Commentaries, Operating Systems & BIRTHDAYS!

1. HAPPY BIRTHDAY nightxade! I'm so glad I have you on my flist! I hope you have a wonderful day and get many wonderful presents and a whole lot of hugs. *adds to the hugs*

2. I've been meaning to post about this since we both posted all our commentaries, but anyway, better late than never:

chaila43 and I decided to participate in the vidder/viewer commentary challenge on vid_commentary. It was challenging but fun to write a commentary on my own vid, and I can only hope I did her vid justice - putting why I love it into words was more difficult than I expected; so much of it is just inarticulate "guh" but it was a completely worthwhile endeavour, and absolutely fascinating to see where our two commentaries on the vid lined up and did not line up. And seeing someone else wax eloquent about a vid of mine was a wonderful and surreal experience.

Anyway - I present links in case anyone's interested:

chaila43's commentary on her own vid Cathedrals.

My commentary on Cathedrals.

chaila43's commentary on my vid Ghosts.

My commentary on Ghosts.

3. I would encourage reading a whole bunch of the commentaries over at vid_commentary, but I'm probably not the person to ask for recs since I've not read as many as I meant to due in equal parts to not being in enough fandoms and current constraints on my net-time. I do, however, want to point out a few I found especially wonderful:

Babies commentary by the vidder aycheb is an interesting audio commentary that is very concise and also really interesting in its discussions of themes not often vidded.

Clint Eastwood by the vidder bop_radar is interesting because it discusses a vid the vidder has a complicated relationship with and was never entirely satisfied with and yet (in my opinion deservedly) gained a lot of acclaim.

Jolene by the vidder nicole_anell. To my shame, I haven't yet had time to comment on this one, but it's a truly fantastic video and the commentary is really good. I have to say, it didn't add all that much to my understanding of the vid (although there were some moments of OOOOH!), but that's to the vid's credit that it manages to convey such a multi-layered story so clearly, that the vid can simultaneously judge Cally and side with her, and make me do the same. This commentary is more like having a gleeful friend to walk through it with you, letting you relive all the awesome bits. So you guys, go do that now.

4. I'm thinking of installing Karmic Koala on my laptop so I have a dual boot Vista/Ubuntu setup.

Pros:
- Not being a slave to the Gates Empire without having to spent shitloads on a Mac.
- Apparently it runs faster and better than Windows.
- Not like I'd being giving up Windows for all the programs I have that won't run on Ubuntu.
- It's free.

Cons:
- I'd have to partition my harddrive to do it and that makes me nervous in case I destroy EVERYTHING DIGITAL I OWN. (Well not really cus I'd backup first, but it'd be a pain).
- It would eat a bunch of HD space and I don't have an infinite amount.
- A lot of programs wouldn't run on it and I'd have to learn new alternates or...not really use Ubuntu much which would then leave me in the position of wondering why I installed it in the first place...
- Technology sometimes hates me. I could just gum up my computer more than it already is.
- Having to learn how to use a new OS.

Thoughts?