Hair clumps
Sep. 22nd, 2004 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynHad a very sad conversation with Evil Twin last night, who broke down into sobs on the phone because her hair has started falling out. I totally get how traumatic it must be for anyone, but especially for someone who is very vain and who just finished growing her hair out to shoulder length, finally getting it to the length she wanted. But I also think she will look good bald -- she got all the chin in the team, and has a strong jaw and actual cheekbones, a really clearly defined nose, and an actual forehead instead of big blank empty billboard-sized one like me. My big pudgy blancmange of a face would not look good without hair. Though I'm not going to tell her that. This is the first time she's really lost it; she told me about the panic attack and how overwhelmed she was the day she had to go cut off all her hair (they recommend that so the loss isn't so traumatic) and how she couldn't go get fitted for the wig because she freaked out. But I haven't actually experienced her having a meltdown and I felt so hopeless and helpless on the phone.
I know I will get to see her tomorrow night if nothing happens with my flight, but I still feel so useless and stupid when she's collapsing from the weight of the Brave Face. I fucking hate the Brave Face and the way everyone expects you to be all noble suffering and think positivey. I'm sick of the Brave Face and the expectation that people who have terminal illnesses are supposed to be models of strength and grace. It makes me angry that people expect victims of illnesses to be stalwart and strong. As Calamity Jane would say on Deadwood, Be fucked. Because people deserve to feel sorry for themselves and have breakdowns every once in a while. I liked that episode of Without a Trace last year, where Martin's aunt had cancer and was tired of wearing the Brave Face and holding everyone up with her Noble Acceptance of Fate. Feh.
I tried to amuse her by telling her I was tearing my hair out in sympathy with my old song video digitizing project. At least it got a tiny laugh out of her.
I'm a little over halfway done with the project to digitize and put on DVD my old La Femme Nikita vids and most of the X-Files vids. It's been interesting, when I'm not actually tearing my hair out or sniveling in frustration. I've learned a few things:
1. I've made a lot of vids. I mean, a lot. These aren't even encompassing my pre-button pushing vids, where I just sat on the couch and helped pick clips, or vids I've made in other fandoms (of which there are many many many).
2. I don't think there's a single vid in there that people really remember much or hold to their breast with deep abiding love. Not the way others make vids that are treasured and remembered. I know part of it is that I was always making vids to less popular fandoms (evil het! sssss). And part of it is the depressing thing, because people have complained that most of my vids are depressing and they don't like that. But damn, that's a lot of vid time that's just kind of washed out to sea! The XF audience has moved on, and there never was much of an audience for LFN, since it's such a feral fandom completely ignorant of vids. It's why I wonder why I'm doing something so hair-pullingly annoying when there's essentially no real audience for these ancient artifacts. I guess it's more about preserving a part of my own history, which somehow seems peculiarly egotistical.
3. Putting the songs in is the hellish part. It's totally a breeze to capture the original source (if painful, because many of my earliest vids I don't have original masters of, and the quality is really fucked) for me with my pass through and the editing deck, but when I used songs that I originally had edited onto tape or something, it becomes a total bitch. I also can't match many of the fadeouts because we often just turned down the volume, and that precipitate drop in sound is hard to match on the computer (i.e., it's not as easy to mimic bad technology with good tech!).
It's also been a total trip down memory lane, both good and bad. I haven't watched many of these vids in years and years. So all these feelings come flooding back -- remembering![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sherrold teaching me how to push the editing deck buttons on Only Happy When it Rains, the great waste video* we had, how she erased the vid accidentally but was too afraid to tell me! All the endless hours at Nicole's house, eating bad food and drinking gallons of soda pop. Or my first vid driving the decks, As Girls Go, a kind of follow the actor vid for David Duchovny (girly Mulder, Dennis/Denise on Twim Peaks, etc.). The first vid I made on my own editing deck in my own house, I Am a Rock, and how hard it was to wire my setup... all this stuff comes back to me, good and bad, and it's so strange because I haven't thought of it in so long.
I think out of all the vids, the closest one to being "remembered" was the first vid I ever made on my own, and it happened more by accident than design, There's No Way Out of Here. I remember so clearly the crazy, loud reaction to it at the Escapade show I brought it to, and how stunned I was that people liked it. Last year,the_shoshanna was talking about how we should have a show at Vividcon for our first vids, so that vidders could show how much they learned and their awkward first steps and feel better about early-days vids, and I said, Well, No Way Out was my first vid alone... and we howled, because the truth is, I know I'll never make anything that good again. In some ways, I wonder if everything that makes me so unhappy about vidding is because I know I shot my wad early, to be vulgar, and can never achieve that success again.
And I remember how angry some people were with me that I was wrecking the Media Cannibals -- I had het fandoms, I was using non-vidding music, blah blah. I grew very flinchy over time, very fan-misanthropic. These days I see people congratulating online vidders for using envelope-pushing music (rap, etc.), and it annoys me. Because a) online vidders are the only ones who count, you know, and b) where were these people when I was getting attacked for using a simple ethereal electronica song like Fall in the Light? I wish they'd been around, because at the time I felt like checking under my shirt to see if I was bleeding from the scratch wounds. "That's not vidding music" was one of the more polite ways someone put it; "it's a tone poem and I don't get tone poems" was probably the nicest comment. There were a handful of people who seemed to get it and supported it, but now, having to really do a lot of editing on Fall in the Light again and watching it a bunch of times, I feel like the vid is so quaint and insignificant; the idea that it would provoke people to say vicious things to me is so odd. I still love the vid dearly, maybe even more for having not seen it in so long, but it hardly seems provocative now.
And I sympathize so much with people likesockkpuppett, watching a vid they made a few years ago to an unusual song turn up every five minutes on the vidder LJ "I just did [the 5,000th] vid to Gary Jules's Mad World! Go watch!" Back in the day, I remember our Only Happy When it Rains being the single vid for that song around; now there are probably 3,000 done by all the people who haven't used up all the Evanescence songs. No one pays attention to anything that's happened before. It has the strange effect of making vids I once felt really pleased with turn into kind of a bore -- not because the vid itself is bad (I still just love our Only Happy), but because the music's been ground into the dirt by so many people since then, often in bad vids, that the luster of our own creation has worn off. This is one of the odder things about this project that I've discovered. It isn't so much the song reuse issue that I'm discussing here, but the effect of seeing something you did become so ubiquitous that it loses its freshness or vibrancy.
Now that I've gotten to the place where I'm using my own masters for the digitizing process, it's going faster and the video quality is better, but it's still a lengthy process to get it all together. Sound is the hardest part of the thing, because it doesn't come across through to the computer as well as the video, so you want to replace it. Fortunately I kept some of the edited music (on a computer! At the time, believe it or not, that was a Big Deal), and never got rid of CDs I bought only for those songs (we didn't have kazaa in my day!). But tape stretch and tape speeds of multiple decks makes it really challenging. Fall in the Light was the worst, but a couple of others are still off by hair-seconds; no one will likely notice, but it bugs me.
It's funny, too, how fond I am of the vids that never went anywhere. For all the crap I took, Fall in the Light is still maybe my favorite, and I love Writing Notes, an LFN vid that I don't think anyone has ever even paid attention to! I made it so many years ago, and wonder now what it would have been like to be able to include subsequent seasons of LFN. (Though I have the last laugh on Fall -- CSI: Miami used it at the end of the episode where they introduced the new NY-set series! Ha ha, I was there first!) I wonder if other vidders feel that way about their runt of the litter babies -- that they love the most ignored or least-appreciated vids the most, sometimes.
I guess it's been good to get away from making new vids for a while and just concentrate on preserving at least a little of my history, even if it's just for me in the end. They may not be as sophisticated as even my little iMovie can make, and they may betray my baby steps in vidding (even though I was learning from a Master), and they may seem awkward and old-fashioned as hell to a modern day audience expecting cool effects and super fast edits, but I do find the trip they take me along memory lane to be an enlightening one. At the very least, sometimes I can just sit back and go, man, I did that? On decks? Wow, I'm better than I realize!
* Waste video was the video track you used to lay down your song. The music used one of the stereo tracks, and the other track was used by your insert edits for your vid. To get those tracks, you taped over waste video from TV or another VCR, and then blew out the second track with your shiny new edits. We often had hilarious, wonderful waste video -- on Only Happy, we had a stupid Z-grade kung fu movie that was hysterically timed to the song; the HL vidders once got a nature program with squid that seemed to fit the song perfectly. And it was due to waste video of the Tombstone DVD that Jo and I discovered it fit for Never Left, our Tombstone vid on Don't Fight in the Snow.
I know I will get to see her tomorrow night if nothing happens with my flight, but I still feel so useless and stupid when she's collapsing from the weight of the Brave Face. I fucking hate the Brave Face and the way everyone expects you to be all noble suffering and think positivey. I'm sick of the Brave Face and the expectation that people who have terminal illnesses are supposed to be models of strength and grace. It makes me angry that people expect victims of illnesses to be stalwart and strong. As Calamity Jane would say on Deadwood, Be fucked. Because people deserve to feel sorry for themselves and have breakdowns every once in a while. I liked that episode of Without a Trace last year, where Martin's aunt had cancer and was tired of wearing the Brave Face and holding everyone up with her Noble Acceptance of Fate. Feh.
I tried to amuse her by telling her I was tearing my hair out in sympathy with my old song video digitizing project. At least it got a tiny laugh out of her.
I'm a little over halfway done with the project to digitize and put on DVD my old La Femme Nikita vids and most of the X-Files vids. It's been interesting, when I'm not actually tearing my hair out or sniveling in frustration. I've learned a few things:
1. I've made a lot of vids. I mean, a lot. These aren't even encompassing my pre-button pushing vids, where I just sat on the couch and helped pick clips, or vids I've made in other fandoms (of which there are many many many).
2. I don't think there's a single vid in there that people really remember much or hold to their breast with deep abiding love. Not the way others make vids that are treasured and remembered. I know part of it is that I was always making vids to less popular fandoms (evil het! sssss). And part of it is the depressing thing, because people have complained that most of my vids are depressing and they don't like that. But damn, that's a lot of vid time that's just kind of washed out to sea! The XF audience has moved on, and there never was much of an audience for LFN, since it's such a feral fandom completely ignorant of vids. It's why I wonder why I'm doing something so hair-pullingly annoying when there's essentially no real audience for these ancient artifacts. I guess it's more about preserving a part of my own history, which somehow seems peculiarly egotistical.
3. Putting the songs in is the hellish part. It's totally a breeze to capture the original source (if painful, because many of my earliest vids I don't have original masters of, and the quality is really fucked) for me with my pass through and the editing deck, but when I used songs that I originally had edited onto tape or something, it becomes a total bitch. I also can't match many of the fadeouts because we often just turned down the volume, and that precipitate drop in sound is hard to match on the computer (i.e., it's not as easy to mimic bad technology with good tech!).
It's also been a total trip down memory lane, both good and bad. I haven't watched many of these vids in years and years. So all these feelings come flooding back -- remembering
sherrold teaching me how to push the editing deck buttons on Only Happy When it Rains, the great waste video* we had, how she erased the vid accidentally but was too afraid to tell me! All the endless hours at Nicole's house, eating bad food and drinking gallons of soda pop. Or my first vid driving the decks, As Girls Go, a kind of follow the actor vid for David Duchovny (girly Mulder, Dennis/Denise on Twim Peaks, etc.). The first vid I made on my own editing deck in my own house, I Am a Rock, and how hard it was to wire my setup... all this stuff comes back to me, good and bad, and it's so strange because I haven't thought of it in so long.I think out of all the vids, the closest one to being "remembered" was the first vid I ever made on my own, and it happened more by accident than design, There's No Way Out of Here. I remember so clearly the crazy, loud reaction to it at the Escapade show I brought it to, and how stunned I was that people liked it. Last year,
the_shoshanna was talking about how we should have a show at Vividcon for our first vids, so that vidders could show how much they learned and their awkward first steps and feel better about early-days vids, and I said, Well, No Way Out was my first vid alone... and we howled, because the truth is, I know I'll never make anything that good again. In some ways, I wonder if everything that makes me so unhappy about vidding is because I know I shot my wad early, to be vulgar, and can never achieve that success again. And I remember how angry some people were with me that I was wrecking the Media Cannibals -- I had het fandoms, I was using non-vidding music, blah blah. I grew very flinchy over time, very fan-misanthropic. These days I see people congratulating online vidders for using envelope-pushing music (rap, etc.), and it annoys me. Because a) online vidders are the only ones who count, you know, and b) where were these people when I was getting attacked for using a simple ethereal electronica song like Fall in the Light? I wish they'd been around, because at the time I felt like checking under my shirt to see if I was bleeding from the scratch wounds. "That's not vidding music" was one of the more polite ways someone put it; "it's a tone poem and I don't get tone poems" was probably the nicest comment. There were a handful of people who seemed to get it and supported it, but now, having to really do a lot of editing on Fall in the Light again and watching it a bunch of times, I feel like the vid is so quaint and insignificant; the idea that it would provoke people to say vicious things to me is so odd. I still love the vid dearly, maybe even more for having not seen it in so long, but it hardly seems provocative now.
And I sympathize so much with people like
sockkpuppett, watching a vid they made a few years ago to an unusual song turn up every five minutes on the vidder LJ "I just did [the 5,000th] vid to Gary Jules's Mad World! Go watch!" Back in the day, I remember our Only Happy When it Rains being the single vid for that song around; now there are probably 3,000 done by all the people who haven't used up all the Evanescence songs. No one pays attention to anything that's happened before. It has the strange effect of making vids I once felt really pleased with turn into kind of a bore -- not because the vid itself is bad (I still just love our Only Happy), but because the music's been ground into the dirt by so many people since then, often in bad vids, that the luster of our own creation has worn off. This is one of the odder things about this project that I've discovered. It isn't so much the song reuse issue that I'm discussing here, but the effect of seeing something you did become so ubiquitous that it loses its freshness or vibrancy.Now that I've gotten to the place where I'm using my own masters for the digitizing process, it's going faster and the video quality is better, but it's still a lengthy process to get it all together. Sound is the hardest part of the thing, because it doesn't come across through to the computer as well as the video, so you want to replace it. Fortunately I kept some of the edited music (on a computer! At the time, believe it or not, that was a Big Deal), and never got rid of CDs I bought only for those songs (we didn't have kazaa in my day!). But tape stretch and tape speeds of multiple decks makes it really challenging. Fall in the Light was the worst, but a couple of others are still off by hair-seconds; no one will likely notice, but it bugs me.
It's funny, too, how fond I am of the vids that never went anywhere. For all the crap I took, Fall in the Light is still maybe my favorite, and I love Writing Notes, an LFN vid that I don't think anyone has ever even paid attention to! I made it so many years ago, and wonder now what it would have been like to be able to include subsequent seasons of LFN. (Though I have the last laugh on Fall -- CSI: Miami used it at the end of the episode where they introduced the new NY-set series! Ha ha, I was there first!) I wonder if other vidders feel that way about their runt of the litter babies -- that they love the most ignored or least-appreciated vids the most, sometimes.
I guess it's been good to get away from making new vids for a while and just concentrate on preserving at least a little of my history, even if it's just for me in the end. They may not be as sophisticated as even my little iMovie can make, and they may betray my baby steps in vidding (even though I was learning from a Master), and they may seem awkward and old-fashioned as hell to a modern day audience expecting cool effects and super fast edits, but I do find the trip they take me along memory lane to be an enlightening one. At the very least, sometimes I can just sit back and go, man, I did that? On decks? Wow, I'm better than I realize!
* Waste video was the video track you used to lay down your song. The music used one of the stereo tracks, and the other track was used by your insert edits for your vid. To get those tracks, you taped over waste video from TV or another VCR, and then blew out the second track with your shiny new edits. We often had hilarious, wonderful waste video -- on Only Happy, we had a stupid Z-grade kung fu movie that was hysterically timed to the song; the HL vidders once got a nature program with squid that seemed to fit the song perfectly. And it was due to waste video of the Tombstone DVD that Jo and I discovered it fit for Never Left, our Tombstone vid on Don't Fight in the Snow.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 11:52 am (UTC)I'm thinking good thoughts for you and your 'evil twin' :) and I think you are holding up very well under the circumstances.
Take care. ::hugs::
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 12:00 pm (UTC)I remember really loving it, actually, and also being baffled as to how people did that. I was also kind of freaked-out by the time involvement and the familiarity with source that it implied, which amuses me now because that's still the thing that boggles my mind the most about vidding. I had no idea that was yours. Thank you for that. I had no way of knowing, at the time, that I was starting down a long and strange road... :-)
On an entirely unrelated note, you & your sister continue to be in my thoughts and prayers.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:22 pm (UTC)And yeah, time involvement and source knowledge... those were really huge keys to VCR vidding. It was a much longer process on the back end -- charting your lyrics with clip ideas, swapping out tapes... and then there were the distractions. I can't count how many hours we lost to staring lustfully at our BSOs on the screen and forgetting that we were looking for clips!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 12:27 pm (UTC)Sounds like your project is fun - and it's great that we have the technology now to preserve these things more effectively. Is what you're doing with your LFN and XF vids the same thing you intend to do with A Fire Is Burning? Hmmm, I suppose digitizing could mean simply capturing analog VHS tape to your HD and then converting the files to MPG (if you didn't capture in MPG) and authoring a DVD, whereas remastering seems to imply something more - maybe actually re-creating the vid? That's something I can't wait to see!
Recently I've been watching the old MC vids (focusing on Pros, of course :-), some for the first time, and loving many of them - some of them just blow me away. I'm endlessly impressed and amazed by the sheer magnitude of talent (I can't know whether you're "better than you realize," but I do know that you are incredibly good!). And it's funny, special effects can be very cool, there's no doubt, yet many of the older vids without those effects are the ones that move me the most and stick with me the longest. I think preserving those is incredibly important - it'd be such a loss to fandom if the great old VHS vids were to disappear (as I know many of them have already). I have friends who have been in fandom far longer than I, some with amazing vid tape collections, and occasionally I resolve to transfer them to DVD just to preserve them, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe one day ...
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:28 pm (UTC)Yes, it's the latter. What we're planning to do for Fire is to completely remaster the vid with the DVD source and on a computer. All I'm doing with the LFN/XF vids is to dump them into my computer, throw in the music, and have a digital file of the vid. I think I might go mad if I had to remaster them. I think off and on about remastering No Way Out just because it's the only known vid, but then I get hives and stop. ;-)
I think remastering Fire is going to be relatively painless, in that even though Alex and I have lost a lot of our Pros source databse brain cells, we managed to identify all of the clips and where they came from. But I doubt we all want to remaster all of the Pros vids. Fire is so... special in so many ways. Now that we can do faster edits even, though, I wonder if we'll be tempted to try to cram in more clips.
I heard a rumor that someone had put our old tapes on a DVD. I've never seen it nor had anyone tell me if it's true. I wish I knew. I can't really do a whole tape myself, but it would be nice to know if those things are safe and not rotting further.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-30 01:18 pm (UTC)But first off, happy (a bit belated!) birthday. Sounds like it was a good one!
And about the vids ... I actually have put all the old MC tapes onto DVD. I did it just for my own use - I couldn't get copies of the earlier ones from you guys, so I borrowed them to copy, but I don't have VCR-to-VCR dubbing capacity, whereas I can capture to HD and author DVDs, and also I wanted to be able to play them on my computer, which I can only do with DVDs, so I just did it that way instead.
Obviously the quality is no better than my source, and particularly for MC 2 I think I must have had a pretty bad copy, because lots of those didn't come out so well (including Fire!) even compared with the other MC tapes. (I had a very hard time finding MC 2 - only one of my many local fannish friends had it, whereas many of them had the other tapes, I don't know why - and that was a bummer, because 2 has some of my favorites on it, including Fire and Tender Comrade - I've been on a mission to find that Billy Bragg album on CD). I didn't bother capturing to avi, which might have given me slightly better quality; I just captured to mpg. So it definitely doesn't look like the vids made from the DVDs, but they're all there.
Anyway, I obviously didn't intend to do anything with those DVDs other than watch them (and I hope I didn't violate some kind of fannish ethic by doing this), but if you're at all interested in copies I'd *gladly* make them for you, and if you have better master tapes that you'd like me to make DVDs from I'd happily do that for you too - I have a 240G HD and about 8 million pieces of video equipment and software for just this purpose :-D
(I also seem to recall that at Vividcon I promised that I'd make you a copy of the DVDs, which I've converted to NTSC and removed region protection from - am I remembering right? It's all a blur ...)
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 12:49 pm (UTC)I don't think there's a single vid in there that people really remember much or hold to their breast with deep abiding love.
*SO* not true! Fall in the Light, There's No Way Out of Here, and Only Happy When It Rains are some of my favorite vids *ever*! The first two still make me bawl my eyes out.
And I sympathize so much with people like sockkpuppett, watching a vid they made a few years ago to an unusual song turn up every five minutes on the vidder LJ "I just did [the 5,000th] vid to Gary Jules's Mad World! Go watch!"
I sympathize because of the amount of repetition, but I wouldn't call that song unusual, really. Tears for Fears released Mad World in '83 (I had it on vinyl), so a lot of people already knew it when it showed up in Donnie Darko, which in turn became a cult phenomenon, and got Gary Jules' version massive airplay. So, in my mind, the repetition was sort of inevitable. Oh, and it was just played at the end of the latest Medical Investigation ep, just like CSI: Miami played Fall in the Light. They keep ripping us off!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:34 pm (UTC)I think at the time that Lum made Mad World, though, few people had seen Donnie Darko and it hadn't quite hit full cult status yet. I was stunned when I mentioned the original to the Cannibals and no one knew it -- they didn't know the original at all. And Jules's version wasn't released to radio till fairly recently, and I think that's the big problem -- I heard an interview with him talking about that, about the long road to having a "hit" three years after he did it. But now that it is a radio hit, everyone in the world is doing a vid to it.
I mean, I don't even want to search on how many vids there must be to Fragile now; I know of three at least. They don't lessen the impact of yours for me, but the odd thing is that other versions of Only Happy tend to diminish my interest in my own vid. Weird how that works, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 04:18 pm (UTC)Hey, stop that, now!
I think at the time that Lum made Mad World, though, few people had seen Donnie Darko and it hadn't quite hit full cult status yet.
Sadly, I was one of those people, and of course as soon as I heard that version I wanted to vid it. The next thing I knew, Lum was vidding it, and then the whole freaking world. So, even if I still did mine, I'd be flayed alive *and* I'd look like a lameass copycat. Feh.
I mean, I don't even want to search on how many vids there must be to Fragile now; I know of three at least.
I've seen more than that, myself, and since I don't watch online vids, there are probably more. Same with Strong Enough.
They don't lessen the impact of yours for me
Well, thanks. It never made much of an impact with anyone, but that's nothing new.
but the odd thing is that other versions of Only Happy tend to diminish my interest in my own vid. Weird how that works, isn't it?
No, I know what you mean. It's just one of the sucky effects of there being 8 billion vidders these days. Songs get vidded to death, to the point where they start turning you off, even if you sort of introduced the song to fandom in the first place.
To be honest, it's hard for me to watch a lot of my older vids. And no way would I ever show my first vid! God, that would be painful beyond anything I could tolerate.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:06 pm (UTC)See, I knew that had to have happened with Mad World. I just posted a vid rec from someone else's LJ--two Harry Potter vids to that song. I'm glad I'm not in vidding because much more exposure than that would drive me bugnuts. I can imagine how you feel going back over old vids and noting that lost freshness.
*Hugs* to you and your sister. I sympathize with her about being vain over hair. That's the only decent feature I've got, not that anyone remarks on it. If I lost mine I'd have nothing. I don't know if it would be a comfort to her, but maybe you can tell her that I kinda get where she's coming from. Except, y'know, I don't have cancer. *Wince*
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:38 pm (UTC)Yeah, a lot of people mention that it doesn't matter if 5,000 people do a vid to the same song if they're in different fandoms, but I think so many people are multifanual that that's a spurious contention. Way too many people will get overdosed on just the concept, no matter the fandom. Makes me want to run away.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:47 pm (UTC)My reaction to those Mad World recs was the same, and I've *never* seen a vid to Mad World. It's just that I know how much people like it as the slow, gives-you-shivers song. I guess it's safe for me to say that if I've heard it on the radio more than three times, it's too obvious of a choice. That's what I enjoy about your vids...I'm utterly amazed at your range in music taste. Most of the time I've never heard of the artist, much less the song.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 01:38 pm (UTC)I really agree. And maybe when you are there with her, she may feel like she can. Leave you to be the brave and strong one and let her just fall apart a bit.
You know you have my good thoughts and my support and if you feel the need to just vent a bit, you know where to find me.
Much love *hugs*
no subject
Date: 2004-09-22 02:29 pm (UTC)I'm glad that you're going to see your sister. I hate Brave Face. I hate it when sick people do it, and I hate it even more when other people expect it from the sick. I find it exhausting. I can't imagine how hard it must be for someone like your sister.
Just saying....
Take care of you. Lots of us out here care about you. Not the vidder, or the writer, but you. And that includes me.
'kay?
Brave face?
Date: 2004-09-22 06:50 pm (UTC)I confess that I now fear I've been guilty of preaching "brave-face" which, god knows, I like to think I would never do. Acknowledging the suckiness of what is going on is part of surviving the whole chemo/radiation business. I think I'm a big proponent of "fuck-this-face." I'm sorry your sister is so panicked about the hair-loss and I'm sure that you'll be able to offer her some comfort, even if it's just pointing out that she looks bitchin' bald. Personally, I found the wig-option more distressing than being bald but whatever works for your sister is the way for her to go (duh). S'anyway, I hope you both survive the experience. -em
Re: Brave face?
Date: 2004-09-22 07:04 pm (UTC)I think I'd probably go for scarves, myself. And the wigs are so bleeping expensive! Hers is going to be $260. Criminy! And she can't even get it until she loses all her hair because they fit it close to the head or something. I'm going to try to see what we're looking at when I'm down there. I'd need a head cover, but she can get away without it, I think, but I know she needs the safety. I think the hair thing isn't even about the hair as much as it is that it's finally really happening to her. Before, she looked in the mirror and couldn't tell that she'd had her innards taken out and was having chemo. Now she can see that she Has Cancer. I think it's finally really hitting her.
no subject
Date: 2004-09-23 04:01 pm (UTC)All the best for your sister. I have no idea what to say, but rest assured she and you are in my thoughts. & :-/
I know part of it is that I was always making vids to less popular fandoms (evil het! sssss).
Tsk, tsk.
It sounds silly, but you know what? At least you can say you followed your heart and not the herd.