HSU IT Department

Prompting is open at hp_silencio, where the challenge is to write a dialog-free fic. Very intriguing. I tend to rely heavily on dialog (probably too heavily), so I'm thinking of signing up to challenge myself.

And I want him.


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I have no idea how I ended up reading a story about Peaches Geldof (daughter of musician Bob Geldof), but I did. And I found this sentence fragment:

"Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fotheringham of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate"

It just doesn't get any more British than that :)

So yay, I finally have time to write about the Pop Culture Association conference, which as I said the other day was brilliant. I think I'll break it up and do one post for each day, since there's so much to say about it.

So first, the background: I've wanted to go to this conference for ages, ever since my brother told me about it when he first presented there six years ago (his field is horror movies) and I looked at the program. This year not only was my brother presenting again, my boss at work was also presenting, plus it was in Chicago (easily accessible via Amtrak, plus I could do a side trip to see my mom, stepdad and grandmother). So this seemed the ideal time. I was not disappointed!

On the spectrum that runs from rabid fans on the one end to Spock-like academics on the other, this conference is tilted about 15 degrees toward the rabid fan side. This is both good and bad: on the one hand it makes for a different tenor than other professional conferences I've been too, very lively and kaleidoscopic; on the other hand the number of presenter no-shows and "lightweight" presentations was higher. It's also by far the biggest conference I've ever been to in terms of number of presenters -- the full program is over four hundred pages! -- and every session involved two or three people. This also was both good and bad: the sheer number of interesting topics was fantastic, but I was left wanting more in-depth information on just about everything, since regardless of how scholarly the paper, there was only time for a very surface overview.

Wednesday we arrived around 3pm so I only was able to hit one session. I chose one on Monsters and the Supernatural, which had three papers: "Which 'Witch' Is A Witch?: Negative and Inaccurate Portrayals of So-Called 'Witches' In Horror" (Charmed, Buffy, etc.), "Rooting for the Monster: 21st Century Creature Features and the Devaluation of the Human" (about how we now cheer for the monster in the movies instead of the humans, e.g. King Kong, Godzilla), and "Monsters and Men: Guillermo Del Toro and the Subaltern" (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, etc.). I was tempted by another session, "Star Trek as a Mirror of American Culture," but that one seemed relatively obvious so I opted for the other one. "Rooting for the Monster" was particularly interesting, proposing that increased awareness of environmental issues may be part of why we now root for the "monster" -- that is, we don't automatically see man as the hero because we acknowledge the damage that homo sapiens has done to the planet. Instead of seeing Godzilla's or King Kong's death as this great victory, we recognize the tragedy inherent in the death of a unique creature.

Wednesday night we had an awesome time at the "Welcome to Our Nightmare" movie sponsored by all the different horror focus areas: Trilogy of Terror (eeeeeeeek!!!) They had a trivia contest before the show and gave away all kinds of cool stuff: movies, books, t-shirts, etc. The questions were ridiculously detailed (Q: Who played Jonathan Harker in the 1931 version of Dracula? A: No one, the Harker character wasn't in that version!) and of course sooo many people knew the answers, because FANS. (I got a Lon Chaney question almost right but not quite, drat the luck.) The movie itself was hugely entertaining, three tales based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one was seriously unnerving, though perhaps not for quite the reasons the filmmakers intended (sexual predators being so much more in the news these days). The second was predictable, and the last was just utterly silly: a creepy little African statue comes to life and hunts a woman through her apartment, gnashing its tiny little teeth and waving its tiny little spear, like some kind of humanoid gremlin. It survives stabbing, drowning and being stuffed into the oven. I won't spoil it by telling you the closing scene, you really need to see it for yourself XD All in all it was a prime example of cheesy 1970s horror and the audience shouted things at the screen and laughed and so on, but it was all done with great affection (because, again, FANS!).

OK, enough for today. Tomorrow: Stephen King, "You've got more problems than lesbians in your sauna!", crossover fics, Star Wars and the monomyth, and who called the fandom police??

Mr Psmith is working on an elephant conservation paper, which involves a VERY SHORT survey. If any of you would be willing to take it so he has more data to work with that would be wonderful and I would hug you virtually! The survey is here, if you're willing. Thank you!!

The cool: The HTML5 Gendered Advertising Remixer. Drag and drop to mix audio and video from heavily boy-targeted and girl-targeted toy ads to see how ridiculous they both are. It's quite funny. I was particularly amused by overlaying the audio for Tonka Garage with the video for Betty Spaghetti.

The srsly?????: We all know about "trigger" warnings; fanfic has had them for ages as a courtesy to its reader. But it's really too much when college students demand trigger warnings on their syllabi.

This boggles my mind.

I'm not at all against trigger warnings in fanfic -- after all, fanfic is known for pushing the envelope in a lot of ways. But fanfic is, when all is said and done, a hobby. A thing you do on your own time, for your own reasons, in which you are free to seek out or avoid anything you like, from SSHG to Giant Squid + Hagrid.

The entire point of college, on the other hand, is (or should be) to expose you to new things, things you don't know about, things that make you think, and yes, even things that might make you uncomfortable. Because real life has those things. It's meant to spur dialog, critical thinking, analysis -- none of which are possible if the only things you look at are things that make you feel good. Because real life demands those abilities. And most importantly, it's meant to be a bridge between your (usually protected) childhood and the (often unpleasant) real world. Because yes, hon, you will encounter things that may be hard for you in Real Life.

As The New Republic pointed out, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s brilliant novel about the great harms of colonialism, Things Fall Apart, now carries the warning that it “may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, and religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”

If we allow students to opt out of things that they assume or imagine might upset them, or that they just plain fear, it seems to me we are doing them a disservice.

Thoughts?

"The next day he had almost forgotten about Gandalf. He did not remember things very well, unless he put them down on his Engagement Tablet: like this: Gandalf Tea Wednesday. Yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the kind..."

Check out Food in Tolkien's The Hobbit, on http://recipewise.co.uk. It provides historical context (the Shire as Victorian England?) plus recipes for seedcake, etc. so that "we can faithfully recreate that same Tea Party that Bilbo, Gandalf and the Dwarves so enjoyed."

One of my prompts has been claimed for sshg_promptfest -- squee!

Yes, I know that ALL the contributions will be brilliant (because hello, sshg), but I'm tickled pink that one of my prompts sparked an idea for someone :)

And there are still lots more, especially for artists -- Go ye and claim!

Claim a prompt. You know you want to.

Prompt review post is up for SSHG -- and there are two hundred, count 'em, TWO HUNDRED prompts! Truly an embarrassment of riches, everything from angst to humor to backstory to AU to the Krampus. Go take a look: