sundries

[rm]

As was her plan, Fayah Azadi was martyred.

***

I had sort of made a decision on the dresses, and then this got thrown into the mix thanks to lolliejean.

PugCake! via tsarina

On the ongoing laptop subject... basic video editing -- can I do it on a white MacBook without beating my head into a wall? Or will I need go up the food chain. We're not talking about huge files here, just a few basic cuts in segments that are 15 minutes or less. (Hi, I've never done video editing and have no idea what I'm talking about).

So, on the subject of video editing: I've decided to start doing little video reports from my life on the SF/F D-list (I need a better name). What particular chaos at Dragon*Con would you guys like to see through the tiny fish, big pond, omg-I-was-sitting-in-the-bar-and-you'll-never-guess-what-just-happened lens?

Oh man, something just got added to my Dragon*Con schedule for Monday.

Speaking of fish, DID YOU SEE THE FISH?

If you have a paid LJ account, you can extend that with three days of free paid time to make up for recent outages. But you have to go here.

ktempest posts about dealing with the trolls that are an inevitable side effect of trying to discuss racism, homophobia and privilege on the Internet.

On the subject of DoMA Obama's jsutice department changes its tune.

Justine Larbalestier's Liar now has a cover that doesn't lie about the book's contents.

The truth about healthcare in the U.S.

They came in their thousands, queuing through the night to secure one of the coveted wristbands offering entry into a strange parallel universe where medical care is a free and basic right and not an expensive luxury. Some of these Americans had walked miles simply to have their blood pressure checked, some had slept in their cars in the hope of getting an eye-test or a mammogram, others had brought their children for immunisations that could end up saving their life.

A response to women being told to be afraid and curtail their perfectly ordinary actions accordingly.

DWNY with Gary Russsel tomorrow!

There's this thing going around from After Elton about Ianto's death and CoE and how said death was meaningless. I know it speaks for a lot of you, and I just want to make it clear that my disagreement with the piece is in no way about saying "you are wrong!" or negating your emotions, because lord knows, I am still fucked up about this shit. But sometimes, death is meaningless. It's stupid and careless and just dumb. But it doesn't negate everything that leads up to that death, it doesn't negate the life or the sentiments or actions that led up to the death -- regardless of whether they were meaningful or not.

Are deaths from cancer meaningful? What about folks who get hit by cars? Aneurysms? Hell, are all military deaths even meaningful? Especially when it's another malfunctioning fucking helicopter (do you know how many service men and women we've lost to those?)

Now I realize, we want fictional deaths to be meaningful. They must, of course, serve the narrative, and if we've ever taken a writing class we learn "something has to happen and something has to change." But real life isn't like that. Sometimes shit doesn't happen. Sometimes shit doesn't change. And, sometimes, a death doesn't mean anything. But the life did.

Look, I get, I really, really get, that for a lot of people Ianto's death is very much what Snape's "snake bubble to the head" anti-climax of a death was for me. And I am so entirely with you on the weird emotional thing we're all still doing with it.

But my mallet of perspective is all the people losing people all around me. And that mallet of perspective isn't the moment of loss, but the process of it. I realize lots of you guys have that mallet of perspective too -- and for you fiction matters because it's a solace, because stories should tell us that life is better than that and that there are reasons for terrible things and that they are beautiful, and give us something to believe in, in our heads when it's hard to have anything in our actual lives to be solaced by. I get that too.

But for whatever reason, I'm not like that. Fiction isn't my escape; it's my preparation.

So maybe the death was meaningless (which I don't agree with in endless rambly meta I typed weeks ago, but maybe I'm totally wrong! maybe it doesn't matter -- it's just TV and there's no such thing as the truth anyway and this is all just opinions besides). But to me, it doesn't matter. Because the life wasn't meaningless, fictional though it may have been. It sure wasn't meaningless to the other characters. And it wasn't meaningless to us, out here, looking at that screen.

It is so primal and strange, this demand for control in the face of the void, this wanting of a good death for people. I thought it was a good death, even if it wasn't a needful one (i.e., the plan sucked, but I think there was a reason for that). Others don't. But it was a good life, and in the end, shouldn't that count more?

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Jumping in here to say, This, and to add some Mac-specific advice. (You know how I feel about Macs; and Patty's on the platform too now, so the switch seems to me to make sense.)

I've never done video editing, but my strong sense is that you can now do basic stuff on any of the Mac laptops except for the Airbook, which has sacrificed a certain number of features for sheer portability. For long-term use, I'd look for the fastest of the chips available, and if there's an option for more memory slots without going further up the food chain than you'd like, I'd get a model with the maximum number of those slots. (If that's the sort of thing you need the black model for, it's probably worth it.) Firewire is faster than USB 2, despite the published specs; I'm assuming that the model you're looking at has a Firewire port? (You have to go to the Pro model, or did last I looked, to get Firewire 800 -- but then, you don't really need that.)

The magic, as marcmagus says, is in the ability to do add-ons yourself. I told Ellen to get as much memory as she could built into her new computer because they were offering a huge discount when she bought it, and because she's an instant-gratification kind of girl. But in general, there's no reason to pay for Apple memory: you can buy extra very inexpensively from OWC Computing, or a number of other reputable dealers, and it's easy to install. (You'll ultimately want a lot of it. Macs love memory like your body loves digestible calories.)

For video editing you'll also want a large and fast hard drive. But, do not despair! For you can buy an external that runs at 7200 RPM and up for much less money than it would cost you to have Apple upgrade your internal drive. If you're comfortable with a non-portable-size external drive, you can get enormous amounts of storage for extraordinarily small amounts of money. And run through Firewire their performance is plenty fast enough.

Et cetera, et cetera.

[rm.livejournal.com]

This is very helpful and confirms some of my gut feelings. External harddrive totally works for me and I was planning to upgrade the memory like crazy in whatever I do buy. The airbook is sexy, but I had the equivalent of that sort of thing like 10years ago in an IBM laptop, and the feature sacrifice was fucking annoying. The platform switch for me feels like it makes sense because of Patty's machine and also E&D; we'll all be working in the same universe of features.

I'm also waiting for Patty to get home on the odd chance her student discount can be used since she's not getting a new machine this year.... and I think Mac let's you get an academic discount once a year.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Yes and yes to the student discount: I think (though I don't know for sure) that they're pretty relaxed about its use.

It can also be worth trolling the Apple online store refurb section. The discount they offer for their refurbished laptops varies, apparently by whim and phase of the moon, from negligible to quite substantial. The selection is pretty much whatever they happen to have around, but sometimes they have current models there -- and their refurbs come with full guarantee and a year of AppleCare, just like their new machines.