smilebackwards

In reading news, I am continuing to clip through the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian quicker than expected! I've finished books 2, 3 & 4: Post Captain, HMS Surprise, and The Mauritius Command. Now that I've gotten into them, I don't find the old-fashioned language as difficult to wade through and I may actually understand 1 in 10 of the sailing terms. Also, I am 1000% more interested since they've revealed themselves to be almost as much spy novels as naval adventure novels. I love the spy stuff. Also also the copies my library owns are lovely paperbacks that are the optimal size and texture I want for reading and the weather has been nice so I can read outside and all this combines to quality reading time. I'm now halfway though book 5 Desolation Island and it continues to be a superb series.

I haven't made a vid in awhile but I have ideas and tech update plans and in the meantime I am bidding on a vid to potentially be made for me in the womansplace auction which is raising funds for the National Network of Abortion Funds. Everyone should go check out the offers!

In TV, I watched We Are Lady Parts which was fun and adorable and now I'm mostly re-watching Parks and Rec episodes while I wait in anticipation for new shows. (Oh and also there is a new season of What We Do in the Shadows that's about 3 episodes in!) I'm going to make myself a release schedule cheat sheet since I keep forgetting and looking these up:

• Good Omens season 2: July 28th (Amazon Prime)
• Heartstopper season 2: August 3 (Netflix)
• Only Murders in the Building season 3: August 8th (Hulu)
• Ahsoka: August 23rd (Disney)
• Wheel of Time season 2: September 1 (Amazon Prime)
• Loki season 2: October 6 (Disney)

Released stuff I intend to watch at some point when I have time/various platform access: Silo and Severence on Apple, The Great on Hulu, 1899 and The Witcher on Netflix, The Terror wherever that is, Interview with the Vampire, and the new Star Trek shows.

vidukon_cardiff has been amazing so far you guys. So many great vids! This also made me make the leap to trying out Discord although I'm still figuring it out. I had two vids in the Premieres show today and people said really nice things!

Vid 1 is a fan trailer I made for Naomi Novik's Temeraire book series. DRAGONS!
AO3 | YouTube | Vimeo


Vid 2 is a Lord of the Rings vid focusing on all the gorgeous nature shots.
AO3 | YouTube | Vimeo

equinox_exchange vids are now revealed! Mine was a treat for alba17 for Black Sails. Many thanks to colls for betaing! Marking off my character study square for vid_bingo!

Title: Man or a Monster [AO3]
Rating: M
Fandom: Black Sails
Characters: Captain Flint|James McGraw
Music: Man or a Monster - Sam Tinnesz + Zayde Wolf
Length: 3:14 min
Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death
Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Guns, Swords, Blood, Pirates, Fanvids, Embedded Video
Summary: They took everything from us, and then they called me a monster.

Password: flint

Last weekend I finished clipping about 200 scenes for the equinox_exchange treat I'm working on and this week I finished the first draft! It may be the ONLY draft because iMovie is insane and doesn't let you save versions of things, but most likely I'll constantly mess with it until the deadline. I do need to reclip at least one scene and there's a couple things that don't quite fit and scenes I really wanted to put in somewhere so we shall see. Vidding is hard! My struggles include: ( cut for my complaining )

Anyway, this probably sounds like I don't like vidding but I actually really like it! It suits my pedantic soul. I have three more ideas for next ones. Not that I'll give up writing in favor of it though. I also have a WIP coming along pretty well which is always nice :)

This year one of my goals is learning to vid and I'm excited! colls has given me some quality vidding advice and guidance and here is my awesome vid_bingo card.

BAMF	guardian	friendship
happiness	FREE SPACE	sadness
character study	multifandom	recruitment

I have some ideas that are probably way too ambitious to start with so I'm going to try like 20 seconds in both iMovie and Adobe Premiere and see if I can figure out how they work and which I like. The latest song I've had on repeat is Save This City by Zayde Wolf which I feel really lends itself to Batman/Gotham (step into the darkness/if you're gonna save this city) but I don't care enough about Gotham and I don't think I have Batman Begins on streaming so maybe I'll try Daredevil. Matt Murdock certainly fits it too.