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Today'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.

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* This subject line may be the worst pun I've ever made in my life.

Things on my mind, itemised for your reading pleasure:

1. All over the flist, I can see people shifting from holiday-headspace to term-time-headspace. I hate transitions - I'm going up to Oxford the day after tomorrow, and haven't even started thinking about piling up all my stuff together - but it always astonishes me how it happens time and time again. I have, apparently, already committed to going to Intrusion on Tuesday. At which junctture I feel the need to point out that I am quite incapable of getting dressed up, and if anyone would like to play Lifesize Goth Barbie with yours truly, then take me, I'm all yours.

In amongst all the mess of moving, I am uncomfortably aware that this is my second-to-last term at Oxford. I don't want this to be over; I don't see how it can be over. More angst on that will undoubtedly be forthcoming.

2. In brighter things, hathy_col and I searched for Spock today. We didn't find him, but it's the journey that matters. On the way we found a) Ducktor Who, light-up suitably scarved rubber ducky of joy and my new best friend, b) Eddie Rocket's Unhealthiest Breakfast Ever, Now With Garlic Mayo, and c) an artist dressed as a bear.

Said man dressed as bear was one of the shortlisted entries for the Turner Prize at the Tate. This is the first year that the exhibition has been at the Tate Liverpool - European Capital of Culture strikes back - and it seemed a good idea to go, seeing as we were there and it was free and the wind was particularly cold today. So we went, and we got lost in a maze, were baffled by snapshots of a sisal factory, momentarily revived by a gorgeous installation, the words "THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE" done in lightbulbs in letters a metre high, and then returned to bafflement by a length recording of a man, dressed as a bear, in a museum in Berlin.

Afterwards we wandered through the city towards Forbidden Planet, idly chattering about nothing in particular ("So, Dax has a snake in her - like, sort of a good Goa'uld with spots." / "A good Goa'uld? / "Tok'ra. Only with spots." / "Ah.") and in comfortable consensus that we had done our something intellectual for the day.

3. "The City on the Edge of Forever" is really, really good. It might be abundantly clear by now I'm going through a little bit of an original Star Trek phase. Well, I am, but also a traditional TV sci-fi in general sort of phase. The thing about TOS episodes is that they all seem really hackneyed and derivative - until you remember that they did this stuff first. So this episode, with its predestination paradox hijinks, actually hits a lot of things I love - changing the past, being responsible for the consequences, the weight of future knowledge, along with some mundanity (I love how one way of looking at its plot is just one very long, very bad day for Doctor McCoy) - and reminds me of a lot of other things I love. I mean, SG-1 does it with "1969", which is one of my favourite episodes of anything - hurrah for "Groovy!" - and Red Dwarf does it in "Stasis Leak", which I also love, and there are lots of examples of what's pretty much the same plot.

And it's a good one, that's the point. Which is not to say re-doing things is necessarily good. SG-1 doing and re-doing alternate universes stopped grabbing me after a while, but the first time they do it - which has distinct echoes of "Mirror, Mirror" and hurrah for evil-goatee!Spock, too - it's good. "There But For the Grace of God", along with 1969, is probably the episode of SG-1 I've seen the most times, and that's partly because I love the skeleton of the idea - alternate universes for the win, both in canon and fandom - but partly because of how it's executed. I love how Daniel's response is not at all like Captain Kirk's. It's, if I remember rightly, "This isn't happening, this is nuts, this isn't happening, this is nuts!" And I love how it hangs on to the light touch, and it's better for it, but in the end it's actually devastating. I mean, er, everyone dies. That's not cheerful. But it's a very good example of how you can do different things with an idea.

Funny, I think I'd forgotten how much I love speculative fiction. I love huge enormous ideas, I love how a lot of philosophical thought-experiments are functionally indistinguisabe from good science fiction - the "problem cases" of personal identity theories are all things like body-swaps (SG-1, "Holiday"), splitting of consciousness (Red Dwarf, "Confidence and Paranoia"), sentience and computers (every piece of SF ever, to be honest) and whether you're responsible for everything your mind is responsible for (DS9, "Dax"). I'm a little wary of "real" SF, though; I like television because it tends to have the lighter touch I like. I've been slogging through Consider Phlebas for the last couple of months to no avail, which is odd, because I've read and liked other Culture books. It's too... I don't know, serious? It's not that I don't want to read books with serious themes. It's just I get the feeling a lot of what's out there is significantly lacking in a sense of humour.

4. Er, I may be transcending an itemised list at this point. I'm going to be away for the next couple of days, I reckon. I'm busy all day tomorrow, and I need to re-register my laptop on the college network, so it might be a little while before I get back into the swing of things. I owe emails to about half a dozen people - they are coming, honestly. I'm just being very disorganised right now.

(5. Also. Emilie Autumn is great and you should all be listening to her. Rapunzel; Chambermaid.)