hmpf

I will demonstrate the rightness of the above claim to you in a moment. But first, get a pair of headphones. Because listening to Phideaux works best with headphones. This is a true surround-sound experience: Phideaux's music is in the psychedelic-operatic mode.

Oh, and another note, about LastFM: You should be able to listen to every song, fully and for free, exactly three times per month. You don't need an account there.

( Read more... )

***

Completely unrelated to fannish obsessions, this is a supremely beautiful song about grief. Give it a listen, too. I think it's my favourite at the moment:

http://www.lastfm.de/music/Phideaux/Ghost+Story/Universally

I've already posted a longer ramble about this at jumping_off, but - shocking thought! - maybe not everybody reads jumping_off, so:

Would you say that this article implies that Ashley Pharoah also thinks that the ending of LoM is 'decidedly downbeat,' or is the latter just the opinion of the writer of the article? It's clearly not a quotation, but it is integrated with a quotation in such a way as to make it seem as if the quotation was derived from a conversation that contained that characterisation of the ending...

(Hey, those of you who have the series two boxset - can anything about whether the writers of the show think they wrote a happy or an unhappy ending, be inferred from the DVD extras?)

It is strangely gratifying, btw, to read an article in which the ending is called 'decidedly downbeat.'

It is also darkly amusing to see that - if I read this correctly - Pharoah thinks we objected to the ending because it was downbeat. Dude, no. I was the woman who kept clamouring for the show to end with Sam dying! I like dark stuff; I've written some seriously disturbing fic, or so I'm told. I keep killing my protagonists, too. So, yes, kill your protagonist, by all means. Even have him kill himself. Just... don't hand me pink glasses and expect me to feel it's a happy thing.

And also, either do try to give him a proper, understandable motivation, or make it a bit more obvious that he's really, truly and completely nuts.

And don't expect me to suddenly forget everything you've previously established about him. Take a page from (some) fanfic writers' book: you have to integrate your surprising ending with what we know about the characters and their world.

Wow.

I looked up a few old posts at TRA today for a discussion in lifein1973. Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at my stats there, too. Well... For all intents and purposes, I stopped posting there in May 2007 (except for a short-lived attempt to return, in January '08 - 6 posts). Yet, despite an inactivity of *a year and a half*, I'm still, statistically, averaging 1.2 posts *per day* there.

That means that in the time I was active there, i.e. before May '07, I must have been *insanely* active.

ETA: That drop from Ceiling Cat knows how many posts per day to zero, after May '07, says more about my self-inflicted semi-death in that fandom than anything I could ever say about the subject.

During the A2A discussions today - I've followed them around to some LJs off lifein1973, out of curiosity (I wanted to see the "happy jumping" folks' reactions) - I've seen that old bit of praise for the ending of LoM pop up again: to paraphrase, "I love the ending of LoM because it's so open to interpretation"; variously also, "whether Sam committed suicide or not is a matter of interpretation". And I have to admit: I still can't see this famous openness of the text, in this case. And you'd think that, what with how unhappy my interpretation of 2.08 makes me, I'd *jump* on any alternative interpretation that I thought even remotely plausible...

I mean, I can see how there would be *slight* differences in people's interpretations. But surely, the basic 'facts' of the story are pretty clear?

Yes, yes, I know. I'll be wanking myself to death, one of these days.

It's a frelling compulsion.

I just noticed jumping_off has 72 members now, about twenty more than there were last time I checked. This makes me happy.

lifein1973 has around 1400 members, so that means that the percentage of people who didn't like the ending is around 5 percent. We're a bigger minority than I thought! (I thought we might be around 1 percent.)

**

I still haven't written the last page and a half of my frelling paper. I have just about reached the right stage of "don't frelling care, but time's kind of pressing now" to be able to write it, even if it's utter shite, and not mind so much.

Edited for wonky maths.

( new layout, wheeee! )

( f-list reading strategy... and a question )

( catching up with fic )

( walking, writing )

( and uni )

( I know this shouldn't bother me so much... )

When cleaning up my old notes and paperwork recently, I found several abandoned drafts for - sadly unfinished - meta posts. I don't really have the time to clean them up and make them presentable (or add substance to the 'thinner' ones), but I also don't quite feel like simply throwing them away. So, maybe, I'll be posting a few of them here. Or at least I'll be posting one today. It's a - fairly unspectacular, really - bit of Methos meta, but I think it may actually be of some interest for Life on Mars fandom, too, as it deals with canon inconsistencies/insufficiencies and fannish reactions to those. Essentially, it's a bit like the 'canon vs. fanon' situation we have in LoM now, only that in LoM we're still struggling with declaring our mental independence from canon. HL fandom has a lot more practice in that department, as large parts of HL canon have sucked, or at least been severely disappointing, throughout the history of the franchise, and the fandom has been feverishly 'fixing' things for more than fifteen years now... (There's a difference, though, in the fact that the *majority* of HL fandom sees a need to fix things, whereas in LoM fandom only a very small minority feels that way.)

Anyway, this particular bit of meta is not really about the fixing of HL canon in general, but about one character who, arguably, is so very fascinating to fans because he was probably not planned but rather improvised by the writers, which shows in his characterisation... i.e., our fascination, and the fanon versions of his character that we love, are *based* heavily on the fact that *the source text is flawed*.

( Here goes the old, abandoned Methos meta. )

ETA: This really hardly even deserves the title 'draft'. It needs fleshing out, it needs structure, it needs lots of things... but I don't have the time.

ETA2: I think the point I was trying to make was that, no matter *how* we interpret him, a certain degree of 'fixing things' is always involved in developing a fannish relationship with Methos.

Gah. My brain is completely fried today. I need to think more about the parallels and differences here - because there *are* differences between the LoM and the HL situation, though I can't quite put my finger on them yet.

why *does* it bother me so what other people think, in this case?

It's puzzling.

(ETA: This song really calls for a Sam-bashing vid, doesn't it? *points to 'current music' below* Go on, google the lyrics... *eg*)

(ETA2: I just may have to make that vid. But first I need to finish "A&B Song". And then make a vid to Phideaux's "Railyard". So, uhm... maybe not.)

http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=2057.0

http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=2095.0

http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=1908.0

(ETA: Isn't it ridiculous that after all this time, this *still* makes me want to scream and tear my hair out?)

(ETA2: I think I *really* am going to withdraw from those threads now. There's only so many times I can rephrase my arguments.)

Still sorting through old papers. This here seems very apt - from a piece of paper around a year old:

"Life on Mars is either vastly more clever than I'm giving it credit for, or a bit less clever than it believes itself to be."

Also, from right after watching ep 1:

"Annie: Sam's death drive?"

How right I was...

***

Going to bed now.