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Class and stuff....
2002-10-15 20:23:15
ROTC exam was surprisingly easy. Can't do Clausewitz for my presentation though, the commandant was like "I want it to be something that everyone can walk away appreciating." I'd say a brief lecture on why what we're doing right now is damn stupid and back it up with proper military theory is damn relevant. Perhaps it's time to dig up the old nuclear notes.
German work is still slightly behind. I need to read more of Drei Männer and study the bigass vocabulary list...and finish making my prep sheet and all that other good stuff. And start reading for 50's and do my list of questions. Argh, so much to do and what did I do tonight? I went to the grocery and sat around renaming and re ID3'ing MP3s so I could make a new mix cd for my portable. Damn how I waste my time. Now I'm doing this to help procrastinate. Someone slap me into doing my work for once. -
Some notes and replies....
2002-10-14 23:11:03
12:30AM, have to be up in 8 hrs for brit history, and an exam at 2pm. Got almost no studying done for the ROTC exam, hope it's damn easy. Did shitty on my German exam (got a mid C on it even after points from corrections) and the quiz i took before I left (around 50%)...looks like it's time to start banking on that final grade saving project again.
Hsien - Ouch. Not that I don't agree with you, but ouch. More importantly, though, are you gonna post all the weakest link sketches anywhere for the world to see? Just remember that you ARE the actor.
Gambitt - *beatbeatbeatbeatbeat* No Puchi Puri Yuushi for you.
VicBond - Damn your tape is cursed. Staff followup meeting is coming up soon, been told I should go. I know you're not reading this, too. And my breakfast at Plato's on Friday kicked ass. You just got crap. Gotta learn where to find new hotness and not just old busted joints.
Speaking of breakfast, I should try and be awake enough tomorrow to make eggs for breakfast...
Breakfast makes me think of waking up. And to wake up, I need to go to sleep. Nite all -
Me and Journals and the Trolls...
2002-10-14 18:01:26
It's 7PM Monday and I'm finally getting back to normal. I honestly can not figure out how I managed to make it to German and back this morning.
Some good news now: This journal has broken 5000 hits. Thanks to everyone who reads, here's to 5,000 more.
As far as the whole forum issue is concerned, I have two sets of people to blame. First are the trolls and spammers who started and kept encouraging this whole mess. You know who you are and have to take the majority of the blame.
The second group, the one that is going to get me in trouble, is the moderators. Or rather, the moderator(s) not present at AnimeUSA this weekend who allowed the thread and situation to get out of hand. I know at least three of the people who moderate the forum, and while I have great respect for all of them and their works, they've been letting a lot slide, including stuff that they really shouldn't have. The main controversial thread started Thursday evening and should have been locked down with an official post BEFORE it got to 13 pages of replies. It was already starting to show signs of breakdown by the time it got to 4 pages when I got offline Thursday night. If you're going to be a moderator, act like one. Part of the point to having mods is that they keep crap like this from happening. A good example of a well moderated forum, as much as I may not like the people on it, is the one at animeondvd.com. Threads that get nasty get locked FAST. The catch for this is that there's an army of mods in various timezones to help and that the forum has a list of 10-15 rules which users are required to read before they make their first post.
Does the forum here even have rules like this?
This isn't to say the moderators are bad people or not doing their jobs. The forums have been, at least from what I've seen, cleaned up somewhat. Flaming for being OT is down, and the majority of spam is in OT/WOT/AAM which I don't have to read or look at. This is, overall, a good thing.
However, I haven't seen much of the other side of modding, namely locking threads. Unfortunately, to do this, it requires the moderator to make a post. Since we have stealth/invisimods this makes things a bit harder. If the people moderating wish to have anonymity (and I really can and do understand why, as the...shall we say...professionalism and maturity (or lack thereof)...of most of the posters leaves something to be desired), perhaps the mods need to be moved over to new mod-specific accounts used solely for giving warnings, locking threads, etc. They don't even need to sign it, it will be immediately understood that a final post by, say, any account with a certain prefix (such as Agent, MOD, whatever phade wants to create 20 accounts of and then lock out of existence) is to be taken as a word from the forum gods to give it up.
Again, most of the blame, though, is not on the moderators. They have their own jobs, lives, hobbies, free time, and are doing this out of the goodness of their souls and kindness of their hearts.
So we have the other end of the problem again.
I don't know how old you are. I *DO* know that when I was in high school and posting online that most people couldn't tell. This is not AOL Teen Chat, this is, for all intents and purposes, a site for (and I hate to use this term) professionals. This means that common courtesy rules apply. I'd say act your age, but for high schoolers that doesn't work very well. Perhaps "Act like your mother is reading the thread" is better. Seriously folks, grow the hell up. If you don't have something useful to post, don't bother. There is nothing wrong with lurking.
I miss the site from a year and a half ago. Threads were on topic, everyone got along better, and we didn't need mods or 5 pages of rules for the forum or all of this BS. What sucks even more is that now the attendees of 2 cons don't even get to post reports anymore. I enjoy reading those, dammit!
**END RANT** - response to dji: 2002-10-14 13:40:16 Ugh. I forgot about him in my report. I was hoping to forget about him forever. That and seeing paizuri's ass on the TV in the room. I could definately live without thinking about either of those again.
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AnimeUSA report (duplicate of forum post)
2002-10-13 18:24:55
This is going to be really rambly. I'm totally out of it right now, hopefully others can fill things in.
Thursday night:
Got packed and took care of some food issues (mostly baking and making sandwiches). Vic showed up around 8ish, we were up until 2:30 working on things for Weakest Link and just hanging out. Insomnia struck me and I didn't fall asleep until 3:30 or so.
Friday:
Vic wakes me up at 6:15 by coming into my room and singing Oha Rock! by Shingo Mama. We strike my computer, bag up everything that could take in water (it had been raining since Thursday afternoon) and head over to Plato's (a diner in College Park) for breakfast. The car was totally full of stuff to the point where Vic's busted suspension didn't matter - the car was heavy enough to take hits from just about anything.
We got done with breakfast around 8 and hit the road. We managed to screw up bigtime though as Vic was in the wrong lane on an access road to get to the hotel and we had to go all the way out to Dulles and double back to get to the hotel (we were about 2 blocks away when this happened), causing us to get there about an hour later than we thought. Met up with Waldo and dji. Walked around a bit, talked a lot to Duane Johnson, confirmed that he's no longer on Otakon staff, talked with Steve Bennett for a bit about manga on both sides of the Atlantic, and did generic Friday things like visiting the con suite.
The AMV contest was...something I didn't see most of. IMHO I'm just as well off. I'm so burned out now on AMV just from what I've seen this weekend. What I saw was, for the most part, pretty good. The crowd was small and dead Friday. Didn't go to the screening Saturday (slept, saw people, did a panel instead), more people were there, heard crowd was better.
There was some generic AMV screening beforehand. Met up with Nightowl there, much bitching about b-ko and functionality ensued. Someone else can remember the tech issues better than I can.
AMV panels Friday:
Overview - kind of a waste. Vic and I played some stuff, took a few questions, mostly used it to plug the other panels.
Beginner's Corner - took this one on my own with Vic around to point things out as he was re-configuring his computer for Codecs. Good turnout, made it through concept to distribution encoding in an hour. Dji showed up at about 50 min. into it.
Codecs - Vic showed what was good and bad in video encoding. Smaller turnout, pretty technical, but well done and some good examples.
Post-Panel screening - the Waldo archive and B-Ko showed up, and videos were played first from Waldo's because B-Ko broke (again) and needed to be fixed. B-Ko also apparently can't run her CD drive while the RAID is turned on, so pat's piss-poor copy of daicon IV from the old JACO days couldn't be replaced with newly filtered MPEG-2 hotness.
Saturday:
AMV contest time is covered above.
Showcase/Inspiration:
Vic had a great crowd. Alan had a thinning but good crowd. I had four people to talk in front of. Joy. Lack of food and audience made irribility high on my part. Got pizza afterwards, felt slightly better.
Old School: RYS and Duane Johnson were mostly the ones talking and playing videos (again rather loudly) for the hour. Not bad.
Digital Age: Cancelled because cosplay ran short and it was time for the AMV awards. There were a bunch of them, and as my video sucked ass I knew well in advance that I wouldn't be getting anything so I ducked out and played on my computer for a bit. After awards ended it was time to set up...
The Weakest Link: This was the highlight of all the programming. Words can not describe the hilarity and mayhem that ensued, fortunately the video of it will be online within a couple days. Sadly I had to pump the audio so that it could be heard as the dance was in the room next to ours and the sound was bleeding through.
Party time: No seal of approval from Hsien! Plenty of alcohol into nightowl, dji got some great footage. There was this fucked up scary dude in the lobby. Reminds me why I hate drunken alcoholics.
Sleep: Sleep was good. the hotel had shitty alarm clocks though. I had no idea how to turn the alarm off. Got to sleep in a bed Saturday, best sleep I've had in ages but not enough of it.
Sunday:
Slept until about 11, didn't even bother with AMV screening. Went to the anime tractor pull and won a mini valkyrie figure (american edition, POS, can't believe they charge $7 for this thing but oh well i didn't pay for it) and a wicked city tshirt. Played a song of DDR with Vic and we loaded up the car and came back to college park.
Overall, this con was, at least for me, way too much work and not enough play. Definately fewer panels next year and I'm tempted to just burn a ton of CDs for myself of anything I'd want to play for people and just leave my computer at home. If it wasn't for the people (when they actually showed up at the stuff they were supposed to) and Weakest Link and Saturday drunkenness to watch, this wouldn't have been worth it.
The worst thing is probably that my speakers were used at all these panels, and at the smaller room screening they were turned up LOUD AS FUCK. I'm trying to get them reconfigured and adjusted, but it looks like this weekend has taken a lot out of them. I'm not sure yet if it's just me being tired and not making everything out or if they were blasted for too long too many times in too short a time and something doesn't want to go now. The bass is a bit lacking, which makes me question the sub the most. Will eventually figure it out.
In the meantime, it's 7PM and I feel like I could go to sleep for the night now.
JOURNAL: iserlohn
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