Dear Festividder
Oct. 30th, 2017 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosThank you for making me a vid! I want you to have fun and do Festivids the way you want to, and if that means totally ignoring the optional details that is fine by me. I like a lot of detail when I read letters, so that's how I write mine, but please don't feel obligated to read this all or to take any of this letter as a strict guideline - I like many different kinds of vids and I like these sources, so you're pretty sure to make something I'll like.
General preferences: I'm pretty open! In terms of things people often worry about in exchanges, I'm fine with: any rating, outside source, crossovers, still footage, dialog over the vid, instrumentals, kink, sex, villainy, comedy, parody, gen, slash, femslash, het, canon pairings, non-canon pairings, critiques, hugs, action, violence, and a bunch of other things I haven't thought of. I have a particular fondness for queer themes, for TEAMS and FOUND FAMILIES, and for places and spaces being related to people and feelings.
Things I would prefer for you to avoid: I have visual triggers that involve super fast flashes of lights or colors – most vids are fine for me, but some that e.g. intercut two scenes that have very different lighting for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. (It depends on the amount of contrast between scenes.) If you're concerned that you might get close to this, please feel free to run a sample bythingswithwings or ask me about a vid with a similar technique.
Music: I never really have strong ideas about music, so feel free to ignore any suggestions (where I could even come up with them) – they're just here for brainstorming purposes. I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! And also vids to spoken words or sound effects or other things.
However, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to parse lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (but I hear volume and instruments and melody just fine). I happily watch vids even when I can't hear the lyrics very well or at all, but it helps me a lot if I can read them after watching the vid for the first time. I'd really appreciate it if you included lyrics in your post or if you offered subtitles.
Black Panther [Still Image]
What it is: A long running set of comic books that feature the Black Panther (often but not always T'Challa), a superhero king from a fictional African nation called Wakanda. He's a genius, a skilled fighter in the jumpy acrobatic school, a king, a spiritual leader, a scientist, an Avenger, a bazillionaire due to Wakanda's vibranium resources, and basically an all around amaze superhero. The movie about him is going to be awesome.
Image:
[Image: A panel from Black Panther #5. T’Challa is riding a hover-scooter-thing; the Black Knight is attached to the scooter by a rope and is being pulled through the air.
T'Challa: You said your success was because god was on your side. Now that you’re losing, has god abandoned you?
Augustine: Blasphemer!
T'Challa: It was just a philosophical question.]
Details: Here's the thing: there is a ton of Black Panther, it's contradictory, people write him in all different ways, it's a mess. I love T'Challa so much, though, even (especially?) when he's being written as an asshole, that I don't even care.
I would love a vid about: T'Challa pwning other Avengers; T'Challa pwning everyone; T'Challa in Hell's Kitchen (T'Challa/Daredevil query?); T'Challa and Wakanda (and reactions to imperialism, and monarchy, and difficult choices, and being awesome); T'Challa/Ororo (though I hate the parts of that arc where Ororo has to be less awesome so that T'Challa can be more awesome than she is because hello Ororo); Shuri (<3<3 Shuri); T'Challa talking to his ancestors and what that means to him; or What Happens When You Invade Wakanda (spoilers: it does not end well for you).
I would love a vid about basically any arc in basically any volume. I was thinking of this as 616 Black Panther, but if you want to pull from other comics / the BET show / other universes that is fine by me; if you want to narrow your source down to a mini or a volume or a single writer or artists that's fine by me too. At the moment I'm enjoying the Coates (story) & Stelfreeze or Sprouse or Torres (art) Black Panther - if you want to do just recent arcs that would be awesome!
Brother to Brother [movie, safety]
What it is: A 2004 queer indie film about Perry (Anthony Mackie), a gay black art student who just wants some intersectionality in his art classes. He meets Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), a gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance, and they talk about history and the present. Also Lawrence Gilliard Jr plays Perry's friend Marcus. Also Anthony Mackie has a shower scene in a bathhouse, because the film is set in the early 80s (probably). Content notes: racism, gay bashing (from strangers and family), poverty, character death.
Trailer:
Details: I love this movie! To me, it's about queer legacies and about queering history: the way Perry finds himself in James Baldwin, in the beginning of the film, and Bruce Nugent and Bruce's friends towards the end of the film. I feel like the movie rejects the progressivist narrative at the center of a lot of gay histories - or at least just doesn't give any fucks about that narrative. Instead it's queer nostalgia, queer familiarity, queer stories that Bruce and Perry tell each other and write down and reenact. There's this moment in the film where one of Bruce's contemporaries steals his writing, and Bruce refuses to be bothered, rejects the ownership of ideas and the idea that his story is different from Wallace Thurman's - he is more interested in commonalities than in keeping his stories as singular possessions, and I feel like that is sort of a theme of the film, finding resonances in other people's queer stories. ALSO okay I am only human and Anthony Mackie is topless a LOT and Bruce and Wallace have makeouts and all of that is wonderful.
Music: I think some of the contemporary queer music - of Perry's time or of Bruce's - would be lovely! (Queer Music Heritage has some great shows on specific eras of queer music, if you're interested in that and want to find something.) But as always basically any music would be great.
Different from the Others | Anders als die Andern 1919 [movie, safety]
What it is: A 1919 film about a relationship between two men, which took advantage of a moment in German history when films were not censored. Different from the Others was specifically written to speak to and about German anti-queer laws, especially Paragraph 175, and it was partially funded by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Unfortunately, almost all copies were destroyed by the Nazis; the one remaining copy was recently restored. Content notes: homophobia, blackmail, government oppression of lgbt people, queer suicide. Details below contain references to Nazi Germany.
Clips / discussion: (contains plot spoilers)
Details: I asked for this film last year, pre-election, in part because I was so excited when I realized it had been uploaded to youtube and in part because of the resonances between present-day anti-queer rhetoric and historic anti-queer rhetoric. That anti-queer rhetoric and anti-queer violence escalated after Trump was elected, and it made this film and its advocacy and its destruction even more resonant for me. We are building our communities; other people are trying to tear them down and burn the evidence. The film is part of an activist response to government suppression, and then it was itself destroyed by the Nazi government censorship program.
I want to make it clear here that I don't see Weimar Germany as a queer utopia or Magnus Hirschfeld as a perfect queer activist – this film comes out of activism, but it is activism that values socially acceptable gay men. One of the ways this film (and the circumstances of its filming) resonates for me right now is in seeing the work of cis gay men and cis lesbians to make themselves socially acceptable by further marginalizing some sex workers, trans people, and "promiscuous" people. I also see resonances in "moderates" blaming queer people for the rise of fascist and authoritarian movements rather than thinking about their own complicity - which people started doing without any evidence in Nazi Germany as soon as the Weimar Republic fell. I see this on twitter now too: Trump is because queer people asked for too much acceptance too fast, if we'd only been more patient everything would be fine, and all of the other ways that people tell us to wait for liberation. (If you're interested in this subject, I found Laurie Marhoefer's "Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis" very informative – though reading it is rough right now.) So I'm having a lot of feelings about this movie and what it means right now.
That said, I also find this a super interesting film - combining positive portrayals of queerness with narratives about queer suicide, and doing melodrama and advocacy at the same time. I'm usually a no-queer-films-with-death movie watcher, but when it's pro-queer advocacy and made by queer people it feels different to me than the standard straight-people-love-to-watch-queer-pain film tropes. Instead this film feels like it's trying to take advantage of straight people's love for those tropes. It says: yes, but do you love to watch us in pain when you're the ones who caused it? Do you love to watch us in pain when you could change it? I feel like there's an interesting connection here to other written-by-queer-people texts that use queer death to make activist points (like The Normal Heart), and there's also an interesting connection to the celluloid closet and the death tropes that become the only stories told about queer people.
I would love a vid about Korner and Sivers' relationship (and the difficulty people have with being differently out of the closet); a vid that makes the activism of this film explicit or even turns it into propaganda; a vid about sadness and joy and art and living difficult lives; a vid about queer communities (the gay bar, the lecturers, finding queer friends in boarding school); a vid about Paragraph 175 or about the real world effects of government censorship on the film; a vid about the historic resonance of fascism and anti-queer governments with the present; or, honestly, a vid that just does the plot of the film but faster and without title screens that are up for like ninety seconds too long.
Music: I know nothing at all about period-appropriate German music except for Das Lila Lied, but it might be fun to find out about it! Or something seriously over the top and dramatic for the melodrama, or sweet and loving for the romance?
Kiki 2016 [movie, safety]
What it is: Kiki is a documentary film about the predominantly QTPoC kiki ball scene in New York City; it is full of voguing and amazing outfits and activism and community building in the face of homophobia and transphobia and racism. Some people call it an unofficial sequel to Paris Is Burning. Unlike Paris Is Burning, which was largely outsider pov, Kiki is co-written by Twiggy Pucci Garçon, who is a community leader; Twiggy also appears in the documentary and invited the producers to create the film. Content notes: homophobia and transphobia, poverty, racism, queer suicide.
Trailer:
Details: I really appreciate this film and the way it talks about community-building, about making families and spaces to be queer together, and about supporting each other. In the film Twiggy talks about what he hopes the film will do, and he says "It's important to me that people who see this film know that the support and the love that we have for each other is what helps us get through these things. And that we're strong as fuck." And that's what I love this film for: for the connections between lgbtqpoc, for the work all the queer people in this film are doing to build communities and friendships and to draw connections to the past (the kiki ball that they do in Harlem on the site of Rockland Palace!), to tell stories that they know aren't being told elsewhere. I also appreciate that the film includes conversations about difficult topics that divide members of the community. I would love a vid that focuses on any of these aspects of the documentary!
Music: Dance music? Supportive found family feels? I've got nothing.
Mark Does Stuff [web]
What it is: The Mark who Does Stuff is Mark Oshiro; he watches, reads aloud, and plays canons that he is unspoiled for and reacts to them as he goes. His most popular projects are probably Mark Reads Harry Potter and Mark Reads Twilight or various Chuck Tingle books, but he's been doing this for years and has reacted to a ton of great media! He's recently been watching Steven Universe and Person of Interest and Star Trek, and reading all of Discworld and Young Wizards. He is also super fun at cons.
Sample Video:
Details: I listen to Mark read things every week at work and he makes my terrible and busy Mondays better! And then I go read his blog posts about what he just read at lunch. I appreciate his social justice work and his reactions and his stories a lot. I know a lot of Mark Does Stuff fans who love the NUNUNUNS best, but what I love most is his intense delight, how much he loves media, and his astonished and thrilled responses to plot twists that he didn't see coming. Incorrect theories ([character] is the real villain!] are funny, but his reactions to things like Garnet's song in Jailbreak are delightful and make me feel like part of a fannish community. Also I love when he sings along to things, all his facial expressions, when he hides in his hands or his shirts, when there is a surprise cat, and when he falls out of the view of the camera laughing.
If you are considering vidding this, just fyi: I asked Mark's permission to nominate him for Festivids and he said yes. What this means is that there is a possibility that he will watch any vid made for this fandom – and I or some other fan might even commission him to watch it on video. If that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to avoid this request or make a note to that effect in your post so that Mark Does Stuff fans will know not to pass the link along to him. (Also, just in case, please don't spoil him for anything he hasn't already watched/read.)
Availability: Mark Reads videos are on youtube for free; these are videos of him reading texts. Mark Watches episodes are for sale from Mark's site, but there is also a Mark-authorized site for sharing extra downloads of these eps called Mark Spoils as well as some torrents (thanks tokate_nepveu for seeding).
My Cat from Hell [tv]
What it is: A delightful show on Animal Planet about Jackson Galaxy, cat behaviorist, who visits people who are having Cat Problems and tries to solve them. Often the cat is just fine, and Jackson has to teach the cat's owners (or the cat's owner's new boyfriend) how to interact with cats. Jackson drives a pink convertible and carries cat toys in a guitar case and interviews people about their cats and takes all of their issues seriously. This series is full of love and learning to communicate and playing and catios and slowly introducing cats to each other. And Jackson gives people homework, and they do their homework, because they want to make their relationships with their cats work. Content notes: animal harm (mostly mentioned as previous experiences of the cat).
Sample video:
Details: Okay so in our household we call this show "My Boyfriend from Hell" because we are often 100% on the cat's side and think the boyfriend needs to learn how to interact with cats, or needs to learn to share space and attention, or just needs to fuck off. I would be totally into a vid about cats and cat owners becoming friends and learning to understand each other and also kicking asshole boyfriends out of their lives or forcing them to be decent human beings. Or about cat owners learning things about their cats and coming to an understanding with them. Or just a vid of happy, blissed out cats who are comfortable for the first time! Learning-to-play montages! Happy purring cat faces and slow blinks!
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love [movie, safety]
What it is: A 1995 indie film about two women in high school who fall in love; it's a very sweet and lovely romance, sort of high-school-awkward and sincere. Randy is white and poor and butch, and living with her lesbian aunt since her mom is anti-gay; Evie is black and upper-class and popular in school. They fall in love in a totally sweet exchanging-music-and-books way. Content notes: sex while under the influence of pot and alcohol; parental disapproval. Also, this film has terrible sound mixing and is sometimes hard to hear.
Trailer:
Details: This is my nostalgic request for the year! I first saw it in college, and I felt like a recognized a lot of the people in it; a lot of it felt like my queer experience. One thing I always really appreciated about this film is Randy's queer friends and chosen family; she's not queer in isolation. And neither is Evie, though she doesn't have queer family – instead she has Walt Whitman poetry. Also, this film is pretty good at intersectionality, which is one of the things I like best about it especially compared to other queer films of my college years.
Availability: This is available on DVD, but if you're looking for a torrent/other download some people call it "true story" instead of "true adventure."
Music: Maybe some of the music Evie and Randy trade?
My themes this year are apparently queer people and kitties. Pretty gr8 themes tbh.
General preferences: I'm pretty open! In terms of things people often worry about in exchanges, I'm fine with: any rating, outside source, crossovers, still footage, dialog over the vid, instrumentals, kink, sex, villainy, comedy, parody, gen, slash, femslash, het, canon pairings, non-canon pairings, critiques, hugs, action, violence, and a bunch of other things I haven't thought of. I have a particular fondness for queer themes, for TEAMS and FOUND FAMILIES, and for places and spaces being related to people and feelings.
Things I would prefer for you to avoid: I have visual triggers that involve super fast flashes of lights or colors – most vids are fine for me, but some that e.g. intercut two scenes that have very different lighting for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. (It depends on the amount of contrast between scenes.) If you're concerned that you might get close to this, please feel free to run a sample by
thingswithwings or ask me about a vid with a similar technique. Music: I never really have strong ideas about music, so feel free to ignore any suggestions (where I could even come up with them) – they're just here for brainstorming purposes. I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! And also vids to spoken words or sound effects or other things.
However, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to parse lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (but I hear volume and instruments and melody just fine). I happily watch vids even when I can't hear the lyrics very well or at all, but it helps me a lot if I can read them after watching the vid for the first time. I'd really appreciate it if you included lyrics in your post or if you offered subtitles.
Black Panther [Still Image]
What it is: A long running set of comic books that feature the Black Panther (often but not always T'Challa), a superhero king from a fictional African nation called Wakanda. He's a genius, a skilled fighter in the jumpy acrobatic school, a king, a spiritual leader, a scientist, an Avenger, a bazillionaire due to Wakanda's vibranium resources, and basically an all around amaze superhero. The movie about him is going to be awesome.
Image:
[Image: A panel from Black Panther #5. T’Challa is riding a hover-scooter-thing; the Black Knight is attached to the scooter by a rope and is being pulled through the air.
T'Challa: You said your success was because god was on your side. Now that you’re losing, has god abandoned you?
Augustine: Blasphemer!
T'Challa: It was just a philosophical question.]
Details: Here's the thing: there is a ton of Black Panther, it's contradictory, people write him in all different ways, it's a mess. I love T'Challa so much, though, even (especially?) when he's being written as an asshole, that I don't even care.
I would love a vid about: T'Challa pwning other Avengers; T'Challa pwning everyone; T'Challa in Hell's Kitchen (T'Challa/Daredevil query?); T'Challa and Wakanda (and reactions to imperialism, and monarchy, and difficult choices, and being awesome); T'Challa/Ororo (though I hate the parts of that arc where Ororo has to be less awesome so that T'Challa can be more awesome than she is because hello Ororo); Shuri (<3<3 Shuri); T'Challa talking to his ancestors and what that means to him; or What Happens When You Invade Wakanda (spoilers: it does not end well for you).
I would love a vid about basically any arc in basically any volume. I was thinking of this as 616 Black Panther, but if you want to pull from other comics / the BET show / other universes that is fine by me; if you want to narrow your source down to a mini or a volume or a single writer or artists that's fine by me too. At the moment I'm enjoying the Coates (story) & Stelfreeze or Sprouse or Torres (art) Black Panther - if you want to do just recent arcs that would be awesome!
Brother to Brother [movie, safety]
What it is: A 2004 queer indie film about Perry (Anthony Mackie), a gay black art student who just wants some intersectionality in his art classes. He meets Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson), a gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance, and they talk about history and the present. Also Lawrence Gilliard Jr plays Perry's friend Marcus. Also Anthony Mackie has a shower scene in a bathhouse, because the film is set in the early 80s (probably). Content notes: racism, gay bashing (from strangers and family), poverty, character death.
Trailer:
Details: I love this movie! To me, it's about queer legacies and about queering history: the way Perry finds himself in James Baldwin, in the beginning of the film, and Bruce Nugent and Bruce's friends towards the end of the film. I feel like the movie rejects the progressivist narrative at the center of a lot of gay histories - or at least just doesn't give any fucks about that narrative. Instead it's queer nostalgia, queer familiarity, queer stories that Bruce and Perry tell each other and write down and reenact. There's this moment in the film where one of Bruce's contemporaries steals his writing, and Bruce refuses to be bothered, rejects the ownership of ideas and the idea that his story is different from Wallace Thurman's - he is more interested in commonalities than in keeping his stories as singular possessions, and I feel like that is sort of a theme of the film, finding resonances in other people's queer stories. ALSO okay I am only human and Anthony Mackie is topless a LOT and Bruce and Wallace have makeouts and all of that is wonderful.
Music: I think some of the contemporary queer music - of Perry's time or of Bruce's - would be lovely! (Queer Music Heritage has some great shows on specific eras of queer music, if you're interested in that and want to find something.) But as always basically any music would be great.
Different from the Others | Anders als die Andern 1919 [movie, safety]
What it is: A 1919 film about a relationship between two men, which took advantage of a moment in German history when films were not censored. Different from the Others was specifically written to speak to and about German anti-queer laws, especially Paragraph 175, and it was partially funded by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Unfortunately, almost all copies were destroyed by the Nazis; the one remaining copy was recently restored. Content notes: homophobia, blackmail, government oppression of lgbt people, queer suicide. Details below contain references to Nazi Germany.
Clips / discussion: (contains plot spoilers)
Details: I asked for this film last year, pre-election, in part because I was so excited when I realized it had been uploaded to youtube and in part because of the resonances between present-day anti-queer rhetoric and historic anti-queer rhetoric. That anti-queer rhetoric and anti-queer violence escalated after Trump was elected, and it made this film and its advocacy and its destruction even more resonant for me. We are building our communities; other people are trying to tear them down and burn the evidence. The film is part of an activist response to government suppression, and then it was itself destroyed by the Nazi government censorship program.
I want to make it clear here that I don't see Weimar Germany as a queer utopia or Magnus Hirschfeld as a perfect queer activist – this film comes out of activism, but it is activism that values socially acceptable gay men. One of the ways this film (and the circumstances of its filming) resonates for me right now is in seeing the work of cis gay men and cis lesbians to make themselves socially acceptable by further marginalizing some sex workers, trans people, and "promiscuous" people. I also see resonances in "moderates" blaming queer people for the rise of fascist and authoritarian movements rather than thinking about their own complicity - which people started doing without any evidence in Nazi Germany as soon as the Weimar Republic fell. I see this on twitter now too: Trump is because queer people asked for too much acceptance too fast, if we'd only been more patient everything would be fine, and all of the other ways that people tell us to wait for liberation. (If you're interested in this subject, I found Laurie Marhoefer's "Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis" very informative – though reading it is rough right now.) So I'm having a lot of feelings about this movie and what it means right now.
That said, I also find this a super interesting film - combining positive portrayals of queerness with narratives about queer suicide, and doing melodrama and advocacy at the same time. I'm usually a no-queer-films-with-death movie watcher, but when it's pro-queer advocacy and made by queer people it feels different to me than the standard straight-people-love-to-watch-queer-pain film tropes. Instead this film feels like it's trying to take advantage of straight people's love for those tropes. It says: yes, but do you love to watch us in pain when you're the ones who caused it? Do you love to watch us in pain when you could change it? I feel like there's an interesting connection here to other written-by-queer-people texts that use queer death to make activist points (like The Normal Heart), and there's also an interesting connection to the celluloid closet and the death tropes that become the only stories told about queer people.
I would love a vid about Korner and Sivers' relationship (and the difficulty people have with being differently out of the closet); a vid that makes the activism of this film explicit or even turns it into propaganda; a vid about sadness and joy and art and living difficult lives; a vid about queer communities (the gay bar, the lecturers, finding queer friends in boarding school); a vid about Paragraph 175 or about the real world effects of government censorship on the film; a vid about the historic resonance of fascism and anti-queer governments with the present; or, honestly, a vid that just does the plot of the film but faster and without title screens that are up for like ninety seconds too long.
Music: I know nothing at all about period-appropriate German music except for Das Lila Lied, but it might be fun to find out about it! Or something seriously over the top and dramatic for the melodrama, or sweet and loving for the romance?
Kiki 2016 [movie, safety]
What it is: Kiki is a documentary film about the predominantly QTPoC kiki ball scene in New York City; it is full of voguing and amazing outfits and activism and community building in the face of homophobia and transphobia and racism. Some people call it an unofficial sequel to Paris Is Burning. Unlike Paris Is Burning, which was largely outsider pov, Kiki is co-written by Twiggy Pucci Garçon, who is a community leader; Twiggy also appears in the documentary and invited the producers to create the film. Content notes: homophobia and transphobia, poverty, racism, queer suicide.
Trailer:
Details: I really appreciate this film and the way it talks about community-building, about making families and spaces to be queer together, and about supporting each other. In the film Twiggy talks about what he hopes the film will do, and he says "It's important to me that people who see this film know that the support and the love that we have for each other is what helps us get through these things. And that we're strong as fuck." And that's what I love this film for: for the connections between lgbtqpoc, for the work all the queer people in this film are doing to build communities and friendships and to draw connections to the past (the kiki ball that they do in Harlem on the site of Rockland Palace!), to tell stories that they know aren't being told elsewhere. I also appreciate that the film includes conversations about difficult topics that divide members of the community. I would love a vid that focuses on any of these aspects of the documentary!
Music: Dance music? Supportive found family feels? I've got nothing.
Mark Does Stuff [web]
What it is: The Mark who Does Stuff is Mark Oshiro; he watches, reads aloud, and plays canons that he is unspoiled for and reacts to them as he goes. His most popular projects are probably Mark Reads Harry Potter and Mark Reads Twilight or various Chuck Tingle books, but he's been doing this for years and has reacted to a ton of great media! He's recently been watching Steven Universe and Person of Interest and Star Trek, and reading all of Discworld and Young Wizards. He is also super fun at cons.
Sample Video:
Details: I listen to Mark read things every week at work and he makes my terrible and busy Mondays better! And then I go read his blog posts about what he just read at lunch. I appreciate his social justice work and his reactions and his stories a lot. I know a lot of Mark Does Stuff fans who love the NUNUNUNS best, but what I love most is his intense delight, how much he loves media, and his astonished and thrilled responses to plot twists that he didn't see coming. Incorrect theories ([character] is the real villain!] are funny, but his reactions to things like Garnet's song in Jailbreak are delightful and make me feel like part of a fannish community. Also I love when he sings along to things, all his facial expressions, when he hides in his hands or his shirts, when there is a surprise cat, and when he falls out of the view of the camera laughing.
If you are considering vidding this, just fyi: I asked Mark's permission to nominate him for Festivids and he said yes. What this means is that there is a possibility that he will watch any vid made for this fandom – and I or some other fan might even commission him to watch it on video. If that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to avoid this request or make a note to that effect in your post so that Mark Does Stuff fans will know not to pass the link along to him. (Also, just in case, please don't spoil him for anything he hasn't already watched/read.)
Availability: Mark Reads videos are on youtube for free; these are videos of him reading texts. Mark Watches episodes are for sale from Mark's site, but there is also a Mark-authorized site for sharing extra downloads of these eps called Mark Spoils as well as some torrents (thanks to
kate_nepveu for seeding).My Cat from Hell [tv]
What it is: A delightful show on Animal Planet about Jackson Galaxy, cat behaviorist, who visits people who are having Cat Problems and tries to solve them. Often the cat is just fine, and Jackson has to teach the cat's owners (or the cat's owner's new boyfriend) how to interact with cats. Jackson drives a pink convertible and carries cat toys in a guitar case and interviews people about their cats and takes all of their issues seriously. This series is full of love and learning to communicate and playing and catios and slowly introducing cats to each other. And Jackson gives people homework, and they do their homework, because they want to make their relationships with their cats work. Content notes: animal harm (mostly mentioned as previous experiences of the cat).
Sample video:
Details: Okay so in our household we call this show "My Boyfriend from Hell" because we are often 100% on the cat's side and think the boyfriend needs to learn how to interact with cats, or needs to learn to share space and attention, or just needs to fuck off. I would be totally into a vid about cats and cat owners becoming friends and learning to understand each other and also kicking asshole boyfriends out of their lives or forcing them to be decent human beings. Or about cat owners learning things about their cats and coming to an understanding with them. Or just a vid of happy, blissed out cats who are comfortable for the first time! Learning-to-play montages! Happy purring cat faces and slow blinks!
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love [movie, safety]
What it is: A 1995 indie film about two women in high school who fall in love; it's a very sweet and lovely romance, sort of high-school-awkward and sincere. Randy is white and poor and butch, and living with her lesbian aunt since her mom is anti-gay; Evie is black and upper-class and popular in school. They fall in love in a totally sweet exchanging-music-and-books way. Content notes: sex while under the influence of pot and alcohol; parental disapproval. Also, this film has terrible sound mixing and is sometimes hard to hear.
Trailer:
Details: This is my nostalgic request for the year! I first saw it in college, and I felt like a recognized a lot of the people in it; a lot of it felt like my queer experience. One thing I always really appreciated about this film is Randy's queer friends and chosen family; she's not queer in isolation. And neither is Evie, though she doesn't have queer family – instead she has Walt Whitman poetry. Also, this film is pretty good at intersectionality, which is one of the things I like best about it especially compared to other queer films of my college years.
Availability: This is available on DVD, but if you're looking for a torrent/other download some people call it "true story" instead of "true adventure."
Music: Maybe some of the music Evie and Randy trade?
My themes this year are apparently queer people and kitties. Pretty gr8 themes tbh.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-31 08:55 pm (UTC)