A post of stuff
22/7/11 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchI'm flying to Florence tomorrow, so I might be out of contact for a few days. Hopefully I'll be having fun with a place to stay, although the people who have offered me a spot in their backyard are being a bit off-and-on with the giving me information thing. Anyway, after that I'm flying to the US next Saturday. I'm just going to apologize now for long delays in responding to anything.
But before I go!![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sophia_sol was doing this meme where you answer five questions, and then you give other people five questions. These are my answers - if anyone wants some questions for themselves, just ask (although, as noted above, you might have to wait a while for the questions).
1. If you could take one character from one of your fandoms with you when you get stranded on a deserted desert island, who would it be, and why?
I am one of those people who always cheats on desert island questions. So I would take Sun Wukong (I've written him once, Journey to the West is totally one of my fandoms), because he'd probably be able to fly us both out fairly quickly. Or Nick from Skinhorse (which I read, I dunno, I'm a bit fannish about it), because he's a legit airplane.
I just don't want to be stuck on a desert island forever, haha. I would get so bored no matter who I was there with.
2. What is the worst book that you have read all the way through?
I don't know what the worse book ever was, but do have at least one recent contender.
I was at this book fair, right? And there was a cart with a huge box of American Sci-Fi novels that had been translated into German. I bought a couple for a euro each - Out of the Silent Planet, which I've read before and loved, and The Dark Other (or Die dunkle Doppelganger), which I didn't know anything about. I read it over a month, a couple chapters every other day while waiting for the bus and so on.
It was so unbelievably awful. The translation was awkward, though I think the writing was pretty bad already - lots of weird dialogue tags and things that I've learned are signs of early SF badness. But also, the plot. Oh god, the plot. There's like this guy, he's abusing his girlfriend, except it is actually THE DEMON INSIDE making him do it. And she keeps leaving him! And swearing to have nothing to do with him! But then she goes back, and the demon shows up again and abuse and agh.
I got through it because it was short and I like reading simple things in German. And in the end, the girlfriend shoots the demon guy in the brain and somehow this only kills the bad bits of him. It was almost worth waiting for, that tiny bit of agency. But not actually, because this was so fucking bad. I am a bit bitter, yes.
(I can't believe it was written by Stanley G. Weinbaum, to the point I actually did not believe until Wikipedia confirmed. It is nothing like his other works.)
3. How did you first get into fandom?
Man, define fandom. I'm always confused by that - being in fandom isn't the same as being a fan of something, as far as I can tell. I think it's more about being part of a community and the production of new canon-based content? But, I dunno. I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic when I was 7 (about a quidditch game, natch), and I did Pokemon roleplaying on the Neopets chat boards when I was 10. I didn't hit LJ until I was 17 and in college, I made an account at 18, and I posted my first fic a few months before I turned 19.
But if I just go with my gut feeling and pick how I really got into fandom and started thinking fannishly, I think I can blame my friend Caitlin. We started out playing the Pokemon TCG and watching anime when I was 9ish, and then started rping Sailor Moon. When I was 11 or 12, we'd walk around the site all day making up stories about Yu-Gi-Oh with our awful self-insert OCs. I still know way too much about all our plotlines and the way we'd give each other challenge prompts, and I can still see all the fanart we drew. Partly because it's still scattered around my room in that state.
Caitlin gave me a ride to A-con last year - I guess she's a BNF in the Yu-Gi-Oh abridged fandom now? And she makes her own cosplays and sells cosplay costumes. I can't say I'm surprised. I'm pretty sure she's not shocked by the fact that I spend my free time writing fanfic.
4. What made you decide to study German? And how long have you been studying it? And do you speak any other languages besides English and German? Er, sorry, that sort of turned into three questions in one...
I'm going to answer these in reverse order! I've been studying German for about 7 years. It's the only other language I have - I mean, I spent a half hour learning Hungarian at a party, and I have some really bad Texan Spanish. Ooh, and I can direct fencing in French (because it's easier for me than directing in German). But basically it's just German and English.
I started studying German in highschool because I wanted a second language and I couldn't find anywhere to learn Hungarian. My dad's family is originally German, having come over in the mid-nineteenth century. My grandma still speaks some weird form of Americanized German that I can't actually understand. So I found a pretty cool tutor, and then I stuck with it for 4 years. I thought I'd switch to Korean or something when I got to college, but it was way easier to go into upper level German to finish out my requirements. I do love my department, and, secretly, I love the language too. It's pretty great to be able to read philosophers in the original (this is also why I want to learn to read classical French).
Plus I got to meet my distant relatives whose ancestors stayed in Germany when mine left, and we could understand each other. That's worth a lot to me.
5. Who do you consider the most attractive Doctor? And is this answer the same as who your favourite Doctor is?
I don't really parse attraction except in a really simple aesthetic way, so I generally base whether someone is attractive or not on other people's estimates. My friends are pretty torn between Matt Smith and David Tennant - the balance dipped toward Tennant when we were watching Blackpool, then tipped back to Smith when the new series came out a few months ago. But if I turn it around and ask who I like watching and looking at the most, it would probably be Sylvester McCoy. He has really interesting body language and expressions.
But I think my favorite Doctor is probably Two. I haven't written much for him recently, compared to, I don't know, Six, but he's still my favorite. I really like how silly and cunning he can be, and he definitely gives an interesting alien feel. Eleven does that too (for me, anyway), but Two's younger and he doesn't carry around the baggage that Eleven has to deal with. I did do a post about how Patrick Troughton is secretly hot, but that was more building off other people's posts and wanting an excuse to find lots of pictures of Troughton.
Right, so - long answers. I'm not very good at the short kind, haha.
But before I go!
sophia_sol was doing this meme where you answer five questions, and then you give other people five questions. These are my answers - if anyone wants some questions for themselves, just ask (although, as noted above, you might have to wait a while for the questions).1. If you could take one character from one of your fandoms with you when you get stranded on a deserted desert island, who would it be, and why?
I am one of those people who always cheats on desert island questions. So I would take Sun Wukong (I've written him once, Journey to the West is totally one of my fandoms), because he'd probably be able to fly us both out fairly quickly. Or Nick from Skinhorse (which I read, I dunno, I'm a bit fannish about it), because he's a legit airplane.
I just don't want to be stuck on a desert island forever, haha. I would get so bored no matter who I was there with.
2. What is the worst book that you have read all the way through?
I don't know what the worse book ever was, but do have at least one recent contender.
I was at this book fair, right? And there was a cart with a huge box of American Sci-Fi novels that had been translated into German. I bought a couple for a euro each - Out of the Silent Planet, which I've read before and loved, and The Dark Other (or Die dunkle Doppelganger), which I didn't know anything about. I read it over a month, a couple chapters every other day while waiting for the bus and so on.
It was so unbelievably awful. The translation was awkward, though I think the writing was pretty bad already - lots of weird dialogue tags and things that I've learned are signs of early SF badness. But also, the plot. Oh god, the plot. There's like this guy, he's abusing his girlfriend, except it is actually THE DEMON INSIDE making him do it. And she keeps leaving him! And swearing to have nothing to do with him! But then she goes back, and the demon shows up again and abuse and agh.
I got through it because it was short and I like reading simple things in German. And in the end, the girlfriend shoots the demon guy in the brain and somehow this only kills the bad bits of him. It was almost worth waiting for, that tiny bit of agency. But not actually, because this was so fucking bad. I am a bit bitter, yes.
(I can't believe it was written by Stanley G. Weinbaum, to the point I actually did not believe until Wikipedia confirmed. It is nothing like his other works.)
3. How did you first get into fandom?
Man, define fandom. I'm always confused by that - being in fandom isn't the same as being a fan of something, as far as I can tell. I think it's more about being part of a community and the production of new canon-based content? But, I dunno. I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic when I was 7 (about a quidditch game, natch), and I did Pokemon roleplaying on the Neopets chat boards when I was 10. I didn't hit LJ until I was 17 and in college, I made an account at 18, and I posted my first fic a few months before I turned 19.
But if I just go with my gut feeling and pick how I really got into fandom and started thinking fannishly, I think I can blame my friend Caitlin. We started out playing the Pokemon TCG and watching anime when I was 9ish, and then started rping Sailor Moon. When I was 11 or 12, we'd walk around the site all day making up stories about Yu-Gi-Oh with our awful self-insert OCs. I still know way too much about all our plotlines and the way we'd give each other challenge prompts, and I can still see all the fanart we drew. Partly because it's still scattered around my room in that state.
Caitlin gave me a ride to A-con last year - I guess she's a BNF in the Yu-Gi-Oh abridged fandom now? And she makes her own cosplays and sells cosplay costumes. I can't say I'm surprised. I'm pretty sure she's not shocked by the fact that I spend my free time writing fanfic.
4. What made you decide to study German? And how long have you been studying it? And do you speak any other languages besides English and German? Er, sorry, that sort of turned into three questions in one...
I'm going to answer these in reverse order! I've been studying German for about 7 years. It's the only other language I have - I mean, I spent a half hour learning Hungarian at a party, and I have some really bad Texan Spanish. Ooh, and I can direct fencing in French (because it's easier for me than directing in German). But basically it's just German and English.
I started studying German in highschool because I wanted a second language and I couldn't find anywhere to learn Hungarian. My dad's family is originally German, having come over in the mid-nineteenth century. My grandma still speaks some weird form of Americanized German that I can't actually understand. So I found a pretty cool tutor, and then I stuck with it for 4 years. I thought I'd switch to Korean or something when I got to college, but it was way easier to go into upper level German to finish out my requirements. I do love my department, and, secretly, I love the language too. It's pretty great to be able to read philosophers in the original (this is also why I want to learn to read classical French).
Plus I got to meet my distant relatives whose ancestors stayed in Germany when mine left, and we could understand each other. That's worth a lot to me.
5. Who do you consider the most attractive Doctor? And is this answer the same as who your favourite Doctor is?
I don't really parse attraction except in a really simple aesthetic way, so I generally base whether someone is attractive or not on other people's estimates. My friends are pretty torn between Matt Smith and David Tennant - the balance dipped toward Tennant when we were watching Blackpool, then tipped back to Smith when the new series came out a few months ago. But if I turn it around and ask who I like watching and looking at the most, it would probably be Sylvester McCoy. He has really interesting body language and expressions.
But I think my favorite Doctor is probably Two. I haven't written much for him recently, compared to, I don't know, Six, but he's still my favorite. I really like how silly and cunning he can be, and he definitely gives an interesting alien feel. Eleven does that too (for me, anyway), but Two's younger and he doesn't carry around the baggage that Eleven has to deal with. I did do a post about how Patrick Troughton is secretly hot, but that was more building off other people's posts and wanting an excuse to find lots of pictures of Troughton.
Right, so - long answers. I'm not very good at the short kind, haha.
