life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

I still can't get LJ Archive to work, despite downloading .NET 3.0 to make it happy. It works for one of my journals, but not this one. I suspect some eejit has stuck a daft smiley in a comment somewhere that the program is interpreting as code. Why can't LJ export your journal with comments in a readable format themselves?

I love it when you find that someone you know in one fandom shares some of your others. Last week doyle_sb4 emailed me saying, "I didn't know you ran an Antonia Forest comm!" I would have squee'd loudly if I hadn't been in work. It turned out that she'd just found the novels in the university library and is currently working her way through them. And the lolcat thing is not her fault really.

Has anyone read the book Human Nature? How old is Tim in it?

A DW fic rec: Mr and Mrs Smith (go to Lyrae), by owlyscribblings. It's funny and pointy and brilliant.

Still no luck with Project Journal Back-up. And sitemeter.com have changed their rather nice green and lavender graphs to red and yellow. Ow, my eyes.

As far as I can remember, every last one of you is in fandom. Go and join fandom_counts. It's to say we're here, and we can tell the difference between paedophiles and fictional characters, abuse survivors and people who want to discuss Lolita.

Oh, looks like LJ are back-pedalling so hard their chain's come off.

In others news, can someone stop the Sun from publishing made-up stories about Doctor Who?

For anyone who isn't watching martha_j:

Martha's Myspace is updated with a rather good post about off-screen adventures (yayness!) she and the Doctor had been having before Human Nature and a little more info on what was happening just before the episode opened.

He's lying outside the TARDIS and he's breathing but he's not the Doctor any more.

Oh, and it seems to be the 30th birthday of some film series or other ;)

Talking a Star Wars, that was a horribly long self-indulgent screed I posted yesterday...shows what happens when I open an update window and ramble.

I was reading someone's feminist essay recently (Can't link it, I've forgotten where it is). The premise was that our stories are missing archetypes. It's okay to be a Princess or a Warrior Maiden, but not a Queen or a Mother, because once you hit 30 or give birth, you become a nonentity. There are no mothers in fairy-tales.

Looking at Star Wars, it fits the bill. All the mothers die. Shmi dies, Padmé dies, even Aunt Beru dies. I don't think it's an accident that the woman are killed as the Empire grows stronger.

Rebel Heart-I mean the Rebel Heart that exists in my head and on scrappy bits of paper, which I've never got around to posting on the net-RH doesn't fit terribly well to that; in fact it's the opposite. There isn't a single adult male in there who possesses a personality.

My protagonist I think is a Warrior Maiden (although a distinctly geeky one) and therefore not interesting to the purposes of this discussion, although I find her interesting. Her mother, sadly, goes neatly into the stereotype, including being offed by the Empire; even worse, she's not only dead, she had premarital sex-though the big issue was the premarital conception-and died. (She was in the Alderaanian counter-espionage and when K. was about 2 years old it got a bit good and the Imps took it out). The reason for this was partly that I wanted Keiten to be able to remark to the relevant Skywalker, "My father could be Palpatine" and partly because I always knew she'd been brought up by her grandmother.

Said grandmother, Shamma, née Miridh Eredesa, walked into the fic, and my head, with her personality complete from the beginning. She started out as a penniless orphaned teenage aristocrat, and finished as CEO of Abram Trade and Transport, wealthy, powerful, and a trusted associate of Bail Organa, having survived poverty, husband's death, the Clone Wars, daughter's death, raising 4 children, a granddaughter and Bail Organa, but unfortunately not surviving the Death Star. She's totally committed to the Rebellion, willing to use her company and her family in its service. She's very intelligent, tough, she has iron self-control, is somewhat abrasive, and she's expert at managing (or manipulating) people. If she was also young and nubile she'd be a giant Mary Sue, but when your character is 73 years old you can get away with these things.

Her sister-in-law Kerith is a similar formidable old woman, which is probably why they don't get along too well. Even though she's against the Empire, she puts ATT in front of the Alliance and her family in front of ATT. Most of said family are terrified of her.

Aunt #1 was created to plague Keiten about Wimmin Stuff, ie clothes. Being married to an Avram, she designs them and has several boutiques. She has occasional aspiration to domestic goddesshood, during which her ungrateful offspring turn up on Shamma's doorstep looking for "normal food". In default of a daughter of her own, she likes to dress Keiten, who is sadly uncooperative.

Aunt #2 is an historian. She took time off to have her sons, and found on her return that the Palpatine Revisionist Text had come in the meantime. She is understandably bitter about this, as it seriously damaged her chances of publication. She went off and had Arkos and after he was in school concentrated on sneaking subversive ideas into her students' heads. Integrity is very important to her; she's completely straightforward. In any trivial matter you can rely on her to have the opposite opinion to Aunt Shosha. For example, clothes are just a means of keeping you warm and covered. She's a little sorry for Keiten, and tends to worry about her.

Assorted other second cousins, great-great aunts/uncles, cousins once and twice removed are mentioned, or have walk-on parts.

Now look at the men:

Keiten's father: He's not Obi-Wan Kenobi. Really. And he's dead.

Her grandfather is dead. He must have had a personality in order to survive life with Shamma (mind you, he only did so for 25 years), but I have no inkling of it. He did well by Avram Trade and Transport however.

Uncle #1: a Strict nonentity. Manager in ATT.

Uncle #2: a Nice nonentity. Accountant for ATT.

Uncle #3: a Complete nonentity. Possibly doesn't work for ATT.

Oh dear. However! There are 6 male cousins.

Lusar is the eldest; he's 5 years older than Keiten, and she hero-worships him. He's basically a good kid: does well at school, looks out for the younger ones, studies law at university (it'll come in handy for ATT to have a lawyer of their own in a few years), marries a nice girl, has a kid and gets blown up by the Death Star.

Phenn is a bit of a problem child. You won't catch him joining the family firm; he studied language and literature at university, but he doesn't go into academics like his mother; he joins the Rebellion, but has a tendency to wander off in the middle of missions and argue with his commanding officer. He's smart-mouthed and short-tempered and, like a lot bright kids, a little lazy.

To make a snap comparison, Avrams are pragmatic and Eredesas are idealists. Phenn is Darth Eredesa (although, let's face it, Shamma it's exactly your sweet old granny either). Dan is Avram to the backbone. He's quiet and gentle and reserved. Keiten and he are only a year apart, and they get on well together. He likes maths for its own sake (he tells his family interesting facts about numbers), but due partly to emulating his father and partly due to a desire to be employable, ends up doing accountancy. He gets sick in space travel, which might possibly have something to so with why he doesn't go off hauling cargo to the Rebellion when Phenn and Keiten do. He feels guilty about this, even though his talents are really in creative book-keeping. He suspects he's actually a coward, although he'd never say so to anyone.

The other three are younger than Keiten. Ged is the son of the Strict nonentity and the clothes designer. He's about a year and a half younger than Keiten.

Benedh and Arkos are about the same age, and they hang out together. They're quite young when Alderaan is destroyed, and I have a feeling they sit in their rooms listening to emo music.

In other characters, there's the canon crew, and Keit's friend's Ari and Vega. Vega's another Warrior Maiden, I suppose; she's tender of her friends and is fond of a good gossip about the X-wing pilots.
Ari-well, Keit thinks Ari is pretty near perfect. He's caring, funny, cute, he doesn't annoy her the way Phenn does and he doesn't complain about doing the washing-up. Sadly, he's a bit oblivious in the romance department. He still doesn't really count as an adult male, though, as he's only 23 at latest appearance.

So there it is, the opposite of canon SW: the fathers are all dead. Although when the canon characters appears, it reverts: Bail has a character and Breha is a nonentity. Mind you, when I wrote the fic, we didn't even know her name, and I'm don't like guessing and being Jossed.

I went back and read a bit of RH and realised that, heh, not much of this stuff actually appears in the original fic. Must get around to the Extended Edition sometime. Mind you, it's not that there were any adult males in the original, it's just that apart from Shamma, there are hardly any adults at all. One character who's nicknamed "Grandfather" Keit guesses to be "about thirty", and she's probably overestimating, given that she's 17 at the time.

I'm a bit bothered by the fate of her mother now. She still has to be dead, but should I change the illegitimate bit? K. still can't going to have a father around (she has quite enough relatives around already, thanks, and she has to stay an Avram).

I have been watching Fanlib (I'm not going to up their Googlerank by linking. This post is a good explanation) and its resultant kerfuffle with an eye of interest. I'm expecting it to Not Work one way or the other: either it will go out in a bang with cease and desists (why both?), or the fans will decide it's more fun on the Pit of Voles without corporations breathing down their necks. I'm all on for dubbing Fanlib the Pit of Weasels, by the way.

The thing I want to know is: who is the money coming from, and to whom is it going?

I'm surprised Lee Goldberg hasn't started foaming at the mouth yet, but to tide us over someone else is. (The writer who praised fanfic is Cory Doctorow).

I don't understand why these people hate all fanfic so passionately. OK, I can see why authors might feel weird at their stuff being ficced, and wanting to put restrictions on it, and maybe even why they would try to ban it altogether. But I can't understand why they're frothing at the mouth at the very mention of the word, and get all shifty when you ask them about public domain works. As far as I'm concerned, if anyone asked me to lend them Keit and co I'd be tickled to death.

Ah, well, probably it all looks very different when you're writing pro fic for Diagnosis Murder.

Gakked from everyone, practically:

Name a character and I'll give you three or more "facts" from my personal fanon about that character.

My fandoms: Doctor Who, Star Wars, Harry Potter, BSG, assorted SF and children's books (check my interests), probably some others I've forgotten....

I didn't even bother watching Eurovision, though it's always good for laffs. I watched my tape of Lazarus Experiment instead, rewinding the trailer several times. Who is that speaking in the voiceover at the end? It's not DT or John barrowman and I'm pretty sure it's not John Simm....