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.

All right. Twilight is hilariously awful. We all know this now. The question is, why do so many people like something that's clearly Objectively Not Very Good so much? What are the sparkly stalkers tapping into?

Kit Whitfield has a rather good stab at trying to explain it here. She's picked up on quite a lot of rather interesting dynamics in the book, in particular the way we keep on being reminded that Edward is DANGEROUS! But SAFE! VAMPIRE! But DRIVES A VOLVO! and the way Bella's relationship with Edward is essentially a fantasy of a perfect D/s relationship where you don't have to do any of that tedious communication and negotiation stuff because your dom's Just That Perfect.

Best thing she's come up with is right at the end, in the comments, though; the insight that Twilight is not really for reading. The fun bit of Twilight is in the fantasising about it, or analysing it, or mocking it, not reading it. Like Edward, it's whatever you want it to be.

The Way of the Squirrel is all about ingenuity, perserverance, cheerful willingness to take on enemies far harder than yourself whilst looking deceptively cute throughout, and large amounts of sugar. Witness:

1. In Helsinki, a squirrel raids a grocery shop to steal Kinder Eggs. Said squirrel neatly unwraps the egg, eats the chocolate, and then nicks off with the toy.

2. Squirrels display their mad ninja skillz by running assault courses and raiding vending machines.

3. Squirrel takes on biker. And wins.

Fandoms are kind of like relationships, really. You get about three to six months of new'n'shiny, then you have to decide whether this one's actually offering enough for you to stick with it. There's some you drift away from, some you never get sick of, and some you keep on coming back to EVEN THOUGH THEY KEEP ON BREAKING YOUR HEART (o hai, Whoniverse).

Anyway, still waiting to see when the new'n'shiny wears off with Cable and Deadpool. I'm currently going through the evangelistic READ THIS IT'S MADE OF CRACK phase with this fandom, slightly hindered by the fact that this means I have to try to explain Cable's backplot. Anyway, this ship manifesto and this essay take you through the set-up and dynamics rather better than I can, and without going off on the rant about how bad Rob Liefeld's art is*. There's some more edited highlights from Deadpool's career here.

Anyway, fic (mostly NSFW):
1. Shut Up! PWP told entirely in dialogue. Very funny, very wrong. Exactly what you might expect shagging Deadpool to be like.
2. Physical Impossibility Wolverine:Origins movieverse. A really quite unsettling character study with some fairly understated slashy subtext (yes, this one is SFW).
3.Selfless Slash cliche time! In which Cable manages to use his vast and ill-defined mutant powers to split off his evil side, and Deadpool finds himself at the mercy of evil!mind-controlling!cult-leader!Cable. Contains psychic coercion, a bit on the disturbing side.
4.One Of The Beautiful People More slash cliches! Bodyswap this time.
5.Suing Through The Fourth Wall Crossover with She-Hulk, for added meta win. Deadpool wishes to sue his fanfiction writers (also SFW).

*( The rant's here if you're remotely interested in it. )

Well, squirrels.



( So, that was Torchwood: Children of Earth... )

I am having the sort of day that makes people decide to become supervillains.

Please find things that will convince me not to hate humanity any more, flist. Otherwise it's orbital lasers time.

Meme yoinked from dracothelizard and amywolf

01. Think of the first word that comes to mind when you think of me.
02. Go to Google Images and search for that word.
03. Reply to this post with one of the pictures on the first page of results.
04. Put this in your own journal so that I can do the same (if you want).

( Slightly impressionistic spoilers for X-Men Origins: Wolverine )