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and the autumn moon is bright
2004-10-04 12:34:10
Another weekend passes, and again I end up with the short end of the stick. I didn't get enough done on my school stuff, and I didn't reinstall the OS on Battlefreak. I didn't even get that much sleep either....suck. At least the Awakening materials are coming along, and I didn't fall behind on summaries, and I was able to catch a few more bugs in DSV, and I scraped up the cash for the full run of Radar Men From The Moon, which I may have to start a Flash Gordon club or something to show to other people. There ain't nothing like that old pulp serial sci-fi.
My younger brother ran his second marathon over the weekend, and finished under four hours, mostly because unlike last time he didn't run the last 21 miles on a sprained ankle, or try to match pace with a guy who was doing a 10K on the same course. I don't know if he qualified for Boston or not.
I should be angling for jobs or reading that paper right now; this much spare time in the middle of the day just always ends up getting wasted. Not really hanging too much fire on the results of the Globocide contest; other people made good videos, and I just made a ridiculously extreme one; no chance. But time is running low for CJN......
--Kai out
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running through the shadows
2004-10-01 09:59:35
I had some free time yesterday afternoon, so I watched, listened, and read through a bunch of stuff that I had leeched over the past couple weeks. Megadeth and Nevermore's most recent videos weren't that inspiring, but Lamb of God, Suffocation, Insision, and Crematory were well worth the collation. Ohtar, despite a promising album title (coming from eastern Europe, home of Graveland, Bilskirnir, and Nokturnal Mortum, expectations are a little higher for a black metal tape called _The Empire of White Power_), weren't that great, but Pain Knot was pretty cool despite being from Ohio, and some of the early material I got from the Butthole Surfers, Tomb, and the Mountain Goats was decent. And of course, more Katsu and Yakitate was beneficial; shoujo was a mixed bag that fortunately included Dice and a bunch of Good Morning Call.
I start work next week, and the major projects will all get raring around then. I'm not going to have time to steal content, let alone enjoy it. Fortunately, there is no limit on how many times you can re-read Monster and 20th Century Boys, or to how many times you can listen through Death and Amon Amarth's catalogs (still need _Fate of Norns_....suck...), and I've damn well got those.
If you leech one video off mediaburialvideos.com, make it Exhausted's "False Lies". This video vindicates the strand of thought that the short-form music video can work as a short silent film with soundtrack, rather than as an instantiation of music. Virtually no beats are hit, and the music is actually pretty boring, but the audio forms an effective and evocative backdrop to a wonderfully realized CG-lego morality play on the last couple years. This should be winning festival awards, not pushing up Pepsi's ad numbers somewhere in the wasteland of on-demand music-video channels.
47 Loyal Retainers tonight; all hail CJS and their Kenji Mizoguchi series.
--kai out
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this is where heroes are born
2004-09-28 11:41:56
I am actually having a fairly successful job fair. I didn't totally bag the one interview I had so far (despite not handling all cases in the function they wanted me to write), and I think I scored points with IBM and the NSA as well as several smaller companies. No Applied, but that's the way things go; only one semiconductor company here this round, and I think I put them off by knowing more about their market than they did. Only one outright bust, but that's to be expected when your strategy is to hit tables nobody's ganged around that have something to do with your field.
On the AMV front, Battlefreak is running sluggish, and I strongly suspect that it's because of virtual memory issues. If your OS does not support a swap partition, bounding the root drive at 1 GB when you have a 600-MB operating system and 1 GB of memory is nothing but World Of Pain Time. Probably this weekend I'll reformat, reinstall, and give the root 10 GB or so....see if that fixes things.
Of course, this assumes that eventually I will be able to make AMVs on this thing; school is of course putting that in jeopardy. The projects haven't even started yet, and I'm already spending almost every free minute reading and summarizing technical papers. I mean, it's not that bad; the papers are interesting, and I can lie back and crank a record while I read it, then another one while I write up the review. If I could get paid for this, it would rock. Unfortunately, I'm not getting paid, and I still have to go to class. SUCK.
--Kai out
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silent are the watchers
2004-09-25 21:21:03
lot of work on this and that; got about seven or eight papers to read and review, four of 'em for Monday. I'm not gonna be sleeping a lot after the session.....fortunately a lot of the work is already done...the hard part anyways. And there's a bunch of good albums to listen to while it's going down.
For future reference, if you leave a shitty review on someone with 90+ videos, make sure you put some content in it, or at least some creative insults. When you just say "it sucks" in as many words, you get ignored, your troll goes for nought, and the creator you bagged on goes back to sleep on his couch, buried in technical scribblings.
/goes back to pound "Blood Red Skies" while walking home and absently toying with the idea of animating 20th Century Boys to the song
--Kai out
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the piece | that evinces the puzzle
2004-09-24 10:33:23
I've got a boatload of work to crank through today, but for now SH091 is up on local and already showing an unusual degree of interest. Demos always do well in that regard....and this one has a single cut from GitS 2 to draw people in and make them feel gypped on the way out.
I got a job yesterday, and I may even make enough on it to cover rent. Of course, with tuition going up, it becomes even more of a shell game: can you keep enough float in your two bank accounts to fully pay bills when they come due? Of course, that's not a problem for now but fotr the future; a torturous real-time assignment is the problem for now and Saturday.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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