Fat Tuesday

[aberrantangels]

Life is what happens while you're making other plans.
— John Lennon

Well, I was expecting to be away from the computer this afternoon. I had it all planned out: we were going to a mall nearby, let kindly gray-haired mother shop in the nearby organic food store, dinner after at the T.G.I. Friday's. All this because Mardi Gras happened to fall the day before my birthday.

See the quote from Saint Jock at the top of this entry? That should've warned me. I woke up this morning and it was snowing. It's expected to snow until late into the afternoon, well past the time we'd be leaving.

So I push it back to my actual birthday, like Dame Nature and Jack Frost clearly want, and hope I don't get caught in the crowds for the feel-good movie of the winter. (You know the one; somebody's probably spammed your journal with off-topic comments praising it.)

And, in the spirit of the day, a personal mutation of the meme that started it all. Pass it on?

It's Carnival time, and everybody's having fun.

She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from the supermarket. You get one of those carts, which simply will not go in the direction you push it, and end up just having to buy completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you do with the recipe? She didn't know.
— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless. Except I couldn't actually use that because, as far as I'm concerned, the Hitchhiker's Trilogy ended with So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. To admit that Bop Ad was capable of writing such a monumental "Fuck you" to Hitchhiker's fans would be equivalent to pissing on his grave, and so those of us who care about the series must reluctantly put Mostly Harmless down the same memory hole as Highlander II and Batman and Robin. Or else write fanfics that give the cast a happy ending instead of that pig's ear we got. And so I went with Bonnie Jock Lennon saying the same thing, much more concisely besides.

EDIT 1:12p to add the code used to create the code used to create it.

<center><table width="50%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="purple"> </td><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="green"> </td><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="yellow"> </td><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="purple"> </td><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="green"> </td><td width="16.67%" bgcolor="yellow"> </td></tr><tr><td colspan="6" align="center"><a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/aberranteyes/">It's Carnival time, and everybody's having fun.</a></td></tr></table></center>

Comments

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you really think about it, what the hell do fans have to do with writing?

Seriously. If you're a writer, you start off desperately wanting them (this is where I should jump up and down yelling buy my book, I guess) and then, as you get them, you start wishing they'd go away. They demand to participate in the process, they become invested in your work (sometimes more invested in aspects of it than you are) and when you start changing from who you were when they found you, they wig out. I'm not surprised Mostly Harmless comes off a touch acidic. Very few writers manage to navigate the demands of the audience as well as Adams did.

[aberrantangels]

Okay, point conceded. Zarquon knows thessalian's reminded me often enough that, at best, I have an advisory position relating to things I'd like to see her write. (Actually, stolisomancer put that sentiment even better in his column for the now defunct Game Place, when he called the first installment "I Am Not Your Waiter".)

And I can understand his wanting to convey the sentiment to his fans more clearly than when he devoted an entire chapter of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish to it (the one that ends "Others may wish to skip to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it"). Evidently, the Dirk Gently books had been either sufficiently like Hitchhiker's books that the differences really jarred, or sufficiently unlike that the similarities went unnoticed. Or else it was just that people wanted more Hitchhiker's.

It's an interesting meditation on the creative process in general and his own creative process in particular. (The quote I crossed out is one place where he makes that point specifically. The whole concept of Temporal Reverse Engineering is a metaphor for the way I've heard he dealt with it.)

And it has moments of beauty and weirdness right up there with the earlier books. (Just off the top of my head, the Perfectly Normal Beasts come to mind.)

And yet the ending...it's not exactly a cheat. It's not exactly a cop-out. It's more a giving up, if you see the difference.

I understand why he did it. I can even agree, from the objective Elohite standpoint I strive for, with his reasons. But, personally and subjectively, I doubt I'll ever like it.

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

This is the point where I could freak you (and doghousereilly) out by admitting that the only books of Adams' I liked were the Dirk Gently books and some of his nonfiction. Didn't like Hitchhiker's all that much.

[aberrantangels]

That'd freak me out less than you think. Nonlinear humor isn't for everyone. And I quite like the Gently books and even such of the nonfiction as I've read (okay, that's limited to The Deeper Meaning of Liff, but damn if some of those words don't come in handy).

I don't mind you not liking the series. I don't even mind that Bop Ad didn't like its fans all that much (although it's a lot like it'd be to discover that J.K. Rowling has the same attitude to Harry Potter fans as the yipyop I had the blog slapfight with last August, the one who refuses to believe in even the possibility of any kinds of people other than those who absolutely drool over HP and those who share his visceral loathing of it).

And while I mind that he opted to make his frustration with his fans so very public, I appreciate that he perhaps didn't feel he had a lot of options. When one of thessalian's fans pisses her off by obsessing over a project she and Thren have long since ceased to care about, she has the option of telling that fan, and that project, to go pound sand, because writing is not what she does for a living. If Bop Ad had tried to tell 10,000,000 screaming Hitchhiker's fanboys that seriatim, he'd have had laryngitis or carpal tunnel syndrome (depending what method of communication he used) before he was even 1% done. So he put it in the end of a book he knew all the Hitchhiker's fanboys would be desperate to have, because he knew there was no other way to get their attention.

(Through Aberrant Eyes: come for TEH WAKCY, stay for the philosophico-literary discourse.)

[ezrael.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's not that I don't like nonlinear humor (as the Gently books are nonlinear in their own, gentle way...and I am the man that once wrote a story about a dude in spandex whose best friend was a deranged robot and who repeatedly battled clowns, mimes, pirates and the solid gold dancers) as much as I don't like fandom, I think. There's something about having seventeen people insist I love something within a day that just turns the love spigot inside me off.

I have yet to read a Harry Potter book, and I doubt I ever will, for precisely that reason. I prefered Mage and Werewolf to Vampire because I got to discover Mage and Werewolf for myself (and I really miss the first Werewolf softcover rulebook) even though I've never liked the Storyteller system (the best example of it ever being put together properly is, ironically enough. Aberrant, imho) - I don't mind that other people like Harry Potter, but when it feels like it's being jammed down my throat I rebel and rebel hard. Same for my feelings towards Neil Gaiman, I suspect - perfectly adequate writer, and I'd probably enjoy his work more if I didn't have to fend off all the goth lights who attempt to bludgeon me over the head with Neverwhere.

I think it's interesting to watch the phenomenon of fandom. There's a lot of smart, passionate people who get caught up in it...and for some reason, it really creeps me out.

[terribleangel.livejournal.com]

You might want to add the code to the post so people can pass it along without having to disect it from the page :P

Re: amused? that's o.k. sometimes, but don't go overboard :) Professor Longhair, "Go to the Mardi

[aberrantangels]

Hey aberranteyes, i sometimes listen to Professor Longhair, "Go to the Mardi Gras" as well... is a new cd coming out soon?

Well, that fills me with hope that this was written by an actual human and not some evil computer program spawned when someone handed Hugo Weaving a jar and a tube of Astroglide.

So what do you think of all this?

*** Kyle

Kyle? Kyle Williams? Is that you? Or just someone as completely mother-damned God-fucking thumb-headed as your columns prove you to be?

What I think is that InterNic is fucked. It couldn't tell me what 217.125.45.61 (or the "via" 80.58.40.172) translated to. So I'm just going to have to baleete your shit Passionspam and turn off anonymous commenting until further notice. Thank you for playing, and we hope you enjoy our home game.