Sleep-speaker

Title: Apple Candy
Video: DC Animated
Audio: Apple Candy // Ben Lee
Summary: I want you, and I want him. [Wonder Woman/Superman/Batman OT3]
Vidder's Notes: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, chaila. I'M SORRY IT'S LATE BUT NOW THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS YOUR our SECRET SHAME.

PASSWORD: vidses

Apple Candy

Direct download available here. RightClickSaveAs. 70 megs approx.

Cross-posted to vidding and vidding

Other vids available here.

Okay, so, I rarely talk about this here, but I regularly play tabletop RPGs. Loads of different stuff over the years - White Wolf, D&D, Mutants & Masterminds, Homebrew Wackiness. The point is, pretty much every Sunday, me and my husband and a few of our friends spend the day gaming. (For the uninitiated, I'm basically talking about Dungeons & Dragons - that game where you sit around with paper and dice pretending to be Elves and Barbarians, fighting Orcs and selling treasure.)

There have been times when our games have been irregular. While we were in Korea, we didn't game at all, and while K was very sick we went for months between games sometimes. But for the majority of my adult life, this has been a weekly ritual. And two of us (K & Addy) I've known since I was 18. I'm 31 right now.

The reason I don't talk about it much isn't lack of enthusiasm. I mean, like everything else, it waxes and wanes, but you don't devote most of your Sunday to a thing you don't enjoy. It's because the best metaphor I've heard for RPG games is that it's like sex: you can't do it with anyone in the room who isn't participating because you start thinking about how dumb you look. Add into that the fact that we're talking about stories and characters and situations that none of you have knowledge of or investment in, and me squeeing about the latest plot twist in my decade-long RPG game becomes a rather one-sided interaction. And if you did think it was cool, what then? It's not like when you indulgently listen to a friend rant about their favourite TV show for six hours, where there is at least the possibility that you'll find it intriguing enough to go off and watch it.

Our stories are largely unrecorded, except in memory. We speak to each other about them. We are a fandom of four. But there is something magical in it: a television show written, scripted, acted, purely by us, for us. When we are disappointed or upset with it, we can talk and change things. The themes and storylines we care about get developed. The characters we care about get the narrative attention. When thing go badly, it sucks monkey fuck, but when things go well it as artistically valid and creatively collaborative as anything I've ever seen.

I need to stop, at this point, and explain something:

We do not play Dungeons & Dragons "properly". We do not, generally ever, go down into cave systems and try to solve logic puzzles, try to outmaneuver little models on square grids, and note down the exact experience point value of everything we killed. We do not play RPG games as board games with some extra descriptive flourishes. I do not mean that as an indictment of board games, I just mean... What we do is on a much further point along that spectrum. If you have played White Wolf game systems, our approach fits much better into that model.

We tell stories.

More accurately, K tells stories. I feel self-conscious, seeing as I'm married to the dude, (and seeing as the fawning GM's girlfriend is one of tabletop's most staple misogynistic stereotypes), praising him so unequivocally. But seriously. For a long time I aspired to be a writer, or at least more of a writer than I am now. I can do words. I know from brutal, personal experience, that plots are fucking hard. Not for him though. Or at least, you'd never know it.

He tells these incredible, intricate, complicated, beautiful stories. He makes these huge worlds for us to explore and takes into account the characters we've created. He spends hours doing preparation each week. Like thematically, he writes us arcs, without telling us, for us to experience and react to and maybe resolve differently than he expected. He's not rigid about it; when we surprise him, he is elated. When the dice throw us for a loop and let us succeed or fail unexpectedly, he works out how this will add a new, interesting wrinkle to the fabric of the story. He once sat on a plot twist for ten years.

I feel guilty, sometimes, that he doesn't write stories for everyone to read - that his preferred artistic medium is so unshareable. But he says it's honestly what he prefers; his favourite hobby. So I guess I should just feel lucky instead.

The reason I'm writing this right now is that we just finished a game - The Monk's Tale. We started it over a decade ago. We didn't play it solidly for that time. In fact, there was more than one hiatus of several years. But we always came back to it in the end. It became unkillable. It became reflective of who we were. During that time, friends turned out to be terrible people, friends who were wonderful people left us for terrible reasons, we made new friends, we changed, we had crises of faith, we were angry, we got better.

It sounds lame to say it, but it helped us through some weird times. The places the story didn't quite fit together anymore or where people were acting out of character just...became like scar tissue. Like a textural reflection of the time and place and people we were with when that part of the story was being told. Like testimony.

A story we told each other over the course of 12 years and all the moods we were in when we told it.

My character's name was Skai. When I started playing her I knew two things: she was a necromancer and a social worker. She was sensible. She was friendly. She was not dramatic. By the end she was a batshit glorious half-Succubus ex-Prophet who apprenticed herself to a disgraced Paladin and swore she only upended her society's entire social and religious structure as a by-product of her quest to kill the Nine Horsemen of the Apocalypse with a bow she stole from the Fairy King. It was a quest to kill her brother, or at least, the monster he would become if she didn't change the future. A future that might have arisen from her decision to make herself half-a-devil, which she did to protect herself from him before she knew he was her future-brother, corrupted by a future-devilish-her.

She brought a pantheon of powers to its knees in a fit of pure rage. She helped convince a machine to become a god. She became terrible at human interaction. Lonely, maybe. Uncertain she still was able to love anything honestly (except her daughter).

She collected lovers like sea-shells - though it was her soul that was hollow; that promised oceans and delivered echoes. People died for her (how terribly, romantically dramatic) and worse (unromantic, undramatic, unfixable - tragedies in all their banal cruelty). In the end she was left with a deposed cartographer prince and her lost friend's betrayed fiancee: the boy she couldn't couldn't control and the girl she wouldn't. A man who drew maps and a woman who guarded gates, and I suppose you'd need both to find and keep her heart.

That's where I left her.

I have played this character my entire adult life.

And now I'm done. I think that's a milestone worth marking. Even if it makes me shift a little awkwardly in public.

It's okay, though. None of us felt it was right to end it all, so we're going to start a game about the Next Generation. On both a meta and non-meta level, we know we can't possibly top a 10 year game of Good vs Evil for the fate of the Planes of Existence. So we decided it was obvious. What would the children of famous heroes do? Knowing they can never escape the shadow of their parents' heroism?

DROP OUT AND BECOME THE GREATEST ROCK STARS OF ALL TIME.

That's right. We're all playing Bards. All of us. It's going to be amazing. And completely different.

The game is dead. Long live the game.

Avatar cartoons. Yup, that's what's been going on lately. I watched them ALL. Like, really quickly cus they were so good. So good. People had been telling me for years, and I didn't listen. I was such a fool.

But now I am enlightened! And, obviously, full of thoughts. Mostly about Korra and expectations and the ways in which it is saddled with an impossible task.

First, though, Avatar: The Last Airbender! Because, wow, that show is a beautiful, beautiful thing. So many narratives that were just...more than I thought they'd be at the start. More subtle, more thoughtful, more touching, more heartbreaking.

( The Last Airbender feelings spam! )

So of course, next, I wanted to watch Korra. Because all that but about a girl? Yes. YES PLEASE.

And then, I was warned, it was not so great, and so I went in forearmed, and I think that helped me, because the first season was not so great. And the others have been...well parts have been wonderful and parts have been confusing, and that's what I have gathered you all here today to talk about!

( So Book One was sort of not great... )

( Book Two was much better! )

( And then we get to Book Three which was mostly lovely yet left me with some uncomfortable questions about the future... )

I need Book 4 like yesterday.

Title: I'll Run (out of time)
Video: Revolutionary Girl Utena
Audio: Run To You // Pentatonix
Summary: I can't save you, but I can try
Vidder's Notes: Vidukon 2014 Premiere!



Direct download available here. RightClickSaveAs. 102 megs approx.

Cross-posted to vidding and vidding

Other vids available here.

I know, I know, this doesn't look good for me. I'm turning into some terrible DC apologist.

But okay, let's unpack that statement for a minute, because there's a lot of stuff, in comics in general, and at DC in particular, I feel no need to defend, and quite often an overpowering need to scream about. Or just hide under a rock and ignore because it's too depressing. That said, my perception of a weird media bias against DC and in favour of Marvel bugs me to an increasing degree. Basically because I feel like it doesn't hold people accountable in the way they should be held to account, and I think it ends up ignoring success stories and examples of positive attempts at change. It's just...since I think this narrative is broken, I worry all we're doing is holding a biased conversation that won't get us any actual improvement.

So...I kind of didn't talk a lot about this for a long time because it's not a popular opinion, and because it's hard to defend a thing without it seeming like you're excusing everything it does, which isn't my intention.

But I was reading a recent article from ComicsAlliance on DC comics' New 52 and how many had been cancelled, and comparisons to Marvel's Marvel NOW initiative (which isn't a reboot but is a sort of...relaunch/rebranding initiative) all about how Marvel are doing it so much better. Based on...basically nothing I could understand and it mostly seemed to harp on about how DC can't possibly sustain publishing 52 titles a month and how it needs a new tactic to reach new readers, all the while ignoring the fact that DC no longer publishes 52 titles a month and they're trialing a new tactic of weekly comics. Which may be the world's stupidest idea. Who knows! But it is super weird this article didn't even talk about it!

And it struck me: here is a place where I think I can demonstrate my point and achieve some kind of catharsis. What the fuck is this article:

http://comicsalliance.com/dc-comics-new-52-47-cancelation/

I'm going to break it down point by point and hopefully illustrate why I think it's biased.

My goal is not to point out that therefore DC is all roses and happy shiny editors who never pointlessly intefere in otherwise successful books. My point is not to say that there are no problems with audience outreach. My point is that the underpinning logic of this article is broken. In some really weird ways. That seem predicated on a lot of generous assumptions about Marvel's business tactics based on three months of solicitations and wilfully ignoring everything earlier than December 2013. In ways that seem indicative of fandom and the comics press' general tendency to award Marvel for effort and punish DC for failure.

This is long. This is really fucking long. I tried to cut it down, I did. I couldn't. I was too filled with the need to destroy it.

The short version is: the article's assertion that Marvel is more patient when it comes to allowing its new titles to find a footing and flourish is divorced from any reality involving sales data, and while I'm very pleased they're making an effort to change their behaviour and actually publish titles featuring women and poc in the title roles, these books are younger than some of the food in my cupboards and not a numerical improvement on what DC tried to do with its reboot, so forgive me for wanting to see how many are still standing next year and whether they're replaced by similar titles, before I believe Marvel have cracked the secret code to making the comics industry less shitty. Plus, you know, that whole thing where the dude keeps commenting on DC's current sales tactics while never actually mentioning DC's newest sales tactic.

That really is the meat of it. But if you want to read that in vastly more detail (I don't really recommend it), then follow the cut.

( This article. This fucking article. )

Right, I've been gone forever. I spent the first half of April in the USA for my grandpa's funeral (well, memorial service, he was cremated right after he died, but people wanted to take time to organise a big memorial service when scattered family could all attend). It was good to see some people I haven't seen in a really long time. It was also sad.

Anyway, I came back and then there was a whole bunch of VidUKon stuff to get organised with, plus a load of house-related stuff I just didn't deal with after moving in but before going on vacation.

But also...I don't know. Journalling communities are kind of dying, it feels like. I'm not helping with that, even though I like them better. But they take more time and investment. Tumblr and twitter can suck up just as much time but you feel yourself interacting constantly. There's just non-stop entertainment. It's not me on my own madly typing into a computer. I like the time-sink-grab-bag-of-cool-stuff that tumblr offers and I like the way of easily keeping in touch with so many people that twitter offers.

But I've realised I don't like the way both of them make it hard to engage in wider conversations. Twitter's too brief, and tumblr - it's...far more based around friends running at you and yelling, "THIS IS AWESOME!" or "THIS IS HORRIFYING!" Everything you see comes with implicit approval or disapproval; you don't just "find" stuff, it's always being presented in the context of who's showing it to you. It has a tendency to echo chamber because it's basically people passing around stuff they find cool. Which is a really neat thing about it. Until you...don't agree with what people are saying. Then it becomes really hard both because tumblr also has a terrible format for longer discussion and because culturally, I don't really feel it's built for it. It's built for squee and outrage and it does those things really well as group activities. In forums people react to things with words - things that aren't necessarily being said by people they already know. In journal communities, people link to and talk about stuff and say "hey this is smart, I agree with this!" but usually with added words. It's a point from which you jump off and talk about stuff and even if it's not your intention, that means you get a ton of different reactions to the same thing, not a ton of identical reblogs. It feels less monolithic.

I dunno. That's my experience anyway. It makes being on the "wrong" side of an issue kind of lonely. You don't want to harsh people's squee. You don't want to look like an asshole. It's hard to say, "Guys I think this is kind of misjudged..." when the thing you're talking about's terribleness is basically a meme. Especially if your point isn't that it's all sugary deliverance.

But also I'm getting tired of feeling like I don't want to say stuff. It's making me as tired as saying stuff and then feeling like I'm being a jerk.

So probably the answer is just to realise that I'm not a tumblr person. Or like, I am, but...not for the talking. I should do my talking here.

It's honestly a little intimidating. Which makes me feel very "tiniest violin." So whatever.

I don't get why people give Marvel so many free passes. That "lol, DC can't get out a Wonder Woman film but Marvel have a RACCOOOOON!" meme can die in a goddamn fire.

How does that make Marvel look good? Why are we using the fact that Marvel are making an offbeat minor-character ensemble movie with one woman, before they've managed to make a single movie ABOUT a woman, as some sort of evidence that they're better at this shit? When they've gotten to a place where they've made so many of these movies, they can do things like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man and they still choose them over Captain Marvel or Black Widow?

Especially since it seems to have been resurrected with this latest round of movie news. So now the fact that DC may be also doing an offbeat minor-character movie with a token woman (Metal Men) before they've managed to make a film about their iconic female character STILL means this is an appropriate comparison? It's the EXACT SAME FUCKING SITUATION.

I don't. I just don't.

Marvel releases a movie with a Space Raccoon before they have a female lead: sign of their adorable wackiness!

DC potentially releasing Metal Men before they have a female lead: DEAR GOD THE MISOGYNY.

Okay, I genuinely feel better for having gotten that off my chest.

One day soon, you can all look forward to me ranting about the Cap 2/Man of Steel comparisons, but I should probably save that for another day.

(Don't worry, I like Steve Rogers, I wouldn't actually shoot a puppy.)

I just wanted to thank everyone for the really kind words you all left on my last entry. I didn't have the...well, energy I guess, to reply individually, just because I was still a bit messy and sad, but I genuinely appreciated every single one. Thank you all for such thoughtful and attentive comments. It really made my days better getting them.

In slightly happier news, registration for VidUKon is open! And this year it will be super exciting because if you purchase a non-attending ticket (for the princely sum of £16!) not only will you get a programme (with your name in) and a premieres DVD, you will also get entry to VirtUKon! Which will be a virtual convention. Yes! The vidshows will go up, streaming (where possible), in REAL TIME, complete with comments to discuss with the masses of other virtual attendees who will surely be there in droves!

We are also looking into livestreaming some panels. This is, of course, our pilot year, and this will depend on several things, but one of them is getting enough subscribers to our YouTube channel so that we can enable livestreaming. It's a totally doable goal and we're a good way there already, but if you'd be willing to head over to our YouTube Channel and subscribe to us, you would be the most awesome person ever.

In the meantime, for a taste of what VirtUKon will be like, our previous cons are already up at the site! Just pick the year that you want to view...

Yes, it's late. I'm late with everything. I'm behind with everything! I haven't posted in forever! In my defense the last month has been not only holiday season but also I now have a house which is pretty fucking amazing (and down to a lot of help, I am acutely aware of how lucky I am), but required time and cleaning and work done and...things. Also for the last week I have been really fucking sick. I THINK I'm starting to feel better now. I hope.

Anyway, I didn't vid much of anything this year, comparatively, which is a little sad. But, oh well.

2012 | 2011 | 2010 | NaViMaMo 2010 | 2009 | 2008

( THE VIDS! )

( THE QUESTIONS! )

So! The next Superman film is going to feature Wonder Woman. She will be played by Gal Gadot, who's best known for her role in the recent Fast & Furious movies.

Obviously everyone on every side (including myself) then proceeded to have a meltdown.

I'm not shocked by the bullshit dismissive judgemental fanboy reactions proclaiming her a terrible actress because she was in a car movie, or because she has an accent, or because how dare they put Wonder Woman in this film anyway, they ought to be focusing on Superman vs Batman, or because her boobs aren't big enough (and yes, I saw all these, if not after this announcement, then certainly when Gadot was leaked as one of the front-runners for the then-unnamed female lead role).

I'm also not shocked by the instant reactions on the other side - Snyder will destroy her because he wrote Sucker Punch, it's probably a cynical reaction to the success of Frozen and the Hunger Games, how dare they put her in a supporting role about the two dudes, not her own film. I most certainly don't mean to imply by putting these claims in opposition that the latter equivalent to the former. I have a great deal of sympathy for fears that this will get fucked up, and there are reasons to believe it will. The idea that it might be good is almost as terrifying to me as the idea that it could be bad because it requires investment and hope and trust that I don't really have. I understand the desire to voice these concerns, to reflexively inoculate oneself against raised expectations. And let's face it, Sucker Punch was fucking offensive.

But I also think that there are some solid reasons why introducing her this way, and this casting choice, may bode well for the movie, or at least not as badly as some fear. So as an exercise in not panicking before I have to, I'm going to list them. Ten Points of It Might Not Be Awful!

Fair warning; some of this is cynical and pragmatic. This is engineering not philosophy.

( 10 Points! )

Okay.

I have reacted, even if I'm still not sure how I feel. *facepalm*

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHAILA! I MADE YOU A VID ABOUT WONDER WOMAN to pop music sung by a boy! This may have been the reason I was suspiciously helpful when you were asking me about source the other week. I BET THAT WAS TOTALLY UNSUSPICIOUS.

Anyway, you are awesome, I'm so glad I know you. Have a vid. <3

Title: Counting Stars
Video: DC Animated [Wonder Woman]
Audio: Counting Stars // OneRepublic
Summary: All the things that we could be.
Note: There's some strobing effects in this.

Direct download available here. 92 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs.



Cross-posted to vidding

Other vids available here.