Life on Queen Street

Ask them how they feel about people who only read their books via their local library.

WHY DO YOU HATE LIBRARIES SO MUCH George R Gabaldon PRO WRITERS, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

Dear STARGATE fanfic that is pissing me off today:

1) An FN P-90 weighs six pounds - 6 - fully loaded (actually about two pounds lighter than the MP5-A5; 3-4 lbs lighter than a standard M-16 and about half the length) - which would be a negligible weight suspended from the four-point sling SG personnel wear. If Carter can carry Teyla, the added weight of the P-90 won't be a problem (hence why real-world police & special operations forces like the gun).

2) This information is available on Wikipedia's P-90 page; it's literally less than 10 seconds work (including load times) to find out the weapon's dimensions. Research - think about doing some. Speaking of which...

3) Carter spent more than 10 years as an SG operator, more often under fire than not. Name one time (in 200+ episodes) she abandoned her weapon while retreating under fire (given that she wears it strapped to her chest).

4) Carter is left caring for a wounded teammate in the middle of a wraith attack and you have her abandon her weapon and field pack - are you kidding me?

Is Carter?

5) This is where I stopped caring reading. Carter is a career military officer, who has more than a decade of combat experience (which would have made her, IRL, one of the most experienced combat veterans in the US military). She is an expert marksman. And because Carter needs to have a less-lethal option, she carries a zat as her personal sidearm. Throwing down with a Wraith in a knife fight when she is fully armed with her P-90 and zat is not cool, it's stupid. Carter would know better* - so should people writing her.

Given her experience, do you think maybe Carter would keep her field pack handy in case she needed to provide first aid, drinking water, extra ammunition, blankets, food - all those things that you need when you suddenly find yourself trapped off-world with injured personnel and Wraith on your ass. So you've either made Carter act the fool by dumping survival gear or by going off-planet with a bunch of useless junk in her field pack. Either way, your fic just jumped the character selachii because Carter would know better (or Amanda Tapping would God-damn well want an explaination why Carter didn't).

Feh.

*A) Never bring a knife to a gunfight. B) Never let your opponent grab you if you can avoid it - jumping on a Wraith's back to stab him in the neck (not how you fight with a knife, btw) definitely puts you in grabby-hands territory.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is an offensively stupid, written-by-committee piece of shit that deletes, ignores or rewrites all the elements of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character that made him worthy of interest in the first place.

I would suggest anyone who

A) Has read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, or

B) Has even the barest familiarity with the Victorian Era, or

C) Has the shallowest appreciation of the operation of Her Majesty's Government

avoid this Americanized garbage entirely.

Those who do not meet the above criteria may, at their own risk, hazard a viewing.

Personally, I've had more fun preparing my tax return: I spent the last hour-and-a-half of the film's two-hour running time desperately wishing for a book to read. Preferably in the lobby.

I am quite irrationally irked that the "Determining When to Compare Someone to Hitler" chart posted to my flist (h/t voleuse) is polemical and not, in fact, an actual examination of when it's appropriate to compare someone to Hitler. Not that it's reasonable to expect someone who regards socialized healthcare as Nazism on the march (and srsly WTF?!) to appreciate the fallacy of reductio ad Hitlerum but pouring snark on stupid seems equally ineffective.

I think Joss Whedon is overrated and I hated THE TIME-TRAVELER'S WIFE.

Bleh.

1) Asking me "why isn't Sarah Connor more popular" will result in a thesis-length essay on the ingrained sexism and androcentricism and sometimes outright misogyny in SF/F (not to mention heterocentricism and Eurocentricism), paticularly in genre TV. And yes, that includes Joss Whedon. And no, I don't think the women characters on BSG are particularly good examples of "strong women characters" - a cancer victim, a slutty headcase, a femme fatale and the stand-by-her man wife and mother are not my idea of good examples of interesting and empowered women (especially not when they're the ONLY female characters in a series). More like three stereotypes* and RDM's skanky gender issues in search of a story.

2) I really hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I don't hate Joss Whedon as much as I hate BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And I enjoy me some hatin' on the Joss. RDM should get some sort of award - I'm a critical viewer but we're talking putting season one out in the trash hate (and I still have X-FILES and XENA crap kicking around. That is how white-hot my hate for the crapfest that is BSG burns).

3) I need to update my layout so that Quantz is displayed properly in my flist. Anyone have any suggestions?

4) Zombies have been seen in the Dallas area. Run, run for you life.


eta - Why "but the guys on BSG all have sucky lives, too" is neither a persuasive argument nor a good enough excuse:



*Laura Roslin is still cool, which is probably why RDM is bound and determined to see her safely shacked-up with a man, emfeebled, stripped of her power and her personal dignity, and dead before the end of the series. Fuck you, BSG, you are aself-congratulatory, faux-intellectual, boiler-plate liberal piece of crap, but so ultimately clueless about how gender, race and sexual orientation are presented in your narrative that I want to shoot skeet with my DVDs (I will trade them in for Homicide instead). Truly progressive narratives do more than change the job labels afixed to their stereotypes.

What fresh fuckery is this, universe.

I'm watching Supernatural and liking it.

Woe for the end is fucking nigh.



I will not write crossover fic. Sarah Connor is not a mom-Dean-would-like-to-eff. I do not find Jensen Ackles attractive. I will not write crossover fic. Sarah Connor is not a mom-Dean-would-like-to-eff. I do not find Jensen Ackles attractive. I will not write crossover fic. Sarah Connor is not a mom-Dean-would-like-to-eff. I do not find Jensen Ackles attractive.

sigh

I blame youtube.

"The wishes turn bad, Sam. They turn very bad."

O-kaaaaaaay. That shit with the Teddy Bear... is SPN like that a lot? Because that is cracktastic and wrong. Awesome.

It's been one of those days: too many late nights, combined with a lingering cold, combined with a dodgy ankle and my refusal to use my crutches for, lo, they are annoying as fuck, which results in combining OTC cold pills with extra-strength Ibuprofen, combined with a particularly boring stretch of manipulating drop-down menus to run reports on the database, leaving me drooling on my keyboard this afternoon.

No baseball tonight, so no excuse not to get an early night (except I'm an inveterate night owl with trouble getting to bed).

Speakng of baseball, I'm utterly engrossed by the World Series - five man infields! Baseball diamonds awash in rain! Batters finding their stroke just in time to keep the game going! A game halted mid-inning to be continued on Wednesday! The drah-mah! My God - and I only started watching to hate on the Red Sox. I feel my investment has been repaid many times over.

I have also booked tickets to a reading on Wednesday night at the International Festival of Authors, so I will be DVRing the game (and possibly walking around with my fingers in my ears - 'nyahnyahnyahnyah, I can't hear you!' - all Wednesday night).

Speaking of authors, as I surfed through LJ, cofax7's journal led me to this post by Sharon Lee about academic analysis and teaching of "genre fiction". Apparently, sf/fantasy needs to be saved from the big self-aggrandizing meanies in academia who don't appreciate that it's just meant to be entertaining. And... sure, fine, whatever dude.

As someone who's done lit crit at the post-grad level and written a horror novel (well, six chapter plus outline) for my MA thesis, I'm calling shennanigans on this one. Cofax linked to a far better and snarkier rebuttal but I do have one word for Sharon Lee - Shakespeare.

Let's see - popular? Check. Escapist? Check. Genre? Titania, Oberon, Puck, Ariel, Banquo... check. Capable of withstanding (hundreds of years) of critical analysis? Check. An example of finely crafted writing? Oh, hella check.

So my suggestion to Lee and anyone else burdened with a similar sense of being martyred on the cross of your populist tastes (and it doesn't get more populist than Elizabethan theatre) by those meanie academics who dare to peer at the underlying structure of your diegesis is to take your hurt feelings and go away. Writing & publishing is like getting naked in public - if you don't want people to point and laugh, don't do it. And the excuse that science fiction shouldn't be studied or taught because it's just "escapist genre novels" is certainly risible - however you feel about the genre.

And before someone says they don't want to be Shakespeare - why don't you want to be Shakespeare? Why aren't you working to be the absolutely finest craftsman you can be? This is the argument you want your work to hang on: that it shouldn't be critiqued because it's meant to be fun, that you're satisfied to rise to the low end of mediocrity?

If you don't take your work seriously, why on earth should I? Even as "escapist genre novels"...?

Bwahahahahahahaha.

Say it with me: copying verbatim is not fair use, asstard.

As expected, cleolinda has all the deets at Fandom_wank

Meanwhile, Twilight continues to make me feel better about anything I've ever said and done in fandom ever.

BTW - TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES is back tonight. I am VERY happy.