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feeding on the agony within
2004-02-22 15:41:12
Worked on the video this morning. The intro and closing bits are now fully together. I still need to do a bit of work on some of the "burst" sections internal, then I can start editing for real. Verry close. Verry close.
Also close to putting out another KK release, though it'll have less than ten unique minutes of video on it. Oh well. It's more or less a space-clearing issue; at least there's a bonus track.
This week is going to see at least two videos posted, plus a lot of work on an exam and two major coding projects. All three server accounts I have here are going to be under heavy utilization. This is what passes for spring break here.
At least there's free beer, and the party that generated it wasn't so loud as to require Amon Amarth to get to sleep. AND there's a new DragonForce track that I can't wait to listen to. If God was a five-foot Chinese man with four-foot hair and played guitar, his name would be Herman Li and he'd play in DragonHeart, because the movie company would have been too intimidated to sue a band with God in it and they wouldn't have changed the name. Regardless, this is one of the few power metal bands worth listening to, and if Noise's distro didn't suck balls, they'd ahve blown up as huge over here as they've done in Europe.
--Kai out
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the strange sensation
2004-02-20 10:32:27
<click>
"I will keep this tape recorder with me at all times. So that I may one day understand the strange things that have been happening to me: the lack of sleep, the loss of time. The sensation of always being watched, of never being alone."
I woke up at 12 past 5 this morning. I look up and the sky is dark, the clock says 5:12, the alarm (set for 6) hasn't gone off, and for some reason, I start panicking. "What time is it? WHAT THE HELL *DAY* IS IT?" Did I sleep through class and miss getting the exam but still have 5 hours before I have to leave for work? Did I lose a whole day and sleep into my shift (and through, presumably, my boss calling to find out where the hell I was)? Or is it Thursday starting? Thursday night even though I think I was still in class then? What the fuck?
Then I checked the clock on my computer, which I had fortunately NOT been fucking with to make certain programs work recently, and found out it was still five AM on 2/20. I hadn't missed anything. AFAIK.
Sleeping in four- to six-hour bursts, being up and active at more or less random circadian times, and putting in 18+ hours of quality cranial activity per day can combine to really mess you up. And spring break (which technically I'm on right now) isn't going to make it any easier. I should be able to finish the problem I presented Wednesday tonight, as well as work out a schedule for when and how I'm going to get done everything else I need to -- between the three dev classes I'm taking, the goddamned demo, and polishing off that last story.
Right now, though, I need to sleep. For about 8 hours after I get home, then I can eat some grits, play some Commander Keen, and do a thorough reset before I go to work. Maybe I'll actually be able to sleep my day's allotment all at once over break -- that would so rock.
--Kai out
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and it's ever so wrong
2004-02-19 00:05:59
Been doing a bit of design for the source generation (may actually do it tomorrow), but mostly working on school stuff (almost done proving RSA-dec Turing-reducible to parity(RSA-enc)), auditing prog tracks (Unicorn yields about 1 in 5 worth keeping), sleeping, and watching more cheap movies.
This time was a 10-box of older horror pics, of which I have seen 2 so far. One was a fairly standard English "youf" movie informed by Sabbath and the Stones' _Their Satanic Majesties Request_; the producers called it Psychomania, even though Zombie Hippie Bikers Go Ape! might have been more accurate. The motorcycle action was decent, and the shitty petrification special effects at the end were quite laugh-worthy, but the film itself wasn't particularly interesting or challenging. When the cast goes gung-ho into killing themselves to gain immortal life (don't ask, it's not explained), you almost wish for them to *stay* dead, so that there's at least a small chance that the movie will stop.
The other one, though, gets a huge Horns Up. Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, AND Telly Savelas? On a train versus Rasputin and the Abominable Snowman? Hells yes. How can you go wrong? Classic lines, incredibly bad science, a touch of sex appeal, and a wide streak of Satanism make Horror Express/The Enigma well worth nearly all of the $17 I dropped on this collection.
The production, for a Spanish horror flick that already had to pay 3 international stars (Lee as the archaeologist/hero, Cushing as his doctor tagalong, and Savelas as a captain of Cossacks), is bloody amazing. The interiors of the Trans-Siberian Express are faithfully done in late Romanov style, and the train itself, and the embarkation station in China, are done up at a top-notch level. Of course, they bought it back by blowing up large-scale model-train cars with M-80s instead of doing realistic SFX at the end, but hey. The weapons are thoroughly accurate, but this is to be expected from a Spanish production, as the country had a tendency to collect reject military equipment from the early 20th century over the last 100 years. There are a couple useless side plots (an international spy trying to steal a formula for super-strong steel, etc), but most of the time the movie more or less stays on topic.
The science, in the grand old tradition of pulp horror, is so bad that even drive-ins couldn't advertise the monster if this was released 20 years previously: "It came from another world...*and it wants to SUCK YOUR BRAIN!!*" Stay with me: the monster is an extragalactic organism that has been on earth since the dawn of life. It can jump hosts along line-of-sight, and can pull memories out of the brain (erasing them) *through the eyeball*, then store them, *as retinally intelligible pictures*, in the host's vitreous humor [eyeball fluid]. This is SO FUCKING STUPID THAT IT BEGGARS DESCRIPTION. It's probably the reason that this movie isn't allowed out in public without supervision any more, but hey: let Crichton worry about getting his goddamned science right and let us pulp freaks keep watching our Radar Men From The Moon tapes. And they probably had to do up the bad science on the spot to keep Cushing from stealing the picture.
It's not obvious from his most famous role (in this community anyways) as Grand Moff Tarkin [Star Wars IV], but Peter Cushing was an incredibly ambitious and creative improvisational monster hunter during his days with Hammer. The destruction-of-Dracula sequence in Hammer's version of Stoker's novel is not in the script; Cushing invented it on-set. If he was not the star (as he very rarely wasn't) in one of these, the lead had to keep an extremely tight rein on the director to prevent him from becoming so. Here, Lee obviously has top billing, and the scripted tension between his character and Cushing's only benefits from his determined efforts not to get upstaged. And yet Cushing continues to play his role his own way; I strongly suspect that the double-barreled shotgun that the leads tote around in the hunt for the monster was a personal weapon of Cushing's, and it may have been one of his improvisations (meeting the ape host of the monster halfway through the picture) that forced the director into the bad science and confused body-jumping.
Of course, this confusion about who is now possessed by the monster sets up most of the best lines in the picture.
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Rasputin-type monk: (whispering) Satan lives. The eevil one is among us.
[Not innately funny, but the way it's presented got an immediate Horns Up on the viewing]
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Miroff [police inspector possessed by the monster]: The two of you together, yes. But what if one of *you* is the monster?
Cushing: Monster? But we're *British*.
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countess: I'll have you sent to Siberia for this, Kazan!
Savelas: I *am* in Siberia.
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Savelas: Anything moves in that doorway, shoot it.
Cushing: But what if the monk is innocent?
Savelas: Aah, we got a lot of innocent monks.
Morals of the story: Don't steal frozen ape-men from China. Don't be expendable when a Cossack tries to solve a problem. And don't put your name above Peter Cushing's on the poster.
--Kai out
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king in my own mind
2004-02-17 09:56:32
As implied In Flames' new video and associated music track is ruling majorly. We'll have to wait and see if it's indicative of the album or not; it sounds like "Watch Them Feed" mixed with Passenger, but that doesn't say anything about the quality or consistency of the rest of the material, which was the problem with _Reroute..._.
Next story on the block is "aldri han skogge greven", which is spoilers for content if you know Norwegian. I really need to get some time and check out Weird Tales' submission rules, because it does no good to just finish stuff if I never act on getting it published. There may be some video work later today (source generation as opposed to collection), but I've still got to do up a problem or two to present tomorrow, and there is still those ops hanging around.
I swear I'll get alla those done....
--K
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it can't be found
2004-02-16 10:41:35
good: I finished "fever in the blood" last night.
bad: entering it instead of going to sleep nearly made me late for class this morning and stuck me up here on 5 hours' sleep. I've seriously got to do something about these schedule screwups. In the short term this is probably going to be going home to sleep for a couple hours before Compilers starts. In the long term....who knows?
I might be able to finish the other story within the next week, then get started on the next book. It's kind of stupid to work on another one without shopping DSV to an agent, but this is the reason that record companies can rip musicians off. Creative people like creating. I know that I *have* to manage the business end if I want to be able to eat off of my writing, but I don't *want* to. I want someone else to do that for me, someone who won't take too big of a cut and won't screw me over, so I can get back to writing, which is what I actually like doing. It's really rare for someone to turn out like Jon Schaffer, who can bulldog as much about business as creative stuff, or Gene Simmons, who likes marketing more than actually playing music these days. Most people just want that shit to take care of itself so they can keep doing what they want to get paid *for*.
At least I can get a couple outlines together. Maybe that, and all the docs I have to generate for 581, will burn up my writing energies enough that I can actually start pitching. Maybe I'll have to fight the B-school bureaucracy to get my goddamn paycheck, and that'll get me in the mood to start selling.
need sleep...still got docs to read...
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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