Alyse

Moe anime is pretty much the hot issue running throughout fandom these days. It's kind of hard not to be, due to the fact that it's mostly about cute or sexy teenage girls in endless general permutations. Everybody knows about it, and it's hard not to have an opinion on it.

For me, moé anime is a genre that is pretty schizophrenic, because its definition changes depending on the person you're talking to about it. And therein lies the problem that I have with moé. Generally, I don't hate it that much. I hate the creepy fanservicey moé anime and the weak harem anime with a burning fury of a Chapter of Space Marines, but the light, cute and innocent stuff I let by, even enjoy, most of the time.

No, what gets my goat is the big "war" between pro and anti moé factions in fandom, with wank flying about the place and people ranting and raving about "greasy slimy pedos" and "angry screaming whiners". I just want to plug my ears sometimes and wish all of them would shut up. All of them. They're seriously giving me trouble trying to be an anime fan.

Soon I hope, this whole moé wank would die down, and maybe I can actually enjoy anime without feeling guilty for it.

From soupytwist:

I have been thinking about this topic lately, so I would like to hear if you have any Thortz on ambitions - if you have any, what they might be, how you go about achieving them if so. :)

I'm a little weird with ambitions, because in many ways 'ambition' to me is linked to a lot of bad behaviour, politically motivated actions and relationships and all the stuff I dislike in the workplace. It's stepping over people and on people and being fake. Someone who is 'ambitious' is someone I probably don't like. And I actually know it's not true, Allegra and Dylan have the ambition of being published authors, Lucy an illustrator, another colleague a musician - these are ambitions I wholeheartedly approve of and support.

However, business ambitions aside, having things to aim for is, I think, a fairly necessary part of life. Or at least of mine. If I thought I was going to continue on exactly as I am now for the rest of my life that would be horrendous. Because for me at least growing and stretching myself is very very important, to improve myself in whatever way I can. Because I'm never going to be perfect but I can get better and be a better person. And also I like challenges (I curse 'em, but I like 'em!) and I like using my brain and learning and knowing things.

That's a bit vague isn't it?!

Do I have specific ambitions? No. But I have some waffley ones!

• To raise a happy daughter. Especially given the issues that both Henry and I come with with mental health and intelligence and social (in)ability. I know she will face her own issues and problems because she's human and all people do but I want to be someone who she knows she can come to for support and who she trusts. So that whatever is going on with her she knows she can come to me and I won't condemn her.


• To challenge myself. At the moment I don't have many chances to step outside my comfort zone, but when the opportunities arise I try to remember to take that step. I think it's important to me. I spent a very large amount of my life hiding in my own head and not interacting with people (do you know that I am fascinated with mutism, especially elective mutism? It's something which ... when I find myself thinking of the attraction of not having to speak I know to take my brain and mental health in hand), for a long time the world inside my head was more real than the outside world. Now I balance between the two and every new achievement in the outside world I feel expands and strengthens me. I grow when I do new things.


• To have a job which challenges me and which I enjoy. (OK, this one's been harder the last few months but as I said to my parents today 'there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it may be a train, we don't know right now, but there's a light.') Ideally I want a job where what I do helps people. (Actually in my current post I do help people, kind of, but something a little more direct.) At the same time, while I'm good at customer service (the peril of being someone who's bad at reading people and wants to please people, the life skills transfer over into work skills too!) I'm also good at systems and processes. I don't know the name of what it is I want to do, and I'm not sure how to get there, but whatever it is it involves problem solving and troubleshooting systems to make them work for the people who use them and the customer. And helping people. Recently I've been most interesting in researching posts in the charity sector but without many specific skills or qualifications it's a little tricky. (Living in the small of the back of nowhere doesn't help either.)

I think all of the above add up to - my ambition is 'to be a better person', better in terms of being good, better in terms of being effective, better in terms of ... being a person! Just better.

(PS soupytwist - That probably was absolutely nothing like you were expecting - sorry!)

We begin our saga on the fair hills of house_wilson, where the grass grows green and the House/Wilson shippers occasionally throw shit fits over whether or not David Shore is dicking around House/Wilson shippers.

One day, this (relatively) peaceful comm is visited by slow_mo_panda, who had arrived to bring to everyone her thoughts on yaoi The Contract, a love-it or hate-it extreme-whump fic amongst House fandom.

The masses do not react well. (And euclase wins the "most over-the-top reaction to criticism" award for this week.)

Having been thrown out by her ears, slow_mo_panda once again continued her travels, landing on the shores of fanficrants, where she hoped to be greeted with open arms and kind words telling her how everyone else is a bunch of mean bitches.

Alas, she had no luck on that front, either.

After a number of negative comments, she deleted that post and was banninated from fanficrants. And there was much rejoicing.

Hearing the commotion, ffrantsrants and sf_drama arrived on the scene so that they could point and laugh.

However, this is not the end of our story. slow_mo_panda, apparently having not learned her lesson yet, appeared once again, this time in ffrantsrants in order to talk about how oppressed she is. Or something. ETA: Now locked down, but here's a text-version:
( also long )

Caps courtesy of xayeidemon.

ETA: Removed links to locked fanficrants content.

ETA2: Apparently, our friend has left a review on ff.net on the original fic:
( cut for length )


ETA3: Now a tl;dr post in her personal journal. Man, she really doesn't know when to stop, does she?

I hope all of you know about Desert Bus for Hope. If you don't, it's a group of sorry bastards who play the most tedious game ever made (it was specifically designed to be tedious) to raise money for Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" charity. The live feed of the guys is hilarious and the live feed of the bus is delightfully mellow, and you can make special requests with your donation! (E.g. have the crew sing a particular song or put on a silly hat). The bus is rolling again, and as of the moment they started they were committed to drive that bus for 97 hours. That's from money raised before they started, over $10,000! Roll on you crazy fuckers.

ETA: For those of you on Twitter, there is an effort to keep #desertbus up in the trending topics! Come on, let's beat out New Moon!

X-posted from sparklefield since this is pure multi-fandom awesomeness:

The Simpsons's 2010 Hallowe'en special will feature a segment in which Lisa falls madly in love with a vampire boy named Edmund. Cast as the voice of Edmund?

Daniel Radcliffe. ♥!

Here's some Project Runway plagiarism wank to go with the lovely vanity pub and author wank. I hope it goes without saying that there might be a spoiler or two for the finale, but I'll say it anyway: There are spoilers for the finale in this post.

Project Runway "villain" and finalist Irina had a shirt in her final Bryant Park collection that has all the reasons she loves New York written on it. Oh, wait. Those aren't the reasons she loves New York, those are the reasons that someone who wrote a famous New York Magazine article loves New York. And this is the same girl who was going to feature Coney Conney Island artwork in the collection until she was told that it would be copyright infringement? And NY Mag says that she didn't ask permission? And I don't even have to tell you that this isn't going to end well, do I?

And then ( spoileriffic things happen! And so does wank. )

Hang on to your hats, kids, this one's a doozy in several parts. To start off, you might want to catch up on agilebrit's clairvoyantwank writeup. Clairvoyant indeed! To sum up, romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises teamed up with a publisher called ASI solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity press. Romance Writers of America promptly revoked Harlequin's "recognized publisher" status.

And now for a wank in several parts, involving a goodly number of awesome people in addition to a wanking Cast of Thousands (tm):

( Part 1: PubRants )

( Part deux: various forums )

( Part Three: SBTB, and Nora Fucking Roberts )

( Part the last: The NEW YORKER?! )

And finally, THIS JUST IN from PubRants. Watch that post for further fappery developments! Notably, Harlequin has decided to dissociate the "Harlequin" name from their vanity publishing rig in response to the RWA slamming them, and the MWA has weighed in. ETA: And the wank has matured nicely! Here's a couple comments of note: Anon #1, Anon #2, "Harlequin, were not stupid" [sic].

And here come the ETAS!
#1: SFWA tweets a heads-up, and the glorious katamari of wank rolls on!

#2: Coutesy of magnolia_mama, Lee Goldberg drops his two cents from the MWA soapbox. In a shocking turn of events, he seems to be making a cogent, reasonable argument. My world is rocked.

#3: annathepiper links us to SFWA's statement, which is possibly the strongest yet! For a snippet:

...Further, SFWA believes that work published with Harlequin Horizons may injure writing careers by associating authors’ names with small sales levels reflected by the imprint’s lack of distribution, as well as its emphasis upon income received from writers and not readers....Until such time as Harlequin changes course, and returns to a model of legitimately working with authors instead of charging authors for publishing services, SFWA has no choice but to be absolutely clear that NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA. Further, Harlequin should be on notice that while the rules of our annual Nebula Award do not expressly prohibit self-published titles from winning, it is highly unlikely that our membership would ever nominate or vote for a work that was published in this manner....SFWA does not believe that changing the name of the imprint, or in some other way attempting to disguise the relationship to Harlequin, changes the intention, and calls on Harlequin to do the right thing by immediately discontinuing this imprint and returning to doing business as an advance and royalty paying publisher.

Count on the pew-pew lasers genre to bring the burn!

#4: Found by pariforma, someone named Jackie Kessler has an excellent (and amusing) summary of the whole mess on their blog. The pricing breakdown (with reference links to the Harlequin price-sheets themselves) is particularly well-done.

#5, which should be like #3 but I missed it the first time: via lady_ganesh, Mr. Scalzi has spoken. Does anyone else smell something...burning?

( Too Hot (and big) For Your Flist )

Mmm, PR barbecue. As a bonus, there's a lovely herd of teal deer in the comments, including some truly lovely wanking by one Diana Peterfreund and a few others. Scroll on through, it's a good time.

Blooper reel: We, uh, may have played a part in crashing SBTB for a while there. please don't kill meeeee

#6: Zoe Winters continues her wanking in the comments of an article at the Examiner. Thanks dreamworld!

Background: Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. Think of it as a version of Linux like you have Windows XP, Vista, Me, 95, etc. Some people created Ubuntun Christian Edition, which annoyed some members of the Ubuntu community who didn't see why a special religious-based distribution was needed but it was mostly a polite argument. Then, in retaliation, Ubuntu Satanic Edition was created.

Cue wank.

Not from the Christians, though! The wank was all provided by a Satanist called HHS and another Satanist who called himself 'friend of HHS', both of whom popped up in the comments box and kept a running argument going with several different people until he randomly disppeared.

Most of it is under the cut, because it's long and takes place over years, but here are a few highlights to whet your appetite, both from him and people who were arguing with him.

HHS starts off with saying "This is very insulting to my religion. I really don’t think you should misuse the Lord’s name like that.

Richard M. Stallman, who is responsible for GNU and Linux, is a jewish psychopath who does not deserve to come near Hell. We do not want to be associated with him or anything made by this communist who never bathes and eats his own hair."

People get confused and think he's a Christian who's objecting to Linux SE. Cue HHS exploding and warning them "It’s very unclever to go against the Lord and dishonour Him and His people. When you die and meet Satan, just try calling Him “jesus boy” too and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I assume that you two are Jews because they call everyone Christian who aren’t Jews or Muslims."

( All hail LINUX -- I mean, Satan/Cthulhu/Flying Spaghetti Monster/God/Allah/[insert deity or pantheon of choice here!] )

From wank_report:
Genevieve Koski, writing for the A.V. Club, offers her opinion on a recent screening of Ghostbusters for Better Late Than Never, the feature in which authors who never experienced some element of the pop culture of the past go back and review it with the jaded eyes of the present. Her opinion, of course, is negative.

( Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. )
...I don't have to warn for Ghostbusters spoilers, do I?

Airing on Saturday on the CW, they are going to be airing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Oldschool/Newschool crossover.

It was a good post day.

Firstly, and most importantly, mabiana Thank you so much! That was way too generous of you but that about made my day, because while the rest of my post (as below) was excellent, I was expecting it, whereas yours was unexpected post and so much yay! and thank you. again.

Secondly - So who has two thumbs and the two disk edition of Star Trek (Reboot, I can't never remember the damn number!) with additional comic? That would be me! (Where does this two thumbs thing come from, by the way? I see it everywhere. Why thumbs? Why not nostrils?)

I am *planning* on only watching the special features. Really I am. Aside from anything else I'm going round to a friend's tomorrow and watching his BluRay version on his big screen high def. TV (boys and their toys!). *Really* I'm not thinking I may end up watching the film as well ...

( Possible spoilers, if you can have spoilers for special features. )

( Liveblogging Doctor Who - therefore spoilers )

Sorry for a bit of a cheat with today's Wriso, liveblogging a TV episode, but I really didn't have anything else to talk about.

Today I *must*

- do the work I brought home from work

Today I *should*

- put all my clean clothes away, especially as I've sorted them by where they go and they're all over my bed
- refill the bird feeders (though there is still some seed in there
- answer all my LJ comments, what's the point in me posting if I don't interact with people when they comment on the posts?
- read two submissions to SPM that Allegra sent me over a week ago

Today I probably *won't*

- tidy up all the junk which I've been dumping on the stairs for the last few months and put it all away
- change what's on my bedroom walls and finally hang the lovely Firefly/Serenity travel posters I've had for over a year

I spent a whole bunch of this afternoon with Grand Designs on in the background. I tend to find Kevin McCloud a bit patronising but I'm intensely curious about the buildings and what is important to people in building their own home.

For example today there was a couple who obviously had a lot of money and wanted everything just right, not caring about budget or time frame. When they moved into their new home they took almost nothing from their old home with them.

There was also a couple who wanted a Miami Beach style inspired house but had absolutely no idea about planning and building a house so ended up with all the different trades making decisions without them. But everything had to be perfectly symmetrical.

I prefer the episodes where the people are conscious of the environment and the impact of building and of materials. I saw an episode a few months ago where a man practically built his entire house himself and the central staircase was carved out of/around a tree trunk. It was almost a hobbit house, if hobbits lived aboveground and I adored it, though I wouldn't have been able to live there as it was too small for my ideal house.

And it's got me thinking. I always used to design my own houses, in fact I still do. When I was in my teens my dad and I did a fairly good and to scale set of floor plans for my (then) dream house. Which was huge and way too grand though it did have a hidden door leading to an aviary which I still like as an idea just for the whimsy!

And I still do plan houses in my head a lot. I *live* in my head a lot and often wherever I'm living has a house, sometimes the house is more clearly realised than any person or situation. Houses, I realise, are an internal safe place for me.

I would *love* to have the money to design and have built my own house. Of course a lot of the things I like in houses are conflicting, and in reality I'd also have to make sure Henry liked the house which would be difficult (he doesn't do 'like' and when he does his thoughts on room sizes are different to mine) but I would so love to do it.

It would have a library. And a DVD and media room. And an awful lot of very comfortable sofas. And my bedroom would be barely larger than my bed, just enough space for some shelves around the edges and it would be very very cosy. It would have a lot of natural light and wood floors and ideally the majority of fixtures and fittings would have been sources from reclamation yards. It would be as environmentally friendly as a large house could be in building materials and in systems (e.g. a grey water disposal system watering the garden, and sunlight tubes lighting the bottom floor rooms, and solar and wind energy, and ...). Above all else it would be comfortable, eccentric, and probably fairly messy.

I want to build my own house. Dammit.

PS I'm not sure how my earlier entry cross-posted so if you didn't see my post about addresses please go here to read it. Thanks.

I warn you that I am really bad at doing this. You may get a card in December, it may arrive in January, or it may not arrive at all. But last year I failed completely and this year I really want to have another go at sending stuff out.

Please complete this even if you've put your address up in an LJ post, or if I've had your address for years. I'm mainly planning on using this poll as my 'address book' for this year because I'm aware that my actual address book is somewhat out of date.

If you're reading this not on LJ, please feel free to email me at ngaio dot wimsey at gmail dot com with your info.

Poll #498 December
Open to: All, results viewable to: None

This is my address:

This is the rest of the address started above because my address is really long

I would prefer not to have a Christmas specific card

I have a wish-list which you may like to look at!

In fact I have more than one wish-list - see!

I would not mind getting a package of random things ngaio has hanging around her house which may not be stuff I like but which I am quite welcome to get rid of!

Do you know what I did today? (You can't answer if you follow me on Twitter!) I got up at 6am and baked. This makes me sound so domestic, as if I'm a farmer's wife and got up to bake ten loaves of bread. Instead I got up at 6 because I'd gone to bed at 8pm so run out of sleep. And I baked dark chocolate brownies (with dried raspberries, strawberries and morello cherries) to take into work. They came out of the over two minutes before I had to leave the house to catch my bus so arrived at work as a warm slab and had to be cut up there when everyone arrived an hour or so later. The entire lot were eaten by 11am. Gluttons, the lot of 'em!

On the subject of farms, I am less addicted to Farmville right now, partly because it's not that convenient to get to (Ubuntu and Opera and it having some sort of three-way row) and partly because whenever I go there it's moved back in time. Crops I've harvested are still there ready to harvest, land I've ploughed is fallow again. So really, it's more trouble than I care for right now. In fact, I've just harvested the same crops twice in the last 5 minutes and I don't really want to do it again. Very irritating.

Still, computers and I seem to be falling out a lot right now. Ubuntu is annoying me with its failure to do many things and some things it does which are pointless (namely, I know they want to separate themselves from Windows but replacing 'Delete' in the right click menu with 'Move to Deleted Items folder' is just silly) and the fact that, in common with Windows, I get error messages with no hint as to how to solve the error. Ultimately I think all OSs are the same, namely clunky and unwieldy. Now to decide whether to go back to the more usable but more sluggish and cumbersome Windows Vista, or whether to ... swear at Ubuntu a lot and continue to dual boot. I don't really want to do either. Is it too much to ask for a computer system that works *with* me not against me?

(The computer at work is awaiting an addition of RAM which will not help the fact it refuses to show me my payslip which is a problem the IT helpdesk cannot solve as of this afternoon.)

Technology - tchuh!

The November 17 issue of MAD Magazine will feature Sarah Palin as Blunder Woman, "where she battles against David Letterman, imaginary death panels, and her desire to quit everything she does."

That face is a pretty good likeness, though, so I guess Liefeld isn't involved in any way.

( A couple paragraphs of Intro... )

So, just moments ago I finished the entirety of the movie (with rifftrax so I wouldn't commit suicide while watching); and I have a few thoughts. The first is that as far as I am concerned the movie is INCREDIBLY faithful to the book; especially the overall mood and pacing, which is to say that it is INCREDIBLY SLOW AND BORING. This was one of my main complaints with the book too; how do you make a vampire love story BORING? To ME?

Watching the movie of Twilight I finally figured out what really keeps me from enjoying it (at least the first book/movie). It isn't the writing; I can enjoy badly written stories if I like the plot and the characters. I've sat through Sailor Moon and other shojo anime and manga; and really at the end of the day that's what Twilight is.

It's not Bella. I know everyone hates Bella, but I don't. I didn't hate her in the book. I LIKE Bella, a lot, I even empathize with her. Yes, she is a "weak-willed" female character who spends most of her time looking for a male to push her around. She's frail emotionally, and physically (clumsy). She's needy, but on the other hand, she knows what she wants. She wants a strong, sexy, deadly, emotionally powerful, physically powerful person to be her (yes I'm going to say it) to be her master. I can relate. And here's where we come to what I hate about Twilight.

Edward. The boyscout, the Superman of "vampires". He's a pansy a goody-two-shoes who never has a moment of weakness. The titillation of the kind of romance Bella wants, and the kind that Twilight tries to pretend it portrays, comes from one thing, a trace of fear. I explored this in my Mary-Sue/Syndrome 'Incredibles' fanfiction, CCR. Some people want someone to serve, and someone who they know they should be a little afraid of. Bella wants Lestat and she ends up with Clark Kent.

And for me, that just kills the romance, and the enjoyment. Going back to the Sailor Moon allusion, in the first season of SM Usagi has good reasons to be afraid of Mamouru, and as long as he's in the story, they never quite go away. He has a force of personality and a demanding persona that Edward lacks completely.

And as a Vampire; a creature of violence and sex sublimated INTo violence, that's just inexcusable.

Books.

I like books. I'm bad about reading them because I have the internet and around 20K fic files so I generally read only a) when waiting for the bus, and b) when on the loo.

Currently I'm reading (downstairs loo) Lucifer Rising which is a VNA Doctor Who novel, (upstairs loo) A Wood Plank by a Stream (or something like that) by Thelwell which I love as it is gentle and humorous, (bedside table) Stephen Fry in America, and (bus stop) the second Scott Lynch Gentleman Bastards novel which's name I've completely forgotten. I'm enjoying the Scott Lynch, though less than the first one, I think possibly because the set up is very similar (perfectly reasonable/adventurous con derailed by one or more party manipulating the 'heroes') and also because I loved the first one almost without reservation so this one has a lot to live up to. That said, I'm only halfway through so I may get suddenly captivated later.

I was sitting in the doctor's waiting room (I never know hot apostrophise doctors - I mean it is the waiting room of the doctors, but doctors appointment doesn't have an apostrophe) reading a Woman's Something (Own? or something else? it had Celia Imrie on the front wearing yellow) and reading a set of book recs and they all sounded interesting. I got half way through writing them all down and got called in so now I'll never know the other books.

Not that I need more books to read. Allegra leant me two which I really want to read and then I have, at best guess, at least thirty on my To Read pile, veering from Spiderwick Chronicles to Liquor (Poppy Z Brite) to The Book Thief. I also have way more than that really, they're just on the shelves with other books rather than separated out. Maybe this weekend I'll rearrange and put every single one of my unread books on one set of shelves and completely horrify myself. And then go to Amazon and buy more books to calm me down!

So I went to go see Paranormal Activity last night, and I had a question. After the screen goes black at the end, does anything happen? I was waiting for the credits, but they didn't come, just text explaining what happened to the characters and black, and since the lights went up, I assumed it was over, but I've heard otherwise. Anyone know if anything important happened?

Also, Night 20, holy crap!