throbbing light machine

Had a day off today, and it was far too hot to go out. Why do I keep moving south?! So instead we watched stuff relating tangentially to Classic Trek: both of Shatner's Twilight Zone episodes, ten minutes of a totally hysterical 70s adaptation of Little Women with Shatner as Professor Bhaer (!), and that episode of Man From U.N.C.L.E. that has both Shatner and Nimoy in it.

Watching the two of them gaze at each other across a crowded ballroom, two years before the Star Trek pilot was filmed, was oddly breathtaking. Nimoy wore sexy silky jackets and had a great bit with a cigarette in a long holder that was too hot for words. Also, my god, Shatner at twenty-nine was all big eyes - and looked about eighteen.

Am now in the process of obtaining a curry, and then I think we're doing "The Immunity Syndrome," and then maybe "Operation: Annihilate!" because the exclamation point makes me happy.

I keep feeling like I'm not the fan everybody's looking for, at least wrt the warnings debate. Because while I'm fortunate enough to not have any real-life triggers, I also prefer my fic plastered with warnings and spoilers of every sort.

I do this with all narrative, actually, because I don't like suspense, and I find the first reading/viewing/hearing of a piece to be the least interesting. I connect much harder to characters once I know where they're going - and often I love sequences in hindsight that bored me the first time around, because I've since fallen in love with the people in them.

I also have fairly ironclad characterizations and interpretive patterns - so what ratcreature's been talking about with the deeper issues relating to the Blair Sandburg haircut warnings definitely applies to me. I often have a very inflexible vision of canon - I'll read exceptionally good fic that falls outside it, but I'll put up with a lot more mediocrity when my preferred tropes are active. So my Daniel Jackson needs to be a gentle civilian geekboy, and my Jim Kirk is really damn smart and personally withdrawing, and my Frodo Baggins is unquestionably an adult as opposed to a teenager, and my Faith Lehane is something more than an evil bitch, and my Edward Elric is weird about his little brother.

Most fics that deviate from those characterizations get closed out of - they have to be really, really good for me to keep reading. And I like it when it's fairly obvious from the outset what character facets particular writers subscribe to, because I hate it when I read far enough in to get invested in the plot before I find out that an author's characterizations are just too different from my own for her story to work for me. And when warnings, descriptors, summaries, and author's notes give me such information right upfront, well, the happier I am.

I realized, in talking with my beta about my (almost finished I swear!) big postquest LotR fic, that the direction of the ending is not actually obvious in the narrative climax. And I thought about trying to hide the outcome, to keep any eventual readers in suspense. But then I realized that I would absolutely hate it if such a thing were done to me - particularly, in this case, because the question at hand involves the Grey Havens, which are traumatic enough that I need to have fair warning going in if they're going to happen as read. If I read through a whole novella thinking that there was hope only to have it snatched away from me - or vice versa - I remember, about two years ago, reading Middlemarch for the first time having only previously done Eliot's depressing stuff. I was sure until the end that everybody was going to die horribly, and I was shocked when they didn't. And I was less involved in Dorothea/Will than I might have been otherwise, because I was bracing myself all the time for a blow that never fell.

At any rate. As a rule, I don't click through to stories that don't have posted summaries, warnings, and indicators as to length. I want specific data before I commit! Am I really that unusual?

eta: just to make clear, I'm not making a political argument, or one of social responsibility, though I think those are important. I'm arguing from the practical - if your story doesn't have information tags all over it, why would I click that link? I'm arguing that information tags are good for fanwriters and fanreaders, as advertisements.

April's come in with wind and rain, huge great gusts of it howling around corners and through windows. I love April here--it's what May is like up home, the first month of tentative spring, when it's all still cool and fragile and uncertain and new.

Went to Target yesterday, for spring shoes. Got a pair of plain black ballet flats and some little socks, and also a pretty blue dress and new earrings and ice-cube trays for making little juice popsicles with when the weather warms back up.

Just happened to grad the Classic Trek ep on the CW last night,, only to find out that it was "The Tholian Web," also known as the best ep ever. Kirk missing! Spock and McCoy have a fight about it! They didn't listen to his last orders! "Tholian Web" was actually the first Trek that I ever really watched. I was maybe fourteen, staying over at my grandparents' while they were out of town. I'd seen Trek before, but never really gotten it. Until that. And then I was hooked.

I can't decide if I want to read the spoilers for the Supernatural finale. So I won't...yet.

I'm reading "Zastrozzi" for class--the Gothic novel that Percy Shelley wrote at sixteen, when he was a schoolboy at Eton. It's absolutely atrocious: moves too quickly, handwaves plot bits that he doesn't care for so that he can get to the emo, is gay like a crazy gay thing, involved naked tied-up boy-on-boy whipping action during a cataclysmic thunderstorm. I love juvenile writing. It's so self-indulgent that it's charming. A quote:

"Not long did the hapless victim of unmerited persecution enjoy an oblivion which deprived him of the knowledge of his horrible situation. He awoke--and overcome by excess of terror, started violently from the ruffians' arms. They had now entered the cavern; Verezzi supported himself against a fragment of rock that jutted out. "Resistance is useless," exclaimed Zastorzzi. "Following us in submissive silence alone can procure the slightest mitigation of your punishment!"

and it all goes like that!

Oh, and GIP GIP GIP.