Hard Drives Freed from Bondage

May 1 2003

PRAISE "BOB;" a giant chore is done.

I'll pronounce the moral of the story first:

BLANK DVDs THAT YOU BUY AT YOUR LOCAL STORE FOR $2 to $5 each SUCK!, AND ARE A TRICK ON AMATEURS. These include Fujifilm and Hypermedia.

On the other hand, Ritek brand unmarked blank DVDs that you buy in bulk, for a buck each, from professional media suppliers, ARE WELL WORTH THE CHEAPER PRICE, since they are actual real DVD blanks instead of tricks on amateurs.

There. Some moral, huh. (There's a very slightly more spiritual moral at the end.)

The giant chore was the conversion of three SubGenius feature-length video collections from VHS to DVD. (And VCD and DivX avi too, for yuks.) Now FINISHED are:

DOBBSFILM
STANGFILMS
AS THEY SEE "BOB" (formerly "SubGenius Interviews."

This means I can soon ERASE THE MASTERS FROM MY COMPUTER so as to start on SubSITE again, plus these new DVDs:

ARISE
THE BEST OF ALL X-DAYS

ARISE has been successfully transfered from the original 1" master to digital tapes I can put into my hard drives for revision. I decided to do the BEST OF X-DAYS from the original camera footage, rather than the semi-edited S-VHS and S-8 first cuts.

The shitty "name-brand" DVDs, by being shitty media without me knowing it, slowed this project down, although in the long run this was probably good. Forced Involuntary Slack on me during which I had nothing better to do than make revisions and improvements.

A little over a month ago, just before the Winterstar devival, the guy asked for his digital camera back from me. This event caused me to try to hurry and transfer all my old originals over and burn them to DVD while I still had access to equipment. My first versions of the three videos all came out badly -- the last 5 minutes of the 90 minute programs wouldn't play from the (Hypermedia) DVD copies in my Apex DVD player. (They WOULD play FINE on my computer DVD player, but that doesn't count.)

So I had to do them over again. Well, if one must go to that much effort, one might as well make any little last minute tweaks and improvements. Which I did. This involved more trips across town to transfer places, more editing and, all day yesterday, attempts to burn the finished masters to DVDs that would WORK RIGHT and thus become the NEW MASTERs, you see. Freeing up 130 gb on my drives. Also allowing me to work on something else, such as SubSITE.

So, PRAZE THAT OLD FIST-FUCKIN' "BOB," it is done and I can move on.

Thanks to the fine arteests of alt.binaries.slack, I have already made the boxes and labels for the new DVDs, and now I can ADD THEM TO THE CATALOG!!

And then I can add the NEW NEWS, TEXT and ART, and videos and sounds, and so on, to SubSITE, and not die in dishonor.

I have gotten two hate-mails from drunks last week, hating me with considerable fervor for "SUPPORTING THE COALITION TROOPS" in that one place on SubSITE. I guess they don't read past that line to the gag about "AND YOU TOO CAN DEPEND ON DOBBSCO MUNITIONS." Actually they did, they read my little essay, and decided I was on drugs and stupid and bad, because, while I thought the war was bad, I didn't think it was ALL bad in quite the same coloring book ways that they did. My "shades of gray" philosophy seems not to be what the bored youth and bitter old unemployed are looking for lately.

Anyway, I really want to get all the OTHER great SubGenius statements and gags and pukings about the War Thing up on SubSITE, just so these illiterates will have somebody else to holler at besides me.

The funny thing is, I also got yelled at for being so ANTI-WAR on all those Hours of Slack. A feller just can't be anti-war ENOUGH for some people, or pro-war enough for others. Carefully explaining one's complex feelings on complex issues doesn't have the same appeal as yelling, say, "BUSH IS AN INSANE CHIMPANZEE WARLORD!" or "YOU PROTESTERS MUST BE IN LOVE WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN!"

Anyway... getting these DVDs to finally come out fully playable, as they did this morning, thanks to the switch to cheaper mail-order media, marks the end for now of a long couple of months of RENDERING.

RENDERING is when your computer is busily drawing your pictures for you. While drawing millions of video frames, my computer can't do much else at the same time. The fancy HTML editing progs for instance, or graphic viewers, they mess up the render, or work too slowly. All I could do was TEXT based crap. Writing, newsgroups or simple web browsing. So I was reading and posting to alt.slack a lot.

Now I can enter a new phase where I just DUPLICATE DISKS with one brain, while updating SubSITE with my other, and, with the third brain, ignoring this newsgroup and the 3 main e-lists -- which I also haven't read lately. I could still use HTML help. We now have a huge volunteer staff, but, apart from from SAINT David Bachner, and SAINT Prostata Cantata, none have actually gotten around to DOING anything lately.

Oh shit I forgot, the taxes. And the email. The X-Day MAILING! Those book reprints. I haven't actually ANSWERED any email that didn't directly demand immediate answers to issues that involve MONEY in some way. Money to print the Stark Fist. I have been unable to keep up with the letters from people wanting me to help make them famous for free. There have been quite a lot of those lately along with the hate mail.

If somebody wants to get my attention, to ask me to help make them famous, the very best way to introduce themselves to me is no so much by mailing me ten of their home produced CDs, but by ordering something from my catalog, Bulldada Time Control Labs. When a person does that, I answer their mail quickly; I hand-write their address on the envelope and remember roughly where they live, and think of them fondly; and most of all, I learn that they're really smart and discerning, not just Pinks who think that wearing a "Bob" shirt and quoting Zappa makes them smart.

Sure, you can actually get most of what I sell for free just by regularly checking alt.binaries.slack. But that doesn't motivate me to help make you famous, you see. SLACK flows both ways ONLY.

Wei and I went out and saw "The Two Towers" at a movie theater last night, finally. Holy Fucking Shit. We didn't get the Flying Cars or Invisibility Rocket Belts here in the future, but we sure got some great special effects movies.

And there ARE real Bozos on some of those busses.

Hey, I came up with a new slogan yesterday, while listening to a vehement conspiracy nut ranting on college radio.

"The less you know, the more sure you are of all of it; contrariwise, the more you know, the less sure you are of any of it."

Has been said about umpteen millions ways before. "The more I learn the less I know," etc. As Hosea said, "Lo, for my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." Lack of knowledge of what tremendous luck and Slack accrue when one makes a proud purchase of SubGenius Media from BULLDADA TIME CONTROL LABORATORIES.

P.S. THE LAST FULL METAL DOBBSHEAD HAS JUST BEEN SOLD. Checks will soon be avalanching on Blackout. Well, *A* check.

P.S. God damn it, another 20 minutes to go on this last duplicate safety burn. These computers. Real time-savers, huh.

So this BEST OF X-DAY project. I used to sell roughly edited X-Day Drill videos, mainly for the benefit of those who were there but can't remember any of it. I didn't have access to editing gear during that period, however. The edits are nice clean PAUSE edits but that's all they are. Less than frame accurate and no fancy transitions or color correction possible.

Modemac recently suggested recutting that stuff and pushing it on Something Weird Video for distrbution. (Actually somebody at Troma expressed interest some time ago, but not to the point of helping pay for remastering.)

Whether or not I ever get around to pestering other distributors -- 'cause, WHY SHOULD I, REALLY?!? -- I want to do a Best-Of collection pulled from ALL devivals... and X-Day Drill footaage is the best way to start, because that footage displays the most FINE FINE TITTIES borne by FINE FINE UPSTANDING CONNIETITES and other SubGenius babes, gals, wymyn, she-yetis, half-men, bulldaggers, etc.

I should mention that the revised DOBBSFILM SHORTIES includes a 2-minute Burning Man photo collage video which Wei and I assembled -- if you crawl through this footage frame by frame you will see EVERY TITTY of the Burning Man Free Tits Bike Marathon or whatever it's called. Likewise, most of the titty photos from the X-Day Drills 96-2000 are crammed into other shorts.

Titty Count on PREDOBBS STANGFILMS is not high, and there are no titties at all in "AS THEY SEE "BOB" (which is mostly Pink news reports on SubGenius.)

Psychedelic animation count is very high in all three DVDs, however, esp. Dobbsfilm Shorties, which, like ARISE, IS LSD in DVD form.

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Original file name: StangReport5-1-03-HardDrivesFre - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44