All you can eat

So apparently the world championship for karaoke singing (you knew there was one, right?) was in Moscow this year. Some guy from New Mexico won (Usher: "DJ Got Us Fallin' In Love," if you want to know). The prize: a million dumplings.

It seems wrong, somehow, that the gastroenterologist was only the runner-up.

There's video somewhere, but it's not that interesting. At least not compared to what I was imagining, which was that the guy finishes his song and, instead of applause, he's promptly buried under an avalanche of the entire doughy prize at once.

Possibly this idea was prompted by vague memories of this cartoon.



(If you have ambivalent feelings about Eastern European dumplings in general, perhaps you can relate to the kreplach joke.)

Fucked up books of my childhood

Respectively, the Sweet Valley High (and satellites) books, as examined at The Dairi Burger

and VC Andrews (Inc), Trapped in the Attic.

If you, too, had your formative years at all warped by these literary classics, and had blissfully put most of the details out of your consciousness, now's your chance to have it all come flooding back to you, with hilarious commentary.

If you don't know what I'm talking about...check the sites out anyway. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll spork. Most important, you'll realize "Twlight" had nothing on the 80's for professional Mary Sues. Tragic orphans! Terrible accidents! Murder, even! Ghosts, werewolves, and vampires! And that's just the Sweet Valley series.

Perfect size six suburban twins with sparkling blonde hair! Perfect helpless heroines locked away in secret-and-spider-riddled garrets! With sparkling blonde hair! Many, many lovingly described outfits and other material details, which were of course in no way why I read the things in the first place. And of course, a whole shitload of men, some of whom are teh sexxy and buy pretty things before revealing themselves to be as bastard-y as all the others, not that there is ever any other ultimate goal besides landing one.


******

Edited to update:

A conversation elsewhere got me thinking more seriously about this essay by Joanna Russ in To Write Like A Woman on the modern Gothic, "Somebody's Trying To Kill Me And I Think It's My Husband." It's basically second-wave feminist analysis applied to lit crit, but she's by far one of the better ones out there.

More details and quotage shortly, but essentially her point is that in the Gothic the female "subject" position isn't really much of one; the protagonist doesn't really initiate plot, she stands there and things happen to/around her. Her main task is figuring out the "mystery" of what the hell is going on around her. Much of which involves figuring out other peoples' feelings
(especially the Man, natch).

It's interesting because her thesis not only fits the gothics she was writing about as well as the more sensationalistic VC Andrews books that probably came out after she wrote the essay, but also applies to True Blood and of course Twilight, no doubt among other contemporary hits.

As far as that goes, I was snarking when I first noted that the Sweet Valley Books, once they started not just jumping the shark but doing trapeze acts with it, eventually have all the elements associated with more standard "gothic" books like the VC Andrews books, but actually, it's not that dissimilar. There *is* no real action in SVH as such-the girls don't really *go* anywhere, despite having cunning plots to defeat rivals and hook boys and career aspirations and such-they stay forever frozen at a perfect age, and they don't ever really set anything in motion. So in order to be "exciting" it has to get soapier and soapier...

I had figured that the reason for this in the SVH books was more because having them actually change and grow would defeat the magic fantasy stasis of Perfect Teen Suburbia, but actually the Mary Sue-ism isn't at all unrelated to that fetish. I mean, it's specifically a woman's fantasy Perfect Teen Suburbia (Francine Pascal, more or less, via her many ghostwriters), a retro one, I mean. So the "waiting for something exciting to happen, which will almost certainly come from a Man" is probably kind of implicit in that.

Anyway, here's Russ in her own words:

The Modern Gothic is episodic; the heroine does nothing except worry; any necessary detective work is done by other persons, often the Super- Male. Whenever the Heroine acts...she bungles things badly. [Hi, Bella!] There is a period of terror, repeated sinister incidents, ominous dialogue spoken by various characters, and then the sudden revelation of who's who and what's what. In terms of ordinary pulp technique, these novels are formless. Even so, they obey extraordinarily rigid rules. There must be a reason for these rules.

I would propose that the Modern Gothics are a direct expression of the traditional feminine situation (at least a middle-class [white] feminine situation) and that they provide precisely the kind of escape reading a middle-class believer in the feminine mystique needs, without involving elements that either go beyond the feminine mystique or would be considered immoral in its terms.

...and here she puts a finger on the Mary Sue phenomenon in all but name:

Most striking about these novels is the combination of intrigue, crime and danger with the Heroine's complete passivity. Unconscious foci of intrigue, passion, and crime, these young women (none of whom are over thirty) wander through all sorts of threatening forces of which they are intuitively, but never intellectually, aware. Most of all, *they are of extraordinary interest to everyone*-even though they are ill educated, ordinary, characterless and usually very hazily
delineated (as one might suspect) as a stand-in for the reader.

Sometimes Heroines are very beautiful (although they don't know it) or heiresses (which they don't know, either) or possess some piece of information about the Secret (which they are incapable of interpreting). Their connection with the action of the novel is always passive; they are focal points for tremendous emotion, and sometimes tremendous struggle, simply because they exist...

In the face of this really extraordinary passivity-for if the protagonist of a novel is not active in some way, what on earth is the
novel about?-it is tempting to see these books as genuine family romances, with the Heroine as the child who is trying desperately to figure out what the grownups are up to...At their best Heroines merely stand (passively) for love, goodness, redemption, and innocence. They are special and precious because they are Heroines. And that is that."

This becomes a lot more evident with VC Andrews, who made the "family romance" part way more explicit than any of the earlier goffics Russ was examining.

As per the Mary Sueism, passivity and all, I think that's what had irritated me so much about True Blood, more so in the first season. Sookie is a *classic* of the type. And she only gets more special and precious and besotting of others as it goes on.

BTVS, whatever its flaws, was satisfying because it explicitly *doesn't* do this: Buffy really is a true protagonist, a Hero with a journey, not just someone who radiates goodness while all the fighting takes place all around her.

That said, I'm digging True Blood more in its second season probably precisely because there's so much more focus on all the subplots and secondary characters, most of whom have a more interesting "story" imo than Sookie.

So Russ concludes:

"The Modern Gothic, as a genre, is a means of enabling a conventionally Heroine to have adventures at all. It may also be a way that conventionally feminine readers can see their own situation...validated, justified, and glamorized up to the hilt, without turning Heroines into active persons or into sexually adventurous persons, both of whom violate the morality of conventional femininity.,

[It'd be interesting to see her take on the later Judith Krantz and such genre. wherein the Heroines do become much more sexually adventurous-within certain strictures-and nominally have careers, but a lot of this still applies. The "Lace" books as I recall them could be termed the Cosmo Gothic. More sex, more designer name dropping, the women become successful fashion designers or that sort of thing, and the rest is still pretty similar]

...

1. Housework, etc. is banned. I'm on holiday.

2. I'm upper-middle class, not lower-middle class.

3. My upward mobility is achieved through marriage.

4. I'm a good girl-modest, not too pretty but quite pretty, not too rich but rich enough, womanly, loving, dependent, and somehow "average" (even though I am uniquely precious)

5. The Super-Male *really exists* (all evidence to the contrary)

6. He really loves me, even though I am not strikingly beautiful, brilliant, talented, famous, or rich. I do not see why he loves me, but he does. He may appear to treat me badly or brusquely; still, he loves me.

7. I do nothing. I do not have to do anything. Merely because I exist, violent emotions and acts spring into being.

8. I am rewarded for being good. Aggressively sexual, beautiful, worldly women are wicked and are punished accordingly. Men don't *really* like them.

9. I have intense emotional relations with places-houses, weather, nature. (Scenery-painting is often the best-written part of these books).

10. I have pretty, romantic clothes (but not sexy or flamboyant ones). Clothes really are very important.

11. *My sexual value is my personal value and is respected by all but villains and villainesses.* Men's desire is a testimony to my personal, individual worth. I have no character, interests, or achievements, but those who do come to a bad end (if female).

12. I am a virtuoso at interpreting faces and feelings. [Sookie in True Blood takes this one further by being actually *psychic.*] This ability is not "wasted" on the everyday drudgery of infants' needs or husbands' grumpiness-it is vital in saving my life and the happiness of all about me. (Even if I come to the wrong conclusions, my intense over-reading of everybody else's emotions is still justified).

13. If I don't know what's happening, that's all right: my man does.

14. I can't save myself, but my man will do it for me. [More often torqued these days, if not consistently; Sookie's killing Rene in self-defense has shades of Final Girl, but she still has the men running to her aid, the distraction helps enable her to defend herself, and they do outright rescue her on many other occasions]

15. Life with the Super-Male is *really satisfying.*

Sookeh! SOOKEH!!!...

annnd

*sparkle out*

"Sometimes...you just need to stand around in a massive gyroscope and this is one of those times."

(h/t Queen Emily)

"Having been purchased, Lady Gaga is on her way to The Rumpo Area wearing a frock with a polar bear hanging out of the back of it. You may laugh but we've all at one point or another been out in a bar or club and started walking out of the toilet with a bit of loo roll stuck to one of our shoes, and this is exactly the same except with a polar bear."

We briefly interrupt this quasi-non-hiatus to say: Fuck Amazon.com

Here's why. It's not just affecting LGBT "adult" books either. Also see re: why it matters.

If you'd like to let them know your feelings, here's their express customer service form. or call 1-866-216-1072. or just join the boycott.

good a reason to patronize indies as much as possible anyway. Powell's still seems to be okay, also.

eta: "Book Depot" in the UK looks promising. free worldwide delivery!

eta again: someone cynical theorizes this is a sophisticated trolling effort of some sort. if so, as far as I'm concerned all it means is "hey, still another party is (also) an EPIC asshole!"

and, this is also not the first time this sort of thing has been discussed wrt Amazon, apparently.

but, yeah. "lulz." wtfever. well, hey, if it turns out to be the case I guess we'll hear it from the PR eventually. can't wait for it. so far the response, "skeleton crew" or not, has been less than satisfactory.

In other but sort of thematically related postage: I can't get behind lesbian comic author Erika Moen anymore, much as I've liked a lot of her cartoons in the past. Here's why. And disgusted with Annalee Newitz--another person I -wanted- to like-- for similar reasons: here's why. (including comments section).

O.K. Really, I'm...busy. no more blogging for a while. hold my calls. Really. Oh, and happy Zombie Rabbits And Candy Eating Day.

p.s. Doctor Who special was v. disappointing. why can't Tennant stick around for Moffat? whhyyyyyyy???

later to all 7.8 of my readers...

ETA okay, whether he's actually behind it or not, I think we can all agree that "Weev" is a smug entitled POS

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

[some code which I have no fucking idea about really]

...and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse.

...The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Funny. Really funny.

More on why Amazon still isn't off the hook:

What I think is going on: there is a severe vulnerability in the Amazon flagging-for-inappropriate system, and it's been found and exploited by one or more nerds with too much time on their hands. Amazon's mistake, vis a vis the brave new world of social media, is two-fold:

Refusing to acknowledge a vulnerability. People are reaching the point not just that they like transparency in dealing with people who hold lots of important info on their behalf, but they are coming to demand it. Amazon's "nothing more to see here" approach is damaging to the relationship they have with those outraged by the exploit.
Refusing to acknowledge the pain of affected people. If you have an entire relationship built on trust (with personal info, with commitments to move products, with referrals and wishlists, etc), you have the obligation to have that uncomfortable sit-down when a betrayal is introduced to the relationship. Amazon hasn't done that yet. Yikes.
There's a livejournal blogger out there now claiming responsibility for the exploit. I won't link over, because I actually think he's full of crap, as do those who've attempted to reproduce his exploitative code. It's a well known practice for those with no skillz to take responsibility for things they have no part of to build up their hacker cred. Please. You know what tipped me off, for the record? The references to wanting to have anonymous sex with women and heroin from Craigslist. Fetishy-objectifying of women is common in the hacker community, for sure, but this guy is just… silly.

This doesn't mean that someone didn't come up with something similar– I'm almost positive they did. Which means that Amazon has a serious problem, and they better have a better explanation than the "glitch."

There's a bigger picture here: cultural implications

From a tech point of view, recommendation systems and flag-as-inappropriate tools that aren't built to handle gaming the system are just no good. It's unacceptable that a masterminding giant such as Amazon wasn't prepared for this kind of attack. Especially considering how much it affects Amazon's contract and relationship with the people that provide them with the goods its users demand, and how much users trust Amazon to do the Right Thing.

On a wider cultural scale, as I'd mentioned in the article in the WMC, the cultural implications of these attacks — especially when it's big enough to get this kind of attention — are huge. Geek culture is one of the last vestiges of an overtly sexist and toxic environment for anyone who's not a straight guy, most likely white and middle-class. (Not limited to the nerds of computer love, either– check out this post on misogyny and comic books from Amptoons.) When these attacks occur, it reveals not just the hatred that the hackers themselves have for women and LGBT folk, but the wider cultural intolerance we still have running rampant.

...Some would react by clamping on the anonymity, the level of free speech and the accountability, often all at once. Sure, keeping trolls off your comments section is probably a good idea. Enacting laws making it impossible to operate independently and anonymously online? Bad idea. Very bad. We need to be addressing the root causes of our misogyny, our racism, our homophobia — not piling on bandaids, duct tape and bailing twine to keep people's mouths shut...

Dear Shepard Smith:

I realize that what with the economic situation and all, now is probably not the best time to bring this up.

Nonetheless, after reading this, (and watching the video above) I feel compelled to ask: is it possible that you're in the wrong job?

signed,

Concerned.

(thanks for the h/t, KM)

So, Joe The Plumber was out on the trail with John McCain today, apparently giving the thumbs up to someone in the crowd who felt that an Obama Presidency would bring about the end of Israel. From Raw Story:

The Ohio plumber, who has no license and is actually named Samuel Wurzelbacher, spoke at a McCain campaign event in Columbus Monday. A McCain supporter asked if "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." JTP hardly batted an eye.

"I'll go ahead and agree with you on that," Wurzelbacher said.

...Anyway, five minutes with Joe The Plumber had Shepard Smith so frustrated that the Fox anchor felt compelled to issue a disclaimer, immediately following the segment, pushing back on any notion that Obama would mean the "death of Israel," saying: "I just want to make this 100 percent perfectly clear -- Barack Obama has said repeatedly and demonstrated repeatedly that Israel will always be a friend of the United States, no matter what happens once he becomes President of the United States. His words." Smith later added, "The rest of it -- man...some things -- it just gets frightening sometimes. We'll be right back." I haven't seen Shep this broken up about the state of the world since Katrina.

Meanwhile, let's remember that after a year of trying to figure out what their campaign is about, the McCain camp has basically pinned all their hopes to the avatar of Joe The Plumber, a random dude who says, "I know just enough about foreign policy to probably be dangerous...I have no idea where John McCain's position is...I honestly want people to go out and find their own reasons. I tell people not to listen to everyone else's opinion. I'm not going to have them start listening to mine." His words. Such as they are.

I don't understand what the problem is. Look! he's honest! honest and MODEST. That right there proves he's more qualified than all those out of touch Washington insiders to know what's right. He's REAL, man. Joe (or whatever his name is) the Plumber (well, more or less) for President (or something)! w00t



And anyway, he's right on this, as are John the McCain and Sarah the Palin. Any -real- American knows that. You don't want to TALK to these foreign dictators; they're DANGEROUS. Also, they might get ideas.



Oh well. Hopefully Shepard the Smith won't get into too much trouble with his bosses, there.

So, having FINALLY started watching Project Runway...

I have to ask: d'you think they kept Garbage Bag Gal instead of the other one because they thought it'd make better television--you know, because she was sure she was gonna be axed and he thought he was gonna win-- or because they really thought wossname's was worse? At least he made an effort...and c'mon, haven't any of these people heard of, ummm, whatever fetish it probably was?

Also, what'd they do in the last Gristedes one? Did any of it involve fruit roll-ups used like leather? Please say yes. Oh please.

Quote of the day, 6/30/08

The Doctor:** The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

--Doctor Who

**(no, NOT that one for once, the one with the scarf. bite me)

So, if I'm understanding this correctly: "Go Fug Yourself" is therefore a radical feminist publication

(image via Feministe)

amirite? Y/N?

I mean, granted, I'm a well-known "anti-feminist troll" as well as being a tad thick, so clearly the fact that I'm still having trouble distinguishing this sort of thing from the time-honored gossip rag tradition of snarking at female celebrities because they're "too" femme and/or sexual is my own problem, but, you know. Just thought I'd put it out there.

I'd also ask about how exactly one makes "mens' balls jingle," but, well, maybe it's one of those things where if you have to ask, maybe best...not.

Quote of the day, 6/4/08: complete anorak edition (well, one of them...)

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

also

I am so cool, you could keep a side of meat in me for a month. I am so hip, I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.

and

[The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is a] mind-bogglingly stupid animal. It thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you. Terribly daft, but very, very ravenous.

--Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I Blame The Assholes, part eleventy-bazillionth

this episode: the Rachel Moss business. yeesh. wtf is some peoples' trauma, anyway?

some more thoughts here, here, and here.

Quote of the day, 4/22/08

Bunch of wanna-blessed-be's. Nowadays every girl with a spice rack and a henna tattoo thinks she's Sister to the Dark Ones.

--Willow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Natalia's right: sometimes even a committed cynic needs to look on the bright side

Paul Potts, whom I'd not before seen or heard of, as I live in a cave & don't watch wotsit, I guess. his shining moment. thanks for sharing, Natalia.

*ahem*

Okay, and -as- long as I'm on a fangirl streak anyway, I feel compelled to share these findings with whomever might also appreciate...such things: David Tennant in drag.

once as a joke



but here (think this must be from some years ago)...well, i think it's meant to be a comedy, probably? (i have no earthly clue what the Scottish men are saying; I think they're orcs) but um. DT's presentation/performance? oh my wordies. i'll be in my bunk...



Yeah, eventually i'll get back to more serious posting...

("bombs are flying...people are dying...the whole world's gone to hell, but how are you?...")

...eventually. Then again, i'm kind of enjoying the shallow end.

Btw, did I ever mention my theory that the Sims holds the secret of life?

No, SRSLY. See, they have these little bars indicating their virtual little needs: hunger, bladder, energy (sleep), social, comfort, fun, and, uh, aesthetic something or other. When all or most of the little bars are comfortably above the halfway point, at least, then they're happy, and you can make them do whatever you want, pretty much. They'll do the tedious shit without complaining much (take out the trash, study, look for a job, exercise), and whatever "fun" stuff they do (throw a party, come onto the cute neighbor) is far more likely to be successful. (Sexytime is part of "social," I guess). They're more likely to get promoted, spontaneously start writing a book or playing the piano, take good care of the kids, and so forth.

When one or more of the various bars is running near empty, they won't be able to do much until that need is taken care of (especially if it's hunger or sleep). And if they're running low overall, they whine and stamp their little feet and burst into tears randomly, sleep through their alarm, start fights, and go "uh uh" when asked to do something taxing, instead wandering off to watch TV.

If the social bar gets too low, they start regressing and eventually end up babbling to an imaginary giant rabbit.

It's great stuff, especially if you feel sadistic. Once I created a "Bush administration" household of eight and tormented them all to death. Well, first I had them fighting over three single beds, one shower, and one toilet; the rest had to take turns, and they were all really cranky so they kept kvetching and getting into fights. Then I removed all that stuff, and had them throw a party. It's not a great way to make friends and influence people, walking around unbathed for weeks, soiling one's virtual self and bursting into tears, picking fights, and of course, fly-encrusted garbage everywhere. Then I got tired of it. I put Rove in the swimming pool and removed the ladder; they swim till they drown. Cheney I locked in the attic with no food. Someone burned to death at the stove...and George was a schoolboy whose grades got so low that he was shipped off to boarding school; this was the old version where they don't age. If I had the capacity for Sims 2, I'd totally have had him get abducted and impregnated by aliens.

No, wait, but I had a point, here, somewhere. Something important. What was it again?...

oh, yeah:

Ole-like mjoel! Robaluki khan. Awasa poa. Uh, licht nar? Uh -uh!- Oo shonga day? Cayoo! Krach! Lamoo! Frabbit! Deepwa spanewash deepla blah!

o all right then: the fangirl post.

By request.

So yeah, as noted and obvious in the vids post below, I have turned my affections upon the new Dr. Who and Torchwood.

Or, well, so far I've just been sticking to the new stuff, only referring to the Wiki summaries of older shit when I need a reference.

I started by watching Torchwood, which is a bit grimmer and -slightly- less with the silly (well, the finale was pretty naff);

and then the first DW episode I watched was the "Empty Child" one, the one with the gas masks? which was genuinely creepy and seemed at least somewhat plausible, SF-wise (as these things go). So I was thinking it was all gonna be like that. Also, dunno if this was as true in the old series, but: Russell Davies is, besides being camp as knickers, a rather grim little petunia under it all. You see it more in TW, the whole "there's nothing after death, (except for the scary thing moving in the dark, which disappointingly turns out to be a rather risible CGI monster); "life is all;" it's the inevitable flip side to the firm belief in humanism that carries DW. I mean, that's true in a lot of SF, but this one...seems to go to the existentialist dilemma quite a bit, actually. And whenever it delves into WWII stuff especially, or the whole "British Empire" riff, you really start to see it, although it's symbolically there in even the cheesier Alien Menaces. How -do- you maintain hope in either a benign God or your fellow humyn when there are bombs dropping on your head? How do you defend against the authoritarian menace from outside without becoming Daleks or Cyberpeople yourself? What's actually worse: accepting that dying (personally or collectively) may really be just... the end of everything? Or the price one pays for artifically extending existence just for the sake of existence: shutting oneself off, turning oneself into a machine, or simply the pain of knowing that one is alone within one's own skin/shell, alone in the universe? What's the point of it all, anyway?

and then I go back and start from the beginning of S1, and it's like: giant farting prosthetic aliens! pissy flying salt shakers that shoot blocklike laserbeams at people and scream "exterminate" for long moments before actually y'know doing it, thus enabling people to run away! "K-9!" "the Weakest Link" is still on 200,000 years in the future! with chunky androids! scary savage futurekind 100 trillion years in the future (the universe lasts this long?!) have evolved fangs for eatin' people but apparently still visit their barbershop regularly (perhaps they use the fangs for grooming? nice to know that neither hair nor styles have changed much in 100 trillion years)...and...

and after some initial sputtering, i realized i was basically doing the equivalent of,

"Velvet paintings are -camp- and thus delightful, but flamingos on the lawn? Now that's just -tacky.-"

so said "fuck it" and accepted that this was 1) part of its charm 2) the price one pays for getting to watch both Billie Piper and David Tennant possessed by Zoe Wanamaker.



"Voyage of the Damned" was crap, though. Not campy, just crappy. Not sure how that happened, since it was apparently Davies who wrote that as well and as I've said, I thought the S3 finale was fucking ace. ho well.

"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."

how deeply true that is.

Weekend get-your-groove-on

Yeah yeah? Yeah, I think so.







and what the hell, a few fanvids*, since I like the songs and also I'm currently sort of obsessed with Dr. Who/Torchwood. -waits impatiently for new seasons even though the DW Christmas special was kind of rubbish-

*not mine, just to be clear; ganked some other folks' efforts that I liked off Youtube along with the rest of 'em is all.

As long as we're on the subject of montages...

I'm kind of digging this one.



h/t femmelesbians

after the fifteen minutes are up

This is kind of horrible. Anyone remember the "God Warrior?"
Marguerite Perrin?




So, I didn't know, apparently her daughter died in a traffic accident a couple of months ago.

Just sad, of course, except:

I dunno. I got there through a circuitous route; right before it I was looking at Marguerite vamping it up for Jay Leno, all smiles and charm and apparent normality after that crazy-ass meltdown. Quite a change in demeanor, if you watch both. Take careful note of the family's faces during the meltdown.

But anyway, so, inevitably, the grotesquery turned it into a media circus and of course she ate it up, did Marguerite. Funny haha. All part of the game, you know.

and now I'm looking at the story of the daughter and it's: drove through a guard rail. No skid marks. No drugs or alcohol.

and I'm thinking: yeah. I wonder.

"I needed your prayers."

"So it's my fault."

"You did come to my mind."

Creepy shit, that was, anyway. Creepy and sad. Now a lot sadder.

Oh well. The show must go on, right?

On edit: and having said all that, and on which note (the Show Must Go On), I gotta admit, I'm sort of in love with Candis Cayne for this routine. (stick with it to the end).

(presumably from before the accident; nothing to do with the daughter)

...yeeeeeahhh, not really funny at all, actually.

Watched this video:



after boggling and wtf?!'ing, brought it to the attention of other people, one of whom pointed me in the direction of this article about Chris Crocker. Read it. Then watched the video again. Found self mentally substituting "me" (i.e. Crocker himself) for "Britney." Suddenly, it doesn't seem over the top or outlandish at all. Just heartbreaking.

While on the general subject of cognitive dissonance, btw...

I want to thank Azundris for the link to the experiment i couldn't remember how or where the hell to find the reference, and it was driving me nuts. Yeah, file under the general subject of dissonance, cognitive:

In Festinger and Carlsmith's classic 1959 experiment, students were made to perform tedious and meaningless tasks, consisting of turning pegs quarter-turns and, another one, putting spools onto a tray, emptying the tray, refilling it with spools, and so on. Participants rated these tasks very negatively. After a long period of doing this, students were told the experiment was over and they could leave. This is an example of an induced compliance study.

However, the experimenter then asked the subject for a small favor. They were told that a needed research assistant was not able to make it to the experiment, and the participant was asked to fill in and try to persuade another subject (who was actually a confederate) that the dull, boring tasks the subject had just completed were actually interesting and engaging. Some participants were paid $20 for the favor, another group was paid $1, and a control group was not requested to perform the favor.

When asked to rate the peg-turning tasks later, those in the $1 group rated them more positively than those in the $20 group and control group. This was explained by Festinger and Carlsmith as evidence for cognitive dissonance. Experimenters theorized that people experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions "I told someone that the task was interesting", and "I actually found it boring". When paid only $1, students were forced to internalize the attitude they were induced to express, because they had no other justification. Those in the $20 condition, it is argued, had an obvious external justification for their behavior. Behavior internalization is only one way to explain the subject's ratings of the task. The research has been extended in later years. It is now believed that there is a conflict between the belief that "I am not a liar", and the recognition that "I lied". Therefore, the truth is brought closer to the lie, so to speak, and the rating of the task goes up.

The researchers further speculated that with only $1, subjects faced insufficient justification and therefore "cognitive dissonance", so when they were asked to lie about the tasks, they sought to relieve this hypothetical stress by changing their attitude. This process allows the subject to genuinely believe that the tasks were enjoyable.

Put simply, the experimenters concluded that many human beings, when persuaded to lie without being given sufficient justification, will carry out the task by convincing themselves of the falsehood, rather than telling a bald lie.

It goes on to talk about how that particular study's been criticized for faulty design (which is the sort of shit I should be able to grasp a lot more easily and quickly if/when I ever finish this fucking research methods/stats course. in theory)

But, I think the general principle does hold up.

"Oh dearie dearie me, this is none of I!..."

tangentially, I think that actually also nails part of what was freaking me out about the Battlestar Galactica season-ender. hell, the entire damn show, come to that.

Okay, okay, okay, so I'm totally freaked out now

so i -finally- saw the season 3 finale of Battlestar Galactica.

and, plotwise, i figured on a fair amount of it (i couldn't help overhearing the gist of the spoilage, even though i studiously avoided seeking any out).

but the existential implications are freaking me out! maaaaaaan

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will--"

oh SHUT up.

it must be that cheesy hippie song they introduced (and yes, THAT was cheesy, i am sorry). it's, like, giving me acid flashbacks...of a past i never had...or did I?

i smell patchouli

it's coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE, i mean the ship.

wooOOOOoooo