#guess who finally got their vlc player to work!

[captaincoffeegirl515]

Okay

So

I finally got to watch Unicorns

The movie was good

But SO NOT WORTH all the fuckery I had to go through just to be able to watch it on my laptop

Like. Jesus fucking Christ

I felt like I was looking for an actual unicorn just to be able to watch it.

They think WAYYYY too highly of themselves man.

You can only stream it if you live in the UK and Northern Ireland, which I don't.

So I bought the Bluray like they wanted us to bc that's the only way anyone who lives anywhere else other than those two countries could watch their movie.

And then! They went through all the trouble putting all this extra encrypting and whatever on the Bluray disc that made it virtually unreadable AND unplayable on my laptop.

I needed buy a new DVD player that can specifically play Bluray discs because nobody had one that could play it. And jfc it was a pain. I went to multiple malls and multiple appliance and computer stores and literally NOBODY had a bluray disc player bc people don't do discs anymore nowadays. They do streaming. I could only get one online which I did.

And then! Literally no software could play their Bluray. VLC doesn't work because of some AACS decoding issue. Like when the disc is open I can see it has an aacs folder but I guess they encrypted that shit to hell and back bc VLC keeps giving me an error that it cant decode the aacs.

So I had to buy a full license for a different video playing software called PowerDVD that can specifically play Bluray discs bc the free version of the only software that could play their disc can't fucking play Blurays. Only the licensed one could. And this was AFTER I tried a bunch of different other video playing softwares, none of which could play the disc.

So yeah. Anyways definitely going to avoid Signature Entertainment especially when it comes to Blurays bc jfc if that's what it's like to watch one of their movies then I don't ever want to deal with any of their other movies.

Anyways if anyone wants spoilers feel free to message me

[xcziel]

First Meeting - Liu Sang and Kan Jian

The Lost Tomb | Reunion: the Sound of the Providence

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Z 249

So, funny story, I was going to watch Episode 250 this morning, and my DVD player quit working, so I had to go to the store and buy another one.   For those of you keeping score, this is the third external disc player I’ve used on this project. 

My best guess is that the mechanism that actually reads the DVD’s is getting worn out somehow.    The first player I used could do Blu-Rays too, and it still can.    It can play CD’s too, anything as long as it’s not a DVD.   You put one in and it acts like you stuffed a cookie in there by mistake.     The second one’s doing the same thing now, only it never had Blu-Ray capability, because I just wanted a cheap standby to get me through this liveblog.   Hopefully this third one will last.    I’ve only got 43 episodes and five movies to go.

Anyway, I’m wondering if my gif-making procedure is what’s wearing these things out so quickly.   For 248, I spent a lot of time moving the playback slider on VLC Media Player, trying to recapture the footage so I could get what I needed.    Most of my gifs are a little quicker.    I have a rough idea how many frames of animation I can use, and I’ve gained a better sense of what I want and what my “aesthetic” is, for lack of a better term.    So usually I can get what I need on the second or third pass.    For Episode 248, I had some trouble, so I kept going back and replaying a few seconds of video from that disc, and I wonder if all that jumping around messed up the thing that reads DVD’s.  

The discs are totally unaffected by this, I know that much.  I watched 249 on the second player before it died, and I just watched 250 on the third player.  What concerns me is that one of these years it’s going to get harder to find the hardware to play these things.   I picked up these last two from Wal-Mart for under thirty bucks, but you used to be able to buy VHS players at Wal-Mart and now you can’t.    I still have machines that’ll play the discs, and I think that’ll always be so, but I fear that it’ll get harder and harder to hook one up to a computer for gif making and screencaps.   

Well, that’s a problem for another day.    Today, Goku’s going back to Otherworld with Fortuneteller Baba, and this time he’s not coming back (ohhhhhhh, brother).  For what it’s worth, she agrees with his decision to leave the fate of the Earth in the hands of the living.   Personally, I don’t think Goku had much choice. 

At King Yemma’s place, the line is backed up from all the millions of Earthlings being killed by Majin Buu.   Yemma’s job is to judge each soul and determine their respective fate in the afterlife.    I guess he’s pretty quick in general, but this is enough to tax even his system.

Goku cuts in line and asks about Gohan, since everyone but Videl thinks Buu already killed him.   But Yemma can’t find him on the rolls, and he’s sure he would have remembered Goku’s son if he ever came through.    So Goku has proof that Gohan survived, and he’s thrilled.    Now Gohan can still help the others against Majin Buu.

But before Goku can celebrate this, Yemma informs him about Dabura’s death.    The flashback shows him being dragged before Yemma by his employees, which reminds me a lot of when Cell was brought before Yemma.  Why do these two get to keep their bodies?   Anyway, Yemma would have sent him to hell, but he knows that hell is very similar to the Demon Realm, where Dabura used to rule.  

So instead he consigned him to heaven, which.... okay, you’re the boss, Yemma.   If you think that’s the right call.

So Goku heads out and flies among the golden clouds for a bit, and he notes that Videl was right all along, which I like.    Then he wonders where Gohan’s been all this time.   If he’s not dead, why couldn’t anyone sense his presence on Earth?  So he reaches out with his senses and finally picks him up, but he can’t tell where he’s sensing him.    It’s not on Earth or in Otherworld.    So he just uses Instant Transmission and settles it that way.

And he nearly teleports right into Gohan swinging the Z-SWord.

Kibito’s not thrilled to have another mortal treading the sacred ground of the Supreme Kai Planet, but what can he do?   Apparently Goku could have teleported here whenever he wanted, he just never knew this place existed, and I’m still a little fuzzy on whether the Z-Fighters can sense the Supreme Kai’s ki.  

Goku takes a few swings with the Z-Sword just to see what it’s like.   In the dub he gives Gohan some helpful advice, which was a nice touch, but in the original script he just asks if he can hang out with Gohan until he’s ready to return to Earth.    Also, he wants food, which is just as well, since Gohan would need some eventually anyway.

On the way to... well, I don’t know where these guys are flying to.   My first impulse was to imagine the Supreme Kai has a little place for eating, but not like a house or a palace, more like the clubhouse at a golf course.   They’re gonna go there and eat those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.    Anyway, Gohan asks Goku about Super Saiyan 3, and Goku’s like “Yeah, I’ll show you when we’re done eatng, son!”  

So, if Gohan, on this plane, could sense Goku using Super Saiyan 3, on Earth, doesn’t that mean someone on Earth could sense Goku using SSJ3 in Otherworld?    Because he would have used it before, at least once, when he first developed the form.  King Kai knew what he was doing as soon as he mentioned it to Majin Buu, so King Kai’s seen him do it off-screen.    But all the characters on Earth, and the Supreme Kai and Kibito were completely surprised by it.   I think about that a lot.

We then flash forward a day later.   I think the dub failed to mention this, which is why I was always confused about this next scene where Goten and Trunks are asleep and Piccolo has to wake them up.

I always thought it was weird how Goku just left and they immediately went to bed, and Piccolo’s coming in like ten minutes later to wake them.   

Anyway, as soon as his back is turned, they immediately go back to sleep, so...

BEST GREEN DAD

Meanwhile, the whole gang is watching this.   Bulma’s like “Yeah, slug my kid.    He deserves it!”

Anyway, this is the scene in the dub where the boys ask Piccolo what’s for breakfast, and he shouts “BREAKFAST?!   YOU’RE HAVING THE FUSION TECHNIQUE FOR BREAKFAST!”

Before they resume training, the boys want to see the Fusion Dance one more time for reference.  Piccolo asks Krillin to help him demonstrate, since he’s seen it before, when Goku did it.  Krillin’s like “Why me?   The others all saw it too!”   And then he looks around and everyone else is gone.   

So they do it and it looks badass, and I’m only sorry that this wouldn’t work for real and Pillin or whatever he’d be called can’t go kick Buu’s ass himself.  

The boys are embrassed to even see this, and Piccolo’s like “Dammit, you were the ones who wanted to see this done again.”

Meanwhile, Gohan’s got the Z-Sword pretty well under control.    He can do majorette twirls with it...

And he can reverse-weild, like Asohka Tano from Clone Wars.   Wait, why didn’t Asohka hold her sabers backwards when she fought Darth Vader in Rebels?  

Never mind that shit, here comes Mongo Majin Buu.   These people were all gathered around a giant TV screen watching news coverage of how Buu has already wiped out two-thirds of the population, and then Buu barges nto the studio and makes faces at the camera to frighten everyone else.    See?  He’s smarter than he lets on.    Anyway, he blows up the whole town after this.

On his way to the next town, he spots a little boy walking by himself and tries to scare him, but the boy can’t recognize him because he’s blind.   He may not even know who Buu is.   

This annoys Buu, who gets a kick out of frightening people before he kills them, so he heals the boy’s eyes just so he can finally see Buu and be afraid.

But it backfires, because the kid is so grateful to be able to see that he thanks Buu profusely.  

Buu asks the kid if he thinks he looks cool, and the kid’s like “Well, you’re literally the first person I’ve ever seen, so I really don’t know.”   But he thinks Buu is cool, simply because he cured his blindness.   This is really kind of fascinating to watch, because you get the sense that Buu’s only been killing and terrorizing people because he genuinely has no idea how else to interact with anything.   It never occurred to him that people could like him, or that he could get them to like him by doing good things.   

The boy tries to reward Buu with the money he was planning to use to buy milk in the next town over, but Buu doesn’t like the taste of it, so he flies off to get the boy actual milk.

And buy “milk”, I mean “he found a man and turned him into a carton of milk.     Buu’s got a long way to go.

So he flies off without even killing the boy, and he seems very pleased with that whole interaction, and then he notices another town and blows it up.  

The message here is that there’s definitely an opportunity here to get Buu to cut this shit out, but how is anyone going to get close enough to him to pull that off?

[crimsonblackrose]

oh boy camp is going to be an experience. I usually love camp but yikes.

At my old school camp was 2 weeks. I picked a theme and then picked fun educational things to do that would tie into that theme and expand upon what they had learned throughout the semester. I did all this on my own. The only thing I didn’t do was buy the actual supplies or send the kids info on the camps. But all the teaching, all the prep everything was just me. I did a full 2 week cooking camp, space camp, detective camp, pirate camp, and harry potter camp. 

At my new school it’s 5 days. My coteacher had a list of things she wanted to include: a dance, crafts, a movie, and some sort of cooking. She didn’t want a them, but hey cool that’s 4 days right there. So I started lesson planning based off of these plans. Because we taught this extra class during lunch she’d pretty much wiped me out of silly dances that I knew from when I was a kid: hokey pokey, cha cha slide, macarena. All I had left was the chicken dance and had to keep swatting her hand from trying to take it to use during that lunch class. But let’s be real the chicken dance isn’t particularly a hour and a half long lesson so I decided to pair it with some of her crafts and this idea of future tense. I want to be/ I don’t want to be. Her idea was we’d do an eco bag and the kids would decorate it and I was like cool. They can decorate it with their dreams. Perfect. And that’ll be day one, toss in the rules and maybe we can squeeze a class out of it. 

Day two would be when is your birthday and I’d teach them star signs and we’d learn about personality traits and essentially expand upon their ability to answer when their birthday is as well as do a card game and some crafts (star viewer). She hemed and hawed over how difficult it’d be to learn their different star signs but I repeated again and again they just have to learn their own. She also wanted them to have a water gun fight so I added that to the end in a red light green light type of game where they’d use the months of the year to move forward. ( she recently told me the water gun fight has been scrapped)

Day 3 was animals. I found some fun animal straw crafts online and put it together with a cup game and that we’d learn the catagories that animals fall into: mammal, reptile, amphebian, ect. (DId I tell you half these kids are already fluent?)

Day 4:Cooking- per my coteacher’s request peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and lemonade. Super easy, no heat required version of cooking but also very non-Korean so something fun and new to try for the kids. And this day we’d start watching the movie she picked “Toy Story 3″

Day 5- Finish Toy Story 3 (yup that’s it, that’s the whole day per her request)

So yeah that was camp. But then she said she changed up the schedule and it would be movie first and cooking first because she felt bad about these kids who had reading camp at the same time and didn’t want them to feel left out. Uhhh okay. Fine. I’ll just adjust the powerpoints and move the rules from chicken dance day to Toy story solo day because we’re starting with that. But then today I got a message from the school about the whole schedule and A. Time is different by a good 20 minutes (which she never told me even though we share a room) and B. the Reading camp is 2 days and it’s the two days she moved the movie camp and cooking too which means it wasn’t her being this aww I feel bad for the kids move it was (I’m deducing) because she does not like the librarian and they seem to have a mini feud happening, so she’s being petty and moved the things she considered fun to the beginning to “punish” the kids who signed up for the other camp. Even though these two camps were originally never suppose to overlap. But she changed the schedules and asked for the schedule to be changes so I’m just like WTH?

So I go through all this work of slowly changing my power points to get them to realign with her plans and then boom today, last day of the semester, day before we actually have camp the Toy Story 3 movie finally arrives. And she gives it to me. Less then 40 minutes before it’s time for me to go home. And so I mess with it and try to figure out how to get it to work because you always check media and tech before you use it. And guess what? The thing doesn’t work. The computer doesn’t actually have any DVD player set up to it. So I have to scramble around trying to find some sort of software I can download to get it to work. I download one of the suggestions from Microsoft’s store. Doesn’t work. I download VLC, doesn’t work. I download Gom player and boom we have a picture. But! it’s moving ridiculously slow and there’s no sound. And this is when she shows up and is like well that’s because it’s not hooked up to the TV. And I’m like no, my headphones are int here should be sound. But she turns on the Tv and still no sound and still snail pace and of course the entire media player is in Korean so I can’t figure out what should work and what shouldn’t and she just walks off. And I’m like it’s in Korean! You’re first language! Surely you can get it set up! But no, she’s super not good with tech and when I try and tell her how I got from the DVD to where I had been she can’t figure out how to right click and get Gom to even pop up. And I’m just like great. Everyone else went home early so it’s just us two and we apparently can’t figure this out before I have to leave. So she tells me “Let’s do the chicken dance tomorrow and the orientation” (orientation? What the heck? You mean go over the rules?) “and let’s do the animal craft.” (Hold up those are two different days ma’am. No can do. I tried explaining how they were different days and the chicken dance day goes with the eco bags...which it turns out aren’t eco bags and the kids aren’t decorating them. They’re giant hard plastic bags that she bought baby shark stickers for them to use to decorate and like really? That’s not fun. That doesn’t fit into the theme we agreed on. Why couldn’t you buy a canvas bag like you said you were and let them decorate that with markers? Why’d you have to buy something that’s probably more expensive and is not fun? Also the older kids don’t get a bag, they get a tumbler with the same baby shark stickers. Really?) So I tried to be like “Uh those are two different power points. And she just stared at me. And I was just like seriously? You don’t talk to me like all week and then in the final hour right before camp starts you’re like this? You changed the schedule on me multiple times and have yet to tell me that the actual time of the classes have been pushed back by 20 minutes? And you changes the lesson plan so surely you know that they all go together, but now we’re acting all willy nilly and going back to the starting point because oh boy the DVD I ordered last minute came in last minute and surely in like 40 minutes you can troubleshoot that before going home.

Like I literally spent the last two days doing nothing. She made this big deal about “oh there’s something to tell you about camp but I’ll tell you later’ (she always does this) “I’ll tell you Tuesday because we don’t have classes” and then she wasn’t there at all yesterday. So I did NOTHING. (okay lie, I finished the book I was reading) And then today I was so bored I finished the NEW BOOK I WAS READING and started listening to an Audio book. ) I had ample time to play with the DVD and figure out how it worked and ask for help from other teachers who aren’t as....technological inept as my coteacher. But noooo. 

Oh and the other stupid thing is apparently we have prizes. Prizes for the two kids who do the best every day during camp. No. You either give something to everyone or give nothing. You don’t make kids feel bad during camp. Camp is suppose to be fun. It’s suppose to be a time for them all to find something enjoyable about English in the hopes that that fun and joy keeps them motivated to learn throughout the year. And my coteacher made a big deal about how we don’t have enough of a budget to buy them all snacks, even though she wants to so the principal said we could give them little things to motivate them. And I have to be the one to tell them at the start of everyday. Yeah the best two of ya’all gets a prize. BUT for some ridiculous reason we were able to afford a DVD version of Toy Story 3, enough hard plastic bags for the entirety of the 3rd and 4th graders coming, tumblers for all the 5th and 6th graders and stickers for everyone, map puzzles they can color (that’s been added to the chicken dance day because I had to tell her AGAIN that I don’t have any more dances up my sleeve that that’s the last one I know). Like really? REALLY? Buying a box of capris sun and some chocopies will cost less then like one of those tumblers. But no instead we bought...I assume fancy AF pencil cases for the 2 best kids per day.

Ugh. Anyway camp starts tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to this mess.