Archive for the 'Fandom' Category
Brave New Pairing
Tuesday, December 4th, 2001Minion Shortage
Tuesday, December 4th, 2001Let me make one thing clear: I’m not complaining about the lack of feedback, constructive, fawning or otherwise. I know it’s just a population problem - there aren’t enough minions to support all of us BOFQ’s in the manner to which we’d like to become accustomed. If we organized properly, put our best fic forward, advertised in search engines and all that, maybe we could tip the reader/writer scale back in the proper direction. I’ll just tack that onto the impossible dream, right after the ultimate all-fic all-fandom XML story archive.
BTW, my license finally arrived. I hate the picture.
Analogging
Monday, December 3rd, 2001I finally got around to running my logs through Analog - it’s been over a month since I’ve done them. The DNS lookup alone took hours.
Logs are always a humbling experience. So many hits, so little feedback. For example, The Dance has gotten almost a hundred hits since I entered it in the Twelve Moons of JuPiter contest, and no feedback. None. Zero. Zip. Technically, that divides out to infinitely little feedback, but it’s pretty close to my running estimate, based on my logs, that I get one piece of email per hundred hits.
So maybe it just bites the big one, and not in a positive, vampiric sense of the phrase, right? Wrong. It’s probably the best thing B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse ever wrote, it’s her most highly-decorated story, and it’s also, if I do say so myself, not half-bad.
Sometimes lists are better for feedback, but sometimes they just ignore your bright shining new filk completely. Actually, I just checked again, and I got one response out of the thousand people total on the two lists I posted it to. So lists can be much, much worse. If a thousand people visited my site, I’d get more feedback than that out of it.
I wish writing fanfic didn’t involve quite so much publicity work - joining lists, posting over and over and over again, fighting with newsservers and the resulting spam. If only there were one big searchable index for everyone’s fic…
To dream the impossible dream… I still need to filk that for my filk musical. There’s no rest for the ficcy.
Kiss the Franchise Goodbye…
Sunday, December 2nd, 2001This is the week I give up on Enterprise. I loved Porthos, Reed and Phlox, but my now unemployed beta reader Jade put it best when she said, “I like a few of the characters but I feel like I am listening to a song played at the wrong tempo.” (She also said it was like soda without the fizz.) Too, too true. Life is too short to sleep through another Evil Twins™ time travel episode.
So it’s all Buffy, all the time for me, with a little Special Unit 2 on the side. I feel like I ought to be sad.
Someone has to say it…
Sunday, November 25th, 2001Someone has to say it…necrophilia.
Long, long ago when the Internet was young, we didn’t have exclamation points and question marks and faux XML. Way back when we walked five miles barefoot through the snow to the VAX lab (uphill both ways) we had to make due with periods - so when someone was addicted to the net, we said she had a net-dot-problem.
My sister has a Buffy.problem, and after surprisingly little effort she’s dragged me down to the kitsch grave with her. I watched some of the early seasons, but Dr. Deb (my Trek Provider and Consulting Physicist) and I didn’t stick with BtVS. My renewed acquainance with Buffy started with a Late Season Five Revue at my sister’s, including the romantic Spike/Buffybot episode. In an hour I left out of my description of last weekend’s Harry Potter Fest, I saw Buffy! The Musical the first time.
Then the nefarious sibling unit brought the tape home for Thanksgiving. I don’t think there’s a Voyager episode I’ve seen three times, never mind three times in one week. I saw “Muse” twice, and that was my all-time favorite episode. B’Elanna, forgive me. It was all over in the first number (spoiler alert, Aussies), when Buffy spiked a redshirt vamp in the sternum while singing “nothing seems to penetrate my heart”. And I thought TOS was campy…
B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse needn’t worry about the Buffybot moving in on her territory, because as far as I can tell, BtVS is already fic. Am I supposed to pit my paltry unfinished filk musical against “Once More With Feeling”? Can my year of gnawing on the corpse of J/C compare to a show that ’ships with real corpses, Buffy’s not the least among them? If I wrote smut, could I ever hope to top “Smashed”? (Somebody tell me they didn’t just broadcast that on prime-time television in my beloved Puritan country, and without any of the TV-NC17 warnings Seema has led me to expect.) And this dragging your friend out of heaven for her own good is just so…J&7.
And so it goes… Dr. Deb has no intention to provide Buffy, but maybe I can change her mind. After all, we’ve been enjoying Special Unit 2, the monster-show so bad it’s–well, it’s bad–more than Enterprise lately, and I skipped the rerun of last week’s Enterprise (which I still haven’t seen), not to mention a Voyager repeat and some midnight DS9, in order to watch that Buffy tape. Trek is still camp, but intentional camp is so much more entertaining…
So I’ve been downloading some mp3’s of the musical, and then I suppose I’ll have to read some fic. But I am not going to buy a DVD player to watch Season 1 like my sister plans to, and I’m not going to watch “Once More With Feeling” three more times to catch up with her. I am not an addict.
I am merely an aspiring addict.
Zen Banners
Tuesday, November 13th, 2001The review is now up at zendom, and Liz has made some cool banners for linking us:
Today I am a real blogger - I just encountered the Mystery of the Disappearing Archives. First October disappeared, and when I got it back, November disappeared. I hope they’re together again now.
Strange New Series
Saturday, November 10th, 2001The zendom page is more informative now, with cool graphics. Thanks, Liz!
Here’s my review, with her permission, of Liz’s review of “Strange New World”:
Zeroth, First and Second Impressions:
Liz starts out by observing the Deja Vu Phenomenon - Trek series ripping off other Trek series (and Babylon 5, where appropriate). It’s nice to see “Resolutions” in the list; that sleeper of an episode has to be good for something. Otherwise, the Deja Vu is more a TNG thing than a general Trek thing. Like TNG, ENT is competing with TOS on its own turf, so there should be plenty more where this came from.
Summary:
Liz seems to have drifted into another series, so I’ll translate for her: TPTB are evil! Evil I tell you! Don’t get sucked into the T/Tu thing. You know Braga is going to pull an A/T in the series finale. Are you going to waste the next seven years writing masterpieces of T/Tu fic? Walk away now, before you get bitter and old.
Deja Shatner:
Liz, are you complaining that Archer is pawing the ladies and overacting? Trek is TOS, TOS is Trek. Oh, sorry, you said overreacting…never mind then.
Phlox in Sox:
What do you mean Phlox isn’t original? I’m failing to see the Neelix connection here. I think Phlox is his own alien, and the best I’ve seen in a long time. And yes, we need a Phlox episode, or at least some Phlox fic.
T/Tu:
Are you saying Blalock can’t act? I think you’re straying into truisms here. It’s like Jim saying “Chakotay was wooden again this week.” Trek is not about acting; just look what happened when they put a real actor in the role of Seven of Nine - it was the end of the ensemble cast. As long as Blalock remains on the acting level of Shouting Spock, the show has a chance.
And what’s all this about “distinctively Vulcan”? Which of the Vulcans on ENT are distinctively Vulcan? To say she’s poorly written is another truism. The truth is, the writers are flailing around like a squirting garden hose. T’Pol is doomed to be the star, because only aliens, half-aliens and captains can be interesting in Trek.
Someone who is naturally interesting despite his humanity is Tucker, though Liz seems to imply otherwise. He is mid-VOY Tom Paris back from the Delta Quadrant, and I liked him psychotic. But he was still Tucker - there was nothing not nice about him in his psychotic stage. There was nothing very extreme, either - it was the same old anti-Vulcan paranoia. The whole series has been so non-Trek that making Tucker psychotic didn’t change anything. There can be no alien spores for these people, because they’re crazy already.
Unworthy Fanfic:
No, Elizabeth is not in love with T’Pol. Everyone hates T’Pol, and it’s going to be much, much worse in the series finale when she runs off with Archer, leaving Tucker carrying her Pon Farr love-child.
Bow Wow:
Yeah! Porthos! And yes it was a shame about Tom. Why don’t you go read MJB’s Revolution for Tom Paris the way he should have been? I’ll hold down the fort here until you get back…
B Movie:
More truisms here - competent without the flair. And three to four years? Voyager fell apart after three years - oh, wait, that’s the BOFQ time frame. Never mind. But things are going to get worse. The writers are headed straight into a brick wall of the canon past - it’s not going to be little things like when the Borg were first discovered, it’s going to be huge issues like the Vulcans not being Vulcan. In three to four years, you won’t be able to see compence over the wreckage of the Alpha Quadrant. But that’s just doom and gloom.
Theme:
I like the theme. Yes, like everything else in the series, it lacks the Trek look-and-feel, but that VOY intro got old fast. I spent the last two seasons complaining through the flight of Voyager to natty background music - think, just think of how many lines Chakotay could have had if they’d just skipped the interminable VOY intro. The whole forgotten trio of Chakotay, Tuvok and Neelix could have had proper character development in the time they wasted. At least the new intro has pretty pictures - if they’re more inspiring than the show itself, well, that’s Trek.
One thing I forgot to mention in my defense of sarcasm is the moral obligation to mock wickedness. All the more so if it’s petty squabbling BOFQ wickedness…
Zen fandom: The sound of one fan griping
Thursday, November 1st, 2001Zendom is off to a roaring start, which is why I’m still up at this hour figuring out the little details of Yahoo!group administration and answering email from Australians, who are all wide awake and upside-down when New Englanders are sleepy and right side up. What the world really needs is more Australians - and a few more Brazilians wouldn’t hurt, either. There are plenty already, but they mind their own business and don’t bother anybody, so you don’t really notice.
Let’s see…I did actually have something to say. Oh, zendom is open to all comers, all fandoms, provided they read the BOFQ essay and get over it.
Peeve of the Day
Wednesday, October 31st, 2001Peeve of the Day: fanfic writers who choose their plots specifically to irritate readers into sending feedback. I don’t appreciate being manipulated. If you’d just write a good story, people would send feedback… Well, ok, they don’t, so maybe this sort of behavior is justified. But it’s still an offense against the muse.