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I'm in the process of arranging my finances, consolidating some old credit card and other debts along with the money I owe for the condo I live in. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the monthly payment I'm going to end up making on that, combined with the payment for my student loans, is not going to leave me with a whole lot of money left over to spend on anything else.

So I'm starting to look seriously at other ways of bringing in a little extra money. In particular, things I can do from home without having to spend a lot of extra time and energy going somewhere else and dealing with people (since I already do that all day). I'm open to suggestions.

I was thinking of trying a Patreon campaign or two, or three. What do you think? )
And those are the extent of the few feeble ideas I've had so far. If anyone knows of any other good way by which I could turn a little extra writing time into a little extra cash, I'd love to hear them. I think I'm just about to find myself in a severe budget crunch.
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In a half hour, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern on December 1, I will be interviewing controversial Robotech fan Peter Walker on my TalkShoe Robotech show, Space Station Liberty. Feel free to listen, chat, or call in, using the Talkshoe client! Just register and it's a free download. After the show is over, it will be available as a free download in mp3 format. See the link below for information on ways to call in.

Also, Thursday December 7th at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time, I will be interviewing Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles co-writer/co-director Tommy Yune. Feel free to tune in!
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Whilst ego-surfing, I came upon a couple of places that mentioned my commentary tracks. I was a bit surprised to find my Castle of Cagliostro commentary rated a glowing mention in Episode 40 of the Weekly Anime Review podcast, a review of the new Castle of Cagliostro DVD, though I suppose I shouldn't have been. It was kind of a freaky feeling to hear myself talked of in such glowing terms on the podcast of someone else, with which I didn't have anything to do. Wow. Anyway, go listen to the podcast, it's a good show and has stuff about me in it!

Also found an apologetically late link to the commentary in the Conversations on Ghibli blog. Nice to read that, and his other entries, to see that he's as upset as I am about their manglement of the DVD's opening titles.

(As an aside, now I'm most of the first page of Google search results whether I search on "cagliostro commentary" with quotation marks (i.e. as a specific phrase) or without (i.e. as two separate words found close together). Sweet!)

And I found a mention of my "Enter Marlene" commentary in this rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe thread about what franchises had worse continuities than Marvel's. I participated in the discussion, and subsequently gave one of the participants a headache with my recounting of just how snarled the various Transformers continuities are. Phear my continuitistical powerz. :)
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Well, it was a decent enough day. Woke up a bit early, couldn't get back to sleep, so I listened to my friend [livejournal.com profile] demiurgent's newest project, a podcast. Kind of neat. Not your usual review or day-in-the-life 'cast, this was more a sort of artistic thing, combining writing, delivery, and music. It was about fatigue and its effects, which fit as I was feeling fatigued myself. It was something to think about on the bike in to work, when I had the thoughts to spare. Stopped off for a croissant and shortbread cookie (to go) from Panera, then headed into the office.

Nothing much doing; ticket queue was fairly slow, and boss was out all day on one of his local networking projects. I did a bit of noodling around on the Internet, wrote a LJ entry and a post or two for my essay journal…and accidentally wiped out my entire terrania.us www directory while trying to test something for a client. Fortunately, our ISP does weekly backups, and I hadn't actually updated any of my stuff in a coon's age except for the journal, and it's a blogger.com journal so all my stuff was automatically backed up. In the end I lost about four days of site statistics, and some Motivator images I'd just uploaded from my home computer to have a place from which to link them. (I'll probably post those at some point when I get around to it, either here or in [livejournal.com profile] robotech since that's what they're about.)

I picked up my paycheck from work, then I caught a bus out west to the BioKinetics clinic, where I picked up my paycheck from them too. Taken both together, I essentially got about 2 1/3 paychecks today. A nice little influx of funds; now I can pay off my $513 credit card bill (I know, I'm a big spender) and my monthly utility bills and maybe have enough left over that I won't feel too guilty about renting a car sometime soon and going to visit a friend. Biked on home after that, and by the time I got here I was soaked with sweat. Fortunately some air conditioning and electric fan action took care of that.

At the moment I'm sitting in City of Heroes not real sure what, if anything, I feel like doing. Maybe some friends will show up. Maybe I'll watch a movie. Maybe I'll take a nap. Maybe I'll post in my Livejournal. Hey, that's an idea!
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One thing I mentioned in my last entry was that I had done some podcast segments. I just thought it might be interesting to talk about about the tools I used for those.

My original Castle of Cagliostro commentary track was recorded and updated using a tool called CoolEdit 96. It was a decent enough editing tool, though a bit primitive, and not open source. It was what I was used to using, though.

Finally, however, its limitations just got to be too confining, and I looked around for a replacement. I ended up with an open-source app called Audacity. Audacity is a pretty neat tool; it lets me record and mix multiple tracks, so I can do my speaky part and then put background music and audio excerpts into it. It even has a decent noise removal tool so I can get rid of my computer's case-fan noise without distorting my own voice too much.

I'm always a little hard on myself when doing these segments, because I'm so much of a perfectionist. If I flub a line on the first read-through, I always feel like I have to correct it. Fortunately, I've learned that I can just wait a few seconds, then back up a few lines and start over, then go back in and snip out the flub later on. That saves a lot of annoying tweak time right there.

One other thing I've learned is to save the project often; Audacity isn't necessarily the most stable beastie, especially if you're doing copy and paste work. If it crashes on you, you lose everything you've done since your last save point. At one point I ended up having to rerecord an entire 25-minute segment from scratch. That was not pleasant.

Tonight I expect to be putting some final touches on the voice track and then doing a lot of mixing on a segment for RDF Underground comparing the music of Mospeada and Robotech in-depth. I'm not looking forward to it, as it will probably take up the entire evening...but we have to sacrifice for our art.

I just wish I knew that people were listening. Since it hasn't really been promoted much, I have this sinking feeling that I could count all the podcast's listeners if I took both shoes off.
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Hello, it's me again.

Falling out of the habit of writing in this thing is always a bother. I feel like there's no point in trying to begin chronicling my life again because I've missed out on chronicling so much of it over the last few months. And then I feel like it's going to be some kind of an obligation to write about my life every day when I don't even know for sure that anybody's going to want to read about it. But what the heck, figured I should give it another try. Not even sure where to begin.

The LJ isn't the only writing project that's been kind of neglected by me lately. I haven't written all that much in my essay journal lately, either. Or at least I hadn't up to about a week or so ago. Lately I've posted written versions of some of the segments I've done for a podcast.

But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself there. What have I been doing with myself lately? Well, in my spare time it's been largely City of Heroes/Villains, on and off. Though in the past few weeks it's been more off than on, as I got bored with CoH a bit and sought other things to do with my time. And I found them, in the form of the Robotech Remastered DVD set I got earlier this year, and the Genesis Climber Mospeada DVD set I bought lately. RightStuf.com had it (and Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross) for sale for $25 each—and bearing in mind that the list price of each of those sets is $80, needless to say I snapped them right up. (Even sent Mospeada sets as birthday gifts to my brothers, at that price.) So I watched episodes of Robotech and episodes of Mospeada in tandem, comparing the changes. It was an interesting experience, and it led to me getting back into Robotech fandom a bit more. Part of it I'd done already, of course, when I got together with Peter Walker and some other folks to do new revised material for the Robotech Reference Guide (I rewrote a lot of the personal weapons section, including coming up with expanded histories for the Owens (Wolff) SMG and Gallant rifle).

But I'd also happened upon a fellow Robotech fan who was doing his own podcast, RDF Underground. Originally I'd been moved to record a brief audio feedback to one of his editorials, about an inane fandom issue involving an Internet poll. Then I got to thinking: given my audio production experience in college and in putting together the Cagliostro commentary, I might be able to put together some actual interesting review segments for the thing. It would be a way of getting into podcasting without the obligation of putting a show together myself, or feeling bad about stopping if I got tired of it, since it isn't "my" podcast—and it would be a way of giving the podcaster some more content to cover given the dearth of Robotech news lately. (In fact, RDF Underground has, for as long as I've been listening to it, been a combined Robotech and Doctor Who podcast, featuring reviews of the new Doctor Who as it has. Lately he decided to make it a de facto combination topic podcast and started covering Doctor Who news as well.)

So I've done a few review segments for that, mostly of Mospeada stuff but also segments on Kamen Rider Faiz and Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Much of the stuff has or will make its way to my essay journal in one form or another, but only after it airs on the podcast. I didn't have anything in this week's episode, but I should have both an editorial and a Mospeada-vs-Robotech music review in next week's, assuming I get the latter finished on time.

Lately there's actually been some rather big news out of Robotech fandom, as the long-awaited Shadow Chronicles has, after a whole year of nothing, finally found a distributor. Funimation will be distributing it, and there's talk of DVD, TV, and theatrical releases. Maybe we'll even see it by the end of the year. I'm pretty excited, though this isn't really the venue to talk about that.

Speaking of my Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro mp3 commentary track, in the last few months I got bitten by the update bug and went back through it and rerecorded a bunch of segments and added a bunch of new stuff, too, filling up a lot of the "dead air" where I'd previously not had anything to say. Along the way I discovered that there's a new Windows DVD player app called Sharecrow that will automatically synchronize commentaries to episodes. Pretty slick. There's also a new site called Commentary Central where people can host or link their commentaries.

As for City of Heroes, like I said I've been kind of blasé about it lately. The funny thing is that part of it was that the character I was mainly playing at the time had gotten some nifty temporary powers that would expire in a certain amount of game time, and I wanted to save that game time along until I could do something special with it. As it happens, something special came along; this last weekend was a "double XP" weekend, where we were granted twice the normal amount of XP and the like on our characters. I took advantage of this to put a couple more levels on my level 41 Energy/Energy Brute; by then they just don't come all that fast anymore.

Though this was a bit complicated by the fact that I was also doing another Biokinetics study this weekend. Thankfully, the food was better than the last go-round; apparently they'd switched to a new caterer. It was the last weekend of a three-week study, and for the latter two of that I got to stay in the pristine new just-opened study facility. It was very nice, they had new widescreen HDTVs set up. Oddly enough, the DVD players that hooked to them were in a staff-only room, so the staff had to load or unload them, but the remote control would actually control them via the TV set. Wireless Internet, too, with a very very good connection. I'm definitely going to look forward to future studies there.

I guess that's about all I have to say for now. Future updates will hopefully be a bit shorter.

August 2020

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