Sleep-speaker

Folks, I have reached the wall and apparently the wall is when I have to stay at work until 8 to take minutes for the world's. most. boring. board. meeting. ever. It was all the bloody budget stuff that I don't understand and sounds horribly dire and did I mention never, ever ends? OY. I also accidentally convinced half the board I'm some kind of numbers genius by blurting out the answer to a tricky sum when they were all reaching for their calculators. It was a tactical error: now they're all trying to foist extra accounts-related admin duties on me, and I'm not even THAT good at maths. I was just super bored and doing all the sums in my head in an effort to STAY AWAKE. So I was probably working on the sum a good ten seconds longer than they realised. All in all not one of the better ways I've spent an evening.

Um.

Wait, yes. Vidding.

I R TIRED. I'm also a little surprised it took me this long to crash out.

But never fear, interested parties, I imagine vidding will resume tomorrow, or maybe the next day. NaViMaMo, the vidathon of ridiculous name, lives on!

ALSO FRINGE! Because of all the crazy vidding I haven't had the chance to really talk about Fringe, so I will, a bit, now:

( OLIVIAAAAAAAAAAA. Also some Altlivia and some stuff about teh romances. )

( WTF MYTHOLOGY. )

For chaila43!

This is totally the vidlet version of this mini picspam that chaila43 made for me for Halloween!

Title: so happy
Video: The Sarah Connor Chronicles // Fringe
Audio: Happy (Reprise) // Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins
Summary: Sarah Connor. Olivia Dunham. Unsettling parallels.

Direct download available here. 9 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs.

Password: vidses


I will index and crosspost all vidlets at the end of November or when I've done all the prompts, whichever comes soonest.

Title: Intelligent Design
Video: Fringe
Audio: Levitibus // Canibus
Summary: Olivia Dunham fights every last damn thing in the world(s).
Vidder's Notes: It takes a flist! Thanks to chaila43, grimorie and emmiere for the help, cheerleading and suggestions.

Direct download available here. 41 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs.

Password: vidses


Cross-posted to vidding, fringe_tv and fringe_olivia.

Other vids available here.

SO. Fringe, pretty much the only show I'm fannish about that's currently on air, is back! I was super excited, but I gotta be honest, the first episode left me with a bit of a sinking feeling. Which is annoying because I straight-up loved about 85% of it.

( So, spoilers for 3x01 )

In sum...great, Fringe, you still have me hooked on a show I feel is always one step away from Failing, and yet never quite does. Please live up to your reputation and don't quite this time either.

SO! Yesterday was the august anniversary of my birth. I am now old. Hoorah! Frankly last year sucked, so here's hoping 27 > 26.

One way in which the year is already looking up is the number of Awesome Things the internet saw fit to provide me with. Thus! A list of recs!

Vids:

Run With Me by chaila43 [Doctor Who]: River Song is magnificent, and so is this vid. Perfectly catches all the almost moments and in betweeny circularity of the way she teaches the Doctor everything he knows because she knows him after he's already learned it all. I still don't understand why I can't snap my fingers to open my front door.

For Your Entertainment by dualbunny [Battlestar Galactica]: We now move to a vid that is amazing for totally different reasons. This vid is about Chief Tyrol, to Adam Lambert, played completely straight, and is amazing for it. It shows how the song, like the Chief is actually violent and abusive when viewed straight, without pop cultural context about how we "should" take things or what narrative tropes are supposed to elicit what responses. It's the opposite of sleight of hand and it's remarkably cathartic as well as superbly edited.

U. R. A. Fever by kiki_miserychic [Fringe]: Olivia Dunham, BAMF. The use of motion in this is phenomenal. It has a rhythm and a pace that keeps you with it even as it disorients you right up until the end.

twinkle, twinkle by kiki_miserychic [Doctor Who]: Weeping Angels take over Amy's brain. CREEPY AS FUCK.

Falling For The First Time by glass_moment [Doctor Who]: Amy and the Doctor and Rory and Happy Adventures in Space and Time that, every now an again, smack you upside the head with a moment of Moving and your heart grows a few sizes.

Glass by cherryice [Watchmen]: This is just stunningly beautiful. I want to give it a huge write up but I kind of run out of words at that point and just want to aim you all at it.

Meta:

The Obligatory River/Eleven Feminist Manifesto by chaila43. There is nothing not awesome about being given a feminist manifesto for your birthday, I really recommend everyone try it at least once. IN OTHER NEWS, IT'S ALSO A SUPER AWESOME READ. And makes me feel about 15% less RIDICULOUS about my fangirliness!

So I was looking for something in Fringe S1 cus I only half paid attention to parts of that and accidentally found two totally different things that nonetheless I feel the urge to inflict on my overwhelmingly non-Fringe-watching flist. :)

1. I was wondering what Olivia's inherent Cortexiphan-related power was gonna be, except now I think that I got it a bit backwards. Looking at the three Cortexikids in the finale, each one of them got destructively "activated" by the ZFT. This I remembered. What I forgot is that it seems the activation is not blind activation of the subject's inherent abilities but rather a process that is designed to induce a specific response. This is best exemplified with the fire starter - the episode actually has at least one and maybe two other Cortexikids subjected to that experiment which makes them spontaneously combust, it's just that Olivia manages to save the last girl in time, ultimately allowing her to be rehabilitated into a pyrokineticist by Massive Dynamic. That suggests that had Olivia or Nick Lane or Cancer Guy been put through the same process the same thing would happen to them. We know less about Cancer Guy but we do know that he was approached while he already had cancer and then his power turned out to be cancer-related and we don't know much about Nick Lane but we know that his projecting abilities were all the more destructive because of his pre-existing mental health conditions. So I think I got it backwards and Cortexiphan allows a range of abilities based on perception as always stated, but also renders the subjects more susceptible to medical experiments designed to provide more outlandish abilities. We have, after all, seen the ZFT "weaponise" ordinary people in a similar vein to the Cortexikids, just with either less success or more fatality on the part of the subject.

2. SPEAKING OF ZFT. I really wish we hadn't just abandoned that whole plotline for a whole season. I do get that season one established "our" side's ZFT - the people on our side secretly preparing for the war of the universes in dodgy, horrible ways, while season two concentrated on "their" side - the shapeshifters sent through: their secret universe warriors. The ones the ZFT hopes the Cortexikids can stop. But there was that whole thing at the end of season one, where they found the ZFT manual and worked out that it was written by William Bell himself, just distributed by either accident or design without the chapter on ethics. Which okay, I could handle; someone else gets hold of his work, twists it or misunderstands it, and he's too busy on the other side trying to keep things calm, trying to help the other side's armies enough not to raise suspicion but not enough to actively help them? Except two things I wish had been clarified and I'm vaguely worried his "noble sacrifice" will take off the "unanswered questions" table:

(a) Season one also strongly implicates William Bell as funding ZFT. Now, writing a manuscript that they got hold of and misunderstood/misused is very different from actively funding an organisation as horrifying as that. One could argue that Bell may not have been entirely aware of the ZFT activities, but even if he'd been on the Other Side for a very long time indeed, we know he's getting messages from Nina. I find it hard to believe he'd be that out of touch with an organisation he's funding/ideologically inspired/believes is necessary/any of the above. Which begs the questions - why is he funding it if they're that eeeeeeeevil? Why doesn't he correct them if they're working from a version of his manuscript without the most important chapter? It doesn't add up.

(b) Okay, fine, so Walter asked Bell to remove parts of his brain, but I'm pretty sure that Walter didn't also ask Bell to store those parts of his brain that knew how to travel between universes in the minds of innocent people thus driving them insane. And it strongly implicates Bell as being the one who gave up that information to Newton, who we know works for Walternate. I suppose he could have been forced to, and that's why he then pulled Olivia over in a desperate attempt to balance the books, but I don't know.

I JUST SUSPECT SHENANIGANS IS ALL. I like the character, but even with his Spock-like sacrifice, I don't trust him or his altruism. There is a larger game afoot, that, given who wrote this show, may never be explained, or might come down to a giant red ball floating over Russia and lots of zombies.

Oh, all right, Fringe, I'll bite and at least make a little post about the finale before it airs.

1) Nina Sharpe? There are alternates of everyone else, but not her? Not even in the trailers? It's possible that Alternina is just in some other line of work and not relevant to the plot, but that seems...unlikely. I'm thinking there'll be some sort of reveal there, especially given that extremely weird conversation she had with Walter before he crossed over to get Peter in 1985. When she basically said, in not so many words, that she knew what Walter was going through (loss of a child), but then also specifically tied that down to Peter and how much Peter meant to her. She could have just been a favorite aunt figure who also had the loss of a child in her life, sure, but somehow, I suspect something else. The easy answer is that Nina is really Peter's mom, but I don't think that's right either given the way the whole thing has been handled. Obviously I'm sure Elizabeth Bishop would love him just as much if he were her adopted rather than biological son, but something about the narrative arc and media tropes (even if those tropes aren't always the most progressive of things) suggests that's not the case. So I have no freaking clue what's up with Nina, her relationship to Peter, or Alternina, but there damn well is SOMETHING, so I'm saying now: I will not be surprised if she shows up in the finale and Shit Goes Down.

2) What's Olivia's Super Cortexiphan Power? Nick Lane is an empath, Sally Clarke is a pyrokinetic, and that other dude whose name I forget is a healer/spreader of cancer. So far Olivia has only really demonstrated the seemingly universal Cortexabilities of perceiving Altverse objects and crossing over to the other side. However, we know that as a child she started a fire with her mind, and at the start of season two, she had some weird super hearing going on, until Bowling Alley Guy sorted her out, so she wasn't scared anymore and felt in control again, and since it seems her abilities are tied to fear, the super hearing seems to have disappeared too (though I admit the correlation there is my assumption). So is she pyrokinetic like Sally? Does she have superhearing like the Bionic Woman? She already has two abilities rather than the usual one, it seems. Is that because she was Super Special? Or just because the other kids didn't learn more than one yet? Or...? I don't know. And in some ways I appreciate that they underplay these things because Olivia running around like an ACTUAL SUPERHERO has the potential to be great but also the potential to be kind of weird. But it's a question that's gonna have to be answered eventually cus otherwise instead of looking like the bestest of the Cortexikids, she looks like the one who got the power of Heart. (Which is fine, but then Mother Nature better give her a kickass pet monkey, that's all I'm saying.)

3) Speaking of Cortexikids, I'm thinking that Altlivia isn't one. I'm thinking that the early 80s experiments conducted by our Walter were not conducted by Walternate. Partly I base this on the fact that when Peter is sick, unlike Walter, Walternate is not peeking at our universe suggesting he's unaware of a parallel universe before his son is kidnapped and the event causes his entire universe to destabilise, which would make a person look into something like that. However, if he was aware, he might also have been aware that we were technologically inferior and that's why he didn't look to us for a cure for his son. However, I do think that further circumstantial evidence can be found in the fact that Walternate, as Secretary of Defence, can pretty much do what the fuck he likes. And if he had a bunch of Cortexikids, specially created as soldiers to defend against the Other Side, he would be using them right now. Which suggests to me that even if there are some Cortexikids on the Other Side, Altlivia is not one of them, or she'd already be working under Walternate and know what was going on.

So, my next thinking is, on the assumption that Walternate was either unaware of or disinterested in our universe until 1985, if he then started experimenting with Cortexiphan, the Cortexikids would be younger than Olivia. This leads to two intriguing possibilities:

a) The vaguely credible option, though still unlikely: Alt-strid. It would explain where her freaky and apparently precognitive abilities come from.

b) The EVEN MORE unlikely option: Alt-Ella. Which wouldn't really do anything interesting narratively except for how AWESOMELY PISSED that would make Olivia. And how it would be a wonderful way to bring to the forefront that tightly controlled fury that Olivia rightly holds against Walter, even though her compassion for him also exists.

IN CONCLUSION: DON'T YOU HURT ME, SHOW. DON'T YOU DARE.

...and I'm done. :)

This was a surprising example of a standalone I thought worked really well. If I had one major criticism of Fringe, overall, it would be the way it relies so much on the standalones and therefore the mythology crawls forwards. Though if it became more arc-ish I'd probably have to worry about Fox canceling it for being too impenetrable. Ah, who am I kidding, I worry about that anyway.

It was a great standalone because it was really about Walter.

It was the story of a day when Walter woke up and found a White Tulip, and it was surprisingly moving.

Still, I feel the need to explain why, because it's not, perhaps, the first reason that comes to mind.

( Walter, God, atheism, uncomfortable implications, simplification, beauty, science, logic and whence came all this forgiveness anyways. )

In other news, emmiere already posted this, but I feel it is a public service announcement to point out that Olivia Dunham is a Private Eye. Or will be in Fringe's musical episode that will air at the end of the month, which has the potential to be awful, but I have decided to anticipate with unabashed joy under the assumption that it will be delicious, delicious, deadly serious CRACK.

Found via a rec from kiki_miserychic on twitter.



I wasn't lying when I said one of the awesome things about Fringe was how the main action hero is a girl. Because seriously, this isn't a selective slice of the show. I mean, she gets to do stuff other than fuck up people's shit, sure, cus she's the main character. She gets to do things like have awesome and confusing and pissed-off conversations with morally ambiguous middle-aged women with robot arms and Leonard Nimoy about how she may or may not be teh speshulz and destined to like, save the world or something. BUT ALSO SHE DOES STUFF LIKE THIS.

(For the spoilerphobic, to be honest, this isn't a narrative vid and most of the spoilers are so out of context you wouldn't understand them anyway. Though the framing device, such as it is, might spoil you for one of the major start-of-S2 plotlines. But like...WATCH IT ANYWAY. It's not like you'll really remember or anything. YOU WILL JUST REMEMBER THE ASS-KICKING.)