You've got answers? I've got questions!
Jan. 30th, 2009 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grammarwomanHere I am, slow as always to jump on the memewagon.
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You may (if you so desire) post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
These are my responses to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
resolute's questions.
First of all, I have no idea why these questions turned out to be so hard and took so long for me to answer. Maybe it's because I actually had to think instead of just typing out my immediate reactions. As for the length…once my brain kicked in, the words started to flow. (Sometimes I suspect there's a word tank in my brain somewhere that keeps filling up, and every so often I have to bleed off the pressure and let the words out in a long-winded entry. Maybe that's part of the writer thing.)
1. What does an average day at your job entail?
Arrive sometime around 8:30, leaning towards 5 minutes late due to the various morning shenanigans of the Emperor and the complete inability of the other drivers to either go the speed limit or get the hell out of my way, especially with any kind of snow on the ground.
Check work email, IMSA email. Sequence notesfiles.
Open up whatever project I'm currently assigned to – good projects are in Visual Basic, bad ones are Fortran programming on the VAX. Poot* between the project and LJ/Internet until lunch at noonish.
Eat quick lunch with coworkers, talking about TV and movies with C and remaining silent during everyone else's discussion of sports, politics, work gossip, and reality TV. Attempt to not feel smugly elitist and simultaneously despairing of the future of quality television if these people are the targeted average viewers.
Escape back to cube, indulge in LJ catchup for the rest of the hour.
Poot between project and LJ/Internet until 5 PM.
Call husband at work to see when he's coming home and if it will be in time to help pick up the Emperor from daycare. Depart.
*The balance between project work and otherness depends on the nearness of the deadline, the coolness of the part I'm working on, and my general disaffection with my situation and/or project manager. (My productivity is not helped by my frequently-reinforced observation that people's perception of what and how much I do has nothing to do with reality.) I have to say, though, that even with all my bitching, my job is not that crappy, depending on the current project manager. It's just far too close to a Dilbert-esque existence to be entirely comfortable.
2. Using character traits of fictional characters, describe the ideal composites of the three persons you'd like to Cliff, Shag, and Marry, respectively.
Cliff – Joey from "Friends". Deliberate stupidity, especially when paired with a dependence on appearance and/or charm to skate through life, is about the biggest turnoff for me. There is no face/body pretty enough to overcome that. See also Dawn from "Buffy". (HAAAAAAAAATE.)
Shag – Malcolm Reynolds from "Firefly", Rodney McKay from "Stargate: Atlantis", Kara "Starbuck" Thrace from BSG. High levels of competence (AKA mad skillz) that are repeatedly demonstrated, as well as confidence in said competence, while still balanced with humility or fumbles in other areas of the person's life, is a HOT DAMN combination in my book. Take Mal's leadership – people follow him through hell. But he can't for the life of him figure out women.
Marry – Karl "Helo" Agathon from BSG. He's a loyal caretaker, slow to physical anger but dangerous when provoked past his limits. He's obviously a family man and will literally do anything for them. He's willing to take a variety of jobs and fits in anywhere. (Plus, the man is built like a mountain of muscles – I want to climb him like Whoa. What's a good marriage without sexual interest? *grin*) See also John Crichton in "Farscape".
3. What's the relationship between your personal fanon and your fanfiction, and do you prefer one over the other and why?
Huh. That's kind of a toughie for me, because up until I started seriously reading fanfiction a couple of years ago, I didn't really have a fanon that diverged at all from canon. Although I must admit that I've had several one-sided arguments with shows that did horrible things to my favorite characters, like locking them into stupid storylines or mishandling their personal evolutions. (I'm still mad about how they transformed the technophile Willow into someone with barely adequate Googling skills.) But really, fanfiction is for the most part what I use to build my personal fanon. Without reading other peoples' reactions to my fandoms, whether that be meta, critiques, or fiction, I don't know that my interest would be stimulated enough to conceptualize a fanon. I suppose that makes fanfiction the favorite, where I can pick and choose pieces to read that then support my evolving fanon. This might be different if I were in a fandom that didn't have as many brilliant writers as the ones I follow.
4. In your alternate life, the Path Not Taken, what are you doing today (instead of what you are actually doing)?
Actually, I can see two alternates. One would have diverged by picking a different college or job opportunity, where I took my fascination with movies and TV and either went to film/acting school and chased my Hollywood dream (writing, acting, gofering or whatever would get me into a studio), or geared my interest with computers into graphics design and gone into special effects and/or CGI, winding up working somewhere like Pixar or LucasFilm. In either case, I could turn on my TV or go to the movies, sit back, and think "I helped make that."
The other would have split off sometime in my early twenties. There was the period post-college graduation, post-getting my own place, pre-hooking up with now-husband, where I was free and in charge of all my choices, and not anyone else's. I could keep any hours I wanted (and did), go anywhere, spend anything, and only be accountable to myself. If I'd been more confident about my abilities, I would have left the Crazy Christians and struck off somewhere else, a better-paying, more-challenging, higher-dork-quotient job. I probably would have become a complete Internet junkie, playing a ton of online games, spending all my free time in chatrooms, finding online fandom more than a decade before I did. I'd go to a ton of conventions a year and spend crazy money on loot and celebrity groping.
But with either, I almost certainly wouldn't have my husband and kid, and as much as I twinge sometimes for the "Calgon take me away!" freedom (moar conventions plz?), I couldn't give them up.
5. You have a working Stargate; what do you do with it?
Bury it and hide! Dear Zod, have you seen what can come out of one of those? Seriously, that's way too much responsibility for me. I am not cut out to manage the hordes that would be needed to responsibly run one of those things, or even hire the hordes to begin with.
I mean, yeah, if I were living in my alternate life where I didn't have a family, I'd be really tempted to round up a posse of like-minded individuals and go through, to see What's Out There. Otherwise, I'd either lock it up and stash in away like a last ditch "Get Out of Apocalypse" free card, or accept it as my life's work to find people with whom to trust it.
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me!"
2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You may (if you so desire) post the answers to the questions (and the questions themselves) on your blog or journal.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
These are my responses to
resolute's questions.First of all, I have no idea why these questions turned out to be so hard and took so long for me to answer. Maybe it's because I actually had to think instead of just typing out my immediate reactions. As for the length…once my brain kicked in, the words started to flow. (Sometimes I suspect there's a word tank in my brain somewhere that keeps filling up, and every so often I have to bleed off the pressure and let the words out in a long-winded entry. Maybe that's part of the writer thing.)
1. What does an average day at your job entail?
Arrive sometime around 8:30, leaning towards 5 minutes late due to the various morning shenanigans of the Emperor and the complete inability of the other drivers to either go the speed limit or get the hell out of my way, especially with any kind of snow on the ground.
Check work email, IMSA email. Sequence notesfiles.
Open up whatever project I'm currently assigned to – good projects are in Visual Basic, bad ones are Fortran programming on the VAX. Poot* between the project and LJ/Internet until lunch at noonish.
Eat quick lunch with coworkers, talking about TV and movies with C and remaining silent during everyone else's discussion of sports, politics, work gossip, and reality TV. Attempt to not feel smugly elitist and simultaneously despairing of the future of quality television if these people are the targeted average viewers.
Escape back to cube, indulge in LJ catchup for the rest of the hour.
Poot between project and LJ/Internet until 5 PM.
Call husband at work to see when he's coming home and if it will be in time to help pick up the Emperor from daycare. Depart.
*The balance between project work and otherness depends on the nearness of the deadline, the coolness of the part I'm working on, and my general disaffection with my situation and/or project manager. (My productivity is not helped by my frequently-reinforced observation that people's perception of what and how much I do has nothing to do with reality.) I have to say, though, that even with all my bitching, my job is not that crappy, depending on the current project manager. It's just far too close to a Dilbert-esque existence to be entirely comfortable.
2. Using character traits of fictional characters, describe the ideal composites of the three persons you'd like to Cliff, Shag, and Marry, respectively.
Cliff – Joey from "Friends". Deliberate stupidity, especially when paired with a dependence on appearance and/or charm to skate through life, is about the biggest turnoff for me. There is no face/body pretty enough to overcome that. See also Dawn from "Buffy". (HAAAAAAAAATE.)
Shag – Malcolm Reynolds from "Firefly", Rodney McKay from "Stargate: Atlantis", Kara "Starbuck" Thrace from BSG. High levels of competence (AKA mad skillz) that are repeatedly demonstrated, as well as confidence in said competence, while still balanced with humility or fumbles in other areas of the person's life, is a HOT DAMN combination in my book. Take Mal's leadership – people follow him through hell. But he can't for the life of him figure out women.
Marry – Karl "Helo" Agathon from BSG. He's a loyal caretaker, slow to physical anger but dangerous when provoked past his limits. He's obviously a family man and will literally do anything for them. He's willing to take a variety of jobs and fits in anywhere. (Plus, the man is built like a mountain of muscles – I want to climb him like Whoa. What's a good marriage without sexual interest? *grin*) See also John Crichton in "Farscape".
3. What's the relationship between your personal fanon and your fanfiction, and do you prefer one over the other and why?
Huh. That's kind of a toughie for me, because up until I started seriously reading fanfiction a couple of years ago, I didn't really have a fanon that diverged at all from canon. Although I must admit that I've had several one-sided arguments with shows that did horrible things to my favorite characters, like locking them into stupid storylines or mishandling their personal evolutions. (I'm still mad about how they transformed the technophile Willow into someone with barely adequate Googling skills.) But really, fanfiction is for the most part what I use to build my personal fanon. Without reading other peoples' reactions to my fandoms, whether that be meta, critiques, or fiction, I don't know that my interest would be stimulated enough to conceptualize a fanon. I suppose that makes fanfiction the favorite, where I can pick and choose pieces to read that then support my evolving fanon. This might be different if I were in a fandom that didn't have as many brilliant writers as the ones I follow.
4. In your alternate life, the Path Not Taken, what are you doing today (instead of what you are actually doing)?
Actually, I can see two alternates. One would have diverged by picking a different college or job opportunity, where I took my fascination with movies and TV and either went to film/acting school and chased my Hollywood dream (writing, acting, gofering or whatever would get me into a studio), or geared my interest with computers into graphics design and gone into special effects and/or CGI, winding up working somewhere like Pixar or LucasFilm. In either case, I could turn on my TV or go to the movies, sit back, and think "I helped make that."
The other would have split off sometime in my early twenties. There was the period post-college graduation, post-getting my own place, pre-hooking up with now-husband, where I was free and in charge of all my choices, and not anyone else's. I could keep any hours I wanted (and did), go anywhere, spend anything, and only be accountable to myself. If I'd been more confident about my abilities, I would have left the Crazy Christians and struck off somewhere else, a better-paying, more-challenging, higher-dork-quotient job. I probably would have become a complete Internet junkie, playing a ton of online games, spending all my free time in chatrooms, finding online fandom more than a decade before I did. I'd go to a ton of conventions a year and spend crazy money on loot and celebrity groping.
But with either, I almost certainly wouldn't have my husband and kid, and as much as I twinge sometimes for the "Calgon take me away!" freedom (moar conventions plz?), I couldn't give them up.
5. You have a working Stargate; what do you do with it?
Bury it and hide! Dear Zod, have you seen what can come out of one of those? Seriously, that's way too much responsibility for me. I am not cut out to manage the hordes that would be needed to responsibly run one of those things, or even hire the hordes to begin with.
I mean, yeah, if I were living in my alternate life where I didn't have a family, I'd be really tempted to round up a posse of like-minded individuals and go through, to see What's Out There. Otherwise, I'd either lock it up and stash in away like a last ditch "Get Out of Apocalypse" free card, or accept it as my life's work to find people with whom to trust it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-30 10:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-31 08:57 pm (UTC)(And you could trust _me_ with a stargate. ;D)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-03 09:01 pm (UTC)1. If you could step into any TV show, movie, or book, as yourself or as an existing character, what would you choose?
2. Would you trade one of your current abilities (ranked as good or better) for either another ability you don't have or to improve one you do, and if so, what would be the switch?
3. A philanthropist offers to pay you a comfortable living wage for any continuous employment you want. What would you pick?
4. (To steal from
5. Given the current mess that is the state of our broadcast media (Neilsen ratings, live viewing vs. timeshifted, advertisements, network vs. cable vs. pay cable vs. online), how would you fix things to best match entertainment with the consumer, i.e. ensure that the shows you and like-minded people watch have the best chance of staying on the air?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 12:38 am (UTC)1. If you could step into any TV show, movie, or book, as yourself or as an existing character, what would you choose?
That's pretty huge. God? (Well, if I ever DID get elected god, there'd be some changes, that's for sure.) Naw. Too boring. Hmm... I'm thinking superhero. Either Cypher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(comics)) or the Integrated Hulk, probably. If I was Cypher, I'd take over the world (true, they live in the marvel universe and that complicates things, but I'd be ok). If I was Integrated Hulk, I'd probably declare myself a sovereign state ala Raven. The other possibility would be someone in the Star Trek universe. Grandpa Sisko, maybe.
2. Would you trade one of your current abilities (ranked as good or better) for either another ability you don't have or to improve one you do, and if so, what would be the switch?
Oof. I'd need to see my character sheet if I'm going to try min/maxing. But I think I'd trade my skills at video games to be able to play music.
3. A philanthropist offers to pay you a comfortable living wage for any continuous employment you want. What would you pick?
Sage. I'd hang out a shingle to help people think better (and I'd only charge a minimal amount cause you gotta make em value it).
4. (To steal from [info]resolute) Using character traits of fictional characters, describe the ideal composites of the three persons you'd like to Cliff, Shag, and Marry, respectively.
Cliff meaning "throw off of" I assume? Hmm. George Bush? Oh, you said fictional. Ok, then "The cast of Seinfeld". They are horrible horrible people who should die in a fire. Maybe Kramer could be reformed.
Shag? Faye from Questionable Content's ass, Mary-Jane Watson's hair, Seven of Nine's boobs, Kayleigh from Firefly's personality.
Marry? See above but + money.
5. Given the current mess that is the state of our broadcast media (Neilsen ratings, live viewing vs. timeshifted, advertisements, network vs. cable vs. pay cable vs. online), how would you fix things to best match entertainment with the consumer, i.e. ensure that the shows you and like-minded people watch have the best chance of staying on the air?
I'd turn around and stop looking at the past. It's a 50 year old business model and it's no longer viable. Time to face the future. I'd get "off the air" entirely eventually. I'd switch to BBC esque seasons but more of them so "reruns" become strictly a matter of choice. I don't know how they will make money. I suspect that our economy will need to reinvent itself shortly into something like either star trek or mad max. In both cases, I don't see the same kind of money showing up in the entertainment industry. (Though in the trek, resource-based economy, I suspect all information products will be held in common with their creators getting a proportional piece of a very big bucket of tax money. Ie, something like what some countries are starting to do with music and ISP fees: download all you like, you already paid for it. The real trick there is tracking and valuation and "the market" doesn't work for information products. At ALL.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 12:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-04 01:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 06:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-09 08:49 pm (UTC)As for yours...
1. What does an average day at your job entail?
2. Using character traits of fictional characters, describe the ideal composites of the three persons you'd like to Cliff, Shag, and Marry, respectively.
3. If you could have any of your fics filmed and presented as canon, which would you pick?
4. What activity from your "do it before I die" list are you most likely to accomplish, and when and how and why?
5. What's your favorite food to cook, and favorite to consume?