holiday round-up
Dec. 26th, 2013 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaydeefalls
Happy holidays to all, whatever you may celebrate! Although it's weird how freaking early Chanukah was this year. Anyway, I managed to complete my Yuletide fic by the skin of my teeth, so that happened, and now I've bounced straight into Festivids crunch time. Well, I still have two weeks and change, so I'm not quite as desperate, although I'm having trouble settling on a song. I thought I knew what I was doing, and then got another vid bunny for the same fandom for a different song that I think I like better? So we'll see. I also got another, way stronger vid bunny for yet ANOTHER song in the same fandom, but focused on a different character than requested, so that's being shelved for now.
I did the thing where I finally dug up my registration info for Final Cut Express, and was able to reregister the program on my current laptop (which I've had for like a year and a half now, that's how long this took), and decided NOW I SHALL VID WITH BETTER SOFTWARE, spent thirty minutes futzing around, and got so frustrated with the program that I gave up entirely and retreated back into safe, familiar iMovie 6. Which is exactly what happened the last time I tried to teach myself Final Cut, like two years ago, although I struggled on a little longer last time before abandoning it. Um. I realize that iMovie is kind of a crap program that's incredibly limited in terms of vidding, and oh my god it fucks up aspect ratios every. single. time, and I know Final Cut is vastly superior in every way, but the user interface is so utterly counterintuitive for the way my brain works that it shuts me down every single time I try to teach myself how to use it. It's incredibly frustrating. Reading the user manual makes me want to cry. I know that if I can only learn how to use it, it'll be so much better for me as a vidder, but I have no one to walk me through it and the user manual is like a billion pages long, I can't even make simple cuts in the clips without wanting to throw my laptop out a window. So I'll be back over here in like 2006 if you need me, thanks.
So, back to Yuletide! I got two gifts -- At Day's End, a Provost's Dog fic about Beka post-series, which is very sweet and lovely, and a little treatlet, The Roommate, a little Elementary Joan/Bell + Sherlock ficlet that made me very, very happy, and also I wish there were more of it.
I only wrote one fic, but despite the last-minute rush job, I'm rather pleased with how it turned out, and it was a fandom I'd been yearning to write in for YEARS, so that was fun to revisit. There are more than 2500 works in the main collection this year, so of course I doubt anyone will figure this out, but if by some fluke you manage to guess which fic I wrote, I will totally write or vid you ANYTHING YOU WANT. Clues: 1. It is a TV fandom, that I have 2. definitely talked about on this journal before, though not recently, and have introduced at least one or two of you to personally, and 3. is a slash fic for one of my favorite ever OTPs.
And rounding out the holiday season, of course, we had the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I had...mixed feelings. I was entertained by most of it, but didn't LIKE it very much. I feel like Doctor Who used to have actual plot and character arcs? And now it really doesn't, and that bothers me. I'm not going to whinge about it all here, because other people have already said it far more eloquently, and because I don't want to harsh anyone's squee. So I'll just say that I really do hope Tasha Lem turns out to be a regeneration of River Song, because that would improve her character vastly in my eyes, and that I did like the idea of the Doctor actually devoting himself to protecting one little town for three hundred years, although I didn't much like the execution of it. However, I did love that final scene in the TARDIS quite a lot, and I adored Matt Smith's final speech, and yeah, I know it was a cheap trick, but I totally teared up at seeing Amy again. AND I AM 100% ON BOARD WITH CAPALDI!DOCTOR based on his like twenty seconds of screentime alone. He's got a very different energy from the most recent crop of Doctors -- all of whom I adore, incidentally, regardless of my feelings on Moffatt's tenure as showrunner -- and yes, I am totally behind the inevitable tumblr meme of replacing all of his lines with profanity. I wish I could be sadder about leaving Eleven behind, but then, I felt the same way about Ten in the end, and that doesn't mean I love either of them (or their actors) any less. I think the show is ready for the change. I just wish we were changing showrunner as well as Doctor on this round.
Continue to like Clara and wish she were given an actual character arc of her own that doesn't revolve around the Doctor. Oh, well.
I did the thing where I finally dug up my registration info for Final Cut Express, and was able to reregister the program on my current laptop (which I've had for like a year and a half now, that's how long this took), and decided NOW I SHALL VID WITH BETTER SOFTWARE, spent thirty minutes futzing around, and got so frustrated with the program that I gave up entirely and retreated back into safe, familiar iMovie 6. Which is exactly what happened the last time I tried to teach myself Final Cut, like two years ago, although I struggled on a little longer last time before abandoning it. Um. I realize that iMovie is kind of a crap program that's incredibly limited in terms of vidding, and oh my god it fucks up aspect ratios every. single. time, and I know Final Cut is vastly superior in every way, but the user interface is so utterly counterintuitive for the way my brain works that it shuts me down every single time I try to teach myself how to use it. It's incredibly frustrating. Reading the user manual makes me want to cry. I know that if I can only learn how to use it, it'll be so much better for me as a vidder, but I have no one to walk me through it and the user manual is like a billion pages long, I can't even make simple cuts in the clips without wanting to throw my laptop out a window. So I'll be back over here in like 2006 if you need me, thanks.
So, back to Yuletide! I got two gifts -- At Day's End, a Provost's Dog fic about Beka post-series, which is very sweet and lovely, and a little treatlet, The Roommate, a little Elementary Joan/Bell + Sherlock ficlet that made me very, very happy, and also I wish there were more of it.
I only wrote one fic, but despite the last-minute rush job, I'm rather pleased with how it turned out, and it was a fandom I'd been yearning to write in for YEARS, so that was fun to revisit. There are more than 2500 works in the main collection this year, so of course I doubt anyone will figure this out, but if by some fluke you manage to guess which fic I wrote, I will totally write or vid you ANYTHING YOU WANT. Clues: 1. It is a TV fandom, that I have 2. definitely talked about on this journal before, though not recently, and have introduced at least one or two of you to personally, and 3. is a slash fic for one of my favorite ever OTPs.
And rounding out the holiday season, of course, we had the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I had...mixed feelings. I was entertained by most of it, but didn't LIKE it very much. I feel like Doctor Who used to have actual plot and character arcs? And now it really doesn't, and that bothers me. I'm not going to whinge about it all here, because other people have already said it far more eloquently, and because I don't want to harsh anyone's squee. So I'll just say that I really do hope Tasha Lem turns out to be a regeneration of River Song, because that would improve her character vastly in my eyes, and that I did like the idea of the Doctor actually devoting himself to protecting one little town for three hundred years, although I didn't much like the execution of it. However, I did love that final scene in the TARDIS quite a lot, and I adored Matt Smith's final speech, and yeah, I know it was a cheap trick, but I totally teared up at seeing Amy again. AND I AM 100% ON BOARD WITH CAPALDI!DOCTOR based on his like twenty seconds of screentime alone. He's got a very different energy from the most recent crop of Doctors -- all of whom I adore, incidentally, regardless of my feelings on Moffatt's tenure as showrunner -- and yes, I am totally behind the inevitable tumblr meme of replacing all of his lines with profanity. I wish I could be sadder about leaving Eleven behind, but then, I felt the same way about Ten in the end, and that doesn't mean I love either of them (or their actors) any less. I think the show is ready for the change. I just wish we were changing showrunner as well as Doctor on this round.
Continue to like Clara and wish she were given an actual character arc of her own that doesn't revolve around the Doctor. Oh, well.
