Thursday, July 2, 2009

ADW #2 = 明成祖




by week two I was already finding it difficult to meet my loose quota of trying to maintain a balance between 1/4 Arab/Persian dudes, 1/4 Chinese dudes, 1/4 Indian dudes, and 1/4 other dudes. Originally had someone else in mind for the second installment, but I might've set the proverbial bar of awesomeness too high with the first one. The only other guys who seemed sufficiently cool enough to follow him were other ibns. Granted I got Euro-ibns and Afro-ibns and Arab-ibns and Central Asian ibns, but I can't make an exception and put two of 'em back-to-back this early in the game. Already have a few new youtube friends and I don't want them to get the wrong idea. There will be plenty more ADWs that will appeal to their particular interests, but I ain't limiting myself to any particular culture/religion/time period (although I gotta confess that them 10th-13th century ibns are my favorites)

had to dig deep and pull out one of the big guns for this one. Several GOAT emperor dudes from which to chose, but this guy has such an over-the-top resume of awesome feats that making a youtube for him was easy. Barely even did more than casually mention his accomplishments as well, since I didn't think there was really much need for elaboration. First 30 seconds are his name, then his dad gets the next minute or so, 45 seconds on dude himself, then it's just castration and dead hooker jokes

hadn't even realized it 'til I was already almost finished with the research, but I had written a story involving 明成祖 back in the day. When I wrote the blog 2 years ago, the Chinese wikipedia page to which I link at the end didn't have an English counterpart. It was a pretty hilarious punchline back in September '07. I assure you that when I wrote it, there was no way you could fact check it without knowing the story better than I did. Even now try asking the google keywords like "9 generations" "chinese emperor" "usurper" and hate me for not allowing you to verify my bedtime story. Dissemination of knowledge is a good thing, but the improvement of the internet does take some of the fun out of mischievous antiquated jokes

from a technical standpoint, this one was a vast improvement over last week's. Only one really sloppy sound goof, and it is only awkward for a few seconds. A coupla mistakes (whatever the oral equivalent of typos are), but no big deal. Soooooo much better than the other one as far as editing and all that. Recorded the entire thing in a single take and only cut-and-pasted in one other audio bit. This one took me a total of 2 days start-to-finish, which is a significant improvement over the month that it took me to do the first one. Lots more pictures too, although I'm still having trouble with the youtube video thumbnail thing [1]"


notes

[1] had thought that the still picture used to represent it was taken from the halfway point. Youtube gives you a choice of 3 frames, supposedly they are taken from the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 marks of the video, but from my experience that is not the case. Of the 7 videos I've uploaded to youtube, only 2 of them take the picture from the halfway mark and only 1 uses a picture from either the 1/4 or 3/4 point. So basically of the 21 thumbnail images I have, only 3 of them are from when they should be

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