Insta-rec: A Partial Map Of Your Tardis

Run, don't walk, and check out this incredible piece of fanwork: A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change) by alibi_factory. Part fanfic, part art, all beautiful. It perfectly captures the whimsy of the TARDIS and the Doctor, and there's something of an air of wistfulness about it. Lovely, lovely stuff.

(For non-Who fans, if you know what the TARDIS is you know enough to appreciate this.)

(Crossposted.)

Vidding vs writing

I don't know how I missed it before, but on thefourthvine's rec I just watched heresluck's incredible Star Trek vid, The Test.

It's an incredible vid, and I recommend it unreservedly; on a technical level it's absolutely masterful, and on a story level it's one of the clearest, most narrative vids I've seen. (Which may, actually, be why I like it so very much.)

The funny thing is the effect it had on me, though. I consider myself very much as part of fandom -- I read voraciously, I think Deep Meta Thoughts (although I don't post nearly as often as I should) and I'm thoroughly polyfannish. But my fic output is very low, and part of the reason why is an inferiority complex, and part of it is the feeling that all the stories have been told already. (Which is, tangentially, why I love Yuletide and write for it every year; because in the small fandoms, there are plenty of stories left to tell.)

My vid output is also low, but that's mostly due to procrastination; for some reason, I have plenty of ideas for vids, and the fact that lots of other people vid in my fandoms doesn't put me off in the same way it does with fic writing. And although I still have a terrible inferiority complex regarding my vidding work (and possibly with good reason) -- when I look at a good vid, my instinctive feeling is "I can do that too one day", and I don't get that with fic. And I really don't know why.

And the weird thing is that I should like writing more than vidding, in the sense that I am a fairly 'explicit' person; I like things to be spelled out, and I very often miss vague inferences. Writing allows you to do that, whereas vidding is almost entirely about the vague inferences; vidding makes you interpret what you see and decide for yourself, because the vidder (usually) can't explicitly tell you the point they're trying to make, given the constraints of source footage. It is surprising to me that I like vidding and vid-watching so much, under the circumstances.

(This is why I suspect I'm not a very good vidder; because I'm not particularly good at putting together a narrative using inference and implication. I'm hoping I get better at it, with practice.)