-
press delete and search for your target
2002-11-08 12:45:34
Club tonight, video going pretty good; I may have 100% overage now, but I'm not guaranteeing anything -- except MSTing for RahXephon and debilitating laughter for AzuDai.
What follows is not my own, but is the last word for y'all when beset by mundanes and other lamers who mistakenly assert that this our chosen hobby is somehow 'not cool'. Behold, hip cats 'n' kittens 'n' catgirls, this slice o' soulful verbiage from the very Bible of the boogity bop, the venerable and oh so smooth Catalog of Cool, pages 145-146:
"I don't know about you, but I've had it up to here with pressure groups that have effectively neutered the cartoons in this country. To me, cartoons mean *action*, and I'd rather eat Shredded Wheat dry than watch the moralizing and excessively nonviolent pap on Saturday mornign television. If, like myself, you're a fan of die-hard mayhem, you've probably sated yourself with "Looney Tunes" reruns or, if you're lucky enough to have a Japanese language channel in your area, you might be a devotee of the giant robot shows. These programs, immensely popular in Japan in the Seventies, featured two-fisted mechanical contraptions with exotic names like Raideen, UFO Epsilon, Mekanda Robo, Getta-Robot-G, and the Great Mazinger, twenty-story instruments of chaos and destruction that are best described in one word -- *violent*.
"How did the Japanese get away with depicting the kind of brute force that, in this country, would incur the wrath of everyone from sanctimonious P.T.A types to Mr. and Ms. Phil Donahue? The answer is simple: technology. The Japanese are not only oustripping us in actual technology, but in its *imaginary* application as well. They have circumvented the entire kiddie-show violence issue by replacing "living" animal violence with robotic punchouts and power-driven brawls. For example, in an old American cartoon a cute anthropomorphic duckie might, let's say, flatten a tomcat's head with a manhole cover. Not so in a Japanese robot program, where human characters use proxies -- mechanical good guys and bad guys -- who bash each other's bolts in with their sophisticated arsenal of buzz-saws, lasers, jet-powered hatchets, and heat-seeking missiles. (O.K. So maybe an occasional flesh-and-blood human is placed in jeopardy, but the primary emphasis is always on their technological substitutes jousting it out with the kind of futuristic weasponry that would make Alex Haig's entire body grow tumescent with lust.)
"Back around 1975 I was hooked on a large samurai warrior robot that could transform itself, if the situation warranted, into a birdlike jet plane. Its name was Raideen, and it was controlled by Akira, a Japanese teenager who looked like a eunuch Elvis Presley. Week after week I was glued to the box,marveling at the seemingly endless display of decapitations, limb removals, and shrapnelizations as Raideen demolished one villainous robot and mechanical dinosaur after the next. The animation style sucked me in; I felt as if I were in the very center of the maelstrom.
"The sound effects were superb, some so powerful that I was certain they could cause involuntary vomiting or swelling of the brain. In fact, the average Raideen episode encompassed the full spectrum of audio irritation, from armor-piercing whistles to a low-frequency crunch that sounded like a madman attempting to shove a station wagon through an office paper-shredder. This was no stroll down Sesame Street."
--from Ronn Spencer, "The Invasion of the Giant Japanese Robots" in The Catalog of Cool, 1980 (first) edition.
So there you go. Anime is cool. And old-school mecha is DAMN COOL. Where the hell's my SD Gundam bootlegs at??
Current video: Pain, "Supersonic Bitch" to Armitage III Poly-Matrix. Progress check: 59%. Expected catalog number: #59. Looking at a Monday completion date now; only 10 minutes more of source to clip.
Con news: NekoCon this weekend, #21 and #47 are there, please support if you are as well.
--Kai out
-
en hymne -- til odin
2002-11-07 13:20:02
In celebration of this record breaking the four-digit barrier, let's try throwing up the horns again, only like this this time, since the normal way don't work: \m/
And nailz is right: Finntroll rocks hard. The modern metalhead who does not own _Jaktens Tid_ is a sad feller, lacking his or her federal RDA of Finnish humpaa black polka metal. No gull.
Ofcourse *I* also currently do not have time to just spin primitive platters from the northern forests, as I'm locked in a mortal death battle with a music video that does not like progressing. It's moving, but slowly.
This naturally does not help me concentrate and burn through the video, as I have a lot of other crap to worry about, from finding a job to acing the GREs to getting expenses down, so I'm 'wasting' what extra spare time I can get beyond job search, study, and production schedule reading: a life of Dan Sickles, Love In The Time of Cholera, The Fortunate Pilgrim (Puzo's self-admitted best work), and a couple others, all iced in the last two or so days.
The Fortunate Pilgrim is a special case, as in the introduction Puzo really sets down, in no uncertain terms, how and why he sold out and stopped writing literature in favor of blockbusters. After the publication of this bone-real, lovingly written, magnificent novel of the immigrant experience, he found out that just being one of the best literary writers of your generation is not enough, of itself, to bring fame and fortune.
So Puzo sat down, turned 180 degrees away, and wrote a novel about the Italian immigrant experience that few would call literary, but a lot of people would buy. It became the fastest-selling book in history, led to three motion pictures (two of which actually turned out very well), and forced on him an audience that turned the rest of his published career into turgid sequels to this one work. The promise of easy megabucks to come from feeding a morbidly curious American public stories about the Mafia was 'an offer he couldn't refuse', and he was never able to get away from that and out of the pidgeonhole.
Morals aside (literally), I need to find some time to watch Hinatori no Saezuri all the way through. It's from Discovery, the people who brought you Mystery of the Necronomicon, so it has some promise. Since I have it raw, I may do a video with it and "She Whipped" -- in another six months or so, after I've recovered enough from doing this video to listen to Pain again.
Current video: Pain, "Supersonic Bitch" to Armitage III Poly-Matrix. Progress check: 47%. Expected catalog number: #59. Almost halfway done. Thin source means I can go faster, but for less real net result. Still haven't ordered that Skyclad CD; it's pretty rare, but The End has everything in the world through Omega; they ought to have this.
--Kai out.
-
how does it feel to be locked up in your own free world
2002-11-06 12:13:28
The video's going a little faster as the source anime calms down; a lot of jaw shots in the last chunk, and less of the action that is probably going to be the other major component. This vid is starting to look as though it'll require some MEIMI work, but I'm not going to go out and say anything concrete on that. If I can get some clean action shots, that may change; as always, it'll come down to the drafting process.
The job hunt is going decent, but I'm not going to go further than that. I just wish I could steal a little more time to prep for the GREs. I also have to go into the city one of these days and find the Sword-cursed place I have to take it at, but that's beside the point.
Links for all videos are now up. There are some problems with linking twice to the same place on the videos on the Special Collection volume, but that's the only real bug -- except the person who submitted a bug report on the second link for #20. I thought the info entry would be clear enough, but apparently there are some people who just don't read the things, or don't notice the 'data CD' bit in every link entry I've put up, and persist in believing that there is something wrong here that I can fix.
"Doof bleibt doof, da hilft keine Pillen."
Current video: Pain, "Supersonic Bitch" to Armitage III Poly-Matrix. Progress check: 44%. Expected catalog number: #59. 15 minutes down, 24 to go. Pixellation is annoying, and I don't understand why it seems to only hit 720x480 rips so bad. The lq will look good on this one at any rate.
Con news: Nekocon kind of snuck up without a lot of people noticing; it's this weekend, if you're in that part of South Carolina. Videos #21 and #47 will be on hand.
Still waiting an address and a want list to send Legionair the screener CD he earned.
--Kai out
-
crushed by the equilibrium
2002-11-05 12:52:54
Video is plodding along no faster than I expected, but a big bright spot: all 4 Perfect Collection releases so far are now available from the AMV DC. Ofcourse this also means that I have to add links to all the videos covered under said umbrellas, but that's my problem, not your'n.
And any hard feelings are surely pasted over by the elation of watching the NFC-leading Pack paste it to the Fish last night. m/ >_<
There's a question on the ballot today in Las Vegas to basically decriminalize marijuana, so people who have a prescription for it under the state's medical marijuana law don't have to buy from illegal dealers or risk arrest by growing their own stock. This is a sensible law and a sensible movement; as long as both alcohol and cigarettes are still legal, there is no reason for marijuana not to be. However there are opponents who hate on the bill as deleterious to the image of Las Vegas. Please. People already think of Vegas as the place to go to to gamble, watch strip shows, get stupid drunk, and have sex with prostitutes. A few joints aren't going to make a difference.
Current video: Pain, "Supersonic Bitch" to Armitage III Poly-Matrix. Progress check: 35%. Expected catalog number: #59. I may have enough source to do the video now, ten minutes in, but I'll keep chugging to the very end and make sure I can go exclusively from top-flight source. The file damage on this one is ridiculous; I haven't had to deal with technical crap this bad since video #17, and most of the damage on that one was my fault.
--Kai out
-
i just had a computer error
2002-11-04 12:58:23
The offer made last week is no longer open; Legionair won the pre-screener of #58 plus mixdowns. Similarly, my break is over: it's back to job hunting, test prep, and the most grinding clipping I've ever done. Two and a half hours to get through five minutes. Ouch.
At least the weekend was cool. A lot of anime, the Patriots finally decide to stop sucking, and I ran into an old pal at club Friday night. However, that wasn't the real highlight of Friday; instead, that event was a strange sidelight showing just how messed up some people in this hobby are.
So there I was in Tokyo Kid, looking for something to throw away my spare cash on before heading over to the showing, and there's nothing on the racks for the series I'm following currently (second vol. of Hellsing is gone, and GTO #5 isn't out yet), and I don't want to look like a goit by dragging up a Burn Up [whatever] volume to the nice [female] counterperson. So my hand falls on the first Kare Kano DVD, since I've seen a bit of this series, and it's been pretty decent so far.
And all of a sudden there's this bigd00d next to me, and he asks if it's the first or second volume. "First," I say, "One to six." "Okay," he says, and turns around to somewhere else. Ofcourse I ddin't say, but was thinking, "So what if it's the second one? What are you gonna do, fight me for it?" The whole notion of getting into a fight over a DVD is pretty ludicrous, but the idea that someone like this could actually have a chance at beating me is even further out. Ofcourse, I was squatting to get at the rack in question, so he maybe couldn't see that I was as tall as him and in considerably better shape, but that isn't the point. The point is that this dude was willing to get into a possible confrontation over less than three hours of imported cartoons. That's messed up.
Current video: Pain, "Supersonic Bitch" to Armitage III Poly-Matrix. Progress check: 29%. Expected catalog number: #59. Estimated time to completion two weeks. If I go faster than that I may kill myself. Hopefully it will be done before next Friday, being as that's GREs, and I'd rather gang around Boston after the test rather than have to chug home, bang the video all the way out, then come back in for club. I have to order a CD for a coming video, as the version of the song that I have is crushed by all kinds of distortion, and the effect isn't anywhere near as nifty as that on video #38. Depending on when this gets in, said video may or may not be on deck in the imminent future.
--Kai out
JOURNAL: Kai Stromler (Kai Stromler)
Current server time: Jan 18, 2026 18:59:48