Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts

Friday, June 29, 2012

Fragile states

I'm exhausted, and there's still 3 weeks of work left, followed by ultra-intense work during the festival itself. I'm coping, but it's not terribly fun.

Found this picture on the Internet today:


Something about that critter's face does a number on me. I know it's supposed to be smiling, but all I'm getting is sad, scared, lost, and alone.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Otherwise we'd go crazy

The festival is almost upon us, and it has imbued everyone involved with a seething hatred for Jean-Luc Godard. I get to translate a metric ton of his brain sewage into English, so I've developed a bit of an immunity, but still, sometimes the pain pushes through. To wit:

So, we asked to be told only about this, not about us, not about you – about something between us and you, you, who are we, we, who are you, we, who came from you. We placed “us” among “us”. We’re among us. Television is a family matter. Dad – day and mom- night. Dad – before and mom – after.

And then 20 more hours of that. Fun!

Anyway, I'm in more or less constant contact with my boss/server goblin, who uploads* the movies I then distribute among our translators. Whenever she's about to leave her house, she asks if I need something uploaded before she goes. It's a sort of ritual. At one point, when I copy-and-pasted my order from our Big Spreadsheet, she went "Pfff! How about a challenge for a change?" So when I sent her my next order, I snuck in Inception, in full Big Spreadsheet regalia (director, running time, language, etc). This became a sort of running joke, until last night I got another yousendit package with a file called Inception. Inside it was this:



You've guessed it. That's Jean-Luc Godard.

Sometimes it's worth it.

* through a series of trial yousendit accounts, so I've already received files from: Buffy Summers, Amber Benson, Sookie Stackhouse, James Marsters...

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Oh my God, are you 12?!

Twilight persists, most recently due to this gem:

But also, I finally remembered that I actually liked one of the songs sloshing around that cesspit, so I got the soundtrack to track it down. And apparently it is time for me the go up against the zeitgeist and check out Muse, universally reviled as they are. Supermassive Black Hole is just too fucking good.

In work-related news, I'm practicing diplomacy in an attempt to stem the tide of people who hate my guts. I think I've grown much better at it since last year. Fingers crossed.

And Parenthood has officially gone the Brothers & Sisters routeThere's hardly been any comedy at all in the last few episodes, and they just keep laying on the melodrama. I also suspect that the "I consider myself too big to fail" speech - the first piece of truly atrocious dialogue the series has served me - was merely an opening salvo.


Cmon, people, look poignant! We're resolving issues here!

Ah well, I'll stick with it until the season finale. Unless that was the season finale, in which case are you fucking kidding me?

Also, reading Kathy Griffin's Official Book Club Selection and finding it better than I anticipated. Light, breezy, kind of informative, and funny without trying to be standup-ish.

Oh, and Mass Effect 2 kicks major Krogan ass. The dialogue sharp, witty and - on occasion - badass, and the voice acting is superb. I checked out the credits and it turns out my favorite NPC so far was voiced by Carrie-Anne Moss, and I still have Adam Baldwin to look forward too. And Claudia Black! Have you ever heard Claudia Black speak?!

Wormholes, man. Wormholes.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Strands

It's been a headachey day. I've been trying to shake off a cold for a few days, and finally decided that what I need is some good old chicken soup. This being my world of nevercook, the part of chicken soup ended up being played by Vietnamese Pho from the takeout place. I hope it works.

I ended up in a professional cul de sac. I can either work on a Romanian documentary featuring quaint, rhymed folk ditties, a Polish newsreel featuring quaint, rhymed folk ditties, or a fairy tale featuring quaint, rhymed invocations. I've no idea how I got here, but I blame Twilight.

Which I finally watched, last night. I don't think it's possible to write anything new about the movie, and to just sum it up as "bad" seems completely beside the point. It was such a weird, disjointed creation. Definitely had that Harry Potter adaptation feel of trying to cram and stich together all these elements on a strict deadline, except without any... you know... action. The end credits took me completely by surprise (and were a total what the fuck of their own - who the hell chose that song?)

I genuinely tried to find the appeal, but I suppose I just didn't have the adolescent ovaries. I did like the cinematography. Well, ok: I liked the forest. The landscape shots. Seemed like a place I might want to live, or at least spend some time in.

Then again, I'm guessing they shot it in British Columbia, so that's not exactly news. I also liked some of the music, but my taste does have several glaring, gothic-skewing loopholes...

I could not, however, wrap my head around how remote the whole experience seemed to me. I felt like I was watching a film that was simultaneously its own, ready-made parody. The dialogue was so clunky and hollow at the same time. The girl's acting so... catatonic. She conveyed brain death with very limited means of expression (I swear, there was not a single line she did not either begin or end with a snort or an "um"), but maximum zeal. And then there was the creepy subtext of a mindless, infatuated drone clinging desperately to a guy who keeps saying - sometimes even jokingly - that he might physically hurt her. It all came together perfectly during the shitballs retarded Watch Me Glitter sequence, and the subsequent exchange:

E: I'm designed to kill.
B: I don't care.
E: I've killed before.
B: It doesn't matter.
E: I wanted to kill you. I've never wanted a human's blood so much in my life.
B: I trust you.
E: I try to play marbles with my ex-girlfriends' clitorises, but they're too squishy
B: I totally get that.

Ok, that last part might not have made it into the movie, but it really wouldn't look that out of place. Weird, weird thing.

What else... Ah. I'm madly in love with Jesse St. James. Not the pornstar. The fictional person who says stuff like "I picked the Stephen Sondheim biography section for our clandestine meeting place because only he would be able to express my melancholia." Now with video!

Over and out.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Shiny

A lot of apartment stuff going on, but I don't really have time to go into that right now, so I'm just posting this brilliant disclaimer I found in one of the festival dialogue lists:

Translators & laboratories: the director, mr. Pasolini, has personally written, timed and layed out the Sinhala to English subtitles. He has requested that you only subtitle what he has subtitled, that you keep his timings and that you keep his layout and punctuation as closely as possible.

That's some hands-on directing.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Rapture is near

I can now claim to have worked on movies, comic books, and computer games - the geek triphecta. Ergo, I've peaked at 26, and it's all downhill from here.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

A day in the life of...

Wake-up call - 10:30 a.m.

Watching the 2nd part of the movie I had to translate - 1 hour
Posting Francoise and Iggy - 7 minutes
Washing up, etc. - 30 minutes
Breakfast - 10 minutes
Pizza, eaten while watching The Colbert Report - 21 minutes
Nap - 15 minutes
Sholazar Basin + Uthgarde Keep (heroic) - 1 hour 45 minutes
Sharpening a pencil - 30 seconds
Coming up with a dedication, writing it down, and erasing it - 3 minutes
Locating and queueing some k.d. lang (seriously people, her Hallelujah will canonize you) - 2 miunutes
Actual time spent IM chatting with Ana and Yssy, Ao and Boogie - 20 minutes
Emailing the finished products - 1 minute

End of work - 1:45 a.m.

Which means I clocked in about 11 and a half pure, crystalized workhours today. Tomorrow, I'm going to celebrate by working some more. And having breakfast with a girl from the University I hadn't seen since... well... graduating. And braving that post office out on that limb.

Cause I just know how to party.