Definitely the Electric Toilet

Hi again everyone. I'm a bit late this week, my apologies. But better late than never, right?

In fact, if you've been following my youtube channel, you may have noticed that I have a new video up! This one has seriously been a long time coming and for that I really am sorry. If you want to know what has really held me up, it's the video editing.

First, there's the fact that the video editing software seriously eats up my system resources, thus meaning that using the program to do finnicky things (like editing video) is really difficult. Fine control is virtually impossible. Second there's the fact that it simply takes a lot of time to edit video. You have to keep going over and over the same bit again to find the exact spot you want to cut/add in/fade/whatever and the time adds up. These reasons plus the fact that I'm usually already quite tired by the time I get home means that video editing often gets put on the back burner.

So yeah, video editing is really quite tiresome in many ways. It's rather rewarding in the sense that you could end up creating something really cool, but it kind of takes some work. This is, I strongly suspect, why so many people just upload their videos without any editing. I can't do that. My videos would look like complete and utter crap and no one would want to watch them. Hell, the editing I do isn't even that complicated. It's basically just cutting and trimming here and there.

Anyway, that's the reason why I've been slow at putting up videos. And with NaNoWriMo coming up, I'm probably going to continue to be slow at videos. Most of my energy is going to be going into my novel and I make no apologies for that. Blog entries will also probably get shorter. Alas, that's just the way it is.

Speaking of NaNo, I've been diving headfirst into that. Haven't started writing yet, of course (it's not yet November), but I've been doing lots of planning and practice. Need a lot more of both than I'm managing to do, but I'm doing my best. Almost done with some characterization questionaires for my two main characters and I've gotten a lot of ideas from that. Also, I have a much better grasp on my characters, which makes me happy. Yay.

It's interesting how much I've dived into this. At work, between classes, eating lunch, I'm always thinking about it or trying to get some planning and/or practice done. Even standing around in class sometimes, if I've been relegated to being a tape recorder, I often find my thoughts wandering off. What would Enos order for his last meal? Is Rachel one-dimensional? Where exactly should the novel start off?

Then I hear a "...Jeffu-sensei..." and suddenly it's back to reality and work. But strangely, it feels almost as if I've been ripped out of reality and into some strange place that I don't understand. Well, to be fair, this is Japan. It is a strange place that I don't completely understand. But that's beside the point. I'd have the same feeling if I were in the US or Canada.

Anyway, I expect things are only going to get worse over the next month and a half. Once I start actually writing the novel... well, it'll be interesting to see what happens, anyway.

*coughjoinmeinmynanocrazinesscough*

This weekend I'm heading back to Osaka for a couple days. I've been invited into a Japanese family's home for dinner and such and there's no way in hell I can decline an invitation like that. Really, it's not that common of a thing to happen. Hell, my host took a day off work to spend the day cooking dinner for when I arrive tonight. So we'll see how that goes. We were supposed to go to Kyoto for the Jidai Matsuri this weekend, but it's going to rain. My host said that, as a result, we probably won't go. Sad times.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. Talk to you next week.

~Jeffles

P.S. I feel like passing along a question asked by one of my younger students. Mostly because it's too strange not to. What's your favorite electric appliance in Japan?