beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Youtube is really frustrating.
I suspect this is deliberate to make you sign in and get more tools for organising it, but it's also because it's just that big.
but especially the version on the tv is really tricky to use if you want the same thing again.

This korning it showed me a Snart/Rory vid that gave me so many feels I had to go hide under a blanket
but I'd turned the tv off so when I came back it wasn't on the page
and searching for it is just... ugh.

this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crVb0ZfCTD4
has the characters, topic, era, song all right
but I could have sworn the one I watched had different clips

or was it just I watch a lot of these guys in a row and there's only so much tv show to go around?
who knows!

oh for Ao3's tags on everything.



ETA: found it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1p2Qq2H4L8

it has six hundred views
why is my tv recommending the six hundred view one and not the twenty six thousand?

also, figuring out how much they are the same is tricky.



it's that song with those characters. big feels.

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...