hmpf | Entries tagged with vids

is that I always get tempted away from social things by books or comics (mostly books and comics, that is. Occasionally TV or games.)

I really think, sometimes, that I need therapy to learn to cope with *people*. It can't be normal that even *pleasant* social interaction is so draining for me that I shy away from it, can it?

I've been job hunting and doing housework and reading, mostly. Yes, I stopped the LJ catch-up almost immediately after I'd started. There was a rather large number of interesting job ads recently, but that's no excuse, really.

Gah.

Have some recs:

beccatoria made another awesome Farscape vid! Actually, I'm sure she's made at least a dozen good vids recently, because she went a bit crazy last month and tried (possibly even managed?) to make one vid(let) per day. So head over there and enjoy!

Did you realise you can read shitloads of classics of the fantastic genres for free on gutenberg.org? I've decided it's time to check out some of that old stuff, and have read Peter Pan and am currently reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill (I read The Man Who Was Thursday years ago, though maybe a reread is in order...) Peter Pan was much odder, and darker, than I expected. TNoNH is about as odd as I expected, because after TMWWT I expect major weirdness from Chesterton. Got any recs of other old stuff I should check out? Maybe A Voyage to Arcturus? That's definitely available there. Or I could try to get back into News from Nowhere, I started that two years ago and then was interrupted by uni stuff...

I've also reread two webcomics I'd more or less stopped checking regularly because they were (and still are) in the habit of going on really long hiatuses. They're both really really good, though. Dicebox is social science fiction with beautiful art and very three-dimensional characters and relationships. Hero is fantasy with religous/mythological overtones, possibly set after some apocalyptic(?) conflict between some analogues between the forces of heaven and hell. Or something. Beautiful digital watercolour manga art, and a surprising sense of humour. (For even more webcomics, check out the links in my sidebar here.)

I've spent a bit of time playing flash games, too:

I really enjoyed Little Rocket, despite the fact that it took me ridiculously long to learn how to control the rocket. But when I finally had the hang of it, I played the entire game through twice.

Endeavor is a nice, big-pixeled exploration platformer.

Looming plays like an extremely minimalist, retro version of Myst.

Seasons is another beautiful web toy/experience by the maker of Windosill.

The Dreamerz (don't ask me about the stupid "z"!) is a charming little point-and-click adventure that feels like you're reading a slightly surreal picture book.

And Transform is another example of patented Eyemaze madness. In other words, it's awesome.

****

I just rediscovered a very fitting old tag so I'm using it...

Current Mood: busy, actually

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.

*

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.

*

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)

*

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.

Current Mood: guilty

kazbaby? You win. You totally win the Most Disturbing Farscape Slash Vid Award. I think Poison is officially not the most explicitly slashy John/Scorpius vid out there anymore... and I, for one, am delighted by that! The world needs more disturbing vids about that relationship!

To everyone else: This is a vid rec. Download Rift at Unrealized Reality. Oh, and if you haven't seen it, do download Poison, too (linked above). I'm not allowed to praise that one as I was involved in making it, but you should watch it for historical value if nothing else: it's one of the few times that I've been accessory to slash. And maybe after watching it you won't be so sorry that I usually don't indulge in that particular endeavour. Because, would you *want* to read something like that? ;-) (

dunkle_feuer excepted. I know you would love me to produce stuff like that. *g*)

Nitpick for

kazbaby: There are a couple of very quick edits (I *think* they're edits and not accidental flaws, anyway) that *in my players* (Zoom Player and VLC) look almost like ghost frames. Those were a minor distraction from the supreme disturbing slashiness... do you think I need to download some special codec or something, perhaps?

Current Mood: amused

(Because occasionally I do take a five-minute break from uni work to watch a FS vid, so as to reduce the "unsorted" folder on my disk and be able to finally burn them all to DVD.)

Yesterday's discovery:

Love and Peace by Di. A vid about the final four of season two that makes *excellent* use of internal movement and internal effects to create a very dynamic impression. Nitpick: Image's a bit blurry, sadly. Still, as with the last vid I recced, it would be a shame to ignore this vid because of that. Simply watch it in small instead of full screen mode and the problem shouldn't bother you. If that seems like an unacceptable hardship, try to remember what watching vids was like in 2001! ;-) (I still have favourites from those days... and I still love them, even though you can only watch them by minimizing the player to stamp size...)

A note: When I play this vid in zoomplayer the image breaks up in the fast parts, so there's either a problem with my zoomplayer or with the vid. It plays fine in VLC, though.

Current Mood: busy

Peter Lustig & Highway to Hell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5ZcUA4FEc&

(Footage from an old German children's TV show, "Löwenzahn". Yes, I used to watch this when I was a kid. It's not a particularly well-edited vid and the footage is rather pixelated, but it's worth having a look just for the weirdness of the combination!)

Current Mood: amused

To celebrate the finishing of my horrible essay/paper/thing I spent about an hour or so today watching Farscape fanvids from my 2.9 GB "still unwatched" folder. I need to catch up with that folder, and with the vidding activities of Farscape fandom in general - it's such a frelling prolific fandom, where vidding is concerned, that it's pretty much guaranteed that there are several GB of unwatched new vids out there I haven't even downloaded yet. My last big trawl was in autumn 2006; I currently have 20.4 GB of Farscape vids on my hard drive. I'm a completist.

So. I watched something like 10, 15 vids, some of them good, some just okay. One of them stood out. So I decided to share the joy by reccing it - and I think I'll keep that up as long as I'm catching up with that folder, and as long as I'm finding really good vids in there.

Here's the find of the day:

Ain't It Fun by el_rika and edeea2001.

Downloadable from this page here.

Setting Into the Lion's Den to a very aggressive song by Guns'n Roses that fits the action and angst of those eps to a t. Nicely structured - usually this kind of mostly linear retelling doesn't work so well in vids, but here it does. Some pretty good motion-to-music matching. Nitpicks: the footage's a bit pixelated (nothing you'd want to watch maximised), and a the editing could be a little more on the beat in a couple of places. But it's a really good vid regardless, and a very nice retelling of a crucial two-parter in five minutes.

Current Mood: awake

Beccatoria has made another vid, this time in a reasonably obscure fandom: Neverwhere! And it's good! So go and download it, and leave her feedback here: http://beccatoria.livejournal.com/19883.html?mode=reply

Current Mood: good

Well, okay, not totally random. Ten out of the maybe fifty that are in my 'absolute favourites' folder that is permanently on my hard drive. I have some 25-30 CDs and DVDs of Farscape fanvids by now, but I need the crème de la crème where I can watch them easily when I need a little dose of Farscape. Which I did tonight.

So here's tonight's playlist:

Back Here by chasa - for the John and Aeryn angst

The Pain Gets Worse by tazey - for the Aeryn and John angst

I'll Be Yours by FieryHands - for the John and Scorpius angst

Adiemus by Birgit - for the sense of wonder

Prayer by chasa - for the Aeryn angst

Until It Sleeps by LithiumDoll - for the destructive!John angst

Somebody Told Me by FieryHands - for ass-kicking!Aeryn and slut!John fun

Under Ice by Birgit - for, uhm, angst, and nostalgia (this was the first fanvid I ever watched!), and still-brilliant editing

You Cut Her Hair by Fialka - for strong narrative

You Make Me Feel by tazey - for the John-Aeryn-Scorpy triangle Die Me Dichotomy angst

They're all brilliantly edited, btw. There's bits in all of them that make me go "*meeeeep*! I'll *never* be able to do that!" If you haven't watched them yet, I highly recommend you seek them out.

Chasa's website:

http://dearone.net

Tazey's website:

http://tazey.club.fr/musicvids.html

Birgit's website:

http://www.birgitsvids.com

The rest can hopefully still be found here:

http://www.farscapefantasy.com

Current Mood: impressed
Current Location: The Uncharted Territories

but a few short notes before I leave to visit

ankae...

1.) On Thursday I went to see 'Spirited Away' and it's a beautiful, beautiful movie. It had the same atmosphere and logic of many of my weirder dreams... Gotta go see it again next week, if I can find the time. Highly recommended.

2.) The evening of the same day I had to do a cast of my good buddy Nager's face because he wants to have a Stark mask made for the comic fair we are going to have a Farscape table at. Let's just say that at 40 degrees Celsius it was not a pleasant experience for him having to wear a rubber bathing cap for hours, and half of his head covered in plaster! It made me worry a bit about being Zhaan with that bald cap at the fair... I'll have to wear that thing for about 13 hours and I doubt it is any more comfortable than a bathing cap! The things we do for Farscape.

3.) Birthday (mine, that is) on Friday - nice and quiet. Breakfast with my mom, then work, then dinner with my mom (Indian food - yum!). (My dad was on a business trip.) Got nice books and nice music for presents. Unexpected present from a certain reader of this journal, too. (Thanks! You know who you are! *g*) Am 27 now, an age that almost fits with the grey hair I keep finding on my head more and more often...

4.) Happy Birthday also to my dear friends Kiki and

ankae!

5.) And to my Scape Sister Dashan who actually had her birthday a few days ago but had her party yesterday. Very nice party; met Atti there, important figure from German HL fandom and webmistress of Fanficparadies.de. Weird, meeting someone whose name you've known for years on the net 'in the flesh' for the first time... Atti was in the same situation, btw, knowing me from my old essay on becoming obsessed with Methos which seems to be rather well-known in German HL fandom. Hey, at least *one* of my pieces of writing is well-known. *g* AnduraNova and me talked with Atti and her boyfriend all night, I'm afraid - we hardly even noticed the other guests. *g* Atti may even come to the next local Farscape meeting.

5.) Going to visit ankae for a few days, but first I have to have breakfast and then do the dishes. The stacks in the kitchen look like every single plate, knife, pot, fork and glass in the house is dirty. Frell.

6.) Oh, and since

kernezelda and

kazbaby already posted links to our new vid 'Poison' in their LJs, I guess I should make it public here, too. Actually, we meant to wait a little while yet before really publishing the vid, since we wanted to overhaul the 'Peacekeeper' vid first, but, well, it's out there now, so I may as well point everyone who hasn't found it yet there. I'm pretty proud of this vid. AnduraNova still thinks 'Everybody Hurts' is better than 'Poison', but I think they are about on par. It was great fun to make, too, even if it made AnduraNova's husband realise that we're perverts. *g*

Go here to download it: ScapeSisters videos

7.) Apart from the dishes I'm feeling fine.

Current Mood: good
Current Music: Radiohead: Hail to the Thief

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

Current Mood: hungry

The first Scape Sisters video is available now at Dallascaper's site, www.farscapefantasy.com (direct link: http://www.farscapefantasy.com/videos/index.php?set=video&id=203) Feedback so far is great. Bet that's working wonders for AnduraNova's self-confidence, eh, sis'? ;-)