New Vid: Every Muppet Show is a Heist

I made a short silly vid a few years ago, while I was working on "Pipeline" and wanted to cheer up my spouse Leonard. Now it's up and you can watch it!

Title: Every Muppet Show Is a Heist
Vidder: Sumana Harihareswara ("brainwane")
Fandom: The Muppets films (in particular, The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) and The Muppets (2011))
Music: Jonathan Coulton, "Sucker Punch"
Length: 1min45sec
Summary: Every Muppet Show is a heist.
Content notes: Stutter edits, needles or medical triggers, choking, imprisonment -- but all Muppety
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA)
Download or Stream: on Google Drive (111 megabytes for an MP4 file; a .srt subtitles file is there too); also available at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res VP9 and H.264 files)
Tools: kdenlive, Handbrake, LibreOffice, emacs
Subtitles file: see the Download/Stream section

Premiered at the WisCon vid party this year.

This vid is under CC BY-SA and I hope people feel free to remix it, redistribute it, and otherwise enjoy it, as long as they attribute me as the vidder.

Thanks to my spouse Leonard and the WisCon Vid party for encouragement!

A Few WisCon 44 (2020) Followups

Quick notes before I forget.

Otherwise volunteering: The Otherwise Award needs to be more structured about "here are volunteer opportunities we have" in a more accessible way, the way WisCon is! A brief list of some things we need help with (you can email volunteer`@`otherwiseaward.org):

* writing blog posts about exciting stuff our former winners and fellows are up to
* helping with data entry/spam-killing/general textual updates for our website
* helping me with the auction (either in Madison or remotely, including by doing things like live-tweeting/Discord-checking)
* serving on a future jury
* apprenticing to our bookkeeper
* apprenticing to our auctioneer (I am sure I will not be the auctioneer forever!)
* making art for next year's winner
* sourcing/making merchandise to sell in our online shop
* dealing with our stuff-to-auction storage in Madison
* spreading the word to get more people to nominate work

And more, I'm sure.

This came out of the discussion following the "renaming the Otherwise Award" panel which people seemed to appreciate -- may have time to talk about that in a followup post.

Discord: There was a Discord chat this year. It made some things easier. Naturally, some people suggested: what if we do this every year?

I'll quote and slightly edit what I said in response to one discussion:

I appreciate the desire for a textual backchannel for all of WisCon even in years when we can meet in person. I agree about how the experience of finding centralized discussion is better this year. I agree that being able to do backchannel only among the registered members (as opposed to public, Twitter/Dreamwidth/Google Group/etc.) is reallllly good. But there are a few reasons I am leery of doing this especially with Discord:

1. The Safety team would have to staff up to be available and to keep an eye on both physical and digital spaces simultaneously (we could mitigate this by getting more volunteers and having some more bots to help alert Safety of stuff to look at)

2. Discord is closed-source and its ownership is in that startuppy kind of approach that I have distrust for (we could look at alternatives)

3. An important part of WisCon, most years, is how most of your conversations are ephemeral and not recorded/saved/searchable; having a central text backchannel increases the invitation to create a shared archived searchable record of members' thoughts/conversations (and I do not trust Discord to be the home for that in the long term), which would be something we'd have to remediate, and that feels more complicated

....

Zulip/Slack/Discord/similar as backchannel for staff feels like a different thing that I see fewer problems with

....

[in response to the fact that Slack (for the free plan) only displays most recent messages]: Slack still has those archived messages... it's a mitigation

Zulip is better than Slack or Discord in most ways IMO. But the ONLY reason I hesitate to recommend Zulip for WisCon right now: I am waiting for them to implement https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/168 muting/blocking. Then I can shout to all fannish groups and say USE ZULIP.

I emailed email personnel`@`sf3.org to say:

1. there's a conversation about all this stuff, for the several minutes prior to [link to Discord discussion]
2. I'm willing to put in 3-5 hours of work or a small monetary donation to help figure this out next year

and that way WisCon's tech committee can take me up on that when they have a chance to take a breath. Anyone else who is interested, please follow my lead; I know I can't do this alone but together we can make a backchannel 2.0 that suits more people's needs and rises to meet our values.

One thing that came up in oral discussion in a small spontaneous videocall: some people really like the topic-based structure because then they know, for example, if they go into a "video games" channel, it's ok to just start saying stuff about videogames, to have conversations about that, etc. I only realized today how that didn't particularly suit me, because I trust that I'll be able to meet any person at WisCon and have an interesting conversation with them that ranges over various topics, and I want to basically start with the person, not the topic -- connection BEFORE content, not connection-through-content. The way I ended up doing this was by announcing (in the spontaneous meetup channels and in the "lobby"): "hey, I'm holding an impromptu short Jitsi videocall right now for the next 20 minutes, anyone want to talk?" and talking fluidly with the 1-6 people who showed up, about whatever topics came up. There's one day left in the con and perhaps I'll try some experiments to see whether there's a Discord-based channel/home (or whether I could make one) for the kind of conversation I'm talking about.

What if we did more of this? People also talked about year-round or more frequent WisCon or mini-WisCon events. Again I'll quote/edit what I said:

There needs to be Safety consistently available to moderate the space and help it stay safe. If the current Safety staff say, after this year's con, "it took more people than it usually does, here is how many person-hours it took over the course of 5 days to moderate this" then accounting for that is going to be a key factor in how often this kind of space can exist.

However! WisCon-inspired mini events that WisCon publicizes, like "here are this month's WisCon-inspired events that are indepedently run and organized" would be lower-stakes; 5-10 different book groups, cons, meetups, friend groups, etc. all around the world could take turns hosting online WisCon-ish panels, and discussion in ephemeral spaces (the "ephemeral" is important).

I love the idea of different meetup groups, book clubs, institutions like the Speculative Literature Foundation, etc. taking on the task of rotating around having WisCon-ish panels/sessions remotely, a few per month, and hosting ephemeral discussion about it -- WisCon could publicize and link to it but not say "this is run by WisCon and will be monitored by WisCon's Safety folks", just, this is an org trying to keep WisCon-y stuff going. Like FOGCon & Think Galacticon stuff -- cross-publicizing.

Otherwise Auction: went all right! I may have more thoughts later. This was meant to be a quick post. Very grateful to everyone who donated, helped work on the auction, bid, and/or laughed/enjoyed!

Next year's guests: People who read this journal may know that I am kind of a Zen Cho superfan and am extremely excited that she is one of next year's Guests of Honor. I have emailed in and nominated her for WisCon GoH a few times now. At Penguicon a few years ago I proposed and led a Zen Cho appreciation session that ended up just being me monologuing about themes in her work for 45 minute. Thus: I will be proposing some panels for WisCon 45 as soon as I can.