my spider-sense has always warned me to stay away from playing with videos. picture editing, fun! html, okay. javascript, not so good, but not that bad. But video compression is soo...arrgghh!!!! Just spent six...SIX!!!...freaking hours rendering from avi to mov, only to have the comp crash on me twice! Urgh! today sucks....

*sigh~~~* Just finished reading volume 10 of the Werewolf King manga (Muo2 Lang2 Wang2 Lie4 Feng1 Zhuan4). Waited 2 years for volume 10 to finally reach S'pore. Did a double-take when I saw it, for a moment I got it confused with the Young Guns comic (mandarin ver) and thot I read it already. On an off-chance (manga-hunters are like that), I took a glimpse at the cover, and zooooomed to the cash counter immediately, volume 10 clutched in my gleeful, grubby little paws. *still grinning like krazy*

*sigh~~~* the ending was 90% what I'd hoped for. And Sho's art has changed - CG-ing for the last few covers, i think. I love the fantasy theme, costumes, humour. And her drawings of the characters as kids are so cute! Sho's art is where the figures are really thin and pointy (not to mention real bishie), and everyone really thin. But that makes the sword fights really beautiful (suspension of disbelief!). Overall, I'd say it one of those out-of-this-world kind of fantasy, where there's a demonic supernatural world made up of various kingdoms and the normal world (Tokyo, where else?). It's got an okay plot driven by this guy (typical high-school guy, for once) and this mysterious figure The Werewolf King. They are one and the same, but we readers dunno why.

There's a bit of gore involved, and the wildlife and scenery are hardly Record of Lodoss War, more like rocks, webs, really ugly (and I mean uhh-gly) demons (or Orcs, since so many of them become fodder), leather jackets, swords, magic, hair (lotsa that...)

Felt the ending was a bit rushed - all that build-up and it ends in two volumes. But the loose ends, most of them, were tied neatly. And it's a happy ending! So that's a good in my book, heheh, adeline pathetically easy to please when it come to fiction/manga/anime...wish there were poster....

Also checked out Blade of the Immortal a little - it was a little too grim for my tastes. But Makie seems to kick some major butt.

was on the MRT home, and peacefully reading my "A Practical Guide to Usability" when a bunch of kids and an lady came over. One of the little girls climbed noisily into the seat next to me, and the lady told me not to disturb chay-chay (i was actually quite grateful she didn't say "auntie", i've gotten that before, you know *sob*).

Then one of the kids gasped and said in an awed-filled (if you wanna look at it another way, loud and obnoxious) voice: "She's studying literature!"....One of my internal voices went, "Huh?!" Literature?!" I resisted, with all my might, to flip to the cover and double-check. Could it be the thickness of the book? Or the perception in a kid's mind that any pictureless book attached to an adult is automatically literature...hmm....

gah! Coolconnect's closing down! now gotta shift all my novice webbie sites to Brinkster by 31st Dec, i am sooo not looking forward to doing that...Violet Haze 3.0 will still be up and running because it's on Brinkster, but my mini-gallery of extinct sites will probably be down because about 90% of the files there are on Coolconnect.Oh well, maybe its a sign for to me to start re-locating my really messy html files, and to stop copying content from the previous Violet Haze versions *snerk*

learning Camtasia now, it's kinda fun cos it records all your movement onscreen and makes it into a video file! of cos, the compressing and rendering into a smaller-sized avi file promises to be mind-numbing. And the analysis, arck!

did a bunch of legwork to get permission to run the trial version of Camtasia in the ICM lab at AS7 - altho' the process was a bit long, but already considered quite fast and efficient. Plus they are very reasonable if you can give them good reasons. Borrowed the video cam and first thing i did once i got home was stow it away in my cupboard because I'm so afraid someone will accidentally step/fall/sit/breathe!? on it, heheh....*sigh* think of all the DV tapes and zip disks I'm gonna need...

adeline, inexperienced little twit that she is, finally got to try what is kway chap Went to try out this food stall with my parents at Havelock Road. It's got giant square mee poh!

and what is occuyping me now:
thesis experiment => logistics nightmare

went to see Harry Potter 2 yesterday....

NO ONE TOLD ME IT WAS GOING TO BE SO SCARY!!!

...grabbing hands, slugs (ewww...seeing one was enuff to put me off the popcorn), oceans of spiders, giant reptile about 0.5 cm from your face???

...ok, it was fun as well.....

Let's see, poor Ron got demoted from exposition-er to comic relief. I felt the ending was excessively Disney (i.e. waffy - but then i missed the Hagrid scene). Draco taller than Harry. Hermione as a cat - arggh! Get that image out of my head! Almost as scary as the grabbing hand.

Snape's thinner and his hair doesn't seem oily like before. He look really evil when he was ranting at Ron and Harry - shadows of the The Sheriff of Nottingham, no? And McGonagoll - don't think she's just one of the Goodies, the way she "suan-ed" Lockhart reminds you that her favourite other form is a cat. *meow* heheh...

Hmmm, what else? I was dead tired yesterday so couldn''t be bothered to log on...i do feel it is a bit violent - how old are they supposed to be 12? Pushing a teacher down a hole, bashing his head with a rock (although it has shades of slap-stick comedy often seen in cartoons and anime.) And with the stream of kids wanting to imitate Harry Potter?....

....Ah! But then i would fall into the trap I often accuse narrow-minded anti-anime critics of - ignoring the fact that the show is meant not just for kids, although kids can make up a large portion...somehow, i doubt this will be the trend (of a largely kiddy audience) for Harry Potter was the darkening movie atmosphere continues.

Havin' a fun time helping my sis make her bear website - it on the ohh...third time round. But I think its gonna work this time because she really needs the website for her bears. It's gonna be graphic-heavy though, hmm...also fiddling with Violet Haze 4 - probably all the XP people will not be able to see it, but i want them flat chromeless browser windows *krazy grin*. Will not be a christmas theme because knowing the speed that i update, it'd probably be christmas all year next year, ne?

wahh~ was so prepared to watch Harry Potter yesterday! Made a date with my sis that after I've re-charged my batteries, will go see the evening show. But when I got there, all the 7 and 8pm shows were gone, leaving oni the 11 pm one, argh! Oh! the agony!.....

...but it's ok, cos before that i also made a group date with my anime club friends to watch it this friday (i.e.tomorrow, heh). Mwuahahahaha! ~

yeah, i know its late (or early) but i couldn't sleep...

was recently quite hung up on how fanfiction builds on the existing accummulated canon-text knowledge fans already have. It's why on Fanfiction.net summaries are more than just hints to the storyline, but that certain keywords play on this knowledge and automatically points the reader to a person. For example, in Gundam Wing, "the silent soldier" is almost always Heero and "the braided baka" is Duo. Very little exposition needed, except when you're writing AU (alternate universe) fics.

I always felt that fanfiction is a fans' way of continuing the story after the official version, or the canon version has ended. Thus I have treated fanfics as a logical next-step after watching a movie, anime or reading a popular book. Checking out the Inuyasha section of fics on Fanfiction.net, and googling at the AUs whose plots are driven by just one tiny change in the original plot, it seem more like mirrored worlds than continuations. Cause no fics every gonna duplicate the same feeling - most either fail miserable short, or carry the story into a new exciting direction (but upon hindsight, probably would never have officially developed that way).

Some wonderful fics of quality include:
Slayers - Stefan Gagne's Slayers trilogy which carries on after Slayers Try
Gundam Wing - the Learning to Fly series by Seawasp; Katsu no Miko's Atropos and Borealis series.
Violinist of Hameln - Facing the Future - Anakin Bester
Rurouni Kenshin - Madam Hydra's That Which Lingers
Card Captor Sakura - all of Meg's fics, esp Kyrielle
Tokyo Babylon - Arashi and Karasu's fics on aftermath of X.
Yu Yu Hakusho - the Harlequin series by Koko-chan and the Blue Spanch
Yami no Matsuei - the Shinigami series by YnM no Miko (i think)
Harry Potter - the Cassandra Claire fics - funni thing is the fics drew me even though I haven't read the books yet, hmmm....

TWO down ONE to go! Man, the IF4101 exam really made me turn my brain upside down and give it a good shake-rattle-and-roll to reconfigure the political economy Vs the cultural studies into audience concepts. Hmmm, cunning of him, ne?

of cos, it gotta go on Wednesday cos the CS4251 exam is just two days away (actually, lookin' at the time) is it only one day away (arggh!).

But i needed some brainless reading after all that heavy-duty reading so I picked up an Elizabeth Lowell romance. *deep voice* Onwards with the saga of the *checks backcover* Donovan family! Heheh, the endless number of ways an author can create metaphors over-arching the romantic lives of biologically-related romance heros never fails to awe me.

This time, the metaphor linking them all together is that the guys all belong to some international jewel company. So as the saga follows the Donovan males as they collect international wives (they are monogamous, of course! Only the super-angsty novels have a guy torn between two women, and those novels (and guys!), in my opinion aren't worth two cents.) while braving the dangers of the international jewel trade. So, this mean titles like, get this, Jade Island, Amber Beach (oh wait, that one was a Donovan heroine doing the reelin' in), and Pearl Cove.

Ne, I think the reason romance novels are a good read is cos they are so predictable - you know there's adventure and there's gonna be a happy ending. The reason I stopped was because they all have a formula which, after a while, is really dumb - like the readers are just reading the same storyline just with a different packaging.....

*gasps and points*

Eh? isn't that Adorno and Horkheimer? *grins* Wonder if Dr Shim would get a heart-attack if I used romance novels as a way of explaining the formulaic production of culture and treatment of the audience? - pre-determined storylines and characters in a bid to integrate the (female) audience into (swooning) masses, heheh...

Went to support me sis at her napfa test together, hmmm, have missed the smell of track. It always brings out the urge for physical activity - like its alright to tumble around and skin your knee because its all in The Game!

Have gotten together 3 of 4 authors so i'm really praying its gonna work. Not looking forward to the logistics nightmare of December but hey! setbacks abd challenges may give us white hairs but they also make us tougher! (Yeah, just keep saying that...)

Took out cs4260 notes to organize today and discovery a long-forgotten mountain of photostated readings (y'know, the kind that gets zapped but not quite read...) - have re-discovered why i like CS modules - they always have nice long lists of revenue/business models neatly organized into tables (shaded and unshaded, hah!) followed by nice long paragraphs of explanations...i find CS readings more structured than IF readings...

Adeline's 2 week-break before the Exams

adeline woke up one day took the long slow stroll into Thesis-La-La-land where she got to sit the Stress-Mobile all the way. Sometimes she got out, but only to take a ride (Whee!) on the Emotional Roll'er-Rollercoaster. Other times she took the boat down the Dark Dank Tunnel of Despair, only to emerge to Sugar High with coke and cocoa. (Hahah!). And ALL of these fun! fun! rides were punctuated by loooong periods of boring~ boring~ Are we there yet? boredom.

THEN SUDDENLY...
out of the blue (well, actually not quite but we'll pretend it is...)

Exam Revision arrived!

.....and adeline was once again on familiar, if not quite joyous, ground.

---------yah, I know I'm sick....