Sorry to be so vague, but I guess this blog is not a priority for me at the moment. I’m busy on a couple of fandom challenges, which I guess can serve as an excuse.

Carry on!

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Thoughts on Kristine Kochanski

In a good story, every character plays a role. They often also do so in a bad story, or in a good story but in a bad way. What I mean is, a well-written character has a consistent psychology and their actions are compatible with it. A good writer will be able to incorporate this as a key element in the story, in which the character both acts logically and fulfils a purpose in driving the story forward. A badly written character is nothing but a role, and in a badly written story she is nothing but her psychology, superfluous to the plot. In a good story, perhaps the character has a psychology and the story is moving forward but it’s possible that she is forced into a role in a way that fails to be consistent with her psychology.

It seems to me that the character of Kristine Kochanski, Navigation Officer and love interest of Dave Lister in BBC/Grant Naylor’s space sitcom Red Dwarf, suffered several hiccups before settling into any kind of consistency, which then was sacrificed once more to better support the development of the male lead character.

In the first two seasons of Red Dwarf, Kochanski, then played by the wonderful Clare Grogan, barely appears, but is the woman Lister dreams of. This will remain consistent: she is his ideal of home, love, marriage and happiness, despite the fact that – at this point of the story – he has never had a relationship or even a lengthy conversation with her. She seems, much due to Grogan, a cheerful sort of a person, but has very few lines of her own, none of them very imaginative.

Much later, in Season 7, Kochanski reappears from a different timeline in which she survived the Red Dwarf mining ship’s radiation leak, this time played by Chloë Annett, and her past relationship with Lister is retconned. We learn that they had sex for two weeks with not much talking in between, after which she left him. In a flashback, she gives as her reason that she felt they should cool it and get to know each other outside the bedroom.

This paints retconned Kochanski as a fairly relaxed person with emotional sensitivity, who enjoys sex, is not ashamed of enjoying it, and recommends it to others as a past-time. This seems to be fairly consistent with Grogan’s rather cheerful performance as Kochanski, though we have no actual characterization to go on.

On the other hand, in the novels, which are not a part of the TV canon, her reason for breaking up with him was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend. While TV’s Kochanski seems to genuinely like, if not love, Lister, in the novels he was nothing but a rebound.

When Kochanski reappears in the storyline after being stuck in the timeline we have been following, she finds herself surrounded by people who, in a sense, she knows, but who have different experiences from hers. The most striking is that during the last few years she had developed a serious relationship with a hologram of Lister, who seems very different from Lister as he used to be and as he is in our timeline – more grown-up, more of the sort of a man a girl is supposed to fall in love with – that she can’t, and doesn’t want to, think of them as the same person. Unfortunately this is played as if she thinks Lister is not “good enough” for her, which is a text Lister himself has been subscribing to since Season 1.

We further learn that Kochanski had rich parents and a sheltered childhood, which seems to set her up as too delicate for sweaty boys’-club mining ship conditions. This is absurd considering she has lived on the same mining ship, presumably for years, in a fairly unglamorous branch of the military, and has had cadet training. The suggestion of her being too high-class for Lister is similarly inconsistent with the fact that she had no problem having a fun, enthusiastic fling with him back when he held the lowest rank on the ship.

These details all have their separate purposes: to give Lister a love interest though he has none available on board; to paint Lister as an optimist, for even thinking an officer would be interested in him; to set up romantic/sexual tension between Lister and Kochanski, but make it so it can’t be realized; to make her look like a more high-status, desirable mate through liberal application and assumption of classism; and to make jokes about the differences between men and women. These are purposes she fulfils with little regard for keeping her characterization consistent.

Sometime around the Season 7 episode “Duct Soup”, though, she seems to settle into a purpose as the sensible one in the crew, as well as Lister’s emotional support, a role previously filled by the departed Rimmer. Rimmer used to distract Lister from his loneliness and the hopelessness of his situation by giving him someone to compete with and be annoyed with. Kochanski distracts him as well, because he wants her and can’t have her, but also because she has an emotional connection and rapport with him. Rimmer and Kochanski were also both thoroughly human companions, unlike the cat or the mechanoid, and therefore likely essential for Lister’s sanity.

It’s also from this point on that her characterisation seems to solidify. She’s shown as empathetic, sensible, competent, sophisticated and tough. She is still the Woman and the Prize, but no longer only that. Again, I can’t quite tell how much of the bearing and melancholy in Kochanski during this period comes from the choice of actress, but it does seem markedly different from the cheerful Kochanski of the early seasons.

Season 8 ends in full action mode, and we return to the story nine years later in Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. Lister is mourning Kochanski, thinking her dead, but we later learn that she had watched him grow alcoholic and unmotivated and had left the Red Dwarf voluntarily because she didn’t bear to watch it any longer. No mention is made of whether or not they were lovers at this point. As we never see these scenes, they’re difficult to discuss, though they suggest that she braved loneliness rather than be with the crew, and that she forewent the possibility of children and family – unless there’s something more Lister doesn’t know about. Big choices, and I’m not so charitable as to think these have any reason other than the writer’s need to motivate Lister.

She never appears in Back to Earth herself, but Lister’s subconscious conjures her as a possibility, looking perfect and immaculate, promising to go away with him and make him happy. Nothing of this imagined Kochanski is like her, except for her looks – she’s the villain, the seductive dream meant to distract him from reality.

This whole confused history seems to me a prime example of using a character for purposes that don’t arise from her characterization at all; using a character as a tool to forward plot or mess with other characters. What’s remarkable is that a character did emerge from this writing briefly during seasons 7 and 8 that was admirable in many ways, neither perfect nor weak, but a competent, intelligent woman with legitimate pride and anger as well as a capacity for sympathy. She held her own and supported her friends, and was loyal and brave, and deserved better than to devolve back into a plot device.

You could argue that Lister is the main character and therefore using the love of his life to tell us something more about him is legitimate, but this falls apart when we’re supposed to connect emotionally with his grief, his love, or his loneliness. Identifying with this love affair would be easier if what we saw was a genuine connection with a genuine character;  empty longing for some idealized figment that changes according to the writer’s whims doesn’t pack quite the punch.

There’s talk of a Season 10 (Season 9 having become, and seemingly set to remain, the lost Atlantis of Red Dwarf). If it happens, I hope that Kochanski, if she appears, will be the Kochanski we got to know, with her own agency and consistency apart from making Lister suffer, or making Lister happy. I miss her, and to lose her completely would be a shame.

I do intend to repay that debt, though. Here’s hoping.

In other news, I’ll be travelling from tomorrow, so there won’t be a comic this weekend, but there will be two next week.

Madame Zizi seems to be the popular vote for the comic-I-will-actually-hold-to-a-standard. So be it! Next step is to find a name for it that isn’t French for a penis, and start writing it in earnest. In the meanwhile, weekly silly whatever-comics will continue.

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Geeks & Dragons
Original Pitch
- A strip-form comic about five 16-45 year old geeks – a tech geek, sci-fi gamer geek, music geek, fantasy geek and a sex geek – who find a miniature dragon and have to figure out what to do with it, where it came from, and how to get Ruth to stop embarrassing them all by believing in fairies after this.

Suffragettes Vs. Aliens
Original Pitch
- An NSFW comic with only minor violence and no nudity whatsoever, SvsA would follow the adventures of four turn-of-the-century feminists as they try to stop Space Rangers and Space Monsters from dragging Earth into their silly little pissing contest. It would have dick jokes. Lots and lots of dick jokes.
NSFW extras on Dreamwidth: one – two – three

Madame Zizi
Original Pitch
Madame Zizi may have to be called something else in its final form, but it’s a light adventure about an ornery vampiress who doesn’t look the part, her man-servant, and her mad scientist. They were forced out of her ancestral castle and are now on the road disguised as a fortune-teller act, and they are travelling the land trying to find out what happened to the rest of Zizi’s clan.
Extra on Dreamwidth

Gods of Cabaret
Original Pitch
College student Blue Connor returns home to the Cabaret Palourde, only to find out one of her mothers is, for a functional value, the Greek Goddess Aphrodite. She had been living a low-key human life to hide from her crazy family – and to stay with the family she loves. Now, she’s been found.

Eve of the Gods
Original Pitch
Eve Albertson and her uncle Carl Blake run a detective agency in the 1930s. He is the face of the organization; she’s the brains, and kind of the brawn as well. They get mixed up in a case of a stolen museum artifact that unravels a supernatural secret world leading right back – to Eve. (Hint: It’s Ragnarök Tiem.)

And finally the “half”…

Amir the Wolf
Original Pitch
This is really nothing but a jumbled collection of ideas right now, not much to show, but if it gets picked on the power of “trans werewolf”, “future people” and “possibly some pirates but they’re not important”, I’ll damn well work on it until there’s a storyline in there, too.

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Poll in the sidebar! Vote, and watch me dance like a puppet on your string.

So I decided to make a sixth comic pitch, and THEN it’ll be over and time to vote, for reals, promise.

Each of these pitches has been based on a combination of two voted character types: geeks and dragons, 19th century ladies and space invaders/rangers, vampires and mad scientists, Greek Gods and cabaret performers, and finally Norse gods and sleuths. So who to pair pirates with?

Here’s a new quick poll in the sidebar, just in case you have an opinion about this. Closes on Wednesday.

“Obviously its ridiculous to think that anyone ever “wants or deserves” to be raped but to ignore that how someone behaves affects the possibility of their being raped is foolish and to start a campaign to deny it is irresponsible.”
Mark, Male (comments to the Not Ever anti-rape apology campaign)

Some men find a woman wearing sandals irresistible. Something about the slutty way they’re displaying all those toes. Perhaps they’ll be aroused by noticing the barest suggestion of breasts under a saggy shirt. Some get totally turned on by some normal speaking voices, or a fully clothed female outline, or hair peeking out from under a headscarf, let alone a woman who goes about scarfless; or perhaps they’re into women wearing glasses, or women wearing prosthetics or using wheelchairs.

Burqas for all! It’s our responsibility as women. Of course it’s not enough because you can still tell a fat chick from a skinny one and you haven’t raped a fatty yet and suddenly the idea is totally turning you on…

Still totally her fault though.

Don’t believe me? Check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actual data on U.S. men living with HIV. Even assuming that all those men whose risk factors included “male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use” got infected through sex, the numbers come down to:

Male to male sex: 218,134
Other: 153,176

I’d like to know how you get “50 times as likely” out of that!

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Edit: Further number crunching: calculating from the current population of the United States and assuming half of them are men and 37% of those men have had mtm sexual experiences (ref, ref), roughly 0.38% of American men may have got HIV from mtm sex, and 0.15% definitely got HIV from something else.

Granted, 37% is a high number, but that’s the only reference I could find for sexual experiences versus sexual identity.

Edit #2: National Opinion Research Center puts the figure of American men at who’ve had m/m sexual experiences at 4.9% which makes Sheenan’s number more plausible but still wrong; the way it crunched out for me was “28 times more likely”.

This is not a review, per se. The below consists of three parts:

- a plus and minus breakdown
- list of apps you will probably want
- conclusion

So here we go.

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Part 1: Breakdown.

Note: I hope you won’t just count the balance here. The points are not of equal value.

Plus:
- it is very instinctive to use (if you only want to use the services it offers; I mean here that the interface is handy)
- just the right size, and light
- fast – no waiting around, apps open when you click them, and the device turns on when you ask it to
- simplicity could be a plus for some
- you can’t lose the most important apps (if your most important apps are the default ones) in the sea of apps, because they’re always on the front
- pre-included Gmail app
- sync with Google calendar available
- the Maps app works beautifully when connected online
- can be charged just by connecting it to a PC
- clear, beautiful screen that shows up surprisingly well in sunlight, too
- highly customizeable with apps, due to its meager default functions
- excellent battery lasting power – I only managed to get it down to 44% during 18 hours of travelling, though it should be noted I didn’t have it on all that time; did write five reviews and unlock two new frog skins on Dizzypad, though.

Minus:
- no possibility of keeping the Maps on the iPad while not connected online – Edit: I have done the iPad wrong here! It does save some maps – but only ones you viewed while connected.
- Maps app has no routing capability – Edit: Again, I was mistaken. It automatically plots a route from your location to whatever location you select from search.
- no USB port and no possibility of direct transfer of files; transfer is only possible clunkily through iTunes *2
- can’t select a default search engine other than Yahoo or Google
- cannot work and sync at the same time
- no support for some very common media file formats such as wmw and avi
- iBooks won’t recognize non-copy-protected pdf e-books and hence they can’t be synced (unless you get a third-party app like Bookman which, fair enough, is free)
- limited pdf support (only as attachments or online in Safari, unless you get a third party app)
- did not come with earbuds
- can’t organize photos with the included photo app – not even to put them in folders, forget about metadata or file conversion or editing
- can’t edit metadata in the iPod application; in general, I guess editing files or folders is not a thing the iPad does
- can’t organize the icons on the desktop – all your apps will be on it in alphabetical order, save pre-included apps, which will always be on the front Edit: My mistake again. Hold finger over icon until all icons begin to wiggle. You can then delete or reorganize apps. Drag icon to the edge of the screen to put it on a different home screen. Click button to return to normal state.
- email/calendar sync, at least as pre-installed, only for MS Exhange, MobileMe (and that’s just a 30 day trial), Gmail, Yahoo and AOL
- no stylus included
- no protective sleeve included
- no alarm clock
- needs a lot of apps just to fix basic requirements
- text editing takes some getting used to; took me ages to find how to control text selection of less than one paragraph, more than one word
- cannot have two apps on at the same time, unless one of them is iPod; on the other hand this makes it easy to close an app, and they all open up quickly if you have to reopen them

Hypothetical plus:
- if you get a stylus and an art app it can work like an electronic sketchpad you can carry around, which is potentially awesome
- Jobs has promised iBooks WILL support pdf later this month

Not a device issue but relevant to our interests:
- apps are really cheap, and a lot of useful ones are also free or available as a limited free version
- make sure to download iPAD apps, because iPhone apps work on it but they’re in iPhone resolution, which is no fun

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Part 2: App recs.

Here are some apps you’ll probably want on it, free unless otherwise mentioned.

If you like e-books:
Bookman – transfer your pdf format e-books (and other pdfs) on iPad for easy browsing. This is still done through iTunes, but is not a folder sync, thank heavens – you only transfer what you want, and from whichever folder you want. May become unnecessary when iBooks starts to support pdf, but what the hell, it’s free and it works right now.
iBooks – quite a few downloads of free classics, but only shows iStore downloads, even when you have other e-books saved on the iPad.
Amazon Kindle for iPad – because it IS a huge and easy e-book shop.

If you’re an artist:
Sketchbook Pro – though you might want to also get an iPad compatible stylus, unless you’re really good at fingerpainting. (€5,99) Also available as a free lite version.
Note: Here‘s how to make your own stylus with conductive foam, some wire and a used pen. Thanks Collin!

If you write a lot:
Notebooks (€6,99) – no real formatting functions, but that hardly matters as you can’t save and export the files anyway, but it allows you to save notes in a “Book” (essentially a folder), which is more than the default Notes app does. You can then send the text to yourself or others by email, as plain text, not an attachment. It’s good for when you’re away from your PC and still want to be writing – notes, reviews, poetry, fiction, whatever takes your fancy.

If you blog:
BlogPress – supports LJ, WordPress, Blogger, Youtube, Flickr etc – not Dreamwidth or Photobucket though, which is weird. (€2,39)
Photobucket for iPad app exists separately, though.

If you have a non-3G iPad but own a Nokia S60 phone, N900 tablet or Windows Mobile OS device:
JoikuSpot (this goes on your phone) – turns your 3G device into a WLAN hotspot, to which you can then hook your iPad. Operator costs, of course, apply.

For organizing your photos:
Photosort (€1,59) – allows you to organize image files into folders directly on the iPad – but on the other hand it takes double the space because the photos are copied from the default Photos app to Photosort, so you have to go delete them from Photos after copying them to Photosort, which can be a little annoying.

If you like brainless, addictive games:
Dizzypad

If you chat online:
IM+ Lite – has ICQ, AIM and MSN among others, and honestly I don’t see why you’d need the paid version.

Other:
Kayak for finding flights.
Wikipanion, one tap access to Wikipedia, with smooth simple presentation.
Skype, even if they’ve only got a low-res iPad compatible iPhone app out at the moment.
Epicurious for recipes.
Awaken for an alarm clock.

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Part 3: Conclusion.

You need a lot of apps to make the iPad a really useful device. Fortunately, apps are available in large numbers. You also need an Internet connection for some of the most useful apps – I’m thinking Maps and email, and Wikipanion and IM+ if you choose to install them  - which would seem to recommend the 3G version, but see above re: Joikuspot and below re: operator contracts being evil. With Bookman it also makes a great e-reader alternative.

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Any questions? If you want to know something specific, I can see if I can find it out for you.

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*1 iPad 3G is only available with a specific operator contract – you have to get the contract if you want the iPad. No thanks. I like to be able to switch my SIM cards around and pay – or not pay – whatever I wish. In the long run, even with a device that would be free with a contract (and the iPad is not), getting an unlocked device and avoiding a contract can even save you money.
*2 Let me just say this iTunes transfer thing is really annoying. If you want to transfer pictures to the iPad, you have to select a folder to keep in sync – not, for example, just a given file to transfer. You have to set aside a separate folder of images you want to keep synced to the iPad. You can select autosync or not. Either way, everytime you connect your iPad to your PC, it’ll open the heavy iTunes program on the PC looking for something to sync, even if you kinda just wanted to charge your iPad on the run. There is such a thing as a Camera Connector Kit (not included) that will allow transfers from your camera.