(no subject)

I finished reading a long fic with a bit of a plot
which was okay as far as it went
but nobody the author likes ever took a step wrong.
No reversals, no misunderstandings, people make threats but they never pay off
everything just clicks together
and good saves the day

and it all feels a bit like having rice pudding for breakfast
kind of nice, kind of nothingy.

plus I'm reading for redemption arcs, but this one just assumed Draco was good already and all that stuff to protect his family was perfectly understandable really
and I just
... sometimes I should give up on a story a lot sooner.

Songvids

I'm wondering if Flash fandom does vid challenges or something, because there's easily half a dozen vids each to Centuries and, as it turns out, Heathens. And that's just with me looking for Coldwave and Eobard Thawne. Though Heathens works better when you include Savitar, I wasn't specifically looking for Barry vids, they just turn up.

I still have no idea why YouTube shows me anything. And limited idea how to get things back if they wander off. I presume if I make an account there's a way to save things but as is it's just kind of mysterious.

I did find the settings though, and finally figured out how to turn Autoplay off on my tele. ... it's possible I've had this one years now? Maybe? So that's... not impressive. *sigh*

I studied a whole degree of Cultural Studies and I don't think we did anything on music videos. One got shown for the Textual Transformations unit on Romeo and Juliet, but the teacher didn't seem to know that was almost certainly a fanvid, thought it was official to do with the movie. I was guessing from the style it was not. ... these memories are from a whole bunch of years ago. But like, music on it's own is a whole Art I know next to nothing of, couldn't analyse well at all, and music is in movies and TV as well as music videos, though it's usually background in the arts we studied. Studying the history of punk was somehow more about the clothes. Because we used textbooks and you can't paste a song in a textbook, let alone a video... except you can now, so there are probably resources. And music videos are their own art, and stand to film drama as poetry does to prose, mostly evocative and connotational even if they attempt plot, which they do surprisingly often. Well, surprising to my ancient self, who knows what the norm is now.

And then fanvids? They take all that existing art - the ways to read music, the lyrics, the video clips, and all the associations those works carry before the vid gets started, and they just... make something that's varying degrees of difficult to read, but, is truly new art.

I mean YouTube keeps serving up the kind of vids that are basically 'look how much arse they kick, woohoo'. And those are the easiest mood to follow. But you get much more complex stuff going on, when they layer up with the lyrics and the history of characters and their relationships, and then sometimes the vids are constructing the relationship, or at least extrapolating it beyond the initial texts. And sometimes they're straight up crit of the source, drawing out commentary that can be pretty straightforwardly about gender or homophobia or race, but can also get layered about these texts we have after all all studied well enough to read in seconds and flashes. You get vids that leave you looking at characters in a whole different way. Or ones where the crit lands so hard it gets hard to watch the source. Or, of course, you just get the plain celebratory ones, but who they can get you to celebrate can be transformative in itself, compared to what canon is giving us.

Vids are built on so many layers of other art forms it's extraordinary.

... and yet, you get these times everyone is vidding to the same song, and I don't know why, and sometimes it seems to be coincidence, and that is just so weird.



But I so seldom pay attention I don't even know what the keywords are to find more of these, or if there are keywords, now. Searching by character seems to kind of work. Ish.



So now I have all these Feelings, and Feels, and yet the art I've been watching isn't one I can do, so I just want to make Story, without having anything articulate enough to make story, even if words in a row were a thing I currently do.


Still, I feel like I'm not as stuck as I have been. So it's kind of like progress.

Even if it currently amounts to being full of inarticulate yearnings, that's something.



... so I'll likely keep watching these...

Pandemic Rising Tide

I tried playing this for practice with the rules, though it is a minimum 2 player game so it don't count properly. I screwed up the shuffling a couple times in ways that made it easier and one time in ways that made it harder, so it isn't a good test of difficulty. Also I think I made one move that was not permitted one time, which was a big help so that's an oops. And I need to read the rules more thoroughly. And I think I might have chosen the two most helpful cards to try first?

But

I won :-)

And it seems like an interesting game, with scaling difficulty levels and extra targets once you've got the hang of things.

Which I have not, as noted above, too many errors to really count.

But it's fiddly to set up, there's 50 things to put on the board before you remove 9 at random, and you need to divide the cards into smaller piles and then shuffle them and put them back together, and if you shuffle in the wrong order or forget to deal your character's cards before you start to play it goes very poorly and honestly you should start again but I was too annoyed. Do things in the correct order and it works fine, it's just a lot of little pieces.

But then you move and remove the little pieces and that's a lot more fun.



I like cooperative games, I have three now, this, pandemic, and ghost stories. It seems more civilised to all try and beat the game together. But then when you are feeling backstabby there's munchkin. So this is a good collection.

I shall take it to games night next month and maybe science fiction group next week.



... these currently constitute the lion's share of my social skills, but that's kind of working, so *shrugs*


Plenty good, does what the games shop guy said it would.