Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Well, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x problem again. Moveable type wrote over my stylesheet last time, because I was trying to be sneaky and edit it on the server instead of through the MT interface. You can set up MT to work that way, but you can’t do it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too…

I’ve also finished going through my old Blogger entries to give them MT titles and categories. So now, if you look in the Quizzes category, you’ll see all the online quizzes I’ve ever blogged. And so forth. It wasn’t necessary, but it was geeky, so I did it.

There’s a killer thread going in ASC about contest suggestions, and I have more ideas about that alien transmitting messages to me through my molars (i.e., the muse), but for the moment I must keep up the illusion that I work here.

Fandom hasn’t been all fun and games, awards and challenges and Sections 31, you know. Think of all the people who toss you off lists and drive you out of genres, all the people who suck you dry then tell you to go take a long walk off a short bridge, all the people who rub you the wrong way then push you over the edge - all the infinite stupidity of fandom.

I’ve appreciated all the idiocy; I’ve appreciated it very much. Why? Because on my own, I’m far too loyal a person. I don’t quit jobs. I don’t drop out of school. I don’t leave lists. So it’s a great service when someone will throw me off a list and save me no end of reading, betaing and writing. It’s a great service when people drift out of a fandom and leave me behind twiddling my thumbs - when they stop tempting me to blow up the ship or assimilate the quadrant one more time. It’s a great service when they make a new fandom so huge and unnavigable that I give up on it in despair. It’s even a fine service when they write badfic, keeping me from reading because the stories I don’t care for so far outweigh the ones I do that there’s too little hope of striking gold.

All of these are ways to gain free time. Any old reason to put down a fic is a good reason, whether that it’s misspelled, or smutty, or angst-ridden, or stereotypical, or incomplete, or part of a huge arc I don’t have time to follow.

Am I a pessimist, because I see all this bad in fandom, or am I an optimist because I turn it all to my benefit? I don’t know - I’m more curious about what it says about my muse than what it says about me.

You see, it struck me that my muse is just another one of these time-saving external factors. In and of myself, I was too loyal to J/C, but the muse was bored out of her ridged skull and she started writing C/7 instead. I was never the type for murder and mayhem, but she borrowed Liz’s black leather and took out Janeway herself, several times over. I could never move on from VOY to another show, but she hopped right over to Tuesday nights and started writing Buffy. I could never walk away from fandom in general, but what has she written for me lately?

I want to stay in fandom, I want to finish the Seven Saga and the Chip Fic, I want the feedback and the derivative nature and the in-jokes; I want it all. She’s not interested. Maybe she’s just tired, maybe she’s been burned, or maybe she feels she’s been there and done that and has the ASC awards to prove it.

I don’t understand her. I’ve never understood the sort of person who’s capable of cutting her losses - I’m there in the brass band going down with the Titanic. She’s out at sea, tossing women and children out of her lifeboat so there’ll be more fresh water for her. She’s a menace, she is, and I don’t even know what she wants.

With my luck, she’ll spend the rest of my life filking tacky seventies songs.

   Word of the day: ethereal

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I read Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro. I figured that for two bucks at Buck-A-Book I couldn’t go wrong. Much.

Well, there was a lot of gratuitous sex, as usual, but this time with a minor. Even fanfic writers quail at statutory rape, and if John Ashcroft had his way Catch the Lightning would go on the fire with Romeo and Juliet. David Brin wouldn’t be happy with all this Rhon prince and princess stuff, and the worst part for me was the data dumps. Yes, Asaro is a scientist, but raw science does not scifi make - not these days, anyway. I couldn’t tell Althor apart from the Kelric of the last Asaro novel I read; it’s possible they’re the same character, or at least father and son, so that’s not the damning point it might have been.

On the positive side, the book moved along briskly and took a violent change of milieu halfway through in stride. I’m beginning to think of Asaro as a mix of hard scifi and bodice-ripping pulps, and not an unsuccessful one. That doesn’t mean I’ll blow another two bucks on her, though - there are other fish in the sea.

Right now I’m in the middle of Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams, which appears, whenever I stop to think about it, to be written in third person present. WJW is a wizard at world-building. More to follow…

Looking for the Borg AU Classification?

In honor of my latest quiz results, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x display problems some more. Now the images shouldn’t float over the text in antique browsers. (The problem was the line-height inherited by paragraphs.)

I’m getting the idea, from the ongoing discussion of AU’s, that AU’s are different things to different people. I’ve come to the conclusion that travel between the canon universe and the AU, and the degree of technobabble excusing the AU, are issues of story structure rather than of AU type. I think I can come up with six different types of AU if I try hard enough, and make up names for them to boot:

The Borg AU Classification

1. Far Alternate: the most extreme AU vision changes the setting to something entirely alien. The characters are transported into medieval times, the Paleolithic or (in the case of non-scifi shows) outer space. Apparently this sort of AU is more popular in other fandoms than in Trek.
2. Near Alternate: the domain of inversion-universes, where the characters and settings are similar, but universe-level details have been changed - e.g., the Federation is now the bad guys, or all the male characters are now women, or Chakotay is the Starfleet officer and Janeway is the Maquis rebel. Such an AU is not rooted at any particular decisive event or turning point.
3. Timeline: the classic AU, rooted at a certain point of past canon - one decision is decided differently, and the rest of the show is changed. This is the “It’s a Wonderful Life” approach to fanfic. Such an AU can be spotted by the question it answers, such as, what if the Maquis had mutinied? (See MJB’s Revolution.)
4. Canon AU: a Near or Timeline established in canon. The classic canon AU is the Mirror-Mirror Universe, although the Year of Hell and the Admiral’s timeline would also qualify. See, for example, DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe.
5. Divergent Canonical: a divergence that begins with the canon universe, and ends up places canon is unlikely to go. Although similar to Timelines, Divergent Canonical has a break point which is not sharply defined and therefore is not central to the structure of the AU, making this approach the most open-ended and fruitful. Divergent Canonical stories are the longest - once you start diverting, it’s hard to stop. Such stories, if written before the fact, may be considered simple fanfiction. (The show may end this way.) If written after the fact, some may be more properly considered fanfix than AU. (The show should have ended this way.) See, for example, Virtual Season 7.5. There are non-fanfix examples as well; see The Captain and the Counselor series.
6. Convergent Canonical: the stealth AU tweaks the past in such a way as not to disturb the present. Like Divergent Canonical, Convergent Canonical may be considered simple fanfic. No known rules of canon are broken, but this approach usually pushes the envelope beyond what is decent and believable about canon. For example, any fanfic in which Tom Paris is Kathryn Janeway’s father, or in which Janeway and Chakotay met at Starfleet Academy, had a love child, and were brainwashed to forget it all (e.g., Regression) would qualify as Convergent Canonical. Bonus points if the love child is Tom Paris.

What’s left? What makes a story truly canonical? In some sense, everything we write is AU; only the screenwriters are writing canon. I believe the question of classifying fanfic explicitly as AU is rooted, not in canon, but in fanon. That is, a typical J/C-happily-ever-after story is fanonical for the J/C subgenre and therefore not an AU, although according to the list above it would qualify as Divergent Canonical. Likewise for any other common pairing, and possibly even obscure or squicky pairings.

On the other hand, any time you change the universe, rather than just the characters and pairings, you’re deep into the AU realm - even if you do it manually, by, say, letting the Borg win. An AU is like obscenity - you’ll know it when you see it.

I think that’s enough fanalysis for one night.

Congratulations to all the secret agents, and good luck with those acceptance speeches. As promised, I’ve added the 2001 ASC results to my Voyager links page. In a flurry of markup activity, I also added the appropriate graphics to B’Elanna’s Award Shelf. (Click to see what B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse won, if you really want to know.) It took me a while, mostly trying to convince the paragraphs to clear: left and updating the story index as well.

I fondly remember the days when I would have free time left in the day after a site update for, say, writing fic. Speaking of which, Jade has entered Carpet of Blossoms in the Ripples in the Pond AU contest. There’s an interesting discussion of AU vs. canon writers going on in zendom, which will eventually turn into an Easter Egg Vinegar column. Don’t touch that dial!

On the Buffy side (spoiler alert! run away! run away!), Dr. Deb and I were cheering Anyanka on yesterday as she tried to get her well-deserved revenge upon Xander, World’s Wussiest Wuss. The magic wasn’t going too well, so she ended up doing it the old-fashioned way. You go, demon girl!

On the Mac side, I installed fink today, so I could get some utilities I needed for work. (Fink is Mac is Unix on speed.) The instructions were a little terse, but once I slowed down and read the help screens, it was like magic. I’ve spent literally hours of my life trying to install XFree86 on Linux machines, and fink just did it by itself while I had my back turned. XDarwin is cool, very, very cool.

Let’s see, are there any categories I missed?

Seema went unrecognized in AAA, but she’s been voted Best Author by ASC. She also raked in the story awards, especially in VOY. Penny came in second, and Monkee third.

My holiday story won second place in its diminutive category, and I got a couple of other awards, too. When I get home I’ll put up the 2001 results on my Trek links page, with the ones I keep there from the last few years.

Right now I’m installing more mac stuff for work, so I’ll just leave you with a philosophical question: If a fan snarks in the blogs and nobody notices, was it really mean-spirited?

Will wonders never cease? I got an honorable mention in AAA this year:

Many congratulations to Penny, who won. That’s yet another contest she’s now disqualified from entering, and as for me, it’s my muse, not my talent, that will keep me out of AAA next year. B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse is just too tired to work her way to the top of the fanfic mountain.

Seema isn’t talking, but it looks like I won a little award in the ASC awards, too. The Newsgroup Recommends only three stories in the VOY Holiday category, one of which was mine, and there are three prizes per category. Ergo, one for me! Time to get working on that acceptance speech - a bird in the hand and all that…

I’ve been wanting to get freeshell into my hosts file for a long time, so I wouldn’t have to type out the full dns name every time I wanted to telnet or ftp over there. Sometimes Mac isn’t quite Unix, and in this case, there was more to getting my mac to read a hosts file than I felt like figuring out until this morning. My mac came to work with me this morning (how about a Bring Your Macs To Work Day, to show the benighted WinWorld what they’re missing?), and I wanted to put the local fileserver in there too.

I found a likely looking link: Mac OS X Hosts Revisited, which taught me not only how to get the hosts file read, but also how to kill ads with it. Basically, it redirects all requests for ads to localhost. There are a lot of ad servers out there, so I’m still waiting for them all to be processed before I can test out my new ad-free mac.

Thanks to a link from Lori, I stumbled into The Fannish Potlatch, a sociological take on all those famous fan follies and the definitive answer to the question, Why is so-and-so so popular when she can’t write her way out of a paper bag?

On a completely different subject, Jade has a new story up: Carpet of Blossoms.

What does The Newsgroup Recommend, Seema? Inquiring minds want to know…