Andraste

So I was talking to people about the Broccoli Test, i.e. the fandom meme where you try and work out if your OTP can successfully signal 'buy broccoli' to one another from opposite ends of the produce section. Most of my pairings either fail spectacularly or cheat wildly, but thinking it over I realised that I have one that could actually do this!

( Read on to find out which two actually manage to communicate ... )

I am currently most of the way through the third of Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas, and enjoying it as much as the first two. Like a lot of fans, I find Murderbot's wish to sit quietly in a cupboard watching its favourite show extremely relatable, which I suspect is one of the reasons the series is so popular. (I mean, the other reasons include it being well-written, exciting and funny but I bet murderbot being a fellow fan helps.)

This got me wondering if this is a trend in AI in modern science fiction. Between Murderbot and the sentient ship Justice of Toren collecting songs in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series and the drama-loving maintanence bots of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire there are quite a few examples out there. Maybe we're moving away from robots that want to kill us or robots that want to be us toward robots that would rather be left alone but appreciate humans because some of the stuff we make is pretty neat. Maybe intelligent computers just want to look at pictures of our cats or maybe even write some fanfic.. And while Murderbot is not more plausible than HAL or Data, I have to admit I would love if it turned out that our future combat bots wanted to watch TV or collect songs.

That said, I feel like the example of David from Prometheus proves that you can have too much of a good thing. Probably if we ever invent AI we should program it NOT to watch Lawrence of Arabia THAT many times. (I mean, I personally believe it is the greatest film ever made and therefore a good example of human endeavour, but clearly something goes badly wrong in an AI brain after years of such intense exposure. If only Murderbot had been passing by and given him their copies of Sanctuary Moon for variety.)

I have just heard that iamsab.livejournal.com passed away yesterday. She was a wonderful writer and a smart, funny fan who will be dearly missed by a lot of people, including me.

I loved her stories - especially her Farscape stuff, which I read before I ever interacted with her and which turned my brain inside out in the best possible way. But the best and most important thing she ever did for me was say 'hey, we should run a ficathon!'

Back in 2004 - and I can't believe that it's been nine years - we were on AIM one afternoon, talking about how we should totally get selenak to write a Londo/Chiana story. And it was Sab who came up with the delightfully crazy plan of creating a whole space show crossover ficathon to achieve this. Thus was Multiverse born.

(If you're thinking 'but wait, Selena didn't write that Londo/Chiana story until years later' then you would be right. It turns out that asking Selena to write the story worked better. Nevertheless, I regret nothing.)

In twelve years of active fanning I have written some pretty good stories and vidded some pretty good vids, but there's nothing I'm as proud of as Multiverse. I flew solo on modding duties in subsequent years, but the whole thing would never have happened without Sab. I wish she wasn't gone.

Happy 2012, everyone!

2011 had good parts and bad parts for me. On the one hand, I became gainfully employed! On the other, I had to drop out of Yuletide due to my grandmother passing away twelve days before Christmas. (No, not the one we expected to die earlier in 2011. The other one. She was eighty-five and had cancer in multiple organs, so this was sad but far from the worst thing that could have happened.)

My only resolutions for the coming year are to write more and vid more, because boy, I did not do enough of that in 2011. (Well, that and 'put vids up on the AO3', but that's sort of supplemental to making more of them.) I wrote one story that more than two thousand people read and made one vid that seven people watched. (Possibly dozens of people downloaded the vid and didn't like enough to send feedback, but I know which explanation I prefer ...) I will leave it to the reader to work out which of these things I put more effort into. This is not a complaint or a request for feedback, incidentally, it just amuses me to observe the vagaries of fandom popularity *g*.

It was, nevertheless, a good year for fandom as far as I was concerned. Fox and Matthew Vaughan made me the GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME. Or at least it felt that way to me, despite its flaws. As a result, the pairing that have been my OTP since I was fourteen became wildly popular! This resulted in piles and piles of awesome fanwork about them and made me very happy. I wrote a deeply silly story about them which was also wildly popular, and that was fun too.

My other fandoms did pretty well. I played Dragon Age 2 five times, and although hanging out on the BioWare forums frequently exasperated me the game itself brought me great joy. Fringe kept being awesome. I liked the new characters on House, appreciated the resolution to the season cliffhanger, and made high-pitched squealing noises over Foreman's Season Eight storyline. Castle continued to be frothy entertainment with occasional serious bits. G.I. Joe: Renegades was the best animated version of that canon ever. My friends made me realise that friendship truly is magic, especially if brightly-coloured ponies were involved.

In addition, Merlin somehow turned into good television while I wasn't looking. I mean, I've always enjoyed it, but I started watching for the fun of pointing and laughing at the stained glass windows, running water and potatoes. In Season Four it has actually been well-written, well acted and compelling. (Qualities it had flashes of before, to be certain, but never so consistently.) I was surprised but pleased.

Doctor Who continued to make me happy in 2011. I don't think I enjoyed Season Six quite as much as Season Five, but The Doctor's Wife is my favourite Eleven episode so far, and I also adored The God Complex and the season finale, so it's not like I'm complaining. I continued to explore the universe of audios, comics and prose as well, and found some new-to-me gems. (My favourite audio was Farewell, Great Macedon and my favourite novel was Cold Fusion.)

I cheerfully ignored the DC reboot and did not buy any X-Men comics, even though I wanted to know what the whole Schism business was about and what Charles was up to. I was probably happier this way.

Somewhere in there I read a pile of books - favourites included Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. My non-fiction favourites were Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and The Ancestor Cell and The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.

I bought too many toys. I was not sorry.

And in a nice end to the year, yesterday I got to see The Adventures of Tintin and LOVED it. This would be my favourite film of the year, only a different comic book adaptation had the unfair advantage of containing Charles Xavier drinking a yard of ale. I will make another post about how happy I am that my first comic book love now has a worthy film version.

Just when I think I safely caught up on all my currently airing TV shows, or will be as soon as Merlin finishes ... magically appearing on my hard drive by the power of magic ... I recall that Batman: The Brave and the Bold is screening new episodes. There are now half a dozen that I haven't seen. Catching up on the Birds of Prey plus Blue Beetle and Booster Gold is going to be no chore, naturally, but it it does once again remind me that I am never going to watch all the shows.

I am not even keeping up with that many! At the moment I am just watching Castle, House, Fringe and Merlin along with some things that air on Australian TV. I am planning to take a look at Undercovers as soon as someone inserts extra hours into the day.

You would think that an unemployed student would have more time for television, but between schoolwork, writing, vidding, reading, communicating with the internet and the occasional spot of eating, sleeping and doing housework I only watch around an hour and a half a day. Perhaps I need to rejigger my schedule if I am to have any hope of ever catching up on my 'TV shows I really should watch' list. (There are one hundred and one things on it at the moment. One hundred and one! This is ridiculous.)

Someone bought me two months extra paid Dreamwidth time today! Thank you, oh anonymous person, it is much appreciated.

(Not cross-posted since there doesn't seem to be much point sending this over to livejournal ...

Pick five of your favourite shows, in no particular order, before you read the questions below, then answer them!

1. Babylon 5
2. House
3. Doctor Who
4. Justice League (Unlimited)
5. due South

( Read on ... )

Please somebody talking me out of buying this. I don't need a t-shirt I can't wear in front of my parents!

Speaking of which, I am now all caught up on Saiyuki Reload and am looking for manga to buy. I've got the first two volumes of Mushishi [1] and the first of Cantarella [2], which I plan to pick up the rest of. Is there something else I should be reading?

Anime series I have enjoyed include: Trigun, Serial Experiments Lain, Hellsing, and Twelve Kingdoms. I liked what I've seen so far of Berserk and Fullmetal Alchemist. I am not much interested in high school romance or sports no matter the gender/sexual preferences of the protagonists.

[1] This is awesome, and if you like fantasy/horror stories you should go and buy it now regardless of how you feel about anime/manga in general.

[2] This is also awesome, if a story where Cesare Borgia is a bishonen whose soul has been sold to demons by his evil father sounds like a good idea to you. Incest with his sister fits the manga format perfectly! And Cesare has a boyfriend who keeps trying to kill him! AND NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI IS A SORCERER WHO TURNS INTO A MOTH!!!

I'm finally back at work now I can talk again, and it is completely dead. Expect spam throughout the afternoon and evening! So, mainly for my own benefit, a list of all the TV shows I need to finish/start.

( So much TV, so little time. )