Day-stuff, penguins, how to be helpful in dw_suggestions, and ABSOLUTE SCORCHING RAGE.

( day )

11:03 PM 4/15/2010
Verity, I was in Trader Joe's this morning, and they had penguin candies with jelly bellies in different colors. I have reasons to believe this is relevant to your interests.

( day )

1:10 PM 4/16/2010
I adore the writing of Tycho of Penny Arcade for the richness and surreal beauty of his extended metaphors.
They boiled the flesh off of a beloved brand, suspending strange new textures and flavors in its thematic broth.
Know that I have a thunderhead of dark crows situated in the vicinity of every word spoken in regards to the industry, raw, jag-beaked birds, rough specimens that perch and hear ...

2:23 PM 4/16/2010
Something that just leaped out at me as the result of reading something, even though I don't think it applies in the thing I'm reading: if you're using "exotic" to describe anything, and you have a viewpoint character, make sure that it's not just "exotic" as it applies to the presumed reader, but to the viewpoint character as well.

This moment of "No, the world is actually a kind of big place" is brought to us by some "exotic spices" and a discussion from actually over a year ago now in #dw. As I recall it, some chatter about Blogging Fannish Racefail '08 was a bit too hot to handle, so it wound up chattering about (no surprise) food. Specifically, tasty local fruits that non-locals consider "exotic", and people's favorite fruits, and how to serve them most deliciously. And someone (probably Fu) said something along the lines of "Here, apples are the exotic fruit." And that stuck with me.

( dreams )

7:41 AM 4/17/2010
And of course that makes me wonder about a dream tropes wiki, like unto TVTropes, sort of for dream interpretation and sort of just for the hey cool factor.

5:11 PM 4/17/2010
SO MUCH THIS. (dw_suggestions-related, but applies to any FLOSS feature request forum in a FLOSS environment where development on the main project is open to any competent contributors.)

( day )

6:19 AM 4/18/2010
This is not okay: http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/5949233.html
I do not have words for how not okay this is.
The County of Sonoma in California split up a couple, in a tragic and infuriating instance of institutionalized homophobia and elder abuse.

Midshipman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Ensign Wesley Crusher, Teen Geek Idol

So there's a round of discussion about Mary Sue (and Gary/Lary/Harry/Barry Stu) happening in corners of fandom that I read, and one of the entries mentioned Wesley Crusher and got me thinking off on a tangent.

How could Wesley Crusher have been treated in Star Trek: The Next Generation, to make him identifiable and even awesome? He was apparently a blatant self-insert of Gene Roddenberry, and annoying, and because he was so disliked, when an episode focused on him, he was show-warping rather than show-enhancing. I think it would have been possible to make him identifiable rather than alienating, and with only a few tweaks to premise and casting. (Note: this is the perspective of someone who's not seen the whole show, and therefore I am pretty much guaranteed to be missing parts of Wesley's canon portrayal that might screw with what I'm proposing.) But he was basically shoved into the show without proper grounding for his existence, just a flimsy backstory, and viewers were expected to identify with him and accept him just because he was OMG TEENAGE. That ... doesn't really work.


Idea 1: Don't make him the exception.
( Holy fuck that's a lot of midshipmen. )

Idea 2: Even on a ship that *has* teens, Wesley really doesn't have any friends his own age.
( Read more... )

Idea 3: Give him some non-adult friends, or at least people he has a positive relationship with.
( Read more... )

With a those few tweaks, Wesley could have been transformed from being the Only Special Snowflake in a desert, to being the Only Special Snowflake in a blizzard. He's still a Special Snowflake, but now there's more support for his existence in his own society. He becomes identifiable: not just sole teenager in a world full of adults, but teenager isolated from his peers because of his intelligence and difficulty with/disinclination for social interaction, having more meaningful interactions with adults than people his own age, yet isolated from them too due to age and social difficulties. With identification, Wesley becomes awesome and not dreaded, and the audience can buy in: this is me, this is my friend who's too smart for his own good, and there I am/he is, and OKAY THIS IS KIND OF AWESOME.

If Wesley hadn't caught on with the audience even with the changes, with a framework that inserted a pool of teenage extras into the background, another teen or two could have been brought forth as a guest star and tested for recurring character potential.

5 tweets for 2010-4-18

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Sunday, 0614: http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/5949233.html *furious*(fairlight, jd, teshi, kevin, this is likely to be fucking triggering)
• Sunday, 1436: RT @lunivore: Giggles. A movement is afoot on Reddit to make .nom the food-related domain. "With enough money, we can persuade ICANN." " ...
• Sunday, 1458: Size six: The Western women's harem http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/6/size_six_the_western_women_s_harem/
• Sunday, 2247: I like that the company that makes this stuff is called "Lunatic Construction": http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/04/lego-esque_modular_furniture.html
• Sunday, 2312: @tiferet93 If that's wrong then I don't want to be right.

Follow me on Twitter.