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- Mon, 12:14: Couldn't find the 13yo University of Louisville student MSOffice disks to try'n install on the Win10 tower, but found a 10yo Creighton disk
- Mon, 12:31: Creighton CD didn't work. But with it there was a CD that appears to have executable Office XP files on it ... that Win10 won't run.
- Mon, 12:51: Copied Office XP CD's exe files to tower C drive, Win10 says files not compatible. Websearched compatibility tricks, no help. 365 it is.
- Mon, 14:07: Photoset: catsbeaversandducks: awesome-picz: Animals Posing For The Camera Like Pros. Look at these animals... http://t.co/4Zc9eDynYg
- Mon, 14:57: athelind: heroofthreefaces: Pretty much decided now to switch to the desk tower as my primary home machine... http://t.co/UHm30k7nYP
- Mon, 19:02: "There is no 'War on Cops'"; There is a Long-Overdue Conversation About Police Brutality - stare-me-down: http://t.co/JYibHrMC2C
- Mon, 20:05: Uh Oh 7: Fictional spy dude to be paired with woman his own age; Redpillers declare end of cinema -... http://t.co/r0YCinKGaV
- Mon, 20:16: I watched Season 2006 on my wife's birthday in June. I think I can skip it in my series rewatch now. #doctorwho
- Sun, 15:35: Watching Casino Royale (2006) on SyFy. The girl is Morgan le Fey from Starz and the villain is Hannibal.
- Sun, 15:42: I have one gag idea for tomorrow 's AKOTAS, but I shouldn't do two secret service car gags in a row.
- Sun, 16:01: #torchwood #sg1 http://t.co/VaG40VcqZV
- Sun, 16:48: I'd like to see source... http://t.co/A6dd88chRD
- Sun, 22:08: Hero of Three Faces update: I dare you to have already seen this crossover. http://t.co/mYc7bEWDSZ #torchwood #callthemidwife
- Sun, 22:13: #AKOTAS update: unexpected. http://t.co/wmFm1ROF05 #webcomics #kingarthur
- Mon, 10:05: Actually, once you ask, "How would a Torchwood/Call The Midwife crossover work?", it pretty much writes itself. http://t.co/mYc7bEWDSZ
- Thu, 12:19: Wednesday night about 23:20 I rolled over in bed, poked my wife and said, "I don't know how else to say this, but I … http://t.co/IkprEVND
- Thu, 13:24: 14 hours behind on my Twitter feed. Wotthehell, nuttin else to do.
- Thu, 13:30: @stratosmacca Counted once, don't recall exact figures, but Kirk actually "sleeps with a chick" only about half the time. Or less.
- Thu, 18:33: Turned on Quantum Of Solace about twenty minutes in. Not really watching close enought to follow the plot.
- Thu, 18:37: John Landis saw the police chase in Diamonds Are Forever, said, "I can do better than that." Thus the last half hour of The Blues Brothers.
- Thu, 19:30: The nurse says the doctors'll prolly say I can't drive for two weeks or work for four. Well, that's what short term disability is for.
- Thu, 19:36: I feel fine. I emailed my boss I thought I'd be back Monday.
- Thu, 19:49: Everyone suspects I'll leave the hospital tomorrow.
- Thu, 20:02: Thanks for all the good thoughts, on Twitter or LJ
- Fri, 07:17: Well today I'm supposed to have doctors come around to tell me about rehab and diet.
- Fri, 07:53: Partner on call from my physician's office says with a sedentary job like mine the cardiologist may send me back after only a week.
- Fri, 10:09: @ferretthimself For me it's "monoxidil".
- Fri, 10:26: Nurse educator visited my room. After I go home drill will be, take it easy, take my meds, no lifting, call if there's pain agan.
- Fri, 10:40: #AKOTAS sketch: oh right, even with all this I still updated. http://t.co/unQUg2nV #webcomics #kingarthur
- Fri, 10:44: Hiro Nakamura is my cardiologist.
- Fri, 10:45: Looks like I'm getting sprung from here today. Not going back to work till December 5 at the earliest.
(no subject)
Jan. 12th, 2007 06:36 am
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ursulav has been discovering fanfiction lately. She has a very interesting perspective on it, and one new to me, perhaps because I've been a consumer and producer since I was only a little older than the age she's flashing back to.
But the real reason I mention this is because I want to preserve in my journal things I've written in the comments on her post.
para_cynic, a professional editor who dislikes fanfiction on practical grounds, brought up the you don't own the characters thing.
That's a fallacy. It's not that the characters don't belong to me. They do, because they belong to everybody, the way Hercules belonged to everybody two thousand years ago, and King Arthur belonged to everybody five hundred years ago, and Paul Bunyan belonged to everyone a hundred years ago. The fact that these characters who belong to everyone are copyrighted intellectual properties is a modern aberration. The hiccup in normality isn't that the characters are treated by me as if I own them, the hiccup is that big corporations own them.
For more academic arguments saying this same thing, google MIT professor Henry Jenkins.
nornagest responded to my comment, in part, "I think there's a significant qualitative difference between King Arthur or Hercules and, say, Buffy or Captain Picard. Retellings of myths recycle plot. You can write a version of the Christian War in Heaven where Lucifer is a basically sympathetic, if deeply flawed, character and everyone will recognize it as the War in Heaven as long as the proper events occur in approximately the proper order ... Mythic characters start out as blank slates ... They only become well-defined after many iterations, if at all; Odin is fairly well characterized, as is Robin Hood ... Fanfiction relies much more heavily on character structure. You can put Buffy, or Picard, in a plot ... unrelated to the original works, and people will still recognize them as the same characters ... I think this is a consequence of a change in the way stories are told; the concept of a canonical set of stories is relatively recent ... and the idea of intellectual property pretty much came in with it."
That's a great point but I'd argue that, while it reflects a new dynamic in the community folk hero's adjustment to the electronic communication age, the phenomenon of "canon" doesn't hold the omnipotence you seem to be arguing it does.
Characters like Buffy and Captain Picard are too new and young to be good examples. James Bond, on the other hand, has just featured in a very popular reenvisioning of his character (even if that "reenvision" was an exercise in bringing the characterization closer to what it had been in Fleming's novels than the films had ever achieved before). Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked which casts the Witch of the West as a sympathetic character is a bestseller, has been made into a stage musical, and has a new sequel out. The last two decades have presented movie theatres with comic remakes of mid-twentieth century cop tv dramas like Dragnet and Starsky and Hutch. And while Captain Picard is too new a character for such treatment, Captain Kirk is rumored to be getting a continuity reboot in the film J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias, What About Brian?) has in pre-production. And actually, Buffy was a movie before she was a tv show.
The concept of "canon" plays a large role in the creation and appreciation of fanfiction, but today's lasting community characters are truly no more restricted by it than the lasting community characters of all of human history before them. Me, I stopped applying the word "canon" to bodies of fiction, because I feel it implies things that aren't true.
I may add to this post if the discussion over there continues.
I wonder whether a lot of non-musical people realize the power of music in pop culture.
Just as an example.
Imagine you're watching a movie trailer in the theater or on tv. It starts out with quick shots of classy British actors talking about ... you can't tell quite what, but there's lots of money involved. The women are young and gowned. Then a shot lingers on a lantern-jawed man in a tuxedo not saying anything ... and he smiles ... and the music track which's been silent till now suddenly blares
"BADAT! bum BADAT! bum BADAT! ... nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh nuhhh ... "
