Random Questions And Links And, Oh Yeah, Your Best Song
Random links.
1) Regarding yesterday’s love post, I note my wife was kind enough to create a love thread for me. I note this because I am an attention whore.
2) Seriously, how cool is it that there’s a Jedi Training Camp for kids? Registration’s still open for slots in February, and if I had a kid nearby to Texas, I’d be sending him off. (And bonus points for not using the term Padawan.)
3) Spotify is really opening up musical horizons for me. I do love being able to listen to any song on the year’s-best lists to see whether I’m impressed or not. So I’ll ask you one question:
What was your favorite song in 2011?
You choose only one. Seriously. If you can’t choose one, I’ll boot you. I’m looking for new music, but don’t wanna be drowned in suggestions. And no, the song doesn’t have to be made in 2011, I’m just curious as to what your favorite song was that you found this year.
If I had to choose one, it’d probably be the Dartmouth Aires’ cover of “Club Can’t Handle Me Right Now” (skip to 2:56 to see it and skip the intro). Seriously. It’s insanely sweet, and as an acapella song it’s just pure beauty. That last note is just…. mmm.
(I have other songs that might be contenders, but I can play by my own rules.)
I'm At theferrett@theferrett.com. Still.
Dude. I’m right here. You know where I am?
theferrett@theferrett.com.
That’s the email address I’ve used for a decade, and it’s easily available in a zillion places. I know, because spammers seem to find it wherever their malicious little robots roam. If you need to contact me, please do so there.
The reason I say this is because people keep messaging me on LJ and Facebook in their attempts to contact me, and it doesn’t work. I don’t even like Facebook, so I check it periodically in the same way you check that bit of moldy leftovers at the back of the fridge. Messages there can languish for months at a time. Likewise, LJ messages may likewise sit in stasis for weeks.
Then I feel bad, because someone emails me to go, “I HAVE A BONE STUCK IN MY THROAT AND MY OXYGEN SEEMS TO BE DWINDLING, DO YOU HAVE ADVICE?” and then I don’t see it until July.
I know Facebook and LJ and all of the other social networking sites want to replace your email because then they’ll be your viewpoint to the world and you’ll be shackled to their snazzy email system… But I don’t work that way. The other social networks are an inconvenience for me, and as such their friendly attempts to replace mostly-working systems with their ad-choked and annoying bits.
I don’t want to have to go to Facebook in the first place. So please. Don’t make me.
Now, I can understand using a social network when you don’t know where to contact someone otherwise, but I’m telling you my details so you don’t have to. Hell, leave a comment on my blog. And Lord knows I can be sporadic with email, too, but at least then I’ll see it and feel guilty. Contacting me via Facebook message is like condemning it to Purgatory – a nebulous, wandering place where they languish until an unspecified freedom date.
I beg thee. Mail may not be your friend, but it is mine. Send it on, man.
A Long Tradition Of Love, Dying
As LiveJournal fades, I still miss certain traditions. Namely, the love posts.
It’s a sweet habit that I’ve seen others do, but Shadowwolf13 does the most often – someone starts a post that says, “Start a thread for people to say nice things about someone else on LiveJournal, and I’ll maintain the threads so someone can come here and see all the compliments left for them.”
The maintaining is a pain in the butt. You have to constantly redo the post to list all of the people, and folks start multiple threads for the same person, and it really is a lot of overhead. But it’s a way of making people feel better on a holiday, and it’s a tradition unique to LJ as far as I know, and I feel bad because once the English side of LJ goes, it will be no more.
So she’s put a new Love Thread up today, and I’ve already left threads for my sweeties, who really deserve some awesome love always. Shadowwolf is a patient wonder for doing this, and this year seems light on love, so please – if you’re still on LJ, I encourage you to go leave love for someone and put breadcrumbs so others can find it.
A little love this season is never a bad thing.
Having Watched All Of Deep Space Nine, I Now Say….
I have now devoted one hundred and twenty-nine hours of my life to watching the entirety of Deep Space Nine. Assuming I’d never slept, that’d be five and a half straight days of television, but as it was, finishing DS9 was a commitment. We gave up Mythbusters, we gave up sitcoms, we gave up Boardwalk Empire because we knew if we strayed we’d wander off and never know how all of this ended.
And how did it end?
Well.
I told you when I started watching DS9 that I hadn’t seen it before now because I “knew” it was a pale rip-off of Babylon 5 – a complaint that has some traction. But DS9 and B5 had similar evolutions because of the nature of the show.
Which is to say that Next Generation was a spaceship swooping from exotic locale to exotic locale, every week a new distraction, so you didn’t have to worry about the characters all that much. Hey, it’s Picard – on a pleasure planet! Hey, it’s Picard – fighting the Borg! Hey, it’s Picard – arguing with Q! So your main plotline isn’t so much the evolution of the characters, it’s the latest show-and-dance.
….Though I note that the fan favorite episodes tend to be the ones where Picard is forced through character evolution, such as “Picard has to live a whole life as someone else” or “Picard goes home and breaks down over the Borg.”
What DS9 did, simply because it was a static locale and didn’t have the luxury of a different enemy every week, was to change the characters. Because you literally couldn’t go elsewhere, the characters had to evolve, and as such what you had was a situation very unlike Star Trek where the characters’ choices in Season 1 would not be the choices they made come Season 7. (As evidenced by Sisko’s chilling, yet correct, choice in “In The Pale Moonlight” – a choice Picard never could have made, yet a choice that needed to be made.)
Deep Space Nine is both far better and far worse than Babylon 5. B5 had the problem of wooden characters and bad actors, while DS9 had rich characters and some very bad actors mixed in with some very good ones. (It took me a long time before I could accept Sisko’s stilted delivery as a riff on Shatnerian earnestness. And ever since Bec made me watch Shatner’s documentary “The Captains,” where he interviews all of the other Star Trek captains only to find Avery Brooks is a singing, piano-playing loon, I found it hard to separate Avery from the role.)
Basically, every flaw Deep Space Nine has when compared to Babylon 5 comes down to “Babylon 5 knew where it was going.” B5 had an end point, so it had a clear character arc for every character – Londo’s redemption and corruption, Garibaldi’s fencing with the Psi Corps, even Sinclair/Sheridan’s attitude towards Earth. As such, the characters had very bold decisions where they moved from friends to enemies, or vice versa, with the grace of a dancer.
DS9 gets the evolution, but falters a bit because they don’t know where they’re headed – they were just running for a few seasons and hoped to tie it up. The only one where they absolutely nail the arc is Odo and Kira, and even that wavers for a bit as the “Will she or won’t she” turns into cruelty for a bit as you can sense the producers not quite sure what to do. So you have a lot of relationships like Odo and Quark that are quite nice as they are, but are entirely about moving by inches and never reach a breaking point.
On the other hand, DS9 has a much better grasp on emotional issues, unlike B5 which treats emotions as something that happens to further the plot. DS9, like all Star Treks, loves devoting individual episodes to giving each of their leads a challenge that shows us who they are. So we get these character spotlights where we wind up getting very much inside the heads of Kira and Dax and co, which matter more because that’s what Star Trek does well – that human factor.
On the other hand, DS9 has the Ferengi episodes, which vary wildly in quality, and a lot of Klingon episodes – and since I can’t stand Klingons, it feels like there’s a lot of filler.
Thing is, though, the end game of DS9 is ultimately pretty satisfying. It suffers because, like all “We’re making it up as we go along” shows, there are dead-ends and shoehorned in aspects – hey, what’s that book that suddenly turns out to mean anything, and why’s it only show up three episodes before the end? Why did the prophets make such a big deal about Sisko making a choice where his punishment was that he could never return to Bajor if this was their end game all along? Who are these Breen guys, anyway, and why’d they steal Leia’s armor from Jabba’s palace?
None of that matters, though, because they got some of the emotional arcs right. DS9 is different from Roddenberry in that it believes that war has a cost, and that cost takes its toll. The end of Next Generation is Picard saying “Engage,” and that there are tons of new adventures to be had – which is inspiring, but not necessarily honest.
DS9 shows that characters must make sacrifices in the course of this war, and what happens in the end isn’t always happy. Some real losses are had – not death, which is kind of easy in fiction, but the kind of thing where ultimately to do the right thing you have to step away from what you want personally to accomplish the larger goal. And in that, DS9 shows how friendships are born and shift as yes, you have friendships, but you have marriages and careers and, yes, the fate of the fucking galaxy, and sometimes you’re going to pay for that currency in unhappiness to get the paltry satisfaction of having done the right thing.
That’s where DS9 nails it. Yes, it’s a little uneven in the last season as the non-arc shows sputter out. Yes, maybe some of the end game is too much “Because The Prophets say so.” Yes, maybe all our questions are not answered. But the emotional resonance of knowing that no, in fact being a tool of the Prophets does not lead to happiness, war does not lead to happiness, combat costs.
And that, I like. So much that I can forgive the unevenness.
Why I Love Kelly Link
Kelly Link was my first teacher at Clarion, and I adore her with all my heart. I like her better than I do her writing, and you can only understand what a compliment that is when you realize how much I love her writing.
Anyway, this quote is not from her, but she quotes this in her interview, and it is perhaps the truest thing I’ve ever read about writing a novel:
Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.