bironic

My promotion actually went through at work! I have a modified title and a tiny raise. My supervisor had coached me to brace myself for nothing, given looming budget cuts across the whole organization, so even a little bit is a nice surprise; and while it's taken three and a half years to claw back up to what I was making at my last job, I still don't regret the move. Best of all, the upgrade doesn't involve doing much more than I'm doing now.

This news was especially welcome on the heels of a weekend where I learned that revisiting season one of BtVS + reading some BtVS fics + washing my hair for the first time since the temporary straightening and discovering that it looked like the worst perm I'd ever gotten back in high school = broody, self-recriminating fugue. Fascinating how a couple of days of rekindling a yearning to be Willow and to have an intense core friend group and mentor and whatnot could send me right back to a college-era headspace like that.

But it faded with a little socializing and a return to the work week. I went to an annual St. Patrick's Day concert with a couple of coworkers. This year's theme involved wandering back and forth through time, from the 1600s to contemporary pieces, tracing some of the threads of the evolution of Celtic music, song and dance. A wonderful local-ish musician, Keith Murphy, led a reinterpretation of the shape-note song Clamanda that I'd grown to love when Ann Leckie mentioned it in a discussion of the music she'd included in Ancillary Justice.

(And my hair is fine now. It just took two showers to get back to normal.)

*

And now today, a vidding zine that Lim has been working on for months has gone live! It's got essays on various aspects of vidding, close readings of vids, ruminations on vidding history, vidder profiles and interviews, stories about copyright appeals, and more, from 16 international contributors.

VIDELICET

*warning: the landing page is a still graphic, but when you click through to the article index pages you will get some animated gifs. details below

Lim asked me to write about the Mashup exhibit, so I expanded my Dreamwidth report from last year to include new stuff about, for example, wrestling with legal questions before accepting the invitation to have "Starships!" included, deciding whether to use my RL or fannish name, brief reflections one year on, and some graphics that tried to capture my general feeling of "OMG" from the months leading up to the gallery opening. The article also features write-ins from Kandy Fong, Lim and heresluck. You can check it out here.

I'm at a local conference this weekend and don't expect to be online much, but what I've seen so far has been fantastic -- dynamic design customized to each article, beyond the compelling subject matter -- and I'm looking forward to reading/watching the rest.

*The All Articles index has animated gifs, although the mobile version doesn't seem to. You can avoid them if you go to the About page, and the Contributors page links to the articles by author. At a glance, the Glitter and Gold essay had a flashy gif (and the History of Vidding essay had a subtler one) that the gif-sensitive might want to be warned about.

My piece was given an auto-playing background video in the "Screening Room" section, and there's a non-flashy gif in the slide show embedded in the "Sh*t Gets Real" section. Also FYI, the section headers font and a few pix are styled with deconstructed red and blue like you would see in 3D materials before you put the glasses on.

I previewed some pix on Twitter, but posting about Friday's visit to the opening of the Vancouver Art Gallery's giant multimedia exhibition on 20th-21st century mashups felt daunting until I realized I don't actually have to write an essay on that history and the place of vidding within it, nor an analysis of the objects the curators chose for inclusion and the way they organized the collection. Because I am interested in and have thoughts about those things, but don't currently have the wherewithal to explicate.

Suffice to say that it was satisfying to see the curators acknowledge fan vidding as a notable form of remixing with artistic merit worthy of being placed alongside household names like Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Brian Eno. Fanfiction and especially the annual Remix Redux would have had a home as well. Starting on the fourth floor and working down provided a more or less chronological tour through the many ways people have appropriated existing media materials and subverted, built on or otherwise transformed them into something new and wonderful. I nodded at familiar examples of fan practice's cousins (e.g. Jamaican dub, William S. Burroughs' cut-ups, T.S. Eliot's dense intertextuality, Quentin Tarantino's metacommentary on film history) and ancestors (e.g. Victorian photo collage, by women, fittingly*) and learned a lot about other fascinating members of the family tree both close and distant. I was particularly entranced by a sound poem written and recited by Kurt Schwitters presented alongside a song version composed by Brian Eno, Kurt's Rejoinder. Little change through time of the kinds of critique, censorship, copyright battles and celebration their -- our -- works have engendered.

*I'd been worried about how male-centric the exhibit would be, based on the promo materials and early exhibit descriptions, so I was glad to see that it pays homage to the critical contributions of women from the very beginning. The introductory curator's card on the top floor begins with Georges Braque and Picasso, but then in the second paragraph, there are the women collage-makers. Cuttin' up ur magazines, shakin' up ur art. "These collages were often enclosed in personal albums, made more for the amusement of small social circles than for wider public exhibition and appreciation" -- sound familiar? While gender wasn't balanced overall, many women were nevertheless featured on each floor. [ETA: More on that from straight.com.] Heavy on Western work, though.

And now I will switch over to glee at seeing Starships! and six other vids by five other vidders on the walls of the museum! My original announcement here if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Also a more recent one from heresluck.

( About the opening reception, how people interacted with the vids, and some pictures & video clips! )

More about the rest of the trip at some point. So much good fish, two excellent plays, contagious vowels, and a lot of beautiful First Nations art.

(It is raining.)

Doing: Just returned from a five-day trip to my grandparents' in Florida, with my dad. Some ups, some downs, as happens when one's family is dealing with age-related health issues and dwindling ability to remain independent. Or codependent, as the case may be. In any event, it was good to see them, they appreciated the visit, and my dad and I did make it to the beach one beautiful morning. Two hours of swimming and of resting in the shade of an umbrella: divine.

Watching: A collection of Turner Classic Movies with the grandparents: Bringing Up Baby, With Six You Get Eggroll, Anna and the King of Siam (with Rex Harrison, not Yul Brynner), and 15 minutes of The Man Who Would Be King before I quit in distaste. Oh, and we caught the last 20 minutes or so of Transcendence, because apparently Paul Bettany movies now follow me wherever I go.

On my own, beginning of season three of Gilmore Girls, with the occasional ep thrown in of season three of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. Haven't yet started the new series of Doctor Who.

Have also been getting together once every couple of weeks with thedeadparrot to alternately heckle and admire Project Runway, which is great fun.

Reading: Re-read of Ancillary Justice complete; Ancillary Sword half complete. Still wonderful. The series works for me on every level: concept behind the main character, basic plot, worldbuilding, personally and societally relevant themes (schisms in identity, class conflict, racism, suppression/absorption of minorities, social justice, police brutality, white male privilege, love and grief and revenge), favorite sci fi tropes (artificial intelligences, alien contact, awakening after centuries in cryo freeze), subtle and indirect emotions that sneak up on you, use of "she" as gender-neutral pronoun so that the universe feels filled with women. Not least, I relate to and envy the main character in numerous ways. Today's delight: remembering how Translator Dlique sounded a touch like Luna Lovegood as well as Delirium of the Endless. Can't wait for Ancillary Mercy next week.

Ummmm also I mentioned this on Twitter but I discovered last week that Ann Leckie recced Starships! in August and I retweeted her and then she replied to me and I may have died a little.

Before that, read Saga vol 5--excellent--then finished The Book of Three and barely started The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander, in the Chronicles of Prydain series, for book club. Eh. So far it is template fantasy; I found myself playing Spot the Comparison to things like Lord of the Rings, The Once & Future King, Earthsea and the Fionavar Tapestry. Young Eilonwy is a hoot and the prince whose name I've forgotten is written to be nice and sexy in a kids' book sort of way--in fact, young male protagonist Taran reads as though he's in love with him without really realizing it--but the books have not grabbed me so far. Gwydion. Will try a little more and see how it goes. Favorite line so far: "She is the only oracular pig in Prydain."

Vidding: Submitted my most favorite source ideas to festivids (who will make me a book trailer for Ancillary Justice???) and am trying to think of whether there are any more. Glanced really quickly through the list of nominations and spotted something that soon after generated an idea, woo.

Also we will see if a vid gets generated for Halloween, my most successful vidding holiday to date. Have a bunch of source already ripped for one potential project. Unfortunately, have a bunch of RL stuff in October, too.

Writing: Not a lot outside of work. Adding some words here and there to that Marius/Mary Sue story. Speaking of posts that met with crickets.

Meeting: Got to hang for a couple of hours with such_heights and happydork last weekend when they stopped by Boston Fannish Brunch on their way across the country for their honeymoon; that was a treat.

Eating: Culinary highlights of September included a lobster roll from James Hook & Co., which lived up to its reputation of understanding that mayo and bun should take a backseat to the lobster meat, and a scoop of Noodle Kugel ice cream from JP Licks, which was cinnamon-spiked vanilla ice cream studded with cooked-then-frozen egg noodles. Because how can you pass up a specialty Rosh Hashanah ice cream flavor?

ETA: Wait, I forgot the other two excellent foods. First, following some nutrition advice, I tried broiled mackerel from the local Japanese restaurant and it was fantastic. Savory and salty and firm with a crisp skin. Will attempt to make something like it at home one of these days and see if the resulting oily-fish smell is worth the meals it produces. Second, I discovered the cayenne-mango flavored almonds from Q's Nuts in Somerville and cannot get over the perfect blend of spicy and sweet. Nom nom afternoon snacks.

Dreaming: of autumn. It's still 80+ degrees out, and nearly October. Come on.

Also I had a dream the first night in Florida that Chief O'Brien showed up to try to save me at the end of a godawful tennis match and I was disappointed (but also relieved) that Bashir wasn't there. And then that I had to explain to Tony Stark how I was feeling after a traumatic event, so I phrased it in relation to his life: "imagine if the Iron Man suits were all destroyed, and Pepper was hurt, and Rhodey'd been killed..."

Whew. Okay, let's return after this to normal-sized, focused posts.

1. Yikes. I picked the best(/worst, if you like staycations with unknown retroactive pay status) time to leave federal service. My thoughts are with you, friends who're caught in the furloughs or suffering from cut services.

2. In less important, happier news, Starships! was linked from the Amazing Stories Magazine website. As they say in emoticons: *_*

3. I attended the last of the required orientations for work yesterday. Knowing I was going to be very early, I brought that newly acquired Vampire Romance book along. Left it face-down on the table as other earlybirds who recognized me from previous orientations trickled in and sat at my table.

I should have known that there was nothing to be embarrassed about in front of four other young women, even at Prestigious University. The one next to me caught sight of the spine and said she's been a fan of the genre too since reading Anne Rice; she mentioned Linda Lael Miller, the Sookie Stackhouse novels and something I've forgotten that wasn't Anita Blake but was similar. The young woman across the table returned from the coffee/breakfast table to say she'd heard the start of the conversation and wanted to know what recommendations were shared; confessed she also loved Anne Rice back in the day. Table-wide discussion ensued of True Blood books compared to TV show, etc.

♥

(I'm quite enjoying the anthology. The writing could be better--lots of adverbs and euphemisms, that sort of thing--but the series of short stories of seduction is working well for me. I guess it was just the ticket in this time of change and potential loneliness, in a city where I once rekindled my love of the Vampire Chronicles and wrote thousands of words of fic for it.)

"Starships!" made it onto io9 today! Thank you to were_duck for the tip.

The thrill of having the vid featured there outweighs what I'm about to say by far, but following on our recent conversation about citing creators and, more important to me personally, including or linking to vid context when posting a rec, it stood out to me that the short post by Annalee Newitz included the YouTube embed without title or attribution, a link to Nicki Minaj's official video, a link to Vividcon's website, and my excerpted source list, but only referred to "this fan video" and "the filmmakers." The result was a flurry of the "No Babylon 5/Red Dwarf/Cowboy Bebop?!"-type comments that I am now expecting and resigned to in the absence of my notes about deadlines and access to source -- they continue to stream in on the Tumblr post as well -- along with the "Ew, Nicki Minaj" comments (which don't bother me). And, not to sound ungrateful, a nice handful of happy viewers. The frustration is just that I (and others) keep trying to explain why the vid includes only what it includes, but because of the nature of certain sharing platforms and because of common reccing practices, it doesn't stick.

What also resulted, however, was that someone named eregyrn, who came to my defense on the MarySue.com post a few weeks ago, and later someone named telepresence, quickly stepped in in the comments section to provide that very context, along with links and a greensilver/anatsuno-style call for vidder credit. There ensued a confusing thread in which Annalee said she'd already linked to the YouTube page (she hasn't; there's only the embed, which means people have to know and want to click on the video and then click on the little YouTube icon to view over there; but to be fair, some people are doing that, because a bunch of comments have been coming in on YouTube this afternoon) and that my name wasn't on the vid (which eregyrn pointed out is incorrect, and also, the video title on YouTube says "by bironic" and the LJ link is in the description right above the source list she quoted, so even though it's easy to miss the opening vid credits, it isn't hard to track down who made it). But she kindly amended the post to include my name, which now links to the LJ master post. So that is cool. I need to find and thank eregyrn somehow.

In conclusion: io9! Whee! And this lovely blog post by Doctor Science on Tuesday, which expands on a comment she made to Masters of War about vids being like bouillon cubes.

.

I think I've settled on a new vid to work on, finally. Not sure what it'll be for -- maybe Kink Bingo -- but after four months of lying fallow it'll be nice to get back into practice.

cinco mentioned last night that a few people would indeed like a way to find out where all the clips in Starships came from because so many of them go by so quickly and/or because some of them are from less popular sources. Since it would be just as hard to ID everything at speed in a caption track, below is a reference to all the clips alongside the lyrics. I hope the table format is not too hard to parse.

(Also, I just took the plunge and posted the vid to YouTube. Have been afraid of takedown notices, but nothing bad has happened so far on Vimeo, so. We'll see what happens beyond the automated "content match/blocked in some countries/you may see ads" notice that's already come in.)

( Lyrics & clip IDs matched up )

Yup—that's ~257 clips, twice as many as my Jurassic Park vid of the same length (134 clips). Whew!

One excellent weekend at Vividcon, another out on the Delmarva peninsula with my visiting mom (hadn't seen her in 13 months, whoops), and now it's back to work work work.

+ Thanks to rubynye for the heads up—Teresa Nielsen Hayden recced Thirteen Ways of Looking at Rodney (AO3 version) alongside many other interesting-looking literary and/or crossover-type fics in a blog post over at Making Light. !! So cool. A couple of commenters also mentioned that Starships! is linked over there; I finally found it on the sidebar under the "Jim's Diffraction" links. Alexis Lothian did a whole awesome post on the vid, too. Basically: Eeeeee!

+/- I do feel like I should add a note over in the vid intro about how it wasn't intended to represent a history of spaceship media or anything, being entirely English-language and Western-centric, no anime, etc. No one has called me out on it but a few people have made celebratory remarks about how "everything" is in there and, you know, really it isn't at all. That's the major thing I'd have fixed if I'd had more time.

+ Despite lingering Vividcon-acquired germs and about 450 miles of driving, we quite enjoyed our three(ish) days out on the shore, browsing in non-chain stores in various coastal towns such as St. Michaels and Lewes, waving to the wild ponies in Chincoteague/Assateague, taking pictures of ourselves in cardboard-cutout space suits at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility visitor center, eating lots of seafood and other delicious fresh foodstuffs, playing Skeeball and dropping into ridiculous tourist shops on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk, and even making it to the beach a couple of times between drizzles. The hotel we stayed in the second night had a glowing sink and ice bucket.

+ In one store, we found and acquired a Star Trek-themed crossword puzzle book. It's hard even for we two Trekkies and crossword aficionados (Puzzle 1, clue 1 across: "I.K.S ___-H'a, Klingon ship in 'The Chase' [TNG]"), but it's great fun nonetheless.

+/- Looked like I was going to have three weeks of evenings and weekends in which to do whatever I wanted, but then I went and acquired a volunteer job putting together a fast-turnaround newsletter. Sigh. (Those of you who knew me in grad school might remember a particular research foundation I worked with; it's for them, because I want to maintain the relationship.) So that'll be the next little while. It's cool, though. I like being "in the know" on breaking news. :)

+ Wrote 1,900 words of Mary Sue fic yesterday (the beginning of the Karin/Makor saga). *coughatwork* It's been a while.

Happy weekend to you all.

40 space-themed movies and TV shows. 9 evenings and 2 Sundays of effort, consecutive. 3 minutes and 36 seconds of Club Vivid vid: COMPLETE. 4 hours before deadline, even. \o/

I have done nothing but go to work, vid, and sleep for the last week and a half. Now it is done, and I like it, and if all goes well people will dance to it at Vividcon, and now I can have my life back. ...And worry about the likelihood that someone else will make a similar vid before it premieres because the song is a new chart-topper and the concept is not a stretch from the lyrics, so by August it's not unlikely people will be tired of it. Whatever! At least it's not by Ke$ha, right?

I can't think of another fan project I've worked on with that length of sustained intensity. The one that comes close is probably A Princeton Odyssey, the 300-whatever lines of heroic couplets; and even that I only had about a week to do. I'm proud that I powered through on this despite source-acquiring challenges and a stressful couple of weeks at the office. I'm proud of my computer, too, for handling all the ripping, importing and editing with minimal errors; my last computer would have died five times over. This one deserves a hug. Or at least a break.

And so do I. :) Hello, celebratory scoop of ice cream and not sitting in the vidding chair anymore.

(At some point, dishes, food shopping [no more subsisting on takeout!], contacting family to confirm I'm still alive, catching up on TV shows, and putting away and/or returning to various loaners the explosion of DVDs across the apartment.)



Thank you, thank you, thank you to those of you who went out of your way to help, either with ideas or with footage: cincodemaygirl, ellen_fremedon, deelaundry, thingswithwings, nightdog_barks, synn. Did I get everyone? You are in the vid credits ... as you will see in a few months. Wow, it will be weird to wait.

Greenlighted for starships vid!! I'm going to do it!

Please, someone tell me you know where I can find good electronic files of Battlestar Galactica that are not streaming? I've asked everyone local, including people at work, and am empty-handed.

( Planned list of sources: )

See you April 30 when I come up for air.