I have no compulsion to be prosaic and coherent about it. Have a chat log.

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In other news, the Bel in my head, the one who was foolish enough to marry Miles, has gotten stuck explaining to Nikki that one-night-stand with Ivan and differing sexual mores of Barrayar and Beta whilst avoiding Ekaterin's hairy eyeball. To my amusement and Miles's, the point at which Bel is like, "Okay, we're wandering out of kid-appropriate territory" is regarding, um, motivations. Miles is like, "huh?" and Bel snaps back, "Would you explain to a kid about your black moods?" Miles is sort of shocked to find that anyone else ever has black moods. Ekaterin and Nikki are mostly just confused. Somehow (I'm thinking Nikki) Ivan hears just enough about this conversation to confront Bel about "wait, just what kind of self-flagellation was I functioning as for you?" And then Bel facepalms a lot.

happydork wrote an interesting entry examining why her own writing didn't reflect the diversity of characters she wants to read about. I thought both the entry and the conversation it sparked were fascinating and I encourage you to go look at it and post your own thoughts because I want to see what more people think!

I look back at the last dozen stories I've written and find I have a similar problem with focusing on the love lives of white dudes despite my broader interests. I think for me the socialized programming to accept the white dude perspective as normative in fiction is something I have to think about to overcome even though my intellectual beliefs concern greater representation of a variety of perspectives in fiction, both fan and media, to the end of normalizing being a not-white/not-dude/not-assorted-currently-normative-states.

Stuff other than Final Cut and Quicktime I use in the course of vidding on my mac (and forget the names of between vids sometimes)

(most of these do way more than I do with it, yay multitools)

--MacTheRipper, for directly-off-the-dvd-minus-DRM rips (as opposed to transcodes)
--MPEGStreamClip--multipurpose, the two big things I do with it are fix broken timecode on DVD rip files (this is another form of DRM) and switch containers on final files for the interwebs (the free/trial DivX codec I use in Quicktime for my interwebs encodes pops out a .divx file, but I prefer to put that data in a .avi container, because that's like, fandom standard)
--xACT--converts .flac files to .aiffs or .wavs, which are more Final Cut friendly

And then of course codec packs so Quicktime and therefore Final Cut will read .avi episode files the internet provides (and if I didn't have that particular neead I would just watch everything in VLC):
--Perian (if you use mac's ichat videochat Perian interferes with it, but other than that is brilliant)
--DivX for making fandom-friendly interwebs final vid files (from Quicktime, because for some reason it doesn't play nice directly with Final Cut, even though in theory Final Cut is built on and has all the capabilities of Quicktime)

I am probably forgetting some things I use. There's something I don't need every time, like FFMpegX was the app we used to get a semi-useable file out of a very old realmedia file for remaster last year (and echan, if MpegStreamClip doesn't do what you want to your .flvs, you might try FFMpegX).

So this is, in part, the entry I didn't write all summer because it was stressing me the hell out. Then Vid Review happened this year and amazingly it was much less stressful than in previous years, so I'm finding my words.

Vid Review was a lot better than in previous years. The moderation was extremely important in that. Astolat and Flo were solid, organized, thoughtful moderators. I liked the set-up this year--they grouped vids into blocks of half a dozen or so, Character Studies (viewable with and without context), Relationship vids, Broader Themes, Comedy, and Lonely Hearts (didn't fit comfortably in other categories). They encouraged the audience to make connections between vids in categories and between categories and to comment on more than one vid at a time. So we stayed on time and finished around 11:55, without skipping over any vids, and--I think this is important, but to be fair, my vid was categorized in Comedy--grouping the comedy vids together prevented the usual savaging of comedy vids.

You see, Premieres is typically drama/angst-filled and beforehand everyone is excited that someone might have made a comedy to break up the tearfest and then afterward at Vid Review--in previous years--comedy vids got fairly uniformly shredded, and then people wondered why hardly anyone submitted comedy vids to Premieres. Gee, it might have been because Vid Review told people that comedy vids were unwelcome and only drama vids were valid Premieres vids.

THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN THIS YEAR. Like, no one even uttered the phrase "should have made the joke and got out." You do not understand how happy this makes me. That's a phrase that functions as a dismissal, because it closes the topic with supposed general wisdom instead of opening the topic, such as by saying what part of the joke was worth keeping and what part dragged, which is something people could actually talk about and might not agree on even if they did all think it could be shorter. And the fact that that phrase--and other old chestnuts--have been repeated year to year just means that they're soaked in context that new members don't get. That's why I think comments like "should have made the joke and got out" need to be unpacked and formed in specific for the vid in question rather than quoted as a general rule--because when quoted as general rules they function to alienate and dismiss vids that don't meet an invisible standard that is not acknowledged to exist.

And can I get a BOOYAH let me repeat THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN THIS YEAR.

There are a few people--and it seems to me to be a specific lineage of vidding geneaology--that prefer to speak in Vid Review only when they have something negative about a vid. Someone behind me, when told I was the vidder of one of the vids of current category, leaned forward to say that she had nothing to say about my vid, and she meant it as a compliment. This is an attitude I don't understand and that bothers me about Vid Review--and in previous years it was much more pervasive, in part because it seemed to be an attitude held by a moderator. I don't get it. I don't get why just because you CAN say negative things in Vid Review, you want to ONLY say negative things in Vid Review. It makes it sound like you don't like anything, because nobody can hear your silences about things you liked, or even things you didn't like or dislike but found intellectually interesting. I like it when Vid Review has commentary on what worked as well as what didn't, on what made people think and wonder. I don't think it needs to be balanced in the sense of 'be nice to every vid whether it deserves it or not,' I mean, 'why can't we be talking about the good that exists as well as the bad? I mean, we like vids, right?'

There were a couple of comments this year that made me wince a little, but overall, I feel like people did talk about what the liked as well as what they disliked, that the moderating emphasis on connections and comparisons got people thinking and talking in ways that were more fruitful, that opened things up instead of shutting things down.

So what I have determined is that by and large I don't want to read White Collar gen because some vast proportion of it is whumping. Kidnapped, beaten, drugged, forced to do crime, rescued non-romantically. Whumping. And I try to steer clear of those even when it's a romantic rescue, because the healing power of sex only occasionally does it for me and those versions frequently also have rape. I hate to say this, but oh fandom, why so predictable? I mean, sure, even the show used the formula, to which I say, show! stop reading so much fanfic! Or at least branch out a little.

I might be interested in reading gen for case fic, if someone were doing research or using an area of their expertise to write an interesting case that got solved without kidnappings and beatings, but mostly gen uses cases as backdrops for kidnappings and beatings, not as interesting subjects in their own right.

Whereas OT3 fanfiction a big gooey marshmallow land, and sure, there's some kidnappings and beatings but it's easier to skip past them and find stories where their biggest obstacle is failure to communicate their feelings adequately. I mean, I wrote gen with case pastede on yay, but I wrote gen in which I stole the entire plot from OT3 fanfiction, which I would like you to know takes talent and brain contortions.

(Has anyone been writing solid case fic sans whumping? I'll take recs.)

Of bunnies I'm currently fielding, Kryptonian Neal is very awake in my head, and that story is so very much an OT3 story that it has interstellar scale failure to communicate their feelings adequately. I feel certain there's actual plot going on in the background but no one wants to 'fess up and tell me what it is.

Also there's the one where Neal's entire life is high drama, not just the parts where he swallows handcuff keys. Shockingly I think this one may be the deeply slashy gen story of how Neal wants Peter to trust him and doesn't even try to use sex to accomplish that end.

It is also kind of hilarious how different my brain's fic space and vid space are in this fandom. It's like all my fic bunnies are totally my id writhing around on the floor (my id just happens to be all about the relationship drama and not about the kidnappings and beatings) and my vid bunnies are intellectual engagement (yes, even Pisco Bandito).

So we were reading Ebert's review of The Last Airbender, about how it's unrelenting bad, like, all aspects of it are bad, cinematographically speaking, and there's a line in the review about "The laws of chance suggest something should have gone right. Not here." It made me start wondering if someone had sabotaged the thing. And I was thinking, maybe the editor. Because you can sabotage a fucking lot in post. You can make the plot meanderingly arcless and awful with editing. You can make the actors look shitty by choosing mediocre to awful takes. You can fuck the effects. You can fuck the 3D. You can fuck a lot as the editor.

So we imdb'd and the editor of The Last Airbender is... the editor who did Spaceballs, Species, The Abyss, Titanic ETA: WHICH WON THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR EDITING /ETA, Terminator 2, King Arthur, and before he was master editor he got started through visual effects work, on Empire Strikes Back, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET (which I don't know if you remember this, but those effects were awesome shit at the time).

This guy knows how to edit and knows how to work with special effect heavy stuff. So yeah. This is my theory. The Last Airbender was deliberately sabotaged by its editor, Conrad Buff. Possibly by just by letting M. Night Shyamalan have whatever he asked for.

The Epistles of @mishacollins by jmtorres. Also on AO3.

This story is RPF/Supernatural as told via Misha Collins's twitter. It contains 37 tweets, 3,442 characters, bizarre pairings, dead animals, tentacles, pegging, twitter users both real and imagined used herein in an entirely fictional fashion, and the angelphone.

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So in the long saga of Supernatural women who die of either fire or being stabbed in the womb, we've caught a couple of exceptions in the season two finale two-parter, All Hell Breaks Loose. The lesbian is not stabbed or set on fire! She is hanged from the neck until dead. Ava is also not stabbed or set on fire! Jake snaps her neck. Lots of necks for girls in this episode.

On the other hand, there is one person in here who dies of stabbing. That would be Sam. And because he lacks a womb, he has to be taken from behind.

niqaeli wrote an entry about the blood, sweat and tears we put into the vid Long Spear. I helped.

(Long Spear was the Trek vid. Yeah.)

I wish people didn't feel like everything needed a pairing label. Also, just because you're slashing them in your own head, it doesn't necessarily come out that way in fic: Cas being a stalker is kind of canon, it's not necessarily a pairing thing. I say this because I am getting sort of frustrated at reading things that are supposedly a particular pairing and then nothing pairing-like happens. I've started getting excited at seeing NC-17 in the labels not because I'm particularly interested in reading about them having sex but because it means I can fairly reliably expect them to be having an actual relationship and not just burgers. Not that I'm not up for cute burger-eating fluff, but it's gen and it's misleading to claim it's not.

*sigh*