Knight Commissioned: Chapter Two is now up for reading. This will be the last thing I put up before Thanksgiving, I think. Enjoy.

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Maybe. I’ve been working in between homework assignments on a story previously known as Untitled #11 that I abandoned in favor of working on Knight Commander. It’s been renamed to Knight Commissioned, because some of the other titles were not great… like To Dub a Knight or Knight Ascending… seemed too wrong a fit for the story, and so since we’re coming to understand the early part of Knight’s career in this fictional setting, the title should be appropriate to the story without giving too much away.

On another note, I’m looking at the final two weeks of school, and so far so good. Looks like I will be pulling a 3.0 again this quarter, which is good and should maintain my cumulative average. The question of next quarter is also still up in the air, because I have yet to find a job or something to cover my expenses. I’m still looking, but nothing yet. There are some prospects, but nothing firm. So, only time will tell.

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I got a little frustrated with the progress of Knight Commander, and decided to concentrate a little bit on the first story in the series, which is Knight Commissioned. Please take a look and read it. Please also send me grammatical errors and whatnot, so I can fix them. I try my best to check up, but it’s always nice to have more people edit it for me.

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Do you remember when you first got turned on to anime? I was sitting here listening to my Winamp list of music from various anime series, and suddenly Mamono Hunter Yoko popped on and I was trust back in time to 1995, when I had first watched it, courtesy of AD Vision (aka ADV Films). Yoko wasn’t the first anime series I had watched. My first exposure to anime in a conscious sense was Dirty Pair back in 1989 at TimeCon ‘89, when they screened a showing of Flight 005. Prior to that, I had been watching shows like Robotech and Star Blazers, and Battle of the Planets. Hell, Speed Racer is in there, too, but I don’t think I consciously understood it was Japanese animation and therefore I wasn’t really an anime fan (yet). I remember thinking how funny Dirty Pair could be and at the same time, how serious it was. The ending of Flight 005 was rather heavy-hearted, in spite of all the humor that most Dirty Pair movies or episodes seem to carry. I just recently rewatched the Dirty Pair OAVs I had on DVD and thought they were still pretty hilarious.

The first anime series I watched was Ranma Nibunnoichi, in English, and I still watch it in English (up until Sarah Strange is traded for an actual male voice). Long ago, though, I did sit down with all my box sets and watched in Japanese. I’m not sure if the argument can be made here, but I think whichever language you watch a series in first is typically which one you like best. I watched Tenchi in Japanese, and then listened to the English track on laserdisc, only to cringe about as bad as I did when I heard the AnimEigo English production of Bubblegum Crisis. But before I dive into yet another argument of sub vs. dub… after listening to Koi no Coup! I am suddenly feeling as though I need to go home and watch something old again, to remind me why I love this artform so much.

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I might actually consider using this feature, if they actually got California based numbers. Transcribing the phone posts isn’t too difficult, except when certain people’s voices are so loud they distort the phone’s pickup (*cough**cough*) and make a phrase completely unintelligible, even from context clues. I listened to his phone post about 55 times, and still I can’t figure out what the hell he said where I put (unintelligible). Sorry, man. I gave it my best shot.

Anyway, transcribing his phone post made me realize that I can transcribe with some decent speed. I felt like a fucking Bynar; listening to him speak and sort of sort his statement for later, whilst typing it all out as quickly as I could without making too many hindering mistakes in what I wrote. Why, if it weren’t for that bit of unintelligbility, I think it would have only taken two plays of the file. One to get it down, one to confirm. That’s not too bad a skill to have, I guess. Maybe I can look for transcription work in a different field…

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I had a job interview today at a construction company for the position of IT analyst. They’re not the biggest company and have only 25 workstations total, but it was an interesting proposition to listen to. The problem with that job was the lack of hours, and I don’t think they could afford me at part-time rates, which would be my full-time doubled. Since it was hourly, there’s a little more flexibility, and there’s no on-call or overtime involved. IT just isn’t mission critical for them. I checked their website before I went in to the interview, and I got a server unavailable error. I let them know and they shrugged and said it wasn’t important to them. Oh, well… definitely not your typical reation to IT problems from where I come from, but this isn’t an IT company.

When I got home from the interview, I had a voicemail on the phone from a recruiter for another firm who’s looking for experienced NOC people. Hey, that’s me! So I left a voicemail on the recruiter’s phone, and let them know I was available immediately. I’m wondering which company it’s for. On top of that, I spoke with my buddy Jason, and he was telling me about another possible opportunity locally, for a mail software startup (sort of an anti-spam thing).

It was after all this that I realized that if I wanted to make money, I was going to either have to have someone rich die and leave me all their money, win the state lottery, or continue to work in the IT industry. This blows.

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When you have friends with conflicting schedules, it’s sometimes difficult to really coordinate activities when something happens on the same day. Now, with the opening of The Matrix Revolutions, the novelty of being there opening day is kind of an in-thing with my crown (with some exceptions). Some of us save movie tickets for the sentimentality of the event. I assume that the same opening day mentality will be in place for when Return of the King is premeired, or perhaps the next Harry Potter movie.

Today, though, because of the difficulty involved in being able to have everyone get a chance to watch the movie on the same day, I ended up watching the same movie twice in twelve hours. I went right after school, and then I caught the second-to-last showing. Luckily, I got to sit before different screens, which gave me a decent idea of how nice the place was (new theater). I really like it, and I may have a new place to go to besides having to drive all the way to Milpitas to sit comfortably.

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I have not been sleeping well the past four or five days, despite having a weekend in there somewhere. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I do know it has nothing to do with my excitement over watching the new Matrix movie coming out tomorrow. Around here, they added like 10 more showings on the schedule and included a 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10am showings. Who the hell is going to go that early? Well, people were there early for the premeires of Episodes I and II, so I guess people can be equally as nuts to be there at the buttcrack of dawn to watch the conclusion of the Matrix before everyone else.

I only hope that the movie does not suck major ass in its conclusion. We’ll see later today, hopefully.

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I’ve been playing an awful lot of EverQuest lately, when I probably should have been studying, but I think I hit another high tide in my EQ playing. Shit, I pay for it every month, I might as well get as much enjoyment out of it before I can no longer afford it. But also, I picked up FFXI Online when it came out last week and installed it both on my laptop and my desktop, for ease of use. FFXI has awesome music, but the interface requires some reading of the manual in order to really get used to it. EQ has the advantage; when I first started playing EQ, it was slightly less confusing and more intuitive to me. Plus, I had Todd helping me out back then and pretty soon it was like I was an old pro. These days, I’ve been spending time looking for decent user interfaces for EQ, since the interface is now written entirely in XML, so any old boob can create a new and nifty interface for the game. I downloaded a pretty good one last Friday and it has everything I’m looking for in an interface.

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Whenever something is compromised, it’s basically giving up something in order to get something. Sometimes, that something is something of worth and sometimes it’s not, depending on the circumstances of the compromise. I’ve been wanting my college degree for quite some time. I don’t blame my parents for splitting up or going bankrupt, or forcing me to work in order to survive… those are all just facts of life. I don’t blame eBay for laying me off just as I was getting back into the school groove, and now forcing me to get out of it to get another job in order to keep the roof over my head currently.

But I cannot sit here and not say it hasn’t been a frustrating thing to deal with. As I said before, it sucks that just as I’m getting into one thing really well, something else fucks that up beyond my control. And beleive me when I say I’ve triede my damndest to get it under control, but to no avail. I will finish this quarter of school for sure, but next quarter is questionable. Which means, I’ll have to wait until next winter quarter to pick up again, and that blows hardcore. I can still do general education courses online without difficulty, but Japanese is what I need to keep up without interruption. The class I’m taking right now is difficult enough without missing a single day here and there, but a whole year? I’ll be lucky if I can get back into it without missing a step and finish it out.

I feel like I’ve been compromising too much of myself lately. Personal integrity seems to be fatigued.

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