JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)

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  • neu england'sche voelligkeit 2004-10-21 09:14:20

    In 1986 I had just turned six years old, and had lived in the Boston area for just less than three years. My maternal grandfather was still alive, and he was up from Philly to help look after us because my youngest brother was just born. But it was also that Bird and McHale and Parish and Ainge and DJ and the rest of the Celtics were about to win the championship over the Houston Rockets, and that was what was on the TV that June: them and the streaking Red Sox. The Celts won and the Sox lost that year, where the Pats had previously rolled over in the Super Bowl and the Challenger had blown up, but it was the Sox that we remembered, and Bill Buckner was the dirtiest of dirty words all while I grew up, with friends who played t-ball and baseball where I didn't and had rooms plastered with posters of Clemens and Mattingly (neither of whom will ever be forgiven by kids my age for going over to the Yankees later in their careers).

    I only got into baseball later, growing up, as I realized that as much as I wanted to stay connected to Wisconsin, where I was born -- and as much as I did stay connected to the Madison mindeset -- I WAS FROM NEW ENGLAND, and there wasn't anything wrong with that. And the Red Sox were The Team, the team that mattered. And then the team started to get hot, behind Mo Vaughn and Tim Wakefield back when Wake could legitimately play the ace. But they were never good enough: since my sophomore year in undergrad, it was always 1-2 with the Yanks, and sometimes it was glaringly obvious that baseball needed a seeding system for the playoffs, because the two best teams in the league were both in the AL East, and anything beyond the series they met was a pointless afterthought. Sometimes they were marginal and it was two teams from the West that went to the playoffs, and we were left grinding our teeth and waiting for spring training. And then it went to Game 7 in the ALCS last year, with riots all the way that I was 800 miles away from, and for a whole year everyone in the whole goddamn country got to feel what it was like to grow up in Boston.

    "Rooting for the Red Sox is like loving a bad woman" -- my eighth grade history teacher said that, teaching us the franchise history because that as much as anything else was Massachusetts History, the eighth-grade social studies course in the Commonwealth before the standardized tests took over (and maybe yet). That was the fall of '93; it'd be in his class the next spring that I'd watch OJ rumble down the freeway in a white Bronco. It's been that long, but the lesson remains: *she will always do you wrong*. And yet you can't walk away.

    So that's why when it's the bottom of the ninth and there are already two outs and Embree is working the count (taking over from Timlin who took it from Pedro who picked up where Lowe left off -- even if Francona Gradied and pulled Lowe a couple batters early, putting those two runs up on Pedro) and you are already up 10-3
    because Johnny Damon is ending the year as red-hot as he started it, you are pounding your glass against the rail, nervous enough to puke, because these are the RED SOX and these are the YANKEES, and the Yankees are a strong, tough, team with more comeback wins this season than Tom Brady will ever notch in his career and the universe has it in for the Red Sox, and you'd only feel certain about the outcome if you had eight runs on them rather than seven, seven is still dangerous because it is the Yankees, even if it is the bottom of the ninth with two outs in game 7 of an ALCS that has felt as long as a whole season of its own, and all of a sudden the play is
    to first, and he is OUT, Sierra is OUT, and the Boston Red Sox are going to the World Series after sweeping the New York Yankees in four do-or-die games.

    The Red Sox are going to the World Series. For the first time since I was four feet tall. And the NLCS is in seven games as well, so it's still undecided if they have home against the Rocket, who wouldn't be the Rocket if it wasn't for Boston, or against Suppan, who played his high school ball in Peabody and grew up following the team just like I did. But even if it goes no further, if the team has nothing left to give after this monster of a series, curse or no curse, there are a lot of people who won't give a damn one way or the other.

    Win the World Series? We just *won* our fucking World Series.


    --Kai out


    (pretty obviously, no video progress.....hope I can get some in before Saturday)

     
  • neue deutsche voelligkeit 2004-10-19 16:14:55
    I just accepted a job offer I had been waiting on for a while; this is only tentative, but once the written deal clears I will likely be heading to Germany for the better part of a year on what will amount to 24-hour call after six months of training. Obviously, this is going to make it kind of hard to do AMV, if I have to train by day and keep up with school by night (if I can't withdraw without pulling straight Fs).

    So the temporary end of my career is staring me pretty much in the face, as is the almost-certain permanent end of my hosting. Fortunately, it also means that I don't have to pay another semester's tuition bill, which would suck, or that much more in the way of rent. I just have to find someone to buy my housing contract and beg the department to allow me to withdraw without penalty. Hopefully I can get an advisor first, then use their leverage to get me out of school unscathed.

    For others wishing to go out on a limb:
    Best laid plans do often go astray.....so make sure to make a lot of plans that have nothing to do with your objective. I have a lot of stuff that people are going to get on my case for leaving in the middle of; things would almost have gone smoother if I didn't get the job.
    If the universe hates you and likes to mess up your plans, make damned certain that it never has a clue what those plans actually are.

    --Kai out.......maybe for real this time, but I *will* at least try to finish #92




     
  • seven seas of pain 2004-10-18 10:55:00
    Current video: Meridian, "Abraham Timecode" to two shows too mangled to recognize*. Progress checK: 38%. Expected catalog number: #92. Work is proceeding briskly; the extra rendering I have to do isn't adding too much time to the totals. What is adding to the total latency is six or seven Westerns that I haven't watched yet out of the 10-bundle. Of course, the incentive to watch them is running down, as I already sat through Cry Blood, Apache (extremely deep and cool, no idea what it's doing on here) and Fistfull of Lead (100% spaghetti...basically involved giving the TV the horns for 90 minutes), plus The Gunfighters, which was just silly...in a good way.

    And then there's the rendering I have to do for CJN. I have Ultimate Teacher running off now, which ought to finish by the time I finish up here and head back, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. My obscure tastes in anime have finally caught up with me, and I'm sourcing about half the con. At least I have the schedule now, and know what I ahve to be cooking fro the next three weeks. This more than anything else is going to put a cramp in what I'm able to do; hopefully I can leverage the new box for faster renders.

    Of course, that assumes that I can finish the code that I'm actually on campus to write in enough time to get back, start another long render, rehab the box, and get this all done with time to still study for 584, or at least organize out the necessary materials. At least I got some sleeping in this break....

    --Kai out

     
  • this is life and death 2004-10-15 13:01:02
    off the Blabbermouth newswire:
    In a recent interview with Kerrang.com, stand-up comedian Steve Hughes, a metal fanatic whose shows spin around the subject, explained why heavy metal was important to him.

    "My friends in Sweden are total Iron Maiden fanatics," he stated. "They've got every Maiden record that was released in every country. That's dedication. Masterful. So they went to Croatia to see them. While they were on the train, passengers were being robbed by Croatian soldiers. They were sitting there in their Maiden shirts and bullet-belts freaking out. Suddenly, the soldiers confronted them armed with machine guns. They noticed their shirts and yelled 'Iron Maiden! The greatest band in the world! You are okay!' and left them alone. Heavy metal will save your life. If they were into Westlife, they would have been shot in the face."

    Beat that, indie pusses.

    .....

    Current video: Meridian, "Abraham Timecode" to two shows too mangled to recognize*. Progress checK: 29%. Expected catalog number: #92. I'm forging ahead on this one despite the issues with punchcarding, and have clipped through one ep. However, if I have time to do post tonight, it will take *ALL* night, as there are now three stages involved instead of just two, and the time requirements haven't gone down any. Three eps to go, probably another two weeks accounting for schoolwork and running showings and such.

    * The shows are determined, but will ruin the surprise of revealing the sources if they're announced before the video is complete. And they are being heavily mangled in VDub to bridge the few remaining gaps in animation artstyle; AMV abstraction has already destroyed the gaping void in genre, mood, and intent.

    I probably ought to already have dupe jobs running....I just can't for the life of me remember what I'm supposed to be running off. Well, not all of it, and I've got to swap some stuff around anyways as I forgot to lug out something I'd promised to show. Well, it's probably hentai anyways, and I'm thinking of replacing it with Wind (OVA, not TV), so it's probably all good. Hope I've got enough tapes.....

    --Kai out

     
  • the filth of righteousness 2004-10-14 10:08:37
    I tweaked the translation that I did for Bounty Hunter: The Hard a couple years back last night...fixed a bunch of issues that were there because I translated off the German sub rather than the Japanese dialogue. I still need to get it into SSA and get the fonts set...the lack of opaque-boxing is kinda disturbing, but I'll work something out.

    Video work is still stalled...classes have been kinda intense, and instead of having 9 hours a week to generally muck around, I'm running power tools and managing checkouts in exchange for some unspecified wage. I sure hope it'll let me make rent.

    Might do some editing this weekend, might put some tweaks in on punchcarding or just let it totally slide. Probably have to reencode Bounty Hunter, and I got a request for #90 that I have to fill. And then there's the showing to run, a bunch of programming to work up, and studying for midterms.

    I should probably buy some food in there sometime. Living on the bottom of a box of potatoes and leftover bagels aint going to get you very far.

    --Kai out

     
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