Tully's · blathering.

That is all.

In an effort to speed this LJ's transition to an "all memes, all the time" format, I thought I'd start one of my own off. It's probably been done before, but then, so has everything else

Fantasy dinner party

You have the opportunity to reach into parallel realities and bring six fictional characters: three female and three male into this world just long enough to have them over for a dinner party (and you get to reach into parallel realities inhabited by versions of these characters who would like nothing better than to come to said party ;). Which characters would you invite and why?

This great honking display of geekery being done with, there remains only the matter of tagging. I wouldn't presume to do anything so peremptory, but I confess I'd like to see what seftiri, piekid and ariestess make of this.

Current Mood:	relaxed
Current Music:	Tori Amos - Raspberry Swirl

Friends, Romans, countrymen, random passers-by, I give you... The Association Meme!

The rubric:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

ariestess invited me to comment on the following:

• Casey Novak: Ah, Caseybabes. The brightest spot of a generally high-quality show in seasons 5 and 6, and the show's one redeeming feature from seasons 5 through 9. Were it not for her, this LJ wouldn't exist, since I'm kinda temperamentally unsuited to the practice of blogging (see below); I only created a livejournal so as to be able to leave a comment over at seftiri's place in which I said that Diane Neal reminds me of Ingrid Bergman. And, indeed, I found the Limer Lounge in the first place by Google-searching for "Casey Novak". The rest is history.
• Fandom: I am a fan. I am fannish, which is another word for "obsessive". Some people listen to music or watch TV or read blogs or whatever just to kill specific chunks of time - the hour between getting in from work and starting on the household chores, the Sunday afternoon that just won't die, that sort of thing. I do not work that way. I turn on the TV in order to catch (and more often than not, record, either to tape or hard drive) the latest show that I've become obsessed with. Some people can content themselves with buying just one single or album by a particular artist. Not I. If I decide I like a singer or band (as opposed to just liking a particular song), I must buy (or, ahem, otherwise acquire) their every album, if not their entire discography. The first thing I do after deciding to follow a blog, next to adding its RSS feed to Thunderbird, is go back through the archive and read every post. So yeah, total fan over here. Every time I've joined an online community, more or less, it's because I'm in the initial phase of a new obsession, and everyone I know IRL has told me to just shut up about whatever it is already. This was particularly fast when I discovered Casey Novak, since most people here in the land of hope and glory have never so much as heard of SVU.
• Language & Grammar: This, being as how I'm a linguistics grad student, is my daily preoccupation. It has been, ever since I was a schoolboy of 11, and discovered Latin. I've always been good at learning languages, but at the same time had a sense that I wasn't doing it for the purpose of using them. I've never been inclined to travel around, and indeed I've never been to the home countries of two out of the three modern foreign languages I speak (and I didn't speak much French when I went to Paris). I'm much more interested in how language works, how we produce the noises we make, how we recover meaning from the noises other people make, and how the ways we do it change without our trying to change them, or in some cases, even noticing that they've changed. As for grammar, I tend to disappoint people who try to enlist my aid in their attempt to persuade someone that some particular point of style (Oxford commas, not splitting infinitives, that sort of thing) is important. I have opinions on these issues, but as a scientist for whom language is an experimental subject, I feel that voicing them would be improper. Shocking bad form to perturb the subject under test, don't you know.
• Blogging: I'm really rather ambivalent about this topic. I'm not normally one of those people who couldn't not write, quite the reverse in fact: really I'm one of those people whose highest ambition for their life is to spend it accomplishing more or less nothing. I also have this feeling that I've yet to give the world a reason to care what I think. But on the other hand, I can succumb to the vice of wanting to talk about myself at great length just as easily as the next man, and every so often the muse does pick me up and squeeze a story or other screed out of me. All this is a recipe for a very infrequently and aperiodically updated LJ, but you don't have to hang out here for long to notice this.
• Music: To quote a disreputable fictional stockbroker, I don't know a lot about music, but I know what I like. And what I like is rather specific: I like the work of female singers, contralto rather than soprano, who make singing beautifully sound easy, never sound like they're pushing the envelope, and, given that I've recently discovered Patsy Cline, and my favourite singer is Kirsty MacColl, an untimely death seems to earn bonus points. Another bonus is if she writes her own songs, with pleasant melodies and clever, witty, inventive or thought-provoking lyrics. It's for this reason that the aforementioned Kristy Kirsty is my favourite singer-songwriter of all time, and I'm also a big fan of Dido.

Current Mood:	mellow
Current Music:	Charlie Daniels - The Devil Went Down to Georgia

I'm preparing the handout for the talk I gave yesterday, right? I run one pass of LaTeX over it, then I run xdvi over it to see what I have wrought, then JabRef to check I've entered all the references. All the references are there so I run bibtex, then I need to run LaTeX again (twice, but that's not important).

this point, I remember that if I type the character jargonically known as "bang", followed by the letters "l" and "a", bash will recall the last command I executed that began "la", and run it again.

At this point, I am amused to the point of actually giggling out loud by the fact that I have, in a sense, just typed "Bangla"

I may have been remembering this, which prompted a similar fit.

That is all.

Current Mood:	amused
Current Music:	Patsy Cline - Crazy

As obliquely mentioned on a previous occasion, I run LFS. The book makes this fairly clear, but for the sake of redundancy I'll say it too: if you're new to Linux, if you know little about it except what it is, and you're considering trying it out by getting an LFS system going, all I can say is "RUN! RUN AWAY AND FORGET YOU EVER HAD THIS IDEA!" LFS is not for Linux beginners, go install Ubuntu like everyone else.

Now that that's out of the way, on to the point of this post and those which will (probably) follow. The reason Linux neophytes or even those who are only moderately experienced with a decent distribution like Ubuntu should steer clear of LFS is that compiling your very own GNU + Linux system from the sources will require you to switch every package you install from its default mode: rebarbatively-abstruse-and-user-hostile to the handy-and-intuitive mode the maintainers of most distros have selected, and in a lot of cases, helped develop for you out of the box. And, of course, when those packages are running in abstruse mode, the commands necessary to change modes to handy-and-intuitive are going to be, you guessed it, rebarbatively abstruse and user hostile. Me, I just take this as a challenge to learn how to use abstruse mode. This being so, I have been learning a bunch of tricks that are no doubt old hat to eminently bearded sysadmins, but that I've only learned after buggering something up and having to fix it. So, I'm going to start writing some of these things down, if only because the documentation in which I've found them is scattered across myriad websites and only makes sense when combined in just the right way. This is mostly for my benefit, just so I'll be able to find these things later when I forget them, but hey, why not make it public?

Herewith, the first tip:

If you're writing a shell script, and you expect to use it an awful lot, perhaps automated via a cron job, and the files it has to deal with are not named according to any particular scheme, make it really robust by putting '--' between the end of the options and the beginning of the arguments to a command, so instead of this, for example:

for $fl in *.*~
do
	shred -n0 -zu "$fl"
done

You'd put:

for $fl in *.*~
do
	shred -n0 -zu -- "$fl"
done

And why? Because if the filename begins with '-', shred will interpret it as an option instead of an argument. Most commands with a Unix-like syntax (except maybe commands with BSD option syntax, since '-' doesn't signal options in that syntax) have a more-or-less undocumented '--' option which says "this is the end of the options, everything after it is argument".

Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.

Current Mood:	productive
Current Music:	Divine Comedy (The) - National Express

This is not unlike the Interview Meme, I acknowledge, but I like it this way. I like a meme that we can all get our teeth into:

The problem with LJ: we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other.

So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Or something completely random. Ask away.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you!

Current Mood:	mellow
Current Music:	Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

OK, I just had to gack this one from ariestess, because I knew the results would be entertainingly random, and randomness amuses me:

Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

Without further ado, I give you:

Current Mood:	amused
Current Music:	Ian Dury - Sex and Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll

( I'm trying to be enigmatic. Has it worked? )

Current Mood:	pleased
Current Music:	Kirsty MacColl - Closer To God

Title: The Collision
Author: Tully
Email: tullius@cantshootfs.cjb.net
Fandom and Pairing: Law and Order: SVU — Casey/Olivia
Rating: PG
Word Count: c. 1100
Written for: Finish It All Off ficathon
Archive: Ask!
Note: The monospaced portion of the first paragraph was not written by me. It was my prompt in the ficathon.

Current Mood:	creative
Current Music:	The Flaming Lips - It Overtakes Me

Praise be to piekid:

If you saw me in a police car, what would you think I got arrested for? Answer, then if you want, post to your own journal and see how many crimes you get accused of.

Herewith, a fun game, for which you may, most proximally, thank ariestess

Whip out your music program, click the random button, and pick out 20 songs. Alter the name by turning it into a convoluted, wordy synonym. For example: "Silent Night" = "Nocturnal Time Completely Lacking Noise." When someone guesses the title correctly, italicize the convoluted one and put the real title and the person who figured it out.

1. Former lady paramour. Ex-girlfriend, as identified by piekid
   No Doubt
2. Pertaining to what were previously thought to be the fundamental indivisible particles that make up all matter.
   Blondie
3. Strike the constituent instrument of the percussion section throughout the diurnal cycle. Bang on the drum all day - ovations to piekid
   Todd Rundgren
4. I refuse to accompany you in the coursing of any manner of fauna, Jacob.
   Jimmy Dean
5. Particulate matter agitated by atmospheric fluctuations. Dust in the wind - a platinum No-Prize to piekid
   The Eagles
6. Juvenile male human from the Land of the Rising Sun.
   Aneka
7. Visionary fantasy of cerulean hue.
   I Monster
8. Make me the confessor of the secrets that trouble you.
   Kylie Minogue
9. A modicum of the sense of esteem which grows naturally between the well-bred.
   Erasure
10. Travelway of Jean Nicot's weed.
    Nashville Teens
11. Adjourn in my company.
    Melissa Elliotte
12. No affection exists that has greater magnitude.
    Amy Winehouse
13. In the event that you suffer this to occur, the fruit of your loins will follow.
    Manic Street Preachers
14. Floating naval hazard of Arctic climes inside a layer of the confectioner's staple.
    The Lightning Seeds
15. Your present interlocutor perpetrates an enchantment on you. I put a spell on you, because it's Halloween piekid
    Creedence Clearwater Revival
16. Oscillate laterally.
    Bic Runga
17. Millennial premises of dancing to pre-recorded music.
    Pulp
18. A well-known German manufacturer of luxury cars. Mercedes-Benz. Plaudits, ariestess
    Janis Joplin
19. Immobilised in your company centrally.
    Stealers Wheel
20. Mendacious organs sensitive to a particular band of electromagnetic wavelengths.
    The Eagles

Current Mood:

thoughtful

Gacked from ariestess

That is what my desktop looks like. How 'bout yourn?

Current Mood:	relaxed
Current Music:	Dido - This Land Is Mine

You see, I'm taking part in a ficathon (also a first for me) hosted by sinandmisery and shiplessheathen entitled 'Finish It All Off'. They give us each a paragraph in our chosen fandoms and pairings as a prompt, and we flesh it out to at least a thousand words. Sounds pretty cool, what? Check it out!

( Vitriolic wingnuttery under here )

Current Mood:

infuriated

Gacked from ariestess:

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

Current Mood:	silly
Current Music:	XTC - Making Plans for Nigel

( Except for the picture, that is )

For the record, I don't smoke.

Current Mood:	contemplative
Current Music:	Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star

You don't have to spend long reading fanfic to absorb the received wisdom of the pan-fandom community: 90% of everything is crud, the Internet is full of loud dumb people, if you find authors who can correctly spell "supersede", "embarrass", "harass" (contrary to popular belief, it's only one word...), "desiccate", "rogue" and "through", pay her college tuition and offer to have his babies, because if you don't, they might stop writing, and that's another star in the firmament of badfic that's just gone out, thanks to YOU!

It's all true. Badfic is legion, and overexposure to it can make you slightly hysterical. It's not hard to see why, either. In fact, the reasons for it can be summed up in three words: barriers to entry. In legal theory, these are insuperable, but in practice, they are non-existent, so every aficionado of fanfic gets to sort through their own personal slush pile whenever they dip a toe in to the ungainly-manatee-infested waters of their favourite fandom.

You know this, even I know this, but most importantly ariestess knows this, so really I should be whapped across the knuckles with a wooden ruler for recapitulating it. What I'm supposed to be addressing here is the fact that the already abysmal average quality of fan-generated homages has reached rock bottom, and apparently has some bitchin' mattocks, because it's started to dig, or so I'm told.

I don't actually read all that much in the way of fanfic, because I'm selfish and lazy, so instead of sporking the hell out of a bunch of entertaining examples of unintentional badfic, I'm going to speculate a little, and offer some reasons for this perceived decline in quality.

The first thing I was put in mind of when I was commissioned to utter this screed was the September that never ended. As anyone who remembers the Great Renaming will tell you (in a ha-ha-only-serious fashion, of course), the Internet just hasn't been the same since it became fashionable and relatively easy to use. The barriers to entry for writing fanfic have remained the same since at least 1976, but the barriers to disseminating fanfic have been steadily declining in inverse proportion to the ease and ubiquity of Internet access. The Web has also brought greater exposure to the fanfic-writing subculture, which inevitably leads more people to join it by giving fanfic a go. So there's that.

But is that really enough? Can the decline in fanfic quality really be exclusively accounted for just by taking into account the explosion in the number of people who are both writing and posting it for all to see? Maybe. Like I said, I don't actually read enough fanfic to know, so if you think it can, by all means stop reading here.

Still with me? OK. I initially thought the missing piece of the puzzle might be the decline in the quality of education that's been relatively infamously occurring on both sides of the Atlantic over the past half-century, but I'm not so sure any more. Usenet, after all, has only been around since 1980, and our countries' respective education systems (bite me, non-UK/US readers!) have been more or less sucky for longer than that. It's got to be mostly about the Great Internet Explosion; after all, before 1993, what was pretty much the only way to get Internet access and have the spare time to use it to share fanfic? That's right, being a college student. We've lost that de facto entry requirement, which means good things for freedom of speech, and of the press, but bad things for the quality of fanfiction.

That is my theory, thank you.

Hope you liked it, ariestess!

Current Mood:	chipper
Current Music:	Poets Of The Fall - Late Goodbye

ariestess

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on whatever in fandom/fanfic, favorite type of underwear, etc.

The post I gacked the above meme from ends with a selection of quotes. Because there's nothing new under the sun, so does this one!
( Life, the Universe and Everything )

Current Mood:	thoughtful
Current Music:	Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

So I'm with my father and his girlfriend, sitting in front of a desk in a bank on the Isle of Man, discussing with the clerk and amongst ourselves the best way to lie on the form he's filling out in order to release the money he had to put in escrow on leaving to come to the island (sounds dull, I know, but I'm glossing over some details and it's all going to get much more silly any minute... now) and suddenly the bank clerk looks up, past the long and winding queue of people cordoned into a crocodile by those extensible-ribbon pole thingies they have in such places, and says "Hey, isn't that Mila Kunis? You know, from 'Family Guy'?"

Long story short, as I wake up I hear the voice of Meg Griffin saying "Do you mind? I'm trying to keep a low profile!"

In related news, I was mildly freaked out, as one generally is when confronted by a coincidence of this kind, to find myself stumbling on the news that Ms. Kunis stars as Mona Sax in the forthcoming 'Max Payne' movie. Not a bad bit of casting that - she's sort of halfway between Kathy Tong and... whoever was the model for Mona in the first game. I can see Mark Wahlberg as Max, too. Not so sure about Ludacris as Jim Bravura, but I guess the Andy Sipowicz-type we saw in-game was just a bit too much of a cliche; though speaking of, I'm not sure the infamous noir of the games will translate well to celluloid. In the games it just serves to underline the concessions a game writer has to make to come up with a story in which a character can plausibly blast through dozens if not hundreds of armed folk and have this be a Good Thing. Not that such concessions don't also have to be made to make an action movie, of course, but it's all too easy to imagine a bunch of humorless dolt movie critics refusing to learn anything about the games before watching the movie just as an excuse to pan it. Still, my fingers are crossed, and I probably will go and see the film when it comes out.