fannish history online, yay!

One of the coolest things about Vividcon is that it always kicks off with a retellling of the origins and history of media vidding, and that story begins in 1975 at a Star Trek convention with Kandy Fong's slide shows set to music. In 2005 we even had a party (with CAKE) to celebrate the 30 year anniversary of what we do. I love that feeling of being connected to our shared history. I was a bit of a late bloomer fannishly, didn't find y'all until I was nearly 30 myself, and I found vids online, learned how to make them online, never used anything but a computer...had no idea of the journey they'd taken (I was two when that first slide show aired *g*), until I started meeting vidders who started when it was all about VCRs and, through them, got a chance to hear the stories, and see the progression of the form and our community. Word of mouth. Living rooms and VHS tape collections, this is where I learned my fannish history. Most of the visual examples don't even exist online (though many are starting to pop up remastered), and some of them are just gone forever. So, finding on my f'list via cesperanza this morning that one of the earliest, 'Both Sides Now', the Spock slide show by Kandy Fong that so many of us have heard of, but never seen, is now online with an explanation of it's history (this was videotaped at a con in 1980)...it makes me so happy. There's a concern with the kind of oral history, face to face, fan to fan, the way most of us learn it, that it will eventually be lost. VHS tapes deteriorate. People leave fandom, get older, and online communication has us so much more widely dispersed (and in greater numbers) than we used to be. It's efforts like this to collect this stuff, to bring it together with the new digital tools and make it available, to save it...I just, yes. Yes, please.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2007/11/19/celebrating-kandy-fong-founder-of-fannish-music-video

Go. Take a look at where vids as we know them started :D.

TARDIS con, and more space blibber

So, who on my f'list is going to Chicago TARDIS? I am more than a little freaked out about this. I've never been to a con that was not Vividcon where, even my first year, there were people I'd known for a good long while previously and a few I'd already met in person. This time out I taraljc is (I think) the only one I know in person, and even if I could spend the entire con latched on to her, that would be a bit unfair. I have great fears that I will end up alternately hiding out in my hotel room feeling sorry for myself between bouts of Tara following. If you are going and wouldn't mind a tagalong sometimes, lemme know (I'm mostly harmless, I swear).

In continued documentary huffing news, super massive black holes ROCK. What rocks more? Intergalactic cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Kinda brings new meaning to the term "eat your own". Bigger galaxies regularly smash into and absorb smaller ones, combining super massive black holes to become..um...more super massive. And right now Andromeda is heading towards us in the Milky Way, eyeing the tasty snack that we are. I'm thinking having the same name as a candy bar isn't helping. We should perhaps change our name to the the Brussel Sprout galaxy. Just a thought.

Also, Neil deGrasse Tyson is kind of awesome. He shows up in over half of the space documentaries around, and for good reason. He's pretty much unmatched in being able to describe complex theories and concepts in accessible ways to moronic universe fangirls such as myself who go "oooooooh, pretty" but couldn't do the math to measure a paper bag. And his enthusiasm for the subject spills all over everything he says. And if that weren't enough, he won my heart forever when he described the process of death by black hole with unreserved glee at the concept, confessing that he's thought a lot about it and considers it his preferred method of demise (quote, "just dying and being buried is so boring"). I have never seen anyone's eyes light up like that while describing how you could be ripped apart and squeezed through spacetime like toothpaste through a tube. Like a kid at the prospect of free candy. I'm pulling for a way to visit black holes to be invented so he can, at the end of his life, live the dream and go jumping into one. We all have goals. Death by black hole is an awesome one.