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when i look back upon my life
2004-07-26 10:02:07
Current video: Mortician, "Brutal Disfigurement" to Kawarazaki. Progress check: 59%. Expected catalog number: #90. Started the actual clipping, getting through the first episode despite the low framerate and lack of data making it difficult to catch markpoints. The filter load to make this source not look like utter shit, though, is so heavy that I had to apply them post-cutting (rather than in the process) in order to have any sort of control on the other end. It's a hell of a way to make a video, and I just hope I'll be able to get Magix running, for otherwise muscling this stuff though TMPEG is going to be a cast-iron bastard.
The weekend was pretty entertaining, starting out with six CDs at Newbury Comics before I got in to club. What the hell else does a metalhead do with fifty unexpected bucks? The releases from Taraxcum, Winter, Threshold, Yattering, and Tankard (for which I threw back a Devin Townshend CD, no regrets) were cool; I haven't heard the last one, from Void of Shadows, yet. Saturday was cool as well, though I seriously have to watch out when drinking around here. It was only about four beers and a couple shots of Jack in some Coke (just enough to still keep watch on people), and I wake up sneezing the next day (still sick). Fucking immune system.
Of course, this wasn't much at all in comparison to the retards doing shots of LoCo and making pirate floats (add Dekuypers to the list of distillers whose products get hit with a baseball bat), but I wasn't the one falling through a styro cooler or rolling around on the ground tearing out tufts of grass between barrel breaks. I was the one making sure said kid wasn't choking on his own vomit and dying. Following that, yesterday was pretty calm. I cut up stuff for the video, watched Tokimeki Tonight (cool stuff for '70s shoujo), and played Gal Pani X until my fingers cramped up. I still can't clear the damned fourth stage. For a non-gamer without a gamepad, it's fucking hard. But I can't stop....kondo kosou.....KONDO KOSOU!!
I'll probably clip up the second ep and do up the timing chart et al tonight, then try to make Magix play nice with it tomorrow night. I've got borrowings to copy, and tapes to run off for Friday (maybe a CD as well), but I can do those while tying my fingers in knots trying to clear silhouettes off....and I still have to get distro-quality tapes anyways. I gotta start walking and get back in condition for school as well...I just gotta stop being sick first.
--Kai out
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a thought that kept you up at night
2004-07-23 09:39:35
Current video: Mortician, "Brutal Disfigurement" to Kawarazaki. Progress check: 43%. Expected catalog number: #90. After two hours of painstaking work (much of which was spent carefully arranging frames of a de-limbed female torso stuffed into a refridgerator), the manga part of the video is more or less done. I'm sending everything through VDub to Huffy right now with the intent to at least try this in Magix; it's a 90-second video at most, which will play out to about an hour or two in terms of drafting. MPD Psycho has kicked in just short of 20 seconds of the 172 needed for drafting purposes, but as all of these 36 cuts, to best effort, are going to be going in the video, it's more like each ep is going to have to supply a minimum of a minute for 100% overage. That's not worth being concerned about, given how sick Kawarazaki is.
I also threw in another hard drive (lo and behold, 7200RPM) that I forgot I had lying around. This was courtesy of someone who didn't check their mobo specs before ordering up a drive, so the part was "like new" and included a spare IDE cable, which I can use in place of the overpriced piece of crap I bought a week back (still in box). The drive works, so all I have to do is not fuck anything up when installing Gentoo on it and I'll finally have this box up and functional.
Now I just have to actually load the OS and settle the matter of store credit for that cable. I'm uncertain what I'll do with it; it's basically a tossup between speakers, a capture card, another HDD, or a 5.25" fan bank and will come down largely to what they have in stock and how my cash in hand is. Regardless, this is the last time I buy parts from this ripoff outfit. They are fuckers profiting from the fact that the average American knows even less about what goes on inside their PC case than they do about what's going on under their car's hood. It's not just a case of 'not stocking brand-name parts', it's 'not being able to compete against brand-name parts with generics on price'. I couldn't get a comparable CPU cooler for less than 3 times what I paid for my current fan/sink for NewEgg -- including shipping. That's some bad shit.
Currently, though, the video takes priority over building up this putative rig. Even with settling this stuff, party preparations, and the actual Saturday-night debauchery, I should be able to get through at least one ep this weekend....maybe two if things fold up early Sunday morning (not likely). At least I don't have to worry about being stuck in Boston -- the second and third blocks at club look uninteresting, so I will be nabbing pizza and heading out. Here's hoping that taking the subway to the dog track to catch a bus will be cheaper than the general train routine, rather than more expensive....as unfortunately usually seems to be the case.
--Kai out
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will i ever see the light
2004-07-22 12:00:39
Current video: Mortician, "Brutal Disfigurement" to Kawarazaki. Progress check: 36%. Expected catalog number: #90. I've got the manga nearly all flattened out, providing so far 35 cuts of gruesome death. The 35th isn't finished yet, as it'll be a pan rather than a static image, and will require some additional editing to make it flow right, but this will be finished up tonight, probably along with the translation of these images into sourcable video. The burden of stuff to be moved for #91 does not appear that intense, and with what I've scavenged to date, future acquisition efforts should be unnecessary. This leads into clipping on the weekend (as much as I can get in) and the push to final next week in time for Farlo's deadline.
Since 7 AM I've been in onsite, furiously writing code and for breaks, scratching intermittently at the beginnings of the SH website. The current plan is to get it online concurrently with the release of SH090, but this may be delayed by work commitments and, well, work on the video. I've got about 5 videos out of 99 entries (there are a bunch of video projects that haven't gotten SH catalog numbers for one reason or another), plus the three main pages
I got Grave Digger's _Excalibur_ and Gardenian's _Sindustries_ last weekend used. Both were decent, but the first one definitely exceeds my tolerance for knights-and-magic power metal, and as for the second....you've gotta wonder about anyone who can call a song "Sonic Death Monkey" with an absolutely straight face. Maybe if I work late tonight and leave early tomorrow, I'll have time to duck out to Harvard Square and see about getting that Golem disc.
That's the essence of underground: buy CDs from bands you've never heard of based on label, name, and cover concept. \m/.
--Kai out
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circles and rings, dragons and kings
2004-07-21 10:41:59
No progress last night...going through more source for the next vid, though I did manage to get the MPD manga loaded and a CD of source for #91 burned off.
#91 is getting weird. The sourcing concept is basically the good old "eat what you kill", which for certain reasons is including a larger and larger proportion of H titles. Many of them do their demos at full-resolution, and high bitrates (same as if I ordered the CD/DVD and ripped from there), which is good, but the content is getting a little off. There's still some good visuals and fluid animation, but when you reach titles like "Daughter Maker", you start wondering, like a Lovecraft protagonist, whether you have indeed plumbed too far and reached primal secrets that were not meant for human eyes.
It's a good thing I'm doing what I am for #90 first. Surviving Kawarazaki grants automatic immunity to most forms of perversion. And the H bits are not going to be present in the actual video, which will be a relief to onlookers....and to me as I can safely skip past those parts in the clipping phase.
Work on #90 will likely proceed rapidly over the two working nights before the weekend, with likely completion at the start of next week, whether or not this one involves Magix. It's looking like "no" at this point; higher production values are kind of opposed to the 'quick and squalid' ideas behind this one (gotta stay consonant with the audio source). Still, I have to learn this suite sometime....though it's not looking like that time will be any earlier than once I return to school --and given the pitch of work, maybe not even then.
It's not, though, like the $13 I spent for it is going to be a hugely wasted investment or anything. I've paid for what I got; the only possible outcome now is to get more than what I paid for from it.
--Kai out
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conjuring power it opens wide
2004-07-20 10:22:34
Current video: Mortician, "Brutal Disfigurement" to Kawarazaki. Progress check: 25%. Expected catalog number: #90. I did the workover last night, shortly after finding out that I had at my disposal zero functional hard drives. Fortunately, my schedule is gonna be too tight to waste money on anime/music for the next two weeks (courtesy of the DNC), and having gotten some reciepts paid, I'm up $85, whcih is almost enough to buy something functional and 7200RPM at retail. I'll run another memtest battery in the meantime to flush out memory in case it's just RAM-resident stuff prejudicing the liveCD, but I'm strongly suspicious that the drive I did not personally mess up was in a machine that was being retired for a reason.
The moral of this story, of course, is that it's never a good idea to rely *solely* on stolen or rescued parts for critical components in a new system. Make sure you have *something* that works first.
I finished watching Kokoro Library last night and I can heartily state that I want my 6 hours and 4 blank CDs back. This series is pointless, plotless, boring, and tries its damnedest to pass 'disgusting' off as 'cute'. They couldn't be content with just creepy pedophilic yuri (photo-fetishist Iina is of age, Kokoro obviously isn't), they had to go all out for creepy pedophilic yuri *incest*. One of the distinguishing characteristics of higher primates is that they at least try to avoid having sex with immediate relatives. There's something seriously wrong when a monkey has more clearly defined ideas of who it's not adaptive to fuck than you do. The last episode doesn't ameliorate it any; even if Aruto is of age, she is still offering herself for "warmth" to her GODDAMNED SISTER....even after being for twelve and a half episodes the only member of the family with any attachment to reality.
Even weirder is the total mishandling of how their parents met and married in ep 11. This, which would be a subpar flashback ep in any other series, shines in the midst of the rest of this one like the proverbial diamond in the proverbial goat's bunghole. But the show's creators fuck it up at the end by their inability to show any kind of romantic or passionate attachment between the two characters who are eventually going to procreate and spawn the main cast. Why? Are they so otaku that they haven't even encountered anything they could *COPY* to simulate a normal relationship? Or is the intended audience (this is another 1-AM show, despite its fatal allocation of "cute") so mentally deformed that they'll be squicked by even traditional heterosexual love? Is unrequited, creepy, pedophilic, incestuous desire what is supposed to resonate? What the fuck?
Even so, I'm probably going to do a video with it: "Afraid To Shoot Strangers" with eps 11-12, and damned if I'm going to let the main cast in. Take that, sister-lesbo perverts. Of course, there'll be a disclaimer in case anyone gets the wrong impression and decides to watch this piece of dreck based on the video.
I will be able to get in to club this weekend....recovering from the party Saturday night in time to do anything productive Sunday may be another matter entirely.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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