Trek fans who have gone more boldly than I have, into the farthest reaches of the fifth series, I have two questions for you! I humbly beg of your knowledge and opinions.

# If I were going to watch one (1) episode of Enterprise showcasing the relationship between Archer and T'Pol, what one (1) episode should I watch?

# If I were going to watch one (1) episode featuring T'Pol after her exposure to Trellium-D, which one (1) should I watch?

FYI, I am planning to watch the series finale. Anything I should know about how that relates to the rest of the series? Because I have Heard Things.

So many thanks in advance, you have no idea.

thank you for the
snowflake cookie
v-gift, gifter
I do not know

by name. I am sure
it was delicious
so virtual
and so cold

DTB: Ryuusei no Gemini 07
Dear Hei, I love you so much. Not even at all because you totally looked like a good friend of mine for part of this episode. Nope, not at all. Also: it shouldn't have taken me this long to realize that Suou totally has Yuna's hair.

( All the way to Sendai.  )

Tune in next week for a showdown with the FSB on a traaaaaiiiin. And possibly the return of Hei's appetite.

So the Interstitial Arts Foundation is all set to release its second print anthology, Interfictions 2, in celebration of which they are doing several cool things, including publishing some of the stories they just couldn't publish in print online at the IAF Annex (go forth! read! they are awesome, which can only augur excellent well for the printed volume), giving away copies for free, and auctioning off interstitial art to support the Foundation! How cool is that? It's pretty cool.

To be eligible to win a free book one has to discuss one's favorites among the artworks. Well, my obvious favorite is the "Berry Moon, Bound" notebook, because it is visually striking and gorgeous and because I love notebooks. I already own way too many, and I have many others which I have filled up with writings over the years in boxes. Oh, notebooks, bound potential. I also quite liked "Untitled" because it's cool-looking, and because I think it speaks to the essential confusion necessary for creativity, the ability to see things that are not one as such. And finally, "What He Said" is beautiful in its own right and also based on the fascinating introduction to the anthology by the famed Henry Jenkins, which is quite fascinating in its own right. (The creator of "What He Said" is selling and auctioning off pendants inspired by Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, signed by the author, at her LJ, Chimera Fancies, starting tomorrow.)

So, in sum, books are no less shiny than actual shiny objects. And now to bed! 

Thanks to cute_sherry for the scans, again.

( Starting a new journey may not be so hard, or maybe it's already begun. )

I received Mechademia 4, Tom LaMarre's new book on his theory of anime, and four volumes of Bleach in the mail this morning. It is already a good day.

Also, I have two spare invitations for the Archive of Our Own, comment to claim! (Queue-jumping! Who doesn't love that?)

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Five questions from eumelia.

1) What got you into Asian Studies and translating manga?
( Manga & Asian Studies )


2) What would you categorize fandom as? A movement, a community, a religion, what?
Ooh, this is a good one. I think if I had to pick two terms I would characterize fandom both as a set of practices (or simply a praxis) and as a (global) community which manifests itself both online and offline--and, crucially, I don't think either on or off is necessarily seen as primary. Conventions aren't any more or less valid as a place for fandom to happen than, say, LiveJournal.

I definitely think that fan praxis is something that has existed in the human psyche for a very long time, possibly forever--look at people trying to fill in the epic cycle in the footsteps of Homer in the ancient world; hell, The Aeneid is arguably a transformative fanwork derived from The Illiad. I think the impulse is particularly notable in upper-class Heian women's responses to The Tale of Genji, too; a lot of later Heian diaries explicitly cite Murasaki Shikibu as their inspiration and model. I'd also agree with Michael Chabon that the Sherlockians are an important proto-fandom, but I think that fandom as we know it today is inextricably tied with television, and if I had to say why I'd say it's because it's much harder for TV shows to delimit audience responses than it is for texts. It's much easier to describe Kirk and Spock wrestling around in "Amok Time" in a non-slashy way than it is to show it on screen. Fandom praxis of course is inextricably tied with gender, too; slash is something that women around the world seem to see in potential--what we've come to call boys' love in Japan didn't start too much later than K/S slash did in Euro-America. Which isn't to say that men don't create fanworks (I was just watching the Dead Fantasy fanvids last night. WOW), but I think men tend to respond to different fannish stimuli than women.

The beauty of all this is that both fandom as a praxis and fandom as a community support and feed off each other. And I think I should mention that besides being a praxis and a community fandom is also a worldview. lian's post on the Gmail Teahouse theme being a Yuletide fandom is a perfect illustration of what I mean by that.


3) What is your superpower and why?
Hmm. Probably totall recall, since I have a very near-photographic memory as it is anyway.


4) What is the greatest challenge that we, women of geekdom, face do you think? Has fandom changed now that its previously silenced members (not just women) no longer so quiet?
( Women, geeks, etc )


5) Do you think there is something that is inherently human? Something that human beings have in common despite the differences between us all?
( Humanity )

...All right, now I'm going to channel some of this into my grad school statements. If you want me to ask you five questions, let me know in a comment.

Went with the young literary man-friend to see The Men Who Stare at Goats tonight. It is funny fluff, enlivened considerably by the fact that Ewan McGregor having played Obi-Wan Kenobi allows the movie to make some very knowing in-jokes. (Although, ten years after The Phantom Menace, Ewan still looks like crap in a desert.) Unfunny things: wholesale, unnoticed, and uncritiqued appropriation of various elements of Native American and Asian practices and belief systems, by the U.S. Army no less. I do think, though, that the movie does have a minor point embedded in the fluff, namely that the U.S. invading Iraq in 2003, and thinking that everything was going to be sunshine & daisies thereafter, were both as bullshit as the psychic soldiers concept. But that might just be me, seeing that I called bullshit on the Iraq war since at least 2002, when they started trying to soften up the public and sell it to the media.

---

Dad and I wimped out on the Y12K, which I think is okay since I probably would have finished in major pain and/or torn a muscle in either or both of my legs (I've been doing better at stretching before and after I run, but need to do both more), but we have made plans to do a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. Given that yesterday and today the high was 71 degrees F, I'm not worried about the weather. Also apparently my running shoes have been worn completely through the sole by my running in them. I am proud of myself, I won't deny.

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Finally, in honor of NaNoWriMo, the AO3 and the fact that I've volunteered to be a tag wrangler for about a dozen anime/manga/video game fandoms, I present the return of the first lines meme: daughter of the first lines meme!

Currently I'm at 18172 words with NaNo. I'm about to reopen my document and plunk out some more words, and while I was running today I had an amazing brainwave that will make the backstory 100% more awesome, and possibly open the door to a kickass related book, but I've obviously fallen off the pace and, given grad school apps, don't think I'll get back on to finish. Still, this is more than I've done in my previous two NaNo attempts combined (confession: all of my NaNo attempts have been the same story), and I'm pleased.

ETA: Did a search in my document for "maybe" in light of this post on diction by jonquil and found that only my upwardly mobile lower class character, and the person who spends too much time with her, used "maybe." I wish I could claim that was entirely conscious on my part. Still, a great post. /ETA

( Okay, for real this time )

The Archive of Our Own is in open beta!!! YAY!!!


denise wrote a very kind post of congratulations to the OTW and to AD&T. Yay fandom! Yay womanpower!

I'll shut up about this some time soon, I swear. In the meantime, lian has some links about the plans for translating the AO3, an effort to which I look forward to contributing.

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To switch gears completely, I thought Steven Pinker completely nailed the problems with Malcolm Gladwell's worldview and did a good job of sussing out the finer details of what exactly Gladwell gets wrong (and let me just say, um, wow. "Igon values"? Seriously? You can't make this shit up) in his review of Gladwell's new book. Which isn't to say that Gladwell can't be very good on his chosen topics at times--I'd recommend that everyone read his recent piece on football, dogfighting and brain injury, and his piece on criminal profiling and the likelihood that it doesn't really work, which Pinker deservedly mentions favorably in his review (I'm looking at you, Shadow Unit, Criminal Minds, most every cop show ever). But these are pieces in which the numbers speak for themselves, but when Gladwell tries to make the numbers speak for anything else, he often as not goes badly astray.

---

Oh Yuletide assignment, why aren't you here already?  

Man, let the record show that I'm a sucker for ascending tricola.

Happy news first. The Archive of Our Own is entering limited public beta tomorrow, 14 November 2009, at 10:00 am UST! Anyone who likes will at that time be able to enter themselves into the invitation queue, and you will receive an invitation to create an account later, to avoid overwhelming the servers. (I've been reloading the AO3 front page all day and am fairly sure our users are going to double in less than 24 hours--we were at 347 before the invitation queue went live for OTW members & donors this morning, and as of now we're at 619. The number of fandoms and fanworks is heading for...well, the sky's the limit, really. Or the servers are.) I should also mention that all Yuletide 2009 participants will receive invitations at some point between now and the beginning of the posting period. HOORAY!!!

While you're waiting, I urge you to check out samvara's awesome Archive of Our Own RPF, told partially in ALT text, because it is funny, interesting, true, and awesome, much like Samvara and her committee, AD&T. *doffs hat in gratitude and admiration*

---

In other news, the government is going to bring KSM and three of his fellow terrorists to trial in a civilian court in New York City in what will surely be the trial of the century for the crime of the century. I think this is a good thing for a lot of reasons, and I agree wholeheartedly with what Amy Davidson has to say in her column on the subject. (Close Read could be so awesome if it didn't always have to add stupid football tags to the end of every piece.) Briefly, military tribunals/commissions bad; torture double plus bad; rule of law double plus good; holding anyone without trial indefinitely unconscionable in a country that purports to stand for justice, or for law. Anything else I might say is going to descend into capslock ranting.

Also, water is wet, and there is water at the bottom of the ocean, as well as on the moon. I am skeptical of the idea of extracting water from the moon for various reasons, but it's a pretty cool discovery nonetheless.

---

Finally, I got our turkey from Trader Joe's tonight, and there was great rejoicing in the land. 

Thanks to cutesherry for the scans.

( Strange angels, old stories, haunting me )

DTB: Ryuusei no Gemini 05 & 06
Man, I didn't even realize they were in Sapporo until the end of episode 5. That's not because all Japanese cities look the same, oh no. And hey, submarines! And more dead contractors, and me questioning Misaki's ethical choices, and thinking that assistant girl is kind of a cold-hearted bitch. I'll be in the corner indulging my bizarre nostalgia for riding the 新快速 and 快速 trains on a seishun 18 ticket until next week. Who else thought the mom telling her kid not to notice Hei riding on the roof of their car was hilarious?

( The silent service )

Whenever Suou gets out her weapon I have the strange thought that I'm watching a magical girl show. Or Utena with guns (which apparently was a concept discussed during that show's development).

It is Veterans'/Remembrance Day in much of the world. The sacrifices of soldiers--men and women--deserve remembrance every day.

Trench Names
( Only the dead have seen the end of war.  )

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( Standing on my cancer soapbox again. Tl; dr )

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In much happier news, the AO3 is going to open beta this weekend! YAY! As an OTW volunteer I am a closed beta user of the AO3 (you can find me there as starlady; currently I have a Tolkienana fanfic, as well as my entry in this year's treknovelfest, posted) I will have a limited number of invitations to send out--leave a comment if you'd like one, with the caveat that I don't know how many I'll have. There will also be an invitation queue that you can join; more info here.

Also, dw_news informs me that of the approximately 170K Dreamwidth invites that have been distributed, 120K have not been used. Four of those codes are mine, and they are free to the good homes of anyone who comments here asking for one.

ETA:  Fox has canceled Dollhouse, and there was great rejoicing amongst fen and feminists, me included. I'm linking to this comment by londonkds at coffeeandink because I think it's a brilliant summation of some of the subtler problems with Joss Whedon's works. 

Kyogoku Natsuhiko. The Summer of the Ubume. Trans. Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander. New York: Vertical Books, 2009. [1995.]

This is the first book in the long-running mystery series by Kyogoku Natsuhiko featuring the onmyouji Kyogokudo, aka Chuzenji Atsuhiko, and his band of friends and war buddies, of which the anime Mouryou no Hako adapts the second book. I liked Mouryou no Hako enough to seek out this book, and wasn't disappointed. It's a mystery set in the summer of 1952, just after the end of the Occupation, and Kyogoku isn't afraid to confront some of the most vexed issues of the century--modernity versus superstition, democracy versus the imperial system, science versus religion--though he's too canny to ever definitively favor one opinion over the other, much like his namesake Kyogokudo (whom, given everything, one suspects is the author's alter ego). In a nutshell, Kyogokudo's school friend Sekiguchi, grubbing for money, is considering writing an article about an incident in which a husband has been missing and his wife has been pregnant for twenty months, and after the wife's sister comes to their friend Enokizu's detective agency for help learning the husband's whereabouts, things spiral out from there.

I had wondered after watching whether the women who lived with Kyogokudo and Sekiguchi were their wives or servants. The book resolves that they're their wives. It's interesting comparing the anime with the book--the book makes it clear that the characters look nothing like the CLAMP character designs (with the possible exception of Enokizu), and Sekiguchi is even more neurotic in the book than in the anime, which I wouldn't have thought possible, but isn't surprising for someone who had problems with depression even before he went off to war to command a platoon which only he and Kiba survived. I still like Kiba the best of all the characters, I think. In some ways the book takes a left turn in resolving the details at the conclusion (child abuse! missing genitalia! dubcon!), but the route there is fascinating. I'd definitely recommend the book to people who liked the anime, or to people who like manga and/or anime such as xxxHOLiC on account of their background in the Japanese supernatural, which this book is positively soaked in (Kyogoku's background is actually in folklore, apparently). The translation is very good, too, despite some inconsistent copy editing decisions on whether explanatory notes should get footnotes or in-text brackets. Anyway, I hope Vertical publishes more. I'll leave you with one of Kiba's lines that I found particularly interesting.

Look at me, Harasawa. I was one of those people who thought the war was right. When I heard the Emperor give his speech on the radio, I didn't know what to think. But now that I've had time to cool off, I understand that we were a little crazy back then. And I think that the democratic thing we're doing now is the right way. So maybe justice isn't anything more than the ghost of an idea. Maybe the winner decides all, and might does make right. That's why–that's why, like you say, there are no gods or Buddhas looking out for the little guy. That's why we have the law. Because we can't believe in gods, or Buddhas, or even justice. The law is the only weapon the weak have against the strong. Don't turn away from the law, Harasawa. It's on your side."

WHEN THE BERLIN WALL FELL
When the Berlin Wall fell, dear Frau Schubert,
I began dreaming migraines. Multilingual mi-
graines, no preservatives. Bulging freedom,
the excess weight of the united countries, be-
gun peering in through my windows. Its eye–
I wonder what it's thinking.
WE HAVE IT ALL NOW
We have it all now, dear Frau Schubert. The
borders' invisible stitch. Impeccable tailored
fields. Close-cropped towns. A genetic crisis.
In the greenhouse, where I'm resting after
growing a novel, Newton's orange ripens.
–Ewa Lipska (translated from the Polish by Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard)

I wish I could say I remember when the Wall fell. Instead I remember watching Gorbachev eat Spam on TV as an example of glasnost (or was it perestroika? whose the hand that holds it? whose the hand that moulds it?) while my mother said that Spam tasted so bad he'd bomb us in revenge. Yeah, that was my mom.

I've seen some good points made about 1989 in the media--particularly that one set of revolutions got under way in Europe in 1989, while in China another was deferred, violently, for a generation or more--and these points are certainly valid, but I don't think they can diminish the fact that, while Ronald Reagan may have exhorted "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" it was the people of Berlin who actually did it themselves. And it was the people of Germany who defied world powers super and not-so-super (guess who didn't want reunification? Margaret Thatcher, that's who, among many others) who voted to reunify their country seven months later. I was saying to my dad that the fall of the Wall is one of the things I point to to justify my rather Whiggish view of history, and he countered that it was economic forces as much as anything that did it. He has a point, certainly, but I think so do I. Nothing is impossible, and a new world can come round as swiftly as a wall goes down--though, as George Packer points out completely correctly and brilliantly as usual, some things are rather improbable. But the Cold War ending was one of them. 

Valente, Catherryne M. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. New York: Feiwel & Friends (forthcoming). It's not the first time I've posted about Cat Valente's works in general or about Circumnavigated in particular, but I now have the happy satisfaction of being able to say that the book is finished and that I have read all of it. Even better, CMV announced several weeks ago that the rights to Fairyland and its sequel have been acquired for a print publication, so those (like me) who love print books, as well as those who don't like reading fiction online, or who have never heard of this book, will have the chance to hold it in their hands. Yay! ( Playmate of the moving seasons... )

Bear, Elizabeth. By the Mountain Bound. New York: Tor Books, 2009.

For someone who doesn't care for Norse fantasy, I've certainly been reading a lot of it this year. By the Mountain Bound is the prequel to, though published after, All the Windwracked Stars, which I read earlier this year and liked (though I would disagree categorically with Bear's characterization of these books as "steampunk." Techno-fantasy, sure, steampunk, no). It's not a spoiler for either book to say that Mountain ends where Stars begins, in the cold and the snow at the end of the world (heck, for that matter, Stars arguably ends in the same place, 2000 years later). To some extent both books are the same story, and in some respects the same tragedy: that of Strifbjorn, leader of the children of the Light, his lover Mingan, the Grey Wolf, a survivor of the world before, and their sister Muire, a historian and poet and the last and least of the Children, who loves Strifbjorn hopelessly. When another survivor from ruined Midgard turns up on the shore by Strifbjorn's hall, she sows dissension among the Children that will lead to the end of the world as everyone knows it.

It's interesting to see both Muire and Mingan, in this book, being both more and less than they are in All the Windwracked Stars, though Stars is unquestionably Muire's book, and in the same way Mountain is Mingan's. One character describes the Wolf as innocent early in the book, after that innocence is already partly lost, and weirdly, he is, though he's also a literally Luciferean character ("which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell…"), as befits the wolf who ate the sun. Still, it makes me wonder whether the final book, The Sea Thy Mistress, will be Strifbjorn's (I think yes. I also think that several characters from Mountain who don't show up in Stars will be returning for a reckoning. How many times can the world end, and begin again? Is, as Strifbjorn claims, the memory of love the only thing that survives the apocalypse?). In some ways these books are clearly about growing up, about casting aside external guidance in favor of one's internal ethical choices, which is hugely difficult even when the fate of the world doesn't rest on one's actions.

The awesomely talented elisem is having a sale. It includes tektites, meteorites, and dinosaur bones, not to mention her amazing jewelry (for which she was nominated for a World Fantasy Award this year!).

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Do I know any icon-makers who would be willing to make me an icon of a McGriddle that said something along the lines of "Screw the McGriddle, I'll take the slush"? ("Fuck the McGriddle, give me the slush" would also be amusing. Or if you can do better with the sentiment, please do.) Context is here, if you're interested.