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which part of me remains
2004-02-28 23:01:08
The video is half done. Well, half edited. I may get to the other half tomorrow, with effects, finalizing, and post coming in the following week. However there are other important demands which may make this the last video for this semseter if not ever. Academic, creative, and....other stuff.
I made a decision and a critical change three years and a little more than four months ago, and am no longer certain it was 100% for the positive. So over the next six to seven weeks I have to try to reverse that change, and its effects both bad and good, or I am going to for-real wash out here, and the job market is not such that I can look at that with ambivalence.
When it's over I won't be the same person who wrote this. Whether or not I'll still be interested in anime or AMV I don't know, though it's probably more likely than not.
Probably three days left in the poll. Good thing I'm going to be going over to sixteen-hour workdays, or else I might miss something. Will be thrown out of the lab imminently.
--Kai out
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my skin | the canary in the coalmine
2004-02-26 21:19:57
Machine Head. God Forbid. Arch Enemy.
Evergrey. Children of Bodom. ICED FUCKING EARTH.
And an Ozzfest that doesn't suck. What more could a metalhead ask for? (Metallica to release the Presidio material and a US tour from Iron Maiden, actually, but you can't have everything).
The video is almost ready to go into editing. I cleaned off a lot of drivespace and did up the timing chart, so all that remains, basically, is to dump in the old source that I've been keeping off for space reasons (maybe do some shell-gaming and keep the HQ versions on CD till needed), and do the bloody editing and production (probably Saturday, eating cold pizza and cream-cheese-on-breakfast-bars).
And then it'll be in post, and then it'll be done, and Monday I can do up the entry, up it, and get local #10000. I'd prefer a straight overrun and #00000, but that's only because I wasted so much goddamned time reading Gravity's Rainbow and want my investment to pay off with stupid references for the rest of my natural life.
--Kai out
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i'm getting used to funerals
2004-02-25 23:59:38
Just my luck. There's an actual metal show at the Pig this weekend, but I have to work. I might drop in right around doors, pay the cover to support the scene, and hang around for like an hour or so, but I still have to get to work by 11. Not fun.
It's cool, though, that they have the balls to advertise on campus....while advertising on the fliers that posers who show up will get beaten as usual. If there's one thing hippie college towns have no shortage of, it's posers.
The video should get done sometime in the near future, I'm about half an hour away from the timing chart being done, and 50+ percent of the plotting is more or less in. Of course, there's so much shit I gotta do for classes that "near future" just means "before the next showing", which isn't until bloody 20 March. Better than never wrapping at all.
Offtopic:
Sometimes I don't like being in fandom. Today I bought two volumes of AzuDai in return for a non-trivial chunk of my food budget. I won't be able to steal enough scraps from my job to make it all up. But those volumes provided forty-five minutes of Solid Laff Riot, so it was almost an even exchange. Until I remembered I had given up FOOD in the trade. When food does not automatically beat comics, you know there's something weird going on.
--Kai out
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my every morning
2004-02-24 21:45:23
I got started working on Blue Sky Warriors today. I probably shouldn't've, but I finished vetting DSV (ready to go for editing) and felt that I was losing scenes, so I should better start writing to get them solid. Ofcourse, this didn't help with the exam or with the 581 project (will work on Compilers tomorrow morning), which I have to re-learn python for and make some significant progress on (such as joining MSDN and figuring out how the hell a plugin is set up) by this time next week.
I just wish that more of these open-source people would put COMMENTS in their code. How the hell's anyone supposed to be able to parse a source file intelligently when the name of the author's the only line that's not executable? Twits. 1:1, comment:code. That's how you write for maintainability.
Offtopic:
I was on the bus coming back from the supermarket with some idiot kid from Ypsi bragging about his fighting technique. He had a decent knife, but was holding it in an icepick grip for a punching/slashing attack. It was hard not to laugh at or feel sorry for him, because if he continues to go into real fights with a shitty technique like that he'll end up dead. That kind of grip sacrifices the whole blade length in reach, limits your effective movement, and doesn't even provide any power advantage over the classic Applegate 'pencil' grip.
Worst, it's unwieldy for what you need a knife to do when you really need to have a knife out: put mortal holes in the dub who required you to get your blade out in the first place. Slashing makes 'tuff' scars and looks intimidating, but it's bad practice for settling fights. Slashes annoy, they don't wound. A stab wound, though, will require much more doctoring to close (duct tape will solve most slashes), and if it goes two inches in, anywhere on the body, is almost certain to put the opponent on the ground. A two-inch stab wound anywhere in the torso is almost certain to be mortal.
This is why stupid kids who fight a lot die so much. They have a lot of fights with other people who don't know what they're doing, and eventually they forget how fragile the human body really is. And then someone screws up and gets stabbed by accident -- or runs across someone who's had even one day of hand-to-hand, in the service or somewhere else -- and there's a corpse on the ground, and a lot of mourning, and nobody really learns anything, because these idiots continue fighting with weapons and letting both sides walk away breathing.
When someone introduces a lethal weapon to a fight, it becomes a killing fight. Knife, gun, axe, pipe, bat, whatever, the appearance of the weapon signals that somebody at least has the intent to put their opponent in the ground. I've not yet drawn a weapon in a fight and sincerely hope I never have to, because it'd mean I was sincerely fighting for my life. I don't doubt that I *could* (there are people walking around today because I was unarmed when I met them); I just don't want to. Taking life is a bad trip. You shouldn't ever think about it lightly.
Why is this coming up? Because the clip on my walking-around knife is busted, and I can't epoxy it up till tomorrow night. It's like I'm walking around naked. And even after that I probably won't trust it (despite living in the hippiest section of the hippiest college town east of the Mississippi, and not NEEDING it for anything but cutting open junk mail), and find excuses to buy a balisong in Kim's. (besides the coolness factor)
What I really need is a Chinese SKS bayonet. Cruciform cross-section. 14 inches long. A large and stainless-steel way of saying "If you jump me, you will be even more of an idiot than I am for carrying this."
NOT.
--Kai out
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engines of hate | still grind
2004-02-23 08:50:26
Mediocre progress yesterday and a bunch of drinking. The presence of mini-kegs has a disastrous effect on proper prioritization. Later tonight I'm going to take care of the first of five exam questions (due in 2 weeks) and probably a good deal of source generation. I might actually get to editing sometime this week.
And the new DragonForce does rock. It's a balladic cut almost 8 minutes long, but nearly all of it is the same speed-of-light playing that we've all come to expect from Messrs Li & Totman.
Now back on the positive side of the given/recieve ops dynamic; I should be able to get a few more done this week as well, and sufficiently prevent owing people stuff much longer.
--K
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JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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