Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I thought I’d posted all my random leftover filks to ASC, but at 11:48 p.m., I noticed one last filk in my UFO (unfinished object) folder. It was Yesterday, When I Was New, and it needed work. But after my 24-hour filk-a-thon to finish The Sound of Borgness, twelve minutes seemed like more than enough to polish up one nearly complete filk. I posted it at 11:59 p.m., just in time for the awards deadline.

I posted a few other filks: a slightly altered version of Killing Me Softly, the old standard I Fought the Borg, and what I considered to be the two strongest filks from The Delta Quadrant’s Greatest Hits / Borgstory: “A Ship with No Plan” and “Borg Transwarp Highway.”

Here’s a draft of The Sound of Borgness. The final version will be posted this weekend at the URL indicated and ASC. The first two filks aren’t my best work, but don’t let them discourage you. It only gets funnier as you go along. Headers are here, the whole shebang is in the full entry.

Title: The Sound of Borgness
Author: Jemima
Contact: webmaster of jemimap.cjb.net
Series: VOY
Rating: PG for implied monkey sex
Codes: C/7, Icheb/Naomi, Mezoti, Azan, Rebi, Borg baby, filk
Summary: Filk of the musical “The Sound of Music”,
starring Seven of Nine as Fraulein Maria.
Archive: ASC only, but feel free to link to
http://jemimap.ficml.org/voy/filk/borgness.html

Disclaimer: This parody of Rogers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound
of Music” is protected as such by the copyright laws of
the United States of America.

Notes: Azan and Rebi were the Borg boys, Mezoti was the girl.
Thanks to T’Other Liz, KC, Kelly, and Seema for rhymes and
adjectives, one-syllable nouns, and kiss-off idioms.
The monkey sex is all Seema’s fault.

Date: January, 2004

Cast of characters:
Maria - Seven of Nine
Captain von Trapp - Chakotay
Mother Abbess - Borg Queen / Neelix
Nuns - drones
Rolf - Icheb
Liesl - Naomi
The Children - the Borg children (Icheb, Mezoti, Azan, Rebi, Borg baby)

Non-singing roles, for reference:
The Baroness - Janeway
Uncle Max - Tuvok

List of filks:
The Sound of Borgness (The Sound of Music)
Drone Seven (Maria)
Borg Perfection (I Have Confidence In Me)
Our Favorite Things (My Favorite Things)
“I” Not “We” (Do-Re-Mi)
Sixish Looking Elevenish (Sixteen Going on Seventeen)
The Lonely XO (The Lonely Goatherd)
So Long, Bug Off (So Long, Farewell)
Play Ev’ry Organ (Climb Ev’ry Mountain)
Something Tight (Something Good)
Voyager (Edelweiss)

(more…)

I’m just wrapping up my filk musical for last-minute posting to ASC. The Sound of Borgness has been in progress for just a year and a half, making it rather new for my Trek fic. Strangely enough, the hardest song to filk was “Something Good,” though I like it and the meter is pretty straightforward. This is the first hard evidence I have that “Something Good” isn’t all that good - I’ve never understood the anti-”Something Good” sentiment among people who like the rest of the cheese in The Sound of Music.

The link to my commentary on “The Lamne’rau” works now. I’ll put The Sound of Borgness up later this weekend - posting it to ASC is my current priority.

On the Stargate side, I wrote a drabble for tonight’s episode, “Chimera” - All Clear. I haven’t seen the ep, so spoilers are minimal. This is the first time I’ve written a Stargate story about episodes I haven’t seen, though I used to do it all the time in Voyager. Even now I’m not sure which Voyager episodes I’ve seen and which ones I only read about in Jim’s Voyager Reviews.

Mac link of the day: Ready to leave your Baby Bell? Try Voice over IP.

I prefer to read text in a narrow column - it’s much easier to read that way. I hate websites that fix the page width, preventing the text from wrapping in a smaller browser window. I’ve gotten annoyed lately because I’m always resizing the Safari window: if someone’s text runneth over, it’s easy enough to go for the green button and expand Safari, but going back to my preferred window size is often a more manual operation (although a second click of the green button works in many circumstances).

I’ve never had much success with bookmarklets (bookmarks that do cool JavaScript things), but today’s macosxhint worked so well for me that I decided to make my own, that would push Safari right and make it skinny: w||i.outerHeight>h){s.moveTo(0,0);s.resizeTo(w,h)};if(m){s.moveTo(m==1?0:screen.availWidth-w,0);};s.resizeTo(w,h);};rsz(self,window,600,screen.availHeight,2);”>600xFull, w||i.outerHeight>h){s.moveTo(0,0);s.resizeTo(w,h)};if(m){s.moveTo(m==1?0:screen.availWidth-w,0);};s.resizeTo(w,h);};rsz(self,window,700,screen.availHeight,2);”>700xFull.

Give them a click - they may work in less cool browsers. Safari doesn’t go under my Dock, which is also on the right, when I click - very, very nice. You can also drag a bookmarklet link to the start of your bookmark bar and use command-1 to run it (or click on it, of course, but I keep my bookmark bar hidden most of the time).

Mac program of the day: Unison, a newsreader

I found the first issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction while I was catching up with the rasfc newsgroup with Unison. Usually I refuse to read articles that you have to register to see, but I really wanted to know what Peter Jackson and the Denial of the Hero by M. Garcia was all about. So, some excerpts (a fair use):

As the trilogy of films unfolded, it became evident that Jackson had fundamentally rewritten the characters and their motivations, and in so doing, had quite stripped the essence of heroic fantasy out of the story. In the film trilogy the heros are weak and hesitant, while most of the villains are denuded of their tragedy. […]

It might seem that all of Tolkien’s character development involves the acceptance of destiny, depicted in (sometimes overwrought) mythic language. But an even more curious reversal takes place in the person of Frodo. Frodo alone of all the major characters in Tolkien’s work chooses his destiny. […]
Jackson portrays Frodo as a lost creature through the last leg of the journey. He is so burdened by the ring, and so baffled by Gollum’s tricksy talk, that he even turns against Sam.

M. notes that a pivotal Frodo scene is omitted from the movie, the one in which Frodo binds Gollum with the Ring: “If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.” Which, of course, he is. There’s no mention of the Faramir or Denethor character assassinations, but if you thought Gandalf and Aragorn were (at least occasionally) heroic this article will set you straight. There’s no room for heroes in Jackson’s world:

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings remains unfilmed and, since it seems increasingly unpalatable to contemporary sensibilities, probably unfilmable.

I wonder, did Peter Jackson see the real story and revise it consciously, or was he, like the literary critics quoted in the article, unable to read the story as it was intended to be read? Are there stories that cannot be told because the audience just can’t see them? It’s a disturbing thought, since those are probably the stories I’d want to tell.

Movie links of the day: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, Star Trek: Nemesis Pictorial Plot Synopsis (rated R for profanity), and Roger Ebert on Macs in movies

The title is from one of the DVD extras on Signs - M. Night Shyamalan prompting the orchestra when they were taping the soundtrack. He doesn’t like CGI, so it was interesting to hear about his struggle with the special effects for the aliens. The other DVD commentaries I’ve listened to recently came with Stargate season 4; Stargate is all special effects all the time.

I wouldn’t want to make a movie myself. The process looks way too complicated and you have to be a business manager, or get your work chopped to bits by whoever is the business manager. I still find DVD commentaries interesting for the insight into how people string a story together under sometimes strict restrictions of time, place, or expense. Lots of money and effort can go into something very small like areal shots of Indian crop circles (or Jonah morphing into Jack in “Beneath the Surface”), while the most striking bits like the Last Supper scene (or Thera with her head on Jonah’s shoulder) come out surprisingly easily.

In that way, filmmaking is a lot like writing. Sometimes you hammer away at the technical details, and sometimes it all just flows out of a good setup.

I wasn’t planning to do the DVD commentary meme, because it seemed
like way too much work considering that nobody really cares
(Bitter!Jack the Muse is sitting on my shoulder, playing a tiny violin
for me right now). But href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/mandysbitch/100150.html">CGB’s
MiSTing highly amused me, and Seema requested a commentary on “The Lamne’rau” or “The Museum.” I went with the shorter story.

Whenever I get ftp access back, I’ll put this up on its own web page (and I’ll get the new SG drabble up), but for the moment, the body of the story is going in the extended entry field (the MT equivalent of a cut). First, my commentary on the ASC headers of the story:

Title: The Lamne’rau

Hold it right there! The majority of effort on this fic went into the title. I spent hours combing through on-line Romulan dictionaries, trying to come up with a good Romulan term for “Borg.” (The precise derivation comes up in the story.) It’s disturbing how much time I devote to tiny details nobody is ever going to notice.

Author: Jemima
Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net

That email address is long dead, but nobody sends fb anyway. At least this way I can pretend that the reams of fanmail bounced.

Series: VOY
Rating: PG for assimilation
Codes: 7

Obviously, this story dates from my Borg period.

Summary: Seven’s brief childhood, as glimpsed in “Dark Frontier”,
“The Raven”, “Author, Author” and other episodes.
Preliminary to Tertiary, a life of Seven of Nine.

And I really meant to write it. I had
big plans, involving psychobabble and a cool AQ frame story. The best
laid plans of muse and man… I have other fragments of Tertiary
floating around in my UFO folder, but none are in any shape to post.

Archive: ASC only, but feel free to link to
http://jemimap.freeshell.org/voy/fic/tertiary/lamnerau.html

There isn’t room in this DVD to insert
my tirade against redundant archives and fic taxes.

Disclaimer: Paramount owns their bodies, but their souls are free.

This is a standard Jemima disclaimer in which I don’t disclaim anything because I haven’t done anything wrong. If you disagree, you’re welcome to sue me.

Date: January 2003

In the fine tradition of January fic-dumps to ASC, I dusted this baby off and posted it. It was written much earlier as part of Tertiary. I don’t know the exact dates, but I do know I started Tertiary in late June, 2001 and worked on it on and off through August of 2002. As far as I can tell from the changelog (I track my fic using RCS), a lot of The Lamne’rau was written in February and May of 2002.

Note: This story won first place in the Voyager Featuring Seven
of Nine category of the 2002 ASC Awards.

Something missing from this note is appropriate thanks to members of the C/7 list for help with a timeline of Seven’s childhood.

(more…)

Fossil of the day: a 428 million year old millipede in Scotland

I’ve finally written a Stargate filk. You can find One Brass Horus in the SG-1 section. Here’s a preview to see if you know the original, “One Tin Soldier”:

I’ve also put up The Perfect Setup, the sequel to The Universe Survival Guide. I don’t think it compares to the original, but there were demands for a sequel and Bitter!Jack The Muse is easily influenced in his current state.

Here’s a Friday Five, by way of Seema:

At this moment, what is your favorite…

1. …song?
“She” by Charles Aznavour.

2. …food?
Chicken Sofrito (with cardamom)

3. …tv show?
Stargate SG-1.

4. …scent?
I’m not a big scent person, but I noticed cardamom is popular now. It makes me hungry.

5. …quote?
“Better a dry crust and peace with it, than a house full of feasting with strife.” Proverbs 17:1

In my day tirade of the day: a Slashdot thread on silver paste

The results are up for the JCFicHaven Decathlon, a new fanfic contest that’s not entirely unlike AAA. I rooted through all the award pages to find out what B’Elanna the Canon Correcting Muse (Retired) had won, and put her awards up on her award shelf. Jade’s awards are also up on her index page and relevant stories.

I can’t speak to the results, since I didn’t actually vote in the contest. B’Elanna the Muse won the silver medal overall, but every story of hers that placed was written at least three years ago, except for one drabble that’s only two years old. Apparently Lurking in particular was new to a lot of readers. I always liked that one myself.

I knew I hadn’t written much lately, but it was surprising nonetheless to look back on how much I wrote circa January 2001, and how little since Voyager jumped the big Borg shark in the sky. It makes me wonder how long this Stargate thing will last before I jump my own personal shark.

Well, back to the Ice Planet fic…