planning the revolution

Fuck, OKAY, I think I'm just going to have to up and write this fucker: reasons why even if you want to, you can't judge Kate the same way you judge Ziva, aka, when misrepresentation of feminism bites us all in the ass.

In other words: if I see another "I prefer Ziva/Kate to Kate/Ziva" post, I'm going to rip someone a new one. It is possibly my BIGGEST hate in the NCIS fandom, which is saying something because it's generally a really zen place to be. The two characters are not the same, and that has pluses and minuses for both of them. But here's the thing: one is NOT the antithesis of the other. Ziva is NOT Kate's inverse; they share a lot of things in common. You know. The way PEOPLE are wont to do.

Hahahahaha, I sort of hate myself? Yeah, I signed up for the next numb3rswriteoff round. WHY DO I DO THESE THINGS? lolz.

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Also, was waiting for a parcel to arrive today and figured that as it was 3pm already, it likely wasn't going to turn up. IT TURNED UP AT 3.30PM. NOW I HAVE TO WAIT ANOTHER TWO DAYS FOR IT. Goddamn. And! Industrial action starts on Wednesday! So I might not even get it then! FABULOUS, ROYAL MAIL, JUST FABULOUS. I'M REALLY FILLED WITH THE JOYS OF LIFE RIGHT NOW.

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Aaaaand! AND! The Rents keep double-tagging me about how much money is in my account and then not speaking to one another, or, in The Mother's case, not remembering conversations that we've already had. IN SUM: THE DAD IS SUPPOSED TO PUT MONEY IN MY ACCOUNT. Has he done this?

No.

I don't even have the words, really. I'm getting rounded on! On two sides! For something that actually has relatively little to do with me at this stage! WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. I mean, seriously. WHAT. ?!

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I know it doesn't seem like it but that first item way up topside of this post was actually not rage-fuelled. UNLIKE THE REST OF THIS POST. Also? Moonlight is shit.

I sort of remembered what I wanted to say earlier. At first it was going to amount to APPLE ISN'T THE BOSS OF ME, but is now more like, look, we use the software we're comfortable with. I think Winamp/Windows Media Player are ASS but I also feel like a lot of that is because they don't do half the things that I need them to do. Or rather, that I find that making them do the things that I want them to do is a stressful, overly complicated process because I find iTunes seems to INSTINCTIVELY GET ME anticipate my needs better, and I'm more used to iTunes, even though I used WMP for years. (UM. I really hate trying to get WMP to cooperate. It's like pulling teeth.)

BUT. I know some of y'all prefer WMP et al, and that they, for you, anticipate your needs more effectively than iTunes (which, I'm told, at times eats people's music? Ugh). In that same vein, please, I love you all, but stop trying to sell me on Firefox. I'm sure its very many nifty add-ons are really great for you all, but - look, even though I use the internet A LOT, IE7 does everything I need it to do, and it does it very efficiently. It's not cluttered, it's not eating memory trying to do a hundred things at a time, it now has tabs and an in-built RSS feed reader that I appreciate. Everything else I need is catered to by Google. Yes, I know that Google may indeed be openly attempting to take over the entire world but it's successful because it ANTICIPATES and winningly MEETS my needs. More than adequately! So. Please.

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I am never going to understand why people have a separate journal for icons so as not to clutter their personal journal, and then make separate, individual entries to let their flist know that icons have been posted. I understand doing it now and then for new people on your flist, and I understand if the icons have been separated for some other reason, but surely anybody who gives a fuck is already friended to the other journal, and the notification posting isn't so much cross-posting as attention-seeking, not to mention missing the point of having a graphics journal? Or, if you want your flist to get a load of your icon-fu, why not just cross-post? I've seen plenty of people do the same with media; I don't know why icons are different.

ANOTHER icon gripe: I have a deep-seeded resentment for people who are secretive about their iconning methods. It's just plain stupid. I can understand not wanting someone to alter an icon you've made (my big ANTI-ZEN is when people take an icon that is pro-something-in-fandom and then alter it to make it anti-that-thing-in-fandom); that's just plain laziness, and it also can go against intention. But hiding your MAD SKILLZ. Oh, what-the-fuck ever.

Lastly, with regards to fandom, I will never, never, never understand people who openly identify themselves as BNFs. I don't know if it's that I'm uncomfortable with the audacity of such a statement, or if it's because I always figured BNF-status is something that's conferred by a community on a member of said community, and giving yourself that status breaks that sense by which the community has given you something because of what you gave to it. (It also assumes that what you gave was worth a positive return.) Also, whilst the idea is certainly something that I accept as a given, the acronym confounds me. Like, a lot.

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I wish more people (not necc. flisters, just people whose journals I'm reading/haunting from afar fairly regularly) would write rambly fandom posts. It would make me feel much less retarded.

Also, because of the strike/boldthroughs, some people whose journals I was haunting have now locked-up! Except... I'm a lurker, and I feel kind of WEIRD about now friending them. What the fuck is the etiquette here? UGH. (This is why I love rss feeds. Well, for unlocked journals. This still doesn't help the locked ones.) I, uh, actually do this a lot? Sometimes I read these people's flists and to be honest, I can't remember how I came across a couple of the ones I've been reading the longest. THIS IS REALLY SORT OF EMBARRASSING. I'm coming across stalkerish and creepy now, aren't I? EW.

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edit: snowpenguin545, that thing I said I'd do is going to have to wait because I have to shut the laptop down. It's burning a hole in my lap. I'm worried that if I leave it on over night it will overheat/SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUST. So. Soon! It's all zipped and ready. Just. Not tonight. Sadface: sorry.

edit ii: LJ's spellfucker doesn't recognise 'combust'. UM. WHAT.

THIS POLL TELLS YOU NOTHING. For example, the sample, was it made up of first, second or third generation immigrants? Were these people educated in Britain, or abroad? Were they of mixed race? Do these people live in urban or rural communities? All these things make a difference.

You know what else? What the fuck qualifies as 'being British'? If you reject your cultural heritage, does that make you more or less British? More or less Asian?

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For the record, I class myself as a British Asian, though I could easily say that I am English, and not be incorrect. Polls like this infuriate me because the assumptions made from them can't really be backed up. Also, what the hell does this collation of data actually mean? And what is it going to lead to people saying? Is it a bad thing that these people do or don't identify themselves as British? Also: coconut, wtf? By wich they mean, brown-skined but no real connection back to the 'homelands'. Isn't that really what it means to become absorbed into the society? Is that a bad thing, too?

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Off to the post office, now.

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edit: Mike Reid died. I'm utterly shocked.

So, just like always, this is proving to be dumb and difficult. ( cut for my usual whinging. )

Also, my family - crazy extended portion included - are in Colchester having a good time. :( I miss them and wish I was there instead of sitting here staring at my notepad full of scribbles. (UGH. I have to write this and then type it up, too. I need to learn to type essays straight into a word document.)

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I did start watching Bones when I got back from the library. Something random has happened: I have a girlcrush on Cam. I KNOW, WTF. Zack is still wonderful. And that's all I have to say until I see the end of the episode.

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AIE! I need to update duck_cheer. !!!

I can't access half the books I need. Typical.

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twincy wanted to know about 3 of my interests (because I poked her and made her ask me, of course). Meme rules say that if you poke me I'll poke you back ask you about three of yours. Alternatively, you could ask me about the others I've got listed?

experimental fiction. Oh, I love experimental fiction. It breaks my head in two, it doesn't always make sense, it's difficult to tell if you're reading it correctly/if people who are reading it understand your rhythm, but it's so great. You know, our perception of reality changes across time, and a lot of this is because of people finding new ways to represent reality. I don't think experimental fiction has to be innovative and the thing about it that's risky is that it might fail - hello Gertrude Stein. Sometimes - or rather, in my personal case - it's a cop out, because I have a difficult time writing straight prose, or writing chronologically. But I also think experimental fiction can make writing more three dimensional. I think people don't like it so much because it's difficult to read - you have to work at reading it, much like all the damn texts on my Modernism course, and that's really fucking tiring. But I also think it's really fucking worth it. If I'd written No More Roads as a straight-prose fic, it would have been porn. Or, if not porn, it would have been less intense (than I imagine it to be; it may not read that way at all). It's all very well to say that as one action takes place, Megan is thinking a, b and c; it's another to try and carry the audience to thoughts a, b and c. I'm not certain I was successful. I don't really care. I think experimental fiction taxes you as a writer and a reader, and I think that's worth it.

flatlanders. Heh. Hi, wliberation! Did you know other people have this listed as an interest? I don't think it's for quite the same reason as us, though. I come from the fens and it's the kind of place where you could set your dog running for three days and still see the horizon - well, if Britain wasn't so skinny. Our dogs would shoot off into the ocean and up onto the continent. Anyway, wliberation and I were talking about how difficult we find it to write about setting in comparison to writing about action or thought/emotion, and she said she thinks this is because coming from a place so, well, flat, the scenery didn't inspire so much and thus we were used to ignoring it. ...then we hit a tangent and now I like to throw the word around because it sounds good, and makes me smile. My girl is for the win, though, because when she writes you don't notice or care that the locational details are maybe scant - she fills every paragraph with really good prose, and I think that's what makes her an exceptional flatlander. She doesn't let the lack of hills stop her from telling the story that needs to be told.

spooks. Aw, British fandom, how weak you are, and yet, so comparatively wonderful. The early seasons are my favourites; I'm having a falling out with some of the newer cast. It's about spies, ooh. And I bitch about it a fair amount, sure, but in the end, I think the production value beats most of the American dramas I watch week on week. That said, I find the hour-long drama exhausting to watch sometimes. Spooks was also the fandom that got me back into fanfiction after that horrid spell with The Tribe, oiskie.

My icon, by the way? Ros. The best thing to happen to the show in two seasons. SERIOUSLY. (Also, I don't know if you've seen the latest CM, twincy, but Olga Sosnovska was on this last time I saw her. Spooks fans? She was playing a Russian. It was really quite fan-fulfilling.)

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Oh, Rob Thomas, you sappy, sappy child. You speak to my inner bad!ficcer.

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I'm going back to the house now. If the books aren't here, why am I?

Supernatural, 2x17, Heart. If you like the show, don't hit the cut. You know I'm not a fan anymore.

( spoilers. )

So completely done with this ridiculous excuse for a show.

I've been talking a little about Absalom, Absalom! this week, but I've also been reading J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians for Af. Lit. Truthfully, Waiting is a lot easier to read than Absalom, Absalom!, mostly because it's a straight-forward, chronological novel. I feel stretched by the novel, wound too tightly. Sometimes a novel can do that. It can pull you ever close to a destination and then when you get there, you realise it is not at all what you expected, and that you are still waiting. And that's what the novel is about, too.

I leave it feeling stupid, like an old man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

-- J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

It's a novel about an uprising, about torture and about resistance. It's also a novel about justice and Colonialism, and is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. I recommend it because I think you can get a lot more from a novel like this than you ever can from Dickens or Austen. Not because they aren't good writers, or because they aren't important; rather, that Coetzee is important too, and for every bent-backed snob (myself included) who can't see past their Shakespeares, Goethes, Dumases and Nabokovs, there is someone who is reaching into what has made the world as it is right now. And this, ultimately, is why I am dismayed that people who 'love' Shakespeare can't be arsed to read Marlowe's Faustus; why I get irritable when someone makes a value judgement based on canon alone. The canon is there for a reason, but whether or not it's a good reason leaves much to be desired. Just because you have read all of Dickens, or all of Shakespeare, or all of Austen etc, etc, does not mean that you are literary in nature. It just means you've read the fucking canon. Try something new every now and again. Don't turn your nose up at what you've never tasted. It only makes you more of an idiot.

(We like to be seen as academic. Oh, I've read so-and-so. Me too, and so-and-so. It's a marker that we're intellectual. We're proud of it, we have pride. And I find it a little disgusting, which is hypocritical, but I also get tired when a person who can tell me that such-and-such is a reference to the Greek Classics can't tell me who Anansi the Spider is. Anansi, for fuck's sake. Or, a person who is an expert on Sherlock Holmes has no time for Nancy Drew. I actually detest Harry Potter with a passion, but I've at least read it to be able to pass judgement on it. Oh, Ulysses is a load of bollocks because no-one can understand it. Oh, Ulysses is amazing, and I'm better than you because I read it, and I'm obviously reading something in it that you aren't, because my intellectual capability exceeds yours. FUCK OFF. That's not how it works. That's not even the point. The point is in the discourse that we have about these texts. It's about what the lyricality says about us, what the subject says about us, what our reactions say about us. It's about what our reactions say about others. Always, always, always I feel like shouting because you are missing the point, you overgrown, egotistical imbecile. And you are missing out, too.)

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I suppose the ultimate question is: what does it say about me that I chose to make this post instead of the one that tells you I'll be going to the Mayflower Theatre three times in the next term?

So, I opened iTunes and ALL MY MUSIC WAS GONE. I panicked and then decided to import my iTunes library file. It's from like, 6 months ago. So I've decided to delete all the music and re-consolidate my library. But I am distraught. All my playlists? Gone. MY PLAY COUNTS? GONE. I am very, very upset. (There are 4 temp files in the iTunes folder? Except they won't open with iTunes? I DON'T KNOW I AM DISTRESSED.) Also, for whatever reason, it looks like an older version of the player?

Also, I nearly fell asleep during Af. lit. Again. Although to be honest, it was because the lights were down low. I have Modernism later on Djuna Barne's Nightwood which is the oddest little book ever. Right now I have to read Ulysses because I'm horribly behind. BUT I LOST MY PLAY COUNTS. Damn them all. !

eta: BATTLESTAR IS BEING MOVED TO SUNDAYS. THE FUCK.

The thing I hate about the World Cup isn't the ongoing footie madness in England - it's the assumption that if you don't give a shit about England winning or not, you're not a patriot. Oh fuck off. And it looks like they made it through by the skin of their teeth, as ever.

I'm more interested in Ghana and Australia's upcoming matches.