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carnivorous jesus
2004-01-09 10:37:56
Unless you count reading up on overly complex analyses of obsolete crypto functions and listening to bad music (never download anything by The Fordz) as work, I didn't do much of anything yesterday. And yet I still had a battle and a half dragging myself out of bed this morning.
I did, however, find out something about my writing style. I can be officially classed as a 'mediocre imitation of Robert Heinlein', which is indeed something to be stoked about.
I got ahold of an e-text of most of Starship Troopers (original novel), and on reading was greatly struck by how similar Heinlein's style in it was to mine, despite the fact that I barely remember The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, and don't recall whether or not I finished Stranger In A Strange Land. I don't have his tersity yet, or his abilities to express scenario so succinctly, but I was almost as shocked to see so much of what I already have in a published work as I was to realize that I've put almost 300 pages into Darkly Shining Void and am within spitting distance of completion.
Some of the similarity is probably due to the way the narratives work, dropping the reader into a foreign environment by total immersion rather than explaining everything at the start, and some of it is probably coming from the fact that Nick fits the strong-silent-good-with-weapons Heinlein-hero mold. (Of course, much of Nick's character is determined by his psychological problems and Heinlein barely acknowledges psychology, but hey.) Some of it, though, is definitely me picking up enough skills to move towards the publishable level.
There's still important differences between Heinlein-in-'59 and Kai-in-'04, though, mostly in character development. Heinlein has zero 'live', round, female characters in this work, and I have maybe one and two-halves. It's tough, as a male, to write believable women, but I think in Tasha I've managed to avoid botching it too badly. I don't know that this puts me ahead, though, because there's no female character in Starship Troopers that has anywhere near the role that Tasha has in DSV. But I'm moving up, by fits and starts.
Eventually, of course, I'm aiming to develop my own voice and not sound like an echo of other people. It's not going to happen overnight, though, and Heinlein is a good enough place to start. It's much preferable to being a third-rate imitation of R. A. Salvatore, which I have actually seen in print and been forced to define as the gold standard for 'wincingly bad'. The real Salvatore's been steadily on the decline since the original Icewind Dale trilogy, which had a lot of dice-clacking to be heard in it to start with; I was doing better than some of his imitators are now when I was in middle school.
Offtopic:
The Borders strike is over, but bookstore controversies continue in double-A. The hippie textbook shop, Shaman Drum, is finally coming under fire due to their holding of an exclusive franchise for some texts and anti-competitive practices: they threw some dude out who was checking price to compare against online book discounters. In return they say "We're local! We're independent!", but this doesn't change the fact that even if the money is going to Nebraska (as with the other bookstores in town), *less money is coming out of the student's pocket*. If we all still lived in villages, we would have to support the village craftsmen, but unfortunately, as the idiotic distances between places around here for someone without a car will attest, the world don't work like that any more.
Brecht said it best (and you'd think they'd have remembered): Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral. If supporting local businesses over out-of-state corporations means not eating, the megacorps are going to get the dollars and the locals will go hungry...unlike those people whose business they've lost.
--Kai out
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some forgotten studio
2004-01-08 10:54:32
Work rolls on apace. I merged in all the work I did on the book over the break last night, then chopped though two eps and had time to write up a profile for 581 and read a bit for 583. This is going to be tough. I haven't done anything relating to this stuff in about 3 years, so I'm in for a lot of catch-up. Fortunately, it's more relevant than 478 was to what I hope to be doing professionally, so I'll be less likely to fall behind. Now I just have to get decent marks in it and 575, then push those through as hardware and theory courses respectively, and I'll be nearly caught up for dropping those four credits last semester.
I'm looking at some alternatives to replace my capture card, now that I've found out I don't need to spend an arm and a leg on books this term (still need a job tho....), but I'd much rather just get it working again. If anyone has the drivers for a Dazzle DVC II PCI, give me a shout.....like that's going to get an answer. I've got some new ideas, but too many of them are coming from commercial source for me to really do anything about them as is. It sucks.
--Kai out -
don't know the answer
2004-01-07 09:09:18
back at school, back to work, back on the video production line. "Just when you think you're out, they pull you back in again." Of course, I had sort of been planning to do this demo for a while, so it wasn't really unprecedented. The date I'm aiming at is 1/14 for release, but something's telling me that that's just a TAD unrealistic, as it would basically mean doing nothing but editing this weekend, and I do have to lay some food in sometime, and there will be schoolwork to do. (And I really ought to work on the book before things get hectic).
I haven't done a demo in the time that I've been on the .org, so the format of progress logs will be a little different. I've got several shows already cut into source (from past videos; this will include Jin-Roh, Kujaku-oh, Saikano, Patlabor 2, Early Reins, and Haibane Renmei, at least), eighteen eps to cut through (which will be counted individually), and a concept that will rely heavily on manga panels, which I have to choose from about 60 series (not done at all yet). Tonight (after I buy any needed compilers books, a new notebook, and a calendar), I plan on cutting up a couple eps and maybe doing come necessary pre-timing. I have no idea how much of the total work on the video this will cover.
Song is by The Gathering off a recent release. I thought I was going to have to edit it, but it was perfect as it was. No problem. Now the problem is just remembering to have enough cash on hand to buy the limited release of _The Glorious Burden_ when it comes out. And AzuDai. And all the other crap I need. Oh well.
--Kai out
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the spawn of hell i am
2003-12-30 12:28:53
...or at least it feels that way, as I seem to be automatic-writing the book instead of having to come up with it myself.
Chapter 13 is done. So is chapter 14, which I didn't think I'd be able to even really work on until after I got back to school. The last two chapters are clearly outlined, and I'm looking forward to working on them in the few spaces in which I'm not going to be watching football over the coming week, leading up to my return to school. Since the start of November (less than two months), I've written a clear hundred pages, which is two pages per day, every day, counting all that time I was concentrating solely on exams, running Con Ja Nai, spending eight hours a day in the lab, sitting on a couch for holidays, marathoning Guru Guru, and watching football. There's something weird going on here, and I hope it continues.
It's not at the point where I'm considering "transfer[ing] from engineering/into English lit", but if I turn out to be good at writing well and quickly, instead of just possessed by something that wants this one book done, it'd be cool if I could get paid for it. It's even easier than writing code, and if I want the intellectual challenge of debugging and versioning, I can pick up a crossword puzzle or maybe make another video....provided I can get the bugs worked out of my capture gear. I still haven't found that CD I half came home to get. Not cool.
I like this hobby, and I want to hit 100, but I don't want to spend another 30 videos wandering around in a digisub wilderness or learn a new paradigm (costs money for DVD drives, money I don't have). I'm content with #84 as a last statement....and #85 as a real exit (scheduled premiere 2/1/04) would be worthy of the Loki-spirit I've inflicted on the world of AMVs.
--Kai out
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in unser uebungs-keller
2003-12-24 10:30:05
Well, I'm back for another semester. Grades weren't great, but I expect I'll have more of a handle on things this time around. I pretty much deserved what I got; hopefully, I won't have to say the same about marks on this order at the end of April.
Somebody better give me a carry knife for Christmas. I've got the money to buy one of my own, but I'm just cheap. There's something weird about not having that piece of steel stuffed into my right pocket; I've never had cause to use it, but it's still like something's missing.
Chapter 13 (in process right now) is about half done, and of course 12 was finished while sitting around in the terminal. I just have to remember to email these two to myself so I can pick them up back at school. Even if I had access to a working floppy drive, the airport security measures'd probably blank it right out. Thank the blade for laser media.
Weirdly, I'm not really getting anime withdrawal. I've already pulled all my old eps of Cooking Master Boy to lug back out (marathon time! 48 eps of Chinese and martial-arts cooking!), but I haven't actually *watched* any in a while. Hopefully, this means the addiction is getting manageable after all, but maybe it just means that my brother is camped out in front of the TV working on his books, and that there's been a lot of extremely good football on TV lately. Favre's brilliant outing on Monday night reminded me of Touch; like it was Irv guiding those all-or-nothing 1996-vintage passes down to the receivers. (not going to extend the simile to prevent spoilage for those poor souls who haven't at least watched the movies yet)
Offtopic:
Landser went to jail two days ago. Thumbs down for free speech in Germany. I'm not mad about it or anything, though; when you join a skin band in the most anti-Nazi country in Europe, you should expect to go to jail at some point. Its been a long time since I was anywhere near on their side, but let this be said: Landser was musically better than Skrewdriver, funnier than Day of the Sword, and not as vicious with the hate lyrics as Pluton Svea. They could have pulled a Boese Onkels and gone straight, but they liked laughing at magazines dubbing them "Terroristen mit E-Gitarren" (terrorists with electric guitars), despite the frankly nonexistent threat that they posed to the social order, too much to repent and have to spill the same story to every interview they ever gave for the rest of their careers. Music before politics, but in a political society, if you imbue your music with politics, you have to be prepared for the consequences of those politics.
Screw the right-apologia stuff; I don't believe that shit any more and I've got a book to work on. Mission mission mission. I've got to get into it now, because the bowl season starts tomorrow, and that means severe SIPLS (Sport Induced Productivity Loss Syndrome -- like most males in developed nations, watching any sporting match, especially of some species of 'football', even a fairly bad one, is quite preferable to doing anything productive at all) right until I get back to school. Go Blue!
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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