nor so wide as a church door

Catching up on everything I've seen since before Yuletide:

( Tom Cruise, Sci-Fi Action Hero. Aka I ended up watching Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow back-to-back. )

And continuing the sci-fi, I also watched ( Guardians of the Galaxy. )

Not caught up on Sleepy Hollow; nothing to say about Major Crimes except oh, the Christmas episodes of Closerverse shows are SO RIDICULOUS AND DARLING. ♥ And the canon review I did for Yuletide has set off some kind of incredible Babylon 5 renaissance in my soul, just in time for babylon5_love's 2015 mini-rewatch! (The mini-rewatch episode list is here, for any interested parties.) I actually just finished marathoning Crusade (oh, god, the sfx and HI DANIEL DAE KIM), but luckily they're going chronologically, so I'll have a chance to work my way back around before watching Well of Forever again.

Time keeps passing without telling me it's going to.

( Revolution, 2.02-2.08. ) I can't quite make myself stop watching, because a) Charlie and Rachel! and b) a part of me seems to find frothing with hatred cathartic. But, seriously, I hate this show. A lot.

( Korra, 2.07-2.14. Herds of teal deer. ) So. Yeah. Some mixed feelings overall.

By contrast, I have almost nothing whatsoever to say about Sleepy Hollow because basically I'm just enjoying the ride. (I haven't seen the most recent ep, I don't think.) Are there plot holes? Sure there are! But the more recent episodes have been much less faily than the first couple, and ABBIE. ABBIE AND JENNY. ICHABOD. CAPTAIN IRVING. The end. *hands*

As far as Agents of SHIELD goes, ( still watching. ) Possibly I'm too generous! But through the rose-colored glasses of my personal interpretation: still happy.

Not quite on track for NaNo, but close, and if you added in what I've written for my Yuletide story, I'd be ahead. :D

Looks like it's storydump time once again; my classes have picked up ever so slightly, possibly because the professors can all sense Thanksgiving inching closer, and combined with all the proofing of other people's papers I've somehow ended up doing (AT asks me to check over her Spanish papers! I don't even know Spanish!), some of my copious free time has started slipping out of my grasp.

Which is ironic, considering that I was bored in September, and now NaNo is coming up. Oh, life.

Anyway. In the category of Offensive Things B Has Said/Done, there are a couple new gems, including ( rape is funny! This movie might have a rape scene in it, but it's a comedy! ) Needless to say, I was not at all amused.

B laughed.

As has recently become my SOP, I let her know what I thought, although not with the kind of language or at the kind of volume I might have liked. Br came down very firmly on my side later, which was a relief, but B still insists the movie was funny, which kind of makes me want to cry.

The other one was the somewhat less distressing ( he sounds gay! ) I did not know it was possible to be "too PC" for Vermont, of all states.

The interesting thing is that I wasn't being PC. Perhaps this is just me, but that term tends to connote more calculation than anything else, when I hear it - you are being PC if you are careful or are telling other people to be careful what you/they say because you are worried that a member of some kind of minority will one day overhear and be offended by it. And I'm pretty sure that used to be what I was doing, at least in some cases. But somewhere in the last few years, I've managed to grow a brain, and now it's more about stopping things because they are actively offending me, not because they have the potential to offend somebody else. I mean, I still want to make sure that I speak up when I see something that might bother somebody who isn't me, because it's better than nothing even if it speaks to an enormous lack of empathy on my part, but most of the time, now, I am offended. That attitude toward rape bothers me immensely; and, yes, partly it bothers me kind of on behalf of anyone who has ever been sexually assaulted, but mostly it just bothers me, even though I am not a member of that group (... yet, I suppose I should say, considering the odds). That attitude toward gay men, likewise, bothers me, even though the odds are very long that I will ever be a gay man, and I am terribly lacking in gay male friends.

... And now I need to stop talking about this, because I'm getting progressively less able to communicate my point, and also if I don't stop I am going to be hugely grouchy and sharp with B when she comes back.

On the more amusing end of the spectrum of stupid I've encountered recently, there was a boy in my World Literature class who ended up taking control of the class discussion, and moved it kind of abruptly away from the Aeneid and toward the value of war. ... In a sense where he said, "I'm okay with America becoming a violent empire that takes over the world if it means I'm going to be wealthy and happy," almost verbatim. He quoted Sean Hannity on the matter of America being the greatest nation God ever put on the earth, unironically. He actually told the class that it was a good thing the French, the English, and the Germans had been such good "warriors" (yes, that is the word he used), because otherwise America wouldn't be here - they wouldn't have been able to clear out all those Amerindians who were in their way, after all.

It pretty much went like this:

CRAZY BOY: **talks a boatload of ridiculousness**
REST OF THE CLASS: ... there is not enough D: in the WORLD.
ONE AWESOME KID IN THE CORNER WHOM I NOW ♥: Well, he did quote Sean Hannity. I mean, what were we expecting, after that?

Basically, the AKitC (Awesome Kid in the Corner) saved the whole incident from being something that it would make me sad inside to remember, and turned it into a reasonably amusing anecdote to tell people. ♥, AKitC. ♥.

I'm still going to mass on Sunday afternoons - I really, really enjoy the singing, although I'm still a little nervous that somebody's going to get weird about me being in the choir, and it's interesting to listen to the sermons. Sometimes I almost feel like the sermon ruins the day's reading, because the passages from the Bible are so eloquent they pretty much speak for themselves. And there is always the occasional awkward moment - last Sunday, for example, the reading was from the end of Mark 10, the passage about the blind man named Bartimaeus asking to be healed. The ... priest? I am still not sure about my terminology - went a little overboard in imagining the awfulness of being blind; I was with him on it being something of a shame to never see the faces of your parents, but the look of love in somebody's eyes strikes me as kind of take-it-or-leave-it (wouldn't the sound of love in somebody's voice, or the feel of love in somebody's touch, be pretty amazing?), and he totally lost me on the blind missing out on the "fullness of being a human person" [sic]. I was expecting him to go on to something like never seeing the colors of a sunset, not, you know, somehow not being a complete person. o.O

Also, I still have trouble not laughing when the bells ring during the transubstantiation (and why do I know that word and not what the guy who talks is called?); I know this is awful of me, but it seriously does sound like the background sound effect for a moment of truly terrible SFX from an old episode of The Twilight Zone, or something.

The HP AU is ever so slowly inching its way toward completion. I'm trying to get a decent chunk of it done before NaNo starts, but it is dawning on some part of my subconscious that when I finish it - well, when I finish it I'm going to edit it, natch, until it is less awful, but at some point after that, I'm going to ... post it. Probably on the Pit, first, although I'd like to have it here, too, just for the sake of having all my fannishness in one place (with tags!). Other people (besides M and my sister) will be able to see it. /o\ I ... I don't know about this whole "writing" thing.

And, of course, it doesn't help that NaNo is starting to take over my brain. The odds are on a sequel to last year: this time, instead of thwarting the massive evil plot of a clockwork company in AU!Britain, my dwarf airship pirate captain and her trusty crew will most likely be fighting demons in AU!India. And possibly borrowing a goddess's hammer to do a little smashing; we'll see.

Aaaaaaaand now that I'm done with this giant wall of text, I should go get dinner. \o/

This whole survey thing really exploded, huh?

I've caught up on a lot of the posts about it between classes and such, and have found it hilarious and infuriating by turns. The "slash is like dudes liking transsexuals" comment was bewildering; the responses to it warmed the cockles of my heart. I think that what throws me the most is the staggering number of hugely broad assumptions they are working from already - they are treating things like givens when they are not actually givens, and that anybody who is supposedly some kind of qualified researcher would not know better than that blows my mind.

I have seen it mentioned that the people behind the survey have implied that, because they were not intending any minors to be involved, they did not need IRB approval. (Although I did not actually follow any specific link to a comment containing that implication, so I have no first-hand knowledge.) If that is the case, then I would like to weep for all the time I wasted filling out paperwork just to get an expedited review of my thesis project by UVM's IRB when no minors were going to be involved.

I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the banners for the survey going around; I've seen that kind of thing before for people's smaller statistics projects and such, and I guess I never really realized that this was at least trying to be an actual official research project. That being the case, the problematic survey items take on a whole new meaning. We spent ages in Measurement of Communication Processes learning about just how careful you have to be about everything when you're making a good survey, including the wording of the items and the various options for the response setup. We had to run our project surveys on a pilot sample and test the validity of the items and chuck the really awful ones and rephrase the only mildly terrible ones and argue for, like, a day and a half about whether we had really picked the right response setup. And that was just for a class project, not for something we were planning on turning into an actual research tool.

Other people have talked quite a bit about the myriad other problems, so: linkspam roundup. I would be so lost by these blowups if it weren't for these roundups.

... And now I have to go to Human Cultures. Sooner or later I will put up a riveting account of my Tuesday, though.

ETA: Obviously I should have checked my e-mail before I left, or I would have noticed I had a comment (on LJ, I mean) before this posted, but somehow my last post about the survey actually ended up in the linkspam. It's like I have some kind of actual presence on the internet or something. o.O

ETA 2: Also, something so basic I forgot to even mention it: every statistics class I have ever taken has hammered home the point that convenience samples are almost totally worthless. Obviously this is a situation where you are aiming to get a particular population, and so a convenience sample, as long as it's taken from that target population, is perhaps slightly less useless than usual, but.

This? Makes me cringe. I could probably rant for quite a while about how much I disagree with what this guy has to say, if I could make it all the way through the article, but one pair of lines in particular made me go "bzuh?" and I stopped reading very soon after: "Why ... would any woman want to write or read such fiction? Our goal, when we began collaborating in 1994, was to answer this question."

Now, possibly I am being hasty, here; pretty much everything in this entry is the result of a few minutes' reading and a snap judgment, and it is certainly possible that I'm not giving Mr. Symons a chance.

But ... your goal was to take the assumption that every single person (person, not woman, because not everybody who reads and/or writes slash is a chick - or straight, for that matter) who consumes slash fiction does it for exactly the same mysterious sekrit reason, and RUN LIKE HELL with it? Oh, VERY SOUND METHODOLOGY, THERE. And the assumption that slash somehow provides a special window into the general female psyche, when not a paragraph ago there was a distinct note made that the second author of the article, a woman, was just as confuzzled by the appeal of slash as Symons himself, is pretty idiotic.

Fandom and slash are really interesting phenomena, and I understand the appeal of examining them with the hope of better understanding people through the pursuit of that examination. But the minute you start making sweeping (and stupid) assumptions about the individuals involved - that they are all women, and straight ones at that; that their motivations are all the same; that those motivations will give you insight into all women ever, even those who do not consume slash - you have just so completely lost me. Ugh.