Kim (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
grammarwoman) wrote2009-01-30 04:31 pm
grammarwoman) wrote2009-01-30 04:31 pm
You've got answers? I've got questions!
Here 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.