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frayadjacentWeather and Climate
My department chair gave a great presentation at this week's weather discussion on what happened with "Nemo". The storm, not the fish. The situation started about a week before, with two low pressure systems in the Eastern half of the US, one in the midwest, one roughly over North Carolina (if I remember correctly! He drew maps on the white board).
Now, in the Northern Hemisphere, winds blow counterclockwise around low pressure systems. These rotating storms extend out hundreds of miles, so the winds from one storm can affect another one. That looks to be exactly what happened in this case. Basically when two storms are positioned like this, each storm's rotation affects the other one, and the result is that they rotate around each other. This is called the Fujiwhara effect.
So, the storms are rotating around each other, and as they spin around they're drawn closer together. Remember how when figure skaters spin, and pull their arms in, they spin faster?
This is due to conservation of angular momentum, and the same thing happens in storms. So as the storms were drawn closer together, they rotated faster -- they got stronger.
At the same time, the storms were blowing from west to east, as these things do, and so the storm intensification happened over the Northeastern US, and that counterclockwise rotation meant that a bunch of cold ass air was blown into the NE from arctic Canada, and there was plenty of moisture in the system from the parts of it that had come from the South. The result was a huge blizzard, with record-breaking snow in many places, especially Connecticut.
In other weather (and climate) news, last month was the hottest on record in Australia. From the University of Reading World Weather News:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I know this has been making its way around LJ/DW already, but this article about why Buffy is so much more than a metaphor for growing up resonated strongly with me, what I find so moving about the show. Why it is My Show.
There's also been an interesting discussion of (among other things), the common claim that Angel is a more mature show than Buffy. Here's what I wrote in the comments:
I guess I can see why people would claim that Angel is a more mature show, even if I don't exactly agree. First and most obviously, the characters are a bit older, on average. The first few seasons of Buffy contain many metaphors for teenage years, while the first season of Angel's metaphors circle around issues many people face in their early 20's. The tone of Angel is, on the whole, darker than on Buffy, which many people conflate with more mature.
And the show focuses more explicitly on thematic existential questions. What is a just and moral way to live in this world? How do I know what is right and wrong when there is no greater meaning, no "sky bully" to tell me the answers? How should I fight injustice? Buffy raises these questions too, but much more obliquely, with its focus more on the organic emotional development of its characters and their relationships and less explicitly on existential themes.
Interestingly, an area where Buffy is clearly *more* mature is in the emotional development of its characters. And I don't mean that the characters on Buffy are more or better developed (though I'd argue strongly that they are) but rather that they are more emotionally mature. Both shows create drama and pathos through characters' inability to communicate their needs, to support each other when they need it, to make sound decisions, and to even understand what they're own needs and desires *are*.
But Angel takes it to a Whole. New. Level. It actually frustrates me sometimes how often characters on that show fuck up -- sometimes destroying their own and others' lives -- simply by not talking to each other about about their concerns or problems. Characters on BtVS make those mistakes too, but on the whole they at least try, and for the most part they maintain a base level of trust and communication that never fully breaks down like it does -- repeatedly -- on Angel.
Also, I'm kind of sad that there seems to be this awesome, thriving community of Buffy fans on LJ and not DW. I started this journal primarily for vidding, but sometimes I miss discussing My Show. I could always put more effort into LJ, but I also dislike being split between two journals, and I just really prefer the look, stability, and lack of ads on DW. Plus so many of my vidding friends are here.
My department chair gave a great presentation at this week's weather discussion on what happened with "Nemo". The storm, not the fish. The situation started about a week before, with two low pressure systems in the Eastern half of the US, one in the midwest, one roughly over North Carolina (if I remember correctly! He drew maps on the white board).
Now, in the Northern Hemisphere, winds blow counterclockwise around low pressure systems. These rotating storms extend out hundreds of miles, so the winds from one storm can affect another one. That looks to be exactly what happened in this case. Basically when two storms are positioned like this, each storm's rotation affects the other one, and the result is that they rotate around each other. This is called the Fujiwhara effect.
So, the storms are rotating around each other, and as they spin around they're drawn closer together. Remember how when figure skaters spin, and pull their arms in, they spin faster?
This is due to conservation of angular momentum, and the same thing happens in storms. So as the storms were drawn closer together, they rotated faster -- they got stronger.
At the same time, the storms were blowing from west to east, as these things do, and so the storm intensification happened over the Northeastern US, and that counterclockwise rotation meant that a bunch of cold ass air was blown into the NE from arctic Canada, and there was plenty of moisture in the system from the parts of it that had come from the South. The result was a huge blizzard, with record-breaking snow in many places, especially Connecticut.
In other weather (and climate) news, last month was the hottest on record in Australia. From the University of Reading World Weather News:
Australia recorded its hottest month on record in January 2013, with both the average mean temperature of 29.68C [85.42 F] and the average mean maximum temperature of 36.92C (98.46), surpassing previous records set in January 1932. The national average maximum temperature on 7 January was the highest on record. Numerous stations set records for the most days in succession above 40C, including Alice Springs (17 days) and Birdsville (31 days). A large number of stations set all-time record high temperatures during the January heatwave, including Sydney (45.8C [114F] on 18 January) and Hobart (41.8C [107.24 F] on 4 January). The highest temperature recorded during the heatwave was at Moomba in South Australia (49.6C, 121F, on 12 January).The average temperature -- day, night, all month, across an entire continent -- was 85 F. The average daily high -- again, across the entire country -- was almost 100 F. That is just miserable.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
I know this has been making its way around LJ/DW already, but this article about why Buffy is so much more than a metaphor for growing up resonated strongly with me, what I find so moving about the show. Why it is My Show.
My point is that not once in the course of watching or re-watching Buffy did it ever feel to me like the supernatural elements of the story could be explained away as mere stand-ins for everyday experiences, shrunk down to the dimensions of ordinary life. On the contrary, the magic in Buffy gives the story its epic character and that epic-ness has drawn bigger, more deeply lodged emotions from me than any naturalistic drama ever has.and
As we watch Buffy take on an authoritarian principal, an ominously wholesome mayor, a covert government initiative that experiments on monsters, a patriarchal Watchers Council that seeks to control her power—each a representative of the established social order and its accompanying storylines—we hear Whedon whispering to us: You don’t have to accept this either. There’s another world, another way. See that crack in the wall?Of course, there are plenty of epic tales that hint at "another world, another way". The reason Buffy affects me so much more than most isn't only its epic, fantastical nature, but that nature in combination with a bunch of other things, mostly related to superb characterization and its number and variety of female characters with a complex web of relationships.
There's also been an interesting discussion of (among other things), the common claim that Angel is a more mature show than Buffy. Here's what I wrote in the comments:
I guess I can see why people would claim that Angel is a more mature show, even if I don't exactly agree. First and most obviously, the characters are a bit older, on average. The first few seasons of Buffy contain many metaphors for teenage years, while the first season of Angel's metaphors circle around issues many people face in their early 20's. The tone of Angel is, on the whole, darker than on Buffy, which many people conflate with more mature.
And the show focuses more explicitly on thematic existential questions. What is a just and moral way to live in this world? How do I know what is right and wrong when there is no greater meaning, no "sky bully" to tell me the answers? How should I fight injustice? Buffy raises these questions too, but much more obliquely, with its focus more on the organic emotional development of its characters and their relationships and less explicitly on existential themes.
Interestingly, an area where Buffy is clearly *more* mature is in the emotional development of its characters. And I don't mean that the characters on Buffy are more or better developed (though I'd argue strongly that they are) but rather that they are more emotionally mature. Both shows create drama and pathos through characters' inability to communicate their needs, to support each other when they need it, to make sound decisions, and to even understand what they're own needs and desires *are*.
But Angel takes it to a Whole. New. Level. It actually frustrates me sometimes how often characters on that show fuck up -- sometimes destroying their own and others' lives -- simply by not talking to each other about about their concerns or problems. Characters on BtVS make those mistakes too, but on the whole they at least try, and for the most part they maintain a base level of trust and communication that never fully breaks down like it does -- repeatedly -- on Angel.
Also, I'm kind of sad that there seems to be this awesome, thriving community of Buffy fans on LJ and not DW. I started this journal primarily for vidding, but sometimes I miss discussing My Show. I could always put more effort into LJ, but I also dislike being split between two journals, and I just really prefer the look, stability, and lack of ads on DW. Plus so many of my vidding friends are here.
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I was thinking of doing a Buffy re-watch sometime soon. I haven't watched any episodes in a few years, and I rather miss the Whedonverse.
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Agreed. And I hope you post if/when you rewatch! I will definitely be reading.
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I keep telling them to come over here, but they don't listen! They're all ~anti-DW for whatever reason. :(
I'm not really "in" Buffy fandom anymore, but it is my one true love, so anytime you want to talk Buffy, I'm here. :)
I think if the supernatural elements of Buffy were never more than metaphors, the show wouldn't have been nearly as good as it is. I love metaphors, it's great that things have that extra layer of meaning, but my primary investment was always in the characters - and the way that the supernatural was very much a part of their real lives.
I also think the whole "Don’t get hung up on the monsters and the magic. It’s all just a metaphor for growing up" argument is some kind of SF/F shame? Like, it can't just be a show with monsters and magic that's REALLY DAMN GOOD. It has to be "really" about something else, something normal and grounded, as though the monsters and magic will scare off anyone who's not a SF/F nerd. And maybe that's true, maybe it did scare people off, and that's why the show never really made it beyond cult favorite, but
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Same here -- but I've been doing a "rewatch" while clipping for a vid (not really watching at all; I have the volume turned off and I scrub through at 2x the speed and completely skip a lot of scenes), and it's got me hankering for more Buffy discussion. So glad to know you'll be around to talk Buffy too.
my primary investment was always in the characters - and the way that the supernatural was very much a part of their real lives.
Totally. The realism in Buffy is in the emotions and characters, not the stories or even the metaphors per se. I don't have to be able to relate Dawn's story to being adopted in order to care about how it affects the characters, because I care about the characters in and of themselves.
I also think the whole "Don’t get hung up on the monsters and the magic. It’s all just a metaphor for growing up" argument is some kind of SF/F shame?
Excellent point. I bet you've seen it, but you reminded me of
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http://lostboy-lj.livejournal.com/38109.html
And the thing is, my first response to the show was emotional; only secondarily was it intellectual, but that intellectual component - intertwined with the other - is what keeps me coming back to rewatch, to talk and think about it, makes it something more than forgettable popcorn entertainment. And yet I get that everyone receives it and processes in their own way (early season lovers, late season lovers, Xander fans, Banders, Spuffies, etc) and that's ok. It's part of what makes the show and the fandom so rich and interesting.
I've only done a quick perusal of Browne's essay and I notice that he mentions Whedon by name, a lot, and I guess that's the point of the essay, but I think that focusing on Whedon to the exclusion of everyone else on the team misses something, which is that the show is what it is because of an indefinable combination of talents - writers, actors, producers, etc, that no one has been able to reproduce since.
I do fan certain people from the show in a way that other fans don't. I do think that the things I love about BtVS are more about Whedon than about any of the other writer/directors. ON THE OTHER HAND, I think that the Whedon/Noxon collaboration especially, and in general the Whedon/Noxon/Espenson/Petrie/Fury/DeKnight/
Goddard/etc. confluence produced something much stronger than any of them as individuals can accomplish.
http://lostboy-lj.livejournal.com/37196.html?thread=385100#t385100
And I'd add the actors themselves to that list - they are all "auteurs" in a collaborative effort, so everything we see on the show (as with any tv show) is not just the result of one man's efforts.
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Until early season 3, when suddenly the plot started driving the characters, not the other way around. Suddenly they started doing things that made no sense, and for me the heart disappeared from the show. When the Jasmine storyline came along, and they basically retrofitted the entire show's arc for it, I just wailed in despair. It was like all the merit in everyone's individual journeys was taken away, they were all puppets. It tainted the whole show for me. Angel was my favourite show in the world, even more than Buffy, but to this day I've not watched it right to the end. One day I might be able to do it without being angry!
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I think if they'd kept up the same quality storytelling and character development in S3 & S4 as they did in S1-2 and (I'd argue, anyway) much of S5, then yeah, Angel would be a stellar show, and I'd never argue that Buffy was better quality. I'd still probably prefer Buffy for reasons of personal taste, but that's a different matter. The group dynamic in those first two seasons (and early in S3) is so fantastic. It kind of breaks my heart that it so thoroughly falls apart.
I also think that Wesley is one of the best developed characters I've seen on television*, and I think Angel was pretty well-developed. Cordy's arc in S1-early S3 was great, as was Gunn's S5 arc, which I ADORE. But then Fred and Lorne had very little development throughout the series, and were mostly used to propel other characters' stories, as were Cordy and Gunn in S3 & S4. So, taken as a whole, the show has real problems with characterization, but there are some great individual arcs. Which is basically what you already said. Sorry
BTW, was it unbearably hot in NZ in January as well? Or was that just Australia?
*Except for his actions in "Sleep Tight" -- I still find it a little hard to believe he wouldn't talk to anyone before doing something so extreme. What do you think?
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And I agree, I can't believe Wesley would have not talked to Cordelia before he took off with Connor.
We have had a lovely summer - it has been pretty warm, but because NZ is a long thin landmass, it doesn't heat up like Australia does. The sea cools it down. We were around 27C. There are some inland areas of the South Island where it can get up to 40C but mostly places hover in the mid 20's.
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Heh, that sounds about right. Though I do love "Waiting in the Wings". :D
Mid 20's sounds perfect, and pretty similar to a nice Seattle summer.
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