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i'm danger
2004-07-01 09:27:48
Well, effectively no club tomorrow night. I have no interest in seeing Saber Marionette stuffs and I can watch Silent Service whenever I want to. Ofcourse, this means less money spent on trains etc, so I can afford to go buy Maison box 3/8 from Best Buy. Eventually I'll get caught up....just in time for Tokyopop to put out another MB box and kill my wallet again. 4x80 = 8x40....but those 8 Maison boxes will total 96 eps, even if the setup isn't half as nice as MB's and the "extra" content is completely pitiful.
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 74%. Expected catalog number: #89. That's the result of nearly 4 hours of production time being thrown at episode 66, which yielded about 2 1/2 minutes of usable source. I don't have anything special to do tonight and will probaly burn straight through the last ep in the bucket tonight, maybe taking another 3 hours in the process. There's about 12 minutes of footage in the can, which has unbelievably taken only 18 production hours to amass. It certainly *feels* like I've been working on this forever.
I've been rewatching LoGH while doing production and draft rendering (nothing much else to do), and last night's block 9-12, hit uncomfortably close to home with regards the current political situation. It's a lot different from how it seemed in late 2002...the only thing now is that I can't decide whether the current US is more like the Galactic Empire or the Alliance of Free Planets.
"The Empire, ruled absolutely by a small cadre of nobles, is bad government. The Alliance, a democratic society headed by politicians fighting for personal gain, is badly governed. Which is truly in the wrong?"
Screw Bush/Kerry -- Yang Wen-Li for president.
--Kai out
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all i need is one more reason
2004-06-30 11:24:22
No video progress; spent last night reading 20th Century Boys (Urasawa's post-bubble answer to Akira) and all morning working on the simulator. Might get in another ep tonight and the last tomorrow, with more work possible Friday as it's uncertain whether there'll be club. The video may even be finished by the start of next week if that happens.
I dowloaded some sample video tools to play around with, and got word that the hull for the new system shipped. Also re-formatted some short fiction and put it up on the website. It's not representative of my normal style, but little that I can post for free really is.
offtopic:
If you don't vote for Rich Christy to win Stuttering John's job, you're not true.
http://contest.trimspa.com/job/poll.php
--Kai out
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cannibals of rust
2004-06-29 10:54:45
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 70%. Expected catalog number: #89. Another ep cut up, and Tezuka has finally gotten (back) onto the court, which makes for richer source. Last night gained about 90 seconds, putting me in striking range of 9 minutes and probably at 100% overage. I think I have enough shots of the rest of the regulars to run the video; all that's left is more action shots of the main-man himself. Things are coming together; hopefully all will resolve by the end of next week. This week would probably be asking too much.
There's been some attention paid to 24-hour videos lately, which sound like an interesting concept. Most of my vids wrap in less than 24 man-hours, but I haven't gritted up and done a full sub-24 process since #3, which was more than 3 years ago now. It might be reasonable to try and do #90 on a 24-hour clock -- all-out. None of this pre-readied source stuff: start the clock at 9AM Saturday and load up source while _Hacked Up For Barbecue_ drops into the CD-player. Pick the song and do the timing chart while basic renders are proceeding, then rip the sucker, blast through clipping, chop sick manga shots for later animation, and just put the entire process on the clock. Of course, I should probably fully check out on Magix beforehand, but it'd be more wrenching if I had to learn a new editing environment in the same 24 hours.
The parts for the new system have been more or less shipped and should come on-site in another week or so. Hopefully they will arrive in one piece so that I can pay the associated bills and order in the rest of the components. This is the credit-card two-step, made necessary by sane credit limits; I'm still a student and normally have no need to just be able to buy stuff worth more than a week's wages at once. Unfortuantely this makes it very difficult to do once-every-three-years stuff like building a new computer. This is probably going to be the last 32-bit system I own, and the intersection of "cheap" and "will provide value until 64-bit chips go under $200" isn't guaranteed to last.
offtopic and potentially entertaining:
http://www.roadrun.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=24229
Silly French. Slipknot actually have a pinch or two of integrity and some heavy riffs. You do this shit to Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit.
--Kai out
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steady in the ranks
2004-06-28 10:55:21
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 66%. Expected catalog number: #89. This was just two eps that got cut up, and some more rebalancing. I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I broke up the markpoints, it came out all ridiculously wrong. There's three eps left and two points on manga-compositioning, which probably means that I get to install Magix no earlier than late Wednesday. Oh well.
I didn't get the new Borknagar Friday, and ended up spending more money on music than I would have liked to. But really...Dismember's _Death Metal_ and a Master's Hammer CD from 1993, plus the Mortician I needed for the next project...it's a hard life, made easier by cheap used CDs furnished by people with no taste. If I didn't have $40 tied up in Maison box 2/8, I might also have been able to pick up two Myrkskog discs, which is a rare sight any way you cut it. Oh well...what ya gonna do.
About to start building that new editing station; just ordered CPU (Barton 3K+, 400FSB), RAM (1GB total of PC3200), and basically everything else short of video and sound hardware. $500 credit limits suck, but I'm planning on buying a generation back on the video card, and those aren't going anywhere; the KVM switch may be more of a problem, but I can probably drop down to a 2-way since that's all I need at this point. And then I need to replace the speakers, drop in a DVD/CD-R instead of the straight CD-drive, and sell off the keyboard and mouse (or just replace my old junk), but that's a problem for later. Depending on how things work out, I may just decide to drop stuff over wholesale, but it's nice to be able to write code or papers or something while a render's rolling. It also looks like I'll have to install my own fan as well, but that's not something I haven't had experience with...fan configuration is the story of my hardware life.
I don't have much room to complain; I paid less for processor+RAM than I would have for just the chip if I was buying Intel (or anything from retail, for that matter), and less for the hull than I could have for the individual bits of hardware *inside* the case separately. Yeah, gift horses, but I'm trying to tweak these into a ravenous battlefreak chariot team worthy of Diomedes...without getting eaten myself.
--Kai out
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product of our walking dead
2004-06-25 09:39:58
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 56%. Expected catalog number: #89. Cut through another ep last night, then recentered the progress calculations. I should be able to get done most of the clipping on this over the weekend, but I don't know that I'll be able to do much on the manga/etc front until I actually start editing. Learning a whole new process is going to suck.
This video is likely going to be hybrid Magix/MovieStar, with the next one to be done wholly in Magix using a old-new HDD to hold the clips. This will be wiped on the acquisition of appropriate parts for the new editing rig; hard drives don't just grow on trees, and I can continue using my current box for everything else if I relocate editing operations to a new rig with even this limited 40GB capability. (Do I really remember running an entire OS and mp3 fileserver in a 1.3 GB partition?? Do I really remember 200MB hard drives??)
Club tonight is going to be torture; the transit authority has started random searches of passengers (stupid DNC, just use the actual convention center out in the harbor instead of the arena built over the train station), and I don't feel comfortable sleeping on the streets etc of Cambridge without a weapon. But I'd also feel bad about cutting out of club before MinoHi starts to catch the train. Atleast it's not Monster in the last slot...someone on staff toughed up and decided to run 7-9 of this godlike series in the second slot. \m/.
Oto was probably right yesterday; expecting a full 3 seasons of Monster is probably asking a bit much. However, there's just so much *content* in the manga (finished it last night) that it couldn't reasonably be pared down past 52 eps. There's some fat in the story, but while it's not really expansible, it's not compressible either; almost every scene and subplot really matters to the final direction and resolution.
If they ever do get around to animating the very end, there's a Judas Priest video waiting on the streets of Ruhesheim -- "Blood Red Skies" coming in right at the start of chapter 147 = more \m/.
The Evergrey one could almost be done from what currently exists.
I raked through my CD-collection last night again and found about 88 discrete pieces of shelfcore, some of which surprised me. I didn't know I still *had* that Destiny's End record; guess I'm just bad at ever discarding music. That's a project for the rest of the summer; plenty of on-topic music to listen to while clipping for the current video, lots of off-topic stuff for other production tasks, reading manga, etc. Of course, this discounts the new Borknagar that will be picked up tonight, and the nothing-but-_Nordland_ sessions still planned, but that's the price of not sitting on your musical laurels. And further videos will result in refactoring these piles; the Incantation and Carnal Forge discs will hopefully make it into the ontopic rack (in actuality, pile) within the next two weeks.
Still haven't listened through the Mortician collection for that next video...but I've been steadily piling up grotesque manga images to supplement the video. Maison box 2/8 says further work on this front is unlikely in the immediate future. One thing at a time; get these to clear and start writing again.
--Kai out
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