drewkitty

Last night was a bit of an adventure. I had some difficulty getting to sleep, and then just as my brain was starting to wind down, my phone started blaring an alert. Tornado warning, take shelter immediately. So I woke up the Dragon, who can sleep through almost anything normally, and the sirens started just as we started heading over to Moo's bed downstairs in the dining room to grab him. I grabbed my phone as well so we could keep up on alerts and headed down to the basement. It was around 1:40-ish in the morning. We sat down there, watching the twin rotations that had developed west of Ann Arbor and were headed our way and listening to Max on the Max Velocity YouTube channel as he tracked the storm, analyzed the two areas of rotation, looked for the debris signatures that would mean a tornado on the ground, and predicted the paths that everything would take. It was a tense time down in the basement, and felt like it went on a lot longer than it really did. Though it was long enough. The tornado warning ended for us around 2:15 AM, now threatening the area east of us instead and headed toward the high population center of Detroit and its surrounding metropolitan area. I then needed time wo wind down enough to sleep. I estimate that I got at most 3 1/2 hours of sleep. Probably closer to three. WOrk is going to be difficult today. It's a job that requires a lot of braining, and I don't have a lot of brain to brain with right now.

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: REO Speedwagon - Ridin' the Storm Out

christophine

Couldn't resist the awful pun.

Went to the Michigan League today to see a performance of the MacAdo by the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society. The MacAdo is The Mikado transplanted to Scotland and omitting all the cultural appropriation and racism of the original 19th century light opera. The songs were able to be largely kept as they were, and what rewriting was done was cleverly done and still kept the tone/feel of true Gilbert and Sullivan works.

It was a really fun production. I was sad to see that a lot of the familiar faces from past productions are gone. You expect that with the younger ones since they are students at the university, so you know they'll be moving on before long. But there are also local residents who participate, and it seems some of my favorites are no longer there. To be expected when you've been going to productions for most of thirteen years. We had missed a few of the productions recently thanks to life, such as living two months in a hotel this time last year and missing the announcement when tickets went on sale. Very happy we managed to get to this year's spring performance. Fingers crossed we can get to the winter show as well. It's Princess Ida, which has only been performed once before in the time we've been going to UMGASS productions. It's remarkably feminist for a 19th century work.

Stained glass windows on a stair landing at the Michigan League

Stained glass windows on a stair landing at the Michigan League

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: The MacAdo - On a Tree by a River

firecat

This is an ~30-minute episode of a Vox podcast called “Today Explained.” There is a transcript.

”How fan fiction went mainstream: The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained” by Danielle Hewitt and Noel King

It’s a pretty good intro to fanfic and how it’s become something publishers and creators of TV/movies pay attention to. They interview Francesca Kappa, a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created AO3.

Things I learned and some bits I liked:

AO3 was created in part to prevent commodification of fanfiction and the social connections it facilitates.
“one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW organization for transformative works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.”
It was claimed that AO3 is “much bigger than Wikipedia.” I’m not sure what metrics they’re using to come up with that.
[AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”
(Discussing copyright) “it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to, like, negotiate with Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it. Like, that's the world we live in, right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet, it has a five-year option, Shakespeare really has a great idea for it, but like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ. Abrams is going to do Hamlet.”
(I need to know which circle of Hell shows JJ Abrams’s Hamlet on repeat, because I really want to avoid it.)

noelfigart

So Andy Weir says his writing isn't political. *head scratch* Clearly Project Hail Mary is deeply so. One of the biggest moments in the movie is about freedom of choice and consent and when it can be overruled.

To anyone reared as an American, that's about as political as you can GET. (And Weir is an American in my generational cohort, so... Yeah)

I self published a novel many years ago, and whenever men read it, one of the invariable comments on the novel is that it is a feminist novel.

That wasn't my intent. My intent was low-fantasy with a legal code and culture sorta kinda inspired by Hammurabi's code. The society in the novel is deeply, DEEPLY sexist. Women are mostly property with a bit of leeway for the upper classes... but not much.

Yes, is it a feminist novel? Well, the female characters are PEOPLE. They have as much agency as their society allows, think, and have flaws just like any male character would have that don't necessarily revolve around the use of sex as a way to any power.

Probably anything I write is feminist because, well, I think women are people. It's so basic to my own thinking, I can't see anything I do as feminist qua feminist, yet... It's almost impossible for anything I write to be otherwise.

Circling back to Weir. I am pretty convinced that he has something similar going on. He feels like a lot of his views of power, life, and how people interact are Just How Things Are, so he CAN'T see it as political, even though it totally is.

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Reading

SO tired this morning

MacAdo about nothing

Look, the outsiders have discovered fanfic again

When the Author Doesn't Get It

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