It's a magical world

source: Star Trek: Prodigy
audio: Kim Boekbinder, "The Sky Is Calling"
length: 3:09
download: 361MB on MediaFire
summary: The sky calls to us/And we go

AO3 page | YouTube link

Lyrics on Genius

Kim Boekbinder on Bandcamp

Made for colls for festivids 2024

source: Star Trek: Lower Decks
audio: Barenaked Ladies, "Odds Are"
length: 3:04
download: 319MB on MediaFire
summary: The odds are that we will probably be all right. Probably.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

Made for colls as a Festivids treat, and for the vid_bingo 2020 challenge.



I'm a noted fan of the Star Trek animated shows at this point. At least one person guessed that I would make a Lower Decks vid before go-live and I deny nothing. Lower Decks is great, whether you love TNG or whether you think TNG needs to have the piss taken out of it a bit more often (or both!), and it's a great piece of Star Trek--in fact Lower Decks might have the strongest first season of any Trek series, which is saying quite a lot. I'm very much looking forward to the next season.

Is the dog lip-syncing?

Would a perfectly normal dog do a thing like that?

source: Star Trek (through Star Trek 2009)
audio: Death Cab for Cutie, "Grapevine Fires"
length: 4:19
download: 0.3GB on Backblaze - right or ctrl+click save as
summary: An HD remaster of skywaterblue's vid, which is no longer available online. skywaterblue passed away in 2017.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics | inset comparison on Sendvid

I got to thinking about this vid about a year ago; I loved the original, and I was sad that it was no longer available online. So I decided to remaster it myself.

Here's what I said about it in the VidUKon con book:


This vid is a remaster, but right off the bat I made some choices that differentiate it from the original in some fairly major ways. First and foremost, I chose not to crop the various sources to match some unitary ideal (which one?); skywaterblue cropped to the widescreen DVD of the Star Trek 2009 movie, but to me the patchwork nature of Star Trek is one of the things that I love about it, and also those shots that were framed for 4:3 (or widescreen, in the case of DS9) should be what they were meant to be. This vid plays that up by including some of the HD remastered footage of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind; if you watch the side by side vid comparison, you'll see that I actually chose some slightly different clips at a few points to make that possible. There are also a few points where the original vid had stray or blank frames, or some very short clips which I excluded in order to spend more time on the more important shots. I spiced up the Captain Proton footage with a reverse iris transition, straight out of Flash Gordon, but I ignored a lot of the apparently Vegas-induced two second transitions between clips. I also did not replicate the old magnetic tape splice transitions.

There's also quite a lot of color grading in this vid. I matched all of the DS9 clips to the What We Left Behind HD shots, as those clips' color grading was personally supervised by the DP for S3-S7 of the show. (I didn't match the TNG shots to anything, as they are all from the Blu-Ray restoration. Having no standard for Voyager, I left those clips alone too.) I also matched all of the Blu-Ray footage from the TOS and TNG movies to the DVD footage that skywaterblue used in her vid, as this thread from TrekCore on Twitter pointed out just how ghastly the color grading is on the Blu-Ray transfers. (Okay, it could be worse. But it's uniformly that paler washed out blue in the original movies, while the TNG movies make everyone look orange.) Very late in the game I also noticed that the aspect ratio was off in the "Trials and Tribbleations" clips and managed to fix it, which was gratifying. All remaining errors and infelicities are, of course, my own. LLAP.

So I went to see What We Left Behind, the Deep Space Nine documentary, last month, and I really liked it. I also wrote this fic as soon as I got home. It spoils the documentary very heavily, and yes, it is possible to spoil a documentary about a TV show that ended twenty years ago, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I managed to avoid being spoiled for the ending, which I'm glad about. 

( The future is not yet written )

The vids are live in the first equinox_exchange; you can view the entire collection of 54 new vids on the Archive.

I made one vid. I think it is very obvious, but I have never yet been successfully guessed on the Festivids guessing posts. Maybe you can break the streak via the Equinox guessing post.

I have not had much time to browse the collection because I was marching for science yesterday. It was a nice day in San Francisco, not too sunny but not too cold. As well as knowing again that we weren't alone, it was nice to know that for a few hours we were exactly where we should be. Also, we ate delicious tacos at the Ferry Building.

I received two vids, both for Deep Space Nine:

I Lived (4 words) by Anonymous
Summary: Hope if everybody runs, you choose to stay.

and

Pundits and Poets (3 words) by Anonymous
Summary: xoxoxoxo

They are both extremely heart-warming. ♥

My roommates have been making their way through the middle three Star Trek series (they're not watching ENT like sensible people and I can't convince them to watch TOS, like highly illogical people), and the penny has finally dropped for me that DS9 is in many ways (particularly in the first three seasons) playing off B5, while VOY is playing off Farscape. Or rather, both VOY and Farscape are dealing with very similar setups and issues, but Farscape explicitly goes about dealing with masculinity in a way that VOY just…doesn't, in the initial seasons. Masculinity and its fragility are consistent problems on Voyager, and Janeway and Torres (and to a lesser extent Kes and even Seska) are consistently forced to deal with the problems they cause, but VOY doesn't really do anything about them the way Farscape does; the Star Trek show treats the symptoms rather than the root causes.

In so many ways I'm glad they made DS9 when they did, because they could never make it now, but for VOY it's just the opposite, and I really wish it had been made in this era rather than 20 years ago.

ETA: And of course Stargate: Atlantis is the unification of both these strands of sci-fi: space station + we've been flung to the far side of the [$very large unit of space]. Note, of course, that neither SGA nor VOY could maintain that isolation forever.

source: Star Trek: The Animated Series
audio: They Might Be Giants, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"
length: 2:01
download: 48MB mp4 | .srt subtitles
summary: Man has a dream, and that's the start: the final frontier is still out there, just a dream away.

AO3 page | tumblr post

My wiscon_vidparty 2015 premiere.



( Notes )
( lyrics )

My sister and I went up (out) to Portland this weekend to see Trek in the Park, which is concluding its five-year mission this summer with The Trouble with Tribbles.  We had a really good time! I have missed her. 

Of course we went to Powell's on Friday night, and I was proud of myself for exercising restraint (I still have books from my first trip to Powell's four years ago that I haven't read) and only buying one book. We saw Only God Forgives at the theater across the street, which was…interesting. The colors were beautiful, and the story was interesting too. My sister loved it, and though I was not as enthusiastic, it was still cool. 

On Saturday we went to the coast, specifically Astoria at the point of the state, where we saw the Goonies house, and heard seals in the harbor but did not see them, and then down to Cannon Beach, where One-Eyed Willy's treasure is, somewhere. It got sunny by the time we got there, and we walked on the beach to see the famous rock, which was cool. We also had the Oregon version of salt water taffy, which is just sad, and tried the sea salt chocolate caramel apples. Too much sea salt. We also found a coffee shop with very tasty Aztec Mochas, and had a chestnut cream/banana crepe. If there's one thing I've learned about shore towns the world over, it's that they're all fundamentally the same, and it was fun. We also finally got to Lemongrass, a Thai restaurant in a house, and it was delicious. We drove around the fancy houses in the west hills before winding up at a fancy cocktail bar downtown, because what else was there to do.

Yesterday we got up and went to Slappy Cakes, and it was delicious, as usual. (Think Benihana except you're cooking the food yourself and it's breakfast.) We had to eat at the bar because it was so busy, so we were not able to cook our own pancakes, but it was still delicious. We went to Extracto Coffee both days. Our consensus is that it is probably the best coffee in Portland. 

Then we went to Pencil Test, which is a bra shop Spike had heard about at Reed, and got fitted for bras. Bras that fit! What a miracle! It really is true that Victoria's Secret bras do not actually fit most women well. So now we know what sizes we are in various brands, and can begin the slow process of replacing our VS bras with ones that fit. 

It has become something of a tradition for us to drive out to The Bird Hut to see the birds, so we did that (Spikeo was making friends with a rose cockatoo, unsurprisingly; they were both pink) and then drove way the hell out to Cathedral Park in North Portland. We got there at two for a five o'clock show to get good seats, because as I said, I didn't come all this way to get bad seats. One of Spike's friends showed up at about quarter to three and we sat around and hang out and drank his homebrewed beer before the show started. 

Trek in the Park! It was so great. The cast was good, and we could hear decently well, and the costumes and effects and music were very well done. A very minor thing that I enjoyed a lot was that Admiral Fitzpatrick was played by a woman, and that one of the security officers was female too, although I was sad that the helmsman (who apparently has no lines in The Trouble with Tribbles) was played by a white dude. I thought that Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov were the best among the lead cast members, although Uhura was awesome too; she just has too few lines in general. Spock was also good, though it seems clear that Gerrold was writing specifically for Nimoy's very arch delivery style, which this guy didn't quite achieve. But the scene with the tribbles in the storage compartments was amazing and hilarious (they just kept falling on Kirk's head!), and it had been long enough that I'd forgotten the denouement with the Klingon spy at the end, and it was really great, and I got a very nice T-shirt to commemorate the whole thing afterward. Long live Trek. Go boldly. 

And finally last night after eating Japanese food and going back to Powell's we wound up at Ruby Jewel Scoops, which is very tasty artisan Portland ice cream. This morning we got up very early (especially considering that my flight has been delayed an hour) and went to the airport, and so a good time was had by all.