Voiceteam Mystery Box 2023 roundup

[jocundasykes]

In early January, I participated in Voiceteam Mystery Box in Team Cookies. We came 3rd! I shared a team with PolynomialPandemic, Aether, Chantress, Notbatman, Yuurei, horchata, peasina, sisi_rambles, aliteralgarbageheap, CrimsonMoonn, and LenaLawlipop.

For the Finish Line challenge, I finished my podfic Endgame, and compiled the mp3s into an audiobook file for mp3. For about a year I had most chapters embedded as a stream into the fic ao3 post itself. I’m so glad to have finished it up! My stumbling block was an awful ”Error Your computer disk is unwriteable”, where I couldn’t copy and paste the audio or save. I had a bunch of files with ”USE” ”USE THIS IS THE ONE” and I was too scared to delete anything in case my files corrupted. UGH

I slightly reduced my to-pod list by doing:

• Love’s Curse, written by Dracofiend. This is almost a sister fic to my pod Sine Qua Non, but reversed, and remaining in Harry’s POV. I recall discovering it by accident on Livejournal and being SO HAPPY! thankfully Dracofiend has since crossposted it to AO3. I hope more people will now discover it.
• Speaking of underrated, I also podficced Can’t Take the Sky by Cluegirl. Weirdly it has 297 Kudos. WHY? I discovered it via an ancient rec list, several years ago. Since then I have seen a bunch of people rec it via Reddit, so it’s on people’s radars. WHY SO FEW KUDOS, PEOPLE. Cluegirl also has blanket permission! yay! I podficced this for the Present challenge. Occasionally on my to-pod list, I write potential giftee names. For instance, if I know they’d love it. In this column, for some reason, I wrote ”Gift for Paraka?” For those of you who don’t know Paraka, she has been around a long time in the podfic corner of fanspace, and she offers (or offered) podfic hosting via her website, so if you listen to a variety of podficcers you must have seen a lot of URLs containing her username. I must have stumbled across her requesting a Cluegirl Snarry pod, or THIS fic, in a gift exchange website, or potentially on a LJ comm like HP Podfic Fest, at a time when I was scouring it for authors who had forgotten to add their name to fplslist.org. Anyway this fic is dark, (yet GREAT! everyone should listen!) and I found out near the end that dear Scarlet1989 aka emeraldlove died, so.... probably a good pod to do after the shitty news. She was super supportive of my pods.
• 18 months ago I asked for permission to podvid Fallen Marigolds. Luendland kindly assented and then I felt bad for 18 months. I had no idea where to start. Thankfully, Voiceteam had a challenge, The One That Got Away, where you could do a challenge from previous years that you didn’t do at the time. So I did PODVID, for a juicy 75 points, and, using Powerpoint(??), somehow managed to cobble it together. Honestly I'm still kinda shocked that it worked. Unfortunately the artwork is done in such a way that I couldn’t easily crop it, to fit the proportions of a landscape video, so I had to do some panning down, which was, errrr, interesting. That’s why I couldn’t use video editing software since they all wanted to zoom in and pan at the same time, instead of being zoomed in, and panning. Nightmare. I had to get the exact milliseconds from the audio track, and display the slide for the exact amount of time, and get the panning to that same amount too. I’ll say it again. NIGHTMARE! I’m really proud I did it, though. The comic is super. And the artwork for this one is splendid.

Those were all my HP fanworks. Not bad for 5 days of challenges!

I did a couple of other projects:

• I'm proud of this one... within the space of 30 mins I read lyrics, heard a youtube video, and somehow produced a filk! Definitely a record for me. Written by my teammate Aether, she would get points for writing the words, so I managed to squeeze this in before the deadline. Tamlin is a Feyre/Tamlin filk.
• Not a fanwork, but I directed Pea, who read the beginning of my fic In the Web. It was loads of fun, a highlight for me. I think I'm going to add more interiority to this fic. I like it, but it's lacking something
• I was an outraged voice in Gummy Cooks Ramen. The editing in this is masterful
• Somehow I ended up as Jason from the Good Place, of which his Floridian accent was an interesting test.
• I read some poetry in the delightful Podfic: 'L'après-midi de Chapman' by houndsoflove podded by peasina.
• And lastly, I was Tom Barnaby in A Matter of Fête, a Midsomer Murders fanwork.

Somehow I didn't end up making 50 memes as usual. It was a great way to spend a week off from work, a much-needed break.

Comments

[peasina]

Yay!! I'm delighted to see a roundup from you! (I need to work on mine omg....)

I'm so proud of you for all you accomplished this round. I'm so sorry to hear about Scarlet. I'm so impressed by your podding ability. Thank you for everything <3