Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Jun 30 2003

Again, I was pretty sure I was done with Episode 5…

Again, I was pretty sure I was done with Episode 5 when I sent it in. Then I just got an email from John saying that not only could he not open the file, his Mac doesn’t show the file as even existing.

Of course.

I am at a complete loss as to how this happened. The DVD was burned on the superdrive of a Mac Powerbook G4, and it worked on that computer. The spare copy we made works fine on my computer as well. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work, except for one: Murphy’s Law. Because it’s important, it has to be fucked up. That’s just the way things work, as surely as it does in Better than Life and you’re Arnold Rimmer. If you’re looking for something you need, you know you’re not going to find it because it has fled to another spatial dimension, and there it will stay until you don’t need it any longer, whereupon it will be there, staring you in the face in every drawer you open, every time you look under the bed, on every shelf getting in your way as you search frantically for some other object which has transported itself to the other dimension. Science can’t prove this yet, but someday it will. It will have to, because there’s no other explanation. One day a century from now scientists will discover this dimension, which will then become like a cosmic desktop trashcan, the place where we know we can find what we’re looking for. Of course, once we know that, off they’ll go to somewhere else where they can’t be found.

But for now, there’s nothing I can do about the situation, save for sending in the spare copy tomorrow, which is too late, but it’s all I can do. There’s no reason the spare copy will work, since it was made with the exact same machine on the same kind of DVD, and contains the exact same information. Any copy I made would be the same. Of course.

I had a good time at Maoman’s pool party on Sunday up at The Village. The pool was nice and blue and cool, albeit full of splashing kids, and the weather was just hot enough but with enough cloud cover to keep from incinerating everyone. There were, as always, quite a few foreigners at the pool, most sitting in loungechairs reading John Grisham-esque novels. Afterwards we tried to have dinner at Kiki, a Sichuan restaurant I walk past to and from work every day, but the line was so long we ended up at IR China at the Estrogen Mall across the street. The food was good, but expensive, and watching our order being taken on a PDA just isn’t worth the extra hundred dollars on the bill, especially considering the small size of the portions.

When I went to Milifilm today after work to pick up the spare DVD, I ended up talking with the director in charge of their little group, a long-haired, bespectackled fellow called “Ah-gao”. He plays Digeridoos and comes up with dancing animations to accompany the music. Just outside the old-style wooden windows cicadas were making their trademark summer sound. They really have a nice setup there. I talked with Vincent about perhaps working together on a project in the future. They certainly have a lot of useful resources. I’m thinking about doing something with a bit more local flavor this time, something technically less flamboyant but more solid in terms of simple story. Of course, this means I don’t know what I’m going to do next, besides lay off for a bit and recuperate before diving into making the DVD version. I was thinking of taking a couple of days off and going south, perhaps to Orchid Island with Kirk, but Kirk can’t go any time soon as he’s busy looking for work. Also, I can’t honestly say I can even afford to go anywhere, since I still have quite a bit of debt to pay off. What price sanity?

posted by Poagao at 4:17 pm  

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