2013 fannish year in review
Past years: 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2008-09 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
general fannishness
2013 is the year I got my feet back under me in some areas of my life, but fannishly I mostly felt like I was treading water. I didn't feel adrift in quite the same way I did in 2011 and 2012; I felt more centered and (in some ways) more connected, and I'm grateful for that. But I did also feel like I was in a bit of a holding pattern, for reasons that had to do with both my offline life and my particular fannish investments.
fandom platforms
Tumblr continues to amuse me -- hot and cold running .gifsets of Kurt and Blaine! bring it! -- and I definitely spend more time on the site than I used to, but it's not my primary fannish site, and I don't really want it to be. So I was very happy to see the resurgence of posting on DW and LJ -- being the change we want to see on our flists, as somebody (probably
cesperanza) said back in August. I would rather be vidding regularly than posting daily, but I would like to keep up the habit of posting more, and more substantively, than I've done in the past few years.
I moved all my vids to Vimeo when blip.tv booted vidders off the site... which meant updating all the AO3 and DW/LJ posts. That took a while. But while I was at it, I posted most of the vids to Tumblr, which yielded some surprises -- more on that below.
shows & fandoms
I really wanted to love Agents of SHIELD, and... I don't. I do like it, and it's been getting better, I think. It's not what I was hoping for, but I'm trying to let go of that and enjoy it for what it is. Melinda May, for example, is well worth enjoying. Hot damn.
I'm not fannish about Almost Human, and not likely to be, but I'm enjoying it. I would enjoy it even more if the writers would give Minka Kelly more to do. Also, if we don't get some fun old-school slash vids out of this show, I call shenanigans.
Castle continues to consistently make me happy without demanding anything of me or inspiring fannishness in me. Apparently I am happy to just sit around watching Castle and Beckett make engagement jokes and solve mostly-absurd murder cases.
2013 was the year I officially became a Darren Criss fangirl: I managed to get a ticket to the Listen Up tour when the second wave of tickets was released, largely on a whim. I'd liked Darren's EP, which is very much a first album by a baby singer-songwriter, and I'd seen clips from some live shows on YouTube, so I knew the show would be worth going to, but I wasn't prepared for it to be one of the better live shows I've been to -- I really did not see that coming. I'd known Darren was a multi-instrumentalist, but there's knowing it and then there's seeing it first-hand. I'd known he was charismatic, but there's knowing it and then there's watching him successfully flirt with 900 people at the same time. I'd known he's a dork, but there's knowing it and then there's watching him rock out with a tambourine. I have seen a lot of live music over the years, and I've seen a lot of performers who are obviously over the moon to be spending their night making music, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a performer so clearly exicted not just about the chance to play but about the people who showed up. It was a terrific show on many levels, and I'm really glad I was able to go.
I started watching Elementary last spring, mostly because vonniek was so excited about it, and I'm glad I did. The individual episode macguffins are generally not that interesting to me, but the development of the relationship between Joan and Sherlock has been a delight to watch; I especially love that while their mutual trust and respect is now well established, they can still be prickly with each other; their relationship has gotten more complex, not less so. Plus it makes a fascinating counterpoint to the BBC Sherlock. Also, as I said in a comment on one of
cesperanza's recent posts, one of the things I like so much about Elementary is that Sherlock's deductions are reproducible within the world of the show: Sherlock is explicitly teaching Joan how to do what he does, and she is successfully learning to do it, and while she is not yet as good at it as Sherlock, that difference is framed as a matter of experience, not capability. And the flip side of that is that Sherlock is still learning to do things too -- not just emotional things (though yes), but practical things like, er, breaking into cars.
I am still hung up on Glee, even though I sometimes prefer the fan works to the show itself. I am kind of frustrated with the show just at the moment, mostly because I want more more more of Glee In NYC and much less of Lima. But then a gifset of Kurt and Blaine in 5x01 crosses my dash and I am beaming and cooing and making flappy hands of joy, so -- yeah. My lack of vidding productivity at the moment is all tangled up with my feelings about Glee and my difficulty vidding open storylines. Last spring I wanted desperately to be vidding Kurt and Blaine, but doing so was difficult because of where they were in canon: vidding the breakup was going to take me even deeper into that sad place, and I just didn't feel like I could handle that until I knew how the boys were going to get out of it; trying to work on my cheerful vid ideas for them just broke my heart more; and, more generally, trying to vid them at all without knowing how/when that arc was going to be resolved felt impossible. And because of the way S4 ended, that lack of resolution kept me in vidding limbo all summer. That problem, at least, has been solved. Yay!
I really enjoyed the first season of Nashville, but then the season finale felt conventional in ways the show had largely dodged up until that point, and my interest waned. I may catch up at some point, but it's not a priority.
Ditto Once Upon a Time, really; I enjoyed the first two seasons more often than not, though they were far from perfect, but by the end of S2 I just wasn't excited anymore. So, like Nashville, it didn't make the cut for this fall.
I reblogged enough Pacific Rim gifsets that I think it deserves a spot on this list. Heh. I am sort of hoping a vidsong shows up, but I haven't gone looking.
I watched the first season of Ripper Street because of
kass's awesome vid, and while the show didn't grab me fannishly, I did quite enjoy it.
I resisted watching Sleepy Hollow for multiple reasons: I was already watching too much TV, vonniek panned the pilot, etc. But then various people (including Vonnie!) kept posting about their enjoyment of it, and somewhere around episode 5 I caved, and honestly, this show ended up being one of the delights of the fall season for me. As I said at the beginning of December, I love that the show is giving me both Awesome Partner Dynamic and Awesome Ensemble Fun in one energetically demented package. And it doesn't hurt that, as a post I reblogged on Tumblr put it, Sleepy Hollow's cast is what we usually have to racebend to get. The season finale was a mixed bag, for me, but I will definitely be tuning in for S2.
my vids
Rondo (Sense & Sensibility)
Hope for the Hopeless (Shelter)
...both finished within the first three weeks of the year. *facepalm*
It was an interesting pair of vids, actually. I'd had Hope for the Hopeless in mind for years and fully intended to finish it for Escapade 2012, and then I just... didn't; I dropped it completely, didn't work on it for nearly a year. And then I came back to it and things just kind of fell into place. Well, they fell into place once I embraced the movie's kidfic elements. The things I do for
renenet!
Rondo, on the other hand, was a complete lark.
laurashapiro requested Sense & Sensibility for Festivids. I love Laura, and I love that movie, and I'd never done Festivids but
fan_eunice pointed out that I could try making a treat sometime, and somehow all of those things came together in a mad dash to a vid. I really capitalized on 2012's lesson that spontaneity can be good. Now I just need to remember that spontaneity and speed do not have to be the same thing. *facepalm*
The other interesting vidding-related thing that happened this year was that I posted most of my vids to Tumblr, and it was fascinating to see which of the old vids got some uptake (relatively speaking). The biggest surprise was "Sea Fever"; don't get me wrong, I love that vid and I'm proud of it, but it is so personal and idiosyncratic that I'm always surprised (but delighted!) when other people connect with it. "Superstar" did even better, which was both thrilling and humbling; if I were to be remembered in fandom for just one vid, that one would be on the short list of contenders, and it's weirdly reassuring to know that I made my mark on fandom, such as it is, back in 2003, and everything since then has been a bonus. But so far the one with the most notes is actually "In the Mirror," which had a little flurry of liking and reblogging earlier this month. IDEK.
new things I tried
1) Vidding classical music, which was fun and which I want to do again! 2) Editing Beethoven, which was pretty nervewracking -- which is how one ought to feel about such an act of hubris -- but also interesting and instructive; it's always easiest to see the structure of a piece when I'm taking it apart and putting it back together. I did a remarkable amount of mental vidding while working on the audio editing.
stuff I learned
1) I can make a vid in 48 hours! But wow, I would rather not. 2) If I'm only going to go to Escapade once, the year I vidded canonical boysex was definitely the year to do it. Heh.
last year's goals
My overarching goal for last year was to balance personal/professional commitments with fannish productivity. Yeah, that... didn't happen. I mean, if something had to give, I'm glad it was my vids and not my job, but I still think there must have been a way to do both; I just didn't figure out what it was. So that's still a work in progress. But I did actually finish one of the vids on last year's list of goals: Hope for the Hopeless, for Escapade (see above).
I wanted "to steer a middle course between obsessive mono-focus, which leaves me utterly derailed if an idea goes wrong, and having so many project drafts that I get overwhelmed and finish nothing," and as it turned out I spent so little time vidding that there was no middle to steer toward. Oops.
I did post more on DW/LJ, thanks in large part to the September and December daily posting memes. I didn't really watch more vids, alas, and I didn't even manage to comment on all the VVC vids I loved. I did leave more comments on fic, though I still defaulted to kudos on the AO3 more often than I would have liked; the tricky thing is that these days I mostly read fic on my e-reader, and commenting using that thing is a trial, so I tell myself "I will comment tomorrow!", except if I don't actually put it on my to-do list I forget about it, and by the time I remember to do it my memory of the story has faded enough that my comments are hopelessly vague. I'm still trying to figure out a solution to this one. Restricting fic-reading to the weekends when I can actually read and then comment right away would help, but I doubt I have that much will power.
goals for the coming year
I have a Glee vid three-quarters done that I stalled out on for emotional reasons (see above), and since those emotional issues have been resolved, I am determined to finish the vid. I am not laboring under the delusion that anyone else in the fandom is likely to care about my long-delayed emotional processing, but that's okay; I care. I have accumulated a lot of other Glee vids in the queue as well, but my hope is that getting just one of them out into the world will pop the cork out of the bottle, so to speak; I have a lot of other vids I want to make, in theory, but I haven't felt able to properly think about them because I've been so hung up on Glee. So: one Glee vid, and at least one additional vid -- which might be a FNL vid, a Firefly vid, or something else altogether.
I want to rewatch all of Farscape -- which might lead to a vid, who knows? I still have several vid ideas for Farscape; maybe rewatching will shove one of them to the front of my brain.
I want to watch and comment on more vids! And I'm hoping that the earlier VVC date will help me comment on more VVC vids, since I will not be diving straight into the fall semester as soon as I get home from the con.
Personal and professional obligations limited my time and energy for fannish participation in 2013, and some of those obligations are still in play for 2014. And I have some Big Life Change stuff going on that is changing my day-to-day life in ways that I am still getting used to. But I'm going to try to use the upheaval to make some new habits around things like vidding -- to prioritize it and preserve time for it even when things are busy. I am never going to be less busy (though I will, I hope, be differently busy); I have to make time to vid anyway, or it'll never happen, and I am really tired of making only little vids that can be done in a short sprint. Some of these ideas I've been hanging on to are not short sprint ideas! So I need to find a different way of working.
And now I'm going to go watch some Festivids. Yay, Festivids!
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
general fannishness
2013 is the year I got my feet back under me in some areas of my life, but fannishly I mostly felt like I was treading water. I didn't feel adrift in quite the same way I did in 2011 and 2012; I felt more centered and (in some ways) more connected, and I'm grateful for that. But I did also feel like I was in a bit of a holding pattern, for reasons that had to do with both my offline life and my particular fannish investments.
fandom platforms
Tumblr continues to amuse me -- hot and cold running .gifsets of Kurt and Blaine! bring it! -- and I definitely spend more time on the site than I used to, but it's not my primary fannish site, and I don't really want it to be. So I was very happy to see the resurgence of posting on DW and LJ -- being the change we want to see on our flists, as somebody (probably
cesperanza) said back in August. I would rather be vidding regularly than posting daily, but I would like to keep up the habit of posting more, and more substantively, than I've done in the past few years.
I moved all my vids to Vimeo when blip.tv booted vidders off the site... which meant updating all the AO3 and DW/LJ posts. That took a while. But while I was at it, I posted most of the vids to Tumblr, which yielded some surprises -- more on that below.
shows & fandoms
I really wanted to love Agents of SHIELD, and... I don't. I do like it, and it's been getting better, I think. It's not what I was hoping for, but I'm trying to let go of that and enjoy it for what it is. Melinda May, for example, is well worth enjoying. Hot damn.
I'm not fannish about Almost Human, and not likely to be, but I'm enjoying it. I would enjoy it even more if the writers would give Minka Kelly more to do. Also, if we don't get some fun old-school slash vids out of this show, I call shenanigans.
Castle continues to consistently make me happy without demanding anything of me or inspiring fannishness in me. Apparently I am happy to just sit around watching Castle and Beckett make engagement jokes and solve mostly-absurd murder cases.
2013 was the year I officially became a Darren Criss fangirl: I managed to get a ticket to the Listen Up tour when the second wave of tickets was released, largely on a whim. I'd liked Darren's EP, which is very much a first album by a baby singer-songwriter, and I'd seen clips from some live shows on YouTube, so I knew the show would be worth going to, but I wasn't prepared for it to be one of the better live shows I've been to -- I really did not see that coming. I'd known Darren was a multi-instrumentalist, but there's knowing it and then there's seeing it first-hand. I'd known he was charismatic, but there's knowing it and then there's watching him successfully flirt with 900 people at the same time. I'd known he's a dork, but there's knowing it and then there's watching him rock out with a tambourine. I have seen a lot of live music over the years, and I've seen a lot of performers who are obviously over the moon to be spending their night making music, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a performer so clearly exicted not just about the chance to play but about the people who showed up. It was a terrific show on many levels, and I'm really glad I was able to go.
I started watching Elementary last spring, mostly because vonniek was so excited about it, and I'm glad I did. The individual episode macguffins are generally not that interesting to me, but the development of the relationship between Joan and Sherlock has been a delight to watch; I especially love that while their mutual trust and respect is now well established, they can still be prickly with each other; their relationship has gotten more complex, not less so. Plus it makes a fascinating counterpoint to the BBC Sherlock. Also, as I said in a comment on one of
cesperanza's recent posts, one of the things I like so much about Elementary is that Sherlock's deductions are reproducible within the world of the show: Sherlock is explicitly teaching Joan how to do what he does, and she is successfully learning to do it, and while she is not yet as good at it as Sherlock, that difference is framed as a matter of experience, not capability. And the flip side of that is that Sherlock is still learning to do things too -- not just emotional things (though yes), but practical things like, er, breaking into cars.
I am still hung up on Glee, even though I sometimes prefer the fan works to the show itself. I am kind of frustrated with the show just at the moment, mostly because I want more more more of Glee In NYC and much less of Lima. But then a gifset of Kurt and Blaine in 5x01 crosses my dash and I am beaming and cooing and making flappy hands of joy, so -- yeah. My lack of vidding productivity at the moment is all tangled up with my feelings about Glee and my difficulty vidding open storylines. Last spring I wanted desperately to be vidding Kurt and Blaine, but doing so was difficult because of where they were in canon: vidding the breakup was going to take me even deeper into that sad place, and I just didn't feel like I could handle that until I knew how the boys were going to get out of it; trying to work on my cheerful vid ideas for them just broke my heart more; and, more generally, trying to vid them at all without knowing how/when that arc was going to be resolved felt impossible. And because of the way S4 ended, that lack of resolution kept me in vidding limbo all summer. That problem, at least, has been solved. Yay!
I really enjoyed the first season of Nashville, but then the season finale felt conventional in ways the show had largely dodged up until that point, and my interest waned. I may catch up at some point, but it's not a priority.
Ditto Once Upon a Time, really; I enjoyed the first two seasons more often than not, though they were far from perfect, but by the end of S2 I just wasn't excited anymore. So, like Nashville, it didn't make the cut for this fall.
I reblogged enough Pacific Rim gifsets that I think it deserves a spot on this list. Heh. I am sort of hoping a vidsong shows up, but I haven't gone looking.
I watched the first season of Ripper Street because of
kass's awesome vid, and while the show didn't grab me fannishly, I did quite enjoy it.
I resisted watching Sleepy Hollow for multiple reasons: I was already watching too much TV, vonniek panned the pilot, etc. But then various people (including Vonnie!) kept posting about their enjoyment of it, and somewhere around episode 5 I caved, and honestly, this show ended up being one of the delights of the fall season for me. As I said at the beginning of December, I love that the show is giving me both Awesome Partner Dynamic and Awesome Ensemble Fun in one energetically demented package. And it doesn't hurt that, as a post I reblogged on Tumblr put it, Sleepy Hollow's cast is what we usually have to racebend to get. The season finale was a mixed bag, for me, but I will definitely be tuning in for S2.
my vids
Rondo (Sense & Sensibility)
Hope for the Hopeless (Shelter)
...both finished within the first three weeks of the year. *facepalm*
It was an interesting pair of vids, actually. I'd had Hope for the Hopeless in mind for years and fully intended to finish it for Escapade 2012, and then I just... didn't; I dropped it completely, didn't work on it for nearly a year. And then I came back to it and things just kind of fell into place. Well, they fell into place once I embraced the movie's kidfic elements. The things I do for
renenet!
Rondo, on the other hand, was a complete lark.
laurashapiro requested Sense & Sensibility for Festivids. I love Laura, and I love that movie, and I'd never done Festivids but
fan_eunice pointed out that I could try making a treat sometime, and somehow all of those things came together in a mad dash to a vid. I really capitalized on 2012's lesson that spontaneity can be good. Now I just need to remember that spontaneity and speed do not have to be the same thing. *facepalm*
The other interesting vidding-related thing that happened this year was that I posted most of my vids to Tumblr, and it was fascinating to see which of the old vids got some uptake (relatively speaking). The biggest surprise was "Sea Fever"; don't get me wrong, I love that vid and I'm proud of it, but it is so personal and idiosyncratic that I'm always surprised (but delighted!) when other people connect with it. "Superstar" did even better, which was both thrilling and humbling; if I were to be remembered in fandom for just one vid, that one would be on the short list of contenders, and it's weirdly reassuring to know that I made my mark on fandom, such as it is, back in 2003, and everything since then has been a bonus. But so far the one with the most notes is actually "In the Mirror," which had a little flurry of liking and reblogging earlier this month. IDEK.
new things I tried
1) Vidding classical music, which was fun and which I want to do again! 2) Editing Beethoven, which was pretty nervewracking -- which is how one ought to feel about such an act of hubris -- but also interesting and instructive; it's always easiest to see the structure of a piece when I'm taking it apart and putting it back together. I did a remarkable amount of mental vidding while working on the audio editing.
stuff I learned
1) I can make a vid in 48 hours! But wow, I would rather not. 2) If I'm only going to go to Escapade once, the year I vidded canonical boysex was definitely the year to do it. Heh.
last year's goals
My overarching goal for last year was to balance personal/professional commitments with fannish productivity. Yeah, that... didn't happen. I mean, if something had to give, I'm glad it was my vids and not my job, but I still think there must have been a way to do both; I just didn't figure out what it was. So that's still a work in progress. But I did actually finish one of the vids on last year's list of goals: Hope for the Hopeless, for Escapade (see above).
I wanted "to steer a middle course between obsessive mono-focus, which leaves me utterly derailed if an idea goes wrong, and having so many project drafts that I get overwhelmed and finish nothing," and as it turned out I spent so little time vidding that there was no middle to steer toward. Oops.
I did post more on DW/LJ, thanks in large part to the September and December daily posting memes. I didn't really watch more vids, alas, and I didn't even manage to comment on all the VVC vids I loved. I did leave more comments on fic, though I still defaulted to kudos on the AO3 more often than I would have liked; the tricky thing is that these days I mostly read fic on my e-reader, and commenting using that thing is a trial, so I tell myself "I will comment tomorrow!", except if I don't actually put it on my to-do list I forget about it, and by the time I remember to do it my memory of the story has faded enough that my comments are hopelessly vague. I'm still trying to figure out a solution to this one. Restricting fic-reading to the weekends when I can actually read and then comment right away would help, but I doubt I have that much will power.
goals for the coming year
I have a Glee vid three-quarters done that I stalled out on for emotional reasons (see above), and since those emotional issues have been resolved, I am determined to finish the vid. I am not laboring under the delusion that anyone else in the fandom is likely to care about my long-delayed emotional processing, but that's okay; I care. I have accumulated a lot of other Glee vids in the queue as well, but my hope is that getting just one of them out into the world will pop the cork out of the bottle, so to speak; I have a lot of other vids I want to make, in theory, but I haven't felt able to properly think about them because I've been so hung up on Glee. So: one Glee vid, and at least one additional vid -- which might be a FNL vid, a Firefly vid, or something else altogether.
I want to rewatch all of Farscape -- which might lead to a vid, who knows? I still have several vid ideas for Farscape; maybe rewatching will shove one of them to the front of my brain.
I want to watch and comment on more vids! And I'm hoping that the earlier VVC date will help me comment on more VVC vids, since I will not be diving straight into the fall semester as soon as I get home from the con.
Personal and professional obligations limited my time and energy for fannish participation in 2013, and some of those obligations are still in play for 2014. And I have some Big Life Change stuff going on that is changing my day-to-day life in ways that I am still getting used to. But I'm going to try to use the upheaval to make some new habits around things like vidding -- to prioritize it and preserve time for it even when things are busy. I am never going to be less busy (though I will, I hope, be differently busy); I have to make time to vid anyway, or it'll never happen, and I am really tired of making only little vids that can be done in a short sprint. Some of these ideas I've been hanging on to are not short sprint ideas! So I need to find a different way of working.
And now I'm going to go watch some Festivids. Yay, Festivids!
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth