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or did you leave before me
2003-05-27 11:44:23
A long and eventful weekend by any standard, despite the continual rain from Friday right through Monday.
Friday kicked ass. I got the last volume of Berserk, which should result in a video to scare the holy hell out of AWA Pro provided I can finish the projects ahead of it in the schedule in time to get it out. Then was club, which was Someday's Dreamers (I *DO* know the main Japanese title of this one, but it's a pain in the ass to write all those words) backed with the first 6 eps of the summer-long Linathon: Slayers Everything. So this was the first 6 of the TV series and I don't ahve to put out another Recca volume (maybe ever since Viz licensed it FINALLY despite the nonexistent animation continuity).
Saturday was cool as well. I watched Makoto (Hoshi no Koe) Shinkai's first short, Her and Her Cat, and was bowled over as expected, and following that took Meg up to the Friendly Toast. I'm not going to divulge the location of this grunge-restaurant-to-end-all-grunge-restaurants, because its cult is far too big already without all five people reading this within driving distance of the Seacoast region going, and digging, and telling all their friends. Anyhow Meg was quite impressed, and afterwards we went to this old-books store and amused ourselves with literature and other pursuits for a few hours.
After that was the problems of driving home. Actually coming back wasn't a problem, but when we got to my place, Meg realized that she had locked her keys in her car. (Meg lives about an hour south of me and had driven up). So I fired up the engine again and took her back home to get her spare keys. Again, heading south was not very challenging, as the traffic was spare and the rain wasn't too heavy. Coming back north to reunite Meg with her vehicle, though, was a decent test of my driving abilities. Low visibility, wet roads, Mass-highway/rally-car speeds and cute girls singing along with Tom Lehrer next to you, not tofu-run hairpin turns, are the true high-test driving environment. I must be decent at it, because we're both still alive, and the car is in one piece.
Sunday was cool and also productive. I got NEARLY into position to start doing editing, and watched two of Mamoru Oshii's overlooked masterpieces, Angel's Egg and Twilight Q2: Labyrinthine Objects. The latter is a really cool playing with ideas of narrative, conceptions of reality, and definitions of animated film. Given its subject matter it's not surprising that it's still unlicensed. Angel's Egg is much better known, but still not as well-known as much of Oshii's later work, to which it is usually superior. There's an amazing amount of content and very deep, multifaceted symbolism in this nearly wordless film, which more than anything else Oshii's ever done participates in the "machine grotesque" ambience of the late 1980s. Everywhere there's the feel of an old Suffocation or Benediction cover-painting. Just awesome.
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: 75%, 75%, 75% and 75%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. It is currently anticipated that I'll finish at least t/c and drafting, if not actual finishing, on #75 tonight, with #76 following tomorrow. Thursday and Friday are occupied with a concert and of course club, so it's anticipated that #77 and #78 won't be done until early next week. As soon as these are done, the contest will be announced, because the prizes are going to be the pre-DC release of Hasshin! 3 and the double-CD set of Project Haibane. Dig it.
Monday was quite fun as well, Meg and I went to the MFA's open house, and made a good bit of progress towards seeing all of the museum (still not done, of course, and we have a few days left before our tickets from the last time we paid go invalid). Then we got eats and pestered one of her friends at his job. Joey Kelly came off as like a cross between Dean (pal from club) and Mike Hammer (from Red Green, more in mannerisms than in actual psychology), which is to say cool if occasionally strange. I've hung out with stranger.
After this Meg became very happy with me and then I had to catch a train back. The rain let up some by the time I was walking home, which was good, as I couldn't have afforded to get sick this week. I have no time to lose on the Project Haibane schedule any more, and no desire for Meg to berate me for not safeguarding my health. Our time together is so little as it is......
rrgh....apartments apartments job listings work projects rrrgh....
-gambaranak'cha-
--Kai out
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i left the way of heaven
2003-05-23 10:27:51
Well, extenuating circumstances prevented me from clipping last night. I should be able to take care of that tomorrow morning, then do finishing after Meg and I get back from the Toast, and after she gets scared away by my family again. Or I could just work really hard on Sunday; either way, I'll be back on schedule and in prime position, despite possibly having to put out another volume of Recca next week, to finish up Project Haibane in time for SH Prod's second birthday.
There will be a contest, but probably no cake. I mail all prizes out by normal post, and those occasionally get left out in the rain, which would be no good at all.
And I'm referencing the Maynard Ferguson version of that song, not the Donna Summers one. I got atleast SOME taste over here.
Offtopic:
I bought Forest Stream's world-distro debut _Tears of Mortal Solitude_ yesterday, because I had heard "Mel Kor" and "Last Season Purity" ages ago and really dug them. This release was nine bucks, and included a bonus-sampler of Russian black/doom metal bands (at least I assume most of them are Russian, I recognized Rakoth and Ephel Duath) on Earache/Elitist. I'm so glad I seceded from pop culture and stopped buying the RIAA's shite. Any Big Five (more like 2 or 3 given mergers) CD would have cost twice as much for half as much music, and it would have also sucked. Better distro for small labels, not mp3-trading, is what is gonna for-real kill the music industry.
Club looks pretty uninteresting tonight, but I have to go anyways to drop off my releases and pick up borrowings (last two tapes of Yawara w00t w00t!). Atleast they close out with Slayers (TV, original, 1-6), and I can fit in a side trip to the Kid.
....and Meg and I have two days this weekend, so Friday isn't really under any pressure to contribute to the 'good-weekend' equation.
--Kai out
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an offering of crimson
2003-05-22 10:05:12
If I'm really leet about double-timing all the stuff I have to do tonight, I may have time to at least clip the last episode involved in Project Haibane. Now that I have improved technology at my disposal, I could also go back and scour the two eps and ten-minute preview that I had junked as unusable for source, but considering that I've already got nearly thirty minutes of footage (for a project that will clock in around nineteen) even WITHOUT using those two, and that I'm running terminally behind original schedule, I don't feel it's really necessary. So clipping tonight, finishing Saturday morning, and I may have a finished video in hand by the end of Sunday. After that....Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I wake up early Friday, put 'em all on tape, and hope to twist arms at club to do the premiere.
Presuming of course I can get them all up to snuff. There's no guarantee on that.
And presuming, of course, that I don't have to put out another volume of Recca for next weekend. I told Ed to get me ep 16 by yesterday if he wanted vol. 4 Friday, but I wasn't expecting him to cut it so close. I get his note on the ftp site around two and immediately have to run out and round up my zip drive, as for once I didn't bring it in. Then last night made for a time-pressed offload, decompress, and reformat sequence; a hectic four-and-a-half hours all told. But this was all right, as I was planning to be on the phone with Meg for most of that time anyways (interesting conversation toward the end.......), and thus was not really dropping system productivity to play catch-up for overworked library overlords.
The render should be done by the time I get home. If proxy-cutting didn't give me twice as much control and orders of magnitude better effect selection, I'd go back to getting digisub source like this full-time. Ofcourse, this project will be the last I work with digisubs for a long, LONG, time. Going from commercial media is MUCH faster and generally looks better as well.
Con news:
MITAC is apparently considering doing an AMV contest in the fall, sorta like the one CSUN started last year. Could be cool if I wasn't relocating come the end of August; now I'll just have to lose to Tom from out of state.
--Kai out
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under a serpent sun
2003-05-21 10:11:34
As of right now, the last review is done for the current block, and total reviews that I've now done for Point of Impact equal 500, dating back to August or so of 2000. Scarier is that I own, personally, all but 90 or so of these.
Strangely, the first review ever done and the five-hundredth are exactly sequential in the huge list of releases reviewed:
_Bad Attitude!_ by Jerry "Maniac" Mattox [0/100]
_my Fruit PsychoBells...a seed combustible_ by Maudlin of the Well [91/100]
The average score over these 500 reviews is somewhere around 81, because there are a lot of factors that get in the way of truly horrible CDs a) getting into release and b) getting into my possession. At any rate, I've got to 500, and gotten the reviews out of the way so I can concentrate on other stuff in my life.
Con news:
Due to a screwup on my end, the slate I entered for Animethon is also being entered in Anime Evolution, which is all right as AniEv wasn't slated to get hardly anything new, and now I have one fewer CD to send off. The Otakon and Fanime entries will be mailed today, with hopes of being accepted for competition despite the late date and the fact that they're SH works.
No video progress yesterday, but I got those two con entries ganged together, and I wrote about a page and a half on Darkly Shining Void. I'm getting slightly bogged down on this, but the narrative will pick right up as soon as I get the party out of the safe house and down into the sewer systems. In the current episode I'm worried that I'm writing Nick as too authoritarian given his prior development, but when you're on point and somebody you're supposed to be looking after makes stupid armament decisions, you can get a little short with them. It's not just them that needs to deal with the Barrett's weight problems....I have to write the first expedition down as tense, believable, and successful around that plot hole of someone with a thirty-pound rifle. Yeah, spoiler, but even if this gets out for publication (as I hope it will), you can generally be pretty sure that the whole party developed in the first six chapters won't be wiped out in the seventh, leaving the author with nothing to do in the remaining eleven.
--Kai out
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in purpuren zeiten
2003-05-20 10:29:40
Word is Bond. The end is near.
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: 71%, 70%, 71% and 70%. Expected catalog numbers: #75, #76, #77, #78. I said there was going to be progress, and there was, even more than I expected. I'm going to be done with ep 13, the last, both clipping and finishing, sometime either tonight or Wednesday, which is going to work in favor of drafting (at least) #75 before I go in to club on Friday. Only eight days to go before the studio turns 2 years old, and one of those (at least) is going to be spent almost solely with Meg, because she's substantially more important than my video work. And then there's Friday, which I have to take nearly off for club stuff, and that time I have to spend breaking up a basketball hoop with a sledgehammer..........
Yeah, I'm ahead of schedule, but it's going to take a full-scale, all-out effort to stay that way. And I have like two other projects that I'm all-out ignoring at this point; I should be working more on _Cairn Zoser_ and Darkly Shining Void (the book), but with work, video hacking, album reviews, and trying to maintain an inconvenient-distance relationship (sure, we're in the same state, but not close enough that we can see each other as often as normal couples do), I'm just flat swamped. And I'm running out of sleep hours to cut back into....
Of course, it's just making things worse that my brother hasn't started work at his job yet, and spends his days flat on his back, working on three books at once. I'm a better writer than he is, but he's actually getting stuff finished instead of complaining about not having the time to work on them. Soon enough, I'll clear my review backlog (closing in on 500 in less than three years, six left in the current block), finish Project Haibane and start something manageable, and I'll get some time to start catching up on the stuff I've neglected.
Offtopic:
Even if my brother is a more productive writer than I am, I still get to laugh at him because he's STILL reading the Wheel of Time, despite his observation that the latest volume was essentially real-timed: it took as long to read (a couple days) as it took for all the events narrated to transpire. And in with this, the observation that nothing much new or of note happened in those 800 pages. I stopped reading a couple books previously, because it became clear that Robert Jordan was just stringing the series along to get more cash out of his fanbase, with no intention of concluding the series before his funeral or termination of his publishing contract, whichever came first. I didn't want to waste my time getting led around by the nose, so I quit and stopped caring. James, though, sees it as an investment: he doesn't want to have read all ten thousand pages so far and not eventually get a conclusion. I keep telling him that this is the sort of idiot logic that keeps Jordan pooping out thousand-page tomes of Pretty Much Nothing Happens In Eight Different Places At Once, but he doesn't care. Either that, or he's now into making fun of the lack of progress from book to book.
In the end, it seems that long-series fantasy fans are like dogs: they'll read whatever you shovel into their bowls, and love you as long as you keep it coming. Except dogs don't read. Or whatever.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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