Jetpack Monkey

I'm overhauling my ode-to-horror vid at the moment*. It's a complex, complicated mofo. The original edit ran 6 minutes (plus another minute of credits) and used clips from 233 horror films. It was also a shambling mess.

I've cut the song by two minutes, cutting a chorus and a verse. I'm rethinking the introduction and refocusing the vid back to its original point, which was an exploration of being a classic horror fan in a modern horror world.

Thing is, the process of making this vid has illuminated some deficiencies in my technique -- primarily in storytelling and constructed narrative. Does anybody know of any good resources on vidding style and technique (rather than technical resources)? I'm doing independent research in my personal library of books on cinema, but it's rather specific to standard narrative cinema.

* Thanks go to bradcpu, whose encouraging words on the early cut of the vid gave me the confidence to start working on it again.

I think I'm depressed because I finished "Memory" so quickly. It's over, gone, and I'll never be able to read it for the first time again.

This is very very strange. Stupid awesome Bujold.

I'm kind of half-assed still working on the HIMYM chronology while I clip for my Barney/Robin vid, but I noticed something fascinating that can't really be explained away by Future!Ted as unreliable narrator.

( Spoilers for Season 3 )

My attempts to construct a HIMYM chronology have been thwarted by the Victoria episodes.

• The invite in "The Wedding" says that Claudia and Stuart's wedding is on "Saturday, February 10th." However, in 2006, February 10th was on a Friday. Throughout the episode, the characters refer to the wedding being on Saturday, though, so it might actually be a misprint.
• Except wait a minute. Ted and Victoria get together at the end of Drumroll Please, a day after the wedding. At the beginning of Zip Zip Zip, a Monday, Marshall says the two have been in Ted's room for two days. Meaning that the wedding really was on Friday, February 10th.
• In Zip Zip Zip, Ted and Victoria agree to hold off on sex for a month. Later in the episode, Ted says that, "the 18th can't get here fast enough." March 18th? Because, uh, that's a month and a week.
• Lily and Marshall's anniversary is inexplicably in the middle of March, despite the fact that they started going out sometime in their first semester of college. I'm less ornery about this one, because lots of couples have weird anniversaries that have nothing to do with when they first began dating.

I guess all of this can be handwaved by Older Ted not having the greatest memory ever (I mean, he did displace the goat by a year), but dammit. I was hoping Bays and Thomas, with their obsession with flashbacks and continuity, would've paid slightly better attention than this.

As I've mentioned more than a few times here, I've been having a hell of a time getting my movie-reviewing groove back on. The last time I successfully completed a review was in August, which is simply ages in Internet-time. My total review output for 2009 was seven reviews (six for Classic-Horror.com and one for SciFiBlock.com), about one-third my average. I didn't write anything for C-H's annual Shocktober event, typically my writing high-tide.

So it's totally appropriate that when I finally got back on the horse, it was for a movie with a title like Black Dynamite. I went to see this at MADCAP with the visiting coltsbane and it was (mostly) awesome. My review is over at Cinema-Geek (and yes, this makes eight reviews in 2009).

Can you dig it?

I've finally had a Glee vidbunny. Not my usual style, either. *ponders*

In other news, I still need Glee icons.

I'll make a more comprehensive post on the State of the Nate soon (tonight, probably, while avoiding doing my Shocktober reviews), but I have some very good news.

I have a car

Or, more accurately, I will have a car starting Thursday. You see, my mom enters this raffle every year where the tickets are $100 each and the prizes are insanely cool. Last week she found out that, for the first time ever, she actually won something -- a new car. What kind of car doesn't matter, because she's trading it in for two used ones (one for her and one for her husband). The upshot for me is that I get her old 1999 Chevy Cavalier, which is in pretty good condition and should serve me well enough for tooling around town.

This is a great increase over my previous situation of not having a car and bumming a ride or asking people to pick me up from the light rail station every time I went to Tempe or Mesa.

Short version: Woot! CAR!