Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in alixtii's InsaneJournal:

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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
3:14 am	More Dr. Horrible Thoughts ( spoilers ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
12:29 am	Gakked from. . .  . . . wisdomeagle, who gave the meme the best subject line ever. [01] -- Look up TEN of your favorite movies on IMDB. [02] -- Click the "trivia" link in the sidebar. [03] -- Post a fun and random bit of trivia from each film. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
11:52 pm	BtVS: "Please Have Snow and Mistletoe" (Buffy/Faith, Dawn/Vi, et al.) Title: Please Have Snow and Mistletoe Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Pairings: Buffy/Faith, Dawn/Vi, Xander/Shannon, Willow/Kennedy Summary: When Dawn returns home from college for winter break to a house she's never seen before in a city she's never been to, she finds out if it is possible to go home again. Rating: Very mild NWS. (Think PG-13.) Warning: Drunk sex. A/N: There's a debt in this story to </a></b></a>annakovsky. (More than one, actually.) ( please have snow and mistletoe ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
6:42 am	Dr. Horrible, Act One So that was fun. (The link, in case you've been living under a rock.) (Comment on this)
Friday, July 11th, 2008
10:18 pm	VMars Thought I don't think of myself as easily spooked. But I do need to acknowledge that whenever I get into my car at night, I always check the back seat to make sure Aaron Echolls isn't hiding there. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
4:52 pm	DC Thought I can understand why Amazon.com thinks someone who owns all the Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes TPB's would be interested in Superman and the Legion of Superheroes. But they're still wrong. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
10:05 pm	Audiofic: "Oasis Serenity" by hermionesviolin. "Osiris Serenity" by hermionesviolin.  "Tender is the touch of someone that you love too much" (Elizabeth's summary). Simon/River. 4:20. Streaming: http://alixtii.vox.com/library/audio/6a00c225215966f21900fa968097de0003.html Download: http://www.sendspace.com/file/58gqv1 As usual, permanent download will be posted once the audiofic is archived. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2008
7:43 pm	To Beat a Dead Horse Geoffrey Pullum, returning to a subject both he and I have discussed before: I would have thought we could agree, whatever our feeling about re-using phrases we've enjoyed before, that it only becomes plagiarism when an unattributed passage of non-trivial length is used with the dishonest intent that the borrowed passage should be incorrectly thought to be original. The conjunction of those boldfaced elements should be regarded as definitional, I think. (See my earlier ruminations on plagiarism here and here and here.) (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
2:18 pm	About to Be Confirmed So I'm off to receive The Bishop's Touch--if I don't boil to death in my two-piece suit first. (Comment on this)
7:41 am	Somebody Has to Write That Crossover So, wait, Sam Winchester is dating Mesektet's older sister? (Comment on this)
Friday, May 30th, 2008
8:52 pm	The Important Things From the new revised LJ policy document thing--via penknife, as I have not read it myself yet: This includes things such as an image of a mother breastfeeding their child, Sinular they with an explicitly gendered antecedent represent! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
10:09 pm	Dar Williams Dar is adorable. My parents complained that she rambled too much, but I really enjoyed her ramblings. Coming out of my computer speakers, Dar's voice isn't particularly the type to speak to me for whatever reason, but it was perfect for the venue, echoing out into the park and filling it beautifully. It's the same venue I saw Lisa Loeb in, a couple years back, and it's very small and intimate and outdoors. Dar herself seemed to really enjoy all of the little children running around, as children are wont to do when they are brought by their parents to a free outdoor concert. By the end of the concert--pretty much everything that came after "The Christians and the Pagans" (it goes without saying that the tears were streaming down my cheeks there)--I was hanging onto every word she sang, which is pretty impressive considering the attention-deficit-disorder way I usually listen to music. I can't even sing through an entire vid without switching windows (and I know I'm not alone among fen in this!). (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 24th, 2008
9:53 pm	Meta: Girlslash OTPs Okay, I'm still thinking about femslash08 and related topics. One of the arguments I've made more than once in this journal is that femslash is more different than m/m slash than one might at first think, they each have their own histories (each within the greater history of media fandom, of course), tropes, conventions, and expectations. Some of these are fairly easy to make like the different role of genderswap or mpreg vs. fpreg. One "difference" that has never been quite so easy to demonstrate, however, has been my claim that femslash fandom is less OTP-oriented than m/m slash fandom. To me, girlslash is something one finds hiding in the interstices of a canon--and indeed, it's one of the things I really love about it. We manage to find the really interesting points of connection in canon, those that would be impossible to find if we weren't already actively searching, in a type of search which just isn't necessary if one is interested in male characters. The exceptions are obvious: Law and Order, Xena: Warrior Princess, Wicked (although the RPF wing of such isn't nearly as OTP-oriented as it once was, as more and more actors take over the roles of Galinda and Elphaba), possibly Star Trek: Voyager. I always think of these fandoms being set up "like boyslash fandoms"; think of the way Xena, textually speaking, parallels a Starsky&Hutch or Due South--or, more obviously in its format. (People sometimes want to add BtVS, with Buffy/Faith, to the list of femslash OTPS, but I don't buy it--in my experience, Buffy femslash fandom embraces rarepairs like an embracing thing embraces an embraced thing with a vengeance.) And there's a spattering of smaller (Yuletide-sized, but showing up on femslash_today with fair consistency nonetheless), mostly film, fandoms where activity, such as it is, is almost exclusively centered around an OTP: Devil Wears Prada, Ice Princess, D.E.B.S. This last one has always astounded me as to just how little is written outside the pairing of Amy/Lucy. How is it that in a canon with rampant general female homosociality like D.E.B.S. has that general homosociality has so largely been ignored in favor of the single canonical OTP? Why are such wonderful female characters as the other D.E.B.S.--Max, Dominique, and my personal favorite, Janet--or Anne and Zoey from Ice Princess passed over? We do not have so many awesome female characters in this world that we can afford to squander them. But so there are these canons with these highly cathective female/female relationships, and these tend to be OTP-centric. Which makes sense, I guess. (Bring It On does, I believe, have a decent amount of fic involving other characters such as Isis and Big Red, despite having this sort of cathective relationship at its core.) Within the bigger picture, however, it may still be true--it still feels true to me, although my experience is limited--that girlslash isn't as OTP-heavy as m/m. After all, in order to have the sort of intense same-sex relationship which is a staple of the big m/m fandoms, a canon needs to, as a prerequisite, pass the Bechdel test--still not something that is always easy even in our day and age. Of the canons which do have well-developed female characters, most tend to be ensemble shows (or films or books). And they tend not to be genre shows: I can name shows which haved focused on pairs of sisters, but I think the very idea of a show about two sisters who travel the country hunting demons, with a very limited recurring cast, is still unthinkable even in this post-Buffy world. So Xena is still very much the exception A quick look at femslash_today confirms this suspicion: while the OTP fandoms provide steady content and cannot be discounted, most femslash still comes from shows which are ensemble and/or genre in character: Battlestar Galactica, the Stargates (and the fic I'm looking at isn't Sam/Janet--I don't know who Janet is at all and only a vague sense of who Sam is, but I know this is sometimes brought up as a potential OTP), Doctor Who, The West Wing, House, Veronica Mars, Buffy, and so forth. And yet I look at femslash08 and think about what I might offer--and the knowledge that if I'm assigned D.E.B.S., it won't be Janet/Max, and if I'm assigned Ice Princess, it won't be Zoey/Ann. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
7:36 pm	When I Opened Semagic, I Thought I Had More to Say Than This I feel like there are some really obvious canons, either girlslashy or brimming with the potential for girlslashing, of which I'm not thinking to offer for femslash08 and will remember right after sign-ups close. Ari has offered "contemporary feminist theologians" or some such, which tempts me to request Rebecca Chopp/Kathryn Tanner or some such (although the thought of reading porn about one of my former teachers is squicky is to say the least). (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
12:03 am	Classism and Realism There's some metafandom-ed posts about Supernatural and class, and at least one flocked post on my flist thinking about it in the abstract, and it's gotten me to revisit my thoughts, because class really does color the way I view fictional characters quite deeply. Well, maybe not class per se, since I've said things like that in the past and been forced to take them back, but classed markers certainly, even as I'm still not at all sure the distinction makes any sense. (Not gender per se but gendered markers? Not race but racialized markers? What are gender, race, and class except a set of markers? Is there such a thing as class essentialism?) Education, idiolect, certain values, cultural capital--things like that--with the archetypal example being high-school student Buffy Summer's ability to make topical allusions to Arthur Miller or Samuel Beckett. (So admittedly it is a very narrow set of classed--and raced and gendered, but especially classed and raced--markers that make me interested in a fictional character.) Now, the thing I'm still struggling with is how problematic that fact is. It seems acceptable to say "I'm not interested in watching a show about working-class characters" in a way it would never be to say "I'm not interested in watching a show about women" or "I'm not interested in watching a show about characters of color." But as a person of immense privilege, the fact that it seems acceptable may be no more than an indicator of how far I still have to go--the way that replacing "white" and "black" for "men" and "women" in a certain situation can make it much clearer how problematic it is, as in this comment to a languagelog post: In general, though, I would say there is clearly much more public tolerance in the US for prejudice against women and misogynistic speech than there is tolerance for racist speech. This was most clearly illustrated to me in a story a professor of mine in University told of an administrative meeting he attended where one of the speakers was discussing a vote that had taken place and in relation to that made a joke about how giving women the right to vote had been a mistake, and was met with genuine laughter. He noted, truthfully I think, that this would have been met with awkward incredulity if it were instead about African Americans or some other racial group. Of course, the degree to which this works will depend on just how "real" one considers sexual difference to be, as evidenced by all the people who disagree with me on whether there will be gender-segregated bathrooms in the feminist utopia. (Of course, insofar as the point of gender-segregated bathrooms is to keep the other sex out, I'd argue there's something hugely heterosexist as well as sexist going on there.) (And if we look at the way racial difference went from seeming quite real to the idea being almost absurd, I don't see why the same process couldn't play out wrt gender.) Still, it seems to be natural and unproblematic to say "it's better to be rich than to be poor" (even though what I'm really interested and invested in has nothing to do with income except insofar as hip-hop music has something to do with race or skirts have to do with gender) in a way one can't even say, say, "it's better to see than to be blind." (Not that I'd want to say the latter, mind you--I've learned better--but I think it's still intuitive for a lot of people.) And I can only doubt my privilege so much. In the end, I suppose it comes down to the fact that while the "reality" of sexuality difference is more or less irrelevant to gender inequality (by which I mean that having a penis doesn't convey in itself any real power), and thus the semiotic power of gendered markers are able to function more or less independently of that reality, and the reality of racial difference (none at all chromosomally) is in some ways more and some ways less divorced from racial inequality, Not having a penis is only a lack once you've read Lacan. Similarly with not being white. Not having money, on the other hand--well, obviously this too is a lack which is in large part semiotic, since currency doesn't have any intrinsic value, as you can't eat or drink it--not having the stuff which money can buy to satisfy one's needs and wants, however, represents a real imbalance in power which is not present in the raced or gendered scenarios. And "classism" as a superstructural system of injustice where the rich think the poor are ignorant trash and the working-class think the upper class are pretentious twits sort of operates above this base. Except that now I sound like some cross between a Lacanian, a classical Marxist, and a metaphysical realist (what is this "real" of which I speak?) and--perish the thought. And ultimately, this distinction does seem to be bogus. The phenomenology of women's lived experience under systemic injustice is that of a "real" lack, no more or less than the one that comes from not having money to spend. All the money in the world won't help you if your boyfriend won't let you out of the house to spend it. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 17th, 2008
2:51 pm	Wow, was I gone long? How long has it been since I've read my flist? Admittedly I'm only on ?skip=300, but the only things which seem familiar are ones I read on filter. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
7:52 pm	This Post Brought to You By Procrastination I'm so ready for this semester to be over. I just . . . yeah. Over, please. * * * The "dogpiling" discussions make me laugh. So many interesting and productive conversations as a result of a soi-disant dogpile over whether dogpiles ever result in anything interesting or productive. Erm, case closed? I mean, really. The Krystalnacht discussion was full of people wondering when it was okay to use historical tragedies and when it wasn't and how we could do it respectfully and whether oversacralizing the Holocaust makes it too easy to believe it can't happen again and there were so many different opinions. I wasn't paying attention to the internets as much during the OSBP because I still had some willpower left then but there were discussions about objectification and enlightenment and good intentions and there were guides how not to objectify and then maybe the guides were objectifying and again, lots of opinions. So, exactly, where is all this groupthink and quashed dissent that's supposed to be going on? Do people really want to be racist or misogynist or homophobic or anti-Semitic that much? We're fans. We analyze everything to death; that's what we do. For every two of us there's at least three opinions. I mean, just looking at a week's worth of metafandom reveals the type of diversity of opinion that I honestly wouldn't know how to find anywhere else. Or people just in a completely different panfandom than I am? (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
3:40 pm	VMars: "Be Kind, Rewind (The Second Ghost Remix)" (Lilly & Veronica) Title: Be Kind, Rewind (The Second Ghost Remix) Fandom: Veronica Mars (slight BtVS crossover) Characters: Lilly Kane, Veronica Mars, Meg Manning, Logan Echolls Spoilers: VMars season 1; oblique spoilers for "Chosen" Rating: Probably worksafe, I think. Depending. Summary: On the day of the car wash, Lilly found a Veronica who was wiser, wordlier, and wearier. Then, after she died, she found herself. A/N: Remix of Be Kind, Rewind by </a></a>dark_roast. ( Be Kind, Rewind ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
11:58 am	More on Endemic White Racism Remember when Obama claimed that white racism wasn't endemic, and nobody had any idea what he meant, but I was pretty sure I disagreed with him? Mark Liberman at languagelog takes up the question here, interpreting the comment the same way I did. So apparently I was right to be disappointed. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
10:37 pm	Remix So, remixredux08 is live, and I've read the remix that was written for me: Where the River Meets the Dawn (The Strobe Lights and the Disco Remix) is a remix of my River/Dawn femslash_minis piece Where the River Meets the Dawn. There are several significant changes my remixer made to my story. It fits into, and makes references to, comics canon. Mal, Zoe, and Jayne are all still alive, so nobody calls Kaylee "Captain." It's Inara's shuttle, rather than Serenity herself, which crash lands into Earth. Zoe is among the crew who appears on Earth, and Saffron is not. Mal and Jayne still don't appear in the story (even though in this 'verse it's because they're still on Serenity and not because they're dead). It extends the story to cover the return of the Serenity crew to their own universe--which means, sadly, that River and Dawn are broken up in it. It's told from Caridad's POV. (The original alternates between River's and Dawn's.) That last bullet point is certainly the most interesting--it makes the story down to earth in a way my original really isn't. There's a lot of little details that Caridad notices and associations that she makes, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot, so that it gives the story a fascinating texture, where she's much more interested in all of that than in the soi-disant main action. . . . Anyone who guesses which remix I wrote gets a ficlet. (Comment on this)