Pies and Paper

So my local deli/lunchbar/50s diner throwback now has an e-feature. There's a sign right in the window detailing it. You can order from them via apps available from the Android marketplace or the Apple store.

I'm still kind of reeling from it. I mean, this is your local deli. It's a family operated business. It's the kind of place you go to if you want a sandwich on the fly, ready-made and settled nicely into one of those fiddly hard-to-open plastic containers. Or a good old Aussie meat pie (made out of real Australians, folks!).

I guess what I'm trying to say is, who is going to download this app? Who needs to order a pie with that level of precaution in case the shop doesn't have any left by 12 noon? Generally they're already sitting there in the pie warmer when you come in for one. And if that shop has run out, there's a bakery next door, and another bakery five or six doors down.

Are these people trying to guarantee their own localised monopolistic pie economy by making sure they supply pies at a level equal with the town's demand?

I don't quite know. But it's making me think--we're getting to that stage of modern life (I hate that phrase, and look at me using it) where you're a little bit odd if you don't have some kind of electronic presence. Even if you just sell Mrs Mac's for a living.

In other words, the internet is bleeding into anything and everything. I'm imagining what sort of world we're going to live in when we're finally fully integrated--and I can't really imagine it.

For starters, there's obviously a limit to how 'e' we can go. Let me illustrate:

Currently, I work in a law firm, and while you'd think something like that would be all high-tech and everything, it's not really. We have a main electronic database, but we still send and receive letters by post. A lot of communication happens by email, but a lot of those emails need to get printed out so it can be referred to in Court. There are handwritten drafts of documents flying around <i>everywhere</i>. When you file documents in Court, you file three physical copies, which are then sealed and written on by hand. You keep copies of letters you send out to the client so you can keep track of what was just generated by computer and saved to disk, and what was actually sent. You keep copies of every document that ever comes into your hands, and whilst you can scan these copies to a server, you're also keeping a copy on the physical file. Photocopies of all sorts of things are made so that lawyers can annotate them.

We still walk around to Court, get documents sealed, and walk back. We don't email the document, or upload it to a Court database. It gets done by paper, and when you ask for a listing, they write it in a physical diary with blue biro. (It's always blue biro; I don't know why.)

Lawyers are anal, anal thinkers (for good reason!) and are thus very pro-paper. Since part of my job is to keep track of all this paper, I'm not quite so pro-paper. But my point is, you tend not to believe in The Death of Physical Material (especially paper!) when you work somewhere like that.

And thus, physical material is just not going away, because we're physical beings. Even discounting that, we are born physically, we sit in physical chairs, and we exist in physical space.

I tend to think that the Google glasses will probably be our last step into the virtual world, because it's the grand link between what's happening in real life and what the internet can say about it. After that, how much further can you go? People aren't going to want to stay inside a little bubble all the time and interact with the entire world via mouseclicks (okay, some will, but that's a minority). At the very least, you'd get cramp. There are some things you can only do face-to-face.

I quite like the Ghost in the Shell TV series for this reason. There are a lot of reasons I like it, but I also really enjoy seeing a gritty version of how technology and people interplay. Ghost in the Shell takes place in a setting that's all about being linked up to a network and having technology and people become almost interchangeable in terms of level of sentience. But at the same time, it is for the most part a very physical show.

Side note - I tend not to take the common sci-fi futuristic portrayal of one Net with one internet community in which each person has only one avatar (their real-life name) and they do and experience everything through that, because it's so different to the way things are now. Right now I know a lot of people with different handles on different sites, and even those who are mostly consistent and keep one handle for everything are still not using their real name. How could a mass group (i.e. everyone who uses the internet) turn away from the freedom of anonymity like this?

Answer: it ain't happening. Thank goodness.

Birds and the Internet (without mentioning Twitter once)

The internet is a frightening place.

You have your world, right? Your normal, every day world. You have work, study, friends you see a lot, friends you see once in a blue moon, people you try to avoid. You have books and movies and sport and music. You have hobbies--you might even have dreams you work on fulfilling in the background.

Then you have the internet, a vast, time-sucking black hole of mostly useless information, peopled with freaks and kindred spirits (and with sites like Facebook, people you know! So, both...), and it's just constant streams of information and non-information and stimuli and noise noise noise.

Back in the early noughties, when you first hit the internet, you build a little nest for yourself in the first tree you come across. You craft it with care, line it with the finest in scraps, and snuggle down, happy. You have your own little presence. You've built a little place for yourself. Sooner or later, you venture out, pecking your way forward little bit by little bit, going a little further each time, until--lo and behold! What is this? It's another bird! You went for the same worm! (Don't ask what a worm is doing in a tree; this is an analogy. We're looking at the bigger picture here.) What a lot you have in common!

And this bird likes other things you do? Even better! What good fortune!

This bird introduces you to another bird or three, and you all have a few things in common! You happily chat away for days, logging on at odd hours of the morning because they're all in different time zones, having keyboard smashes of lols at the funny things you all say, and generally having a whale of a time. There should be a birdy metaphor here, not a fishy reference, but I can't think of one.

And then one day one of these birds invites you back to its nest, and in its nest, you see a stick.

Baby, you've never seen anything like this stick before in your life. It looks really cool. It does cool stuff. It's a real talking point. It's spouting things you've never heard before, and you want more of it. Where can you get one?

The bird it belongs to agrees to link you to a new place. It's a new branch. It might even be a new tree. Whatever the case, there are tonnes of these sticks here, and even more birds flying around talking and interacting and doing birdy things together, and you realise--your sleepy little tree was nothing compared to this. This is where it's at. Stuff is going on here. Your birdy friend shows you its own nest in this place. It tells you it's not known as 'bird' here. Here, it's known as 'Shadowslayer'. It's nest isn't like the fluffy nest you knew, all colourful and decorated with the knitting patterns you both loved and bonded over. This nest is a different kettle of fish. There we go with the fish references again. This nest is decorated in the industrial style, with shards of metal and pieces of concrete. That might even be a little mouse skull in the corner. You wonder how it died, and take a closer look at your friend. 'Shadowslayer' is looking a little different round the edges. Does it have a mohawk? And a pierced wing?

Yeah, my little friend, Shadowslayer says. "This is another side of me." And that's when you realise: you don't have to just be one bird. You don't just have to have one nest. You can have two!

Baby, you've just stuck your teensy claw into this world. You ain't seen nothing yet.

On your own, you venture around the branches of the two trees that you're familiar with. You find out that there's a lot going on. You realise you need a couple of different nests and outfit changes so that you project what you want to project here. Knitting patterns just aren't appropriate in the goth metal nest you've also built. Your writerly postings don't quite match the beer-swilling sports branches. So you build a few more nests to match the different parts of you. (You shy away from the wing piercing, though. That's a little extreme.) All the while, you're making more birdy friends, inviting them over to your nest, and inviting a select few back to your other nests.

Pretty soon, you're intertwined irrevocably. What you've been doing here is making little nests for yourself on different branches of different trees in the internet forest, and gradually you get to know your neighbours or share a nest with a few other birds, and then you start to connect your different nests together, until eventually you're living in a chattering hive of birds and nests and newfangled sticks that do things you can't quite figure out and freeze mid-pulse for no reason at all sometimes, and there are those random bird feeders filled with honey and seeds and all these other birds shouting at you to try and buy their birdy wares and you're spending too much time there and it just gets too much.

So you retreat. You start taking down your nests, selling the parts for scrap, letting the birds you really liked know that they can find you at the first nest, and nowhere else. A few nests you just abandon altogether.

You might even fly away from the internet forest entirely and not come back for a while--migrate to South America, or the like, and enjoy not having any 'responsibility' to keep logging on.

But your old friends haunt you. The nests you made--the extra rooms you added on to them and the beauty of them--they haunt you. The gossip you're missing haunts you. In short, bird calls are taking over your dreams and you have no choice. You have to go back.

So you put it off for as long as possible, and then gradually come back. You start to refurbish your nests, one or two at first, and then the rest of them come back. You start setting up a couple of new ones here and there--until all the noise gets to you and you close up shop and migrate back to real life for some peace and quiet. It's safe there.

But the bird calls still echo in your mind, and so you fly off, back to the nests and the birdy friends you miss so much, and soon you're caught in an endless yoyo-y cycle of migration, and one day you wake up and realise that this whole extended metaphor passed the realm of the ridiculous a long time ago.

In summary, this is why I have a backlog of emails from friends I haven't connected with in months, why I shrink away from the forums I once frequented, and why I haven't posted on this blog since January.

In theory, I should love the internet. It's introduced me to some great people, some amazing ideas, and some helpful hints. It's just that instead of loving it, I get scared of it because it's so big and it seems impossible to do only one thing on there at once.

Trees weren't meant to be this complicated.

So my question is: How does everybody else cope with this? Am I alone in being so freaked out?

And does anybody know exactly why a cute little bird would find a pierced wing asethetically pleasing?

Reflections on Australia Day, Australian culture, and Aboriginal rights

Alternate Title: What the hell were we smoking when we thought of January 26th?

Expect a long one, kids.

Australia Day was two days ago, and I was going to write a post for it. But then life crept up on me, I ended up not writing said post, and now I feel a little bit differently about it anyway.

Let me start from the beginning.

My original feelings were that I couldn't celebrate Australia Day, for a few reasons. I still feel the same way about these reasons, but I'm not so sure that my anti-celebration stance still holds. I'll get to that though. First of all, I'll go through the reasons.

Most of Australia sees the 26th of January as the date for the celebration of the establishment of a society we love and wouldn't trade for the world. I believe in celebrating that. I just think that the 26th is the wrong day to choose for said celebration.

So the first of January? I'll go with that. Australia became, well, Australia, its own country, on 1 January 1901. Federation Day marked the beginning of a new year and a new nation with its own purpose and a vision and all that jazz. I mean, it was still quite similar to Britain in a lot of those respects, but fundamentally, it was the day of formal acknowledgement that we were beginning to move away from Britain and have our own set of national identities. It's a celebration of a positive event of building up. No matter that some people thought that others were completely messed up for proposing Federation--the date as a whole still marks something constructive: a birth.

But the 26th of January is the anniversary of no such thing. I can't say it's an anniversary of death with a straight face, but it's pretty close.

Years ago, Captain James Cook claimed this land as a commodity on behalf of Britain, denying the pre-existing Aboriginal right to the land they were already on. We didn't even acknowledge their humanity, instead classifying them under the National Flora and Fauna Act until something crazy like 1956.

Basically, white people just swanned in, said, "That looks good. Let's use it to house the dregs of our society", swanned out, and swanned right back in with a bunch of the dregs of their society. On the 26th of January, 1788, the first batch of dregs landed. It's the day Australia began to work as a useful commodity for Britain, not a country.

It kind of all began to go downhill from there. It marked the beginning of the British hunting Aboriginal people for sport, treating them like dirt, and banning them from 'civilised' areas. America wasn't the only country with Jim Crow laws: we had a whole stack of them.

To sum up, the whole connection with 26th January is way more fraught with tension than January 1st. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that Federation is the opposite of the 26th, and that it was the day Aboriginal people were given rights and everybody was happy and had their own pet fluffy duckling. If we're going to look at it objectively, January 26th is the anniversary of the start of exploitation and mass-scale colonisation of an invaded land, and January 1st is the anniversary of the creation of a new nation founded on said exploitation and colonisation 110 years later.

While there are a multitude of things wrong with this, I can't help but see the second date as being comparatively so much more positive (we're leaving objective territory now. Feel free to disagree with me).

The main reason I feel this way is that the society we've got right now is much better than the society we were a hundred and twelve years ago. We've got a long way to go, but the fact remains that we have come pretty damn far. We wouldn't be where we are today without Australia becoming its own country, and I think it's right to celebrate the major milestone of the development of our own cultual identity. We can't say just when the very beginning was, but we can point to the first of January 1901 and say, "This is when it was set in stone."

And if you're looking to celebrate the day your nation was born, it might be a good idea to actually celebrate it closer to the day it was born. I know it's all stuffed up because 1 Jan is New Year's Day too, but, I mean, just give us an extra day after it. It's like those years when Christmas falls on a Saturday, so we get Boxing Day on Sunday, and Boxing Day Holiday on Monday. Just have Federation Day Holiday on January 2nd or something. If the reason we got January 26th was because it was the closest day that wasn't a holiday to Federation--I have to say, I think it was still kind of a dumb choice.

***

Making a rather important tangent before we can go any further, can we say that the beginning of the development of our cultural identity was, in fact, the date the First Fleet landed? Am I constructing an argument against the 26th of January out of nothing?

This is where it all gets rather grey.

Yes, you can make a case for that. You definitely can. You can say that the landing of the First Fleet meant that our population count suddenly leapt into existence (though you'd be forgetting Aboriginal people, and according to everyone they were around before the 1700s). You can say that the instant the convicts landed on Australian (well, British, at that time) soil, they had to adapt to a new way of life in a new country. They had to make a go of it. They had to pull their heads in, get rough-and-ready, and just deal with it--all typically Australian values. Well, okay, maybe not the pulling your head in part.

The first groups and classes who made their way onto Australian soil, too, helped to define the new attitudes of this country. Of course the middle class and the upper class came over later on, when business (i.e. gold and sheep) was booming, but the very first major influx of attitudes were the lower class in England with a smattering of Irish political prisoners. They were used to hard knocks, to being treated unfairly. They were fairly anti-establisment, and small wonder: you could get transported to Australia for stealing half a loaf of bread. They used to hang kids for stealing hankies. Not really the hardened criminal past we like to pretend we have, is it?

Fact remains, though, you can tell that although the majority of Australians can't complain about oppression, we still carry the stamp of that in our cultural attitudes. The little Aussie battler is practically trademarked, even though the most we normally battle against these days is rising taxes and the most daring thing we do is drink and drive, or, if we're going to get really wild, egg Julia Gillard. These attitudes, and more, have been passed down through society from a time when bushrangers were romantic figures, and it was settlers vs squatters (the squatters won. It's Australia).

I balance that against the way Britain controlled everything. The way the national identity was only just in the very vague stages of being formed. The fact that Australia wasn't by itself, but a collection of divided colonies overseen and completely controlled by Britain.

On 26th January 1788, the defining presence was that of exploitation and invasion rather than the vague beginnings of a national identity. When they got off that boat, those people were cowed and sore and sick and injured and slow and bruised and traumatised. The jailers and the officers, all British to the core, ruled the roost. At that stage, the convicts and prisoners were merely bringing over their own class identity to cope with the situation they'd been forced into. They adjusted it here and there, I'm sure, but the main thing is that these people had no concept of being a nation unto themselves. They were British, through and through. (Except for the Irish prisoners.) As for the Aboriginal people, they were a culture separate of their own--and they do play a role in our culture and national identity now.

Summary: the beginnings of the hallmarks of our national identity as we know it were definitely there, but the concept of themselves as a separate nation definitelywasn't. For me, that's the dealbreaker, since to have a national identity, you kind of need a nation to go with it. But you might say it differently.

This really is a matter of opinion. I can't stand here and say that it's definitively wrong to use January 26th as Australia Day (though looking back, I seem to have done my best). I'm weighing everything up and making my own judgements, and it's a bit like weighing up chalky cheese and cheesy chalk. They're not completely different, they do relate to each other--but they're not that similar either.

De-tangent-ing now.

***

To get back to talking about society being better than before and therefore we should celebrate it: we also need to examine 'better' from the point of view of Aboriginal people.

Obviously, Aboriginal people still face marginalisation and discrimination from like everyone else in the country. In turn, there are a number of Aboriginal groups who harbour a lot of bitterness and resentment, and for good reason. We're still a fairly divided society (though since I live in the state with the highest Aboriginal population, it may just be that this is what I see). We still have many, many problems to deal with, and on a day-to-day basis, it still looks like the same old thing: casual racism dropped throughout conversations in a horrifyingly similar manner to that in which pre-Civil War American Southerners would have spoken of their slaves. But we're moving forward. Witness 'Sorry Day', when we finally did the right thing and apologised on behalf of our ancestors for kidnapping Aboriginal children in the 30s and creating the Silent Generation. Witness the slow growth of Aboriginal programs and the growing number of Aboriginal people in professional capacities.

To be brutal about it, the other side of the coin is that even if we white people don't belong here, it is, plain and simple, just not practical to chuck every single white person out of the country so that the Aboriginal people can have their land back. Very few of them would want it that way, either. There are still groups of tribal Aboriginal people, but despite their problems with white attitudes, most Aboriginal people do prefer the beneficial side of the type of society we brought with us. In all honesty, and I'm not trying to be racist here, I'm simply stating facts: we provide most of their jobs, and our taxes pay most of their welfare. Again, I'm not trying to be racist. Aboriginal people make up 1 percent of the population: 200 000 of 20 million. It's simple maths.

History marches on. The invasion has happened. What's done is done--now that we've made the mess we've made, we've got to do our best to build something on top of what we've got left. We can't always go on about  rights and justice when the simple fact is that life is messy. I can't take back the fact that the society I love, that I live in, has a murky and clouded past. I can't help being born here and loving this country, the land itself, right down to my bones. And I know there are people who will disagree fiercely with me about this, but I'll say it anyway: in sentiment, Australia isn't just Aboriginal land anymore. There are people here who are born and bred in this country, who will fight for it to the death, and they're as white as white can be. I'm one of them. Aboriginal people have a solid claim to their history here. They have the right to be recognised as the traditional owners of the land, and indeed they should be. But nobody can deny that there is a culture, a national identity, and a whole new history intertwined with the story of this land. We weren't there when Australia was invaded. We're here now, and we have a claim here, too.

And that's why I think that January 26th should be, if anything, more like ANZAC Day - a sobering day to reflect on the life we have here, the complicated history of bitterness and olive branches we have, and at what cost to its own people, of all races, that this nation came about. January the 26th should not play host to a light-hearted celebration that overshadows what really happened centuries ago, and gets people thinking deeply about their love of this nation--something that this date doesn't really represent.

Unfortunately, Aboriginal rights weren't a going concern in the first decade of the twentieth century. And since that was when January 26th began to be celebrated... well, let's just say nobody was thinking about any of this back then. It's highly unlikely that the date will be changed. I think it should be, but I don't think it will happen.

To add a final anecdote: By law I have to be paid for a public holiday. Because I couldn't go to work (and I would rather have), I wanted to do something for the community instead. So I got up at five in the morning and helped out with a free Rotary Club community Australia Day breakfast. An odd choice, considering how strongly I felt about this, but the only actual choice around. And besides, I'm not going to say people can't celebrate their nation on a day they genuinely believe is for celebrating it, and even though I was facilitating it, I was also helping to ensure that people who didn't get a good feed all the time actually got one that day. That's a good cause.

At the time I thought that my pay for taking Australia Day off would be equivalent to blood money, but what I saw at that breakfast kind of changed my mind. There was a range of people from all races: African, Asian, Caucasian, and yes, plenty of Aboriginal people. All were celebrating Australian heritage as they saw it. At one point I looked up to see an Aboriginal woman giving a speech about her own national identity--publicly celebrating Australia Day. Since I wasn't able to pay much attention to what was going on up the front (I know there was a banjo involved somewhere), I don't know whether she was the token Aboriginal person for the event--but I do know that she wouldn't have been up there if she personally hadn't wanted to be. That's not how we do things.

So we have racial tension to deal with. It is the elephant in the room for a lot of us. It is publically acknowledged with exquisite discomfort and shame at every possible function that might need it mentioned to be on the safe side. It is referenced subtly in any Aboriginal speech given to a room full of whitefellas. But I saw no protests yesterday. I saw no outrage. There would, of course, have been some somewhere, but that breakfast wasn't feeling any effects. I saw a group of people all celebrating something they loved. The issues surrounding the date might have mattered to them, but they didn't matter enough to visibly mar their own celebration and general enjoyment of the day. And the fact remains that the protesters over January 26th are in a definite minority. We can't treat this as a massive social outrage, when, though it is an issue that needs to be sorted out, it isn't a massive social outrage.

So I suppose I'm undecided as to whether or not I should make a definite decision not to celebrate Australia Day next time, and where the line is on celebration. I will still, however, help with some sort of community event, same time next year.

***

If you're reading this, it's statistically unlikely that you even come from the Southern Hemisphere, let alone from Australia. If you are, what do you think about Australia Day? If you're Aboriginal, what do you think? Are you offended by anything I've said?

If you're not Australian, what do you think about your country's equivalent holiday/s? What about your own country's murky past, and the racial tensions that people sometimes pretend don't exist? I'd really like to know about more than my own little corner of the world.

Please keep from being offensive. Passionate declarations are allowed as long as they're not intended to be overly inflammatory (a little bit of inflammatory I suppose is unavoidable). While I won't delete or block you for differing in opinion with me, this is my blog and I'd like to keep it nice.

Can't get much stranger than liking Hannah Montana

A few months ago, I was reading a review of Miley Cyrus' film The Last Song. The reviewer noted that the movie overall was pretty bad, but that Miley has a flair for broad comedy, or something along those lines. I'm paraphrasing, because I cannot for the life of me find that web page again. If it even was on the internet.

So because I'm interested in girls doing comedy and being genuinely funny at it, I wanted to see her in action.

I'm going to digress here because this is something I wanted to talk about, since most girls in most comedy movies just aren't funny. In terms of romantic comedies, Sandra Bullock was only funny in While You Were Sleeping, and Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, and Katherine Heigel in none of the ones that I've seen. Maybe it's the writers, since I've noticed that rarely does a female character in a chick flick have any good lines or any kind of comedic dominance over any situation they're placed in; maybe they're just not funny.

Courtney Cox and Lisa Kudrow in Friends weren't bad. My personal jury's still out on Jennifer Aniston. She seems like she has just enough comic timing to make a funny line work, but somehow she doesn't have the extra zazz or whatever that gets the really big laughs. Maybe I'm missing something--after all she has a lot of fans. But it's like the women in the movies I mentioned above: they all seem to be able to deliver a line well, but then you look back and realise, "Hey, that scene was actually meant to be funny, not just have some flow to it."

Moving on, Melissa McCarthy is one of my favourite comedy actresses. She had nearly no good lines in Mike and Molly--but in Bridesmaids (coincidentally written by a woman) she is a force to be reckoned with. She is funny. (If we're talking Mike and Molly, we're only going to talk about Katy Mixon, the stoner sister of Melissa McCarthy's character. I really sincerely wish she had her own show.) Every single lead actress in the BBC Coupling is funny. Raven Symone is funny. Kaley Cuoco can normally hold her own in The Big Bang Theory, especially in scenes with Jim Parsons, but Sara Gilbert, who played Leslie Winkle was far and away my favourite.

I'd also like to add that yesterday I saw some of Margaret Cho's standup comedy. She too is hilarious and deserves every fan she's got, but I'm not sure I'm ready to go down that rabbit hole. Um... no pun intended.

Reading over what I just wrote, TV seems to be holding up better in the comedy stakes. Perhaps it's because shows are so dependent on ratings that they really have to get their casting choices right, whilst not being as dependent on star power as movies seem to be.

Anyway. I need to wrap this laundry list up. Back to Miley Cyrus.

I thought, I have to check this out. So I first of went to Google to get an idea of what I should watch (Season 2 seemed to be the most recommended), and then went and secretly borrowed the correct Hannah Montana DVDs from a certain younger relative of mine.

Took me a while to get around to them, but tonight I couldn't sleep. 'Twas the perfect time to watch 'em.

And so, Reader, I watched them. And, Reader? Miley Cyrus is funny. Emily Osment is funny (possibly funnier). Those two girls who play Amber and Ashley are funny.

Yes, they all overact at times, and Miley sometimes shouts her lines or delivers the serious lines in a tone that screams so loudly "I'm Sincere!" that it feels fake--but. She is still learning. She has enough charisma to make up for these shortcomings. She's not afraid to look really, really stupid. And what's more, she doesn't just have enough ability to time her lines well and get from A to B respectably--she adds funny on her own through facial expressions, voice and stance. Pretty much any technique or body part she can use to add some funny? She uses it. Give her the right lines and Miley Cyrus nails them consistently, because Miley Cyrus is a genuinely funny person, and if she sticks with this kind of thing, she will end up being very good at what she does. She's already doing amazingly well.

I was never a fan. I was even a bit of a hater not so long ago ago (because it's Hannah freaking Montana, and it used to be cool to groan about it, much as it has been more recently to groan about Justin Beiber. Ahh, peer pressure), but I'm ready to take it back. And, well, she's adorable. I know, I know, it's not like she's six.

Hannah Montana as a show has a fair amount of other redeeming factors beyond Miley--among them, Jason Earles and Billy Ray Cyrus (even Mitchel Musso and Moses Arias have their moments), talented guest stars, some stand-out minor characters, humorous song snippets, and the writing. The plots are average at best and ludicrous at worst; the structure of the show allows for little creativity and no fantastic A and B plot collisions--but the jokes for the most part remain genuinely funny (and get a few parental bonuses in too, if you're paying attention. And... I kinda was). It's far, far more than you'd expect to get from a sickeningly plastic Disney package deal--and far, far better than a lot of shows I've seen. I've heard things about Seasons 3 and 4 that mean I'm staying away, however.

So. Yeah. Add another item to the list of very guilty pleasures, cause I'm not sure I'm ready to give those DVDs back just yet.

It's a very smart move on my part to tell the internet about it almost immediately.

Once upon a time

I miss innocence.

I miss the times when I accepted what happened in a novel just because it happened. I miss the 'okay, let's go with that new plot development' attitude I used to have.

I miss the time before I began to see the way writers structured a tv show or a book series, and I could get fully outraged over a plot development, having no idea about what was going to happen. Nowadays, I can tell you the three most likely options for the way the latest stunning climax will be resolved. I can tell you about how real life will probably dictate what happens next in a show with a vulnerable actor or awful producers. I can figure out how this latest development relates to the arc as a whole.

I can guess which guy the girl will end up with because of the pattern of the story that's gone before. I can catch the hints that mean the thing I'm hoping for is never going to happen.

I can get mad at abuses of technique that I never used to notice because I didn't know they existed.

Gone are the days when I'm purely carried along by the story. Oh, those moments are still there, don't get me wrong--but they're always tainted by the way I now know that the author is a fallible person. Just because they got published, doesn't mean they always know how to write a story in the best way.

The mystery's kind of gone.

Maybe it's because of the internet opening my eyes to fans who didn't take things lying down, actively protesting against something like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies.

Maybe it's because now that I've begun to seriously learn about how to write, and write well, that I notice these things. I notice what I should and shouldn't be doing. I muse on what I would have done instead, or how I would resolve the situation if I were writing it.

Or maybe it's simply an overdose of TV Tropes.

Whatever. Now I live in a land of doomed but hardy Penny/Sheldon shippers and once-beloved stories that don't quite make the grade anymore.

I may have begun to realise that I can have my own opinions on a character's fate; I may have begun to critically think about literature; I may have a better understanding and control over developments in my stories--but with the coming of all these things, cynicism has set in.

Damn it.