eating cucumbers without permission...

There was a big problem where sometimes pages would mysteriously fail to save. Moving from the “load” event to the “DOMContentLoaded” event fixes the problem, though as usual I’m not sure why. (My guess is that something else hooked to the insanely crowded load event was causing it, but I can’t say for sure.)

Moving to DOMContentLoaded causes a few problems, the worst of which is that Ark can no longer get the file size of the current page from the cache (unless it’s already there because the page has been recently visited).

The page size getter was already problematic, given that it was utterly useless for the application/x-gzip encoded pages which comprise 90% of pages I save, so it’s not too much of a blow. As a partial workaround, I added a dodgy file-size estimator. When I say “dodgy” I mean “dodgy”; all it does is count the number of characters in the document body. Thus, size estimation is utterly, utterly wrong for images, PDFs and the like.

It solves my second-to-last annoyance, though, so I can’t bring myself to care.

Download in the usual place.

To try and ensure I take useful notes this semester, I’m planning to write them up here. Any points I want to argue about, at least. Given that I never know what I think until I write it down, it could be a valuable experience.

First-week lectures didn’t go deep enough to be worth much comment, so I’ll only bother with one of them.

ENGL2075: Speculative Fictions

Naturally enough, the course started with a definition of “speculative fiction”. In this context it’s not a slightly-more-pretentious synonym of “science fiction”, but (supposedly) a superset of it. It’s intended to encompass all of gothic fiction, science fiction and magical realism; I say “supposedly” because I’m not sure that it does.

To quote from the course guide:

Speculative Fictions focuses upon these three fictional genres that introduce touches of the fantastic into a realistic milieu. […] Its guiding thesis is that in such modes the aim is not to provide imaginative escape to dreamlike fantasy realms, but rather to undermine faith in conventional notions of what is credibly real […]

Gothic fiction challenges us by suggesting that there are Bad Things out there, in the dark and nasty regions, where nobody goes: it’s right to be afraid of the dark, because that’s where the monsters are. Magical realism is similarly subversive, contrasting grimy realist narratives with deadpan mentions of angelic visitation, magic and the supernatural. We’re comfortable in our knowledge, here in the information age, and speculative fiction challenges that knowledge. A lot of science fiction does seem to fit well. “The Matrix” is an obvious example, spawning as it did a new wave of pop-philosophy on the nature of reality and the credibility of the senses.

The problem is that “science fiction” is incredibly hard to define. It’s an umbrella term covering everything from “Buck Rogers” space fantasy to realistic extrapolations from current technology. One end of the spectrum is just realist fiction with faster computers; the other is pure fantasy: there’s no science in “Star Wars”. The middle ground is better, but still far too broad. Stories about artificial intelligence question what it is to be human; stories featuring alien life threaten humanity’s place at the top of the food chain; and a lot of New Wave science fiction questions contemporary social mores. They’re undermining certain preconceived notions, yes, but it’s a stretch to say that they “undermine faith in conventional notions of what is credibly real.”

From the excellent TV Tropes Wiki:

Facefault

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When shocked or surprised, often by an absurdity or non sequitur, the listener may fall over onto his face, his limbs in a twisted mass above him. A device usually limited to humorous anime, this may have been imported from American slapstick comedy.

I believe the original was a joke definition post by Martin Rose to rec.arts.anime in 1992:

Face fault : (noun) falling to the ground, landing on your face. Ex: Lum flew through the door and Ataru did a face fault.

The term is fairly common in anime fandom, and I’m mildly curious as to its derivation. “Face” is obvious enough, but the only source I see for “fault” is the incredibly nerdy use of “segfault” as “an exclamation at the point of befuddlement”. It’s amusing if it’s true, given that the popularization of anime in the West over the past few years means that many fans are unlikely to have even heard the word “segfault”, let alone know what it means.

I ran across it in some Ranma ½ fanfiction; it was “the family facefaulted” here and “Ranma facefaulted” there, and even one notable (and anatomically difficult) “facefaulted sideways”. The curious thing is that it’s utterly incomprehensible to anybody unfamiliar with anime, but to fans it’s clear enough — especially in context.

Fanfiction of this sort isn’t a textual representation of fictional events, it’s a textual representation of a cartoon representation of those events. There are various manga tropes — like the facefault — which are convenient symbols that help offset the deficiencies of the medium. When you’re drawing small and not terribly detailed pictures, a character falling on his face is more obvious a symbol of shock than an open mouth or raised eyebrows. Even if these deficiencies don’t translate to a new medium, such as plain text, the symbols get ported across anyway.

One example is the stylized sweat drop used to indicate confusion or embarrassment, which ties into the link between sweat and stress. It’s hard enough to draw sweat on a cartoon character without it looking like running eyeliner; it’s impossible when the character’s head is smaller than your fingertip. A stylized drop solves this problem, with the added benefit that the artist doesn’t need to bother overly with subtle facial expressions. In text form it’s easy enough to write “she sweated” or “he started sweating”, or expand into florid description of crinked brows, quavering lips, slight blushes and other subtle signs. Instead, there’s often a marked lack of descriptive prose in favour of “he sweatdropped” or “a large sweatdrop formed on the back of her head”.

My Little Pony fanfiction has to be the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks. I don’t know whether to be glad or not that there doesn’t seem to be any My Little Pony fan-porn–oh wait, yes I do. I’m very, very glad. Even without sinking into BDSM slash pony debauchery, however, there are still some delightfully corrupt gems.

My Little Pony: Demon’s Eye:

War has come to Ponyland, when a mysterious artifact is discovered to be hidden somewhere in Ponyland, a bloody thousand year civil war spills over, and in the war between the Third Imperium and the Black Cobra there are no such things as neutrals.

Battle Ponies:

Everyone looked down at the front of the class room in horror, as Megan continued. “You will all draw the duffel bags at random, and you will not open them until you leave the school. You must all use these weapons to kill each other off, one by one, until one and only one is left. The last one left is the winner, and gets to go home. Won’t that be nice?”

Star Wars: Shadow War Episode 1:

“Hi,” Fizzy said, “I’m Fizzy, I’m a Little Pony, who are you?” Kyle was reaching for his Lightsaber, when Kit stopped him.

“I’m Kit Kanos,” she said.

“Jaina Solo,” Jaina replied, “I’m a Jedi Knight, and X-wing pilot.”

The Darkness Within:

Wind Whistler’s dead mate comes back to the world of the living, to take back their son, but in the process he brings enough evil and darkness with him to destroy all of Dream Valley. How far will Wind Whistler go to protect her only child? and what happens when things aren’t always what they seem?

Not “My Little Pony”, but this “Care Bears” fic is even worse.

Dealing With Chage [sic]:

Grumpy now felt Cheer’s chest and breasts pressed up against him as he had an erection. He moved so that he inserted his member into Cheer Bear as she moaned softly. Grumpy felt himself begin to thrust into Cheer Bear as she accepted him love making to her. Grumpy began to go faster and harder causing her moans to become groans of pleasure and delight.

Over in the Teletubbies section, there are more R-rated fics than there are G-rated ones. A lot of teenagers with younger siblings dealing with stress, I imagine; there’s something quite cathartic about killing off Tinky-Winky with a cocaine overdose.

One of the main reasons I started using WordPress was to have pretty URLs. It helps with permanence, because I don’t find them annoying and get urges to shift to a new system; it helps the user, because hackable URLs are a form of navigation; and oh! it’s so much more elegant!

Pretty WordPress URLs typically look something like this:

http://example.com/2005/02/14/example-post/

Which is all fine and dandy, but it’s not for me. Posts are so infrequent that I don’t need daily archives, and my aesthetic sensibilities demand that the year string be two digits only.

http://example.com/05/02/example-post

Doesn’t it make you swoon with delight?

A four digit year is more usable, of course, both because it’s more easily recognizable for what it is and because it’ll still be problem-free in a hundred years or so, or a thousand. Nevertheless, I’m willing to take on a little work in my extreme old age in the name of beauty.

The problem is that WordPress doesn’t let me do it — %year% in the path template is a four digit string, and that’s that. No choice. It’s easy enough to hack it in quite elegantly, but this method works as a plugin.

Fanfiction.net’s new category search pages show the how just how not to implement “friendly” URLS.

To provide a little context, they used to look like this:

http://www.fanfiction.net/list.php?c=224&cr=0&ch=0&l=1&sch=1&g=0&l=1&s=1&len=0&p=1

The new version looks like this:

http://www.fanfiction.net/l/224/4/0/1/1/0/0/1/1/

It’s such a huge step backwards that I don’t even know where to start complaining. It’s at least as daunting to look at as the old URL, but it’s less human-readable and less intuitive. It’d be understandable if it offered some major benefit, but there’s none that I can see.