really for real this time

Starting color correction tomorrow. Within two weeks, TA91 should be finished, finally, no dicking around. Made a lot of last minute adjustments. It's changed so much since the last time we showed it publicly to anyone. I think it rocks now. I have no idea how people will react to it. In some ways it accomplishes much more than any low-budget feature that I know of. In some ways it does none of the things that you expect a regular movie to do. One thing it indisputably does have, though: The guy who plays Lloyd from "Entourage."

another otaku armageddon dream

We were being attacked by the aliens, that is ALL the aliens. A whole coalition of armored snarling creatures in assorted colors and shapes, but what was really upsetting was that among them were the Aliens from "Alien" Aliens, the Giger Aliens. Did I mention that there were aliens in this dream? Aliens. Anyway, the onslaught from the regular alien horde was one thing, because we had our own legion of superheroes and flying robot-types to fight them (I am not among them; I am just some guy on the street), but the Giger Aliens took on a new nightmarish aspect in this little dream I dreamed. They could come from anywhere, cover any distance instantly, and be utterly in your face with their spiky tail and fanged launcher-tongue thingie. I suppose this is the kind of visceral horror that the filmmakers were trying to achieve in the movies, but it was never so vivid as in my subconscious. So, while the brightly-colored Earth robot squads are clashing with the evil invading aliens in the sky, I am running around on the ground in a panic, thinking, "Where are the Giger aliens? Where are they?" The sense that they are anywhere near feels like the promise of instantaneous death. I stumble into a deserted Waldenbooks. I feel a tentative reflief there, as it seems to be far away from the battleground. Then, someone outside in the street yells something like, "There they are..." Meaning, of course, there are some Giger aliens, approaching from a distance that is entirely meaningless to them. I scramble around in a terror for a second before, yup, totally killed by the fanged launcher-tongue bursting through the Waldenbooks wall.
...My death was one of those out-of-body deaths though, because somehow the dream continued for a bit, and from a third-person omniscient distance I find out that Earth won the battle of fetishized-mecha pyrotechnics, the alien forces were repelled, and I even read my own obit on a newspaper that looked just like the New York Post.

I'm not sure what to take from this dream; it juxtaposed elements of my nerdy fantasy life with the true fear I'd probably feel if I was really on a battlefield. They always expound on the horrors of war in those anime series (e.g. Macross, Mospeda) but you never really feel it because it's all about their cool weapons and vehicles. I guess it's good to realize that for every awesome clash of colossuses there really is some ordinary citizen getting killed inside a defunct bookstore. I guess the lesson here is, even when the day comes when we really do have giant flying robots in the U.S. arsenal, war will still be a a bad thing.