potentialities

What I've been reading

I read The Story of French, which was fairly engaging as a biography of a language, but I have to admit that I found the position of the authors on modern francophony somewhat incoherent—apparently non-French speakers learning French as a second language is awesome and broadening, but French-speakers learning English as a second language is terrible and oppressive because they have to express themselves non-natively. Also there's this hilariously snitty aside about how when the authors, who are husband and wife, give presentations to francophone audiences, Julie, who speaks French as a second language, gets complements on it while Jean-Benoît, who speaks québecois natively, does not. Yeah, that could be a symptom of prejudice against Québec in the French-speaking world, or it could be because you don't complement someone for speaking their native language fluently, duh.

I read The Best of All Possible Worlds, Karen Lord's followup to Redemption in Indigo, which is so clearly fix-it fic for reboot Star Trek, recast closer to the original spirit of Trek and cross-pollinated with Le Guin.

I read Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, a graphic memoir-cookbook that picked up an Alex award. I love memoirs by sequential artists; it's such a great medium for conveying this is what I remember it feeling like when I was a kid.

I picked up Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers because I like what he's been doing with Loki: Agent of Asgard. It's been pretty fun and engaging so far.

I read Heartstones, one of Ruth Rendell's standalone creepy stories in novella form, which reminds me that I always love her standalone books and I think there are still quite a few of them that I haven't read. I had a brilliant professor once who used A Judgement in Stone in a class about orality and literacy.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm not properly in a fandom until I have discovered the pairing of my heart that virtually no one ships but me. Not that I don't want other people to ship these pairings, it just seems to be a thing that happens to me, repeatedly, and I complain and tag-stalk and yearn for them.

I was rewatching Star Trek Into Darkness with my mom, who loved the first one but played Words with Friends through some of the bits she found rather boring in this one, which is fair enough. (I was playing words back to her, but then, I'd actually seen it before!) And, like, there's a whole genre of post-STID dark AU fic where the bad guys win and there's sex slavery and all the other requisite id-y goodness, but the thing is, it's all predicated on the Khan being the one who takes over and debauches the crew of the Enterprise. Which is all very well and good and whatever, but there's a character in this movie who is much better positioned to do such a thing, whom Kirk actually offers himself up in order to protect his crew to in a scene so mind-meltingly hot that I was almost embarrassed to be watching it in a theatre, and nobody is writing the AU where Admiral Marcus keeps Kirk as a sex slave. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

(I mean, I realize that the answer to this question is: Benedict Cumberbatch. But since what I enjoyed most about Cumberkhan was all the bits where he similarly suffered bad things happening to himself, and very prettily I might add, in order to protect his crew, I would also prefer to read about him in an Admiral Marcus's Dystopian Starfleet AU. Alas.)

I just got back from seeing Star Trek with my mom! She hadn't actually watched Star Trek since the first run of TOS back when there were like two channels and there was nothing else on, but she is a big fan of J. J. Abrams ever since I got her hooked on Alias. Her only complaint was that she couldn't hear what was going on in the Kobayashi Maru scene because the whole audience was chortling so damn hard.

You know that feeling you get when you find this plotty cracky epic fic in a fandom that you hadn't thought much about in a while and you devour the whole thing in a single gulp of fannish glee? Yeah, it was like that. I loved it.

Then again, I got into Trek through novelizations (my brother handed me his copy of Dark Mirror on a family vacation when I'd finished all my books) and fic (I'd been on the internet since I was twelve, but the first time I heard of slash was in an actual dead tree magazine when I was seventeen, and I started googling for Kirk/Spock even though I had only the vaguest idea who they were), so my cred is highly suspect.

A while ago, when Sam was out of town for his grown-up science fair, he asked me to send him something without subtitles to watch while he ate. I presented him with an inventory of everything I had on my computer and he ended up requesting the TNG episode Data's Day. Apparently, he rewatched this episode numerous times, because, you know, he was eating, and it was there.

Me: what fic should i write now? there are fics i should be working on, but they're on my laptop so i can't work on them anyway
Sam: oh
Sam: ( ambassador t'pel / picard 's secret love during the episode data's day )

Tragically, I fear this story will never be finished, so I got permission to post this conversation instead.

Guess what I found at Barnes and Noble?

The Star Trek Scriptbooks Book One: The Q Chronicles.

Yes. The scripts of all the episodes of Star Trek with Q in them.

It was only, like, $6, too.

I don't have any Picard/Q icons. I should do something about this.