Pirates win, fandom fails

The good: Spent today at Indiana Beach with vagabondage and holy crap that was awesome. There were roller coasters and cheese fries and I won enough tickets playing skeeball to trade in for purple fuzzy dice. But that wasn't the best part. No.

The best part was Pirates Revolt: the Pillage of Paradise Island. That was the name of the water show. Where the plot (and I use that term loosely) depended on a rift in time to bring the pirates. And oh were there ever pirates. There were pirates doing ramp jumps on waterskis! Pirates on jetskis! Pirates diving from very high towers! There was a hot pirate queen! Cheesily choreographed fights...fists and swords people. Bad jokes and puns! A loserboy pirate named Bubba who was a total idiot and kept getting knocked out and was thus clearly created just for ME. And then? THEN? Just when I thought it couldn't get any better? A ninja showed up and burst into flames. You think I'm making that last part up. I'm totally not. I cannot fully express in text just how AWESOME this thing is.

The bad: I came home overflowing with the kind of joy that only flaming ninjas can provide...only to hit my friendslist and be reminded of just how much people SUCK sometimes. What. The. Hell. Why do I live in a world where it has to be pointed out that equating interracial realtionships with goatfucking is racist? How is that not the most obvious thing in the world to avoid? You'd think that wouldn't even require being a marginally sensitive or aware human being to grok. Apparently I was carrying too much faith in humanity. And okay, I get how someone might not be immediately aware that a word carries an extremely offensive history and might use it without any ill intent, but refusing to acknowlege harm or change it after you've been made aware moves you from the category of clueless to deliberately racist asshat mighty quickly. And even when you weren't aware of that particular word's meaning? Defining two people having sex as deviant for no other reason than one of them has darker skin than the other? FAIL. Categorizing two humans having sex with human/creature sex for no other reason than one of the human pairing has darker skin, regardless of what word you use to define the category? FAIL FOR ALL ETERNITY. I just keep staring at the whole thing going...what? No, seriously...what? This is a question? There are people confused as to what's upsetting and rage inducing about this? I really wish I could kill people with my brain sometimes.

In conclusion: The world needs far more flaming ninjas and far less racist fuckwads.

A whine and a question.

Why is it not next week yet? I've started to move from excited about Vividcon to impatient. There are people I haven't seen in a whole year and they will be HERE, but they are not here now. Considering I still have to clean my apartment (oh god do I ever have to clean my apartment) and buy an air mattress for pre/post con crashing this is a good thing objectively but I don't care because there's a whole week to wait. I suck at waiting.

Also, right now at this very moment there are a slew of new vids by so many amazing vidders that are finished and just waiting to be seen. I want to see them! I don't get to see them until next weekend. Knowing this turns me into a grabby handed whiny two year old.

So, talk to me about vids please. What do you love best about vids and/or vidding? If you are a vidder, what do you want to work on most this year as you make new vids? Me, I want to reach a point where I'm comfortable with my cutting, and directly related to that, get a much better understanding of musical structure so that how I cut uses the music and becomes integrated with it in ways that I don't think I'm approaching yet. Now you.