Audio Problems

           

            I tend to follow a theme of renewal on New Years Day and so while cleaning up I did a little extra. I also threw away three bed sheets that had been sitting in a bag in the kitchen for several months before I’d washed them on Thursday. When I started to put them away I saw that they were looking pretty ratty and besides were made of synthetic fabric.

            I hoped I wasn’t jumping the gun by starting to put things back in the bedroom, but I haven’t seen bedbugs for almost a month so I’m guessing it’s safe to return to normal after a year of hell.

            I went online to see if my mark for Children’s Literature had been posted but it would have been surprising if it had, since I’d only written the exam nine days before. I assume that the professor celebrates Christmas so it wouldn’t be fair to expect that she’d spent the holidays doing evaluations.

            I did find the early version of the syllabus for my upcoming Continental Philosophy course. I found out that we would be dealing with Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments” and Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. I tidied up the bookshelf where I keep the philosophy books and found that I have a book by Kierkegaard and several by Nietzsche, but wouldn’t you know the required books are ones that I don’t have? Fortunately it’s easy to find PDFs of works by people that have been dead for as long as those two guys have been, and so I downloaded the works.

            I also found out that I have one week more of a holiday than I’d thought before classes start, so if the weather’s okay I’ll be able to go to the Tranzac open stage on January 4^th and maybe even the Yellow Door open stage on January 9^th.

            I’d been promising Nick Cushing that I’d do some voice work for his animated project and so I set up the microphone he’d given me and tried to record something. For some reason though that I couldn’t figure out, I could get so little volume on the microphone that I had to crank it up so high that I got a loud hissing hum along with my voice. I made three recordings anyway, but they were saved in WMA format whereas Nick had said that he’d prefer MP3. The audio converter I used to have was years past its trial end date so I downloaded AVS, but I found out they put an audio mark on every file they convert unless one pays for the software, so I deleted all trace of the asshole company’s product and started again. I downloaded Hootech, got a key to register the product without paying and within minutes the files were converted.

            I watched Avengers: Age of Ultron. It was petty busy. I prefer it when action isn’t so fast and so all over the place that if I blink I will miss some of it. They also changed a lot of the stories behind the characters. Tony Stark didn’t create Ultron but rather Hank Pym, who started out as Ant Man, became Giant Man and then started going nuts before he became Yellowjacket. The Scarlet Witch’s powers were subtler in the comic, at least in the beginning, and therefore more interesting. Her hex power could alter probabilities so that if something could possibly happen she could bring it forward. She and Quicksilver were originally part of Magneto’s team. Hawkeye was originally a villain along with the Black Widow and they were lovers until Hawkeye became a good guy. She didn’t turn good for quite a while after he joined the Avengers. The second incarnation of the Avengers in the comic consisted of Captain America, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. It made for a more interesting team without all the heavyweights like Thor, the Hulk and Iron Man.

            The movie starts with all of the Avengers doing a raid on Baron Strucker’s stronghold. It seemed odd because really, any one of the heavyweights could have taken Strucker’s army on.

            It was a nice touch to have James Spader do the voice of Ultron.

            I doubt if Quicksilver really died.

            I had more sound problems while watching the movie, though I think it might be unrelated except by coincidence to my difficulties of earlier that day. For some reason, all the heavy, low-end sounds produced crackling noises. I had been listening to loud music earlier and heard nothing like that. I don’t know if it relates to that particular film, to my audio settings or if I blew out my woofers.