jmtorres

Holy crap, Neal's talking!

You know. In my head. To Peter.

Trust me, this is a breakthrough. Heh.

I feel like crap. I feel like I lost my weekend, and alas I didn't even lose it to sleep or I'd feel up to more right now. No, I lost my weekend to writing White Collar fic and watching Supernatural. (In other news: I appear to have actually acquired a Supernatural plotbunny I want to keep. Who knows when or if I'll write it, I have seasons 2, 3, and half of 4 and 5 to catch up on, but it amuses me.)

Writing... I'm sure you're all aware that my intended thousand-word thought experiment got away from me and is now the better part of seven thousand words. I actually culled a few hundred out of it last night because there's one section that was 1500 words, which is about three times longer than most of the other sections, and I'm trying to figure out some way to fit into the structure. There's... I've been told, of its content, that there's two pieces of plot that need to be there and one sentence which is the linchpin of the story, so it's not like I'm battling extraneous crap here. Gah. I haven't tried the 1300 word version on anyone to see if it works as well cut down, but even so that's not cut down enough. I'm wondering if there's a way to space out these pieces across--even two scenes instead of one would be better. Also, I was told it needed more snark in this section. I'm pro-snark, but I'm finding it difficult when Peter and Neal are both trying so damn hard to get through to each other, hopefully without being forced to actually say anything about anything. Clearly they should be using snark to not say what they're trying to say.

In the meantime, I still haven't written the ending. I know what piece of information needs to get transmitted to Neal and I know how that needs to get reflected back to Peter for narrative resolution, I just can't write it. Partially because I'm fucking around with the 1500 word monster scene and partially because the scene I'm in the middle of is threatening to turn into a 1500 word monster as well, if I don't figure out how to end scene and go somewhere else for the next important bit.

And I still don't have a title.

And echan can make me shriek "Ew" repeatedly just by saying "spanking" now.

And last night I discovered the absolute, over-the-top, practically parody of itself bad epitome of the story my story was written in response to. Before I was writing about something that happened here and there, seemingly unintentionally and unthinkingly in stories I otherwise enjoyed, but whoa, this story was non-stop, all-singing, all-dancing, in your face for the entire story. Dude, some people like to play with feathers, some people need the whole damn chicken, apparently. It was hilarious. But probably only to me. From all the comments, people enjoyed it as a serious work of drama, so I think I'll respectfully refrain from naming names.

The following is not so much vidding advice as general video editing advice. These were taught to me as good practices for ensuring that no matter what wacky thing you do to your project, you have back-ups.

Caveat: I work in Final Cut Pro; to my understanding Avid and Premiere run on similar principles, but all my menu/keystroke instructions will be for FCP.

( tl;dr on how to make sure your vid is always recoverable )

That's all I know about backing up your project files and sequences. I was thinking of doing another entry about my workflow, which of course is not the only way to do it but hey, I might know a few useful tricks?

Let me know if you've got any questions, about this entry or about Final Cut in general.

And I just broke six thousand. SEND HELP AND CHOCOLATE.

*cries*

I am writing. I have 1419 words of a White Collar fic that I didn't actually want to blow more than about 1000 words on. HELP. Anyone want to alpha or beta?

So I started in on the fourth season of Supernatural today (skipping quite far ahead of where I'd been before) out of an interest in Castiel. After two episodes echan decided that the easiest way to answer my incessant questions was to skip ahead to 4x09 and 4x20, respectively "fun sextimes with Ruby" and "how the Holy Tax Accountant got touched by an angel."

I suddenly have this huge interest in Jimmy Novak. I want to squish him! For the first part of the episode I very much thought he was going to go home and find his family already dead, and then he started lying to his wife about how he'd been crazy! But he was ALL BETTER NOW! and started wondering how he would ever be a fit vessel for Castiel again, since I knew he'd be in season 5, and then as the denoument approached I rather feared that he'd become a vessel again because his family was DEAD. So I was relieved at how it turned out, all told? And also a bit smug to have called that clearly his daughter was going to be vessely as well, if what made him special was in his blood. Also I really wish Dean had grabbed Castiel and turned him around and made him give the wife and daughter a few platitudes about Jimmy fighting the good fight because he loved them.

I want Jimmy Novak fic. I do not know where this would even fit anywhere in the canon unless you twist things sideways and suggest Castiel can/would let Jimmy out now and again, but I have a sort of horrific desire for Dean/Jimmy. I don't know what is wrong with me.

Recs?

I currently have four (4) vids open on timelines.

One is very meta, one is pretty damn meta, one is sort of snarky side-meta, and one is not so much meta as... corrective.

Dear god, will it never end.

Today someone had to honk me through a green light I was stopped at because my brain was off figuring out where to use the prison clip of Holmes. What.

Realization that I now have appropriate flowers on hand got me working on a vid I've left hanging since early December, if the archival dates are accurate. I have to remaster about a minute of it and that is frustrating me.

What I think when fandom tells me Ianto Jones is playing Watson:

( fic snippet here )

That is totally the title of this vid now.

Found the pilot script via Eastin's twitter, some interesting notes--

( Read more... )

ate a firewire cable.

AFTER I sprayed them with bitter.

I find Castiel crossplay superfuckinghot.

Who knew?

For kicks and grins I skimmed through an early script of the Holmes movie, which had some significant differences in characterization, plot, and so forth. Things that were interesting to me: ( spoilers? )

echan said something to me about SPN fandom being in a tailspin about the possibility of season 6, my summary of it was as follows:

The Network: This show is high-rating and money-making! Why would we cancel it?
Fandom: WHY GOD WHY.
Kripke: You know the whole apocalypse thing is too big, what if for season 6 we gave them a really simple thru line, you know, as simple as season one and being on a quest to find their dad.
Fandom: ...Oh. Well if you put it like that...

echan then suggested it would be completely hilarious if Ackles and Padalecki refused to play ball, since reportedly they have said OMG IT'S DONE too.

I then suggested Season 6: Castiel and Gabriel on a roadtrip across America to find their father.

I then wondered, if I posted the idea to my droll, would someone write it for me?

Dude, apparently I am subconsciously matching grains and legumes for protein. I realized the other day at work that when I can't get away to buy real food and I can only buy candy, my default purchase is rice krispie treat + something full of peanut butter.

I came to the realization the other day that if I had Wishbone source, I would totally vid it.

One of the temps at my work this season, back from last busy season, is an old, retired guy who works seasonal jobs because he's bored, as far as I can tell. Within the first two hours he was back, he called me Girl, Honey, and Babe. I am not a manager, but I close the store, and I have been a permanent employee for four years, which makes me like five echelons higher than him. Our relationship is not close. He has no reason to think he should be able to--or should be able to get away with--calling me these things.

I couldn't make myself tell him to his face not to do it. I don't know why. I feel like I should have been able to just tell him to shove it. Five seconds after, every time, I wanted to. I did not. What I did do was bitch to my coworkers and bosses, none of whom particularly wanted to confront him either, but the store's 2IC (and highest-ranking male employee) did call the old guy into the office and tell him that in our company's work environment, Honey, Sweetie, Babe, etc were not appropriate and he needed to use his Misters and Ma'ams. I was there for this reprimand, although my boss didn't point me out as the person who had complained against him, and the office is fairly open and full of people in and out.

All in all, I am happy with that outcome. From everything I have discussed with my coworkers, I was not the only person this man was making extremely uncomfortable, I was just the only one who was willing to complain to management about it. I'm not sure everyone understood my problem, though, because I have had to listen to a couple of rationales for this guy and because the treatment I received after from regular coworkers I consider friends pissed me off.

First:
"Oh, he's old, of course he'd call you Girl." Uh, no. I recognize age/experience as a valid social disparity but in this environment I am professionally his superior. You can argue that these equal out, and I am fine with that: he could treat me as an equal and call me by, oh, my name, maybe? I do not believe that his age is worth more than my job title. I definitely do not feel that his age and his sex are worth more than my job title because I do not believe that men should be privileged above women and I think this is goddamn relevant, because the names he was calling me made the issue very much that he was a man and I was a woman. He's made male coworkers of mine uncomfortable as well, but not using the same terms. Girl. Honey. Babe. These are belittlements to be applied to women, in assertion of male privilege.

"But I call you Honey all the time!" That's nice. However, you and I have known each other for a couple of years now, so you have earned some familiarity with me. Also, you are a woman, so I do not feel you are asserting male privilege when you call me Honey. Also, you are both older than me and in a higher position at our workplace than me, both of which are disparities I recognize the validity of. If you were (female,) younger than me, and, say, a mere cashier, I would probably think you were a sassy little punk if you called me Honey all the time; since you are not, it passes by me as unremarkable. Because you are female and not male, I do not feel as if you are perpetuating male privilege by calling me Honey.

Second:
So I do have informal relationships with most of the regular employees at my job. We call each other a lot of things. There's one cashier who calls me Bitch. Today she called me Honey, and when I jumped a mile, she told me I had to be expecting that today, given I had called out our sleazeball temp to management. What? No. Then my boss (female one, not male one) called me Sweetcheeks, continuing in the vein of mocking the situation. I said no, no that's not how it works, no: you should not be shaming me for calling out a harasser. If I was the only one who felt secure enough to complain formally and get the guy reprimanded, I, who couldn't make myself tell him off to his face, what kind of message do you think it sends to everyone who wasn't brave enough to say anything to anyone, for you to behave like this? If you shame people who speak up about harassment, even in jest, you make it so no on wants to speak up. You contribute to an environment of harassment, genuine, non-jesting harassment, because your actions serve to silence victims of harassment. I wasn't pissed off for myself, I was pissed off for the context and the people around me. I don't care if you're my friend, it is inappropriate to shame someone for stopping harassment, so you will not say these things to me.

I was not this eloquent at work. I wish I had been. I think I managed to get the message across, though.

Sigh.

He ate through my phone charger. Again. IN LIKE FOUR PLACES.

It is sort of heartening that when I start writing down a happy thought a day in the happy journal, things start pouring out and suddenly I'm writing down four happy thoughts as fast as I can before I have to run back to work.

In other news, I got a ramekin of cheesecake and left it on the counter instead of taking it home with me. It, it will go to waste now, because omg I'm not driving back down to the other end of town. *sadness*

I keep poking at this one particular story in my head and it's possible that if I keep at it, the sex scene will congeal into something I can actually elide instead of farming out to niqaeli to write for me. Relatedly, I think niqaeli and I should credit all episodes of xfp Lennon & McCartney style. She can even be Lennon! I'm good with this.

grey_bard contributed to my tattoo fund for a holiday gift, and I asked her what she would like for a snippet of fic for a thank you. She asked me to write something in the "Neal is Kryptonian" universe inspired by this picture. I fully admit that this snippet will probably not make super loads of sense to people who have not been listening to me snicker about it ever since someone handed me the pic and the plotbunny, so, to summarize: ( what is this universe? )

And now, the fic snippet, about 600 words:

( Sex Crimes )

Earlier today I very much wanted to completely quit my life here and go back to Cali and move in with ysobel and cook her grill cheese and curry and falafel every week. We could make dorky Merlin vids and I could find somewhere to work part-time and pay me crap to support my food habit, but I could stop worrying about the rent money and spend the rest of the day being her wife and writing fanfic that might be optimistic? Reading fanfic. And her library. Heh. Unfortunately I couldn't bring the children with me and through a bizarre quirk of bureaucracy I'm medically uninsurable if I don't complete another year at [current university] here and I do, actually, have a few commitments here that I can't walk out on. But isn't it a pretty fantasy?

I stopped off at Borders tonight to pick up my brother's birthday present and ended up taking home a pretty notebook, because while I found the Loki book, I've actually used all the pages up and the binding's coming undone. So. New year, new book. Paperchase makes a lot of pretty notebooks but I ended up picking not the one I thought was the prettiest but the one that made me happiest. It is very silly. It is covered in shiny flowers that look like they were drawn by a five-year-old and then preserved with tin foil. I just officially wrote the first words in it. They are I'M A FREE BIT, BABY, because that's how we're rolling this year.

(I, I do not know why blasting Bad Romance in my car cheers me up as much as it does. But at least part of it has to do with the radio edit version of the CD I have cracking me the hell up. You can't stop the signal, guys! She's a free bit! Whee.)

This entry will consist primarily of quoting people off my droll who made me laugh tonight. It's Follow... Tuesday? Sure! Why not?

thedeadparrot: I discovered after doing this one that apparently I am introducing each person I quote. Um, thedeadparrot! I have followed her for so long that I forget what awesome thing she did to attract me. It might have been FMA fic? I sort of went on a spree when I was reading FMA fic.

I believe that we should not be ashamed of writing fanfic. Yeah, I write romance. Yeah, I even write porn. Yeah, I did this as a teenage girl. And yeah, I sometimes daydream about characters. None of this should mean that my writing -- our writing -- is automatically worth less than that of some fanboy who daydreams about being Paul Atreides and about things blowing up and writes a script about his daydreams and then gets it turned into a movie. I am looking at you, James Cameron.

thefourthvine: I could quote all of every entry of hers, every single one of them make me laugh. She's been watching TOS for the first time and it is hilaaaaaarious. If you do not actively hate small children, ask to be on her Earthling filter, it is cuteness and awesomeness and wonderfulness and total quirkiness (they started calling him Earthling in the womb when they couldn't decide on a name, and I am still not sure they ever did decide on a name, because one of her worries was that they would just keep continuing to call him Earthling in perpetuity if they started then, and, online at least, they have). But most of the time, thefourthvine writes recs. Sometimes her recs go off on tangents. Here is one:

Benton Fraser has porn. I just want to repeat that, because I think it's a brilliant concept that deserves far more attention than it is currently getting: Benton Fraser has porn. Yes, this story is just as good as it sounds like it must be.

But there is a down side to it, and it is this: after reading it, I could not stop imagining the porn collections of other fannish favorites. Rodney McKay likely has roughly a terabyte of porn, but really only uses three short clips and one still photo. He's just completist. Jim Kirk (Reboot) also has the terabyte of porn, but he's actually working his way through it - he jerks off to something new every time. It's all hot if you look at it the right way, you know? Batman's porn does not bear contemplation and is certainly not something I would ever want to see, so I am pleased and comforted to know that it is hidden somewhere no one will ever find it, and also it is designed to self-destruct if anyone besides Batman touches it. Clark Kent likes the underwear catalogs. He's never been able to bring himself to get turned on by anything more explicit; he's always afraid his mother will walk in. (Lex Luthor's porn, it goes without saying, is his extensive Clark Kent memorabilia collection.) Methos's porn is called his memory. Jack Harkness's porn is called everything in the world, because everything is hot. How can you put a plug in an outlet and not get turned on? And laundry! All those dirty clothes, shirts and pants and trousers all touching, writhing together: clearly the hottest thing ever.

dragonfly: I recently subscribed to her (? --my default assumption in fandom, though it occurs to me that in this case I don't actually know) because I am reading every White Collar fic under the sun, seriously, White Collar makes me happy like you wouldn't believe, every night I check del.icio.us to see if anyone has recced new White Collar fic, and, uh, I like hers. Yes. Also apparently we are both giant dorks who are trying to figure out where the hell Neal's radius is on googlemaps.

So Sunday I met with my writers' group and they were critiquing a chapter of Mom and my mystery book set in Arizona. The people around the table told me they wanted to know more about the Native Americans I had introduced. Could the main characters have more interaction with them? Were they going to show up later in the book? I said, uh, no, not really, but if they were really that interesting ... So we started talking about Chekhov's gun and how if you introduce a gun into a scene it needs to get used at some point. Likening my Native American characters to Chekhov's gun, I said, "So you're telling me if I introduce some Indians into the story, I have to shoot them."

Stunned looks followed by hoots of laughter all around. Er, that didn't come out right.

zvi is smart and opinionated and, I find, often leading serious discussions I find important and want to take part in. Also she started Ladies' Choice, an AO3 collection for stories in which women enjoy having sex and do not have shame about it. I could love her for this alone.

Helpful advice what I have learned from fanfiction: If I accidentally have sex with someone with whom I would, in actual point of fact, enjoy having an ongoing sexual or romantic relationship with, I should not hastily begin apologizing for the sex, calling it a mistake, or otherwise characterizing it negatively. Because if the other person had enjoyed having accidental sex with me and would have liked to intentionally have sex with me in the future, they certainly aren't going to say so after I declare that it was a terrible idea, having had sex with them.

And, uh, one more--I read this at about two o'clock in the morning so that totally means I read it tonight today. It might not have been on my droll, exactly? But I deeply wanted to share it with like five people immediately and none of them were online, so here we go. Homo Ex Machina by toft is Sherlock Holmes fic--apparently the 1984 version, which imdb informs me is the Jeremy Brett version, which I hear is very good; not having seen it, my brain is currently slotting in RDJ and Jude Law for all versions of Holmes and Watson. In any case! In this story, Holmes is anonymously notified that someone is writing and publishing smut about them. There's a manuscript and pages go everywhere and lines of lurid, purple description keep catching Watson's eye and he is dying of mortification because--because--oh my god, this is probably a story spoiler, but so is the quote I want to pull--because he wrote it. This is probably my favorite line of narrative in the whole piece:

What on earth could I say? Holmes, I accidentally published a pornographic novella in which you and I perform a number of illegal acts, and now I am being blackmailed into making it a serial?

Because oh my god accidentally yes he did. But the awesome of this story cannot be contained in any summary, because the reveals keep coming. Holmes is always six steps ahead of everyone, right? So you can be well-assured that Holmes has even better secrets. I deeply want to quote some of Holmes' dialogue from later in the story, but whoa story spoilers, and really, part of the deep, deep awesome of this story is every time you think you've turned the twist there's a bit more. I just have to say: OH HOLMES. (Yes, that is actaully very like OH DEAN. Who knew?)

Flying: the best time for your period!

10:09pm: txt msg from niqaeli: "Terriawesome vid idea: Sherlock Holmes '09 to Lady Gaga's Bad Romance. I thought I should share the wtf."
( Read more... )

I am at isabeau's. I could see my breath when I got off the plane! Craziness.

Airport security? Dude, at six thirty in the morning there is no line. I was through airport security in three minutes.

Today: played with Isa's stepmom's dogs, went SQUEE YULETIDE some, fell over asleep for most of the afternoon, watched three episodes of Being Human, which Isa had never seen before, made grill cheese. Now it is Isa's turn to be asleep while I entertain myself on the internets (SQUEE YULETIDE). Tomorrow, we go see Sherlock Holmes (second time for me) and she has promised me grocery shopping.