sundries

[rm]

At 6am, well, 6:20, I finally heard the ringtone on g-chat and Patty and I had a half-asleep vid date. Then it was off to 2-day film school. I'm just home, and ladyofthelog is over and we're cleaning the house, but I'm having introvert time by writing this post.

2-Day Film School is awesome. Exhausting. Somewhat bizarre. Occasionally frustrating, but super good. I'm definitely getting the answers I needed in terms of technical elements and budgeting and that's awesome. And it's making me consider plans, both in terms of treatments I've been kicking around on my own and with others, and in terms of "well if I want to make a film, how do I do that?"

Also a plus, somewhat surprisingly, is the deep cynicism of the dude teaching the class. Whereas the the Luhrmann thing was like "just do what you want and sometimes it will be a devastating experience and sometimes it will be awesome" this dude is like "fuck you, fuck art, this is how you make money, don't fucking waste your time making shorts, make schlock for this much, and then this much and then this much and then 'lo you will have a budget to do what you want." The benefit of this approach even if it doesn't really mesh with my sort of "all things are possible" call to arms bullshit, is it makes me not feel the near moral obligation to Make Things Right Now, which is good, since I'm plenty in the throes of multiple projects right now (D&J! D&J!), and therefore I should only be nosing around at such endeavors and scheduling them for Time Other.

Funniest thing that's easy to explain right now: You're the producer/director on a 3-week indie film shoot. The first week = fun! The second week = zombie exhaustion! Third week = everyone hates you. Then it's over, you pass out, wake up four days later, find out your cast had a party without you. How do you avoid this? 2 week film shoot! I'm still laughing.

It's been a while since I've talked about financial crisis suicides. But it seems one of Bernie Madoff's sons has killed himself. Awful.

Julian Assange's blog from back in 2006/7. It's... well, it's a lot of things. Less charming than I'd expected. Just as "I'm a dude on the Internet who knows more than you" as I expected. It's fascinating, unsettling and unremarkable all at once.

West Point runs a football to Philadelphia. I normally know about things like this, but this one was news to me. Next year they are running all the way to DC.

So Kali and I aren't at a point where we can give you a full narrative summary, but I have to share this bit of hilarity. We're working on a chapter and Cecilia is needled by her fiance and her sister about how they used to burn her dolls to torture her (book is about the fall of empire and colonialism and inbred nobles and magic and the whole bit, so yes, of course everyone's known everyone their whole lives) when she was a child. And then we were talking about it, even though it won't ever appear in the book and I said, "And I can hear Cissy saying, sobbing, 'You have to cut their heads off first or else it hurts them!'" Cissy seems really sweet but is creepy. So yeah, it's like that.

Hey, Sherlock fandom, unironically warning for "Light M/M boy kissing" isn't just offensive, it's a boggling, irritating, weird redundant thingy. Don't.

Did we all hear that two new Torchwood audio plays (audio books? something?) are coming out on CD in March that are set pre-CoE? I loved CoE, and I'm also ecstatic about this. Got it through the Starz Torchwood twitter account.

I have gluten-free red velvet cupcakes and you don't.

Things that ladyofthelog and I have discovered that have exploded in the kitchen at some point: grains of some sort, sugar, a box of chai tea, green food coloring. Yay! ETA: Also, spiders, spiders living in Spider Lothlorien. Yeah, my Saturday night is great.

Comments

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Well, I read "high functioning sociopath" as being him grabbing a label for himself to prevent the act of being labelled by others ie it's fairly central in my concepts of him as a bullied child adopting bullied child coping strategies which I could happily discuss all day and which certainly is one of the things going on in the babysitter series. I think anyone trying to close down that sort of discussion is being a complete idiot but I've experienced similar things on other lists - the Lord Peter yahoogroup is a bit prone to it - where someone seems to have difficulties with a discussion developing organically rather than being forcibly herded in one direction.

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I read "high functioning sociopath" as being him grabbing a label for himself

Agreed - he seems to have just come out with that to freak Anderson out, IMO. It's one of the reasons why I have trouble with the "Holmes as actual psychotic" stories.

On the other hand, Sherlock doesn't appear to be neurotypical either, and there are aspects of the original Sherlock Holmes that can be argued that he's aping socially acceptable behavior rather than actually understanding how and why society works the way it works. (It can be equally argued that he knows perfectly well, he just doesn't *care,* which is a different issue.) So there's a wealth of stuff to play with and discuss.

I'd love a more in-depth discussion of Sherlock as a bullied child, because he's certainly a bullied adult; we watch it over and over and aside from the lashout at Sally, he takes it with surprising meekness. Obviously he simply accepts being treated in that manner as one of the annoying facts about the world, and he doesn't appear to know the difference between being bullied and affectionately teased.

(How far rm wants this to go here, I don't know, but I'd discuss it all day m'self! I could pop open a post at my place, or I've got a DW account to comment at yours.)

Or perhaps after the holidays I should actually look for people to help me try to start that Sherlock/Sherlock Holmes discussion-only comm and cross my fingers that it wouldn't die on the vine. Wanna mod a comm?

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

If you want to friend my DW using your lj open ID I'll put you on my Sherlock filters, and if I'm not the person to mod the comm, you should find some like-minded individuals over there (I'm slightly wary of pure discussion comms because I express ideas more clearly in fiction than in essay form, and the potential for misunderstanding and subsequent grief is less as a result).

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[neadods.livejournal.com]

If you want to friend my DW using your lj open ID

*is sadly ignorant of how to do this* I will when I figure out how!

While I look forward to more of your fic, I think the comm is going to happen and you'll be welcome there when it opens. (note to self; figure out how to open a comm to OpenID posting) Hopefully there will not be misunderstandings and grief, that wouldn't be the point!

There have been one or two fics that spawned reaction discussions on SherlockBBC - maybe it'll work out that way! Because I really would love to pursue the whole Sherlock as a bullied child thread.

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

To follow someone on DW with OpenID you go to their DW a/c, try to comment, when asked to log-on to comment because they have disabled anon commenting, choose "Log on with OpenID" and type in, say, neadods.livejournal.com after the prompt and carry out the captcha. At the top of the screen it ought to offer you the option to follow said DW journal, so click on that. That ought to send a message to me inviting me to reciprocate, which I will (I can't work out how to do it the other way round, though).

There will, I suspect, always be misunderstandings, but with mods holding a light rein it may mean people work past them rather than come up against them and turn away (on both sides) baffled.

Re: Sherlock batty warning conventions

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm trying that now and crossing my fingers. I tried and I'm confusing the system because I also have a DW account. So let's try putting that on the filter, if you're willing, and I'll set it to email me when you post.

A couple of experienced mods have raised their hands to join us, people I know to be level-headed in a different, often hot-headed fandom, so I'm hoping the meta comm will be a go and provide a service to Holmesian fandom. To be honest, I'm really quite surprised that a fandom this old (Holmes, not Sherlock) doesn't have something like it already.