giglet

I had a fantastic Christmas holiday! But that's not what I'm here to ask you about, dear friends.

So...for Christmas, I tried (and failed) to give my violin to one of my brothers. I have lots of rationalizations about why I failed, but I suspect that closest to truth is that the more I fixed up and handled the fiddle, the more I wanted to play it myself.

I'm now looking for something that will play the major scales of G,D,A and E slowly, on my iPad.

I need to train my ear to hear when a note is in tune or not, and this is how I usually do it. I have learned through bitter experience that if I skimp on this step, I'll never be happy trying to play tunes and feeling that I'm not quite in tune but am unable to tell whether I'm sharp or flat. Right now I can't even tune up the fiddle without help.

Any suggestions for apps?

( Why am I taking this seriously? )

I thought this might be interesting for OTW's lawyers, and possibly for people writing IronMan fic about what happens when Tony Stark's robots start producing fanfic:


So photographer David Slater wants Wikipedia to remove a monkey selfie that was taken with his camera. As you can see from this screen shot, Wikipedia says no: the monkey pressed the shutter so it owns the copyright... Read more at:
http://skunkbear.tumblr.com/post/94176155752/monkey-selfie

I didn't expect to stumble across this.

Fandom: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Second person POV fic, AU (Marvin is a web server)
Author unknown, but presumably a human at the Association for Computing Machinery
Link: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/404

If you give a damn about your economic situation and/or democracy, do two simple things:

Now: Make sure you are registered to vote.
In November: vote for the party and candidate least likely to fuck you over as they make policies that affect your paycheck and body and schools and environment.

This is one of your opportunities to be a citizen, rather than a consumer. The voting booth is one place where money doesn't always win the contest.

This could take you as little as 15 minutes, and is unlikely to take more than 4 hours. Surely between now and November 3rd, you can find time to do that?

Register to vote resources
http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/Voting/Register.shtml

Voting resources
http://votesmart.org/

You don't have to be perfect, you don't even have to be smart -- the important thing is to show up.

dorinda said:"Historical slash! Anything at all about it--the challenges of writing slash in a historical time period, the things that have drawn you to it, the best and worst (or your favorite/least favorite) things about it or about the planning/writing process, how you like to go about it, etc."

The past is a different country and writing about it without doing research is going to produce lousy results. Ill-considered details can throw me right out of a story. For example, an Avengers fic had someone recognize that Steve Rogers is experiences technology culture shock, saying, "you've gone from transistor radios to the Internet" -- and I wanted to yell that no, Steve Rogers never had a transistor radio! Those were an amazing development of the 1960s that liberated radios from the big, delicate, power-hungry vacuum tube radios that Steve Rogers knew in the '30s and '40s. And technical details are the easy part -- when the author wants to get into attitudes and slang and subcultures (and really, everyone but The Man is in some subculture or other), it all gets harder to get right, and easier to get terribly wrong.

(I have had occasional to explain to a young writer that no, actually, in many cities in the early 1970s, finding one night stands was easier and less... scripted? fraught? than they are today. There really was a belief that The Pill made sex consequence-free and that there would never be a reason to confine sex to marriage again. Then came the neo-Puritan backlash of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, plus AIDs... but that's a rant for another time. I wish I could have handed her Maupin's "Tales of the City".)

Good historical fic shows off the differences inherent to the times and places without turning the story into a documentary. People who enjoy reading history and then re-purposing what they've learned for fic tend to do pretty well. For example: Flamingo wrote Starsky&Hutch stories about the gay rights movement in the 1970s. Sylvia Volk wrote some Highlander stories set in the ancient world. Parhelion's Nero Wolfe stories are notable for their sense of time and place.

I'm not that good at it. I do fall into historical research sometimes -- and wow, I know a *lot* about the Klondike Gold Rush because I wanted to know more about the history of the RCMP because I fell into due South fandom. Also about the freight tunnels under Chicago for the same reason. And Navarone fiction got me interested in WWII in Crete, which for a while had me thinking about going to grad school just so I could spend time delving into the lives of British spies on the island at that time, with some professional academic guidance. Fiscal realities prevailed, so I'm still fumbling my way around historical research. I've written many things that I won't show off in public because they're just embarrassingly naive about the setting. Some of those details I knew were wrong when I wrote them, but I didn't know how to get them right, and just steamrolled on in an effort to finish a rough draft.

Another thing that draws me to historical slash is a unrealistic, exploitative romanticism. You've heard that saying about "an adventure is just someone on the other side of the world having a hard time"? I like my stories thrilling rather than realistic, which means I want to be able to ignore the squalor (unless it contributes to the story) and focus on the story of people rising above the average, doing heroic feats, finding love in a place far enough from my current world to have a gloss of romance or even exoticism. With slash, there's also the lure that it is sometimes subversive or at least bohemian, which can also be romantic or exotic. The trend can descend into... I guess id-fic is the politest term.

If I'm writing id-fic, I want to know it, and make that clear to everyone reading it. The danger is that people really do "learn" history from entertainment like "Inglorious Bastards" and get their ideas of what a romantic relationship should look like from "Twilight". And that's not okay.

 bell asked what fic I find most memorable.

i really struggled with answering this, because there is no single story. I have favorites, of course, and unique stories that I come back to re-read, and stories that I find  perfectly formed. (Most recently, these are "we were emergencies" by gyzm (avengers) and "Written by the victors" by Speranza (SGA) and "the Good student" by Sylvia Volk (Highlander), respectively).

Also, and I apologize for my unseemly egotism, the stories that hold the most space in my mind are -- must be -- the stories I have written. But among these, the ones that continue to come to mind are the problematic ones, where I aimed higher than I could achieve. Some are unnamed and unposted.

so, I'm sorry. I can no more name a most memorable fic than I can date my most memorable sunrise. Some are better than others, but there are far too many that are beautiful in their own way for any one to stand out.

 monkey5s asked what is my most recent fandom and why, and my oldest still relevant fandom.

Most recent, although I hesitate to admit it, is Sleepy Hollow. Crane is eye candy and I did have some sympathy for him waking up out of his time, but I have limited patience for his beautiful suffering that might be veering towards man pain. He needs a new coat, a cellphone, and a discussion about what he wants for Katrina. Mostly though, I'm interested in Abbie,  and her story, her loyalties, and her sister. I'm also amused by a white guy playing the magic exposition character. But I don't trust the show runners enough, yet, that it won't go Supernatural way. I'm not really looking for fic yet.

I could make an argument for my oldest still-relevant fandom being "Three Musketeers" by Dumas. That was the book of my adolescence (and it didn't hurt that Raquel Welch was in the 1970s movie) and I still have a great fondness for it and have slowly been acquiring and reading the other books in the series. But... I think regarding a *fandom*,  I gotta go with Doctor Who.

Doctor Who changed my life. When I was a deeply alienated teen, the fourth Doctor was the awesome Outsider and I could identify with Sarah Jane Smith, and I felt like there was undoubtedly life beyond high school where heroes could be smart, odd, compassionate and effective people who find a way to bring peace without picking up a weapon. And because of Doctor Who, I went to my first convention, and at my first convention I spent 6 hours sitting on the floor outside the video room talking about Doctor Who and Blake Seven and books and philosophy with strangers who had drunk from the same well as I had. I was a starstruck newbie who Found My People.  By and large, they are still My People, and my life would be far poorer without them.

mollyamory asked me "What's your least favorite thing about fandom, and why?"

Mashup pairing names. I hate them. The first five were cute, but after that, it got really old really fast. (Actually, while I'm complaining, I'm not fond of conversational tags, ala Tumblr, either.)

Okay, that's the immediate and trivial answer. The real answer is that my least favorite thing about fandom is also my most favorite thing about fandom: ( fans )

Yay, thank you all for commenting! I'm taking the questions in order, daily when I have time.

the_rck [Bad username or unknown identity: ]said, "Tell me about your three favorite characters."

Only three? Okay, these are the characters that I adore at this moment: ( Methos, Dusty Miller, Natasha Romanova )

OMG, I forgot Parker from Leverage! And Wendy Watson
from Middleman!

This is a USA-centric post. This Thursday is our Thanksgiving holiday.

I won't be buying anything on Black Friday. I don't find shopping fun, and I really don't want to participate in a blood sport.

And I sure as hell won't be buying anything on Thursday. I don't object to the idea of folks buying stuff on a holiday, but I very much object to retail employees being told they have to work on a national holiday.

(I will, however, be shopping on Small Business Saturday. At, you know, small businesses. I have so little cash to spend this year that I want to spend it in a way that fits my ethics.)