beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Something that has been bugging me lately about texts that get called feminist and groundbreaking: they're usually not that new.

It feels like spinning wheels in mud, to be told something is new and shiny over and over again. Look at all the progress we made! Working so hard!

So when prejudice and misogyny get shown, they get pushed back as far into the before as possible, so it's something that happened to grandparents maybe. Parents if you must. But it's in the before. And it's meant to be high contrast, because they show the stuff that's so obvious and ugly, and then haha, punch it in the face, that'll totally work.

And then we're meant to be happy that we get such a new and shiny female character, who can kick butt and be feminine, wow, we never had that before!

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Maybe I'm watching the wrong shows. I'd love to hear about shows doing all the things I want. I mean I don't watch much that's on TV lately, I end up getting DVD box sets, I'm probably missing a bunch of cool.

But I get somewhere between tired and scared when something gets proclaimed again as all all new! and groundbreaking! because it's like being given last year's worn out christmas presents and being told we're happy with them.


Gender pay gaps still yawn hugely, casting ratios still run at about 2:1 male to female, women directors are losing ground as a percentage for some years now, women's stories are considered lower priority so female characters are expendable, and whenever we get a female led show or movie announced everyone crowds around it cheering like someone lit a campfire in alaska. But we should be lighting it up all everywhere, taking half the places, half the screentime, half the stars.

Don't settle for anything less.

And don't forget. Don't let them recycle progress.
We should have had it all along.

I put away a whole stack more of CDs. Cracked the case on at least one of them, because the box lid turns out to have tiny sticky out bits on the inside, so the top of the box is actually half an inch taller than will work with the box lid, and if you press on the lid at all at all the pressure all goes on something about 1cm long and a couple mm wide. Idiot design. ... explains why there wasn't more in the box, on account of it don't really fit. So mostly I've swapped around a stack of things into new configurations. :eyeroll:

Also stacked all my magazines tidily in the same place. I've apparently been throwing them on the same stool in the same corner to put away later for really a lot of years. There were Torchwood magazines down there.

Books are where I read books, the phone is in the place designated for the phone, it's all weirdly tidy.



... I have so much stuff. The vast majority of it is data in various forms, books and CDs and DVDs and things recorded off the box and onto DVDs at some point. I think I vaguely planned to put it all on the giant hard drive and free up the box space? But I haven't done that for long enough the hard drive is at 99% working and will last 'a couple more years' and the CDs are... well, I have no idea if they'll even play.

at least with books you can actually see if they're falling apart.


I never think about how much music/audio I actually own because it's just a giant file on the big computer. Then I'm trying to find drawers for yet more CDs and realise hey, that's actually quite a lot of CD I've got there.



If I move house all this will get boxed up and probably I will find myself in a decade or so wondering where it is and then will go unearth the corner of boxes I never got around to unpacking. As happened with the box containing Sherlock Holmes books last time.

Logically I should therefore move along some of this stuff.

... if my family was ever any good at that, I'd have inherited far fewer books.

Fandom keeps on making characters poor sweet woobies with no self esteem who can't feed themselves.

Which usually flattens them out considerably, though there's also usually a bit of that in a character because apparently knowing your own worth isn't in fashion right now, just the extremes.

I suspect the appeal is that, if someone thinks they're rubbish, we can totally fix their poor little broken hearts just by being fans of them. We think you're best! We fix you with love!

And the food thing is pretty easy to fix for most humans. Not me, I forget to eat a lot, but most people.

Personally I'd rather be reading about superheroes having superhero sized stuff going on, but this particular vein of... not even hurt/comfort, more like fail-at-life/comfort... it seems unlikely to run out any time soon.

Watch White Men Save the World
(again)
By trying to kill a woman and then magnanimously giving her free will!

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So, I can see why that film is fun to watch for some people.

It's proper tragedy of everyone being themselves really persistently, with just that glimmer of hope to keep us around. It's full of feels. Charles & Eric, as ever, only really make sense as Charles/Eric, to the point it feels like cowardice when they're not out. And I'm sure that ending is a really handy get out of jail free card for the franchise.

I just am really tired of the same old predictable flaws.

I'm going to go hang out in fanfic land if I go near the X movies any time soon at all.

Tonight is the social group again
the one I can get to but not home from
or to be precise would have to either leave a 2 hour group 45 minutes early, wait an hour and a half for a bus after 9pm, or spend £30 on a taxi home for.

... I'm actually still trying to talk myself into going because I haven't been anywhere for a really long time.



But if I wait a couple months I think I can get to ones later in the year, so probably I should save the money and just wait here.

... yes having a social life in a couple months sounds grand...

*sigh*

This is why I'm moving to Norwich.

I hate contacting people.
I hate web forms that don't *rudeword* work.
I hate forms that only take your details so they can phone you back later.
What is the point of communicating in writing only to arrange a phone call that they clearly post a number for right next to the form?
Why insist that people make speech noises and understand your speech noises, when that's not easiest for everyone?

I am glad it is past 1700 because now I can sulk until work places open again tomorrow, instead of sulking while making grouchy faces at stupid *rudeword* webpages that won't work.



If I could get the other computer working it's entirely possible they'd work on a newer more updated machine, but that's still not connecting to the internet, and I still haven't figured out how to follow the instructions from the computer shop, let alone fix things. and I spent awake time doing or trying to do this stupid contacting people stuff instead.

boo to everything.

When I dream up my endless Mary Sues, my going to sleep characters who get to be in all the different universes, Starfleet officers, mutant leaders, superheroes: I don't dream so much of fighting. I dream of shelters.

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It's just F&SF shaded basic activism. Get educated, get organised, inform others, share resources, make structural changes. Deal with the problem on the same scale it exists at, not just one strong person with a pointy stick at a time.


And I just daydream it. I don't actually get out of my flat and go help with the real world versions of these. It's foolish. If these are the things that work, I should be doing them RL.

But sometimes the daydreams are shelters for the brain. Sometimes the ones we need. Just to recharge a while, and go back out with a better set of skills.

Today Sunday was swapped for Epic Sunday of Cinema, so me and mum and sibling went not to the supermarket but to the cinema.
... so I've run out of bread and a bunch of other things, but that's fine, I can totally fix that tomorrow.

also on the way there we went in Waterstones and mum and sibling had cake and I checked on my book order. Which isn't out until 31st March, which wasn't what I'd thought when I ordered it or I'd have ordered something more... existing. But that's cool, I'll go get it when it exists.
So today I bought The Mammoth Book Of Best New SF 27, which I have been looking forward to.
It's going to have half a dozen books on top of it in the to-read pile, but still, is good.


We went to see the Hobbit :-)
... that was a long fight sequence.
... like, the whole movie. a loooooong fight sequence.

and I watch martial arts movies, so I'm not inherently averse to such things, but... well... there were bits in the middle where I thought possibly it could become a better movie if someone had taken more of it away and put their foot down about it.

Also if they had run it past some wargamers, maybe SCA people, someone to check it for... stupid.
... there were bits where my mum, who is not a big fan of fighty movies, could see someone had suddenly become stupid in the fighting department. If my mum can see it, it is probably not subtle.

it is possible there were bits of it that were not very good?
... I am deeply puzzled by this, because I have been looking forward to this movie for a long time, and it had all sorts of exciting bits in it, so really it should be good?

there were bits that made me laugh not because they were being funny but because their quest to be Moar Epic had just broken my suspension of disbelief.
oh, also, because Legolas makes good faces. that was good though.

I just feel that sometimes just because you can make it Moar Epic doesn't mean you should.

This isn't even a 'I don't remember that bit in the book' purist thing, it's just, sometimes I felt like a bunch of people had been bouncing ideas around going 'and then, and then, right...' and maybe they could have taken it back a notch without losing anything.

... so now I'm turning it around in my head looking for the bits where I could change emphasis to make it the movie in my head.

but, I had fun watching, and I'm glad I went.
which is probably the important bit.

support haven't directly answered my messages for a couple of weeks, and I might end up having to phone.
the problem is I have two email addresses and whichever I tell it to send out from it will only have the full header information from one of them. I could say sod it and compress my identities, but I don't want to.

so I'll have to use a completely different email address to reply to people who can't do comment threads.
that way I'll still be beccaelizabeth.
... because it's not like there's multiple beccaelizabeths in the world and that won't be confusing at all :eyeroll:

I went and paid for my computer, bought some loo roll, and picked up the repaired vacuum cleaner.
it took like an hour
and now I feel like I had a really long day.

*sigh*

But! Computer appears to work *xfingers*
and they promise the vacuum cleaner doesn't make the noise now they've cleaned it and swapped the bag for a better bag. I guess I bought the wrong sort. Even though they said hoover and appeared to fit in the hoover.
eh, I'd have bought a new one if it wouldn't be repaired quieter, £18 for a bunch of new bags and some fixing is fine.

I haven't actually run the thing to see if it has in fact gone quiet, but that can be Tuesday's problem.

Today I have still on the to-do list... well, all the things. all the usual things. I have a to-do list that stretches and stretches.
but I ticked off a whole bunch.

mostly the next thing to do is to continue to organise this meeting. I have found a room for £10, which is an amount I have so clearly this is a good room. The room is available from Wednesday 21st Jan, half the people who want to go to the meeting to support me can be there from Wednesday 28th, and the social worker can only be there from 4th Feb. So now I have to decide which is the most important, soon or with people. which is difficult to decide. I shall ask some people.

I'm autistic spectrum, and it influences what kind of TV I like.
quite a lot of that is the intense and focused interests part, because I can't follow my favourite actors outside of F&SF even if I really try and concentrate. people in those stories just do stuff and things. borings.
but some of it is going looking for acting I can actually read.

I am better at that after 30+ years of actively practicing. But there's still going to be moments when the story is trying to do something, probably something intense and richly complex, and about all I'll get out of it is 'and then he has feelings with his face'.

The thing is, natural expressions are very frequently clear as mud. People are having feelings, sure, but they don't usually make a face like :-) or :-( about them, they're usually doing a whole bunch of stuff at once and not greatly resembling a smiley. it's the visual equivalent of everything being blahblah noises in the background, until some big high point goes !

So what I found I liked, quite often, is children's TV, and stuff from the 70s.
Not just specifically the 70s. Acting idioms change over time, and the specifically stagey interpretations developed for small screens and fuzzy picture quality were pretty highly stylised. It's like large print for body language and facial expressions. There's conventional means of expressing things, little shortcuts, and a tendency to play to the cheap seats that means you're unlikely to miss even subtle moments.
They are ac-tors. It's like translating.
In even more stylised representations, say things with masks or dance, then there's more to learn, but people at least recognise that stylisation is what they were doing. Pretty often with older acting people will just write it off as bad.
And the newer it is, the more people are acting in styles developed for television, for close ups, for ever better picture quality. It's not an abrupt switch, but at some point a particular audience are going to call that bit 'realism' or 'naturalism' when earlier styles look fake to them.

Only it's all acting. It's all some degree of fake. They're giving signals to tell people what's going on on the inside, and it doesn't match what you actually see on most people most of the time, because most people aren't that communicative.

What I've found with children's TV is it still has that tendency to make itself very clear. It's not that kids TV doesn't have emotionally complex plots, they're just more likely to have someone's face go :-) or :-0 or D-: for a moment so you know which emotion it's about to be complex with.
... not that I've watched very much kids TV very recently, but when I do (usually while waiting for cartoons or something Doctor Who related) it does the thing.

Cartoons are fun as well, you can learn the feelings like a book, and in some styles of cartoon they'll have one face that the other people in the scene are seeing and another that's showing someone's insides. or they'll have Emotions Dog, who has feelings so the stoic one doesn't have to.

Point of View has a lot to do with it too. If you're in a character's point of view, say with Ianto at the start of Cyberwoman, you're going to be shown more than the other characters in that scene will ever notice, not because they're ignoring it but because you are to some extent in a particular character's head. Or the just mentioned cartoons, it won't be everyone who gets mini cartoons of their emotional state, maybe just Spiderman. The more 'naturalistic' the style is the rest of the time, the harder those bits are to read though, some people won't see that in Cyberwoman at all. But if we're following the Doctor around in his own show, we'll see him have a whole emotional range that his enemies wouldn't ever see. We'll see him alone, for instance, having feelings in an empty TARDIS. So point of view in TV is about showing the insides of a particular character, as well as following them around.

In writing of course it's all a bit different. You've got the most highly stylised and conventional means of expression there are available to you - words. You can just say 'he was happy' and go on. Or 'he was a bit happy but with an underlying sadness and exhaustion, while thinking about lunch' which frankly is a bit much to ask an actor to convey. But I don't really like using the feelings words so simply, because it feels like a lie. That probably loops back to being autistic again, but it's only exaggerated with us, neurotypicals aren't actually mind readers and they're not even entirely clear on their own feelings. I might be terrible at noticing I'm hungry, or angry, or angry because I'm hungry, but I'm far from alone in that. But if I write about a character, whether or not I'm in their point of view, that they are hungry and angry, I feel like that's only ever a conclusion they've drawn from available evidence. So I'd rather write the evidence. Maybe their stomach growls, they think of how long it has been since they ate, they can't seem to relax properly and they keep tapping their fist against things. Which comes first, the feeling, the word for a feeling, or all of that?

but then what I've got to draw on to show all them feelings is going to be drawing on a whole lot of actors using established conventions to convey in shorthand a particular and select slice of feelings.

and how real that's going to seem to an audience, whether it draws them in or bumps them out, is going to be like the sliding cutoff of 'realism' on TV, a very movable target.

... aaaaand now I get to wait while electricians make maps
and people talk to their bosses.

#xfingers#