the better part of me

Some quick updates.

I spent the middle of the week up north. I found a cheap hotel deal, so I treated myself in exchange for working so much overtime and cutting my credit card debt in half. (The interest charge for next month is still high though, wtf? I'm starting to suspect shenanigans.) I had some friends over and we made much use of the pool. I also took my mom to a couple of haunted house things. Yes, the Haunted Shack is better than this year's Ship of Ghouls.

I had some time to kill on Thursday so I went to see City of Ember. It was a fun movie, if a bit shallow. I like post-Apocalyptic puzzle-solving stories (yes, even Waterworld), so. The structure and society of Ember were interesting enough all on their own.

Friday, back in the Cities, I went to a local alumni event organized by my college. I normally toss the fliers they send me, but this time the speaker was one of my favorite professors. So I went, and got to catch up with him and his wife, another of my favorites. I exchanged anime with them when I was in school, so I was able to tell them about Detour without getting a confused or pitying response, haha.

Speaking of anime, tonight I finally finished The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi. There were a few episodes I really liked, but on the whole, I still don't understand why everyone's so crazy about this series.

I stopped taking my heart medication. I forgot for two days in a row, and I didn't notice any difference without it, so. I'd never been confident it was making a difference anyway. My doctor, when I had one, had said it was OK to stop taking it if it wasn't helping or I didn't need it anymore, so I'm not worried.

Oh, and my Azumanga Daioh AMV got TOSed off YouTube as well, also from the music end. At least the "Against All Odds" tribute vid is safe; I got a notice a while back that the Cranberries (or their label, at least) had given the official OK for their music to be used in vids. Go, them.

For anyone who might have missed it, I'm doing NaNo. Friend me there if you want.

I just remembered I never posted my new AMV over here. I keep forgetting to upload it to my website and the Org, so it's only on YouTube at the moment, but ta-dah. This is the one I entered in the contest at Anime Festival Orlando. A basic one, no bells and whistles... but I like it. Too little too late, really, but this was one of those cases where I'd wanted to make the video for years and didn't have all the source material I needed until recently.

Well, I didn't get into the Sakura-Con AMV contest and I just found out I didn't get into the Anime Boston AMV contest either. So I think that's it for me and convention AMV contests. I just don't have what it takes. :\

Before anyone gets on me for being emo... I honestly think it's better that I just quit. Some of you have probably heard me say I've hit a wall when it comes to AMVs. I don't know how to improve any further. I can make basic videos that are fun, but I don't have the artistic eye for how to make them better. And I don't have a source of feedback. AMVs aren't like fanfic. You can't make them in a couple of days, send them to a remote friend in ten seconds and make edits in minutes. They take forever to edit and render and exchange, so online help is pretty much out. The few people I've found offline to show my vids to wouldn't give me any feedback. And nobody comments on AMV.org anymore.

So... I'm at an impasse. If "The Bad Crack" had cut the mustard, I would've at least had that as a foundation to stand on, a minor success on which to build. But my best isn't good enough, and I have no idea how to improve. I'm done.

Sooooo here's a long-overdue personal entry.

The giant void in my LJ calendar last week was my five-day run of days off from work. I normally go north during that break, but it was my dad's birthday Friday, so I stayed in town. And wow, did I have a GREAT break. I did a fair amount of lazing around, but amazingly I was actually in a mood to get things done much of the time, so I had a week that was both productive and fun! Yay! :D It was generally one of those weeks that's comfortable and relaxed and makes you happy to be alive. ^___^

Of course, now it's difficult to remember what all I did. Highlights would be seeing Cloverfield again, going on a midnight dessert outing with my sister and a friend of hers who's staying with us for a couple of weeks, and hanging out at pkat and shorinai's place. I may have created some new Mai-HiME fans. :3 On the productive end, I finally got all our Christmas stuff taken down and put away, and got some much-needed cleaning done around the apartment. And on the fandom front, I captured all the needed footage for the AMV I'm going to assemble for mechaboydos.

My AMV to-do list is, unfortunately, scary and long, and most likely in this order.

• Polish up "The Bad Crack" and submit it to Anime Boston and Sakura-Con


• Finish my WTF entry for Anime Detour (I was making two, but now it looks like it'll only be one)


• Throw together the ultimate Sailormoon AMV in time for Anime Boston


• Create mechaboydos's video


• Make... something... for AnimeIowa, after winning the contest last year I can't really skip it this year ^^;;

Somewhere in there, I also need to fix up my cosplay before con season kicks off (in less than two months!). This is gonna be a crazy spring. Oh, and while I'm on the subject of cons, his lordship Chaos asked me to throw my name in for the Sailormoon panel at Anime North, so I did. For the heck of it, I volunteered for the general fanfic panel as well, we'll see if that pans out. Should be interesting.

Friday was my dad's birthday, and I took him and his fiancee and my sister out for a nice dinner at this new Alaska-themed seafood place. Whooee, was that ever expensive. My sister's going to pay me back for a portion of it, but still. @_@ My meal was kind of mediocre, but Dad and his fiancee really enjoyed theirs, so overall it was a win. Unfortunately, Dad's birthday present still hasn't arrived. It's one of Peter S. Beagle's autographed books. I've heard the delivery on those is slow, but I had been hoping it would get here in time. :\

And of course, after I blew all that money on Dad's birthday dinner, I found out my mom got dropped from her temp job and really needs my financial help. Sigh.

Sunday was the Detour staff meeting. I seem to have found a niche as a sort of Ops secretary. I've been taking meeting notes and putting them online (and getting lots of thanks from the out-of-state staff members), and when we made a trip to the storage locker after the meeting I took inventory of the department's supplies. Plus, I've been handling the operating manual and other documents. Yay, I'm making myself useful! I love feeling useful. ^___^ (But OW I just bit the inside of my cheek again I HATE THAT ow ow! Evil Jelly Bellys! ;_;)

I've also found another judge for the new Detour fanfiction contest, and at the meeting pkat and I pitched the CRAZY IDEA OF DOOM that we hit on when I was hanging out at her place on Saturday. Now that the initial shininess has worn off, I'm kind of having second thoughts ^^;; but after seeing how excited Kale got about the idea, I'm not about to back out now. ^^;;;

OOH, I almost forgot to mention! pkat loaned me the Playstation re-releases of my two all-time favorite games, which were originally for the SNES. I can play them on my PS2, but I didn't have a Playstation memory card, so I hit the mall Sunday to try to find one. Of course, places like GameStop don't carry old stuff anymore, but they pointed me to a kiosk on the third floor with tons of old-school games and equipment. Not only did they have the memory card I needed, but they also had the games I had borrowed! So now I am the proud owner of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI! *geeks out* I am so excited by this, it's so dorky. xD But I've only gotten to play these games as ROMs before, and Chrono Trigger wouldn't play all the way through. The Playstation versions have some obnoxious lag points, but I'm so happy to finally be able to play these games as they're meant to be played without having to shell out $60 for rare cartridges. Their 16-bitness is so glorious on my TV. *_* And they came with two other FF games for bonus fun. :D

That about sums things up for now. There's some more I want to ramble about, but that'll have to wait for a flocked post when I'm not at work. >.>

I should've made another chibisenshi comic this week on my days off, and written some more drabbles, but I made AMVs instead. My newest one, a brief Trigun video, can be downloaded from this link. It's up on the AMVs page of my website, too. I might be submitting this one to Anime North's contest, but I still haven't figured out why XP keeps stretching my videos into widescreen.

Perhaps more importantly, I also nearly finished The Big One - the remake of my very first AMV that I've been trying to get done for years. This is "the death video," the one I made in 2002 before I knew any of you guys, during my years outside the Sailormoon fandom. I really loved that AMV but the extremely poor quality of some of the footage was so embarrassing I had to take it down. I finally got the last few DVDs I needed to replace the fansub footage I used, so the other night I spent a few hours reassembling the video from scratch. It looks beautiful, so much nicer than the original! It needs just a bit more tweaking, though, before I make it available for viewing. I've got work now for the next five days but I should be able to get it ready sometime next week.

Oh, I've also got a new fanfic up on the big archives...and an email begging me to add more chapters, even though the fic is just a prose version of a scene taken directly from the anime. -_-;;

Well, I'm back at work again, whee. Thanks for the support and well-wishes over the last few entries, everyone.

To my mixed delight and rage, there is almost no snow in this area whatsoever. A mere hundred miles south of my hometown it is bordering on spring, while I left my hometown buried under over TWO FEET of fresh snow. After all the snowing and scary driving and sliding around, I return south to find there is GRASS here. I'm relieved I won't have to worry about driving in snow anymore, but still. We'd had to cancel the movie night we had planned for Friday because the roads were a nightmare due to the ongoing blizzard. The injustice.

I'd planned to do some writing and programming last week, but I went out and got a new cross-stitch pattern and started that instead over the weekend. After Tuesday night's adventure I just wanted something I could sit quietly and do to keep my hands busy with a minimum of thinking. Danger, though, Will Robinson. It's probably not a good thing for me to be doing this when I've just got a bit of my writing spark back, because if anything's going to pull me off of writing for good, it's going to be a switch to another hobby, which I've been furiously trying to prevent from happening. Cross-stitching could be it if I'm not careful.

My godson's second birthday party was on Saturday. He's two already! ;_; I did the safe and smart thing by ordering him a couple of classic Sesame Street movies, "Follow That Bird" and the old Christmas Eve special. They're old, so nobody else would even consider buying them for him. Heh heh. I got to indulge my nostalgic side while getting him a fun present without worry that someone else would get him the same thing. Plus, it's not a toy (he gets tons of those), and some extra movies will give his mom a break from having to watch "Elmo in Grouchland" 50 times a day. It was a pity they sort of rushed him through opening all his presents, but meh.

It's back to same old same old now. Only a few more day shifts before some time off and then nights again. I need to rush off an AMV entry to my local con, and then make a new one this week for Anime North. *peruses ideas list* What to make, what to make...

I might be making something else for AN, too, but for now that's a secret. :3

Okay, now that I've got my head back on straight after last night's insanity...a real update. I overslept and was late for work today. But it was still worth it. ;D

I finally finished my new AMV, the Sailormoon R-breakup video, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. It could still use some tweaking but there comes a point where you just have to say, "ENOUGH! I'm sick of working on this!" And I am.

Anyway, it'll be properly linked to my website AMV page and AMV.org probably tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, there's a thread about it on ASMR if you just can't wait.

Now that I've finished my new one-shot I'm not sure what to do next. I don't have any new inspirations and I don't feel like working on any of my in-process fics.

And ASMR has just reminded me that NaNoWriMo is just around the corner. Decisions, decisions...