cry havoc

You know it's been awhile since you've posted, when you totally forget to do a cut on a really long post.

Yep, definitely out of the habit.

Followup post for whatistigerbalm, but anyone else interested, here's the entire sad list. Maybe a quarter of these are available on the web; the rest are from Jstor. Check your local city library. You might have a free Jstor account. If not, and you're as whacked as I am about research, I have the pdfs. I can email zipped version. Just don't ask for all of them because that's just lazy, and besides, there's 895 of them. (and these don't include images and other non-pdf formats).

( THE LIST, OMFG, IT'S A LIST. )

branchandroot and I have commiserated in the past about this obsession over Making Code Look Nice (Just On The Off-Chance Someone Might See). I've always applied that rule. I mean, it's not like it's my own hair, which ostensibly I should be making Look Nice but hell if I can see it myself, so I don't have to look at it. But I do have to look at my own code when I'm working on it, so I try to keep it clean and organized and legible.

So I had a benchtest for an FED position, and naturally I organized the code like I normally would (although the commenting was more than I'd usually do, since it was a benchtest). I didn't fully minimize it for live-level presentation, but was still mostly legible. During the follow-up interview both the PM and the lead were highly complimentary about how nicely organized it was, that it was the highest level of clean, simple, efficient code presentation they'd yet seen.

I was all complimented until they added that other benchtests they've gotten back have consisted of a) the original png, sliced into large chunks and arranged on the page via basic css, and even b) a digitized, pixelated flat-image version of... the original png.

I'll take the original compliment as-is, but it's still hard to see yourself as that awesome when you find out the competition was that low-grade. It's like being proud of getting an A on what you thought was advanced calculus only to find out the most anyone else did was sign their name. If they're grading on a curve, that A might not have been so awesome, after all.

But that could just be me. Still going to keep organizing my code neatly, as a matter of pride, at the same time I wish I could pay someone to interview for me. I really do suck at extemporaneous on-the-spot questions.

In LA Story, the weatherman Harris K. Telemacher ends up befriending a road sign. It tells him that he'll find the key to his happiness by unscrambling the phrase, "HOW DADDY IS DOING". Harris spends most of the rest of the movie puzzling over this, and at the end, he takes his (new) girlfriend to meet the road sign. Yep, side of the LA highway, there they are, talking to a sign.

Harris: I never figured out the riddle, HOW DADDY IS DOING. It's a riddle too tough for me.
Sign: UNSCRAMBLE HOW DADDY IS DOING
Sara: I know it. It's an English crossword clue. See, unscramble means rearrange. Change the "s" with the "h," move the "ing" after the "s," put the "do" after them. Swap the "h" and the "s." And put the "i" behind the "d."
Harris: "Sing Doo Wah Diddy?" That's the mystery of the ages?
Sign: I HAD TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING FAST.

I just discovered that all this time, I've been doing object-oriented programming. I just never really grokked 'object' so I'd figured I was somehow not doing it. Then I get whacked in the head and I'm like, what? That's the mystery of the ages?

Then again, this is a common reaction to me when I stumble over something that's gotten a constant build-up of mystique. Like objects. When I finally grok it, I'm not sure whether to be disbelieving at how simple it actually is, or disbelieving at how much time I spent agonizing about it.

Thanks to marymac's suggestion, I ended up watching various documentaries from the Volvo Ocean Race. The best are the most recent, which include in-port, mid-race, mid-break interviews with each boat's skippers, navigators, crewmen, and so on. You don't get any idea of what's coming, but you do get a lot of really interesting reflection on what decisions they made in that leg of the race, what influenced those decisions, how they made those decisions, and so on. Plus, the narration is somewhat subdued, and there's not as much a sense of the teams being pestered to interview while on the water, which undoubtedly could get annoying. (No, I do NOT have time to explain what that is, I'm busy FIXING it! and so on.)

The 2005/6 race seems to just have an hour's documentary, which is like ten-something months to cram into one hour. You get a lot of highlights. Okay, more like you get a sense of how insane these people are, because most of the highlights consist of "and then their bowsprit broke" or "and then their main mast came down" or "and then they discovered a massive crack in their hull" or "and then they RAN OVER A WHALE AND LOST THEIR RUDDER" and there's no need to make this stuff dramatic. It comes that way out of the box.

The 2008/9 documentary seems to be a more as-it-happens format, but it has a lot of padding from pre-race clips. I really don't need a shot of some guy walking along the shore with his wife with voiceover about his dog dying. I get enough of that shit watching the Olympics. Plus, the narrator seems to have graduated from the Robin Leach school of narration. Not only does he talk like a bootleg version of Leach, he's just as dramatic about it. Quit the "but little did they know!" and the "but more was to come!" and "they had no idea what lay in wait!" Dude, when bowsprits break and sails go ripping along 120' of seamline, and this kind of catastrophic shit is considered one of the race's features, the tension is already there. No need to amp it more. Please.

A'course, the truly annoying part is that the 2008/9 narrator teases but then doesn't explain. Like, "little did they know..." and idyllic shot, then "...that THIS would happen!" and then a video of... something happening. I'm not sure. It's not explained. It's just several minutes of the boat going at a crazy angle and the boom swinging around, and... hey, narrator? A LITTLE HELP HERE, PLEASE. Someone tell me what I'm watching. At least the 2010/11 documentaries pretty consistently put voice-overs from the skipper or person-on-watch, explaining what you're seeing, to some degree.

Serious, this race? Shit happens. Constantly. Like nightmare material, extreme-panic, holy-crap-we're-all-going-to-die shit. I don't need some Robin Leach knock-off telling me for the nth time that these teams are experiencing LIFE AT THE EXTREME. Their fricking MAST just splintered and they're a thousand miles from the nearest solid land. They just missed a goddamn ICEBERG by a foot and a half. Unless someone wrote the 2008/9 documentaries for the total cabbages in the audience, it's pretty much OBVIOUS that we're not dealing with just a trip to the goddamn supermarket here.

The 2008/9 videos are totally inconsistent on subtitles, too. We've got one guy who talks softly and kind of mumbles, and no subtitles. We get the guy who speaks with an American middle-class accent... and subtitles. The guy who I still can't tell if he's speaking Spanish or English, and no subtitles. And then one episode won't subtitle anyone, and the next one subtitles every other person. Plus that year's version has bad editing and unoriginal music, though at least they quit it with the car-commercial jump-cuts and slow/fast crap after a few episodes. The production values on the 2011/12 version are substantially higher and the narrator is a more laid-back. I mean, it says something when you're watching a freaking youtube television documentary and you think, where can I get this soundtrack? Naturally there doesn't appear to be available OSTs on the Volvo Ocean Race site. Figures. Probably a bunch of generic soundtrack music from one of those warehouse companies, but still, whomever went through and found the music had an incredible ear for what to use, when, and blending it from one mood to the next.

I do wish the videos would have more infographics on what's happening. A simple CGI showing where the break occurred, or how, or whatever, would be really helpful. The extent of Volvo's visual info appears to be crazy-ass low-budget CGI of the little boats scudding across computerized water, with trails showing their paths. Not nearly as useful as knowing wtf-just-happened-there, especially when the skipper is speaking heavily-accented English so I'm ostensibly getting an explanation... that I can't understand even if I did know the jargon.

Last! Today's protip: don't bother with Google's on-the-fly subtitles, unless you're slightly tipsy and need the entertainment. Google doing on-the-fly of someone who speaks American english is iffy, but of someone speaking with non-American accent? Utter hilarious uselessness ensues.

Alrighty. Now the conlang generator will incorporate first/last vowels or consonants that you pick.

http://words.karinoyo.com/

ETA: ah, anything's better than dealing with the madness out there on the roads, so I went ahead & figured out the logic to allow different choices in start/end vowels and consonants. Now you can designate whether you want ending vowels to be single or multiple, same for consonants.

Frex, if you pick "only ends in certain consonants", you'll get a choice of single consonants and doubled consonants, which repeat from your original selections from each. If you want to narrow it down, edit/add as needed. If you only want to limit the options on one, say single consonants, just edit that one, and leave the other field (for doubled consonants) intact. Then carry on.

Note that for some reason it's not pulling over the single vowels for ending options. I don't know why. For now, guess you'll just have to refer to the previous tab to see those & copy them over.

Next up: a way to save all selections so you can come back to the same just by clicking on (a really long and complex) link. Hrm!

Sometimes it's a little odd to analyze other people's stories, and also get feedback from the author at the same time. Evidence A and B being some point I made for Diana Francis once and her response was basically, "hunh." Even over the phone it was kind of clear she was trying to figure out how I'd come up with that one, whatever it was. Which is to say, I think sometimes it's what a reader sees (whether reading into, or just picking up on little details that tip the nuance one way or another), and sometimes it's just the writer being focused on this plot-point and that character arc. Or: in the process of writing, the author sees the trees and doesn't realize until the end -- or until a beta points it out -- that the forest is not high altitude evergreen after all but somehow ended up being a semi-tropical rainforest.

It occurred to me today, out of nowhere, that while my current wip has an additional (if somewhat casual) theme of a matriarchal-blend in a patriarchal world, there's another genderflip going on that I'd completely missed. Main character has two potential spouses (polygamous society). In the MC's marriage to one of them, the one who proposes is the woman (editor: more like demands, really). For the MC's second marriage, the male potential consort arranges himself as part of a political transaction, which takes all of it out of his control, and in the end is effectively given as a male-consort to the MC. (I should note that since the second is a political transaction, it's not within the MC's control, either, but that's just a side-point.)

I had been thinking along class-lines, not gender lines. The female consort is from the farming class, and historically it seems that since the lower classes didn't have a lot of money or land, there was little basis for making marriage into a business transaction. When your dowry is going to be new shoes and maybe a picture for the family altar, or the bride price consists of a half a leg of cow (if even that much for either), then there's just not reason for anyone to get all worked up about arranging the marriage as an alliance between two dynasties. Over and over I've read historical commentary about otherwise widely-disparate cultures where the lower classes did do the whole love-match thing, because love (or at least a general like) was the only currency the participants really had. For that matter, lower classes tended to marry later, and without a lot of hoopla, and even in societies with emphasis on arranging (for middle class and above), the lower classes didn't have, or need, or could afford, such busy-ness.

So it made sense to me that if the female-consort is from a lower class background, she'd have grown up expecting marriage to be basically a, "hey, let's me and you live together." As long as the families don't hate each other, and the two parties agree, then that's about the extent of it.

Meanwhile, women in upper-class have less freedom -- being valuable assets used in transactional politics, like marriage alliances -- so the upper-class consort had to be male if he were to participate in the story at all. (Along these lines, I also realized belatedly that there's only one woman of rank from the patriarchal society who even gets named, let alone has any role to speak of; all the rest of the female characters are lower-class, thus not shut up in the house to sit around looking pretty all day.) And that means marriage becomes transactional, so it's not a huge stretch, culturally, for him to assume that marriage between his own elite family and someone else's family will be based on business/political alliance.

Anyway, that just struck me, that I'd unexpectedly reversed the usual gender-based order of things. It's the woman who takes the traditionally-(western)masculine approach of being active and doing the proposing; it's the man who sets himself up as a commodity to be bartered for and purchased, unseen by the groom.

Hunh.

I finally realized who Shun Oguri reminds me of: a young Brendan Fraser. Similar striking height and good looks, hiding some kind of innate good-natured, good-hearted goofiness. Like the body of a model but the mind of a big honking dork. Or maybe it's just that anyone willing to star in a wacked-up storyline like Tajomaru can't be all that fundamentally different from someone willing to star in a live-action make of George of the Jungle.

Why, hello, second item on the list.



Am I the only one thinking that might actually be an awesome mashup?

"Look at me, Nathaniel! It's all for you..."

Watching a bit of Towa no Quon, ep5, over lunch, and there's a very short scene with two VA I can't recall seeing in the same scene together, before. I know they've worked together, they have to have had, but this is the first time I can recall seeing just the two of them: Toru Ohkawa and Shinichiro Miki. Also known as Roy Mustang #1, and Roy Mustang #2, respectively.

It's a little odd. It's like Roy Mustang, in stereo... and I'm going to have to say that although Miki did a fairly good job, in the end, as Mustang, that everything else being equal, I still prefer Ohkawa's version. Miki's voice manages the sexy, just as well as Ohkawa, but Ohkawa manages one thing really well that Miki doesn't: the amiable, guy's guy, kind of easy-going tone. And by that I mean, it's a kind of delivery that doesn't load on the sexiness, but sounds just like some regular guy, the kind of guy who'd have beer and chips to watch the game, and order too much pizza with the notion of having it cold for breakfast the next morning. Probably while standing at the sink in his boxers, still half-asleep. Miki's delivery always sounds like he's up to something, or would like to be up to something. Ohkawa's able to dial that down and just sound like the only thing on his mind is that pizza, and maybe another beer.

ETA: Ohkawa can also pull off the military a helluva lot better than Miki, who always sounds just this edge (if not all the way into) insubordination. And while Mustang may be ultimately insubordinate, plans-wise, he spends a whole lot of the storyline not showing it. Ohkawa manages that dutiful military respect a great deal better.

Still. Dual Mustangs. I swear, there's a fanvid in there.