Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Desktop icons of the day: Snow

There’s an ENT-bashing party going on at Slashdot over the recent rumors that ENT will be cancelled soon. It amazes me that something so much worse than Stargate is allowed on the air. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s fanfic, though - I’ve always thought that the worse the show, the better the fanfic potential. VOY was a mediocre show that inspired reams of fanfic.

But write it fast, you ENT writers, because the axe is about to strike…

Warning: Spoilers for 2010

I watched 2010 today and was shocked by Sam’s hussy marriage. Since the episode appears in so many spoiler warnings for Sam/Jack fic, I naturally assumed it was shippy. Once I accepted it for the evil anti-ship episode it was, however, I got into it and thought it was an excellent ep. Nice sets, nice lighting, nice Bitter Jack (with a side order of I Told You So), nice to see the ladies dressed up in nice clothes (even if the species has no place to go) - and of course the total annihilation of the human race, with bonus death scenes for all Our Heroes. (Of course Janet and Hammond had to die off-screen. They deserve a pair of nice death fics. Jerie?)

And that’s my hussy! Way to marry a genocidal maniac - maybe someone at Showtime wanted to one-up “Counterpoint.” He’s sweet and loving and he must have realized why you couldn’t get pregnant. I’d love to go on more about the episode, but I feel a drabble coming on.

My friend who braved the cold to visit Boston this weekend also braved the boredom to re-watch The Return of the King tonight. Silly me, I said it couldn’t be sold out anymore, but it was. Fortunately Loews Boston Common was showing it in two theaters, so we only had to wait an extra hour to see Aragorn come into his own. (Our show sold out as well.)

We enjoyed it more the second time around. My friend got to see the parts she slept through previously. For me, I was too distracted the first time by all the things that violated the letter and spirit of the book, and I was with someone who was getting just as offended and was also checking points of canon with me. (It’s scary how much I know - eg., what happened to the seven rings for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone?)

This time I got to sit back and watch without any distractions - the movie didn’t seem nearly as long. Since I wasn’t so busy getting offended, I could appreciate it for what it was. Elijah Wood still can’t act, but the other hobbits were fun, as were Gimli, Gandalf, and, in his own way, Aragorn. Arwen’s mysterious allergy to Sauron doesn’t improve with a second viewing, but the sections filmed in Elfvision were cool from a stylistic point of view.

My favorite character is still Pippin. Anduril, Flame of the West, gets a lot of Gratuitously Long Sword shots to balance out the traditional Gratuitous Whispering Ring shots. I can see myself blowing a day sometime in the future to watch all three movies on DVD - but I won’t be the one buying the DVD’s.

Scary Boston weather of the day: record low temperatures

I’ve been thinking about the difference between the traditional fanfic solutions to the J/C problem and those applied to Sam/Jack. I wasn’t expecting there to be a difference; in fact, my first Sam/Jack fic corresponds closely in approach to my first J/C fic. My idea for an ice planet fic similarly resembles my second J/C fic. And I’m not the only one giving me VOY flashbacks - SuzVoy gives me the same sense of J/C deja vu.

I was never one for taking the traditional J/C approach in which Janeway suddenly comes to her senses, tosses Starfleet regulations aside, and lives happily ever after with Chakotay. I preferred more exotic solutions to the problem of protocol. I think Suz was willing to toss protocol aside; she’s brought that plot over to Stargate - but in my ickle newbie experience, she’s in the minority. The traditional Sam/Jack approach is rather to have Jack retire from the Air Force (or otherwise slip out of the chain of command) so that Our Couple can fraternize happily ever after.

So my question is, Why? Starting with two ships that share the same basic premise (two officers who can’t be together because of military regulations), how do you get two bodies of fic that are so different, especially considering the influx of J/C fans into Stargate fandom? Why are there so many fics in which Jack retires and Sam takes over the team, but none worth mentioning in which Janeway retires and Chakotay takes over the ship? Why is protocol all in Janeway’s mind, but not all in Jack’s mind?

I know some C/7 fans who would say that this is actually the same approach - J/C fans emasculate Chakotay by making him a lapdog, and Sam/Jack fans emasculate Jack by forcing him into retirement. Jack is getting a much worse deal, though - at least Chakotay gets to keep his job, if not his dignity. Not only is retirement bad for Jack, but don’t you think Sam enjoys saving the world with Jack? Yes, she could command SG-1 herself, but Sam is a Riker - she likes it where she is.

I don’t want to get all feminist-meta on this issue. I’m not asking anyone to password protect their swooning idiot women. At this point I’d love to see Sam give up her career for Jack, just for the change of pace. In fact, within the context of their respective shows, it would be a lot easier for Sam or Chakotay to go civilian yet keep on doing their jobs. So why aren’t there as many Sam resignation fics as there are Jack resignation fics? At least Sam has marketable skills.

All meta aside, it comes down to an issue of writing: why solve the protocol problem the same way every time, when there are so many other approaches that are being neglected? For me, fanfic is about the variety. I like to use technobabble or matchmaking aliens, but you can make your pairing a test case for fraternization as in the Captain and Counselor series, or start a court martial trend to rival the Janeway/Maquis/Equinox Trial tradition of Voyager fandom. The possibilities are endless.

Then again, the problem may be all in my mind. I’m the ickle newbie so I haven’t read that many fics. Resignation may be just a passing fad.

Birthday of the day: Happy birthday, Seema!

I listened to President Bush’s speech yesterday about a new space program, and I was disappointed. It reminded me of the former President Bush’s space program - maybe not as pricey, but just as misguided. It’s better than no plan at all, but with the shuttles going to pot we were unlikely to end up with no plan at all.

Consider, for example, that the plan is to have men on the moon sometime between 2015 and 2020. May I remind El Presidente that we had men on the moon in 1969? There’s nothing on the moon. It’s not a good place to make rocket fuel or oxygen or anything else. The moon is the Mohave Desert of space - there’s nothing there. There’s no gravity. There’s no atmosphere. There’s no sunlight for 14 days a month. Anyone we send there will be permanently dependent on Earth for supplies. Considering that the last shipment was in 1972, I wouldn’t want to be the one up there waiting for the next batch of groceries.

There’s only one place worth going at our current level of technology - Mars. Mars has an atmosphere. Mars has gravity. Mars is a great place to make rocket fuel and oxygen and anything else you need. According to the BBC, the Russians have a clue; they’re planning to go to Mars within a decade. They probably read the book.

Go Ruskies!

Mars picture of the day: a Martian

Heat has returned to the nether reaches of my apartment. In celebration, I’ve put up three new Stargate drabbles, which can be found on the fic list. Jade’s drabble pick of the day is We have no joy on the burn, my “Tangent” episode addition. Jerie also endorses it, so you can’t go wrong there.

Continuing the saga of the broken radiator…

The plumber replaced the trap and another one somewhere in the building. It was a loud, long process during which the heat had to be off for the entire building. (You’d think they’d separate the risers, at least, but no…) In the process the bushing sprang a leak. Apparently you can’t get a concentric bushing to fit an 80-year-old steam radiator anywhere in town, but the bushing is in the mail. It may show up tomorrow, or maybe next week, which means several more days of not sleeping in because the plumber could show up at any time. I suppose it’s better than freezing.

For the moment, I have epoxy on my bushing. I’ve been waiting for it to dry, and now I’m going to turn the radiator back on and see what I get in the way of hot water leaks. If I never blog again, you can assume the bushing blew and took me out.

It’s a toasty 0°F in sunny Boston this morning, with a windchill of only -20°. Maybe I should go for a walk before the cold weather returns. Or maybe I should wait for the -40° windchill, just to be masochistic.

Last night’s ice is still lingering on one window, and the plumber is out retrieving a new trap for my broken radiator. It’s exploding pipes season here in Boston - he told me how one house lost its entire heating system when the heat went out and all the radiators froze and burst. Fortunately I still have 2 radiators that work, so nothing’s at risk of freezing besides yours truly.

Rather than spend another entry talking about Sam/Jack fics that everyone else in the fandom has already read, I think I’ll clean out my random links folder. So, in true weblogging tradition, here are the links:

• Old images of Venus reprocessed - did you know the Soviets managed to land on Venus, a planet that’s literally hotter than hell, 10 out of 10 times?
• New images of Red Mars in QuickTimeVR - doesn’t it look nice and hospitable? It’s heaven compared to Venus - so where have all our landers gone?
• Maybe we need spies to find them.
• Are you a huge government space agency with a reputation to maintain, but you can’t hit Mars to save your life? Try this map of the universe (not to scale) - try not to hit the Great Wall
• Are you a Martian in search of a quieter neighborhood? Check out the galactic habitable zone.
• Here’s a map of Minnesota - where do you think O’Neill’s cabin is?
• If you’re crazy enough to come to Boston when the windchill is headed for -40 degrees Fahrenheit (I believe that’s about 11 degrees Kelvin for those of you playing the home game), here’s a handy map and pictures of the Chinatown bus stop. I cannot be held responsible for ensuing frostbite.
• Italian Mutant Cholesterol
• Talk to your baby using baby sign language
• The 100 Most Often Misspelled Words in English - bellwether? Who uses bellwether?
• Saddam the novelist
• The fifth annual Tomato Awards for the worst movies of 2003 - I didn’t see any of them.
• UK Millennium Seed Bank - Save Our Seeds!
• An old question from a pessimist: Why pretend to care?
• A little humor: The International Jewish Conspiracy
• A lot of humor: If Microsoft were a soda company, from slashdot.
• Attend Battery University to learn how the old laptop lost its spark.
• I ought to download LyX for MacOS X and mod_bandwidth and the newest DivX, but I don’t.
• I could always make my own Big Mac…
• A lovely macosxhint comment that begins Into zee Terminal, typa wiz your fingers - what you should type is sudo periodic daily weekly monthly.
• Pagesucking made easy (if you have a real OS)
• No mac? See how the other half lives with iCapture.
• The unused diveintomark site redesign which inspired me to make Jade’s new splash page

Contest of the day: The Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards

The Awesome Author Awards are happening again. I wrote the KK to say I wasn’t entering because I’ve retired from Trek, but I have a few other reasons for not entering this year. I’m one of a handful of writers (Dakota, KJ, Sängerin, Sheri) who have entered in all three years, and it was my personal (not contest) policy to enter different stories every year. Last year, especially, I figured that I wouldn’t win or place but that the contest would be a way for people to see my new stories, since I don’t participate in mailing lists anymore. This year I have no new J/C stories to enter, so there’s no point to my entering on that account.

One reason so few other J/C writers have entered for three years running is that winners become ineligible. This policy is also used in the ASC Awards for the Alara Rogers (Best Author) award. It’s an approach that can bite you in the behind after a few years - I call it the last one to leave ASC turn out the lights and pick up the Alara Rogers award effect. It’s not so gratifying to win an award once the real competition has become disqualified or left the fandom entirely.

I know there are people who aren’t picky about how they get their awards, but I’m not one of them. I don’t want an award that I’m the last one left in the fandom to pick up - I’d rather just move on to fandoms that are still active enough to generate new competition. Moreover, even eligible authors still active in the fandom are avoiding AAA this year, compounding the last one out effect. I know of several writers who aren’t entering AAA this year because of unrelated incidents within KK (of which I have only second-hand knowledge), and others who won’t enter on suspicion that the contest itself is being rigged or abused in some way.

Personally, I don’t believe that there is any internal corruption of the contest in favor of KK members. In any contest, people will know certain authors and therefore be more familiar with their fic and more likely to vote for it, but this effect reaches beyond KK members. If there’s a big pro-KK slant to the winners, I’ve never noticed it. As for external attempts to cheat in AAA, I have no first-hand knowledge of it but from my perspective, such cheating has no visible effect - if person X places ahead of person Y because X cheated, but I don’t think either of them writes well, then for me the cheating is irrelevant.

To put it more simply, if I don’t like the fic of writer X but she has a hundred friends who love it, and if I don’t like Y either but she has a hundred friends who are willing to stuff the ballot box for her, how can I tell the difference? The friends of X are voting in good faith, and those of Y in bad faith, but if I don’t know either X or Y, to me it looks like two mediocre writers got the same number of votes.

So for me as a fringe member of the fandom, with nineteen days to go to my Trek retirement, the only standard I can apply to a contest is whether the best fic (in my opinion as a reader) wins. Fanfic contests are therefore almost always a disappointment to me, because the stories and writers I think are the best rarely win. That’s setting aside the fact that I don’t win, which is certainly a disincentive to entering contests but is not my complaint. I can always assume that my own fic is not as good as I think it is, but I’m not the only one not winning AAA.

When I vote in a contest, I look at every story in the contest (except NC-17 and slash), or if, like the ASC Awards, the contest is too big for that, I make sure to look at every story in the categories where I’m voting. I say look at rather than read because if a story is downright bad, or clearly worse than other stories I’ve already read in the category, I don’t finish it. As a consequence of this policy, I have looked at every PG story in AAA for the past three years. Because AAA is so huge, I had to keep detailed records of whom I was considering voting for. So I know exactly how far off the results are, in each case, from what I thought they would be.

For comparison, I’ll give the lists of who won in each year, and who I voted for. AAA placements are in order of winner, runner up, and honorable mentions. People equally ranked, in my opinion or as honorable mentions, get slashes between them. My rankings are determined from the number of categories I voted for them in, and ranking if there was ranking involved.

2001 AAA results: Shayenne, EJ, Cassatt/D Kent/KJ
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Clare009, Shayenne, Lady Firebird, Karma, Alicia/Claudia/D Kent/KJ, Ammo/Sangerin/Turtlewoman

The first year was a big year, so I have a bunch of people in my list who got only a vote or two from me. EJ was far and away the best of the bunch, even better in 2001 than in the next when she won, but Shayenne is a good writer - I can’t complain that she won. I voted for two people off the Honorable Mention list, in only one category each. This was, by comparison, a good year. [I confused Dakota with D Kent at first - sorry about that.]

2002 AAA results: EJ, Brianna, Jemima/KJ/Sheri
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Seema/Rocky, Monkee, Jade, JinnyW

In 2002, things began to get funky. EJ won, perhaps because she’s the kind of writer that crosses boundaries between what I like and what the general AAA voting population likes. Note, however, that I did not vote even once for any of the other people with Honorable Mentions (including myself). I did consider voting for Brianna in one category, but she didn’t quite make it. Most notably neglected in 2002 was Monkee, considering her fame in J/Cdom and abroad.

2003 AAA results: Brianna, MaquisKat, Kadi/KJ/Sylvia
Jemima’s ranking: Seema/Rocky, JinnyW, Jade/Caffey, Sylvia, Brianna/Diane/Morgan/Yael

This time I did vote for Brianna in one (and only one) category, as my third choice. Even Sylvia did better - she was my first choice in one category. Otherwise, I didn’t vote for the winners at all. The lists are nearly disjoint. I knew Seema and Rocky were doomed after the results of the previous year, but I’d at least hoped for a showing for JinnyW. No such luck.

None of this is intended to get down on Brianna. If you write something and other people enjoy it, that’s great. I don’t like a lot of the stories that make it into SNW, but the ability to sell your work, either literally or in terms of hits and feedback, is what counts. Writing to the market is more important than abstract literary qualities. As the man said,

“The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a really superior sort of ice.” –G.K.Chesterton in “Charles Dickens”

So I have to conclude that AAA is not my market. They want coffee and I’m selling ice. All my favorite authors are also selling ice and losing along with me. ASC is my market. I don’t look at the ASC Awards results and think who voted for these people? I know who they were, I know what their feedback said, and I know they’re looking for what I’m looking for in fic.

And in nineteen short days when I retire from Trek, the Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards will be my market. Fortunately they’re by nomination, so there’ll be none of this considering whether or what to enter.