Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I heard about learned helplessness from a Metro column on the Red Sox, back when they were down three games and looking, well, helpless. I was curious, I googled, and this is what I found:

• Learned helplessness - a basic introduction, with the ubiquitous story about the dog in a box.
• Eliminating Helplessness - an application of the idea to classroom teaching.
• Learned Helplessness: A Critique of Research and Theory - for every theory, there’s a debunking.

I admit, I’ve been ignoring the whole thing. Unlike the local Sox faithful, my money is on the curse. I don’t have time to waste watching the Red Sox take five extra innings every time just to stay in the playoffs, not when I know they’re going to blow it in the end like they have every year since before any of us were born.

But if you want to keep up on the long road to stunning defeat, I recommend the Red Sox Nation Advisory System from a small victory. The current alert level is Orange: High Risk of Elimination.

Note: There is content after the geeking, really.

I found a couple of blog entries about authenticating LJ RSS feeds so you can see friends-locked posts in NetNewsWire and better RSS readers everywhere: eclecticism (Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS) and
life - listed chronologically (LiveJournal RSS Celebration).

The LJ FAQ (Question #149) isn’t nearly as informative. It doesn’t mention putting the username and password into the RSS URL. I’ve been experimenting with leaving it out, and NetNewsWire will ask me for the password and save it in the keychain if I do. That’s probably a better approach.

Jerie was kind enough to lend me a test account to try it out, and it does all work. Rather than make everyone friend a sockpuppet, though, and since the RSS feed thing gives me a use for one for the first time, I made my own LJ account. I’m not planning to post anything there except possibly Stargate fic announcements, but friend the new me if you want me to see your friends-locked posts. I will still read your LJ RSS feeds even if you don’t friend me, and I won’t get offended or anything about it.

By way of Jerie, Seema and probably more people I’ve forgotten: When you see this, post a bit of poetry in your own journal.

My favorite poem is an obscure bit of traditional Portuguese verse which I can’t find online, don’t have my hard copy of, and have never been able to properly translate, anyway. If you know the poem that starts “Onde vais, formosa e bela, aqui neste deserto?” please leave me a comment.

So instead here’s a fragment of “Fare Well” by Walter de la Mare:

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
   Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
   In other days.

Pretty picture of the day: a new Apple mini-store

I blogged at GNXP about recent IQ news. If you’d like more medical anomalies, here’s an article about ‘truth wizards’, human lie detectors.

Dr. Deb and I finally made it to the LotR Exhibition at the Museum of Science yesterday. The tickets were free so it was well worth the money. If you’re the sort of person who likes DVD extras about how the movie was made, this exhibit is for you. If, on the other hand, you’re a book fan, you may be disappointed in how little the staff seems to know about it.

You needn’t worry for your wallet, though. The level of merchandising is shockingly low for an exhibit of this size. They were selling the books, books on tape, games, and posters of Orlando Bloom. I don’t know whether the culprit was licensing restrictions on the LotR end, or Museum of Science policy (the main gift shop is pretty bare, too); if you’ve been to the exhibition in another country maybe you can tell me.

Boston was the only stop here in the US this time around. I think they said it’s going to London after October 24th, so see it now or forever hold your peace.

Ok, I’ve succumbed to the infectious first lines
meme, but only so far as to post some first lines from my
stories. The first set are what was intended by the meme; the rest
are there for fun. Feel free to fic with any of them.

Generic first lines:

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A BRAD meme, by way of Rocky:

Who was your first beta?

Jade.

What was the story and fandom?

The fandom was Voyager, but I was writing a few stories at once. It may have been The Unity of the Multiverse.

Are you still writing in that fandom?

I try not to. The muse has moved on and it’s always best to move on with her.

Which beta(s) had the most impact on your writing?

I’d have to say Jintian, for pointing out my wandering POV. But see the question below about qualities I look for in a beta reader.

What is your favorite story or series of what you’ve written and why?

I’m fondest of the filks, really. Although the musicals are my greatest filky achievement, the Khan-filk I Will Revive is currently nearest and dearest to my heart.

Who was the beta?

The betas just nod and say “very nice, Jemima” when I send them filks. I’m not sure they want their names involved, but they can ‘fess up in the comments if they’d like.

What are your next two favorite stories or series of what you’ve written and why?

Moving on to actual stories, I pretty much agree with the fans on favorites. People are reccing “The Dance” almost 4 years after B’Elanna the Muse wrote it. Why is it my favorite? Because of the incredible muse high I had while writing it.

It’s harder to pick another. I’d like to name an SG fic, but my favorite is my unfinished SG novel, for its theme. Of things you can read now, I’ll go with another VOY standard: The Museum. It started out as a loosely-linked AU series but then it came together to an unexpected resolution. I got to do all sorts of character assassination and the Borg got to assimilate the Alpha Quadrant along the way, so fun was had all around.

Who beta-ed your most recent story?

Jade and Jerie beta all my Stargate fic. Lately they’ve been doing drabbles in batches of ten and campaigning for longer fics.

What do you consider the most important quality in a beta reader?

The same as in a writer—she needs to love the show. Familiarity with canon and fanon are vital, because a beta reader is not (for my purposes) an editor; she’s a test reader. You can’t know whether a story is coming across well unless you’re familiar with the genre and the background.

What do you consider the most important thing to be accomplished in a beta read? (Grammar, spelling, continuity, plot, character, canon, fanon, hand holding, other?)

It depends on the strengths and weaknesses of the author. Grammar and spelling aren’t a problem for me (though the betas still find stuff), so I just want to know in general that the story is working. I’m behind on Stargate canon, so Jerie is very helpful there. Jade is always on the lookout for good kissyface opportunities.

How has your writing changed from your first stories?

It’s better from a technical standpoint, but it’s gotten worse in some ways. I don’t spend the time on my fanfic that I used to. My SG stories aren’t getting the love that VOY did. Fortunately I’m a faster writer now so things have evened out more or less, but I still haven’t written The Great SG Ship Story.

What do you attribute that to?

The good I’d attribute to practice and learning more about fiction writing (for the sake of my original fiction, but the fanfic benefits, too).

The bad I’d attribute to laziness, shows going off the air, and the flight of the Muse. I feel guilty now about writing fanfic instead of original stories, so I don’t put the work into fanfic that I might have in the past. I’ve also done most of the things I was inspired to do, especially in Voyager.

The kissyface I attribute to Jade.

Here are some fun and handy links I’ve come across recently:

• I am learn: the artificial teenage intelligence weblog.
• Morphases - More Faces: the on-line face-morphing editor
• The Economists: just a little fun with Flash.
• del.icio.us: social links.
• dropload: temporary storage for downloading and uploading stuff.
• zoom: infinite fun with Flash.

This entry inaugurates my new emacs category, which I’ve already stocked with some old emacs-related posts. (Emacs is the infinitely extensible text editor with a soft spot in its heart for elisp.)

The emacs extension of the day is tabbar.el. I was feeling jealous of cool new Mac text editors like TextMate with their drawers and their clickable tab-like buttons. How I wished that emacs had a pop-out drawer, or at the very least, tabs.

So I googled for tabbed emacs, and found the magic elisp file at EMHACKS. (Download it from the tabbar files section.) In just a few short moments, I had tabs!

Although it is documented, tabbar has no handy start-up guide for beginners. With the help of Zhou Chen’s Emacs Tools page, I figured out that I needed to add

(require 'tabbar)
(tabbar-mode)

to my .emacs file just to get the tab bar to show up.

Next, I wanted to do a keybinding to get emacs to switch tabs with command-shift-left-arrow and command-shift-right-arrow, the way Safari and iTerm do. With the help of the emacs function keys info node, I found the right combination for my .emacs file:

(global-set-key [A-S-left] 'tabbar-backward)
(global-set-key [A-S-right] 'tabbar-forward)

[The above may depend on (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil). If you don’t have that setting, then try M-S-left and M-S-right instead.] You can also assign ‘tabbar-backward-group and ‘tabbar-forward-group the same way, but ‘tabbar-backward and ‘tabbar-forward will scroll through groups as well so I didn’t bother.

I didn’t like the way tabbar assigned my buffers to groups, so I wrote my own version of the tabbar-buffer-groups function and put it in my .emacs file, too.
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