fredart : blogbits

First off, i should let you all know that the table repair for the Megatokyo forums IS in progress, and hopefully things will be back up and running tonight. Of course, we still need to dig in and find out what is wrong and work to fix that (which will probably mean some more downtime at some point) but with some luck we can attain some semblance of stability with the MT forums.

Oh, and as for the MGS:4 joke today… it was a natural. I feel kinda bad that we are all making fun of the slightly older, more mature Solid Snake. I mean, he’s still cool, right? Him chomping on a cigarette cracks me up. The mustache has got to go tho (shudder).

Had an odd revelation today, and found out about something i’ve been wondering about for years. I think it was back in 1999 that i connected to my first shoutcast station and started to discover some of the musical genres that up to that time i had had little exposure to. One of my favorite stations was Afternoon Nap (which was defunct for a long time but now i see is now back up again! (adds to playlist)) I really like Downtempo stuff, and the balance of things you will find between what is considered ‘downtempo’ and ‘ambient’ and ‘chill’. As with anything, you develop favorite tracks, and over time you will seek out the artists and the CDs to add to your collection.

MP3 tags are great, but sometimes, especially with tracks that have been around for a long time, they don’t contain a lot of info. One particularly quiet and moody track that i have always liked was one called ‘Trucker.mp3′. On many occasions i’ve tried to dig up just who the hell did this track and what CD it might be on. As you can imagine, searching for ‘trucker’ on google didn’t lead to much, nor did combining it with tags like ‘ambient’ or ‘mp3′ or ‘fredreallylikesthisone’. I had little choice but to just be happy to hear it when it came up in rotation on Drone Zone.

Imagine my surprise today when ‘trucker’ started playing, and when i glanced down to look at the itunes window:

Terre Thaemlitz - Trucker

Several years of wondering finally solved by the simple act of Drone Zone adding the right mp3 tag to a tune i’ve been listening to for years. Obviously, with the artists name it was pretty easy to find out more information about the artist, the track itself, and what CD it was on - Soil

Of course, my hopes were kinda dashed when i went poking around to see if i could find this CD anywhere… nope. Nothing on ebay, and none available from anyone on Amazon.com. There’s still hope, of course. Now that i know what CD it is on, i can keep an eye out for it, and over time who knows? Might actually be able to listen to ‘trucker’ whenever i want to.

- pirotunes: Drome - Age of Affordable Retina -

This drawing doesn’t really feel all that risque, but i guess it has elements to it that would make it such. Once again, just one of the random drawings that i produced in my week of being laptop-less. I’ve been toying with saeko’s character design and things about here because much like many of my other female chracters, i’m finding that i’m having trouble ‘finding’ her, and this is just one of the drawings that is going into that process of ‘looking’ for her. I barely touched up this drawing (just some spine shadow on the left side) and left the texture of the pad in the drawing. I kinda like the rough, sketchbook feel of this one.

click here to view the sketch.

Got a call from the Apple store last night… Hikari is back, fixed and ready for me to pick up. yay! Now i just need to head out to Novi and pick her up. I’ll have you know that i chose to finish Friday’s comic rather than pick her up last night. Just so you know.

It’s been a weird week. I started the week with a ‘this week is going to be better than last week’ attitude, which of course just led to more things going wrong Ah well, all you can do is sit and look at it all with some semblance of humor. I suppose the thing that really put the biggest gloom over my was worries about all the folks down in the gulf coast area. I was watching/listening to a live stream of a Houston TV news station while working on the comic yesterday and it was… sobering. As i sit here comfortably, sighing in relief over managing to pull 3 ok comics together this week and thinking about what Sarah and i might do this evening - there are a LOT of people, including many, many of my readers, who are finding life uprooted and all sense of security taken away from them as they brace for the landfall of this massive storm bearing down on them.

When you watch national news, you stort of just roll your eyes and get a little numb to the over sensationalization that seems to be part of the job of news reporters these days, and you just sometimes feel that they are over-reacting or trying to make hay from the ‘big story’, desperately just trying to fill in the 24 hrs of coverage with whatever they can get thier hands on… coverage that is tuned to a national audience not directly effected by the storm.

Watching the local news is different. Listen to the raw feed of people calling concerned about where they should run to, or scared because it’s taken 8 hours to go 10 miles and they are worried about being stuck in their car in the storm, or running out of gas, or having decided to stay and finding themselves suddenly more in the path of the storm than they thought they would be.

thats gets to you.

If you are in the area and will be effected by this storm. Be safe. I think we are all worried about you.

sidenote: the table repair for the MT forums is still going - really hoping that it finishes later today. Going to be moving to add the 2nd server to the mix in a few weeks so we can try to prevent this from happening again. Also, the RSS feed for the this blog was borked because of some problems with the way Movable Type was coding the japanese in one of my recent blogs. Now looking into fixing it, if i can.

- pirotunes: Gel-Sol - Few And Far Between -

Good grief, what is it with this month? I seem to be surrounded by equipment and software dumps. My Laptop is in for repairs, the forums wen’t plowie (needs a table repair which based on experience can take over two days to process) i can’t remember what i changed a password too recently and for the life of me i am gonna turn off auto fill so never have to do it again…

yeah, it’s been that kind of week. The comics this week have come out ok. They’re kind of awkward, and they have more to do with setup than me trying to zing people with story bombshells. As the pieces of Megatokyo have come together over the past few years, i’ve had odd gaps in things that are quite breach-able, but… they require some finesse to get them to the point i want them to be. These past two comics really gave me a headache, hopefully now that some of the issues covered in them can be put down to either groundwork red herrings, they are there

Have i mentioned that i feel… severely handicapped without my laptop?

Well, it could be worse. From a weather standpoint I am glad that we live in the relatively boring weather state of Michigan. All you folks down in the gulf coast region stay safe. (I’ve already been asked, but it’s worth mentioning… Megatokyo’s servers are in Texas, but they are in Dallas. Unless there is a 700 foot storm surge, Makoto, Nayuki, Saki, Natusme, Mai and Sayuri should be fine.)

- pirotunes: Lustmord - Deep Calls to Deep from “Purifying Fire” -

I have to say, it feels kinda weird not always having my laptop with me. Honestly, i never go anywhere without my 12″ powerbook in my flapdoozy bag (the original one, you know - the one i had before starting Megatokyo, where all the flapdoozy stuff comes from :P) but now Hikari (that is what i named my powerbook - my desktop is Reki, sarah’s laptop is Nemu, etc. :P) seems to have taken her day of flight, and i’m bereft without her…

Ok, it’s not really THAT bad. On sunday sarah and i went up to the Apple store and made use of their ‘Genius Bar” - a pretentious name, but its actually a very smart idea - a couple of techs who look things over and try to help you out with whatever problems you are having with your apple product, and do it is a very casual friendly way. Anyways, after determining that there really was something wrong, it was decided that Hikari needed to be sent in to be given a full going over. Oddly enough, they have a simple flat fee system where you pay a set fee and they fix whatever is wrong with it. Nice. Also, i opted to have them pull the data off the hard drive before sending it, so i don’t loose anything (esp since there are a bunch of things on there from this month that i never backed up). Should have her back in a week.

Till then… wow, its weird not having a computer at home. I’ve opted to not try to use my old Dell laptop - i’m going to try to go analogue for a while. Sit with my sketchbooks rather than my computer. It’s time i started increasing my sketch output anyway. I think better on paper than on the computer anyway.

So maybe this, in an odd way, is a good thing.

- pirotunes: 大谷幸 - Blight from “ハネノネ” -

Ok, major disaster, or at least it feels like it right now. My 12″ powerbook laptop died.

I was working on it last night when it froze solid. This doesn’t happen often, but its a computer, computers do that. The problem here is that it never came back up. It will make the mac start up chime, then the CDrom will cycle, then… nothing. I’ve tried all of the things recommended by apple to try to get a powerbook to start up, but none of them are working. The hard drive isn’t making a sound. I’m left with having to probably take the thing into a mac store to get it fixed… which probably means several weeks without my laptop, AND no access to all of my writing, development notes, scripts and other megatokyo and warmth writing material. Yes, all of it is on my laptop, and my last backup of it is at least a month ago.

I can’t catch any fucking breaks. I really can’t. Everytime i turn around its something else gone boffo. (sigh)

I have to get working on monday’s comic - i can’t let this impact the schedule. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to deal with the problem. I just hope its not a super serious one.

Did i mention how much this sucks?

- pirotunes: John Russell — bp70/32 — lowercase - sound2002 (2002) -

It did something yesterday that it hasn’t done a lot of around here - it rained. It’s raining off and on here this morning, and unlike many parts of the country, it’s kind of a welcome change from the dry weather we’ve been having. Fits my mood for the day, too

Suffering from a real lack of focus this morning. maybe some coffee will help. I hate being an emotively driven person… sure, it helps me do what i do, but damn it can be a bitch to live with sometimes.

Going to go clean up around the house. that’s usually good for clearing the head. I’ll prolly be back a little later. I did some interesting sketches of Saeko last night. Without a doubt, i’m having trouble ‘finding’ her right now… but i’ve had that trouble before with other characters… it just means i need to look harder.

- pirotunes: Sounds From The Ground - Triangle -

Ok, Itunes officially rocks. Well, maybe not rocks, but drones. I was astounded to see Lustmord listed in the Itunes store today… four cds worth! It’s just… bizzare to see stuff from such a specialized genre (dark industrial death ambient drone whateveryouwanttocallit) available for purchase.

To me this is a good thing - these are not disks that are easy to find, except via mail order. I never could see the value in picking up a CD you can just as easily pick up at Best Buy or Wallmart… the real value of something like Itunes is being able to find stuff like this - and buy it. Yeah, there are all sorts of things to worry about with DRM and the long term future of your collection (see previous comments about my Ipod :P) but in general practice, it works well enough for me. Not that i buy a lot, but i’ve picked up a few things that i’m glad to have.

I would guess that for obscure titles that people may come across while exploring, this can be nothing but a new source of revenue for the artists. At least i hope so… often, the more unusual stuff can only be found on mp3s via trades from people who have the odd disk in question. I hate mail ordering CDs… i guess i suffer from the immediacy of want.

Ah… shoutcast and internet radio is the best thing to ever happen to music. I almost never listen to regular radio anymore. You know how you often hear tunes on tv from years ago and no matter how horrible the song was, you tend to know it and could probably sing along? It warms my soul to know that many of the young people growing up today will, if they choose to, can grow up and hear a song that was ‘popular’ when they were young and not even recognize it.

That, to me, rocks.

- pirotunes: Lustmord - Strange Attractor from “Purifying Fire” -

t’s no secret that I rarely answer email. It’s not just the volume of email (though that is part of it, especially since i started doing Megatokyo) but… it’s like i have some kind of mental block about actually *answering* emails. I’ve never really been sure why. Probably just another one of those things that a psychologist would have a field day with.

It also amazes me how much time i can put into dealing with email, yet still never answer anything. Especially in the past year or so. I have spent more time organizing, flagging and sorting email (nevermind the maintenance i have to do to keep the spam filters working properly - a absolute necessity with the spamsurge that tries to make it into my mailbox every day) than i have actually answering email. The biggest part of this problem, is that i never seem to finish organizing, or sorting - I always run out of time and have to move onto more important things. As such, i never hit a ‘level place’, a new starting point to work from.

Yesterday, however, i finally managed it. I stuck it out and got things to a point where i feel satisfied about how things are organized, archives, and i’m ready to move on from here. Will i be better at answering email? Probably not, not really, but i am going to try. It’s really not right that i answer so few, i need to start trying to answer some. I also managed to get advertising straightened out - i had to let some things slide in August, and the catchup there was a nightmare, but i think everything is in place and far more organized than before.

Ugh. Need to go back to t3h factory and finish up inventory, finish uploading new products, and get ready to re-open the store late tonight. Oh, and i have to do a comic too. Joy At least i feel like the comic is in progress again. Nothing i hate more than that ’stuck’ feeling i was suffering from a few weeks ago. I could use not having that feeling for a long time.

On a side note, i have to say one of my fave shows this year is Kamichu. Yes, its an odd choice, but there’s something really nice about it. Like most westerners, most of the stuff about gods goes over my head, but here it doesn’t bother me (unlike Spirited Away which i disliked BECAUSE all the mythological stuff just didn’t do anything for me.) Could be because the story more about the girls than anything.

- pirotunes: Jeff Greinke - “Metal from the Sky” from Cities in Fog (1985) -

If anyone remembers my “i tossed my ipod in the trash” rant a while back, I have an update to the story:

my Ipod still hates me.

The easy thing for me to do would be to just flat out call this device the most troublesome thing i’ve ever owned –but that isn’t really fair to Apple or the Ipod. The truth is i think it has had a defective hard drive since i got it. Once i got past the problems i was having, It worked more or less fine for several few months, enough so that i figured it was ok. Silly me. Recently its started to act up again, and it’s added a twist. Before, it would just crash itself and sometimes lock up my computer (easily fixable with a reboot) but this time it’s started to do something REALLY fun - its causing itunes to cease to function all together on my main desktop computer. ^^;;;

Basically, i tunes would start to load then just freeze, and all you could do was force quit it. I’ve had to re-install itunes twice now just to get it to start running. Crashes are one thing, breaking things so that they stop functioning when the ipod isn’t connected is bad. What this basically means - no plugging my ipod into my computer. Kinda renders it somewhat useless, yknow?

It’s sad, really. I like the thing, I just wish it worked better. Sure i could get it repaired, but that wouldn’t be cheap, and for something that really IS an ‘extra’ for me, i can’t justify it. I just wish I wasn’t one of the poor saps who got a bum one.

On a positive note… when i fixed Itunes yet again today i discovered that apple had FINALLY upgraded the look and feel of it. Finally. The changes are subtle, but they are nice. I used to use Winamp and SexyFont and other funky japanese plug-ins and had many megs worth of winamp skins… ah well, guess it wasn’t bound to last, and it was kind of a funny thing to be into

- pirotunes: KID - In slow zigzag from “想い出にかわる君～Memories Off～ Sound collection” -