Wildfang’s treasure trove

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Any of the big programs will have a million youtube tutorials on the technical aspects. We no longer need to rely on fandom tutorials for that.

As for aesthetics... That gets tricky since there are a lot of different fannish communities that have diametrically opposed views on what makes a good vid. If you want to go oldschool, there's a vidding discord with a bunch of fans from the LJ era. Some of the extant fancons have vidshows and vidding panels or even run vidding courses. Escapade, DC Slash, etc.

Some parts of vidding aesthetics are just film aesthetics. When I got interested, I wandered over to the local university bookstore and got myself a copy of In the Blink of an Eye, which is just about the only thing film schools ever manage to assign unless you're specializing in editing. I also think The Eye is Quicker and The Visual Story are worth a look. You certainly don't need to know film nerd shit, but those kinds of books can give you some vocabulary should you want it.

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The thing is, you already know aesthetics.

Forty years ago, Media Fandom vidders were learning from vids. You see meta from long after this was true still saying that you have to watch good vids to make good vids.

But in fact, any person in the 2020s (and, frankly, long before) has watched a lifetime of short-form video with vid-like aesthetics long before they ever think of doing any kind of fannish remix video.

Trailers, commercials, music videos, short films, plenty of youtube content: it's all relevant to one type of vidding or another.

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If you want to do very oldschool Media Fandom vidding that is highly narrative but doesn't use any show audio, your best bet is to look at the visual grammar of film. The character with the closeup is the important one, the person looking near the camera's emotions are more accessible than the emotions of the character we see in profile, etc. etc.

I've made a couple of videos about visual grammar aimed at fans.

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In general, I would ignore any vidding meta about music choice. Everyone is a coward with bad taste, whether that's an entire community that only edits to Linkin Park or an entire community that only vids to Sarah McLachlan. Down with 4/4! Down with only top 40s pop! Unless you like it, of course.

Just pick something you're willing to listen to eight billion times if you're doing a song without show audio. If you're doing a more trailer-y vid, pick something that works well as a short, punchy backdrop to dialogue. Don't play dialogue and song lyrics at the same time. Again, this is basic shit from every commercial trailer and ad ever.

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That linked guide seems fine. It's full of things that will vary by person, of course. "(compared to phone) It’s not portable unless you have a beast of a laptop." is cracking me up. For ages, I did all my editing on a macbook pro, which is indeed a beast.

Don't use After Effects. That guide is right that it's super popular, but unless you are primarily interested in heavy effects, it's a worse choice than a program aimed at editing, IMO. Vegas is insanely popular with vidders who use Windows. I'm not as familiar with it, but it seems to be popular at least in part because a lot of vidders have released presets and effects packs and such that work with it.

You can use any program, really. I know a Linux vidder who used Blender because it was what was available. I once was an idiot and could not figure out how I'd fucked up Premiere right before a big deadline, so I made my vid in Avid. (Don't use Avid. Nobody vids on Avid and for good reason.)

That guide's comments about the Ken Burns effect are... sort of right, but I think they're glossing over the fact that it really depends on the type of footage. If you're vidding a sitcom or most anime, you may well want to add motion. If you're vidding a single film that is shot well, it probably already has a lot of beautiful camera motion, and adding different motion requires a deft hand. Ditto Pixar, which spends huge amounts of time and money on imitating live action camera styles.

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I use 4K Video Downloader+ to get footage, music, etc. It works on many sites and is good at keeping up with Youtube's constant attempts to thwart it.

Generally, I think you should just grab some footage and some music and go play around.

Whereas the reality is far more like

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

I don't mean like those prepper type people. I mean keep a granola bar in your purse or backpack. If you have a car, keep a jar of peanuts in there.

This is good for if you miss your bus, or forget your wallet somewhere, or get stuck in traffic. You never know when you are going to feel shaky, and it's better to have something quick and easy on hand, in case you need it.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

For something like computers, this looks like how pricey "gAmiNG" laptops look all fancy but fall apart in about the same timeframe as the lower end laptops for students. But if you've ever handled the sort of laptops for banks or businesses, you'd wonder why laptops can't all be like this. People swear by Lenovo Thinkpads for a reason. Dell's Latitude (general productivity) and Precision (has the power of a gaming laptop but far less bs) lines, HP's probooks, all feel really nice and last for-fucking-ever. But you can't buy them in a store even if you wanted one.

So the trick is to buy what big organizations are buying, but you likely gotta get 'em secondhand when the orgs are done with them. For basic clothes, mil surplus might be a good port of call, for technology see an e-waste recycler or sometimes government auction (you just gotta know what to ask for; ThinkPads, Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Probook/Zbook). Otherwise try to thrift old, pre-enshitification items. The blanket I had as a kid is still going strong and has lived to bury multiple sets of newer bedding (which have worn thin and torn). Kitchen items, see if you can shop at a restaurant supplier.

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

And the answer is, we don't.

The unhoused people who come here seeking refuge 99% of the time understand that they will be kicked out if they misbehave.

The people you have to watch out for are Jessica, who only came because the kid she didn't want had to visit for a homework assignment and she just *needs* to yell at her child for asking to borrow two books or stay an extra five minutes, or Michael, who came in to look at porn on our computers for whatever fucking reason, or Karen who just wanted to come by to throw a fit that the particular book she wanted was checked out and harrass our staff about our collection being too limited.

And we did what we could to help. He was incredibly kind and patient despite his obvious anxiety and stress, more than most able bodied, housed patrons are to us under much less dire conditions. I liked knowing that we were the first place he came.

We have so many people like this who come in everyday. Many are quiet and keep to themselves, but sometimes they talk to us.

They tell us about how they're taking a few courses on a scholarship they applied for from our library's computer at the local community college to get their diploma. Or ask about a manga or dvd or book we might have to help them pass the time.

One woman, who comes in daily with her tattered walker always says hello to me and likes to work on the new jigsaw puzzle with me when we set one out.

So like, treat unhoused people like people. Treat disabled people like people. I don't want my library to feel like the only safe space in the world, but I'm glad it can be one of them.

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).

The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.

And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.

If the Please Do Not Eat That Professional thinks it's inconsequential enough to be funny, then the concerned caller knows it's no big deal. When I was a kid my mom called poison control because I ate not one but several crayons, and their advice was to make sure I didn't stray too far from a toilet for a few hours because suppositories are made of wax, too.

Also several years ago I ate half a sandwich while wondering why the hell it tasted so funny only to realize the Goo Gone I'd been cleaning with was leaking, and did so onto my sandwich. Poison Control now has an online form where you can put in what you ingested/how much/when/etc. and someone basically triages those out, so the kid who just drank a bunch of drain cleaner isn't in line behind the kid who ate a crayon. I got a call like twenty minutes later from a nurse who told me I was fine.

Oh! And if you want to know what the tool looks like, it now gives a "this is not a real case" option to let you test it out, so I became a hypothetical worried patient who accidentally took 1000mg of ibuprofen (max dose should be 800) instead of 1000mg of acetaminophen (which has a max dose of 1000) and ran the entire thing. It took me less than two minutes from this:

To this:

Below this screenshot I was advised to drink some water and that if symptoms developed in the next four hours, I should only be concerned in certain cases (e.g. nausea is normal, heart palpitations are a problem).

So what if it's a serious problem? Suddenly, hypothetical Nina was cleaning xir bathroom sink and got hit with some Drano splashback with xir eyes and mouth open! Here's what the tool suggested. As soon as I selected that I'd gotten Drano in my eyes, this popped up:

So I hypothetically went to rinse my eyes, came back, and indicated it'd also gotten into my mouth and onto my skin. Here was the result:

And finally, hypothetical!Nina made an extremely bad decision, then decided this wasn't how xe wanted things to end after all. So I selected the option that says I'd attempted self-harm, and this popped up. (I didn't get it in the screenshot, but there's a drawing of a sad snail at the top of the screen. I think it's supposed to remind you someone is there, this just isn't the best route to reach them.)