Hilarious Anime recommendation: "Azumanga Daioh" (The fluffy temptation of wheat!)

In brief, Azumanga Daioh is a hilarious and adorable anime series about a group of girls in high school in Japan. It mostly revolves around the normal day to day events of school and the strange things kids talk about, not about giant robots or anything epic. It's "a show about nothing" that takes place in a Japanese school. Years ago I watched it with my anime group, and last monday I randomly picked up the DVDs off my shelf and watched some, and discovered it was so much better than I remembered.

I first discovered Azumanga Daioh through a fanvid (oh look, fan promotion that lead to me buying the product!) I was looking through popular videos at animemusicvideos.org, and watched the highest rated AMV that was listed as having multiple sources I recognized. Here it is, to Blowing for Soup's "1985".



As it turns out, the majority of the footage is from AD with cameo shots from other shows, but I was intrigued by what I saw. I showed the AMV to many of my friends (mostly for the NERVana jokes), and went to youtube to find the show. I watched the first half of the first episode, and then ordered the DVDs. I didn't want to buy them without knowing anything about the show, and I had no legal way to see it. I have really never understood why all shows don't have their first episode online. I'm never going to buy a DVD without seeing at least one episode, and I have no desire to just watch a random episode from the fourth season of a show to decide if I want to watch it. Lots of shows have their most recent 5 episodes on hulu these days, why not the first episode? I can't imagine it possibly decreasing DVD sales. I suppose this is a tangent, but I always think of my experience with Azumanga Daioh as the perfect example of this use case that I think should be totally reasonable from everyone's perspective.

The main character in the AMV is Yukari, the homeroom teacher for the protagonists of AD. Her life bares very little resemblance to the lyrics of the song. She's a single Japanese woman who teaches English and is more immature than some of her students. She's very... enthusiastic, and spazzy in a traditional anime way. In my opinion, the real star is Chiyo-chan, a young prodigy who has skipped middle school and gone straight to high school. She is kind and earnest, but quite naive and susceptible to being lead astray by strange ideas. "Osaka" is the transfer student from the Japanese city of Osaka, who is slow witted and speaks slowly with a strong accent that the subtitles try to portray. In the dubbed version, she speaks with a Southern drawl. We also have the tall, attractive and athletic girl who is considered "cool" and "mysterious" by the other girls, when she is really just shy. She desperately wants to play with animals, but they usually bite her. One of the other girls is desperately in love with her, but of course unable to say anything. There's the smart overachiever and her slacker best friend who she pretends to hate but really loves, there's the athletic girl... the characters can all be fairly easily summarized, and there is nothing particularly deep about the show, but it is rich and delightful.

Each season repeats the same general events, like summer vacation at Osaka's house and the school field day, but each one manages to be funny and charming. There isn't much in the way of continuing plot arcs, just life continuing on. There's no graphic violence, scatological humor, or strong sexual content. I'm not sure at what age kids would start enjoying the show, but it's totally acceptable for all ages in my mind. Well, there's a male teacher who seems to have creepy crushes on students, which I can't imagine ever airing on a similar American show, but that's the creepiest thing.

In conclusion, it's delightful, you should watch it. You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VFM5YM/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000ADKWNM&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0CY50CS320QZ8NYJCVWF

Top Chef: Just Desserts

Top Chef: Just Desserts is on the air, and I am super excited! The first episode aired last Wednesday, and I think this is a great addition to the Top Chef family. Host Gail Simmons is a long time judge from the main Top Chef, and Head Judge Johnny Iuzzini and his crazy pompadour appeared on this past season of Top Chef. (I have to admit, watching him as head judge is making me imagine super-bald Tom Collichio, Head Judge of Top Chef, with a pompadour. Someone should photoshop that.) When I found out that (DJ) Hubert Keller is one of the recurring judges, I literally got up and did a little dance. I fell in love with Hubert Keller during the first season of Top Chef: Masters, and my love only deepened when I saw pictures of him DJing at a festival in San Francisco, the city I was living in while falling for him.

But enough about the judges! This season starts out with only tweleve contestants, compared to I think seventeen in most seasons of Top Chef. Did Bravo not want to commit to as many episodes? Honestly, I find it hard to keep track of everyone when there are seventeen chefs running around. As with the other shows, they start with a short "Quickfire" challenge, where the loser suffers no peanlty but shame and the winner gets immunity from elimination for the episode (at least in the early episodes). This week's elimination was all about chocolate, and my sweet tooth is begging to be fed now. For me, the biggest downside of cooking competitions is that we the viewers can't actually taste the food, and just need to take the judges' opinions, as opposed to something like fashion or singing shows where the audience has most of the information the judges do. However, I think with pastries, presentation will be much more explicitly part of the challenge, so we viewers will have more information to judge the contestants with.

One of the big issues in the cooking world is gender. For ages women have had a terrible time working their way up the ladder, with men to this day still openly saying that women belong making pastries, which of course drives me crazy. Top Chef season six was particularly annoying in seeming to have selected a lot more talented men than women, so that something like the first six people eliminated were women. Season seven was better in this regard, but I am excited to see the competition in what is traditionally considered the female side of cooking. (There are tons of talented chefs of all genders, races, sexualities, et cetera, and I do hold Bravo responsible for their selections. No, I don't know much about how they select contestants, but when it is obvious to the audience on day one that some people are vastly outclassed, I can't believe that the show runners did not have some idea going in.)

Also, I lost count of how many out gay men there are this season, and of course I do love out people on TV. Season seven didn't have any, and I really loved season six's gay male-Ash and lesbian Ash buddy comedy in the background. (Favorite moment of the reunion show: They ask if there were any romances, profound awkward silence, and the two Ashes said they switched teams for each other. Wonderful stuff.)

I watched the preview for the rest of the season, and it looks like one of the stronger chefs is clearly going to be the "bad guy" for the season, which I am not looking forward to. There also seemed to be straight up sabotage, with someone hiding all the butter from the rest of the chefs? Ugh. I have no interest in those kinds of shenanigans. I do watch Top Chef for the people, and not just the food, but I don't like when people are too horrible. Season six of Top Chef featured a lot of people hating on one contestant to a degree that I found extremely unpleasant and reminiscient of the bullying and cruelty I faced in middle school, and one especially loud mouthed and offensive contestant who drove me up the wall. Right in the first episode he started off with comments about how women shouldn't be at his level (and that particular woman outlasted him and was the final one eliminated before the finale!) and I just hated him all season and cheered when he was eliminated. I also had a lot of affection for one of the season's finalists, and several people who lasted much of the season.

This past season just never caught my attention the way season six did. I think a lot of it was that most of my favorite contestants were eliminated early on, but perhaps the lack of strong conflict actually mattered to me more than I thought? I really don't know. We'll see. The two seasons of Top Chef: Masters have never had any nastiness (well, expect Ludo's... I don't even know what to call it, delusions of something) and I adored those seasons. Top Chef: Masters is like the celebrity Jeopardy of Top Chef, with chefs who are older and well established, usually with multiple restaurants of their own, and their winnings all go to charity. Most of those contestants are just much more secure in themselves and their careers, without the desperation of some of the Top Chef contestants, some of whom have very unsure futures. The prize money for Top Chef is $100,000, which is clearly intented to "further their culinary dreams" or something like that, but the apparent "bad guy" of this season of Just Desserts has a mother with over $100,000 in medical debt, so that puts an entirely different spin on that. (To any European readers: Please enjoy your lack of bankruptcy from health care costs!) Hopefully that won't color the season too much.

I think I've said more than enough for a show I've seen less an hour of, so, Top Chef: Just Desserts! Wednesdays on Bravo, with episodes available on their website! http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef-just-desserts

Dragon*Con: Or why I missed posting last week

Last Sunday I ruined my streak of blogging because I was partying in Atlanta at Dragon*Con, "the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe". It runs Friday-Monday every Labor Day Weekend, and will have its 25th anniversary next year. This was my third year going.

Most unfortunately, I was sick during the con. I still had fun, I just had fewer hours of fun than I would have had otherwise. One of my con roommates was getting about four hours sleep each night. The con rule as I know it is 5-2-1, for 5 hours of sleep a day, 2 meals, and one shower, but she swore by 3-2-1. Even if I had been in full health I couldn't have pulled that off, but she's only 23. ;-)

Dragon*Con is really big. It runs basically non-stop all weekend. I don't believe there are any scheduled events between 6 am and 9 am, but otherwise, there are usually at least twenty things going on. I don't know the official attendance numbers, but it is some multiple tens of thousands of people, which just sounds utterly ridiculous. The minimum I usually hear is thirty thousand people... and yet I still managed to randomly run into people who I didn't even know were at the convention. D*C is basically twenty different conventions all happening in the same five hotels over the same weekend. There are some events that are run by the main convention staff, like the costume parade and the masquerade, but most events come from the fan run tracks. Some of them are pretty standard, like the Star Trek, Star Wars, and anime tracks, but some tracks have a larger showing at Dragon*Con than at most normal cons, like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series or Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. I think it's self fulfilling, Pern fans know that Dragon*Con is big for Pern, so they keep coming, and it stays big. (It does help that the author used to come to the con and not to most other American cons.) I like that bottom-up feel to Dragon*Con, even if I don't go to most of the more niche tracks, I am glad they are there and the programming isn't all determined by corporate interests. (*cough* San Diego Comic-Con *cough*) I've been to a *lot* of cons, and I really do love Dragon*Con. One of my other favorite conventions is just a few weeks before D*C every year, and that one is only 140 people, so I really do experience a wide range of conventions. :-)

Dragon*Con is like Burning Man in that you have to resign yourself to the fact that there will always be cool things you are missing, no matter what you do. I actually have compared D*C and BM a lot. They are of roughly similar sizes in terms of attendance, happen at the same time, there are many people who are devoted to going every year, people plan for it all year, people show up in crazy costumes and get very intoxicated and many of them seek out (and find!) casual hookups amongst the other attendees. I've been to both, and I have to say I really do love the air conditioning at Dragon*Con. :-) I'm considering trying to do several days of Burning Man next year then heading straight to Dragon*Con, which my friends all say is ridiculous, but it's the kind of crazy idea I like.

Dragon*Con is full of crazy costumes. Would you like some pictures? This year I was too tired to attend the costume parade, but I did catch a rebroadcast on TV. The police shut down several blocks of downtown Atlanta, and I think something like 2700 people participated this year. It's quite the scene, and you can see my 2008 Parade pictures on flickr.











This one is perhaps not quite worksafe if you look closely, so you'll have to click.

I organized a group of ten people from Boston this year, here are three of them in their Steampunk versions of Team Fortress 2.


Rum cake is a tradition for me at d*c. I might have gone overboard this year?

Vividcon 2010 Premieres

Summer really is convention season for me, I went to two in August and I'm currently madly prepping for Dragon*Con which is this coming weekend. I thought I'd be done after this, but I just found out that there's a new con, New England Comic Con, in Boston October 15-17, so I'll probably be at that.

As some of you may recall, I left this year's Vividcon early to be in a wedding party, and I missed the Saturday night Premieres event, "the Oscars of vidding" (though it's premieres and not an awards show, so really sundance or cannes would be a better analogy, I think). This weekend I finally sat down with a friend and watched all of the Premieres vid show in one go. These forty vids were all brand new, finished weeks or months early but not shown or distributed publicly until this event. It's really quite neat to be at the world premiere of anything, in my opinion, and I loved Premieres last year. There's two main ways to watch premieres at Vividcon, you can watch in the utterly silent (except laughter) formal viewing room, where people are only allowed to enter or leave between vids except in an emergency, or you can watch in the overflow room, where talking is allowed. I was right up front in the formal room last year, my first time at Vividcon. I mostly had a great time, but it might be a bit more intense than I want next year, I'm not sure what I'll do. I watched this year's premieres in my living room with a friend, and we were pretty quiet during serious vids that we liked, and laughed heartily during funny vids, and were vocal about our confusion during the strange ones.

So, about those vids! I didn't have my program near me this time, and while I had read through what was listed at the con, I had forgotten most details. Normally when I watch a vid I have to actively seek it out, so I know exactly what I am getting. At the con, I constantly check my program. This time, I just put the DVD in, and sometimes the vid began by telling me what the source was, and sometimes it didn't! It was very different. I think in the future I would like to have the program available for when I am confused and would like to know the source, but I'd also like to make myself stop obsessively checking it, because being surprised can be nice.

Here are some links to some of the vids. Starting with the more humorous ones and moving into more serious vids. Enjoy! If you like the vids, leave a comment! Livejournal takes open id.

• "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", Stark Trek
  http://lcsbanana.livejournal.com/1990920.html
  
  I've seen a lot of vids to songs from "The Lion King", and this one still made me laugh. Oh, Kirk. :-)
  



• "Because I'm Awesome", Glee
  http://anoel.livejournal.com/117488.html
  
  I love Glee, and I love Kurt, and this vid is a quick, fun romp through the life of everyone's favorite gay teenager in Ohio show choir. :-)
  



• "When I'm up I can't get down again", Takin' Over the Asylum
  http://deejay.livejournal.com/188291.html
  
  This is the one vid I saw before Vividcon, which made me feel special of course. :-) (Vidders are always allowed and encouraged to get feedback on their vids before they release them). Do you love David Tennant, lately of Doctor Who? Then watch him in his first major role, from all the way back in 1994, as a young bipolar man in a Scottish mental institution. I plan to watch the whole miniseries eventually.



• "I like you so much better when you're naked", Smallville
  http://sisabet.livejournal.com/400373.html
  
  So, I've never watched any Smallville (outside of vids), though I think the Vividcon DVDs and my friends might be conspiring to change that. (I hear season nine is really good?) I know hardly anything about the show outside of the standard Superman canon, and that Lex and Clark are ridiculously slashy, at least in the early seasons. (And on that topic, one of the vidders of this premiered another vid at Club Vivid, Clark/Lex and "Bad Romance", primarily Smallville but drawing from lots of other Superman properties. It's fabulous, and I am reminded how compelling villians are for me... )This vid is totally fun and had me bouncing, and just seeing the title again put the song back in my head, which hasn't happened with anything else from premieres. And I've only heard the song once, ever!



• "CITIHALL*", Futurama
  http://bradcpu.livejournal.com/123653.html
  
  Wow. Brad took a long song, that is mostly spoken word, and really complicated, and he made a vid that matched up to that better than I would have thought possible. I am really impressed. (My other favorite vid to a Tenacious D song is here)
  



• "Ada", Inglorious Basterds
  http://braver-creature.livejournal.com/15702.html
  
  A lot can, and has, been said about the women that Quentin Tarantino creates, how they interact with violence, and with men, lots of really interesting things. Right now, what I have to say is that Shoshana is awesome and I would have gladly watched her story without all that Brad Pitt stuff. Warning, this does spoil almost the entire movie, but it's beautiful.



• "I Can't Hear the Music", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
  http://settiai.livejournal.com/1379002.html
  
  It's been years since I watched DS9, but I loved that show so much. This is a portrait of Kai Winn, her flaws and her desire, her path throughout the whole show. DS9 has had a minor resurgence in my corner of fandom lately, and I really need to rewatch some of it.



• "Becoming Brothers", Friday Night Lights
  http://kassrachel.livejournal.com/834852.html
  
  Do you watch Friday Night Lights? I will have to write a big post on it some day, because it's just fabulous, and I swear on everything, you don't need to like football for this show, and if it's not the kind of show you normally watch, that's a major reason you should watch. Oh, show of my heart! Here is a lovely vid about this amazing show. Watch it, then let's chat. :-)



• "Stay Awake", multiple sources.
  http://laurashapiro.livejournal.com/304845.html
  
  This one is creepy and poignant and I love it. It's about women, and fertility and the womb, and... just watch this one, and tell me (and laurashapiro!) what you think!




• "Bloodbuzz Ohio", Breaking Bad
  http://f1renze.livejournal.com/219264.html
  
  People have been telling me for awhile that I need to see Breaking Bad, and I vaguely intended to do so someday, but this vid just grabbed ahold of me and would not let go. I didn't quite cry, but I am not sure this show will make me cry when I watch it... in the very near future.

There are so many good vids in there, but the hour is late and the laptop power is low, so I shall bid you farewell for now. Watch vids!

More Theatre! "Next to Normal"

I'm not going to bury the lede here, this might be the most emotionally powerful play I have ever seen. It was the first musical to win the pulitzer since "Rent", and something like the 9th in 93 years. I was fairly certain this show would make me cry, given what I knew about the subject matter, but I didn't expect to end the show sobbing and to spend half the show trying not to disturb other audience members with my crying. It's pretty intense.

"Next to Normal" is the story of a suburban family with serious problems. It is about mental illness, how it can control the life of the person with the illness, and how it affects the people around them. It is painful, and poignant. I feel like I could see it three times and still be finding new ways to relate to the story, new ways to identify with the characters, new ways to relive my own experiences through the show. Mental illness has affected my life in so many different ways, and while this is just the story of a handful of people, centered around one person's illness, I feel echoes of so many people in this show. I'm afraid that even a week later, I can't speak very coherently about this show. It was so intensely emotional, I know I didn't catch everything.

I won't talk about the plot in detail, because this is a show that I very strongly recommend going into knowing as little as possible. Trust the story, and let it unfold before you. The music served the plot well enough, but I don't know how much I will listen to the soundtrack. I haven't tried listening to yet, perhaps some of the songs will jump out at me.

I'm told the original lead actress, who left the show last month, was truly amazing, but I was very happy with this cast. The married couple at the heart of the story is played by a real life married couple, (which i read about in the playbill for "A Little Night Music" earlier in the day.) I can hardly imagine what it is like to go through that relationship every day with your spouse, to say all those things and have all that conflict to the person you have a real relationship with. It reminds me how much I would like to play closely with my boyfriend Peter in a Live Action Role-Playing game some day. Recently he played the Judas-analogue to my Jesus-analogue in a game, and the game masters called us during casting to make sure we'd be comfortable in those roles. At the time I laughed and said that of course it would be no problem, but afterwards I did find I really wanted a hug from Peter and promises that he'd never sell me out to the feds. :-)

In conclusion, go see this show. I wasn't the only one crying, when we finally left the theatre one couple was still sitting in their seats, clutching each other and sobbing hysterically. I don't know what pain they've felt in their lives, but I hope the show gives them some catharsis. I really can't speak to what the show is like for people whose lives haven't been touched by mental illness, but I fairly certain the story will still be strong, the pain will be real, the characters will be sharp and touching, even if it doesn't cut into your own heart's pains the way it did mine.

"A Little Night Music"

Hello, blog! I am just back from New York City and I am full of culture! Over the course of < 30 hours, I saw three groups perform at Lincoln Center and two Tony award winning Broadway musicals! It was delightfully decadent. And at the same time, I visited my third city (Chicago, Boston, New York) in seven days! I am very lucky.

Today I'll talk about the Saturday matinee. This was my second time seeing "A Little Night Music" and my companion's first. It's a romantic comedy from Stephen Sondheim (my personal god of musical theatre) set among the love affairs of actors, lawyers and Counts in turn of the (20th) century Sweden. At least I think it's a comedy, it is full of comedic moments, but also many tears and much sadness.

We got really quite good seats through the TKTS booth in Times Square, which sells significantly discounted tickets to shows the day of the performance. Sadly, Angela Lansbury is no longer in the production, but it now stars Bernadette Peters, who I'd take over Catherine Zeta-Jones any day. She was just *wonderful*. Sixty two, and she's still completely gorgeous and lively and wonderful.

This production felt much more comedic than the other production I saw, I think in large part thanks to Ms. Peters. Her mannerisms and tone of voice and energy gave real humor to scenes that felt flat in the college production I saw previously. She was an utter delight, and I was honored to be mere feet away from her.

As I told my companion on the way to the show, I was never clear why, of all of Sondheim's wonderful music, "Send in the Clowns" had gotten the most popular attention, when it wasn't even in my top 20 favorite Sondheim songs. When Bernadette Peters sang it on that stage, heartbroken, crying, vulnerable and pained... I didn't sob, but I had chills, and people near me cried.

The rest of the cast was fine, I was just overwhelmed with love for Bernadette Peters. The actress who played Anne in the previous production... her voice was incredibly unpleasant. It was interesting to see that with an Anne where I am not distracted by the actress, I still think of the character in approximately the same way. (At least this time I didn't slip up and say "God she's so *dumb*" outloud in the front row during Act II.)

Elaine Stritch played Madame Armfeldt, and while she was certainly a fine actor, I did keep thinking about how much I wished I could see Angela Lansbury in the role. I don't know if she's a trained singer. Her one song, "Liasons", was not so muc sung as... complained? In the previous production, she was mostly wistful in this song, where as Ms. Stritch seemed to be close to, well, freaking out about it. As I told my companion, she has such special problems.

"The Miller's Son" is a favorite of mine, and I had high hopes for the actor playing Petra, and she did not disappoint. It's a joyful ode to youthful promiscuity, and I think it will now be stuck in my head again thanks to writing this post. :-)

I always forget just how much better professional productions are than physicists at MIT. (Especially the dancing, I do so love dancing.) I don't have a good enough ear to really notice the difference in singing skill most of the time, but with dancing, I am just delighted by professional work. And this is a show with hardly any dancing at all!

Overall, it was a lovely production and I recommend it. I left the theatre in excellent spirits, full of happiness and love for the world, a perhaps strange reaction to a Sondheim play, I know. Of course, by the end of the second play I saw on Saturday, I was sobbing hysterically, but that will be another post. :)

A Taste of Club Vivid! (Or, I do crazy things to party with fangirls)

This weekend, I flew to Chicago for a dance party full of 100 drunk fangirls covered in sparkles, stayed up almost all night, slept 90 minutes, then flew back to Boston and went to a wedding rehearsal. This is the kind of the thing my life is full of.

Technically, I wasn't just there for the dance party. The dance party, Club Vivid, is the Friday night event at Vividcon, the fanvidding convention that occurs every August in Chicago. (For explanation of vidding, here's one of my earliest posts to this blog: Festivids Reveal.) The con runs friday-sunday, with many people arriving Thursday and staying till Monday, for extra time with rarely seen friends, or time to visit Chicago. Last year, my first time, I showed up on Wednesday and stayed till Monday. This year, I was scheduled to be Maid of Honor in my friend's wedding on Sunday (today). I was quite miserable over the scheduling, and eventually decided to go anyway, just attending one day of official programming.

I flew to Chicago on Wednesday, and went and visited two old internet friends of mine who live in the area. On Thursday, I visited the Field Museum with 5 other fangirls, one of whom works there (and got us in free!) On Friday, I attended panels, and Club Vivid. During all that, I spent as much time hanging out with my once-a-year friends as I could. It was very bittersweet, knowing I'd be missing two days of programming and the big Premiere event, when dozens of vids made my attendees premiere for the first time ever.

There's a lot to talk about with Vividcon, but in this post I'm just going to talk about Club Vivid.

From what I've gathered, no one ever expected Club Vivid to become what it is. It started as a dance party where attendees danced to fanvids made to dancey music. Now Club Vivid has on the order of thirty vids that are made *for* Club Vivid, and premiere there before being offered online or to anyone else. I think the whole con shows up, there is a pre-paid open bar, people wear complicated costumes and a whole lot of glitter, and it's my favorite dance party in the world. I had a fabulous time this year. A lot of people at Vividcon are anxious, many of them surrounded by people they only know online. Drunken dance parties help with that.


Club Vivid always starts with the Joxer Dance from Xena. Imagine rows and rows of excited fangirls dancing along to this, including the weird hopping and the conga line. It is good times. I found myself in a somewhat grumpy mood before Club Vivid, wondering if it really was smart to come all the way to Chicago for such a short trip that would leave me exhausted for the wedding rehearsal.... and then the Joxer Dance came on and everything was better. :-)

[It is at this point in the writing that the author realizes that many of the vids she's been planning to use in this post are not yet available online. This makes her sad, thought she doesn't fault the vidders at all, because they are still having fun at the con or traveling home. It does however change the rest of the post.]

I don't know of anything like Club Vivid. Vids made for Club Vivid... will get watched by other people, but the intended audience in unique in my knowledge of vidding. (Please enlighten me if you know otherwise!) The audience will be watching many, many vids in a row, but that is not unique, given vidshows at many cons. The audience will generally be very happy, and much of it will be intoxicated. Club Vivid (CVV) vids might have some deep and profound meaning, but most of the audience won't see deep nuances while dancing. They won't be looking at the vid continuously, there may be a significant undulating crowd between them and the screen, and they wlll be *dancing*. Some people will ignore the images completely and just dance to the music! I have no proof, but I feel like CVV have it easy, because the audience is easy to please. Given them good music, and something that looks pretty or contains characters they like, and people will cheer and dance. In the light of day, those vids will be analyzed, they will be watched by sober people who are sitting still and watching ever second intently. They will be critiqued, praised and criticized, but for those few moments at Club Vivid... it's just pure glee. I like to play vids for my friends who aren't regular vid watchers, and I have a hard time trying to explain the context of Club Vivid vids to them... hopefully I have done a better job here.

Unsurprisingly, I would like my first Vividcon vid to be at Club Vivid, and I at this moment I am committed to submitting one next year.

And now, some vids that have shown at Club Vivid. I really wish this year's first premiere was available online... I'll add it when it gets posted. Not all vids at CVV were made specifically for Club Vivid.

First off, an Adam Lambert vid to a Lady Gaga song. :-)



This is one of my favorites CVV vids. It premiered last year at CVV and played again this year, it's a multi-source vid about robot armies. Seven Nation Army



Iron Man vid to "Let it Rock" (made for one of my vividcon roomates!)



Club Vivid makes me dance to things I'd never voluntarily listen to, like Miley Cyrus and Kee$ha. Yes, I know.

From Milly, a "Legend of the Seeker" vid to "Party in the USA".

http://millylicious.livejournal.com/343231.html

From Kuwdora, a Vampire Nikola Tesla (from "Sanctuary") vid to "TiK Tok" by Ke$ha

http://kuwdora.livejournal.com/502230.html

This one might need to be seen to be believed... "The Sound of Music" to a remix/cover of Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". It is a bit weird. :-) (If you want to see a "The Sound of Music" vid that made me cry, go here)



One that was very popular at Festivids, OK Go and "Back to the Future", Here It Goes Back Again (download only, no streaming).

Of course, we had to be on a boat.





This one is so loved that when the song was played at another con's dance party, sans vid, people were shouting about this vid. It's my favorite of Dualbunny's vids about Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica to Pink songs. :-)

There are many more, but I need sleep to recover from my mad 5 days of con and wedding!

Talking About Television: Mad Men (contains very minor spoilers)

There's lot of reasons I watch "Mad Men", but I think in the end the most important reason is the world. I am fascinated by the world of 1960s Manhattan. I like to think I am acceptably well versed in history, but nothing else has given me such a window into this world. It became even more fascinating to me when I realized that I'm looking at the world of my grandparents. They all worked in Manhattan. My parents are age contemporaries to Don Draper's children. One of my grandmothers met my grandfather because he was looking for a nice Irish girl from the girls in the building (for they were decidedly considered girls back then). My grandfathers both worked in insurance, and I know the constant heavy drinking was real, and something that had real consequences. I've never really understood what that world was like, and I'm fascinating. I'm planning to send DVDs to my 84 year old grandmother, and see what she thinks. There's so much going on in Mad Men, and so much of it is mostly in the background, but so important. Little things, like the family picnic that ends with just leaving all the trash in the grass, and things that turn my stomach, like the depiction of early 1960s childbirth. There's so much going on with gender and gender roles, the sexual revolution, and the increasing prevalence of divorce.

So far, Mad Men has covered 1960-1964. In my mind, the 60s didn't really begin until Kennedy was shot and the Beatles arrived (and I've long seen the intensity of Beatlemania as partly a reaction to the hole left in the America psyche by JFK's death). All of the major events of the 60s are foregone conclusions in the minds of the audience. I know that Nixon loses the 1960 election, and that JFK, MLK and RFK don't survive the decade. I know we make it to the moon. I know that the little conflict in Vietnam first mentioned in season three is going to change American life. It's weird, I rarely watch TV where I know so much of what will happen.

For all of season three, I felt JFK's death looming. Early on, we see the date on a wedding invitation for Saturday, November 23, 1963, and we know that the wedding is doomed, taking place the day after JFK's death. JFK died long before I was born, but I still found myself crying over his death, not so much because of the loss of his life, but because of the way it affected the people on the show. I am a sucker for strong emotion on screen, sometimes even commercials can make me cry.

I am honestly dreading the escalation of the Vietnam War in the Man Men world. That is a story that I know quite well from school and other media. Perhaps they will surprise me and show me some angle that is new to me, but I'd rather they focus on something I know less well. I am very curious to see how many years Mad Men will cover, and which time periods they will skip over. I am looking for recommendations of other shows that give such a profound send of a real time and place.

Leaving Iron Blogger?

I'm really not sure if Iron Blogger is working out for me. I went to a (champagne brunch) meetup just today, and I had a good time, but I think this may be causing me more stress than it is worth.

My life is very weekend focused. I spend a ridiculous amount of time on weekdays throughout the year just planning weekends, whether it is conventions, festivals, trips, or parties. I am usually exhausted on Sunday nights, and find myself thinking of needing to blog similarly to how I think about needing to deal with the trash (and cat litter) on Sunday nights.

Part of it is that the rest of iron blogger is overwhelmingly about computers in ways I don't care about at all. I love when my friends get slashdotted, but usually their posts mean nothing to me.

I do want to keep blogging in a more formal style, but I might be better off posting because I have something to say, not because I want to avoid paying money.

I almost quit last week, but someone asked me not to. Ironically, by posting about this, I keep myself from hitting the maximum debt level for another week. I'm moving next weekend and running a bachelorette party, so we'll see if I blog anything. If this is my last post in the iron blogger group, well, it's been fun, and remember to talk about things oher than computers sometimes, even if you are really skilled in that area. The world is full of interesting things to explore and talk about!

20 Days of Vidding

There is a popular style of meme/survey in fandom, where people answer a series of questions about things they like (or don't) like, theoretically answering one question a day. I've seen a lot of these lately, probably due in part to the lack of new television recently. There's 30 days of Doctor Who, with questions about favorite companions and season finales, 30 days about favorite songs, and a number that are just generic questions about one's favorite show, or all time favorites across sources. Last week, jarrow came up with 20 days of vid questions, in preparation for next month's big vidding convention, Vividcon. I am going to attempt to participate, and share the results with y'all. Forgive me for overusing the word "awesome", I am not the best at talking about vids. Just watch them. ;-)

Day 1 - A vid that made you start watching a brand new show

Day 1: Winner: Mad About You by gwyn-r, Mad Men. I first saw this vid at Vividcon Premieres last year, and I knew nothing about these women, but they grabbed me, and I needed to know them, I needed to know their lives. I had been meaning to go back and rewatch this vid for a few days, and then this meme appeared! The streaming video was skipping, so I pulled out my VVC 2009 Premiere DVDs and wound up watching a lot of vids. :-) This was my first time going back to this vid since I started watching "Mad Men", and of course it is just wonderful.

Day 1: Runner up is "Fix You" by sdwolfpup, Battlestar Galactica (which was very hard to find given that I couldn't remember who had made it, and it turns out there are a lot of "Fix You" vids!). In actuality, a lot of vidders made me watch BSG, because I saw all my favorite vidders were vidding BSG and I wanted to know the source so I could watch their vids. It sounds a bit ridiculous and silly now that I admit it. :-) This vid did push me over the edge, I think I saw it at a random little vid show at Wiscon in 2007, and I was intrigued, and started watching.

Then right after Vividcon 2008 I read a whole lot of lj posts about the vids, and This post by bradcpu talked about "Fix You" and I went back, having seen tons of BSG by this point, and I was blown away by the awesome.

Day 2 - A male character study vid you love

"In the mirror" by Here's Luck, due South. The reason I am so impressed by this vid is that I hardly know Ray Kowalski. I watched the first two seasons of due South devotedly, completely unaware of the fandom. After that, it became really hard to find the episodes where I lived, and I only caught a smattering of episodes, and was generally suspicious of this major casting change on my beloved show. Years later, I was startled to discover due South had this huge fandom! I had thought only sff had fandoms.

I found this vid, and I watched it, and I felt like I understood RayK, between the episodes I had seen, and this vid, and all the bits and pieces I picked up from people... it all came together in such a great way. Being able to convey so much to someone who doesn't know all the source? Totally awesome. :-)

(Not very deep) thoughts on my relationship with video games

I have so much trouble thinking of myself as a (video)gamer. I'm a LARPer for sure, a writer and player of live action roleplaying games. I'm a tabletop gammer, with Dungeons & Dragons, Exalted, World of Darkness, et cetera. These days, I even play german-style board games, despite swearing for years I'd never given in to their siren call. But video games? I'm not a gamer, I just play the stuff. My little brother had video game systems, and I played them sometimes, but he was the gamer, not me, I was sure of it.

Hilariously, I used to *make* video games, when I worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab back in college. It might have been that experience that raised my standards of what a "real gamer" was, as it seemed everyone around me was so much more into videogames than I was. The games I did like tended to be puzzle-oriented games, not "hardcore" games, which obviously made me less of a "real gamer".

It all went downhill with Rock Band. I love Rock Band sooooo much. I engaged in ridiculous shenanigans to get to play RB, and desperately wanted to play it all the time. I was in the middle of trying to convince my boyfriend's housemate to get it when I had a birthday party, back in December 2008. My clever boyfriend got a bunch of my friends together, and they bought me an X-Box 360 and a Rock Band 2 set. I was ridiculously excited.

I never would have bought an X-Box on my own, and for a long time I thought I'd only ever use it for Rock Band. I got sucked in by being able to get download games and game previews directly onto the X-Box. Portal and Braid lured me in. Now I have a Nintendo DS, and a Wii, and a Gamefly subscription. Gamefly is basically netflix for video games, and it's fantastic for me. Games are so expensive, and I just can't convince myself to buy most games without having played them. Gamefly is wonderful. Right now I have out "New Super Mario Brothers Wii" and the "Metroid Prime" trilogy for the Wii, and I sent back "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney" for the DS. NSMB is a modern take on the traditional 2-D side scroller Mario game, Metroid Prime is, well, I guess a combination First Person Shooter/Sandbox/Puzzle game, and Phoenix Wright is actually a game about being a lawyer. Earlier this year, I found myself completely obsessed with "The World Ends With You", a Japanese RPG. These days, I find myself open to most styles of video games now (except MMORPGs, not going there!). What should I play next?

Talking about TV: "Dexter" (very minor spoilers)

"Dexter" (4 seasons, 12 episodes each, Showtime)

This is one of those shows that I started watching due to excessive critical acclaim. I actually postponed it for years because I have still never finished "Six Feet Under" and I was convinced I wouldn't be able to deal with Michael C. Hall playing such a profoundly different character from the sweet gay Catholic undertaker I knew and loved from SFU. Turns out Michael C. Hall is such an amazing actor, it didn't matter. I swear even his voice is completely different. I picked up the show while sick and marathoned the first two seasons, and watched the third season fairly quickly as well. The fourth season ended last December, and I watched that mostly in real time.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the premise, I will summarize. Dexter Morgan works in the homicide department in Miami, doing blood spatter analysis. He brings donuts into the office and is on the bowling team. He is very patient and kind with his girlfriend Rita, who is a survivor of spousal abuse and is raising her two kids while her ex serves jail time. Dexter is also an extremely good serial killer, so good that no one even knows there *is* a serial killer in Miami. Dexter had a very traumatic incident as a child, and was adopted by a policeman, Harry Morgan. Harry realized (or decided) that Dexter was going to grow up to be a serial killer, and he didn't want his adopted son to wind up executed for murder. Harry taught Dexter how to blend in, how not to get caught, and indoctrinated in him that he was only allowed to kill other killers, people who deserved to die by Harry's Code. He also gave Dex some issues. As the series progresses, Dexter has to deal with balancing his work, his relationship with Rita and her kids, and making time to get out and kill people. Things predictably get complicated.

"Dexter" is a really well crafted show, but not an uncomplicated one. At Wiscon I walked into the middle of a discussion about Dexter that I really wish I'd heard all of, about the way that we the viewers become complicit to Dexter's crimes. I have thought long and hard about this, and right now the best I can come up with is saying that I have different rules of morality for the real world and fiction. I don't even support the death penalty, and here I am, wanting things to work out for Dexter, wanting him to keep getting away with it. It's... complicated, and I'd love to talk about it with anyone who watches the show.

As the show is getting on in years, I am thinking more and more about how the show will end. Because of the nature of TV, something dramatic pretty much has to happen in Dexter's life in the next couple of years. It probably won't be "twenty years of more of the same, and then he gets caught". I sort of resent that TV basically has to do that, but there's not much to be done about it (unless we get better at making actors look older.) I really like when shows have big time jumps, actually, as I often feel it makes narratives and character development feel more genuine, rather than rushed. But that's a tangent! As I see it, there are three options for Dexter:

1) He gets caught and almost certainly executed, or dies in some other way
2) He gives up killing
3) He keeps up killing, probably with a lot of lengthy introspective Dexter voiceovers.

I forgot the voiceovers! It's a fairly voiceover heavy show, because who the hell is Dexter going to talk to about any of this? Honestly, they probably use the voiceover more than is necessary, I can't think of any other show I've watched that uses it so much. I watched "Dexter" and "Mad Men" at the same time, and I found a lot of parallels between Dexter and "Mad Men"'s Don Draper (and I was so glad to see I wasn't the only one who saw these, as I felt kind of weird), and "Mad Men" never uses voiceovers. (Given how hard they work to put the passage of time into dialogue instead of on screen text, I expect they'd never even consider a VO. It would be pretty stylistically weird.) Don Draper is full of secrets, and things are revealed very slowly. Sometimes I want to beat the TV and have him just say why the hell he is doing certain things, but Mad Men is all about making you read into things, where as "Dexter" spells them out very clearly.

I think "Dexter" needs to have voiceovers to make people watch the show. He's a serial killer! He's not supposed to be sympathetic, by conventional morality. The show really takes place in Dexter's head, looking at events from Dexter's perspective. However, the voiceover does lead me to one of my favorite parts of the shows, which is what an unreliable narrator Dexter is. Dexter will tell us over and over again about how he doesn't have any feelings, how he doesn't care for Rita and her kids, how they are just a convenient cover, but his actions will eventually betray him, as we the audience see that he *does* care. Dexter is a dynamic character, and I am really interested in seeing where he goes. (This will possibly lead to me feeling horribly betrayed if his final destination is not one I like, but that's one of my big problems with watching ongoing TV). I think Harry, Dexter's adopted father, had really good intentions with Dexter, but I think he may have done him a disservice, that his serial killer was perhaps not set in stone, that he could have learned to have more normal relationships if he hadn't had Harry basically telling him he'd never feel love. It's weird. Harry's been dead a number of years, but spectral Harry shows up, mostly to criticize Dexter. It is completely portrayed as a construct of Dexter's mind, Harry's influence lingering in him, and not at all like there is an actual ghost. (Though I like those shows too, especially when they involve Paul Gross!)

If Dexter winds up executed, I will probably cry, especially if it suddenly turns into some morality play about "Dexter has to pay for his crimes". Dexter suffering for what he does is fine, that had already happened in pretty significant ways, but I would hate if the show suddenly stopped being complex at the end. I would probably be mostly okay with Dexter having a lot of realizations and epiphanies and what not and continuing on with his killing, or it being left ambiguous if he will. (I have a very clear potential final shot for the series, with Dexter doing something very normal looking, like barbecuing with family, and it looks like he's given up on the killing, but then he turns and looks at the camera, at the audience, with a creepy ambiguous look in his eye and a hint of a smile. If you know the series you can probably pictures this yourself.)

I think what I actually want to see is for "Dexter" to learn to live without killing. It is presented as a serious compulsion, something he can't live without. In one season, he even went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and talked about his need to kill like it was a drug. His killings is very ritualized, very careful and almost clinical. It is never presented as something that is sexualized for Dexter, but it does seem reminiscent of media portrayals of sexual fetish. There is probably a lot to be said here about mental illness, but I don't actually feel qualified to get into it and I need to go to bed. :-) I want Dexter to be happy, I want Dexter to grown up and step out from under his father's shadow (which his sister is also living under, in a very different way). I want Dexter to stop killing people, to not need to kill people, to have real, happy, normal human relationships. I don't want the people around Dexter to have to deal with finding out he is a serial killer, as it would probably leave many people emotionally scarred and crippled for the rest of their lives. I want a happy ending, I guess, which may be a ridiculous thing to want in this context, but I want it.

The other big thing I love about "Dexter" is the other characters. It would be really easy in a show like this the other characters to just be two dimensional, for them to only exist in relation to Dexter, but somehow, they don't! Dexter is on screen *most* of the time, but all the time when he's not is generally well used. I adore his foul-mouthed, insecure adopted sister Deb, who wants nothing more than to be a great detective like her dad. I as pleased as punch that beyond Dexter, his white sister and white girlfriend, most of the rest of the cast *isn't* white! It is Miami, but anything can be white-washed, and this isn't. I adore Angel, one of Dexter's Cuban coworkers, to itty bitty little pieces. Maria LaGuerta is the head of homicide, and I really didn't like her much in the beginning, and she really does some super questionable things at times, but she's really well drawn. Jimmy Smits shows up in season three and... really surprised me, honestly! Doakes... I can't even begin to talk about Doakes right now, I might need a second post. (To think I'd work multiple shows into this one post!) We get romances between characters of color, and we even get closeups of characters of color kissing! (Turns out white people kissing is framed differently on TV, which I find fascinating.) The show is multicultural and it does not feel forced at all, it's just what Miami is, and I love it.

In conclusion: I think Dexter is worth watching. It's on premium cable and is about serial killers, so there's blood, but I'm pretty sensitive to these things and I find it easy to deal with, in large part because it's rarely a *surprise*, I can close my eyes when Dexter's about to stab someone and miss all of the gore. It's complex, and it may make you uncomfortable, but I think it's the kind of discomfort that is important to explore. Let me know what you think.

MIT: One year on

(Our internet is down, so I'm writing from my phone, so I expect this to be brief)

The MIT class of 2010 graduated on Friday. Today I found my MIT freshman class photo, taken on August 26, 2010. I feel like... I should feel more. I've always been rather sentimental, and put great stock in things like anniversaries and things in that general category. People have told me that the first year out is the roughest. That certainly would be nice! Overall, its been a pretty good year, except for my crazy startup job that was too similar to the bad parts of MIT.

When I look back, I am still proud of what I accomplished, and still just a bit shocked I actually made it through, but right nw, the main emotion is disbelief at how crazy I let mit make me. I still remember just how desperately I wanted to graduate, and the ridiculous sacrifice I made, the horrible thing I did to my body and my health and my mind. What was I thinking? It's absurd. I can't imagine voluntarily suffering like that again unless someone's life was literally on the line. Such madness.

Everyone suffers some at mit, but the people I find I can connect most easily with on this topic are other people who didn't do the 8 consecutive terms option. If you get into mit, leave, and then have to convince the to take you back... it requires some soul searching, and a much more informed decision to enter hell than any high schooler could make. We knew how bad it was, and experienced extra badness in one way or another, and we came back for more.

Don't get me wrong, MIT was a fabulous experience in many ways, formative and transformative in more way than I even am aware of yet, I'm sure. I found the most important people in my life, and I have no idea who I'd be without MIT, but MIT and I had a messed up relationship, and it was bad for me in a lot of ways. I feel like I've spent this year detoxing getting the bad stuff out of my system. I'm wiser and happier now, I'm more self aware and more at peace, I'm more grown up. I don't know where I'll be in a year, but I'm okay with that. I think I will probably stop counting the months since I graduated from MIT. MIT is not the most important thing in my life anymore!

Congratulations, class of 2010. I hope your lives only get more awesome from here!

Wiscon 34: Probably a transformative experience

I'm at Wiscon 34, a ~1000 person feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin. This is my second time here. I came in 2007, mostly because good friends of mine in Chicago come yearly and encouraged me. This year, several friends from Boston are also here.

I don't remember why exactly I decided to come this year. I've been planning to come back eventually, and now that I've graduated, I have time. I didn't come here with many expectations. The day before my flight, I honestly didn't want to come very much at all, but I'd paid for too much in advance, and had connecting flights for a short trip to Indiana after this, and it would have been terribly complicated to drop out. Also, I was pretty sure that I would have a good time once I got here.

At first, it was a pretty chill con for me. I showed up a day early so I wouldn't be rushed and travel-grumpy on the first day. I made sure to get enough sleep every night, which involved sleeping through a lot of morning panels. I was not super attached to any one panel or event, and was pretty flexible with my schedule, switching panels freely if they were not interesting enough. I made time to hang out with the people that I came here to see. I was interviewed for a master's dissertation, and I adore being interviewed. Panels and conversations were interesting enough, but I had no big goal, I was just enjoying myself.

Today was different. I went to a reading that was just emotionally gutting, recovered some, then went to a panel that was good but emotionally fraught. I went to dinner, had a good time, then had conversations about complicated topics that mean a lot to me. Then dessert, then even more conversations about complicated topics. Last night I blogged that I felt I should become a bit more radical in my politics. After those conversations I was starting to feel like I need to take action with certain groups in my life to do things like increase diversity and try to make better spaces and help educate people on certain topics. Then Mary Anne Mohanraj gave an absolutely amazing Guest of Honor speech that left me in tears, and may have caused a significant change in the rest of my life. I have a lot to process. People have been noticing that I look off. I'm exhausted and I wish the con wasn't about to end because I want so much more, but on the other hand if I did this for too many days in a row I would probably just die. I am going through *such* a period of transition, oh, it makes my head spin. Thank goodness I have such good grounding back home in Boston. I'm spending the next few days with one of my best friends in Indiana, then back home to Boston. I feel more and more like I am at a turning point in my life, and I am fascinated to see where it might take me. You're welcome to come along for the ride. :)

Yoga: Coming Soon To My Living Room!

One of the most important changes in my life in the past year is yoga. I had tried tiny bits of yoga previously as part of other events, and found it intriguing. I had planned to find a yoga class during my summer in San Francisco, but it never happened. Last November, my friend Q started teaching yoga in a belly dance studio in Jamaica Plain. By the end of the first class I was hooked, but getting to Jamaica Plain is really a pain from Davis Square, where I live. The trouble getting to class was probably the main reason I've missed it so much, but now I will have no such excuse because class will be... in my living room!

We have a great big common area in my apartment, and I'm very excited to host things here. I have plans to also have a dance party and host a LARP or two, and possibly a tabletop game if the current location becomes infeasible.

I've realized that my greatest satisfaction in life comes from making people happy or making their lives better. I'm not sure what this means for my future career, but I know that I want to open up my home to things like this. I want to become the best hostess I can. I want to make events runs as smoothly as possible, while minimizing stress for myself and everyone else involved. I want my net impact on the people around me to be positive.

Yoga has been so good for my body, my relationship with my body, and myself overall. I can't really quantify everything it has done. I really want to start practicing daily, and I just need to get it into my routine (what little routine I have) and I think it could become something I do basically every day for the rest of my life. I haven't tried any other style of yoga, but I know that the combination of yoga styles that Q teaches is good for me. I encourage everyone to try yoga out, whether with Q or someone else.

The first class at my house is Monday at 7:30 pm. Contact me at laura47 at gmail for directions and details. We're about half a mile from the Davis T, on two bus lines, and have reasonable parking.

"Q has studied kundalini and vinyasa yoga for the past decade. His
classes tend to incorporate breathing exercises, a rigorous vinyasa
flow, and a range of different meditation techniques. Students of all
levels and all body types are always welcome." - From the facebook group description

Home again, Home again, Jiggity Jig

I'm home again, a full 90 minutes before the blog deadline. I was going to write about how troublesome it is to have personal connections to celebrities, but right now all I can think about is HOME. I had some complicated feelings about Boston this weekend, but I felt such happiness as I got closer to home. The first time I saw a sign for Boston, I was mostly just happy that I wouldn't be driving forever. Driving on to the Mass Pike and finding a familiar rest stop (of known and much better quality than those in Connecticut, thankyouverymuch) made me start feeling at home again. Watching the distance to Boston creep downwards on signs, driving past towns I know, letting out a little cheer when I hit 495, having been on Long Island's 495 mere hours ago, getting on to *my* stretch of 95... My favorite things about taking route 2 home is coming over that hill and seeing Boston shining down below me in the distance. Boston. My home.

I spent this weekend in Manhattan and on Long Island, where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My life has been split about 65/35 between Long Island and Boston, so far. The only time I've spent more than two weeks outside New York or Massachusetts was my summer in San Francisco last year. I really enjoyed my time in San Francisco. I also really enjoy Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Madison... and those are just in this country. I've only left North America once, and all I saw was London and Dublin. I've never even been to Mexico or any part of Canada beyond Toronto. There is *so much* world out there that I haven't seen, and yet I find myself wanting to buy a house in Boston and plan to live here for the rest of my life. I am torn between my desire to travel and explore and expand my horizons, and my desire to form a really solid, permanent rock hard connection to a place, to plant my flag and call it my own. I want the luxury to spend perhaps three months of every year in different places, for 1-3 months at a time, and to take some of my nearest and dearest friends with me, because with the right people, I'll go anywhere. If everyone I knew in Boston decided to move to Iowa, I'd go. History and architecture and culture are nice, but places are really about people to me. There's a Billy Joel song, "You're My Home", that has this to say:
Well I'll never be a stranger
and I'll never be alone
wherever we're together
that's my home.

Home could be the Pennsylvania turnpike
Indiana's early morning dew
high up in the hills of California
home is just another word for you.

My boyfriend came to San Francisco with me last summer, and I realized that home is, in fact, wherever we're together. I know that is horribly sappy, but it's a very convenient thing to realize.

San Francisco is painfully far away. I am very disappointed that transcontinental travel is not getting any faster. I realize it is utterly amazing that we can fling ourselves three thousand miles in six hours, but it's still a pain. If Boston and San Francisco were "quick weekend trip" distance apart, my life would be significantly easier.

New York, however, is right there. People go from Boston to New York and back again in a single day, and it's grueling but not insane. I can't count how many weekend trips I have taken down there. The buses have gotten really cheap and convenient, it's a totally reasonable drive if you have a car, there's a ferry to Long Island, flights are cheap and fast, and there's even Amtrak, which is sometimes the right option even though it is not the fastest or cheapest. :-) I grew up 40 miles from Manhattan, a mile from a train station that would send you right into the heart of Manhattan. I was always in "the city", as we always called it, several times a year for my entire youth, but I never spent the night there until I was in my 20s. My trips were frequent, but very contained. I went to museums, Central Park, parades, and so many Broadway shows, and then I always went home. I feel like I know New York, but I know that I only know it as a visitor. I've still never spent more than three nights in a row in the city. Yesterday I wound up in the upper west side at 7 am on a saturday, and found yet another New York experience that was entirely new to me. I want to stop these one night stands and have a serious fling with New York, the way I did with San Francisco, but it's hard to convince myself to make that kind of commitment when I can in fact just go there every weekend if I want to. Oh, New York, I don't know what to do with you!

Northwest Trek Wildlife Park

Last month I went to San Francisco and Seattle for two weeks. On my last day in Seattle, I borrowed a friend's car and drove to the Northwest Trek Animal Preserve. I was afraid it would be corny based on the promotional material I saw, but it was actually quite nice. I spent about an hour looking through the enclosed exhibits, which had carnivores, birds, and some small mammals, and an hour on the tram tour of the nearly square mile herbivore free range area. Here are a few of the pictures I took that day.







She lost a horn by getting it stuck in a fence years ago. She seems to be getting by.

CMS 10th Anniversary

Happy Birthday, CMS! Today is a celebration of the ten years of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, which I am very proud to have a bachelor of science in. http://cms.mit.edu/anniversary/

Last night began with an address from Henry Jenkins about his 20 years at MIT, given almost a year after he left for USC. I need to listen to it again to respond to it, it was too much and too emotional for me at the time. You can listen to it here: http://cot.ag/cnmfBX (CMS has started getting podcasts up so fast! Yay, CMS!) Sam Ford has already written about last night's talk here: http://bit.ly/aF0yQA

First panel today is "Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education", which I don't really feel like liveblogging. I may or may not do some liveblogging or livetweeting of the rest of the panels today. I expect to be updating this post.

One quote for now: "When you say you do educational games, it's like saying you're the blind date with a nice personality" - Scot Osterweil

3: Participatory Culture: The Culture of Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society, moderated by Henry Jenkins
Panelists: Erin Reilly, Karen Schrier, Sangita Shresthova, Pilar Lacasa, and Mitch Resnick

It's nice to see a majority female panel. In my own MIT experience, CMS always had the best representation of women at a graduate+ level. MIT has many undergraduate women, but grad students, less so.

"this is the first thing I learned at MIT: theory is not valuable without practice" -Pilar.

Sangita came to MIT as a dancer and other things but not a gamer, and was put on the games to teach project, and now she's at USC with Henry again. She's glad to work with Henry a second time because CMS took awhile to digest. Was a person between worlds, dancing and development, Czech-Nepali. Worked on how undergrads at MIT used Bollywood dance to express diaspora identity, MIT CMS responsible for direction her dissertation went.

(discussing play as one of the new media literacy skills) Karen: Play with other people's values, other people's ethics, break down boundaries, play is powerful because it lets you be yourself or be someone else and reflect on the values that you have.

Mitch: Play as a stance towards the world, play is not just games. went to a conference with theme of play, they showed all these video games, last day he played hookey to go see the anne frank house, realized that anne frank in his mind had a very playful stance towards the world, experimenting, exploring, trying out new things, that's what play is about, links closely to issues around participatory culture.

Erin: Anne frank made a choice to deal with her environment in a different way. [I get very distracted and mindblank on some of what Erin says, because she starts talking about how popular one activity I wrote for New Media Literacies about play was. I'll have to listen to the podcast to remember what came right before and after that. http://newmedialiteracies.org/library/ "Fail and Fail Often", link is on the front page currently]

Remix:

Erin: James Gee and situated learning, DJs as hunters and gatherers of samples, teachers need to realize that they are also hunters and gatherers, providing people a vocabulary to identify themselves.

Mitch: Incomprehensible that we have this whole educational structure opposed to remixing. Has platform for kids to work on projects, some kids still get upset at other kids "stealing" their work when they remix it. Need to give technological and social support to remixing.

Sangita got some of us (including me) up and doing some bollywood dance. Now I feel all fired up! Evolution of Bollywood has complications of identity and authenticity? I actually missed it but would love to learn more, anyone have reading suggestions?


Note to self: check out the NML mapping guide.

henry: upset about "learning 2.0" because web 2.0 is a *business* model, been making fun of people tracing web history over 20 years and ignoring everything else, toy printing presses as web -10.0, people exchanged ideas, similar to web, men and women fought over women's rights, by 1870s african americans started expressing their voices.

karen: had to change how she thought about web 2.0 for her certification exam to be able to pass it, people talk about cms spoiling you for the rest of the world, but it also spoils you for other academic situations, not the same discourse.

Beth Coleman asks about participation and community and changing behaviors, some of it is wonderful.

Pilar says in Education, we really need to talk about who has the power, this is about democracy and citizenship, and technology is changes things, in some ways its making things more democractic, in other ways less. technology is empowering your mind.

Mitch thinks about de/centralization, new tech can be used for both, insidously things that seem decentralized arer actually just getting people to spread a centralized idea, need to have technology support and amplify individual and diverse voices. each new generation of technology this issue comes up again, need to rethink and refight these issues over and over again.

Henry: tea party involves a lot of what we talk about actively doesn't have a leader, people resist there being a leader, involves practices of remix. We've ignored conservative voices. now the tea party is a reactionary resistance movement and one of the most promiment things in the country and we CMS people don't understand them, we don't need to agree with them, but they are an embodiment of bottoms up grass roots energy whether we like it or not.

ricardo pitts-wiley's mobey dick remix was similar to fanfiction in how it takes the literary work and reimagines characters int he 21st century, makes whaling trade into drug trade.

Final Panel: International Media Flows: Global Media and Culture, moderated by Ian Condry
Panelists: Aswin Punathambekar, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb, Orit Kuritsky, Jing Wang

Aswin: Media Futures are being worked out all over the world, not just in LA and London. Need to understand in their own terms, local context, before you can really be comparative.

Xiaochang (who is a mercenary): Claims she took NyQuil instead of DayQ uil and may drift off. :-) Companies hire her when they have some questions about digital/media/something, and they hire her to do a quick and dirty job, and she's been pushing K-Pop all over, which doesn't surprise me at all, knowing Xiaochang. :-) What happens when communities of sentiment are full of people selecting and curating and subtitling and discoursing over and remixing the very source that brought them together. (paraphrasing a lot here, reminder!) cms takes you away from the idea that you have to prove your mastery over something before making an offering. you don't have to be fluent in korean to do _something_ with k-pop, and someone else can come pick it up with their resources, have it be very iterative.

Jing Wang: Wishes CMS happy birthday with a cute animation. Working on NGO 2.0, civic media project with a Chinese face, karmic connection to cms, 2 years ago a professor from China was brought in as a visiting scholar (flew in from China for today's event!) Many NGOs in China are using digital resources, but they don't know much about social media. Trying to introduce web 2.0 culture to NGOs so they can find each other and collaborate and brand and market themselves. non-profits are change agents, trying to help them push their creativity and social innovation to the next level. They do 4 day long training workshops twice a year, they hope they will take these skills home and spread them. The boundary between civic social media and entertainment social media is basically not there. If she has any suggestion, she would like to see a stronger CMS identity with civic media, and more intersection with the nonprofit sector. This project would not have happened if she hadn't been at MIT. Her tangential relationship with CMS has had a big effect on how she thinks and how she conceptualizes this project.

Orit: Script writer and content creator from Israel. Used time at MIT to explore the exotic of the US. Just handed in script treatment for Israeli tv while living in Somerville, MA. Media production has become very international, animation for a title sequence done across the world from the rest of the show.

wants to share two contradictory experiences. was involved with revamping/relaunching the parenting channel. Was watching show about potty training, little vignettes about how it has been done in different places in the past, woman from a kibbutz talking about how it was done in a socialist manner, all the kids in the same age group at once. Pediatrician gives advice, same advice you'd get in new zealand or england, stood out from other lifestyle channels which were mostly from the bbc and discovery and such, so most families and experts you see are american british and australian, and a lingua franca on parenting emerges for Israelis, things like terrible twos and timeouts have become fundamental part of the Israeli family experience.

first season of Israeli version of "Big Brother". It comes with a huge manual, the Dutch control how each version goes. Everyone was divided up between two contestants on the show, one eastern european jew, one north african jew, super fierce division. People watched and debated as cultural face of Israel. Was in a restaurant during semi-finals, place was empty. everyone was crowded around TVs. Is it a debate over ethnic camps? No, the camps consisted of people of different origins, many israelis are mixed between north african and eastern europe, there was an arab israeli woman in the friedman camp, format that's been run all around the world with strict rules, and out of it we get a meaningful discussion we couldn't get anywhere else in the world.

Ana: Before coming to CMS, worked with producers, knew what content producers were, was basically who she worked for, put on festivals and performances, came to CMS to continue thinking about them, and then came to CMS and discovered the audience, and found herself coding youtube videos and trying to find what it meant to be a content producer these days. Was working in C3, got really lucky they got Brazilian partners and had to go to Carinval. :-) Found group of people from North Brazil who decided to forgo copyright cause they weren't making any money anyway. Techno Braga? (I can't guess at the spelling) They have giant parties. City of 5 million people and _three thousand_ parties a month? parties with 10k people every weekend, audience decided to be involved by forming teams, not quite fanclubs, not quite associated with the DJs. One example uses art from US justice league, called themselves "super amigos". ask them what you need to form a team "honesty, friendship, sense of adventure!" but the material object they would always have would be a bucket. the DJs can identify them "oh, super amigos are in the house" also to haul the beer around. We now _do_ media, it's not necessarily something we just consume. Upset about what was said about understanding media in its own terms, because it creates anxiety, not sure if she did or didn't or attempted to in this case. this is about globalization in the sense that they have inserted themselves in the world from a very empowered position and approrpiate content the way they want, but it's very local to north of brazil.

Ian Condry wants a keytar spewing flames.

Aswin: Get away from idea of "first here, then elsewhere", things are unfolding at the same time in different places, don't impose established timelines with all that baggage.

Jing: trying to get out of the frame of the global, think of practice not in discursive terms. To be frank about being on this panel, found out it was going to be an international theme, everyone can sit at that panel, us/uk media studies have come a long way with the so-called "international perspective", the rest of the world as you might call it, but thematizing the panel as international forced each panelist to work even harder. Being thematized makes it harder to draw in the mainstream. Thinks she could have been in the participatory panel and made the same presentation.

Orit: Never thought she'd do this, but refers the questioner to the third chapter of her thesis (re the original question about time that i totally failed to write down).

Xiaochang picks up on Jing, and being grouped as the outside group, the 5 people not born in the US, feels there may be some ghettoization with international stuff, every other panel was also global,

Ana: we're always aware of this with foe, don't want to have "international panel"

xiochang: what do we have instead, tokens on each panel?

william urrichio: these panels are based around what our ideas were of what we wanted to do 10 years ago, and the one glaring absence is the international. The point is not the "foreign" as in foreign languages, the international does permeate all we do

Ian: if we'd all been farmed out to different panels, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.

Ian's worked on hip-hop going us-> global and anime going japan -> global, Hip hop was seen as stealing and not really music, anime was seen as for kids, neither pushed by big things, but have gone global none the less.

Jing: somehow we always come back to industry, i want to see us talk about games and non-profits, things like the berkman's center's free rice, want to draw us towards the non-profit sector, it's exciting and amusing

Ana: there are certain forms of fandom that just by participating they are inacting citizenship, that's important to remember, don't force our ideas on to them, a group gained a voiced through this music engagement.

Orit: with people in differnet parts of the world making media for other parts, new questions and issues about labor. Israeli tv show translated verbatim to english language version, israeli script writer doesn't see a dime.

I think I deleted the photos I was going to blog

I was about to post pictures from my trip and do a little travelogue thing, until my eyes went wide with horror realizing that I've deleted photos I want. Even since I lost almost everything single photo I took at Burning Man in 2006, I've been obsessive about trying to keep copies of my photos in two places until they were up on flickr, but due to not being able to get photos from my camera to ubuntu and a full harddrive on a mac... I totally screwed it up, and deleted awesome pictures that I thought were safe. I'm not entirely sure where the camera is, and I can't convince myself to go check and see how many I deleted. Elk! Bison! Moose! ARGH!

I recently hit over 15K photos in my flickr account. I want to take more photos on a better camera and I want them better organized. I want a personal assistant for my data needs.

I decided to start doing photo a day on april 1, but I missed last saturday and that failure, and the end of my vacation, has caused me to stop doing it. Need to get back on the horse, et cetera.

I wish we'd had digital cameras when I was in high school, I'd have thousands of photos, and I'd cherish them... I need to digitize all the ones I do have, and to decide what to do with all the boxes of prints of photos that I never touch or look at in hardcopy. Oh, storage locker, you contain so many challenges to deal with.

Musings from San Francisco

Hello, blog. I'm in California, about to go to sleep in my friends' attic. I am really glad I'm on this trip. I lived out here in San Francisco last summer, for three months right after graduation. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten, but it's been delightful to have memories come flooding back. While getting fabulous drinks at Berretta earlier tonight, I wondered out loud if I'd adore SF less if I wasn't always on here on vacation. To me, SF is a magical place where I get enough sleep, wander around, and see my friends. Because I'm always here for a limited period of time, my friends tend to prioritize spending time with me while I'm here, and can be more easily convinced to go out to nice or interesting places. And the weather's not so bad.

I've never been on a trip this long without having an SO or a group of a friends who were also traveling. It's a bit weird. I've had a cold most of the time here, and getting sick while traveling alone really sucks. I was only truly miserable for a few hours, and thankfully that was one of the nights when I had a room to myself that I could be in as long as I wanted without being in anyone's way.

I hate that so many of my friends live so very far away, but it's nice to have a city I can go to and have a solid friend base in. Vacations here are very non-threatening, and rather cheap without any hotel costs. It's almost like... a refuge I can retreat to? An oasis? I last came here right after graduating from MIT. I came here my last two Spring Breaks at MIT, which always needs to be some concentrated relaxation and rejuvenation in the middle of the hell of MIT. I also came here right before I began my final year at MIT, right after leaving a job that I'd wished had ended differently. Now I'm here because I got laid off. I didn't realize until I started writing this that I'd never come here except to get a respite from MIT stress. Someday I'll come here entirely randomly, I hope. The night before I got laid off, a friend emailed me and told me to come visit SF soon. I told her I'd be here as soon as my job ended, one way or another, thinking this would likely be a (somewhat longer) trip in August after my contract ended. Instead, I got laid off, and pretty quickly started looking at travel options. Because I was coming out to Seattle anyway, it seemed quite obvious to attach a SF trip as well.

I did not explicitly set out for this trip to be a time of reflection, but I was always open to it. I definitely have started some trains of thought that I think will be good for me. One of the few things that upset me about getting laid off was having to bump up the timeline on deciding what to do next in my career. I'm feeling much more secure in that regard now. I still don't know what I want to do next, but I'm much more confident in my own abilities and in the existence of interesting jobs. I went to a series of talks last night under the general theme of Art, AI, and Algorithms ("Do Androids Paint Electric Sheep?") and two of the talks left me feeling excited about things in my field for the first time in awhile. I took notes of things to read and investigate. I've been having really excellent small group or one on one conversations with old friends about life. I feel like my intellectual curiosity is starting to return to me, having been stifled by that job that left me with so little time or energy to think about anything. I realize that I need to give myself more time to recover from MIT. It was the most significant experience of my life, and it affected me in ways I don't even know yet. It's been less than a year, I don't need to know what I'm doing with the rest of my life yet.

It'll be more than a week before I get back to MIT. Ha! I wrote MIT! Boston, I mean. Boston. See how it dominated me still? ;-) I hope the thoughts rumbling in my head continue during the rest of my west coast travels. We'll see.

Oh, and by the way, Iron Bloggers, I talked about IB today and I think a west coast league wants to form up. :-)

Nobody reads this blog, and that's okay.

Perhaps someone has been reading, but I really have no idea. I haven't gotten any comments and no one has mentioned reading it to me. I'm in this whole Iron Blogger thing, and maybe that causes people to read the other posts in it, but there are, what, 40 of us? And most of the rest of the blogs are about version control and other things that make me feel like they probably are not super interested in my blog.

I don't have an audience I'm writing for, and that's fascinating. I haven't kept a personal diary in years, and all other writing has been for some audience, whether it's a personal email, a paper for a professor, a zephyr(*) for unknown numbers of MIT people, tweets for potentially the entire world... and that always strongly shapes what I say. With this blog, my only real goal is to write a bit more seriously and formally than I do in other fora, and to be accessible to a wider audience. I suppose that means I do have an audience I am writing for, but it is defined by what it is not, instead of what it is. My audience did not go to MIT, and does not have a degree in Comparative Media Studies. My audience is not a fangirl, but is generally aware that American media exists. My audience does not play LARPs or go to Burning Man. My audience is not sexually or socially deviant. My audience does not live in Boston. My audience basically has nothing in common with me, I suppose. I want to be able to write for people who little to nothing in common with. I would like to able to take all the things that are important to me and explain them clearly and compelling to people who are unaware and uninterested. I'd really love to have a book published someday, and this blog aspires to be practice for that, though I haven't really lived up to that potential yet. "Maybe Next Week". Is that a motto of Iron Blogger? It should be.

* MIT's internal IM/IRC-like chat system. It has the strange evolved property that people constantly have group conversations where they have no idea who might be listening it, and any one of thousands of people affiliated with MIT could be.

Oscar Spoilers!

Kathryn Bigelow just won an Oscar for Best Director! I AM SO EXCITED! It is *incredibly* hard for women to make it as directors, or in much of the high-powered parts of Hollywood. In 2008, 9% of the top 250 films were directed by women! And NPR says that was a lot! Check out this story, which I heard when it first aired last summer. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106402458 It contains great lines such as: "It's like jumping into an orgy while you're still shaving your legs."

Within five minutes of Bigelow's win, I was editing wikipedia because the page for "The Hurt Locker" had been defaced by someone upset that Tarantino didn't win. The vandalism was claiming that Bigelow had only won due to performing sexual favors on men! Ha ha ha isn't that funny! I mean, whatever, random wikipedia vandalism, but it got my attention. I am just so excited. I really, really hope this means something! Right now I feel like running off to film school. :-)

"Precious" looked just so heart rending, I haven't seen it. I heard a lengthy interview with the director, and just listening to him talk about the cycles of violence and suffering was enough for me. He did open calls looking for an actor for "Precious", and found lots of random fat girls in stores and the like, and gave them a chance, and in the end was concerned about being exploitative, and actually here's the link. I haven't listened to it since it aired, but I remember it being painful and good. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120092180

Still on "Precious", I'd really like for Gabourey Sidibe to get more roles! She got a nomination for Best Actress in her first role! I really want to see more fat women in non-comic roles on screen. Male actors are allowed to be fat, women aren't, and it's just another thing that irritates me about Hollywood.

And finally, I enjoyed the dancing, and I don't understand why so many people react to modern dancing with "ugh people flailing on stage". It irks me.