somniloquence

Does anyone out there in flistland have any Justified story rec links they could point me to? I'd really like to read something in the fandom, but there's hardly anything on AO3 and what's there is lousy, and I really don't want to go to ff.net. I'm looking for something that's Raylan-centric, and well written. Even people's links pages who I know are fans are completely devoid of fic recs. Surely someone somewhere must have written something decent?

Spent the day today with lovely people watching Mag 7 at sdwolfpup's house. She even got us all sheriff's badges and fake moustaches to wear. We watched Ghosts of the Confederacy (the pilot movie), One Day Out West, Working Girls, and for brynnmck, the ep with her beloved Carl Lumbly playing Nathan's dad. It was a lot of fun to see the series through new viewers' eyes, and to watch it again after such a long time of not seeing it. I still love that show so very much. I miss having people to share the fandom with, so it was fun to have some people enjoy it and want to see more. I really need more new friends. There's nothing like sharing a fandom with people and spending time with them enjoying it.

A day I never thought I would see happen: My Magnificent Seven first season DVDs are right here in my cold little hands. Mag 7. DVDs. I never thought they would ever, ever release these. I don't even care that it's likely to be shabby treatment (double sided discs, no extras, nothing). I don't even care that it's clear the worst graphic designers in the world work for MGM (wait till you see the slipcase design: Vin's head looks like it's sprouting out of Chris's shoulder; gold type on a gold and white background, squeezed into a fakey condense so you can't read it; Buck looks like he's resting his head on JD's shoulder -- though I imagine that last one will make klia very happy!).

Why oh why isn't work over yet?

You can bet your saddle blanket I'll do a review of the set when I can.

I thought I'd try to do a non-horrible death post for a change and say something fannish.

The reception to my Magnificent 7 vid In a Big Country surprised me a lot, both when it premiered at the con and when I put it up online. It seemed to pique the interest of a lot of people who normally wouldn't give cowboys in love a fightin' chance. Coupled with the fact that Showtime Extreme is currently showing the episodes uncut and unbugged, I think the fandom is poised for a little bit of an uplift. Before, anyone getting into it through word of mouth or fanfic had an awfully hard time getting hold of the 23 hours available (a pilot movie and 21 subsequent episodes, spread over two "seasons" because CBS cancelled it halfway through its first season, but it was brought back by a successful fan campaign, whereupon CBS promptly cancelled it again without airing the final four episodes that TNT, before it became Spike TV, did air with their horrible, horrible station ID bugs and all cut up). When they could get tapes, they were second or third gen, blurry and dark, or people bought the terrible DVDs that someone is selling, where they are compressed, blown up to full screen size, and then crammed on a disc with so many other eps that they are nearly unwatchable. So it's been a difficult fandom to pimp. Hallmark channel showed them a few years ago, but their scheduling was weirdly unreliable, and some eps were drastically cut, often in the slashiest places, or then not touched at all, but they changed schedules without alerting TiVo, so one of the most pivotal eps never repeated.

I'm hopeful that with the Showtime airings making good copies available, people can discover this wonderful series -- and hope they will show up on the torrent sites, if people don't have someone who can record the Showtime eps for them. The ones I've seen so far look stunning -- the show was filmed using natural light, which is very unusual, so the darks often didn't register well previously, but these airings have restored the look of the show quite well, I think. I'm also hearing things I've never been able to hear before. Like a lot of shows on CBS at the time, Mag 7 was made with a very clean-cut, family audience in mind, so there are a number of the usual Western cliches. But the show really veered away from that in many respects to create a more realistic feeling about what things were like, and they got a number of historical details right that I really valued (being someone who really loves to research the old West). I heard a couple people disparage the show at Escapade as being not bad, but not good, but I disagree -- I think it was frequently great, and had some good solid writing from people who knew their characters well (no mean feat for seven main characters and a couple of recurring secondary characters). The final four eps that CBS never aired, in fact, were superb, and were taking the show to a very dark, very adult place that was everything I could have hoped for.

I really enjoyed killabeez's posts about essential Highlander episodes, and I got to thinking after someone mentioned again how the vid had got them interested in seeing it, what episodes would I consider mandatory watching to be pimped or to pimp someone into the fandom? I'm a terrible pimp, so I might be choosing the wrong things (I like dark, challenging, gripping stories as opposed to lighter weight or humorous, most often), but this is a listing of what I would show someone if I had limited time. (OTOH, I think watching all 23 hours isn't unfeasible, and would recommend that more, especially in order -- I sent mlyn home with a bag o' tapes and she came back hooked. A marathon can be a lot of fun.) Keep in mind, too, that I'm very, very Chris/Vin-centric, with a lot of love for everyone, but not as much for Buck and JD, though I do think they have their moments.

( My essential episodes of The Magnificent Seven )

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Showtime airs them all, and doesn't just peter out halfway through. Because that second season is a corker (I didn't even include the wonderful Love and Honor, and Lady Killers), and I would hate to think that people won't have good copies of this wonderful series.

Even though I had a million things to do this weekend, I found myself hunched over the computer for hours on end, working feverishly to finish my Magnificent 7 vid for Escapade's vid show. (Though why I worked so hard to get it done rightthisweekend I don't know, considering that we don't even have info on where to send the vids and the deadline is but three weeks away... you'd think that having been on the vid comm for going on oh, 7 or 8 years, I'd have inside info, but you would be wrong.) Probably so that I could get beta input because it sucks, I'm pretty sure. And I've never made a Mag 7 vid without feochadn and she will probably watch it and get that tortured face she gets when she wants to say something negative and is searching for a polite way to tell me it sucks, but then she'll just tell me it sucks and I will cry and pout and then go, "Well, it's all I've got, so I'm showing it anyway."

And the worst part is that I don't even know why I'm torturing my own self over this stupid vid because if I've learned anything from showing two separate Mag 7 vids and one Tombstone vid at Escapade, a vid show that I'm growing increasingly dispirited about because of the pointless, calculated meanness and nastiness and general whinage that I addressed last year in this post, it's that the vid, no matter how good or bad, will elicit a response from all but three other people (you know who you are!) ranging from veiled dismissals about how meaningless my fandom is to outright "ew"s because it's a true Western. There are defintely more Mag 7 fans at the con than there were the last time we showed a Mag 7 vid there, but most of them are of the "Chris & Vin bad, Ezra or Buck good" variety, and I've even had people tell me Chris and Vin make them sick. Literally. Always one of those things that makes you feel encouraged to show your vid!

I think in the time since I made Stripped, my Fast and the Furious vid, I've pretty much forgotten how to vid. Or lost whatever small gift I had (and yes, I know the emphasis is on small). I couldn't really take the time to learn Final Cut, so I went back to iMovie for this, and that's okay because it's a pretty straightforward series with little movement. Most of the motion comes from people on horseback, so right now the vid feels like it's just people on horsies. Bleh. Or Vin tipping his hat, which I've come to realize he does about every five minutes. I kept struggling with how to create movement in a fairly static series, and how to judge length of cuts. Because it's often still, the movement that is important to get for the vid makes it harder to do short cuts, because you lose the significance of the motion. But the music is too fast and beat-driven to use longer cuts too often. I just couldn't get a handle on it, as if every skill I'd learned in 10+ years of being involved in vid-making had just poof! disappeared. Kind of dispiriting.

And especially dispiriting knowing that I'm going to have to listen to the usual craptastic comments after the con, not because they're judging the vid, but because they're judging the fandom. At Escapade if you're not doing the top 3 fandoms these days, or you're doing the wrong pairing in something well-liked (for instance, I wanted to do a Hornblower vid, but I know better than to bring a vid centered on Horatio and Pellew to the Archie-obsessed fans that predominate HH fandom), then you're pretty much guaranteed those smarmy, shitty remarks, even if you avoid comment sheets like I do. This is the hardest part about fannish vidding, to me -- dismissal of fandoms outright because they're not yours, without even giving the vidder a chance to prove herself. Some people are actually pretty darn good storytellers, even for fandoms people aren't familiar with (there were only about two people in the Vividcon audience two cons ago who knew Miracles, for instance, but most people liked feochadn's and my Darkness, Darkness and felt they understood the story), but there are always the people in the audience who won't even let you try to tell them a story. Either they just shut off because it's not my fandom, or they overintellectualize something as being impossible to understand because they don't know the fandom, even if there's no story to intellectualize and it's just very obvious, lightweight stuff.

So once I finished I found myself sitting there going, now, why did I bust my hump on this again? So I can be put down and insulted for my stupid Western fandom? So I can listen to post-con comments that make me feel small and worthless? I mean, I can make myself feel small and worthless on a daily basis, I don't need help from the mean crappy people who are taking over Escapade these days... I'm a *pro* at making myself feel bad ahead of time. When I was doing film criticism, I got really depressed about how quick to judge genre most other critics were. I'd go the press screenings and listen to the bigwig movie reviewers filing out, talking about the crappy things they'd say about a good solid action movie like the original First Blood -- just because it was action. Or science fiction -- I remember being the only person in town who had good things to say about Blade Runner when it came out, and then 10 years later they were falling all over themselves about it. All I could remember was thinking, "Yeah, I heard you when we were leaving the theatre, you ass, and you were excited about skewering it." Showing things at the Escapade vid show reminds me of that these days. If it's not Fargateville, you're pretty much guaranteed that a vocal group will disparage your fandom just because it's not the "right" fandom, and if you dare to show a Western... well, god have mercy on your little vidding soul.

I must be nuts, or masochistic. Or both. I should know better by now. I guess I just wanted to make another vid with my pretty cowboys in love. But showing it at that audience... probably not worth the torment I've put myself through. And it probably sucks, but I'd love to think that the vid itself will be judged by its worth -- good or bad -- and not the fandom, though I know that's impossible these days.

I'm not a prolific writer. I'm sure I could be a BNF with minions and have shrines all over the net to me if I was more prolific.

(for the general audience, that's a joke. Please keep the rotten cabbage to yourself)

But I seem to be suddenly strangely prolific, maybe as a way to dampen my pain -- taking refuge in writing ridiculous fanfic. (Oh my god, Camille Bacon Smith was right -- we're writing through our pain! Feh) I may never actually finish the longer Buffy story, but for now I have a short one and also a reasonably sized Mag 7 story, both just posted at my site.

They're both really odd -- neither is in my "traditional" 'ships. The Buffy story features Dawn and Spike, although in my head and heart it's about Spike and Buffy. The Mag 7 story is a thank-you to a kind and generous friend, so it's E/B.

The main page has the blurbs, and the stories, individually, are here for Buffy and here for Mag 7.

More about the employment situation later. I can't thank everyone enough for their kind support.