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Saturday, April 13, 2002

Yeah, I said I was going to post some blargh about the vid show, but Shrift is doing a much better job with it <g>, so I'll just direct you to her. One thing I did want to say was that I learned from a member of the vidder list that the person who did the eight LotR vids had basically done them for herself, without much awareness that such a thing as fannish vidding or vid shows existed, and hadn't brought them to the con with the intention of showing them publicly; someone offered to put them on tape and add them to the show. Apparently during the show she became very aware of the cumulative-overload factor herself, and was distressed at the poor visual quality on the big screen. I have a huge soft spot for people who leap into activities like this in pursuit of their singular fannish/artistic obsessions, so I really want to encourage her to continue, and I join those who've expressed a hope that she'll redo some of these with better source material (like, when the DVD comes out). Especially the Brothers in Arms one, which I think is marvellous--a really superb match of song with movie.

The con is already starting to feel long ago and far away, because work has been insane this past week, and also a number of my lists have been quite active. Not that I've posted much to them, but I've started a lot of long posts that mostly rambled off into inconsequentiality and never got sent.

Spring has arrived here on the tundra, with a whump, or maybe a whoosh, or whatever noise an arriving-spring would make. This may be one of those years when we go more or less straight into summer, in fact, with spring a mere interlude of slop. It's going to get up in the seventies this weekend, and I can take plastic off the windows, take off the storm doors, and get some fresh air in the house. Garrison Keillor, in one of his books, has a nice bit on that first warm day of spring, when you open up the house and take a lungful of fresh clean air and are suddenly struck with how stale and filthy and cluttered the house is, full of a winter's accumulation of dust, cat hair, old magazines, dirty socks. Everything that seemed cozy and snug a few months ago is suddenly, intolerably, suffocating. So I plan a mad cleaning-binge this weekend, and am making comprehensive lists.

I also need to buy some clothes--my wardrobe is getting pretty ragged--but the times I've tried to do so lately I've been appalled by everything that's out there. Not just the current fashion for tightly and skimpily cut clothing (although it is certainly discouraging to find that, although I'm not a particularly large woman, I still can't get into the XL t-shirts -- is there some belief in the fashion industry that the entire human race has shrunk, in the past few years??) but also because everything looks so depressingly ugly to me that I can't stand to look at it. I think this is likely a generational thing; fashion seems to go in these 20-30 year cycles, so the current trend is for stuff that looks like what I used to wear when I was young. I mean, bellbottoms! Dear god, I lived through bellbottoms once, don't make me do it again! Platform shoes--aaaiiiieeeee!!! (I remember my mother having exactly the same reaction to the 40s-revival Joan-Crawford stuff that was trendy for a while in the 70s and which I loved.)

Am in the middle of composing a long belated incoherent blither on the race-in-fanfiction thread that was lively a week ago, but I need to do some more thinking, and I must now go vacuum.

Posted @ 10:30 AM CST [Link]7 comments

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

Part 1 of extremely boring con report is here (I put it on cutaway because it's long as well as boring). For an entertaining con report, check out Shrift's latest.

I'm feeling very thickwitted this morning, and it is raining like stink here -- the first big rain of the season. The snow is gone at last, hallelujah. I have to go see if I can figure out where the hell I stored my umbrella back in November. [more]

Posted by jones059 @ 08:19 AM CST [Link]2 comments

Monday, April 8, 2002

The bad part about con-going is, of course, the return; and the most stressful part of the return isn't really the oh-god-I-have-to-go-back-to-work, or the I-miss-my-buds-*snif*, or the crushing sleep-deficit, or the extent to which my cat is furious with me and haranguing me relentlessly for attention. No, it's the fact that I have perhaps 100K of stuff bouncing around in my head that I really want to jam in here, about the con, the panels, the vid show, the conversations, the air travel experiences, the people, the deep thoughts, the hilarity. And then there's the additional 100K or so I really want to write in response to all the provocative blog-conversation that's been going on while I was gone. And on top of that the story ideas that got sparked by con conversations, which are going to shimmer away if I don't scribble them down somewhere soon. And also, likewise, in addition, the huge pile of new and as-yet-unanswered e-mail, which is not going to shimmer away, but will just lie there and smite me with guilt.

So what I'd really love to do is take a day or so and DO some of this, except I'm already behind on a whole bunch of stuff at work, and being out a day and a half didn't help.

All of this, of course, beats the hell out of being bored to death. So I'm not complaining, just whimpering a little and biting at my knuckles. Hope to have more here later. Must now try to find clean socks and race off to staff meeting.

Posted @ 08:28 AM CST [Link]2 comments