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I can do five things. Sure.
1. Ebook piracy: the latest hot topic. I have been staying out of this discussion, mostly because: I have been listening to pirated audiobooks since before I could *read*, since pirated audiobooks meant "check the LP out of the library and copy it on to reel-to-reel tape." I worked through all my moral and ethical questions about the issue by the time I had hit kindergarten, with the assistance of the fact that *all* of my peers and authority figures did the same things; I had picture books that were photostat copies bound with brads; I had Boxcar Children books that were bookstore remainders with the covers stripped.
My father was a math and programming teacher in the early 80s; the county-wide department inservice days were the best thing ever, because Dad would come home with 5.25-inch discs holding pirated copies of all the latest Apple II games that all the teachers were trading around under the desks. (True story: I once asked Dad what the "kracker" did in programming, since all the programs we had at home had a "kracked by" credit before the opening screen.) In fact, I have never met a single teacher, at any level, and growing up a TK I've met a lot, who has taught for more than five years and doesn't routinely make illegal copies of things for her classes. When a law is that widely flouted (by pretty much everyone who doesn't directly benefit from its existence, and also often, quietly, by them as well), what you need to do is change the law, not human nature.
Which is to say, I got over this topic two decades ago. Can we move on and stop acting like fainting flowers about it? ^_~
2. Still listening to (pirated) Dresden Files! 3.5 books in have reached Step 10 in the getting-into-a-fandom timeline. Current fic bunnies: A Day In the Life of Father Forthill; 5 Times Harry Dresden Narrowly Avoided Learning About Slash; and Ray Kowalski Dances With The Winter Lady. Also did another meme fill, which was probably obvious to anyone who knows me and is reading over there. However, I've reached the point where I know just enough canon that I no longer feel comfortable writing fic without knowing it all, sigh, so that's stalled, mostly.
Luckily, the anon meme is keeping me in fic for now! Actually I was just thinking that maybe Dresden Files has finally cured me of politics RPF, given the relative numbers of times I've been reloading the two memes, but then Dresden Files fandom decided on its own to adopt Rahm Emanuel as a character, so I suspect I'm just cursed to read politics RPF forever. (Oh, Rahm, oh.)
3. I am almost finished with my mending basket! Which means time to start a brand-new sewing project, maybe! (Or go back to a years-old retired one.) The last thing in the basket was the Madelyn Mack dress I wore at con-txt and ripped the hem out of. It's 100-year-old black silk, so thin it's translucent in sunlight. I have a picture of my grandmother wearing it, c. 1930, in an "Old Hometown" history pageant; I have a picture of her grandmother wearing what might be the same dress, 30 years earlier. I was really, really nervous about attempting to repair a dress that's practically an artifact and such fragile fabric, too - until I actually started the repair.
I am at *least* the fifth person who has attempted to repair the hem of this dress! (And a better seamstress than at least two of them.) That makes me feel a lot better, and, somehow, love the dress a lot more, too. In fact, its value as a historical artifact may not so much be its value as a dress, as it is a record of Edwardian and early-20th-century home clothing repair techniques; this dress wears its scars proudly, and I'm learning things about effective and efficient repair just from studying it that even my mother's generation seems to have forgotten. (I never did get a picture of me wearing it last summer. Maybe once the repair is done I'll attempt a photographic record. Repair being done make take awhile - there is literally six yards of hem around this skirt.)
4. Last Thursday was the first 10 O'clock Live! It was not terrible! It could use some settling-in time, but it was legitimately good. It actually feels like it's kind of halfway between wanting to be the Daily Show and wanting to be something more like W$W - a serious but irreverent real current events magazine. Am looking forward to more.
...and then the next day Keith Olbermann signed off for the last time. D: D: He wasn't always right and he wasn't always good, but he almost always said the things that the American left needed said but was afraid to, and shouted them when they needed shouted, and now who's to do that?
5. I joined![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
inkitout - the DW community to challenge yourself to keep writing all year - and so far, thanks to Dresden Files, am doing okay. But! This week's support post was to introduce one of your characters, and I was like hooray! I always want to talk about my original characters! Until I tried, and realized I couldn't do it. When I try to describe my characters, I talk about what they do, what happens to them. How can I give an age to a character when I've known her from pre-birth to afterlife; how can I give a character's favorite author when part of his story is discovering a whole new world of stories that he had missed before; how can I tell you about a character's family when zie has found-and lost-families several times, and has changed zie's definition of 'family' every time?
I can't decide if this is a bad thing or a good thing. On the one hand, people who fill out tons of character profiles and can tell you the character's favorite color and astrological sign and weight down to the ounce, I have found, tend to create boring and unrealistic characters, at least until they get past the character sheets. (Plus, I can't even tell you *my* favorite color; I am in a long-term argument with my horoscope; and my weight varies within a 20-pound range without notice, which is part of the reason why I rarely bother with those things for my characters.)
On the other hand, though. Is knowing characters only by way of what's happened to them, and how they've reacted, and by the sorts of traits and values that don't fit on a chart - is that good? Am I missing something, turning my characters into mere servants of plot, if I don't know their exact height and oldest fear and greatest desire and most prized possession? Should I go back to filling out character profiles (at least in moderation)? Is it a weakness in the way I make stories that I can't describe a character without writing a biography that tells their life?
(Although, let's be honest here, maybe I'm just really bad at condensing a character bio down. I have a file that profiles some of my characters by nothing but gender identity and it still took something like three paragraphs each to get them down semi-accurately. And the last time I tried to do character profiles, I ended up working out a five-dimensional grid system to plot sexual orientation. I mean, the reason I want to tell stories about these people is that there is no other way to say the things I want to say. So maybe I should just tell the damn stories. On the other hand, maybe the fact that I can't say this stuff - that I skitter away and jump back, when I try to lay it out in bare exposition, that I don't want to diagram up my characters like a dissected frog - is why I can't just tell the damn stories. Maybe I need to be willing to do that; maybe I can't keep treating my characters as friends, with a right to secret selves.)
My father was a math and programming teacher in the early 80s; the county-wide department inservice days were the best thing ever, because Dad would come home with 5.25-inch discs holding pirated copies of all the latest Apple II games that all the teachers were trading around under the desks. (True story: I once asked Dad what the "kracker" did in programming, since all the programs we had at home had a "kracked by" credit before the opening screen.) In fact, I have never met a single teacher, at any level, and growing up a TK I've met a lot, who has taught for more than five years and doesn't routinely make illegal copies of things for her classes. When a law is that widely flouted (by pretty much everyone who doesn't directly benefit from its existence, and also often, quietly, by them as well), what you need to do is change the law, not human nature.
Which is to say, I got over this topic two decades ago. Can we move on and stop acting like fainting flowers about it? ^_~
2. Still listening to (pirated) Dresden Files! 3.5 books in have reached Step 10 in the getting-into-a-fandom timeline. Current fic bunnies: A Day In the Life of Father Forthill; 5 Times Harry Dresden Narrowly Avoided Learning About Slash; and Ray Kowalski Dances With The Winter Lady. Also did another meme fill, which was probably obvious to anyone who knows me and is reading over there. However, I've reached the point where I know just enough canon that I no longer feel comfortable writing fic without knowing it all, sigh, so that's stalled, mostly.
Luckily, the anon meme is keeping me in fic for now! Actually I was just thinking that maybe Dresden Files has finally cured me of politics RPF, given the relative numbers of times I've been reloading the two memes, but then Dresden Files fandom decided on its own to adopt Rahm Emanuel as a character, so I suspect I'm just cursed to read politics RPF forever. (Oh, Rahm, oh.)
3. I am almost finished with my mending basket! Which means time to start a brand-new sewing project, maybe! (Or go back to a years-old retired one.) The last thing in the basket was the Madelyn Mack dress I wore at con-txt and ripped the hem out of. It's 100-year-old black silk, so thin it's translucent in sunlight. I have a picture of my grandmother wearing it, c. 1930, in an "Old Hometown" history pageant; I have a picture of her grandmother wearing what might be the same dress, 30 years earlier. I was really, really nervous about attempting to repair a dress that's practically an artifact and such fragile fabric, too - until I actually started the repair.
I am at *least* the fifth person who has attempted to repair the hem of this dress! (And a better seamstress than at least two of them.) That makes me feel a lot better, and, somehow, love the dress a lot more, too. In fact, its value as a historical artifact may not so much be its value as a dress, as it is a record of Edwardian and early-20th-century home clothing repair techniques; this dress wears its scars proudly, and I'm learning things about effective and efficient repair just from studying it that even my mother's generation seems to have forgotten. (I never did get a picture of me wearing it last summer. Maybe once the repair is done I'll attempt a photographic record. Repair being done make take awhile - there is literally six yards of hem around this skirt.)
4. Last Thursday was the first 10 O'clock Live! It was not terrible! It could use some settling-in time, but it was legitimately good. It actually feels like it's kind of halfway between wanting to be the Daily Show and wanting to be something more like W$W - a serious but irreverent real current events magazine. Am looking forward to more.
...and then the next day Keith Olbermann signed off for the last time. D: D: He wasn't always right and he wasn't always good, but he almost always said the things that the American left needed said but was afraid to, and shouted them when they needed shouted, and now who's to do that?
5. I joined
inkitout - the DW community to challenge yourself to keep writing all year - and so far, thanks to Dresden Files, am doing okay. But! This week's support post was to introduce one of your characters, and I was like hooray! I always want to talk about my original characters! Until I tried, and realized I couldn't do it. When I try to describe my characters, I talk about what they do, what happens to them. How can I give an age to a character when I've known her from pre-birth to afterlife; how can I give a character's favorite author when part of his story is discovering a whole new world of stories that he had missed before; how can I tell you about a character's family when zie has found-and lost-families several times, and has changed zie's definition of 'family' every time?I can't decide if this is a bad thing or a good thing. On the one hand, people who fill out tons of character profiles and can tell you the character's favorite color and astrological sign and weight down to the ounce, I have found, tend to create boring and unrealistic characters, at least until they get past the character sheets. (Plus, I can't even tell you *my* favorite color; I am in a long-term argument with my horoscope; and my weight varies within a 20-pound range without notice, which is part of the reason why I rarely bother with those things for my characters.)
On the other hand, though. Is knowing characters only by way of what's happened to them, and how they've reacted, and by the sorts of traits and values that don't fit on a chart - is that good? Am I missing something, turning my characters into mere servants of plot, if I don't know their exact height and oldest fear and greatest desire and most prized possession? Should I go back to filling out character profiles (at least in moderation)? Is it a weakness in the way I make stories that I can't describe a character without writing a biography that tells their life?
(Although, let's be honest here, maybe I'm just really bad at condensing a character bio down. I have a file that profiles some of my characters by nothing but gender identity and it still took something like three paragraphs each to get them down semi-accurately. And the last time I tried to do character profiles, I ended up working out a five-dimensional grid system to plot sexual orientation. I mean, the reason I want to tell stories about these people is that there is no other way to say the things I want to say. So maybe I should just tell the damn stories. On the other hand, maybe the fact that I can't say this stuff - that I skitter away and jump back, when I try to lay it out in bare exposition, that I don't want to diagram up my characters like a dissected frog - is why I can't just tell the damn stories. Maybe I need to be willing to do that; maybe I can't keep treating my characters as friends, with a right to secret selves.)
no subject
And no, that one's not me, though I'm flattered! (Best hint it's not me: that authoranon managed to get up to 16 parts within a reasonable length of time.)