The Current State of Everything

The current state of everything.

So, if you are the type of person who is intricately aware of everything that has been going on in my life (IE you subscribe to my Twitter feed, and you listen to all the Desu Rattles) then you may no doubt have guessed that over the past month I’ve sort of been in a kind of juggernaut hellhole of types with a combination of school, life, and really stupid technical problems all conspiring against me.

For those who have not been aware of everything that has been happening let me tell you the story of everything that has been going on. As you may or may not have known I am a University student and as such have recently completed the first semester of my 3rd year. To do so I had to:
- Code 3 different programs within Processing. (Coding language similar to Java)
- Present said programs to my peers.
- Memorize over 50 slides worth of information for an exam, then write the exam.
- write several other exams.
- get enough food and sleep to not kill myself.

and all of this took place within a 3 week time period that ended about a week ago.

Then comes the Garbage story. Instead of retelling said story I will simply link you to the Desu Rattle where I explained the whole thing, as that’s probability a much better way to learn what happened and also I just really don’t feel like writing about it right now.
So with all of that done it brings us to about 4 – 5 days ago. Since that time I wrote a script for a Higurashi review, filmed said script (which took about one and a half times to do) and then attempt to edit into a cohesive video.

Here are the problems I faced. First, with the live action footage. Originally I had planned to film the review in my (now) regular room back in Toronto but due to the aforementioned schoolwork I was unable to film before I left so I decided to improvise and use my room here in Caledon with which I have previously recorded many Vlogs so I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Unfortunately the lighting is very different in my room here, as such it was a real pain in the ass to get anything to the sort of setup that I have in Toronto, and the lighting scheme and everything is…well bad.

So I ended up spending around 2 days working with the live action footage alone, first trying to get the blasted thing recorded with half decent lighting in the first place, then trying to fix everything else in post only doing say about a half assed job at it. Of course also during this time Ive been dragged out numerous times to do proper Christmas shopping with my father, which while necessary, is also time consuming. So then about yesterday sometime I decided to just go with what I had, then drop in some anime footage, render, upload and be done with it…

Then I ran into another problem.

How I like to grab my footage is simple, I play my DVD on my desktop using VLC media player, then use the screen capturing software FRAPS to take it and make it into a video file that I could then edit, the problem came about when I try to play the episodes in VLC.

Because of how the DVD was encoded, it would not let me skip around the episode to find the scenes that I wanted. What this means is that, say I wanted a clip that was about 1 minute long from episode 3, and that one minute was located right before the half-way point of the episode. Because of the crappy encoding I had to WATCH ALL of the episode up to the point I wanted to record and then only have one chance to record it, because if I tried to click and drag the slider to where I wanted to go it would just go back to the beginning, it wouldn’t skip around.
So that added, suddenly, a whole crap ton of more time to this project, and then I came to the boiling point. After actually going through one of the episodes and painstakingly grabbing the footage I needed from it, when I imported it into Sony Vegas, the footage was full of Junk frames.

Junk frames are regular frames of video that are either covered in static, or distorted in some way that makes it un-useable, and if I tried to render the junk frames Vegas would just give me a black screen. So that was fu2n. I promptly raged and then took 30 minutes to get some tea.

When I did eventually get back to my computer I had a look at this review as a whole and basically just decided it wasn’t worth the hassle at this point. The script was written in a night, and wasn’t my best work to be sure, the live action had terrible lighting and just didn’t work out the way I wanted it, and finally the anime footage just didn’t want to cooperate.

So for now the Higurashi review is officially scrapped until later next year sometime.

If you really want to know my opinion on the show, know that it is one of my favorite animes (if I made a Top 10 it most likely would be on it) and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in psychological horror, or just like seeing cute things get murdered horribly.

Currently I’m just in this kind of funk where I really don’t feel motivated to do anything really, as it’s just not enjoyable, and it’s not a position that I want to be in because I really do enjoy making reviews and I don’t want to be in a position where I’m doing them just because I have to, but instead because I WANT to.

The next review will be out whenever it’s done, sometime before I end up going back to Toronto most likely though I’d have to work around all the various family holiday gatherings that I have to attend,.

The review week of awesome is obviously delayed until the New Year, but I figured that would happen from the get go so I’m not too concerned about that at the moment. Though I am considering delaying the RWoA until after The World God Only Knows is released on DVD in January so then I could talk about the dub but at the same time that’s really delaying it…what do you guys think?

So that should be everything, think you to anyone who read through that giant block of text, I’ll try and get proper updates after I get out from under this Funk I’m in, plus when all the family gatherings have passed. Until then though, happy holidays everyone.

Stay frosty.
- Ark

LD;DR
- Higurashi Reveiw is scrapped
- Next review to be released WID
- RWoA scheduled until sometime in January

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