BroNYcon

On a whim, I realized I had nothing better to do, so I decided to go up to New York for the day and see if I couldn't get into this BroNYcon convention. I like going to conventions so this seemed like an infallible good idea at the time. It was going to be an adventure! This was about a week before Saturday January 7. By the middle of the week beforehand, I decided I was absolutely going to go to New York. And then I figured I'd buy a ticket Thursday. They were sold out at 650 tickets. Oh. This now begins to put the convention into the 'fun' category.  So it was decided that getting there early was a good idea Saturday morning.

Derpy keeps my backpack in order.

Saturday arrived and now I was required to get to New York. I armed myself with my Derpy Patched Backpack of Holding with some survival items (flares*, bagels, sketchpad, ponies, etc) and it was time to go. Getting to New York early meant getting up at 5:50am, leaving at 6 am, catching the bus at 6:30 am and then finally arriving at Hotel Pennsylvania at 9 am.

Baking Cupcakes

Yesterday I found a box of cupcake mix in the cabinets. I decided to make cupcakes! I mean it's a box and how hard can it really be?

Mixing Ingredients:

Reading Directions... 3/4 cup of oil IS BAD.... it's only 1/3 cup of oil! and 3/4 cup of water!
Mixer.. OH GODS IT'S FLIPPING CAKE EVERYWHERE
Cake on the floor, the counter and me!

Filling the Cupcakes:

The cupcake papers needed to be filled halfway up and then some marshmallow center applied and then filled up the rest of the way.

There's not enough cake in each of these cups! the bottoms must be covered!

I'm pretty sure that the box was done with simple graphics to mock me. I mean, my cupcakes so far look nothing like the ones on the box. The filling is going everywhere! Not a nice little blob in the middle of the cup like this picture indicates!

Once that's done it was time to put the rest of the cake into each cup and fill them up the rest of the way. But was is this?! It's not even! There's almost no extra cake to cover this filling on the last two cupcakes! I need to take some from over from this cake and put it over onto this cake! And now the filling on this one is showing! HOW DO I Make these even!!?? D:

At which point I realized I was channeling Twilight AND the CMC and realized I needed to get them into the oven STAT.

Baking went the smoothest. Here's the results....

A Wild Pinkie Pie Appears

Pinkie Pie showed up soon after they were out of the oven and before they are cool enough to actually eat.

Lucky D's Hostel, San Diego

Spent the night in Lucky D's Hostel in downtown San Diego.

Twilight and Rainbow Dash posing for a picture. Pinkie Pie had already run off yelling something about pipes and bats. My hope was that the building was still standing by morning.

Smile for the Camera

The Hostel group then went out to a club on a rooftop of some building somewhere. It was crazy. We had to stand in line until the guy showed up. He then said that we were all with him, and then they let us through for free. Then we had to walk through a very fancy resturant, to the back down a hallway, then into an elevator up a few floors. We got out on an unmarked plain white hallway, At the far end a guy stood standing and wanted to see our stamps. We showed him the stamp and he waved us through the doors and suddenly we were on a rooftop completely hidden from view. And that's how I found myself at a club. Complete with a dance floor, loud music, a pool to jump into when completely drunk and a very large expensive bar.

Not Pictured: Giant Flame Geysers

PMV: Pinkie Pinkie Zoot Zoot!

It's not often I end up making any kind of music video. But in the end. I did.Because hey! It's ponies!

So I present Pinkie Pinke Zoot Zoot!

This took about 20 hours to make. It took this long because I ended up making it twice. I wanted it to be done before Comic-Con 2011. And I had about 90-95% completed already. But I had been struggling with compressing the video to something that looked remotely decent the entire time while making it.

Then when it was nearly done I started looking into compressions and what not. I had realized though, When I had taken the source video out of the mkv format into something that Adobe Premiere would accept, the Aspect Ratio had changed. I very quickly realized the only way out of that mess was to recompress the video again, in the correct aspect ratio.

Unfortunately, doing this meant that Premiere could not interpret the new file against the old one. This meant I couldn't simply just switch the sources and hope everything would be peachy. So with 90-95% done, I realized I had to start over from scratch.

One of the other problems I was having was that the codecs that premiere let me use, apparently sucked. Or at least refused to let me understand them in a way that would make my video look nice.To resolve this, I picked the brute force method: Exported the entire movie sequence as an uncompressed avi file (7gb I think) and then compressed it in virtual dub with xvid. That seemed to work out well.

Besides the video being much better quality the second time, I feel it also turned out better the second time around, due to the inherent editing process.