It's no secret that for the past few weeks I have been busy writing the biggest academic paper of my life. At 6,001 words (22 pages), 8 drafts, 15 works cited and 16 works consulted, "The Body Bears the Head: Embodiment, Sensuality and the Formation of Identity in Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself'" is unequivocally my most monumental work of academic writing, to date. Oh, and I have to defend it on Thursday morning. ;)
The bad news is that I have another fifteen-pager due tomorrow, this time on CanLit.
The really bad news is that Robert Sheckley, a beloved 1950s sci-fi writer died at the age of 77.
The not-so-bad news after that is that the Æon Flux (or, should I say, "Æon Sux"?) ;) film sucked donkey balls:
a) It had nothing to do with the original TV series (which is nothing less than a masterpiece); true, they tried to imitate some of the visual conceits, such as the fly in the eye, Scaphandra's four hands (though she was renamed to Sithandra) - and so on - but eye candy (ooh, what an unintentional pun, hehe) does not make a movie.
b) Charlize Theron is not Æon Flux (and that guy is definitely not Trevor Goodchild).
c) Peter Chung had nothing to do with the film.
d) Yes, I'm going to say this: this film was directed by a woman, Karyn Kusama - and a talentless one, to boot. It's a fact: never, in the history of humanity, had a woman directed a good action film. Period.
Some quotes from fellow IMDbers:
The [original] show was a celebration of sponteniety. You never knew what was going to happen next, and at the end of the credits, I always found myself staring in awe at the screen, trying to assmeble [sic] what the *beep* [sic] I had just seen.Of course, IMDb is not without its madmen:
- kels-errificAm I the only one that felt that the editing job on this movie looked like it was done by a first semester film student? The fight scenes were terrible, with no continuity between perspectives in the cuts. [...] This movie could have benefitted from a disjointed editing approach. Instead of an a+b=c plotline, b=c+a, or something [else] would have made this much more interesting to watch.
- greazy_b
another horrible liberal movie that hollywood has produce. This show was weird, an therefore bad, when it was on MTV but the movie was terrible. This movie had an obvious anti-Bush message and was nothing more than liberal propaganda. So, in summary: Aeon Flux---a poo poo movie.I kid you not.
- Hephaistos
To make a short story shorter, I went out and got "The Complete Animated Collection" of Æon Flux, remastered and released on DVD on November 22. I was in bliss. ;)
Other bad news include the fact that the Battlefield 2: Special Forces expansion sucks ass, temporarily requiring over 2.9GB on drive C:, regardless of which drive BF2 was installed on. (The workaround for this is to temporarily redefine the TEMP and TMP folders in Control Panel -> System Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables.) This is all beside the point, however, since I wasn't able to play a single online game since installing the expansion, because I can't even login onto a server.
Finally, just for the record, the conclusion of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - The 2nd GIG" sucked utterly. Shame on you, Mr. Shirow, shame on you.
Well, that's about it. What can I say? I take the bad with the...bad. ;) Don't expect any new poetry posts for a while. I'm still writing, of course, but, needless to say, I'm busy as hell these days. Cheers.
Well, I have never seen the animated show, nor the movie, and I will not EVER plan to see the movie, now, I'm pretty sure.
Battlefield 2 is a great game- from the demo at least. I don't have enough RAM for the full version, though I plan to upgrade up to 2-3 gigs soon, and then go on to four.
Well, something odd happened. This just came up minutes ago, and even through our time difference, it should have been AT LEAST an hour past, unless there was a bug of sorts.
I highly recommend the animated show; it'll fuck with your head. ;)
Well, that's the thing: you're in one timezone (Which one? I'm in GMT -8), I'm in another timezone, the server is in friggin' New York somewhere, and Movable Type, the program running this entire thing, compensates for it by adjusting all the times to my timezone, so no matter when you post, it's all converted to my time.
I could be in New York relatively quick. I know that it is converting crap to your timezone, but I'm saying that when I converted your time of posting this article, it happened at least an hour and a half before I saw it. Look at my other comment time. That's when I first saw the entry, unless it had to do with my cache or somethign. ;) Probably something on my end.
Now I'm so totally confused. Wait, which timezone are you in?
OK, wait. There is a three-hour difference between the west coast and the east coast. If you're not quite in the east but somewhere in between, it makes sense that the server would register that my comment was posted about two hours before you saw it.
Well...it's either that or one of us somehow ripped through the fabric of the time-space continuum. ;)
Maybe. :P
I don't know, I think it was just random, so lets ferget about it. Oh, and I should be in the same timezone as your servers, according to you saying they're in New York. (Unless, there is a peice of New York somewhere in Utah.)
What does Utah have to do with anything? Have I lost my mind entirely? (Mind you, I would have been awake for 24 hours at 10 PM). Bah.
Incidentally, I passed through Utah earlier this year; it was boring.
I absolutely agree an Aeon Sux. Embarrassing. The director must be related to Uwe Boll. But stil Charlize Theron is not the problem here, I think and so I gave another of her movies a shot and watched NORTH COUNTRY and that one was just great.
Meh. You know, I'd really like to fan-edit the film, when I can get my hands on the DVD. Speaking of which, how the hell do you guys preserve the subtitles and soundtracks when editing DVDs? Which program do you use to make your menus?
Creasy was done masterfully. While your take on the story was interesting but a bit hurried, it was much better than the original, and cleverly edited at that. High Tension just freaked me out - that first "blowjob" scene was crazy, hehehe. Keep up the good work.
After my defence of the stupid paper tomorrow, I'll be able to get back to making FanEdited, by the way...finally.
We don't preserve the subtitles. We write them anew. With Creasy this was much work, because some had to be written inside the movie. Writing the subtitles is sometimes quite hard, but the internet is a grea tlittle helper there, offering screenplays for almost every movie ever made.
The soundtrack is tricky patchwork. With High Tension minus one, we just changed the sounds for the scenes we edited and inserted them with the already new sound into our edit and the original soundtrack. This way we were able to keep the three languages.
Which program do we use for our menus: Jasc Paint shop pro 9 for images, Ulead Media Studio Pro 7 for almost all menus. Ulead can work with any number of overlays. For the main menu of Creasy, there were 11 little animated movies running simultaniously and of course we work only with uncompressed avi to avoid qulaity loss as much as possible.
Forgot your e-mail address, but wanted to send you our best anyway. Happy Holidays.
Boon: My respect for your work just doubled. Keep it up!
Raoul: All my info is in the Contact section. Thank you. What were you up to these past few months?