hmpf

Welcome to Livejournal land, anduranova of the TBFC tribe and of the Scape Sisters. Anyone who followed my rec for Poison recently and liked it, go tell anduranova - she's the editor.

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I'm totally running out of time on uni stuff and still haven't made my Important Decision, so of course, I did the logical thing and spent most of today tagging all my LJ entries for 2002, and sorting through the rest of my Farscape vid backlog. Arrgh.

At least the Farscape tag in the tags list here is about as big as the Life on Mars tag now, as it should be. As I continue to tag the years between 2002 and 2006 it will probably grow even larger.

And I have 1.200 well-sorted Farscape vids, now.

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Farscape vid rec for today: back in 2001 or so, Birgit made some of the best fanvids in the entirety of young Farscape fandom. She then mostly disappeared (as a vidder) for several years before re-emerging in 2005 with some vids that I, personally, thought good but not as spectacular as the admittedly hard-to-beat Under Ice (which was the very first fanvid I watched, and which is probably the main reason I turned into the total Farscape fanvid nut that I did.) More recently she's made some rather remarkable vids, which sort of remind me of Under Ice.

J/A shippy vids make up the majority of the fandom's production, and they can kill you with kitsch, so whenever I open a vid to find it's shippy I tend to get wary (and just a tad bored in advance). Birgit's approach to shippiness and shippy angst in her recent vids is one that managed to capture my interest, though. She chooses somewhat jarring, in some cases almost dissonant songs, which somehow - IMO - fit the John/Aeryn relationship much better than your average love ballad from the top of the charts. Like the relationship, these songs have hard edges. She also eschews the 'smooth' look and editing that have been the hallmark of many of the better vids in recent years, using some very odd effects and blending images in a quick and sometimes deliberately messy succession that nevertheless somehow works. The overall impression is occasionally hectic and disjointed, but fits both the music and the relationship depicted perfectly. So hop on over to Birgit's Vids and download

- Missing (J/A shippy/angsty)
- Disarm (J/A shippy/angsty)
- Goodbye, Blue Sky (PKW, wormholes, time)
- Three Sunrises (J/A shippy)

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And, for amonitrate and bimo and other Twin Peaks fanatics (as well as anyone else who's interested in superb vidding): astolat has made a Twin Peaks vid that is so good it leaves me speechless. You can download it here. The editing is perfect, the song is perfect, and the crazy thing is that that song has been linked to Twin Peaks in my mind since I first heard it, back in the same year I watched Twin Peaks for the first (and so far only) time.

ETA: Go and leave astolat feedback here!

This vid captures the essence of Twin Peaks so well it gave me Bob nightmares yesterday.

I just spent an hour or more on ICQ with AnduraNova, surfing ebay and various sex shops for an orange-red latex skirt and top to dress AnduraNova up as Sikozu at the Bochum comic fair. Dashan will dress up as Chiana, I will be Zhaan, Nager will be Stark, and Bettina will be Scorpius again. You wouldn't believe how many hours of shopping - or rather, hours of searching for things without much success - go into each of these costumes.

But we will get to meet Virginia Hey. In fact, we'll have breakfast with her. And she'll probably think us total nutcases for appearing in full costume for breakfast, but we have no choice - the comic fair starts right after breakfast, so we can either get into costume *before* breakfast or not at all.

I sense that this has the potential to become the most embarrassing day of my life.

I'm sweating so much I can't work properly. My hands keep slipping when I try to bend the metal. Frell.

without warning when the pressure becomes too much.

I've been away from LJ for a few (2?) weeks, I think, and I feel terribly out of the loop, but what with getting sick and having to prepare for the 'Zwischenprüfung' and England and other stuff I simply *had* to reduce my online life. Drastically. Again.

So I moved to my parents, 'cause 1.) their place is much less hot than mine - where I live it was virtually impossible to concentrate on *anything* in the last few weeks, and 2.) they only have the most rudimentary online access. I've been barely able to check my mails, once or twice a week. Which was good for the 'Zwischenprüfungs' preparation. It was also good for my writing - I've written a lot, 'cause, you know, you can't cram knowledge into your head 24/7. ;-)

Now I'm back home, and back on line, though I still have four more days of revising for the exam before I can join the online community as a full time member again (wish me luck on Thursday...).

So, this is just an apology to everyone who hasn't heard anything (or very little) from me recently. I haven't forgotten you. I'll be back soon.

And, before I sign off to return to the bronze age ;-), a short fandom activity update:

- My first HP (and first slash) fic is almost finished, I'm going to do a last revision tonight. Actually, I sent what I thought was the final version to K'immie who's agreed to be by britreader already, but I discovered I had to rewrite part of it later. I rather like the story so far (only time will tell if I will still like it when I re-read it in a year or so) - in the two or three weeks I've been writing it's been rewritten close on 20 times, and I think it's really pretty good by now. Or at least as good as I can make it, with my still limited skill. It's short (4 pages, which seems to be my standard length for 'quickies') and depressing, as it should be. It's called, not without some degree of irony, 'Together'.

- I got feedback! For 'Mann Mit Mantel', which still is my most popular piece, but still... it's been so long since I last got feedback for that essay that I don't even remember. Probably a year or so. (The last feedback I got for anything was in March, for 'Epilogue'.) Anyway... that considerably brightened my day, and strengthened my resolve to rebuild my website as quickly as possible.

- The Scape Sisters have been at it again... We had a fun-filled evening yesterday, collecting material and creating the concept for a Scorpy/John vid, as well as trying to fill the holes that still plague our Braca/Scorpy vid. Sometime during the evening - we were watching 'Into the Lion's Den', loudly expressing our delight at all the John/Scorpy goodness - I remarked that we were like three old beer-bellied men watching porn... the Sisters didn't disagree.

- I re-read some of my old fics. Lots of stuff I would change now. But I guess one has to stop rewriting sometime, and just accept that a story is finished, and that one never will reach perfection, anyway. 'This Is Your Time', though, is so bad it really hurts. I probably should take it off my website, but then, I have the soul of an archivist - I want my *complete* works on my site. But maybe I should move it further down the fic list, so it isn't the first thing people will read.

- Scapekid has beta'd 'Simple Things 1: Rise and Shine' for me. I've had some issues with parts of that story for some time, though I'm very proud of other parts of it (namely the Chiana bit), and Scapekid had issues with exactly the same parts, and helped me a lot by clarifying what the problem is/might be. I've had the story removed from Leviathan, and will resubmit it when I've done a thorough revision. No compromises this time. (Last time I submitted it I had a nagging suspicion that something was wrong with the story, but couldn't put my finger on the problem, and so submitted it despite the feeling.) Who knows, I may even get feedback this time, if I manage to make the story as good as possible. ;-)

- And even more news from the writing front: for no good reason at all I translated my HP fic to German! And I even like the German version! Of course, now that I'm about to change a few things in the original English version I'll have to change the translation, too, but overall, I'm really pleased - even though it was a very fast translation, done in about 2 hours.

- Last, but not least, I'm soon going to be blue again, soon. A whole bunch of people from the farscaped mailing list will go to the Bochum comic fair 'cause Virginia Hey will be there, and we'll have a Scorpy and, well, me as Zhaan. Only this time I'll try and make the costume and make-up more convincing. We'll have a table there and will try and promote Save Farscape. :-)

Well... so much for my geek activities. I'll sign off now. Too much to do still...

... left me with sudden surges of love for my two partners in crime, Dashan and AnduraNova. (Please, everybody who's reading this -- no jealousy... I love you, too! *g*)

So, we were at Dashan's today, watching and discussing our latest work in progress ('Peacekeeper' by Fleetwood Mac), and indulging in (fan)girl talk... Heh... I'm not the only one who's developed a strange fondness for a male with a tail this week! And the guy AnduraNova is currently fond of is actually even weirder than mine! LOL... Oh, and we watched the cats, of course. Watching cats is always a worthwhile pastime. So is eating, and drinking tea.

Is it normal to be so deeply grateful to have certain people in your life?