Emptyeye

Awhile back, I announced that I had acquired a copy of Lifting Shadows: The Authorized Biography of Dream Theater by Rich Wilson and intended to review it, though I suspected it would be useless from a functional standpoint. Having actually read the book, I stand by this statement–if you’re a hardcore Dream Theater fan, you likely pre-ordered the book as soon as you learned of its existence; if you’re not, you will no doubt look at the price tag (A total of $83 to ship to the US) and wonder “Who in their right mind would pay that much for this book?!”

Well, right mind or not, I paid that much for this book. Or more accurately, I paid that much for these books–Lifting Shadows is actually two books. The first, Images, is essentially a 175-page picture book of the band’s career, starting in high school and ending in late 2007 with the release of their newest album, Systematic Chaos. A companion CD is also in this book, taking selected tracks from various rarities/fan club releases/etc the band has released. The second book, Words, is the story “proper” of the band, again, essentially starting with the core of the band in high school and continuing to effectively the present day.

Despite the overall lack of the usual excesses of Rock N’ Roll, the story of the band itself is nonetheless captivating. One thing I personally found fascinating was how much of a part label politics play in the making of an album–the band’s issues with their label in making Falling into Infinity have been documented elsewhere, but I found it amusing that the band were pressured to hurry up and release Awake so that their label’s financial bottom line would look good for the quarter. As is said in the book, “It’s a wonder albums ever get made”.

There are two things that bothered me about the book (Besides the price tag, that is). The first is something that the author couldn’t really help–while pretty much everyone involved in the band, past or present, had something to say about their time in the band for the book (Charlie Dominici and Derek Sherinian being the obvious ones, but also figures from the pre-DT days, and one-time DT vocalist Steve Stone), the early part of the book in particular suffers somewhat from the absence of Kevin Moore. This isn’t Wilson’s fault; Moore has wanted nothing to do with his past since leaving Dream Theater, repeatedly declining offers to appear at special DT shows. Nonetheless, maybe because of his silence over the years, it would definitely have been nice to get his side of the story on things, in particular one story James LaBrie told about one show where they had agreed to start wailing on a heckler. James dove down and started pounding the guy, and Kevin…stayed right behind his keyboards. The second thing that annoyed me about the book were various typos. Not factual errors, by any means, but little things like misplaced punctuation, misspellings, etc. that would occasionally make me stop and go “wha?” Granted, there are times I’ve made some pretty bizarre typos here on this site, but then you’re not paying a huge amount of money to read it.

Overall, Lifting Shadows is very good from a story standpoint. But, unless you’re a superfan of Dream Theater (In which case you likely already own this), it’s simply not $70 good, even taking into account the cool case with the Dream Theater symbol it comes in.

Today at work I listened to the mixes I currently have here for The Six-Day Exile on my iPod. I realized the following:

• Recording solo bass and making it audible on the headphones I use is going to be very difficult without it overpowering more substantial systems, such as a car radio.
• My cousin was right–I do sound much better vocally on “The Secret” than on everything else. Part, though not all, of it is definitely being up in more traditional rock singer range. For the rest, I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s the fact that I had to almost shout that song, which would probably make me sound more confident anyway. Random aside: I love being a natural baritone, because I can link to this video as a legitimate example of approximately what I sound like.
• There is such a thing as “too rough” mixwise. Whoops. Oh well, this is a learning experience for me, really.

Speaking of “too rough”, I also listened to Metallica’s St. Anger at work today–yes, I’m aware admitting to this fact pretty much automatically invalidates my opinion on what makes quality music, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it nonetheless…besides, it’s not even the worst Metallica album (I’d give that “honor” to Load), much less the worst album in history like a lot of people wanted you to believe for a year or so after its release–and couldn’t help but note that it was trying really hard to be something it’s not. That is to say, for all the talk about how “raw” it was supposed to be…listening to it with headphones, it becomes clear that it’s an album on which a lot of money was spent to try and get that raw sound–there’s a lot of panning and separation of stuff through each of the songs, for one. Essentially, they tried way too hard to force it, which is exemplified by the fact that no one told Lars Ulrich to put away the trash cans and set up his drum kit to record the album (Incidentally, general consensus from what I’ve found is that the album isn’t bad musically–quite a few people have ripped the audio from the accompanying DVD [In which Lars is playing an actual drum kit as opposed to whatever the heck he used on the album] and just listened to that as the album).

A couple people have found this site through a search approximating “beating Arrabiata in Hyper Master Mode”, I believe because I posted about said song here. For those of you who are looking at that phrase and thinking it may as well be in a foreign language, essentially, what it boils down to is that in DDR Supernova 2 there is a mode called Hyper Master, which is generally the quickest way to unlock material in the game. You play various songs that have various conditions attached to them beyond simply “get to the end of the song”; the specific mission involving the song Arrabiata has you trying to get an A on it on the Standard/Difficult/however you want to refer to The Pink Difficulty steps. How I finally got by this stupid mission was with the help of one of the Custom Modules that added a bunch of Perfects on to your score, boosting my grade up enough to pass it. This unlocked the song, and I played it in Free Mode (Or Game Mode, or whatever it’s actually called).

Imagine my horror when I discovered that the obnoxiously difficult steps in Hyper Master mode were the official pink difficulty steps for the song.

If you’ve never played these steps before, suffice to say that…wow, just awful. And I’m generally pretty lenient when it comes to charts I like and don’t like. But these steps…ugh, awful. But anyway, yeah, for those of you wondering how to beat that song in Hyper Master Mode, the Add Perfects Custom Module, I forget what it’s actually called, is your friend.

In other news, my hypothesis about site traffic and where it can come from seems to be correct, as my Rygar speedrun commentary continues to be one of the more popular files on the site despite my not doing much to promote it after I initially put it out there. A lot of the songs generally get a spike when I first release them, but this may be the first file I’ve seen on the site that has what can be called sustained popularity. And here I thought Rygar was actually a fairly obscure game (Albeit a fun one). Interesting..

-EE

This week on Emptyeye.com…again, not much happened.

I did a lot of thinking about the site, and very little actually acting on it, either in recording new music or promotion. One of the things I’m looking at is using Project Wonderful for ads. It’s essentially a never-ending EBay auction for adspace on the participating sites. One of the main men behind the scenes is one Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame; as such, most of the clients are other webcomics. And that’s fine, as it would certainly be a different audience for me. You can click on Ryan’s name and scroll down a bit to sort of see it in action. The money is per day, so if, for instance, I wanted a little emptyeye.com button on Qwantz, I’d have to pay $2/day (As of right now; the price can actually fluctuate). There are a lot of sites participating in it, most of them smaller than Dino Comics (Which is big enough that, as I understand it, Ryan actually lives off of the merchandising based around it). There’s a lot of advanced options too, but that’s the gist of it.

I’ve also occasionally mentioned doing commentary for my speedruns, which I honestly think would be the best, quickest way to get people to the site (If not directly to the music section, which is really the ultimate goal)–the audience for speedruns is huge, and a lot of those people seem to appreciate audio commentary for runs (A couple people have actually said they wish that all speedruns would come with audio commentary). So I think either hosting them here or breaking them up into YouTube-friendly chunks with a link to the site in the description section would be a nice idea. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen behind in actually recording music, and this weekend was no different, so that has to come first.

On the DDR front, I managed to get another home version AAA, which you can see by clicking the thumbnail at the top of this entry–it’s a picture of the Dive remix from DDRMAX2 for PS2. Late next month, I’m actually going to try my luck at an arcade tournament some two hours away in Rhode Island. I don’t expect to win–to this day I have no idea how I managed to finish fourth at a tournament in Trumbull (I’m not being modest–no one there could figure out how the people running the tournament were arriving at the results they did. See the second page of posts here for more info)–and honestly, I’ll be happy just to qualify and make the main tournament; any matches I manage to win will be a bonus. There’s actually one coming up a week from yesterday, but I honestly don’t think I’m ready yet–I hope to head down to the Brass Mill Center machine a few more times between now and then to acclimate myself to arcade pads a bit more–my timing on anything 9 or above is just awful, as you can see by looking at my scores on my DDRecall that don’t have locks next to them. I don’t expect to magically become a top-tier player in five weeks, but I want to improve enough to make a respectable showing for myself. I figure if nothing else, I can write a nice report about the whole thing.

Finally, on the non-DDR gaming front, I’m still working my way through Mario Galaxy. I have 52 Stars, I think. I like the game a lot, as I’ve mentioned before.

Until next week…

-EE

Today I opted to stay home from work thanks to the weather here in Connecticut. I had a bit of an adventure going home from work the last time it snowed any appreciable amount, and so figured I’d stay inside today to make sure it didn’t happen again.

I did very well at the staying inside part, but didn’t actually get a whole lot done, unless playing Super Mario Galaxy counts as getting stuff done. I’m up to 45 Stars now, moving along at a not-very-fast clip. Mainly because I’m trying to get all the stars I can in a given area before I move on to the next, which leads to amusing situations like all five Galaxies in a dome opening up before I ever visit it. It’s still quite fun.

As I mentioned elsewhere, of the various things I seem to be naturally talented at, art is decidedly not one of them. In true solo artist style, this didn’t stop me from attempting to create a mockup of a sort of business card that I might hand out to random complimenters of my DDR skill (Or other people I might meet in various situations). There’s not a lot of information on it at the moment, primarily because I eventually want to get a PO Box and put that on there, but I’m not exactly sure where I want the PO Box yet (Suffice to say that my work schedule, plus near future plans, may mean that the “obvious” choice of the Post Office about three minutes from my house is actually not the best option). In any event, you can look at the mockup below, and feel free to mock me for how bad it is. This is why I’m handing off the album artwork to someone more talented at it than I.

Lately I’ve been visiting the HalfPixel forums to learn some stuff about the business of webcomics. No, I don’t plan on trying to become the next Dinosaur Comics, but there’s a lot about the marketing and business of webcomics that I think I can apply to this site. One of the mantras of building a webcomic audience is to stick to a regular updating schedule, the more frequent, the better (Daily update comics, as a whole, tend to do better audience-wise than those updated on, say, a weekly schedule). This gives people a reason to visit your site again and again and again. Well, I can’t exactly pump out music on a daily basis, but I do try and make at least one post a week in the form of the weekly update on Sunday nights, plus whatever else I write/post in the meantime, including new music, reviews, and the like.

I thought about something else while reading some of the posts, namely “What do I have to make myself stand out from everyone else?” And while yeah, I’ll be putting up rough, in-progress versions of all the tracks I’ll have for my upcoming album, I’m not sure if that’s really so original nowadays (Plus, with MP3 players rapidly becoming the method of choice for the masses to listen to music–if they aren’t already there–I’m not sure if many people would even be able to tell the difference between the “rough” and finished versions from a sound quality standpoint anyway). It wasn’t until I was recording “ The Secret” yesterday that I hit on something: I have many, many failures before I record a quality take, even when I’m only recording, say, a verse at a time. I think it’d be cool to throw some of this failed stuff into a file and throw it up for download for people to do as they wish with–use them in techno remixes or whatever people do with random samples nowadays (Quite a few of the vocal takes end with a “Gah, I totally couldn’t find that pitch…” or similar). I also figure it might demystify the recording process somewhat to sort of show what goes into even a semi-successful recording of a song.

Hello there,

After what is probably way too long, I have a new song that you can download. It’s called “The Secret”, after the book of the same name, and it’s essentially a cynical, sarcastic look at the book’s thesis (Though I should point out, as I do in the linked review, that the line about “Thinking fat thoughts” is actually in the book) in the style of Bad Religion. You can read more about it here, or if you’re not the literary type, you can download the song directly here. Let me know what you think!

-EE

This past week, I actually did stuff. Besides what I detailed below, this weekend I did some recording for a song, and actually finished the rough version of it that will go up probably tomorrow. It’s amazing, I’m actually capable of writing short songs. Who would’ve thought?

Last night I had a dream which had a girl from high school in it. This periodically happens to me; as I’ve detailed elsewhere, I was something of your classic mallgoth-esque “Everything sucks and I hate the world” type throughout much of high school, and grew out of it too late to undo any damage to my social life. I say this because generally, the girls who tend to show up in my dreams tend to be the ones who thought I was destined to grow up and kill someone, so I suppose my subconscious is expressing regret and/or wishing what might have been socially. That’s pretty standard, and I don’t particularly like waking up from this sort of dream (As the girls no longer hate me in said dreams), but I’ve grown used to it by now.

The weird part is that this girl was dressed as what could best be described as looking like Tifa from Final Fantasy VII. Indeed, minus the armgear, and the fact that if I remember correctly the dream had her wearing jean shorts, it was pretty much a dead ringer–impossibly short shorts, shirt that’s little more than a bra, etc. I’m not even going to try and decode what this particular aspect of the dream means–I never had any particular crush on Tifa, for instance…

I’m still plugging away at the Dream Theater book. Currently I’m up to the band touring in support of Falling into Infinity. It’s really amazing how much politics and actual business and the like play into the release of an album. The best example so far is DT’s label of the time pressuring them to hurry up and release Awake, essentially so the label’s financial statement for that quarter would look good. Interesting stuff, though probably not worth the price I paid for it (Let’s just say it was about on par with the average video game in the mid 90s when cartridges reigned supreme and leave it at that).

Until next week…

-EE

Those of you who are fans of the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? no doubt know who Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood are. The actors/comedians/improv artists go on tour and essentially, bring a two-man version of Whose Line to audiences across the country. Last night, they came to the Palace Theater in Waterbury. Jess and I went to dinner beforehand at the Bin 300 Restaurant in Wolcott. It was very good, and very expensive; I had Metropolis Chicken, and she had…something, with Pudding Cake for dessert. After that, it was show time!

This was actually our second time seeing the show–I think the first was back in 2005–and it was every bit as good as I remembered. As Colin said, “Those of you who think that we somehow had advance knowledge of stuff in Whose Line, raise your hand. *Some people raise their hands* You people are bastards.” Before every game/situation/etc, the two take suggestions from the audience and work them into the scene. And lest you think that these suggestions are somehow planted, consider that they used my suggestion of “K” in one of the games (The game was “Letter Replacement,” where any “S”es in any words they said had to be replaced with the letter suggested by the audience, in this case “K”.), and made it work really well. Essentially, picture Whose Line where the games are longer and, occasionally, more adult, and you have a pretty good idea of the show. Like Whose Line, the two make constant references to earlier suggestions, and also like Whose Line, sometimes things occasionally don’t go as planned (One example: “It’s almost like our stage manager didn’t tell you guys to not leave the stage until we were finished!”), which really makes the whole experience even better.

At any rate, if the show comes around to your area, definitely see it. It’s amazing to watch them work with the suggestions on the fly and pretty consistently get funny stuff out of them.

-EE