Having finished the Components, Jazz, and Linear finals, I can finally breathe half a sigh of relief, and turn my attentions to absolutely nothing at all for a few days. w00t.

For the two of you out there who might care, I've decided not to post the Last Exile AMV now. I probably won't ever post it, but you never know what sort of things might happen. I'm not happy with how it turned out, and that really makes all this trouble I've been going through trying to encode it seem extremely pointless. Anyway, I'll be making more AMVs in the future, but I'll definitely be making sure to put some real effort into them, and I promise I will never again start a video one week before the contest I hope to enter it in.

"Patrick!" I hear you say, "Where did you put the Last Exile video?"

Unfortunately, right now the Last Exile video is hiding in the land of Can't-get-a-decent-encode-to-save-my-life. If you know a great mpeg encoder for OS X, by all means say something. In happier news, the video got me a stack of free manga from the Anime Anonymous AMV contest. Woo free manga! On that note, Battle Royale is disturbing, and scary well-done.

The upside of this whole encoding thing is that while I was waiting for the bad encodes to finish so that I could be disappointed in them, I had enough time to craft myself an origami buckyball. Woo. That might turn up somewhere.

And December is upon us. Hope everyone else had a good Thanksgiving. I certainly did.

The small tidbit of news today is that I finished the rough cut of the Last Exile AMV last night (Technically this morning, I suppose), so that's definitely on track for a release on Friday or Saturday. I'm really happy with how it's turning out so far.

Huzzah shortest post ever!

And it's time for Thanksgiving! Yay! I'll be heading up to Wisconsin for the duration of break, to be with the family and all. Which is good, because I like the family. Hopefully it's not too cold up there.

Anyway, at this point, I'm just going to say that we'll have the Erlking video up next semester. The AMV, on the other hand, I'll be working my butt off from here to Friday night to finish, but it should be awesome. Or at least awesome-ish.

While we're on the topic of 'things I'll get to eventually,' I should point out that Jeff has beaten me to coming up with a good Blame! desktop (Which I am of course now using), while all I have is this, which should become something cool. Anyway. Be excellent to each other. And- party on, dudes!

P.S.- Visit Nick's site for free good music.

I just finished playing the new Splinter Cell level, and the fact that it's part one of two started me thinking about ways that a game could be based entirely around downloading levels. You buy a game that has a few levels on it, with the promise that you'll be able to download a new level every month or so. Sort of a serialized game experience, like the .Hack series, only not fifty bucks for every chapter. I think something like this could present a unique opportunity for a developer to truly tell a complete story, without feeling restricted by the amount of space on a disc (Not that disc space is really a huge issue right this minute), or even the release of the game. Brain... Ack.

Anyway, after this week I'm sort of trying to avoid thinking too much. Or at all, for that matter. I don't really have anything cool to throw out at you, I just needed to talk about that serial game thing. Hopefully the as-yet nowhere to be found Erlking video will appear for you this week. Then in a few weeks, probably around the 8th of December or so, I'll be putting up a Last Exile AMV, which I'll also be entering in A.A.'s AMV contest. Yay.

Really need to start that...

Thanks to the free download, I finally have a decent image editor. Yes, I'm too lazy to install Fink and make it myself. I'm comfortable with the command line these days, but not that familiar. Someday.

Anyway, I've made this wonderful happy face to celebrate, and to look sort of creepy in a belated celebration of Haloween. So hopefully you'll all be entertained by that, and breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that this sort of thing probably won't be happening again. A little less terror in everyone's lives.

Turns out that tonight, Nick & I were once again struck with the inspiration, so there will be a new movie up either before the weekend, or on the weekend. Probably on the weekend, since I have tests this week. Anyway, look forward to that. It'll be completely different than what we've done in the past, and should be pretty cool.

Looks like Lee is actually making a real site. Mayhaps mine actually being updated semi-regularly pushed him over the edge or something. On a related note, guard breaking with you-know-who is annoying. Meh.

Umm... FEAR THE TERROR!!. And the boredom. Fear that, too.

And so, we're all in the middle of a slow, torturous death last week and this week. Oh boy!

I promised to give Lee & Jon this link, but actually I already did. So, if you're not Lee or Jon, you might enjoy that link. I haven't gotten quite bored enough, myself. Been playing too much Soul Calibur 2. With the stick guy, since we all know I love it when Lee victimizes me with the fast characters.

In completely unrelated 'news,' it is really, really cold in Boulder. Dang. I'm glad I have a furnace here, but I really really wish my windows were a little more advanced than plain old plate glass. I'm all for retro, but after working for my Dad's company (funner link) and living with him, old homes with really crappy insulation just don't do it anymore.

I think I'm done rambling for now. If you check back later, I may edit this to make it more cohesive. Probably not.

I don't really have much to say beyond the fact that Panther is currently quite literally rocking my box. Woo, man. It both runs faster and looks prettier than anything before, and the fact that Exposé doesn't run like shit continues to amaze me. For the first time ever, I actually want more buttons for my mouse. Curse you, Apple!

I actually find myself rather enamored of some things I thought I would just hate. The extreme hugeness of the program-selector is starting to be sort of neat, and the tray in the finder is actually really useful. I don't think I'll ever agree with the brushed-metal finder windows, though, especially when they aren't consistent. Oh, well. The coolness that Exposé oozes all over everything more than makes up for anything else.

Here are some screenshots that I took at random times yesterday, none of which can express how cool Exposé is in motion or how fast the system is, or how cool that little icon-explosion thing that happens when you open something is:

• This is what this page looks like.
• A shot of the installer, with iChat in the background.
• This is what the screen looks like after you hit F11 to show the desktop.
• All of the windows that were hidden in the previous shot.
• The new brushed-metal finder window, with the drawer hidden.
• Some windows with expose activated.
• The standard contextual menu.
• Expose can handle more windows that I can.
• The windows from the last shot, unorganized.

So, as soon as the store opens tomorrow, I'm going to pick up a fresh copy of Panther. Yummy.

Of course, after having been around Lee for too long, I find that my brain will allow no course of action other than wiping my disk clean upon installing a new OS. Darn you, Lee! Fortunately, Lee was kind enough to loan me his firewire hard drive of mass destruction in order to back up all of my important... Umm... Well, all of my music, anyway. I would hate to have to rip all of that again for the second time this year. I should be putting up some screenshots for Lee to drool at once I have my system working tomorrow, so wish me luck.

Also, many thanks to Jon for giving me the random-quote script that you can see the wonderful affects of up in the gray bar at the top of the page. Refresh a kajillion™ times for further enjoyment!

And everyone go see the Animation Show, for it is indeed superb.

The observant among you may notice that the site has undergone some minor work in order to make it more difficult for Jeff to read without his contacts in. I think it looks better, anyway. There's also some new Noise desktops up, if you're into that.

Anyway, the main reason for this update is that there's a new video up, A Day In The Life. The raw humour is slightly less than the two previous videos, but it should give you a chuckle. And before you ask, the sound isn't off, it's badly dubbed for (hopefully) comedic effect. That's all for now.

Not much really going on here. I finally made a page for the various desktops I've patched together from leftover magna and DVD frames. They're not incredibly good, but maybe you'll have some fun or find one you like.

So, having seen that AMV that I pointed to last time, I know it's not really so much a Lain video as it is a fun video, but it's still better than what I might do with Lain. Don't even get me started about trying to layer with iMovie. My brain might kill me.

That's really all for now. Have a good day, and talk about it in the shoutbox.

And here I thought I had an original thought for once... Turns out that there's already a Lain AMV using Strong Bad's techno song. So, nevermind about that new video that I was going to make. I'm not into redundancy in AMVs (And no, there aren't enough Naruto videos. Good ones, anyway).

If you like Giger, manga, robots, the future, decapitations, or overpowered guns, then I have no choice but to recommend Blame to you. Lee and I have been reading it (And yelling at each other because he reads too damn fast, and I like to stare at each page for about five minutes), and then going 'Woah' at each other every day because of how cool it is. And it is very cool.

But, I would feel bad giving you nothing, so I give you the photos from last year's contest (That we owned), long thought lost to mere mortal man:

• Baglok The Crazy And The Laughing Test Tube Fish Are Ready To Knock Your Socks Off!
• Patrick Will SSH Into The Lab To Give You The Ping Of Doom!

The new Naruto AMV, Patrick is a Rock Lee Fanboy is now up. You can click that link, or over on the right under "Media," along with our other videos. I'm pretty happy with the way this came out, so hopefully you'll like it, too. We may set up a BitTorrent tracker next month if all you AMV watchers eat up every byte of bandwidth we can muster.

In similar news, Lee has encouraged me to make a Lain AMV set to Strong Bad's nifty little techno ditty, so keep an eye out for that.

Anyway, if you really like the AMV, or really hate it, or really like cheese, send me an email and I'll reply with perfect spelling.

I've gone and made an actual page. Hopefully, this will put enough fear into the hearts of the fish that the other bits and pieces of the website will get put back together. Of course, we all know that Jeff was kind enough to step up and cobble together the current Main page from bits of trash found underneath his bed after his last fake drug binge, so be sure to check out Test Tube Undergrads, since that's the only thing that's getting updated any time soon.

In other news, my next AMV, tentatively entitled either 'Rock Lee Rocks' or 'Patrick Is A Rock Lee Fanboy,' depending on who you ask, is done, and being converted by Lee in to tasty .mpg format right now. That should be up soon both here and at AMV.org. It's another video inspired by my intense... 'fondness' for the anime Naruto, especially the character Rock Lee. Personally, I think it's a whole fuck-ton better than the first video I made, which I can barely stand to watch anymore. Hopefully you'll like it, too.

P.S.- If you want to have the fear of God put into you by my primitive html skills, check out the source for this page. It makes me afraid, and I wrote it.