In which I try to break a program, but I'm pretty sure it broke me.

Dude, Pandora just tossed up Patty Griffin covering a Wailin' Jennys song. My little folky heart is going pitter pat.

williqueen pointed out this awesome internet toy that purports to tell you whose authorial style a given piece of text most resembles. I had great fun putting my fic into it and seeing what it spit out. And then, as it continued to put out more and more male authors, I kept going in kind of a grudgy way, wondering if they even had any female authors on there. I finally managed to get J.K. Rowling on my SG-1/Harry Potter crossover. (Commenters to williqueen's entry and williqueen herself did manage to get a few more female authors, so they're out there.)

Anyway, for your amusement and my own, here's a list of what my fic going back to approximately 2004 (with selected entries from earlier) got, with snarky commentary where appropriate. Which, given the crazy this spit out, is pretty much everywhere.

( This makes NO SENSE. )

I also put in a couple grad school papers for giggles. My thesis got James Joyce again. Given that there's obviously a limited bank of potential results, this is understandable. However, since my argument was that Eavan Boland rejects male-derived traditions which seek to represent Ireland via the static feminine (including those put forth by Joyce) and instead represents the nation via these other, personal, methods, it's also hilariously ironic.

However, the biggest WTF of all goes to my paper on social/ballroom dance, Virginia Woolf, and Fed Astaire and Ginger Rogers: H.P. Lovecraft. I...buh? Did it have something to do with the section on the language of unanimism; i.e., waves, circles, and eddies? (Alternately...paper needs more Cthulu?)

Some thoughts on TV

A couple weeks ago, alethialia asked people to comment with their five favorite TV series ever. I find that topic fascinating, so I thought I'd try it here. Plus, it offers another opportunity for fannish navel-gazing! (I swear, I'll stop with this soon.)

Name your five favorite series--not the ones you think are "best" (for whatever that definition encompasses for you), not the five most critically-acclaimed, most popular, whatever, but favorite.

My five were:

Northern Exposure
Babylon 5
Slings & Arrows
Battlestar Galactica
Wonderfalls

What seems immediately apparent is that I'm drawn more strongly to ensemble shows rather than, say, buddy-cop shows, or Doctor Who, where it's often the Doctor and the companion du jour against the world. I'm interested in the world built by these shows, or our world as defined by these shows, and to get a fuller perspective on that world, one needs more viewpoints. To that end, two of them have absolutely mammoth regular casts and a slew of reoccurring guest characters; two have larger-than-average regular casts (nine for NX, 11ish for S&A) and also use several reoccurring characters; WF, at eight main characters (minus the wax lion, etc.), isn't as huge, but is still on the big side. Two of them (S&A, Wonderfalls) do have a central protagonist, but they never forget to give the supporting characters full and interesting storylines which often have little to do with that central protagonist. The other three, while technically having someone who comes first in the credits, really don't give that person more time in the spotlight than most or all of the other characters.

(I wonder if part of the reason I like ensemble shows it that it ups the chances of getting interesting female characters. These all have some fantastic ones.)

The other big thing they all have in common is that, on some level, they all deal with creating a community and/or discovering, taking, and defining one's place in either the created community or one that exists before the show starts. One is about finding your place in a family, one about finding it in a small town, another in a professional community and as an artist; one creates a society out of a ragtag fleet, and one out of civilizations on a galactic scale. (B5 includes a hefty dose of "taking/defining one's place" from pretty much all the characters, not to mention the cultures they come from. And beyond that I shall remain silent because to do otherwise would be very spoily!)

The final conceptual glue holding this list--and all of my runners up, about which more in a moment--is QUIRK. Apparently I am an even bigger fan of magical realism than I thought. For example, every single one of these shows includes at least one character who hears voices in their heads and/or sees and speaks people who don't exist (anymore). Granted, B5 tends to have sci-fi explanations for this--telepathy, generally--but Sheridan's dream in S2, say, still falls into the general pattern; not to mention there are all the prophecies and such going on. Things get even more quirky/magically realistic if we include my runners up, which are due South (ghost!Bob), Farscape (though Harvey does get a sci-fi explanation), Pushing Daisies (no ghosts, but it passes the fantasy test because, well, Ned brings dead people back to life), and Moonlighting (again, no ghosts or visions, but...yeah, I think you could say it's pretty damn quirky. Fourth wall? What's that?).

...All of this says yet again that I really ought to LOVE Buffy. And yet, somehow, no. I was going to suggest that this means I now have a really good metric for picking out media to glom onto, but that reminds me that there are always exceptions, apparently.

Anyway. Your five favorites, go.

B5 Rewatch: "In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum"

( Those that would not serve. )