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never to rise again
2004-11-19 11:55:48
What kind of idiot runs off 11 VHS tapes in 3 days? Answer: an idiot whose job doesn't start till Monday and who has some kind of delusions about status with regard to anime clubs with a library. And to a certain degree, I haven't even gotten started; when I'm doing digital->VHS conversion again, as I probably will be, it can only get worse. Fortunately most of this round was straight from VHS, so I could fire-and-forget. Changing tapes on the second MB brick, though, was an exercise in pain, mediated chiefly by Tokyopop's idiotic insistence on running the credits in English after each ep and chewing up more footage.
I should probably be doing at least some exploratory stuff with regards preparations for more videos, but The Awakening is really chewing time. I'm on somewhat of a roll; I may be able to get the last bit of content that is going to be actually written new done either tonight after club or tomorrow, and then it's all revisions, which can go in on Sunday.
Tomorrow is a funeral for the father of one of my best friends and old scouting buddies; he was the same age as my dad, who doesn't take *that* much better care of himself (though he doesn't smoke, which is a huge plus), and I knew him pretty well, so it hit pretty hard. I haven't seen Eric basically since we graduated high school -- we were both pretty headstrong people, out to go out into the world in our own directions and kick some ass, even if it didn't exactly work out that way, and shunted us off on different routes -- and while it's good to see him again, it sucks that it has to be like this. It's been glum the last few days, but at least it wasn't another one of my brother's school buddies. We lose too many good kids in this town, and there's nothing simple to blame it on like drunk driving or gang violence. It's just all freak accidents and survivor-guilt-complex suicides.
Contemplate your mortality; before you lies only a coffin. Nothing in this world is certain but the end of your life: all life must die.
I once knew a girl who told me that there were moments when she would be in class and think to herself, you know, some day there's going to be only one person in this room who'll still be alive. She was a nice, bright, energetic normal girl who played varsity lacrosse and went from cemetery to cemetery collecting inscriptions from the seventeenth century. And when I heard that I thought, wow, Min, that's really out there; I'm glad I'm not that morbid.
--Kai out
.......*far* out, more like..............
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form a cancer of this world
2004-11-17 13:50:03
Ten chapters in, The Awakening may not be an immediately *better* game in version 2.2, but it's certainly gonna be *longer*. It's out to 164 pages already, and there's definitely another 50 pages of content. The thing is that a lot of stuff is being imported from various supplements, and I'm being more judicious about pagebreaks and labeling stuff. Also, some of the explanations are taking longer; the game gets less terse, but hopefully a lot more runnable by other people.
The first run of release candidates should be done by the time I start work...shortly thereafter is Thanksgiving, in which I should be able to get most of the contros that will go into the second run of RCs. Sometime after that, I may actually be able to start work on an AMV -- if I can keep my mom supplied with Yawara and doramas and MIT happily fed on duped VHS.
Sometime I'm actually going to sit down and figure out whether I had more spare time when I was in school or now that I'm working -- I'm betting that the answer's NOT going to be when I've been on 24-hour support call.
--Kai out
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and dark dragons fly
2004-11-15 10:51:58
I'm back home, and it would appear just in time. Club has the first three of Yakitate on Friday, and I'm NEARLY sweated through my caffeine-withdrawal headache. After I get my deck built up (probably later today), I'll be back to work on The Awakening, on which I am actually getting some good input from my remote peoples.
Next video is up in the air, but it's looking an awful lot like either a heavily remixed Inoue Kikuko song or I go on a three-video Black Heaven tear. It's probably going to come down to how much time I have once work starts and if I can successfully rip DVDs with the current (buggy) drive. Some of the Black Heaven video ideas have been previously aired out in different contexts, but at least one has been 100% under wraps.
Completely offtopic:
My brother should not be allowed in casinos. He has the dual abilities of being incredibly lucky and convincing other people to do extremely stupid stuff. He and his frat (Pi Delt at RPI, for those who care) took their pledges up to Montreal, and he was the only one who won any money at the casinos. By playing War. War. In which he took the house for three hundred bucks. Even in Canadian, that's still a lot of money.....what kind of idiot casino lets people play War for bucks, let alone win three C's at it?
And I have to design games to accomodate this psycho......
--Kai out
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hybrid children watch the sea
2004-11-08 10:48:54
CJN is over. I leave on Saturday. #92 is up. It will eat your sanity on a hoagie roll.
The Awakening revision is proceeding, and most of the major parts of the manual will be done by the end of the week. The rest hasn't changed materially since the first edition, and will be pretty quick to revise. I'm looking at a new system for the Bestiary, and drastic reorderings in the spell lists, but the actual content is going to be pretty stable...just have to rewrite 'd6' as 'dice' and all will be nifty.
--Kai out
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trying to conquer the sun
2004-11-05 16:51:06
SH092 is done. The 'finishing touches', as it were, have been auto-generated, even though I couldn't get punchcarding working. Now all I have to do is cue one tape, and I'm set for CJN. That means I can finish my paperwork for my new job tonight and duck out to Kinko's sometime tomorrow...I think I've got a free slot or two while they're open.
AMV-wise I'm going to take it easy for the next week; I've got a manual to finish and if I can pack up Battlefreak instead of leaving it on and idle, so much the better. On arriving back in the Bay State, it's probably going to be Cat Soup or Gokusen (just got the first DVD == rawk), or maybe Pretty Cure if I can skin another disk off MITAC. Of course, I'm not quitting school to work on AMVs; der job and hanging about with my old-town mates is going to take priority....and then I'm going to Deutschland. SH100 may not drop till 2006.
#92, though, will go up Sunday or Monday, maybe accompanied by #89, and ofcourse I'll have to actually update the webpage with appropriate entries. I don't even think I've got #90 in, let alone #91 or the current stuff. And I should be looking for another host, but that can wait.
I should get some sleep too...up at 5 is no problem, but going to 2 from that....tough.....and I don't have the time to go north for booze........
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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