Status report, early March

[bironic]

Doing

Working a lot at work. Consequently, doing not a lot at home. My proposed promotion is still moving forward, although not approved yet. But I'm sad about feeling vaguely unwell so often. (No advice needed; docs have been consulted.) On the tail end of one of these periodic weeks of poor sleep, I had a gross dream about a manager in the office and had trouble looking at him yesterday. Then today my laptop died! Only I looked up the "symptoms" on my phone and fixed it via a method that indicated it was only an issue of built-up static charge, whew. We had an Arctic front sweep through last night; the same dry air made my lip split when I went to the library this afternoon.

Last weekend featured Boston fan brunch, always good, followed by fangirl movie night at thedeadparrot's, in this case Dune, for which serenadestrong made a spectacular sand worm spice bread. On the downside, a friend moved away to NYC, and the whole weekend felt vaguely unreal because my ear was plugged for uninteresting reasons, so until these drops from CVS cleared it up I was half deaf and felt slightly feverish, maybe because I associate plugged-up ears with being sick.

...This is the kind of post people used to make fun of when they talked about the banality of blogging. I will stop complaining.


Vidding

No, wait, I will complain about one more thing, because it is upsetting me: Last Saturday YouTube blocked the Ancillary Justice trailer in the U.S. and Canada because of the DhakaBrakha audio snippets (although it's still up on Vimeo), and then last night Vimeo took down Starships! because of the Nicki Minaj song (although it's still up on YouTube) -- no warning, just down, with an email explanation of the copyright claim.

Things I have done:
- Emailed the OTW's legal team to see if they have experience helping vidders contest copyright claims for music rather than video clips
- Emailed the Vimeo support team to gripe about the sudden takedown and to request screen shots of the comments and last known view counts
- Asked vidding friends on Twitter for advice
- Added the YouTube link for Starships! to the biggest Tumblr post that's been circulating, although who knows if people will see it
- Begun preparing points to make in the appeals

I believe the book trailer has a better shot of being reinstated because it only uses a small portion of the full song and isn't competing with the original. Starships! I'm not super hopeful about, in the same way I haven't been hopeful about previous copyright matches for vids that got denied upon initial upload, and that sucks, because vids are clearly transformative works and I wish I could articulate how video clips transform the audio (rather than vice versa), or form a gestalt with it that the song wouldn't have done alone.

Meanwhile, I requested a song for Club Vivid and it got approved, although I'm not sure I can make it in time because of the scope of one of my Fandom Trumps Hate auction vids, which I am going to post about soon because I could use your help.


Reading

Those SF/F compendia. Also Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked Binti a lot and was pleased to learn of the sequel, which was also good, except for how it's a CLIFFHANGER, sigh.

Next up, The Dream-quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, because the Nebula nominees were announced and some of the novellas looked interesting.


Watching

This week I got to see a performance of Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana featuring Amanda Plummer and James Earl Jones! More on that later, I think. We do not often get New York-caliber dramas in Boston, so that was a treat.

Also a bunch of random movies that I will not list exhaustively but that included 13th, just as powerful as advertised; some movies my sister and I used to watch all the time as kids but that I hadn't seen since then (Annie [1982] and The Neverending Story); Cloud Atlas, which was terrible in different ways from the book (the racebending makeup was creepy and wrongsighted); and Child 44, an action film that was utterly unremarkable except for its cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Charles Dance, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel and Fares Fares. It took place in Stalin-era Moscow and Volsk so of course they cast Brits, a Frenchman, a Swede and a Lebanese Swede and made them speak in "Russian" accents.

Want to see Get Out and Logan. My sister will be visiting next weekend and we plan to take care of at least one of those.


Listening

Stephen Thompson at NPR released this year's Austin 100, a batch of songs by artists he recommends ahead of SXSW. I usually find a handful of vid songs in these -- among the 2016 recs I found this year's Club Vivid song, the song I used for the Chris Hadfield vid, and the song I'm going to use for the Mary Sue vampire vid -- and am looking forward to this new collection.


Writing

Posts and emails, mostly. Did I mention that over Presidents' weekend I added some pages to some very old Mary Sue fics? It felt good to get words out and to extend those stories a little, even with the inevitable self-criticism over things like "Why did it take you all day to write two pages?" and "Why are you still thinking about teenage fantasies?"


Off to disgruntledowl's for dinner/movie. I made brownies. Before that, I made some mashed cauliflower. The apartment smells very confused.

Hope you are having good weekends.

Comments

[topaz_eyes]

I made brownies. Before that, I made some mashed cauliflower. The apartment smells very confused.

But a good kind of confused! *adds brownies and cauliflower to next week's grocery list*

The DMCA sucks, and I'm sorry you've had such a bloody week. Hugs if you want them, positive thoughts always.

vidding

[yhlee]

Sorry to hear about the takedowns. I am very much not a lawyer, but re: this:
I wish I could articulate how video clips transform the audio (rather than vice versa), or form a gestalt with it that the song wouldn't have done alone.

Can you make the argument that the video clips recontextualize both the song lyrics and the mood the song generates? I'm an ex-vidder, not a vidder, but I have an interest in this topic and in film scoring/game scoring/similar endeavors generally. I was actually thinking about your vid for "Starships" the other day (the song came up on my playlist), and particularly about how lines like "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" (and the rest of the musically-transformed "quote" from the song that follows in the next measure) are, in fact, transformed in the viewer's mind by the visual of (in that case) Sulu fencing--an association that I don't believe is present in the original. If helpful, I can rewatch the vid and pull out some more moments like that with commentary; if not, I'll leave it there. Good luck!

Re: vidding

[yhlee]

Dammit, and now I want to make a post about vids, transformative works, and music recontextualization generally, except I no longer own the software to do a good job of it...

[snickfic]

That sucks so hard about Starships! Now I'm irate, too. Best of luck with your efforts to get it reinstated.

[isis]

Good luck contesting the takedowns.

[monanotlisa]

Congrats on the promotion! Otherwise, sending hugs -- undiagnosed malaise is the worst. <3

[seekingferret]

Ugh, the takedowns suck. I have no advice about contesting them, but will say that at the moment www.criticalcommons.org is the only place on the net that I actually trust to not take down my vids. There are ways in which it's not the most convenient site to use, but the people there are definitely pro-vid as transformative work.

[ghost_lingering]

Whole-heartedly agree re: critical commons as being a safe place to upload vids (and also that it sucks you have to deal with takedowns. D: Really really sucks.)

That said there are two downsides (as I see it) to the site. First, the quality isn't great and second, last I checked, you couldn't upload captions. It also obviously won't work as well for anon periods of exchanges. But a really good backup streaming place for vids since it's vid friendly. There's some info in the comments here: http://ghost-lingering.dreamwidth.org/167277.html from folks who use the site if you want to hear other people's experiences.

This post also inspired me to make brownies. Not sure if I should thank or curse you, because I won't have anyone until Monday to foist some off on.

[shati]

Good luck with the takedowns! And any and all physical ailments. My lips are also a little split -- I really wasn't prepared for it to get this cold again. I'm basically avoiding eye contact with my windows.

[escritoireazul]

I hope that things work out with the vids. That's such a frustrating hill to climb.

[amnisias]

* That sandworm looks disgustingly real yet amazing.
* Those take-downs, they suck. Have you haver considered streaming from your own website, at least for the the vids that have been taken down? It's totally doable although obviously not as convinient as youtube, and at a small cost.
* I ADORE Tennessee Williams, when I as young I loved all the old movie adaptations with Liz Taylor, Montgomery Cliff and Paul Newman. James Earl Jones seems to have a thing for TW as well, I saw him (& Adrian Lester) in an amazing, all-black Cat on the Hot Tin Roof production a few years back with London. You have to tell it all about it after you've seen the play.

[gwyn]

I feel you about the takedowns. I haven't had the spoons to contest anything, but it burns me a lot. I'm just waiting and waiting for my vids on Vimeo to disappear, and only have like 1/16th of my vids on YT. Vimeo hates vidders, they really do. They only see us as pirates, thieves. And YT is so random--one person's fanvid to Titanium is up, but mine apparently will earn me a copyright strike. I just…there's no sense to it. It's so greedy. I wish you luck with it--do you know Lim? She and I were recently interviewed for a ReCreate Coalition piece about fanvids, and though the article was really short and not helpful, Lim's expanding on it in a zine she's doing, and she mentions dealing with the notices. I found her ideas helpful, in case I ever have the spoons to fight these things instead of running away in a cowardly fashion. She might be willing to share it with you.

[starlady]

Ugh, Vimeo. From what I've heard, there's a better chance of getting stuff put back up on YT than on Vimeo; despite their language about contesting takedowns on the site, they apparently loathe fanworks--or at least they did several years ago. Hopefully that's changed in the meantime.

[serenadestrong]

I'm interested/glad you liked Binti. I was interested by Lagoon more than I actually liked reading it but Binti is still on my list and I hope I like it a little more.