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he grasped the runes
2003-03-26 12:34:25
Because everyone and their brother wanted to see it, video #52 ('Another Fine Reason') is currently being uploaded to the Carrot. It'll be done in another two hours or so. Adding to this boredom is the fact that my efforts to add overscan to AzuDai have failed, and I'll have scarce two hours from mastering the tape to when I have to go deliver it on Friday. Slow, connection, slow computer, -- death in fire! -- not.
I was reading a review of Amon Amarth's _Versus the World_ the other day, and while the reviewer was generally positive, he was bitching a little about the cover design. Yes, it does look like a Manowar cover, with the half-naked warrior raising his sword against the globe, but there is a reason why Manowar and other bands (the guy mentioned Virgin Steele) get flacked for this kind of cover design and Amon Amarth by and large does not.
The difference is one of intent: no matter what kind of cover they have, Amon Amarth is going to be playing balls-out, beer-soaked, viking-inspired groove death metal on the record inside. Everybody knows that. These other bands have a certain element of pomposity to them that AA never has, and never will have, which makes their warriors on the cover look over-the-top and cheesy. Also, the image of the viking warrior is consistent with the rest of Amon Amarth's image: they really ARE violent beer maniacs from Sweden, where Manowar and other acts are anything *but* the Conan clones they put on the front of their CDs. Just like the vikings of old, they work most of the year digging ditches and roofing houses in Sweden, then take off a few months in the summer when seas are calm and days are long to raid and plunder all over Europe and America.
Fortunately, this is a rock band rather than a longboat full of murderers, so they're a little more welcome than their forefathers....except among the weak and christians, for whom it might as well be the same thing.
--Kai out
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sell the rights to the networks
2003-03-25 12:15:25
A decent day, all in all; AzuDai 26 should finish rendering in another couple of hours, and I've got #49 currently being uploaded to the Carrot. I should probably advertise these vids, but they're not that exceptional, and neither, so far, is longer than two minutes. I'll wait and put up #33 and #61; colorspace issues in those two means that 6 minutes can fit into 20 MB of space.
I was doing some cleanup today and found some old issues of Fine-Scale Modeler, which I subscribed to for a couple years back in middle school, and in flipping through them I noticed a lot of really odd similarities with the AMV world. The articles show stress on tricks and details to make standard kits shine, or scratchbuilt/conversion models even possible, and there's the requisite technical discussion of tools, glues, paints, and filling/detailing agents, info on new releases, and even a con schedule for the upcoming months.
What really hit me, though, were the reader mail columns. Some people asking technical questions, some thanking the editors for running a particular article that helped them out, some picking technical nits, and some complaining about the intense criticism that awaits those going into competition with a less than perfect model. The similarity to the forums was uncanny; it seemed as though the only thing keeping off spam and insults was the magazine format and the temporal lag. If there's a scalemodels.org out there somewhere, surely the same things are going on in their forums, thanks to current tech, that are going on in ours.
Are these similarities peculiar to any hobby that combines craft and art, aesthetics and technics? Is is because AMVs and models require a lot of solitary time and effort to do well? Or is it because there's a significant overlap between model-builders and anime otaku (see Otaku no Video for the importance of garage kits to otakudom)? Whatever the reason, something tells me that the bad parts (and it aint all bad) of the current community are going to stick around for a while, so we'd do best to deal and ignore.
....or protest and survive, whichever.
--Kai out
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abraham timecode
2003-03-24 13:16:39
A little bit of a break, but not much. Video #67 is going in to the Carrot as I type, at the breakneck speed of 26.4Kbps, and video #72 is done, soon to be entered into the catalog. Unfortunately, with this kind of speed, you're not going to be seeing long videos on the Donut/Carrot from me anytime soon. I seriously need to get into work/school asap and off this limping 56K.
Club was mas nifty, save the tremendous Naruto cliffhanger that had the whole place screaming; everyone seemed to both like GuruGuru and get most of the jokes. Unfortunately, we were watching the new digisub; the translation on the older fansubs is much better, as it seems at times the digisubbers aren't aware that this show is supposed to be a parody. That's messed, man.
Which leads into the current project: rendering AzuDai for tape output. MITAC has Azumanga Daioh 1-22 on tape, but not the last 4. So I borrowed the CD, asked some questions about tape library requirements, bought some high-grade Maxells, and cancelled all commitments and reasonable sleep schedules for the first 48 or so hours of this week. I've got two eps rendered and a third going now; should be finished and perhaps mastered to VHS by this time tomorrow.
The toughest part about this was the overscan generation, and that wasn't even that difficult. AzuDai, like a lot of digisubs, is subbed very close to the edges of the picture, and there's a lot of information and stray notes that you don't want to get cut off, so the people who output the first 22 eps put borders around the edges of the frame. Lacking their AviSynth settings (or whatever), I just had to capture a clip at the resolution I was going to use for output, measure the borders, and do some simple math to gin up my own; we'll see how well it worked when I output to tape.
After this is done, I'm going to burn the CD-release for AniBo and maybe record some guitars for _Cairn Zoser_. Vocal recording is being put off for another week; Friday's club is going to be pretty intense, all day, and I'm not certain that I'll have the 15 bucks for a mike and converter to spare before that's taken care of.
--Kai out
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when the tanks roll through
2003-03-21 12:34:06
It really sucks that I did not, at the points in my life where I could have, buy a cheap four-track recorder. I threw down some hella burning guitar lines yesterday, but recorded not a one of them as the comp was busy doing something else. It's not that bad, though; if I can't play them again, there's no way I would have been able to put bass and such to them later anyways.
Club tonight should be cool, especially if the rain holds off. Naruto and Guru Guru on the big screen -- hellz yeah.
Current video: Nokturnal Mortum, "Barbarian Dreams" to Piano. Progress check: 50%. Expected catalog number: #72. The more I work on this the more I get the impression that the translation really sucks, and the people subbing this anime have no idea at all about musical terms. What the hell is "Forteshimo Music School", any fifth-grade clarinet-honker could tell you that's supposed to be Fortissimo, even if there *wasn't* that double-f marking before the name to clue you in. There are other places where the text doesn't make sense that have nothing to do with musical terminology, so it's not just specific ignorance but a more general confusion.
Video, then burning, and either recording or some special processing for the club if I get what I requested. That's next week's drill.
--Kai out
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and into the sea
2003-03-20 12:45:00
I've been working since like seven this morning, but it seems like nothing's been getting done. I clipped about 3 minutes of source for the current video, though, so that's a positive. The color scheme is working damn nice so far.
A minor problem, though; my capture gear burped and I have to reset it. Not that big, but it's just one more thing to worry about.
Oh yeah, and we went to war last night without a clear long-term goal or any idea of when the conflict would be over. Aint that nice? One of my oldest friends is currently in his last year at West Point, learning how to fly attack helicopters. Some guess where he'll be in a year. Of course, I don't begrudge him the right to put his life on the line for his country if that's his choice; it would just really suck if he got killed fighting for Haliburton's bottom line or to elect the moron in the White House to a second term. Perhaps we really do need to fight Iraq, but our leadership hasn't yet given us a good reason why.
On topic:
Current video: Nokturnal Mortum, "Barbarian Dreams" to Piano. Progress check: 31%. Expected catalog number: #72. If I go at one ep per day, I'll finish this start of next week, and will have new entries to send around to all cons with deadlines within two months, so I can stop fretting and get back to work on _Cairn Zoser_.
Still no ever-lovin' clue what the hell I'm going to talk about on the AniBo panel: "Hey, I don't use the gear any of you use, and my ideas of what's good and bad in videos are pretty much opposed to what everyone else likes, so unless someone has a DVC II or a really bizarre question, I'm going to take a nap here."
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
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