hmpf

Welcome to Livejournal land, anduranova of the TBFC tribe and of the Scape Sisters. Anyone who followed my rec for Poison recently and liked it, go tell anduranova - she's the editor.

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I'm totally running out of time on uni stuff and still haven't made my Important Decision, so of course, I did the logical thing and spent most of today tagging all my LJ entries for 2002, and sorting through the rest of my Farscape vid backlog. Arrgh.

At least the Farscape tag in the tags list here is about as big as the Life on Mars tag now, as it should be. As I continue to tag the years between 2002 and 2006 it will probably grow even larger.

And I have 1.200 well-sorted Farscape vids, now.

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Farscape vid rec for today: back in 2001 or so, Birgit made some of the best fanvids in the entirety of young Farscape fandom. She then mostly disappeared (as a vidder) for several years before re-emerging in 2005 with some vids that I, personally, thought good but not as spectacular as the admittedly hard-to-beat Under Ice (which was the very first fanvid I watched, and which is probably the main reason I turned into the total Farscape fanvid nut that I did.) More recently she's made some rather remarkable vids, which sort of remind me of Under Ice.

J/A shippy vids make up the majority of the fandom's production, and they can kill you with kitsch, so whenever I open a vid to find it's shippy I tend to get wary (and just a tad bored in advance). Birgit's approach to shippiness and shippy angst in her recent vids is one that managed to capture my interest, though. She chooses somewhat jarring, in some cases almost dissonant songs, which somehow - IMO - fit the John/Aeryn relationship much better than your average love ballad from the top of the charts. Like the relationship, these songs have hard edges. She also eschews the 'smooth' look and editing that have been the hallmark of many of the better vids in recent years, using some very odd effects and blending images in a quick and sometimes deliberately messy succession that nevertheless somehow works. The overall impression is occasionally hectic and disjointed, but fits both the music and the relationship depicted perfectly. So hop on over to Birgit's Vids and download

- Missing (J/A shippy/angsty)
- Disarm (J/A shippy/angsty)
- Goodbye, Blue Sky (PKW, wormholes, time)
- Three Sunrises (J/A shippy)

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And, for amonitrate and bimo and other Twin Peaks fanatics (as well as anyone else who's interested in superb vidding): astolat has made a Twin Peaks vid that is so good it leaves me speechless. You can download it here. The editing is perfect, the song is perfect, and the crazy thing is that that song has been linked to Twin Peaks in my mind since I first heard it, back in the same year I watched Twin Peaks for the first (and so far only) time.

ETA: Go and leave astolat feedback here!

This vid captures the essence of Twin Peaks so well it gave me Bob nightmares yesterday.

Hmpf reads Judith Butler. It's dense reading, very slow, with a lot of rereading, and marking things with little question marks in the margins.

( my brain has other ideas )

(Excerpts taken from chapter 3 of The Psychic Life of Power, by Judith Butler, Stanford University Press, 1997.)

I'm about to finish my Bierce essay/paper, and boy, does it suck. Mind you, I'm not saying it will get a bad grade necessarily. But it has nearly no real content whatsoever; it's the most pointless thing I've ever written in a uni context. I can sort of see how it would be possible to make it better, but that would require such amounts of extra time and, likely, more research - not to mention at least ten more pages on top of an already over-long 27 - that I don't think it's worth it, especially seeing as how I really don't care.

But it's painful. I really have to force myself to continue, constantly give myself mental kicks in the ass. I'm not good at producing crap intentionally. The writer's block of the last few weeks was largely my inner perfectionist refusing to cooperate with a conscious attempt to fudge things.

I've got my inner perfectionist wrestled down now, but oh, it still hurts. I can see the gaping holes in what I'm writing, the way nothing really hangs together or forms anything approaching a coherent argument, and there's a strong urge in me to fix it. Only reason is telling me not to. It's not worth investing any more time in; it's 27 pages of wasted time and energy and brain cells as it is. (Though to be honest, I don't think I wasted many brain cells on this, really. It was written with my brain on less than half its capacity, and it reads like it.)

First off, I'm kind of... not around because I *still* haven't finished that one freaking essay, arrgh. It's like every time I think I'm nearly done I accidentally open a new can of worms, sort of on the home stretch, making another day of work for myself. Very frustrating. Plus, as a consequence it's now so late I'm not sure they'll still accept it. They usually do, this being the German university system which is somewhat more lenient about stuff like this than, say, Britain's, but... you never know. Very nervous here!

In addition to this I'm angsting about my thesis again. I just talked about it to a rather skeptical friend and that reminded me how little of an idea I have yet about what I'm *really* going to do with it. And how much theory I still need to read, and how little idea I have where even to start on *that*. And how badly I need to read a whole lot of older indie and small press comics to understand the context better. Will I have to shell out for the ten Cerebus 'phonebooks'? I am afraid so. And Cerebus isn't even the biggest problem; at least that's *available*, if rather pricey. A lot of the other stuff - even the stuff I sort of know about - isn't available at all anymore. Not to mention that I only have a vague idea of indie and small press books of the early 90s and earlier, because that's way before I ever started reading comics. And with this kind of stuff you can't just go to a library, you need to buy it or you need to know someone with a huge collection. Arrgh. I need to befriend my local comic shop guys, I think. (In fact, I *am* planning to talk to them about this; at the very least they should be able to give me a better idea of essential titles etc. They're pretty good with American indie and small press stuff. - Oh, and I'll try forums, too.)

I'm thinking of really just focusing on Finder now. I just received my copy of the recent Sin-Eater hardcover and that reminded me rather forcefully how Finder is *teeming* with stuff to write and think about. Finder alone is probably more than I can handle, to be honest. (I just still lack a lot of the necessary background to say much of academic worth about it.)

The most interesting and most worrying thing my friend (who has a Ph.D. in American studies) did regarding my thesis was questioning my choice of doing a thesis about these comics at all. How could I be sure, she asked, if there was really something - or, perhaps rather, 'enough' - there that was worth talking about in an academic way; could I be sure that, as a fan, I wasn't *putting* things there that I *wanted* to see but that weren't really present in the material? Which, yeah... may be a good question. Although I'm fairly certain that Finder is of academic interest, really, because it tickles all my academic bones, so to speak - it really speaks more to me as an academic, almost, than it does to me as a fan. Still, I'm setting myself up for a fall here, potentially, as I will have to go that extra length of convincing the readers of my thesis not just of the worth of my own ideas but also of the worth of the material I've chosen to talk about. This is something you don't have to do if you write about something that already has academic acceptance.

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To balance all that angst, here's your daily dose of squee:

As I said, yesterday I got my copy of this, and - the image there doesn't do it justice. It's an artefact of superb beauty. It's smaller than your usual comic, somewhere between American comic size and manga format; it's hardcover, satisfyingly thick and solid, and - literally - very shiny. Very white paper, very black print, and the artwork 'shrinks' surprisingly well, although some of the smaller bits of lettering and a few details do get very tiny. The overall effect is positive, though, and somehow the composition of many of the pages works better in this format (probably because you tend to look at the whole page at once, whereas with the usual format you tend to look at the top half first, or at least I do.)

It's also superior to the previous version of Sin-Eater in two trades because it also collects the 'lost issue' Fight Scene, plus nine new pages.

I could go on, but I have to go - work calls.

( 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... )

I'm still fairly exhausted; sleep pattern and appetite will probably take a while yet to return to something more normal. Still extremely relieved, though - I hadn't realised just *how* much of the stress I've felt in the last few years was due to archaeology! I'm feeling a lot better now. Nearly everything else suddenly feels... manageable.

I spent most of today sleeping off the exhaustion, and then, when I finally woke up, spent the rest of the day cleaning up the mess that months and months of relentless stress had made of my room. (Still not quite done with that, actually.)

Still got loads to do for uni - my other subject, American studies, will require a lot of time now. But I'm sort of looking forward to that, as I'm enjoying it a lot more than archaeology, and feel I have a better handle on it, too. (Would still like to manage to reopen some spaces in my life for non-uni writing, general creativity, friends and stuff, though. We'll see how that goes.)

Maybe I'll even finally manage to *really* get back up to speed here on LJ! Here's to hoping...

... I was given a good grade I didn't deserve;

... I am filled with a burning love for jumping_off for all the great discussion there, and the fact that disagreement isn't seen as a threat there (I'm way behind on commenting on comments and stuff, though);

... I still need to (and will!) wrestle down Slovakian archaeology;

... I've eaten properly for the first time in oh, I don't know how long;

... I feel creative (but still don't quite have the time to write LoM/Sandman fic now - Slovakia comes first, I'm afraid);

... I'm still viscerally disturbed by the prevalent 'happy ending' interpretation of LOM, but beginning to feel a bit more relaxed about it;

... I'm actually looking forward to getting back to the kind of uni work I *enjoy* (once the bloody Slovakian thing is over).

Paper's done (or at least, has been delivered - I still need to produce a written version), Am. stud. essays are done, too... Time for LJ catch-up. (Length of backlog: some 600+ posts. Yikes! This may take a while...)

Actually, I'm not. Will be back (lurking or even posting, we'll see) when I have some energy left for that - probably late next week. (It's the problem with procrastination: when you finally *stop* procrastinating you have to put everything you have into the work you should have been doing while you were procrastinating.)

I'm fine, though. I think I even know how to do this bloody paper now. *If* there's enough time left...

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I'd like to thank killabeez for introducing me to Liz Phair via a fanvid. I've recently managed to acquire Exile In Guyville and have been listening to it obsessively for several days now. Brilliant album.

I'd also like to thank aislingde for sort-of-introducing ;-) me to Naked Raven via a sort-of-anti-rec recently. ;-) Another great discovery I would never have made without the internet.

One of these days I have to post a list of bands and artists I like and ask you all to rec me something that may be compatible with my taste. I'm hungry for new music. ('New' as in 'new to me', not necessarily 'current'.)

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Also... I seem to spend far too much time reading political stuff online recently. This is *partly* procrastination... but partly, perhaps even mostly, it's a - somewhat - urgent need to define my own political position. I am more and more coming to the conclusion, however, that before I can seriously think about criticising the-world-as-it-is, I need to understand *economics* better. Because most of what seems to be going wrong seems to be based in the economical system, and while having a queasy feeling about that system is a good enough motivation to start collecting information, and perhaps even to start protesting, it is not the same as having a proper political position. Or at least not one that's promising to be very useful. You can't argue properly if all you have to counter someone else's arguments is 'the current system makes me uncomfortable'...

I'm actually a really crappy archaeology student. I just have absolutely *no* clue what I'm doing. It's a bit sad to contemplate, really, because a) I'm not *actually* stupid, and b) I'm far too old, and far too advanced in my studies, to change subjects again.

Okay, I said I shouldn't post. Probably true. But I need to vent, because the frustration is killing me. So. I'm reading these texts. I'm supposed to draw information about the beginnings of metalworking in the eneolithic period in certain parts of Slovakia from it. The texts are short, and very dense. *Extremely* dense. The shortest is essentially a list of prehistoric cultures and cultural groups of the period in Slovakia and its adjoining countries. The geographical attribution is... vague. Especially for someone who does not have a very precise idea of Slovakian geography. There are no maps included. Of course, I have a map of Slovakia, but since a lot of the geographical attributions aren't of the kind you're going to find on a normal map, it's not much use. But even if the geography weren't as much of a mystery... Oh, I dunno, I think I'll have to give you an excerpt from my notes, although probably only tryfanstone and a certain Mystery Reader of this journal will be able to appreciate their uselessness. Anyway, here it is:

( Read more... )

So, I sit here with my notes, and I wonder: What the *hell* am I supposed to do with that stuff? In two weeks I'm supposed to *talk* about this to my fellow students, so what am I going to tell them? Is there *anything* valuable in this for them? If I just throw all those names at them - unpronounceable names they've most likely never heard before (neither have I) - they'll fall asleep or at least forget about it in less than five minutes, and I couldn't blame them - I would, too.

So what do I do? Look up every single one of those cultures and groups and whatnot, compile typical inventories, chronology, cultural connections, and drown them in details they'll quite probably never need again - or if they do, won't remember from my talk, because hearing something like that once, in passing, isn't enough *by far*?

What is the fucking use in that?

And what am I supposed to draw from this for *myself*? What do I learn from this? That Slovakian place names are a hazard to your tongue and keyboard? Thanks, but I think I suspected that already...

Whenever I try to work on this damn paper, it feels as if my internal computer is about to crash. Too much information to process, and too little of it seems to be of any use in relation to what I'm supposed to talk about.

Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious. Maybe all the above *actually* isn't relevant, and I was supposed to find something a lot more useful in those texts. Or maybe the above *is* useful and I just lack the archaeologist's eye to see it. Anyway, it's frelling frustrating, and it makes me feel like a total beginner without a clue. I wish actually asking my prof about all this wouldn't make me feel like an idiot. I wish I were back in Birmingham - there, I didn't feel like an idiot when I asked fundamental stuff like that.