Saturday:

First there was Enemy Territory. If you like a strong element of tactical thinking in your 3D shooter gaming, you owe it to yourself to bribe someone with broadband to download this wonderful free “expansion” for Return To Castle Wolfenstein. See, it’s not so much an add-on as it is a wholly stand-alone free product that happens to be based on the RTCW game. How cool is that? Oddly enough I like the game and I’m not into the uber-realistic thing.

Then… I started tinkering with myHTPC. Hoo boy. You see, there’s a computer in the living room built for the sole purpose of playing video and audio computer files on the entertainment center. The interface has always been a bit on the cumbersome side. Now, however, I have a delightfully easy menu-driven system that will run picture slideshows, play up as much queued music as I want, or show videos… all controlled by my ATI Remote Wonder.

The basic install of myHTPC will do all of that and download a weather report into the bargain, but of course I couldn’t just leave that alone. I needed a custom background. (Easy.) I wanted to use my preferred media players (Winamp for music, BSPlayer for videos) instead of the default (Windows Media Player 9, ugh).

But wait, there’s more! Reading the myHTPC forums taught me that I could, in theory, add a song display progress indicator to the mix. The trick is to utilize something called Serious Samurize, a tool I’d never even heard of previously. Wow. If you’re at all into nifty desktop widgets for Windows, you must give it a whirl. It’s intensely geeky, so of course I dig it lots. Heh.

After some tinkering, cursing, downloading of scripting tools and various other widgets, I have a system that will allow me to launch and kill the Samurize process (no point having the song now-play data showing while videos are playing) and just generally do almost all of the neat things I want that multimedia box to do.

It only took me, oh, almost all day Saturday. And the next (tedious) step will be a systematic renaming of all the music files on that computer… oh, hold me back!

Sunday:

Went to work and hammered on the backup system a while. After a couple of hours of tinkering I realized that the Snap server (remember that damned thing?) has a very annoying habit: It sets its own timestamp on files pretty much at random, and no matter how many times you try to copy over files and give them the correct timestamp each of those files will henceforth be re-set with the timestamp of the last attempted copy.

Argh! So this is why Rsync was taking longer and longer every night! This is why the entire backup run was taking nearly 24 hours to complete every day!

It then took me a couple of trial runs to determine that the Rsync option best suited for the task of synchronizing directories on the Snap server is the ‘–size-only’ directive. (The ‘–ignore-times’ directive did not work at all as advertised.) As I write this, a fresh automated backup run should be underway, and may in fact be nearly completed. The graphs will tell…

Monday:

After a relatively peaceful day of work, I was absconded with by Mari and Doug for a night of Yule partying at Lilith and Geoffrey’s house. Huzzah! Many wonderful friends were in attendance, good ham was consumed, nifty presents were exchanged, and much joyousness ensued. All in all, it was one of the better gatherings of The Usual Suspects And Then Some.

(Next year, hopefully, I’ll be able to buy more than just a couple of meager gifts. My friends deserve a bit better. Le sigh.)

I have Tuesday off since I’m still burning vacation days like crazy before I lose ’em at year’s end. Look for me to be kicking back between bouts of housework and holiday decoration and kid wrangling…

Here’s the capsule review of the Two Towers “extended” showing today:

Only two restored scenes were particularly useful. The most important is the Boromir/Faramir Flashback. Say what you will about its overall usefulness to the plot, it was very interesting backstory in its own right. The other scene is the Eowyn’s Stew bit, mostly useful for showing us what a good cook Eowyn is. No no, that’s not right. It’s useful because we find out Aragorn’s age (which isn’t interesting in and of itself, but learning his age tells us something about his lineage).

Another restored sequence is a bit of characterization goofiness from Merry and Pippin, where they find Saruman’s stash of pipeweed. Oddly enough I was delighted to see that sequence, since it’s one of the few bits from the books that remains vivid in my mind years after the reading. Your enjoyment mileage may vary, of course. Of questionable value is another “let’s give Merry and Pippin more screen time” sequence involving some magic water…

As with Fellowship, most of the restored footage took the form of “making existing scenes just a bit longer.” Well, I can’t forget the additional Gimli, Comic Relief Dwarf moments. Le sigh. I was sort of hoping that the trend begun with the Fellowship extended release would continue, but apparently the movies’ creators don’t share my despair at using the dwarf almost exclusively for very cheap laughs. Ah well.

Is Two Towers better in its extended form? Absolutely. Nothing is changed about the overall tone or pacing, and while some of the originally-excised scenes weren’t necessary for the sake of audience comprehension (we don’t need to see Theodred’s funeral: we know he’s dead) they don’t detract from the film either. No, not even the Comic Relief Dwarf moments. (I admit to laughing at the last one of those.)

Mind you, most of the people who might find this review useful have probably already purchased the appropriate DVD release. Ah well…

Another care package from The Great Wet North arrived today. No brownies this time, but I did get some music CDs and…

Hey look, it’s a mug, and cocoa to drink from that mug! But wait… whose image is that on the mug? Let’s take a closer look:

It’s Sumomo! I have a Sumomo mug! Yay!

Wow. Whoever sent me this must be one heck of a nice person, huh?

Today was the first of three scheduled movie viewings this month, all of movies that include the words “Lord” and “Rings” in their bipartite titles.

Ben, John, Constance and I went to the before-noon showing of the extended edition of Fellowship. And when you extend a movie that was already three hours in length, you can expect numb buttocks when you’re through. Still, it’s a damned good movie, and I had damned good company. I miss hanging out with Ben, dammitall.

This was my first time watching the extended version, and my eighth viewing of the movie itself. I still like it just as much as I ever did, I must say. The added bits were, well, added bits. Some were entire scenes originally cut, while others were extended versions of scenes. Whole scenes include a brief bit between Gandalf and Frodo just before they arrive at the entrance to Moria, and another short sequence in which Aragorn and Boromir spot Gollum trailing behind the Fellowship along the river. And let’s not forget Singing Aragorn. (I like Viggo, yeah, but sadly he just can’t sing.) Gimli has some material restored that balances his use as Comic Relief Dwarf, and that’s a damned good thing.

As for extended versions of scenes, those were mostly in the fight sequences. We watch Legolas showing off his ability to draw down and shoot nearby targets in rapid succession, towards the end; in the original edit, we see him get off three shots, while in this edit it’s more like six or seven. The cave troll battle is almost twice as long, and this edit answers the question of how the troll ends up with the spear he uses to impale Frodo. Boromir, in the same sequence, gets a fabulous “oh, hell” take as he realizes that being chained to an angry cave troll might be a bad idea.

Nothing significant about the movie is changed, and only a few of the restored clips feel jarring, forced or out of place. You walk away from the extended version feeling much the way you do about the original: “Okay, I’m ready for the next one… just let me go to the bathroom, stretch my legs, and grab a bite to eat, please.”

Actually, I need to amend that. One major thing is different: The feel of things at the beginning. In the original edit, there’s a real feel of complete innocence and lightness in the early Shire scenes. Now, however, with the much-revised opening sequences, the ambience is darkened somewhat. It’s a subtle change, but it colors your viewing of the rest of the early part of the movie. I leave it to better minds than mine to determine if this is a good or bad thing… for me, it is merely different.

Next week? The Two Towers… extended edition. I’m really looking forward to that one, since I’ve only seen Towers a couple of times in the theater and never on DVD…

Remember just a few days ago when I wrote about how “back” I was? I had all of this drive, determination and motivation? Yeah. That went nowhere in a big screaming hurry, didn’t it? It’s sure as hell gone, now.

I’ve tried no less than three times today to pick up and delve into Blender, the 3D animation studio. I just… can’t… do it. Between times I’ve tried to come up with a good music video idea. Nope, I can’t do that either. How about some writing? A couple of false starts, but nothing to (*cough*) write home about.

I’m so frustrated I could scream. But that would be a bad idea, don’t you know. There’s enough tension around here right now, who cares about one whiney guy who can’t get his creative juices flowing? It’s not the end of the world, after all.

Just because I’ve thought of myself my entire life as a creative sort of person, that shouldn’t mean the fact that I’m really not ought to send me into a dark pit of despair, right?

I guess I’ll go back to playing games. I can do that…

I needed a vacation. It turns out I needed one from my online life as well as my job and home life. Correction, I needed two vacations. In November, I took them.

And now, I’m back. I’m back here, I’m back there, I’m back everywhere. Look for updates to the Anime Site, look for more frequent postings here, look for more frequent postings to the fora I frequent (all two of them, sure). Hell, if I can really get going, there’ll be creative video goodness in the not-too-distant future. No, I’m serious. Stop snickering. Stop it, I say! Thpppt.

It’s time to shake off the doldrums, stand up straight and bring my gaze back up to the horizon.

I’m ready. And it’s about damned time.