This premiered at the WisCon Vid Party last night! :D

Title: Machine
Video: Mass Effect // Bioware
Audio: Machine // Regina Spektor
Summary: The war is in your body. The future is here. The future is a machine.
Notes: Spoilers for all three games. Vid features close variations on the default FemShep model from ME1 & ME2 (due to impossibility of using prior footage with the default from 3). With many thanks to cosmic_llin for the song inspiration.

Direct download available here. 94 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs.



Cross-posted to vidding and masseffect

Other vids available here.

So I started playing it. I heard it wasn't as good as the first one. I think I'm about half way through? I'm enjoying it so far. I really like having a voiced character and I'm not against the decision to characterise Hawke as confident and sarcastic in quite a strong way, I think there's still enough leeway to create your own person there. Gameplay-wise, I usually...sort of don't care, blowing stuff up with magic is fun but not really what I get the most enjoyment out of, but even I am kinda hacked off with the endless recycled maps.

( Characters: I don't want to sleep with them! )

( Opinions on the story and gameplay SO FAR! )

In other worse, will I ME3 my reaction to the ending again. ;)

OH, ALSO, I CANNOT STAND THE QUN. Argh, they are frustrating and stupid. I really wanted to like that DLC featuring Felicia Day but in the end I was just extremely frustrated that after spending a whole five minutes in the real world deliberating on whether or not to help her, and ultimately deciding that morally, I couldn't do it if she wouldn't tell me what was going on, I got railroaded into helping her anyway and there was no option to go, "Wait, you have a list of spies for the people sat in the middle of my city, threatening to start a war of conversion that would seek to turn my sister into a physically and mentally mutilated slave? Yeah, NO GIVE ME THAT, we are not going to have some witty reparte before parting well-wishes, lady!" But...bah, whatever, I need to put them on the list of things I shouldn't rant about in public, right under Batman.

So, for the few people out there who know what I'm talking about, I'm replaying Mass Effect 3 as a Renegade (mostly) this time, and I just got to Tuchanka and was pretty blown away by how differently it plays and the way it still manages to maintain a sense of, well, making sense. I also am now a total emotional wreck.

( So can we talk about Tuchanka? )

I just think it's a real masterpiece of scenario construction. And stuff.

Okay, so, in my OUAT catch-up I finally got to the episode where we find out why the Queen hates Snow White. And frankly, I'm kinda disappointed. Which is frustrating because after a bit of a soft few episodes, I'm really getting caught up in the plot again and overall I'm enjoying the show. But I feel this is one place where they almost pulled of something really interesting.

( So here it is, plus brief bonus commentary on Rumplestiltskin's reveal. )

OH HEY THERE INTERWEBS. So I haven't been around much lately partly because I have been vidding like a crazy person to try and get a vid done in time to procrastinate and then panic about whether or not I want to submit it to WisCon (but don't worry, I've decided to - if I can stop fiddling with it), and partly because some software in my OS broke during an update and instead of trying fix it I decided to upgrade to the newly released long-term support version because I thought, hey, my OS is years old now. This is the new long-term support version that focuses on stability and stuff. Now's the time! So I painstakingly backed stuff up, prepared, etc., and at first I was very pleased. The main issue I had to fix last time (stuff with my audio drivers) sorted itself out immediately on installation. I was so happy. Then I discovered it had shipped with a glaring problem for people with integrated Intel graphics cards whereby the eyecandy shiny desktop animations cause endless crashes and I'm having to use the boring 2D oldskool desktop with no fancy dock or desktop cube or multiple wallpapers or anything. *plays tiny violin* I'm mostly pissed about this because having investigated I know exactly what the problem is. I need the newest build of mesa, which they just need to pull over to Ubuntu and spin out as an update for people like me, but even though this has been identified for weeks no one has bothered doing it yet. I am...disappoint. And considering installing a virtualbox so I can experiment with compiling it myself, since it seems...super complicated to compile. :/

SO ANYWAY THAT'S ME.

In the meantime, have some thoughts on comics - spoilarz obvs:

( Swamp Thing. )

( Earth 2. )

( Worlds' Finest. )

( The Manhattan Projects. )

( Briefly, but only because it's so awesome there's not much to say, Saga. )

Hey guys - just checking in and letting you all know that I'm still alive, and REALLY SORRY it's been so long since I've posted. I've only been quiet because really nothing's going on much in my life right now and I'm WAY behind on almost all telly so I don't have much to say right now. Mostly my life has been consumed with what began as a casual project whereby I was going to actually clip stuff before vidding a vid I wasn't even sure I could/wanted to make and somehow spiralled into a weird completionist cataloguing project. I'M NEVER DOING IT AGAIN.

ANYWAY, I finally have something worth posting about!

( Batgirl #8 - or WOW, before I thought this comic was doing some unexpected, interesting stuff but *THIS* is what I came for. )

In addition, Batwoman is just kicking ass. It's so...rich and just all about these women with these really complicated, challenging, distinct relationships with each other. It's about power, competence, loss, betrayal, romance, ass-kicking, and supernatural noir detective work. One of my favourite things about it is that nearly everything passes the Bechdel test, and the cast is almost entirely gender reversed from the male/female split you'd expect (it's what, four or five women vs two guys in the regular/recurring roles?), but it never feels like that's what it's doing. It just feels completely natural to the point I don't even want to be mentioning it here because the comic just is. But obviously I AM going to mention it because then more of you might start reading it! :D?

Demon Knights also continues to be a hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking tale of...something or other; I'm really enjoying it. It's not Secret Six, nothing else ever will be, I don't think, but I do wonder if this book might fill part of that void. And on top of that it's got beautiful art.

Finally, two comments:

Wonder Woman: oh god, I think it broke my heart. I don't even have the desire to go into detail about why. I don't even have the energy to be angry, I'm too sad. If it were ugly or poorly written that would be easier. As it is, it's a beautifully written, visually gorgeous story that wounded me in my soul, and not in a good way. I just...I don't know dudes. I guess we'll see where it goes.

Saga: this, on the other hand, was interesting weirdness. I've read the first two now, and what I wish I could do most is sum up the type of WORLD it is, because I think if I could, I could explain what's so compelling about it. I suppose it's like...a space fairytale with a dirty mouth and a rocketship forest full of nightmares? Anyway, I'm hooked is what I'm saying.

So, fair warning, this LJ may be a bit Mass Infected (GEDDIT?!) for a while. I'm sure I'll get over it. What this post really is the fact that now that I've written out my more meta thoughts on branching narratives and interactive storytelling and...stuff, I wanted to write an actual, detailed review of the game and its universe and characters. But honestly, with all the crazy controversy around it, I'm not sure where I'd start, and for now I'm happy to just link a bunch of random crap and talk about my reactions via that:

( Forbes Magazine, yes that one, seem to have gone a liiiiiittle bonkers in reporting on Mass Effect 3. )

On a happier note, there are a few articles out there I find genuinely interesting, which I shall now link in lieu of giving my own opinion:

( Three articles on the Mass Effect universe and my reaction to them in lieu of a personal review. Some spoilers in the second two, none in the first. )

So, okay.

There is my Linkspam of Mass Effect 3 instead of a review.

I played Mass Effect 3. Most of the world seems to hate the ending. On the wrong side of a technocalypse featuring Tricia Helfer as a robot yet again, I adored it.

This post will detail some of why, although I don't intend to get into a detailed rebuttal of the criticisms of the ending and its apparent tonal and logical diversions from what came before - I may do so at some point, when I want to actually discuss what I thought the game and the ending was about, but this is actually more of a post about artistic intention, the purpose of authorship in a shared world, and how the meaning of an ending can vary depending on the experience of the story. A lot of these thoughts relate to my experience of hating the end of Battlestar Galactica so much I created an alternate fan-edit of the last half-season titled Battlestar Redactica. Obviously that makes for a fairly large and ironic counterpoint to my current position. ;)

Broad spoilers follow.

( Infinite shades of meaning in singular events. )

And anyway...there's what I think about that.

This post brought to you with many thanks to nightxade for letting me bounce most of these ideas off her in email form. ♥

Man I have not made a vid in ages - like over two months. I'm vidding so slowly lately, it's annoying. However:

Title: Quantum Theory
Video: Once Upon A Time // ABC
Audio: The Quantum World! // Symphony of Science
Summary: The irreconcilable differences between two worlds have not yet been explained in physics, either. [Ensemble vid]
Notes: With thanks to cyborganize and metatxt for the wonderfully helpful beta.

Direct download available here. 68 megs approx. RightClickSaveAs.



Cross-posted to vidding and abc_onceupon

Other vids available here.

So, something awesome happened today that I am going to share with YOU, interwebs, because I love you.

( In Which A Friend Discovers Comics. )

And that's my story, interwebs. Just one more of the million examples of how it's not that chicks don't dig comics, they just don't dig exploitation.