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Your internet is not my internet: I read about this new Facebook stuff and it just makes me confused. Filters are exotic and nobody knows how to use them? And so Facebook is going to let other people decide what my Groups are? Why can’t I manage my friends myself and filter out specific people when I need to? (I take it that hidden somewhere in the bowels of Facebook settings, deeper even than privacy controls, you can do this, but that they expect Groups to become dominant.)
The LJ/DW solutions seem so intuitive and elegant, whereas Facebook’s prompting for me to add people to various Lists has been terrible. Am I just wanting those kids to get off of my lawn? (I should also note: I declared LJ bankruptcy and gave up on updating my friendslist/filters there. I haven’t been filtering at DW, though I also have not been adding back journals that seemed to be for reading purposes only. I expect I will have to start filtering soon, though. So it’s not as if manual filtering is easy. It’s just so much better for what I want to do than automatically being added to groups!)
Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon: Yay, new Ilona Andrews! This is another Edge book, the idea here apparently being to create a new main heterosexual pairing with each book, here by bringing to prominence a minor character/disappointed suitor of the heroine of the previous book. Also, we repeat the pattern of powerful outsider male (physically powerful and also with connections to the nobility/power of the rulers of the fully magic lands on one side of the Edge) matched with physically/magically powerful female who’s in a socially disadvantaged position because she’s from the denigrated Edge and has significant family burdens. This all makes it sound like I didn’t like it; not true! Andrews has found a pattern and executes it well, and the guy’s extraordinary powers are not offputting because he’s well matched, and this time he also has some chewy Angst (he’s a shapeshifter and has a history of abuse because of it, and is convinced he’s unloveable). You’ll like it if this is the kind of thing you like.
Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Paul Attinello et al. eds: A collection of essays of varying interest/accessibility to nonmusical Buffy fans; I was probably most interested in the couple that focused on Hush and Once More, With Feeling as opposed to the analyses of the choice of indie rock as an expression of both logics of production and aesthetics. There’s one essay on Buffy fan videos, focusing on canonical pairings, and I didn’t get it. The author, Rob Cover, thinks they’re somehow different than Star Trek slash vids, to which he contrasts them. According to him, Buffy vids that engage in “reconfiguration as renewal, working with the postmodern spirit of the Buffy phenomenon,” whereas Star Trek vids “seek not so much to rework the text by reconfiguring its intermedia, but function as an appreciation or confirmation of other slash readings of the text.” So Buffy vids “work differently from the Star Trek slash videos, partly in going beyond the K/S slash clips’ use as a celebration of visual confirmation of preexisting slash, partly through the very different form of romantic cheese that they offer, and partly through their recombining of the popular visual with the even more popular song to create significantly diverse meanings.” All I’ve got is: ? I guess the argument is … Whedon (here the auteur figure) doesn’t mind it when fans bring their own subtext. And Roddenberry … did? Well, that’s just inaccurate, and also I don’t get why it matters. I’m also not sure what “preexisting slash” means or why Star Trek vids don’t create diverse meanings. Oh well.
William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era: The technical differences between film photography and digital two-dimensional representations challenge a lot of our assumptions about the status of photographic images as truth, even though photos too have always been manipulable and manipulated. Very interesting insights, including the point that a photograph captures both an instant and an instance, whereas many of these new images (electron microscope images, images of the universe from radio telescopes, etc.) are actually made over time and could more readily be said to represent a type rather than a specific individual.
The LJ/DW solutions seem so intuitive and elegant, whereas Facebook’s prompting for me to add people to various Lists has been terrible. Am I just wanting those kids to get off of my lawn? (I should also note: I declared LJ bankruptcy and gave up on updating my friendslist/filters there. I haven’t been filtering at DW, though I also have not been adding back journals that seemed to be for reading purposes only. I expect I will have to start filtering soon, though. So it’s not as if manual filtering is easy. It’s just so much better for what I want to do than automatically being added to groups!)
Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon: Yay, new Ilona Andrews! This is another Edge book, the idea here apparently being to create a new main heterosexual pairing with each book, here by bringing to prominence a minor character/disappointed suitor of the heroine of the previous book. Also, we repeat the pattern of powerful outsider male (physically powerful and also with connections to the nobility/power of the rulers of the fully magic lands on one side of the Edge) matched with physically/magically powerful female who’s in a socially disadvantaged position because she’s from the denigrated Edge and has significant family burdens. This all makes it sound like I didn’t like it; not true! Andrews has found a pattern and executes it well, and the guy’s extraordinary powers are not offputting because he’s well matched, and this time he also has some chewy Angst (he’s a shapeshifter and has a history of abuse because of it, and is convinced he’s unloveable). You’ll like it if this is the kind of thing you like.
Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Paul Attinello et al. eds: A collection of essays of varying interest/accessibility to nonmusical Buffy fans; I was probably most interested in the couple that focused on Hush and Once More, With Feeling as opposed to the analyses of the choice of indie rock as an expression of both logics of production and aesthetics. There’s one essay on Buffy fan videos, focusing on canonical pairings, and I didn’t get it. The author, Rob Cover, thinks they’re somehow different than Star Trek slash vids, to which he contrasts them. According to him, Buffy vids that engage in “reconfiguration as renewal, working with the postmodern spirit of the Buffy phenomenon,” whereas Star Trek vids “seek not so much to rework the text by reconfiguring its intermedia, but function as an appreciation or confirmation of other slash readings of the text.” So Buffy vids “work differently from the Star Trek slash videos, partly in going beyond the K/S slash clips’ use as a celebration of visual confirmation of preexisting slash, partly through the very different form of romantic cheese that they offer, and partly through their recombining of the popular visual with the even more popular song to create significantly diverse meanings.” All I’ve got is: ? I guess the argument is … Whedon (here the auteur figure) doesn’t mind it when fans bring their own subtext. And Roddenberry … did? Well, that’s just inaccurate, and also I don’t get why it matters. I’m also not sure what “preexisting slash” means or why Star Trek vids don’t create diverse meanings. Oh well.
William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era: The technical differences between film photography and digital two-dimensional representations challenge a lot of our assumptions about the status of photographic images as truth, even though photos too have always been manipulable and manipulated. Very interesting insights, including the point that a photograph captures both an instant and an instance, whereas many of these new images (electron microscope images, images of the universe from radio telescopes, etc.) are actually made over time and could more readily be said to represent a type rather than a specific individual.
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I set up my fb account a couple of years ago because a lot of people seemed to be migrating there, and it was one place I could keep track of everybody. I haven't visited my account there in months. About the only thing I use it for is if someone on DW or LJ or b.org links to photos in their fb. I quickly got bored and cranky with the interface. I don't care what fleeting thought someone's having at the top of their brain. I'd rather read what they have to say when they get a chance to sit down and have a little think before they post. Dialog is good. Discourse is better. fb and twitter promote neither. Feh.
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I use twitter to share links, but I don't fundamentally get it.