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I have Head Explodey!
2001-11-12 23:59:46
Man...that title was a lot funnier when I thought it up this morning, before....well, everyone knows, and enough has been said already by people better at it than me. I think the events of the past two months were best encapsulated by the following "Bob the Angry Flower" strip:
http://www.angryflower.com/septem.gif
Mirroring knghtbrd's sentiment, this strip single-handedly made "Turn on CNN right fucking now" the most frigtening sentence I could ever hear. Again. Here's hoping that this turns out to be an accident, and not something worse.
Now I will attempt to do a little dance to amuse and distract everyone from world events.
Yes, I am still sitting on the AMV tapes. Yes I will announce when they go out.
Finally got around to watching NieA_7, or the first disk anyway. Fascinating. I have absolutely no idea where this story is going. (This puts it in the same ranks as Key and "Bringing out the Dead.") It's like someone crossed Maison Ikkoku with Lum, took out the romance story, added FLCL on Prozac, and illustrated it with the artists from Lain. (just for the characters, no trippy stuff yet). So far, it's remarkably sedate and easygoing for an anime series. Can't really tell, but there even appears to be some social commentary going on in there concerning the status of immigrants in Japan. Very sympathetic characters, and hilariously funny on occasion. I'll be getting the next disk.
Now, answer the following three questions:
1) Do you know what Dave Merril's "Anime Hell" is?
2) Do you enjoy it?
2) Do you have cable?
If the answer to the above questions were "yes" then, for the love of God, find out what time the Sci-Fi channel's replay of "Exposure" is on this week, and watch or record it! About midway through is a short film called "Terrible Cosmic Death" starring "President Steve Elvis America" and "SUKI KUNG FU GO-GO MORNINGSTAR PERFECT ASSASSIN." The host (Lisa Marie Presley) describes it as Austin Powers meets James Bond on acid. I describe it as a condensed version of "Moonraker" as narrated (extremely quickly) by Mojo Jojo. It contains such wonderful quotes as "I am using my extrainterstellarspacescanner to scan for their location! I have found them! They are.....IN SPACE! Let's go!" and "I bet they will have sex.....LATER!" If the guy who made all those psychadellic/groovy 60's font titles went mad and made a Bond flick, this is what would have happened. If it has a fault, it's that it's a little too long. (Head...start...to...hurt...) I would direct you to a download site hosted by sci-fi, but all the links for that movie appear to be broken. What the hell, maybe you'll have better luck: http://www.scifi.com/exposure/frameup/terrible.html
On top of everything else, a new Acme Novelty Library issue came out. After all the events of today, I'm still going to try to read it. If you don't hear from me again, those of you who have read Acme will know why. (Damn, is that 2-point font?)
(Oh, knghtbrd? Reboot does, indeed, kick ass.) -
Gleamin' like the metal on the edge of a knife...
2001-11-12 00:47:13
Well, I should probably put to rest the anxious anticipation that, no doubt, followed my last post. Yes, both masters of the AWA 7 AMV compilation tapes are finished. I'll probably run through them one last time to make sure nothing hideous happened when I was out of the room, and then they go off to the distributors! (To be revealed when I have confirmation they got there...so we don't flood the poor fellows before they even have the tapes.) Gotta get the addresses from Jingoro, though. No big glitches I know of on the tape, other than one minor glip in the black space between two videos due to me not putting the title in the right place and then going back and fixing it, and one previously unnoticed artifact in one video. 'S OK, though, since it's MY video the artifact appears in (razza frazzin....).
Quu has retreated from the public eye for a bit...so I guess that means I should hold onto the SVHS VCR for a while longer...
Pretty good weekend. Ran a great whopping story-arc-ending game for the majority of Saturday. It ran from about 5:30 PM until nearly 3:30 in the morning! I seemed to be the only one who worried, though, so I guess it's a testament to their interest in the story. Rest of today was spent in the lab going over old notes and helping out a friend with editing his Master's Thesis. Broke away with the intention of seeing a movie, but NOTHING was playing at the time I got to the theater. (I, presently, have no one to take to the movies, so planning and checking times isn't a big priority for movie-watching.) Instead, I think I'll finally get around to watching the first ep. of NieA_7 tonight. Had the DVD for a while, but haven't watched it yet.
Tripped over the online comic "Zebra Girl" (http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/zebra/first.html) during my loafing at the lab today and got drawn in enough to read the whole run in one sitting. Despite how it sounds, it's not a "furry" comic (or it wasn't...not really sure where the present storyline is going), nor a "novelization" of that one particular Olivia print from that cover of Heavy Metal. The "Zebra Girl" comes from the moniker the main character picks up after a magical...uh..."accident." It's got some pretty good (dramatic-wise) and fairly funny moments throughout, despite the rather obnoxious regularity with which the artist "ruptures the 4th wall" all the time. His doing it isn't obnoxious, he just isn't good enough at it to justify doing it that often. The humor is pure situational absurdism, and the art style is to my liking as well. Sorta a "Phil Foglio does Illyana Rasputin" thing. What can I say, I'm a sucker for angsty-driven humorous stories where people randomly burst into flames. Oh, the comic does have the occasional touch of cheescake(http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/zebra/images/Zebrapeek.jpg Uh, don't open at work.) but it's not _too_ bad about it. Best to start at the beginning, (http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/zebra/zebraarchives1.html) the current storyline looks rather atypical...
(Phil Foglio is a comic book artist from pretty far back. Did the "Phil and Dixie" strips from Dragon, the comic book version of Robert Asprin's "Myth" books, and a bunch of Magic:TCG cards. Present work is a comic book called "Girl Genius" [http://www.studiofoglio.com/girlgenius.html] that is funny as hell. If you ever find the first issue, flip to the text section in the very back and read the bit about "Discovering the new world via catapult." My this is a long parenthetical phrase. Anyway, if you don't know who Illyana Rasputin is....I don't think I can help you.) - Oh the Humanity.... 2001-11-08 21:31:49 Official mastering of the first AWA 7 AMV compilation tape just began! Everyone keep your fingers crossed!
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...Right in Der Furher's Face
2001-11-07 23:22:18
The final episode of "Band of Brothers" is on. Apparently the final military action of Easy company before VE day was the taking of Eagle's Nest, a regal mountain-top villa built as a birthday present for Hitler. The amazing thing is, I've actually been there. I was an exchange student to Germany back when I was 16, and part of the tour we took around the country at the end of the exchange included a trip up the gold-plated elevator to the Eagle's Nest, long since converted to a small museum, gift shop, and resturant (service was terrible, but the sauerkraut was good). There's a tradition in Germany and Austria (or all of Europe as far as I know) of placing a crucifix on the highest point of every mountain. The crucifix for Eagle's Nest stands about 150 feet from the villa patio. I like to think that it would have infuriated Hitler.
EK and Kwasek, Re: Plympton: Plympton has had a bunch of truly brilliant short pieces, but apparently he can really only shine in that format. (My personal favorite is still "Car Alarm.") He actually made a near-feature-length film (70 min) called "I Married a Strange Person" that is truly dreadful. It's nothing but a whole bunch of his more sub-par short ideas all tied together with a really weak plot about a man who develops ironic omnipotence, a couple of awful songs, and a lot of cycling animation to take up time. I think there may have been two funny jokes in the entire film.
Forgot to mention yesterday that I am now officially required to like Moby. Not his music, which I can take or leave, but him, because during an interview on VH1 he described Nirvana as being "insouciant," a word that prompted VH1 to run a vocabulary check across the bottom of the screen. :) -
Booze.... booze..... the Firemen cried....as they came knockin' at the door.....(BAM BAM)
2001-11-07 00:26:02
Well, despite the fact that I know "Guinness mouth" is perhaps the foulest of all flavors of morning breath, I'm gonna sit here and finish off the last pint of the 4-pack while I jot out a brief note.
Through my own collossal stupidity with timing and my complete inability to read a map, I wasn't able to pick up the SVHS tapes from tape warehouse today. If you're reading this, Quu, I hope it's OK if I hold onto the player until the weekend. Work is likely to occupy me all of Wed and Thurs, so I won't get to the mastering until Friday.
Just remembered that a friend of mine invited me over to see "Ring" tonight if I was free. Crap Crap Crap. I just know they're going to take this as a personal insult too. Oh well.
EK: Thanks, but no thanks. I kinda file this under the "what the hell" category. The reason I used to take upwards of six months to finish a video was because I would get all tied up in knots over some stupid technical aspect giving me grief, or badly captured footage, or computer crapping out, or whatever. Stopped being any fun at that point, and even after the video was technically "finished" I would hold on to all the source footage for MONTHS, never getting up the gumption to actually go back and fix that off-by-three-frames-cut or the why-is-that-pixellated scene, or I-have-to-get-a-better/unsubbed-copy-of-this, angsting over whether I should dive in again.
There isn't a single one of my videos that doesn't have some section that I would like to "fix" in some way or another of technical problems, but all it's doing is giving me an ulcer, and if I did go back to fix them, I'd never get started on anything new.
The GR video is actually one of the cleaner vids I've managed. Other than the first riff/zoom in on Alberto which I just couldn't seem to allign with the drumbeats properly, all the timing was intentional. I can live with a little grainyness on the final section. The really infuriating thing is that A) I haven't been able to find a copy of GR 7 for sale ANYWHERE and B) Someone in Quu's club has a copy of the official US release (ie, dubbed) but forgot to bring it to the club for 2 months straight. I was thus left with my crappy fansub and a rental from Rainbow that had been watched so many times it had dropped 1 1/2 generations. Footage was better for some scenes from one, better for others on the other. The rental was significantly brighter, though, so additional adjustments had to be made (filters, etc.).
Oh, for anyone who doesn't know me:
A) I talk a lot.
B) I whine a lot, but most of it is intended to be humerous. Learned the hard way that the humor doesn't come across as easily through text as in person.
Back to reading the "Decameron." (Want a good laugh, you High-schoolers? Ask your teachers why you can't read the Decameron instead of the Canterbury Tales. There's a very good reason, but I'm curious if any of your teachers will know it.)
JOURNAL: MCWagner (Matthew Wagner)
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