incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I have spoiler thoughts about last week's Elementary, but I'm just going to combine them with a reaction to tonight's season finale, so in the meantime:

Con or Bust generally runs a bracket-style challenge at Wiscon's Gathering, thanks to the heroic efforts of popelizbet, which pits characters of color from SFF against each other in a light-hearted "who's more awesome" way. Nominations for this year are open, and anyone can nominate online.

Anyway, in a fit of absent-mindedness I nominated Joan Watson, forgetting that Elementary cannot really be considered SFF. Later, in one of the nominations for Wendy Watson of The Middleman, the nominator left a note saying, "Can we do Wendy Watson vs. Joan Watson?"

Well, sadly we cannot, because like I said, Joan is not eligible. But now I desperately crave a crossover fic in which they are cousins of some degree, meet up at a family reunion, compare notes about their situations, and kick some butt.

Someone make that happen, please? *puppy-dog eyes*

I've had this vague thesis for a while, that there two kinds of people, those who—well. Have a poll:

(At one point I had more examples, but lost them. I also firmly expect to be in the minority on all of these, though I'm less certain whether there will be a pattern.)

and I don't like it.

My disk imaging program says that it can't read a particular sector. On the other hand, this time chkdsk didn't throw any errors, so perhaps the backup program is just flawed somehow. But somehow I doubt it, and I really do not have time to be replacing my hard drive again just now, or really ever.

(The last full backup I have is from two weeks ago, so at least it's better than last time, when I had no full backups. Still.)

Here is the text of my Mary Sue talk! [ETA: for people coming here through outside links, this was given at a quasi-academic conference with a fifteen-minute limit.] It is mostly as I gave it except I skipped a couple of paragraphs for time. I do have slides but I'm not sure I'm going to bother, they were very text-heavy and not that interesting. (Edit: moved the links to the end of this post, since there were no comments on the links-only post and this way everything's all in one place.)

( the text of my talk )

( the links )

You know, the panel before this ended early, and while the last panel looked interesting, my neck and shoulders are screaming at me from spending most of the day bending over my netbook, and if I leave now, I can eat a leisurely dinner and then go see Iron Man 3 instead of bolting my food and fretting the whole way. So despite my guilt, I'm playing hooky.

If you were at the conference, say hi! I do have notes about my co-panelists' talks, which I will post, but maybe they'll put their slides or notes up somewhere. Stay tuned. Just not until tomorrow, probably.

Now I might actually want to see Iron Man 3 after all (see: synecdochic and thingswithwings (SPOILERS, like I said)). I still have some qualms, but amazingly it sounds much less awful than I had every reason to believe.

(Hmm, let's see: *flips coin* Okay, assume spoilers in comments.)

I finally got through being stuck halfway through the second Farscape episode! And watched another!

( quick comments, spoilers )

Anyway. Not as excited about this as Elementary, but I am interested in the characters and perfectly happy to watch more.

Spoil me and suffer heatstroke.

Behind the cut. This is exciting!

( five panels )