Sisters and Brothers

Don't Worry.

If there's HELL below,
We're all gonna go!

I may go wrong and lose my way

Until this trip I'd never been further west then the Black Hills of South Dakota. Realization that I haven't really done much traveling in my life was one of the reasons I decided to go to FanimeCon in San Jose. I figured I should. So Thursday morning I packed my bag and waited for Ms. Echo to pick me up and take me to the airport. "I sure hope the weather doesn't screw up my flight," I told her.

I checked my bag and got my boarding pass issued with no problems. I was processed through security with no problems. I get to my gate and there's a problem. My flight now boarded some 25 gates from where I was. No problem, I had time to walk to the gate. Problem, it was past boarding time and there was no plane at the new gate. Finally a plane arrives, people disembark. We weren't gonna make it out on the scheduled time. We finally board and leave the gate around noon. Then the storm hits. I spend the next 5 hours belted into a window seat in a plane sitting on the runway. FIVE FREAKING HOURS. I got a good nap in.

After 5 hours the flight crew is in overtime. So we head back to the gate. We get a new flight crew. We are told we can get off the plane if we want to, but we won't get our luggage back. So, I stay on the plane. We finally take off in the storm. 3 and a half hours later we land in Orange County. There is no ticketing agent at the gate, and I've missed my connecting flight by 5 hours. I go to the gate where I was suppose to make my connecting flight. There's a ticket agent taking tickets for a puddle jumper. When he finishes I explain to him what happened. He tells me to get on the puddle jumper because it's headed to San Jose. I get on the plane, my luggage doesn't make the flight.

I get to San Jose and find the Baggage Claim desk and fill out the paper work to have my bag found and sent to the hotel. I have to call Gavv and Dani to figure out which hotel I'm staying at. I'm a bit scattered at this point. But I thought my ordeal was almost over. All I had to do now was catch a shuttle to the hotel.

I wait for an hour for a shuttle. It never shows up. So I call the hotel. They tell me they don't have a shuttle from the airport. I'd have to take a cab. So one cab ride and $20 later I'm there. Gavv is in the lobby with Andrew. I talk with them for a few minutes and then go and check into my room. Getting my key to the room had been the quickest and least painful of anything I'd done all day.

It was 10pm, Pacific Time Zone. I was hungry and tired and without my luggage. But I had a place to sleep. And I was at FanimeCon 2007 in San Jose.

And that was just getting there.

Thor Pencils

Thor Pencils
Originally uploaded by Ape Lad

Maybe inks? Gotta look at the page...

Back from San Jose

DSC00092
Originally uploaded by tohoscope

Getting there sucked and coming back sucked but while I was there I had a damn good time...

In 1 day

Got everything I need, almost. One more load of laundry and at least one more disc to burn and it'll be all done. I'll be ready to go to San Jose. To bad I won't be able to connect with Chad, but maybe some other trip...

In 2 days

Updated the A-Kon HELL raffle tickets. Still haven't made the A-Kon HELL flyers. Hate it when I lock up like this. Busy making discs for Gavv. Need to do laundry tonight for the trip. No sleep 'til San Jose.

In 3 days

Spent the weekend buying new clothes for the trip to San Jose. Spent a good chunk of change doing it, too. But I got some new threads to wear while in Cali. Still need to get some shoes.

Talked to Gavv on Sunday, sounds like we're covered pretty well for HELL. I'm still making discs for Gavv, but it's good. I still need to get discs together for A-KonHELL next week. Ugh. I've got travel nerves, but then I haven't traveled in a while.

Calm down...

Fontz

Playing around with fonts. Impact is suppose to be a safe webfont.

Gotta go to T.J.Maxx and get some shirts and pants for my trip next week. And some shoes, too. Can't forget that.

Gotta get ready for that.

Loaf and Loath

Pinched off a flyer for the FanimeCon show. I'm really bottoming out on the creativity it seems. Of course this makes me all the more frustrated with myself and my lack of ability.

Hellish pursuits

Picked up Bruce and Katie at the airport. They had lots and lots of new ideas for HELL. Some pretty good ideas, too. Bruce suggested a table skirt with the HELL logo on it, I'll have to see if I can afford it. Talk of making postcards, too. It's a good idea. Basicly promotion cards for the shows.

News that we'll be in a panel room and not in the main video room is a bit of a bummer. I've been thinking about starting a petition to get HELL into a bigger room. Maybe I'm just getting too self important about this. Who the hell am I to demand a bigger room?

Found some cheap postcard printing online. A thousand glossy full color 4x6 postcards for forty bucks. Not bad at all. Makes me wanna get to designing flyers. Too bad I can't find cheap flyers. I suck I guess. Time for another order from Sticker Guy, I think.

Friday Nite HELL

Last year it was Saturday night. The year before was Friday night. And this year we're back to Friday night. June 1st. 9pm to Midnight. I think we may be in the main video room because I see that the Rocky Horror kids are on at Midnight. So, maybe. That'd be funny. We'd be the lead in for Rocky twice this year. I'm thinking about digging out the trailer for SHOCK TREATMENT. Heh.

Spent a chunk of the weekend making that DVD of clips for Gavv. I'm probablly gonna put NINJA SQUAD on a separate disc. We'll see how much there is. And I still have to make new discs for the A-Kon 18 show. Hmmm. Gotta go through the Crate O'HELL and clear out the dross and replace the lost. I've done a few clips, but I'm way behind. I may need to re-rip Phil's VHS for the Goji clip. IF I can find that damn tape. Grrr.

You want it when?

I completely failed to make a Central Hellfest flyer for tonight's show. I suck. Better get my head outta my ass now and get the flyers for FanimeCon and Anime North done freakin' yesterday. Oh yeah. AND PROJECT A-KON, TOO!

To do list:
3 flyers.

Go!

Stormy nights

Rough night. More sundown storms. I didn't get a lot of sleep. Stomach really doing a number on me lately. Right now I'm tired and a bit grumpy. Irritated. Which isn't very helpful. I need to get work done. I've got a crapload of stuff that must be done before I go to FanimeCon. And there's Project A-Kon 18 the following weekend. I guess this is the year I start going back to Cons again. At least until I get burnt out, again.

No, I'm sick. The meds aren't keeping me from running to the bathroom. My guts hurt. As soon as I can I'm gonna go home and straight to bed...

Hype it

The new promo copy for AnimeHELL:

Come and celebrate with us the wonders of A/V oddities from all over the world. Witness a maddening assortment of forgotten cartoons, movie trailers, TV commercials, music videos, found footage, ephemeral films and other shorts. SEE spectacles committed to tape that will haunt your dreams! SEE educational clips that will burn their way into your fragile brain! SEE films so wrong they will follow you to your grave! SEE videos that defy description! SEE the secrets of the Orient revealed to you by those who have gone before! SEE the show THEY don't want you to see!

Join us for an evening of forbidden video . . . IF YOU DARE!
http://www.animehell.org

HELL is other people

Sent off e-mails to A-Kon, AnimeFEST and AtsuiCon. Need to get some flyers done for Central HellFest and FanimeCon. Always something to do.

Finally got some copy written for Mike Battle. Hope I got it done in time. Hope I'm still doing a HELL at A-Kon.

Damn, too much.

The Other Side of Midnight

I'm up at half past midnight to go to the bathroom. Ed's on the intraweb. So I ask him if he'll be staying up all night. Because Bruce and Mundee and Hans are gonna be showing up at 5am. "No point in going to sleep if we're going at 5:00," he tells me.

I'm thinking this is good, because I want somebody to wake me up if I oversleep. And I was feeling really tired. Somewhere around 4:30am my internal clock kicks me awake. So I lay awake in bed until 5am and got up and ready to get everybody to the airport to catch that flight to Atlanta. Ed's asleep. Good thing I didn't rely on him as a backup. When Bruce, Mundee and Hans show up I wake Ed. We're running late, so Ed takes a shower.

Eventually we get Ed in the 4Runner and to the airport and off to Atlanta and I get to white knuckle it back to the Edstead and clean myself up and get to work. Where I'm writing this up. And so it goes.

Oh, and I'm gonna be at FanimeCon. I'm looking forward to seeing what the West Coast thinks of AnimeHELL.

A Numbers Game

There's a big stink going on about a 16 number code that unlocks HD DVDs being posted on the net. I couldn't care less. I have no intention to buy HD or BluRay or whatever format they're selling. I'm happy with my DVDs, thank you.

Which is funny when you think of my original position on DVDs. I thought the whole DVD Region scheme was the stupidest thing ever and I'd never ever buy a DVD ever! Now I've got a room filled with hundreds of hundreds of DVDs of many different regions and there's really no turning back at this point. God I'm pathetic.

Looping video thing

It's called a Vosonic Digiviewer. It's really small. About the size of a moleskin sketchbook. The remote control that came with it is bigger then the Digiviewer. It looks like a digital card reader. One side has slots for all types of digital memory cards and the other side has RCA and SVideo outputs. It looks at the memory cards and finds any files it can play. All I have to do is click the AUTO button on the remote and the Digiviewer will play one file over and over or all files over and over. I just set it up as one of the channels on my video switchbox and switch to it when clips end. It works pretty good. There's some gliching when the clip starts over because it doesn't have signal synch, but that kinda adds to the low tech cheesiness of HELL. Don't wanna come off as being too professional or anything.

Bare Faced

Had a virus. After an hour at work on monday I had to call it done and go home. I had a bad case of sweats between runs to the bathroom. I'm thinking it started Saturday. I had a crop of breakouts under my beard that bothered me so bad that I shaved off all my facial hair. Something I haven't done it years. Feels good though. Maybe I'll keep it like this for a while.

I posted this to Dave's LiveJournal:
I had gone out and bought myself a laptop with the idea that I could just run everything from the hard drive. But then I realized that the only way to run clips from the laptop would be to have them locked into a playlist. Maybe the solution is to run a combination of laptop and DVD? Has anybody tried this? What I'd really like to find is some software that emulates live video editing. where I could load up video channels and then do star transitions between the videos.

The way I got around the DVD bootlag was to have a video switchbox and a looping video 'eye catch' running on a device that plays videos from memory cards. It works, to a degree. I hope to be able to run two DVD players this year, eliminating the DVD bootlag issue completely.