Soon everyone'll be callin' me K Rol because of the Amazing Meganame Generator. The high school I went to wasn't Unity anything, it was Lake Region High School. But "Otter Lake Region" is way lamer sounding than "Otter Unity."

Sin City is brilliant. It's like a giant erection that ejaculates cool. Even people disturbed by the violence or questionable nature of it acknowledge it's supreme awesomeness. It is by far one of the best movies I've ever seen. I was nearly moved to tears by the sheer awesomeness of it.

It's beautiful.

Also, my thesis idea is more concrete. It isn't going to be an outright comedy like my previous ventures, but it will still be over-the-top, as perhaps only a zombie-noir can be. I'm quite happy with it right now, Johannes, my advisor, and I nailed down an ending that I think will really make it cool and worthwhile. It's going to be shot in High-Contrast black and white. In all fairness, it's been my idea to do that since before Sin City, but it'll inevitably draw comparisons. Also because it'll be dark and noiry. Anyway, I'm pumped.

OK. So there's this:

I'm really enjoying my drawing class. It's taken the place of a production one quarter this quarter (in which I would make a movie) and I'm easily having just as much fun. It's also been useful for drawing shit! Cool. I think I might take a "Sequential Art" class next year and work on a comic book. Featuring the Zombie character from my thesis.

On to my thesis. I've got a class that meets around 10 on monday and it seems pretty worthless. It'd be better if they just set deadlines and told us we had to have certain things done by then. In a matter of protest (and fun) I've been getting drunk for it. And I don't see that stopping any time soon. I can walk to class and be sober for spanish and 2.

Spanish is going pretty well. Seems like it'll be easier this quarter than last. And we just watched a really interesting movie about some of the atrocities that went on in Argentina. A lot of pregnant women were kidnapped and their babies stolen so they couldn't grow up to become subversive. This started an organization called "Los Madres de la Plaza Mayo." Which we are talking about in my "Women in the Hispanic World" class.

Women in the Hispanic World should be cool. We hang out and talk about stuff. Read about stuff. Eventually we'll write about stuff. Mostly women and the hispanic world.

I'm also in Directing and Sound Recording. Both are fun. I'm directing a scene from The Princess Bride and in sound recording we'll be making the soundscape for a photograph. Should be fun.

Also, the proprieter of Slumbering Lungfish and Lore Brand Comics has been sick for a rather long time and not updated. I hope he gets well soon. I need a fix.

All right. I've created a new blog to link to for tests and quizzes and results and things so this one does not get so bogged down (maybe even blogged down?) with crappy images and changing font sizes. In that spirit, here is Procrastination is like Masturbation

Dance the night away by karchan85
Name
What you Look like
The Music	The Music in your Head
Quiz created with MemeGen!

I have two ideas that I am pretty pumped about. Both are movie ideas. One is potentially feature length, t'other is closer to a thesis length, I think.

Thesis one: A man discovers a body. But it turns out the body is not dead. Biologically it should be, but the brain is fine. The body is decaying rapidly, though, and it can't communicate effectively. That coupled with how it looks immediately gives people the wrong impression. The Man and the Corpse try to figure out how the corpse was killed together.

Feature: A love triangle sort of thing. A woman is deeply in love with her husband. But he dies and comes back as a zombie. She tries to keep him but eventually loses control of him and he kills someone. She tries to cover it up, then gets her friend to investigate it. Her friend, of course, is deeply in love with her. So even though he figures out that the husband was responsible for it, he helps to cover it up because he's a sucker. Of course, by the time he figures it out she's been bitten and zombified. And she is finally his for good.

Yeah. I'm stoked.

Alright. So the quarter's over. But here's a story about my project.

The night before I was to hand in my project to the screenings committee, the people who need my project so they can show it to the school so I don't fail, I accidentally deleted 93% of my project.

It sucked.

Don't ask how, it just happened. So, I recaptured everything. I tried my best to get it to them the next day, but there was terrible video intereference in my export. So I tried the next day, but I got a bad deck for transferring and all my sound sucked. Sucked balls. But then the next day I got it taken care of.

Then I screened.

My screening was less than successful. I got two comments. One was "I liked your credit sequence" which, while nice, is useless. The other was "I didn't get the rhyming." What the hell am I supposed to say to that? There's nothing to get. It just is, for christ's sake. Bleh. I was upset.

Then I went to florida and chilled in the keys. Which was wonderful. I read four and a half books and spent some quality time in hot tubs and snorkeling.

Then I came back and this quarter started and it seems that it'll be fairly sweet.

Crazy Math

Been workin' out the numbers. I've slept for fifteen hours since 2 PM sunday. Hell, lets throw in another hour for all the times i've just sorta passed out in my chair.

But it's almost over.

An excerpt from a paper I'm writing about the absence of Latinos in the American Literary Canon:

"A book has a small self-selected, educated audience. A TV program is now a common cultural experience. People are engrossed in it. It transforms the would be reader into the aliterati, the willfull illiterates. It’s not that they can’t read, it’s that they don’t. The aliterati almost have no control over what they watch. Turn on the TV, plunk down, let the guys who pick the programming feed the brain. The market for books is dying."

I'm so goddamn proud of myself. Aliterati. I really like that phrase. And it's so true these days. Books have an active following. You have to seek out a book, pick it up and crack that sucker open. A TV just sits there, and then you do. And there ensues a one-sided conversation.

But people don't go home from work and read. You know it used to be a family activity to sit around while someone read a book aloud? I like this idea, I like the interaction it automatically provokes. I like the involvement it requires of both the reader and the audience. Hearing some sentences read alound is a truly wonderful thing.

To be fair, it's an entirely different medium from television. TV isn't without it's merits, but I think it is easier for it to be mindless. Something about it cottons to the base, the bottom, the lowest ranks of culture.

Aliterati refers to people who don't read print. Everyone reads their email and so on. I guess certain online resources fall into this category. Online encyclopedias, newspapers etc. If you read one of these it helps keep you out of the aliterati. People who don't seek out reading.

That's all I have to say about this. I wonder what's on...

It is technically saturday, february 12. But I'm mostly talking about activities of the 11th.


I woke up at Tristyn's today, drove to my apartment by 12:15 and had to hang out until one or so to meet Joe at the cage and start setting up for our ADR session in the evening. I had class at two, so I sprinted home for 1:40, hopped in the shower and was back out the door by five of. I had class until three thirty or so, but I had to rescue Paul and Co. who were locked out of his car. I was in the apartment for maybe one minute to pick up his extra car key. Back home by four. Out again at 4:30. I head to building 7 and help set up ADR equipment and get things under way. We have technical difficulty after technical difficulty and throughout the course of the evening I wind up buying a fifty foot S-Video cable and a 50 balanced 1/4 inch cable and various adapters. From super helpful people at Applied Audio. Top notch store, aces all around. I swing by home for another five minutes around 6 PM or so to check for adapters of various sorts. And that's it, the last time I'm home until five o'clock.

But here's the thing, I enjoyed it. I'm worn out and exhausted and wish my movie were done with, but I'm having fun with it. I like working out the kinks, I like some of this technical stuff and most of all I like seeing it all come together and, more importantly, making it all come together.

It's a tremendous sense of accomplishment to see this project through. I have been at the front of nearly every aspect of my movie and when the parts connect, and this will sound silly, it's like there are little pieces of me coming together, too.

I know, I know. It's crazy, you say. "Krister! It's 5:36 AM! That's the sleep deprivation talking."

But I love it.

And other people are going to get to enjoy (hopefully) my movie. I'll put headache-inducing brainstorms, all night ADRing and non-stop editing together. I'll string hastily shot scenes with well planned segments and I'll make it work and people will laugh and I will be happy.

Hell, I'll be happy if people throw eggs and shit on me. I made this fucker. This is getting done, it's me doing it.

I'm happy.

I wasn't permanently banned.