"Oh, Father John, you cannot tell me what’s right and wrong. You cannot tell me."

• Feeling: Miserably Allergic To Something Unknown
• Listening To: "The Henney Buggy Band" by Sufjan Stevens

Lately I’ve been all over the place musically.  I’ve actually been listening to my library on random, which is something I normally swear against doing because I have such a strong preference for album continuity.  It’s almost disconcerting to do it, but that’s life.  Sufjan Stevens came up on random and now I’m listening to The Avalanche: Outtakes & Extras From the Illinois Album without shuffle, so I have some normalcy back.  It’s a pretty good album.  There are a few tracks on it that I’m really surprised didn’t make it on the original album since I like them significantly better than some tracks that did, such as “The Henney Buggy Band,” “Adlai Stevenson,” and “The Mistress Witch From McClure (Or, the Mind that Knows Itself).”

This past week I’ve been trying to play catch-up on my work and failing due to computer issues.  I had to play catch-up in the first place due to other computer issues … and also Cole being home from Germany for a week.  Yeah.  So the week before last was … hectic to say the least.  We basically managed to condense an entire summer’s worth of fun into seven days.  I averaged four hours of sleep and two energy drinks a day.  We went into the city, wrote a song, took a road trip, played video games, watched movies, went to bonfires, played Frisbee, shared music, shared pictures, had jam sessions, ate far too much, slept far too little, and went partially insane.  It was the best week of my summer so far, and I’m sure it will remain so through the end.

Other than work and the week of Cole, my summer is pretty low-key and hardly worth mentioning.  I’m hanging out with friends, but it’s just pretty standard.  Nothing to write home about.  I enjoy it though.  I’m in the middle of the eighth season of Stargate SG-1, so only about two days worth of footage left until I’ve finished the series.  -_-”  I still haven’t even finished the first half of Gurren Lagaan though.  I guess in some way what makes Stargate great is that I can watch it without realizing I’m watching it.  Most shows, even the greatest, I’m still aware of time passing, my responsibilities, and the fact that I’m just watching some show.  That’s especially true of most animes.  They’re great, but I can only watch so much before I have to go do something productive.  With Stargate, I can basically put it on and forget about everything.  I need that sometimes.

Comments (0)

"When you wake up, everything is going to be fine. I guarantee that you’ll wake in a better place, in a better time."

• Feeling: Skatastic
• Listening To: "A Better Place, A Better Time" by Streetlight Manifesto

Ah, the summer Streetlight kick. It’s that time of year again, folks. I’ve once again rediscovered my love for Streetlight Manifesto. Wait a second, that implies that I lost it … which I didn’t. But it’s been renewed again. I’ve been watching some videos on Youtube of Tomas’s solo acoustic set at Bamboozle in May, and thus far I’ve really enjoyed it - for two main reasons. Firstly, it’s amazing, just like everything else that Tomas touches. He writes all the songs by himself on his acoustic guitar, so hearing all the songs I’ve come to know and love in their original form is pretty exciting. Secondly, he forgets his own lyrics even more often than I do. It’s pretty nice to be able to point to a musical prodigy and say, “See? Even he forgets his lyrics. I’m pretty sure that gives me the right to mess up a bit when we play at a graduation party after not having performed our songs for three months.” So yeah. I’m also realizing that I’ve got every song from both of Streetlight’s original albums at over 100 plays on last.fm. Well, to be honest three songs are in the 97-99 plays range, but that’ll be fixed before the day is done. Keasbey Nights is a bit further down my charts, with most songs in the 30-45 plays range. Now if only last.fm could keep track of when I listen to legit CDs in my car, and the times I listened to it before I started using last.fm … probably another 100 plays for everything on Everything Goes Numb, easily.

Other than listening to Streetlight, I’ve been up to some relatively boring stuff. I’ve watched quite a bit of Stargate SG-1. It’s keeping me from my work, really. And from Gurren Lagann. I figured out that the runtime of the entire series is 9900 minutes, or 6.785 days. Yes. It is almost a week long. I’m not even halfway done with it.

As for my work, GSoC is coming along nicely. I scrapped most of the work I did the first week in favor of a new plan that my mentor suggested, and the past couple days I’ve really made some progress on it. I’m coding mainly from my new Gentoo installation on my laptop, which is quite nice now that it’s actually set up and mostly functioning.

As for my anime releases … Cowboy Bebop is moving along … slowly. Typesetting takes a lot more time than I had thought. Just the first pass at it is taking about half an hour per episode, and I’m not doing any real editing of the subtitles. Once I get everything relatively typeset, I have to go back and check for errors, edit things to make more sense as I see fit, fix errant timings, etc. It’s going to take a while. I’m going to give DN Angel the same treatment, but beyond that I think I may drop character-specific styling. We’ll see.

Comments (0)

"You disappeared with the same speed as the idealistic things I believed when the optimist died inside of me."

• Feeling: Apathetic
• Listening To: "No Sunshine" by Death Cab For Cutie

The school year is over and summer has officially begun for me. Finals went okay. I wouldn’t call the results perfect, but they put me where I need to be grade-wise. I kind of miss being at school, yet I feel so much more at home here. It’s weird because first semester I actually felt more at home at school. It’s an odd reversal I went through (mostly caused by a certain someone I think). Some odd things have happened this semester that have changed who I am and how I feel about the world. I think I have a rather less optimistic view on the world now. While I’ve always been quite the jaded individual, I’ve always held a very optimistic view toward life, and in particular love. That seems to have changed, contrary to my wishes. I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist now - I don’t think my views have changed quite that much. I’m just more flat with my expectations if you will. I don’t believe everything will always turn out alright, nor do i believe that everything will always go wrong. It’s a strange feeling for me.

I picked up Death Cab For Cutie’s new album, Narrow Stairs, when it came out last Tuesday. It’s the first time in years I’ve gone to a store to get an album on release date. I must say it was entirely worth it. It’s an absolutely excellent buy.

This past weekend was ACEN. I was rather excited to be going again after missing it last year for prom (bad decision on my part - so much drama could have been avoided had I just let my inner geek speak out). I was also apprehensive as to whether it would live up to my expectations. The first year I went, I got to see The Pillows perform live. Thus, the following year I was quite disappointed when my experience wasn’t up to par. This year I went into it with rather low expectations and was rather pleasantly surprised. I got to meet Jeff Nimoy, Quinton Flynn, and Vic Mignogna (among others) and get autographs from them all. For those of you who don’t know, Jeff Nimoy wrote and directed the English dub for the first, second, and fifth seasons of Digimon, in addition to voicing Tentomon and other characters, as well as Nicholas Wolfwood from Trigun. He’s also an incredibly down-to-Earth guy. Same with Quinton Flynn. The two of them do a great panel called Adventures in Anime. If you get the chance, look up their so-called “Yaoi Song.” It’s quite entertaining. The other highlight of the convention, at least for me, was finding the FLCL Ultimate Edition boxset for under $60. Usually it sells online for a few hundred dollars. Given that FLCL is one of my all-time favorite series, I couldn’t help but snatch it up. In fact three of my other friends bought it as well - we cleaned the booth out of FLCL boxsets.

This week I’ve really begun research on my GSOC project. It’s a bit hard to motivate myself because it’s really open-ended and right now I’m not actually doing work, just research. It’s kind of like studying without any assigned homework. I’m just not good at it. The program officially starts on Monday, so by then I’ll be really working.

I’m finally getting to work on real anime releases. I’ve done a lot of ripping for myself in the past, and this year I got involved doing encoding for Ryuu-Rogue, and now I’m gearing up for my launch as a real releaser. It’d be kind of deceptive to call myself a release group since it’s just me, so a releaser I am. The first thing I plan to release is Cowboy Bebop. I’m taking the video from the Japanese HD-Remastered set of DVDs and the audio and subs from the English Remix DVDs. See, there are groups who are doing good work with subtitled-only releases, niizk in particular, but no one has done a decent dual-audio release since Zhentarim’s way back when. I’m going to fix that. I’m actually getting into typesetting for once and planning on using character-specific styling. After Cowboy Bebop I think my next release will be DN Angel, followed by Trigun most likely. Neither of those series have good dual-audio releases available either. I believe I’m going to buy Gravitation and Hellsing this summer, and hopefully Serial Experiments Lain, so they’ll get the treatment as well, then hopefully Samurai Champloo, Paranoia Agent, Peacemaker, Gilgamesh, and Samurai 7 later on. I’m going to be busy for a while, and I’m going to enjoy it.

Comments (0)

"We promised the world we’d tame it. What were we hoping for?"

• Feeling: Reflective
• Listening To: "Pioneers" by Bloc Party

I’ve had a strange sense of emptiness the past week or two. I’m not entirely sure what’s caused it. I suspect it is related to knowing that in a short while I’ll be back at home with all the people I care about but that for the time being I’m still here at school with only a few friends. I’ve been uncharacteristically reflective lately - and for me that’s saying a lot. I’ve been thinking back to how time has played out for me over the past couple of years - the good, the bad, the completely forgettable. I’ve wondered how different my life would be if only I’d changed certain minutia. In most cases, I find that it would be entirely unpredictable. Some factors seem to suggest that changing one conversation might have altered all my friendships, yet other factors say that it wouldn’t have made any difference. I guess all the speculation has left me in an odd place mentally.

Anyway, the year is almost over. I had my last day of classes yesterday. I have my first final, physics, tomorrow morning, then nothing until the middle of next week. I have my DiffEQ final Wednesday afternoon, then both my ECE classes back to back Thursday morning and afternoon. I really need to do well on all my finals, especially DiffEQ and physics. That means I’m actually going to be studying over the next week. Fancy that. Me. Studying. Anyway, I should really be doing that now, but I figured I’d take a while to unwind this morning/early afternoon and get some things taken care of. Blogging just happened to be one of them somehow.

Now, in the less than two weeks since i was introduced to How I Met Your Mother, I watched the entirety of the series thus far (the first two seasons have 22 episodes and the third has 17 so far) and have begun re-watching. Actually to be more accurate I should say I’m almost done re-watching. I only have about 12 episodes until I’ll be done seeing the entire series twice. In less than two weeks. Yeah, it definitely takes the number two spot for comedies in my book.

Comments (1)

"This place will chew you up then spit you out before you go. And when they drag you kicking and screaming from the scene, you know that it’s time to leave."

• Feeling: Brain-Fried
• Listening To: "Scott Farcas Takes It On the Chin" by Less Than Jake

Somehow I managed not to document the fact that I saw Kimya Dawson until now. It was last Sunday night, and now it’s early Saturday evening. How did I wait this long? Oh, that’s right. This week was the week from hell.

So last weekend was pretty damn busy, what with my family coming to town, Emily’s musical, my birthday and all. It was pretty enjoyable though. Urinetown is a really, really great musical, and I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get a chance. Also, my parents got me a Wii for my birthday, along with Brawl. So that’s cool. On to Sunday night and the Kimya concert.

It was at this really small venue off in the middle of Urbana. There was a tiny stage that was only a foot or two off the ground. Angelo Spencer and l’Orchidee d’Hawai opened for her. Angelo Spencer is a crazy French man who lives here now (and according to last.fm is married to Kimya?). He is also a one-man band, and a damn good one at that. l’Orchidee d’Hawai is also a French band that Angelo Spencer used to be a part of or something like that and so they’re just here in America for a show or two…? I was confused by the situation. Anyway, the venue was really pretty sweet, as it was the Urbana Independent Media Center, which means it had all sorts of quirky and artistic stuff all over the place. Kimya and crew were really happy to play there because they had just played a show at Notre Dame where there were uniformed servers and camera crews on both sides of the stage to show them on big-screen monitors right over the stage. So they really liked being in a small quirky laid-back venue again. I liked it too.

They were all incredible, especially Kimya. She’s just so positive. Her music, even the darker songs that deal with heavy issues, all remains quirkily optimistic. Also, I think this post probably has the highest concentration of instances of the word quirky and its derivatives this side of nowhere. So props to me for that. But yeah. It was an amazing show.

The beginning of this week wasn’t so amazing after that. I had a good birthday and birthday dinner, but after that I studied for my ECE 290 exam. The exam was Tuesday night, during the Ben Folds concert at Foellinger that I had to miss. So that pissed me off. Then I spent about three and a half hours debugging my code. I didn’t finish. I started debugging again Wednesday at 2:30 in the afternoon. I gave up at 9:45 and turned it in before the 10:00 deadline. I don’t know what the problem was. It passed all but one of the tests I threw at it, but I couldn’t isolate the issue to save my life. So yeah. There’s that.

Last night I was finally introduced to How I Met Your Mother. It’s a pretty excellent comedic show. I still hold The Office as my favorite, but HIMYM is actually a contender for tying with Scrubs for second I think. I don’t know where Grey’s Anatomy fits in on my scale of favorites anymore, but since it’s a drama I’ll say it’s in another category so I don’t have to deal with it. :)

Comments (0)