seven of Nine schtups a Cylon named after the author.
P'CHOO... there goes London as every computer screen is simultaneously replaced with a quick story of the Tom Baker Doctor seducing the newest guy, the one in the leather jacket and so on.
P'CHOO... Paris falls to a torrent of who would win in a battle: Asterix or the television Highlander.
P'CHOO, P'CHOO, P'CHOO. The civilized world falls, sex scene by sex scene, crossover by crossover, self-insert by self-insert, extrapolation of someone else's ten-novel-long fan-canon by extrapolation of someone else's fan-canon.
Only those of us meta-factually study enough to endure the levels of reality and desperation raining down on the world, breaking the minds of the weak and the pure, would climb out of the rubble of ten thousand Ranma-1/2-seducing-Ellen-Barkin's-character-from-"Switch" essays and attempt to start the world anew.
I'm... pretty sure David Lynch would end up the President of those wastelands.
Anyway, it is too bad that the people here aren't in charge of creating the memes of the internet.
The analogy of fan-fiction to atomic war is a fine idea and bears repeating.
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damn, dude. My friend at school had a page of fan-pics-- including one of Harry Potter trying to get his smooches on with Cho.
...that one ended up in the student newspaper, in an article about students who make art in their free time. Now whenever we want to get her all red and blushy, we just say "err, Cho, what are you doing--" and pretend like we're pushing her away. (that is what Harry was doing in the picture.)
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In my cantree, if a pedestrian crossing has a green light, and a car also has a green light to drive through that crossing then, basically, something is broken. I may be misreading the original scenario but it sounded like the traffic system was giving both parties the go-ahead to move. "Metal and Flesh - I call on you to mingle violently!" It was saying.
So, in Amurickey - is there some element of overlapping green-lights which is regarded as normal workings of the system? Sounds like the kind of thing Lex Luthor would pull to keep Superman occupied during nefarious deeds.
Let's see...
Per capita road deaths in 2003
USA: 14
UK: 6
Ooh.
Elf-Traffic-Core:
THE CHAOS LIGHTS FLASHED GREEN TO STEEL AND MEAT
EMBRACE IN DEATH UPON THE BLOOD SLICK STREET
Heh, excellent song. You get a tiny can of Dr. Pepper for that, mate.
Also...YES! Our country was built upon the automobile! We have a culture of HATE AND DISRESPECT towards pedestrians and bicyclists!*
*I have a degree in architecture and urban planning and our European professors constantly drove it into our heads that we had to design with the pedestrian in mind to pay penance for the past sins of automobile-centric design. It's a good thing -- just ask my twin sister (we call each other wombie, as in womb-mate) Kellichou, who got hit by an asshole when she was commuting to work on her bike.
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Here is the reaction that my 15-year-old self had to the Harry-Cho story from inside me:
"Girls... make fan-fiction? This blows all my perceptions of everything. Are you sure she is a girl? Have you consulted her doctors to make sure? Surgery can do amazing things these days, simply checking is not enough. Get some blood, there has to be Y-chromosomes in there. Science allows us to check now."
My fifteen year old self did not... and from inside me, does not... accept that women could be warped in that kind of way. Intellectually, as technically an adult, I understand that there are genetic female who do that sort of thing. But... man.
Early-Teens Mike will just not accept it.
Only boys could be twisted and lonely like that. I think this is why I didn't date much until the end of high school, I thought there was something particularly male about being that turned up inside of yourself. I totally didn't get that it was a human condition, that all kinds of people could feel like that.
I mean, I dunno. I probably could've identified with the girls I had affections for if I understood that they could possibly been in the bad weird place that... I thought was the provence of boys, generally, and myself specifically.
I mean, I didn't do fan-fiction but I had reams of embarrassing semi-autobiographical plays and short stories that I didn't share with anyone. I thought that I was a rare kind of broken, improbable amoungst men, impossible amoungst women. I guess because even the weirdest or least attractive girls were persued romantically occasionally.
I thought that somehow that was the tonic against the kind of teenage loneliness I was feeling.
I guess that realizing that everyone is broken inside is when you start becoming an adult and... really full accepting that everyone is broken inside, really integrating that into your life and dealing with the high and the mighty and the low and the crazy are all broken, deserving of pity and undeserving of being feared... that's when you actually ARE an adult.
If I'm still debating these things, maybe I'm not yet, I dunno.
Anyway: wow.
On some deep level, I had to triplecheck that post, to make sure that you said a "her" made fan-fiction about Harry Potter. Some little part of me, my old teenage self, could not accept that as a part of reality at first blush.
I dunno what this says about me. I dunno what that says about the world.
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wait, what? Every person I know who writes fanfic is a She. And they are all about Harry Potter. (I think the count is Three.)
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Yes, what InEv says is very true. There was this lass who would write a new chapter in her Harry Potter fanfiction every week. Being an obedient, spineless sort, I would pretend to read it every day it was updated and post glowing reviews on the way she really GOT Harry's little mannerisms.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm not a complete lying bastard, but I have a crippling inability to tell anybody that what they do is wrong. Is this why people write fan fiction? Because people encourage them? Christ.
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Yeah, I always thought that was a girly kind of thing to do.
I don't understand why people write fan fiction. If you think it is fun to write something, why wouldn't you want to make up your own characters? I guess it is more work, but it's the most interesting part. But I imagine that my confusion is due to missing the point entirely.
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Yeah, I always thought that was a girly kind of thing to do.
I don't understand why people write fan fiction. If you think it is fun to write something, why wouldn't you want to make up your own characters? I guess it is more work, but it's the most interesting part. But I imagine that my confusion is due to missing the point entirely.
Without meaning to get too crude, there is the very real thrill some people experience from having two characters or people they adore doing things the artist or author never wanted. I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time before we get Ray and Roast Beef fan fiction. Wait, I'm sure at least someone here has done that.
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I dunno, man.
I went through a phase where I spent weeks looking at MST3K-ings of terrible fanfiction and I think there were only two or three female names in the whole bunch. And one or two of those were, just, clearly not women because of the "new" character being an obvious male self-insert character getting it on with... Tasha Yar or... A-Ko or... Public Defender Christine or... whatever the kink was.
Maybe Harry Potter fanfiction is a different subset than the... Star Trek/Star Wars/Highlander/anime/wants-to-have-sex-with-the-ladybear-from Talespin crowd? Maybe women write better/less-twisted fanfiction that never comes onto my radar for reading ironically?
I've never looked into fanfiction as... actual... reading? Never really even considered it, I guess. Fanfiction's only positive aspect in my experience has always been that... big German word I always misspell... shaudenfreude (?). Overwhelming yourself with joy at the outlandish failings of others. Making yourself feel smarter and better by looking at things that seem to be a product of idiocy, madness or laziness.
As it stands, fanfiction has always been to me as... like... sort of how my brother and I play "Family Guy Chicken"... who can suffer more of it before someone can no longer take it, gets up and turns the channel.
"Whoop! The baby's gonna say something droll again! Try and not laugh until you die!"
"THE FATHER. LIKES. EATING. So funny!"
Etc.
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Somewhere there's a great master's thesis in the shifting demographics of fandom: how a cultural phenomenon that was associated entirely with men (the classic "fanboy") has gradually shifted towards a majority, to the point that fandom is now frequently considered to be stereotypically female. My personal theory on the matter is that it has to do with what kinds of fan behavior are dominant. Classical "fanboyism" seems to apply to a sort of fanatical obsession with canonical material in great detail, behavior that seems to be waning, while use of fandom as a jumping-off point for community and creative activity (in my experience, a much more stereotypically female mode) seems to be growing.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, as someone who has in the past considered writing fanfiction (and wrote a fair number of MST3Kifications back in The Day), the pull of fanfiction is that it offers a chance to explore characters and situations people are already familiar with in greater detail. Some of this is to attract a greater reading audience; after all, nobody really wants to read your original story about Todd The Wizard Boy And His Make-Out Adventures, but there's a huge audience hooked into reading a story about Harry Potter making out with more or less any other character in the books. Some people also think of it as "practice" for original writing -- you get to hone your skills working with characters you already know well -- and some people just do it as a lark. There's also the pull of "What if...?", which, while you could file the serial numbers off and claim it as your own, lacks a lot of the appeal if the plot is relatively specific.
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my grandparents told me over dinner about a Chilean girl who wrote a huge, 500-page alternate ending to the most recent Potter adventure. it became really popular in Chile.
she is now under contract to write a full-length novel for a Chilean publisher.
also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.
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also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.
They had one when I was there. If they don't anymore you should be so grateful.
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I guess I always associated fan-fiction as being sexual on some level... whether about having the characters make Maximum Cuddles directly or about subtler more repressed sexual fixations expressed in slavish devotion to characters or... the entire story being about the slow progression TOWARD Maximum Cuddles.
Often, the author's fictional proxy making Maximum Cuddles with the character(s).
I guess I think of baroquely-twisted manifestations of sexual repression/disfunction/desperation as a primarily male thing. Maybe left over from teenage pedestialization of the girls I dug in high school, not sure.
The point is well taken, though... my mental image of "fan fiction" is almost exclusively of a fan fiction... read five or six years ago and probably written years before that. Highlander showin' up on the Enterprise, six novel cycles about self-insert characters evolving to the point where the original work's influence is nearly entirely discarded for the adventures of the author/author proxy.
Is there a flood of fanfiction out there, now, that isn't... at its core... driven by the desire to see two fictional characters have sex or to have sex with a fictional character?
Or am I basically still right except that it's largely toned down to "relationship porn" instead of "sex porn" for the purposes of wider acceptability... and the stuff where a transporter accident turns Weslie Crusher into a girl and then Lt. Totally-The-Author has sex with her because he wants to have sex with Weslie Crusher but can't admit he's gay is just... pushed deeper into the hidden parts of the internet?
Is it just that Draco turns Harry Potter into a girl as a prank and then the young wizard Totally-The-Author "eventually forms a relationship with her and they date" now... because that's the code today?
Is shipping just softcore slash at the end of the day?
Perhaps things have changed as I slide closer to thirty and with it senility.
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Is there a flood of fanfiction out there, now, that isn't... at its core... driven by the desire to see two fictional characters have sex or to have sex with a fictional character?
Yes. But from what I understand, such fanfiction is much, much, MUCH more boring.
A friend of mine wrote a Scooby-Doo fanfiction with intent to piss people off (and so yes, apparently there's Scooby-Doo fic out there, AUGHHGHG). It was some elaborate thing about Scooby getting a terminal disease and dying. This friend of mine was horrified when it was met with praise. It's funny because he was stupid enough to think that silly fanfiction fans wouldn't eat it up.
But anyway, not all fanfic is "slash."
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also: goddamn how did I end up at a school that doesn't have a sociology department.
They had one when I was there. If they don't anymore you should be so grateful.
August is right. Sociology is the worst fuck*ng subject I've had the misfortune to take this year.
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Is shipping just softcore slash at the end of the day?
Absolutely.
And, to your question about the baroquely twisted fantasies of teenage girls, it's my understanding that girls are typically not at/near their sexual peak in high school, which may explain why the bizarre desperation that leaks into their stories is less explicitly sexual, in general. It's still bizarre desperation, though. There are plenty of adolescent girls who are ostracized and rejected, who fail to grasp the basic principles of socializing, who have surreal sets of obscure interests, who have hopelessly tangled interior monologues, who wander alone in the intricacies of their fantasies, and who are weirder than they are hot (at least for the time being). The isolation they feel may be more isolation from community and romance than isolation from sex -- hence the preference for shipping over slash -- but I doubt that makes their desperation much less consuming.
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lfm you're on a fucki*g roll.
CANNED
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Hmm, whether it's maybe per 10,000 people or something? The relative ratios are meaningful I guess - i.e: about 3 times more deadly in the USA than the UK. I will re-google.
I am really sorry. I was pretty drunk, and for some reason I took offense to what you were saying. Basically I thought you were putting down the USA which really bugs me, not because I really like the USA, but because it implies that people here are dumber than elsewhere. Lazier? Probably, as we adapt to the fact we have more conveniences than we could possibly need. Basically, I have no pride in the USA, as MY country, but I do think that countries an antique idea, and that it is dumb to separate people into countries, etc., etc. You weren't saying this at all, sorry.
Oh, I guess the point I was trying to make was you aren't perfect or something, by doing something that didn't make since. Sorry, but the ooh in your post made me mad for some reason, now I see I was an ass. On to Achewood.
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I learned from the last page of posts:
1. Fanfic often involves a proxy for the author having sex with the main character
2. There is Scooby Doo fanfic.
I don't want to know more, OK? Please?
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I am really sorry.
Pshaw! Internet is Trivial Business. I could see where you were coming from.
For what it's worth Yank-bashing really gets my goat as well. It's so lazy, hypocritical, and... annoying.
Another form of bigotry that for some reason, people seem to think they can indulge in while retaining the moral high ground.
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My experience with fanfic is colored by my membership - or participation, or whatever - in a BBS that followed X-files. Most of the members of that board were female, and they were prolific fanfic writers. There was a major component of Mulder/Scully consummation, but as I recall there was a lot of my-version-of-Monster-of-the-Week plots as well. The point being, I guess, that not all fanfic is diverted sexual frustration. I didn't contribute to that, as I'm not much of a storyteller. I'm more of a creative person's foil - a critic, as it were.
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Yeah, I always thought that was a girly kind of thing to do.
I don't understand why people write fan fiction. If you think it is fun to write something, why wouldn't you want to make up your own characters? I guess it is more work, but it's the most interesting part. But I imagine that my confusion is due to missing the point entirely.
Fanfic is nothing new. Le Morte D'Arthur, Idylls of the King, The Once and Future King, Taliessin Through Logres... all Geoffrey of Monmouth fanfic. The difference is that now, only the shitty, laughable fanfics get written, because trying to publish a good one will get you sued for copyright violation faster than Harry Potter fellating Dumbledore to climax.
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It's still bizarre desperation, though. There are plenty of adolescent girls who are ostracized and rejected, who fail to grasp the basic principles of socializing, who have surreal sets of obscure interests, who have hopelessly tangled interior monologues, who wander alone in the intricacies of their fantasies, and who are weirder than they are hot (at least for the time being). The isolation they feel may be more isolation from community and romance than isolation from sex -- hence the preference for shipping over slash -- but I doubt that makes their desperation much less consuming.
This pretty much nails it. Speaking as a former awkward adolescent girl (I'm still awkward, but at 23 you can't really call yourself "adolescent" anymore), I can say with some confidence that what you're really fantasizing about at that point is belonging: being in love (possibly with Maximum Cuddles as an option, but these are less important than the True Love) and loved, ideally by one Significant Other and as many adoring friends as possible. This obviously lends itself to shipper fanfiction -- but, I think, particularly shipping of awkward couples, people who really shouldn't get together (because they have nothing in common, or because cruel society keeps them apart, or perhaps because one of them is Harry Potter and the other is Legolas), because what good is it for twisted desperate wish fulfillment writing about the love lives of serene, happy, confident people? You know you're not a serene, happy, confident person. But you might be Harry Potter, and Legolas just might show up.
Possibly the best example of this I ever read was by a middle-school friend of mine, quite possibly the most awkward adolescent girl I've ever met, who wrote fanfiction about the Disney version of Hercules. The first such fanfic (in what turned out to be a series of 3, plus bonus installments) was about a girl who was the secret, abandoned daughter of Aeneas and the muse Erato, living as a beggar despite her incredible beauty and prodigious musical talent. She meets Hercules, they fall in love, she turns out to have psychic powers, Hercules has a crisis because he has a pre-existing love interest, it turns out the beggar girl is the love interest's childhood best friend, and so on... until, inevitably, there is a conflict with an Evil Guy in which the beggar girl dies tragically so that Hercules can be with his love interest, and everyone mourns. Seriously, everyone. All the Olympian gods and stuff. It is such an archetypal Work Of Fanfiction By An Awkward Adolescent Girl that I almost can't believe I really did encounter it in the wild, from an author who apparently had no awareness of fandom as a phenomenon. (Later on her work got more self-aware, right down to inserting characters "inspired by" her friends as bizarre, frequently antagonistic supporting cast, which is less archetypal but also symptomatic of adolescent desperation in strange ways. Honestly, she as a person was a psychology thesis waiting to happen...)
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The first such fanfic (in what turned out to be a series of 3, plus bonus installments) was about a girl who was the secret, abandoned daughter of Aeneas and the muse Erato, living as a beggar despite her incredible beauty and prodigious musical talent. She meets Hercules, they fall in love, she turns out to have psychic powers, Hercules has a crisis because he has a pre-existing love interest, it turns out the beggar girl is the love interest's childhood best friend, and so on... until, inevitably, there is a conflict with an Evil Guy in which the beggar girl dies tragically so that Hercules can be with his love interest, and everyone mourns. Seriously, everyone. All the Olympian gods and stuff.
So... wow, yeah. Her desire for Maximum Cuddles with a cartoon version of Hercules spun down the spiral from... cartoon Hercules falling in love with her authorial proxy into her proxy's full-on Christ complex swansong death. It appears safe to say that there was more going on there, in that particular case, than mere desire for romance or sex.
I still say that the person who writes the full-on-by-name self-insert Star Trek twelve-novel cycle partly based on continuity from SOMEONE ELSE'S fan-fiction is probably less healthy than the writer mentioned above but... yeah... definitely more warped than your run-of-the-mill twisted story where, like, Sam Beckett leaps into David Bowie while he's blowing Mick Jagger and he's all like:
"Muuum buh!"
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Heavy female fanfiction involvement is nothing new. Female authors were driving forces in Star Trek fandom pre-Internet, and continued to be very dominant in highly slashable/shippable fandoms such as Starsky & Hutch, the aforementioned X-Files, and (I'm told) Blake's 7 and Man From UNCLE. Much of this was continuing to go on in fanzines, of course, so as far as The Internet is concerned there are no records of it and it therefore does not exist.
The reason that Internet fanfiction was massively male-dominated for years is because the Internet fanfiction subculture grew out of USENET, which was very male-dominated, and from there shifted onto a relatively few massive mailing lists and archives that preserved the USENET-developed culture. Now the visibility is shifting to livejournals, small mailing lists, and web MBs while at the same time more girls and women are online than Back In The Day, so you're seeing much more prominence from female authors and readership; the boys' clubs are still there, but they're not in the spotlight.
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Oh God, please please PLEASE make me stop reading this thread.
No wait - I will keep reading this thread. Nothing has ever made me feel more normal and well adjusted in comparison.
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Or am I basically still right except that it's largely toned down to "relationship porn" instead of "sex porn" for the purposes of wider acceptability... and the stuff where a transporter accident turns Weslie Crusher into a girl and then Lt. Totally-The-Author has sex with her because he wants to have sex with Weslie Crusher but can't admit he's gay is just... pushed deeper into the hidden parts of the internet?
What I find most disturbing about this is that I've read interviews which claimed that Wesley Crusher was actually Gene Roddenbury inserting a younger version of himself into the story. Weird. Eerie.
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Starsky & Hutch
Really?
I guess I'd also hoped that fan-fiction... especially relationship/sex fan-fiction... was almost solely a genre thing. But there's a significant slash cultuire for... crappy old cop shows with no scifi/fantasy elements whatsoever?
Somehow, this is weirder. I can't put my finger on why.