Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in beccaelizabeth's LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 28th, 2012
10:05 am	intersecting interests I have been thinking about The Avengers ... I have still not been seeing it. I must finish essays first. Any day now... I read a while back somewhere I can't currently find the link for the theory that science fiction comedy western doesn't exactly work on television because it sounds like you'd get all the people who like SF and all the comedy and all the Western, but in fact you only get the people in the venn diagram overlap who like all three. The Avengers is a gigantimous crossover. And it's doing spectacularly well. So is it that it's a crossover of all the same genre, so you just get a lot of comics superhero movie fans? Probably helps even though comics aren't all the same genre, even superhero comics, they have facets with different rules and conventions and stuff. ... okay, now I've written that, it seems sufficient. It's a xover but only between things that are already x. But! Also, it is a crossover between different series, so is that helping the ratings? You have all the Iron Man fans AND all the Thor fans AND all the Hulk AND all the Captain America AND everyone who just likes Nick Fury or SHIELD or Hawkeye or Black Widow. I was wondering if in movies it doesn't have to be a venn diagram. On TV you don't just have to snag someone's attention, you have to keep them for a couple dozen episodes, or the ratings graph does that sinking thing and cancellation happens. In a film, different rules. You just have to bring the shiny long enough to get butts on seats once. The number of fans I've read who have seen it three times (when I haven't seen it even once *sulk*) is rather unusually high, but they're not the ones powering the box office records. Fans can make a Serenity size audience, not an Avengers size one. (hmmm, hypothesis, needs more study.) So is maybe a way film and television don't have the same rules. Like on TV you need characters that can stay the same yet have different aspects you can go play with and different ways they interact. If the Marvel movie universe gets as long as even a half season of TV it would be the most epic cinema thing ever. (yaays) (huh, it probably will, even if just by everyone getting one sequel) So movie characters can be a bit more bold print four color and not worry about the aspects. However, comic characters are the definition of bold print four color, and they've been going for decades. My theory needs work. /random xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (1 Comment |Comment on this)
9:35 am	finished the Annotated Bibliography I have finished and uploaded the thing that is worth 20% of a level 2 unit. It should have been much much easier because I should have had it done already. But now it is done. Now for the thing that is worth the remaining 50% of that unit. ... except it fills me with a sinking sense of panic, because really, I don't know, I have nothing to say, and probably I should have picked something that wasn't so full of fascinating tangents. But 'Gender in Doctor Who: The Aztecs and A Good Man Goes to War' is what I've been decided on for a while, even if it was by the process of 'what could I stand to watch for a year'. And the teacher said 'There is clearly a useful and interesting dissertation topic in the subject of representations of gender in Dr Who' and I will keep that quote in front of me while I panic in little circles because otherwise I might give up. Boo. ( Read more... ) ... okay, the more I witter on about Doctor Who, the more calm I get, but the less of my assignment I'm getting done because it's kind of relevant but not in fact writing the thing. One thousand words to explain what I'm going to find out about these two texts when I study them. Lovely. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 27th, 2012
1:24 pm	Breakfast at Morrisons phoned mum at 1030, got back at 1330. bit of an outing there. mum and my brother walked me to the shops and I bought us breakfast. and then mum bought sandwich bags and a tupperware because my brother was not in an eating mood. I did my shopping, but they don't have much of the stuff I want. Neither does Tesco at the moment. But mum said she'd seen an ASDA van round her street, and I checked and they now deliver around here. I'm pretty sure they didn't before. So I will do an ASDA shop. They have a completely different set of Quorn stuff. I think Quorn make plenty of different things but nowhere stocks it all. I want to make a vegetarian supermarket where it's as easy to buy all my food as it is to buy all the meat eater staples. At the moment I'd have to shop three different places to find all the things. It has also reached that time of year when my clothing is not suitable. It is inconvenient. I shall have to work on wearing the right things again. now I'm full of breakfast, and I have shopping done, and I have a plan for later. today is good. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
9:24 am	annotated bibliography I woke up today and decided to just get the annotated bibliography done for diss prep. three hours later... omg how does it take 3 hours to write 15 books & journals, 3 websites and 2 DVDs? it's not like the annotations are a work of genius either. also, at the moment, all of those books etc are about Doctor Who. Which is good as far as it goes, I'm studying Doctor Who. But I'm studying GENDER in Doctor Who, so I now need some books with gender in the title, preferably that will tell me useful things about gender that I can apply to TV shows. ... the trouble with Gender is there are ALL THE BOOKS. There's entire rows of the things in the library. How do I choose which particular ones I need for this? Well I'll start with the one I own, and then bung in some from the further reading lists in a couple of intro textbooks, and I'll hope the teacher won't notice I'm going lalala everything's fiiiiiine of course I'm studying lalala. ... the teacher always notices. This thing is worth 20% of my grade in a 10 credit module that will not, bar a miracle of spectacularly high grading, even count towards my final degree classification. I should stress less. Of course the point of the thing is to have a reading list for the summer I can build on to do my actual diss with. And right now I'm somewhat in despair of ever writing anything remotely useful for my dissertation. But that is a seperate problem. I could at this point hand the thing in and not completely fail. I only need to complete this unit to that standard by Friday, everything else can wait to be made good later. I still need to do a proper final actually useful draft of my Caligari essay too, but I'm taking a break for ice cream and to shift tracks in my brain. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 26th, 2012
9:05 am	my regularly scheduled essay panic, don't mind me Kracauer is a nincompoop and I have less than 1000 words left to explain why. A lot of other people have explained why in quite a lot of detail, but having read the stupid book I feel the need to join in. Also my essay is not turning out to be about what I set out to make it be about. Since we have to make up the question this time I could possibly tweak the question to fit the end result better, but, I don't want to, I just want to fix the essay. It is full of quotes and empty of meaning right now. On the plus side I found all the quotes I wanted. On the minus side it's really far too many quotes. Why are people so wordy? Everyone should have a 1500 word limit. Then they can't arse about inventing new language and explaining it, they have to have a point. Actually Kracauer was answering a widely felt need to find an explanation for the general feeling of "WTF Germany WTF" after WWII. Most of the world was busy explaining to themselves that they were not and could not be fucking Nazis. Lots of books explained all the symptoms of being nazis and how the reader, not being German, didn't have them. I feel this is a slightly misapplied effort. But I'm not a big fan of humans. ... I think between Maus and the shadow of Hitler that Kracauer's big book threw all over Weimar cinema we have been studying vaguely Nazi bastards all college year. As soon as I get this essay done I am going to rinse my brain. ... as soon as I get this essay done I need a research proposal and annotated bibliography about Doctor Who. Which should be good brain rinse. Except I have this horrible sinking feeling that I'm not going to get anything at all reasonable done, and I should have by now, easily, so I feel really deeply stupid. Arse. I have no sense of scheduling or time management or whatever else. ... also I have either insomnia or sleeping more than 12 hours, take your pick, both are quite destructive to actually getting stuff done. I still only have until midnight Friday to do all this work. With the extension already. Arse! xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Friday, May 25th, 2012
12:16 pm	Monarchy I have been thinking about the Queen, because there's all pictures everywhere and all my food got swapped for party food. So I have been being grumpy about the Queen. Because it seems like it's all of a piece, things that we need being displaced by big stupid party for someone we never get to vote for. My mum likes it that there is a Queen and is quite shocked that I'm not keen on the idea. I like the bit where there is someone who has always been paying attention and can talk to the people in charge all that time. Continuity is a pretty good thing. As one element of a balanced system I can get behind that. ( Read more... ) So I guess I'm all for someone with a long memory and enough respect to have a proper talking to when necessary. Possibly even someone who can remind people of their promises and how well certain plans didn't work last time they were tried. But I'm not very keen on people thinking they're the boss. Elected people work for us. They're not the boss. They're supposed to be doing like we told them. >:-( I can see how trying to change big politics is like trying to tinker with an engine that is currently working. No poking it, it could be messy. So, okay, leave well enough alone. But I'm still not impressed with big parties. Even if parties is big enough everyone gets a piece of party for their own. There still seems like more necessary things to be doing. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
11:58 am	I relearn some things every time I just spent all morning looking for the two sentences I needed to base my whole argument on, which I could remember but not remember where they were. Because when taking notes I hadn't realised I was going to make them important. So. Big stack of books, lots of search. :-p note everything! always you end up needing it. also I phoned the library because I got an overdue letter that said it was the second letter for books that I thought I had renewed. They are renewed now, and I have to pay £2.70, but I can live with that. Buying them replacement copies, not so much good. now I'd quite like to go back to sleep. I still don't have a new essay draft though, and I was going to finish it today, because I still have two more assignments to do. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
9:39 pm	Today phoned mum, talked, got us both :-( about politics went to bed neighbours did hammering and something to do with cars that made a noise like choking a fire alarm slept ... probably slept, some. Dancing! I went to Bollywood Sparkles dancing and we learned more dance. It's quite complicated with going around the floor in big shapes and ending up in lines that are sometimes straight or diagonal or curves or circles. There is nowhere to hide at the back and copy because everywhere turns into the front at some point. Difficult. But I did dancing all the hour, yaay. Tesco shopping. None my foods were there. We looked. Some of them don't even have a place on the shelf. Quorn foods were mostly out. I found a cottage pie, and now I'm thinking I should have bought more of them even though I don't want to eat a bunch of days of cottage pie, because actually there's no other things. Even in the frozen section. Nothing that microwaves. Nothing I can eat. boo. So I got icecream and apple puffs and bread. which isn't my best shopping ever. I would like to move to Norwich for many reasons, including: there are several shops, and one of them has to have something I can eat. And several of them deliver. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
9:08 am	Oh joy I still have a headache and someone is doing DIY in the underneath garage. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
7:07 am	blergh I have a) an utterly rubbish draft of my essay and b) a headache *swears* I can't hand in the essay draft, it resembles an academic essay in that way that's not. Also it is 500 words longer than it can be and yet says absolutely nothing useful. why do I keep doing this? I enjoy neither the process of research nor the writing of essays. ... I keep doing this because I'm three essays away from finishing the year. And I keep doing next year because Grandpa wants to be at my graduation. okay then. also, the tiny netbook computer gets very warm. Since it has had the fan replaced once already due to getting entirely too warm, this seems not of the good. I'm not sure it's very useful, all in all. But it weighs very little, so yaay to that. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
12:56 am	sleep went to bed Wednesday morning woke up Thursday morning granted that only involved a bit over 12 hours sleep, but wtf brain? crappy nasty dreams. I'm keeping the bits about Dean and Sam, even the weird bit where Dean looked really like his dad with a beard. He was alternate universe Dean. Alternate universes have beards. There was a bit where I got attacked by an angel but I could just block it with my hand because I was righteous. Pretty sure Supernatural doesn't work that way, but that was fun. There was also part where Dereham had been wiped out by angels and asking any questions about it, including how close you could get to it without major problems happening, got people getting shotguns out. That was not good. The train station being full of assorted types of Buffy style demons who were all refugees who couldn't leave the stations, that was weird. Visually interesting though. I kind of liked where I slowed time almost to a stop pretty much just to show off. ... stopping time breaks it apparently, but slowing it so you can see all the details in a droplet splashing is just fun. Everything else from that day can just go away. Grotesque nasties everywhere. Also mud. Stinky mud. Also trying to find housing that turns out to be so many kinds of unsuitable it fits the horror theme. So, anyway, I missed going to the pub due to epic being asleep. Also have not done my essay yet. This is why I need extra time. Too busy saving the world in my sleep. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
1:49 am	random: how to draw Superman Superman should look like a total wimp. Bodybuilders get muscles by lifting things that are almost too heavy, making themselves work at it. Superman pretty much never has to work to lift things, he can do all the lifting real easy, superstrength can lift aircraft carriers so normal day to day work wouldn't be noticeable ever. So his muscles would never build up. So Superman should be this totally skinny dude. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
11:55 pm	random thought Most actors I've been following a long time never look much older. They just look really weirdly young in reruns. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
7:53 am	and at some point I actually have to write the dratted thing I have reached the point where I can't read any more about The Cabinet of Dr Caligari without both starting whole new books and going beyond the suggested reading list. Also I have gone through getting screencaps from the Openflix version on Youtube that actually matches the DVD from the library that we were watching in class. Rather than the version with many minutes missing that was linked on Blackboard. ( Read more... ) I do all this wheel spinning looks-like-work when I should just sit down and bang out an essay. Efficiency: I no has it. I'm really looking forward to my degree being over now. At least for the summer. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 20th, 2012
11:39 pm	planets with no imports I was trying to figure out what my barely terraformed planet would be like, so I found which countries have the lowest population densities and figured it would be like Australia, Canada and Mongolia. http://beccaelizabeth.livejournal.com/2379220.html But I have been thinking it's even more complicated than that, because on this planet those places can do imports. If your entire planet is Australia and Canada and Mongolia, you could only import from other places that are also not known for their massive food exports. I found a video on YouTube about Eat Canadian because cheap imports are making the farms go away. Exports are in the hundreds of thousands and imports are in the billions. For each food group or something. I don't know, large numbers just boggle me. So anyways, Canada gets a lot of food sent to it. A LOT. So what would Canada be like if it didn't have all that imports? I guess it would be like a century ago when there wasn't so much flying food around the world. There was much less people in Canada a century ago. I don't know if I could find a map with the population marked on it, but that would be handy. That video also said that there's places paving their farmland to make more city. I'd say that sounds unwise, but I don't know where British food comes from at all. Probably we made more city over the top of a lot of it. Getting food from far away only works in conditions where there's tons of fuel around. Which isn't going to be true for very long. If you've build over the top of your food while you happened to have a lot of transport, that looks like trouble waiting to happen. Growing enough food for everyone local would be really a BIG lot more food than the way we do it at the moment. When I design spaceships the GURPS rules just say have an open space and call it farming. They don't even say how much open space you need to feed how many people. They're all lalala we have food now ONWARDS! Which I can see in a game meant to be about sneaking around stealing things or shooting people or other such active and glamorous pursuits. But food is a huge big deal in the real world. You can make plenty of adventure about food. But a lot of it would be really quite slow. So if they're an advanced biotech planet then maybe they have food the way spaceships do, everyone has a food room and boxes that grow food for them, simples. But they'd still need power and water to do it. I know some places have geothermal power and some places have solar power but nowhere on the planet has fossil fuels because the planet hasn't been alive long enough to have fossils. Let alone flammable ones. Also I was going to say they can't scrape together enough glowy rocks for nuclear power, but apparently I need to find out how planets work first, because complicated. It's easy to say they don't have as much metal as they want, it's not so easy to say how that would end up working or how planets would form like that. ANYways... on spaceships power, water and food is pretty simples, there's power plants and water floating around and they grow food for themselves. But it's only simples because the rules don't want to spend all the time thinking about it. Planets do not find it simple. Planets spend a lot of their time making enough food. So I'm inventing a planet, and trying to imagine just growing all their own food in difficult conditions. Their advanced biotech would be retained just to make sure there's enough good eating. And it would not be simple at all. When they come visit our planet, I can't decide if they'd be wow about supermarkets, or kind of grossed out. So much waste! ... probably wow that turns to guilt when they discover the inefficiencies. They'd also want to buy one of each of everything, buy plants and animals and get all the codes. Because very rich biosphere, even after what we've been doing to it. Space neighbours could get Very Serious about conservation, because it would be the kind of stuff that's worth going to a different planet, finding a unique biosphere full of things your planet never grew. If all their tech is bio then they'd value our bio more than we do, like seeing people sitting on a heap of gold and persistently turning it into lead. So they'd want to come and visit and collect all kinds of everything. Stone circle gates aren't going to work well enough or often enough to do mass import/export like with food, they could only do samples. Like if the Enterprise could only send a shuttle once a day. And then spend a year going to the next planet. Which is a pretty reasonable set of constraints for real exploration, just a lot slower than television stories bother being. I can see why people on a poor planet would invent VR. If it is difficult to make enough food they might end up with really boring food. And if it is difficult to transport stuff they couldn't go visit the neighbours very much. Virtual Reality and some good networking be much more efficient. Have all the good stuff, save on resource use. They wouldn't be trapped in the Matrix necessarily, just if everyone woke up they'd need a lot more stuff to go around. Wake up and starve isn't a good plan. It's really hard to think of a world with no imports and exports and no neighbours. It's not even like hitting rewind, there were some for all the history times, even if not much. To have your whole world be what you brought with you... not easy to imagine at all. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
5:43 am	Reading I have done almost all the reading. There are 5 sides of A4 left to read, plus skimming the references for anything actually interesting. and I cannot make my brain stick to the page for even one more page. I have been trying, and I think the last page took me an hour. :-pppppppppppppp to these pages. I have read the Kracauer, Eisner, and Elsaesser stuff talking about Caligari, and a couple chapters in each that weren't just Caligari. I have read enough to have a rough idea what each is talking about. Except instead my brain has turned to mush and all I can say for sure is they all talk rubbish about rubbish. Also, there is far too much oedipal all over the place. Seriously, if I ever get a time machine, Freud is history. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add anything to anything, and the whole of the multi page argue is based on the idea the film doesn't make enough sense without inventing extra motives for people, which is bollocks. Caligari felt like killing some dudes because the writing in the air told him to. He runs an asylum. He be crazy dude. And then dudes start getting dead and other dudes investigate it. It's not hard! I need to watch the film again and pick a couple of frames and do the print screen thing and stick them in a document and then start writing an essay. ... how much do I not want to start writing an essay. I mean, right now, I look at my vague plans to go do an MA after this BA, and I think that maybe I'll just slam my head against the wall repeatedly, because that will be just as much fun. It's one of those moments when I look at the entire subject I have chosen to study and think, really, when you get right down to it, 99% of it is balls. And the other 1% is really obvious. *big sigh* Oh, also, I was reading something about the Hand of Orlac and alienated labour and recognising the other in oneself, and I went off on a brain tangent about Angel and Lindsey. So I have been trying to study while trying to not think about pretty, pretty tattooed lawyer dudes. That could work better. But I had an idea, only it was several chapters ago, so I'll get back to it if I think of it again. Mostly, if you poke a text to see what it says about gender, class, ethnicity, disability and maybe religion, and tie it to contexts of production and reception, that's pretty much the interesting bits. There's also stuff about Brechtian defamiliarisation techniques and some things about Bakhtin and the carnivalesque and maybe some Foucault and discourses and panopticon and then getting into weird stuff that's kind of like the Matrix about simulacra and how things are always already the story of a thing and not the thing itself, because language. and I may have studied other stuff in the course of the last six years but that's the bits that stuck. omg how did I spent six years on this stuff? *headdesk* PS am going to fail at diss prep and poss at dissertation because writing about Doctor Who seemed like a really good idea but there is really a lot of Doctor Who and now I don't know what I should write about anything ever. And I'm sure I put hours in to the prep part but I don't know where they went. And also bugger. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
4:18 am	too true cartoon http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1495 xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
7:34 pm	shoppings I went to the supermarket and had food and did shopping mum was there and caught up in the freezer aisle so that was weird. and nice. but I was in shopping mode and then sudden mum. my brother also was there but was in the DVDs section choosing all the things he already has again again again. I got the Sherlock Holmes film, but I won't watch it until I've done my essays. I also got vegetables, but not the ones I wanted. The ones I wanted aren't there at all. There's a new name and a new range from the same makers. So I guess that's why Tesco doesn't have them any more. None of the steam bags had broccoli in. Mum showed me some from the fresh veg bit that did, but they were very large portions of fresh, I'd never eat them all. So now I must quest for steam bag broccoli or cease to eat broccoli. And I like broccoli. Next: Read Eisner's The Haunted Screen, or at least the bits about Caligari. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
4:57 pm	Before Watchmen I keep seeing articles about Before Watchmen, and it puzzles me every time why DC want to do this. Those weren't heroes. That whole book was about taking off the mask and finding maggots underneath. We weren't supposed to want them. How messed up do they think readers are? xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
9:57 pm	bollywood I went to dancing and it was fun :-) ... I had a dizzy and did sitting down dancing for the first bit, but they were going through all the dances we've ever done, for performance, so I wouldn't have remembered them all anyway. Then I did standing up dancing for when we got to the dances we did recently. they're going to do a lot of performances soon. They've got like all the weekends in a row for a while. I don't know. I don't do standing up in front of people even for dancing. ... actually, being first or only on the dance floor, I do do that, but it's different when you do it and call it a performance. or indeed when you do it with the lights on. after we went to Pulse and I had vegan pizza with spinach and mushrooms. I like it. I didn't like the mediterranean vegetables version because you could never know what the next bite would be like, but the spinach and mushroom had a green layer and a mushroom layer and I like it. they ran out of vegan ice cream though. sad. but cheaper. xposted from Dreamwidth here. comments. Reply there (Comment on this)