Seeking Ferret

tightpresent, the Sarah Connor Chronicles vid exchange I foolishly signed up for revealed yesterday, and it was fun to wade through the collection. Despite only 10 participants plus two pinchhitters, there were 16 vids made and as far as I can tell they're all AMAZING.

I didn't get into TSCC when it was on the air, because the pilot was a complete swing and miss for me, but when I was finally made to watch it, I got hooked pretty deeply. It's a shockingly well put together show, given that it was a part of the Terminator franchise. It's so much deeper than anything else Terminator related. And it is full of rich imagery and great closeup reaction shots of characters who say so much with their faces even when their faces are ostensibly blank and they're hiding secrets from each other. So it is so much fun to make vids of TSCC.


I received The Monkey's Paw, a Cameron vid to Laurie Anderson's song of the same name. It is wonderful.

It's full of great shots of River Glau's muscular, robotic, graceful movement, her brilliant body performance as Cameron. And it throws that up against the various animal metaphors that TSCC uses, the turtle that somehow represents human kindness, the pigeon that represents innocence, the snake that represents cunning and deception, wondering how Terminators learn about life by observing the life around them and ultimately in the brilliant conclusion to the vid, wondering how Terminators learn about death by observing the death around them.

But despite all the learning, all the knowledge and transfer of knowledge that this vid communicates so well, it is ultimately best summed up as talking about the 'mystery of life'. It is fully content, even cheerful, with the fact that it will never comprehend the consciousness gap separating humans from AIs, if there is in fact such a gap. It rejects the idea that there is any physical difference worth noting. The way Terminators interact with their bodies is not the same as the way humans do. The vid shows Cameron stitching herself together with a stapler, Cromartie remaking his skin. Yet this interaction with their own physicality is mirrored with humans doing the human equivalent of these repairs- recall that Cromartie goes to a plastic surgeon to have his face remade. So what the vid leaves open as the possible distinction is the soul, the unknowable mental component that endows us with something beyond the physical. The godliness that Ellison and John Henry struggle with in the final episodes of Season 2.


The other vids are all great, too. I made several, and sanguinity guessed them all immediately. I am super-transparent. If you take a look at the vids, you ought to be able to suss a couple of them out immediately before even watching them.

New laptop is named Ajax-greater, half of the fulfillment of a joke I've dreamed of since coming up with the Iliad naming schema. When I get my tablet, whichever kind I chose, I will name it Ajax-lesser. I may, quite possibly, be a terrible human being.

It's a System 76 Pangolin, which came with Ubuntu preinstalled and set up to work nicely. I immediately switched over to KDE, but that wasn't a major hardship. Wireless worked right out of the box, which was probably 20% of my motivation for buying an Ubuntu preinstall. I've never had that happen when buying a major brand and installing Ubuntu myself. Never. There's always a day or so of fiddly tweaking with modprobe commands. And part of me enjoyed that, because I got to pretend to be a 1337 hacker, which I am totally not, but mostly I hated it and am glad I didn't have to do it.

I synched my dropbox to it and borrowed a windows desktop to download my music collection from the Amazon cloud, since they don't support mass downloading to Linux. Yay for the cloud. I've lost some stuff, but nothing so far that I really miss.

And I have now therefore finally started assembling my vid for the tightpresent The Sarah Connor Chronicles vid challenge that I signed up for despite all sorts of reservations. I laid the song on the timeline, clipped the annoying outro, and started grabbing video clips. I need a lot of figuring out, still. I think there's really only about five or six images that I know where exactly they need to be in relationship to music and lyrics, and I have vague ideas about the rest. This is not quite the same as vidding in Fringe, where I know 60% of the footage cold.