Last week Dreamwidth implemented a search-your-own-journal feature for paid users and paid communities. So I can search my old posts (but not the comments), but as of right now I can't search other people's journals.

I've never blocked search engines on LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, so I regularly use Google to find old posts in my journal that I want to reread or link back to by searching for "cryptoxin [keyword(s)]". This is particularly valuable for me because I don't have a good tagging system for my posts.

Dreamwidth is also considering implementing site-wide search of public posts as a feature for paid users. They're looking for feedback, including whether to implement it on an opt-in or opt-out basis. One suggestion supported by several commenters for when the feature is rolled is to set the default preference to match each user's setting for offsite search engines. That is, if you've opted to minimize your journal's inclusion in public search engine results (e.g. Google), the assumption would be that you're also opting out of DW's site-wide search unless and until you change your DW site-search preference.

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So what would best describe your searchability preferences? For 'Google search' read 'external search engines'; for sitewide search, it only applies to your public posts, and is only available to other journal users. Sadly, my attempts to create a poll in DW are failing, so let's try a manual version ETA or see next entry for a functional poll:

A. Block Google search AND block sitewide search by other users

B. Block Google search BUT allow sitewide search by other users

C. Allow Google search AND allow sitewide search by other users

D. Allow Google search BUT block sitewide search by other users


Bonus question: if you would opt to block both external and internal searches, are your reasons or privacy concerns the same in both cases, or different?

Summary: A zealous federal agent played by <insert fantasy casting> heads up a joint FBI/IRS/SEC task force charged with one goal: shut down Leverage and put its principals behind bars for life. As the web closes in on Nate, Sophie, Hardison, Parker, and whatshisname (sorry! you know, the one with the longish hair played by Christian Kane?), they come up with one last, desperate plan: stage a fake alien threat to Earth that will wind up taking down the entire government and throwing the world into chaos and anarchy. But are they really prepared to sacrifice everything -- even their own lives -- to pull off the greatest con in history?

Tune in next summer for a week of Leverage that you'll never forget!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet, Torchwood fans have apparently hatched a devious scheme to overcaffeinate Russell T. Davies. Or something? Because after all, "I think we can definitly show them that a show is meant for it's fans, it's not for writers to inflict what they want on their faithful audience." [link with spoilers for recent TW]

Yeah, I just don't know what to say to that. It reminds me of a segment of soap opera fans and critics who claim that certain producers & network executives are conspiring to ruin their show intentionally with bad writing and casting decisions so that -- actually I don't understand the logic there either. I've seen it suggested that they don't want the fans to get too upset when their favorite shows are cancelled, but I'm not sure why that would justify TPTB putting themselves out of a job?

You know how generally some shows aspire to greatness or at least very goodness, and other shows are kind of bad and have trouble pulling it together, and some shows are in the middle -- as good as they need to be for casual entertainment?

I keep thinking that Leverage should sit squarely in the middle, and from the episodes that I've seen, sometimes it does. But much too often, it slips into bad -- or falls distractingly short of good enough -- where it really doesn't need to. It's frustrating, because it feels so close to "as good as it needs to be" but can't quite consistently get there.

I might have mentioned this before, but while I'm at it -- I love Aldis Hodge's Hardison, but I vaguely wish he were on one of those first category shows that have higher aspirations. Because as long as he's on Leverage, he can pretty much coast on his charm and charisma in the role. And Gina Bellman, who was so great in Jekyll, really needs better material than she's been getting here as Sophie.

From a Racialicious post on a recent MoMA screening of DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation, billed as a remix of DW Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation. One main theme in the critique is that the original source was insufficiently remixed; the result was, in effect, more a re-presenting of the film that reproduced its racism.

The whole post, and further discussion in comments, is worth reading.

I love, love John/Cameron vids -- they're my catnip, or Kryptonite, or something. They don't even have to be particularly good vids --  I'll still get hooked within the first few clips.

And yet! I don't ship them, at all. And, okay, I'm generally a total failure as a shipper*. But if anything, I anti-ship John/Cameron; I very much DO NOT WANT a human boy/robot girl love story from SCC, either in canon or in fic**.

So why, why I ask you, am I so drawn to these shippy vids?

(Also where is my SYTYCD torrent? I'm convinced that "The Scene" hates dancing. Or Mary Murphy.)

* I am at best pro-"I like how these two characters interact with each other, I want to see more, but it doesn't matter if they end up together or linger in UST or decide they'll just be friends or have a messy breakup as long as they keep having interesting scenes together." For example, one of my un-ships lately is Victor & Niki on The Young and the Restless: they've been married & divorced multiple times dating back nearly three decades from what I gather, now divorced and engaged to other people; they share children and grandchildren; and they have a very messy, complicated relationship as exes filled with tenderness, anger, regret, resentment, attraction, and mistrust. Their scenes together are fantastic.

** I am however perfectly okay with "Cameron exploits John's sexuality to manipulate him, or just figure out how it works" as long as it doesn't actually result in anything romantically or sexually.

'And as for the “macho = homoerotic” thing, both in film and in general, well, let’s just chalk that up to the fact that at this moment in the history of our nation straight men have ceded everything but snarky T-shirts, Xbox 360, leet speek and the classic geek pear shape to the men of alternate sexualities. A good-looking man in text-free clothing, speaking about something other than the iPhone? Gay.'

  -- John Scalzi rescues a lost LJ post from the distant mists of 2007, presumably before the advent of the [NSFW] Guys with iPhones.

I'm going to tentatively claim this one (and the Slate piece purporting to explain "How macho movies get misread as homoerotic" that he's riffing off of) as further support for my theory that we're entering into a post-homoerotic landscape. It's one thing for straight men to protest that they don't see the supposed homoeroticism in, say, Point Blank or 300, or -- as the author of the Slate article does -- take pains to reject or refute a homoerotic subtext. Those are the familiar old-school moves, based on a classic contagion model of the homoerotic. And what are the traditional ways of dealing with contagion? Quarantine and isolation. Separate the healthy and the sick; minimize exposure risk; regard potential symptoms with a high index of suspicion; develop sensitive diagnostics and, ideally, vaccinations. Because everyone's potentially susceptible.

And that's why the Slate author comes across as either old-fashioned or juvenile. Dude, chill out! When you protest, in defense of straight men taking pleasure in narcissistic identification with the "hot, sweaty men" of 300, "Shouldn't a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?" -- you're fighting last century's battles (and over a film set in 480 B.C., no less). I certainly wouldn't say that nobody cares anymore, but let's face it, vast swaths of culture and society have moved on. Retro, unironic avowals of heterosexuality? Not hip, not hot. Sure, "no homo" still has currency, but also inevitably oscillates between "straightforward" ritual disclaimer and ironic performativity. (Conversely, people quite earnestly and sincerely profess that when they say, "That's so gay!" they really, really don't mean that kind of gay because they're totally cool with that stuff and homophobia is, like, so lame.)

These days, no self-respecting straight man would protest the homoerotic too much -- at least, not with a straight face. Over the last decade or so -- marked at its outset by the launch of Viagra, and culminating in the ascendancy of Judd Apatow -- straight men all over the country have embraced the possibilities of a masculine heterosexual insecurity all but completely decoupled from the 20th century spectre of contagious gayness and sexual orientation misattribution.

So nowadays, the fight has shifted to cultural status. These men have learned to relax and love the gay, but that doesn't necessarily mean they support same-sex marriage or gays in the military. When Scalzi cites "the present heterosexual male abdication of anything more culturally, emotionally and intellectually resonant than 'Dick in a Box'", do we mourn, celebrate, shrug, or roll our eyes? If the global economic meltdown is accelerating the Death of Macho, will sexual orientation as well as gender determine the respective winners and losers of this world-historical process? But hey, that's politics -- in the meantime, we can all go laugh together at Brüno, right?

Melissa Gregg linked to her post from last year that I hadn't seen, a critical response to Clay Shirky's Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk that several people on my friendslist linked to. An excerpt:


Néojaponisme excerpts a passage from Azuma Hiroki's Otaku: Japan's Database Animals which "deconstructs this self-association with postmodernism in Japan, arguing that the idea of a 'postmodern Japan' has more to do with 1980s’ narcissism than proper theoretical conclusions":

( spoilers through CoE 4 )

It has been pretty good, though. Who knew they had it in them?

I JUST SPENT THE LAST HOUR ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT.

MY LOVE FOR LISA McCUNE AS XO KNOWS NO BOUNDS.

ALSO: BUFFER! SPIDER! EVERYONE!

Re: the preview for next week's episode: !!!!!

(...it makes me feel a bit sorry for everyone for whom Torchwood is the highlight of their television week...)

 

Via giandujakiss : Salinger wins injunction barring U.S. publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye (WSJ, NYT)

I took a quick read through the decision [PDF], which hinges on the judge's findings that the new novel is not sufficiently transformative to outweigh other factors supporting a copyright infringement claim (e.g. commerical nature of the use, amount & substantiality of the portion used, potential market harm to the original).

The court rejected the defendants' argument that the new book constituted a parody of the original and was therefore transformative. From what I can see, the judge reasoned as follows:

• Parody must comment on or criticize the original work itself (vs. using the original to parody society in general)
• Parody must be immediately recognizable as such to the average reader (vs. indirect or implied)
• Rehashing or even accentuating themes already present in the original work does not constitute parody
• While parody requires some borrowing from the original (e.g. characters, plot details, style) to be recognizable as such, the amount of borrowing should be limited to that necessary for parody or other transformative purposes
• N.B.: describing your work as a respectful tribute or sequel in interviews and promotional material will undercut your subsequent parody defense

( Infringer in the Rye )

In other words, this interpretation of "transformative" would tend to reward works that have the most immediately combative or critical relationship to their original sources. In this light, fannishness counts against you: in rejecting the parody defense, the judge reasons that "60 Years' plain purpose is not to expose Holden Caulfield's disconnectedness, absurdity, and ridiculousness, but rather to satisfy Holden's fans' passion for Holden Caulfield's disconnectedness, absurdity, and ridiculousness..." [emphasis added], citing statements from the defendants conveying respect and admiration for Salinger and Catcher (and their "status as 'American icons') as further evidence against a parodic purpose.

In this light, fans writing for other fans would be implicitly suspect in the eyes of a court. Fannishness here is incompatible with the muscular, antagonistic work of transformation that verges on the patricidal, the necessary wrestling with an original work rather than "'free riding on another's creations.'" The insufficiently transformative writer is precisely the writer whose work is insufficiently critical of the original, "'which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up somethng fresh...'." This sounds very much akin to the "why don't you just create your own characters and write original fiction?" objection to fanfic.

So regardless of whether this particular commercial unauthorized sequel to a work still under copyright merits protection as fair use, the reasoning which the judge applied to evaluating whether and to what degree 60 Years constituted a transformative use are disturbing from the perspective of fanworks and other forms of remix culture.

Tonight's episode was really good -- they're sent to respond to a helicopter crash on an island that was used as a nuclear test site. Complications ensue, and then keep ensuing. It's not Shakespeare, or The Wire, but Sea Patrol consistently delivers well-constructed plots with nice character moments that lean towards the underplayed. And according to the preview, next week's episode is called "Ghost Ship"! Complete with ominous voiceover promising certain doom. Yeah, I'm so there.

I've started watching the first season of Sea Patrol as well. It's good, though I'd say the series has gotten stronger since the early days. It's interesting to see Lisa McCune's XO back when she's just joined the crew, when she's struggling to be accepted, ambivalent about how the new posting fits in with her career ambitions, and clashing with the CO. And it seems liked they originally leaned heavier on weaving a season-long arc/mystery throughout the episodes, the first one having something to do with a private marine biology company and a "cursed" island.

Jason Mittell is asking for examples via Twitter of "'3rd person flashbacks' on TV (not character's memory or recaps) to something seen in earlier episodes." Michael Newman suggested soap operas, but my sense is that flashbacks in soaps typically signal a particular character's memory. One possible exception is the "detective gathers all the murder suspects together and reconstructs the night of the crime" where s/he narrates events shown in flashback that s/he didn't actually witness. I'm not sure, but I think Santa Barbara did that 20 years ago with their excellent denouement to the "Who killed Channing Jr.?" storyline. Other people have suggested 30 Rock, Arrested Development, and Damages as shows that use the 3rd person flashback device. It makes me wonder why it's not used more widely.

After last week, I would definitely rec the very idea of weekends. These recs are things that brightened my weekend:

I've Been to a Marvelous Party (vid; multi) by charmax

Symmetry or something (fic; The Office, Erin/Kelly) by dollsome

4ever (vid; D.E.B.S.) by jarrow

Basically any or all of these are guaranteed to make you happy, whether or not you know the source.

Also, my favorite YouTuber communitychannel (aka Natalie) went to a con dressed as BSG's Starbuck, which just makes her more awesome.

Plus, check out the amazing collection of BSG vids and vid-type things posted on YouTube under hybridutterances, featuring stuff by talented vidders like kiki_miserychic and beccatoria. As a body of work, it's something akin to a BSG version of Scooby Road in scope and achievement, and a compelling argument for the seductions of hybridity.

Is there a fandom service where you can commission someone to pimp your new show? Because I am terrible at it, and probably have zero credibility given most of the stuff that I watch. Plus, I've never worked out how to include an image in a post, so no picspams for me.

But I want everybody to watch Sea Patrol with me!

It's about the Australian navy, which means that it's mostly set on a boat! At sea! With lots of action! And sometimes pirates!

Um, that's probably not enticing enough, is it?

There are lots of characters, and I'm starting to be able to tell them apart after six episodes! It was hard at first, because they all wear uniforms -- mostly fatigues, but occasional the fancy dress kind. People like uniforms, right? Also they all have nicknames, some of which refer to their positions on the ship and some of which don't, so you have the XO and the CO, but also Nav and Buffer and Swain and Spider and Two Dads. And some that I'm forgetting. But I like them all!

( XO XO XO )

Still, the point is, that this show is maybe turning me into a proto-shipper! I'm not there yet, and I don't have any OTPs on the horizon, but -- I'm speculating. And there's plenty to work with -- six or seven guys on board plus three women makes for multiple combinations of all persuasions, even an OT10 if you like.

Anyways, if you're up for a high seas adventure with an ensemble cast, here's your show!

Because I'm basically watching So You Think You Can Dance on a torrent time delay, I occupied myself last night by checking out the semi-final round of the second "season" of So You Think You Can Vid on YouTube. The judges had selected 80 vidders from the 420 entries in the audition round, and assigned them one of five songs to vid (entries had to be at least 40 seconds). I watched the entries for three of the songs: Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows" (playlist of semifinalist entries), Utada Hikaru's "Sanctuary" (semifinalist playlist), and Frou Frou's "Let Go" (semifinalist playlist). I haven't seen the other two batches yet for Muse's "Plug In Baby" (playlist) and Radiohead's "How to Disappear Completely" (playlist).

Because not all of the semifinalists submitted vids (or else some were posted privately?), and most vids were shorter than the full length of the song, you can watch each playlist in about 25 minutes. It's pretty cool to see over a dozen vid responses to the same song, though it can get repetitive. I can't say that I saw a lot of wildly divergent interpretations of the songs, but then I didn't know a lot of the sources (which skew heavily towards movies overand I wouldn't describe the ones for the batches that I've seen so far as lyrically meaty.

What does emerge really clearly is a certain YouTube vidding aesthetic (albeit not the only or even necessarily dominant YouTube vidding aesthetic). I'd describe it as rapid cutting and lots of effects, with a tendency towards heavily working over the clips through tweaking elements such as color and saturation. I'd also mention the frequent (or at least, significantly more frequent than in the vids that I see posted on LJ) use of text (generally fragments of the lyrics) and audio from the video source (lines of dialogue).

( against naturalism )

Either way, in the meantime, I'll be rooting for elekta to advance into the next round.

Do you find yourself getting caught up in following an internet kerfuffle about something you know nothing about that you randomly stumbled across? To the point of forming opinions and mentally taking sides, even though the core issue remains impenetrable to you?

Apparently it all started when someone named Alex declared in Why I will never be clean again..., "With a heavy heart, and with very little jouissance.... 'I hate Badiou.'"

Now all I know about Badiou is that he's a trendy French philosopher, the latest in a long line of trendy French philosophers. Where 'trendy' means intellectually fashionable, though for all I know, he may also be a style icon, but that seems unlikely. I don't know anything about his ideas or writing; I looked him up some time ago when I first heard his name, and frankly it all seemed too dull to pay attention to. I am pretty sure that his first name is Alain, but I can't guarantee that since nobody involved in the current blog contretemps refers to him as anything but Badiou.

So Alex hates Badiou, and people react and respond, and apparently someone somewhere dismisses Alex' critique as fanboyism gone awry, according to k-punk in Fans, vampires, trolls, Masters:


Ah, but wait! Anodyne Lite intervenes in Sexuation and fandom: there are no girls on the internet:
And thus did the fanboy/fangirl debate arrive at the cutting edge of philosophy, which (fittingly?) is apparently going by the name of speculative realism these days.

I will give Alex the last word here, if only because his renunciation of Badiou could only be better if it had been published as an op-ed in The Onion:


Hey Alex -- if this is your idea of the future of philosophy, I think 4chan got there first.

Ever since my dream that I was trapped on The Hills, I've mostly been avoiding Twitter, not posting and only checking it once a day. Last night I had a dream in which I was getting ready to go to work in the morning, and as I was about to leave my apartment I discovered that all of the locks on my door had been removed, including the chain and the deadbolt.

My first thought in the dream was that someone had taken them off in middle of the night while I was sleeping. But then I realized (again, in the dream) that the locks could have only been removed from inside of the apartment, and nobody could have gotten in while I was asleep, so I must have somehow done it myself. Upon waking, my first thought was that this, too, is a Twitter anxiety dream.

It seems like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has also been going through some social media anxiety viz. Twitter:
( warning: offensive to fangirls of all sizes and those who love them: )
Um, wow, Trent. But the rest of his forum post is worth reading. He's been a huge pioneer and advocate for online music distribution and social media, so when he pulls back from Twitter, it takes on more weight than your typical flounce.

I can't help but read this in the context of recent events on the feminist group blog Shakesville, which Sady from Tiger Beatdown posted about here; see also this post from The Apostate). Personally I've never really been a fan of Shakesville, and don't read it regularly; when I do follow links to it, I've tended to find the in-jokes and invocations of community increasingly off-putting. That definitely biases me towards wondering how much of their recent problems are a direct consequence of both the personalities involved and their particular way of claiming and promoting themselves as a community.

( also I really hate that teaspoon thing, but moving right along )

And maybe there's something here about the difference between building social networks vs. online communities. But I don't think that Reznor's pitch (echoed by Techcrunch) for verified identities or the demarcation by Shakesville's Melissa McEwan of "safe space" necessarily get to the root of the dynamics in play here.

LJ/DW media fandom has been the first time I've really participated in an online community. This month marks three years since I created an LJ, but I mostly lurked for the first twelve months, so my period of active participation really only extends back for two years.

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One thing that I like about being a guy in LJ/DW fandom is that I can't take for granted that I have a clear and secure place in every conversation, or feel confident about how to enter into those conversations and participate in them. It's not that LJ/DW fandom is the only place in my life where that applies, but in other contexts that uncertainty is temporary and situational; here, for me, it's foundational and structural.

And what I found here is that I make mistakes. Sometimes people tell me that I've made a mistake, sometimes I figure that out on my own, a lot of times I'm not sure, and other times I probably never realized that I made a mistake at all. Some of my mistakes have stemmed from not thinking about my words from someone else's perspective; some of them have come from being inappropriately glib; some of them have come from arrogance, or ignorance, or just a self-serving desire to be part of a conversation regardless of whether I had anything to contribute. And sometimes my mistakes are in not saying anything.

And of course I make all of those mistakes elsewhere in my life, but the experience of participating in a community that is both online plus predominantly female has sensitized me to them differently. I can't say that it's actually translated into me making fewer mistakes yet, but it has giving me more insight into how and when and where I make mistakes, and what I can do about it. And then I think about how "making fewer mistakes" is setting the bar pretty low, and I want to do and be more and better than that.

At any rate, thanks to everyone who's been part of my time in LJ/DW fandom so far -- you're pretty damn fantastic.

This weekend I had a nightmare about The Hills. It started when I was in Los Angeles for some reason, maybe a work conference, and I took a break and went to an outdoor cafe. I noticed Stephanie Pratt sitting by herself at another table, looking as though she wanted to be recognized, but I just kept reading my book and sipping lemonade. Finally she got up and started to leave, but as she walked by my table she dropped her handbag, spilling the contents. I helped her gather them up, and she was very friendly. She sat down with me and struck up a conversation, even though I tried to discourage her by not putting my book down. It felt awkward because I could tell that she wanted me to treat her like a celebrity, but never came right out and asked me if I knew who she was. Still, she kept working the first names of her castmates into the rather one-sided conversation, each time scrutinizing my face for any hints of recognition.

I finally said that I had to leave, and that it was nice to meet her. She instantly leapt up and said she'd give me a ride in return for helping her when she dropped her handbag. I tried to decline, saying that I didn't have far to walk, but she insisted that in L.A. you have to drive everywhere. As we were leaving the cafe, I saw a camera crew across the street and realized that they'd been filming us the entire time. At that point, I insisted that I'd rather walk, but she begged me to get in the car with her, or else I'd embarrass her in front of the camera people. I finally agreed, and we drove off, with the cameras following us on skateboards.

But instead of dropping me off at my hotel, she drove to a pool party that Brody Jenner was throwing, and told me that I had to introduce myself as her date. I said that I didn't think that was a good idea, and explained that I wasn't even dressed for a pool party and had to get back to my hotel because I had dinner plans, and then she started to cry. She said that the producers were threatening to fire her from The Hills because she didn't have a storyline, so she needed to create some drama to stay in the show. Suddenly Kristen Cavallari came up to us, with a camera team in tow, and started taunting Stephanie as a has-been. I tried to slip away as they got into a shouting match, but just as I made it to the street and saw a bus coming, Spencer Pratt popped up from the bushes, grabbing my arm and demanding to have a man-to-man talk with his sister's new boyfriend.

Before I knew it, I found myself living with Spencer and Heidi, partying with Brody and Frankie Delgado, going out to lunch with Lo and Audrina, dodging Stephanie at nightclubs, and hating every minute of it. But every time I tried to explain that this was all a big misunderstanding and I didn't want to be on the show, a camera crew would show up and I kept my mouth shut so as not to humiliate Stephanie on television. I went to ever more elaborate lengths to sneak away and get to the airport, but something always happened to foil my plans. I was increasingly miserable, and kept desperately trying to call or text people in New York to feed my cat until I could get back. But none of my friends took me seriously because I was on The Hills now. Meanwhile, all the tabloids and gossip sites referred to me as Stephanie's loser boyfriend, so Spencer tried to coach me about my image and advised me that I'd get more screentime if I started acting like an asshole and cheated on his sister with Kristen or Audrina.

Fortunately I woke up, and discovered that my cat had been trying to get my attention because he was long overdue for his breakfast.

I haven't seen last night's So You Think You Can Dance yet, but I was curious enough about who made it into the Top 20 to go to the SYTYCD website. Based on the auditions, it seemed possible that half of the dancers who made it into the competition this year would be people of color, but then on Wednesday night it looked like they were sending a high rate of people of color -- especially women of color -- home during Vegas week. Based on the FOX SYTYCD blog, I'm tentatively guessing that the numbers didn't quite reach 50%, but are still eight or nine out of twenty?

For future reference & comparison, here's part of a comment that I left in one of oyceter 's posts last year:


I don't know how this compares to other competition reality shows like American Idol, but in oyceter 's words, "it's so much easier seeing non-stereotyped POC on SYTYCD than it is on most network tv shows."

And of course these numbers don't even begin to capture SYTYCD's complex racial and cultural issues -- but at least they suggest that the positive trends from the last couple of seasons will continue this year.