Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

On Thursday I broke one of my personal rules for continued sanity and got into a heated debate on the Internet. It was pointless and mainly fueled by the fact that all involved parties were/are extremely passionate about the subject of contention (Festivids), but held strikingly different viewpoints on what that entailed.

The reason I don't get into fights on the Internet (or really, arguments at all) is that I spend the next two weeks living in an echo of the debate, considering how I could have responded better or more cuttingly or more kindly or when I could have extricated myself earlier.

To speed the process, I declared a Festivids-free weekend. Both the roommate and the spouse were instructed to gently flick me if I started talking about Festivids and to escalate the response if I didn't relent. Only one flick happened, thankfully.

Instead, I spent the weekend doing some LEGO scale-building experiments, playing through LEGO Dimensions (which is becoming a $$$ suck), and rewatching Grey's Anatomy with jmtorres. Last night, echan and I went to the Pasadena Symphony for Dvorak's "From the New World", which was lovely and fun. It's nice to expand your horizons sometimes.

I am very much looking forward to Festivids and I hope the rest of you are as well.

Vid Title: Invincible
Vidders: echan and jetpack_monkey
Length: 03:33
Song: Pat Benatar - Invincible
Source: Tank Girl (1994)
Warnings: Some super-quick clips, violence, Ice-T as a giant kangaroo-man.

Summary: We will be invincible.

Password: rippers


Download: 32.8MB MP4 file (right/ctrl-click, "Save link as...")

Notes: This is not a new vid. I made it between December 2010 and March 2011, in collaboration with my spouse echan. It was a Christmas present (ultimately belated) for my sister, whose favorite movie of all time is Tank Girl.

This was an incredibly difficult vid to make. I had just moved to Los Angeles and my laptop crashed. I had it fixed, but Final Cut no longer recognized my hardware and asked for the license key (which was in a box in Phoenix still). So I had to download the thirty day free trial of Premiere, a program which barely worked on my laptop. I started the vid there, but was struggling (partially with the slowness of the program, partially with the new workflow, but mostly with the realization that I wasn't a big fan of Tank Girl). Thankfully, echan came in and laid down the basic structure of the vid. Eventually the thirty day trial expired and I was able to get Final Cut up and running again, so I had to lay down an export of my Premiere project into Final Cut and then tweaked and poked at it until it was in final form.

The end result is not something I'm completely satisfied with (even though my sister adores it), so I held off on releasing it properly (it does show up on the 2011 Apocalypse West reel). However, with the launch of my new vidding website, I decided to just post the damn thing. Even if it's not my best vid, there's some good parts in it and I know that a lot of my friends love Tank Girl. So here you go!

So I'm prevented from playing any farther through Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I'm currently ahead of where echan is in the game and ze is a spoilerphobe. Every time ze comes into the room and there's plot (and I'm at a point where it's almost all plot or plot-adjacent), hands go to ears and ze goes "Lalalalala." If I remember to warn zir, which I rarely do.

So I have to wait for Echan to catch up.

Echan, I should mention, is a slow, methodical player in a game that rewards slow, methodical players.

This wouldn't really be a problem if the game wasn't so damn good. I kind of feel like I'm in the middle of a cyberpunk novel. 

The Deus Ex series: consuming my every waking, non-working minute for the second time in seven years. Dammit.

So I've been a terrible DW/LJ person lately. Sorry about that. I've tried to start a few entries, but they were quickly nixed because I either didn't have a lot to say or I was just whining about crap.

Today I kind of want to document my experiences with something that both affects me and has no bearing on reality (beyond what has always been true).

Recently, my spouse echan  came out as gender-neutral. I haven't talked about it a lot here because, A) I haven't been talking about anything and B) it's a complete non-issue and issue wrapped into a paradox ball.

It's mostly in the language, honestly. I don't have a wife, I have a spouse. It's "ze" not "she", "zir" not "her", etc. I'm better at rejiggering my nouns than my pronouns. Still, there are times when my sentences end rather lamely when I found that they were driving towards a gender-specific term like "girl" or "lady" (and the sentences really don't work with "person" instead -- this whole thing has been a grand lesson in how unconsciously I use language to sort out gender-specific sorts of phrasings). Also, lots of epic backtracking after letting slip the dogs of gender-specific speech.

I find that some part of me -- some very stupid part of me -- is a little put out by the fact that I'm not paired with a woman anymore. I think this is the part that's still damaged by all the gay-bashing I received in high school when I wasn't gay*. I am not proud of this part of my reaction. I simply note it because I'm trying to be honest about this experience.

I am, however, paired with an Echan and that's ultimately the most important thing to me. I'm actually a little surprised about how much zir coming out doesn't actually matter, except as far as I'm happy ze's found a way of self-identifying that ze is pleased with. Is ze the person I fell in love with? Yes. Has anything fundamentally changed about zir? No. Ze's exactly the same person I married, has all the qualities I fell in love with (and the ones that I find occasionally annoying).  I find zir just as attractive and ze still thinks I'm hot.

When Echan woke me up to come out to me, I poked my head up and said, roughly, "Not really surprised. Still my Echan." This is the truest part of the experience. Echan is as Echan always was. Ze's just putting a name to it now.

* After Echan came out, I did have a little internal discussion about my sexuality and found that I actually didn't give a fuck who I was attracted to (male, female, neither or both) beyond Echan. So that was interesting.

So I had Social Fail at the July 4th party I went to, which I feel guilty about, so I'm taking a cue from qkellie and listing some stuff that makes me happy.

• Having an apparently telepathic connection with my wife, wherein we are already in agreement on propositions that neither of us have brought up (i.e. whether to leave our stuff in boxes after the recent fiasco).
• The best coffee in the Phoenix area is a flight of stairs away from my apartment.
• Classic-Horror.com is back and better than ever.
• Babylon 5 has been rocking more awesome into my world over the past month (just four episodes left in Season 4).
• I have great friends who I love and trust.
• My niece and I have a mutual admiration society going. She thinks I'm the bee's knees, man.
• Doctor Who Season 5. I wasn't sure about it at first (and I'm still not 100% on Matt Smith), but Moffat makes me go, "Rusty who?"
• Mandatory daily cuddles. 
• Being a member of the horror blogging community. These are some of the most intelligent, friendly, and down-to-earth people I've ever dealt with.
• Watching "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers" (an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre) for the first time in many, many years. It stars Peter MacNicol, Christopher Lee, David Warner, and Frank Zappa. Narration by Vincent Price. Fun times and just as delightful as I remember it being when I was much shorter.