Mar. 10th, 2017

beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
dancing is difficult
you use All of the muscles
and some of them don't like it later
beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
Sometimes I see the edges of some kind of fandom Thing where people are being rude or mean
and I'm like
I'm from Highlander fandom
where choosing a favourite character meant hoping he'd kill all the others.
There Can Be Only One.
And we were still more chill than this.

humans need to deep breath calm.




Which is not to say there's no real issues under the loud. There's racism and sexism and really annoying changes in direction in shows you thought knew better. Just, the people getting All Caps Yelled at are not often the ones remotely responsible or able to do anything about it.
beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
today I discovered I did not understand as much as I thought I did about genetics and meiosis and recombination
which, given my a level grades, is not a surprise, but remains slightly frustrating.
but now I have a dozen tabs open to learn more and replace my wrong knowledge, which is always a nice opportunity.

... all this in aid of figuring out exactly how much of the world a time traveller from the 25th century would be related to, and how likely he is to grandfather paradox himself on accident if he's a serial killer.

... except the TV version of the flash says he's born 136 years into the future, which is a very different number of generations (and like 64 or 32 ancestors to memorise? 128 if all super eager?). And comics version gives multiple different dates of origin in quick succession according to web pages that claim to know, so who knows how many generations. so it's not entirely useful even in fanfic terms, it's just what I was wondering.

Because if you kill your grandfather you're clearly screwed, unless there was secretly a slightly different ancestry than you were aware of. But if you go far enough back we could have more ancestors than there were people, but don't because of marrying in your village and so forth, and people who do clever math reckoned an English child would be related to 80% of Britain a thousand years ago, or possibly not depending on which what where who and what you believe. So does that mean that a time traveller from far enough forward would have an 80% chance of a grandfather paradox if he killed any random person, or would it only matter if their specific genetics made it down the line to you?

But then that's more likely than I'd at first understood, because recombination, so you probably need a really large percentage of your ancestors for a bunch of generations. But there's one page has fancy graphs to show you're probably not related to all your ancestors at ten generations out. So could you just kill the ancestors you weren't carrying genes from, and because Time Wants To Happen, it'll all work out somehow anyway? Different ancestor swaps in instead, but washes out the same way? Seems unlikely.

Best just to say that time travellers trying to kill ANYbody far enough back they're unclear on their ancestry are risking a grandfather paradox, and that therefore time travellers should not dare be killers, and killers really must be stopped from time travel.

And it makes no sense to pack a ship full of vigilantes and murderers to go assassinate someone who started living four thousand years ago, and then treat their violence as trivial. It would be quite difficult to be sure of a four thousand year old man's descendants, even if he tried to keep track. And it would be impossible to be sure of the identities of all the people they've opened fire on, let alone their descendants.

Ciolence whilst time travelling is very likely to be terminally unwise.

Unless you are dealing with different species and an isolationist home planet, in which case you'd only have to make sure not to go home again. Unless of course you're a hybrid...




but, genetics. more complicated than I remembered even. which was quite complicated enough.
beccaelizabeth: animated icon, Giles pictures and Giles&Ethan, quotes 'Cup of tea, cup of tea, almost got shagged, cup of tea' (Cup of Tea)
The thing is, about all I can think is, since when did I have twenty years of adult life? Surely I'm not old enough for this?
... it's not like I'm looking at forty from here...

I have about a bazillion tabs open right now because everyone is saying something col about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And it was a game changing feminist excellence, for all its flaws.

But for me it was fandom and friends and the first few years of my degree, including getting the message board for the Soulful Spike Society unblocked because I was doing cultural studies and we were there studying proper cultural texts.

... also because the random pep talks and cheerleading were on occasion how I got through the day, and the early years of the course.

Highlander was my first convention going fandom, and Highlander saved my life, but Buffy was the convention after that, and many more. And it saved my life at least as much. A number of three in the mornings have been survived with the help of Spike singing.

And as for the possibilities that opened up for all that thinking about Ethan Rayne...

... and all my icons from this great feminist show are blokes, which says something about me, but Willow and Tara, Faith's arc, Buffy standing up and saying hell can choke on her, and everyone who can stand up, will stand up...

those are the stories that get you through the dark.




So, now we just need to get on with making something that's twenty years better...

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beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
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