Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I took a fanfic survey today; the usual paleo-fan questions about zines and how-has-the-net-changed-fandom were in there. One question no one asks is how print changes your perception of a fic. Since I printed out my Glory Days PDF, I’ve found myself enjoying the story more than I would on-screen. I read one of the stories on-screen before, so I do have a basis for comparison.

So I have this option for the printed page. It’s easier on the eye, less disposable, less likely to be dismissed with a command-W. Maybe it’s thirty years of reading good stories in print, compared to three years of reading questionable stories on-screen, that has given me the prejudice. Maybe it’s the ease of picking up and putting down a book, compared to the trouble of bookmarking a story and searching for where I left off. I usually think of the pro-zine crowd as exclusionary and inbred, but if it were just about the advantage of paper over photons, I’d be in their camp.

I hope someday someone invents a passive computer screen - something black and white, at 600dpi, that generates no light - something that looks just like the printed page. It could be done mechanically in black and white, or chemically in color. It might even break down the barriers between pay-per-fic and fanfic.

Sock of the day: Harry Kim

I haven’t been entering my votes in the ASC Awards for the last few days, but I have them all typed up in a file. I have only two Voyager categories left to read: J/C and Glory Days. Glory Days isn’t an official awards category; I just saved all the stories from the series (except for one Seven fic) to read together. Toward that end, I converted the whole series to PDF. My special, paper-saving version is only 82 pages, but I also looked at the double-spaced version, which was 344 pages and 100,000 words. Now I have a printed copy thanks to the wonders of LaTeX and duplexing laser printers. It had better pass the three paragraph test…

[The three paragraph test: read the first three paragraphs of the story. If it hasn’t caught your interest by the end of paragraph three, close the window and move on to the next story.]

Sock of the day: Chakotay

My modem connection has been bad lately because changes in weather throw the phone lines for a loop, but despite the challenges I’ve been listening to Filk Radio. There are some great one-liners (You’re not retro - you’re old!), and some very odd ideas (Joey who fills his waterbed with beer). My new favorite filk is “Black Davie’s Ride” from Avalon Rising by Avalon Rising, a techno-medieval band. You have to hear it to appreciate it.

The filk standby is, of course, popular songs with new, sci-fi, lyrics. Take, for instance, The Saga Begins, Weird Al Yankovic’s filk of American Pie (from the album “Running with Scissors”). This filk covers the entire plot of The Phantom Menace, but my favorite lines are the chorus. (You have to hum along to the tune of “American Pie” to really appreciate it.)

Oh my my, this here Anakin guy
May be Vader someday later - now he’s just a small fry
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye
Sayin’ “Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi,”
“Soon I’m gonna be a Jedi…”

The video is hilarious, but my connection is decaying rapidly - I can’t tell whether that’s the Emperor or a sand dude from Tattooine playing the piano. I’ll have to watch it at work tomorrow to find out.

Sock drawer of the day: the Enterprise NX-01 Mess Hall

I’m finally done commenting on TNG stories in the ASC Awards. VOY voting is already open and I have a schedule to read everything by next weekend, though I probably won’t have time to do Paris/Torres and the VS7.5 stories. I was worried about AAA, but the deadline isn’t until April 25th so I’ve put it off yet again.

So far I’ve gotten one comment back from the VOY voting - I’m on digest on the Awards mailing list, so I haven’t seen most of this weekend’s voting frenzy yet. That one comment was great to find in my inbox, though. I’d say more people should run feedback awards, but they’re a writer’s kind of award system. Most people have trouble writing feedback - the prospect of reading 250 Voyager stories in two weeks and then saying something intelligent about all the ones you liked is just too much for the average reader. The average reader doesn’t send feedback the first time, so it’s unlikely they’d do it months after the fact.

With all the Trek contests going on lately, technical issues are always coming up. How do you write an automated vote counter script? How do you track hits? How can you tell whether someone is a legitimate voter or a sock puppet? Or perhaps a sock platypus?

I say call a sock a sock - if it’s fuzzy like a sock and has those googly sewn-on eyeballs, odds are, it’s a sock. Stuff it back in the sock drawer with the other smelly underwear.

Not all socks are evil, thought - some are purely for entertainment value. Take, for example, the recent rash of Star Trek characters on LiveJournal: Kathryn Janeway,
Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres, Seven of Nine, Deanna Troi, Kira Nerys, Captain Picard, the female changeling, and, of course, Q.

I never did get back to the topic of sexual politics from my backblog list, but since Fay has been commenting on an old post about slash I’ve been thinking about it again.

When I said I wasn’t interested in fic driven by gender politics or an underlying agenda, I didn’t mean that I thought the purpose of slash was to convert innocent heterosexuals to homosexuality. Of course no reasonable person reading the posts would believe that, but in a game of telephone with my words on fandom_wank, some very strange misinterpretations come out.

I find the sexual politics of slash fascinating - not because they’re threatening but because they’re weird. If someone had written a sci-fi story about thousands of women getting together on the Internet and spontaneously writing gay male erotica, who would have believed it? What’s the attraction? When slashers say that it’s pretty boys, the answer answers nothing at all - it only shows that they’re so into the fad that they cannot see that it’s unusual.

Femslash, by comparison, is hardly problematic. Many femslash writers are openly bisexual, while female m/m writers clearly are not homosexual men. I wonder at the appeal of m/m slash - the social phenomenon (i.e., the sexual politics) is far more interesting than the fic. That goes for strange het subgenres as well, although when a het writer writes some unbelievable pap about a m/f couple, you can always chalk it up to an overdose of Harlequins in real life.

As for having an agenda, of course people are free to write for whatever reason they wish. However, I consider fic where the author’s motives are transparent to be bad fic. I’ll always remember one classic example of agenda-fic in which the author was writing about gun violence, with barely a nod toward the show and characters.

There’s an even simpler sense of “agenda,” though, that covers all the genres in which my interest, if I ever had one, has faded. If a fic gives the reader the impression that the author was at a meeting that the reader missed, in which it was decided that Chakotay is gay and involved with Tom Paris, or Chakotay is married to Janeway, or Chakotay and Janeway’s abandoned love children are out looking for one of them, then that’s an agenda-fic. There’s a fanon agenda from that missed meeting that the reader is assumed to know and buy into. The story doesn’t stand on its own; you have to have the fanon Cliff notes.

I lost my Cliff notes somewhere along the line, so I need the story to start from canon. Where it goes after that is up to the author.

Filk of the day: “Temper[ature] of Revenge” by Tom Smith [after] Julia Ecklar is the ultimate Khan filk. Tune in to filk radio to hear such timeless lines as:

So find me a ship, Reliant will do,
Find me an anchovy covered in goo,
It will go in the ear of a young Russian jerk,
Who will send out a signal to James T. Kirk.

I’d been thinking of doing a Ceti Alpha V story long before “Not All At Once” led me to “Weeds” and got me thinking just how different my Khan would be from Rabble Rouser’s evil wolf out of Trek history. Khan is the Borg Queen of TOS - the villain who steals the show and comes back for encore face-offs with his nemesis Starfleet captain.

It’s one of the many ways in which VOY is closest to TOS in spirit. Captain Sisko had obscure, or at least muddy, antagonists, like Sloan, Kai Winn, and the Prophets themselves. Picard had Q, of all things. Q is cool and even has his own LiveJournal, but universe-destroying yet strangely attractive evil he’s not. He’s more of a milk-run nemesis. ENT, of course, is satisfied with picking on its own warped view of Vulcans, with a side of Suliban for muddy, mystery enemies. At least with TOS and VOY, you know who the bad guys are, that they want your lungs/ship/planet, and that they’re genuinely, enthusiastically bad.

Work has been a real drag lately, and I’ve also been doing some geeky stuff in my free time. The end result is that I’m too tired to blog. Instead, I’ll point you to the two TOS stories I read and voted for in the ASC Awards lately: Weeds by Rabble Rouser and the sequel Not All At Once by Djinn. They’re about Marla from the TOS episode “Space Seed,” with a little of The Wrath of Khan thrown in. If all TOS fic were about Khan, I’d have a new fandom on my hands. Fortunately, it takes only a paragraph or two of any fic involving Christine Chapel to send me running back to the Delta Quadrant.

Cool link of the day: Space Film - I can’t believe no one had tried this before.

I thought I’d never think of a fannish application of J/P, but RJ’s comments have inspired me. This is my version of her version of the difference:
INTP: It’s true because it’s beautiful.
INTJ: It’s beautiful because it’s true.

The analogy to fanfic comes immediately. Some fans love any well-written story, no matter how depressing the plot or esoteric the pairing. It is a good story because it is beautiful. There’s another camp who appreciate any story about their one true pairing with a happily-ever-after ending, even if the literary quality is questionable. It is a beautiful story because it is fanon-correct.

So far it’s just an analogy. I’d have to know more about fans’ tastes and personality types to claim that it’s a real J/P distinction. I wouldn’t do a survey just over fic tastes, though it might be interesting to find out how the personality types found in fandom differ from the proportions of the types in the general population. That sounds like a job for Seema…

Cool link of the day: Memeufacture: Weblog and Automated Trend Reporting

In some really excessive midnight geekiness, I hacked modtool, a perl script for usenet moderators, to do NNTP authentication at Earthlink. I can only assume it was a more trusting time back in 1996 when the script was last updated, when NNTP servers ran wild and free… Anyway, if you want my modified script, email me and tell me what newsgroup you moderate and I’ll send it to you.

Now, back to the meta. I was thinking about this topic even before I saw Melymbrosia’s comment, to which I hope this entry will be a sufficient answer. First of all, the purpose of a debate is not necessarily to convince the other party of the truth of your own point of view. Argument purely for the sake of winning converts is more properly called proselytization. The proselytizing mindset is most ironically seen in A’s allegation, you’ve already made up your mind. In that case, A believes that the sine qua non of argument is the potential for changing B’s mind. The possibility that B’s opposing arguments might, in fact, change A’s own mind has been completely overlooked.

There are very few cases in which I get into debates with the hope of persuading other people, and most of them involve communal activities where everyone wants a certain outcome - say, a fair set of rules for the ASC Awards, or a new XML DTD. In the case where there is a final goal the group wants to reach, you need people to be able to compromise on the outcome. Yet there is never a need for anyone in the group to actually change their mind about what they, individually, feel would have been the ideal story categorization.

Most of the time, I argue because I enjoy thinking about whatever the topic is, voicing my ever-ready opinions, and hearing what other people think. It’s entertaining. I don’t expect anyone to change their mind because of what I say, except possibly me. I don’t expect anyone to stop writing slash because I don’t care for it, any more than I expect professional SF writers to change their styles because I got bored halfway through their last book. Without a communal goal in mind, there is no pressing need for people to agree with one another.

Because it’s my personal soapbox, my blog is the biggest repository of argument for the sake of hearing what I think. I write it down because it clarifies issues for me, entertains me, and may even interest others or prod their own thoughts. If I get into a debate with another person about something as non-earthshattering as the latest fan follies, I don’t do it to convert them to the gen cause. I just find it interesting to dig down to where we truly differ. It’s fine if they’ve already made up their minds, as long as they can say how they came to that conclusion, and I can figure out where we diverged.

So where do discussions go wrong for me, so that I have to walk away? It’s never that B holds an opinion. It’s not that B doesn’t want to discuss the matter - in that case, B is the one who has walked away and I see no point in pestering her. If B is willing to argue, yet unwilling or unable to do so rationally, then I’m the one who has to walk away.

If B is incapable of expressing why she thinks X instead of Y, she’s useful as a statistical point in an opinion poll but not as an opponent in a debate. If B consistently misconstrues A’s statements or resorts to logical fallacies like ad hominem, whether out of malice or out of a simple lack of reasoning skills, it becomes impossible to have a rational discussion. Maybe other people enjoy a flamewar, but I don’t.

Is walking away from a bad B in itself itself impolite? If you’re face-to-face with someone, maybe you do owe them an explanation, but that explanation cannot be you’ve already made up your mind because there’s nothing wrong with having an opinion. That B stands by her original cause at the end could just mean that A presented no convincing arguments to the contrary that were based on premises B would accept. With a bad B, that’s not the case, but it’s logically possible. It’s not polite to tell B that she’s not as intelligent or interesting as you would prefer, so it’s probably best just to bow out of the situation gracefully and not get involved with B again.

If you’re on-line, most communication is asynchronous anyway, so there isn’t really a problem with dropping the ball when you’re tired of B. Unless B has left some outstanding question that A couldn’t answer (and this is unlikely with an irrational B), A can let her explanation stand. A could do so even with a rational opponent who hadn’t made any particularly intriguing points in the last round. Most arguments peter out one way or the other.

For instance, it could be 3 a.m. and A might need to get to bed.

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