I love road trips. I'll go anywhere, nearly anytime. Unfortunately, Mr. Daroga is not of the same mindset. Mr. Daroga likes to be "productive" on his off time, which is all very well but makes for boring vacations.

A compromise was reached last weekend, and we (me, Mr. D, and the other Mr. D) went up to the San Juan Islands to rent a cabin. This cabin came with a beach, an outdoor hot tub, and a wood stove with a glass front. The area is gorgeous, and reminds me a lot of northern California. But smaller, and with more ferries.

Speaking of which, the canine Mr. D was not overly fond of the ferry on either crossing. He stayed in the car the whole time, occasionally pacing in the back seat. He liked the cabin, though--or rather, the smells outside it. He wanted to be outside all the time, which is unusual, since he usually wants to stick to us like furry glue. So we tied him up to the cabin's porch (I told him he could pretend he was a "real" pitbull), left the door open, and started working.

Mr. Daroga's working on a comic which tells the story of his dad growing up in rural Florida. There are lots of rednecks in the stories. And snakes. So Mr. D's putting together transcripts of his dad talking into a script for his comic.

I got some good work done on my book, and finished a book about cult films (it sucked) and the Cerebus volume Church and State v. 1. I also spent a lot of time walking the dog and taking photographs, which I hope will come out as awesome as they seemed to be at the time.

Usually, I'm an advocate of camping. Mostly because it's cheap, but it's also fun. However, the cabin really was ideal. Even though we did what we were supposed to be doing anyway, doing it Someplace Else was good. I think it lifted the burden of other, more mundane commitments, off our backs.

Plus, I made a kickass fire. Mr. D was not even impressed. He is a fool, and does not appreciate me.
* * *
( twelve character meme )

The "and" is misleading, I know. It's really all one thing. Borrowed from lafemmedarla.

I undertake this meme with the following clarifications: There's not really any ship I won't read, if it comes recommended or is written by someone I like. I'm much more attached to quality than specific pairings. That said, I'll ship Spike with anyone. Likewise The Phantom, as I feel there's plenty of territory left to mine.

Six ships you like:
01. Erik/Persian
02. Spike/Buffy
03. Kirk/Spock
04. Doctor/Turlough
05. Logan/Rogue (movieverse)
06. Mulder/Scully

Three ships you used to like, but don't anymore:
07. Erik/Christine
08. Spike/Willow
09. Holmes/Russell

Three ships in your various fandoms that you can't stand:
10. Buffy/Angel
11. Spock/Christine Chapel
12. Jack Harkness/anyone

Two ships you're curious about but haven't actually started shipping:
13. Christine/Meg
14. Spike/Dawn

( questions about above )

Went to the doctor yesterday. Gave me some Maxalt, which dissolves on your tongue in a frightening matter and, thus far, hasn't worked. I think I have to "come off" the caffeine and tylenol first, anyway.

Some links!

*A most gorgeous Elizabeth Bennett doll made by cesario. She has been doing amazing things lately, and this is my favorite. How cunning!

*alixtii writes about Incest and the Adolescent Fantasy and makes some really good points about why certain impulses might arise in fandom that don't in "real life."

*Mouse the Italian Greyhound informs concerned pet owners about the 9 must skirry thengs 4 yor dag. Old link, true, but new to me!

*And, I've jumped on the kitty macro bandwagon:

It’s always a little suspicious when someone asks you to believe something really attractive. I mean sure, Mr. Johnson, I’d love to believe that “popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.” What partaker of that culture wouldn’t? But Johnson gets down to what he’s talking about on page 9, and I’m going to quote it because it’s pretty darn interesting:

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. You can see this symbolic approach at work in academic cultural studies programs analyzing the ways in which pop forms expressed the struggle of various disenfranchised groups: gays and lesbians, people of color, women, the third world. You can see it at work in the “zeitgeist” criticism featured in the media sections of newspapers and newsweeklies, where the critic establishes a symbolic relationships between the work and some spirit of the age: yuppie self-indulgence, say, or post-9/11 anxiety.

The approach followed in this book is more systematic than symbolic, more about causal relationships than metaphors. It is closer, in a sense, to physics than to poetry. My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve [named for the Woody Allen film about a future in which scientists are appalled that we weren’t aware of the health benefits of cake, or whatever] comes out of an assumptions that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms. The specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume. The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them.

Okay. Sorry about all that, but I just couldn’t cut it down. Note that he doesn’t dismiss outright the “symbolic analysis” school of cultural studies; just that his argument for these “bad” things being “good” is not based on any moral standards but on cognitive ones. He starts out, predictably enough, in the realm of video games, and describes a “fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined, than life.” He stresses that “only” in games are you forced to discover the rules—it’s not a static universe like a book or a film. What’s important to him are the cognitive steps you take to learn the universe, not the actual narrative. What is more, the rewards one gets from playing games are not the “instant gratification” decried by the naysayers—most games today require hours of play to accomplish anything.

Now, I know Johnson talks about television later in the book, but I can’t help but stop right here and notice a few things about fandom (most particularly online fandom). Because when I read about a property that forces you to interact with it in ways you may not have a map for (this is why guidebooks to games are bestsellers), that doles out defined rewards with an addictive quality, I’m seeing fandom. Specifically in the sense that fandom is the creation of a game out of a static property. This game consists not only of “creating” the fic, art and “meta” that make up the currency of the fan community (and provides reward in the form of reviews and notoriety), but of “discovering” the rules of fannish interaction—both with the text and with other fans. Whatever the content of the “fanned” property of at least relatively fixed canon, there is a complex series of interactions which expand our involvement with it, and create the sort of fictional world Johnson’s talking about with video games. In this construction, the fictional world isn’t really the universe of the tv show or film or novel—it’s the one we make right here, together. We have our own reward system, our own currency, our own geography and social system.

In other words, SimFandom.