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bodies fall like rain
2004-01-27 10:53:49
Let's see...another page and a half added to chapter 16, plenty of time to write more today, satisfactory research for 581, did some work on the demo, and I should even have time to maybe prepare a problem for tomorrow morning. And I sent off my AniBo entry. Hopefully, it'll get there in time, but the video is no great shakes, so it's okay if it doesn't
Current video: The Gathering, "Broken Glass", demo. Progress check: 58%. Expected catalog number: #86. Currently, this video is going to include cuts of at least one frame from 47 manga or dojins, 3 manga-style webcomics, 27 anime including one secret ingredient, and one secret US cartoon produced in Korea. That's a grand total of 78 titles, which would be more if I could install BT on a box I don't have root access to, or on which I have a large enough transfer capacity to do something useful.
Area 88 on TV. Now that's something to be stoked about, even if they say the planes aren't well-rendered. Also cool is Swano's site being responsive again, so that my lack of cash will not also translate into a lack of cool music.
Put up the Chipmunk Mix of DWTV today....no death threats yet, which I suppose is a good sign.....
--Kai out
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bloodless shadows
2004-01-26 10:24:32
I was thinking about changing programs this morning, mostly because I did everything this weekend except homework. I worked the AniBo entry onto SVCD and then onto tape (at the cost of having to sit through Jean-Claude Van Damme's slow-starting, krunky, promising-once-the-action-gets-going, yet ultimately unfulfilling and poorly concluded Legionnaire -- I hope I can sell this back), I chopped up another two titles for the demo, and I finished chapter 15, but I didn't do a lot of research and did no work on the Crypto stuff at all. I just can't get into doing math late at night.
Then, of course, I go to Crypto this morning, and not only do things start to make sense, but the announcement comes that we'll actually start doing some actual cryptography maybe by next week, an amazing turnaround after what will be three whole weeks of complexity theory, and I find out that one of the other guys in the class is a Nevermore fan. Keeping hope alive.
And, of course, Lee Van Cleef wouldn't ever back out of something he got started on, so I'm definitely not going to do the transferred-to-English-Lit thing. At the very least I don't want to give up my infinite-printing capability before I do up my red-pen galleys.
Yeah. I actually made an accurate prediction. I finished up chapter 15 Friday night, and figure that I have about 2/3 to 3/4 of chapter 16 left to write, considering the two-page start I've made and the 2-4 pages I've had written for next to forever, and after that I need to rework chapter 17, maybe extending it by as much as a page, and then I'm done. DONE. Just barely by the end of the month, and I'll have a lot of red-pen time before break.
As I stated earlier, even with working more on the demo and all my school crap, I'll definitely finish the book before the end of the month. After that, editing, and finishing up five or six opening pages/concepts to short stories that started a while back. One of them, due to a lot of between-class downtime, is now about 2/3-3/4 done; I'd expect that one to wrap early in February if I continue at current pace. It's a little thick in some of the parts that I still have left to do, though; I've got most of the action onto the page already.
This one is a little tribute to Lovecraft, New England horror, with a few of my own touches like the hunter Barlow from Aroostock (originally based on a character design for Parsival from my aborted attempt at a manga adaptation of Eschenbach's Grail Knight story; much more striking visually than verbally) and the decayed-small-town setting that I got familiar with in college. The problem is that it uses New England vampires, which next to nobody knows about any more. There have been some scholarly books and articles on the legend recently, but Lovecraft was the last one I know of to use it in print, back in "The Shunned House", but here like there there are some slight changes; Lovecraft had the cosmic-horror angle, so he took the vampire towards a 'giant in the earth', and my brutal-death-metal interests mean that the corpse isn't pristine as it technically ought to be. I still have to explain all this stuff and bring out the narrator's fear a little more; I'm too used to unshockable, grim narration from working on DSV, and that's not the kind of feel this story needs.
This is like the third or fourth try at writing a New-England-vampire story for me, and I'm not sure that the result will be publishable. (First go stranded a bunch of college kids in town with it, second try moved the setting to NYC and introduced Barlow, this one puts it back in Maine where it belongs, but hasn't done much with the isolation angle yet.) It's just tough to do a monster-horror with a monster that just sits in the ground and sucks life force. I don't have the luxury of describing its physical grotesqueries and immediacy (normally my strong suit), and I can't do anything with its motivations like people normally do for ghosts, because it doesn't have either. That's the reason East-European vampires took over as soon as Stoker discovered them: they're a hell of a lot more interesting to write about than this kind.
Then again, as with coursework, if it wasn't challenging, I probably wouldn't be doing it.
--Kai out
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bury me deep where there's no will to be
2004-01-23 10:15:34
So I'm writing more, and doing less work on the video, but it's not *completely* my fault. I was going to do some stuff, but then I got called in to work Wednesday night, and I was burned out yesterday, and nothing happened. I need to get on top of my homework as well, or things are going to get nasty.
I'm going to try to make AniBo this time around: I just need to buy a bumper-cased movie from Encore tomorrow and build a SVCD version of 'i brought you fires' to tape. If you don't know how good it was supposed to be, it doesn't suck quite as bad, even though I wish I could have done some pop-blurs instead of just slowing down the framerate in some places, but it's not my fault that I was a klutz with AviSynth back then. After that I'll probably be able to finish the demo in peace, maybe even by deadline if I can stay up real late Saturday.
offtopic random shite:
Joe Namath battling a drinking problem? Members of Judas Priest having deviant sexualities? Metallica putting out total media-whore crap merchandise? WHO THE FUCK COULD HAVE GUESSED?? The stupidity going on out there is absolutely mind-boggling. Maybe it's just that we get used to not thinking about these kinds of things, and then every so often they get shoved back in our faces.
In any case, the solutions are simple. Send Broadway Joe back to Betty Ford. Lock up Holland and throw away the key. And shoot any remaining members of Metallica on sight: it's obvious that they've been replaced with corporate-controlled robots, as the thrashers who put out _Kill 'Em All_ would never have assented to doing a Spongebob Squarepants tie-in.
--Kai out
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i will defend my land
2004-01-21 10:23:06
Installing bloody trimaran AGAIN, and I've got even more math problems to work through for Crypto. I'll have no trouble getting this accepted as a theory course, and it's a good thing that I've already done actual cryptography, as I'm not sure that we're going to learn anything but set and complexity theory in this one. At least the discussion today was interesting.
Work is always toughest in the front part of the week, because I have as many classes today as I have over the four days Thursday-Sunday, and I have a hard time managing to do work before Sunday. I'm still hoping to do some work on the video and the book tonight, and to start in on reprocessing the 2-3 videos I need to run through the mill to release a new DC volume, but I probably should also at least get a start on one or two of the problems for next week, so I can present it and not look like the Ape King of the Idiots.
I'm also seriously considering picking up a DVD-ROM drive if:
a) I can work an extra shift sometime and get up the cash and
b) installing it won't force me to upgrade my configuration.
I'm sick of not having a video to work on, or more accurately sick of the hoops I have to jump through to work on the current project, but I'm also on an exceedingly tight budget; I need the income from my job to pay non-rent expenses, and the $50 for even an exceedingly low-end DVD drive is a month's worth of entertainment budget (or more) or 5 weeks' food. That's serious money; the cash to upgrade my hardware and OS (provided I can't find someone in CAEN willing to steal me what I need) might run as high as a rent payment. That's just plain non-affordable.
However, not working on stuff is worse, because it just leads to frustration (see book gripings). I need to find someone with Planetes whose arm I can twist.....
--Kai out
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canister rips through them
2004-01-19 21:41:08
This wasn't a very productive weekend. I screwed up my sleep schedule over Friday night at work (didn't sleep enough during the day), and didn't even get anything done out of it. The book is languishing, and I'm still not done my homework.
Fortunately, there's nothing due until Wednesday, which gives me all of tomorrow to finish the school stuff and hack on the video a little; the book will flow as soon as I sit down and write it. Most of this lucky respite is due to not having class today, MLK Day being one of the few federal holidays the U observes.
(offtopic) Of course, if you've been keeping up with the news, this only makes sense; it'd look really bad for the University to fight so hard for affirmative action, then refuse to take Dr. King's holiday off because it's the start of only the third week back from winter break. There's been a lot of noise on campus about how we should all turn out at various events and support, how Connerly is going to reverse King's legacy, and how current students are apathetic about the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
The thing is, though, that it's difficult NOT to be apathetic. Civil empowerment of nonwhites (and women, though that's not where the noise is now) has advanced on a steep logarithmic curve in the past 50 years, and at this point, it's difficult to separate their current status from the alleged limit, the rights and priveleges currently enjoyed by white males. People look at how bad it was merely thirty years ago, when whites and blacks were spearing each other in the streets of my home town over their kids going to school together, see how much progress has been made, and feel justified in skiving off, because there's no point in going to a battle that's already been won.
The condition of oppressed groups, legally and actually, is so much better now than it was that a broad-based civil-rights movement cannot be sustained. It is no longer in the interest of the elites to redress the racial imbalances of the society, because there is no longer the threat that those imbalances are enough to lead to race war and destroy their positions of privlege. And the advocates who can see the differences that remain, and are not satisfied with the 80% loaf that their predecessors won for them, aren't exactly helping their cause, either.
Before I came to this hugeass University I attended a SELAC, and discovered exactly what diversity was and wasn't. Diversity is NOT selecting kids in proportion to the color of their skin when the only other difference between them is the color of their Bentleys. And it's not some kind of geopolitical Pokemon on a set of income levels, skin hues, sexualities, regions, nationalities, and political affiliations. Real diversity is finding the right people to change minds. Diversity is realizing that the big long-haired dude behind the lunch counter is also a student at this elite college. Diversity is finding out that the girl on your floor who looks like a trust-fund-baby cheerleader is a year ahead of you in calculus. Diversity is meeting a black Muslim kid who hates basketball and loves Linux. Real diversity teaches you about people. The fake that too many people are mistaking for diversity these days just informs you about skinning and feature sets. It reinforces stereotypes instead of destroying them.
Actually overheard while crossing the Diag the other night: "You're not a legacy, you're not from Michigan, and you're *white*? How the hell did you manage to get in?" That's what the fruit of fake diversity sounds like. It was a joke, sure, but the situation that gave rise to it is anything but.
(/offtopic)
I don't know that I've ever got as many ops and as much fan mail as I have since more or less being forced into retirement. Most shocking was checking the Globocide page to send the link to someone, and seeing that 'BLOOD REIGN' has a higher 'bullet' rating than the infamous GOREGASM. That's just bizarre. Hopefully, the release of #85 (whenever it premieres) won't greatly disappoint these people; the effort I'm putting into #86, combined with this encouragement, will probably also lead to a public release, even though it's being developed as a demo.
I did some thunkage checking on the book, and my pagecount numbers are about right. Any hardcover publication will probably finish a little under 300 pages, and as far as paperback goes, I'm pretty certain I'm up over 300 already. This was the target figure, but I'm not 100% certain; I need to spend more time in Borders doing words-per-page counts, and less time buying Lee van Cleef movies. (For the uninitiated, this is the guy who reinvented "badass" for color film.)
There's not enough to do; if there was, I'd have gotten a lot more of this undone stuff finished over the weekend.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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