When counteragent said that she wished Supernatural had cast Chuck as a woman, my first thought was, why stop there? What if they'd cast Dean as a woman, Sam as a woman, Bobby as a woman, Castiel as a woman, Lucifer as a woman -- in short, an all-female cast?

Then I realized that what I was imagining was basically Supernatural as reimagined by the Takarazuka Revue. Here's a clip from a performance of Rose of Versailles:


Perfect, right?

So what shows (movies, books, comics, etc.) would you want to see with an all-female cast?

So I have some comments to catch up on, but I got sidetracked this weekend by finding out that one of my favorite wrestlers, Jeff Hardy, got arrested on Friday and charged with drug trafficking. I can't tell you how much that depresses me. The charges are based on the amount of drugs (Vicodin, Soma, and anabolic steroids) found in his home, and not (as far as anyone knows) any evidence that he was dealing them -- it's very conceivable that they were for his personal use, as Vicodin is a painkiller and the others are apparently often prescribed & used to aid healing from injuries.

One of the reasons I started drifting away from wrestling years ago was my growing discomfort with the idea that my enjoyment was inextricably linked to the spectacle of the wrestlers going to ever-greater lengths to do these amazing stunts which punished and injured their bodies, over and over again. And Jeff Hardy was always a prime example of this, with his wild leaps from the turnbuckles, ladders, etc. It made me feel uncomfortably complicit as I'd hear about serious and even permanent injuries, even career-related deaths, and dependence on drugs to get through a grueling touring and performing schedule.

So I don't know. I'd only just rediscovered my joy for wrestling, and now I'm already back in that place and have no better answers. And like all the problematic narratives and representations and erasures in media fandom TV shows (which are also present in professional wrestling, of course), part of me wants to find ways to reconcile myself to what my pleasures make me complicit in, and part of me wants to resist or defer that urge towards reconciliation. Because the obvious options in both cases -- compartmentalization, recuperation, subversion, critique -- still feel to close too denial or disavowal or accommodation. And I distrust the temptation to just figure out how to feel good about the stuff I like and feel good about myself for liking it, and rationalize away the rest. At the very least, I think I should hold on to that tension and discomfort, and the reconciliation tactics feel like they're geared towards relieving or resolving those tensions that I should be feeling and paying attention to.

Also there's another wrestling PPV event tonight which I'm actually not that excited about, due to the set up and stipulations, but there's a few matches that I do want to see. So the clock is ticking!

In the meantime, inpsired by cofax7, I've been watching the third season of Avatar this weekend to distract me from drug busts and wrestlers' herniated discs. So far, so good! And I need to get to the comics store to pick up the latest Secret Six.

So whose idea was it to chat up the Supernatural season premiere on Twitter by making #luciferiscoming a trending topic? Was that some kind of consensus alternative when nothing on the first slate of #deaniscrying, #samisshirtless, #brothersarehugging, #castielismycopilot, and #ofcoursebobbyisstillgrumpy got a majority of votes? Or is there some kind of fan campaign to market the show to Satanists?

And hey, while I'm asking -- you know that thing where someone makes an LJ post, and then one or more people comment, "This."? Is that just an LJ/fandom/et al. thing, or does it happen on other kinds of blogs? When did it start -- and more importantly, where will it end?

And another thing! The whole "Signal Boost" in subject lines when you're linking to something -- where did that come from? Is it a Firefly thing? Just how many of my pet peeves can I blame on Joss Whedon?

TorrentFreak: isoHunt Launches 'Social' BitTorrent Site

It's called Hexagon.cc -- from isoHunt's announcement:


Sounds perfect, right? Stream or download, complete with privacy options. Check out how they've worded their copyright policies viz. DMCA compliance too.

Wrestling: The amazing match on last Friday's WWE Smackdown between Rey Mysterio and John Morrison for the Intercontinental Championship. Nearly half an hour in length and never a boring moment. Rivals the tables, ladders & chairs match between Jeff Hardy & C.M. Punk at Summerslam for the best wrestling I've seen since I started watching again.

( Honorable mentions )

Soap opera: Stacy Haiduk's riveting performance as Patty Williams aka Mary Jane Benson on The Young and the Restless. Normally, I abhor the whole Fatal Attraction-style woman-spurned-turns-psycho trope -- like, I really, really hate it with a passion. I think it's the idea that this trope needs no further explanation -- that we're supposed to assume that women's psychology is such that they're only one romantic rejection away from insanity. And this case, at least on paper, should be no exception, especially on a show that already has two other female characters in the midst of nervous breakdowns (no, seriously! Driving one to random acts of shoplifting that landed her in a mental institution, and leading the other -- victim of a gaslighting plot preying on her history of mental illness -- to hallucinations, a hit-and-run accident, and a miscarriage-turned-hysterical pregnancy).

But Haiduk is so mesmerizing that I don't care. Even when the storyline has faltered, as it has many times, Haiduk infuses such conviction and commitment into the role that it smoothes over all of the plotholes and dubious motivations. And the layers and subtlety that she brings to the role somehow manage to keep her character sympathetic even when she's committing unforgivable acts (though it helps that most of the other characters involved with her aren't particularly sympathetic themselves).

Reality dance competitions: Okay, despite my fears, the America's Best Dance Crew Bollywood challenge last week ended up with some awesome choreography & performances. One especially welcome choice -- they assigned each crew a different "Bollywood" dance style to incorporate into their routines. A very strong episode overall, and tied with the excellent  "Bollywood" group routine on last week's results show for So You Think You Can Dance Canada, choreographed by Slumdog Millionaire choreographer Longinus "Longi" Fernandes.

Comics: Nothing special that was new out last week (Invincible Iron Man lost a bit of momentum after the last few issues), but I'm enjoying catching up on some stuff I'd missed -- most notably the sadly canceled Manhunter. It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite '80s comics, Steven Grant's Whisper.

I feel as though my fannish interests are drifting further and further away from the LJ/DW zeitgeist, which makes me hesitant to post about the stuff I'm enjoying. So, as an experiment, I'm going to try to post in code to make my enthusiasms sound more relevant to everyone else's interests.

I've been catching up on The Secret Six Leverage and I'm really enjoying the "band of misfit outlaws" team vibe and Gail Simone's John Rogers' writing. And the characters are great -- I had my doubts about Bane Eliot at first, but I think I like his dynamic with Scandal Savage Sophie.

Another recent find is The Mighty Avengers Merlin. I'll admit, I found the art anachronisms jarring at first, but it's very well done visually. And the writing somehow hits that magical "so wrong, it's right" sweet spot. The characterization of Hank Pym Uther is especially inspired, and I'm intrigued by where they're going with Loki Nimueh.

A pretty strong episode of SYTYCD Canada Supernatural this week; I haven't seen tonight's results show yet, but I'm assuming that Melanie B. Castiel gets eliminated. Still, America's Best Dance Crew House had possibly its best episode this season with the Bollywood challenge.

...okay, I'm stumped for what to substitute for professional wrestling. I guess I haven't used the Star Trek reboot yet: if Randy Orton = James Kirk, who's the WWE's Spock?

Wow, this code thing pretty much went all down hill after Secret Six/Leverage, huh? ETA: or possibly during.

Twitter (following 28 people): "about 1 hour ago"

Facebook (102 friends): 2 minutes ago

LJ/Dreamwidth (~80 friends, factoring in overlap): 41 minutes ago


I actually first confirmed by searching Twitter for 'gmail' before anyone in my social networks had posted about it. Still, unsuprisingly, Twitter & LJ/DW = more web-oriented than my IRL Facebook friends.

I'll miss Jeff Hardy, but how much do I love that the WWE's new heavyweight champion C.M. Punk's gimmick is that he's straight edge, complete with magic marker 'X's on the back of his hands, and harangues the crowd about their drinking, smoking, and drug use?

(I am worried that last night's Bollywood challenge on America's Best Dance Crew will turn out to have been a train wreck, so I haven't watched yet. Anyone who's seen it, please advise?) 

 Insta-reaction:

( let's say spoilery to be on the safe side )

In other news, next week's theme on America's Best Dance Crew is Bollywood. *crosses fingers*

Between comic books and professional wrestling*, I seem to be revisiting some of my main mid-to-late '90s-era fandoms. Oh, and I also embarked in a desultory rewatch of the first two seasons of Babylon 5 on Hulu, which I haven't seen since they originally aired. At this rate, any day now I'll end up searching for downloads of Xena: Warrior Princess and Marmalade Boy.

Is there such a thing as a fannish midlife crisis?

* And falling behind on professional wrestling in less than a week! Next time, I won't plunge back into wrestling the week before one of the WWE's big four pay-per-view events. It's only Tuesday, and I've barely seen an hour of the 5 hours of wrestling that have already aired this week. :(

 I think I accidentally started to make a vid last night. With a song choice inspired by watching wrestling this week *facepalm*. Oh, and it's a shipper vid *headdesk* [nothing against shipper vids, it's just that I'm a total failure as a shipper so it's not exactly a "vid what you know" scenario for me]. So I ended up staying awake until 5:30 am. I have zero clips to show for it so far, but I did manage to edit the song down to two minutes! Which is still probably 90 seconds more ambitious than my concept, but maybe I can just string together a 30-second sequence of clips and repeat it a few times, right? Especially since I've now got a track with 2 verses and what feels like 8 repeats of the chorus. But it's a great chorus!

See, I've been thinking about trying to vid for over a year now. By now, I've got at least seven or eight Works in Progress Solely Existing in My Head, because the software seems so daunting. And it is! I started off by trying Windows Movie Maker, figuring that it couldn't be that hard to pick up. And it looked pretty straightforward, until I imported an .avi of an episode and discovered that it only recognized the audio and not the video. I tried to figure out what was going on, via Google searches and looking through the tagged entries of the LJ vidding comm and making sure that I'd downloaded the right codec, and -- still nothing. I contemplated converting my avis to another format, but figured I'd see if I had better luck with another program.

So I, er, acquired Sony Vegas and couldn't get it to install. Next stop: Adobe Premiere. I got that to install easily enough, and it handled the avi files fine, but refused to import the mp3 of the song I wanted to use *sigh*. Which, okay, I could handle that, and I wanted to edit the song down anyways for a) length and b) wildly inappropriate lyrics. So I opened up Audacity for the first time, and it all went pretty smoothly (I hope? I cut a section out of the middle, and I think the resulting splice works but, hey, 5:30 am). Audacity let me export the edited song as a wav file that Premiere was now happy to import.

So I guess the next thing to do is watch the episodes and jot down scenes to clip? The Premiere interface is absurdly intimidating -- did I mention that I needed to choose an aspect ratio before it would even let me start a new project? -- and certainly overkill for my immediate needs, but so far it works. Maybe I'll play around with it a bit or go to a bookstore and find a Premiere for Dummies-type book. I still have no idea how I'm going to do stuff like match beats -- the waveform for my song basically looks like a solid wall, due to the heavy guitars.

Well, there goes my weekend. I'm posting this to keep me motivated -- it would be all too easy for me to give up, especially with the absence of instant gratification. Also my cat was really upset that I was ignoring him last night (or maybe he was just sick of hearing the same song over and over while I was fiddling around in Audacity). I'll have to come up with ways to reward myself for incremental progress and reward my cat for his patience and understanding.

In between reading laurashapiro 's VividCon post yesterday evening, and bop_radar's related post this morning, I got the sudden craving for professional wrestling vids. I think my mind had drifted towards different vidding cultures and communities, and idly wondering whether any wrestling vids had ever been shown at VVC, and what (if anything?) it would signal if/when one was.

I'd randomly stumbled across some wrestling vids on YouTube before, so that was where I headed, but I was at a bit of a loss as to how to search for them. After a bit of trial and error, I did some searches for "[wrestler name] vid" (starting with Jeff Hardy as a likely vid subject) which yielded some results, but still left me feeling like I was hovering around the edges of wrestling vidding. In hindsight, I should have tried a Google search, since I'm pretty sure that the major community hubs would most likely be on message boards and other sites.

In hindsight, what I really wanted was something structured analagous to the LJ-based live action/media fandom vidding community, which I now know how to navigate. But when I came to LJ, I had a relatively steep learning curve, and I had to invest a significant amount of time in just getting the lay of the land. It wasn't really until I started delurking that I really got my bearings and developed ways to find what I was looking for via recs, communities, etc.

In my experience, YouTube as a portal isn't always an ideal point of entry to other vidding cultures. Sometimes I can track down stuff like contests and playlists that link together vidders, but other times I just spend a lot of time validating Sturgeon's Law and wondering why it's so hard to find the good stuff.

In the meantime, I ended up appeasing my craving by watching this week's ECW and WWE RAW shows, which I haven't done for *gulp* years. If I get hooked on wrestling again, I'll blame the dearth of SYTYCD Canada torrents. And if you have any recs or pointers for wrestling vids or vid sites, send them my way!

Thanks to everyone who has been posting such excellent Vividcon recs and con reports! It's definitely another bumper crop this year, with lots of innovative, ambitious, self-reflexive, and just plain fun vids.

For the moment, I'm just going to rec one vid: bananainpyjamas aka dragonchic's stunning Wanted vid, Break Teen Spirit in Four Minutes. The editing is just fantastic -- some of dragonchic's best work, and that's saying a lot. I haven't seen the movie, and now I'm really tempted to, but I doubt that it can live up to the vid.

I should tell you that this vid is incredibly addictive -- I've watched it at least twenty times* already, and it's gotten so I can't leave home in the mornings without another fix viewing (luckily my boss is on vacation, so I don't have to explain why I keep arriving late to work). So don't say I didn't warn you!

* Er, come to think of it, it's actually more like thirty or forty....

From The Women Behind 'Mad Men', WSJ (via kottke)

There are two -- Count 'em! Two! -- new episodes of the geeky comedy Better Off Ted airing tonight. This is a very good thing.

The 4th season premiere of America's Best Dance Crew is up on MTV's website. It's looking like this could be a very strong season. Also, they have a voguing crew this year!

Over at MightyGodKing, two overlapping-but-different lists of the top 21 most influential comics writers here and here. As someone dipping my toes back into comics after a long hiatus, I'm pretty ambivalent about the turn to decompressed storytelling. Then again, a couple months ago, I went back and picked up one of those black & white Essential collections of 20+ issues of The Avengers from Steve Engelhart's run, which I remembered fondly from my childhood (at least from the back issues that I avidly scavenged). I was sad to discover that it really didn't hold up very well. So -- aside from the classics -- I can't really lapse into nostalgia for the good old days of Silver Age-style narrative. That doesn't mean I have to like Brian Michael Bendis, though....

Anybody remember back when Madonna was the darling of the cultural studies set? I'm getting flashbacks from all the trendy fawning over Lady Gaga (see: FlowTV [cached version], Tiger Beatdown, Flavorpill) barely a year after I first encountered her through her appearances on So You Think You Can Dance and The Hills. (Yes, she appeared on The Hills, and please don't use that as a springboard to pontificate on how 'Lady Gaga' subverts realness/celebrity/performance/whatever.) I'll be over here, rolling my eyes and counting my grey hairs.

First, everyone passed the pop quiz! Among the acceptable answers submitted: 4chan, YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDB, and TEH INTERNETS in general. A geeky gold star goes to gchick  for 'APIs', and executrix  gets the Marshall McLuhan Memorial Award for 'the Marconi telegraph'. I also would have accepted 'art school', 'beauty pageants', 'that camp my parents sent me to when I was ten', and of course 'fandom'.

And apparently some of you think like the U.S. Marine Corps, who used the description that I quoted to justify banning Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other unspecified "social networking sites."

It just goes to show that even the self-proclaimed "world's premier expeditionary fighting force" is helpless in the face of the sinister new threat of user-generated content. Protect yourself before it's too late -- delete, log off, unplug!


Also it's Wednesday, which means new comics day, so I have a rendezvous with The Invicible Iron Man #16 after work. After seeing an intriguing favorable mention from Steven 'Doom Patrols' Shaviro on Twitter recently (shh! don't tell the marines!), I picked up the last few issues, and they were really good! I've never particularly been a big Iron Man fan -- the last time I read his comic regularly was umpteen years ago, before and during the classic "Demon in a Bottle" arc. But I really like the current storyline, and it's weaving in some great characters like Madame Masque and the Black Widow.

Sadly, I figured I should check out Iron Man writer Matt Fraction's other main title, The Uncanny X-Men, and it was terrible. I haven't read any of the X-books since Grant Morrison's run, but the original Chris Claremont Uncanny X-Men was a formative part of my childhood & adolescence.

So for any superhero comics fans out there -- anything else I should pick up at the comic book store? Marvel or DC is fine; I can catch up on the continuity later. Basically, any recs for current/recent comic books, superhero or otherwise, welcome!

What does the following describe?

"[A] proven haven for malicious actors and content and... particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries."

First thing that comes to your mind -- no wrong answers!

ETA: And the results are in!

Whether you're disenchanted with the current season of So You Think You Can Dance, or worried about going through withdrawal after the Thursday finale, I've got good news -- the fourth season of America's Best  Dance Crew begins on Sunday on MTV! Previous winners include the JabbaWockeeZ and Quest Crew. Bonus -- Shane Sparks is a judge, and Mary Murphy & Nigel Lythgoe aren't!

While you're waiting for Sunday to come, you can sample previous seasons on ABDC's MTV website (offer may not be applicable outside of the U.S.?). Or just get a taste of dance crew competition via this music video from Varsity Fanclub Big Bang:

Rebecca Tushnet blogs:


The section of the brief covering transformativeness draws on Blanch v. Koons (see William Patry's blog post, full text of 2nd Circuit decision). One of the interesting things to me about that decision is how the finding in favor of transformative use relies heavily on artist Jeff Koons' own account of his purpose, as stated in an affidavit, in making an artwork that included part of an image appropriated from a fashion spread by photographer Andrea Blanch. This seems to put an enormous amount of weight on the artist's own self-proclaimed, after-the-fact intentions. In an earlier post on the district court decision, Patry acerbically commented:


Everyone seems to agree that judges shouldn't play the role of art or literary critics. In the words of the brief for the Salinger case, "Courts have recognized that fair use must not depend on a single judge’s perception of an artist’s merit but rather on the possibility that a reasonable member of society could perceive the transformative use."

But who are these reasonable members of society? The phrase seems to imply laypersons rather than experts and critics -- the kind of people that Patry suggests could "merely look at [the artist's] work to see if it is, objectively, transformative." I almost get the sense that reasonableness is construed as the opposite of expertise. If it's only those highfalutin' experts with their five-dollar words that can discern a work's transformativeness (and you know those art and literary critic types -- they'll happily argue that up is down and right is wrong if you give them a podium), what's a poor judge, trained only to the law, to do? So a reasonable perception of transformative use is one that your typical judge could at least conceive of, or -- if proposed by, say, the defense in a copyright case -- deem plausible, without special recourse to critical theory or specialized discourse.

So where would this leave subcultural transformative works that rely on community-specific knowledge for legibility? How many "reasonable members of society" outside of specific fan cultures could perceive the transformative nature of vids? If certain kinds of subcultural works require their own forms of subcultural expertise to generate meaning and response amongst their subcultural audiences, how will courts navigate fair use claims? Should courts be predisposed to give greater deference to fair use claims for subcultural appropriations and transformations of mainstream sources? Have they in the past?

See previous entry for context & explanation.



ETA: ...er, the second option should read "Block Google searches; allow...".