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limitation of human understanding
2003-06-17 10:54:12
The schedule changed yet again. I'm drafting #78 tonight, as it was pre-empted by the need to save Meg from her family and a bad day. We hung out and played Scrabble, at which I won kind of by accident. Meg won on points, but I was able to go out first, and between her and Joey I picked up 22 points. The letter Q remains a sentence of death.
I'm currently up in the air about what I should send to AWA Pro. The smart money should be on #64 at this point, but I have a huge killer video waiting in the wings. The only problem is that this is going to be going from a full-season TV series, and will pretty much require me to clip through all 25 eps. At this point, I'm not certain that I can do a project of this magnitude before the deadline, and #64 is pretty cool anyways.
Perhaps #64 this year, and the video mentioned above next; turn the Pro tape into a yearly exhibition of Kuroi Kenshi kill-you-in-the-head action videos.
Con news:
#68 got REJECTED from Fanime, for fairly obvious reasons. Videos about giant boobs with a shock-and-awe f-bomb campaign in the audio track will usually get you that. It will be sent out again as soon as I can find some other con with loose requirements about taste.
It's a positive for the community that #71, with politically sketchy music but no real obscenity, got played at PortCon Maine, and this one, which like its title says really has 'no taste at all', got slapped down.
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 100%, 100%, 100% and 80%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. The 'new vids on the block' box on the main member page is kind of cool, but the titles I've seen so far are kinda lame. When these vids are put out for public distro, you're going to catch the following monstrosities hogging all the space in that caption:
worn soule [#75]
...and even this shall pass away... [#76]
Vivimus | Vivamus [#77]
on black canvass blacker stars... [#78]
Ofcourse, that won't be for a long while. Since the full premiere and release of fourSquare is going to be after AWA Expo, I'll probably be out at school by then.
shigoto shigoto........
--Kai out
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turned away into a thousand dreams
2003-06-16 10:51:43
$5700 TAKAIIIIIIIIIIII!! So I'm hopefully spending a thousand dollars more to live in a non-Godai situation next year...if things don't fall through. Up until now the weekend was quite decent, a lot of progress on a lot of fronts.
There was Hawaiian pizza at club on Friday. And I got the final volumes of MB. SKORE. Of course, now I have like 15 eps of Slayers to watch through to get caught up, which will be a chore that'll only get worse the longer I don't do it.
Then on Saturday I caught Bend It Like Beckham (great movie) with Meg, and afterwards we watched MiniPato, Twilight Q2, and Angel's Egg, which made it kind of like an Oshii-smokes-weed film festival. It's hard to believe that we've been together for less than two months. By luck or by accident we stumbled into each other, so weird that it feels like fate, red strings reeling us in, and there's not a thing that I'd change.
On Sunday I spent a lot of the day fixing bugs in #77, and then there was one of my bro's buddies' Eagle court, which was a good opportunity to catch up with some of the crew from my old troop, and then at the party afterward to eat food somebody else paid for and watch Boondock Saints, as, horror of horrors, a few of the people hanging with us had not seen said film. I also tried to remaster #46, but that didn't work out so well. HASSHIN! 3 will be going out with the original mixdown, sometime in the near future.
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 100%, 100%, 100% and 76%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. I should finish #78 tomorrow night, provided there aren't too many bugs. Tonight is for timing chart, a very important phone call, and drafting; I'll tie everything up tomorrow night and do the release Wednesday morning.
Offtopic:
With the exception of the wallet and Opeth CD Meg gave me, I got mostly useless birthday presents. My brothers, between them, gave me a DVD I already own and a telephone, despite the fact that I don't have a phone jack. Maybe I'll need it at school, but I don't need it now.
--Kai out
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it's your turn to die
2003-06-13 09:59:40
#77 is all drafted and looking quite cool, despite the restrictions on source footage that I had to work around. Finalization will proceed tonight around club and tomorrow before the tool expo opens, leaving Sunday to finish #78, which should be a piece of cake. I've got so much source just waiting for this DARK atmospheric video as opposed to the soft, nice feel that's been dominating the previous three.
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 100%, 100%, 90% and 76%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. After Project Haibane wraps, there will be a short, fast, video cut together over next week and the following weekend, and then a bigger project to be determined for the rest of the month of June and probably into July. Time to kick ass....
Yeah, I also turned 23 today. Maybe I can finagle free pizza from club, or just get Ed to give me all of Cooking Master Boy instead of just the first three discs as requested. I should be finishing up MB this week, but skipping club last week to drive cross-country and then getting in my requests a little late this week may have torpedoed that. Sooner or later it'll be done.
Of all the things I'd want for my birthday, the one I want most is the one I'm least likely to get. Mostly because I'd have to buy my own box of Guinness, and there's no way that I'd get the 24 hours of doing nothing any time soon.
There should be a contest for the occasion, but I can't come up with one...mail me your suggestions and what you'd like to win and maybe you'll get lucky.
--Kai out
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determines my deathstyle
2003-06-12 09:45:51
Well, Project Haibane got pushed back again. Maybe if I skip the Slayers TV portion of club tomorrow night I'll be able to get back towards schedule. However, I'm feeling much better about the current video; I'm half done, with enough source to finish strong, and it's actually quite cohesive, which is a real necessity in a five minute song that evolves strongly from start to finish -- unlike the songs on _St. Anger_ that just flop around for eight minutes trying to figure out where the hell they want to end up.
There's been some interesting contrary opinions on this record, that it's anti-technology or leading into some new phase that the rest of us can't appreciate, but the base reasoning behind all of these theories seems to be that Metallica spent eleven months in the studio with a professional producer, and obviously intended this CD to have crappy production, bad fidelity, and bloated, nonsensical arrangements. In other words, it's not a shitty album, it's performance art precision-engineered to an artistically determined level of ironic badness. That we trust the people involved with Metallica to be rational, clueful, human beings, and that nobody could spend that long making a CD sound this bad unless they WANTED it to sound this bad.
Offtopic:
I have to stop going into stores that sell anime while I'm carrying money. I dropped about 80 bucks between Master Keaton v1, Miyuki-chan In Wonderland, and the special edition of WXIII. Of course, it was Master Keaton that derailed my prod schedule after I built the halfway test, and MiniPato that killed dead all attempts to recover. That 'digital paper puppet animation' thing is just so cool.
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 100%, 100%, 85% and 76%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. Current anticipated finish date for Project Haibane is sometime over the weekend, probably on Sunday. I have three non-work-related things taking my time this weekend, and this is the lowest priority of them. Top priority is ofcourse getting together with Meg sometime, and after that is stealing time to buy illegal weapons at this one-time-only tool/camping supply blowout tent sale. Normally you can't buy crossbows of any kind where I live, so the chance to buy a pistol crossbow for 20 bucks (60% off) is not to be missed. Not that I really have anyone I want to shoot; pistol crossbows are just cool.
A lot of good news in the music world; In Flames is working on a new CD, hopefully learning the lessons of _Reroute to Remain_, and Iced Earth has announced a new guitar player. This last is especially good news, because it makes it much more likely that they're close to a decision on a vocalist. Let's be realistic: Jon Schaffer is a well-known tightwad (ok, he prefers "hard-headed businessman") and an even better-known control freak. Why the hell is he going to hire a new guitarist before he absolutely has to?
Awright, back to work. Got business stuff to stomp flat so I can have a clear head to finish #77 tonight.
--Kai out
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let the cold blood flow on its own
2003-06-11 10:41:31
Somehow, Meg and I listened all the way through _St. Anger_ last night without throwing up. This sort of CD is what the word 'craptastic' was invented to describe. Not quite as bad as Maniac Mattox, but it *was* substantially worse than nearly everything I've listened to in the last year or so. Fortunately we were able to distract each other from the horrible music. It should be a law that an independent review board must listen through every album intended for major-label release, and mark the really rancid ones with a sticker to the effect of: "Warning! Do not attempt to listen to this CD without a Significant Other to cuddle with. May induce excessive amounts of rage, or make listener SO FULL OF HATE".
Current videos: Bill O'Brien, "Old Shoes", Gamma Ray, "A While In Dreamland" and "Farewell", and Borknagar, "The View of Everlast", all to Haibane Renmei. Progress check: 100%, 100%, 83% and 76%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. After Meg went home, I was able to work on drafting #77 for only about 45 minutes before work-, stress-, and girlfriend-induced fatigue combined with a lack of stimulants to put me right out. I did get the video about a third of the way drafted, and looking moderately decent. It's supposed to be a Kuu profile, but it's not quite there yet, as Kuu didn't ever really get a whole lot of unsubbed screen time, and I need to save source for the choruses, which are pretty impactful. Like #76 it'll probably end up requiring viewers to take a bit of the series in with them, which in my eyes is a failure.
This is basically the third video on the same source base, so things are a little tight, and there's some heavy amounts of repetition going on so far. The next one won't have this problem; the feel on #78 is drastically different from the other 3, which are fairly close, and there's still a LOT of good source to go in. That I'll take care of tomorrow. If I finished up yesterday, it would have been two months since I started work, and since the standard pace for videos from this kind of source pool is about two weeks from inception to completeion, there's only a slight delay. Take off time spent at AniBo not working and driving out and back from Michigan, and there you have it. I'm actually ahead of theoretical projections, when you consider that I plan to finish 3 days over the 2-month mark, less three days at an anime convention, three days on the road, two days at Metalfest, and all the time I took off last week to work on the book. Once I finish this, I'll be right back on a more normal pace....and ready to again scare and revolt all of those who can't conceive of finishing ONE video in two months, let alone four.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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