-
And when it is time to sail away home, oh row.....
2002-06-04 00:47:30
Wow. It's been a few days between entries.
Esther came by on Friday. We watched Full Metal Panic, Hoshi no Koe, Love Penis (the Love Hina parody sub), and Sexy Commando. I still haven't heard back from Anne yet that she's safely in town which kind of worries me...she probably started working today though.
Got to see Melinda in Saturday. I haven't seen her in person for a while, but she's such a sweetie.
Sunday night was Otakon AMV prescreenings at TAS, and we watched the VHS submissions. I'm not giving away any details, though. It was a fun night for all, and I'm looking forward to finding my way up to UMBC on Saturday for the repeat of the VHS videos and the first voting on Digital 1.
I also had a bit of a crisis this weekend. I'd lost my Katuscon AMV reel master, which had all the omake bits, early stuff, and liner notes, etc. on it and I wanted to get ready prepping my CD for Anime Mid-Atlantic next week. Forutnately Chris brought a copy on Sunday to the prescreen so all is now good. I plan on giving away 10-15 discs, as it's a small con and I don't really want have to carry home extras.
Anime watched this weekend....I finished Battleflag of the Stars, to much letting down. This show got *really* bloated, even at 13 episodes. Battleflag 2 is still sitting on the hard drive, and it'll be a little while before I watch it I think. Saturday and Sunday were spent watching CLAMP School 1-3, Excel Saga 15-18, and...uh.....crap I can't remember anymore. Scary, isn't it. Whatever it was, it's not on my HD anymore in a folder, so I truly cant' remember.
Today was spent not watching anime actually. My overpriced Amazon.com order came in, so I've been doing some reading up on the Verbal section of the GRE and beginning to plan out where I want to stay and visit while in Germany. I think I've got my city list pinned down to Munich, Nuremberg, and Dresden, and the travel books are helping....somewhat. What I want to know is why the fuck travel books (Specifically Let's Go! and Lonely Planet Germany) feel the need to tell me where I can buy English Language travel books in Germany. If I'm reading the book, chances are it means that I ALREADY OWN A FUCKING TRAVEL BOOK IN ENGLISH. What I want you, Mr. Travelbook, to tell me, is which hostels have luggae lockers (Both Let's Go, which is Kyburg's suggested title, forgive me if I misspelled, and Lonely Planet fail to mention this at all, except for one case in Munich where Let's Go printed in bigass italics "USE THE SAFES HERE!!!!"...must mean it's in a shadowy area.). I also want to know how much mass transit cards are, what kind of nasty looks I'm going to get for carrying a bigass backpack around, how much a hunk of cheese is going to cost with a loaf of bread, where to get passable water for cheap, and where to buy GERMAN books. At least I know where I can buy manga in Munich (http://www.neotokyo.de)
This reminds me that tomorrow I should pop in on the summer German students and see if I can sit in once a week or something just so that I don't get rusty before I leave. A good idea, ne?
Something that's disturbing right now is the number of bugs that are finding their way into the house. Mostly it's little ones, but still, it's extremely annoying. It doesn't really help that we leave the doors open most of the time (they're always unlocked which I've gotten strangely comfortable with...that being said, I keep my personal door locked at all times.) Still, I hate insects of all sorts.
The booklist for my class *finally* got posted today. I think I'll leave the house in time to get to campus for the end of the 9am german section (ends at 12:00), talk to the instructor, run to the book store, buy the book (which is about the development of Blade Runner), and then go to class until 4:30. Good thing I've got sandwich bags, I can take some water and a bagel with me to munch on during class.
I've now got 28.1GB free on my editing drive, and 700MB is about to go...actually about 950 really. It's time to start working on projects again...I'll probably try and do my translation end on Manitu before I go, but that's not as desirable as my AnimeUSA video...or is it. I have to find the DVD no matter what. In the meantime, it's another project to work on.
And, now that it's almost 1AM, it's time to wrap this up and go to bed. -
But as the days unwind this I can not believe
2002-05-31 01:13:09
Another period of doubt, for no good reason.
Today was a day of waste. I did laundry, which was not wasteful. I then went and registered for my GRE's in July, and bought 2 GRE books and 2 Germany tourist books for far too much money. Dinner was good, had pasta and ragu traditional with lots of garlic powder and chili flakes (which I need more of...thankfully I can get to a Giant soon)
In anime news, I got my berserk dvd in today. I now have a fansub of the first tape and no exact idea what to do with it. I watched the whole disc, and the show itself is just as good as I remembered it. I also watched 1-10 of Seikai no Senki, aka Battleflag of the Stars. For some reason it just felt like I was dragging through it for the last couple eps, so I wound up not finishing it like I thought I would. *shrug* there's always tomorrow.
Tomorrow Esther should be coming over to watch some Anime. I'm looking forward to it, and I'll probably show her Guu or Rave or Hikaru no Go, since I've got those from the beginning and have been wanting to see all of them. I may show her One Piece as well, but it really just depends on the moods and such for the day.
Sunday's the trial Otakon AMV prescreening and, hopefully, the first public showing of this video. Only about 15 people have gotten to see this one so far, mostly friends and close confidants who have gotten the (dis?)honor of reviewing the beta versions and helping me hammer out issues with it. I'm getting a bit fretful about it...the novelty of it has worn off for me, and I'm playing the obscure anime wildcard again, which means that it could be seen as extra creative, or it'll go over everyone's heads (like so many other vids that I've done have) and they'll all hate it. If the response from Otakon is overwhelmingly negative on this one (read: I fail to make it into the main screening for the third straight year) it's going to be time to rethink what I'm doing in this hobby. Therefore this is a weekend for watching anime and relaxing and clearing off hard drive space and if all feels well I'll begin making my video for Anime USA. All I'm going to say about this one is that it's going to be...odd. More people know of this anime than the Otakon video's, but it's still somewhat obscure.
Of course, there's the BIG project...the BIG SECRET one that may be entering preproduction soon. we shall see...same goes for the project that's just secret...depends on who's at AMA.
Speaking of AMA, if you come to the con and are capable of finding me (I'll be wearing my amv.org badge if I can find it, otherwise my regular con badge will have iserlohn written on it), come get a CD. I'm only making 10 of them, but they'll be updated versions of my reel, so they'll have the new video and the new omake, but to make everything fit, some of the older stuff will be gone...trust me, you're not missing anything.
So until tomorrow, it's time to just wander through the world of the night. I actually went out for a walk a couple hours ago. The temperature drops here at night, so while it's still humid, it's cool enough out that walking around isn't such a big deal. I walked for about 20 minutes around the neighborhood, looked at the stars, tried (and failed) to identify some of the constellations, and felt really good on the way back. of course, that coudl have been because i was walking under a power line, but who knows. I've always loved the night, but because of reality calling I don't usually get to stay up horribly late or else I won't be functional the next day. With this nice period of summer, I can stay up damn late, go for walks at 11:30pm, and then stay up until whenever and get up however much later. If I get the good feedback vibe, I may go semi-nocturnal and try to get up at noon or so and stay up until 3 or 4 and edit late at night when it's quiet and I can control all the settings in the room...which reminds me that I still need that lantern light...or at least an adjustable lamp. I'd prefer the lantern though - smaller and easier to move.
ELO's time album kicks ass. Go get all the tracks. I used two of them in Daicon V!
Is it me or has everything been kinda blah lately with most of the boards? I'm not singling out the AMV.org boards either (I usually find the most interesting and intelligent one here to be the contest and convention one)...i've stopped reading FSN again, aodvd's boards are barely worth skimming, and I haven't even been reading much on Harry Potter for Grownups, despite all the free time I have to actually read the 200 messages/day that it can generate. I'm such a fucking lazyass.
I've also been majorly slipping in my German now that I don't have 50 forced minutes of it every day. I'm not thrilled about this idea, maybe I can sit in on a summer class for a little bit every day or something *shrug*
Ah well, to surf for a bit and then to bed. -
3017 reads! woohoo!
2002-05-30 01:00:04
OK, I feel contented now. Perhaps the secret is to be referenced by EK, at which point everyone flocks over here to read =)
The last day or so has been pretty slow. I got home from the computer lab to find the cable modem back up, but the firewall blazing at full force - I can now send files by ICQ, but not by AIM or DCC and can't get my FTP configured right behind it. When the guy comes back for real on Sunday I'll see what I can do about that.
To kill some more free time, I finished Gasaraki, finished Sugar, and watched what I had left of GTO (ep 3) and Steam Detectives (ep 1). I think tomorrow'll be the day for Battleflag of the Stars (I).
The extroverted housemate from Chicago who likes to barge in on people wanted to rent Harry Potter last night, so off we went to the video store. This was my third time seeing the movie and it's getting a bit old with me. The extras disc, however, was damned interesting, but only because it is so fucking annoying to navigate your way properly to the cut scenes that it was easier for me to rip the disc, and play back all the ifo's in a row on windvd and skip to what I needed. I did get to rip quidditch however for a fun little omake project which will appear on the AMA edition of my CD....unforutnately I did the conversion to AVI wrong and didnt' take the fact that it's anamorphic into account when setting up Flask. Ah well, so it goes.
I ended up renting Hedwig and the Angry Inch last night as well. I love the music, and enjoyed the movie, but the stage version is definately better. After watching the movie last night I did the documentary (85 min) which was also enjoyable to watch. I watched the movie+commentary this morning and while there was some ok information in it, there certainly wasn't anything special on there that I felt the need to remember in great detail.
I'm really looking forward to AMA. It's my last con before going to Europe and should prove to be a blast. I'm not running anything, just have an AMV in the contest and am supplying the DDR project tape/dvd for screening. I hope to see some of y'all there, and will be giving out CD's (but only 10 of 'em....unlike Katsucon where there were a ton more people).
So tomorrow's schedule of events in my post-finals pre-class life looks like:
-Laundry
-Register for GRE's
-Battleflag of the Stars
-Finish watching Bebop Movie just to recall musical scenes
-Clean up a bit
-Rejoice in the fact that I've got sauce now and can make the bag of pasta my mother gave me in NYC
Kyburg: While I'm glad that you want to meet up in Germany, your dog does not deserve the fate of being sold off to get there.
I've got to admit, I feel remarkably unstressed right now, which is odd as I should be going nuts right now. I'm going overseas in 6 weeks, starting class in one, and am doing jack shit right now to get some money....but man I've needed this. -
At a time like this, nothing beats a nice plate of Sardines.
2002-05-28 12:40:49
The last entry didn't break 3000 reads (it was 2997 when I began to write this out...) so this one will FINALLY be the one to do it *mwahahahahahahaahahaha*
So this past weekend...
Friday at about 12:30PM I left the house and hopped on metro down to Union Station. The B Dalton there had some manga, but nothing that I was going to bother to pay for, so I dealt with rereading part of Initial D on the train, but mostly listening to my new Kitchen Sink mix on the MP3 player. It's so nice to be able to leave the house and not repeat a song. Anyways, the train was late by about half an hour getting into New York, and then I walked to my mother's apartment, so I got there about 6:30ish. After walking around a bit and getting some new boots (once again amazing shoe store employees by displaying exactly how much I destroy shoes by wearing them for a year), we went to dinner at a Thai place, which was really good. I had tofu stuffed with basil and some other veggies in a basil sauce, and my mother and I split some spring rolls and another veggie appetizer.
The true kicker for Friday night, though, was that my mother's landlord has been going through a nasty divorce, and so they've been talking a lot (my mother having gone through something similar), and so he wanted to talk so she asked if I could leave the apartment for a couple hours (no they're not fucking or anything), so at 9:10PM I call the Astor Place Theater, and by 9:20 I'm hopping a cab to pick up my $70 ticket to see a 10PM performace of Blue Man Group: Tubes. After hearing so much about BMG and wanting to see it for years, I finally got to and it was VERY much worth the wait and DEFINATELY worth the $70 out of pocket to see. The theater that it's in is extremely small (I'd guess maybe 150 seats) but the show is amazing and you leave feeling very refreshed and younger in a way.
Saturday morning I got dragged to religion, but it was fairly quick if not a bit painful (I think I'm allergic to organized religion - I always sneeze in synagogue, as well as having a MASSIVE defensive reaction to all of it), and Saturday afternoon we WERE going to walk around, but the plan changed when, thinking we could get tickets for Sunday's matinees at the Times Square TKTS booth instead of the Bowling Green one, we wound up getting tickets for Saturday's matinee of Noises Off for half price. Noises Off is a great show, very British, and extremely funny. The basic plot is that a set of third-rate actors are performing a sex farce onstage, but they've got a sordid set of affairs and relationships off which only hinder the performance greatly. Act one was the final rehearsal, act two was backstage a month later, and act three, the weakest act, was the final performance onstage again, which would have been better if it had remained off. Saturday night we got dinner at Lombardi's (apparently the first pizza place in NYC) at around 10PM, and then happy sleeptime.
Sunday morning I got up around 9, had breakfast (eggs! potatoes! These are things that I have not eaten in weeks and are FAR more substantive than what I have to eat now for the most part....) and went to stand in line at TKTS again for Sunday's matinee of Cabaret at Studio 54. Whereas we waited maybe 15 minutes max in line on Saturday, the line on Sunday took two hours to get through, but managed to net us half price mezzanine seats for the matinee again. Cabaret is an asskicking show that I love to death, and Jane Leeve was good as Sally Bowles, but John Stamos (yes, that John Stamos, yes, uncle jessie from full house) was a bit.....flat as the emcee. He's gotten over the problem the early reviewers had with him, that he wasn't fully getting his lines out, but he's still lacking the charisma that Alan Cumming or, from what I've heard, Raoul Esparaza had. Still worth it for half price, and my mother liked it a lot more than Noises Off. Sunday night was spent watching the food channel, as the friend I was hoping to meet up with sucks and wasn't available on Sunday when he promised that he'd at least be around to answer his cell phone.....
Monday morning was a nice breakfast (I needed to eat well over the weekend, I feel so much better now because of it) and then back on the train to return to DC. I got home around 2:30 to find that.....my computer was off.......and the cable modem was down. Apparently there was a power outage early Monday morning for about an hour and the guy who keeps the cable modem in his room and has the sharing server set up is away until as late as next Sunday possibly, so his computer can't be reset until he can pop in and turn his computer back on.
What does this mean? It means that I watched episodes 9-22 of Gasaraki last night as well as episode 3 of GTO. I haven't chain-smoked anime like that in years. I'm probably going to do the latter half of Sugar today, or at least most of it. I really dont' want to start shows right now until I know who I'm watching them with, as going back to watch the first episode or two of stuff really sucks when you're doing it over and over and over again.
What else does this mean? It means that forum posts, chat room appearances, and that sort of thing will be sporadic until my net access properly returns. What sucks truly, though, is that I can't IRC from the WAM labs, so no international discussions for a while =(
So, the final statistics for the past few days:
Time spent on Amtrak: 7 hours
Shows seen in NYC: 3
Shows planned to be seen in NYC: 1
Shows paid for by self: 1
Meals eaten out: 3
Money spent by self: $75
Shows seen ON broadway: 2
Shows seen OFF broadway: 1
Amount of walking done: Don't Ask
Weeks left until AMA: 2.5
I think things are going to be nice this summer. -
fuck fuck fuck fuck
2002-05-22 23:12:15
i had this hugeass entry and i accidentally closed IE like a motherfucking idiot...............................
Maybe I should invest in a keystroke recorder for times like this. *sigh* I can be so fucking stupid sometimes...
So anyways, you all sadly are getting a continuation of thoughts from where I was before because that's how these things work.
So the Xmas lights can't be easily plugged in, but it's nice that they're strung. A lantern flashlight would be really cool to work to late at night, especially if I keep the windowshade that I face while working up so that it reflects and stuff nicely. It'll be a very cool mood to work to. I can't type tonight either, I've been doing a lot of corrections as I go. I think part of it may be that the new desk is OK but not great....the monitor's all the way at the back of it because the front angles (and that's how you get to put stuff inside - the front lifts up)...so it's a lot farther back than I like. The front bottom of the desk is also solid so there's nowhere to put my feet up like there is with the school desks. I'm not sure if I'll get used to it in time. The tower's nearby on the left of the desk and the subwoofer's nice on the right, but the legs are high enough that the subwoofer (my usual footrest) isn't comfortable to use, the angle's not right for that, and it means turning my head too much to look back at the monitor.
The nice thing, though, is that the bed is right across from the desk, so I can lay down on the bed (or sit on it with the husband - the pillow, not a person) and watch anime from it in fullscreen, which is a luxury I didn't really have in the apartment.
The kitchen seems to be equipped OK, and there's a decent sized fridge up here...the freezer portion is too small to keep ice cream in but the fridge part is big enough to hold my Brita, which anyone who has been to my place can tell you is essential. The water around here is...not the greatest so it's a big help.
The desire to get a webcam is growing and I'm not sure why. I hate being in pictures. Maybe it's because everyone else that I know is getting a cam or has a cam and seems to have so much fun with them, i dunno. I have no doubt that there will be enough pictures taken in Europe though to provide a lifetime's blackmail.
Seeing parent this weekend, being dragged to religion, getting to pick the play for sunday, waiting for hours in the tkts line, must effectively pull all the cash I have to pay for it (and thankfully get reimbursed later) and all that good shit. It's weird, I used to think New York was the center of the universe but now I have no desire to really go anymore. Maybe I've just adjusted to the DC area and have found it comfortable enough to be cool with.
So anyways it's been 15 minutes and I haven't added anything, so other than saying that my speakers seem to not have handled the move well (and how I'd love a new 5.1 set....) it's time to post this one. I've got a lot to do tomorrow, and if my math is right, this is the entry that will put me over 3000 views to the journal. Congrats all.
JOURNAL: iserlohn
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