[sticky entry] Sticky: Introductory post

Jan. 27th, 2021 09:25 pm
lizard_socks: cute yellow lizard fursona drawing on a tablet (lizard fursona drawing)

I usually don't like to talk about personal stuff, out of fear that someone might be hurt from me butting into their space, but I feel like a Dreamwidth journal really is my space (as opposed to the topic-centered nature of Reddit or DeviantArt, or the public commons of Twitter or Tumblr where there's no technical distinction, implementation-wide, between a conversation and a public shaming).

I'm a computer programmer (Microsoft stack) with an old-fashioned taste in software (the reason I use Firefox over Chrome is that it still has a File/Edit/View menu and I use SeaMonkey to check my email and write my stories). F# makes me happy and IAsyncEnumerable<T> makes me feel like a wizard.

I'm cisgender, white, male, and even though I'm asexual I don't consider myself LGBT+ or queer. My asexuality is tied to being on the autism spectrum, and when you're already on the autism spectrum, nobody's terribly surprised that you haven't ever been on a date. I'm also a Christian, if not a particularly devout one, but I grew up going to church and I like to keep that tie to my heritage.

I'm doing very well in my life, but a lot of that is thanks to the people who've supported me. It's taken me pretty much that long to figure out how people around me interact, and as a result I'm uncomfortable in a lot of online spaces, especially leftist spaces, where the norms are different. And yet it's consistently the people in those spaces who are creating the kinds of art and stories I'm most interested in. If I wanted to see people who looked like me and had my background, I'd just go outside.

My biggest fandoms are either episodic TV sci-fi (e.g. Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate SG-1) or contemporary Western kids' animation with clever humor (e.g. Steven Universe, Summer Camp Island, Amphibia). My favorite Voyager episode is Alter Ego. I love writing about my OCs, living on their unimportant spaceship and doing nothing but delivering exposition all day long, but you might be more interested in my SG-1 / cartoon crossover series which I think has some of my best work.

Separate from my fandom stuff, I also make cute drawings and post them on DeviantArt and Fur Affinity. Most, if not all, of my icons come from there.

lizard_socks: A humanoid cat alien holding a smiling blob with eyes (misam bolnar cat alien)
Let's say that the music in video games today is like the marching band at a football game. And suppose the original Game Boy, instead of a marching band, has one kid with a xylophone and a tambourine.

You'd think the Game Boy Advance, released 12 years later, would have, like a guy with a guitar, at least. But no, here's what you get:
  1. The same exact kid, who has not aged at all
  2. The football team itself, which is really good at a cappella now, but they can only do it between plays
lizard_socks: A humanoid cat alien holding a smiling blob with eyes (misam bolnar cat alien)
Here's some neat web design.

https://njacsports.com/index.aspx

See how the logos of teams that are part of the conference get put in the header?



Those are the full members of the conference. But not every college here has a team in every sport, and some colleges are associate members for certain sports that their regular conference doesn't have. Men's tennis, for example - only four of these schools have a varsity men's tennis program, but there are four other universities whose own men's tennis teams compete in the NJAC.

If you click over to Men's Sports > Tennis:



Boom, there they are.

I'd also like to point out how fun it is that three Wisconsin schools are competing for the championship of the New Jersey Athletic Conference.

lizard_socks: cute yellow lizard fursona drawing on a tablet (Default)
I had a dream that there was a summer camp island movie in the theater.

It started out with a scene of some people in a secret organization underground on Earth (think Stargate) and some new aliens working with them and a small one-person space plane. This did not come back later.

There was a scene where Hedgehog had some flashbacks to stuff that happened in the show where she got into a pickle, but each time it went a little further and we got to see how she got out of it. Since it was a dream, of course none of them were real. One was just her watching a Carmen Samdiego knockoff on tv (the main character was a brown bear)

Also, at one point Julia Pott talked about a character she'd made years ago who showed up in the background and had no lines.

It had a really nice sad song in the middle, then ended abruptly. I loved the movie but was very confused. Pajamas was in the theater with me, and so was one of my coworkers, and I asked them about it but they didn't know either.

I kept leaving my winter gloves in the theater. Also, a charity sends me an email saying they're turning down a $20 donation from the show because there was a scene in one episode that showed test tubes in a kitchen.

I looked up the movie online then, and a lot of people didn't like it, but I still did. There were also some fan theories about the shape of New Jersey.

Anyway, then Oscar was at a hotel and he needed to put his stuff somewhere safe. The hotel guy says he should put it in Hedgehogs room, which Oscar knows the code to (and the hotel guy knows that, he's seen the movie and knows how good of friends they are). When he gets there, he finds some clues and realizes that the part he saw at the beginning of the movie, with aliens, was a clue for how he could find Hedgehog again. They go to a magical desert so they can spend another month together.

Headcanon

Feb. 25th, 2021 08:18 pm
lizard_socks: cute yellow lizard fursona drawing on a tablet (lizard fursona drawing)
When I'm trying to extrapolate the worldbuilding of a story, there's one big thing I like to keep in mind:

Would it put constraints on what kinds of stories can be told?

I'm always trying to maximize the amount of stories that can exist without coming in conflict with each other. This is the number one reason I don't think of Peridot as asexual / aromantic. Does it make sense for her character? Yeah, I think so - without getting into too many details, she reminds me of myself and some of my aromantic friends. Would it make sense thematically? It absolutely would: sure, fusion is not always a metaphor for romantic relationships, but if you want a metaphor for how it feels to be aromantic in an LGBT+ space, what better than a character who doesn't fuse when almost everyone else does?

But the fact is, there's nothing in the show that comes out and says that Peridot is ace, and I have to believe that's a deliberate move by the show's crew, just like how there's nothing that says gems can't identify as male or use he/him pronouns (even though none of the ones in the show do). They don't want to stop people from feeling included in the show's world.

And, ultimately, Peridot is probably the show's most shipped character. At this point, if someone comes out and says she's for-sure aromantic, they'd be cutting out Amethyst/Peridot and Lapis/Peridot from the world of possibilities, which in some ways cuts fans of those ships out from the rest of the fandom.

(As a side note, I was afraid that they would go down this route with Stevonnie's pronouns - I can attest that a fusion of a boy and a girl using "they" isn't as obvious as you think if it comes at a time when there are no nonbinary people in your life, and it doesn't really work as representation if you don't make it clear.)

As another example: The Federation in Star Trek is... incredibly vague. Is it a federal state like Switzerland? Something like the European Union? Is it a loose organization like the UN that everyone should theoretically be able to join? Point is, they don't usually tell us what Federation civilian life is like outside of Starfleet, which forces people to extrapolate.

And there's a good reason for this. The Federation is an ideal future for humanity; readers and viewers presume it to be in the right unless it's really obvious they're making a mistake. Saying that one side of a contentious real-world issue has "won" doesn't convince anyone of anything - it just excludes people on the other side from seeing themselves in your story. Either they're the villains, or they don't exist at all (which is fine, if that's what you want). But by making characters people care about, and making them believe the things you do, you can still advocate your side of an issue by demonstrating its effects on them, while offering a way for people who you don't see eye-to-eye with to still accept your story into their personal headcanon - to enjoy it, and see it as something that happened somewhere in this world, without necessarily accepting the bearing its themes have on the real world.

This is also the reason I'm not fond of fix-it fics in general. When you cut out entire movies / shows from the canon, you're not just cutting out the things that happened in those movies / shows - you're stopping readers who do enjoy those movies / shows from considering your story part of their own headcanon. If I'm reading a Star Trek fic where the author is deliberately excluding, say, Picard, that means my stories - which do acknowledge it - can't exist in the same world as theirs. And this may just be me, but I can't enjoy fanfiction unless the potential for collaboration and compatibility is there.
lizard_socks: cute yellow lizard fursona drawing on a tablet (Default)
You know what would really make me feel better right now, and I'm being totally honest, is addressing some technical debt. And it's not even urgent stuff. It's stuff that only bothers me because I wrote it. I'm always more particular about stuff I did and I'm a lot more easygoing if it's stuff other people did. Keep this in mind if you spill something on my carpet!
lizard_socks: A humanoid cat alien holding a smiling blob with eyes (misam bolnar cat alien)
I think my latest story is turning out pretty well. It's a time travel thing - a couple of my characters end up in season 9 of SG-1, a generic sci-fi plot happens with one of them, and that gives the other one an opportunity to reveal some backstory that I haven't had a place for yet. I'm not gonna put it in the same AO3 series as the others, because canon characters do show up, but I'll definitely post it there when I finish.
lizard_socks: A humanoid cat alien holding a smiling blob with eyes (misam bolnar cat alien)
I had a dream that I was watching a time travel episode of Amphibia and Sprig's parents were humans. Not sure how that's supposed to work.
lizard_socks: (gray furry monster leaf)
One of the best things about writing OCs is that I can have a thought and then project that thought onto them, without having to interrogate whether or not I actually believe it. Also, since they're my characters, nobody can tell me I'm wrong when I put words into their mouths.

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