| Nothing explained today. |
[Mar. 6th, 2009|06:32 am] |
Spent the last several hours looking back over everything I've written since my first day of college over four years ago. Mainly looking for girl drama, to see if I had written about a specific person who plays a larger role in my life these days. I only found one for sure. It was... depressing. Though in general, it's nice to look back at these writings and not hate myself for who I was. I'm not sure I could write like that anymore, and it makes me rather jealous.
While I don't intend to start writing here again regularly, it's nice to have these records of the things that were so important at the time but will soon be forgotten, or how I felt on the day about something I remember in much gentler, faded terms now. To that end, I'd like to summarize my current girl drama here sometime soon. Preferably on a day when I need to get things out more than I do now. Lately, things have been okay. Compared with the pages of this record, I seem to have gotten stronger, more centered, and slightly more able to reach out for what I desire. Still plagued with the coldness, neuroticism, narcissism, and awkwardness of old, but I'm starting to feel capable of slowly turning the little bit of attraction I've seen on her part into mutual affection. Not up to me, I know, but I was feeling pessimistic under unprecedented circumstances, so for me to overturn those default assumptions of failure almost has to mean things are going well.
Full story in time. |
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| A hypothetical |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|09:58 pm] |
A recent change in sleeping habits and overall mood has lead me to wonder - for those who embrace a nocturnal lifestyle and receive little natural light, is it possible to make seasonal affective disorder a year-round condition?
Excusing the part where this is a clear case of attribution error, wild conjecture with no medical or psychological data to back it up, what would you do if you woke up from four or more years of mild, self-induced dysthymia? |
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| I don't think any of this involves the presidency |
[Feb. 6th, 2008|10:19 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  indifferent | ] |
So it's been a while, but I've heard word about you recently. Thought I'd see what's going on.
I don't feel like relaying any sort of news or feelings. Just the bits of a nightmare I can remember from this morning.
The scene is set like this: I am playing some game similar to laser tag or counterstrike, in the sense that the rules are similar, the arena is similar, but I'm standing in it, holding a submachinegun. At least one of my teammates was a girl I know. I can't remember who, or if there was a third team member. The other team was an old Rasputin-with-a-shave-and-haircut kind of guy and a little girl with a plain cloth dress and pale, inconsistent features. The first round ended with me shooting her to death as though we were just playing laser tag. As a result of this round, part of the teams were switched and the little girl's corpse was now my supposed teammate, which struck me as unfair for the brief moment until she started to get up. It's hard to explain exactly how this worked, but the flesh of the rising girl kind of shoved itself out from inside the core, reshaping her like a piece of writhing clay. I could see the Rasputin a million miles away causing this, and there wasn't the slightest bit of doubt that more than ever, I needed to shoot her. I couldn't though. My body wouldn't move anymore, and my perspective was torn from it and brought right in her face, which was like a doll's, with big, round, painted marble eyes.
I think this is a combination of being invited to go play laser tag on Friday and a horror novel I've been reading called John Dies at the End. Try googling it. It's all online, and the writing style is great. I'm reading a passage now where the author compares his penis to a toddler who thinks he's going to Disney World.
On a personal note, the words four years surprised me today, and maybe depressed me a little. Actually, think the previously mentioned passage is what lead me there.
Edit:
Holy fuck. So, a doll extremely similar to the one I just described to you has just been described in the book for the very first time. I have not read this passage until now, although it was only a few paragraphs later. When I had the dream I was still near the beginning of the book. What had happened in the book thus far mostly involved seeing or knowing things that one should not see or know. I imagine the doll won't even be a minor plot point in the book, though it will be creepy and will move, but I will have trouble sleeping tonight. Jeez. As though I didn't already have a nightmare about the damn thing even before I heard about it. |
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| Something-or-other is the Devil's playground -- and he always pushes me on the swings! |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|08:21 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cheerful | ] |
So little time left, so little progress made, and yet I still can't help but waste some more time and feel good about it.
Today, I was supposed to hang out with Ryan and Charlie, both of whom just got back from Texas last night. Charlie is a long-time long-distance friend of Ryan's who seems to have decided that there was nothing more for her at her home or anywhere near it, so she and Ryan have decided to move out of their respective living arrangements and get an apartment just outside of Atlanta. I've yet to meet her, but she sounds pretty cool. Since they should be within twenty minutes of here, I hope I'll be able to hang out with them from time to time in the future. This got rescheduled till tomorrow, as they were mislead about how long it would take to get here.
Yesterday, my little brother and I went to some classes together so he could get a feel for what college is like and whether he should apply here. He still has no idea what he wants to be, which is problematic, but he found the course difficulty and Tech's students unintimidating, which is good.
If I ever manage to finish and polish Renfield, I think it could be quite acceptable, but having it done by the first week of August seems impossible, as I'd be doing all the writing, programming, and art myself, and I want to hold myself to a standard beyond my abilities in each respect. I also want to put it off. Worse still is the paper... I can't imagine what kind of thesis is going to suit the damn thing, especially as I'd like to be modest and analyse design considerations rather than pretend I'm solving some problem or can propose some universal truth about art. We'll see how that goes, but I really need to be allotting myself two weeks to write that, which would start... today-ish? (I also feel that I need two months to write the script and make the art, but again there's the part where I only have two weeks, so... I'll need to shorten the scope of the story considerably, methinks.) How did things get this way?
Oh wait, I remember...
First impressions - Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai:
Like many other anime, I've ignored this one on principle because it looked like one of those over-cutesy shoujo that ends up being vapid elementary-school angst, baby's first romance, whatever you want to call it... and so far, I couldn't have been more wrong. I reconsidered when I saw in the anidb listing that it had won some kind of viewer's choice award for Best Villain, as there's no better way to get my attention.
The work opens with a dramatically different art style than what I had seen of it. Pacing is very slow, and story is an engaging conspiracy theory told as speculation until firsthand accounts become more available. By the time we do see the cutesy animations - all in flashbacks and montages, they're laced with the heavy knowedge that most of the characters shown within are dead, and the sequence is juxtaposed with a naked corpse obscured by the crows feeding on it, in that same cutesy style. The slow pacing and somber treatment of a subject that is usually accompanied by magical transformations, giant robots, or diabolical acting is a surprising and pleasant change of pace from what I've seen in anime, and I look forward to more. Also, having a disparity in mood and subject matter tied to changes in artistic style is a neat trick, and one used masterfully in the little bit we get to see here. Props to thee, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai.
Baccano! (Just a trailer):
It looks as though the drought of the last season is starting to end. Can't get too much of a feel for what the plot might be, but it looks to take place in the railroads of depression-era America, and is clearly a shounen with a fondness for the Capone-style mafiosos. I'm expecting something in the vein of Black Lagoon, (if a little more centric on the up-and-coming protagonist) which would make me very happy indeed.
Zombie Loan:
Every once in a while comes an anime with a name such that I can't help but watch it. This title speaks of a morbid sense of humor that I'm sure to love, only maybe I misjudged. It has some potential, but I'm mostly unimpressed and my ears ring from the shrill, shrill screaming of the slightly more than two-dimensional protagonist. Ugh. This did shed some interesting light on Higurashi, though. Apparantly when a minor (or a suspect or whatever) is reported about in a paper and his or her name is protected, they are referred to as shounen "A", "B", shoujo "A", etc. This appeared in both anime, but Zombie Loan explained it better. I'll give it another chance, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The actual plot is that a bullied girl meets up with some questionable sixth sense rejects that fight evil for selfish reasons. Despite a couple interesting quirks that surface, the three main characters fit a description of two-dimensional all too well - the protagonist is either somber or frantic, boy A is either kind or disgusted, and boy B hasn't shown a second dimension yet. Artwork involving the two boys is almost always of them posed together... if pressed, I would almost call it an unmanifested "twincest" motif, something that says "At any moment, we'd might take our shirts off and kiss with figurative rose petals raining down from above, only we won't because we're dead inside and so instead we feel compelled to glare at you and suggest that we should kill you, mostly out of the disappointment for what could have been if this were targeted to girls who like that sort of thing." You know what I'm talking about. Hell, if it would have made the main girl stop screaming so damn much, even I would have preferred that.
Umisho:
From the school of thought that says do one thing, do it right, and do it constantly, the makers of Umisho chose fanservice. I dunno if they succeeded or not, I haven't seen one of these since Love Hina or so, but whereas Love Hina was primarily a romantic comedy that had a little too many cheap laughs from adult situations, (as though those things ever happen to adults... I stopped having constant embarrasing encounters of that sort after high school) Umisho starts with the protagonist taking off her clothes, followed immediately by the first line of the theme song "You can fly high! Let's get naked!" all of which sets a general tone for the rest of the episode. (Please note: while I say nudity a lot here, it is not graphic, and is generally censored or unshown, but they beat you over the head with it... quite literally in at least one case.) Our narrator character is a young spineless boy who manages the high school swim team, unable to swim himself because of a childhood accident where something he insists was a mermaid dragged him underwater at the beach. The focal character is The Great Okinawan Harbinger of Nudity, (That much, I am just making up.) an eccentric seafaring transfer student who immediately declothes another woman via shark upon her arrival, and whose primary pastime is nude swimming. And that, give or take some general highschool comedy schtick, is the entire show. I will... ahem... give it a second chance as well, because I am a pig.
Doujin Work:
Holy hell of what the fuck what that? I don't know if I want to explain the premise, since I'd be ruining the biggest laughs in the episode, but essentially a doujin is a kind of comic, often similar to fanfiction, and there's an indie business to it, which is what the show is about. The humor in this tends to be pretty scatalogical, which is generally a cheap laugh, but it has some razor execution. If I was the sort of person who cry-laughed from television, this would have done it. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the cute mascot of this show is a pair of girl's gym shorts the size of a fingernail that dances eternally on a supporting character's beret. So, again, what the fuck. (Note: in case someone is going to watch this and doesn't get the pun, the word yuri loosely translates to lesbianism, I think) |
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| Don't look back. And never, never make any sense. |
[Jul. 2nd, 2007|07:31 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  crazy | ] |
After having failed my last physics test, I decided to get an earlier start for the one in two hours. I still skipped all of my classes, but I started studying at 2:00 am sunday instead of 2:00 am monday, because I didn't have to worry about filming for the movie all day. I slept a lot during the day, so it's not like I'll have been awake for over twenty-four hours this time, but it's still been awhile.
Also, I've spent the last hour and a half watching Trigun, and I think I know how to make sure I'm extra prepared for the test this time:
I'm going to open a can of rootbeer and take a drink every time someone says "Vash the Stampede."
This is my way of the idiot. |
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| Work well under pressure. Masterpiece under hopelessness? |
[Jun. 29th, 2007|02:19 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  listless | ] |
There have been articles today claiming that the potential cure to both cancer and aids have been found. That's a weird coincidence, and it makes me even more skeptical than usual about that sort of thing. Still counts as pretty good news.
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6722291&nav=menu36_3
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070628/hl_afp/usgermanyhealth;_ylt=AvV3uZHh5CyPZZkjs3UPh6Ba24cA
So, I'm not really sure whether things have been going well or not. I think I may have screwed up pretty bad this semester, both in research and physics, but as a sixth consecutive semester, maybe it's all right for me to screw up a little. Certainly the physics thing won't hurt that bad, as long as I don't make a C or anything, (which I might not be able to avoid... I made a 96 on the first test, but a 65 on the second one....) and the research is going relatively well lately, though I've only met with my professor once this semester. Haven't heard anything since. As long as I have a solid paper and a well-made project by the end of the semester, I think I'll be able to smooth over any of the horrible missteps I might have made by procrastination or fear or having pretty much left to my own devices. Maybe I shouldn't be too worried, since I think my advisor is just really busy and didn't notice the lack of my emails, since he didn't respond to most of the ones I did send. Other than the worry that I've been forsaken entirely, I like the setup just fine, and after I sent the letter saying that I was worried, thought I might have screwed up, needed some help, etc... well, I just started working and have been getting along fine, (by ignoring the problem for now...) making plenty of good progress, though I essentially have to make up for two lost months, and now that I'm at the writing phase, I've slowed way down. |
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| Maybe I need to switch to watching something in a language where I can't tell how bad the acting is. |
[Jun. 18th, 2007|12:01 pm] |
Don't mind the video. I was trying to figure out how to get some audio off of it for a ringtone. Coincidentally, some announcement regarding this work should be available later this week. There's a sort of countdown at the official site.
So, test and filming are now finished, leaving the rest of the summer open to work on my research. I guess.
In the meantime, I watched some anime, which were terrible. Excuse my change in writing style, I'm either temporarily stunned into a similar dialogue mode to what I was just watching, or am unable to function correctly because I have only gotten six hours of sleep between two periods of 30+ hour consciousness. Hopefully it is the former, as I thought I did well on the test.
So:
First impressions, Devil May Cry:
Do the games have a storyline? They transition fairly well to anime, due to all the action and the high production values capcom is able to shell out. However, the premise doesn't really lend itself to situations with dialogue or other characters or anything like that. Having noticed this, the writers of the anime have decided to just include bit characters that move the story along without really introducing them -- they figure you won't really care who they are as long as Dante kills something again soon. Naturally, the default setup in this case is to exploit an arch-stereotype of anime setups -- "badass" type character is forced to take a spunky little girl as his/her companion. If you like the sound of that, you might want to watch gun x sword, or cazeador de bruja, or claymore, or hell, just pick a shounen at random, you've got a one in five chance of getting this plot device. If you look past the part where none of the dialogue is worth following (the writers and producers did) the show is actually reasonably enjoyable. Just turn your brain off and drool vapidly in the direction of the screen as Dante shoots things. It's a nice change of pace sometimes, honestly. My only criticism is that the artists are pretty lazy with the monster designs. They settle for a lot of rorschach tests with glowing eyes.
Moving on, first impressions, ICE:
I think if this one had only been a half hour instead of a full hour, I would have been able to finish watching it.
It reminds me of a project I had in middle school, where groups were told to write a story about anything whatsoever. My group decided that they wanted a bunch of deaths and killings and fighting and so on, and constructed a list of around fifty characters that should participate on all sides of the battle, which they handed off to me to write. To fit fifty characters into a five page short story, I ended up using the following handy pattern: 1.Introduce a batch of characters. 2.Introduce more characters, which kill some of the first characters. 3.Introduce an important character, which kills most of the characters introduced in the last two steps. 4.Transition to the adjacent room using some plot device established in the preceeding steps. 5. Repeat.
ICE has mostly plagarized my formula, and mixed it with something like the premise for Children of Men. In a word, it is incomprehensible, and the vast list of arbitrary names and deaths continue unabated for most of the thirty minutes that I stomached. Noteworthy points include:
-the part where we establish a plot that nobody follows, kill the protagonist immediately, jump a million years into the future, and then really set to work by jumping between thirty or so characters, at least a third of which die.
-an overwhelming blame the victim complex regarding the death of every man ever.
-onscreen psychotic maid self-inflicted artificial insemination which results in the woman turning first into a giant ice formation, and then a bipedal tank demon.
-a woman in a mech screaming in terror because of a hallucination of a naked anatomically correct (well, it had a penis, but no nose) baby boy crawling towards her. with bonus targeting reticles.
-at least sixteen of our twenty principal characters participating in a no-holds-barred contest for the worst voice acting ever, each speaking with their own unique emotion and level of intonation. (ONE PER PERSON PLEASE, NO SHARING OR TRADING.) Seriously, I think this is the first time ever I've wished I could be watching a dub instead, simply because the friends and immediate family of the person hired to make the English voice track, when reading the translated lines into a midi microphone for the first time, will be unable to randomly stumble upon acting as bad as this. You can't just open your mouth and do it, this is a professional damn job. They have to be completely static, one-note characters at all times, with no levels or fluctuations, otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Shame on the one woman that deviated once or twice into a human range of emotion. You deserved to be hit by that truck a minute into the show.
Shows that haven't sucked this season:
Nodame Cantible:
Charming, if slightly static protagonists, a portrayal of a fairly mundane subject in an always riveting light, a sense of humor that's more warming than funny, but still very pleasant to watch, and a slowly expanding cast of characters that take on their own depth with surprising ease. It sometimes seems like it wants to be Honey and Clover, but isn't quite hitting the mark, though it succeeds in its own direction. Also, every episode is filled with skilled covers of classic hits, such as --- Mozart, Debussy, Brahms, etc. It's worth watching for the music alone, which is, I suppose, much of the promise of making a show about piano playing and symphonies.
...
That's pretty much it. Maybe Denno Coil is okay too? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2007|02:39 am] |
Sort of irrelevant, but I think I've been up since 5pm on friday.
Tomorrow will be the last day of filming, though, and maybe things can return somewhat to normal. The schedule hasn't been that busy recently, though we were filming from 1:00 pm to 5:00 am earlier this week.
Immediately after, I have a physics test that I don't know any of the material for, and then I think I'm a week or two late in sending some kind of progress email to Professor McGuire about my research, much less getting some concrete work done on it.
Also, as soon as I get a weekend off, I need to drop by my hometown so the family can spread Ollie's ashes around. (My dog) He died last Sunday.
It's not really as though everything is going wrong, or that I'm overwhelmed or anything. It's just been a full-time job working on the film, and I'm tired and behind in everything else. I need my role in it to be over. Hopefully tomorrow will pass quickly enough to allow me to study.
For the research I will be working on making Renfield as an interactive fiction piece, so that ought to be pretty cool once I really get started, but for now I just need to wind down and get some sleep. I have to get up early tomorrow, and earlier the day after, and for some reason despite having been awake for so long I can't seem to let myself sleep. |
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| This towel rack aint' big enough for the both of us. |
[May. 21st, 2007|05:37 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  irritated, though only slightly | ] |
The beginning of the semester always finds me relaxing a fair bit of time, even if I can't actually afford it, and this semester is no different.
On the other hand, I've been kind of reclusive. I only really hang out with Greg in the evening every once in a while, and I mostly just watch him play disgaea until he falls asleep, then play it until daytime. I've been sleeping during the day because my phone is malfunctioning, and the alarm goes off at 8:50 am every day, which is pretty awful. I have been meeting up with Jonathan a lot for the short film he's making, mostly going over what he wants in terms of delivery for each line. Shooting won't be for a few weeks. Physics kind of sucks, but then that's how I feel about most non-cs, non-lit, non-design courses. So much homework, and four-five hour labs just for a core course I won't ever actually use. Grr. At least I kind of like the math.
Sorry to say this, but I'm starting to sympathize with Fen. Having your roommate have a live-in boyfriend/girlfriend kind of sucks, because the bathroom situation seems like it's just them sharing it, and all this really long hair everywhere makes me nostalgic for the days when my bathroom floor was only covered in somebody else's curly pubic hairs. I'm apathetic about the occasional noise, and the sex, and if I was on the other side of the apartment I wouldn't care at all, (geez, Fen.) but I have my own irrational peeves... you don't get both towel racks, dammit. Roommate seems like a nice enough guy, though.
I'll have my first research meeting on Tuesday or Wednesday to discuss what I'll be doing. I'm thinking that I might be developing a stream-of-consciousness gameplay suited to remediating an epistolary novel like Dracula. In other words, Renfield. The first few entries, anyways. More on this later.
I only have a few hours left to finish my homework, then class, then hopefully sleep.
As an unrelated note, check this out: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZJWT3p7uM6Y. I'm trying to keep myself from being too fascinated by the choice of a particular number, and the role the associated character ends up playing. May look into this at some point. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 4th, 2007|09:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bored, but good | ] |
Grr... nothing is any fun now that I'm not putting myself in danger by taking the time to do them.
How was did the movie? Will there be some manner of collective sigh before we go our seperate ways for the week+ ?
Oh, and I did get the research position. This essentially means I get an independant study class where I get to spend all semester doing something related to interactive fiction. Dunno what yet, but my guess is either get a bunch of theory written, or make something. Though he acquiesced before reading my paper, I think the paper turned out pretty good too, even though I did way too much of it today. |
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