bironic

Just to say that Geek Burlesque was a total hoot. You haven't lived until you've seen a young man strip down to nothing but briefs and a Boba Fett helmet. Or a coy female Cthulhu in a green bodysuit and mask lowering her bloomers to reveal the tentacles peeking out of her bikini bottom.

Also ran: a brilliant, joyous Robin; Catwoman with a whip, subduing and teasing Commissioner Gordon; Captain Hammer dancing to "Can't Touch This"; Spike singing the "Rest in Peace" song from the Buffy musical and then doing a striptease with his leather duster and red shirt, etc.; the Power Rangers defeating a monster with the strength of skin-baring, and also gymnastics. Oh, and a routine involving the cubes from Portal. Plus two (I think) "regular" burlesque acts with fantastic performers, one a doll/puppet and her puppeteer, and the other breakfast food-themed.

All hosted by a "George R. R. Martin" clearly inspired by the South Park parody. (One of the many floppy wiener jokes involved a broken microphone stand. During the raffle, when he was having trouble getting a ticket out of the Tardis-shaped container, he said, "Winner is coming.")

*trails off with glitter and snap pants*

One year ago tomorrow (or yesterday, depending on how you count it), I dove into making Starships!. As if to celebrate the occasion, this just happened:



I haven't been able to piece together a timeline of what led to what, but for some reason Starships! had a huge resurgence in popularity last week. By which I mean the Vimeo video went from 9,000 views (Aug.-Mar. total) to 34,800 35,300, and the YouTube version has garnered 2,700 views and 180 likes in its first week and a half. Together that makes it my most viewed vid ever. Measuring by hit count, the next most popular is, of all things, the SGA tentacles vid, at 27,500, and even that has 20,000 more than the third-most viewed (Satisfaction). LJ comments for Starships! also passed the 500 mark, which is about 350 more than any other of my fanworks has received as far as I can recall. o_o

Metrics, Google searches and tips from friends tell me that a tumblr post that had been around since August exploded, shooting up to 5,000 likes/reblogs (375 of which are comments, wow), including from the OTW and at least a couple of accounts that must be widely read (like albinwonderland?). The tumblr post got featured on TheMarySue.com last Wednesday, which led to other posts on individual blogs like this one. The vid also showed up on a Finnish TV site (second highest play count after tumblr and before TheMarySue), something called SourceFedNews, a French blog, and Facebook and Reddit, among other places.

It's awesome, although I'm still baffled as to what set it off. The vid had been up on YouTube for several days already, and the YouTube version isn't the one that's been making the rounds for the most part; ditto for the lyrics-to-clips chart timing; and Swancon and Muskrat Jamboree happened a couple of weeks earlier. *shrug* Not that it matters, in the end. I don't know how those kinds of numbers compare to other people's vids, but it's a thrill from where I'm sitting.

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Interesting things that occurred along the way:

• Thanks to the third-party platforms, received objective feedback from strangers who may or may not have expected the vid creator to see what they said. Common criticisms: "This vid is invalid because Babylon 5/Red Dwarf/Andromeda/Lexx/anything anime/something else isn't in it." (I added a note to the Vimeo & YT posts saying that I agree but it was made under deadline, for what that might be worth.) "I hate the song, but this vid is still okay." "I hate the song, so you should play ___ instead while you watch the vid." It's been excellent to see that side of people's reactions, even when there's an itch to engage; and it's been excellent as well when others have replied to comments here and there with rebuttals or with background about the deadline etc.


• On the subject of fellow fans stepping in to support the creator: this tumblr post from greensilver about credit etiquette re: the original tumblr post, echoed in anatsuno's comment to TheMarySue post. Interesting stuff. Personally I want things to be credited, because credit is all we have here in non-monetary fandom. However, I hadn't thought beyond that to whether a label on an embedded video is enough or whether more attention should be given to attribution in the rec, other than that doing it in text makes it easier to ego-search, heh, and therefore to see comments from people who don't make it back to the original post.


• Learned a little about how tumblr works. Not enough to feel comfortable navigating it, but something, anyway.


• Discovered that at least three people linked George Takei to the vid on Facebook. ! My life would have been fulfilled if he'd reposted it, but having evidence that he might have watched it is plenty exciting.

The other super awesome thing that is not related to the above other than in how it ramped up my excitement is that jetpack_monkey is making a remix of Starships! using all black and white SF source. (!) No one has ever remixed a vid of mine before, unless you count the bizarre spambot thing that slapped effects on Masters of War, changed the song, and produced a long, head-scratchy YouTube description. Anyway. jetpack_monkey's legitimate remix is almost done, it's a ton of fun, and it's going to premiere at Vividcon in August, at which point you can join me in urging him to do some kind of commentary about it. Full circle in one year.

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(And hopefully that all comes across as wanting to share the happy news instead of as bragging.)

Back from a weekend that was full of adjectives: lovely, refreshing, exciting, fun, nostalgic, stimulating, unexpected, much-needed, too brief. I got to hang out for the first time in a while with most of my grad school classmates, one of whom brought her seven-week-old son. We delivered and heard a bunch of interesting and/or entertaining presentations, and I talked with dozens of people in a way that wasn't draining like networking usually is, because it was all natural and mutually interested conversation (and because it was interspersed with lectures, ha). I got a kiss on the cheek from a favorite professor. There was much wining and dining, and yesterday a fellow alum/friend introduced me to a nearby bakery that had opened up after I graduated. Mm, tea and fluffy Mediterranean quiche.

At one of the events I encountered a man with my last name, which has never ever happened before. It's a rare name, so it wasn't a surprise after the initial discovery to find that we are related.

On Friday, I got to meet rubynye! I get nervous sometimes when meeting a new online friend one on one that we won't be able to sustain a conversation, but she is an absolute delight and we had a great time in one of Harvard Square's new-ish coffeehouses. Well, I did, anyway; I shouldn't speak for her. :) I am not just saying that because she brought me a hand-made tentacle magnet and some baked goods. The few hours we had together went too quickly.

The other surprise of the weekend was that I actually won one of the eight thousand raffles I entered in a travel expo a couple of weeks back, which, if no more catches present themselves, means I am the recipient of two round-trip airfares to one of a few select destinations... provided I buy the minimum night stays at their hotel(s) at said destination. I read the terms of agreement and think it will still be worth it, given air travel costs these days.

Mostly it was one of those weekends where you really needed a change of pace and didn't realize it until you had it. On either side, the flights provided welcome reading time. For those of you keeping track, the penultimate few chapters of My Own Country broke my heart, not because of the author's difficulty taking care of terminal AIDS patients (redundant at that time, in the mid- and late '80s) or his marital problems but because of his portrayal of the families when they started losing their adult children and siblings and spouses to this disease that had no treatment, the descriptions of what happened to their bodies and minds as they faded, and especially the chapter in which Verghese worked out the pattern and the cultural narrative of infection from his Tennessee base: a generation of young men who migrated from small-town, mainly small-minded U.S.A. to the coastal cities to celebrate gay and bisexual liberation only to contract this illness and make their painful ways back to their roots for care until they died.

Next up, a change of pace: The Hunger Games. Might as well, right? Almost everyone appears to be out of town the next couple of weeks anyway.

You guys, sabinelagrande has created a podfic of my SGA story Upside Down and Inside Out, in which John, whose body has temporarily been turned into that of a woman for unexplained reasons, gets tied up and hung from the ceiling and brought off in three marvelous ways by Rodney (who is not temporarily in a female body) at the behest of off-screen aliens.

It is a marvelous podfic, read quickly and expressively and with audible enjoyment. Granted, that is a biased review on my part because this is the first time a story of mine has been podficced and I am beside myself with delight to hear the scene brought to life like this. Nonetheless! It is a joy to listen to, it sounds clever and peppy and tight, and the occasional infusions of Southern vowels are charming, as are the parts where Sabine-as-Sheppard tries to speak around the rope in her-his mouth. Even if the whole experience is a bit unreal since all podfics have to date been readings of stories by people who are not me. It is also fitting that Sabine chose to read this particular story for her "suspension" Bingo square, as the fic was written to fulfill a kink-saturated prompt of hers a couple years back.

I hope you will give it a listen and tell Sabine what a fun job she has done.

...

On the subject of cars and car shopping, I can only say this: Why on Earth do all these new models have such narrow windows and ill-placed rear-view mirrors and headrests? Is it so much to ask that a car be something you can see out of? No wonder so many people go for backup-view cameras and blind-spot sensors. This is like when I tried to get a watch in December and found that four analog models out of five lacked hour marks. Why would you want a watch that does not tell you what time it is. I am not looking for jewelry masquerading as a timepiece. I am not looking for a sporty body masquerading as a safe-to-operate vehicle. Ugh. What next, flatscreen TVs that don't actually hook up to provider services?

thingswithwings wrote a story for meeeee! It is the Kink Bingo Arbitrary Mod Prize she and eruthros bestowed last round and it is called Germination and you should go read it.

To describe it one way: At first blush, to me, it's about the hesitance and awkwardness and ultimately the freedom and satisfaction of exploring new kinks in a relationship, and about overturning expectations of how a woman might feel empowered by something that others call monstrous.

To describe it another way: It has tentacle roleplay and functional Jennifer/Rodney and wonderful morbid humor and emotionally!hopeless!John and a running gag about animal transformation and sestina-like recurrence of the phrase "hive ship" and also pegging!

Or, to put it a third way: It is like a mix-remix of my "Seed" vid that won the mod prize and my beloved Rodney/Katie story that helped complete the bingo. In "A Week in the Life," Katie wanted Rodney to dominate her; in "Germination," Rodney wants Jennifer to dominate him. In the "Seed" vid, icky scary tentacles became erotic; in the fic, Jennifer's horrible transformation becomes a source of desire. Nifty!

It makes me happy. Even more so, as I'm not in Remix this year and haven't had anything creative to offer in a while.

Hm. I said I was going to stop writing summary posts like this. Another time, I guess.

This week in a nutshell:

Furniture. Up to NY on Saturday—saw my sister for half a day between a gig and the next leg of the tour, rescued her from a flat tire when she had no money and a dying cell phone, played a rousing game of "where the hell are the table legs?" in a house full of stuff from my dad's moving-in girlfriend, and ate sushi—back from NY on Sunday, and now I can has furniture. Well, the table/chairs, an area rug, a small bookshelf, a little papasan chair, and a metal cart left over from college, anyway, but at least now most of my things aren't on the floor.

Oven. Adventures in broken-down apartment features this week included the smoke that came steaming out of the oven when I tried to use it for the first time. Long story short, it took one day for maintenance to identify the problem, another for them to come back and fix the problem instead of just telling me about it, and another for me to find out they had come, because they sent a note to the previous tenant's email instead of leaving the piece of paper on the door like they'd always done. Aie. I had, naturally, just bought a chicken to roast; the poor thing ended up in the fridge for a day, cooked for ten minutes on day two, put back in the fridge for a day, frozen for another day, and it's now defrosting so I can cook it tomorrow. If I die of salmonella or something when I finally eat it, please all of you play nicely as you divvy up my things.

Hair. Attend: I am making a pact not to use elastics anymore (except at the gym, where I have been trying to go most evenings right after work). Gone with the ponytail of yesteryear, I cry! Thanks in part to a book about curly hair recommended by hannahrorlove and wisdom accumulated five or so years ago the last time I got a good haircut, I am trying to care for my hair with conditioner and gel so it can do its thing without frizz, and plan to use some freelance money to get a good-quality cut at a real salon in a few weeks when a spot opens up.

Alcohol. For the first time in all the years I've been over the legal drinking age, I bought a bottle of alcohol for myself. Two, actually: amaretto and sweet-and-sour mix. I plan to use it as a wise professor once advised me, to lower inhibitions so I can actually write without the impending deadlines of Kink Bingo. Okay, his advice didn't mention Bingo, but the rest is true.

Plants. A coworker who gardens potted two small plants for me, a spider and a philodendron, and they make a disproportionate difference in this place than their size would suggest. The spider plant is in a pretty earthenware pot that's glazed deep blue-green with brown streaks in the light. She said it reminded her of my eyes. Aww.

Job. I have absolutely sucked at work this past couple of weeks. Just sitting there all day getting nothing done. I have to get my act together and make up my mind about which of the two offers I have I'm going to take, because while neither is ideal, I can't keep stringing people along and agonizing so much that I'm totally unproductive. On the bright side, just got a raise and will have health insurance in November. On the dimmer side, that means a two-month lapse in coverage; need to find a stopgap plan, because there are prescriptions to fill and possible illnesses and accidents to be prepared for.

DVDs. After following up with Amazon, the postal service, and the place I used to live, a refund was attained, a new order placed, and SGA S5 finally arrived here on Thursday. Hopefully that'll kick-start the vid-that-was-in-progress about how Pegasus people are angry.

Fanpeople. Thanks to kassrachel, I was put in touch with a local cluster of fans who gather weeklyish to watch sci fi down the street from me. I met many of them for the first time last night and it was wonderful. We watched the Vividcon premieres along with a few others, had tasty food, and chatted about the usual hit-and-miss collection of fan topics -- vidding, knitting, cats, various Star Treks, works in progress, textual analysis, slash, Canadians, mpreg. Okay, the last was my fault for having brought up, as we were leaving, the fact that I was glad we hadn't talked about it, after barely_bean scarred me for life the first time I hung out with the NYC brunch crew.

Good vids included greensilver's American Tune, a tribute to The West Wing set to Simon & Garfunkel that moved me even though I barely know the show, and another viewing of Seah and Margie's spectacularly unsettling Dr. Who vid No Handlebars (again, need not know the source material), and Learning to Crawl by jarrow (BSG, ditto). A couple of nice vids introduced me to lovely songs, including Greg Laswell's It Comes and Goes in Waves (vid) and Jars of Clay's Boy on a String (unlinked vid of the same name was by traykor).

Okay. Off to see the wizard Laundrys for the first time in a while, and then… long weekend!