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Curly Sue

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From the alternate literary universe:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction*, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an "author's pet."

"Mary Sues" can be either male or female, but male characters are often dubbed "Gary Stu," "Marty Stu," or similar names. While the label "Mary Sue" itself originates from a parody of this type of character, most characters labeled "Mary Sues" by readers are not intended by authors as such.

While the term is generally limited to fan-created characters, and its most common usage today occurs within the fan fiction community or in reference to fan fiction, original characters in role-playing games or literary canon are also sometimes criticized as being "Mary Sues" or "Canon Sues," if they dominate the spotlight or are too unrealistic or unlikely in other ways. One example of this is Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

*very particularly. But am anxiously awaiting Stanley Fish's upcoming op-ed on the Mary Sue in postmodern fiction. Or the retro-identification of Sues in pre-fanfiction. This blog's nomination would be Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens' Bleak House. This entire category seems to have been invented for Wesley Crusher. Sorry to be snotty but "Canon Sues"?--ugh.

Crisp Resizing in Firefox

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On a topic we're constantly griping about here, Firefox is introducing an add-on to keep sharp pixels from going blurry when enlarged. It will apparently be introduced in Firefox 3.6.
(hat tip drx)

From my email to drx about this, some lingering questions/issues:

One thing I'm confused about: the screenshot for "crisp edges" is just as blurry as the screenshot for "optimize quality."
Also, this is optional so the Ordinary User would have to turn on "crisp edges" in Preferences, right?
That doesn't solve the problem of ordinary users seeing html-enlarged pixel art blurry. Most people never go into preferences.

On a conceptual level, I guess I didn't realize that SVG was vector and that most browsers use it now. [Big duh--but I never claimed to be an expert on this stuff, just a concerned artist user. See "Bitmap vs Vector" discussion.]
Resizing in a browser is always resampling, it's just a "taste" for nearest neighbor or bicubic.
This still seems wasteful to me but I guess there is no going back.

The discussion of Bug 423756 is as gripping as a Ken Ludlum novel.

Update: Since I wrote this it appears SVG isn't as universal as I thought--some browsers support it but the HTML5 standard has gone with an Apple graphics rendering element called Canvas, which is bitmap-based rather than vector-based.