applejinx

So, it's twenty-three degrees below zero outside. (celsius) -9 farenheit...

And my furnace won't light.
( Read more... )

I am SO burnt out. I guess I'm about ready for new pony episode and day off tomorrow, huh?

On the day-job front, flak and static and a desperate need to outline and describe my product line better.

On the fanfic front, I busted my plot writing a tight, intense little episode-formatted MLP fic that is tighter than most of the stuff I see, put my love into it, and drew up a picture of a pivotal moment in it, and sent it off to ED- and it bounced! I can't believe that I can't get a fic through first try. I think those guys are so gunshy from dealing with crappy authors that they beat everybody into their model of 'not crappy'. I instantly dove into the thing again, and whacked away at adverbs and verbs, shoveling mass quantities of 'said' everywhere I possibly could, and revised a key passage they didn't like to be structured a lot less poetically and a lot more simply.

This, after I lost the entire day to a random impulse to rewrite the notorious 'Cupcakes' and drag its ending back to what you'd get in canon. I pulled it off, even, and now I'm just rattled.

Nobody bitched about the country song, except that I had to fake the voices :(

Here's the picture of the fic that bounced, anyway...

I still got it- might have fed my kitties through the winter with this one :)

The pow'ful hindquarters of Applejinx have kicked loose a plugin update for 'Desk' that is just stupid good XD I'm so happy, it does everything I hoped an' more. I'm gettin' it out as soon as I possibly can, and sendin' out the usual awful lot of free updates, and as always hoping the happy users don't put it straight up on file sharin' (or at least that some people will want to support my work even if the internet has everythin' free)

I have a set o' controls that does crazy, crazy, awesome things to any sound you put through it, and I'm in the middle of all the rigamarole involved in makin' the web pages and all that stuff. Did it already for a sample trimmin' gate plugin, now I'm doin' it all again, after which I ain't gonna be good for anythin' but ponies XD

Nobody outside of a few friends cared about the country song an' I don't even care tonight. This is what I do, just keep chargin' along and eventually, occasionally, somethin' clicks. Mostly it don't. I'm okay with that as long as I can be patient.

I did it! I cut vocals for the song, I mixed it, I sorted out all the little details and I put it up on soundcloud and on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0pKgwAQCPo

I gave all the credit to main cast ponies XD but technically, all of it is me and studio trickery.

I had to turn around and remove the first pony video I put up, because it was a repurposing of a very sad guitar solo track I had, to a picture of Dashie mourning over AJ's grave! And youtube tried to link everything to do with the love song to THAT video D: aaaaahh! Not a good followup to a feel-good, 'it gets better' type love song :)

Now I'm totally tired, and for all I know, nobody will like it and I'll get yelled at for not makin dance music or somethin' and I don't care 'cos I did it out of love and I think it shows throughout the piece. And I'll find out later if it was magic or just endless practice and more work. But I made it as real as I could.

Spotted pinkieturtle, I mean KinkyTurtle, on LJ with a massive outburst of ponies XD I have always liked him but have also been perplexed at the same time. That's now TWO Pinkie Pies I know (one in my recovery groups in Keene, too) where, once I realised that was who they were, I 'got it' and was much less awkward-feeling around 'em. I don't know if it works both ways, but the important thing is the understandin' :)

KT is perhaps the pinkiest Pinkie I've yet seen in the fandom :) mind you, it only counts if they self-identify.

NOW I'll git back to work XD

I fear I'm gittin' into a tragic-overreach thingy, where all my efforts will go for naught because nobody will like the music 'cos it's not eurobeat dance chiptune what have you.

An' I don't care, I'm doin' it anyway, out of love, and because I know the song is true. Even if nobody loves it ever, I'll know it was real. I've just done four takes for each pony in the song, all of which were pretty good. They- we? whut! AJ and Dashie hit a harmony on the final chorus, even. I have the compin' to do and then a mix, much of which is done already.

An' then, it goes on Soundcloud, on Youtube, and I mention it in My Little Remix, though I am scared I'm not makin' friends there 'cos I clomp in all rudely and such. :(

Oh, and it might as well be the first post on that Applejack Radio tumblr. I'll steal the complicated broadcast/EQ rig used in the song to git the voices more accurate, and use it for just talking stuff too, later. Probly gonna fuss over it some more first, but that's a channel strip and no mistake. SAVED for future reference once I get it.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Talked to my therapist who was enthralled with how much happier I seemed and is gonna be a brony most likely (she's a RD through and through). I did not tell her, "Oh by the way, my personality is being sucked out and replaced with a lesbian pony" XD but the reason for that is, it ain't much of a change. I don't know why the dialect comes too easily but I did write a character like that in one of my books.

Back ta work!

Distracted me ALL day, but I got it! I got a whole song with chords and everythin'. AND between-verse chatter. And it's the most adorable thing. And now I gotta re-cord it *ULP*

No time to do that today except maybe gettin' the backing track structure together in Logic. But I am charging ahead on the project like only I can, because it's for love of Dashie :D (no, there ain't no clop in it, it's more romantic-like: well, as romantic as WE git, anyhoo, which ain't as wussy as some would have it, but powerful in its own right)

I am in so much trouble. I've come down with song- lookin' into that country-music-composing tendency, and ran straight into a verse and chorus that HAD to come out.

*cough* in a manner of speakin... 'cos it's a flagrant AppleDash shippin-song.

IN AJ's voice with cameos by Dash- IN character.

Oh sweet lord how am I gonna pull this off? I'm terrified but it's latched on like grim death and won't let go, and I gotta try and do it justice somehow D:

If nobody ever sees it, it din't work XD

So THIS should be interesting...

Today I'm diggin' into Flash, which I have from when I got that Adobe bundle so I could make CD packaging with InDesign. I always let Flash sit around, because it didn't seem that suitable to anything plus I know Photoshop so well- obviously I was gonna want to do things with that, and for much pictorial work that would be correct.

But... PONIES!

MLP is a Flash thing- more than that, if you look at the actual images of it, it's really plain that it's built out of very Flash-y bits. Just about anything is either a vector line, or a full-on shape such as eye parts. These can be animated, and of course are.

The catch is, it's more like programmin' than drawin'. You don't even USE nice line-making skills, you add these control points and fool with 'em and layer all different sorts of simple shapes inside each other with reeeeally complicated masking.

The FUN part is I'm a programmer XD just one who has no clue about Flash, so I am poking around in this big deceptively simple-looking program tryin' to find where stuff is hid. I already took a tutorial animation, busted the masking, and fixed it, but I didn't really know what I was doin' so it hardly counts. I have the O'Reilly missin' manual for Flash CS4, so I'm going to keep at it, and might just be focusing on that in the foreseeable future.

Oh, who am I kidding. 'Course I'm going to keep at it. The only question is, am I gonna produce anything out of it- I'm guessin' YEAH.

Gah! What a day. Apparently I'm losing my mind in a couple ways and have to settle the heck down, to which end I'm eating dinner (always a trouble spot, getting so busy that I don't eat anything all day long)

I'm trying to do a number of things in hopes of being liked by bronies i.e. STRANGERS and it's freaking me out. Still downloading videos like mad, with another day to go (thanks, slow-ass DSL in Vermont) and diving into new projects with terrifying alacrity.

Namely- I experimented around and discovered that Applejack pitched down from 44.1K to 32K sounds a heck of a lot like my voice. Thus commenced a mad frenzy of sound file work- converting ALL the shows to audio mp3s (good for the car! if I want to be CRAZED FREAKING OTAKU about it!), loading them into a sound editor, digging through more than two full episodes to edit out ALL the most characteristic AJ lines to be able to hear at 32K, making those references to have...

Starting a tumblr based on the idea that I could probably embrace the brony world by doing a more straight/canon thing like those alarming 'Pinkamina' tumblr blogs, assuming I could get the voice REAL good- knowing that I could write the lines with much less difficulty due to natural predilection...

Deciding that it would be pretty funny if Dashie appeared as a voice on it, the whole thing flirting with mischief but refusing to flat-out ruin things as entertaining as that would be- and it's the same voice actress, so BADABOOM go back in and do another whole multi-episode line filch, this one for Dashie...

Discover that I don't like her adorable voice quite as much at 32K- and what the hell am I thinkin', confusing matters in such a way? AJ is sort of like a 'personal furry' of ponies, Dashie is more an object of desire of ponies, or of adoration? Why do I feel so weird tryin' to do that voice? What the hell am I doin' in the first place trying to totally master not one but TWO distinct voices by one of the most gifted voice actresses I've ever heard? In a day? AND puttin' up sound clips for people to hear, of how close I'm gettin' it?

*freakout* *delete a bunch of stuff* hhh hhhh hhh hhh hhh...

I believe my credentials of being the crazy pony that unthinkingly tries to do the completely impossible and then goes SPLAT trying it, are unchallenged ;P

Good lord, I put SINGIN' up in a place. I was tryin' to rewrite old songs of my own in such a way I could do pony versions singin' them AS Applejack (not liking my own voice or singing persona any).

I basically need somebody to sit on me and say 'you, stop that before you make yourself sick and crazy!'. In the absence of such, I gotta just... I dunno. Go watch more ponies and listen to Dashie laughing with that adorable squeakin'. 'My' laugh is more a hyuh hyuh hyuh, which matches the human being furry and brony type who types this rot. No wonder it gets confusing when they go and make a damn pony outta you, and suddenly there's a crowd of people goin' "This is wonderful! You are the best thing ever!" and it's a cute cartoon pony that acts like you in myriad ways.

Tomorrow is another day.