Fic/Vid Masterlist

Hello! Look, there is a journal here. It contains much random blather, most of which is not friendslocked. I have no particular friending policy. Lurk, comment, whatever. It's all good. :D

It's possible you're just stopping by for the fanfic and vids. In which case, might I direct you to a masterlist? Also: I give blanket permission to podfic, remix, translate, or otherwise do anything creative based upon any of my works. Just please drop me a note letting me know so that I can point and squee. ( what you see is what you get )

( X-Men Movieverse )

( Avengers )

( Doctor Who/Torchwood )

( Multifandom )

( Avatar: the Last Airbender )

( History Boys )

( Hunger Games )

that I am completely in love with Elementary. Seriously, this is far and away the best show I'm watching right now. ( minor spoilers )

So, I just saw Arthur Darvill on Broadway as the lead in Once from six rows from the front of the orchestra.

I may be having some OMG RORY feelings tonight.

This has been a good couple of weeks for me and theatre and Doctor Who actors, oddly enough -- last week I saw the all-black RSC production of Julius Caesar at BAM with, among others, Paterson Joseph as Brutus and Adjoa Andoh (Martha's mum) as Portia. Who were both really fucking amazing, though the guy playing Antony (Ray Fearon) completely stole the show with his brilliant interpretation of the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech.

Anyway. So Arthur Darvill is apparently a really talented musician as well as a lovely actor, and I basically spent the whole show like ♥_♥ and the rest of the cast was quite talented as well and I'm more than a little bit in love right now.

Seriously, incidental enjoyment of Who actors aside, seeing these two wildly different but equally good productions in the past week and a half has very much driven home that to me, the theatre is a sacred space. There is nothing in the world that transfixes me quite like live theatre. It's not -- Broadway, or being fond of a television actor on a stage. It's just that the experience of sitting in an audience with living people twenty or fifty feet away from you creating a whole other world on a stage -- it's unlike any other feeling in the world. I feel more fully alive when I'm in a theatre than...god, any other time. It's why, for all the stress and hassle and shitty hours and worse pay of stage management, I honestly can't imagine ever doing anything else, because the theatre is everything to me. (Also, seriously, being alone in a dark, empty theater with only a ghost light for company makes me feel more at peace than pretty much anything else. I'm a stage manager, I'm often the first person in and the last person out of a theater, so it's not an unusual situation for me. But god, it's glorious. Theatre is an empty space just brimming with potential.)

I sometimes wonder if I'm...broken, or not built right, because it seems like I don't have feelings or form emotional connections in the way normal people do. I mean, not that I don't have feelings at all, obviously, I do, but not the way people around me seem to, and I'm mostly just lonely a lot. I genuinely like most people but don't particularly connect with very many of them. I've only been sort of in love maybe once or twice in my life; I can count the people I truly consider friends on one hand and I'm well aware that I need their friendship far more than they need mine because I'm a very distant and frequently absent sort of friend. When I look into my future, I don't see much of anything for my personal life -- I haven't had sex in years, I doubt I'll ever meet anyone I want to marry (or who wants to marry me), it's extremely unlikely I'll ever have kids. Barring accidents, I'm pretty much going to grow old and die alone, and I'm slowly resigning myself to that. But god, I fall hopelessly, selflessly in love every time I step into a theater. Productions like Once and Julius Caesar completely transport me. This is why I can get so angry about commercialism and Broadway -- empty trash moneymakers like Mamma Mia! or Legally Blonde: The Musical are actively profaning that sacred space for me. (Okay, I've probably never given my Broadway Rant here, but I have one, and many people who know me IRL have heard bits of it.) Good theatre, true storytelling, is just...magical.

...this post wound up being way less about seeing Rory on Broadway than it was supposed to be. Anyway. He was really, really good? And he can sing and play guitar. For real.

Completely random: I am trying to find a Jolly Roger T-shirt by Friday morning. Your standard skull&crossbones, yarrr me mateys sort of design, no text, just the damn pirate flag on a stupid T-shirt. I found one I really liked online and ordered it two weeks ago...and near as I can tell, it hasn't even shipped yet. So now I'm almost out of time. I live in New York City, you'd think I could find a fucking T-shirt, but no luck yet. Does anyone know where I might look in NYC to find this? Like tomorrow morning? I'm gonna hit up the T-shirt shops around St Marks Place and pray.

Seriously, I bought the damn thing online two weeks in advance, I thought I was good. I mean, maybe it'll turn up tomorrow, but though I received order confirmation promptly, I haven't even gotten anything like "it shipped and here's your tracking number". Fucking hell.

(It's...totally not for anything important, really, except I've got a show opening on Friday night that involves a pirate and I'm making a tradition out of wearing something to our opening night parties that pays homage to the show, and I really really really want to show up in a Jolly Roger T-shirt, okay? I work at a kids' theater, they'll get a kick out of it, I'm trying to be the cool stage manager here.)

There was a new episode of Who! It was fun! I really like Clara! ( minor spoiler )

( and one criticism )

So I'm working on this Ponds vid. The song I'm using is on the long side, so I made a couple of edits to it right off the bat -- in particular, cutting a full verse out near the beginning. (It starts verse-verse-chorus; I reduced it to just verse-chorus). And I vid linearly, for the most part, so I've put in clips through the first chorus and into the verse after that. Except listening to the song, I realized that I've put too much emphasis on the earliest Pond episodes, and that might unbalance the vid as a whole. So either I can reedit what I've got right now, or push forward and see if it really does become a problem later on -- which it might not, or that might mean that I'll have to do a lot MORE reediting later.

Then it occurred to me that if I stuck the verse I'd cut back into the song, I'd have much more room to maneuver. Which, okay, less is more, and putting MORE music back in (when I'd quite liked the shortened version) feels very counterintuitive to me, but out of sheer curiosity, I saved a new draft of the vid and reinserted the verse. And then I watched that draft through what I had, without changing the placement of a single clip, though I knew I'd then have to reedit heavily since, y'know, I'd been vidding a completely different part of the song, and that video would play over the 2nd verse instead of the chorus, and so onward.

IT MATCHES UP PERFECTLY.

This creeps me out quite a lot. Like, even the different lyrics work! I mean, the song has a very steady, rhythmic beat, which explains why the rhythm of the clips still works, but I can't believe it still flows right thematically as well. Maybe I've got the 1am crazies or something? Seriously, I may just proceed with the vid from here, without changing a thing I've already got. (Well, I know I'll do som reedits later, because I always do, but you know what I mean.) But how the hell did THAT work out? And it really does buy me the space I'd wanted to go into more depth with the story, which is also of the good. Except...christ, now I'm worried again that the vid will be too damn long. (It's right around 5 minutes now -- I still cut a good 30-40 seconds off the original song later on in it. With the verse cut, though, it was more like 4:15, which feels like the longest any vid should be to me.)

Other vidders, any thoughts on vid length? I mean, 4:15 is plenty of time to tell a story -- I should probably go back to my original draft and edit that instead. I don't want to get hopelessly self-indulgent. But...Ponds! And there's a hell of a lot of character arc in early S5 -- more so, I think, than in S6, which is all over the freaking map -- so maybe it wouldn't feel unbalanced anyway. ARGH.

Fics-in-progress are way easier to discuss with people than vids. I have nobody I can SHOW this to right now, and it's much simpler to share a googledoc of a fic than the first minute and a half of a vid draft.

Queen's Gambit, chapter 6.

In which Cain Marko’s dreams don’t work the way anyone expects them to, and shit gets kinda real. And also Sean discovers exactly why Logan has such a dangerous reputation as an extractor.

So that only took me, um, A YEAR to write. And there are still three more chapters to go! (I think. I hope.)

OH HEY ALSO. white_lotus Lunar New Year Exchange reveals are up! And once again, I made the only vid in the exchange this year. I am super predictable.

Title: Galileo
By: kaydeefalls
Recipient: kouredios
Music: "Galileo", Indigo Girls
Rating: PG
Characters: Korra, Aang
Summary: How long 'til my soul gets it right? A reincarnation vid.
Notes: Thanks to such_heights for looking it over!

Download: Mediafire (.mov, 56 MB)


Password: whitelotus

I'm not gonna lie, I have planned to make a Korra vid to this song since the existence of the series was announced. Not a single episode of LoK existed, and I already knew I would vid this song about Korra and Aang and the Avatar line and how fucking pressuring and confusing being the Avatar is, and how they both suffer and learn from past lives' mistakes. And then the series actually aired, and the song continued to obviously be completely about Korra. Ugh, the lyrics are just too perfect to pass up -- "then you had to bring up reincarnation over a couple of beers the other night / and now I'm serving time for mistakes made by another in another lifetime", or "but then again it feels like some sort of inspiration to let the next life off the hook / but she'll say look what I had to overcome from my last life, I think I'll write a book."

So, I'm super glad that kouredios requested a Korra introspection/aangst vid, because it was exactly the excuse I needed to actually make this thing. :D

As I was clipping, I noticed all kinds of AWESOME parallels between the Gaang and Korra's Team Avatar that I badly wanted to include, but it started getting too bloated and disjointed, so for this particular story, I stuck with Korra and Aang. Someday I will find the right vid to tell the story of the parallels between Zuko and Asami, for damn sure, and also all the rest of them. (I feel like Asami's true inheritance is from Sokka and Suki's line of nonbender genius, but goddamn, she and Zuko have an awful lot in common. Another time.)

( lyrics )

Seriously, guys, Elementary is fast becoming my favorite TV show on the air. The cases themselves aren't terribly inspired -- I do wish they'd draw more from ACD in that respect -- but the CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, oh my goodness, this show is all about the characters. These aren't ACD's Holmes and Watson, but they are very recognizable reincarnations, and oh god, I love their faces so much. While I love complex plots, I'm a character girl at heart, and the way these people (including Gregson and Bell) visibly grow and change from one episode to the next, and the shifting dynamic of their relationships, is just golden. ( spoiler from most recent ep )

The Pond Continuum (5389 words) by kaydeefalls
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams
Characters: Amy Pond (Doctor Who), Rory Williams, Martha Jones, Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness, Ninth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, Canton Everett Delaware III
Summary: Five people who have never heard of the Ponds (but might have met them anyway), and one who has.

I started working on this pretty much immediately after watching "Angels Take Manhattan" back in September, and it's been coming along in fits and starts ever since. This is my Ponds head!canon. Huge thanks to the lovely analise010 for the beta!

So I have a roommate. It is very much her apartment, I just happen to live in it too. This is fine. Her house, her rules. There are many rules. I follow them all without argument. The apartment is nice and the rent is cheap, whatever, I can deal. I'm both quiet and clean, and I keep shared spaces tidy by nature, because that's just common courtesy in my books.

She's...the sort of person who should probably never share a space with anyone else, because she is anal beyond belief. She talks sometimes about her "future husband" (she's single and not seeing anyone at the moment), and I kind of cringe -- not because I don't think she could ever meet someone, because she's attractive and a decent human being and stuff, but because no living heterosexual male would ever be able to follow her house rules to her satisfaction.

I am not going to discuss the rules, because I follow them as instructed and they're not formalized or particularly interesting. But I found it strangely therapeutic to make a list of all the UNSPOKEN rules that I have broken at some point in the past four months and been reprimanded about. (None of these are repeat offenses; once she tells me "don't do that", I don't do that again.)

So:

THINGS I HAVE DONE WRONG, according to my roommate: an ongoing compilation
-Did not push my chair all the way back in to the table when I was done sitting it
-Left a light on in my bedroom while eating dinner in the living room
-Didn't wring ALL the water out of the kitchen sponge after washing dishes
-Didn't push the soap dispenser all the way back against the wall after washing dishes
-Didn't scrape all the tiny food bits out of the kitchen sink strainer thingy immediately after washing dishes
-Knocked the kitchen sink strainer thingy against the inside of the garbage can to knock all the tiny food bits out
-Bought new dish soap instead of refilling the empty bottle with existing dish soap (kept amongst the 30,000 supplies under the sink) that I didn't see
-Didn't clean out the bathtub drain after every single shower
-Didn't refill the Britta water filter to the top after pouring one glass of water out of an otherwise full pitcher
-Left a bowl and a mug in the dish drainer to dry on a day she decided to clean
-Didn't take out the recycling immediately when it was "full" by some unknown metric of her deciding that did not actually involve the bin being full
-After taking out recycling, put fresh garbage bag in bin on a day she decided to clean (because obvs she was going to clean the inside of the recycling bin so putting a new bag in made more work for her? although taking out trash without putting a new trash bag in would otherwise be a cardinal sin)
-Threw out a Chipotle container into trash instead of recycling (in fairness, she was right; I didn't realize that tin top was recyclable. just not sure it warranted a passive-aggressive note on the kitchen counter)
-Didn't fold up empty cereal box into tiniest possible contortion before putting it in recycling bin
-Cleaned bathtub with tile cleaner/all purpose cleaner instead of Comet
-"Please check the garbage container in the bathroom and rethink how you dispose of sanitary napkins", sent as text; to this day I still have no idea what I did wrong (I decided maybe the garbage can was "full" by that same unknown metric of her deciding, so took out the trash, but I don't think that's what she meant)
-Didn't empty out the vacuum cleaner filter immediately after using vacuum once on my tiny bedroom rug
-Didn't give her warning in advance the one day out of the past four months that my work schedule was weird and I wound up getting up right around the same time as her, even though I immediately offered to let her use the bathroom first and withdrew without complaint until she was done

I think perhaps I shall continue recording additions to this list as they arise. So that I can refer back to it whenever I may be in danger of Doing Something Wrong, and can cross-reference. I'm also almost definitely missing things that I've just forgotten about.

It should be noted that for some of these items -- the chair thing, the soap dispenser thing -- she phrased her complaint as "I was waiting a few days to see if you'd notice, but you're still doing X, so..." Because when I don't realize I'm doing something wrong, waiting to see if I'll magically intuit that I'm doing something wrong is OBVIOUSLY the best course of action, and therefore I am doubly wrong for not reading her mind and figuring it out for myself.

Am I completely crazy in thinking this is just a wee bit anal?

Today is my full day off this week, thank god. I opened a show over the weekend, which is great because it means TECH IS OVER, THANK CHRIST. I celebrated after the shows yesterday by taking myself out to the movies. Saw Zero Dark Thirty, which was quite good and very tense. Although I become completely distracted by the unexpected Captain Jack Harkness cameo, which made me giggle inappropriately. Seriously, that first scene with the CIA director, I kept thinking, man, that extra looks an awful lot like John Barrowman, but he was one of a group of faceless Suits around a conference table, and the camera never actually panned in on him, so I thought I must've been imagining it. Then, like half an hour later, there's another scene with the CIA director, and this time he actually had a couple of lines, and I nearly jumped up in my seat shouting I knew I recognized that jawline! GOOD TIMES. I was not expecting Barrowman in that movie!

I do have a lot of fandom stuff I need to be doing this week. Which is good! I like fandom stuff. Though I'm working on a vid that's giving me a huge headache right now for reasons completely unrelated to the vid itself -- the only source I could find for it is in a format that takes my laptop freaking forever to convert into something usable, so not only do I need to clip it all, every individual clip takes a good 2-10min to convert before I can load it into my vidding program. Which, ugh, I have really outgrown iMovie at this point. But while I HAVE Final Cut Express, I got a new laptop last summer and then, y'know, moved four times in five months, and I cannot fucking find the original CD-ROM with the necessary registration info, so I have this great vidding program installed that I can't fucking access. I'm like 95% sure the stuff I need is in one of the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany that I didn't have room for in my current apartment, so are in storage upstage at my parents' house, but as they go upstate only on weekends and I WORK on weekends, I haven't been able to get up there to sort through the six boxes of books-and-assorted-miscellany to find the damn CD-ROM. And I'm still only beginning to learn how to USE Final Cut, so it's not like that will solve all my problems, but it is frustrating to have a program that I can't even open to play with.

Which is unrelated to the fact that every fucking clip I make takes, on average, five minutes to convert. Do you know how many clips I assemble in the process of making a vid? If I'm clipping a 2-hour movie, and I know specifically what I'm looking for, that's maybe 100 clips. If it's a TV show, and I know the general outline of the vid I'm making but don't know the show well enough to storyboard it blind...christ. For, say, One Mississippi, I had the benefit of knowing Doctor Who pretty much backwards and forwards (partly from having vidded it so many times already), so I could seek out the sort of clips I needed with a high degree of precision, and know that, oh, for this lyric I need this particular moment from episode X, so I'd take a few different clips from that scene and edit it out in iMovie. The folder I created for that vid holds 121 .mov files, for roughly a four-minute vid. Let's say that the vid I'm currently making only winds up needing 200 clips itself -- which is probably about right, since I'm much less familiar with the source (I've only watched it through once before) and don't have quite a strong concept in mind for the vid as a whole. Setting aside the time it takes me to rewatch everything and find the clips themselves, this added conversion time -- let's call it an even five minutes per clip, though it varies depending on the lengths of the clips themselves -- means that that's close to seventeen hours of time wasted JUST CONVERTING .MOV FILES. This is incredibly frustrating to me, because I can't actually do the vidding itself until the clips are converted and then uploaded into iMovie. And I can't continue clipping while one file is still converted, so I'm basically caught in the holding pattern from hell.

At least I can work on a fic beta while videos convert in the background. That's something.