Er, MIDI came first - though it wasn't originally intended as a performance medium, but as a tool for musicians needing a standard for more versitile and easily set-up control of synthesiser equipment, hence its shortcomings as a performance medium. Mods then got cheated by the fact that storing large amounts of music on one's hard drive didn't become popular until file-sharing, which coincided with and greatly advanced the creation and growing popularity of the .mp3 file format, which could be applied recording as opposed to needing to be thought of ahead of time. Even though better compressed wave formats exist (like ogg, aac, and wmv), mp3 still rules by virture of self-perpetuating pervasiveness (like Windows). There is currently another format with as much, if not more potential than MODs as a flexible rendered audio format called SAOL, or Mpeg4 Structured Audio, which is a markup language for both audio synthesis and recording musical events and parameters. Unfortunately SAOL is a bit on the complex side of things, hindering it's inclusion in popular playback software and really precluding its use by amatures as a sound composition or distribution medium.
Back to the AMV idea:
Princess Tutu should still work. You wouldn't know the protagonists are protagonsits unless you are among the few to have seen the series, and they are antagonists in the scenes where they are "evil", so it should fit fine. Outside of the incredably complex relationships and plot are visuals that are (in the magical 'fantasy' fascet of the storyline) almost as black-and-white good-and-evil as an old Disney film, and just as well rendered (but in a Japanese style with a pervading fairy-tale/ballet theme).
i am looking for the perfect anime
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rose4emily
- Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 1:36 am
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Contact:
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mudholestomper
- Joined: Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:17 pm
- Location: Oregon
well, that was highly inforitive.rose4emily wrote:Er, MIDI came first - though it wasn't originally intended as a performance medium, but as a tool for musicians needing a standard for more versitile and easily set-up control of synthesiser equipment, hence its shortcomings as a performance medium. Mods then got cheated by the fact that storing large amounts of music on one's hard drive didn't become popular until file-sharing, which coincided with and greatly advanced the creation and growing popularity of the .mp3 file format, which could be applied recording as opposed to needing to be thought of ahead of time. Even though better compressed wave formats exist (like ogg, aac, and wmv), mp3 still rules by virture of self-perpetuating pervasiveness (like Windows). There is currently another format with as much, if not more potential than MODs as a flexible rendered audio format called SAOL, or Mpeg4 Structured Audio, which is a markup language for both audio synthesis and recording musical events and parameters. Unfortunately SAOL is a bit on the complex side of things, hindering it's inclusion in popular playback software and really precluding its use by amatures as a sound composition or distribution medium.
Back to the AMV idea:
Princess Tutu should still work. You wouldn't know the protagonists are protagonsits unless you are among the few to have seen the series, and they are antagonists in the scenes where they are "evil", so it should fit fine. Outside of the incredably complex relationships and plot are visuals that are (in the magical 'fantasy' fascet of the storyline) almost as black-and-white good-and-evil as an old Disney film, and just as well rendered (but in a Japanese style with a pervading fairy-tale/ballet theme).
and yes, i was aware that midi came before Mod format. shame too. much of the public are and were not even aware that Mods exist, so theyve Really missed out IMO. iA tracker bud of mine that i frequently corrisponded with sent me a cd with, once unzipped, a GIG of mods. several years later i Still havnt had the time to listen to them all. but i digress.
i was unaware about much of the rest of that bit. the reasons and differing format types. interesting.
And thank you for the vid referial. first i'll download and watch as a potentional candidate. if it works, ill see if maybe i can get an offshore supplier to ship it here so i can begin.
(this idea is to special to waste on inferior video quality. i plan it to be a tribute to the depthless love i feel for my wife. nothing would Truely be good enough to show that, but i am sure as hell am going to try!)
Even if the voices in my head aren't real, they have some Damn good ideas, you're just jealous because they only talk to me.
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rose4emily
- Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 1:36 am
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Contact:
I've seen them for sale as region 2 dvds on the Japanese market that you might be able to import. The prices were in Yen, so I really don't know how much the series is going for, but you might want to make sure that you either have a region-2 drive or a good knowledge of DeCSS before you try importing. That, and the DVDs have no subs orenglish audio, so you really can't get the story out of them without knowing Japanese. It's too bad this one hasn't been marketed over here yet - I definately would be buying it if it was - but I think the combination of a pretty lame title and a mahau shoujo/ballet/incredibly complex fairy tale concept probably kill it's marketability in America despite the high overall quality of the series.
may seeds of dreams fall from my hands -
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
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mudholestomper
- Joined: Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:17 pm
- Location: Oregon
and yet another reason why i dearly wish i knew Japenese. to HELL with spanish. its getting too damned proliferant here. its almost like the national launguage here is changing and that rather pisses me off. i wish to god that in order for the person to become a full citizen they HAD to learn the national launguage! (english) insted, we cater to them more and more giving them less and less reason or need to do so. (sure, the reasons for that Are fairly sound, but it just perpetuating the problem) 
*steps off soapbox*
anyhow, for my purposes i dont have to understand the dialog so long as the video works for the music track i have picked out. granted, ild Prefer to understand the dialog, still in the end it matters little.
i wonder if the local community collage teaches japensese. ill have to check into that, and the cost if it Is available.
please explain what a "region 2 drive" is and how it differs from what is currently the standard here in the states, (or if there is a differance) if you would be so kind. sank you.
*steps off soapbox*
anyhow, for my purposes i dont have to understand the dialog so long as the video works for the music track i have picked out. granted, ild Prefer to understand the dialog, still in the end it matters little.
i wonder if the local community collage teaches japensese. ill have to check into that, and the cost if it Is available.
please explain what a "region 2 drive" is and how it differs from what is currently the standard here in the states, (or if there is a differance) if you would be so kind. sank you.
Even if the voices in my head aren't real, they have some Damn good ideas, you're just jealous because they only talk to me.
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rose4emily
- Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2004 1:36 am
- Location: Rochester, NY
- Contact:
A DVD's region code refers to geographical ranges in which hardware supporting that region code is distributed. This is done to allow the film industry to charge different rates to different countries (fair enough, everything else is priced differently according to geography) and to reduce commercial piracy such as bad Hong-Kong bootlegs by making it more difficult for bootleggers to distribute their product outside of their region. Unfortunately it also prevents people in North America (Region 1), or anywhere else - for that matter, from using their standard Region 1 DVD players to view legally purchased foreign films that aren't sold in America (like stuff from France or Japan, both of which produce good films that are often not marketed across the language barrier). The hardware is programmed to only play stuff matching its region code, and this applies to both entertainment-center and computer DVD drives.
DeCSS is a computer program that allows most computers to circumvent the CSS (another name for the region-code system, not to be confused with the W3C Cascading Style Sheet standard for web formatting) protection established between the DVD and the DVD drive. I've heard rumors that some newer drives would have uncircumventable hardware protection that would render DeCSS useless, but I don't really know if that's true, or which models would be affected if it is. DeCSS is technically illegal, and was the subject of some big court battle a while back that was quickly overshadowed by the much more hevily publicised (and more commercially important) Napster P2P file-sharing case. I don't remember who won, but DeCSS is now widely available as software for "academic purposes" (the same disclaimer that LAME used for a while to prevent being sued by the company holding the patent on MPEG Layer-3 (mp3) compression. You should try it before buying anything expensive that would rely on it, though, to make sure it works on your hardware.
You can always get the fansubs for watching the series and then get the DVDs if you want to go ahead with the AMV project, giving you better footage and a good idea of what's going on. I, personally, am waiting a bit longer to see if the company that bought the American distribution licence will end up releasing or letting someone else release an English-subbed set of DVDs before giving up on that hope and buying the Japanese-only ones. I still only know enough Japanese to make out a third of a simple dinner conversation, so I could hardly keep up with complex dialog and still enjoy watching all the pretty pictures at the same time.
As for the whole Spanish thing, I go back and forth on that myself. On the one hand, I have a thing about voice-mail systems (for companies in New Hampshire, of all places) asking me (in Spanish) if I want the Espaniol version before going on to the English voice-mail system. I recognize enough Spanish that I could probably just use the Espaniol system, but that's not really the point.
On the other hand, I think the real problem isn't so much expecting adults to be multi-lingual to work more smoothly with new immigrants and such as it is the lack of any emphasis on that sort of thing while we are still young enough to easily gain fluency in multiple languages. I once spoke with two girls from Romainia who could converse fluently in Romanian, French, Russian, English (and their grammer, vocabulary, and pronunciation was as good, if not better than mine), and Latin (in which their grammer, vocabulary, and pronunciation was definately better than mine). According to them it's common in their country to know at least Romanian, English, and Russian well enough to hold a fluid conversation, but they start seriously studying all these languages almost concurrently with learning to read at around 4-5 years old. According to census figures, the Hispanic population in America is large enough to warrent an official secondary language we were a bit less nativist about it (like French is in Quebec), and continues to grow. Along these lines I think it really would make sense to require all elementary school children to learn both English and Spanish concurrently and put the next generation on equal footing.
On a more philisophical note, languages are like textures and flavors of thought. Each has some things that can't be fully expressed by others, and a different sound and set of connotations to match each denotation. This is, I imagine, why nations with large multi-lingual populations will often mix languages in poetry and everyday speech to increase the versatility of sounds and meanings at the speaker's disposal. As much as we mock "Japanglish" over here, it seems rather common in Japanese pop media and technical terminology, as is the incorporation into English of phrases from Romance languages like French and Spanish. This can be done to give a phrase a bit of ethnic flair (Ricky Martin, anyone?), to describe something of foreign origin without having to change its name (calling Kareoke "empty orchestra" or Kamikaze "godlike wind" would probably be lost on most Americans, as such phrases don't really match their uses in our linguisticly-shaped vein of thinking), or to make something sound more pleasent by using a language with equivalent words that sound more pleasent than what we have ("like wiping your ass with silk"). It can also be done to make you look cool and knowledgable to whatever your in-group happens to be, whether you are spurting off lines like "ex nihil, nihil fit" (from nothing, nothing comes [or, really: out of nithing he/she/it makes nothing]), "hey, ese, he be going loco on my ass - like crazy homes" (greetings, friend, someone was assaulting me in an manner such as to suggest his insanity [God help me if I ever hear anyone outside of badly-done films talking like that]), or perhaps something like "Good evening, sir, are you as fagged as I am tonight? I think we shall both get pissed and hope to encounter a pair of ladies who fancy lorry-driving blokes like our selves" (Hello, are you as tired as me? Let's both get drunk and hope to run into two girls with a thing for truck drivers). You could even go southern and "reckon" upon what "is and ain't fittin'", or to the days of Shakespeare where a guy, dissapointed that he isn't going to get laid, would say "wouldst thou leave me so unsatisfied", and a goth-child complaining about the meaningless of existance might say "Out out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." You coult even visit the Victorian era, where "God is in his heaven, all is right with the world" wasn't just the words under NERV's sign in EVA, and the line "God is dead" had yet to be ripped off by shock-rockers or countered with "Neitzche is dead". Even within one supposed language many languages exist, and bits of many other languages can be found. Further, there are very few languages that don't share part of their ancestry with other known languages. A few small tribes in central Europe have one that seems to have developed independant of German and Latin, and Japanese doesn't have a recognizable predecessor among its neighbors, nor any major influx of outside terms or structure until the Japan's social and political walls of national isolation were partially broken by forced industrialization at the hands of Western influences diring the 19th centry and the drmatinc military rise and fall of the Empire of the Rising Sun with the Second World War. Languages like English and Spanish actually share so much in common that, though being a speaker of one hardly makes you a speaker of the other, it does give you a surprising amount of ability as a listener. Even with no formal training in either Spanish or Latin I could decipher intelligable meaning from simple Spanish phrases like those written in assembly instructions and other short, concrete documents. It's really the abstract thoughts that impose cross-lingual barriers, as they can't be fully explained by what words other words resemble and their meanings in the dictionary. Yet those abstract thoughts are exactly why I think there is a value in maintaining several different languages on the Earth as opposed to just trying to overwrite them all with English (which was already forced on much of the world through British military and American commercial conquest and opportunism) or Chinese (which has far more native speakers, though I'm not sure on the relative numbers of total speakers between the two, given the far greater likelyhood of someone having English as an auxiliary language rather than Chinese, but also is split into two very disparate dialects that I hear are semanticly even farther apart than formal British English and Ebonics). Different languages promote different ideas, and thus channel human creativity in different directions. I know that with every bit of another language I learn (as well as every bit of my own I've picked up) comes a different strain of thought and set of ideas that are most concisely, clearly, casually, or poetically expressed in the newfound fragment of speech. Replacing one language with another, either by forcing a native language on newcomers or by accomodating the newcomers through ignoring the native language, does nothing other than move the communicative barrier between populations one way or the other and set people into different but equally restrictive paradigms. Encouraging the use of both the new and old language by both the new and old sub-populations breaks down the barrier and widens people's perspectives on their own thoughts and observations.
Wow, I guess I'm still in literary mode (I'm taking a break from writing a paper on Stanly Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire and the obsolescence of the alpha male). Anyhow, I think I was on topic for at least part of the post, so that's good enough.
And, as was put forth by The Daily Show:
If George Bush expects to gain a large segment of the vote because he can speak Spanish, just imagine how well he'd do at the election if he learned to speak English.
DeCSS is a computer program that allows most computers to circumvent the CSS (another name for the region-code system, not to be confused with the W3C Cascading Style Sheet standard for web formatting) protection established between the DVD and the DVD drive. I've heard rumors that some newer drives would have uncircumventable hardware protection that would render DeCSS useless, but I don't really know if that's true, or which models would be affected if it is. DeCSS is technically illegal, and was the subject of some big court battle a while back that was quickly overshadowed by the much more hevily publicised (and more commercially important) Napster P2P file-sharing case. I don't remember who won, but DeCSS is now widely available as software for "academic purposes" (the same disclaimer that LAME used for a while to prevent being sued by the company holding the patent on MPEG Layer-3 (mp3) compression. You should try it before buying anything expensive that would rely on it, though, to make sure it works on your hardware.
You can always get the fansubs for watching the series and then get the DVDs if you want to go ahead with the AMV project, giving you better footage and a good idea of what's going on. I, personally, am waiting a bit longer to see if the company that bought the American distribution licence will end up releasing or letting someone else release an English-subbed set of DVDs before giving up on that hope and buying the Japanese-only ones. I still only know enough Japanese to make out a third of a simple dinner conversation, so I could hardly keep up with complex dialog and still enjoy watching all the pretty pictures at the same time.
As for the whole Spanish thing, I go back and forth on that myself. On the one hand, I have a thing about voice-mail systems (for companies in New Hampshire, of all places) asking me (in Spanish) if I want the Espaniol version before going on to the English voice-mail system. I recognize enough Spanish that I could probably just use the Espaniol system, but that's not really the point.
On the other hand, I think the real problem isn't so much expecting adults to be multi-lingual to work more smoothly with new immigrants and such as it is the lack of any emphasis on that sort of thing while we are still young enough to easily gain fluency in multiple languages. I once spoke with two girls from Romainia who could converse fluently in Romanian, French, Russian, English (and their grammer, vocabulary, and pronunciation was as good, if not better than mine), and Latin (in which their grammer, vocabulary, and pronunciation was definately better than mine). According to them it's common in their country to know at least Romanian, English, and Russian well enough to hold a fluid conversation, but they start seriously studying all these languages almost concurrently with learning to read at around 4-5 years old. According to census figures, the Hispanic population in America is large enough to warrent an official secondary language we were a bit less nativist about it (like French is in Quebec), and continues to grow. Along these lines I think it really would make sense to require all elementary school children to learn both English and Spanish concurrently and put the next generation on equal footing.
On a more philisophical note, languages are like textures and flavors of thought. Each has some things that can't be fully expressed by others, and a different sound and set of connotations to match each denotation. This is, I imagine, why nations with large multi-lingual populations will often mix languages in poetry and everyday speech to increase the versatility of sounds and meanings at the speaker's disposal. As much as we mock "Japanglish" over here, it seems rather common in Japanese pop media and technical terminology, as is the incorporation into English of phrases from Romance languages like French and Spanish. This can be done to give a phrase a bit of ethnic flair (Ricky Martin, anyone?), to describe something of foreign origin without having to change its name (calling Kareoke "empty orchestra" or Kamikaze "godlike wind" would probably be lost on most Americans, as such phrases don't really match their uses in our linguisticly-shaped vein of thinking), or to make something sound more pleasent by using a language with equivalent words that sound more pleasent than what we have ("like wiping your ass with silk"). It can also be done to make you look cool and knowledgable to whatever your in-group happens to be, whether you are spurting off lines like "ex nihil, nihil fit" (from nothing, nothing comes [or, really: out of nithing he/she/it makes nothing]), "hey, ese, he be going loco on my ass - like crazy homes" (greetings, friend, someone was assaulting me in an manner such as to suggest his insanity [God help me if I ever hear anyone outside of badly-done films talking like that]), or perhaps something like "Good evening, sir, are you as fagged as I am tonight? I think we shall both get pissed and hope to encounter a pair of ladies who fancy lorry-driving blokes like our selves" (Hello, are you as tired as me? Let's both get drunk and hope to run into two girls with a thing for truck drivers). You could even go southern and "reckon" upon what "is and ain't fittin'", or to the days of Shakespeare where a guy, dissapointed that he isn't going to get laid, would say "wouldst thou leave me so unsatisfied", and a goth-child complaining about the meaningless of existance might say "Out out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." You coult even visit the Victorian era, where "God is in his heaven, all is right with the world" wasn't just the words under NERV's sign in EVA, and the line "God is dead" had yet to be ripped off by shock-rockers or countered with "Neitzche is dead". Even within one supposed language many languages exist, and bits of many other languages can be found. Further, there are very few languages that don't share part of their ancestry with other known languages. A few small tribes in central Europe have one that seems to have developed independant of German and Latin, and Japanese doesn't have a recognizable predecessor among its neighbors, nor any major influx of outside terms or structure until the Japan's social and political walls of national isolation were partially broken by forced industrialization at the hands of Western influences diring the 19th centry and the drmatinc military rise and fall of the Empire of the Rising Sun with the Second World War. Languages like English and Spanish actually share so much in common that, though being a speaker of one hardly makes you a speaker of the other, it does give you a surprising amount of ability as a listener. Even with no formal training in either Spanish or Latin I could decipher intelligable meaning from simple Spanish phrases like those written in assembly instructions and other short, concrete documents. It's really the abstract thoughts that impose cross-lingual barriers, as they can't be fully explained by what words other words resemble and their meanings in the dictionary. Yet those abstract thoughts are exactly why I think there is a value in maintaining several different languages on the Earth as opposed to just trying to overwrite them all with English (which was already forced on much of the world through British military and American commercial conquest and opportunism) or Chinese (which has far more native speakers, though I'm not sure on the relative numbers of total speakers between the two, given the far greater likelyhood of someone having English as an auxiliary language rather than Chinese, but also is split into two very disparate dialects that I hear are semanticly even farther apart than formal British English and Ebonics). Different languages promote different ideas, and thus channel human creativity in different directions. I know that with every bit of another language I learn (as well as every bit of my own I've picked up) comes a different strain of thought and set of ideas that are most concisely, clearly, casually, or poetically expressed in the newfound fragment of speech. Replacing one language with another, either by forcing a native language on newcomers or by accomodating the newcomers through ignoring the native language, does nothing other than move the communicative barrier between populations one way or the other and set people into different but equally restrictive paradigms. Encouraging the use of both the new and old language by both the new and old sub-populations breaks down the barrier and widens people's perspectives on their own thoughts and observations.
Wow, I guess I'm still in literary mode (I'm taking a break from writing a paper on Stanly Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire and the obsolescence of the alpha male). Anyhow, I think I was on topic for at least part of the post, so that's good enough.
And, as was put forth by The Daily Show:
If George Bush expects to gain a large segment of the vote because he can speak Spanish, just imagine how well he'd do at the election if he learned to speak English.
may seeds of dreams fall from my hands -
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
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mudholestomper
- Joined: Wed Mar 17, 2004 6:17 pm
- Location: Oregon
yes, Dailey has a well put turn of phrase there dosnt he?
*asmmused grin*
and i also have noticed long ago about languages "borrowing" parts of words or even the entire word from a differant culture and language completely. English itself is rather infamous for that.
by your description of region settings and "DeCSS" i believe it would behoove me to make certain that the DVD burner i purchise would be compatable with that utility. at least if i Do have to go the rout of having the dvd shipped from overseas. i hope not. but in any case, much as ild love to get right on the project i recognise that i need to increase my editing skills to do this notion the justice it deservs.
so in the meantime i have several other projects i can and one in particular i Am currently working on for the learning process. and frankly, just for fun (and artistic expressionism) as well.
thank you very much for the enlightenment.
*asmmused grin*
and i also have noticed long ago about languages "borrowing" parts of words or even the entire word from a differant culture and language completely. English itself is rather infamous for that.
by your description of region settings and "DeCSS" i believe it would behoove me to make certain that the DVD burner i purchise would be compatable with that utility. at least if i Do have to go the rout of having the dvd shipped from overseas. i hope not. but in any case, much as ild love to get right on the project i recognise that i need to increase my editing skills to do this notion the justice it deservs.
so in the meantime i have several other projects i can and one in particular i Am currently working on for the learning process. and frankly, just for fun (and artistic expressionism) as well.
thank you very much for the enlightenment.
Even if the voices in my head aren't real, they have some Damn good ideas, you're just jealous because they only talk to me.