Stuff About TV & Miscellaneous

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Happy National Punctuation Day. Are you punctuating properly?

TV round-up: Spoilers for HIMYM, Criminal Minds, Bones, Glee, & Dollhouse

How I Met Your Mother: I’m so relieved the writers aren’t screwing up the Robin/Barney thing, because what a shame that would be. I like that their relationship is more about the moment they’re in than what the future might hold or whether they’re compatible long term. And you know what? Some relationships are like that and that’s okay. Not everything has to be about forever ’til death do us part. Not all relationships need borders and rules and labels and futures. At the end of the episode Lily’s smugly convinced she knows what’s what, and that moment bothered me even if it reads true to life; people uncomfortable with relationships that blur the line between friend and lover force labels on them so they fit neatly into a world view those people don’t necessarily share, and it’s extremely frustrating. I hope the writers resist the temptation to force Robin and Barney to be something they aren’t. Not every couple’s happy ending has wedding bells and babies.

Criminal Minds: OMG poor Hotch. The scene with Jack in the hospital room broke my heart. And also, how much are the writers teasing the Prentiss/Hotch shippers, eh? Other than that, my critique is mostly of the NEEDS MOAR GARCIA variety.

I really love all the women on Criminal Minds. AJ, who did not buckle to society’s expectations and quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom (and what a wonderful show it is that gives us a man who gets it and decides on his own to relocate and become a stay-at-home dad, eh?). Emily Prentiss, who is professional, competent, efficient, and can compartmentalize without becoming the cold, ice-queen cliche. And my dear, wonderful Penelope Garcia, who is who she is and makes no apologies for it, who is unabashedly awesome without having to be a gun-toting, ultra-skinny super-agent because there are so many other ways to be a hero and this show just gets that.

Bones: AHHHHH JUST KISS ALREADY. Sweets, I usually love you but SHUT. UP. Though I suppose the romantic tension between Booth and Brennan is a pretty integral part of why this show works, so I get the writers being hedgy about getting them together. Still. WHATEVER, SHOW. Also, the payoff for Booth’s coma was kind of lame. They couldn’t have given us one or two episodes of Brennan angst before his memories started to come back? I understand the show can’t go for very long with Booth not solving crime because it is, at it’s core, a Crime Of The Week show, but there could have been one episode dealing with Booth’s amnesia. Ball, you has dropped it.

Glee: Ugh, this whole pregnancy storyline is brutal. I’m sick of it already and it’s only episode four. I wants more dancing football players, more music, and more Emma. I do like that Will’s not catering to Rachel’s need to be the star of everything. But that part where she was like WAH WHY DON’T I HAVE THE SOLO AND THE BOYFRIEND AND THE RESPECT IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT made me want to throw something at my TV. It is sort of interesting that we have a protagonist who is at times genuinely unlikeable, and depending on what they do with her arc it could be brilliant or just awful.

My biggest problem with Glee at the moment is how little I care about the characters over all. I’m basically watching it for the musical numbers at this point, but if I continue to be uninspired to give a damn about the people then I might start catching the musical numbers via youtube. Show, I want to like you for more than the razzle-dazzle, but you’re making it very difficult. A few more flat episodes and I’m probably gonna tune you out.

Dollhouse: On tomorrow, so we’ll see. Some spoilers in this interview at Television Without Pity here. I’m especially keen to see Summer Glau play Topher’s mirror in another house. Also, because I love Alexis Denisof, hurray for Alexis Denisof! I’m stoked about the promise of more stories set in the Epitaph One future, too.

International Blog Against Racism Week

Monday, July 27th, 2009

International Blog Against Racism Week starts today and runs until August 2. It just happens to coincide with some links I wanted to throw out there.

Justine Larbalestier has posted on her blog regarding the white-washed US cover of her book, Liar, which features a black female protagonist. She talks about how she fought against the cover, but ultimately lost the battle because authors have very little control over the covers of their books. Publishers pick a cover they think will sell, and right now the publishing and retail worlds believe books with faces on them sell better unless those faces are black ones. Larbalestier draws the connection between marketing dollars and black faces, saying “I have found few examples of books with a person of colour on the cover that have had the full weight of a publishing house behind them … all we can say is that poorly publicised books with “black covers” don’t sell [which] is usually true of poorly publicised books with “white covers”.” She then wonders if “the big publishing houses really only in the business of selling books to white people” and I can’t help but agree with her.

Larbalestier goes on to speak about how covers can change the way people read books:

Liar is a book about a compulsive (possibly pathological) liar who is determined to stop lying but finds it much harder than she supposed. I worked very hard to make sure that the fundamentals of who Micah is were believable: that she’s a girl, that she’s a teenager, that she’s black, that she’s USian. One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true. At which point the entire book, and all my hard work, crumbles.

Online reviews show this is exactly what’s happening. So, even aside from the fact that white-washing these covers is racist (and that’s a huge aside), they also affect the artistic and thematic integrity of the work they’re supposed to be representing.

International Blog Against Racism Week is just starting up, and I’ll be taking some time out of my week to read through the posts that come from it. Even if you have nothing to add, it’s an important conversation to listen to.

Amazon Fail of a Different Sort

Friday, July 24th, 2009

I love the idea of the Kindle as a device that can instantly connect me to any and every book out there. At least 60% of my reading takes place on a computer of some sort, either through pdf ebooks or fanfic. All my news comes from the screen, and the idea of having a device built for comfortable reading that fits in my purse and links me wirelessly to all that is an extremely appealing thought.

Tethered devices are not necessarily all good, though, as Kindle owners are discovering. Tethered devices don’t only mean you can reach in and grab what you want from the cloud, it also means the cloud can reach down to your Kindle and grab it back.

Recently, Amazon remotely removed digital copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm because of a rights issue, refunding all the users their $0.99 back. The symbolism was not lost on anyone, particularly the news media and the affected Kindle customers. The uproar has been significant enough that Amazon released a statement promising they will stop deleting the already-downloaded books on user’s Kindles when they delete rights-violating content from their archives.

This is not the first time Amazon has removed books from user’s Kindles, but it got the most press for the obvious ironic reasons. Some people don’t get why this is an issue, but consider how this affects ownership. When you buy a physical book and take it home, even if it’s pulled off the shelves the minute you walk out the store, no one comes round demanding the return of the already purchased ones. Once you’ve bought it, you own that copy. Book burning is a serious yet mostly symbolic affair, largely because copies always survive. Someone finds a copy in their attic or hides one under their bed.

A world where books are tethered to devices is problematic because it allows someone to take back those books — all of them — quickly and efficiently, without warning. You may not even realize it’s missing. The ebooks you buy don’t really belong to you, not the same way real paper books do. This is how book burning will look in the future, when everything is published via data instead of as ink. Remember how much AmazonFail sucked? Think how much worse it would have been if someone had ticked the wrong box in their content admin tool and deleted all those books from thousands of people’s personal libraries. Some day (and probably some day soon) someone will write a letter or make a phone call complaining about some book or other, and an underpaid and overworked manager will log on and click the delete button without really considering the ramifications, and next time there might not be a way to take it back.

This problem doesn’t just affect books. It affects applications (Apple, a company I love dearly, has some serious issues in this regard when it comes to iPhone apps and it makes me furious), music, and gaming every day. This is the way companies will seek to control their copyright in the future, with tethered devices and back doors.

Please do not hand wave this issue off. Pay attention to it, because it affects everyone. Understand that an age of cloud-computing is descending where everything is computer-based and everything is connected and everything is stored somewhere else. Google docs are wonderful tools, but Google can easily remove the content you’ve built or the service entire. Livejournal can delete years of personal journaling, writing and art, and no matter what you say or how loudly you complain they don’t have to give it back to you. That “right” is build into the user agreements no one reads but everyone accepts when they sign up for a service.

Be aware of how the world is changing, not just how it benefits but also how it restricts. We’re not just talking about books and music, we’re talking about the fundamentals of ownership.

The Complications of Slash as a Fanfiction Genre

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

This post calls some folk out who needed to be called out, and also draws attention to the blurry line of slash as a genre versus slash as the concept of same-sex relations. She also talks about the fetishization and over-sexualization of queer and gender-queer individuals — sometimes especially by slash writers — in real life. There’s nothing wrong with being turned on by slash, but there is something wrong with the entitlement that goes along with transferring and demanding that arousal be satisfied by real people. Would you like to be oogled and have sexual or intimate acts demanded of you for the satisfaction and sexual excitement of others? It’s objectification, it’s disrespectful, and it’s ignorant.

In some ways I think defining slash as a genre is a good thing; to me it means the fic has become so mainstream in fandom that it has created its own category with its own particular troupes and themes (some of them problematic, but that’s a whole other post). I also think it’s fair that, as slash identifies more as a genre, so therefore must het fic. Last year the admins at UR.org were called out for defining the Romance categories for the Hourglass Awards as "Romance" and "Slash Romance", and all of us *headdesked* in a simultaneous duh-moment; the categories are now defined more equally as "Het Romance" and "Slash Romance". Defining one as a deviation of the other as a norm is at the core of the privilege issues surrounding this debate. I think it’s more or less a good thing that slash becoming a genre has forced het to also become a genre.

But slash-as-a-genre does cause problems — especially in conversations about the topic — when some people discuss it (and whether or not they enjoy it) as a genre while some discuss it (and whether or not they enjoy it) as a broader concept. Most problematic is the discussion of slash that darts back and forth between the two definitions, using one to defend and justify what may really be homophobia and privilege. Value and moral judgments get clothed in false political-correctness, which somehow makes them "okay" to say.

Not enjoying slash-the-genre doesn’t make you a bad person. Saying so doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. Just remember that any value/morality/decency modifier you choose to use when you do so can be rift with a subtext you may not even be aware of because individuals that identify with the lifestyles represented in slash and gender-queer fic are better equipped to see the privilege and homophobia beneath it than you are.

Neil Gaiman on Fan Entitlement

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Neil Gaiman calls a fan out on his entitlement issues.

He’s very, very right about everything he says. As fans, we can get so wrapped up in something that we forget there are real people behind these stories with real lives and, you know, autonomy and their own ideas and stuff. I admit I was a little disappointed in some parts of the final Harry Potter book, but I hope I never came across in my criticisms of it with this kind of entitlement. If I did, I am sorry for it. This is an excellent reminder from someone on the other side of the fence.