elz

It's been a while since I watched it, but I seem to recall Dark Angel being set in a world where someone had set off EMPs to wipe out the internet, and I gotta say, that sounds less dystopian all the time, relative to the alternative. The existence of improbably attractive cat people is also not much of a downside.

So this is something I've been craving for years now, frankly, but - if I set up an old-school kind of message board space (maybe a little nicer/cleaner than that) for fannish discussion, would anyone be interested?

Just - it feels like there's a hole in fandom where that should be. Conversations, longer than tweet-length, easier to keep up with than a chat, not the same kind of perceived commitment as a journal entry, more text-based and connected than Tumblr. Shared spaces for community to happen, where no one has to apologize for being over 25. :P That sense of "what's everyone watching/reading/making?" and "let's talk about it, coherently or not". Semi-private or invite-only, maybe, to avoid trolls and marketers and people googling themselves. Because I feel like we've kind of lost those places to cultivate enthusiasm together, and I miss it.

Honestly, even if only a few people were interested, I'd give it a try. Not everything has to be AO3-sized, and in fact, that might be a nice change of pace.

(PS: Marathoned all of The Good Place, loved it. Had weird dreams about Jeremy Bentham afterwards.)

I just watched the Stargate Atlantis finale for the first time while eating dinner tonight - I'd lost interest by Season 5, for reasons I no longer remember, and nobody seemed enthused about it at the time, so I just never bothered. And yeah, that was... an hour of tv. Pretty big contrast to the SG1 finale, which was a fanservicey hour of the characters basically just hanging out together, forever. This one was a pretty typical 'save Earth from the alien menace' episode that felt oddly generic. The most emotional moment might have been the reference to General Hammond/Don Davis passing away, and I don't think Sheppard ever even met him.

Three random thoughts:

1. It amuses me that poor Major Davis is the one character in this universe who never seems to get promoted. Somewhere out there today, Sam is a general and Davis is still a Pentagon flunky.

2. If I ever knew that they resurrected Dr. Beckett, I'd forgotten about it, so his appearance was a bit of a surprise. Had to check to see if that was a storyline or if they just suddenly made him un-dead for the hell of it (sadly the former).

3. Fifteen seasons of SG1 and SGA, and Rodney McKay is (if I remember correctly) the one character who walks off into the sunset with an unequivocal canon romance. There's just something wrong about that.

Short notice, but I have a ticket to the Welcome to Night Vale anniversary show tomorrow night at 7pm in NYC which I unfortunately won't be able to go to. Drop me a line if you'd be interested or know someone else who might be!

(I have duly learned my lesson about volunteering for things without paying close attention to the date. Alas!)

aka, things I was watching before the Olympics started up and I began having sudden and intense feelings about luge.

Teen Wolf

I feel like watching this show is more than a little like rooting for the Mets. You go in with very low expectations, because you know what you're getting yourself into. Then there are some pleasant surprises, and there's that point mid-season where they get hot, and you think, hey, there's some real potential here. Maybe they're actually going somewhere! Maybe this time will be different! And then, of course, it's not, and everything collapses, and you end the season lying on the floor clutching an empty bottle, wondering why you do this to yourself. (I'm pretty sure Dylan O'Brien is Matt Harvey in this analogy.)

So yes, the last few episodes are the equivalent of the midseason hot streak, and I'm definitely intrigued by what's going on, but it's hard to have confidence that it's actually going to end up in any sort of coherent and satisfying way. I live in hope of being proved wrong. (That goes double for the Mets.)

Downton Abbey

I knew I'd like this show, but if I'd known just how much of it was an epic bitchfest between Professor McGonagall and Harriet Jones (MP), I'd have gotten around to watching it a lot sooner. Currently up to early S3, not so unspoiled that I don't know what awaits me at the end.

The After

This is one of the Amazon Prime pilots, from Chris Carter of The X-Files, co-starring (among others) Aldis Hodge, Adrian Pasdar, and an almost unrecognizable Jamie Kennedy and Sharon Lawrence.

( spoilers )

I've seen a lot of talk going around about the Big Bang Press kickstarter and whether it's a good idea to contribute to or not, and I have some thoughts on that.

1. If you put in an amount of money that you're comfortable paying for three as-yet unfinished and unreviewed novels by new authors with established fanfic backgrounds, you'll either get three novels out of it or you'll get your money back if they don't actually deliver. (Kickstarter ground rules.) Backing a kickstarter doesn't make you liable for any legal or financial problems the owners run into, so it's pretty much on them to decide whether those risks are too high. If you don't think the books are worth it or you don't have the money to spend, obviously that's also a completely valid choice.

2. Is their fundraising goal too high? Do they have professional editing and publishing experience? Do they have an actual lawyer on staff? I'm not sure I care. The thing is, I'm coming from the tech world, where it feels like a white guy can walk up to a VC and get $10 million to build an app that makes barnyard animal noises. I want to see more women out there in the world asking for money and starting businesses and taking risks. $40,000 doesn't exactly seem like a wildly exorbitant sum to launch a company, and worst case scenario is that they end up with more professional experience and some useful business and life lessons to go on with. And if they get more money than they need and turn a profit on their work? Why exactly would that be wrong?

Have you heard of Wattpad? It's a fiction hosting site founded by two men that (from what I can tell) seems to be used mostly by teenage girls posting One Direction fanfic. To date, they've raised at least $20.8 million by making the claim that they're out to disrupt the publishing industry.

Do you know how much money Etsy and Pinterest (both founded by men) have raised to date, on the backs of women creating and sharing content on their sites? At least $91.7 million and $338 million, respectively. And while I'm reading stories about these sites on Hacker News every day, I'm still looking around the internet and seeing a lot of talented women who are underemployed or trying to make ends meet while generating value in the form of content for other people's companies. So yeah, I love the fannish gift economy and have done thousands of hours of unpaid labor on its behalf, but I also respect the fact that people have to eat and pay rent, and I support their efforts to make money to do that as long as they're not hurting anybody. Will I be more cynical the fiftieth time I see people in fandom doing the same thing? No doubt. But if any of them make it big, I'll be thrilled, and in the meantime, if I pay for a book and I get a book that I enjoy as much as my average Amazon purchase, that's a perfectly good deal for me.

There's nothing like the prospect of moving to force one to acknowledge that maybe there is such a thing as too many books.

-Today I watched all of S3 of Haven. I think I need to find a magic barn to go take a nap in to recuperate. No deep thoughts, but I definitely enjoyed it, and it remains the OT3est of shows. Now on to S4...

-mumble's been compiling AO3 search tips for users and doing some posts about them: The "Search Within Results" Field and You, Part 1 and Part 2. The problem on our end is that the search engine can do so many different things that it's difficult to add/convey all of them through the interface without overloading people with complexity. But while we figure that out, there's a lot you can do manually to exclude tags and refine searches, so check that out if you're interested.

-Other than that, I had four and a half hours of OTW meetings today, deployed a couple of tiny fixes to AO3, did some much-needed cleaning and laundry, and played around with some API code. The first item on tomorrow's agenda is "go outside", because I'm working on a thing where I try not to spend entire weekends on my laptop anymore. It's a work in progress.

*cough*

One thing we periodically toss around is the idea of having an OTW con where people could actually meet up in person - we've had a lot of small, unofficial staff meetups over the years, but nothing org-wide or formally planned. I think it would be pretty awesome, and what it mostly needs at this point is someone to pick a city and date when at least some number of people could make it, and get the ball rolling. I know absolutely nothing about event planning or how to book a venue, but Lady Oscar actually does and was encouraging my flights of fancy, and therefore, a poll! Highly speculative and unofficial:



Assume the cost to be around whatever a fan-run con usually costs and attendance to be open to any staff, volunteers or fans who would like to come. Obviously you could have this event anywhere in the world at any time of the year, but what the heck - DC's a big city, easy to fly into, cheaper than NY (unless anybody has venue tips for NY) and about as central as anywhere, given that we're scattered all over the world. Though I myself would not be averse to going to Europe. There could theoretically be regional meetups on the same weekend for people who couldn't travel quite as far, with some sort of video hookup, maybe? Google hangouts? Cross-chatting? Something, anyway. We could have brainstorming and hackathoning and vid watching and teamly bonding and general shenanigans! Field trip to a Caps game! Multicolored alcohol! Just think of the possibilities. :D

Ideas, suggestions, alternate times or places? If there's interest, we should totally make a Party Planning Workgroup and get a bunch of people together to hammer something out (all meetings to involve party hats and sparkly balloons).

And please link around to anyone who might be interested!

This sounds fascinating from a future-of-vidding POV: Valve hands over its own movie-making tools to gamers

The new tool will allow gamers to make their own movies using the acclaimed Source game engine directly. This means that users will have almost any element from a recent Valve game at their disposal, including characters, locations, props, particles, textures, and sounds. New assets can even be created from scratch using the Source SDK and imported into a video project. People will then be able to position objects and choose their shots as if it were a real-world location - even lighting and visual effects can be adjusted on the fly.