The Best of 2013 According To Me

Best Albums:

Most of these were on the Rolling Stone list of best albums which reinforces my theory that I have great taste.

HAIM - Days Are Gone
Lorde - Pure Heroine
Arcade Fire - Reflektor
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
Tegan and Sara - Heartthrob
Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Soundtrack
London Grammar - If You Wait
Portugal.the Man - Evil Friends

M.I.A. - Matangi

Best Movies:

Now this is just a list of the movies that I saw this year that I enjoyed the most.  In order of release date, not quality.  

There are lots of movies that I saw this year that are not on this list.  Like 'Thor: The Dark World' and 'Beautiful Creatures'.  They are not on this list because they were not good. 

And there are lots of movies not on this list that are great and are going to be nominated for Oscars and such.  Like 'Gravity' and '12 Years a Slave'.  They are not listed because, with a few exceptions, I found that I just didn't feel like watching anything that wasn't going to make me laugh or involve explosions and/or supernatural creatures.  

Warm Bodies
Side Effects
The Sapphires
Iron Man 3
Now You See Me
Much Ado About Nothing
This Is The End
The Bling Ring
The Heat
The Way Way Back
The World's End
Ender's Game
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Frozen
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Best TV:

I watch a LOT of television.  And I generally don't watch things I don't enjoy watching.  

So this is just a list of the shows I enjoyed watching the most in 2013.  Ranked in order of how much I looked forward to them each week and how torturous it was for me to wait for them when they were on hiatus.

Breaking Bad
The Walking Dead
American Horror Story
Game of Thrones
The Originals
Scandal
Orphan Black
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The Mindy Project
The Killing
Veep
Family Tree

Fanfiction: A Beginners Guide

For those of you out there with hobbies that involve going outside and interacting with other human beings, fanfiction is what happens when an obsessive geek discovers the internet.  More specifically, when he or she discovers that they can put anything they want on the internet and other obsessive geeks will read/look at/listen to it.

Some of you out there may already be aware of fanfiction and that either means you are an obsessive geek or you know an obsessive geek who doesn't know when to shut up and stop embarrassing him or herself.

For those of you I mentioned earlier, who don't know, here's the Urban Dictionary definition:

"A piece of fiction within a fandom utilizing characters and situations from a pre-existing work including (but not limited to) books, television programs, films, and comic strips."

As you may have guessed, I am quite familiar with this particular dark corner of the internet because I am, as I have written about many times, incredibly obsessive and incredibly geeky.

Now don't worry, this post is not meant in anyway to advocate or sell non-geeks on the idea of fanfiction.  This is meant to illuminate for you normals just how batshit insane some of us are.  Because it is hilarious.

(At this point I would like to state for the record that I have never written a fanfiction and I try to steer clear of the really fucked up shit.)

The first thing you should know is that there is an entire vocabulary of fanfiction.  There are so many genres and sub-genres of fanfiction that it would be impossible to list them all.  

As it mentions in Urban Dictionary, most fanfiction is based on some kind of romantic pairing of characters.  This Romance genre is then divided into either 'het' or 'slash' fiction, meaning the pairing is either heterosexual or homosexual.  

Now when I say that stories are focused on romantic pairings, that does not mean that they are limited to characters that are actually paired together in the original work.  Oh no.  Let us not limit ourselves.  If some weirdo wants to read a story about Professor McGonagall and Hagrid gettin' it on, I assure you some other weirdo out there wrote that story.

Or maybe Harry/Draco is more your thing.

Hell, let's not even limit ourselves to same species pairings.  If you want to read about Professor McGonagall hooking up with Dobby the House-elf you can bet your ass somebody wrote it.

(Here's another fun fact:  if you have a particular couple that you're fond of, then my people would say that you 'ship' that pairing.  Get it?  Short for 'relationship'?)

But let's say an elderly witch and a house elf isn't off-putting enough for you.  Maybe you want to read something truly twisted.  Never fear, there's always a lower place.  

There's a whole genre of Incest pairings out there, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat.  Fans of 'Supernatural' have even come up with a specific name for stories about the Winchester brothers getting a little too close - 'Wincest'.

(Again, I would like to remind you, before I go on, that I do not read these stories.  I am just unfortunately aware of them and now so are you.)

Ok, ok, so incest is gross.  But you know what's grosser?  Incest plus pedophilia!  So if you're really demented, you can read a story that pairs Rick from 'The Walking Dead' with his pre-teen son Carl!  

Right now you might be thinking that I'm making this up and that no one would be sick enough to not only think that up and then write about it but then also post it on the internet where other people can witness their shame.  But you would be wrong.   

(I was going to try to post a link as proof but I started getting sucked into a black hole of depravity that I thought I might never be able to escape from.  So you're going to have to just take my word for it.)

I'm going to move on from this train of thought and not go into some of the other sub-genres you might stumble across because I feel dirty even thinking about writing them down here.

Instead let me explain the 'Original Character' fanfiction genre.  Because while it is pathetic, it's not horrifying.

An 'Original Character' story basically means the writer has taken her favorite character and paired that character with a character of her own invention.  

(I'm just going to assume the author is female from this point on because that is usually the case.)

You might assume that this means that this person is more creative than other writers because she has created a new character and integrated this character into the canon.  

(Canon means the actual story created by the people who are paid to do so.)

You would be wrong about this and I'll tell you why.  Because if you see that a story includes a pairing of a character from canon and an 'OC' this just means that the author has written herself into the story.  She has just taken the time to write down the fantasy she had where she is assigned to The Enterprise straight out of Star Fleet Academy and Spock, despite all his logic, falls madly in love with her.

"Oh yeah, this is gonna win an award at www.trekiverse.org this year."

Another fun quirk of fanfiction is the 'AU' or 'Alternate Universe' story.  In these the author has taken characters from the TV show or movie that she apparently loves and decided that the premise of said TV show or movie just doesn't work for her.  So instead of Tate and Violet from 'American Horror Story' meeting in a haunted house in the year 2011, they're star-crossed lovers from Victorian England.  And vampires.  Because, why not?

So now you might be asking yourself, if fanfiction is this lame, why do I read it?

Well part of that answer is because sometimes I am so deeply fixated on a current obsession that even the shittiest story about it sounds more entertaining than watching something new, created by professionals.

The rest of the answer would be that sometimes, sometimes, you find a story that is actually good.  Some of them are really, really good and you wonder why the hell this person is wasting their time on fanfiction when they could be writing novels.

And when I find that story I start to think that maybe this hobby isn't completely ridiculous.  Maybe fanfiction deserves some respect.  It's not all terrible and sad.

And then I see that there are 17,923 stories written about One Direction.

Memories

I was reading Hyperbole and a Half today (which is a blog that is amazingly hilarious: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/ ) and I was marveling at how well Allie Brosh remembers her childhood.  

How she remembers detail and even her own motivations as a 4 or 5 year old.  And the more I thought about it, the more I figured she must make most of it up.  She can't possibly remember this much about her maniacal need to get cake when she was a toddler.  Nobody remembers being a toddler.  She would have to be some kind of freak.

So I asked a couple of my friends and started to realize that maybe I am in fact the one who is a freak.  I did some very basic research (meaning I typed 'what is the average age for a first memory' into Google) and discovered that most people say their first memory is from when they were around 3.  And I remember nothing about being 3 or 4.  If pressed I can maybe scrounge up something from 5 or 6.  Maybe.  

Which apparently is weird.

Anything that I think may have happened from elementary school back has a 50/50 shot of being something that my imagination has created based on a story that my parents told me or a photograph I saw.  I can't even be sure that I existed before 1988.  

My experience most closely matches the way characters in Sci-Fi movies describe the vague, mundane memories that have been implanted to make them think they had a childhood. 

I had a dog named Lacey, she ran away but I don't remember what she looked like.  We used to dig holes in the backyard for fun.  There was a secret passage way in one of the kitchen cabinets that opened up in my closet... I think.

None of the lame recollections that I have can be strung together.  Its like, instead of a video camera, I have a polaroid. 

I don't have any emotional connection to any of these rudimentary images and impressions either, much less any kind of understanding of how my child mind worked.  

This all leads me to the only logical conclusion.  At some point, in my early years, the original Heather died and was replaced by me, a clone.  

Or possibly some kind of really convincing android.  Maybe my parents are in on it or maybe they don't even know.  Maybe their memories of the incident have been replaced with some other, benign memories.

I'm a replicant.  Or maybe a Cylon.  Maybe there was never an original Heather.  Maybe I was just created in a lab out of stem cells as a 7 year old and implanted with the memory of that albino kid I'm pretty sure I was in first grade with...

Or, maybe my medial temporal lobe is just defective and that's why my episodic memory is for shit. 

Google!

But I think I'm a clone.