The Earth-Noise Intervene

So I was annoyed at tumblr a little, and then a thousand words later, I had this rant/meta about D/s and how everyone is Doing It Wrong.

( So if you like it when I'm pedantic and somewhat bitchy, please proceed. )

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/403985.html. comments over there.

1. Am I alone in this, or is The Usual Suspects an ENORMOUSLY slashy movie? I have just seen it for the first time, you understand, and love it unreservedly because I have a hardon for unreliable narration, but I mean, everybody seems like they're about thirty seconds from fucking everybody else.

TO THE AO3

2. Dear children, I am ready to go HOME because being with my parents is, as always, driving me MENTAL. For various reasons it's much worse this year, but the one saving grace is we're not going out to see my extended family. Lord. I want to go home and sit on my couch and perhaps sip some wine and definitely watch lots of movies and TV I haven't caught up on.

3. Okay, here's the thing with the LJ/DW thing:

There is nothing, nothing in this whole thing that I would like better than fandom to just pull up stakes and move en masse to DW. It's not a "let's stick it to LJ" thing- as much as I love to stick it to the man- it's a "hey, we could be doing so much better for ourselves" sort of thing. We could leave something that is starting to become kind of rickety and busted-ass for the new hotness- and unlike certain other LJ clones I could mention, they're actually committed to, y'know, being a real thing, not something cobbled together in someone's basement to get around LJ's TOS.

That being said.

I'm not going to stop crossposting. The whole reason is the people on LJ. As much as I can wave the DW flag, I didn't even want to move over at first; I wouldn't have unless people I liked hadn't stopped/all but stopped using LJ. And I can do that, I can do what I can, but I'm not going to ditch my friends because they won't move.

I'm also not going to close comments; almost all the posts on this journal are 1) friends-locked RL posts 2) fic posts. If I turn off comments, 1) my LJ friends can't comment on locked entries (I am sure there is a way to do this through openID, but, really, that's not going to happen) 2) my comment count will go down on fic posts (no, trust me on this one, people really will not comment if you don't give them to option to do it where it's most convenient).

So. For the foreseeable future, you can find me in both places, but if it gets to the point where I feel the need to move, I'll be moving to DW, not back to LJ. That ship has sailed.

Okay. Back to the porn and the cat macros.

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/365563.html. comments over there.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be Storm.

Other superheroes and heroines, whatever. Storm's the best. Storm is in control. You better not piss her off, because she'll fuck your shit right up, but most of the time, she's classy. You know why Charles Xavier leads the X-Men? Because Storm lets him. Storm was my hero and role model. I wanted elemental powers so badly, you have no idea, you guys. That weather control shit was right up my alley.

A lot of arguments for increased presence of characters of color as good guys in popular culture is based on the premise that children of color need role models that they can relate to, ones who look like them. But you know what? I'm white. And you know who needed a strong black female role model? I did. We all fucking do. We as adults still do.

And that's why X-Men, despite its issues, which are as numerous as, well, its issues, gets thumbs up from me. There's something all of us can relate to there; more than that, we can relate to each other through it.

But if you're watching X-Men: First Class? Not so much.

( Spoilers, squee harshing, etc )

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/336799.html. comments over there.

I shouldn't have to say this, but:

Do not repost comments made in my journal to Facebook or Twitter.

I don't understand why you would want to, but there it is. I'm less worried about people reposting reviews of my fic, but if you do it with my locked entries and I find out about it, I will ban you from my journal.

Facebook is its own set of problems, but I'm more worried about Twitter, honestly. I use Twitter like it's going out of style, but I don't like it when people pass my stuff around on Twitter anyway. I understand why people do it, but it makes it essentially impossible to track how my stories move (unless people ship their tweets to their journal). And besides, if somebody had used Twitter to send your stories to David Hewlett, you wouldn't like it either.

So don't do it.

And if anybody needs a DW code, I got 'em coming out of my ears.

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/253539.html. comments over there.

1. So the bulletproof kinks meme has been going around again. I've been tumbling it around in my head, and this is what it keeps coming down to: my only bulletproof kinks are trust and love. Because everything else- the whips and the chains and the clothespins and the consent play and even most of the tentacles- hinges on that point. It's about using your body to express your love for and trust in another person; it's about trusting yourself to know your own limits; it's about having someone else invest their trust in you. And that's it. Everything else is icing.

...

Well, trust, love, and Colonel Sadist.

I'm a masochist, what do you want from me?

2. Following the whole hc_bingo thing, I've been thinking about h/c a lot; and the more I think about it, the more I don't really know what to think. I always say that I don't like h/c, and I never set out with the intention to write it. But I look out over all the stories of mine that I really like, the stories that I'm the most proud of, and a lot of them are undoubtedly h/c stories.

I've also been contemplating this whole issue of who's being hurt/insulted by what- whether we're protecting the interests of those of us with the kinds of problems that appear in h/c stories, or blocking people from getting catharsis/escapism from those same stories. It's hard for me to even get a handle on, because I can only think of one and a half stories that even address the challenges that I face (it is still really weird to even think the word "disability" in reference to myself). I've always felt that there was this sort of tacit understanding that mental health issues in general are off limits in fandom; the only stories I can think of that address them do so under the weight of an existent scrutiny, and so are really carefully written. But, at the same time, I can think of a lot of issues that aren't treated with the same kid gloves but really should be.

So I don't know what to think. But I'm glad to see these discussions happening at all, because I feel like it's shit we all need to be cognizant of- and having it pointed out that we're not cognizant of it is the first step in getting there, y'know?

3. On that note, I am sick to my back teeth of hearing shit like this.

Medicine doesn't work for everyone, and even getting to the right medication sucks up time and money like a fucking black hole. Even so, this type of bullshit rhetoric is still hurtful to real people who could really get help; I know, because I was one of them. There was a time in the not too distant past where I said I'd never go back on medication again, because I bought it. I thought there was something inherent in myself that I'd lose to the medication, that it would somehow contaminate me, turn me into- gasp- a normal person.

And you know where that got me? It almost got me out of graduate school, and it's come close to getting me dead.

And I am so very, very tired of people acting like bipolar disorder is some gift from the heavens that I should be fucking thankful for. It's not. It's a disease that's in my fucking way.

Being manic is not being creative, it is being manic. There is nothing creative about staying up for four days. There is nothing creative about snapping at people you care about. There is nothing creative about being curled up on the floor, pressing your hands to your ears in the vain hope that you could somehow block out the sound of your own racing thoughts. You know what creative looks like? Creative looks like not being too depressed to get to the computer, and not being too manic to write when you get there.

And even if it were the magical creative fugue that people paint it as, that shit is not worth the trade off. Some of us would rather be able to get out of bed in the morning the other fifty weeks of the year.

So please, don't listen to assholes like this.

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/238377.html. comments over there.

I've been looking at the "why I write fanfic" meme, and I'd do it, but nothing on it seems to express my main reasons for writing fic, which I don't think I could sum up in one sentence anyway. So I suppose I'll take a break from reading badfic and talk about it a little.

I hate it when people work under the assumption that fanfic is practice for writing "real" stories. Because you know what? I'm probably never going to be published (as a fiction author, I'll be published as an academic or be unemployed). Not because my work's not quality- and some of it is- but because I don't have the desire to write a novel.

I don't usually find the spoon analogy applicable to myself (I'm sometimes fond of saying that for me it's more like forks- if I collect enough of them, I tend to get stabbed), but in this instance it totally applies. I just don't have the spoons to write anything more than about twenty thousand words. Writing forty thousand toppled me into a depression that took me months to get out of; I can't even fathom writing a novel-length story, original or not. The reward structure is all wrong for me- I need little bits of encouragement, not to labor in quiet for months (or years) and then have one triumphant moment at the end.

And anyway, even when I do write original stuff, guess what? It's still bricolage (building from existing pieces). When I write original stuff, I write about vampires and people with super powers and assassins and road trips to find one's self. None of it is new. It's bricolage and cultural cannibalism whether you write about John and Rodney or about Steve the out of work vampire or about somebody's coming-of-age or about a quiet little town in the hills where evil lurks. You are not a special snowflake. What you do is not original. You are a cultural production. GET OVER IT.

[/unexpected soapbox]

Furthermore, I'm a breaker, more than anything else. Some people are creators, I suppose, but my forte is breaking things down to their component parts. It's the way I communicate, the way I teach, the way I think. I enjoy studying things that other people think of as hard or monolithic, because I find it easy to take them apart and communicate them efficiently. I like to play with people's assumptions about things, because I find it incredibly satisfying when people go away with a different perspective or a different kind of knowledge than they started out with.

I write fanfic because it meshes well with what I like to do. Fanfiction is about a whole bunch of people building a community together, gravitating towards the same tropes and themes. And I like to take those tropes, break them open, twist them around, hold them up and say, "No, really, it's like this." And yeah, sometimes that includes writing porn, but you know what? Porn- the good, non-exploitative kind- is awesome, and well written porny fic is even better.

So that's why I do it.

This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/228807.html. comments over there.

Dear Joe Mallozzi, Brad Wright, and the rest of you jokers,

I was going to write a long rant about how pissing off your fanbase is a bad idea, and if you're going to say, "You just don't get it" to a whole bunch of science fiction fans (read: overeducated sarcastic jerks with too much time on their hands), you better hope like hell that you're right and they're wrong, and how you can all generally just eat me.

But then I realized everything I needed to say could be summed up in cat macros. So,



( Cut for images, snark, etc )

Okay, look. I honestly never thought I'd have to say this, but:

Please, please, please do not show fic I've written to people involved in the media upon which it is based.

I know they could find it at any time. Trust me, I get that; I'm certain that Brad Wright knows all about mckay_sheppard, and it really wouldn't surprise me at all if Kohta Hirano lurked at hellsing. I've never been conceited enough to believe that anybody would ever want to read my fic, but I'm pretty peaceful with the fact that, out of the three-hundred-odd (and they have been odd) stories I've written, chances are at least one of them's been stumbled over by someone connected to the canon it concerns.

That doesn't mean you should help them along.

I'm sure, in a certain light, it probably seems like you're doing me a solid, but, really, David Hewlett does not need to be all up in my livejournal. It would likely scare him half to death, and he seems like such a nice man. And no, it doesn't make a difference whether you email it to him or tweet it at him or print it out and mail it to his agent; because any way you do it, you put him in a horribly awkward position, and you make me look like a crazy person. Worst of all, when you do it without my consent or knowledge, I don't get a chance to defend myself from that. And considering how emphatic I am about not embarrassing myself in front of famous people or invading their already diminished privacy, I find it particularly impolite and invasive.

So seriously. Don't. It's not cool.


(I know it wasn't any of you guys, because you are all lovely and sparkly and such. <3)

I feel a little hypocritical weighing in on Racefail: The Colonialism Remix when I kept my mouth shut through the original Racefail. It was mostly because I didn't have anything intelligent to say, and because I was up to my ass in Bourdieu at the time.

But I find I have rather a lot to say this time around.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Patricia Wrede wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child, and, well, I'll just quote the same thing everybody's quoting:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.

No, really, she actually said that. Like, right on the internet in front of god and everybody. She sat down at the computer and typed that, probably read back over it to see if she misspelled anything, hit send, the whole bit.

I have debated how to present my thoughts on this, because I'm afraid that the next three paragraphs come off as me trying to establish my cred. That's not my intention; thinking about all of this has led me to ruminate on my own identity, which has always been a question of some doubt, and the things in my past that've biased me (there are a lot of them). So mostly, I'm just thinking aloud here; feel free to skip down if you only came to read about the present issue.

( On the stickiness of identity )

( On the present Fail )

On a completely separate, but tangentially related issue: ( Because this post lacks both lulz and SGA references )