It was a bit like eating a smoked salmon, asparagus, white truffle and champagne risotto made by someone who can't actually cook. All the ingredients were fantastic, but had been put together with only the haziest idea of in what proportions, in which order, and for how long. Still, if you prodded the sticky mess and picked off the charred bits, there were some delicious morsels in there.

( Autopsy of an Epic Mess: contains spoilers for both parts of the End of Time )

Anyway, this has kind of inspired me to go hunting fics for my favourite fascinatingly wrong Slashy Nemeses again, and here are some recs:
1. Chasing The Paradox - a lovely, twisty, timey-wimey Doctor/Master romance, kind of sweet and deeply disturbing at the same time.
2. Intoxication - Academy-era fic, in which Ushas has to cope with Koschei's attempts to seduce Theta Sigma crashing through her study whilst she is trying to revise. Fairly dark comedy, in which Koschei comes over distinctly stalkery, with some dubious consent issues.
3.The one where Koschei goes all BDSM on Theta's arse - Academy-era fic, as NSFW as you might imagine, all psychological and creepy with definite consent issues.
4.Bit of femmeslash for a change of pace - Rani/GLaDoS. It really does work.

It's at times like this that I really wish I could do fanvids. Because is this the ultimate Doctor/Master song or what?



If anyone wants to make that vid, or knows someone who does, I'd love to see it.

Tropes of fanfic and pop culture as first spotted in classical literature:

1. The Mook - discovered by Livy (thanks to prochytes for pointing this one out, and setting me off on this train of thought): "I doubt not but that...to persons reading of so many wars waged with the Volscians, this same circumstance will suggest itself, which often served as an occasion of surprise to me when perusing the writers who lived nearer to the times of these occurrences, from what source the Volscians and Æquans, so often vanquished, could have procured supplies of soldiers." . The Volscians existed to attack en masse and have their arses kicked. Like ninjas, or orcs,or Imperial Guard.

2. Slash fic - possibly the first example would be Achilles/Patroclus, given that Homer never explicitly states they're a couple, but they act so much like one that everyone else has kept on writing them as one. prochytes also mentioned a play in which is was suggested that Heracles performed his Twelve Labours because he was in love with Eurystheus, but I'm having trouble tracking this one down.

3. The Deconstructor Fleet - Neon Genesis Evangelion did it to giant robot anime, Watchmen did it to superhero comics, and Euripides' Electra did it to the Oresteia. It's all answering the same question: just how badly screwed up would these people actually be, and would you want to run into any of them in real life?

Also there's the Take That in which Euripides takes a moment out from the plot in Electra to discuss how implausible the scene where Electra recognises Orestes as her long-lost brother is in Aeschylus' version.

Actually, Euripides comes over to me as clearly hating an awful lot of the tropes of Greek tragedy and wanting to produce works that really, really screwed around with them. There is a reason why I keep picturing Euripides as Warren Ellis in a tunic and sandals.

4. Fix-it Fic/Ret Con - Euripides again, in as close to fluffy mode as he can manage, specifically Helen. In which it is revealed that Paris ran off with an illusory Helen, and the real Helen has been languishing in Egypt, hence was never unfaithful to Menelaus and they can get back together and sail off into the sunset.

Can anyone think of any others?

So, the nights are drawing in, the weather is getting cold and nasty, and I'm going into misanthropy mode again. Here are some of thing I found to make myself feel better:

1. Map of the C++ Lands . I think I'm in the bit marked "programmers eat each other here" right now.
2. Sex tips from D&D players. You can tell they aren't Living Greyhawk players since single transferable vote doesn't get mentioned once.
3. Atomic theory explained with golden retrievers. I couldn't hate the species that got its quasi-symbiotic servitor race to do that and look so damned cute whilst doing it.

The Digital Economy Bill got released yesterday (full text here), and it's not looking good. They've still got the "three strikes" disconnection policy, based on allegations by copyright holders rather than actual criminal proceedings, and there's also provisions for new measures and executive bodies to be created on the fly by the secretary of state. Because there's no way that can go wrong.

Anyway, if you want to get informed:
1. Cory Doctorow takes this about as well as you'd expect him to.
2. CNET are also not keen.
3. The Guardian points out how this legislation could be misused if, say, future governments want to suck up to Rupert Murdoch a bit more.
4. Apparently Mandelson is deeply worried that people are using cloud storage to distribute pirated materials, and so wants to remove the right to keep uploaded files private.

If this is doing to your blood pressure what it did to mine, you may want to
1. Send a strongly worded letter to your MP, if you have one.
2. Get involved with the Open Rights Group, and sign their photo petition.
3. Sign TalkTalk's anti-disconnection petition.
4. Join any of these Facebook groups: I won't vote for any MP who supports Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill, A fair say on copyright reform, or Don't Disconnect Us.
5. The Pirate Party UK are exactly the sort of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time single issue party I tend to get sniffy about voting for, but they might be a useful place to go for copyright reform resources.

*Note: I don't think that trying to find some way to get creative types compensated for their output is a bloody silly thing**. I think it's entirely reasonable to want to be able to make a living off having good ideas. It's trying to pretend that digital copying is going to be made to go away rather than having to be addressed that's the bloody silly thing.

** By the way, points for spotting the reference.

Title: Amaurot
Author: Arachne Kallisti
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama, Horror, Crack.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Really. Not even slightly.
Warnings: Body-horror and mind-screw.
Summary: The first civilisation to arise in the galaxy left behind an ancient and powerful device. The Borg want it. How far is the crew of the Enterprise prepared to go to stop them?

Author's Notes: Sorry this one took so long. I set myself a couple of tasks here that turned out to be quite difficult for me, specifically a) turning the results of a night of automatic writing under the influence of ginger wine and Grant Morrison into something coherent, and b) making Deanna Troi interesting. Do let me know what you think of the results.

Beta-read by ignisophis. Contains spoilers for "Q Who", "The Best of Both Worlds", "I, Borg", "Descent", "All Good Things..." and "First Contact".

Chapter 1: A Fragment

Chapter 2: The Wire In The Blood

Chapter 3: Resistance

( Chapter 4: A Handful of Dust )

How much do I hate C++? Enough that I started making macros again.

I blame all the TNG research I've been doing for Amaurot, and the fact that the_whybird is a bad influence on me.

Caps by Trekcore and captions by roflbot.

( ALL YOUR BORG ARE BELONG TO US - 16 macros under the cut. )

Title: Amaurot
Author: Arachne Kallisti
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama, Horror, Crack.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Really. Not even slightly.
Warnings: Body-horror, mind-screw, death and despair.
Summary: The first civilisation to arise in the galaxy left behind an ancient and powerful device. The Borg want it. How far is the crew of the Enterprise prepared to go to stop them?
Author's Notes: chaosdeathfish requested "some exposition and plot and less cryptic bits". I aim to please. Beta-read by ignisophis. Contains spoilers for "Q Who", "The Best of Both Worlds", "I, Borg", "Descent", "All Good Things..." and "First Contact".

Chapter 1: A Fragment

Chapter 2: The Wire In The Blood

( Chapter 3: Resistance )

Title: Amaurot
Author: Arachne Kallisti
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama, Horror, Crack.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Really. Not even slightly.
Warnings: Body-horror and mind-screw.
Summary: The first civilisation to arise in the galaxy left behind an ancient and powerful device. The Borg want it. How far is the crew of the Enterprise prepared to go to stop them?
Author's Notes: Beta-red by ignisophis

Chapter 1: A Fragment

( Chapter 2: The Wire in the Blood )

Let's get one thing straight - I quite liked Narnia. Lewis had a real knack for striking imagery, and for mixing the cosy with the compellingly bizarre - behind the coats in the old wardrobe, there's a snowy pine forest with a lamp-post in the middle of it, where a faun emerges from the woods with an umbrella and invites you to tea. That's good children's fantasy in microcosm, there - Enid Blyton reimagined by Rene Magritte. Criticising it for inconsistent world-building is kind of missing the point, since this is pure Fantasy Soup, running entirely off Lewis' personal Rule of Cool. That's why you get Father Christmas in one book, Bacchus and the Maenads in the next, and a medieval romance complete with trippy and bizarre islands after that. Even if, as you get older and more critical, the Christian allegory starts to look a bit heavy-handed, and the authorial voice seems to take on a certain smugness as it describes the Important Moral Lessons the characters learn, and the Dante-like relish for inventing comeuppances for the kind of people Lewis didn't approve of starts to grate, there's plenty of good, powerful stuff in there.

Let me also make it clear that I loved Northern Lights and quite liked The Subtle Knife, although I felt that The Amber Spyglass got me over the back of the head with a dull thud. As an attempt at post-Christian mythmaking, trying to create a narrative about growing up, the loss of innocence and the awareness of death that doesn't draw on cultural assumptions inherited from the Church, it was a brave but ultimately unsuccessful experiment. As a deconstruction of Narnia, it really didn't cut the mustard.

Thing is, the deconstruction of Narnia's been done, in the 60s, by Alan Garner. It's called Elidor.

( Cut for rambling and spoilers )

1. Garth Ennis. Sometime genius, sometime juvenile git. This, though, is pure Genius Ennis. A moment from the late lamented Hitman comic, a rather touching slice of Superman angst, and some interesting thoughts on where the big blue boy scout fits into the mythology of the American Dream.

2. A rather sweet Harry Potter fic sending up the particular variant of bad fic in which a hardcore Evangelical Christian who believes magic is evil gets sent to Hogwarts. It's fairly obviously High Church Anglican flavoured, but it's written well enough that even a hardcore atheist like myself went "awww".

3. More gratuitous cats being really rather silly in a cute kind of way.

Title: Amaurot
Author: Arachne Kallisti
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama, Horror, Crack.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Really. Not even slightly.
Warnings: This is going to get dark. Body-horror, mind-screw, death and despair.
Summary: The first civilisation to arise in the galaxy left behind an ancient and powerful device. The Borg want it. How far is the crew of the Enterprise prepared to go to stop them?
Author's Notes: Betaed by ignisophis. Posted because mejoff wanted it, and so did some random people off the Internet. This is 70% Rule of Cool, 20% Wanting To Be Tanith Lee, and 10% Proper SF. You have been warned.

( Chapter 1: A Fragment )

Today was one of the friendlier professors' birthday, and the entire office bunked off to a rather nice pub for lunch. I ended up sitting next to the professor in general, and discussing the Dead Fish Test. In return, I was told about the Medical Astrology paper, a cautionary tale in medically spurious post hoc subgroup analysis. Apparently, from analysis of a largeish hospital admissions dataset split up by sun sign, we can deduce that Geminis are more likely to be alcoholics, Capricorns are more likely to have abortions and Scorpios are more likely to suffer anal abcesses. Of course, if we split the admissions up by sun sign and then look for the diagnosis that's most common within each subgroup, we will be able to produce these kind of results. We could just as easily try to find out what diagnoses correlate most strongly with being born on a Monday or being called Kevin.

On the same note: more news and comment on the dead fish.

It's a pity that I didn't have this paper handy to wave at the Survey Twits. It displays a series of fMRI scans purporting to show how different areas of the brain light up when the owner of said brain is shown pictures of scenes of human interaction with different emotional content.

Thing is? The owner of the brain was a salmon, and was not alive at the time. The active voxels were due to random noise in the fMRI time series.

It's a valuable cautionary tale as regards false positives. Before you publish your fMRI data, ask yourself if you could have got the same results from a dead fish.

Anyway, things that make me happy:
1. I now have a large stack of vintage back issues of 2000AD dating from 1979-1985, which turned up in someone's attic and were given to me for free. They include such highlights as the Apocalypse War, the Judge Death Arc, and the issue in wich Johnny Alpha finally moved in with Wulf Sternhammer. Squee!

2. As recommended by huggyrei: sleeping kittens. Making little high-pitched kitteny noises. I am dead of cute now.

3. scans_daily is gone but not forgotten. Other communities have stepped into the breach, and there are archives available, as is explained here.

4. Cory Doctorow's short stories and novels are available online, since he's putting his money where his mouth is on Creative Commons. He's got a nice line in really rather well-thought-out near futures, and can do great world-building by paying attention to the little details of what people eat, how they get to work and so on. He's also got a rather touching appreciation for the aesthetics of junk.

Good News: Knights of the Old Republic makes me happy. It's rebuilding my Star Wars squee to pre-prequel levels. It makes me so happy that I'm even managing to stay mostly Light Side.

Bad News: It's crashing like a bastard. Keeps freezing once I go into menu screens or cut scenes, and the graphics keep going weird and flickery on me. Yes, I have Googled this fault, and found nothing helpful. Are there patches in obscure locations I should be downloading? Should I perhaps be forcing this process to run on a single core? Do I need to fiddle with my graphics card settings?

Please. You want me to stay good, don't you?

The week in Godawful Science:

1. A couple of idiots attempt what is either a) one of the most shoddy and unethical pieces of research I've ever seen or b) one of the biggest trolling exercises I've ever seen. I can't possibly summarise the FAIL nearly as well as these two bloggers did. Suffice to say that their brilliant research questionnaire included such stunningly logical questions as "Which fictional character would you consider your perfect mate?"

2. dracothelizard linked to a particularly failtastic piece of "research" that claims to prove that girls are innately scared of spiders. Sigh. I refer you to my username. Evolutionary psychologists prove, once again, that I don't exist.

Anyway, having proven I'm imaginary, let me cheer you up with some News of the Weird:

1. The Whitstable Seagulls. They will come for your cat and your allen keys.

2. If you've ever wondered what Lalla Ward's been doing since leaving Tom Baker, besides illustrating and editing Richard Dawkins' books, wonder no more. Knitting patterns. The pictures of her modelling them have to be seen to be believed.

3. Ben Goldacre now owns a cape and has managed to befriend Tony Head in Waitrose. This is clearly a Sign.

It's a question I get asked a lot. Quite a lot of people can't quite see what the appeal is of working in quite such a restrictive genre, with so very little leeway in terms of setting and characterisation, and no commercial prospects. Quite often, they're expecting some kind of answer about how it's good practice, since having character and setting defined frees you up to work on things like plotting and dialogue, or how pastiche is an interesting technical problem.

The thing about answers like that, though, is that they seem to regard working on fanfic as a kind of necessary evil, a tedious exercise for a writing student who'd really rather be getting on with original work. They don't explain why people who aren't aiming at a writing career would choose fanfic as a hobby, and they certainly don't explain why anyone would bother reading fanfic.

( Wild theorising cut to save your Friends page )

There's a new green paper on disability provision in the UK, with its consultation period due to end on 15th November. This includes proposals to cut disability benefits and pass the money freed up on to local authorities, thus meaning that a certain amount of the claimant's money will be spent on whatever they can persuade their social worker they need. They're also discussing introducing means testing for disability-related benefits. Because that isn't going to put extra layers of bureaucracy and potential inefficiency in between diasabled people and the resources they need or anything like that, and it isn't going to compromise their ability to live independently at all. Oh no.

Most of the disability-related charities have come out against this green paper, and are calling for some strongly worded letters to be written to MPs, and some strongly-worded feedback to be left on the consultation website. There's a summary of the campaign here, if you want to get involved.

Today is H.P. Lovecraft's 129th birthday. Or would be if he wasn't, well, dead. Cthulhu cake all round!

There is a petition online to win a posthumous apology from the British Government to Alan Turing for the prosecution for homosexuality which led to his death two years later. There's an article about it here, if anyone's interested.