bironic

Vid #1 posted! lilysea asked for Guillermo/Nandor set to this song, and so she did receive.

Sex and Violence
Fandom: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Rating: Mature
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless
Music: by The Scissor Sisters (edited)
Content notes: bloody clothes, vampire biting, stakes, swords, ashy bodies, physical fighting & shoving around, one clip of fairly explicit sex
Physical notes: constant shaky cam, including panning and zooming
Spoilers: through the end of season 3; does not contain any footage from season 4
Thank you to findmeinthealps for source help!

Summary

Who is gonna make you cry?

At the AO3 or ( embedded )

This vid supported the World Health Organization Foundation.

Mini-reviews of the billionty books I read last fall. Most are adapted from the communal spreadsheet we kept for the autumn reading challenge.

( From Spinning Silver to Murderbot & Wayfarers to rereads of My Teacher Is an Alien & The Vampire Diaries )

FOR THE RECORD, four of the five sources I offered for Festivids this year were NOT about vampires or outer space.

I loved What We Do in the Shadows when it came out in the U.S. and have seen it a few too many times since then. That said, I've talked with friends about how it would be tough to vid the movie well because of its specific, oddball humor. So of course that is what the Festivids algorithm fate matched us on.

I couldn't decide which of two song candidates to use--the more unconventional choice of "Hey Ya!", which had been on the to-vid list for years and would provide opportunities to include Katherine and Jackie, or an "I'm Too Sexy" mashup I found on YouTube, which would allow a dual focus on how these guys are terrible at being sexy and terrible at being vampires--so I started working on both, and figured I'd submit whichever one got done first. Except when "Too Sexy for My Fangs" wrapped up, I still wanted to work on "Hey Ya" because it was fun. The pace of the song and the need to fit the (pared-down) lyrics to the story made me work harder, and as a result I think the editing turned out better. Still nothing fancy, but a little peppier.

Both vids seem to have gone over well. So that is nice.

tl;dr TAIKA WAITITI'S FACE
AND ALSO JEMAINE CLEMENT'S


( Hey Ya )

( Too Sexy for My Fangs )

Last night I finished reading The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 & 2015, the only two years they've done the anthology so far. They accomplished what I hoped for, which was to include some excellent stories and to help me get a better sense of the contemporary SF/F short-fiction landscape by introducing me to new(-to-me) U.S. authors (who are not all white men) and magazines.

I thought 2016 was stronger than 2015, or maybe the stories were more my taste; but 2015 closed with a story that made me cry, and I want to recommend it to everybody, because it's about robots and people who like robots and people who wish they could be robots and autism and asexuality and polyamory and depression and struggling with suicidal ideation and it's just really moving. While I was reading it I heard many friends' experiences echoed in the text, but I know that can make something difficult to read, so, you know, assess the rec and warnings accordingly.

How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps by A. Merc Rustad

(Follow the link in the author's blog to a podcast transcript. The short story is reprinted a little ways down the page.)


Other favorites from the 2015 collection

"The Blue Afternoon That Lasted Forever" by Daniel H. Wilson - A frightening and touching apocalypse story with a father/daughter relationship at the core, featuring a protagonist who may be a man or may be a robot, but who, if he is a robot, clearly has human emotions about family.

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson - Vampires who farm different "grades" of humans after taking over the world! Nice worldbuilding in a few strokes.

"Tortoiseshell Cats are Not Refundable" by Cat Rambo - Did what most film/TV stories about female-coded A.I.s should do but don't do.

"How the Marquis Got His Coat Back" by Neil Gaiman - An enjoyable romp of a revisit to some Neverwhere characters, even though I don't recall liking Neverwhere overmuch.

"The Bad Graft" by Karen Russell - Classic-feeling, spooky tale about a Joshua tree that tries to take root inside a young woman.


Favorites from the 2016 collection

2016 had a strong start, with:

"Meet Me in Iram" by Sofia Samatar - Which felt too smart for me to understand, certainly not on first reading -- it felt like the sort of story we would have read in a college class followed by a discussion question of "What is Iram?" -- but was deep, beautiful and memorable.

The Game of Smash and Recovery by Kelly Link - Siblinghood, personhood, artificial intelligence and the detritus of interstellar colonization. Or: two strange kids and their robots on an abandoned moon.

Planet Lion by Catherynne Valente - Alien life corrupted by human civilization, and the humans don't even realize what they've done until it's too late.

Then a dip, when "Interesting Facts" by Adam Johnson failed marginaliana's "a dude wrote this" test. [Note: link includes mention of fictional sexual assault]

Then a recovery with stories such as:

"The Mushroom Queen" by Liz Ziemska - Joins the rank of "wonderfully creepy stories about humans merging with fungi"; see also auburn's SGA fic The Taste of Apples and... something else I just forgot The Girl with All The Gifts.

Tea Time by Rachel Swirsky - Alice in Wonderland fanfiction with a striking prose style that reinforces how the Mad Hatter and March Hare exist outside of time. Also, bestiality.

"Rat Catcher's Yellows" by Charlie Jane Anders - In which the protagonist struggles with her wife's decline from a brain-degenerating plague and the question of whether a VR game sweeping the world is a balm for plague victims or some kind of conspiracy.

And several others.

However, I really don't know what to do with "The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History" by Sam J. Miller. Told in the format of a newspaper article featuring witness testimonies, it's an alternate history of the Stonewall uprising where the bar patrons revolt against police using pyrokinesis. Is that an empowering fantasy, or does it undercut the bravery of real people who stood up for themselves without the safety net of supernatural abilities? By focusing on gay male characters, does it not also erase the real trans women who have struggled so hard to get the credit they deserve in the long fight for civil rights? Would the story have been better or worse if set in a totally fictional scenario? I struggled against this narrative and am interested in looking around to see if people have written about it.


Any recommendations for other short stories or authors to continue to catch up on what's happening these days in SF/F?

Title: She Walks In Beauty
Fandom: Let the Right One In
Pairing: Eli/Oskar
Music: by Sissel Kyrkjebø and Nicholas Dodd, adapted from the poem by Lord Byron
Length: 2:07
Summary: All that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Content notes: Blood, brief gruesome injury, underage relationship.
Thanks: To anoel for cheering me on on Twitter, even though she didn't know this was the vid I was struggling with.
Physical notes: I don't think any.
A/N: A treat for quizkwatsh for festivids 2016-2017. I'm sorry this turned out more Eli/Oskar than just Eli. Originally posted here.

This vid took four or five tries to make, including a couple of afternoons where I was ready to throw the whole thing out the window. Despite that, and even though I hadn't expected the middle sequences to feature so much linear narrative, I'm glad it finally came together; I'd been wanting to set this source to this song for a while and to try to play up the haunting quality of the refrain, the mix of horror and allure bundled together in Eli's character. I wonder if it worked for people, since the original post didn't get much feedback.

Personal favorite parts are the opening clip, Oskar making up his mind and hugging/accepting his new vampire friend as the music swells, and the cute "grr"s at the end. I had hoped to make that arm-stroking clip quite long, overlaid on the attacks, but I couldn't figure out how to do it the way I envisioned. Oh, well.

In other news, I thought this vid had "bironic" written all over it, but no one guessed me for it at the guessing post. Or rather, no one took a guess at all for it. Maybe because few people watched it? IDK. Stealth achievement unlocked?

( eli )

I have been meaning to post, and then I do not post. Such is the way of things.

Here is an entry about vampires.

Reading: I am leisurely rereading Anne Rice's Blood & Gold, a.k.a. the Marius novel. I hadn't revisited it since my sister first bought it for me in 2001 because it was so disappointing and dull. Thus it's been a pleasant surprise to find that it's not as terrible as recalled. I mean, it's not good, but there have been a few engaging passages and enjoyable character/relationship moments, and many things I hadn't remembered about Marius' history. Down to silly stuff like how he takes a nice hot sexy bath in the beginning with Thorne the Viking vampire.

Maybe it was Pandora that I really hated. Though I still rolled my eyes at the Botticelli worship and skipped Zenobia's Eudoxia's history, etc., and Marius' excuse for not going after Armand following the Santino disaster still rung hollow. If we start listing flaws, we will be here for a while. I continue to believe that stories involving Marius, and Armand, and probably others, are best told in third rather than first person.

Writing: Concurrent with the above, have been playing around in an old Mary Sue storyline where the girl who had been together with but then dumped by Marius gets turned into a vampire after a complicated (and, on reflection ~15 years later, not entirely logical) bring-her-close-to-death-so-Marius-has-to-decide-right-now plot set up by Armand.

That all was written already; this week I've been jotting down the scene where she takes her revenge on the humans Armand hired to hurt her. So she moves from being a victim to making them her first victims. It's been enjoyable to explore what the changes in her personality might be post-transformation.

Just as it's been enjoyable to contemplate how the story has evolved each time I've come back to it over the years. This feels like a more grown-up segment than the breakup fight I wrote when I was 20 (friends-locked, sorry), which felt like a more grown-up segment than the puppy love I wrote at 15. These Word documents are like an archaeological dig of my psyche, or like a diary in the form of melodrama.

The writing is coming out flat, though, as so much of my fiction has for the last couple of years. Something to do with not connecting to or conveying emotions, I suspect. I'm trying not to dwell on it, but rather to let the words come while they want to. Rewriting to change the POV from Marius to Mary Sue might do the trick, so we hear more of what's going on in her head instead of watching her.

Rereading this book has also made me realize I may have been better at capturing Marius' personality back in high school and college than I gave myself credit for. Which is nice.

Thinking: About how much the Vampire Chronicles may have influenced my feelings about polyamory and bisexuality, in addition to its more obvious role in my introduction to male homosexuality. So much of the VC narrative concerns men loving men, of course. But also men loving both men and women. Sometimes at the same time.

Because I read the books starting in my early teens, I'm not sure whether they shaped my preferences and showed me what was possible or whether I fell for them so hard because they articulated and affirmed how I felt or would have felt anyway. (I suspect it's the latter, in part because the books' obsession with Christian theology and sin and souls and damnation didn't rub off on me at all.) About how there can be such easy, deep, emotional and physical affection regardless of gender, and how vampires--a.k.a. individuals traditionally not considered in the mainstream--a.k.a. regular people--can love more than one person simultaneously. Without causing drama. Nor conflating bisexuality with promiscuity. A few exchanges in Blood & Gold brought the thought to light today, when Marius was telling Bianca about Pandora:

( Excerpt )

It's all obvious and ordinary and wonderful to me now, especially after so many years in fandom where queer identities are the norm rather than the exception, but the awareness and the embrace of what I didn't see around me in real life growing up must have started somewhere, probably not entirely from within my head, definitely before college, and I wonder if this series wasn't a significant contributor.

I got under the covers last night and finished the last 150 pages of Prince Lestat, and all in all, I'm glad to have read the book.

Trying not to spoil anything specific:

( The good )

( The not so good )

Final opinion: If the series stopped here, it would be a decent conclusion. Unlike half the stuff she put in Blood and Gold and whatnot, it felt like this story really happened (in the Vampire Chronicles world). I'll almost certainly buy a copy when it comes out in paperback. And then skip many sections on re-read. :)

ETA for reference: Guardian review on the digital age angle; Nerdist; WaPo; PissedOffGeek on the science vs. faith theme

.

And now, the cooking done, it's back to vidding. Two vids in progress as of yesterday, two different sources, two different tones and styles. Helps to switch between them when feeling stuck or bored on one.

...Okay, after this. Aisha Tyler is on PBS watching someone cook octopus.

1. One year in, ignazwisdom's and my Star Trek TOS rewatch continues apace, with great nostalgia and humor. We recently started season three. Here is iggy's latest writeup, on Elaan of Troyius. Episode recap tag / Full tumblr. All NSFW on account of URL and icon, heh.

2. Famous on the internet? Well, not quite, but thanks to a friend, the pudding cups and Jell-O shots from that Kink Bingo birthday party a couple of summers ago make a cameo appearance in the latest issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, special issue on materiality and object-oriented fandom, article "Beyond souvenirs: Making fannish items by hand" by Dana Sterling Bode. Neat. Just wish there were a link to the full post. Looks like that's not journal standard, though.

3. I encountered this summary of Five Times the Inception Team Tried to Extract Information from the Atlantis Crew today on pinboard and found it amusing. Y/N?

I READ ONE WHERE THE INCEPTION TEAM WAS HIRED TO FIGURE OUT WTF WAS GOING ON IN CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN AND WENT INTO THE DREAMS OF A BUNCH OF STARGATE CHARACTERS AND JUST ENDED UP CONFUSED.
--march 2011 by LLD_ONMEME

4. My lower calves (?) are so tight after three days in conference chairs, two flights and next to no exercise that it actually hurt to walk today. Whoops.

5. ( Non-spoilery nitpick re: this week's Penny Dreadful )

Was so good. So good. Worth the wait since no_detective first posted about it six months ago. (Her February review.)

I'd been wondering if this might be the Anne Rice movie of my dreams that the actual Anne Rice movies didn't achieve, and in a way it was: these beautiful creatures in beautiful clothes drifting through centuries, drinking in art and literature and music and science and technology with blood as more of an afterthought, some of them angsty and others full of endless wonder, traveling to the corners of the globe, living away from and reuniting with their beloveds with a depth and permanence of feeling most of us can only envy. It appeals to all the same desires to become a vampire for the sake of becoming the ultimate aesthete.

In another way, it was like Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire: a love song and a dirge for a city (in this case, Detroit) at its nadir, complete with long shots of damaged architecture and indie music performances that capture something about the current era, while a pair of benevolent supernatural creatures watches humanity from a remove. Not that it achieved the level of quality of Wings of Desire, but the resemblance was remarkable.

Which is not to imply that Only Lovers wasn't also very much its own movie. The plot summaries don't do it justice. This is the kind of movie I want when I complain that today's mainstream movies don't leave time to think about anything, including all their plot holes or nonsensical...ness. This movie takes its time, because the characters have all the time in the world. (When they talk about a white dwarf that's only 30 light-years away, you realize they could actually visit it on some spacecraft one day without having to worry about intergenerational planning or cryo.) The movie talks about appreciating culture(s) and nature to the fullest. Tilda Swinton's Eve literally stops to smell the Amanita muscaria. It's about different approaches to life and immortality. It's about maintaining a relationship. It's sort of about the recent history of American music. It touches on elitism/privilege and the contamination of our bodies and our planet.

And it's funny, and beautiful, and tense in the last third when the fragility of their survival becomes clear, and full of references to artists throughout the centuries. Although, if I can nitpick for a sec, you'd think that a pair of vampires as old and educated as these two would have more diverse and obscure references and favorites to toss back and forth. Byron I'll take because Tom Hiddleston's Adam follows so much in his image, and Tesla, too, because he's among the favorites of today's hipsters, whom Adam also embodies-slash-laments, and Darwin worked because it made a good joke/point. I just would have liked less well known names in the mix, and more subtlety. Adam putting on a name tag that said "Dr. Faust" was great, but it lost a little something special when another character called it out. The photo/illustration wall in Adam's apartment did a better job. (Oh, ha, and in one corner was the same pic of Neil Young I posted about the other day.) Unless the point was for us to get all the references and therefore empathize even more with the characters for what they love. Or maybe the lesser references are meant to be uncovered on repeat viewing, among the records strewn across Adam's apartment and the books Eve browses while packing her suitcases.

Okay, but also, since Adam is supposed to deeply appreciate science and electrical engineering, it made me cringe when he said to Eve that Einstein's spooky action at a distance isn't a theory because it's proven. Ugh, writers, you should know that in science, a theory is a pretty damn strong case, and you can't prove something, only disprove it.

Also also, apparently in this universe, vampirism bestows not only fangs (great makeup job there), pale skin and luminous eyes but also very dry hair.

In sum, highly recommended even when it's a bit ridiculous, & want to see again.

ETA: And here is a perfectly valid dissenting opinion from daasgrrl!

I wasn't sure how a Saturday could start better than a good night's sleep topped off with a dream about having dubcon sex with vampire David Bowie.

Turns out the answer is by following up with a walk to check out the winter farmers market (it was okay; I bought a radish and some garlic-roasted nuts), taking advantage of the one-day 50-degree break in the weather to go on a long-for-me bike ride, and stopping on the way back at Trader Joe's to pick up a few treats like pea shoots and dried apricots.

Later, when my quads work again, there will be cooking. Am going to try these steamed gyoza and either spinach or pistachio muffins (maybe these or these) for St. Patrick's day/six-month anniversary at work on Monday. Trader Joe's had shelled pistachios, which would make the latter easier. Maybe this time I will not overmix the batter and actually achieve non-dense muffins.

...Hi, this is me trying to post more. Should talk about how fabulous Top of the Lake was.