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.

(I'm teaching science and I'm) Still Alive

Hello there, blog. I'm still here. I am painfully busy at my job, and I haven't updated you in a month, but I'm not quitting Iron Blogger. Even when I don't update here, I always think about trying to do so, and I like how it organizes my thoughts, even if I don't write them down. I wonder how many bloggers would have people "Great People of Letters" in a previous generation, and if being a great blogger will ever have the same connotations, or if we'll move past blogging to something else before it can become that respectable.

I've been working for just about two months now, and the one thing I am sure of is that I don't know what I want. How long is it going to take me to be able to make decisions without MIT coloring everything I think? Will that ever happen? I suppose I just want it to happen less so. I feel like I'm rebounding after the end of a long and troubled relationship. I've been swearing for months that I will never go to graduate school, except maaaaaybe a master's, but now I'm officially moving my answer to "I have no idea." A Ph.D is probably unlikely if only because I'm so old, but never say never, I suppose. I don't know if I even want a career! I knew what I wanted for a whole decade, and that was to graduate MIT. Now I have no idea. It's not really scary, just irritating. Oh well.

Festivids Reveal!

January 2010 has been a wonderful month in the vidding world! First, a few links for those of you who aren't familiar with vidding.

• How To Watch A Fanvid, a blog entry from Henry Jenkins all the way back in 2006, when a certain Star Trek vid to Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" hit it big. Now I've actually met many of the people in this entry or the comments!
• 
  


• New York Magazine: The Vidder, a 2007 profile of Luminosity, one of the best vidders around.


• Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love, another Henry Jenkins blog post from 2008 about videos about fanvidding that were created by vidders (many of whom I have since met) and Project New Media Literacies (which I worked for, but was not involved in this project).


• Organization of Transformative Works page on vidding, with all the vidding NML videos.
  

I love vidding. It's beautiful and fun and transformative. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it turns me on to new music and makes me see things in new lights. I've heard lots of people say they don't watch vids because they "don't get them". Please don't let that keep you away! Lots of vids are just meant to be enjoyed on a relatively shallow level, and even if there are many levels, you don't need to see them all! Don' stress, just watch.

There is a whole lot to be said about vidding. The history of vidding, the copyright aspects, the social aspects, the transition to digital, the rest of the world discovering vidding... but I'm just going to talk about some recent events and my own participation.

This month was Festivids! I mentioned it here: http://lauraboylan.blogspot.com/2010/01/ive-been-considering-just-defaulting.html Festivids is a brand new event where fanvidders come up with a list of movies and TV shows and the like that are rarely vidded and make requests of something they want to see. Everyone also makes a list of what they are willing to make, and it gets put into a database and people are assigned someone to vid for, which the do anonymously. The vids were put up anonymously two weeks ago, and today all the vidders were revealed. While waiting for the reveals, vidders (including myself) have been hanging out on IRC and trying to guess who made what.

I've been aware of fandom for a very long time, and involved in various ways for over a decade. Since I graduated in June, I have made a concerted effort to get involved in fandom, and I am extremely happy with the results. Fandom is full of amazing, clever, creative, talented, kind people. I didn't realize until recently how much giving and gifting there is in fandom, how many exchanges like festivids and Yuletide there are. On some level, all fanworks are for other people to enjoy, but there is something just lovely about crafting something specifically for someone else, who probably isn't even your friend. For me, it was a great kickstart into writing fanfiction and making vids, it provides a deadline (and I work best under deadlines) and it gives me something to work with, which mskes it easier to get started. Also, it gives you a very clear audience, which is one the standard tricks of creative work, knowing your audience. For instance, for my yuletide story I worked in a green energy plotline because I thought my recipient would like it based on what I read in her blog. I think one problem I have with this blog is that I have no idea what audience I am writing for besides "not my usual audience". I assume you don't have the same background as my normal audience to make myself explain things. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone even reads this. I've never told anyone about it, and maybe everyone else in Iron Blogger skips it for not being about version control or AI.

There is tons more to say, but it's gotten late so I'm going to wrap up here and show you the vid I made and the vid I got.

I got "Enchantment", a vid about the Japanese film "Kamikaze Girls", about a lolita girl and a biker girl living in rural Japan. It was fairly obscure among vidders -- my vidder didn't even get matched on it, she picked it out and watched it based on my requests! Many people have said they plan to watch the film because of this vid, and one group already reported in that they loved it! I am very excited for other people to fall in love with this film! Here it is! Watch it!. I don't know this vidder, but we know at least one person in common in real life, and we live in the same state. The vid she got is also awesome, from a Bollywood film about India's first female field hockey team that I just put on my netflix queue. (And the person who made that vid is someone I talk to online, who gave money to Haiti relief for me to make her a rum cake. The circle of fannish giving!)

And now, my own vid! My very first! It is to "The Princess Bride", which means it got a lot of views, being such a well known source.

Hanuman from Laura 47 on Vimeo.

Today's Election

If you live in Massachusetts, please please get out there today and vote for Martha Coakley. I don't love Coakley, but I am for Democrats getting things done in the national legislature, and that is what she will give us. I desperately want health care reform, and we can't afford to put another Republican in who can block progress. We still need those vote. PLEASE GO VOTE. I'll cry if Brown wins, and you don't want to make me cry, do you? Please please please go vote today. Your vote DOES matter. Nate Silver and Intrade are giving her ONE IN FOUR odds today. Please vote!

I've been considering just defaulting this week

$5 to the beer fund isn't so bad, after all. And I've been posting so much to my personal blog this weekend, it was hard to imagine I needed to blog more. However, I'm done with my very first fanvid an hour before the deadline, so might as well say something while I'm waiting for it to process.

(Am I too meta? I may be too meta. That's probably the easiest way for me to go, after being a blogger for so long. Well, a livejournaler. Perhaps I will post at some point about the difference?)

The vid was for a fanvidding exchange, Festivids. http://community.livejournal.com/festivids. A bunch of people nominate various visual media sources that are not often vidded, the list is sorted through, people make 6-8 requests of what they might like, and offer what they are willing to do. Then they are anonymously assigned to a recipient, and make a vid. They will all be revealed (without attribution) on thursday. Then everyone will squeal and reccomend them to each other, and then they will find out who made them a vid, and thank them. It is based very closely on Yuletide, http://yuletidetreasure.org, which is basically the same thing as festivids, but with fanfiction. And much bigger. Yuletide has 2000+ participants, Festivids had <100. This was the first year for festivids, I expect it to grow. This was my first year in both, and it's been quite stressful, but also very rewarding. I can't tell you what I made for festivids, but... I think it's not horrible! The people who've looked it over for me didn't think it was horrible.


The story I wrote: "Way Down In The Mines", for vulgarweed. The series is "John the Balladeer" by Manly Wade Wellman, about a man with a guitar with silver strings who wanders the hills of Appalachia encountering weirdshit. Vulgarweed loved the story, which made me very happy. It was my first fanfic.

Also, while festivids is the first proper fanvid I've ever made, this will not be the first time I recieve one! I was part of a secret santa exchange for a Star Trek group, and my santa not only sent me a calendar, but also made me a fanvid! Her first ever! I was blown away.

Star Trek XI FMV - Float On from Ariante on Vimeo.

The holidays are a very fannish time indeed. Next year I might make a fannish crossstich for the fanart exchange. I never paid attention because I can draw, but I can cross stitch!

New Job! this form works HORRIBLY on my android phone, for shame google, i cant actually edit the typoes or the extra sentence at the end, forgive me

i have a new job! i start in the morning! i have yet to see my confidentiality agreements, so all i am going to say is that i'm working in digital education, which is very exciting for me. its one of those fields that i didnt think id be cool enough to work in, even though i had a summer joob in it at mit. hopefully this mans i will have intersting things to say about education and digital education. i will actually be creating content (job title is "author") which is more than i expected or my first real job! i have a new job!