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count every breath that I take
2004-05-27 11:36:53
This morning I did a lot of corporate work and spent about 5 seconds refreshing basic HTML, remembering what path I'm supposed to use for my CAEN account, and thrashing together a page to serve up the weekend's videos. No effort expended = no quality...but 100% W3C compliance. Much as an empty piece of paper is always an ISO-compliant empty piece of paper.
The servers that I've been working with this morning have been slower than frozen molasses with a severe learning disability. The new one-shot I'm l33ching from Lililicious is clocking about 2Kbps (when it doesn't decide to just randomly stop working), and the CAEN box is taking uploads at about 62Kbps max, which is torturously slow for 20-50MB videos. And worse, I don't know where I am with regard to my quota, so I have to put the vids up one at a time. Remote admin, the pain in everybody's neck.
Everything will be ready for tomorrow. I may even just toss it all out tonight, four-day-weekend style, because I sure as hell don't feel like working. Manga tonight, and maybe some video work or plotting. I've gotta do something to distract myself from this stupid idea of translating Quarter Iceshop. I mean, really: no Photoshop and I don't even speak Japanese. That's like failure just waiting to happen.
--Kai out
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one-legged devil | from the pit of hell
2004-05-26 10:12:35
So I'm not sick any more. But menial labor and the rigors of getting the three-year onlineparty set up will probably preclude any work on the video for the near future; work is starting to crank up as well. Now that I'm getting a handle on MFC, I should be able to work up a WBS and finish the SRS in short order (like by the end of the day), with the SDS following by the end of next week.
Yeah, Shin Hats Prod is more or less three years old, so there will be five videos put online over the weekend out of my CAEN account that have not previously been generally available, mostly for content reasons. It's gonna be #7, #12, #22, #48, and #71, though the chipmunk-mix of #83 may make it up as well if space permits. Since the link-checker on this site doesn't like the CAEN gateway, they're gonna be indirect, which will require a generic crappy webpage (oh so fun to put together in my copious spare time), which may become the seed of a future KK site as promised since the ass end of forever. It'll get done.
offtopic #1:
If anyone heard about "Pimps 'n' Hoes Day" or something on Howard Stern recently, that was my old high school. My bro was involved, but not very.
offtopic #2:
Who says Microsoft has no sense of humor?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwue/html/01_06.gif
Who bets that that dialog box is easter-egged somewhere in some MS-app?
#66 is linked up from Globocide now, and at least initially is roaringly popular. Don't kill farlo's server now...
--Kai out
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in your boring puppet show
2004-05-25 12:30:17
Evangelion bathrobe dolls, zero-day AMVs, cross-genre sniping, sickness, obtuse requirements, paychecks held, rent for using no utilities, administrative degredation trips, fucked-up presidents, slept through trash day, no new Borknagar yet, bands that rip off riffs from other bands, Euro-english messing up my speech/spelling patterns, bitches on Blab, disk quota, poor partitioning, dumb apps, spacehogs, timesheet spam, lack of progress, can't multitask, lacking new gear, config specs, logistics, loan angst, bills underdue, level governor, WHOLE WORLD GONE TO HELL!
<listens to Running Wild>
Please ignore the above. If too much of it resonates with your own life, please apply "Raise Your Fist" at the maximum level supported by your speaker system until you can successfully do so.
I sort of worked on the video last night, if only to make the decision that I probably ought to storyboard it a little in order to make effective use of the manga I recently l33ched. I could also use the US releases, but then I'd have to buy myself a scanner and an X-Acto knife -- and besides, consumptive AMV went out of style a while back. An unpleasant side effect of this is that the video is probably going to include an entirely uncalled-for amount of original animation, and not a little effect-driven ghosting. Hopefully the will to do both of those will decrease as I actually work on it; like most people I hate actually throwing effort at a video, but manage to do so and feel rewarded when the result fails to suck.
Scratch that, the "when" in the last sentence might be better off as an "if". This is why I spend more time writing etc....
--Kai out
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where virtuous lives are sacrificed
2004-05-24 09:46:41
There should be a formal definition: the relative worth and feriosity of a metal show is directly proportional to the time required to recover from it. If this can be established, then the double releaseparty on Friday will end up in the top echelons, as I'm still a little ripped up from it. I hit for the cycle: voice gone, ears blasted out, back strained from headbanging, bruises from the pit, and no bleeding. You bleed, you screwed up, like the kid who got leveled with two forearms to the nose a minute into Life In Vain's set. Sucker kept moshing, but it was pretty obvious that he had concussion or something. Dumbass.
The openers were some friends of Matt (drums, MPD) Kenney's who got pulled in at the last second, literally. They had to pull up stakes so fast that the bassist forgot to bring his axe and had to borrow Adam (MPD)'s. They had a lot of potential, but were the wrong band for this show as they were. Instrumentally, very impressive, the same sort of hardcore-plus-Maiden that is recreating thrash metal these days, but encumbered with emo vocals, and not quite heavy enough. The Lab, it was; less one guy in a Thursday shirt, they've got a chance.
Next up was One Way Down, far and away the heaviest band on the bill, and continually impressing as the only early-period death-metal act that I know of to emerge from a modern scene. They covered "Refuse - Resist" with customary explosiveness, but really tore up with their original material. It's difficult to describe how they transitioned seamlessly from melodic and low-key to blasting and roaring, almost without anyone noticing that there was a transition going on. A lot of signed bands would kill for that kind of songwriting subtlety, let alone that level of live dynamic control. Jay is singing more now, which fits in better with their material; Matt's vox are too influenced by Death to blend right with their current (and now completely original) style.
After OWD's sonic assault, it seemed almost like Life In Vain's guitars were throttled back. Of course, this was because they'd had to do a real soundcheck and get them set correctly, as they are a NWOSDM act and need their melodic parts to be melodic as opposed to head-ripping. To see what happens when bands don't do this, we refer you to In Flames' _The Tokyo Showdown_. They fired up the pit, leading to that kid getting wrecked as described above, and to this kid who had been bitching about the lack of moshing on the sidewalk after OWD's set (what the fuck did you expect, metalheads don't mosh to emo and nobody moshes to first stage death) going into total shell-shock. There were some hardcore kids kicking people, as expected, but for once just the right amount, and built like normal people. They did *not* cover Jotun, much to the chagrin of the crowd, but the sets were shorter due to there being four bands on the bill, and they had a lot of stuff to play off _The Thorned Resistance_ (good CD, about on the level of Shadow's debut, and with the same characteristics).
Finally MPD went on, and while they were a little disorganized, and a good chunk of the crowd had left after Life In Vain, they put on a good show, with moderate moshing and most of the crowd wedged in around the stage banging. They did almost all of _Crime Pays_ (a huge step up from their debut in terms of songcraft, a giant leap backward with regards catchiness -- not that this is always a bad thing), the stuff from their first CD that everyone expects them to play, "Ace of Spades" of course, and "Self-Esteem", which might have been a first. Regardless, it kicked ass.
Certainly, the show kicked mine; I did nothing productive all weekend but lie around reading manga and trying to make up lost health points. If I hadn't spent the last year in hippieville, I might have been better prepared, but at least my improved physical strength prevented me from totally, like, dying, and stuff. Sick or well I've still got work to do, both what I'm getting paid for now and what I hope to get paid for in the future. I've got most of the concept down for "A Cracking of Bones"; now I just have to finish plotting and start actually writing it. As it is now it's looking like a shorter novel along the lines of David Morrell's Totem.
The video will be worked on when I can. Maybe tonight if I wake up around midnight and need to run the batteries back down. Now I just ahve to figure out some way to keep myself from re-reading W-Juliet again...
--Kai out
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this time I'm marked for life
2004-05-21 12:17:03
No video progress last night, mostly because I was sick (provided that "sick" is expanded to also define "moving files by wicked slow protocol and reading Midori no Hibi manga"). It's still not safe to sleep with your head under an open window, which I've had several opportunities to learn and apparently have not yet. This does not bode well for current attempts to re-teach myself best practices in preparing to write up certain docs. However, the stuff I learned in the last year, of what I've retained, anyway, has been enormously helpful so far; if I actually invest a chunk of my first check from here on books and, like, *prepare*, for next semester's classes, I may even get my cumulative GPA up over a 6.5. I've got a couple vids still left that I can do with my current gear, so making the inevitable upgrade wait is nothing to sweat.
offtopic:
There was apparently an attempt to determine potential terrorists that assigned relative risk ratings to 120,000 individuals. This is just silly, because anyone intent on serious terrorist action lives sleeper-style until the flag goes up. However, I do wish some details about this had been released, in order to answer some pressing questions:
*How did I score?
*Why didn't I score higher?
*What do you mean I'm not on the list, I'll blow your goddamned house up!
ontopic:
Next video after current will use Kawarazaki (rewatched yesterday) and some other stuff. Music is likely to be Rossomahaar. Cross long-established lines of taste and kill all you find there.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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