Various meanderings
Well, my tax rebate got here. I put half of it towards bills and half towards a new graphics tablet, hunting around till I found one on EBay for considerably less than retail. Frugal Barb is… well, not all that frugal. I’ve been trying to decide if I should start taking the bus to work.
Pros:
1. Saves money.
2. Commute time can be used to catch up on my reading.
3. Would require me to walk half a mile from nearest bus stop to office, promoting healthy exercise.
4. Environmentally friendly!
Cons:
1. Triples commute time.
2. Would no longer be able to easily run errands for Mom (or self) on the way home.
3. Would require me to walk half a mile from nearest bus stop to office in 115-degree summer heat.
I dunno. Con #2 is the only one that really matters - I do need to be able to pick up Mom’s groceries and prescriptions and whatnot at need. But if gas prices go up much more, Pro #1 may outweigh all else. It’s really annoying that we work on opposite ends of the Valley, and can’t carpool. I wonder if there’s a carpool group at work…most likely I’d have to organize one, and I hate doing things like that.
We watched part of Television Parts last weekend - I had forgotten just how many of the musical numbers were grade-A song leeches. I’ve had “La Vie Danson” (which I’m probably spelling wrong) running through my head ever since. Also, I have been craving salt something fierce, which is not good for me. Bad Barb. No more chips for you!
Writing kind of stalled until I can wrestle the outline for the next 3D chapter into shape. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn in something satisfactory this weekend and then work on my seasonal_spuffy. I might actually have two stories for that this time, one very silly and one all angsty. Most irritatingly, Buffy and Spike keep wandering off to the back of my head for porny interludes in the training room which have nothing to do with either of them and don’t even have enough plot to qualify as a PWP.
“OK,” I said, blowing hair out of my eyes, “this isn’t going to work”
“Wouldn’t say that,” Spike replied from where he reclined on the weight bench, all lazy and sated-looking. Only Spike can manage to look like a dissolute pasha with sweatpants down around his ankles. “If the objective’s to get all flushed and sweaty -“
“The objective of putting a workout room in the basement,” I said firmly, “is to work out.” I rolled over and started searching for my very cute new bike shorts, hoping they hadn’t been that far-off ripping sound I vaguely remembered hearing when things got, um, flushed and sweaty. “It’s all your fault anyway.”
“My fault?” Spike’s eyebrow arced. “Was under the impression it was a joint effort.” He sat up, which did interesting ripply things to his stomach - he isn’t going for the cut-to-the-bone look any more, but believe me, the view is still pretty spectacular. He dangled a little scrap of pink nylon from thumb and forefinger- RIP bike shorts. “Anyone wriggling their hot little arse in this, for example, is definitely aiming to work a bloke up, not out.”
“Totally your fault. How am I supposed to concentrate when you’re over there being all… bulgy?”
Something got me musing on icons the other day, and the way we use them to stake out fannish territory. Icons are so very customizable, and pictures, more than words, grab us by the guts. I can make a snap judgment about someone based on their icon long before I read their post - decide they’re an ally or an enemy, flag them as nice or witty or obnoxious. I have decided that someone was a doody-head purely on the basis of an icon. Those snap judgments aren’t always right or fair - we are all more than a 100×100 pixel square with a snappy tag line. But I make them just the same, and presumably, other people make them about me. (Of course, of late, that judgment is probably “Doesn’t she ever change that damn thing?”)
Somewhere or other I have an icon of William biting Anne, with the caption “My Spike Loved His Mum.” For anyone who’s familiar with BtVS the TV show, that icon is a factual depiction of an event: one of Spike/William’s first actions after Drusilla made him a vampire was to turn his own ailing mother. Some viewers might pick up an oblique reference to the old Tom Lehrer song “Oedipus Rex,” and the writers’ somewhat clumsy attempt at Freudian imagery. For people who are familiar with online BtVS fandom, there are a few more layers. The icon is part of a tradition of “My Spike…” icons that became prevalent during the last couple of seasons of BtVS, promoting one vision of the character or dissing another. It’s also a commentary on the eternal debate about Spike’s capacity to love without a soul, and the nature of vampire love in general, and on the perception of William as a mama’s boy, and a bit of a poke at the daddy!kink contingent.
Awful lot to squeeze into 100×100 pixels. This is just an average icon slapped together by a mediocre icon-maker. If the knowledgeable viewer can get all that out of a crappy icon, think what you could get out of a good one. There are, of course, icons which are not intended to be ambiguous: icons proclaim our allegiances and our opposition, to a show, to a character, to a particular interpretation of canon. And there are stealth icons that code their message in ways which allow them plausible deniability in the face of questioning. (Ah, the ever-popular “You just have no sense of humor.”)
So sometimes I think… what exactly do I want to say about myself with my icons? Should I make more of an effort to come up with the perfect icon for posts about this, that or, the other thing? Do I want to come off as “I like X,” in the hope of connecting with others who also like X, or is it more important for me to advertise my loathing of Y? Is loathing Y a requirement even for people who also like X? Is it really that important anyway? I don’t know, but at the end of the day I usually end up with the same old icon blinking away. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.