7 Feb 2015 07:36 pm
Five things
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frayadjacent1. I'm very slowly making my way through Festivids, alphabetically, only skipping vids with "chooses not to warn" (though even then if I'm familiar with the source or I see lots of "that was fun/delightful/sweet" type comments, I'll go for it). I'm really enjoying the vids! A lot of people have posted recs and I'm not going to do that, but if you like vids and you haven't checked out Festivids yet, here they are. Also I've been pleased to find that after watching a vid I can leave not just a semi-coherent comment but I can usually say something specific that I liked about the vid, which I chalk up to having more experience watching and talking about and especially beta-ing vids. It feels nice to have the vocabulary and mental framework to be able to do that without difficulty.
2.kuwdora is going to mentor me/work with me for the rest of the year on vidding! I am very excited about this arrangement. To that end, today I wrote out a timeline of vid projects for 2015, keeping in mind con deadlines and whatnot. It's ambitious but doable if I stay on top of vidding, and if I make the seven vids on the list then I'll have said the most important things I currently want to say about my two most beloved fandoms, BtVS and Xena. If I manage to actually do it, I wonder how that might change vidding for me. I've had a few things hanging over my head and the idea of having them finished this year sounds really really good.
3. I am finally really running again! So much so that I bought a new running shirt, because I was going through them too quickly. My mileage is still painfully low. I look back on the days when I regularly ran 4-6 miles without stopping and I can't imagine it; I'm going more like 2-3 miles and having to stop and walk several times. BUT I'm doing it.
4. I've been really struggling to focus lately. On everything: work, vidding, chores, Festivid-watching, even relaxing. And it's felt related to a general crankiness and uptick in my (mild) anxiety. Last weekend was one of those that just happened, and at the end I didn't even know what I'd done. I hate that feeling and the listlessness keeps building with it, but today I came to a realization: not every day has to have a perfect story arc, a Thing I Did. I don't have to clean the whole house or have an epic day of vid-farr or hang out with people all day. I can poke at a vid and chat with people on Twitter and watch one episode of one show and do a chore or two and go running and just kind of hang out, and *that's fine*. And I immediately felt much better. And I know this will pass; like most people, I imagine, I have phases where my focus is better and phases where it isn't.
5. Shows I'm enjoying right now: Elementary, The Mindy Project, Selfie, and a Key Episode Farscape rewatch. And tonight I'm going to check out Fresh of the Boat.
2.
kuwdora is going to mentor me/work with me for the rest of the year on vidding! I am very excited about this arrangement. To that end, today I wrote out a timeline of vid projects for 2015, keeping in mind con deadlines and whatnot. It's ambitious but doable if I stay on top of vidding, and if I make the seven vids on the list then I'll have said the most important things I currently want to say about my two most beloved fandoms, BtVS and Xena. If I manage to actually do it, I wonder how that might change vidding for me. I've had a few things hanging over my head and the idea of having them finished this year sounds really really good.3. I am finally really running again! So much so that I bought a new running shirt, because I was going through them too quickly. My mileage is still painfully low. I look back on the days when I regularly ran 4-6 miles without stopping and I can't imagine it; I'm going more like 2-3 miles and having to stop and walk several times. BUT I'm doing it.
4. I've been really struggling to focus lately. On everything: work, vidding, chores, Festivid-watching, even relaxing. And it's felt related to a general crankiness and uptick in my (mild) anxiety. Last weekend was one of those that just happened, and at the end I didn't even know what I'd done. I hate that feeling and the listlessness keeps building with it, but today I came to a realization: not every day has to have a perfect story arc, a Thing I Did. I don't have to clean the whole house or have an epic day of vid-farr or hang out with people all day. I can poke at a vid and chat with people on Twitter and watch one episode of one show and do a chore or two and go running and just kind of hang out, and *that's fine*. And I immediately felt much better. And I know this will pass; like most people, I imagine, I have phases where my focus is better and phases where it isn't.
5. Shows I'm enjoying right now: Elementary, The Mindy Project, Selfie, and a Key Episode Farscape rewatch. And tonight I'm going to check out Fresh of the Boat.
Re: this is a total tangent: how best to elicit surprise?
Anyway, I don't think I'd ever seen "Creep" -- it's very cool! Yeah, there are definitely different types of surprise that can happen in vids and not all would even be something that content notes would even suggest. The surprise in Creep is the POV switch, not anything that would show up in content notes, familiarity or no. Or, another example, This Be The Verse in this year's Festivids crop, which has a (IMO) delightful surprise, but not one that needs warnings for and not one that someone familiar with the Batman show could guess. thuviaptarth's Hey Ho also is surprising, a bit, in the second verse: it's set up to be a condemnation of Tony's compliancy in the military-industrial complex, which is a relatively common take on things, and then turns it around to the rest of the superhero world as well. So surprise is possible! I'm just not sure it's a good idea to rely on something in canon as the surprise & (by extension) rely on CNTW as a way of making sure it stays that way. Again, not even sure if that's what the vidder for the Life After Beth vid is doing: it was just something I started thinking about after watching the vid, because my experience of the vid was one of surprise, largely because it was CNTW. Though, thinking on it further, I think had there been content notes, I would have thought it was going somewhere entirely different -- I would not have expected what happened even if it said "sexual violence" or "gore" (perhaps *especially* if it said sexual violence). I definitely would have watched the vid differently (if I had watched it at all) and, I think, not liked it as well -- I would have expected the sexual violence and gore to look very different and have been bracing myself for that. My expectations would have been more serial killer-y and less genre.