bironic

Doing

I spent May working 24/7 on the vid; did little but watch TV in June; then spent three-quarters of July working 24/7 on an article for my job. Now it's back to chillin' out, by which I mean doing the minimum at work while visiting friends and family, consuming media, daydreaming and going for the occasional swim. Things will achieve balance again at some point.

Oh, and my birthday happened last week. 'Twas a pleasant one. Some friends made me dinner ♥, and some other friends and I went for fancy Italian over the weekend. marginaliana made a beautiful Star Trek and blood moon-themed card and thingswithwings wrote an Odo/Quark flashfic. Other surprise gifts included a quart of farm-fresh blueberries, a book on Hollywood Gothic and a Ravenclaw button. Happy double chai to me. The Hebrew kind, not the tea.

Going

I popped down to NYC for 24 hours to catch my beloved friend A., her husband V. and their five-year-old while they swept through three states on a business trip from Munich. The timing was terrible, but it was a joy to see them; I hadn't seen A. in three years. That kid was born a few months before we all left DC. Time flies.

My mom came to MA for a class mid-month, so I hung out with her for a few days. That was nice, although it would've been nicer if I hadn't had to work. We played mini golf, went to an art museum, walked around a lake and watched bits of the Harry Potter marathon on TV. Food highlights: lamb burger with goat cheese, sunflower seed risotto, cocktail made with local blueberries.

Next weekend is vividcon, the last before it metamorphoses into fanworkscon in 2019. It already sounds like people's emotions will be running high. I'm aiming to remain calm, set simple goals—i.e. "meet sol_se"—and not have too-high expectations for hanging out with people who will all be trying to do and feel A Lot. My perspective: It is just another Vividcon, this is not the last opportunity to see vidders, not everything has to be 'a moment.' It helps that I'm not showing any new vids amidst the glut of premieres. So far the worst I have to deal with is performance anxiety over co-modding a panel. (If you have requests for multifandom vidding topics, drop a line here!)

Watching

The movie adaptation of a play I'd wanted to see but missed, Marjorie Prime, which, like Robot and Frank, and like Westworld only less irritating, uses AI as a lens to explore age-related memory loss, how memories help construct a person, how they can be manipulated, and what happens to memories themselves and echoes of people as time passes and stories get conveyed second- and third-hand. The movie dipped in the… third quarter? But the beginning and end were wonderful.

Other than that, a string of movies and shows featuring Zahn McClarnon.

I watched six seasons of Longmire in about a month, whoops. It's a present-day sheriffing show set in rural Wyoming. Came for Zahn as the police chief of the neighboring Cheyenne reservation; stayed for him and Lou Diamond Phillips, Katee Sackhoff and some heartfelt seeking of justice. Post pending when writing about it feels less intimidating.

Writing

Fic!! Although I've been playing with Mary Sues on my hard drive here and there, it's been two years since I posted a story to the AO3 (Here rest, interred without a stone) and three years since an actor or source inspired a cluster of fics (the Inkheart trio, plus two WsIP I swear I'll finish one day). In the last month, I've started no fewer than three stories, thanks to Zahn McClarnon characters.

So far:

- 1,400 words of an indulgent Mathias/OFC dubcon aphrodisiacs story for Longmire

- 670 words of the vampire threesome flashbacks no one else has written despite the clear subtext in this one episode of Midnight, Texas

- 2,000 words of noncon inspired by a scene in the premiere of The Red Road that I watched on Sunday. I should have known noncon would overcome the writer’s block.

- Well, and 6 lines of Mathias/Cady (Longmire), but I'm not sure there's enough to hang a story on

It's both motivating and refreshingly low-pressure to observe how few AO3 fics there are for some of these characters. ( Quick examples: )

I need all the momentum I can get, being so rusty at this point and easily defeated by self-recrimination and any narrative problems that arise. disgruntled_owl and other local fic-writing friends have been great help on both fronts, offering solutions and encouragement.

Vidding

I've recovered enough from "The Greatest" to plan vids again. I'd like to make one for Longmire; given that I've been humming a particular song candidate for about six weeks, chances are it'll be set to that.

Also on the docket is the second FandomTrumpsHate vid, for deelaundry. We've narrowed it down to two options: either the opening credits to a TV show she has been imagining for a while or a remix of her "all you can kink" Tango & Cash vid.

Reading

Can wait for another post.

A commenter on "The Greatest" turned me on to Métis in Space, a podcast hosted by two Métis women from Calgary and Alberta who analyze representations of indigenous cultures and themes in sci fi, fantasy and horror visual media. The hosts, Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel, are (or recently were—I've been listening to episodes all out of order) graduate students in Native Studies at the University of Alberta.

I am loving this podcast. It's entertaining and educational: a perfect combination. I started with episodes that focus on the movies and TV shows I know best, and, man, I thought I was pretty okay at spotting this particular set of stereotypes and problematic tropes, but a few minutes into the first episode it became clear how much more sophisticated the conversation is. I'm so grateful to have access to these discussions and am delighting in—and humbled by—the enriched understanding of people and texts.

So far, I've listened to episodes about:

(-) Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Pangs"
(-) Star Trek: Discovery episode with the planet Pahvo
(-) Apocalypto (Mel Gibson)
(-) Dune (David Lynch)
(+) Lilo & Stitch
(+) Thor: Ragnarok
(+) What We Do in the Shadows

Next up is Westworld 2x8, "Kiksuya," a.k.a. the Ghost Nation episode, and I cannot wait.

FYI for those who are interested, there are also installments about the movie Avatar; episodes of Farscape, SG1, SPN, Star Trek: TOS, TNG & Voyager, Futurama, Highlander; and a Muse music video, among many others. They just wrapped up their fourth season.

( IMO the podcast is at its best when criticizing something )

My thing for Paul Bettany took a nosedive a couple of years ago when he started defending Johnny Depp, and I stopped seeking out movies with him in them. Then he appeared in these two franchise tie-ins back to back, and it seems I'm still not entirely dead to his charms.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

( It was… fine. No major spoilers, I think. )

Avengers: Infinity War

( It was… fine. Spoilers. )

I churned through the short story collection The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories (2017) in the past few days because it was due back at the library. A decent read with lots of Middle Eastern, Asian and cross-cultural perspectives. Hardly any romance despite the title, which was fine. The first story, Kamila Shamsie's "The Congregation," came perhaps closest with its human protagonist longing for his lost djinn brother. A few authors had fun riffing on the mythology in sci fi and future-dystopian settings (E.J. Swift, Saad Z. Hossain, Jamal Mahjoub). I also particularly liked Kirsty Logan's "The Spite House," in which a djinn struggles with the simultaneous power and entrapment of finding they can grant wishes, and Sami Shah's "Reap," in which U.S. military staffers remote-monitoring a neighborhood with a Taliban operative witness a possession they can't explain. IMO the reprinting of Neil Gaiman's American Gods chapter on Salim and the ifrit was unnecessary, especially since another white author who'd notably written about djinn, Helene Wecker, came up with a new story for this volume.

Having djinn on the brain motivated me last night to open that languishing Jinni/Dustfinger crossover fic I swore to finish this year. It's not even long; I just lost the initial momentum in, er, 2016. Added a few lines, bridged a gap that had been bothering me, wrote a sentence that restored a little bit of my confidence that I can still do this fiction-writing thing.

I also finished a poorly acted movie called Dot the I (2003) that featured an infuriating plot about three men manipulating a woman plus an "edgy" message about the ethics and trickeries of moviemaking. However, as it also starred baby James D'Arcy, baby Gael Garcia Bernal and baby Tom Hardy, I couldn't look away. It has a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems fair. One critic praised an "unpredictable twist" toward the end of the film that you could only not see coming if you believe the main character would go out of her way to resume a relationship with a man after finding out [spoiler] he followed and filmed her for months without her knowledge despite her history of being stalked, swapped a marriage certificate for a release form and faked his own death to obtain an ~authentic performance~ from her. Bleh.

Anyway. The fic and the movie are clearly to blame -- or rather, to be credited -- for a nice dream I had this morning about kissing Tom Hardy for a long time on a couch. It carried me through a busy workday and another spate of depressing national news. Now, speed skating and snowboarding on TV.

How are/were your Tuesdays?

Reading

I finally tried Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, and I loved it. First, it fit the need for a novel and an easy read during this week of post-snow hell commutes. Second, it was more relatable and moving than anticipated. Plowed through the whole thing in two days.

Should I read Carry On next? I didn't have feelings about Simon and Baz like I had about Cath, but then, before starting Fangirl I didn't think I would have feelings about Cath, either.

Plenty of--maybe too many--other contenders for To Read Next, although none of them seem quite right at the moment. I combed my bookshelves this weekend and compiled a list of things I own and haven't read. It shouldn't have been long, not after I did a major cull a couple of years back when I decided to switch from "collector" to "curator" mode, leaving only books I (a) have read and liked or (b) truly want to / intend to read. Yet the list somehow topped 85? It's weird, it doesn't look like there are that many unread books on the shelves. And only 20 of them are SF/F.

Watching

Kubo and the Two Strings: engrossing story, good score, beauuuuuutiful animation, but super bizarre to discover that it was indeed an American production and not dubbed in English over the original Japanese, because how else on Earth can you justify the casting? White American, English and South African actors as the five main Japanese characters? Why am I hearing Ralph Fiennes while looking at this face? I mean, Charlize Theron stole the movie as the monkey, but those were some seriously questionable choices. Did enjoy the George Takei cameo.

Star Trek: Discovery: I still have no idea what this show is; it seems to change every two or three episodes. Since the pilot, which I loved, it has been alternately entertaining, infuriating and tedious. I don't identify with, adore or find myself fascinated by any of the characters so far, which is probably the main reason I keep taking breaks in the middle of episodes. I did enjoy the latest one and the time loop one, because time loops, and I gasped aloud during a certain moment this week, so some stuff is clearly working. Just not sure I'd still be watching if it weren't Star Trek. It's nice to see so many friends passionate about it on Twitter, though. I would read their Burnham/Lorca d/s fic.

Vidding

Puttering away at the Festivid(s) and auction vid. In more important news, someone asked me to beta one of their Festivids, and it is AMAZING. [Extensive flailing redacted.] If it's not in my top five recs for this round, then we will have experienced a true bounty of excellent vids.

Doing

Battling the messy streets and sidewalks. We've barely had a thaw after clawing our way out of the city's third-longest recorded stretch of days below freezing. It's taking around 90 minutes to get to and from work, which is, by the way, four miles from my house, which saps energy and mood. Something weird was going on as well earlier this week where I kept falling asleep an hour or more early at night, having odd dreams and still waking up tired.

But: a couple of those dreams were good, such as the one where I was about to have sex with Jeff Goldblum. (TMI? Something about how, while we were both lounging in bed, he announced he had overcome his ennui and impotence for the first time in a while, I magically produced a condom, and then circumstances kept intervening.) And it was announced today that some things I wrote at work last year won awards in a national competition. That felt good for a while, until it started to also feel sad that I rely on that kind of external validation to gauge the quality of my work. But there it is.

How are you all faring?

Continued from here.

( 48 movies and ~20 TV seasons )

That averages out to a movie every 3-4 days this year, which may be a little low for me? But easily explained by the much higher than normal TV viewing because of the auction vid.

As always, I have opinions despite the startling lack of review posts and am happy to talk about any of these.

Might as well post the movie & TV lists while we're here. Last year I did them by month; this year I collected them for longer in part for Festivids reasons and in part because I was embarrassed for a while at the proportion of sources that weren't for the auction vid. But that is chugging along now.

( Averaging a little less than two movies per week, and more TV shows than usual, for vidding reasons )

As with the book list, happy to talk about any of these.

Today is Patriots' Day in Boston, a.k.a. Marathon Monday, a.k.a. the day most people in the city seem to have off from work and school except us. My usual commute is bisected by the marathon line, so I came home the long way tonight, through the city: a packed train of tourists, Sox and Bruins fans, and an international collection of runners in foil cloaks, some limping and leaning on one another and some looking like they just went for a jog around the block.

This afternoon, per tradition, a few of us walked to the local portion of the marathon course to cheer on our now-former coworker as she ran by. The crowd was quiet enough this year that she heard us, smiled and waved as she continued along the final stretch. (It was hot today and she's injured in two places, yet she still ran the thing in less than 4 hours. Unbelievable.)

*

Friends are great. Some came over for a seder on the first night of Passover; some were in town for lunch this weekend; some will be moving here from far away; some are helping me sift through an enormous amount of source material for this multifandom vid. I've only sent out a handful of emails so far, so if you volunteered for something and haven't heard yet, stay tuned.

Since last we spoke, I've watched or scanned through a whole bunch of movies and short TV shows. Let's see: Crazyhead (fun), Cleverman (difficult but rewarding), Extant (derivative but enjoyable), Travelers (meh), now starting Timeless (fun); the "San Junipero" episode of Black Mirror (not traumatizing, hooray), the Green Fury episode of Powerless (I liked parts of it, but sitcoms are still not my thing) and the new Doctor Who premiere (winning me back over); Pacific Rim (meh), Fantastic Four (2015) (Action Movie formulaic emptiness), Z for Zachariah (great), The Fits (as wonderful as promised). I am not a huge TV fan compared to the general fan community -- some of my dearest and most passionate fandoms have been TV shows, but I'm not well-"read" in TV and don't love the medium as a medium as much as I love movies -- so this endeavor presents an interesting challenge.

There is still a ton to go, but it feels good to have made a dent.

*

Meanwhile, my de-stressor and pre-bedtime media over the last month or so has been a BBC show made for five-year-olds: Sarah & Duck. Have any of you seen it? It's so lovely and chill, wholesome, and often funny. Sarah is curious, imaginative and accepting, and every day seems to be a vacation day, which sounds nice right about now. From time to time the art is really beautiful, too. You never know when the plot will go full-on surreal or stay within the realm of the plausible -- well, given a reality where ducks sort of understand English and ladybugs play small trumpets. I am a particular fan of Duck wagging his tail, Sarah when she gets really excited about things like baby manatees, and Scarf Lady's long-suffering handbag.

I'm almost out of episodes on Netflix, though, and then whatever can take its place?

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.

I.

Quick reminder that bidding for the vid I'm offering for charity ends at midnight tonight, if you would like to make a pledge. Sorry/happy to report that the current bid is $110, in case that saves you a click.

I put in one bid, for a Remus/Sirius/someone fic from setissma, but thedeadparrot outbid me. :) That's only fair, since she'd been bidding before I stuck my nose in.

II.

I'm at my mom's for the week and she's doing well. Big relief. Last week was tough, being in another state and waiting for updates while trying to work. Now we are just lying around the house listening to music, watching TV and old movies, occasionally playing Scrabble* or this Star Trek trivia game** or yelling at a Banff National Park jigsaw puzzle whose pieces all look the same.

*Geekiest hand of the game

**We shuffled the trivia cards so the movies and series would all be mixed together, but then we realized we didn't know Voyager or Enterprise and by the end we just shamelessly cherry-picked TOS for her and DS9 for me, with occasional Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home thrown in.

III.

Persuant to the above:

TV: My mom and her bf are into reality TV, so I've been introduced to shows like Wicked Tuna, Living Alaska, and Alaskan Bush People, plus many reruns of Property Brothers, House Hunters, etc., and the usual Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Let's not talk about the news.

Movies: I brought down one of the DVDs from a grab bag jetpack_monkey put together, and we are two for two so far: Attack of the Crab Monsters, which featured the immortal line, "Once they were men. Now they are land crabs," and Not of This Earth, featuring space vampires and questionable transfusion practices. YouTube trailer for the double feature. Tonight we'll try the third, War of the Satellites. Maybe we'll even get to the .avi file of The Frozen Dead that's been on my computer for about three years since my coworker tried to get me to watch it.

Books: Binti was great. I haven't gotten more than a third into Akata Witch because of all the TV, but I look forward to finishing it. Then The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl vols. 1-2, which was supposed to be for book club but just got outvoted by Paper Girls vols. 1-2, which I guess is next-next.

IV.

The neighbors' college-age son has gotten into Game of Thrones, grew his hair into several inches of curl, got himself a sword at a garage sale, and now does cosplay of Jon Snow in a fur-shouldered Night's Watch cloak. It's impressive!

V.

Okay, she's out of the shower, so that's all for now. Hope you're all hanging in there.