Because I'm a sick fucking freak, that's why

So, um... can anyone think of an even remotely plausible scenario that would put Dom in a... um... cage match, especially an... um... forced cage match, like in Gladiator and the Angel episode The Ring? And... uh... then Brian would have to, you know, rescue him or something?

Yes, I own my sick fucking freakiness.

Also, GIPpiness to show off this nifty icon from spasticat!

And also gratuitous pre-pimpiness for lierdumoa's new Fast and the Furious vid to Bush's The Chemicals Between Us. She let me see her beta copy yesterday and oh wow, it's gonna be so great and I can't wait to see her final tweaks. She's hoping to post it soon, so keep an eye on her LJ. If you like these boys, you will love this vid (though now I have wimpy vidder competition anxiety and realize how sad and lame my own Stripped vid is. Sigh).

Fear of presents

I have to sign checks for my dad when he takes out huge chunks o' Benjamins from his retirement account because I'm in charge of his finances and I asked him why he was getting rich so suddenly the other night. He said, "I have two daughters' birthdays coming up and Christmas" and so now I'm figuring that he'll probably give me a hefty chunk of that cash as my birthday-winter shopping festival gift like he always does, because nothing says I love you to my dad like dollar bills -- and he'd always prefer not to actually *say* I love you. And I've been planning that I would buy Final Cut Express, so even though I thought I might make a vid after a long time of not wanting to, I realized that it would be stupid to start with the b-day coming up soon and FCE likely to be in my grubby mitts soon.

But now I'm in a total tizzy -- I stopped at the Apple store the other night and tried to play with it a little and I. Am. Completely. Freaked. Out. There's no way I can use this kind of program! iMovie was made for maroons like me. I can barely figure out how to use iMovie for god's sake. I didn't understand any of it, least of all how to import clips -- with iMovie you point at a button and go click and it puts it right there in a nice little section of the window and you can see the clip and everything is hunky dory for a stupid person. Stupid people like things they can see -- witness Denny's and IHOP menus, witness Ikea furniture instruction booklets where the text is tiny and the pictures are huge. Stupid people NEED to have everything spelled out for them and visually prepared for them. We are the people for whom peanut packages have warnings printed on them that say, "May contain peanuts."

All these people are like, oh Final Cut, it's so easy. Bitches! Arrogant smart competent bitches! People who get computer programs should never ever be allowed to say shit like that. And I have no idea how I can learn to do this in time for Escapade -- at first I thought I should do my LFN vid, but then I thought, eh, I have to do that vid for the con and who knows what the deadline will be this year (I sure don't! So much for being on the vid com!), so I better get cracking. But OMG the anguish.

Last year my dad bought me a camcorder with passthrough so I could finally hook all my shit up and run my tapes through to the computer. Loved it, but there're still tons of features on the camcorder that I cannot figure out and so it sits here, an extremely lovely, modern, multifunctional toy that essentially does nothing more than hook up my VCR and DVD player to my computer for vidding. I haven't turned it on in months.

I want to be able to do more with my vids than I can. I'm tired of always being unable to do the things I see in my head (of course, when I do do the things I see in my head, like in Valentine Heart, people think they're mistakes and they are all messed up on the TV screen because iDVD can't handle them) after years of working on VCRs. But Final Cut Express is scary. I wouldn't even want to touch Pro at this point. They don't even have any good books at the library about the newer edition, and these days manuals are pretty much useless "help" files.

I really want this present, but I don't want it at the same time. I want to vid what I imagine in my mind, but... I don't know if I can ever learn to use this scary program. Skeeeeery. I am skeered.