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Three hundred sixty first entry - RANDOM THOUGHT
2007-08-21 05:24:45
Time - 4:21, Noise - Vienna Teng - "Drought"
ZOMG SUDDEN INFLUX OF GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME VIDEOS.
(not that I mind. very pretty anime, although I don't know it. just a bit surprising, that's all.)
:O
Yeah... it's 4:21 in the morning. I'm not writing anymore. I'm googly-eyed enough as it is without concentrating on text. Z_Z
Nighty night... morning... folks....
- Jen -
Three hundred sixtieth entry - Spider Princess
2007-08-17 19:55:41
Time - 5:50, Noise - Hans Zimmer - "What Shall We Die For"
Phobia... thought I should explain this one...
There aren't a lot of things that I'm deathly afraid of. I would skydive in a heartbeat. Generally speaking, I like being in darkness. Dunking my head underwater is fun.
However, I hate needles. I shake from head to toe whenever I need to get a shot or blood drawn. It terrifies me. I've never even been stung by a bee, and I'll probably have a hard time not crying the first time that I am.
And then... there are spiders. In IRC it was deduced that spiders must be attracted to me. I am, in fact, the Spider Princess now. Remember the stories I told you all a few weeks back? Toilet Spider was the most memorable of them. A few days ago, a new challenger rose to meet me. Outdoor Spider. It was a big, furry thing, and it was impossible to get at it from where it was on the wall in the kitchen. I had to wait at least twenty minutes for it to crawl to a position where I could kill the thing. When it got where I could deal with it, I actually hit the Swiffer head against the wall so hard that the head of the duster popped off. And then the spider kept running. Fortunately, it was pretty slow for one of its kind, so I took several whacks at it with just the stick handle of the Swiffer, and I finally scored a hit that stopped it. Think "Whack-a-Mole" here. It was still alive, naturally, so I put the detached head of the Swiffer back over its body and just stepped down on it for a while. That did the trick. Then, just to spite me, a few days later a tiny spider was in the kitchen sink. I promptly dealt with that one by seeing if it had learned how to swim.
So yes. Spider Princess. Either they love me, or I just notice them a lot more often than most people.
The point of the spider story is that they freak me out terribly whenever I run across them. I get the feelings that I associate with needles. Shaking, cold sweat, and a complete paranoid feeling. The only reason I bring myself to deal with the spiders is because I know they'll just keep wandering the house if I don't - and that thought freaks me out even more.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Unrelated stuff... I tried re-encoding two of those ginormous MADs I have. The first one didn't really come out much smaller. It was 125 MBs, and the .mp4 was 80 MBs. However, the second one started at 318 MBs and came down to 92. I consider that a much better improvement. They're still quite big (especially for h.264 o_O ), but anything below 100 MBs sits fine with me. The best part is that the quality loss is unnoticeable. I mean, I kept going back and forth between two freeze frames, but no matter how many times I look at it, I can't tell that there was really any difference. I'm willing to take that kind of a result. 200 MBs less for what looks to the naked eye to be the same video quality anyway is good enough for me.
Now it's just a matter of when I get the patience to sit down and rework the MADs. I still don't know if I'm really doing a good thing by re-encoding an entire collection of videos I didn't make, but I'm not wasting eight gigs of space on something that *could* take up half that.
But y'know what? Even with all this .mp4-ness... I still feel like a n00b. I suppose that's a feeling that'll stick with me forever.
See you, folks.
- Jen -
Three hundred fifty ninth entry - pondering...
2007-08-17 01:07:24
Time - 11:11, Noise - some random Silent Hill 3 ambience...
I know that I said this entry would be "phobias," but I've been pondering other things.
1. This the greatest beverage company EVAR. I currently have a bottle of Fufu Berry soda sitting next to me. I seriously want to try so many of those flavors. ;p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Soda
2. I have a crapload of MADs (I downloaded four big packs - about eight gigs total), but most of them have huge filesizes. Sorry, but I don't really want to take up 130 MBs for a one or two-minute video. Why the hell these things weren't compressed is beyond me. I think that many of them are lossless... or MPEG2s... I'm not really sure. I'm not up on my encoding. Anyway, the point is that I keep considering doing an h.264 compression on them, but I stop everytime I think of the fact that someday someone might want these MADs from me. They might be irritated that they're not getting them in the video quality that the creator intended, y'know? It's probably stupid to worry so much about that, but I can't help it. I always think ten steps ahead with stuff like this. I've said before that I'm a digital packrat. This is still true now. I dunno. I'll compress a video or two, and if it looks good enough, I'll start compressing more. I guess I can take it on a video-by-video basis. If I find one that just doesn't compress well, even with h.264, I guess I can just leave that one "lossless," or whatever it is.
3. Speaking of digital packrat-ism, I need to make a note to go through my video editing related stuff more often. I had sixteen gigs of Onimusha 4 clips that could easily be dropped because they aren't the lossless ones I'm using now. (Rather, they were the .m2v's I was working from.) Also, on the pseudo-yaoi MEP, it hadn't occurred to me that I had rendered so many lossless versions of my segment. I got rid of many beta renders, and I'm finally up to 33 gigs. I had 6 when I started this whole thing. In the end, the only one I actually needed to keep was the Lagarith that I sent u_queen. That's what I was going to use for the stand alone version anyway. That one's gonna be an .mp4. Yeah, that's right. I learned how to do it - and all on my own, no less! It almost seemed too easy with Zarx's guide... I hope I didn't do anything wrong. Oh well. If I did, the forumfolk are sure to let me know when I make the announcement.
4. I downloaded an AMV a few days ago that I'm still trying to make a judgment on. I can clearly see what the person was trying to do... but I have no idea if that's because there's real meaning in the video, or if it's because I just always LOOK for meaning in videos. I don't know... I see something special, but I'm still deciding what I'm going to say about it. (PS: that's a surefire way to get a free op from me - make a video that I have to debate my thoughts on. ;p )
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?vid_id=148905
5. Tomb Raider (any of them, 1-8) is officially the Reigning Queen of Glitches. Seriously. I was looking at The Forbidden Site for just this purpose, and I found some absolutely hilarious glitches in those games. When I say this, I don't mean that they're poorly made games. No, I love the TR series, no matter how much it may infuriate me at times. It just has some of the best glitches (ie: weird shit) in gaming EVAR. Probably even more awsm than the Ashley Suplex. Brownie points for knowing what that is. Two funny videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlIaz022RRI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlnB6Id4MqI
6. The more I read the Fruits Basket manga, the more I realize that the anime was actually a LOT better. It may have stopped before it got through the whole story, but man did it do a good job on what it DID get done. It's too bad it won't get a second season ever. Anyway, I guess I just want to say that THAT is how you do book-to-TV franchises. The only reason I'm keeping with the manga still is because it's going to hit foreign territory on the story eventually. Aside from that, though, I don't like it.
7. I know I've said this many times, but Cod damn it, Tsubasa, hurry up and be released already!!! ;_; That is all.
Nighty night, folks. <3
- Jen -
Three hundred fifty eighth entry - fear
2007-08-14 04:55:57
Time - 3:14, Noise - storming...
This entry is fear. The next will be phobias.
I've never been scared of storms. More than anything, they just annoyed me. My bedroom is right next to the streetlight, so it's fairly well lit. I've come to be very used to that, and I hated that those photosensitive lights would blink out every time there was a particularly strong flash of lightning.
And yet... when that would happen, I would sit in my room statue still until the lights came back on, which took ten or fifteen seconds. Actually, I didn't always sit still - but I consider the other thing to be far more worrisome. Even if I was laying down for sleep, I would sit straight up and start rocking back and forth. I was probably scared then. But whether I was scared of the storm or the dark, I've never been able to figure out.
It seems like a childish thing to be scared of the dark, doesn't it? Right now, the living room, my brother's room, the bathroom and the kitchen all have their lights on. I'm the only one home right now. I feel like an ass for wasting so much electricity in rooms that I'm not even in, but at the same time... every light I turn off makes my skin crawl a little more.
I've started to think in the last year or so that maybe my irrational fears were because of the fact that I constantly have nightmares. But then I get thrown around in circles with my logic, because I wonder what's causing the nightmares. This morning, I was jolted awake by one such dream. It was storming outside in my dream, and it got so loud that I went out to see how bad it was. It was clearly a tornado, but it didn't look like one I had ever seen. It was much more freeform, and a hell of a lot more menacing. I got as far as the house behind mine when I felt my body lifting up. It was like having someone push you onto your back and then being carried upward. It happened so fast and as I was rushing up to meet whatever was going to happen to me, my eyes snapped open and I woke up.
I didn't move, I didn't gasp, I didn't make a single sound... I just stared at my ceiling for a few moments while I waited out the very strange feeling of having your heart thud horribly and then feeling like it just completely stops moving for a few seconds. It's the same feeling I get whenever the power goes out - whenever the lights suddenly blink out and I'm sitting in a pitch black room for a few tense seconds.
It didn't really surprise me that I had a dream like that. It's been storming badly at least every other day for the last two weeks. It only seems to happen when my mother and brother are away at work at night, too. I don't like being alone when this kind of stuff happens. If someone's here, I don't get that thud in my chest. I don't get that urge to rock back and forth. Maybe it's an instinctive thing from back in the primal days. Who knows. I'm sure the ancient people must have been worried about storms. For many cultures, it meant the wrath of the gods was raining down on them. For some, it was a blessing. I'm guessing MY ancestors were of the former category...
That more or less leads me roundabout to the point of this entry. The power went out about twenty minutes ago. (I keep copying this journal to a text document so I don't lose it if the power blinks out again.) When all of the lights went out for a few seconds, I had that statue still feeling again. Very unpleasant. I want to sleep, but I know that it would be useless. I'll end up looking into every dark corner of my room a dozen times before I can calm down enough to get drowsy.
I think I'm just going to listen to some music. I can't sleep with music playing, but it'll help with relaxing my body.
I'll probably have another nightmare tonight. I hope it's at least about zombies. Zombies don't bother me the next morning. -_-
Nighty night, folks.
- Jen -
Three hundred fifty seventh entry - the prince(ss) of all cosmos
2007-08-12 17:46:03
Time - 3:05, Noise - Project FMV mix
Ran into two oddities in Dark Cloud 2 when I was playing it last night...
The first, and quicker-to-explain of the two, is that there is an item in the game called a Name Change Ticket. I always thought that this meant you would change the name of your characters, so I didn't bother getting one. I don't care about that kind of stuff. However, what it really means is you can change the name of your weapon. Why anyone would want to do that is also beyond me, and yet... it serves a very awesome purpose. If you change the name of a weapon to the name of any existing weapon in the game, it will *transform* into that one - this includes ultimate weapons. So, you could have the strongest wrench/gun/sword/brassard at a ridiculously early point in the game. Very cool.
The second oddity, and I consider this more of a glitch, is a Spheda set up I had. For the uninitiated, Spheda is basically just golf. You have a ball and a vortex you have to hit it into with a golf club. However, the vortex is a fixed color of either red or blue, the ball changes from red to blue and back again when you bounce it against something, and it needs to be the opposite color of the vortex to be sucked into it. Otherwise, just like magnets of the same poles, it'll be deflected. To make things even more fun, you have a limited number of hits (which I've seen range anywhere from 1 to 21, depending on how far away the ball is from the vortex and what obstacles are in the way). You play Spheda on the randomly generated dungeon floors after you have defeated all of the enemies on that level. About half of all of the Spheda set ups are reasonable, and the other half are downright diabolical. The particular set up I had last night was just mind-boggling. The ball was in the same room as the vortex, and it was the opposite color. There were no obstacles in my way. A shot like that would have taken only one hit. Instead, the number above the ball was... 13. THIRTEEN!?
Eventually, I deduced what was probably the reason behind the gross overestimation of hits. The vortex was right next to a wall, and directly on the other side of that wall was another path in the dungeon. Had the vortex been on that side of the wall, it would have definitely taken thirteen hits to get it there. I guess that the game just glitched and thought the vortex was on that side. Strange, strange game.
But I'd rather have it do that than the set ups I normally get - one hit, ball/vortex are the same color, and I have to weave the ball around six corners to get it anywhere NEAR the vortex. Way to go, Level 5. You made a game that gives impossible circumstances.
Aside from that, I've just been reading stuff on GameFAQs lately. It's fun to see all the different bugs, glitches and strategies that people have used to exploit certain games. Some games have pretty amazing things you can do that give you such an advantage that it's not even funny. I'm considering making a money FAQ for Dark Cloud 2, just because I've had such success in getting money. I think I've developed a strategy that works well.
That reminds me. I should speed run Fatal Frame II again. Gotta keep in practice, you know. Just another day in the life of a gamer.
See you, folks.
- Jen
JOURNAL: dj_ultima_the_great (Jen )
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