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attack those not knowing my force
2004-04-22 01:42:34
One class is sorta done. Another one finishes Friday, though I hope to finish it up proper tomorrow if not tonight. Now I just have to get B- in one or less of them and B or better in the rest, and I'll be back on pace to graduate come December...or at the least have all next spring to do my cognate and maybe some research while I hunt jobs.
In the spirit of finals week, here's a fun game to play with the junior faculty member of your choice:
First, declare a class bar night. This won't work if most of the class is under 21 and doesn't have half-decent fake IDs.
Go to the bar following last class. Encourage the faculty member to buy the first round. If they go, "Sure, why not", suggest that they set everyone up with some appetizers as well. By the time everyone is finished their first round, the prof will be in money-spending mode, and you can stick him/her with the whole bar tab at the end. (This is a Good Thing.)
If they're like "Ok, but just the first round", it's time for the class to take a wallet hit for the sake of the future, and some fun to come later.
Browbeat the lecturer into getting thoroughly impaired. This works best if you have several people along who significantly outmass him/her, or who regularly clean up at Beer Olympics. This will take a good bit of time, and a lot of money, since you're paying for your own drinks.
Now that you've got an inebriated professor on your hands, you give them one last chance to pay the bar tab. If they still refuse, it's time to stop at a nearby party store and grab the accessories to play Edward Fortyhands. If your college town doesn't sell several hundred varieties of beer, wine, and liquor in an average convenience store, you should have transferred to somewhere that didn't suck like, a semester ago.
Anyway, you've got your victim, and two 40s of Schlitz or something else inexpensive, and some duct tape, so you are ready to play Edward Fortyhands. The prof takes a forty in each hand, and some duct tape is applied, both for safety reasons and so that the rules are assiduously followed. The tape doesn't come off until the bottles are empty. The only real spec is that the bottles don't leave the hands until empty, but someone who's in a condition to agree to play this game is also in a condition to drop bottles. Broken glass == not fun.
As you can imagine, this results in accumulating 80 ounces of fluid in the system before any of it can be released without extreme embarrasment. Someone ought to have a camera on hand, because professors under five pints of rotten lager, impatiently stamping as someone attempts to cut the bottles out of their hands so they can run to the john, deserve to be documented for posterity.
We didn't do this to our Compilers teacher. He was too wily. Instead we just left him with the bar bill, which is the course of action evolutionarily rewarded. Professors who pay their students' bar bills get better reviews and have drastically lower chances of getting roped into playing dumb games with excessive alcohol.
I may have some time at the end of next week to actually work on the video. However, there are extensive work, school, and party commitments that may interfere. Regardless, it and possibly two more will wrap before the studio turns three. My VPY for this year is going to be crap, but an average of 30 across 3 years wouldn't be too shabby.
--Kai out
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all the pieces fall to the ground
2004-04-18 16:53:38
I keep getting ops. They're just piling up all over the place (two today), and I don't have the time to respond to them as I ought. Mostly because I'm still in a drag-out battle to finish the code I've got to finish and build and a bunch of other stuff for Tuesday. I've gotten a good piece into it, and I've got plenty of time, but as anyone who's ever been involved with serious dev knows, no amount of time is ever strictly enough.
Over the weekend I watched the first volume of Texhnolyze, and as expected it's fucking brilliant. There's like five spoken lines in the first ep, none until about 11:30 into it. As I said a while back, ABe-sensei's stuff is where to look if you want to see how to make animation respond to music. But who remembers ep 11 of Lain when the two that followed it were so bizarre? There's a video in this one as well, but I'm going to need at least another volume. Summer will be tough. I've got to follow Texhnolyze AND get up to speed on Patlabor, Master Keaton, and Kino's Journey...and I'm not 100% that I'm going to be working where I think I'm supposed to. Bastards. If you make something mandatory, don't forget to enclose it, will you?
I also picked up Pantera's second and third CDs on bootleg. Not the ones you're thinking of, but _Projects In The Jungle_ and _I Am The Night_. Back before they decided they needed an Exhorder ripoff out front, and when they were still writing second-rate Judas Priest songs with titles like "Ride My Rocket".
I swear I'm not making any of this up.
It wold have been fun, but there was a scratch around track 11, so I'll probably haul it back to Encore. Ten bucks is too much for one bootleg novelty-value early-Pantera disc instead of two; I could have gotten something from Panzer or that Czech hardcore comp for that kind of money.
Obviously, no progress on the video. Maybe after I get done with all my class stuff....if I'm still alive then.
Offtopic:
My vids are unpopular enough that I can usually track what star ratings they get when with a fair degree of determinism. #70 recently got a '1', which can mean only one thing: somebody got the political message...and didn't like it. In your eye, rightwing goatfuckers. Larouche in '04!
--Kai out
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we turn to stone
2004-04-15 02:28:54
Current video: Hecate Enthroned, "An Eternal Belief" to Yaiba. Progress check: 25%. Expected catalog number: #88. I'd be extremely surprised if I made any more progress on this one between now and the end of the month, because that would involve doing actual work, as opposed to just drinking Korean beer and ignoring deadlines when I need to take a break. (2 projects and an exam due in the next 10 days. Ouch.) I may or may not end up editing down the song; the end is a little weak, and could use some enhancements.
The same could be said of the anime. The DVD print of Yaiba is not that good, but it's not like anyone spent a whole lot of money preserving the cells -- or even animating it in the first place. Donald Graft and Lags will get credits on this one for making filters to remove washed-out color and animation painting altogether (respectively), and Lags will get his damn ops.
Offtopic:
In Flames has jumped up to the top of the shortlist for "shelfcore album of the year". I might like STYE more if I was somehow motivated to listen to it again.
I need to find out what record label Heaven Shall Burn is on so that I can preorder their CD. "The Weapon That They Fear" is fucking amazing.
The line from AzuDai ep 4 where Kaorin tells Chiyo that she might grow up (physically) to be like Sakaki is, coming from her, fucking creepy. I don't know how I missed this watching the fansub.
Tommy Lee recently proved his irrelevance by insulting the Blabbermouth posters who regularly abuse him for being a wifebeating kiddrowning junkie wigger wannabe has-been. They then proved their collective irrelevance by flaming him for 300 posts. Kind of like the nitwits who spammed the "OT is closing" thread here a few months back.
I was going to write up a comparison of OB Lager with Asahi and Molson Canadian here, but then I realize that lagers all tend to taste more or less alike (unless it is American mass-market imitation lager, which doesn't materially change from input to output). It's fucking beer, and I don't know that the 80 cents more to get it from Japan-via-Canada rather than Korea direct is worth it.
If I don't cut this shit out and write some code, I'm not going to be able to sleep all weekend.
--Kai out
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for better or worse
2004-04-12 12:01:44
The video is now up on local, and I'm mulling over ideas for #88. I'm down to two songs and a handful of anime, though the concept is already set. Despite the numerological coincidence, it's not going to be crunked Nazi stuff, and it's not going to be the Cat Soup vid....unless I don't get to work on it before I get home and have a chance to start building a new box.
Most of the components in my current editing station are between three and six years old. The newest major piece of gear is the CD-burner, which was replaced only 2 years ago. I'm running off a three-year-old mobo and a 500MHz CPU, with a video card that's almost 4 years out of date. The drive I'm storing my vids on was installed in summer '00, and the drive I do all my editing on is only a year younger. I'm running an OS that won't efficiently support more than 128 MB RAM, which just happens to be all of what I have in my case, and half of what the board will support.
This is the problem. I don't want to chain a DVD-ROM in behind the CD-RW, which is the only drive slot I have available. But I'm under-spec for any DVD-R/CD-RW currently on the market, which would otherwise be the normal option. And I'm so far behind in motherboards that I don't know if I'll be able to find a modern processor to fit...and even if it does, there's still the OS issue -- I've got a lot of data I'm not crazy about losing, and W2KPro (weapon of choice for forced-into-Win32 types) gets a little cramped in 256 MB.
So that's why building a new system for video editing will become a minor priority before the restart of the school year. If I can get a "borrowed" copy of W2K (not difficult considering where I'm working), I can probably keep costs below $1000 total and still build out a nice rig with 2+ GHZ Athlon, maybe 80-100GB of storage, a better video card, DVD-R, and a gig or so of RAM. Of course, I'd still keep my old gear (hooray render parallelism) but put that more towards writing and listening purposes; editing and dev would go on the box that can actually handle them.
Offtopic:
I think I started a novella last night. I've got three single-spaced pages in and it looks to be able to get significantly longer if not significantly long. Military SF...I need to stop reading Heinlein. But if I keep mixing it with enough Tim O'Brien, maybe it'll come out different. I keyed in "Return Void" back on Friday night, and need to format that up as well.
Isn't there some schoolwork I ought to be doing instead?
--Kai out
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i was told that i could fly
2004-04-09 11:19:33
The video is finished; even the DC build should be done by now. Entry will be up as soon as I get final stats together (looks like I broke the speed barrier yet again) and get the distro mixdown on CD. Just in time too...got papers to present on Monday and Tuesday, and another Crypto exam starting Wednesday. Sleep is rapidly becoming a near-mythical entity. And I've got a bloody screening to run Saturday too....
The bright point in all this is that I found a twenty on the sidewalk coming home from the lab last night and promptly invested it in Coke, Asahi, and tortilla chips. If your first reaction on finding random free cash isn't to immediately transmute it into alcohol and munchies, it's time to just give up and do correspondence courses.
I also picked up some Yebisu, but I haven't drunk that yet (work coming up and all), and may not before Saturday...it'd make a nice raffle prize given what we're showing, but even the people in favor of showing the hamster show at the end of the program would probably object to raffling beer.
(Y)EBICHU DECHUU!!
--Kai out
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