Question and Meta
Aug. 24th, 2009 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lls_mutantIt was a very good weekend, but wow, I am exhausted. My sister's daughter is beautifully behaved, but the child simply does not walk. She JUMPS. EVERYWHERE. My boys and I are exhausted.
The question: Computer people... help? And this is not what you'd think it is...
I'm trying to come up with a semi prank (probably fairly sarcastic) that an Eight played on a One. However, I can turn a computer on, run the browser, Word, and Excel, and maybe program a little in Visual Basic. Can anyone help me out with this? I'm just looking for a couple of lines of description, and it frankly doesn't matter if I understand it, because the character hearing it doesn't understand it either. :)
The meta is about A Lot to Live Up To, and most specifically why I wrote the very end the way I did. Read if you so desire, skip if that's what you'd prefer :)
Well, now that I've done that smooth and seamless transition....
When I write fanfic, there's a definite pattern. See if you can catch it- here are the characters I've written fic for: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James Potter, Lily Evans, Peter Pettigrew, Charlie Weasley, Petunia Dursley, Cedric Diggory, Felix Gaeta, Tom Zarek, Anastasia Dualla, Louis Hoshi, Noel Allison, Hera Agathon. Prominent secondary characters in my fics have included Frank and Alice Longbottom, Caradoc Dearborn, Alphard Black, Xeno Fenner, Racetrack, Jurgen Belzen (well, he will be), Helena Cain, Brooks, Pilot!Eight, Engineer-Goatee!Two, Sweet!Eight... I'm guessing you've all figured it out. At the absolute most, these are all secondary characters in the canon. Some of them- even ones I've made into central characters in novel-length fics (Hoshi, Alphard, Dearborn) are glorified extras that had a name and a sentence or two of personality.
Don't get me wrong, I love the main characters. (Well, I loved Adama pre-4.5.) I adore Harry and his friends, and they're the reason I read the books. I love the whole crew of Galactica, and I watched the show for all of them. But see, with the main characters, I feel like their stories get told. I can write silly little one-shots focusing on the main characters, but I can't write the epics. The main characters may show up in them- I mean, heck, Lee Adama was a major player in A Lot to Live Up To, and Adama and Tigh were minor players that actually had roles beyond commanding officers. But I feel like when an event happens in the canon, we know what's going on in these characters' heads. Moreover, because these ARE the main characters, I find it hard to believe a major event could happen in their life during the chronicled time and the author wouldn't have known about it.
(However, there are major exceptions here, particularly with BSG. You know what I'd actually like to read? A really good "Starbuck got pregnant on New Caprica and miscarried before the Cylons came" fic. Preferably pregnant by Sam. OR, "Starbuck got pregnant and didn't know if the daddy was Lee or Sam and so she aborted and then later regretted it because abortion is HARD no matter what you believe" type of fic. Erm, my real point is, BSG makes some huge, deliberate jumps in time.)
But yeah. I like writing the secondary characters because I'm not often retreading the story told on the TV. And that's a lot of what happened with Dee's suicide.
I'm uncomfortable with the subject of suicide to begin with. I can understand it to an extent, because I went through a period of time when I thought I was suicidal. I don't think I was, not really. If there's someone who didn't at least think of suicide in the abstract as a teenager, I've yet to meet them. But I don't really understand what Dee went through, because I wasn't really suicidal, and I find it hard to get into her head for that. Especially because Earth broke her. Completely and utterly.
I tried to build up to that. I wanted to show how much Dee trusted Adama, and that Adama was beginning to fail her. That was where Noel came in very, very handy, because Noel could voice all the things that I wanted Dee to not admit that she was thinking. I mean, we see Noel be very outspoken against the Admiral, and frankly, it's the most in character for him. Before Earth, we never saw Felix speak out against Adama. And Louis stays loyal to Adama afterwards, although I'm not sure my version of Louis is loyal to Adama as much as he's loyal to the military and the Admiral. But as I was writing, I was finding it hard to make Dee make that realization. Because honestly? Until Earth, I didn't fault the Admiral for much myself. (Except Sine Qua Non.) I didn't even fault him for not investigating Felix's leg yet much, because there simply was not time.
In some ways, I can understand Dee's decision, I guess. Adama disappointed me bitterly as well when he fell apart. I loved Adama, and I got my heart broken like they did. Just, y'know, not to the same extent as he's fictional to me :)
But I'd been in Dee's head for 260 pages already. I started the fic liking Dee. I ended up understanding canon aspects of her more (like why she left Lee, and why she stayed through the Kara mess), and I completely fell in love with my fic version of her. I think Dee is a character that many of us can relate to. She's a young woman with no special destiny or strange mechanical features, who has a job and a personal life... Dee is the kind of person who really exists. And the way she comes across... Dee is one of the characters I would very, very much like if I met her in real life. (Also? After listening to interviews with Kandyse McClure, I want to go shopping with her and then go get girly desserts and gossip for an entire afternoon, because she comes across as the sweetest person ever in her interviews.) But yeah, when you get into a character's head for that long... killing them off hurts. That was a small reason as to why I just skipped the whole suicide.
But the biggest reason I skipped the suicide was the fact that the show did it. And the show did it well. Dee was the main character for that episode, and seeing her last day totally broke my heart. It was well done and extremely powerful. When I find a scene extremely powerful, I feel like it flattens on paper. If you notice, I also skipped the "restaurants shaped like food" scene in Youth's Final Luxury. I built up to it and showed Felix being led away and Baltar coming in, but I wouldn't touch the scene with a ten foot pole. It was easier there, because I could shift to Zarek's point of view, and that was a point of view that was neglected by the show. So I had something interesting I could do that distracted from the fact that we were skipping over this powerful scene. And Dee's last day... the only things I might have added were Noel and Louis, but she wouldn't have said anything significant to them- just like she didn't to Felix.
But the tl;dr version of why I didn't write the suicide is the show covered it really well and I couldn't do it justice, and it hurt too much.
As far as the afterlife, I love canon afterlife! :) I'm a big believer in the idea that you aren't just in one place when you die, that the soul... not splits, but has aspects. That you don't have to inhabit one discrete place in space and time. So Dee could be with Lee, with her family, with Billy, etc. (It was something that got mentioned a little in YFL, too.)
I don't believe much in Hell. I honestly don't think there are many people that deserve it. There are a few people I can think of that are truly irredeemable, but I certainly don't know them personally. (Hitler would be an example.) But I'm a big believer that God is infinitely wiser than the rest of us, and that He (or She) understands human nature better than we give Him or Her credit for.
However, it's probably clear that this part of Dee stayed in Purgatory for a bit. There was a part of Dee that regretted what she had done and couldn't go on to Paradise without making peace with the people she had hurt. Because she must have hurt her boys very, very badly. And I wanted to focus on Louis, because the story started as a Dee-Hoshi story for so long.
Originally, the epilogue was supposed to be a Louis POV, where he gets a head!Dee or reflects on Dee during his stint at Admiral, and he respected her enough by then to think that it should have been Dee in his shoes, and he should have been her XO. But while the front half of the fic was really about Dee and Louis, the fic became about Dee, and that epilogue didn't feel right any more. Especially as Felix and Noel were just as close to her. I was sort of thinking of what to do, and then I remembered the vision that I gave Dee of Louis's father and her baby.
Dee saw parallels between herself and Hoshi, Sr. when she had that vision, but they aren't really accurate. Dee was feeling guilty there for losing the baby, even though it was not her fault. But from what I've been told that's a VERY common feeling among women who've lost a child, and when I was scared I was going to miscarry (I had a scare with Trevor), I already felt that guilt of "what did I do wrong"? (Plus, Dee was totally hormonal at that point.) However, what happened with Hoshi and his father was a totally different ball of wax. But now at the end, what Dee did to Hoshi is actually very similar to what Hoshi's father did to him. She gave up. Their decisions cost Louis a lot, although in both cases that wasn't really the intention. Thomas Hoshi was deeply religious and truly thought he was doing what was best for his son, and Dee's decision wasn't about other people- it was about her. But it seemed very right for the two of them to wait together.
Plus, there's a whisper of a happy ending about that. Louis broke his parents' hearts, but the truth was that they never stopped loving him. And when his family found out he was alive, they couldn't say they were completely sad about it. There was a part in all of them that was relieved. And the image of a father waiting for his grown son until the end of time... I loved that.
So, there it is. :) A little incoherent, I think, but a meta just the same.
Now, on to the AU!!!!!!!
The question: Computer people... help? And this is not what you'd think it is...
I'm trying to come up with a semi prank (probably fairly sarcastic) that an Eight played on a One. However, I can turn a computer on, run the browser, Word, and Excel, and maybe program a little in Visual Basic. Can anyone help me out with this? I'm just looking for a couple of lines of description, and it frankly doesn't matter if I understand it, because the character hearing it doesn't understand it either. :)
The meta is about A Lot to Live Up To, and most specifically why I wrote the very end the way I did. Read if you so desire, skip if that's what you'd prefer :)
Well, now that I've done that smooth and seamless transition....
When I write fanfic, there's a definite pattern. See if you can catch it- here are the characters I've written fic for: Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, James Potter, Lily Evans, Peter Pettigrew, Charlie Weasley, Petunia Dursley, Cedric Diggory, Felix Gaeta, Tom Zarek, Anastasia Dualla, Louis Hoshi, Noel Allison, Hera Agathon. Prominent secondary characters in my fics have included Frank and Alice Longbottom, Caradoc Dearborn, Alphard Black, Xeno Fenner, Racetrack, Jurgen Belzen (well, he will be), Helena Cain, Brooks, Pilot!Eight, Engineer-Goatee!Two, Sweet!Eight... I'm guessing you've all figured it out. At the absolute most, these are all secondary characters in the canon. Some of them- even ones I've made into central characters in novel-length fics (Hoshi, Alphard, Dearborn) are glorified extras that had a name and a sentence or two of personality.
Don't get me wrong, I love the main characters. (Well, I loved Adama pre-4.5.) I adore Harry and his friends, and they're the reason I read the books. I love the whole crew of Galactica, and I watched the show for all of them. But see, with the main characters, I feel like their stories get told. I can write silly little one-shots focusing on the main characters, but I can't write the epics. The main characters may show up in them- I mean, heck, Lee Adama was a major player in A Lot to Live Up To, and Adama and Tigh were minor players that actually had roles beyond commanding officers. But I feel like when an event happens in the canon, we know what's going on in these characters' heads. Moreover, because these ARE the main characters, I find it hard to believe a major event could happen in their life during the chronicled time and the author wouldn't have known about it.
(However, there are major exceptions here, particularly with BSG. You know what I'd actually like to read? A really good "Starbuck got pregnant on New Caprica and miscarried before the Cylons came" fic. Preferably pregnant by Sam. OR, "Starbuck got pregnant and didn't know if the daddy was Lee or Sam and so she aborted and then later regretted it because abortion is HARD no matter what you believe" type of fic. Erm, my real point is, BSG makes some huge, deliberate jumps in time.)
But yeah. I like writing the secondary characters because I'm not often retreading the story told on the TV. And that's a lot of what happened with Dee's suicide.
I'm uncomfortable with the subject of suicide to begin with. I can understand it to an extent, because I went through a period of time when I thought I was suicidal. I don't think I was, not really. If there's someone who didn't at least think of suicide in the abstract as a teenager, I've yet to meet them. But I don't really understand what Dee went through, because I wasn't really suicidal, and I find it hard to get into her head for that. Especially because Earth broke her. Completely and utterly.
I tried to build up to that. I wanted to show how much Dee trusted Adama, and that Adama was beginning to fail her. That was where Noel came in very, very handy, because Noel could voice all the things that I wanted Dee to not admit that she was thinking. I mean, we see Noel be very outspoken against the Admiral, and frankly, it's the most in character for him. Before Earth, we never saw Felix speak out against Adama. And Louis stays loyal to Adama afterwards, although I'm not sure my version of Louis is loyal to Adama as much as he's loyal to the military and the Admiral. But as I was writing, I was finding it hard to make Dee make that realization. Because honestly? Until Earth, I didn't fault the Admiral for much myself. (Except Sine Qua Non.) I didn't even fault him for not investigating Felix's leg yet much, because there simply was not time.
In some ways, I can understand Dee's decision, I guess. Adama disappointed me bitterly as well when he fell apart. I loved Adama, and I got my heart broken like they did. Just, y'know, not to the same extent as he's fictional to me :)
But I'd been in Dee's head for 260 pages already. I started the fic liking Dee. I ended up understanding canon aspects of her more (like why she left Lee, and why she stayed through the Kara mess), and I completely fell in love with my fic version of her. I think Dee is a character that many of us can relate to. She's a young woman with no special destiny or strange mechanical features, who has a job and a personal life... Dee is the kind of person who really exists. And the way she comes across... Dee is one of the characters I would very, very much like if I met her in real life. (Also? After listening to interviews with Kandyse McClure, I want to go shopping with her and then go get girly desserts and gossip for an entire afternoon, because she comes across as the sweetest person ever in her interviews.) But yeah, when you get into a character's head for that long... killing them off hurts. That was a small reason as to why I just skipped the whole suicide.
But the biggest reason I skipped the suicide was the fact that the show did it. And the show did it well. Dee was the main character for that episode, and seeing her last day totally broke my heart. It was well done and extremely powerful. When I find a scene extremely powerful, I feel like it flattens on paper. If you notice, I also skipped the "restaurants shaped like food" scene in Youth's Final Luxury. I built up to it and showed Felix being led away and Baltar coming in, but I wouldn't touch the scene with a ten foot pole. It was easier there, because I could shift to Zarek's point of view, and that was a point of view that was neglected by the show. So I had something interesting I could do that distracted from the fact that we were skipping over this powerful scene. And Dee's last day... the only things I might have added were Noel and Louis, but she wouldn't have said anything significant to them- just like she didn't to Felix.
But the tl;dr version of why I didn't write the suicide is the show covered it really well and I couldn't do it justice, and it hurt too much.
As far as the afterlife, I love canon afterlife! :) I'm a big believer in the idea that you aren't just in one place when you die, that the soul... not splits, but has aspects. That you don't have to inhabit one discrete place in space and time. So Dee could be with Lee, with her family, with Billy, etc. (It was something that got mentioned a little in YFL, too.)
I don't believe much in Hell. I honestly don't think there are many people that deserve it. There are a few people I can think of that are truly irredeemable, but I certainly don't know them personally. (Hitler would be an example.) But I'm a big believer that God is infinitely wiser than the rest of us, and that He (or She) understands human nature better than we give Him or Her credit for.
However, it's probably clear that this part of Dee stayed in Purgatory for a bit. There was a part of Dee that regretted what she had done and couldn't go on to Paradise without making peace with the people she had hurt. Because she must have hurt her boys very, very badly. And I wanted to focus on Louis, because the story started as a Dee-Hoshi story for so long.
Originally, the epilogue was supposed to be a Louis POV, where he gets a head!Dee or reflects on Dee during his stint at Admiral, and he respected her enough by then to think that it should have been Dee in his shoes, and he should have been her XO. But while the front half of the fic was really about Dee and Louis, the fic became about Dee, and that epilogue didn't feel right any more. Especially as Felix and Noel were just as close to her. I was sort of thinking of what to do, and then I remembered the vision that I gave Dee of Louis's father and her baby.
Dee saw parallels between herself and Hoshi, Sr. when she had that vision, but they aren't really accurate. Dee was feeling guilty there for losing the baby, even though it was not her fault. But from what I've been told that's a VERY common feeling among women who've lost a child, and when I was scared I was going to miscarry (I had a scare with Trevor), I already felt that guilt of "what did I do wrong"? (Plus, Dee was totally hormonal at that point.) However, what happened with Hoshi and his father was a totally different ball of wax. But now at the end, what Dee did to Hoshi is actually very similar to what Hoshi's father did to him. She gave up. Their decisions cost Louis a lot, although in both cases that wasn't really the intention. Thomas Hoshi was deeply religious and truly thought he was doing what was best for his son, and Dee's decision wasn't about other people- it was about her. But it seemed very right for the two of them to wait together.
Plus, there's a whisper of a happy ending about that. Louis broke his parents' hearts, but the truth was that they never stopped loving him. And when his family found out he was alive, they couldn't say they were completely sad about it. There was a part in all of them that was relieved. And the image of a father waiting for his grown son until the end of time... I loved that.
So, there it is. :) A little incoherent, I think, but a meta just the same.
Now, on to the AU!!!!!!!
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 07:37 pm (UTC)When I was in college (we ran Linux), the classics were:
1) Waiting until somebody turned remote access on and then popping up porn or embarrassing photos on their terminal
2) Finding somebody who forgot to log out, and changing their prompt text to something funny (e.g. "hi_loser!>$ or "Iforgottologout>$")
3) Setting their word processor, terminal, or whatever to display in Turkish/Japanese/Insert Language Here (heh, making One's computer display in Raider language might be fun and ironic...!)
4) Changing settings to something obnoxious (the keyboard layout to Dvorak, the mouse to the lowest speed, screen brightness to near-zero, turning on the text-to-speech setting, etc)
5) Those screen-savers which display user-selected text are also priceless. For extra fun, set them to take a password! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-24 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 01:10 am (UTC)I am not computer-magical enough to come up with something awesome for a prank, but I'm really looking forward to whatever you pick.
AU! AU! AU! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:31 pm (UTC)And I am having SO MUCH FUN with the AU. HEHEHEHEHEHEHE :) I owe you big for this idea, believe me!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-25 11:36 pm (UTC)I like your characters. Your Dee. Your Narcho. Your Dee was a different Dee than on screen. I like them both but yours was far more cynical and just more active. Your Narcho more vulnerable. The Narcho I saw on screen was scary and mean. You saw more there, but I didn't. I respected and shared some of his feelings but I didn't like him. Your Narcho, however, has been winning me over in several stories now. :-)
You know what I'd actually like to read? A really good "Starbuck got pregnant on New Caprica and miscarried before the Cylons came" fic. Preferably pregnant by Sam. OR, "Starbuck got pregnant and didn't know if the daddy was Lee or Sam and so she aborted and then later regretted it because abortion is HARD no matter what you believe" type of fic.
Really? I've read both of these fics. When it comes to Kara you need only ask. I totally read the first type just have to figure out where. She might have miscarried instead of aborted. And I read a story where Kara got pregnant, aborted, and Lee . . . well, it was hard.
You only have to ask. :-) Let me know and I'll find links.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-26 07:58 pm (UTC)The AU is interesting, because now I'm getting to write Adama and Kara and Tigh, and Lee's point of view, and some Baltar and some Roslin, plus my normal crew.
I like them both but yours was far more cynical and just more active. Your Narcho more vulnerable. The Narcho I saw on screen was scary and mean. You saw more there, but I didn't.
Interesting! I always think it's neat how different people view the characters, both on the screen and in fanfic. It's funny, because I don't think of this Dee as overly cynical- just practical. Narcho's characterization I took from when he proposed Lee's toast in Six of One (very obviously someone who smiled and joked a lot), and his behavior in the mutiny. It's neat to see different interpretations :)
I'd love to read either of those Kara fics if you know where they are, btw! Thanks!
:)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 03:09 am (UTC)1. Turns out this was an item on someone's personal canon about Kara and Sam. See number 4. But it stayed in my mind.
2. Sorrow by
This one is short and sad. I won't say more and spoil, though.
3. This is an excellent Kara/Lee story called All My Dreams, Torn Asunder. This is the part you will be interested in. But the entire story is a good one. I'm just not sure how much Kara/Lee you want to read so I just linked to the one part. Oh, and Dee is characterized differently. It's before we knew a lot about her and . . . well you said you like different interpretations!
ETA one more: I had this one on the list originally, but removed it because you don't like adultery. But then I looked at your request again and this seems exactly like what you wanted. So I guess adultery fic is okay in this case? You decide!
4. If It Were His by
I'd be curious as to what you think of these!