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this would be | no easy ride
2003-08-08 09:57:09
Got the video done, and it's up on local now. link: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=21662
If you actually watch it, you may be interested in the forum RFC: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=312711
Of course, no ops and barely any hits so far, but that's the way the world works. Announcing the vid may have been a bit of a waste, considering that it'd probably have gotten to this level without such, but hey.
Current video: C.W. McCall, "Lewis And Clark" to You're Under Arrest mini-specials. Progress check: 1%. Anticipated catalog number: #80. Technically, this should be at 0%, but I've got all the source hanging about. I plan to finish the output options for #79 (con is going now, will build AMVDC-MPEG2 tonight while I'm at club, then MITAC-contest early tomorrow morning) overnight, then clean off the source from disk and collect the a/v source needed for this project tomorrow before I go down to see Meg, and do necessary separations either then or after I get home.
These are easy operations that don't require too much attention, so I can multitrack them with "tearing apart the room looking for my Eagle medallion". My youngest brother's court is on Sunday, and I figure I ought to at least wear the medallion since my old uniform shirts are all in use by other people.
After the court, though, comes the party. Eagle parties tend to turn out cool in Troop 4. The last one I went to had Sam Adams, Boondock Saints, and a six-foot Italian sub. The one before that, My Pet Demon played their first headlining gig in the basement. This one will feature Sam Adams stout (two great tastes that taste great together?), and it's at my house, so I can get lit up without worrying if I have to drive anywhere.
Good times. Hopefully club will be as well. More Luna Varga and the possibility of Hawaiian pizza. Gotta love it.
And now, a quote from the deepest depths of ultimate evil (ok, F. Paul Wilson's _Reprisal_, but hey):
"Who ami I? Why, I'm you. Or parts of you. The best parts. I'm the touch of Richard Speck, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy in all of you. I'm the thousand tiny angers and fleeting rages of your day -- at the car that cuts you off on the freeway, at the kid who sneaks ahead of you in line at the movies, at the old fool with the full basket in the eight-items-only express check-out at the supermarket. I'm the locker-room residue of the names, the scorn, the pain heaped on all the pizza-faced, flatchested, pencil-necked, lard-butt geeks, netds, and dumb bastards who had to change clothes in front of their peers. I'm the nasty glee in the name-callers and the long-suffering pain, the self-loathing, the smoldering resentment, the suppressed rage, and never-to-be-fulfilled promises of revenge in their targets. I'm the daily business betrayals and the corporate men's room character assassinations. I'm the slow castrations and endless humiliations that comprise the institution called marriage. I'm the husband who beats his wife, the mother who scalds her child, I'm the playground beatings of your little boys, the back seat rapes of your daughters. I'm the rage toward a child molester and I'm the pederast's lust for your child, for *his* own child. I'm the guards' contempt for their prisoners and the prisoners' hatred for their guards. I'm the shank, I'm the truncheon, I'm the shiv. I'm the bayonet in the throat of the political dissident, the meat hook on which he is hung, the cattleprod that caresses his genitals. You've kept me alive, you've made me strong. I am *you*."
Go read this book; anyone who thanks George Hayduke in their dedications is a writer to be respected.
--Kai out
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tomorrow turned into yesterday
2003-08-07 10:35:48
Warrel Dane lied at the end of his interview in Live4Metal (http://www.live4metal.com/nevermore.htm). Scroll down to the bottom. It's just not true. In certain situations her relatives could keep dropping in, like they did last night.
This is what I did last night instead of work on the video. People who are in college or about to go to college should pay close attention, because this entry is about cooking from next to nothing when you care about how it's going to taste (and not just about getting nutrition down; this is a couple steps above the cheese-salsa-sandwich category of loser cuisine).
Last night Meg and I were hanging out at her house watching TV. Her uncle Tom comes in looking for something to eat, since he's just got an onion at his house. He has to settle for nuking some cheese and bacon bits (not even real bacon) which sets the alarm bells off since we haven't eaten yet.
We go in the kitchen and are faced with the fearsome dilemma of having to cook a meal from no food. Most of her family is living at the vacation cottage in Plymouth for most of this week, so the processed, low-prep-time food is there. And since nobody's around to eat it and it might go bad, there are very few raw ingredients available. This presents a unique challenge: cooking not from scratch but from middleware.
We ransack the freezer, the fridge, and the cabinets, and come up with three primary ingredients: a bag of frozen ravioli, a can of Hunt's tomato sauce, and a pack of frozen hot dogs. There are some frozen turkey burgers that are rejected as disgusting and a half cucumber that is discounted as guinea pig food, but that's about it. We scavenge up a pot, fill it with water, and set it on to boil.
Just by itself or with a vegetable, I'd prefer the ravioli in a light garlic-heavy pesto-based sauce, but the hot dogs throw a curve ball into that equation. Their salty, nitrated taste will start wars with the pesto and things will not be good. The tomato sauce will be used after all. Besides the practical consideration that we didn't find the jar of pesto until after the tomato sauce was already simmering, and that we didn't have any whole garlic to work with when I was considering working up the sauce by hand anyways. I scored and then defrosted/nuked the hot dogs (with a lot of help from Meg on actually operating her microwave).
Now the problem becomes what the hell to do about the Hunt's. For those of you who didn't grow up with homemade pasta sauces, Italians like myself generally look on Hunt's as the flat worst of the packaged tomato sauces, only a step up from ketchup, and not a large one at that. However, it was what we had, and I had to make it work. The taste of the hot dogs would cut the sweetness drastically, but this would be a half measure at best. Fortunately Meg found her garlic powder (lots dumped in), oregano (a good bit dumped in), and basil (a fair bit dumped in) to save the day.
From here out it's easy. I just let the shredded hot dog bits simmer in the sauce as the water comes to a boil, then dump the ravioli in to cook, and wait a few minutes till they're floating and squishy. Then strain, plop 'em back in the pot, stir in the sauce, turn off all the burners so the house don't burn down, and serve.
And the weirdest part was that it actually came out kind of decent. Not something that I'd make again if given a wider range of ingredients, but good in a pinch, especially if you're starving. If we had had an onion to work with I probably would have overruled Meg on the turkey burgers, shredded two or three of those, and fried them up with the onions and some garlic salt to put in the sauce instead of the hot dogs, but it came out fine with the ingredients we actually had. I didn't find the frozen carrots until we were cleaning up, but I'd have had to do something extra interesting with those, like steaming them with the one pineapple slice we had at our disposal, to make them palatable, since Meg doesn't normally care for frozen vegetables.
A nearly empty refrigerator isn't a notice to call out for pizza, it's a challenge, kids.
The video should be done by this time tomorrow. I'll do all the effects work that actually requires attention this evening, then call Meg while rendering the effects-processed clips back into usable formats and building the final project file, since that requires no actual mental activity, and I won't get my wires crossed by doing it and trying to talk on the phone simultaneously.
I should combine my interests in improv cooking and mediocre AMV editing with a Cooking Master Boy video, but that would rely on there being some form of source for it available that didn't look like butt. Time to hit CDJapan...
--Kai out
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all have nice faces
2003-08-06 10:38:03
I might have been able to do some effects work last night, but I got some more sleep instead. Meg's gonna wear me to a frazzle tonight, I can feel it...^^;;
At any rate, the video is drafted, and I've prerendered both sections that were in need of it. The effects work for this one is going to be a little tricky and take quite a while, but fortunately the game tomorrow night doesn't look that interesting. I don't ever care about the Pats until the season starts, and by then I'll instead be following the Wolverines (GO BLUE!!) and pretending the Lions don't exist.
Current video: Gamma Ray, "Fire Below" to Peacock King. Progress check: 91%. Expected catalog number: #79. The video, as it is, is decent. The editing's nothing really to write home about, but I'm hoping that'll be fixed by rebalancing the aspect ratio and adding in the final effects. This one sort of has a story, and it might even be ZCoA, but I'll have to get some independent ops on it to test that part.
I'm doing a bit of an experiement with this video in that I'm using full 720x480 white screens instead of 720x360 screens with black fill top and bottom. I get tired of measuring aspect ratios, so I figure on just doing this up fullscreen and cropping to the picture area defined by the captured video's dimensions only rather than having to bring in the borders to match the dimensions of the white clips. After black-fill removal, the video will be resized to a nice proper 720x360, and from this made into con- and DC-quality MPEG2 and distro-quality DivX versions. I'll keep the original MPEG2 version as well, and if I get any ops identifying the source of the title, they'll win that version so they can see the sprues that I cut the video out of.
Or not considering that that might be kind of a booby prize.....
--Kai out
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no stronger drug
2003-08-05 10:25:14
amazing, for the first time in days I'm not feeling worn out. Of course, the price I pay for my stability is no video progress.
Not that that would have been a terribly good idea last night anyhow. I occupied myself mainly with talking on the phone (to Meg, who else) and washing dishes, which are also tremendously safe things to do during an electrical storm.
I wouldn't have these nerves if my capture card hadn't gotten blasted around this time two years ago when a strike produced a jump/drop in the line that my surge protector couldn't quite completely handle. The storms are going to keep up all week, though, so I'd best take advantage of any lulls tonight and mash out the draft at least and hopefully the effects. If I wake up early tomorrow I might be able even to get the final produced by the time I get home from work.
Gambarusou!
offtopic:
finished the book I ran into Sawney Beane in, ran into more sick shit, like the Butcher of Dusseldorf, the French village where all but 7 inhabitants were massacred by the Nazis because of an administrative error, and the British spy who survived death by hanging in German-occupied Estonia. Reality is always much more bizarre than fiction writers can get away with.
--Kai out
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into the dead sky
2003-08-04 10:25:13
first: the new Nevermore is beyond killer, y'all gotta run out and buy it. #8 on the non-RIAA Amazon album charts is where it's at, biotch.
second: The First President of Japan is beyond killer, y'all gotta run out and buy the first volume. Literally no manga out like this, if you're over the mental age of 15 this will be the best thing you've read all week.
All right, down to brass tacks. No progress on the video this weekend, but there were good reasons. On Saturday I built that SD Zeta Gundam I got last weekend, duped all my borrowings, and saw Whale Rider (great movie, see it when it gets wide release) with Meg, and on Sunday I spent nearly the whole day underwater. I'll be able to do drafting tonight before the game starts, so all is good.
Club was pretty cool Friday, with Luna Varga being more cracked-out than anticipated, and they had Hawaiian pizza. SKORE. Prior to this I nabbed X volume 6 (now need the new Argent Soma as well, missed that) in addition to the two releases lauded above. I think I'm just going to give up and buy the FMP box when it comes out, chasing DVDs one by one just isn't worth it.
Saturday was as described, and then Meg and I went down to her family's cottage in some state park around Plymouth. The water wasn't too bad, and it was a welcome relief after lugging first huge rocks and then the paddleboat down a 60-degree slope. Paddleboating is good exercise, especially when you're towing a raft. Another weekend or two like that and I'll have right angles on my quads again....and incipient cancer on my shoulders, since I'm too dumb to learn from one bad sunburn. Spending a whole day together was great, even though some of her younger relatives can get a little annoying.
I should be able to finish #79 before the end of Tuesday, then steal time to format up my AWA Master's entry by the end of the week and FTP it to Quu overnight. That's gonna be a hella huge zipfile. If I can't, it'll just go to Expo as originally planned, and then I can see about kicking #80 into shape.
One day at a time, and maybe some time for sleep....
hugely offtopic:
There was a real-life inspiration for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back in 14th-century Scotland, there was a guy named Sawney Beane who decided that robbing people was easier than real work, so he picked up his similarly inclined wife and moved to a remote cave with easy access to well-traveled roads. There they started robbing people, and to conceal the evidence and ensure a steady supply of provisions, murdering and eating them. They killed so many people that they actually had to start salting and pickling them in order to keep them from going bad, and in more than one case had to dump meat that had spoiled anyway.
This went on for a long while. They had relations and had like ten children, and those kids had relations with each other when they came of age, and had more children, who grew up knowing nothing but cannibalism, incest, and murder. They also became such a huge problem that after one of their intended victims finally got away, the king himself led the expedition against them. They found their cave, piles of human bones several feet deep, and a total of 48 cannibals of three generations, all of whom were captured and taken back to Edinburgh for justice.
The late-medieval Scots didn't fool around when it came to punishing cannibal murderers. They chopped the arms and legs off them while they were still alive, even the children, without benefit of trial, and tossed the bodies and body parts to rot. And that, to the best of anyone's knowledge, was the end of the Sawney Beanes.
This is real history, people. Makes you wonder what else has been going on undiscovered for twenty-odd years....
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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