-
we are gonna rock tonight
2004-06-11 12:55:13
I downloaded some videos yesterday to fill out my quotas for paying back people who had left ops back to 1:1. Then, last night when I was watching them, I remembered why I don't do this so often. I ended up picking one cool, one boring but decent, and one that was just godawful. Even the DBZ vid I had to sit through for that Eldrin kid who left an all-ones on SH003 didn't piss me off as much as this, because I knew it was going to be newbie DBZ shite going in.
I had a positive opinion of the intelligence of this creator going in. I dig Naruto, and Fear Factory is always cool. I was expecting a rip-and-tear, precision-timed blast of the kind that makes you want to watch action videos, but unfortunately what I got was pure crap. This video, in terms of source components, could have been awesome, and the raw conceptual stuctures, frankly, should have made it easy to direct something dramatically meaningful as well as viscerally gripping. Unfortunately, it proceeded to cut its throat with total lack of timing, subs all over the place, a watermark that looks like ass, crunky picture damage and pixellation, crumpled audio, and just all-around badness.
I don't like doing pans. They diminish the general stock of community good feeling, and can lead to stupid wastes of aggression in needless flamewars. But when something sucks so bad that, as in this case, there are literally NO redeeming qualities, something's gotta be said. If this was the one video that I just downloaded cold (that one was the one that rocked), I could just ignore it, but no....I'm stuck having to pay stones for bread. Not cool.
Because I was writing pre-ops (the scores on all 3 of these videos are done, just need to throw in more verbiage), resurrecting the RS232 port (now working), and generally grilling around with my brothers last night, there was no progress on the video. In between finishing ops (this is a ~lilo queue, so those owed earlier than yesterday will get theirs first), getting new boots, etc, this weekend, I ought to be able to cut through another 4 or so eps and kind of get back on schedule.
This was more permanently threatened by suspicions on viewing the boring video that I had cut several of the scenes used, based on color balance and some levels of picture damage. An untweaked DVC II does certain very specific things to certain titles, and the scenes in this video using that color-damage profile were, unlike other shots in the video coming from a more clearly transferred but less well-preserved source, found in certain SH videos made with the title in question. Right now all I can say is that if there was some source choppage going on, it wasn't with the locally hosted versions, and some VHS-specific artifacts have been explicitly removed. It's okay if people skin source from CDDC releases...that's kind of why they were put out, and at least it envolves more effort than ripping something off from the web.
Still, though, nothing is proven, so I'm not going to go all SCO on them. If they're working from a DVC II and VHS source like I was, it's no surprise that they got the same source fidelity. The simplest explanation is not always malfeaseance...but the video still looks damn spooky. There's not a lot of video on the table for this title, but to use so close a shot overlap...weird.
--Kai out
-
arrows let them rise
2004-06-10 09:49:23
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 39%. Expected catalog number: #89. There ought to be an official slogan: It's Easy To Gain Markpoints When There's No Usable Source(TM). I chopped through two eps last night, for a net gain of about 40 seconds. Not cool; tonight will probably run one more ep, but one of the more useful ones from the other end of the source pool. I'm working from a really non-deterministic selection of eps, weighted heavily towards the stuff that already went into #85, which probably aren't the best ones out of this show's 120-plus-episode run to date for what I'm trying to do here. Regardless, it'll get done, and done looking sort of like what it's supposed to; coming from behind on suboptimal kit is what I do.
Shit has been breaking at a truly odd rate; there were the bass problems over the weekend, then the RS232 port Monday night and the problems with the clinically retarded CD drive on the work box, then last night I blow the threads on the *other* screw holding the clip onto my carry knife (the one I didn't epoxy up back at school) and have my sound card go buggy from the heat. This last rates NOT COOL in large letters; a new rig, in a larger case with better air circulation, is becoming not a luxury but a necessity. The card is working again, but when heat and humidity become factors in how well your gear is working, it's definitely a time for concern.
Warheart got his op last night, and Lags this morning. This cuts into my owage; I still have to pay back MJ from almost a year ago, and finish Warheart's other two reviews, but I'm well on my way back towards 1:1. Unfortunately, a bunch of the people who have dropped ops on me lately have no videos of their own for me to review. Not cool (well, from the 1:1 perspective anyway). May have to do an anti-RIAA free-ops bit in the forums...then actually do the reviews in some kind of expedient order. That's always the problem...
--Kai out
-
there will come a golden dawn
2004-06-09 09:41:32
Quorothon RIP. This day was decent until I got to work and read the news. Now it's just totally gone to shit. I need to write some more data onto this damned CD so that I can give Warheart his review (RS232 port died yesterday, so zips are out), and now another musical genius leaves this world.
I first encountered Bathory in the darkened prod booth of a campus radio station pushing past two in the morning. I had just dug out the first (only?) _Touch of Death_ compilation issued by Black Mark, and spun up the last track to see what it was all about, where all these bands that I had been listening to for the past few years had been drawing their inspiration from. I dropped straight into "Blood And Iron", nine and a half minutes of acoustic-lit kick-and-drop viking doom building from creation through the Ragnarok to the new earth beyond. It made the hair literally stand on the back of my neck. As soon as I finished my dig-through-the-unsorted-vinyl project and found that we had the original combat pressings of the first two albums, they went out over the air, en bloc, whole sides at a time, at the end of the night. I wasn't a huge fan, but to hear this music that had come out in 1986, before there was a real idea of what black metal was or was going to be, and knowing that Quorothon had done this essentially unaided -- not just without a band, without a metal scene at all -- was just mind-boggling.
Then, later, to listen to the viking-epic "second era" of albums and realize what he had dragged into reality, five or so years ahead of the scene at large, and how well it was done (despite the cracking vocals, occasionally amateurish production, and plodding structures -- which still combined to give it a feel of ultimate sincerity) only reinforced the point: in Quorothon we had something rare, perhaps not someone with Chuck's ambitious vision, but definitely someone with both the will and power to create new worlds from nothing. One note on _Twilight Of The Gods_ is enough to excuse the godawfulness of the entire _Requiem_ disc; anyone can make a *bad* record, which ought to be the default assumption. But someone who *can* do more, and does, needs to receive more latitude in return for their contributions.
Quorothon does not leave us with any abiding mission in the same sense that Chuck did. His legacy will be the ideal of inspiration; if from Chuck we take the conviction and determination to never give up on our dreams and goals, we take the initiative to create thsoe dreams and goals from Quorothon. Chuck at least was always able to gather up some sidemen to flesh out Death records; Quorothon couldn't find even two other musicians in all of Sweden to *tour* behind the self-titled, let alone put any tracks on tape. His vision was supremely his own, swinging without apparent provocation between black and viking styles, unconcerned with Black Mark's stability problems or how others reacted to his work. And at the end, it paid off: he will be forever remembered for his contributions to the idea of heavy metal and to Scandanavian musical culture.
One more to ride with the Aesir. One more hero passes from Midgarth.
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 31%. Expected catalog number: #89. I finished up the finalizing for the stuff I did Monday night, then spent the rest of the night trying to fix the RS232 port so that I could get the zip drive working. This ofcourse failed, so I gave up and wrote Warheart his (first) review. Tonight I'll finish the one for Lags that I've put ~1100 words into and try to write some more stuff out to CD...I think I've got some spare manga (incl. Parfait~tic, good stuff) that I can pad it with and get it up to that level where the damn drive in the work-box will recognize it. Random I/O device failures = bad shit; even with my donation for flint's medical fund I should shortly be in new-comp territory...once I find the time to build it.
To add insult to injury, I ran into some electrical problems in my contrabass yesterday. This sucks, because I don't want to string up my Mock like that, and it's a classic piece of hardware...I don't want to permanently fuck it up if I screw up the wiring. I've had problems with the jack not gripping before, so I hope it's just that; springing for a new jack would suck, but not as much as rewiring the thing.
Listened to Hypocrisy's livealbum again after all was said and done last night, and wondered why I don't go through it more often. It's about as perfect as you'll get for an extreme-metal live release, though Morbid Angel's _Entangled In Chaos_ (must listen to that again also) comes close. Tonight, though....I'll be killing mad if I don't have _Hammerheart_ and _Twilight Of The Gods_ about.
<turns up the Agalloch and pushes down the self-destructive impulses>
--Kai out
-
wants to be in on the kill
2004-06-08 09:30:34
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 30%. Expected catalog number: #89. Cut up two eps out of the 14 on the docket, and *nearly* finished making the drafting versions for this bloc before I had to come in to work this morning. I've got about 2:30 to 3:00 of the 8:30 I need, so this is officially ahead of schedule. If I can be remotely as productive the rest of the week, I'm looking at a finish date sometime around the 20th.
I also bit the bullet and finished "Amulets & Analects", the first Karle of the Mark story, last night instead of sinking more time into Where Light Touches None. It runs just under 6K words. I really need to learn to edit myself, but this is sort of an origins thing....I ought to be able to write some shorter stuff now that I've got the character established. That, I can hopefully get published...as long as there are some in the genre-press racket who can appreciate old styles and subtle humor. This will go online as soon as I can find/steal the time to redo my school webpage; other tales will be held back awaiting publication.
I also did up that list of what I'm working on...I've currently got at least 11 full-size-novel-length works in process, plus three more short novels/novellas [70-200 ppg/40-100 ppg] that I'm allegedly working on, in addition to two serials with one or fewer stories complete. I'm hoping to finish ONE of these by the end of the summer and another over the school year; it's just a case of Just Writing, but time is always tight.
This is part of the reason I haven't done the ops that I owe people (gomen Warheart, please stop guilting me now), but a bigger reason on that is that I'm just lazy. I can knock out a nice average 1200-word op in half an hour, but the challenge is to get into intelligent-reviewing mindset when I can just go on autopilot and read manga.
YOU PEOPLE ARE NOT FORGOTTEN. I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. I PAY MY DEBTS.
offtopic:
I was listening to Soilwork's _Figure Number Five_ this morning, after a long time at the bottom of the shelfcore pile. At first, it was decent, and I wondered how it had gotten consigned to there, but then it started to yaw schitzophrenically between good and boring. After I finish what I'm working on, it's going back to the bottom shelf....not worthy.
--Kai out
-
some say the devil is dead
2004-06-07 09:56:22
I really gotta dust off my bass and start practicing again....and not just because Adam is on the way out from MPD -- I'm not going to be any closer. It's just that I haven't really played, at real volumes, in so damned long. Work, school, and anime commitments just eat you right up. It's probably just that people I know are making an honest run at a music career, so the least I can do on getting back out to Ann Arbor in the fall is try to start up a decent band and punch some hippies in the face.
When I wasn't sick this weekend, I was running around like crazy on errands regarding my brother's graduation or hanging out with Kenny et al, so no video work got done at all. This week, though....nothing to get in the way. I should also be writing more, but I'm going to take parts of this week and just lasso up everything I need to finish, plot out where I'm going to be going with the rest of it. There's just so much I've started; it's time now to Just Write and beat the crap out of these ideas until they wrap. It'd be nice to at least *try* and publish something before I turn 25.
Every so often I have crises of motivation where I ask myself why the fuck I continue to do AMVs, seeing as they suck time from writing, code, music, and everything else I do with my life. But I keep getting these goddamned ideas, and I have to work them up to get on with what I have to do. Someday I'll run dry, but until then it looks like I'm stuck. I'm hoping to finish 3 vids this summer, which is down about 75% from normal pace, but as long as my gear is on the fritz....
offtopic:
I bought _Mad Grandiose Bloodfiends_ used on Friday. I can pick Roger out on the inside cover, but the record still sucks. "5" is peripherally interesting, and they don't totally bag the King Diamond cover at the end, but the rest of the disc is SO FOCKING BORING. Of course, I was comparing it to Gorefest's live album, a double EP (studio/live) from ...And Oceans, and Cruachan's latest (reissue _Folk Lore_, you fucks), but I got the impression that it would probably lose to a lot of the second- and third-rank black metal already in my collection.
offtopic part 2:
MPD hadn't reheadsed in a while before doing their set at Kenny's graduation party Saturday, and were casting about for something to play that wasn't too demanding. So Kenny says to Matt, "Let's do something that we know, but we all hate, so it won't matter if we butcher it." Five seconds later, without, further discussion, they hit into an abbreviated version of "Undetermined", marking the first time they've played the song in about two years. I've seen them do it at Sputnik's, but the track was on the point of falling out of the setlist the second it was recorded and they actually listened back over it. Said Matt afterward: "We found where track 3 was on the first CD and scratched it off on all the copies. It goes 1,2,4,5 -- track 3 isn't on there any more." If the worst mistake you make as a band is writing a lame teen-angst track at the age of fifteen, you can count yourselves lucky.
If you write another lame teen-angst track, and it becomes a huge, catchy, hit, and you get stuck playing it at every show for the rest of your careers, and eventually someone makes a video with it....that's just Fate having it in for you.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
Current server time: Jan 07, 2026 01:44:04