one more miracle

I've started vidding again!! I'VE STARTED VIDDING AGAIN!!!!! :DDDDD

I'm really giddy about this, if you couldn't tell. Heeee.

I chose Watchmen as my source, because a movie where my subject is only about half of the movie is MUCH easier to tackle than, say, four seasons of a TV show (*cough* Battlestar!). So I already ripped it and clipped out some scenes and I am on my way! *boogies* I have vidded, literally, the first 10 seconds, and I just keep watching it over and over because I am so, so chuffed. *beams*

I won't say anything about what song or what the subject is, because I've jinxed myself a lot by doing that before, but suffice to say it is VERY AWESOME and I am suuuuuper excited. YAY!

Good morning, lovely LJ.

Today is my last day of classes as an undergraduate! Wow. Pretty huge. I've got one last lecture for my Africa class and then I'm done! Never will I have to sit in a classroom again, listening to a lecturer go on and on and on...

Wait a second. I'm going to graduate school! /o\

Haha, regardless, this feels kind of intense. I'm finishing at F&M! But I'm also very ready to be done and move on, so I think the next couple weeks are going to be okay as I say goodbye to everyone and everything. Today I have pizza with the other chem seniors, then a reception for chemistry at a local restaurant (they're kind of unrelated things.... don't ask), and then ~~Senior Surprise~~ in which we all gather on campus and they bus us off to locations unknown! Wooooo! I think it's just going to be a fancy dinner someplace, but I'm not sure. Most of my friends are going anyway so it should be fun.

Yesterday I got an extremely, extremely depressing non-result for my research. Submitted a sample and got zero signal from the instrument, after running overnight scans. That is.... bizarre and inexplicable and scary since that's the method we hoped to use for the entirety of the rest of our project. I don't know what to do. :( So I'm trying not to think about that since it makes me nauseous, and also renders invalid all of the data we're publishing next, but WHATEVER. Not thinking about it not thinking about it.

I've been having some weird stomach pains for a couple days. For the last two days, I've had issues with perpetual hunger - I'll eat a good dinner, then I'm still bloody hungry. I'll resist for a while, but then I'll eat something more, an in an hour I'll still be kind of hungry but also nauseous and weird feeling. I haven't started my period so I don't think that's it. Then last night, I woke up at 6 AM in a whole lot of pain, my whole lower abdomen pretty crampy and gross. I assumed I had gotten my period, but apparently not, and I still haven't this morning, but my stomach still feels really gross. I don't feel like puking or anything - it's more of a muscular pain, low in my gut, just above my hips. Any ideas? :(

Last night I stayed up way too late reading tutorials on vidding for Macs, and I've got the whole setup now! I've got Mac the Ripper for ripping DVDs, MPEG Streamclip and a $20 codec from Apple for converting to an iMovie friendly file, and iMovie itself. I tried it out and iMovie deals with these files SO SO fast, whereas in the past I'd tried to use straight up mp4 files with iMovie. Apparently that was incorrect! So now I've got all the tools at my fingertips and the only question is - what do I vid??? I'd love to do that BSG idea, but I think I'd need all the DVDs and that's not happening any time soon. So I gotta think through what I own. But it's very exciting!! :D

Now I'm going to go get ready for my last day of college! :O Love ya flisties!

I just wanted to say a quick few words about 2008. All the economic shitstorm and what have you at the end here is casting a pall over the year as a whole, but it was really something special for me... at least at the beginning. The year was quite cruelly split in half for me, so it's hard to remember that Dublin really WAS part of this year. At the same time, it seems a million years ago, or that it lasted just the blink of an eye. Being in Dublin felt like taking a vacation from my own life, or conversely actually living my life for the first time. The memories are so vivid and gorgeous and intense that just looking at a couple pictures can bring everything rushing back and cause tears to prick at my eyes. The first three months of 2008 were easily the best of my life. It was the middle term (Michaelmas) of Trinity's school year, and I didn't have any labs to do, so I was free as a bird. I went to lectures and that was it. So I had endless expanses of free time which I used quite fruitfully. I was going out with my friends and having a blast at least twice a week, and during that time I was becoming extremely close to Kate, Emily, Cary, and Megan. I wasn't dating anyone (I was between Colin and James) so I was just... free. I cannot remember another time when I felt that happy and vibrant and alive. Then my best friend Michelle came to visit me in Dublin, followed immediately by my dad and sister, which was so so much fun. Niall and Laura's birthdays, St. Paddy's Day, Father Ted Night, going to Germany, Belfast, Cardiff, Brighton, and Oxford, endless hours of Guitar Hero, nights at The Pav or Fibbers or The Porterhouse or Doyles, throwing fantastic house parties, the PERFECT last week full of friends and joy... my memories are legion. Niall, Paddy, Lou, Dara, Barry, Bren, Niall C, James, Paul, Sinead, Sarah. It hurts my stomach to not be there anymore, but I will always treasure the memory and the people that are in my life because of Dublin.

*deep breath* Then I came home, and immediately had to start my lab job at my college. I was depressed but determined to make the best of being here... it only kind of worked. The school year started and I was thrust into some of the most intense and constant work I have ever had to accomplish. I also met Jeremy Moss. Oh yeah, and we elected a man that I truly believe in to the presidency. It was a weird, reclusive semester that is such a polar opposite to all that I just described about Dublin. I think I'm still trying to recover my equilibrium. But now I'm heading into my last semester of college, gearing up for grad school, and I don't even know where my head's at. Sometimes I feel impossibly old and grown up, sometimes I feel like a stumbling, naive little child. I'm both excited and scared of what 2009 will bring. I know that nothing will ever be Dublin again (though I do hope I'll make it back this summer) but I do hope that the growing I did in Dublin will serve me in good stead as I try to find my footing.

And that's enough of that! Dublin has been on my mind a lot lately... I think I just needed to talk about it some.

On a completely different note, I have been thinking a lot about vidding lately! I've made three music videos (Harry Potter, Buffy, and Supernatural) and I love all of them so much. I just don't have the tools anymore - the last time I did it I used my PC laptop and actually went through all the complicated crap to get Premiere working. But now I've got a Mac and I don't really want to go through the ridiculous process of downloading and figuring out Final Cut Pro. So I'm playing around with iMovie just to see what happens.

The idea I'm working with? A Merlin vid set to "I Just Can't Wait to be King". YEAH. I think Rob suggested it as a joke while he was watching with me and Michelle, and Michelle and I were like "....YES!" and now it won't leave my head! I started converting and organizing and clipping stuff last night. Who knows if I'll actually follow through with it! But it's just such an awesome idea, and Merlin has the really nice benefit of very limited source material, that I can't not *try*. Heehee.

A side effect of getting back in the vidding mindset is that I keep thinking of songs I listen to as potential vidding songs. I was listening to Pink's (I refuse to call her P!nk) latest album, and the song "Please Don't Leave Me" hit me as hilariously appropriate for Merlin and Arthur. ( Just read these lyrics! )
Seriously, it's lolariously PERFECT. Semi-emo, just like preshface Arthur, but the music has this fun bouncy thing going on that I think would go well with the show. And, my perfect little punching bag. Ahahaha. I don't even know. I just know that it's PERFECT. <3

A couple fun things from today - I chatted with Jeremy on AIM tonight! Just for about 15 minutes, but it was really nice cause I've been missing him. Also, I got a voicemail today from my uncle's sister - she works for the National Institutes of Health and their Graduate Partnership Program. My uncle gave her my CV, and apparently she's really interested, or else she wouldn't be calling, especially since their application deadline was in December! She said she's going out of the country but she's passing me on to someone else in her office, so I'll probably be hearing from them soon. I have no idea if anything would come of it (the GPP is basically where you enroll at a university for your PhD and do courses there, but then do your dissertation research with a mentor at the NIH) but it's still really cool that my CV was apparently that impressive. Gives me good hope for my grad school apps! Which I still need to finish, rar.

I am so relaxed and unstressed right now - I'd forgotten what this feels like. *HAPPY SIGH*

So a while ago I won two awards for my Supernatural S1 video "Blind" - Best Video and Best Drama at the Art of Vidding Awards. It was very exciting :D Now the site is having a "Best of the Best" round, and my vid is up against the winners in the same categories in all the rounds since! This time around, in addition to the judges' assessment, there's a poll that anyone can vote in, which is pretty darn cool.

So I thought I'd bring your attention to it :) I know that it takes a while to download and watch videos, so I suppose you could just vote for me if you wanted to be nice. HOWEVER, I am up against some of my favorite vidders, and LITERALLY my favorite music video, oh, EVER (Living Dead Girl - nnnnngh, SO GOOD), so I feel really silly asking you to vote for me when I honestly think they deserve it more.

So consider this as an offer to go watch dozens of really really beautiful videos and enjoy it and vote for whatever you think deserves it the most :)


(Click on the banner for the site with the nominees.)

So here I sit, with an entire hour to kill before I can go downstairs and read for 20 minutes before Jeff gets here. I'm trying very hard not to feel guilty about LJing and reading fic while on the clock. I'm sure I'll get over it eventually :)

I've watched up to Hell House with my cousins. Last night, before we watched HH, they had both taken a victory shot (I think because Meg listed some new items for sale on her online yarn store - right Meg?) so Meg was kind of giggly, and it's a giggly episode anyway, so that was highly amusing. That episode is just so much fun. It gives us a chance to see the boys just being boys, and it highlights that they are, slowly but surely, learning how their puzzle pieces fit. In the beginning, they clash more often then not - now it's becoming more of a comfortable harmony, a relationship with mutual respect and affection. This is not to say, by any means, that they've solved their issues - Dean is still clearly terrified that Sam's gonna leave (that's just gotta bother him all the time, buzzing at the edge of his consciousness... oh, Dean) and Sam still resents it all, but at the same time is deeply committed to revenging Jess's (and Mary's) death. So, they're not pretty or clean puzzle pieces by any means, but they're getting there.

Oh, there I go again! I start talking about these boys and I just can't seem to shut up. It's worse than usual right now because I've got this vid on the brain, and I'm constantly in that analytical headspace, specifically with regards to how the boys relate to each other. There are some really priceless lines in the song that I'm looking forward to vidding... these include "remain your funny valentine," "I'd freeze us both in time," "your eyes forever glued to mine," "fill your every breath with meaning," and of course, "if I could tear you from the ceiling." It's just such a RICH, textured song that I can take so many different directions, and that is DEEPLY exciting.

And still on the vidding topic, I was listening to House Rules, and I've always thought there should be a SPN vid to that because HELLO, so I started trying to watch the vid in my head (does that make any sense? I mean trying to envision specific moments working with the song both in terms of words and rhythm, to see if the *feel* of the song is right at all) and omg. That would make the best vid EVER. So I really want to do that eventually as well. I hope this other one goes relatively apace (that is, I hope that 1) I'm not a big boob and let it sit around like I did with the Faith one, and 2) Premiere decides to cooperate on a regular basis) and that I get it finished in time for Wincon, because I'd love to be able to show it there and get real live feedback from fellow fans. That's gonna be my motivating force, I think.

That's enough rambling for now. Off to read some fic! \o/