>((Cross your fingers for me to be able to get my BSB colum up the day after tomorrow, huh?))

I used to watch Ocean Girl

Actually, I used to watch Ocean Odyssey, because I am Bri’ish. But the show was Australian, and in Australia it was known as Ocean Girl.

I read it, too; there was a cinemanga-style phoo story adaption thing in Girl Talk, which was my favourite magazine. The radest thing about going to the Big Bash in year six was going to the Girl Talk booth and talking to the editor, getting a goodie bag and my nails done.

Ocean Girl was a pretty good show. It was the kind of sci-fi where the speculative aspect of the genre is just an add-on to our current real life, and Australia and New Zealand (something in the air? Or water?) were apparently really good at those from about 1994-2005. According to wikipedia the show was “an example of deep-ecology science fiction” - it was about two boys (both named, as the captain formally addressed them, “Master Bates” I am not kidding) whose mother’s job as a marine biologist demanded that they move to an under-sea research dome lab run-like-a-ship thing. They have to learn to get along in their new environment, in the cramped quarters with the other kids whose parents are ‘on-board’, with having left their friends, with their dastardly father’s absence, blah blah.. but then they also meet Neri, who is magic.

Course, she isn’t just a wizard did it-style magic. She lives alone on an Island, and can talk to a whale (Charlie) and swim underwater for extended periods and is terribly curious about the boys’ world whilst also fearing outside influence. Pretty straightforward Pocahontas-arc stuff, only eventually it turns out that Neri is actually an actual alien, from space. By the end the elder boy and she fall in love.

When it’s written down like that it sounds like just my kind of thing. Emotional drama on a backdrop of futuristic science fiction, with no gratuitous tit-flashing (because, For Kids), with a basically ridiculous premise played straight. Dark Angel, The Tribe, Dekaranger, Buffy, Kamen Rider Anything, The Girl From Tomorrow, classic X-Men, etc etc. And the costuming was good too - Neri wore a dressthing made out of what looked like natural fibres and fishing net, which was perfectly evocative of ‘ocean’ and ‘girl’ and even ‘alien’, really. The boys (and the other kids on the station, who were the gang in the background for use when needed) wore variations on a basic lab-base uniform which got across the whole “suddenly trapped in a military-style world away from home, grasping for identity and personal connection” thing. But somehow.. somehow it never really became “mine”.

You know what I mean when I say “mine”, right? It’s the difference between being a fan, and just tuning in or picking up. You know what I mean.

It kind of bugged me, what was so-called ‘wrong’ with Ocean Girl. It did. It went off-air in 1998 and I think I stopped watching before it finished, but it stayed at the back of my head somewhere. I was curious! But I watched the first eight or so episodes recently, and I think I figured out what my problem was.

Wikipedia, again, says that the show was set “in the near future”. We all, I think, know how poorly vague that can be. But that wasn’t the point here - the point was that the show never contextualises itself that way. That’s not the whole point, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 1994 I was seven, and as a seven year old it didn’t occur to me that underwater bio-dome laboratory stations didn’t actually exist. I didn’t know - I lived in inland England, and I was seven, and I had heard about Atlantis. I knew that science was pretty amazing, and that people had been to space. Sure, people could live underwater. Why not? With that as the only solid suggestion that the timeline on Ocean Girl and the timeline I was living on were out of sync - because I definitely never noticed any dates referenced the first time around, and I gotta say I never noticed any this second time around either - there was no reason for me to think Oh yes, of course, this is set next Sunday A.D. Of course! Culturally, things may be a little different!

That was a problem, because the hairstyles on the base-bound girls in this show were fipping wacky. I’m serious, I am fairly sure that this was the basic reason why I could never really get into OG’s groove. I can’t quite believe how small-minded that makes me look, either.

But see, at seven one is old enough to know about “normal” and “weird”. Honestly I don’t think this is a parental-fail thing - parents don’t know about which trainers are cool, and my parents raised me to not see “cool trainers” as something I was entitled to, but I still knew which ones were cool and that people valued them based on that. I may not have been completely down with omgtrainers or omgcool, but I still felt the pull of cool trainers. Y’know? Am I sounding totally well excuuuse me princess about being a judgemental asshole (at seven)?

It’s nice to see that the [whatever they call character designers on liveaction shows] were doing their job, being creative, experimenting. It’s good that they tried to do a bit of extra world-building. But the script, alas, completely let them down.

In Dune, things are different to now and nothing is explained; it’s just written as if what’s everyday to the characters in their weird drugged-up space-future is everyday to you, the reader - and that’s cool, it’s good, it makes the story larger and realer and engages you all over the shop. But in Dune, it’s more than just “Paul woke up in his perfectly normal bed, put on his perfectly normal trousers and shirt, went through the perfectly normal automatic door to the bathroom and looked in the mirror at his COMPLETELY BATTY ENORMOUS SQUARE BOUFFANT WHICH LOOKED CRAZY. He mused on how utterly usual everything was, especially his hair, which he never mentioned to anyone ever.”

Do you get my drift Ocean Girl?

I’ll show you pictures, now.

Mark, please - there are three characters here. One of theme is batshit bonkers in the locks department, two are merely real-world unusual and what you might call bold. If I saw them alone, or in real life, I wouldn’t squint at them or wonder what their game was! I’d think, you rock that puff lady, right on. They wouldn’t unsettle or throw me out of a story in just about any other circumstances. It’s just the volume of unusual that’s here, all crammed together, never mentioned, discussed, spotlit or even lampshaded.. there’s a kid with a fringe cut in steps, too, and a boy whose details I have forgotten but who again alone would look interesting and individual, but packed with the rest makes/made me want to shout EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN! TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON because I know that that isn’t what you’d get if you just took a bunch of people!

It’s a SQUARE, just on her head. Why.

If you are going to evidence cultural shift, even ‘just’ visually, you need to note that your story is not set now or kids like me, who pick up on patterns but are too young to quite articulate or realise the questions forming due to them will just not be all that into your show. And it will bug them to all heck, maybe for twelve years.

Then I guess they’ll write a blog post about it, and maybe someone will read that and think “I remember that show, I loved it. I think I will buy the dvds RIGHT NOW” let me know if that’s YOU, so maybe my tirade is all in vain, and it’s actually a pretty good long-term marketing strategy.. ..?

It’s still really annoying though.

Happy watching, ocean girls and boys.

Don’t lose your faith in me. I’m unemployed again (nobody needs a Dinner Lady when all the kids are on holiday), so lots of time to feel like I need to do at least something for society at large.

I’m working on things to make you ponder or inform you, honest. You will get them eventually.

..Not next week though (probably), because I get to go to the beach!

Not blogger-free. My mum’s colleague’s daughter’s hand-me-sideways free.

They’re kind of loose at the waistband, and they ride rather lower at the rear than I’d like when I sit, squat or bend, and they’re tight enough on the thighs that when I put them on (and then periodically, through the day) I have to do the kind of lunges that used to give energetic schoolmasters a bad name.

But they’re mine, and they cost me nothing, and they represent the thoughtfulness and unwillingness to waste of strangers. And they fit inside my boots easily, and I can make them work for me. And they’re a nice colour, a sort of almost-silver. There’s a black pair too, actually, which I should have worn today because I have already got bicycle-chain oil down my right calf. I didn’t notice it happening..

I wore them for my Last! Day! of School! and they stood up to it fine. We are now a team.

The lighting was off, clearly, when I took these. So I fiddled (to no effect) with all the powers of iPhoto, on the one shot where I managed to get my whole foot in frame. A more exaggerated pose too, obviously - I prefer looking a little silly to looking like I’m trying not to look anything but ‘nice’.

Lunges:

And in a moment of colour-normality.. Why couldn’t the balanced photos have happened next to the apple tree? Apple trees are pleasant!

The newly purple stitching about the neck of my sweater matches my boots so well.. I don’t expect anyone noticed, but I did, and it made me feel dandy!

Bury him in advice!

Advice the first:

When you are cycling through fields in summer you DEFINITELY need to wear a face-protecting neckerchief. You see how many bugs are on this sleeve? The black specks. Imagine that many bugs flying into your face. That’s no fun. Only once I forgot my necker, and it.. was pretty terrible. You can feel them hit your lips.

Advice the second:

Even if you buy a second-hand, vintage item that has surely been washed MANY times before - if it is a deep colour.. wash it alone or with (very) like shades. I know, I know! Obvious! But not obvious enough, for me!

Things that used to be white:

This shirt - luckily the only non-pants item that wasn’t something of mine - used to be a delicate pink to match the buttons.. I’m sure my dad likes lilac, though. Probably.

There was a pair of pants in this was that went from green to purple. That was a strong purple pill!

Advice the third:

When a nine year old peels off from the pack of nine-ten-eleven year olds who have already sassed you several times and runs across a field apparently expressly for the purpose of telling you you should “get a better hat”, Caesar, I want you to remember this - you should drink down that fine old vinegar-wine of oh yes, that’s how it feels to know that people want to belittle you because they’re uncomfortable with your wardrobe. I remember and savour the fact that it’s a vintage unpleasantness. Not one that can currently spoil your day. In a minute, you’ll catch a glimpse of your reflection in a french window and you’ll think DAMN, I’m looking GOOD.

And you’ll be right!

Oh, and don’t forget to bend down to his or her eye level, give him a Paddington stare, and say “And maybe YOU shouldn’t be so rude“. If you don’t tell them, how will they learn? That is the kind of thing you need to nip in the bud.. before they grow up into full-blown users of “negging“. That would really make the world a poorer place.

Remember when that Malcolm in the Middle episode first aired? The one where, if you can make someone look at the circle you’re making with your fingers, which you’re holding below your waist level, you get to punch them in the shoulder?

I do. *shoulderpunch!*

Abney Park

They make music, they have a look, they have a whole parallel reality.

Buy them for me, buy them for you, whichever.

Besides that, though, today I have been working on book reviews again. The Raven’s Gate one, and a new one where I share the knowledge I have stockpiled about which ‘marketed to look like The Da Vinci Code’ books are actually like The Da Vinci Code (spoiler: none).

But that’s like saying (spoiler: the princess gets the guy) about an animated Disney joyfest. So y’all will still want to tune in.

It’s pretty infuriating, reading interviews with authors. They almost always say something completely whackadoodle that makes me want to metaphorically smack them. Authors are just people, and people are pretty fallible. I just.. think that books deserve better than that, I guess?

Speaking of books-for-kids.. when I wear this jacket I’m paying silent tribute to that glorious style maven Claudia Kishi. Claire was standing by the wall, fists over her eyes for some reason, wearing a cream-silk blouse as a jacket. She looked fantastic. She had made it herself, by cutting the skirt from an old wedding dress, and she said the frayed hems were symbolic (I didn’t ask of what). It was really unusual, and anyone else might have thought it too over-the-top to wear at home on a sick day - but Claire had long ago decided that if you can see yourself, that’s audience enough. Thank you, unnamed narrator. I think you look great too, even if those leggings aren’t my style.

If you too were a BSC fan, can I rec you this fic and this blog? Yes I can. I just did. Happy reading,

The jeans of my mother, again. I forgot about them! And that they turned out to fit me pretty well! I don’t need to buy new work trousers, after all! I already have the means to teach the new generation about how to dress like a 1970s Tokusatsu secret identity.

The pictures are all effects-ed up because I couldn’t find the camera, so sister took these with the “polaroid” “app” on her magical future-phone.

Plus, as promised: some pictures from the Morris dancing in the town I was in a couple of weeks a go. Gosh I enjoy traditional Britain. We are a culture of tie-on costumes, arcane dancing, effigies and scary masks as much as any other, and (considered as a whole) we have not lost the dance-to-death spirit as much as our more toffish reputations suggest.

The face of the hobby horse:

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

I have a ton of story-seeds using Morris Men like pop culture uses ninjas.

ETA: Video!

I’m feeling pretty good about all of these things.

Wise words from a decent dude. You seem pretty great, Jay Smooth.

You seem like a fugitive rapist, Polanski.