Friday Five

[cdybedahl]

1. Name the worst movie you have ever watched (you don't have to have sat through the whole thing).

That would be Highlander II, if that movie had actually existed. But since that was just a very, very bad dream, I'll have to go with the only movie I've ever actually walked out of: Manhattan Murder Mystery.

2. Name one or more actors/actresses that will make you avoid a movie, show, play, etc. because they are involved.

Julia Roberts. Just can't stand her.

3. Name the squickiest pairing or pairings for which you've actually seen/read fic.

Dilbert/Wally. And I really hope I never see anything to top that.

4. Name a fandom that just makes you say, "Someone actually reads/writes fic for that?"

I can see some sort of entertainment value in writing even for deeply crap shows. Knight Rider comes pretty close, though.

5. Name one thing about being in fandom you could live without.

I ignore the parts of fandom I don't like, mostly. About the only thing that regularly annoys me is the insistence of some long-time B7 fans that a story becomes more widely available by being printed on a few dozen pieces of paper on the other side of the Earth than by being put up on a web page.

Comments

re: Friday Five

[rozk.livejournal.com]

1. Far worse films spring to mind - The Bloodhounds of Broadway probably wins because,in spite of various Quaids and Rutger Hauer and being based on Damon Runyon, I have never been able to watch it all the way through in spite of having bought the video for a pound just so I could try.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is smug complacent crap, but it does have one great moment: Keaton'We could be living next door to a murderer' - Allen 'So? New York is a melting pot.'

2. I would agree with you about Julia Roberts were it not that she has done OKish work with Soderbergh, who does not buy into the idea that she is beautiful or anything and makes her actually act. Specifically, to my surprise, I liked Erin Brokovitch.

Ben Affleck on the other hand - if it were not that he works well with Kevin Smith....

Re: Friday Five

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

A large part of my dislike for Higlander II cames from how extremely badly it failed to live up to the hopes we held before it premiered. We saw it on its opening night, and stayed all the way through more from being stunned by its utter crapness than anything else.

Manhattan Murder Mystery I tried to watch while very tired, and the spastic camerawork made me seasick. Plus it seemed to be all about whiny americans.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Agree on a lot of these. Especially about the godsdamn zine thing. If someone really has claimed that zines are more widespread than the net... oh gods. That's just so bizarre I don't even know where to go with that. Even if the core of B7 fandom seems to consist of middle-aged women, it's still ridiculous, considering how many of them post on FC already. I think the Space/Freedom City zines are a great idea for those who can't get on the net or just want a paper copy, fine. Other zines are worse. The BNFs' attitude suggests that if you can't afford a £30 anthology zine with £10 postage from the US to Northern Europe, you are Not A Proper Fan. And don't you even *dare* to suggest that some of the stories in 15-year old out of print zines should go on the Web... *shock horror*! In its obsession with paper zines, B7 fandom lags 10 years behind.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I like zines. Call it a fetish for paper if you want but there's just something about the printed word. Then again I started off buying small-press comix(1) before moving into media fandom so IMO paper zines should cost between one and five quid before postage depending on how many pages are involved.

Gina
(1) Small press: draw cartoons, write some words, paste together a few photo-montages made but cutting/tearing stuff out of magazines. Assemble into prototype booklet form. Sneak into school library/office and run off a batch of photocopies. Assemble zines, staple only if enough money remains from last giro/student grant/cash-in-hand job. Post out to adoring fans in carefully opened and resealed envelopes previously used by utilities/parents/bank.

Some of them were more professional than that but they were still muchly cheap'n'cheerful.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Five quid would be a fantastic price, as for a poor person it's *my* absolute upper limit at the mo. And I *still* think it should be so.

Oh, and yes, I started on zines the same way you did:). Punk has been alive and well in Finland since day one, and in the very early Nineties me and my best friend were involved in making a lot of punk/goth/comics and mix'n'match zines. We spent ages glueing all of that stuff together:).My friend's mother works at a library, so she snuck her daughter's zines there to be photocopied. We sold the zines for about, I dunno, 1.50. That was a fair price.

I loved that time, and I still do love zines--a lot of good hard work goes into them and I'd love to some day make one myself. Perhaps a compilation of "purple-prose" B7 slash writers and silly drawings/scribblings.

One thing that pisses me off is the big risk you take when you spend huge amounts of money on paper and shipping of *anthology* zines. You never know where your money's going to go, you might end up getting a zine that's mostly shite. You know what a rabid B/A fan I am, and I just dread to think what piles of mushy crap there lie within all the issues of Fire&Ice.

Ok, rant over, PMS always makes my posts extra-long...

[archbishopm.livejournal.com]

carefully opened and resealed envelopes

...and don't forget to soap those stamps, boys and girls! ;-p

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

At the time I had a massive crush on a cartoonist called Jeremy Dennis, who did a long-running comic-soap called 'Three in a Bed' about fout housemates: lesbian, straight, bi and celibate IIRC. Her recycled envelopes always came with bonus cartoons on them and I think I still have a couple somewhere.

Gina

[archbishopm.livejournal.com]

So since it's called Three in a Bed I presume the celibate one slept in the bathtub?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

The argument has repeatedly been put forward that a computer and a net connection is very expensive, while a zine is not, and therefore zines are available to more people than anything that requires a computer. While there is some sense to the argument, it seems to disregard the fact that a large and rapidly growing proportion of the population already have computers and net connections, and that those who don't have them for economic reasons are pretty damn unlikely to send cash off to a foreign land. But I long ago gave up hope on this particular debate.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Mm-hmm. The "on the net any perv can see it just for wank fodder" argument is pretty silly too, considering the amount of porn on the net. Any random person feeling a bit frisky is %99 likely to go somewhere completely different than a B7 fanfic site. Beyond a) print zines being handy and neat and comfortable to read and b) people not wanting print zines to die, I haven't found a pro-zine argument that would stand up to close scrutiny.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

How about: websites can move or vanish altogether whereas once you have a zine it's yours for good? I wanted to rec a story I printed out a few months ago and went to double-check the URL only to find that the site's no longer there.

Of course Google Is Your Friend and I found the same story in at least three other archives, although the layout of all of them left something to be desired.

At the end of the day I just like paper.

Oh and it's much easier to set up a zine library at a convention than to provide attendees with PCs and a list of URLs.

Gina

[archbishopm.livejournal.com]

Dilbert/Wally

Thinking about it, isn't that basically just Avon/Vila, only slightly more crudely drawn? ;-p