Kat Dancing

Damn The Slush God, anyway. He linked to the Official Seal Generator, and is therefore responsible for this:



It does not go small enough to make an LJ icon, which is a shame, cause I'm quite enamored of it. It's so very me.

Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 247 words. Bad Kat.

Comments: I am slowly crawling back on the wagon of writing regularly, after two weeks of no time and writer's block. I know where things are going, now, but I'm hitting the old problem of getting tripped up by packing enough cool alien-ness in the wee details. I'm coming to the conclusion that there's no such thing as too much worldbuilding.

Snips: Hey, Elliot has morals. Who knew?

Elliot grimaced inwardly. The other kin were ignoring him as well, blithely unaware of the human in their midst, free to act as they would without any masters present. It was hardly the first time he'd been in this position, but it still made him uncomfortable. Watching other people without their knowledge was merely gathering intelligence. This was spying.

My god. I had no idea Elfquest was still around. I devoured these things when I was a kid. If you've no idea what I'm talking about, they've got some stuff online. Treat yourself.

And speaking of online comics, I forgot to blog about Girl Genius turned into an online strip, so I guess I will now. It's by Phil and Kaja Foglio and it's steampunk and it's wonderful. Go read. Now.

Revision Progress: 55 pages (of 337)
Changes: Made a whole chunk of infodump more in-line with the story - I lost some info, but it's not so interruptive now, so overall I think I came out ahead. Tweaked the spacer dialogue.
Up Next: The final part of this conversation is Kat being self-indulgent and letting two characters she really likes play. I am such a dialogue junkie. Let's see how much of it I can cut.

My father took Sunday morning off, which meant that instead of listening to NPR or CDs I was subjected to my brother's favorite radio station. He won't play it around Dad because it makes Dad foam at the mouth. It makes me foam at the mouth, too, but I'm a sibling and therefore a lower form of life.

I mean, really. The music itself is annoying enough - insepid, uninspired, and utterly without variation - and thinking about the audience always frustrates me. The music is nothing but sex, violence, and money, and yet the people who will happily listen to it and let their kids hear it are the same who will call up and scream for heads if a single cuss word makes it into a song unbleeped, because it's "obscene." These are the people who made all those calls about Janet Jackson's nipple, crying because their kid saw some female flesh... and yet it's not "obscene" to let their ten-year old daughter walk around dressed like a Las Vegas street hooker. Lyrics like Joni Mitchell's "Win your medals, fuck your strangers, don't it leave you on the empty side?" are "obscene", because SHE SAID THE F-WORD (horror!) but lyrics like "And then I wanna, uh, uh, oooh..." aren't, because they don't use the dirty words. Bah.

Don't even get me started on music videos.

At any rate, the music is bad enough, but this station, like most commercials stations nowadays, features a "morning show." This is, as far as I can tell, idiots being paid to make idiots of themselves and other people. This is intended to be amusing. Most of it is pop culture references that I don't get anyway (such as the talk of that morning, which was about American Idol, a show I've never watched and have no desire to watch).

The rest of the morning was devoted to an amateur "Sing the National Anthem" contest. Or maybe it wasn't a contest. I'm not sure, I spent most of the time with my hands over my ears.

We have a stupid anthem. First, there's the lyrics. This is a man who was singing to a flag. I mean, yes, very nice, very symbolic, but really I'd prefer to have a national anthem that actually sang about my country, like "America the Beautiful" does. I've got nothing in particular against our flag, but singing about majestic mountains means a lot more to me.

Then there's the melody.

Is there anyone that can actually sing our national anthem? It's all right for the first few lines, although there's way too many up-and-down bits - and then you get to "And the rocket's red glare -" and the whole song just falls to pieces. Women's voices squawk or fade out as they try to climb the register, and as for men, well, the only way your average guy can jump an octave that fast is if you kick him in the balls, which seems a fairly extreme song experience. And then it's down an octave and up and octave and down. By the time you reach the bit about "the land of the free", half the singers have given up, the other half are all over the scale, and dogs are howling all down the street. And doing a better job of keeping the tune, too.

Does it strike anyone as vaguely ironic that the national anthem of America - land of opportunity, equality, and good ordinary average joes - can only be performed by trained opera singers with really, really excellent natural range?

And this was an amateur singing contest. They had numerous groups of people doing this. Over and over. One right after the other.

Next time Dad takes the morning off I'm bringing earplugs to work.

Dan just posted a link to this article on his blog. I'd somehow avoided seeing it at the time. It is in essence a documentary of the "war" between literary and popular fiction, with the journalist leaning decidedly towards the literary point of view. He rounds his arguments off with a tip of the hat towards popular novels and an emphatic "But great novels, regardless of print run, change lives."

I can hardly argue with the fact of that. The implication, however, is that a novel that is popular and sells well is unlikely to be literary.

Is unlikely, in fact, to be good.

Bullshit.

First off, there's historical precident. The article notes that some writers, like Dickens and Twain, have been popular and regarded by later generations as literary, but adds quellingly, "They, however, are the exceptions." This is true enough: only a very few writers become popular, and only the slightest fragment of those stay popular. But look at the number of writers who were unpopular during their lifetime but famous after and you are looking at a far smaller number; look at those who were unpopular with the masses but recognized as great by the literary elite, and the number becomes vanishingly small. The literary elite has, over the centuries, largely ignored or decried anything truly interesting that was going on (plays in the sixteenth century, for example, or novels in the nineteeth) while touting writers or art forms that, as history rolled its way on, would fade. Name me a sixteenth-century poet, if you please, or a nineteeth-century essayist? Unless you're an English major, you probably can't.

You'd think after a while the critics would learn caution, or at least humility. But no, they keep going, pouring derision on anything that sells well or is read or, God forbid, is in any way genre.

An interesting post at 2blowhards.com talks about the general views of movie people in America:

The movie person's conviction is that trash and art are closely and necessarily connected -- that, since movies have their roots in lowbrow entertainment, the ultimate movie is one that fuses the oomph and power of popular entertainment with the values, complexity, and pleasures of high art.

The book person in America, however, sees things a bit differently:

...in the world of books trash and art still don't ride in the same section of the bus; the books mindset -- at least the respectable-publishing mindset -- is still segregationist. If the movie-world view is all about the vital connections between art and trash, and about how each is the lifeblood of the other, the book person's imagination is taken up with the neverending struggle of art, talent and brains to triumph over the forces of money, hustle and fame.

This may or may not have a lot to do with why most people would rather watch a movie than read a book. It most certainly has a lot to do with why plenty of people in my generation have never read a book, or read fiction only under protest. Books, they have been taught, have no oomph or power, only complexity and moral lessons. Books must be taken seriously. Books are medicine. Who wants to take his medicine?

And many medicine books are also very bad books; not just suffering under the burden of my poor opinion, but actually poorly written, as B.R. Myers points out in A Reader's Manifesto. They are difficult to read, not because they present difficult concepts, but because the modern literary world equates incomprehensibility with quality.

The worse it tastes, the better it must be for you.

(The Myers article is bloody brilliant, by the way. If you haven't read it, do.)

Ursula LeGuin wrote that "Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst." More than that - to divorce Art from Entertainment is to encourage Entertainment into greater and greater vapidity, for fear of alienating an audience trained to hate Art, while Art in turn solidifies into a more and more indigestible lump for fear of being mistaken for Entertainment.

Writing with the purpose of being literature is so useless as to be laughable... except that there's a market for it. Why? Well, some people genuinely like reading the stuff, and good on them - but far more are getting their clique kicks. Reading something they don't really understand makes them feel superior, because they appreciate it while those other people don't or can't. Or, as Myers puts it: "This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we aren't worthy of them."

I mean, how many times have you heard it? "I've never read a bestseller in my life." "I only read serious fiction." "Oh, that science fiction stuff - I read one once, when I was a kid." "You read romance novels?"

This is hardly to say that genre readers are any better. They can sneer at the literatzi with the best of them (case in point: self). We're no better than you.

But the reverse is also true: you're no better than us.

Neither of us has any clue what people will still be reading in a hundred years.

And any great book - regardless of genre, print run, lack of print run, or rubber stamps from the cultural elite - changes lives.

Thoughts on Return of the King:

(Spoilers ensue. If you've not read the books, don't read this. If you've read the books but not seen the movie, use your own judgement.)

It was damned good. There were, of course, a couple of things I missed. I'll get the complaints out of the way first thing:

The conversation with a trapped Saruman, where he bandies words with the rescuers. It's a very subtley frightening scene, in the book, and one that made a major impression on me.

The romance of Eowyn and Faramir. Actually, the plotlines of Eowyn and Faramir, both of whom were made much of and followed religiously through the early half of the movie and then dropped, leaving the audience to go, "Okay, so his father told him he loved his dead brother more and sent him out to die and then lit him on fire, and? She rode in a battle she wasn't supposed to be in and cut off the head of a great ugly thing and killed the unkilliable Nazgul and lost her uncle and is lying half-dead on the battlefield... and?" This is really the only bit I'm seriously annoyed with the movie folks with. Oh, sure, they get a cameo in the crowning scene, but it's not the same. Extended version, where are you?

The razing of the Shire. The end of the movie was a bit too much sweetness and light for me; Tolkien's version, where the point was made that evil had not been eradicated from the world, was much more palatable.

Of course, these are pet peeves, and I don't blame the movie folks for them; they were trying to fit a monsterous epic into three-hour blocks, and there was no way they were going to get everything in there, and in general their choices were excellent. The dynamic between Faramir and his father was brilliantly and subtley done. The hobbits were excellently handled. Even the annoying "Gimli as clown" thing was far more in the background than it was in Two Towers, irritating me less. And in some areas the movies added an extra dimension to the books. There is no way, no matter how brilliantly it was described, that I, the reader, could properly visualize the terror and scope of the final battle at Minas Tirith. Jackson has given me that. There is no way I could visualize what Frodo and Sam, half-beaten, exhausted, and starving, were facing when they looked out across Mordor and prepared themselves for that final crossing, or when they struggled up the side of Mount Doom. Jackson has given me that. There is no way I could see and really understand what "outnumbered" means, or how terribly, insanely brave the survivors of the battle at Minas Tirith had to be to go and knock on the Black Gates and create the distraction that let Frodo cross Mordor when they didn't even know he was alive. You have to see this stuff. Jackson let me see it. The next time I read the books, I'll know.

I will forgive a lot of blunders for that.

I came away from the movie with a few more generalized thoughts, as well, which I will share:

I first read these books when I was eight, and have read them many times since, but in all that time I never really understood why people insisted that Tolkien was drawing a parellel between the World Wars and his epic battle against evil. Now I do. I don't know, I think it was the battle scenes that did it for me; the amount of death and devistation and hopelessness was... disturbing. And suddenly I started to see it. The brave soldiers of Minas Tirith, throwing the stones of their own city back at their enemies, praying for allies they didn't know would come to come... the Bombing of Britain popped into my mind. And the fields of Mordor looked strangely like pictures I've seen of the trenches, and Frodo and Sam a lot like lost, frightened soldiers lost in a nightmare of war. And Frodo couldn't go home. He'd been too deeply scarred. The World Wars were the first time we had to deal with shellshock, the first time we had soldiers coming home physically sound but staring, blind-eyed, home but somehow still in the trenches, somehow unable to get back from the war. It made me feel ill.

The battle scenes, once again, have made me think of feudal societies. It's PC just now to think of them as backwards societies, and of kinds like Theoden who were kind and good as the exception, not the rule. And I think, in general, that this is true. But I suspect that it's only peace and safety that's made our "advanced" societies possible. When danger threatens from all sides, and constantly, you need a leader to hold you together. And a strong leader. That was really the thing that hit home watching the movie. We're used to thinking that the kings enforced their rule by killing everyone who crossed them, which was in general true, but if that was the only reason they stayed in power then who was protecting them from the killers? From their own army? It takes a certain brute power of personality, a charisma, to keep a warband under control.

Okay, obvious stuff. But still, for some reason, it had never really hit home to me that it takes a certain kind of man to be able to point at a twenty-foot tall elephant with spikes on and shout "Charge!" and have people do it, instead of, say, sodding off to the nearest pub. It takes a certain kind of man to sit on a hilltop and say, "We're going to die. We haven't got a chance in hell. Let's go," and have people still following him. He doesn't have to be a nice man; in fact, he probably isn't. But he's got to have something. Otherwise he's going to look back halfway down the hill and see his army vanishing over the opposite horizon.

Theoden never even had to look back.

That's pretty scary, really. I think I'll stick with democracy.

Lord of the Rings linkage today, because a) I am obsessed with the thought of seeing the movie in a few days, b) I'm too lazy to do a real post, and c) they really are good.

First go here and read about the computer program built to simulate a real battle, with real enemy soldiers, each with their own computer-generated "intelligence", that was used to simulate the big final battle in Return of the King. The only problem was, these soldiers took one look at the battlefield, assessed it, and, as a man, turned into Sir Robin. As the special effects designer put it, "We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."

Well, that's one way to know you've designed a *really scary* final battle. This link courtesy Dan.

And then go over to The Electric Smack Shack and read the various installments of "LOTR: What Really Happens." It's hysterical. If you've got a particularly sick sense of humor, anyway....

My mother's birthday present arrived yesterday - late, of course (Damn you, Powells! Damn you, UPS! Damn me, last minute order-er!) and with it a copy of Stanley Schmidt's Aliens and Alien Societies. I'd already had my hopes lowered by the other two books in the Science Fiction Writing Series I'd bought, but still.... *sigh* Oh well. At least I only blew twelve bucks on it.

The most annoying thing is that I can't figure out why these books are so damned useless to me. At first I thought it was simply the prejudice of the author but that doesn't seem quite right; I enjoy reading prejudiced authors. Even if I don't agree with their prejudices, it's always more fun to read something when the author's genuinely passionate about what they write.

Then I thought maybe it was because I'm just not a hard sf writer of the Hal-Clement-worshipping type, but that doesn't seem right either, because I do like getting my facts mostly right and so books chock full of facts ought to be useful to me, right? Right?

*sigh*

Finally, yesterday, I tracked down the nagging sense of deja vu that reading the Science Fiction Writing Series was giving me. Back in my sophomore year of college I used to walk into my Chemistry II class, dump my bag under the table, sign the attendance sheet, nudge my neighbor, say, "Wake me up if he starts looking at me funny," and take an hour and a half long nap. This was partly because I was working the 5 am to 7 am shift on the pig crew at the farm and Chem II met at eight, but mostly it was because I'd found out I got better grades in the class if I didn't listen to the teacher. A really bright guy, mind you - but a terrible teacher. Generally he'd start out by slowly, painstakingly, going over the ground we'd already covered, explaining things that even simpletons like me had already gotten the hang of and explaining them over and over, in the most simplistic terms possible, repeating himself intermidably - until something would catch his attention and he'd forget that he was talking to a Chem II class and be off on quantum physics and higher-level math and the interesting consequences of this, that, and the other and in general would be teaching grad-level chemistry to a class of people going, "Excuse me? What?"

Reading these books is almost exactly like that.

I'm figuring that these books are good for exactly two types of people: rank beginners with no scientific background, who will find all the painstaking, elementary-level background helpful and not even try to understand the advanced speculation bits, and true science-y types, who will have to skip over all that annoying background but will happily delve into the complex speculations.

But for me - with a solid background in biogenetics and a skimpy one in chemistry, astronomy, and physics - it's bloody useless. I end up flipping through pages going, "Big Bang, nebulas, DNA, evolutionary theory, come on come on come on," and then suddenly I'm bang in the middle of a discussion on fluorosilicone life forms and photosynthesis being catalyzed by something other than chlorophyll, and I have to read back through the stuff I've missed in case there's something there to explain what's going on now. Which there isn't; it's like five or six rather major steps have just been skipped.

God, that is irritating.

Oh, well, there's a chapter on alien societies that looks semi-interesting, even if from the opening I'm guessing that the author thinks the social sciences are for wussies and really only put this section in out of a sense of obligation. And I may be able to eek something interesting out of the rest somewhere.

And it was only twelve bucks. *sigh*

A friend of mine recently blogged about this interesting toy called Gender Genie (which he had, in turn, heard about from another friend's blog, who had undoubtably heard of it from another's... you begin to see why Google is underwriting Blogger these days. Damn, the advertising potentials) and I've been playing with it, with... interesting results.

I would appear to be male.

Oh, not entirely male. A selection from my second novel Harmony Station was identified quite firmly as female, although it thought my first novel Anagenesis was written by a man. (The protaganists of both stories are, by the way, female.) On the other hand, I ran two of my nonfiction articles through it, and both were apparently written by a man. As were three of the four blog entries I ran through it. (The one that Gender Genie correctly identified as female, by the way, was yesterday's. Go figure.)

The friend whose blog I nicked it from apparently had very accurate results, though, as did the guy he nicked it from, and the thing is apparently 70% accurate overall. So I guess I'm just weird.

Oh, and:

It has been pointed out to me that I refer to my dogs way too much. Well - actually it hasn't, but I think I do, and anyway there's this nifty "upload image" feature that's appeared since I moved to ftp that I'm just itching to try out.

So you don't get less canine references, but you do get visual aids.

Visual aid number one. This is my dog. When I refer to the mad dog, the stick fiend, "that damned walking heater blockage", or simply Kid, this is the dog I'm talking about.


Further pictures will be inflicted on the captive audience at a later date.

Oh, and this post? Male. By over a hundred points.

I was wanting to do this some time ago, when the site was down, and have finally gotten around to it:



Hmmm.

The problem is that I can't take these things without remembering an incident in my freshman pyschology class. The whole class did one of these - not the Myers-Briggs, I think, but something similar - and our answers were taken up and sent off to be analyzed by an actual human being. A week later we were handed back the results - though asked not to show them to each other, as they might be rather personal - and then the teacher took a poll of the class to see how accurate we thought the tests were. Easily ninety percent of the class said they were accurate or very accurate.

It then transpired that there was no person that the tests had been sent off to; the teacher had thrown them all away, unread, and printed out identical copies of the same "personality analysis" and handed them out to us.

This isn't to say that I don't think my Myers-Briggs is inaccurate; in fact I think it's *very* accurate, regarding me, and I suspect that a lot of people who know me would agree with me. But then again, I was one of that ninety percent who agreed with her carbon-copy personality analysis.

People aren't simple. 48 questions aren't enough to tell me, or anyone, anything much about me.

On the other hand, it gave me half an hour's diversion, so who am I to complain?

Oh, and probably my all-time favorite online quiz.

The Ninth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is on, games officially available for download, judging beginning.

Most people don't know about interactive fiction games, or text adventure games, or if - however you want to write it, it's the same thing. It's very simple. A very long time ago, before Doom or any computer game more complex than arcade-style Space Invaders, there were these games put out that were nothing more, and nothing less, than text. You, the player, were the protaganist of these games, essentially being walked through a long and complex story with puzzles and mazes and brain-teasers to keep you interested. Infocom was the company, and Douglas Adams's adaptation of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was probably the most famous of the games, although stories like "Zork" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" were popular as well.

Then came Doom. Ba-da-boom. Bye-bye text.

But not quite. There were still quite a lot of people who loved the old story-games, with their rich descriptions and good storylines, and kept writing them, and the format of text adventures grew and changed and improved with titles like Graham Nelson's "Curses" (well-written puzzlefest) or, on the other end of the spectrum, Ian Finley's "Babel" (dark science fiction nightmare.) The games were an incredible amount of work, and generally they were freeware, or at worst donation ware. They were written for the love of the story.

The IF competion is a chance for game writers to strut their stuff and game lovers to get some grand new material. Judging is by popular vote and prizes are purely for the show of it, but it's a great way to get introduced to the IF world. Another way to tell stories. What a wonderful, wonderful idea.

As for the competion games themselves, well, there's no predicting exactly what you'll get, but they tend to fall into a few definitive categories. At the top are the mind-blowers, the truly, really excellent games that everyone agrees are excellent and which place at the top of the comp - Ian Finley's stuff is always good for this, and Emily Short's. Then there are the really good games which are a matter of taste and get argued over heatedly. My personal faves in this category are the humorous games. There's some truly excellent humorous IF out there, but most people seem vaguely uncomfortable lifting them to the heights of the darker works, because we've been so trained to see humor as "light" stuff, clearly inferior. There's always also a couple of hardcore puzzlefests, a few in-joke games like "Being Andrew Plotkin", and a few ultra-literary James Joyce style thingies which no one is entirely sure what to do with.

Then there'll be a vast middle category ranging from the competent and entertaining to the "well, it was a good idea, pity about the programming bugs" or the "nice programming, but it would have helped if the writer had learned English first", and finally there is another small category of really, truly stinking games. Some are simply so buggy as to be unplayable, some are painfully small and pointless and badly written, and some are just... strange. There is almost always one erotica story, which has been without exception very, very bad so far, although I did get a few laughs out of last year's. Nothing like a paragraph-long description of an orgasm using words like "superlative" to give me the giggles.

But it's a narrow genre. The total is down to thirty games entered this year. This makes me sad. The world could always do with less Doom and more stories.