Fan trailers, end of Pretty Sammy, lack of sleep, Deoxys giveaway

I'm going to make this quick cause I want to go take a shower and go to bed soon. I am just trying to kill time until this one thing finishes downloading so I can set it up to convert.

Oh ha ha. I had the SuperS special in AVI format already. Oops. Oh well.

I am working right now on trying to get my regular videos-to-make to-do list out of the way so I can focus on the Dark Mercury Arc Fandub Project (a group PGSM fandub I'm running), starting the "Best of Fujiwara Zakuro Fandub Series (a Tokyo Mew Mew group fandub I'm going to do...it was originally going to be a solo effort, but after the long process of transcribing my own script for the first episode and doing read-throughs, I realized that I can't pull off some of the voices, especially Pudding's), and doing solo fandubs for my backup account. I want to try to redo one of the Generator Gawl fandubs that I did that didn't turn out as well as the other GG fandub I did (the first one I did for that account). I bought a program recently that appears to be able to do DVD-rips (at least, it can copy DVD's, which is the closest legal way to get DVD footage on your computer, I think), and if it works, I'm going to get the footage for that redo fandub from my Generator Gawl DVD set. The advantages of this are that I can turn the subtitles off (maybe) and also the video quality is way better on the DVD than on the eps I'd downloaded from this one guy's YouTube account.

Right now I am trying to finish off my endeavor to make Sailor Moon-related fan trailers of the five current Harry Potter films. Others have done this, but I am being somewhat unique in that I am doing each trailer with only footage from the corresponding Sailor Moon season: Classic for Sorcerer's Stone; R for Chamber of Secrets; S for Prisoner of Azkaban; SuperS for Goblet of Fire and Stars for Order of the Phoenix. This is in response to an idea somebody had in comment to someone else's SM/Harry Potter fan trailer. I finished the Stars one tonight, and the clips I'm converting right now are for the SuperS one. The reason I did the Stars one first was because the torrent of eps I downloaded for that were the right format whereas the torrent for SuperS weren't. I tried to find torrents for SuperS, but they were pretty much OGM files, which Movie Maker doesn't take. So I am back to direct downloading. Fortunately, I took advantage of Megaupload's "Happy Hour," which upgrades those with a free account and the Megaupload Toolbar to premium status for the period between 9PM-3AM Eastern Standard Time (6PM-12AM my time) if they press the "happy hour" button. I heard about this from k1anime.com. This is a fantastic thing because premium status on Megaupload lets you download as many files as you want in a 24-hour period (normally, I think you can get away with like 3) and it lets you download multiple files at once. Oh, and you don't have to wait 45 seconds for the download to load; it's ready immediately. Pretty cool, ne?

The Stars/Phoenix trailer was killer for editing because I chose the teaser (my favorite of the Phoenix trailers), and this involved a really fast-paced montage sequence, as teasers usually do. When I finished saving it, I kept rewinding the video to watch the montage again, because it went by so dang fast. Strangely enough, the Stars footage in the video only comes from only 7 episodes (whereas my SuperS trailer is planned to have footage from 20 episodes, plus footage from the SuperS movie and the 2nd SuperS Special).

With the SuperS one, I scripted out every shot of the Goblet of Fire trailer I'm using and matched it with an episode, using Hitoshi Doi's episode guide to find appropriate episodes. A lot of them are from the climax of the season (the last 10 episodes or so), but some are from earlier on.

I finished watching Magical Project S. It was good and funny as usual. I watched the rest of the extras as well. "Cinderella Misa," where the fairy godmother (Ramia) turns the Cinderella character (Misao) into a "demon of revenge" (Misa) is funny and has a somewhat twisted ending. The "26 Secrets of Pretty Sammy" one is pretty funny and deals with all the different types of "magic" Pretty Sammy can do. They're pretty much all things Ryo-oh-ki thinks are significant but that Sasami thinks are dumb, and she stops him before he can finish the list. One of them, something about a skirt that can twirl around and cut anything, sounds like something I've heard before.

I am happy that I was able to get that torrent, with all the extras and everything. That's awesome. Now if only I could get the video files onto a CD so I could keep the series but get it off my computer to save space. I tried to save it onto a CD-R by making a data CD (something I've done before with an anime series) but it didn't work for some reason.

You have to be careful with torrents. I started to download one for the xxxHolic anime today that I was really excited about because it had all the videos in MP4 format, which would have meant I could watch them on my iPod (very convenient). But when I looked into the fansubbing company for it, I found out that yes it would be fansubbed, but the subtitles would be in Spanish. And that does me no good. (Reminds me of the time Amy had obtained video of the anime Saiyuki, but it was in Japanese with Chinese subtitles, so she had to print out scripts in English from the net). So I found a new torrent with English subtitles. It is downloading right now. I also found a site that has torrents of the episodes of the second season of the show (xxxHolic Kei) in mp4 format, so I will be able to watch that on my iPod at least.

The reason I want to go to sleep soon is because I have had too little of it the last few days. Last night was the first night in at least a week that I'd gotten eight hours of sleep. I had one less than 6 hour night and a few 7-hour nights. The other night I was only going to get like 6 hours of sleep, and then around 5am I had a recurrence of a strange phenomenon where my throat feels weird, my back hurts, I feel like I have to go to the bathroom, and I toss and turn -- all at once. So I got up and used the bathroom. I didn't want to take medicine for my back cause for some reason I thought I might be nauseous. Anyway, I tucked in the sheet corners, made the bed softer (I have a Sleep Number mattress) and went back to bed. The lack of sleep is impacting my work performance -- I get tired a lot sooner than usual (being a morning person, I tend to get tired in the afternoon) and I am often disoriented. And although I am consuming caffeine (via soda), I tend to drink Diet Pepsi (diet soda is better for you, and I don't like Diet Coke), which only has something like 35mg of caffeine in 12 fluid ounces, meaning in a typical 20 ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi, there's only a little under 70 mg of caffeine.

I don't have to be in to work till 2pm tomorrow/today (Friday) so I'm going to leave a little early and stop by GameStop, because they are giving out...DRUM ROLL...Deoxys! Yay. And it's through DS Download Play too (that little built-in mechanism in your DS that lets you download game demos and stuff at certain hotspots), so you don't have to set up Mystery Gift and stuff like with Darkrai or Manaphy. I need to charge up my DS tonight and also set it to not autoplay when turned on, because I think you have to have your game cartridge in when you do the download.

Okay it's late I better go now.