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small progress seems futile
2004-03-30 09:43:14
That's the debit on group projects. You can't always schedule them to provide sufficient time to eat. It's a good thing that instant ramen is so convenient to eat on the move, otherwise I would be in serious trouble. One project is hopefully due to complete before the end of the week, the exam tomorrow should not be excessively difficult (no coding), and then I'll probably have enough rest time to hit straight into the next-to-last task, for which I should be finishing the design again this week. Header files make a marvelous organization tool.
Video should finish up maybe this weekend, maybe early next week....all depends on coding management paradigms under use, and how much productive time I can squeeze in around commute time, class, and system-recharge.
Circadians are flexible. Deadlines are not.
--Kai out
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and our vision goes backwards
2004-03-28 14:23:24
Interesting crossroads here. My partner for crypto wants to implement something, but hasn't yet responed to my where-the-hell-are-you pleas. Time to turn up the DragonForce and start cracking on torus-based crypto research; there's not enough time left to do anything but write a paper, even if I don't understand half the mathematics in it.
If I had my second VCR to hand, I'd have an interesting line item here; however in its absence it's just a theoretical exercise. I picked up the classic German silent horror film Nosferatu last night, and timed up Enslaved's _Mardraum_ album to play along with it. It underran by about 5 minutes, but the native synch was cool as hell, and provided that I can get access to such hardware as necessary I plan to run off a full dub; silent films have never been played truly silent save by completely clueless wannabe hipsters.
Speaking of alternate soundtracks, I would dearly like Artisan to have put an original-Cantonese/original-music track on their release of the Jet Li feature Black Mask. The dub is, well, a HK action dub, and the hip-hop soundtrack can get a little distracting. Not enough, though, to subdue the coolness of Jet Li totally 0wnz0ring Ozzy Osbourne with fists, feet, lasers, blades, CDs, and an oxygen tank. People who talk about how live-action can't pull off anime's hyper-action and over-the-top visual effects obviously don't watch enough Hong Kong cinema.
--Kai out
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no one's seen you kill
2004-03-25 22:28:33
Current video: Subway Mirror, "Forever Young" to Stratos 4. Progress check: 58%. Expected catalog number: #87. Yes, I cut up another ep. No, there wasn't much source in it. I'm pushing seven minutes now, which is way over 200% overage, so I don't care that I could probably dust off the last two before I have to go in to school tomorrow morning. This one took about 1:15 from the start of clipping to the end of the drafting-mixdown stage; the rest of the sourcepile will probably produce less source all together than I got out of this one.
I think I have a job this summer. If not, more incentive to get the book out. And to get some more music put together and more writing done. About six pages went into _Blue Sky Warriors_ today, despite waking up late and having academic stuff to mash through. Slowly, slowly, it's starting to take form...maybe another chapter or so of backstory and things will start to roll.
I should be listening to more metal though....writing about race relations, revenge, and personal identity issues in the Old West will surely suck my contemplative side dry, which will require recharging from heavy, violent, and explosive music. Less beats, more ripping guitar. It's been a long time since I turned _Human_ all the way up....
--Kai out
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who draws the line
2004-03-25 01:59:36
Current video: Subway Mirror, "Forever Young" to Stratos 4. Progress check: 50%. Expected catalog number: #87. I had some free time today (classes let out early), and so was able to chop through ep 3 in just under 2 hours to finish the ep....which is less than half what went into either of the two eps done before. I think the result was somewhere around 50 seconds of material, which should have been the average for this project.
It may yet be; ep 5 is all courtroom stuff and ep 6 is a filler about the cat, so this one may actually go into production next week, even considering all the shit I still have to do for school. More papers to read tonight....
Offtopic:
Tuesday night I finished schoolwork ahead of schedule and decided, rather than working on the vid (it was 9:30 and I was still burnt out from ep 2), to try and work up another oskulumObszenum track. An hour and a half later, I was listening to the rendered-out version of a seven-minute, 35-track monster that sounds better than the two tracks I'd done previously, and was made with less preassembly from the Acid folks. Of course, I'm still not playing my own synth parts or ginning up my own beats, but the fact remains that Acid is still too damn easy.
On real instruments (probably a real keyboard and real 909/808 would suffice as well), I might be able to write enough riffs for a song in 90 minutes. And I might even be able to get good takes in on all of them if I had recording gear running the whole time. But there's no way I'd be able to do all parts for all instruments and get everything arranged and properly mixed as well. And yet with Acid, it's all right there. Like, instantly. There may even be an album in this, after another couple tracks, and what's shocking is that to do so would not really require expending a lot of effort. Ten more songs is fifteen hours. That's nothing. I've sunk almost that much into the current video already.
In summation, Acid oughta be illegal. It's not right to make decent sounding music with no total effort. But if someone offers me a deal based on the demo that I'll probably put out after 2 more tracks, I won't be complaining much.
--Kai out
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soon all will burn and die
2004-03-23 13:01:44
Weird. The demo is doing much better than I'd anticipated. Of course, that's the point of a demo -- pander and make people go wow -- but it's supposed to be directed at non-anime-fans rather than AMV creators. What the hell ever.
Current video: Subway Mirror, "Forever Young" to Stratos 4. Progress check: 42%. Expected catalog number: #87. I cut through the second ep last night (and into this morning), and now have over 5 minutes of source...of the 4:20 I need. Technically, I could do the video now, but I want to make sure I have optimum possible cuts for every second of the audio, and I've still got 4 eps to skin through. I'm about 90% sure I could make the vid I want to make from the source I have, but the only time I've ever cut off clipping before reaching the bottom of the source bin was in the production process for video #34, the dead-worst outing of my career. Fight till the end!
Further progress is unlikely; I've got to learn TeX today and write up a bunch of stuff, and then there's programming for one class and research for the other two. Probably also work up a problem for tomorrow -- don't know if I've done one this month, and I can do symmetrics -- the math is more in the 'kludge' line that I can do rather than the 'hard' kind that I have problems with.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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