JOURNAL: Amizadai (Lee Amizadai )

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  • Make the monkey stir the pot! Add marbles and salt! 2002-11-05 05:56:10 Wow, it's been ages since I last posted here. Mostly because I've moved to another online journal, so I don't impose my personal entries on unsuspecting AMV.org visitors.

    But I now have some AMV news. It's a little belated, but I guess I should just post it up here anyway. I finished editing my first AMV a little more than a week ago. I don't believe it myself. It's taken almost two years, but finally all my edits are finished.

    However, since I used sucky VCD footage for my first edit, I am going to have to re-master the video with new DVD footage. I've already started on that, and I'm quite pleased with my progress. I am not making new editing decisions, which takes up the majority of my time during. I think I should be able to release my Nausicaa-Now We Are Free video by the end of the week.

    I was thinking of reelasing the video with the sucky VCD footage, but a screening at the local AMV gathering made me think twice. The Chinese subs on the footage I had become so used to were very distracting to first time viewers. And the slow-mo parts were very pixelated. It just looked so awful quality-wise that I don't think I can stand knowing it is being shared on Kazaa, or sitting on someone's computer harddisk...

    So I read up on ripping DVDs, converting them to a format suitable for editing on Premiere, and am now happily chugging along. But a peek at Shonen Dizzy Cow's journal today, where he says he regrets his decision to edit in the same format (AVS) I'd chosen for my Nausicaa video, has me a little apprehensive. So far I don't have any complaints about the quality of the footage, but SDC is a seasoned AMV editor, and I am afraid I may have overlooked something. What could it be? I know it looks sucky in the monitor when I render the footage, but I exported a test clip in Huffyuv and it looked fine. Or at least, I thought so.

    OK, I blew my test export file up to full screen and I saw pixelation. Aaargh. Back to the guides and tutorials.  
  • Brought to you by the letter A. 2002-09-11 14:26:34 I sold my IKEA futon this evening. I posted it up in Yahoo! Auctions, and after a couple of auction cycles where lots of people viewed it but nobody bid, some guy left me a message asking if he could come look at it before making a decision. I said OK, and he asked if I could lower the price to less than the $110 I had asked for on my auction page. I told him that if he took the futon with him when he came to see it, I'd let him have it for $90. So anyway, after he came by and looked at it with his wife, they tried to ask for a lower price, but I was adamant. And then the guy gets a call and talks loudly on his mobile for like 10 minutes, leaving his wife and myself staring wordlessly at each other. When the awkward silence starts to crawl up our backs, we start a stilted conversation on trivial things - Australia, the weather, their new house. I hate conversations like that. I suck at pretending to be good conversationist.

    Finally Loud Mobile Talker gets off his phone and gets his wife to pay me. Yay. Two crisp $50 notes, which are now sitting on my desk. Lucky I had a $10 note in the back pocket of my jeans to give him the change.

    Now there's a huge blank space in my living room where the futon used to be. It spent the last 5 years in my room taking up space and providing the cats an effective hiding place for whenever we tried to give them a bath, but now I kinda miss it. It was a familiar sight if not a comfy seat. Ah well. I'm looking forward to unpacking the bean-bag that arrived with my boxes from Australia so I can have somewhere to sit and read in my room. Of course, I'll have to buy the styrofoam beads and that'll probably set me back about $50. Aargh.

    The stuff that made up my life in Melbourne finally arrived today. Wally took his time sending them, so for almost 2 months, I had to live on a wardrobe of 5 tops (2 of which I wore practically to rags). Hey, what do you expect, when you have a 40 kg baggage limit and a computer desktop to carry home?


    I went to visit a Mexican lady at her house yesterday. She married a Singaporean Chinese, like my mom, and recently gave birth to a little girl. My family is pretty excited to get to know this lady because she's the first we've met whose marriage is so similar to my parents'. And she seemed quite nice over the phone - she said she didn't like a lot of the Mexican expats in Singapore because they are too posh... my mom shares the same view.

    My sister and I were joking that we were going to visit her just to see if her baby daughter is prettier than us. We practiced hissing in case the impossible turned out to be true. The little girl is so pretty we almost bit our tongues in envy. She was so so so cute, and so sweet-tempered too. She started crying a bit after tolerating my bony embrace for a few minutes, but other than that, she was really quiet, and even fell asleep in my mother's arms.

    The Mexican lady is nearer to my age than my mother's - she'a mere 27-year-old. Still, I found it a little hard to relate to her, because afterall, I am not a new mother, and facing a lifetime in a foreign country where she barely understands half of the English spoken to her, and none of the Chinese jabbered everywhere else. She's Mexican, and I grew up in Singapore. Half the time I was talking to her parents-in-law who were sitting in the living room with us. Of course I made sure to translate all the conversations back to Spanish and vice versa. It was a little harrowing, especially because my Mandarin sucks.

    Anyway, I feel kinda sorry for Alejandra. I can tell she's having a hard time dealing with the culture shock. I know what it's like, even though I am comfortable with both cultures. I know how different each culture can be from each other. The things that make sense in one life, is utterly taboo in another. I know it because my mom went through it too when she first arrived in Singapore 25 years ago. Luckily my grandmother was really nice to her, and took good care of her when I was born.

    My mom was living in a flat separate from my grandparents, unlike Alejandra and her husband, who are currently living with his parents, as is the custom in some Chinese families. She says it drives her insane, because she's used to living by herself. She said she sometimes wants to hit her in-laws, or strangle the nephews and nieces that come and visit every evening.

    Poor girl. I'm hoping that my mother will impart some of the experience that she gained from living in Singapore for the last 25 years. She told us that she took jazz dancing lessons in Mexico, so we suggested that she go by the YMCA with my sister one day and try out the Lindy Hop. She could even take English classes at the British Council like my mother did when she was pregnant with me - I think it would help a lot with her communication problems. I really think she needs to get out more... and make friends. She seems so lonely and frustrated.

    And at the risk of sounding really snotty, I'm hoping that my sister and I will be a visible example to Alejandra and her in-laws of what the little girl could turn out to be... someone able to traverse both worlds with ease, schooled in both cultures and languages and able to communicate with both mother and grandparents.

    And I want to be a friend too.

    But these things don't always turn out as neatly or idealy as we want to. I don't want to get all excited about somebody new and later find out that we ultimately don't get along. I guess it's just my pessimistic side talking, but I need imagine the worst so I feel prepared to tackle a situation. I don't like to be caught unawares.

    I think Alejandra is as anxious as I am. Both my mother and I noticed her tension when we arrived at her place. She was trying to smile, but there was this look on her face... acute apprehension is the only way to describe it. She was clutching her baby as if it was a lifesaver.

    I hope we didn't scare her.


    This entry is mirrored on www.unravelling.net/amizadai

    I am moving my journal there. This journal has served me well, I think I should keep the entries posted here of an anime/AMV nature. It doesn't seem fair to subject the odd unsuspecting AMVer to my rants. The new journal isn't all prettied up yet, but it will get better looking as I find the time to play with the style sheet. Whee. 
  • Springy as a mountain goat 2002-09-09 14:06:03 Haven't written in so long. I've been accumulating rage and angst all week long, with no time or energy to come here to rant and spew. OK, maybe the week wasn't entirely lousy, but there certainly were some days that set themselves apart by simply being... unsatisfying.

    I can't remember all the details anymore. Maybe they'll come back to me as I write so I can gnash my teeth and foam at the mouth in renewed disatisfaction. Yes, of course you can watch.

    Let's see... there was this one day that I went to Simlim Square with Bart to get his printer and some cables for myself. I went to get the cables from this shop - $15 per 3-meter USB cable, and $39 for a 10-meter parallel cable. After that we went to a couple of other shops to look for Bart's elusive HP printer, and I went to check out the prices of the cables they had in stock. To my horror I found that I had paid almost double for every cable I'd bought in the first shop. USB cables were $8, and the parallel cable was $22. I was so pissed that my vision literally went spotty, and my hands grew cold. I was actually hyperventilating from the rage of being cheated. I went to several shops were my plight was sympathetically tutted.

    I went to confront the guy in the shop where I'd bought my cables, and asked for a refund. He said he couldn't do it, however, because he wasn't the owner of the shop. Bart was behind me, and he said that we'd take the matter to CASE, which is the consumer watchdog in Singapore. I didn't yell or wave my arms around like the maniac I felt and I kept my voice down so as not to attract the attention of the other customer in the shop. But it seemed that this shop attendant didn't really care if anyone else heard about how I had been over-charged, because he kept repeating everything I said. "Overcharged?" "Twice as expensive?" "You want a refund?" In the end, I took the owner's business card with the full intention of not letting him get away with it.

    And then I went to another cable shop, where I talked to couple of really nice guys. I told them about what happened, and I showed them the cables for their opinion. And it turns out that the USB cables I bought were expensive because they were shielded, and what I thought was a parallel cable turned out to be a parallel extension, which IS supposed to be more expensive than the common printer cable.

    I felt like someone had let out all my air.

    I felt really bad about all the huffing and puffing I had indulged in before. The only way to rectify the situation was to go apologise to the shop guy. After that I just felt really embarrassed and silly.


    Yesterday I directed in the dialect service in church. It's the first time since I left for Australia more than a year ago. It was quite fun, but a little intimidating because the HUGE LED screen in the auditorium was on and showing the shots live as I punched them up with my vision mixer. There were only two camera people operating the cameras, so it was a little limited in terms of variety, but it sure made me think on my feet. I had to make sure the cameras didn't show me shots of similar composition so that I wouldn't commit the horrific sin that is the jump-cut.

    A normal service sees 6 cameras, with about 2000 people in the hall to see every single mistake and wild camera shot you punch up live, and quite a few people to come and yell at you if you screw up.

    Anyway, after the dialect service, I went to help with the tear-down of the mobile television setup that was at the Ritz. There was some church function there, and I'd been asked to help pack up afetr the event. Now, I don't mind doing the physical work that makes up the bulk of tearing down, but I hate it when I am asked to go down and people don't let me do anything because I'm a girl. I know they try to be gentlemen, but look, I'm an adult, and I know my own strength and I'm not going to attempt to carry the CCU unit by myself or anything like that. I know that women lack upper body strength, but we're not entirely useless, you know.

    One of the guys saw me going off with the camera and went "no no no no no no" because he thought I couldn't handle it. Now, I'm pretty small-sized but I'm sure as heck not a paper princess. Would I be involved in production if I was? I told him I could do it, and that it wasn't that heavy, and even showed him by lifting the case one-handed, but he would have nothing of it. "No no no no no, please put that down. If you want, you can carry the VCRs."

    Ooh, yay, I'm so useful.

    And then some other guy saw me carrying a tripod over the shoulder. He goes, "Aiyoh, I should take a picture of this - a sister carrying a tripod. Tsk tsk." I know it was a joke, and aimed at the guys of the television ministry, but I was already quite pissed from before, and this didn't help at all. It wasn't even a video camera tripod, just a dinky little still-camera tripod.

    "So 'sisters' are useless, huh? Girls are made of paper, huh? If I carry a tripod I'll collapse and die, right?" Nervous titters from the television guys. A little caustic maybe, and rather childish, but it was just another chauvanistic jibe that stung my ego.

    Look, if I'm so useless, don't ask me to go down and 'help'. I don't make three or four hours just to come all the way down to carry a couple of power cables and stand around looking cute. Grr.

    To be fair, not all of them are like that. I got pissed off with the first guy's tone more than anything. If he does that to me again I'm going to have a talk with him. I'll try not to push him over and stomp on him. But only because it's not a very Christian thing to do.  
  • 2002-09-08 01:28:12 Mom: Sneeze again and I'll hit you. 
  • 2002-09-07 04:33:37 Eva: "I start my diploma course on Monday... I'm a diplomat!" 
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