vids, links, tech, food, miscellany

1. More Festivids recs!

Attention Please, Paprika. PRETTY. I don't know what's going on at all, but I think that's part of the point. And the editing is really great, and uses the music really beautifully, and the whole vid has this cool hallucinatory quality.

Illumination, Joseon X-Files. Wow, this is completely gorgeous and atmospheric and ...oddly creepy, maybe? I love the way the vidder used movement of light and shadow, and the music is a great choice. I have never seen this show but clearly I must!

Space Oddity, Community. This is a really sweet Abed/Troy vid about their shared geekery, awwww. Their love of spaceships brings them closer together!

They Want More, Jurassic Park. I can't believe I forgot to rec this the other day, because it made me laugh and laugh. Dinosaur pov ftw.

Truth Is in the Dirt, V (2009). Oh, Erika Evans, ILU! This vid draws some interesting parallels between Erika and Anna, and uses the song and the atmospheric footage to great effect.


2. In knitting-related news, if you're going to drop a stitch, should you do it a) while doing some nice 2x2 ribbing, b) while setting up your short rows, or c) immediately after knitting your two stacked short row stitches? Yeah, I picked option c, who the hell even knows where these loops go. *rips back like twenty rows*


3. I was really sick of accidentally clicking on links that people had written to include hxxp (which some people do to anonymize links) so I installed a greasemonkey script to change hxxp to http. Then I realized that I was not respecting people's desire for anonymity and not incidentally was breaking the rules of some communities and forums, so I edited the script to change the hxxps to working anonym.to links instead. If you'd like to do the same thing, ( instructions for making an anonym.to redirect )

And now I am clicking on those links with ease. *is so lazy*


4. I am excited to see the permanent style=mine and style=site options (described in the latest news post), but reading people's comments about both options always reminds me that neither option is perfect for me. I often turn custom comment pages on not because I like the style or worked hard on it or anything, but because I want the sidebar or header (tags and links and etc) to be available on entry pages; I usually prefer to read in the site style. And especially in communities, if the entry page is in the site style, there's no obvious place to click for the rules or tags, which often leads to a lot of questions that are a pain in the ass ("where can I find ..." "but do you ..." "if I want to sign up ..."), or posts that don't follow the posting templates or rules or whatever. So I am still torn about site style versus custom comment pages.


5. Aren't these pantone-chip cookies pretty much the coolest thing ever? I love that she just mixed up colored icing and then matched it to a pantone color after it cooled.


6. And speaking of food, glass_icarus recently posted Potluck #1, a blog carnival dedicated to multicultural/intersectional posts about food.


7. And only loosely related to food, Happy New Year to everyone who celebrates! At the moment I am all eeee white_lotus Lunar New Year Exchange eeee. The fanworks are SO GREAT GUYS, I am so glad to be posting them now where other people can see them. I have been so caught up in the excitement that I have even tried to make some treats, but I keep being interrupted by spreadsheets.

Xena! Gabrielle! <3!

For reasons possibly related to someone on my rlist looking for recs for Xena episodes, a while ago I rewatched "The Bitter Suite" for the first time in five years.

And then I sniffled a lot.

Guys, I miss that show. I miss the strange and beautiful combination of camp and wtf and tragedy and drama. I miss the women who love each other that intensely. I miss women with emotional scars. I miss (my corner of) the fandom(s) where the most common pairings were Xena/Gabrielle and Xena/Callisto and Xena/Lao Ma. I miss the working-motherhood and the fighting and the joking and the parodies and the hugs. I miss Xena singing and dancing and leaping over people's heads, and Gabrielle hitting everyone with sticks and writing it down later. I miss their despair and their tears and their hope and their joy. I miss the anachronisms, and the giant snakes, and the people in foam monster costumes, and the centaurs filmed only from the waist up, and the styrofoam monuments they borrowed from ST:TOS, and the fight scenes that completely ignore the laws of physics. I miss Xena and Gabrielle's determination and their anger and their laughter.

I miss two ladies riding off into the sunset together after saving the day.

(Though on the other hand I do not miss the noncon-mystical-pregnancy and the sexual assault metaphors and the Orientalism and the weird Christian season and the way Gabrielle and Xena could say they loved each other but could never actually, canonically, be sleeping together.)

So then I watched two vids that made me sniffle some more, and here they are in case you, too, have been missing Xena and/or ladies riding off into the sunset lately. They're both massively, massively spoilery for the main arcs of the show. ( Some vid recs )

And since I'm writing this post now I might as well copy the recs over. So!

You might like Xena if you like: the early seasons of Supernatural (they have similar road-trip-jokey-buddy-cop-heros-with-camp-and-tragedy thing going on, though Xena takes it to a whole nother level), ladies who love each other, pseudo-historical settings filled with anachronisms (kiwis at the siege of Troy?), seriously epic drama, tragedy and humor in the same episodes, camp, cheap special effects, loyalty, emotional arcs (oh Gabrielle!), tragic villains, women kicking ass, women saving the day with science or diplomacy or cons as well as ass-kicking, fight scenes, fight scenes that completely ignore physics, people who seem to use their swords just to add weight to their punches, boomerangs chakrams that always come back, or shows that love their tropes. Also other things I'm sure I can't think of right now, but perhaps people will leave them in the comments.

( some eps I recced the other day )

( some extremely spoilery things that some people might want to know about the show before deciding whether to watch or deciding to skip some eps )

... aaaand between the time I started this post and now I might've started a rewatch and made it all the way to episode 1x20. I clearly need to post this before I'm in season four and this post is even more ridiculous. But it makes me smile and brings me joy! Mostly! Except for the parts that don't!