Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Fic of the day: Rubber Sword, a Ninja!Daniel SG story by Milareppa. Just keep in mind that it’s humor. (Note: the NC-17 rating is completely undeserved. I didn’t even notice the PG-13 language on which it’s allegedly based.) Thanks to Jerie for the rec.

I laughed along with everyone else when I heard about the Borg episode of Enterprise. In my Empty Shell drabble The Full Shell, I snarked at the whole pattern of Archer meeting species that Captain Kirk met for the first time a hundred years later. But the lure of the Borg is stronger than the natural aversion to Enterprise, and so I finally got around to watching “Regeneration” tonight.

It wasn’t all that bad, really. After a long lag of no ENT, Scott Bakula’s acting was a fresh and painful shock, but fortunately there were two whole segments of arctic Borgcicles with no Enterprise crew at all before the inevitable whining started. Of course it’s completely unbelievable that these people with their sticks and stones (phase pistols and hull plating) could both defeat the nameless Borg and cure assimilation completely - but this is a matter of degree, not of kind. Janeway also walked a few miles in the Borg’s cybernetic moccasins and defeated them time and time again when she shouldn’t have been able to. At least she did it with style and a-dish-best-served-cold hatred - she never felt guilty about spacing drones.

As an early adopter of the just don’t call them Borg fanfix, I enjoyed seeing it on the little screen. (Like Gene Roddenberry, I get no compensation when TPTB rip off my ideas and make a hash of them. Maybe the Great Bird is being punished for what he did to Harlan Ellison, but what have I ever done?) I also found it ironic that Archer caused the Borg invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, including the massacre at Wolf 359, by his trademark indecisiveness. And you thought his acting was painful!

The thing is, at the end of the episode he knows the Borg will be back in the 24th century. He could have at least left somebody a note about it, just as long as he didn’t call them Borg…

Writing link of the day: The Theory and Practice of Titles by B.W. Clough

I know I’m late to the title meme, which I spotted in Sara’s LJ. Since I’ve done this meme before and chimed in on other title rants, I’ll try to focus on newer titles.

Pick five, or ten, or more, of your fic titles. List them in your journal and explain how you came up with each one. Post this prompt as well, so that the meme spreads.

1. The Lamne’rau: Everyone’s heard this story before - the title that took longer than the fic. I explained it in “The Lamne’rau” Unplugged as a Romulan verb in the acquiescent mood, meaning “let them collect; let us gather together.” I made up the name of the mood, but there’s a real Romulan root (so to speak), *lamne*, meaning “collect,” taken from the online Rihannsu - English Dictionary V. 3.1. The postfix *rau* (let) is from the online Introduction to Rihannsu Morphology and Syntax.
2. The Other Side of the Gate: This was my first real SG-1 fic, written in response to a crossover request, and the big issue was how to cross SG over with the other show, while keeping the technobabble consistent with both canons. I decided to send the team through the back of a Stargate rather than the usual flushing side, since that hadn’t been done and anything could happen. Daniel whines about going through the “wrong side” of the gate but I thought “other side” had a more ethereal, titlelike flavor to it.
3. Goodbye to VOY: This one is a typical filked filk title, for a filk of the Carpenters’ “Goodbye to Love.” It’s notable mainly for the use of a fannish abbreviation (VOY) as a real word. Fortunately, I didn’t need to rhyme anything with it.
4. Raj of Rage: Although I Will Revive is my most popular Khan filk, this one has my favorite title. It’s a filk of “Turn the Page,” and I owe the title to Seema.
5. One Brass Horus: This one was another filky titling challenge, for “One Tin Soldier.” Horus guards are those Jaffa soldiers with the silly brass hats.
6. I do not love you Thursday and And why you come complaining: I adored the episode “2010,” and I wanted something special to put at the top of my Bitter!Jack codas. Nothing says I loved you and you stabbed me in the back but I’m cool with that because bitter becomes me like Edna St. Vincent Millay. Both titles are from her poem “Thursday”.
7. We Call Them Angels, Theoretically Possible, The Highest Risk, Cordesh Is No Longer, Hail, Dorothy, The Petty Needs of the Goa’uld, and We have no joy on the burn: Drabbling has led to no end of titles, but my favorites are the ones stolen directly from episode dialogue.
8. A White Dove: Not my best titling work, but since it was just recced at BSO I feel that I ought to explain. This songfic was inspired by “Blowin’ in the Wind” and that was the working title as well. I wanted something a little better, but still taken from the song. Since the story turned out to be about Sam, as was the scene for the verse How many seas must a white dove sail / before she sleeps in the sand?, I decided to name it after her - though I’m still not quite satisfied with it.

Over the past year of heavy SG drabble activity, I did manage to write a handful of Trek filks and drabbles which were eligible in the 2003 ASC Awards. The results came out tonight.

I really ought to be embarrassed that I placed in ENT but not in VOY. Somehow retirement is making it all fuzzy now. Anyway, here’s my very short list of placements:

ENT General Drabbles
#2  The Full Shell by Jemima

TOS Filks/Poem
#1  I Will Revive by Jemima

MIS Crossover
#3  The Other Side of the Gate by Jemima Pereira

MIS Filk/Poem/Drabble
#1  I Fought the Borg by Jemima
#3  The Sound of Borgness by Jemima

Both the MIS filks are actually VOY filks, but because I was the entire VOY filk category I had to be combined with MIS so that someone else could get an award. The embarrassing ENT drabble is part of the Empty Shell series listed in full on the MIS page. “I Will Revive” is one of three Khan filks I wrote during my Khan phase, and “The Other Side of the Gate” is a humorous Stargate crossover.

You Know You’re Too Fannish When: you throw a Klingon wedding (link thanks to KC)

Seema’s been pestering people for episode-based haiku. The following is probably not what she meant. “Resurrection” is Stargate episode 719 (see the newly updated episode list), but this haiku fits far too many seventh-season eps.

“Where’s Colonel O’Neill?”
Sam makes another excuse -
We’re Jackless again.

Well, the ASC Awards are over and I voted all over the place - pretty much everywhere except DS9, most of ENT, and some of MIS. I still haven’t done my taxes, but the big post offices are open until 9pm tomorrow, and the one near South Station until midnight. I suppose it’s no rush.

Once the madness was over (I cast the last vote at 11:01pm), I came here to blog and noticed tons of comment spam had piled up. Nothing new, and the blacklist plugin can delete it en masse, but the trouble was I hadn’t gotten any notification of the spam, either. It turns out I haven’t gotten any comment notification at all since the beginning of March. I try to keep an eye on the comment list in the MT interface as well, but it looks like I missed a bunch of comments. So I haven’t been ignoring you - I just didn’t know you cared.

I’m trying to catch up on the lost comments, and then I really have to do those taxes.

ENT humor of the day: Enterprise Characters plus reviews
VOY humor of the day: Foyager Park - check out episode 3!

Let me say straight off that I don’t like animals. Other people’s animals are ok, but I don’t want any flea-ridden beasts in my home. Living with animals leads to SARS and cat scatch fever and the death of half the population of Europe. In other words, it’s not a good plan.

I was up late last night finishing voting in the VOY catergory of the ASC Awards. When I went to bed, I started hearing things. Scratching, chewing things. I triangulated the noise: it was coming from inside the wall near one of my bookcases, about two shelves up from the floor. I knocked on the wall to discourage the chewer, but it took him a while to settle down.

Today I called the landlord to tell him about my nibbling acquaintance. He couldn’t give me a positive answer but he thought that maybe, possibly there’s a mouse in there. Ya think? Here I was thinking Elvis had entered the building. Seriously, though, Rattus rattus is a bit chubby for getting in between the floors - in my experience, he prefers Red Line subway stops. And decimating Europe.

The landlord said he’d send the exterminator next week. I hope the mouse doesn’t chew through the antique wiring and burn the building down before then. It’s not half of Europe, but it’s home.

No, this isn’t a political post. I’m just stopping by to apologize for not blogging. I managed to find the muse by sitting very still and waiting for her to poke her foxy nose out of my subconscious. She’s in a first-person present-tense mood at the moment. I hope she gets over it soon, because I don’t care for the first person. Present tense is no object, at least in a short story.

I suppose I should go vote for some more VOY stories.

Link of the day: So You’ve Decided to be Evil

NaNoEdMo sent out a home stretch email today. There are 50 hours left in March (or so they tell me) and I have 25 hours left of my EdMo quota, and other things I need to do. Thus, I’ve added another year of not finishing to my EdMo record. But I did get the restructuring of the novel done, so it was a month well spent.

Part of my EdMo problem was that the novel gave me ideas for related stories. In my research, I discovered that the left side is the lazy half of the brain. (The right side is the creative half.) Laziness is a feature of consciousness - schizophrenics and hypnotized people are far more industrious in their non-conscious states. I suppose that explains why the muse (a non-conscious entity by definition) is so industrious, when she shows up at all.

If you see her, please remind her I have a deadline coming up.

Writing metalink of the day: The Writer’s Desk writer’s on-line resources

And I’m only halfway through the ASC Awards. I voted in a couple of categories of interest in ENT, and did a more thorough job on TNG and TOS. So far I’m one drabble category into VOY, which has to be done by the 4th. MIS is a must-read, but I’m not voting for that many writers, so the overall author category shouldn’t be too much work.

I have 85 votes in the mailbox where I’m collecting my copies. Out of those, I messed up two and had to fix them. The on-line voting interface is much more convenient than last year’s. If you’re a fan who usually avoids ASC, I’d recommend going and reading a category or two according to your tastes and vote. It’s fun.

I gather from various responses I’ve seen, such as Rocky’s, that the point is to list all the pairings you’ve written. Here goes: