Beyond Selidor

I've been neglecting LJ a bit due to the sheer lifeyness of my life for the past month or so. However, I've returned in true Ronni fashion with a bunch of links for you.

First up are the first two posts on my blog about life in Germany.

I also rediscovered the wonderful blog Myths Retold. For a taster, try It was awesome being a poet in ancient Ireland and Ilmatar likes to dive headfirst into shitstorms. The language on these posts (and throughout the blog) is NSFW. Also, that last post kind of makes me want to read the Kalevala...

I really like this post on The Mary Sue in defence of geek culture.

Speaking of geek culture, Smart Pop Books is running a series of posts about The Vampire Diaries (which starts again tonight, woo!). I really like this post by Vera Nazarian about vampires and obsession.

That's it for now. I don't have the energy to engage with the Say Yes to Gay YA situation, but there are lots of good links floating around on Twitter if you search through the #YesGayYA hashtag.

The title of this post deserves an Una icon because she is AWESOME.

I had to do something about all the tabs I've got saved in Firefox, so you're all getting a linkpost. Aren't you lucky? The first is a discussion about whether epic fantasy has been 'feminised'. I think I came across that link via kateelliott. Then, I've got a couple of links relating to GLBTQ characters in fiction, and how outing characters in extra-textual spaces (webisodes, interviews etc) does not really address the problem.

Then Patton Oswalt posted this article on Wired about the supposed demise of geek culture, and rodo on Dreamwidth and seperis, also on Dreamwidth pointed out that rumours of geekdom's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Those last couple of links are courtesy of metafandom.

Neil Gaiman remains as awesome as ever, as does Jo Walton. Seriously lacking in the awesome, however, is Sebastian Faulks, who, in a BBC programme about the history of the English novel, claimed that Shakespeare's heroes lacked both personality and flaws. To which I say, have some Borges!

Then I read about this (trigger warning for rape) and got even more angry. Thank goodness the good folks at Tiger Beatdown are all over it. (A couple of good other Tiger Beatdown posts on the subject: Sadie calls out the Democrats on their deceptive advertising with regards to HR3 and a post about contraception and abortion, and the problems relating to them in the US. (This freaked me out somewhat, since it's a subject about which I'd only been dimly aware. I had some vague idea that things were somewhat better in Australia, where I lived until 2008, and the UK, where I live now, but it suddenly occurred to me that I have LITERALLY NO IDEA about how such things work in either Australia or the UK. For all I know I could be wringing my hands with pity at the situation in the US and it could be just as bad here.))

As a unicorn chaser of sorts, I hung around listening to this song by seanan_maguire. That made me feel a whole lot better!

While Skyping with Mum yesterday, I mentioned that I'd seen Scott Pilgrim Vs The World last week.

'If a group of people had got together and planned to make a movie perfectly designed for me, that would've been the movie,' I gushed.

'But you'd hate it,' I added.

She would. She didn't grow up with video games, nor raise children who played video games. Most of the desperate indie hipster references would've whooshed over her head. She usually finds things that are very postmodern and meta quite artificial and contrived: she doesn't like Buffy precisely because of its self-referential nature, she found Zadie Smith's White Teeth annoying to read. She noted that most of the reviews she'd read (in places like The New York Times) had been very negative, probably because they were written by people of her age group. I imagine that, in general, the film (and the comic) wouldn't appeal to anyone over the age of 35.

That is because it is such an unabashed, gleeful celebration of the cultural milieu of the younger, geekier end of Gen X, and the whole of Gen Y. You have to have grown up immersed in that milieu (and I, for all that I've never played video games, have many friends who do, have seen all the parodies and so on that draw on video game culture and thus consider myself a part of it) in order to appreciate the humour of Scott Pilgrim.

That is not to say that all Gen X and Y geeks will love the film. But being in those generations and that demographic will put you at a greater advantage in appreciating it than someone like my mother.

Our conversation then morphed into a discussion of generational conflict.

'My parents' generation didn't understand the things that were important to mine,' she said.

'Yes, but I think your generation (baby boomers) is better at understanding that of its children than your parents' generation was at understanding yours,' I said.

'That is true,' she said. 'I can understand stuff like Scott Pilgrim on an intellectual level, but not on an emotional one.'

That is exactly the heart of the matter, and not something that we'd ever articulated properly before. It is right and proper that each generation creates and defines its own impenetrable cultural milieu. But I'm so happy that although my mother cannot see the appeal of my (geeky, Gen Y) cultural milieu, she can see why it appeals to me.