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when the last command was given
2004-06-04 10:45:05
W00T!! Club has MinoHi tonight on top of Naruto....definitely worth the trainfare. As if I didn't need an excuse to get the hell out of Dodge tonight....bloody relatives. My youngest bro is finally graduating high school, and as a result everything has gone to hell. I wish I was back in Michigan.
Especially as the beer situation in this stupid, backward, state is beyond pitiful. The average convenience store in Ann Arbor has more and better choice in alcohol than dedicated liquor stores do around here. I'm beginning to see how people might get the impression that Coors Light is a beer. What I wouldn't do for a quart of Asahi right now...
Been listening to Sentenced's _Down_ again (more once-shelfcore, but I never bought the CD); Laihiala's vox are still weak/immature, and the bass is still practically nonpresent, but the material's still all right. That's just what you'd expect for them firing Jarva, even if Chaosbreed and The Black League haven't put out a whole lot of interesting or especially worthwhile stuff. It's decent, but it's no _Amok_.
Of course, there's been no work on the video. Ad tempore there is just the new profile pic....first person to correctly ID the manga it's from wins a copy of Demo-lition (all those demo vids that have never been online, plus some unlisted stuff) on CD at top quality. Email address is where it's always been.
--Kai out
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i'll throw the first rock
2004-06-03 09:55:03
Sometimes, there is shelfcore and you wonder why you stopped listening to it; other times there is shelfcore and you wonder why you haven't sold this shit off already. In the first caption, I'm sort of getting into Blaze-era Iron Maiden, even if in strictly small doses. In the second....well....Black Funeral and Ancient Ceremony....need I say more?
I did no work on the video last night (urgent commitments reading Yakitate and making a new profile image [will debut tomorrow]), but tonight will hopefully be different; there's less new and interesting manga releases to read through.
Recent shonen:
Yakitate Japan, like I said
Mr. Fullswing
Genshiken
Recent shoujo:
Double Juliet (must buy must buy)
GALS!
Penguin Brothers
There is ofcourse more popular stuff that I've been reading, but this is the core of what I'm mad that there aren't more releases out for. Genshiken especially; a recent discovery, but it's so frikkin awesome. The liner notes are really cool, and the content...well, if you're in an anime club, you know all these people. You'd be lying if you said you WEREN'T one of these people. It's like a modern-day Otaku no Video plus Comic Party after a near-fatal overdose on REAL. Kick ass.
Also cool but unfortunately dead was Densha de D, which is like a line-for-line conversion of Initial D to use light-rail cars. It's a bloody hilarious dojin for anyone who's into Initial D, but even the author was kind of shocked at how stupid it ended up becoming, so I can't really blame the group for dropping it. Yeah, it's repetitive...but so is the original. Deal.
--Kai out
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insufficient funds, insanity and suicide
2004-06-02 09:42:21
I did virtually nothing video-related yesterday. I might claim scouting through another dojin, but I was pretty sure I wasn't going to use it going in. This coming video doesn't have room for more than 10 or so manga cuts, if even that many.
I keep getting the same Wolf's Rain idea every time I listen to Ulver's "Lykantropen", but it's too obvious, about all I could do would be to just run the ending animation at excessively low speed, and the song is pretty minimalist and repetitive to start with. Maybe I'll do it, later, after I've thrown down something more metal, but it's probably more interesting as an abstract concept than it would ever be in actual video form. The only way to spice it up would be to do the ED in an overlay track and intermittently weave scenes in behind, but for me that means two editing passes, one of which is going to be absolutely choked with black space. Not a whole lot of fun.
"If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao, no Ying Chan, and, perhaps, no I." That's Mishima Yukio, at the end of The Decay Of The Angel, about three pages out from the paragraphs he wrote before stepping out onto the road to his bizarre yet ultimately fitting death. I also finished the Sea of Fertility over the weekend, sort of: I skipped Temple of Dawn, which is generally reputed to be the weakest of the tetralogy, and didn't feel like I missed too much. It may have been the translation, but Mishima at the very end of his life sounded more pretentious, more caught up in his own conceits, and less focused on what he was saying than how he was saying it. At the end he recovers and gets his old power back; the transition is slow, but the difference is remarkable.
It may be that he finally resolved the conflicts of ending a cycle about reincarnation with a refutation of the central idea (which he did, through classically Japanese avenues of negation and self-destruction), or, more likely, he consciously made the decision to die at the work's completion. When you lose the fear of death and the fear of the future, you can do amazing things. There's no room for time-wasting or equivocation in "I will do X, and then I will die." Fatalism, sure, but if you can look at it with a clear mind, there's no better feeling.
Of course, you've got to be sure you're up to the task...if I decided "I will revive my capture card, make my magnum opus video, and die in a blaze of glory" tomorrow, both me and Rupert Murdoch would probably end up living forever.
--Kai out
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nailed to the gun
2004-06-01 10:46:39
Current video: Nightingale, "The Glory Days" to Prince of Tennis. Progress check: 25%. Expected catalog number: #89. Yeah, I just loaded on the rest of the source, formalized the clipping order (top down instead of bottom up), and decided NOT to use a certain dojin. If I had access to Gabe and Tycho's twice-burner, I might well have thrown my eyes into it as well as the file; we will lock this one away, forget that it exists, and never speak of it again.
The links will be coming down today, as soon as I can both get motivated and find some time around what I'm getting paid for. Most popular, oddly enough, was #71. There probably weren't 18 skinheads out there, but if there are now, and it's my fault, well, maybe I'll be briefly troubled for a second or two. Somebody that easily swayed won't ever become an asset to whatever side they end up on.
offtopic:
I yawned my way through George R. R. Martin's A Game Of Thrones yesterday. There was a lot of content there, and one or two interesting characters, but NOTHING BLOODY HAPPENED. That's well over eight hundred pages of rising action, fragmented by the usual follow-this-character-for-a-chapter-follow-that-for-the-next that plagues the fat-fantasy-series form to the point where the few interesting events that did occur were so spread out as to lose all impact. Worse, there is nothing NEW here, not even the pretense of stepping outside the stereotypes. Halfway through this book, you have a pretty good idea of how the characters are going to develop for the rest of the series, because the cues are obvious, and obvious means boring. Yes, there's nothing new under the sun, but most authors usually at least TRY a little.
The most original thing about this book is its treatment of its villains; ALL the major evil actors are willing participants in brother-sister incest. It's good to see long-standing taboos reinforced, but the continual importance of sisterfucking to the plotlines is more than a little creepy. Also, it rings a little hollow that what is described in-story as an ancient and characteristic practice of noble families to protect bloodlines is at 'present' exclusively practiced by the two major 'bad guy' houses.
And I want to break into this game? Good thing I'm somewhat decent at my day job.
--Kai out
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had one drink but no more
2004-05-28 10:38:51
RRAGH....yet another turn on the Disk Quota Wheel of Nightmare. That's why #22 isn't up, though #7, #12, #48, and #71 made it in okay. Enjoy the video slatherings; I know I'm certainly going to enjoy the 3-day weekend off. Club tonight, then gorging tomorrow (my youngest brother's turning 18).
As of right now I have 64 videos available to .org members. When you discount the demo stuff, this is more real AMVs than I had completed when the studio turned 2. Did I think I'd be here when I started out? No, not exactly. I thought for sure I'd have 100 finished by now. Of course, that was before I started breaking equipment like a Motorhead roadie on an orchestra bus. And got a life. And actually started backing up my literary aspirations with real writing/woodshedding. Mostly the equipment, though; Project Haibane, if nothing else, proves you can have a life and do decent AMV on a reasonable pace.
Early results from the front support the contention: people are impatient and like pr0n. Who the hell knew?
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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