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scifantasy
scifantasy
10 July 2008 @ 11:33 am
Case Notes, or I'm Going To Regret This...
In retrospect, the Case Study series has enough references to warrant this. I've not footnoted things which you would know from the [livejournal.com profile] mina_de_malfois series, though, such as sparkly vampires. If you have any recommendations for other footnotes, let me know.

Prologue And Part One

  1. I was three hours deep in hack mode Hack mode is just what it sounds like.
  2. Cheetos, Mountain Dew For the significance of Cheetos and Mountain Dew to pencil and paper RPGs, check out "Dungeons And Dragons" by the Dead Alewives.
  3. Henry Dorsett Case (not his real name) Whatever Case's actual name is, his cover name is that of William Gibson's protagonist in the cyberpunk-defining novel Neuromancer.
  4. The World Tree is a very old, recurring concept in myth, folklore, and therefore video games.
  5. Tree, root...you get it, right? In case you don't, the administrator account on UNIX-based computer systems is "root." This is the bar of the admins, the "roots"; hence, "tree."
  6. the Black Sun--though I've steadfastly refused to code swordfighting The Black Sun is the elite VR bar from Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk-redefining novel Snow Crash.
  7. To the demise of our enemies The traditional first toast of STWing, the residential program (think a frat, but with housing in the dorms and better standards) of which I was a member in my own college days.
  8. a ProctoProd is the painful-to-insert device which gives the user full sensation in VR in Bruce Bethke's satirical cyberpunk novel Headcrash.
  9. Planet of Orcraft or Neverendingquest This should be obvious I hope, but...World Of Warcraft and Everquest.


Part Two

  1. Zorba's is based on The Greek Lady, where I bought way too much food in college.
  2. Blow on, you crazy zephyr From the webcomic Gossamer Commons.
  3. Nancy doesn't drink martinis. She drinks gin in fancy glasses. Because a martini actually needs some vermouth. Not much--I use six-to-one--but some.
  4. it's all Rashomon Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon tells the same story--a rape and murder--from the perspective of four different characters, and therefore really tells four stories. Perspective affects reality.
  5. what happens at the con stays at the con Conventions do remind me of Vegas, a little--but Possible Oscar said it best.
  6. "Banned From Argo" The filk song everybody loves to be sick of. Probably the most well-known filk song, period; there is a songbook devoted to eighty different parodies/rewrites/in-joke songs about "Banned."
  7. Xanatos Gambit Where no matter what happens, she wins.
  8. recitations of Shakespeare This one's me: I use Puck's last speech from A Midsummer Night's Dream as an inebriation test. It's not very useful, but it's fun.


Part Three

  1. a drunk and disgruntled employee was allegedly the cause for a power failure at 365 Main, a datacenter which hosted sites such as LiveJournal and CraigsList, in July 2007.
  2. I've just spent sixteen hours with my finger in the dyke just like the Little Dutch Boy in the story-within-a-story in Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker, Or The Silver Skates.
  3. Space Battle Universes is Star Wars Galaxies by any other name. No, SWG is up and running, but not well-regarded as I understand it.
  4. the Big Show Dragon*Con, in Atlanta over Labor Day weekend, is one of the largest fandom conventions, and one of the most well-known. (The parade through downtown Atlanta in full costume probably helps.)
  5. both Vorkosigans Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan, probably the best parents in modern science fiction, from Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan Saga."
  6. Girl Genius really is the best steampunk on the web.


Part Four

  1. the Spoon Theory is a wonderful description of what it's like to live with a chronic disease or disability. "Spoons" has since entered the lexicon as a measurement of how much energy one has in a given day.
  2. Rich Fantasy Lives Lyrics by Rob Balder (left), music by Tom Smith (center), performed here by Rob, Tom, and me (right) with sign language interpretation by Judi Miller (far right).
  3. Epileptic seizures, even petit mal, do not a good weekend make as this rant attests.
  4. a drunk young woman demanding people lick icing off of her and the other con-unpleasantness stories were mostly taken from my (otherwise positive) experience at Penguicon in 2007.
  5. Nuclear Fizz Old fannish drink. One part gin, one part Cointreau, one part lemon/lime juice mix, several parts club soda, aromatic bitters.
  6. Simon Illyan-like pose More Vorkosigan references.
  7. I don't even like Oklahoma wherein an auction for a young woman's picnic basket (and therefore her company on a date) becomes a bidding war between the rancher Curly and the farmhand Jud, and turns into a near-brawl between the farmers and the cowmen.


Part Five

  1. I swear, the next time I hear "Web 2.0" I'm going to punch someone "Web 2.0" is a catchall for...well, I'm not really sure what. Whatever the speaker wants it to mean, I guess. But the concept has generally been attached to things like "user-generated content" such as independently-developed modifications to video games.
  2. a wormhole jump to hell which ended up crash-landing The aliens in SO, especially the backstory and accent jokes, refer to the Draenei from World Of Warcraft, whose accent sounds roughly Eastern European to my ears.
  3. Harlan Ellison A talented writer and dirty old man.
  4. Appin Dungannon A talented writer, dirty old man, and murder victim in Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos Of The Death Sun. Probably based loosely on Harlan.
  5. a baseball bat with two basketballs attached is a paraphrase of a comment in the Mystery Science Theater treatment of the famous worst story ever written, "The Eye Of Argon." (And a bit of a misparaphrase; it was cantaloupes originally.)
  6. A Civil Campaign by Bujold, so yes, more Vorkosigan. Probably the best Vorkosigan novel, certainly the funniest, it shifts in tone from the previous galaxy-spanning space operas to a hilarious Regency romance. Highly recommended.


Part Six
  1. Tales of MU is a webstory set in a fantasy universe about a college student. It tends to be a bit on the sexually explicit side of things.
  2. sore wa himitsu desu translates roughy as "That is a secret." It's the recurring line of Xellos, from the anime Slayers, and is usually accompanied by a smug smirk.
  3. Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin are (in Jordan's case, were; he passed away a few months before this story went up) the writers of the "Wheel Of Time" and "Song Of Ice And Fire" fantasy series. Both have many interweaving plots, characters with hidden agendas, and lots and lots (and lots and lots) of secrets.
  4. Kinsey 0 The Kinsey Scale is a way of defining, or at least quantifying, a person's sexuality. 0 represents total heterosexuality, 6 total homosexuality.
  5. he said with a Scottish brogue Because onions have layers, you know.
  6. She'd probably help you maximize the potential of any brownies. Remove the mystique, and the thrill evaporates. This has in fact been known to happen. Not to me, but to college friends.


Part Seven
  1. pride of researchers Pride, shredwness, murder...in the middle ages, they came up with some great collective nouns, didn't they? (Lions, apes, crows.)
  2. Masquerade As in, "Vampire: The." The tendency of supernatural or secret groups to hide their existence.


Part Eight
  1. Utena, fully titled Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), is an anime series which uses, subverts, deconstructs, bends, folds, spindles, and mutilates the concept of the "prince on a white horse."
  2. He follows idiotic, asinine fads... The original comment was Warr1or's message to Mina, but I doubted he'd stop there...and when you're posting, you get more verbose.
  3. It was a disaster. PrinceC and Case both speak for me. I haven't had a fully-fledged disaster, but I've had uncomfortable wake-up calls about matters of privilege and money. And I'll probably have more.
  4. half-cent transactions are the traditional way to make secret incomes--divert half a cent from every transaction to another account. See Office Space.
  5. the Jones Laughing Record wherein the tuba player starts playing "Flight Of The Bumblebee," but the orchestra starts cracking up about four measures in and they laugh for the rest of the piece.


Part Nine
  1. She told me that she didn't want to burden her friends That one is me, or was, as a younger and stupider teenager.
  2. Like the Great Maker said: From "The Parliament Of Dreams," season 1 of Babylon 5, said by Catherine Sakai to Jeff Sinclair.
  3. a fan-in. Surely the concept of a "sit-in" hasn't been forgotten by the younger generation...
  4. "root@wintermute.org wasn't exactly informative." Clearly, Seldom hasn't read Neuromancer. Anybody who had would have recognized "Wintermute."
  5. the vampire people in the lobby Allyson Beatrice's Will The Vampire People Please Leave The Lobby? is a fascinating bunch of stories from Buffy The Vampire Slayer fandom.
  6. a Placebo song This came from the original JC, who elaborated, "I actually know which song...'Pure Morning.' 'A friend in need's a friend indeed, a friend with weed is bettAAAAAHHH...'"
  7. the key of R Demented. The Key of R is a particularly entertaining folkish song. "Demented" is a mashup of "augmented" and "diminished," of course.


Part Ten
  1. a flying gryphon to the Tree to ask for a bailout The same way that the CEOs of the Big Three American automobile manufacturers took their private planes to Washington to plead for one.
  2. six if one went to Harvard "Ask five economists for an opinion, and you'll get five opinions. Six if one went to Harvard."
  3. the West Wing joke "Economists were put on this Earth to make astrologers look good." From an early episode of the show. Note that the President of the United States on the show was a Nobel-prize winning economist.
  4. the McCrumb Specifically, Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool, the two murder mysteries McCrumb wrote about fan culture.
  5. "Ah! Sweet Idiocy!" An infamous tell-all memoir of the late 1940s about early fandom and all the ways the writer couldn't stand it.
  6. Earl Grey. Gift from his mother, I bet. Eva being such a Trek fan and all.
  7. "This is SPARTA!" Really, can't you just see Warr1or in 300? Repressed homosexuality and all?
  8. white-hat Good-guy hacker.
  9. He-Man Women Haters Club From the old Little Rascals, and the comparatively recent movie.


Part Eleven
  1. Burrito Bongo is, like Zorba's before it, patterned roughly after a restaurant I ate at a lot in college. In this case, it's a Qdoba burrito shop. I guess at some point I'll have to start taking restaurant patterns from law school places, too, now...
  2. as authentically Mexican as the Frito Bandito A quotation from the geekiest man in the world of food.
  3. Perchik and Hodel are #2 of the three couples in Fiddler on the Roof.
  4. On the other hand, on the other hand, tradition, fine, sure, go ahead is not a direct line from same, but it is one from the infamous Avenue Jew mashup that the casts did to support Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 2004.
  5. She told you what happened I take [livejournal.com profile] jackiejlh's story Losing Home as the sequence of events. I have good evidence.
  6. 'Not enough,' indeed. Eat your heart out, Shaenon Garrity. Two of the emotional critical points of Garrity's fantastic mad-science webcomic Narbonic turn on those two words.
  7. the last time someone asked me a question with that much sanity riding on it Judy was the one asking.


Part Twelve
  1. just as planned Catch phrase of Light Yagami of Death Note.
  2. the finest muffins and bagels in all the land are what Josh Lyman of The West Wing ordered of his aide Donna on his day of glory.
  3. Brandon Avalanche is how Brandon Sanderson describes the end of his books.
  4. G'Kar of Babylon 5 quoted Yeats's "The Second Coming" much as Case does here.
  5. the witness, and when I captured it on film If you need proof that Case is in a weird mindframe in this scene, he quotes Rent to himself. QED.
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[identity profile] thedorkygirl.livejournal.com on July 11th, 2008 09:32 am (UTC)
Just a perfect complement!
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[identity profile] jchance.livejournal.com on February 2nd, 2009 07:47 am (UTC)
Must add, the main reason for "R Demented" is that I can't sing. Good ear pitch, perfect as a small child, but I can't get my voice to cooperate, even sober. And, no, I've not had a con breakup, though I'm sure it's in the cards at some point in my life.
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