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Project Bluebook*
Dec. 3rd, 2010 12:02 amToday's random thought: if I could vid, and I think it's probably a blessing for the world that I can't vid (I actally can't even watch vids with anything approaching intelligence - I like them when the music is nice and the images are pretty, my IQ drops several hundred points when I click play).... anyway. Yes. I think someone-not-me could make a fantastic SG-1 constructed-reality vid that suggests the Stargate project is a figment of Daniel's imagination. You'd frame it with clips from "Legacy" and "Lifeboat" - it'd be amazingly fun to make, because of how clever you could be doing it.
...okay, so it's nearly midnight, and the wind is howling, and I haven't slept more than maybe twelve or thirteen hours this week, and I am in the library writing the paper that ate Manhattan (it's a paper about bills of attainder which is now nearly ten times as long as a bill of attainder) so I'm going to talk about something quite dear to my heart.
So, I am coming up to ten years in internet-based-fandom with a kind of hollow-laughable inevitability, and something in my brain wants to take me back to 2001 and Stargate SG-1. Seriously, though. In the last couple of days I have watched "Legacy", "Meridian", "Chimera", and "The Fifth Race", and they all make me so very happy, especially the last. Some of the reasons why my thirteen-year-old self fell so hard for this show are still the reasons I love it now: it's clever and silly, whimsical and serious, doesn't take itself at all seriously except when it does, and depicts its characters with such loving affection. It does episodes like "Window of Opportunity" (riding bicycles through wormholes! throwing pots! making ketchup faces on plates!) and "Serpent's Song" (an underrated one, I think: I love the measured contrasts in it, the way the good guys realise they can kill, and then there's this bit where Daniel, standing up by himself in fatigues in an underground military base, performs the last rites for Apophis's host, and it kills me) and it never seems to find anything odd in doing both sorts of show.
But the other reason: okay. Remember the beginning? Here, at about 4.27 (warning: if you don't skip through it, what comes before that is kind of TV-icky and potentially disturbing). Daniel, in the floppy Abydonian robes, and Sam, the first feminist I fell in love with on TV, meeting for the first time. ( transcript under the cut )
And, okay, Sam and Daniel are both very clever - the only reason they can do what they do is because they're clever - and they're also this immensely geeky archaeologist and immensely-geeky-in-a-different way astrophysicist (and as an aside, which one of them is which is not what sci-fi gender tropes would suggest), and they do what they do. And.... do not laugh at me, okay, but I think when I was thirteen I hadn't realised that geeks can save the world. That you can drink too much coffee and be socially inept, and you can be loved and you can save the world.
All this time on, I don't think that's the worst lesson to have learned. And for watching this stuff at thirteen goes: I have met more than one woman who's said she was inspired to be an astrophysicist like Sam, and one who was going to be an archaeologist like Daniel, and if I've met more than one, imagine how many there must be in the world, and how many people just like me who grew up thinking they could be fiercely, geekily, intellectual, and that that had value, that it was important. And, I don't know, it's different from Star Trek, somehow. What was part of the charm of it, for me, was that the characters have ordinary lives around the extraordinary, they have pizza and budget cuts and terrible dates and children, and it's all underscored with extraordinary things. I mean, if Stargate is about anything, it's about the wonders of the world that's around us, that we're in, you know? There's all that meaning-of-life stuff, and we're going to be okay; your gods are false, but here, have the wondrous universe instead; there are aliens among us and they really like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. From "Urgo": "I want to live! I want to experience the universe, and I want to eat pie!"
Yes. Yes, that.
(I wonder, sometimes - should I catch up with this show at some point? I have seen the first seven seasons (barring "Shadowplay", for some unknown reason), and also "Threads" and "Moebius", also the Atlantis pilot and "Letters to Pegasus". I don't really want to watch the rest of SGA, but part of me does wonder who these Cam and Vala people are.)
Right. I am going to kick this dratted paper into submission, dammit, and then I am going home. Fie upon attainder.
* This subject line may be the worst pun I've ever made in my life.
...okay, so it's nearly midnight, and the wind is howling, and I haven't slept more than maybe twelve or thirteen hours this week, and I am in the library writing the paper that ate Manhattan (it's a paper about bills of attainder which is now nearly ten times as long as a bill of attainder) so I'm going to talk about something quite dear to my heart.
So, I am coming up to ten years in internet-based-fandom with a kind of hollow-laughable inevitability, and something in my brain wants to take me back to 2001 and Stargate SG-1. Seriously, though. In the last couple of days I have watched "Legacy", "Meridian", "Chimera", and "The Fifth Race", and they all make me so very happy, especially the last. Some of the reasons why my thirteen-year-old self fell so hard for this show are still the reasons I love it now: it's clever and silly, whimsical and serious, doesn't take itself at all seriously except when it does, and depicts its characters with such loving affection. It does episodes like "Window of Opportunity" (riding bicycles through wormholes! throwing pots! making ketchup faces on plates!) and "Serpent's Song" (an underrated one, I think: I love the measured contrasts in it, the way the good guys realise they can kill, and then there's this bit where Daniel, standing up by himself in fatigues in an underground military base, performs the last rites for Apophis's host, and it kills me) and it never seems to find anything odd in doing both sorts of show.
But the other reason: okay. Remember the beginning? Here, at about 4.27 (warning: if you don't skip through it, what comes before that is kind of TV-icky and potentially disturbing). Daniel, in the floppy Abydonian robes, and Sam, the first feminist I fell in love with on TV, meeting for the first time. ( transcript under the cut )
And, okay, Sam and Daniel are both very clever - the only reason they can do what they do is because they're clever - and they're also this immensely geeky archaeologist and immensely-geeky-in-a-different way astrophysicist (and as an aside, which one of them is which is not what sci-fi gender tropes would suggest), and they do what they do. And.... do not laugh at me, okay, but I think when I was thirteen I hadn't realised that geeks can save the world. That you can drink too much coffee and be socially inept, and you can be loved and you can save the world.
All this time on, I don't think that's the worst lesson to have learned. And for watching this stuff at thirteen goes: I have met more than one woman who's said she was inspired to be an astrophysicist like Sam, and one who was going to be an archaeologist like Daniel, and if I've met more than one, imagine how many there must be in the world, and how many people just like me who grew up thinking they could be fiercely, geekily, intellectual, and that that had value, that it was important. And, I don't know, it's different from Star Trek, somehow. What was part of the charm of it, for me, was that the characters have ordinary lives around the extraordinary, they have pizza and budget cuts and terrible dates and children, and it's all underscored with extraordinary things. I mean, if Stargate is about anything, it's about the wonders of the world that's around us, that we're in, you know? There's all that meaning-of-life stuff, and we're going to be okay; your gods are false, but here, have the wondrous universe instead; there are aliens among us and they really like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. From "Urgo": "I want to live! I want to experience the universe, and I want to eat pie!"
Yes. Yes, that.
(I wonder, sometimes - should I catch up with this show at some point? I have seen the first seven seasons (barring "Shadowplay", for some unknown reason), and also "Threads" and "Moebius", also the Atlantis pilot and "Letters to Pegasus". I don't really want to watch the rest of SGA, but part of me does wonder who these Cam and Vala people are.)
Right. I am going to kick this dratted paper into submission, dammit, and then I am going home. Fie upon attainder.
* This subject line may be the worst pun I've ever made in my life.
