D&D

After a month off for Worldcon, we resumed my D&D campaign last night with the 5th session. We were all a bit foggy on the story after the time off, but fortunately I've been sending fairly detailed recaps to the players after each session, so... that was a good plan!

The first quest the players were sent on when I started the game had two parts; Deliver a pearl to the Faerie King, and figure out why the person sent to do so originally didn't. The players achieved the first part, but failed the second, getting sidetracked by several other objectives. This week they finally found the elven trader sent to deliver the pearl originally.

What happened: Had they followed some footprints during the original adventure, they'd have found a semi-conscious, badly wounded elf in the lair of a winged frog/snake monster. They could have rescued her and healed her. As a week has passed, she is sadly now dead. It appears she took a wrong turn and was eaten. Choices have consequences.

I have at least two more levels down to her story for the players to discover, plus any more I improvise as the story goes. I think they are likely to find the next layer down next session, and possibly further hints to the additional level. Have I mentioned how much I am loving running a campaign, where I can set these plot seeds and not have them come to anything until multiple sessions later? It is so much fun as a storyteller.

The Sequel Week 3 Update

Vid Draft Week 3

The story of this week is that vidding fandom is the best. findmeinthealps gave me a zip file full of awesome clips from Community. bessyboo gave me a clip from One Small Hitch and a half dozen other sources to check out. dirty_diana and beatriceeagle gave me more fandom recs. ambyr and bessyboo have both recruited their parents to help identify fandoms. I am not regretting my choice to be more open about the work on this vid. And everyone in Vidding Discord has not yelled at me to shut up about Seth Cohen yet, somehow. I am amazed and grateful for all the help I've gotten. <3

The other story of this week is that there is an Alec Guinness/Rosalind Russell movie called A Majority of One in which Russell plays a Jewish widow and Guinness, in tasteless yellowface, plays a Japanese businessman, and fuck that noise. Russell's character does in fact dance, but I am not putting yellowface in my happy vid. So add it to the list of movies with Jews dancing that I will never include in my vids, which up to this point consisted of a bunch of movies with Jewish gangsters and criminals, and also every Woody Allen movie.

In other news, the ex-Chasid Baruch dances in his episode of the NYC anthology show High Maintenance (the framing device of the series, apparently, is a traveling marijuana delivery person known as The Guy), and I was otherwise mesmerized by the plotting and dialogue of the show, and want to watch more.



I am also having second thoughts about the song. To be clear, I am entertaining no other thoughts besides vidding to some version of Lior Narkis and Omer Adam's "Mahapecha shel Simcha", it's the perfect song. But so far I've been showing you guys drafts set to the Koolulam cover. Koolulam is an Israeli public arts project where hundreds or thousands of people show up to a venue, are taught an arrangement of a song over the course of an hour or so, and then everyone sings it and it's recorded. It sounds like an amazing experience, one I would love to be a part of. But... here's the thing. A lot of the song arrangements are carefully arranged to make a political statement about unity and peace. Often English lyrics are translated into both Hebrew and Arabic to communicate a dream of unity. And that's all great. But the Koolulam arrangement of "Mahapecha shel Simcha" significantly sanitizes the song.

1. The lyric "Im shotrim, ken rokdim"- "If you drink, you must dance." is changed, presumably for anti-alcoholism reasons, to "Im sharim, ken rokdim", "If you sing, you must dance." A handy translator in the comments on the original song points out that the original lyric is a deliberate play on an Israeli anti-drunk driving PSA... "If you drink, don't drive" becomes "If you drink, yes dance."

2. A parallel pair of verses later in the song link the Charedim who refuse to join the army to the Chayalim who do join. The first verse starts "Elohim, Elohim, rak tishmor et harokdim"... "Lord God, protect those who dance." The second verse goes "Chayal, tarim li t'kahal // Hem lo rokdim bichlal // tarimu et hayad." "Soldier, bring forward the crowd. They're not dancing at all. Put up your hands". It's indirect but perfectly clear what these verses mean. Narkis and Adam are saying that both the Charedim and the Chayalim have been misusing their power to hurt people, when they could be using their power instead to protect the dancers, the ones trying to live joyful lives. But they're not criticizing either, rather, they are inviting everyone to the party. Just imagine what Israel would look like, says the song, if we had a revolution of joy instead of a revolution of fear and sectarianism.

In Koolulam's version, the first of these verses skips the invocation of God and jumps straight to 'Rak tishmor et harokdim", a sort of dreamy wouldn't it be nice if the dancers were safe. And the verse about the Chayal is skipped altogether.

3. There's a bit where Narkis and Adam misappropriate an Israeli political slogan from recent Tel Aviv protests "Ha'am doresh tzedek habriti", "The People demand Social Justice", as "Ha'am doresh ketzev mizrachi", "The People demand a Mizrachi beat." I'm not up enough on Israeli political context to fully follow this, but I think it's similar to the previous two... It's saying that social justice is fine, but what we really need is joy and community. It holds the left partially culpable for disunity, too. That part is removed entirely from the song.

4. And there is the insertion of a new verse, since the song was performed as part of Israeli 70th anniversary celebrations, that goes "Kulam sharim b'koolulam, haketzev lapanim, higanu l'shiv'im"- "We are all singing with Koolulam, the beat is heating up, we've reached 70 years".

So in order to create a version of the song that speaks for a politically correct version of what Israeli unity looks like, the song strips out all the clever invocations of overcoming political disagreement. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with using that. On the other hand, I don't exactly know how I would handle the Chayal section of the original myself as a vidder. Do I engage with that, do I include Jewish soldiers in some fashion explicitly, or do I just treat it as noise knowing that most of the vid's audience won't understand a word of the song unless I call their attention to it? I try, when vidding, not to be scared of complexity and difficulty, but I have to admit that using the Koolulam version makes for a simpler vid. And I don't have any problem with the message of the Koolulam version as it is, it's just frustrating knowing what it made the decision to hide.

Anyone have opinions? Significantly not a consideration is how much time I've already spent putting together this timeline- I am not at all attached to this particular arrangement of clips, as I've said before.

Original Lior Narkis/ Omer Adam version

"ליאור נרקיס ועומר אדם מהפכה של שמחה Lior Narkis and Omer Adam" (Watch on YouTube)

Koolulam cover

"קולולם | מהפכה של שמחה - עומר אדם וליאור נרקיס | עמק יזרעאל | 20.4.18" (Watch on YouTube)

fandoms I have clipped

Caddyshack
Bruriah
The Good Fight
Life During Wartime
Destination Wedding (bad rip)
The Good Wife
The Women's Balcony
Northern Exposure (1.2, other episodes not yet clipped)
Barney's Version
The Sitter
How to Make it in America
Late Marriage
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
While We're Young
Seinfeld
Hello, Goodbye
This is the End
The Campaign for Camelot
On the Basis of Sex
Modern Romance
The Wonder Years
Hart of Dixie
Community (Annie)
Call Me By Your Name
One Small Hitch
High Maintenance (Derech)
Mean Girls
The OC
Russian Doll

Fandoms I know have mixed dancing, but haven't yet clipped


Caddyshack 2
The Pickle Recipe
Parks and Recreation (Jean Ralphio in series finale extended, also End of the World Party drumline)
Biloxi Blues
Burn Notice (Season 1 episode 5)
Love Comes Lately
Beverly Hills 90210 (David Silver)
Schitt's Creek (The Olive Branch)
The Year of Spectacular Men (bathroom scene)
Superstore (S4E17)
Starsky and Hutch (original) ('Tap Dancing Her Way Right Back Into Your Hearts')
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
The Crazy Ones (S1E19)
The In-Laws

Also, cartoons including Big Mouth, The Simpsons, Gravity Falls, Duck Tales, and Rugrats, if I feel like adding cartoons

Fandoms that might have mixed dancing, but I haven't checked yet

The L Word (Jenny Schecter)
Man Seeking Woman
Beauty and the Baker
Shtisel
The Holiday
Full Court Miracle
The Princess Diaries
Falsettos
Legends of Tomorrow
Pinsky
10 Things I Hate About You
Garden State