Thursday, February 29, 2024

Getting in on that Book Club Convo

For Christmas we started a family book club, and the first book up was Boundaries: When to Say Yes How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. I was at dress rehearsal for Fiddler on the Roof during the discussion on it so I missed that! So I figured I should make this month's blog post about it!

December's post, "ambition, obligation, followthrough," is about how I do many a thing I do because I feel obligated to do it, which is fitting to bring up again given the subject matter of the book. The central metaphor of the blogpost is the final couple of episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Third Impact, which is funny, because Boundaries is a very Evangelion book. Christianity aside, even (all the Christian images in Eva are just because Japanese people think it's cool and exotic.) 

The Third Impact (the first impact was the creation of the moon and the second impact was the awakening of Adam) is the dissolution of human boundaries, causing all human beings' souls to essentially merge into one as we evolve into the final Angel. The Angels (an advanced alien species who are also the progenitors of humans) shield themselves with forcefields called AT Fields, which it turns out that humans also have: Absolute Terror is that which keeps us separate as beings and prevents us from intimacy. The Hedgehog's Dilemma. The evolution of our understanding of boundaries as an infant, growing up and realizing that our mother is not ourself but another, is an important philosophical theme that gets discussed in these episodes, and is talked about in Boundaries the book.

But anyway, like, I don't know what they discussed during the discussion, but I guess I should talk about my actual takeaways here though, like, what did I learn here, if I do things only because I feel obligated, how do I set boundaries for myself there? When I'm already okay saying no to doing things I don't feel obligated to do? Do I have a choice on what I feel obligated on and what I don't? I'm not sure the answer to that. Maybe it's possible to get finer toothed with it, tease out parts of tasks that I do feel obligated on and separate them from others?

I'm certain yes, but that leaves me uncertain of where to go from there: for example, I feel it would be better to write more to this post, better still to have something to say on the book, better still to have more personal takeaways, but I only feel an obligation for the first few things. There is plenty I'd love to say no to, but still feel an obligation towards, so maybe this idea of drilling down on which aspects I feel that obligation about and why can be a takeaway, even if it's not something that the book is even about.

Another thing that just sprang to mind after I hit publish on this: prioritization! Today I felt "obligated" to make a blog post, do rehearsals, get in some final updates to my monthly journal, catch some films before they leave streaming, finish up my brown-tagged graphics on my video project. Overcoming an illness, however, and sleeping fifteen hours today (and about to go to bed early right now) I prioritized doing this blogpost apparently. And rehearsals. And Duolingo; I'm out of streak freezes. As nice as it would have been to work on my video project today, getting my brown-tagging in by the end of the month (premiere date May 4 2024!) I can't feel the roof of my mouth, so, my health has always been more of a priority than working on the project, even when I'm doing serious crunching I've always gotten in at least seven hours of sleep.

Saturday, January 13, 2024

Of Negative Tests and Workloads

If you read my WordPress blog you'd know that a.) I tested positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago and b.) I've been watching a lot of Lindsay Ellis videos lately, kinda. I still have all of "loose canon" to get through, those videos are relatively short but there's a lot of 'em, and AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER IT'S REALLY BOTHERING ME HOW THE SINGLE AND DOUBLE QUOTES ARE ACTUALLY JUST FOOT AND INCH MARKS you don't see these kind of shenanigans on WordPress, I grew complacent or something.

‘“”’ see isn’t that refreshing. I mean it’s not "incorrect" to use "straight marks" necessarily, or even at all, they’re just forms of quotation marks, it’s not like programs that convert ASCII-style marks like that to their curly brethren are 100% accurate in their automatic doing so, but (is that why it)’s bothering me so much because the " marks look like a positive COVID result
So I figured I’d get a post in today, while it’s still the day that I’ve tested negative (for the first time in my life actually, I think. I hadn’t actually taken a COVID test (I don’t think) until that first one on Jan 1, which read | |, which = +.) Here’s the thing- I was kind of getting used to having COVID. I was getting used to never leaving the house and barely even leaving my room. I was especially getting used to not having to go to work.

One year ago, from the very beginning of April to the last week in June, I took what was initially supposed to be one month off, which spiraled into almost three-- working on my project, my 9-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube project. (urgh and it’s doing a double en dash instead of a single em dash)

Initially the plan was to work on that project last Tuesday, from even before I would turn out spending the day in quarantine: it’s a vlog of 2 January, and so last year for a chunk there the idea was that it would come out 2 January, albeit a few years on. The idea before that had been 4 May, and that’s the idea again, but the current draft is labeled the 2 January draft- so, you figure, January 2nd would be an excellent time to finish a draft labeled January 2nd. But.

all- of- my- notes

whichI’dbeengoingtocompile

in the, it’s fine it’s fine, draft,

all my notes that I’d taken over no less than three separate occasions last year watching through the entire almost-10-hour-video and taking notes, those notes are in my personal planner: which, thing number c.) because I also talked about it in my WordPress blog, it’s all in my personal planner for last year, and said planner is ???, might as well be at the bottom of the sea, lost it somewhere a few weeks ago and I’m at a total loss as to where.

So I couldn’t actually work on the draft on the day I’d been planning on it. And for an entire week, a little over, I couldn’t even put in any editing work in the places I knew were already working but could just use some footage going on in the background, because it was like, nooo, it needs to be done in the correct order. In my brain.

So last week I spent watching... (...grabbing my personal planner for this year and looking through it) westerns, and Real Steel, and the Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 director’s commentary, and a double feature of Titanic and Birdman of all things, and rewatching Jurassic Park and Glass Onion. And a bunch of Lindsay Ellis videos. And reading a bunch too. But no working on my project! Except for to, mask up occasionally and upend a bunch of furniture in search of my dang At-A-Glance!

But halfway into this week I could finally start working on my project again, At-A-Glance or no. Did that for a full day, only pausing to film for a different project while the lighting was good, and to catch the latest Folding Ideas video which had come out within the past 24 hours. Mostly working on my project though. Editing, but also making the adjustments to the script that I remembered at least needed to be made. That was Thursday. And yesterday...

Yesterday I took a break for, not the entire day but it felt like it was going to be.

Tim Rogers’ Action Button Reviews is a YouTube series I take great inspiration from whether I want to or not, where he talks ostensibly about video games but really about everything; the shortest episode is over three hours long, and he bleeds for that time, through each and every video. He’s on season two right now, but the finale of season one is a multi-part choose-your-own-adventure playlist where he talks about Cyberpunk 2077: a game pretty good for something made entirely of problems. There are eight parts to the review: an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion; the idea is that you open, choose two of the internal six chapters to watch, before reaching the conclusion. (If you watch all eight chapters the whole thing is even longer than my own 9-hour-twentysomething-minute video, but that’s proscribed. And so instead you watch through it three times, which takes a little over four hours longer.) I’d already watched through it twice before, and so yesterday I began (and today I finished) the path where I could sweep up the final two chapters I had not yet gotten to. I’d forgotten how much Tim Rogers bleeds for that time.

I also watched a Lindsay Ellis livestream she did with a bunch of her YouTube cocreators (her cocreators! thing number d.)), on Nebula (though it is on YouTube, just unlisted (you can get to it through a playlist though.)) It’s about persona, the identity these creators, semi-public figures, craft to present themselves as on the internet. It was also pretty raw, and contextualized a lot of stuff I hadn't even realized lacked context beforehand.

So there was, time, for introspection on a lot of stuff, why exactly (for the millionth time it feels like sometimes) I feel like this video needs to exist in the world, why I need to make video at all. Last night I dreamt I was starting up a new channel, and had a good workflow and a solid first video guaranteed to be a hit and generate a lot of views (maybe even some ad revenue.) And I’d just started, but I felt like I could reliably put out one video every two weeks- and my agent (?) was thus all, great, you’re going to need to do two videos every one week. And I had my passion project video which it would take two weeks to do, but I had one day before I needed to put out a new video, and no matter what I decided to do it was a compromise, and I was waking up on a morning where I would need to do an entire video from conception to publication in one day.

But I actually did do work on the video yesterday.

Five sections, not counting interludes, each section taking place in four segments, that's twenty segments in total. Of those twenty, I have one that’s basically finished (just need to shoot a five-second bit of footage) and one that’s let’s say half-finished (there’s a text I quote extensively from and I need to make it visually interesting somehow, but the rest of the segment is 100% done.) I’ll plug in an hour’s worth of work and I’ll wind up with twenty seconds of footage in the background, of a nine-hour video: but those are some handsome twenty seconds.

All this is to say, in between the introspection and the editing and the fact that I’m used to not having to go into work, and the fact that Tim Rogers did seventeen consecutive 20-hour workdays in a row to edit the masterpiece that is his 5:56:26 Tokimeki Memorial video (bleeds)(I'm not sure of course how comparable it is putting together video game footage and putting together movie footage)* and that I want some bleedtime before the May 4th deadline, and also I’ll have Fiddler rehearsals again for the next two months... I really really want to do that again, just for this month, taking time off of work so that I can work on the video. 

But also I’m afraid it’s just going to look like I’m chickening out of working outside because of the weather.

*To compound the question of how relevant this is, but to explain the relevance at all: by the time I reached the end of June being off of work for those three months, my editing pace was sluggish. I felt uninspired, felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, and was working on the project less time per day than I worked while I was still holding down a steady job. There was no reason anymore to miss out on my job, which I genuinely love. Now, however, I’m feeling genuinely inspired to edit again. But sometimes there’s a (visual) metaphor you can achieve using video game footage that you shot, that you just can’t achieve with footage from the movie you’re talking about.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

ambition, obligation, followthrough

(experimenting with formatting, it kinda just feels right)

「because people tell me to」

  1.  obligations for 2024
  2. 2024 campaign
  3. book club
  4. fiddler on the roof
  5. Watching Every Cats and (Sequel Trilogy) Star Wars in One Day: A Vlog and Also a Video Essay


why do we do the things we do: a question I've been asking myself for years. (like Shinji Ikari (going there!) being confronted with the question of his own motivations for doing things in the final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion)


it's a question that I've had to confront head-on a couple of times this year, managing to sort of glance off it both times- going in consulting with a few friends on my script for WECa(ST)SWiOD Aaron asked me (and I'd been asking why the audience should care, and I'd been asking what my central thesis even was, and both these questions were circling around it but also glancing off of it) why I even decided to start the project in the first place, why I decided to vlog so much on that initial day knowing that I'd be making it a project to begin with, and I only sort of had an answer; auditioning for Fiddler and filling out the cast role questionnaire where it asked why I even wanted to audition or be in the show in the first place, which totally took me aback because it's not a question I'd ever thought to ask myself, and I only sort of had an answer.

 i feel obligated i guess. 

I realized today, chafing against being told to do something I already felt obligated to do, that I just,, feel,,, obligated. I'm not sure what's deeper than that, but at least we've uncovered that.


The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault...


My obligations list for 2024 seems somewhat ambitious, in some regards. Shifting a gear, unsure if it connects to previous thoughts, but a thought nonetheless I've realized recently. (going back in my YouTube history to find what triggered this realization, it's from ym birthday, I happened to watch on my birthday.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5byfi2JVdo about a vdeio game that was promised and Kickstarted and was ambitious but never came to fruition, because the ambition was just ambition, and anyone can be ambitious. you can have all th' ambition in the world but it means nothing if you lack followthrough. 

AMBITION IS NOTHING WITHOUT FOLLOWTHROUGH

A couple of lessons taking into the new year- is the followthrough just something I do because I feel obligated to that also, I don't know.

Saturday, November 25, 2023

The Mildly Strange Tale of What's Going on with My Computer's Power Supply Unit

Alright so the computer crashing at the end of last month turned out to be a false alarm (¿mixed metaphor? it wasn't an  "alarm," so just, like, well it wasn't really a crash anyway) and when we zooted the computer by the shop it came on just fine, booted up as if it had never lost power to begin with. I didn't have to pay for anything: the guy took a look at my power supply unit, and was like, well what the heck that's very smoll, and called someone else in like hey check it out and she was like, well what the heck that's very smoll. So.

My power supply is an L500EPM-00, which is giving my computer 500 watts of electricity to, work with or eat or however 'lectricity works- that's a proprietary power source and I can't find an exact equivalent for my build on the Dell website's Batteries and Adapters Parts and Upgrades page, but the power supply for the XPS 8930 (when I've got an 8940) offers up 850 watts and I can find a few Alienware models on there that need 1000 watt power supplies; doing a little poking, XPS 8940 can ship with a 1000-watt power source or a 750-watt one (all of those numbers being higher than 500!) and like the the the L500EPM-00 is not something the XPS 8940 even ships with! (There is a bronze-rated 450 volt XPS 8940 option though?)

So what's going on? I'm not positive on this but here's what must have happened, I Think: back in December of last year, when the poor computer's poor heart gave out and everything fried, I took it to this other place, Nevada Computer Works, before I took it to Comp-U-Build. They must have been the ones to get me the new power supply unit (PSU!). They had a proprietary Dell PSU lying around, which is not something they had at Comp-U-Build (CUB!), and could plop that in, even if it was a little weaker than the last one; any was better than none. Probably. I say I Think it's how that happened because the computer was taken to CUB a few days after that because the power-doesn't-seem-to-be-working-at-home-but-it's-actually-fine-and-just-on-my-end-try-plugging-it-in-somewhere-else-maybe? thing happened at that point too, guess we figured out why that keeps happening, but they didn't mention anything about the comically underpowered PSU then, when it seems pretty instrumental. But the L500 would have been in by that point anyway, either from being built like that in the first place for some reason, or from Nevada Computer Works. So.

Either way it's left me paranoid about working on my computer, all month. 500 watts with my high-end graphics card... well let's just say it's a good thing that I haven't had a chance to do any gaming yet, aside from a few 8- and 16-bit games from Steam and elsewhere. (Apparently editing video doesn't actually require much video card? counterintuitive, but, thank goodness for that nonetheless.) 

When the computer seemed kaput at the end of last month I promised myself that if my files survived, I would do immediate backup and create redundancies and everything, so we could finally bring my project to land. "Immediately" took until today, I guess! Because of the paranoia, yeas, and because of the complexity of what making backups of my data actually entailed: thousands of files representing hundreds of gigabytes of data, spread out over three external hard drives, one external SD card and the internal RAM drive. I'm not even entirely finished yet! I just started this post to give me something to do while some files were migrating. And now I'm finished with the post. And I still have work to do.


...
oh! and I said that I'd use this month to do some like, editing on NaNoWriMo projects? Yeaaah so I've barely done any of that. Because of the paranoia. And now that I don't have to be paranoid anymore, after finishing off this last bit of file backup? I can work on my Very Ongoing Project instead. It was a self-defeating idea really.

AND ALRIGHT just finished backup of the final thing, updating the redundancy folder I created seven months ago (to the day, it turns out.) Now to create multiple redundancies... and this part is less obvious, because ideally that would mean on a separate drive from the one I created the first backup on, but it's the only one I have with enough space for everything (more than a quarter of a terabyte!) 

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Here We See the Rather Long Hallway

Let's begin by moving inwardly, toward the source. Without: an ordinary warehouse, one of any number in the warehouse district; within: the edifice, wide and low, resolves itself as mostly empty. Not terribly unusual by itself, but it's to that which keeps the building from total abandonment that we turn our attention. 

The sole inhabitant of the interior would vary, of course, from warehouse to warehouse: a single segment of hallway, perhaps, a section of a room. A vestibule mostly open, lacking one or more of its expected walls. From an observer on the ground, it would look like a wedge of somewhere else transported into the middle of the warehouse floor, not a place, but a fraction of a place. A sliver of a metro station, a part of a gallery, a fragment of a shopping center. Not an entire corridor, but a moiety of one, starting and stopping abruptly, the edges of wall and flooring cutting off along a very specific angle. Because across from this set, where the angles converge, is a pole sticking out of the earth, a precisely aimed camera perched atop. 

There is no portion of set that does not exist within the camera's vision. From the camera feed: an ordinary location; from the ground, the set itself: the portions of the walls invisible to the camera remain not so much as painted, the floor untiled, uncarpeted. In some cases, the invisible portions of walls are nonexistent entirely: if the camera looks out across a gallery festooned with a colonnade, for example, the wall sections blocked by the pillars from the camera's view would remain unconstructed, so from the ground it appears a curious set of double columns.

And here acts as our spoke from which to move outward again, and back inward to another place. The camera in the corner of each of these sets, at each of these warehouses, feeds toward the center, the art instillation at the contemporary gallery in London that links each of these video casts from each of these sets at each of these warehouses around the world- the juxtaposition and assembly of these feeds creating spaces that never were. For each of these sets are replicas of one another: they replicate one another, but not duplicate each other, each playing the role of a different corner of the same fictional room, not one contiguous space, but the illusion thereof. Each feed streamed back to the instillation at the art gallery in London, locations all around the world all playing a small part at creating the illusion of one location. What does such a work say? What anxieties does such a piece reflect? Exploring the boundaries of theatre and fiction, of three men making a tiger, of the sliding scale of privacy and security under the surveillance state. 

Which theme brings us to the final external internality: the art instillation would probably be impressive enough viewed at night, consisting of just the locations themselves, reflect a massive coordination of infrastructure to capture a fake location made of real locations scattered among the globe, but the artist went a step beyond. The central art exhibit is in London, which is one of the most modern cities in the world, but also one of the most surveilled cities as well by far. It is estimated that there is one camera to every fourteen residents in the city of London. Instead of these partial hallways being empty spaces, this ratio of people to cameras is replicated in the art instillation, at each participating location.

From all over the world, fourteen actors per location were carefully cast not only for specificity in bodily proportions (that they be able to pass as one another) but also their sense of timing and bodily control (that they be able to replicate precisely one another's motions.) A figure onscreen walks down the corridor, passing into blindspots sometimes, but more frequently being recorded from more than one angle at a time: these actor-models have trained hard to go through precise motions as each's fictional counterpart, each's wandering figure, gets caught on more than one camera. Stepping, turning, speeding up, slowing down. Even the tiniest hiccough in a person's step is a carefully choreographed dance. 

If at the exhibit, hallways lined with monitors, it would cross one's mind to question how many filmsets are running concurrently, it would be tempting to think that there would be at least one set would have more than one camera; such options would be set to rest as each set breaks differently, as the possible meaning of the piece spirals out: a commentary on resistance? on free will? a commentary on the expansion of potential meanings itself? For the question would cross one's mind beforehand, would one alteration in routine between the camera feeds break the immersion? Would differences stick out and be noticed immediately by the patternseeking parts of our brains, or rather would the compounding of evidence elsewhere on all the other feeds add up to erase the microdistinctions between performances? How much compounding of change would it take to shatter the illusion entirely? If each angle held one distinction from the others, would it read as a contiguous space still? Thus, the performers break and reform, engaging in these bending and stretching of the immersion as experiments and as freeform acting exercises, and, as it crosses the mind of the gallerygoer watching this that this last exercise is entirely a step too far, that even the merest deliberate difference would break the central artistic metaphor entirely, no sooner had one thought this than the models snap back into synchronicity as if nothing had happened. Which raises themes of its own: the uncertainty of evidence and reality even in an industrialized setting, the ambiguity of the past when it's only accessible through the present, and, perhaps musing on the too-convenient timing of it all, the surveiller becoming the surveilled.

Because it's here that the audience member notices a security camera on a pole, where the other wall would be: in theatre it's called a fourth wall, but in a hallway, in any hallway of any length, there are only two walls, and so the audience would lie beyond the second. And it's here that you perhaps feel the movement of your own counterparts, people you've never met performing your same routine in portions of sections built in warehouses all over the world, in front of banks of monitors perhaps the same feed you're receiving, but perhaps receiving a suite of camera feeds all on their own, each of them. And if one were to turn a corner and to see a portion of the set that one had not before seen, that the set continues unobserved, would one find that odd, when one had gone one's whole life thinking it normal? And if one were to walk down this hall in pre-rehearsed rhythm, as the banks of monitors dimmed as their pictures fuzzed and grayed as they started showing feeds of feeds of feeds. And the hallways stretched out so far, and so far, and on both sides now, and all four sides now, and if the hallways continued to dim and dim, the glows of the monitors not enough to see by, and if one were moving by prerehearsed movement now, pressing forward by strength of muscle memory of all that practice, would even a break for a freeform release from the choreography be enough to escape? And if, as you started walking faster now, the cameras got closer to you as the hallway narrowed, and were spaced closer together in the hallway as the hallway shrunk, and the replicated segment of hallway accordioned in on itself, and if the lights dimmed completely now and all you saw out of the corners of your eyes are those dim red recording lights with the purple veins floating around them in the dark, and if you felt hot breath down the back of your neck just as you felt a neck right there in front of your own breathing, as you exhaled and inhaled in time with the exhalations and inhalations in front and behind you, and if, pressing ever forward into the shrinking and shrinking hallway, you reached forward and brushed the back of someone's head just as you felt fingers caressing the back of your own scalp, would that finally erase the identity between the observer and the observed? 

Because the figure on the monitor now slows down, and lowers their hand, and stops at the end of the hallway, and turns around. And discovers that the hallway wasn't nearly that long at all, wasn't nearly that long at all.

Monday, October 30, 2023

Spooky Story 2023

Yesterday I read through all my published Halloween stories so far and it was pretty wild! (I can see why my entry for Machine of Death Vol 2 was rejected... it does get good, by the end; maybe just chop off the entire first part I don't know.) They're all, in fact, far from perfect; Midnight Cat of Rustling Leaves is probably the best, and that's got some weird jank to it itself, where it takes a sudden swerve into comedy as the segue into introducing the titular feline. Funny House is pretty good, if you can see past the massive massive extent it wears its influences on its sleeve (The Machinist, Candle Cove.) 

I bring all this up to say that a great deal of the jankitiness in a lot of these are artifacts stemming from the very specific imagery that inspired the stories, which I tried to build around or build from or shoehorn in, frequently running out of time to do them elegantly. In many an instance, taken straight from the dream that became the story ($20 is the only amount that isn't infinity dollars.*)

And I bring that up to say that tomorrow's story isn't based off a dream at all! I've been having dreams lately, quite vivid ones, many of them fueled with the specific strain of anxiety that powered what became "the rope slackening in your hand." So like, I could turn them spooky, I guess. But rather not: I like my idea too much.

It's going to be called something along the lines of, Here We See the Rather Long Hallway. It was inspired by watching security camera video, realizing it was an intriguing horror proposition, then taking that idea and making it as un-Five Nights at Freddy's as possible upon realizing that security camera video horror from the perspective of the viewer has already been done- and is in fact a major motion picture in cinemas now.

*BED SHEET has a very weird racial imaginary, and I find it utterly baffling that we didn't really go anywhere with the young Black kid in the old plantation-style home: I'm glad BED SHEET wasn't submitted to Machine of Death, I guess.

(Speaking of weird racial imaginary, if I can't work on my Rather Ongoing Project I guess I should spend November Nanowrimoing the revised draft of Anachronominion with all those ideas I said I have...)

Sunday, October 29, 2023

So There Was A Weird Brownout Or Something 12:00 AM Friday...

I've only been doing one post a month this year generally, but since the October tradition seems to be do the Spooky Short Story on the 31st BUT WITH ALSO an introductory post on the 30th explaining my inspirations and everything, I figured I could also do a life update here, and those two things to- and over- morrow! Last year's Spooky Story did not actually get published! That will be rectified shortly!

So I'm writing this on the fantastic craptacular batteryless old MacBook because it looks like my computer, the one on which I'm finishing off my Very Ongoing Project, is kaput again. Won't turn on, and plugging it in anywhere the internal systems briefly whir up before plonking off again. (Like, the fan whirs on and the tiny green light on the back comes on, it thinks for five seconds, and the fan immediately unceremoniously stops whirring, the green light shutting itself off with a "plonk!") But it's been in this situation before, and it's come back from this situation before, so I'm not worried about that- just hopefully the data isn't in the state it had been during aforementioned time, requiring pretty expensive processes to call back from the darkness.

But anyway I guess I'm going to have to write those two other posts this week also on this laptop, meanwhile, which is fine. And move back the date again for the completion of the Very Ongoing Project, if it is to be completed at all by this point. I'd hate to disappoint those people I'd contacted in the course of research and rights management, but, well we'll see what the status is on the computer once we get it looked at, won't we.