Toil and Trouble

Progress Report:

1. Stolen Goods: Our insurance company is being very kind and generous in helping us replace our stolen gear. After some dithering around with police reports and paperwork, we have started to be able to replace things. Unfortunately, the camera we have chosen to replace the stolen ones has not arrived yet. We DO still have a Kodak zi6 camera that I have done all the filming for my next episode on, and I started recording the voiceover stuff using my headset mic. It's not as good as the old setup, but it's A setup, so I can get something out of acceptable quality.

2. Release the Magic Smoke: Right after I got everything filmed and uploaded to my Mac, my primary hard drive gave up the ghost. Fortunately, I had Time Machine set up and everything was backed up. UNfortunately, that meant I had to share my husband's newly-replaced iMac, try and repair a lot of broken pathways to my data, and still have to find a way to access my secondary drive with some important footage on it. My husband has been awesome in helping me with this, but the basic upshot of it is, editing together the episode has screeched to a halt.

3. Month of Weddings: Between October 9th and November 13th, I will have run one regular roller derby bout's non-skating official staffing, one 3-team round robin roller derby bout, a special exposition match, attended three weddings, and officiated a fourth wedding. I need to make 2 costumes, one for the wedding I'm officiating (Halloween wedding), and one for an end-of-the-year hoedown (?!) for the roller derby league that'll be taking place later in November. Losing the time I have on Nightmare Fuel really freaking sucks... I was hoping to get Episode 3 posted and Episode 4 made by now. I don't want to lose momentum.

4. Good News: Things are starting to look up, though. One of the things that got stolen was our 8 year old MacBook G3. The insurance company has replaced it with a new MacBook. As this is a processor upgrade in some ways to my aging Mac Pro, we're going to try to set this up as my primary machine. We'll see how well it handles my video-producing needs. I'm just waiting on getting a few things we need to transfer my data over. It'll be nice to have the ability to produce on the go!

Sometime in the next week or so, we should be able to get me set up, and the new camera should get here any day now. I was actually about halfway through completing Episode 3 when my computer blew, so once I'm set up, I should be able to power through and get it done pretty quickly.

5. Happy Birthday to Me: I also had a birthday recently. A friend gave me a gift card that will be going towards a much-needed new microphone. (Stereo, baby!) Even more awesome, however, was the gift that my husband and our good friend Chris Pallace collaborated on. Soon, my projects will all be coming together at http://crazyraven.org ! WOOHOO! My own domain! Bitchin'. Chris will be doing the design work on it, and his skill is mighty. You can take a sneak-peek at it at http://crazyraven.org/CrazyRaven/layout.html ... he went with a rather sexy steampunk-flavored motif for the main page. Now I just have to figure out how to USE it!

So, to sum up, despite some rather sizable setbacks, Nightmare Fuel is going to continue to soldier on, spreading trauma and mayhem as we go. With luck, I'll still get October's episode done IN OCTOBER, and get November's done sometime soon after that.

Love and mayhem,
--Gravity