HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

[beccatoria]

So. August 10th. I am 25. Bloody hell. o.O

I'm aware that, in the grand scheme of things, life and such, I'm not actually that old. In a society that increasingly ups the age of majority, and postpones true adulthood even beyond that, with higher education, more education, with the concept of living carefree bachelor-like lives for years after that, with the notion that things like marriage and kids and owning houses are all things you worry about in your thirties, and not necessarily your early thirties either... I know I'm not old.

But damn. Taking stock I feel old.

I think it's partly because when I meet new people, I'm now more often older than them than younger than them, especially on the internets.

But more than that, I think what's really happening is this:

I'm 25, and that's young enough that I don't want to have to think about how the hell I'm going to manage to pay a mortgage or look after a child or settle somewhere (and picking a spot to stay for the rest of my fucking life or large chunks of it is really the scariest thing for me, I think: and I know I don't have to but logistically, practically, it'll probably happen).

But, I'm 25, and if I want any of those things to happen in the next decade, I should probably work out what the hell I'm doing with my life. Especially since I'm over-educated but in useless areas and I have a dearth of practical experience. I pissed away the last two and a half years of my life in a job that didn't even require me to get A Levels and in the town I was in, I felt lucky to have it. I have no idea how to go about getting a job that's reasonably paid, let alone one that will allow me to do more than pick either saving some money or being able to visit my overseas family or being able to live in somewhere that's not falling apart.

This would be a good state of mind to use to kick myself the hell into writing that book I keep meaning to write. The one where everyone's in prison, but the only people who know it are an insane archeologist, a toddler that doesn't really exist, the toddler's amnesiac immortal sister, and the man with her memories. And together they have to solve a MURDER MYSTERY YAY!

Except I don't know how to start it and instead all I want to do is make a vidlet about how Scar the Cylon Raider is the third wheel in Kara and Sam's marriage, to experimental rock music about a critter caught by priests and put on display in a cathedral. No. Really. *headdesk* THANKS, MULTIHEADED CYLON VIDDING MACHINE.

And now, I'm off to try and ignore the fact that our wrangler is coming to pick us up at 9am tomorrow (two and a half hours before I have to be in work) and we have no idea why because she babbled something at Kev an then ran off in a hurry. She seemed happy about it though, so, fingers crossed it's Cake not Death.

Yours,
Old!Becka.

Comments

[sonofgodzilla.livejournal.com]

HAH! Let me tell you what it's like to be *REALLY* old.

Seriously though, happy birthday! (^_______^)

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should institute a policy of only ever being as old as your favourite idol?

Mine is President Roslin, therefore I'm probably something like fifty-five. Excellent. Age crisis over.

(And thank you!)

[sonofgodzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh shit. I'm as old as Peter Cushing. Actually, I'm already dead that means!

OMG! Becky! You just killed me!

(seriously, anything we can do to help, say the word. You're like the Doctor and we'll be like UNIT...except Mister Mo can be Winifred).

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

NOOOO! RICKYYYY!!!! Ahem. :p

And I think that sounds like an excellent plan, but to be honest with you, we might want to recast Mr Mo. Winifred Bambera is (awesome) and quite assertive and bossy enough without an injection of Mr Mo's sense of either humour or propriety... o.O *flees*

[sonofgodzilla.livejournal.com]

LOLOLOLOLOL!

MY HEAD NOW IS FULL OF THE IDEA OF MISTER MO MACROS! ^_____^

I fear for the Mo/Bambera ship though...srsly!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday!

... I have no comment to make about mere 25 year olds saying they feel old. ;)

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Though I bet you felt old when you turned 25 too. Admit it!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really did. I was like OMG HALF WAY TO FIFTY! :)

[pirateygoodness.livejournal.com]

Hey, you know what you should vid instead? LEE'S GAYEST SHIRTS.


Also, you're secretly turning 26. Welcome to Korea.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I WILL! But, like, later once I have an actual internet connection I don't have to steal so uploading it to bug you about it constantly won't get me murdered by my neighbours! And, you know, once you can send me some form of storyboard thing. I'm naturally fashion-disabled. I wouldn't know a gay shirt if it...well okay, I can regonise Lee's.

Stabby. STABBY STABBY STABBY.

[pirateygoodness.livejournal.com]

Ha HA.

Shit, uh, what kind of storyboard thingy do you have in mind?

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Nothing fancy or anything, just stuff like, "I think this clip would be funny on this line," or "use the music bridge for a montage of gay shirts, like maybe from these episodes:" or...whatever?

Just like...whatever ideas you have. Even just an index of episodes with GAY SHIRTS would be a starting place?

Basically I love the idea cus it's funny but I don't really know if I'm going to be full of genius ideas for clips beyond the initial WTFGAYSHIRTLEEHAHAHABBQ moment, so if you want the vid made, ya gotta help me with clip choices! Not like...every last one, just...general ideas for the "story" and anything specific you have in mind is a bonus?

[pirateygoodness.livejournal.com]

Well, I know there's like the Gay Red Shirt of Politics And Homosexuality, that's obvs in for sure. There was a. . .really ill-advised sweater choice sometime in S4 that came before the shirts, but I have to do a bit of research to find the episodes.

Anytime he takes his suit-jacket off in the end-S3 lawyer arc, I feel that should be there, and the silly shirts he wears when he chats up his Good Friend the Hooker in Black Market.

I am wondering if it would be funnier with just Lee and his shirts of gay, or Lee crossed with Kara in her tanks for gender balance.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Lee and his Shirts of Gay would probably be funniest, but in all honesty, there might not be enough material? Even if we cut the song down? Plus it might end up unexpectedly hilarious. Especially if the comparison is between very girly gayshirted Lee and very manly tanked up Kara? (OH I THINK LEE WEARS A GAY SHIRT FOR DUALLA IN THAT EPISODE WHERE BILLY DIES TOO!) So for Lee we have dead!baby!mama, hooker, Dee, Romo, Adama (eeeew, but he is in the scene with the shirt), Kara (she makes out with him when he's wearing a shirt in S4), and the hilarious jumper which I'm pretty sure he's wearing in the scene where Helo's feeling him up while they're drinking or...something.

Plus there are plenty of people who can go crazy for Kara's gay shirt. Off the top of my head, Lee, Leoben, Anders, Racetrack, Kat, D'anna...um, at this point I'm outta ideas. But the point is: gay shirt.

I'm thinking Kara might actually be an entertaining addition? But...I'm not gonna start it just yet anyway and it'll be your call ultimately cus it's like, your vid bunny idea thingy.

[daybreak777.livejournal.com]

Hope you have a great day! And go with your vidlet idea! It's your birthday, you can do what you want. :-)

Hope you got Cake!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I did not get cake. Nor did I get presents! :( But I did get pizza, which is what I wanted more than the cake, and promises of future presents once we've been paid and aren't living off steam and overdrafts. So it's all good.

[daybreak777.livejournal.com]

Aww, sorry no cake. But pizza is excellent. And yes, vidding must occur in the absence of birthday cake. And I'm sorry about your WMM woes. I thought it got better with experience. No? Um, that is not good. Heck, I might have to go find some cake, or cookies with that news.

Nice piratey icon!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, it's not WMM woes - just the fact that I deleted my season 1 - 3 TV ripped source material and thanks to the way the DVDs are formatted, or the way my DVD ripping program works or some arcane interaction between the two, it's a two-stage process rather than a one-stage process to get them usable. (i.e. not in the wrong aspect ratio or with HUGE letterbox bars above and below the picture).

But it's not a WMM thing.

Actually I'm probably the closest thing you'll find to a WMM defender. The thing that won't get better is the crashing. It will continue to crash, grind to a halt and drop clips if you have too many in the timeline. I ended up having to render "there's a war going on for your mind, laura," in six separate sections and then relay them over the audio because otherwise the program kept dropping clips.

But...it functions, you know? And I get a perverse and probably masochistic pleasure out of trying to make good vids on it. Trying to work out how to spoof button-push effects from other programs, work out how to time toggle with only half or double speed available, that kind of stuff. You have to think laterally, but...it definitely does get better with experience and if you ever have any questions, if I can answer them, I totally will. Every vid I've ever made has been on WMM, so I can explain to you how I managed any of the effects you see in them (though obvs, they're not effects heavy).

The only real limitations I've noticed so far is a) lack of fancy credits and thus text overlay capability and more seriously b) lack of another video track, which means you're stuck with fades rather than any sort of overlays which means you can't spoof textures either. :(

And...now I'll stop with my babbling about WMM. A program I probably know more about than most simply because I'm the only vidder not sane enough to stop using it... *weeps*

My pirate icon is totally my writing/vidding icon! AND OMG PIRATE!STARBUCK YAY!

[daybreak777.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this cheery comment on this day of female monthly woes (WTF body? Pain? You have not given me pain since I was well, 25. :-)) And I'm glad to know WMM gets better since it tried to kill me last week. Seriously. But the crashing actually helped me since it automatically saved my file into a document that let me use effects again. Urge to kill WMM lessening.

I will take you up on your offer about questions! I'm not insane but I am cheap and WMM is free. And I am new so it's super user-friendly. You just drag the clip. I do like that and suspect it's not quite that simple in other programs.

Your vids are awesome and I'm impressed you use the old WMM. And I feel your HD pain too. I am currently down to 400 MB on my HD or something. I need to delete some episodes. But I don't wanna, I might need them!

Yay, pirates! I did write a Kara and Gaeta as pirates story once. Because in some world they so are. Thanks for being cheery and saying there is hope with WMM. I will keep that in mind and make it walk the plank when it gets saucy with me. ;-)

[asta77.livejournal.com]

I'm 36, get over it. ;p

This would be a good state of mind to use to kick myself the hell into writing that book I keep meaning to write. The one where everyone's in prison, but the only people who know it are an insane archeologist, a toddler that doesn't really exist, the toddler's amnesiac immortal sister, and the man with her memories. And together they have to solve a MURDER MYSTERY YAY!

Wasn't that an episode of Murder She Wrote? But, seriously, you have my interest peaked! (And have me a little worried.)

and instead all I want to do is make a vidlet about how Scar the Cylon Raider is the third wheel in Kara and Sam's marriage, to experimental rock music about a critter caught by priests and put on display in a cathedral.

Hmmm, now I'm wondering how the rabid Lee/Kara shippers would react to that scenario!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

In eleven years, I'm sure I will have gotten over it! :p

But, seriously, you have my interest peaked! (And have me a little worried.)

Good, good, doing my job on both counts then!

Hmmm, now I'm wondering how the rabid Lee/Kara shippers would react to that scenario!

HAHA! Probably worse than they otherwise would considering that if I manage to finish it, I want to bill it as, "And you thought Lee was the third wheel in Kara and Sam's relationship..." ::evilgrin::

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

THANK YOU!!!

[projectcyborg.livejournal.com]

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAA!

Thanks. ;)

Hopefully my mid-life crisis will probably involve crackvidlets...

[kiki-miserychic.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!

And of course Scar the Third Wheel can best be described in a song about a critter caught by priests and put on display in a cathedral. It is your mission to make everyone else realize that.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

And of course Scar the Third Wheel can best be described in a song about a critter caught by priests and put on display in a cathedral. It is your mission to make everyone else realize that.

...damn you. *goes back to ripping DVD footage because she deleted all her source files before moving to South Korea to free up space on her hard drive*

[kiki-miserychic.livejournal.com]

Awwww. That stinks.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in some ways. But it'll at least force me to use a watermark free source for most of it, which I've never bothered with before, and it's probably about time I did.

(Then again, probably a higher priority than that would be switching to a program other than WMM, but I'm weird and fear these new programs that I can never even work out how to cut a clip on, and I think that's really just a mask for the fact that somewhere along the way, using WMM has become a matter of STUPID, POINTLESS principle, like I think I have something to prove. If only I knew what the hell it was...)

Though my DVD ripping program seems willing to either rip in 4:3 or to rip with huge black letterbox lines above and below the picture. So either way, I'm ripping and then cropping or re-rendering for aspect ratio. OY. Hopefully I'll at least make a start on this thing in the next few days. o.O

[kiki-miserychic.livejournal.com]

I suggest getting as many trials of programs as possible before you make a decision. There's plenty of 30 day trials out there to keep you busy for a while. That would actually be rather perfect. For every 30 day trial of an editing program, make at least one vidlet. *wink wink nudge nudge*

In the mean time I upload some files I have for Windows Movie Maker. When I used WMM I found that there were additional things it could do using XMLs. I zipped and uploaded them if you would like to play with them. Some of them are written by other people, some I altered for my own use, and a wrote a few. They basically are effects that other higher end programs can do that WMM can be tricked into doing.

Upzip the folder, cut/paste the files into the C:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\AddOnTFX\ folder, then start up WMM.

You can download here.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

OMG! YOU STAR!

The bad news is, I can't actually use any of the things you so wonderfully uploaded for me (which, dude, THANK YOU), because, google tells me, I'm running Vista, not XP and WMM in Vista uses different code even though it doesn't have any really different/nice fancy features.

HOWEVER, this research also led me to a number of very free and rather lovely new effects that people have made for the Vista WMM version. I'm not sure how many if any of them I'll end up using - I'm actually rather leery of becoming and effects whore: I think often people end up using them because they're there not because the vid needs it - but...wow. AWESOME FUN TO PLAY WITH!

So THANK YOU!

[kiki-miserychic.livejournal.com]

I never even thought about that. I have XP on my desktop computer, which I used back when I vidded with WMM. I've never used WMM on my laptop that has Vista. That is lame.

I remember learning about XMLs and going crazy with all the new things I could do, but after a while I simmered down. :) Have fun.

[madenglishbloke.livejournal.com]

just out of sheer noseyness, what do you use for ripping?
i cant speak highly enough of handbrake which, although possibly a little bit slow on a not-quite ultra-modern machine, dowds a bloody good job.
although youve got to remember to set it to de-interlace most things... **rolleyes**

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I'm using IMToo for DVD ripping and MOVAVI VideoSuite for resizing, basically because...those are the programs I have. But HOORAY for open source and thanks for the recc - I'll be downloading this and giving it a whirl!

Phideaux/Scar FTW

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Srsly.

Re: Phideaux/Scar FTW

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

OMG I KNOW, RITE?!

I was so wrong when I said Boomer!

[jo-lasalle.livejournal.com]

Very belatedly, happy birthday!

The meeting younger people on the internets is really scary once you start to notice. (Hello, younger person. *g*)

And I hope it was Cake.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Well, it was pizza. ;)

And thank you! :D

Hello, old woman!

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>I'm now more often older than them than younger than them

Clearly you need to spend even more time around me. Clearly.

Reflect on this, young padawan: by the time you get to the point in life that I am at (chronologically speaking), I will be preparing to enter the fifth(!(!!(!!!))) decade of my life.

Maybe I'll start feeling old then. *g*

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: Happy Belated Birthday!

I'm sorry it's belated, but I spent my own birthday and the entire weekend and most of today recovering from a stomach bug at my parents', where there is no internet (or at least none to speak of).

Well... I'll go and read your exciting Korean reports now, I think. :-)

Re: Hello, old woman!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes, clearly. Come to Korea! (I know you can't: you're being good and doing academicky stuff: speaking of which I'm still here to email if you need to).

Argh! Your comments about fifth decades just reminded me I'm in the middle of my third, not second! *iz a wimp* Nah, I'm doing okay on that front, honest. ;)

I'm so sorry you spent your birthday being sick! That's awful! At least you had your parents to take care of you. *hugs*

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Hippy buffday!

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I fail at leaving happy birthday comments, but this has been open in a tab waiting for me to do that for three days now, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

You're doing scary and exciting things that are appropriate to being in one's mid-20s so I say good job.

And I want to see that vidlet. :)

[nightxade.livejournal.com]

A belated birthday wish from this old lady (32 this year!). Of course, I am looking at your post and wanting to sit you on my lap and pat you on the head and tell you that it's okay, you're doing just fine, I've been there. I can speak to you like this because I'm just that old and wise!

Hope you had a great one, lovely lady. And seriously, don't worry. Yes we piss away a couple years here and there, but you've got a head on your shoulders and will figure things out. I still am working on that. It never ends. But the start is realizing that somewhere along the way you've got to do more than just think about it. So you're half way there!