eye_of_a_cat

THUNDERSTORM OMG. Fiiiiiiiinally. *goes to watch*

Hate writing abstracts. Haate. Haaaaaaaaaaate.

Weirdest problem-page letter ever: My husband hates Macs, and I can't live without mine. Is our marriage doomed? Woman wishes to buy Mac to replace existing Mac. Man hates Macs, cites 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' adverts as justification. Standoff! Jezebel's version features responses from Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac and Job ('First world problems. You haz them'), too.

(I love the griping over the Apple adverts. How dare Apple imply that its competitor's computers are a bit clunky and unattractive! Dell's designers can totally hold a candle to Jonathan Ive! And pointing out that Mac users have to worry much less about viruses is just smug! Apple really should keep quiet about such things - it just sounds like they're boasting or something.)

In her place, I would tell the husband that he might not want to make me choose given that I hadn't been in love with him since 1989, and get the Mac anyway. But, Mac people. We're odd like that.

Landlord says I can renew my lease after the 6 months is up in August - but only for three months, because she might want to move back into the flat in November.

After so many moves, most of which weren't of my own choosing, I can no longer put into words just how fed up and upset and tired I am of having to move again, of never getting to live somewhere for more than a year, and of trying to find a bright side to look on about the whole thing. If my landlord wanted her flat back only a few months later, I would at least have a better idea of what my next job would be and how much money I could afford to spend, and I could make different choices, or at least have a choice; if my landlord wanted her flat back a year later, I might have recovered enough from the financial hit I took from the last three moves to look at buying my own place, from which nobody could kick me out. But that's not what the situation is.

And yes, she only 'might' want the flat back in November. The alternative is that I'd be on a month-to-month lease waiting for her to decide when she did want it back, and knowing I'll be unlikely to ever have more than 31 days to find a new place to live and arrange yet another move. I'm sure I don't need to expand on why this isn't exactly ideal, either.

I have lived in thirteen different places in ten years. I have had enough.

(ETA: Letting agents say to e-mail them to confirm in writing that I do want those three months. E-mail address they gave me bounces. NOBODY RENT EVER.)

(Note - for the purposes of this, I'll be sticking to science fiction in film and TV, rather than books. That's a slightly different conversation.)

I love the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, up to and including the finale. It has its flaws - lagging sense of direction from time to time, weirdly forgetful writing, and a bit too much focus on the furrowed and angst-filled brow of Lee Adama, to name a few - but it's really, really good. And most of that goodness, without a doubt, comes from how beautifully dark and gritty and postapocalyptic it is. Main characters die, horribly and often. Humanity is nearly extinct. The ship that holds the last remnants of the population together is falling apart. This is the future, red in tooth and claw.

Most of the critics, obviously and justifiably, welcomed BSG with open arms. It's science fiction, but it's serious! It's dark! It makes disturbing points about contemporary American foreign policy! (Of course, some critics took all this to mean that it's not 'really' science fiction at all, merely a drama series set in space and therefore it's okay to like it, non-geeks!, but seriously - it's about killer robots who live in space, so give up.) I don't disagree with any of this as well-deserved praise, but I do take objection to the argument which quite often follows: that what's so good about BSG isn't that it does gritty realism very well, but that it does gritty realism at all, and that sci-fi which goes down this route is inherently better than sci-fi which doesn't.

To put it another way, I don't think BSG is superior to Firefly or Wall-E by virtue of being bleaker.

And yet there's a growing tendency, among sci-fi dabblers who don't want to be associated with all that silly stuff and among sci-fi fans who don't want people thinking their hobby is childish, to start thinking along just those lines. Good sci-fi is dark. Good sci-fi isn't suitable for children. Good sci-fi uses futuristic settings as allegories for contemporary issues. Good sci-fi certainly doesn't feature any cute robots, or aliens in ridiculous make-up, prosthetics, and costumes.

Make no mistake, I'm not disputing that Ron Moore did a great job of rebooting BSG. At the same time, I'm really glad that Russell T. Davies didn't go down that route with a dark, gritty, unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who, because that would have sucked. I'm glad J. Michael Straczynski was unapologetic about including weird-looking aliens as main characters. I'm glad Pixar created a cute, huggable robot. I'm glad George Lucas didn't design Star Wars as a thinly-disguised commentary on American politics of the 1970s, and I'm really, really glad he had absolutely no problem at all with escapism, because sci-fi would be a poorer place without someone to decide it needed Wookies, alien jazz bands, and Boba Fett.

Sci-fi is a big, broad genre. It's always had room for all of this, and it would be a shame if we ended up shrinking it out of a desire to make it 'better'.

When I was doing my PhD, lo these many years ago now, a karate club met on Wednesday nights in the hall just down from my office. You had to walk right past them to get to the coffee machine, so I saw quite a lot of karate. It looked fun. It looked active. And it also looked like I wasn't ever going to get a chance to try it myself, since soon after that I got offered another late-night library shift... on a Wednesday.

I've been wanting to try karate for years since then, but there do not seem to be karate classes that I could fit around my previous jobs. Yoga classes were everywhere; karate, not so much. And while yoga is a worthwhile activity, and while lots of my friends get a lot out of it, and while certain parts of it are appealing enough - the exercise, the stretchiness, the balance - there are people in this world who are cut out for lying still on the floor for ten minutes while focusing on total relaxation, and there are people in this world who are not. And I am not.

But, they do karate classes on a Wednesday night just down the road from my flat. And I don't have to work till 10pm on a Wednesday any more. And karate, it turns out after one lesson, is great. Obviously I have no idea what I'm doing yet, and obviously my muscles are going to ache like hell tomorrow, but I sort-of-learnt three katas and half a dozen kicks and blocks and things and damn, this is fun.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch katas on YouTube.

Via a bunch of people on Twitter: 'Ask Pixar to Make a Movie About a Girl? Why, That's Just 'P.C. B.S'!' , which in turn links to Linda Holmes's Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees, and a response piece to that, 'Dear Pixar, How About a Chick Flick?', the comments to which may cause serious damage to foreheads, desks and keyboards alike.

Here's what's still considered a perfectly sensible response to someone's suggestion that, hey, maybe Pixar could make a story with a girl as the main character one day, and maybe that girl could be something other than a princess:

Come on! I’m sure when an interesting story with a female protagonist develops organically at Pixar, they will make that movie. Until that time, stop trying to ruin the fun for the rest of us. Don’t tell me that a woman can’t appreciate a good story for it’s own sake.

Ever seem to notice this complaint pops up somewhere every time Pixar releases a film.

Like all good writers these directors write about what they know. Their films, thus, are greatly influenced by their personal experiences and the themes of their stories are inextricably connected to their personal lives. Pixar’s films reflect closely the individual personalities of each director, so it is only natural that they see their protagonist as a male. Here’s one example, Finding Nemo...

For crying out loud, its not good enough that they create incredible films with amazing stories and perfectly crafted characters of both genders… We need a sanitized balance of the lead characters. When that is done, these clueless people will find something else to cry about.

I find this entire issue pointless and almost rather insulting, and the last thing I want is Pixar focusing on having a strong female lead instead of first focusing on a plot.

[G]uys are usually into more adventure and action, and girls like to bake cookies and be princesses. Of course there are plenty of exceptions and variations but in general I think its just human nature.

I have nothing more to say about all this idiocy, except that someone in that comment thread seriously used a clownfish protagonist as an example of Pixar's directors only writing about what they know.

With thanks to rivendellrose for linking to this: Total Sci-Fi's list of The 25 Women Who Shook Sci-Fi. Where by 'shook', we mean: 'Some are striking for their leadership and bravery, others for their incredible sexiness, many for both.' The list itself is a bit weird (Rose Tyler at 7? No Firefly characters at all? Barbarella what now? Pfft, whatever), but leaving that aside for a second, let's see if we can spot any general trend in the descriptions:

• "An appealing combination of toughness, self-reliance, vulnerability and sexiness, Ripley is far from a conventional damsel in distress."
• "... and, of course, there’s the slave girl Leia that fanboys will never forget."
• "The image of Leeloo, clad in white strips and boasting flame-red hair, hanging off of a ledge above 23rd Century LA remains one of science fiction cinema’s most arresting moments. Jovovich’s character holds the key to saving Earth no less, and combines an alluring sense of mystery with an unbeatable sexiness." [You're missing a comma there, friend. Try typing with both hands.]
• "She can pull boiling eggs out of a saucepan with her bare hands! She can crush a man’s head with her thighs! Could this robot woman be any more sexy?"
• "Fans will always debate whether the Julie Newmar or Michelle Pfeiffer incarnation of Catwoman is the sexiest..."
• "Posters of the scantily-clad space heroine still adorn bedrooms and living rooms everywhere..."
• "But thanks to images like the much-reproduced one above, movie fans everywhere can’t wait to get another glimpse..."
• "After that she appears as Baltar’s sexy, advice-spewing vision..."

Jesus Christ, fanboys.

To head off the inevitable "what, so men aren't allowed to find women attractive in your feminist utopia?" grumbling that always follows this kind of complaint, I have a reasonable suggestion: TV/film sci-fi fandom magazines can either stop describing female characters predominantly in terms of their sexiness, or start describing male characters the same way. This seems fair. And anyone who would like to protest this on the grounds that women don't find visual stimuli attractive in the same way that men do etc. etc. is kindly invited to think about whether we're all watching Supernatural for the plot.

I think this might be particular to the UK, since 'partner' (in the personal-life sense) seems to have a slightly different usage elsewhere. But we'll see.

Okay, so as I'm used to it, you would typically say 'my partner' instead of 'my (boy/girl)friend' in the following circumstances:
1) If it's a relationship that's been going a considerably lengthy amount of time, in a way that's clearly very serious, but due to personal preference or legal restrictions you're not actually married;
2) If you're, say, in your late fifties and 'boyfriend' sounds a bit silly;
3) If you're speaking in a more abstract context, in which you want 'partner' to count for 'spouse or (boy/girl)friend or anything similar', or if you don't want to reveal the person's gender.

It seems to have become a lot more common over the past few years, though, to use 'my partner' to indicate 'my (boy/girl)friend, who I'm quite serious about'. This is the curiosity. I've noticed a few people recently refer to the Mad Scientist as my partner, and while I don't mind at all, I'm pretty sure I've only ever described him as 'my boyfriend'. Has anyone else noticed this? When do you use the word?

One of the other vegetarians I know is vegetarian because his girlfriend is. He's getting on fine with it, but I will wholly and openly admit that I don't get that.

If you live together it's easier if you eat the same food, I suppose, but significantly changing what you eat to make that the case - doesn't that sound like a step too far? Especially when it extends to all food, not just the stuff you cook at home? I haven't eaten meat for eighteen years; it makes me slightly uncomfortable anyway that my boyfriend eats less meat because anything one of us cooks from scratch is usually vegetarian, but he doesn't not eat meat at all, because, well, he's not a vegetarian. I am. We are different people. And I'd be really uncomfortable with the idea of him not ordering whatever the hell he wanted if we were out for a meal, just because the person sitting across the table was eating tofu.

Does this make sense to other people? Am I missing something fundamental?

Also, a let's-pretend-it's-hypothetical dilemma:
1) You need work after your current project finishes. There are possibilities, but not certainties, of getting to stay on where you are, which would be ideal;
2) Your former department, which is commutable distance from where you'd like to live, is advertising for a 2-year lecturer post you'd be a really good fit for;
3) Said department is a dysfunctional snakepit.

Hmm.

Three-ish days in Hay-on-Wye, town of secondhand bookshops, and one-ish day in Cardiff before flying back home.

( The book stash from Hay-on-Wye. While I would not actually say these words under normal circumstances, I think maybe we bought too many books. )

( Sadly, everyone at Torchwood was out when we arrived in Cardiff. )

Has everyone seen Dell's incredibly condescending site for marketing computers to women? And has everyone had a chance to catch up on what it looked like before everyone started mocking them? Good, good.

The comments to that article in my second link there drove me crazy the first time I read it, all people saying "Well, some women do want to use computers to find recipes and watch yoga videos!" and "It's not sexism if there are girls who like pastel colours!", which is oh my God so very much not the point that this post was originally going to be a rant about precisely what they're not getting. But! Aunt B at Tiny Cat Pants already wrote that, and even better than I could, so I strongly recommend anyone who's interested (and anyone who even thinks of saying it's not condescending stereotyping because blah blah blah) to go and read what she has to say. Because it's excellent. A taster:

It’s like, they take the very thing you might find cool about it–that it makes you feel powerful and competent and like your gender is not an issue–and strip that out and replace it with this idea that you should not be afraid of these toys; they’re just new ways for you to address the same old girly needs.

YES.

Tiscali, Hell's own ISP, have now conceded that they do owe me a large sum of money and will be sending me a cheque for that amount. I'll believe it when I'm holding that cheque, of course, but this is excellent progress all the same.

Things are chaotically busy work-wise at the moment. That ends on Saturday morning, and then I'm travelling down south to this for a few days, with boyfriend and family. This means I have about twenty minutes tonight back at my flat to feed the fish, pick up the bag I've already packed, and pick up all the other things I haven't packed but will no doubt remember I need between now and this evening. So.

Passport. I have already found this - not, alas, in the Safe Place in which I'd left it, but with a pile of letting-agent materials dating from back when I'd taken my passport out of its Safe Place to use as ID. It's already in my bag. I've never actually forgotten my passport for any trip that needed it, but that's maybe because I always spend two days solid before leaving worrying that I'm going to.

Sunglasses. Possibly an assortment thereof, given that I now seem to own around 6 pairs. But really I want to take the magic photochromatic ones that get darker as the sunlight gets brighter, and right now they're sitting on my desk. The last Hay festival I went to was the first time I noticed how much of a problem I was having with sunlight (thanks to my mother pointing out that I was walking with my eyes closed, which I will admit is not the safest way to get from A to B, but what are you going to do?). Sunglasses mean I can actually see.

Book. Because even though we'll be going to a town with 30-something secondhand bookshops, and I fully expect to return home with more books than I can carry without a yak, I'll still have nothing good to read in the airport if I don't remember a book, and this cannot be.

Ongoing ISP war continues. We won't refund the money we took from you after you cancelled your account, because, um, you didn't phone the right department to cancel it! No, because you didn't give us a moving date when you phoned! No, because you were told to phone back to confirm cancellation, and you never did! Also, we can't cancel the account anyway, because the line rental is still active. Sure, you claim you never ordered line rental with that account and that we never provided it anyway, but on our systems it's still there, so tough!

However, they would like me to know that - and I quote - 'I realise this may not be a satisfactory response at this time, but I am confident that this matter will be resolved soon. Tiscali does take these issues seriously, and it is always our intention to bring the concerns of our customers to a satisfactory conclusion.'

Uh-huh. Yes.

So what I didn't know, and should probably have gathered had I spent more than about five seconds thinking about it, is that there's a lot of very strong feelings attached to Dreamwidth both pro and con. Very strong. Mac vs Windows vs Linux strong, really. Such that even if your only dealing with the subject so far is "wait... I have an OpenID profile that's actively using a site I've never even looked at? That's a bit weird. Does anyone else think that's a bit weird?", you will end up in a maelstrom of comments along the lines of "You're just looking for reasons to hate Dreamwidth now!" and "Oh, because it would be so bad to use Dreamwidth, because we eat babies over there or something?"

Dear Lord, fandom, calm the hell down.

For the record, I have nothing against Dreamwidth. I think it'll do LJ good to have some feasible competition, if it ever gets big enough. But I'm not planning to get a new account there or move this account there, for the same reason I'm not planning to move to Wordpress or Typepad or anything else - I'm fine where I am, thanks. It's not a big principled stand or anything.

This was going to be a longer discussion about how LJ and sites like it really don't work like the wider blogosphere, in such a way that moving from Livejournal to whatever is indeed a bigger upheaval than moving from Blogger to Wordpress is, but... see above. This kind of thing just doesn't happen with other blogging services. Forums that end up spawning splinter forums run by people who don't like the way the original forum was going, yes; Wolverine having enough of the X-Men and going off to form his own team of one ("Okay, Wolverine, see you next week! Give our regards to Sabertooth when you run into him in the Canadian wilds, as you inevitably will!"), yes; blog hosting services, nope.

EXCITING POWER CUT DRAMA. Or a little bit exciting, since it lasted six hours, and then when the lights kept coming back on in between, they were all dim and weird and Obviously Not Right. The man in the shop across the road said that power finally came back on at 3am, but their lights and credit card machines are still not working. 

This would have been a lot less interesting if I'd been at my own flat, since it would have knocked out the filters and heaters for the fish. But since I wasn't, and the Mad Scientist does not have any fish (yet), the only real problem was that a) my computer battery was almost flat just before the power went out, damn it and b) ailing boyfriend cannot have Lemsip without a working kettle (and water from the hot tap just wouldn't quite work). But still, unusual enough to be interesting; I haven't seen a power cut that involved going to get candles for years, ever since living with a flatmate who loathed fire and spent most of the power cut trying to get me to put them out. 

Oh my God, Glasgow, stop raining. It is May. Is it not enough that you destroyed my umbrella yesterday with some tornado-esque weather pattern on the way to the cinema (ps, guys: Star Trek fantastic)? Is it not enough that I had to sit through the film all soggy and cold? Must you continue to plague us with downpours and shivers? And how have you not run out of water now, anyway? Gah.

This was going to be a post to say I don't have a Dreamwidth account and don't have any plans to get one, but it turns out that due to their importing policy, I have an OpenID account on Dreamwidth which has left 131 comments already. So it looks like I'm using Dreamwidth already, sort of. Which. Um. I'm not.

This doesn't massively bother me - and if you've imported an LJ account there with all comments, please don't feel the need to delete mine - but I'm glad I'm not the only person who finds Dreamwidth's policy on this a bit icky. I've seen people equating this to LJ-archiving services, or screencaps of LJ posts, or even RSS feeds, with the implication that if you wouldn't object to those you have no ground to stand on re: Dreamwidth's comment-importing. But for me, that's not the issue. What is the issue is that Dreamwidth sets up that account for you through OpenID, and that therefore it looks like you're using the site already; there's no way to distinguish between imported comments and comments made there directly.

To put it another way: I have friends on Facebook who don't use Twitter. There's no ick-factor in desktop clients that let me read people's Twitter accounts and their Facebook status updates in the same application. But there would be an ick-factor if Twitter decided all by itself to set up accounts for everyone I knew on Facebook, and posted their Facebook status updates as Twitter feeds - or if Facebook decided to do the same for people who only have Twitter accounts. I don't mind my comments appearing on other services, but I'd appreciate it if those other services would let me decide whether I want an account with them or not.

[Your friend] has posted an album: [Your ex-boyfriend's] stag night! [Lots] of your friends are tagged!

This is an ex-boyfriend I broke up with six years ago, in what was a horrible breakup that happened for a horrible reason. I care very little about him getting married, except for a vague nagging thought that I really hope someone's warned his fiancee about what he did to me. We still share a lot of mutual friends, but we're not in touch with each other, and long may it stay that way.

So far, the only annoying thing about him getting married was that several of those old friends saw it as their duty to tell me in the most awkward brace-yourself-for-this-upsetting-news way possible. Like, "I'm really sorry to tell you like this... it's kind of uncomfortable... please don't be upset... but I thought you should know that [Ex] is getting married there I said it." And then seemed actually surprised that my reaction was "Um, okay" and a shrug. It was six years ago! I dumped him! Really, I am over it! I have no idea why they do this, but they do this with anything re: him ("So I was out shopping with [Ex] the other day and - oh God, sorry, I wasn't thinking!") and I have resigned myself to the fact that they do.

But, here's the thing: his stag night was held in the city where I live now, it seems, and featured lots of his old friends - who are also my old friends, who I'm still pretty close to - who live hundreds of miles away and were staying here for three days. And although the distance means I hardly get to see those old friends now, not a single one of them thought to let me know they'd be here, to see if I wanted to meet up for coffee or something, which is the way we usually do things if we happen to be in each other's parts of the country - because they were here for my ex's stag night, and they are all convinced that such things cannot be mentioned around me, lest I combust or something. So, the closest I get to seeing them is seeing a photo of a bunch of my old friends with their arms around each others' shoulders, on the underground station that's five minutes from my flat. Which is... a bit odd.

(Although, how much more odd would it have been if I'd got the underground to the Mad Scientist's a few hours later than I did, and ended up meeting them on the platform? AWKWARD.)