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

[ckd]

If you have time to play with it at the Apple Store, I'd say "go in, futz with iMovie a bit, and see if it feels too slow". I haven't used iMovie in a while so I don't have a good feel for how iMovie 8 runs on any hardware.

I suspect that for smaller edit work like that, the white MacBook will do okay on CPU/disk bandwidth but may feel cramped in screen space. No idea, really.

[such_heights]

I vid on a Macbook with no problems, you should be fine.

Re: Macbook video editing

[jimmynebraska.livejournal.com]

I have an older (2 yrs) Macbook, and the video editing software (iMovie?) that comes with it works well enough for me. It's simple enough for me to use, and the computer handles it well enough. I don't do anything complicated with it, though.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Yes yes yes on all the last.

[valkyrwench.livejournal.com]

Oooh, pretty. I still stand by my first choice, though :)

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Regarding CoE Meta, you should read this!

Torchwood: Children of Earth - Ethics, narrative structure, and why I don't think that Ianto's death was meaningless (http://solitary-summer.livejournal.com/438214.html).

Long and well thought out, imo.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that pretty much speaks for me, although my gut keeps telling me Ianto didn't think that plan would work for a second, but that it would somehow create a scenario where they could find a way around ... Ianto's actions in that whole situation remind me of being a child and having nightmares about monsters trying to kill me, and at a given point in those dreams, I always decided to let them catch me, because I couldn't stand being that terrified anymore.

[cerulean-sky.livejournal.com]

Re: Dresses: You might also take a look at the dresses here: http://www.pinupgirlclothing.com/

Not to make your decision harder or anything!

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

The whole CoE scenario was of the team being out of control and their comfort zones, so I can totally relate.

Perhaps I read too much "Where the Wild Things Are" as a child, but I was never chased by monsters in my nightmares, but by people (Doctor Mengale is my monster under the bed) who were going to take me away and I always "died" trying to get away rather than to let them catch me... so, that relates as well.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

You know, fiction is discussion for me. It might be prep, though Jesus, I don't feel like I need any more of that. What I liked about Ianto's death, once I did my sackcloth and ashes bit (mostly because I would have liked another season. I just wanted more Ianto in canon, period), and also what I adored about Snape's death, too was that it was apropos. It fit. It was meaningless because that is real, in those particular cases. Snape lived in the back of the room, ignored, disregarded, hiding, being hidden, and if Harry hasn't witnessed his death through chance, his body might have laid there for days, months even. That works more me.

Ianto? Yeah, it was a little impractical (like a few niggling plot holes that I would have liked to have seen cleared), but he died in almost a foolhardy manner, in a moment of bravado in which he trusted Jack, as he always did, a moment for which Jack wasn't remotely prepared. But it's Torchwood, which is pretty damn close to the front lines in concept, and I often think of how many soldiers die in the first few minutes of battle. The first few seconds, even. The average life span if a WW1 machine gunner, once he hit the trigger, was approx 30 seconds, IIRC.

Anyway, I like that it happened at an "aw shit" moment in some ways, because Jesus, those are the ones that hurt the most, and they mean the most because they DON'T mean anything. Gah. I dunno how I can say that more clearly.

Also? I am content to be overruled.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Just word. To all of this.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

Oh! I made sense! Usually I let fic do the talking for me. But I'm trying something new.

[(Anonymous)]

hate to point it out, but you typo martyr

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oi! Got it. Thanks.

[marcmagus]

When I went with shield_toad111 to the Apple Store a year ago to shop for a new MacBook, I was looking at the comparison between the white and black MacBooks. At the time, other than the color, the differences were entirely in user-upgradable parts.

A general bit of advice on computer shopping, and this applies to both desktops and laptops. RAM and hard drives are both frequently upgradable by the user at home with little effort, and stores often charge a premium for including these upgrades for you. It's often possible to get significant [hundreds of dollars] savings by buying a bare-bones system and upgrading it yourself.

This comment got really long, so I decided to make it into an entry; feel free to read: http://marcmagus.dreamwidth.org/112301.html
* Do the research: make sure the base system you're looking at is capable of

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Ditto the "buy the RAM and install it at home". I got a gig of ram recently for, what, 25 bucks? And installed it on my iMac no problem. To upgrade like that when you buy will cost significantly more.

[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.

[marcmagus]

Seriously. I put 2G in my netbook for $28.35 shipped, with tax [I took notes]. I'd paid extra for the new low-latency RAM, too; I think I could have gotten it a week earlier at about $20 if I hadn't. RAM is *so* cheap these days.

[marcmagus]

Ugh; didn't notice my editing failure when I deleted the stuff I'd started to write before I decided I was heading off on tangents rather than writing stuff appropriate as a response to you; sorry about that last ugly line, everybody.

[P.S. I hope this didn't come across as my assuming you didn't know anything about hardware. I wanted to share thoughts you *might* not have had, I didn't mean to imply there's no way you had.]

[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.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's all good. I am, much to my frustration, pretty ignorant about the current state of technology. And I used to lived in a house with a Sun station and 3 NeXT boxes! So it's helpful, even if it's personally galling to me that I have no idea what's going on in the world of gadgets anymore.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

The one in Los Angeles attracted thousands of people. Even if you were the sort to point and laugh and mutter something about crazy people hidden back in mountains of nowhere, you can't quite ignore it when one of the country's major metropolitan areas has the same damn problem.

(Of course then if you're that sort, then you'll be the sort to jump up and down screaming "brown people" in all kinds of code phrases...)

It's so headdesking I hardly know where to start.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

As far as what happened with Ianto goes, I haven't a problem with it, per se. My problem is more that the team is now down to Jack and Gwen. So they're really kinda having to build an entirely new team, or else deal with a Jack+Gwen show which everyone will read as a love triangle. In that regard, it seems to have been ill-planned.

There's some interview floating around somewhere that implies the virus was meant to be a poison gas, which to me makes so much more sense in terms of the overall plot structure. But anyway.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

"You" being "if you're the sort to be dismissive of..."

Really, meaning pretty much not meaning anyone who'd be on rm's flist, for sure.

The Plan Sucked.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

The plan of battle is usually the first casualty. Mostly there isn't one, people are just trying to do something.
Sometimes it's moving people to the other tower where they'll be safe, and sometimes it's keeping all the Etruscans at their end of the bridge until the bridge goes away, but people are honest-to-god trying.
It's what people do, and it's not meaningless.
Trying our level best is all we've got, and it's all we've ever got.
And sometimes it's not enough. And sometimes it all goes wrong. But not because no one tried.
I've never identified with Ianto. Or Jack. But i can say that their lives are not meaningless. And I will love them for that. In lieu of all the flesh I will never know, that died doing the best that it could.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Fiction isn't my escape; it's my preparation.

Yes.

I can't even count the dozens of experiences I've had in my life that have evoked a relevant sentence or paragraph I read, which prepared me for those experiences.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

It's a lovely dress, and it would look great on you. That said, I still hold to my earlier vote.

On the topic of women being told to avoid a place they've been going, I have only seanan_mcguire's song, Wicked Girls to offer.
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear:
Be wicked and lovely and don't live in fear --


(If you haven't seen the video of the live performance, it's here.)

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

ok... firstly, that dress up there is gorgeous
2ndly, i'm NOT arguing with you, i swear
But sometimes, death is meaningless. It's stupid and careless and just dumb. - i believe this, i believe this SO HARD and a completely pointless, random stupid death makes sense for the kind of life led in torchwood
BUT everyone (the writers, other fans, whoever) have been saying and keep saying that ianto's death DID serve the narrative by being the catalyst for jack to lose all hope and push him so far that he makes the choice to sacrifice his own grandson - and, honestly, i personally just do not see it that way, at all
i'm not angry that ianto died (even though i want him back!) and i'm not even that upset that it wasn't, IMO, a good death, it's all the ppl saying how it had to happen when it just didn't
it didn't have to happen for any reason, it just happened

/end rant
you post so much thinky stuff all the time, i'm still catching up with your last post!

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I think that the thing with the After Elton article was that both Tara and Ianto both got meaningless deaths, because yes, sometimes death is meaningless. But at least with Tara, it really did seem to serve the story, whereas with Ianto it did not, in spite of how we're constantly being told that it was necessary. Being as generous as possible, it served a story that was full of holes, and his death only "served" it in the sense that the emotional impact distracted one from those holes, rather than being part of a well-structured story. And yeah, Torchwood has never done well-structured stories, and I've always been cool with that -- but that's because I invested in the characters rather than the story. And I'm not buying it that those characters need to be sacrificed to distract us from holes in the story.

It was just cheap.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I love the way that Daddyos dress page had the measurements for each size right there. Very helpful. (In this case, it told me I could never wear that dress because I'm just not proportioned that way, but that's still helpful.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, their sizes don't quite work for me -- 'cause that dress has to be tight, and whether the hips would work if the rest fit is entirely based on how stretchy that fabric is, so I think it wouldn't be happening for me.

As much as Trashy Diva stuff is cut bustier than I am, it accommodates my hips and their tops are often meant to be somewhat blouse-y so it's okay.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I don't really have much of a waist - I'm more straight than curvy, with enough arm and leg muscles to have some trouble with armholes and pants legs. It sounds as if you do have a tiny waist, so I have been noting the dress sites you link to, in order to avoid them. (I've been known to make recommendations to friends who wear the same dress size but are differently proportioned, along the lines of "Here, this didn't fit me at all so you should check it out.")

[stiobhan.livejournal.com]

...How come I can't stop fooling with those damn fish?

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

As someone who's sweet gentle ex was murdered needlessly, stupidly, I wanted to thank you for what you wrote about Ianto's life being the meaningful part. It meant a lot to me.

[exbentley]

idk if you're trying to make a fanvid or are doing something with personal footage, but vidding has a lot of great tech resources in the memories; if you look under Macs you're find some good tips, tricks, software recommendations, that sort of thing. And if you are actually making a fanvid, viddingnewbies is probably worth browsing. :D

[rm.livejournal.com]

I am _so_ sorry you had to experience something like that.

And thank you very much. It's always a relief when my insistence that stories and how we interacting with them is important seems to actually be true.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not for fanvidding, although I imagine once I have the tools I might well try it, so I will check that out. Thanks!

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

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?)

This. Over and over.

People, on the whole, don't die as the denouement of a coherent narrative¹. Death doesn't wait for us to be ready. And, you know, okay. In fiction we have different expectations, but even as the piece stands I can't help but think that what happens in CoE was contextually workable. How many times a week do these two go running into danger because they think they can win? Because they have to? Because it's what they do?

It sucks, and it's awful to get shot down like that, but at half strength under such high stakes? Yeah.

---
¹ All the more reason to manipulate our coherent narratives...

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

[wynkat1313.livejournal.com]

I think I am going to have to friend you, if you dont mind... I keep finding myself back here wondering what thoughts you have to share this time.

The dress btw is awesome.

Your thoughts on Ianto and CoE make a lot of sense, thank you. I keep going back and forth with that whole thing. I knew his death was coming. Dramatically it was pretty much a given. I was frustrated with the plot holes that I saw and the feel of the lack of planning, but I do see your points, and the ones from the post that was linked in the comments (thank you to all, that was also very interesting). I personally dont like RTD's statements about Ianto needing to die to make Jack's actions happen in day five. I dont see that as making any sense. Jack's screwed up and broken and has already sacrificed lots of lives for various reasons. I dont see that the writing gives us the support to his words. But hey, that's me, and they got to make what they made.

your point is well taken - death happens and the life lived is what is meaningful regardless of how the death appears. I think if there is anything we would do well to learn as humans, er, make that one of the things, it is this. I think it might help us cherish life a little more if we could hold on to this concept.

"Fiction isn't my escape; it's my preparation."

This is a really interesting thought, thank you.

When I stop to think about it, what I read is often my escape, but what I write is my processing, even in my fiction. I suspect that is either a tangent or something off to the side of what you mean by preparation, but it does seem to be what my head does.

[alycewilson.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links. Fascinating. And especially, thanks for the link for extending our paid service. I didn't know such a thing existed!