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