This is a piece of fan-fiction that posits the Avengers taking over the American presidential election, and I love it very, very much. It's acute and funny, but it's also a beautifully-encapsulated demonstration of exactly what fanfic does. Superheroes are already about wish fulfilment, and most importantly about agency - they are a response to the ( Read more... )

I can't say that it was official Movie Club, because Rule 1 of Movie Club is that we compare two movies, however tenuously connected. However, Sunday night's spontaneous movie-watching with jo&stv did fulfil one of the secondary functions of Movie Club, which is to make us watch movies we otherwise wouldn't. I have randomly and without ( Read more... )

I am Randomly Amused this morning.

1. My lovely new car is a lovesome thing, god wot, but it has a rather cheap and nasty sound system. As a result, I can't persuade it to play music off my MP3 player in any format other than through individual tracks in one ginormous string. This means that when it randomly resets, as it does occasionally if I don' ( Read more... )

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Random thought for the day: this article is amusing, but it should have been written by a poet rather than a linguist, because you can sum up most of it by saying that random facsimiles of Benedict Cumberbatch's name can be reproduced by the simple process of juxtaposing two dactyls. Preferably two dactylic nouns with approximately the right ( Read more... )

One of the more entertaining side effects of my liminal academic existence and strange research interests is that I'm becoming the go-to person for The Media when they approach my Cherished Institution for commentary on the more outré corners of culture: Lewis Carroll, or fairy tale, or Terry Pratchett, or vampires, or, apparently, fan fiction. ( Read more... )

SHOCK CAPE BID FOR WINTER OLYMPICSI love April Fool billboards, they seem to inspire the fiendish iconoclast wordsmiths who produce them to new heights. Today's was the perfect exemplar of what I can only think of as the April Fool Hesitation, the momentary buy-in which mines the Pavlovian response via which we instantly and instinctively accept as ( Read more... )

So, there's this thing about voices. I'm not consciously aware of how important voices actually are to me until (a) I sit through an hour's meeting run by someone with a horrible voice and stagger out feeling as though I've been compulsively running my fingernails across a chalkboard, and (b) I do a quick check of a judicious sample of my various ( Read more... )

Occasionally my life is surreal. This morning I madly registered 23 rugby players for their year's courses, an early taste of reg hell occasioned by some giant manly rugby tournament they're all dashing off to and for which they are not eligible unless they officially exist on our systems. I would not have survived the morning had I not ( Read more... )

I went back to work yesterday, after three weeks of holiday1, and more or less as a last desperate splurge before going back to work I gave myself a slightly mad Tuesday during which I saw two movies in actual cinemas and everything. The first was by cunning plan, viz. braving the holiday crowds for a morning show at the mall to see The Hobbit: ( Read more... )