Emptyeye

Since Saturday, I’ve been listening to “Lazenca Save Us” pretty much nonstop. Because I’m the sort of person who has to over-analyze everything, I’ve been trying to figure out why I like the song so much.

In the most general sense, the song is right up my alley–it rocks hard, and has quite the epic feel to it, especially when the choir kicks in. Yet, the song is in Korean, which I understand even more poorly than, say, Japanese (Where I know your basic anime-kid wannabe-Japanese words–Kawaii, Baka, Kitsune, Neko [EDIT 4/1/08: “Keno” is not a Japanese word..I don’t think. Told you I didn’t know the language very well.]), even if we decided to be generous and allow “GEEEEE GEEEEEEE!!” to count as “Korean”. So it’s not like the lyrics make some special connection with me–heck, it’s not like the lyrics in their original language can make a connection with me. And musically, I’m pretty sure it really doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before. So I’m at a loss to explain exactly why I love the song so much. I just know that I do.

Branching out from “me, me, me”, there’s probably a college level paper in here somewhere. What I mean is that maybe it’s just ingrained somewhere in, at the very least, American culture why, as a whole, we like the music we do. Maybe there’s some type of scientific explanation for why Linkin Park can repeatedly write the same song and people will eat it up. Who knows.

This past week on Emptyeye.com, I began actually advertising the site using Project Wonderful. The first day brought me a large spike in viewership–and also burned through fully a quarter of my PW funds I had set aside. After adjusting my ad campaign somewhat, the cost of advertising is now more manageable, though the spike in traffic appears to have been just that. I guess the lesson I can take away from this that, somehow, Internet advertising actually works. Neat! And if any of you who found the site via the PW ads are reading this, welcome! Take a look at the sidebar and in particular, the About Pages as well as the Music page. *Note to self: Add Into the Aether into that page..* And if you want to take a quick second to vote in a Poll i set up, that would be awesome.

Placing ads on sites is not actually where I’ve sold out, though. No, that will come when I take down the Donate button and replace it with a Project Wonderful ad of some kind, probably a button ad. At some point, I may put a banner ad near the top of the site as well. You don’t have to worry about the site being a vehicle for advertising porn or anything like that–I’ll be looking over any ads before they go up–but essentially what I’m hoping will happen is that someone will bid a small amount on the ads, see their site views go up from people clicking on them, be persuaded to bid more, and I can use that money to either A. (The “Good” scenario) pay for ads on other PW sites, B. (The “That Would Be Freaking Cool” scenario) pay for the hosting of the site, or C. (The “Dream” scenario) finance the music recording, which is a function currently held by my 8:30AM-5PM M-F job.

So in non-being-a-shameless-promoter news, I played Pump It Up for the first time yesterday, and as I said, it’s quite fun. Maybe part of this is the fact that my one day of playing wasn’t enough for me to get to the “hit arrows really fast and abandon all pretense of the game simulating dancing in any reasonable form” phase that I play in DDR, but the game actually felt more like real dancing to me than DDR does (On the other hand, I am decidedly not the guy to be asking about “real dancing”.).

In music news, I decided to heed the advice of my cousin and change my approach to distorted guitar for the next song I’m recording. The result sounds better, but I’m not sure it’s what I’m looking for. I guess I’ll let you be the collective judge when the song ultimately goes up. On a big-picture note, I’m now two and a half weeks away from the actual Six Day Exile, so I really need to get up and running here, particularly with programming the drum machine.

Finally, I collected the remaining missing stars I had to grab in Super Mario Galaxy and unlocked the reward for doing so. Now to take advantage of it!

Until next week..

-EE

So hey, remember that DDR tournament I was supposed to go to today?

I went, and it didn’t happen.

Now, I had expected that it wouldn’t be as big as some of the past tournaments that the place has held before, but I figured at least people close to the place would have shown up. Apparently not. Maybe it was for the better–I’ve been a bit sick lately, so I doubt I would have played as well as I was capable of (Which isn’t all that well).

It wasn’t a total loss, though. I discovered Pump It Up today! Well, “discovered” is the wrong word, as I’ve known about it for almost as long as I’ve played DDR, but I played it for the first time today. It’s very similar conceptually to DDR, except it has five panels–one on each diagonal, and one in the center. I’m told it’s hilarious to watch novice DDR players try to play Pump, because they keep going back to the center (As most beginning DDR players do) and get completely confused when they have to hit the center panel, which they’re already standing on with both feet. I’m far from an advanced Pump player after only a day, but I did seem to get the hang of it pretty quickly, which led to my favorite quote of the day from Nathan, the guy who would’ve been running the non existent tournament: “You’re definitely a lot better at this game than you were, um, six hours ago…”

Plus, if nothing else, I discovered this song as a result of the game. The Pump it Up version is quite a bit shorter, about a minute and a half long versus this video’s five minutes, but it rocks either way. It’s called “Lazenca, Save Us”, and from what I could find about it, it was the opening theme to a show called Lazenca. I guess Lazenca saved some people, or something.

The above is my latest attempt at an ad banner for the site; click it to see the full version, as always. I still like the “Emptyeye” font, and I managed to deal with the superfluous site address that was in my last attempt. It doesn’t have any cutesy anime characters, or any characters at all in it for that matter, but it’s actually sort of a nice contrast to a lot of the typical advertising you see on Project Wonderful (As I’ve mentioned before, most of its clientèle are webcomics). I’m trying to find dirt-cheap banner ads at the moment. My one attempt to this point has failed, but I shall press on.

Tomorrow is the DDR Tournament. Wish we luck, because I’m going to need it. On the other hand, from reading the topic, it sounds like a lot of the players that would destroy me won’t be there, so maybe I’ll have a chance after all.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been playing around with my new sound card for my computer. I think I’ve managed to get it fully working with my current recording program of choice. The weird thing was that I had to switch to Virtual Out 3/4 this time around, as there was some driver conflict when I tried 1/2. That, plus a cable that came with it whereby I can get stereo sound into and out of the card itself, resolved the “I only hear the guitar out of one ear” issue I had. Nonetheless, the little bit I’ve recorded continues to have that ultra-lo-fi sound to it. I have no idea if it’s my cheap guitar, or something I’m not doing production-wise, but it’s beginning to get annoying.

Today I got home from my girlfriend’s house–note that she and I don’t always agree on everything–to find that my new soundcard had arrived. Hooray! After some fiddling around, I got it to at least a working, if not optimal state (I currently only get sound from my guitar out of the left ear of my headphones, for some reason). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t magically cured the issue that is my achilles heel at present–getting a good distorted guitar sound. Maybe it’s just the fact that I have a cheap guitar, or the fact I’m not currently using any sort of preamp right now, but everything sounds a lot more “fuzzy” than I’d like (The tone in Epic Failure is a good example of what I mean. It’s more fuzzy and less crunchy (Think Bad Religion) than I want it to be).

Oh well, I’ll figure it out. Hopefully.

EDIT: The links should all be fixed now.

I really didn’t intend for this to be a regular feature, but nonetheless, here we go.

• I found out this weekend that my aunt owns a vinyl copy of the album Whenever You Need Somebody, which is best known for having this as its lead song. I’m pretty sure this makes my aunt like 20 years ahead of her time, or psychic, or something.
• I also found out earlier this week that in my NCAA tournament pool at work, I am second-to-last, with two of my Final Four teams (Including my national champion) eliminated. I am in excellent position to make a huge comeback and take the whole thing!
• I found out yesterday that I play DDR badly when I’m tired. Oh well. Obviously I’ll just have to sleep a lot between now and Saturday.
• Don’t forget to vote in the poll I created yesterday!

Yeah, running tests on your live site is generally not a good idea. This was a lesson I refused to learn after my first Wordpress upgrade debacle. But in any event, this is a test of a Polls plugin that I installed earlier today. Hopefully I can make the thing display in this post. It involves my link button at my cousin’s site. As I’ve mentioned before, my button there has nothing whatsoever to do with any content on the site (It’s the one just above the Jamesfaqs button, and is a holdover from when it linked to my LiveJournal, or you can just look at it at the top of this entry. Note that the brown border that I see is an unfortunate side effect of the “unvisited link color” I chose, I think. Like I said, I’m not an artist by any stretch.). So I’m wondering if I should change it. If all goes well, you’ll be able to vote on that within this post. Here we go…

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This past week at Emptyeye.com, I managed to post at least something every single day, and my viewership apparently liked this. Either that, or spreading what little promotion I do throughout the week increased said viewership compared to the previous week. Whichever it is, hopefully I can somehow maintain that, or even increase it over time.

I started recording a new song over the weekend. Currently I have drums (Using the drum machine this time, which I am getting better at operating) and bass done, and want to get the rest done as quickly as reasonably possible (Though I don’t have a firm date for that yet, I’m helped somewhat by the fact that this new song is shorter than either “Epic Failure” or “7-11“).

Other than that, I don’t have much new to report. It would be a good time to give a heads-up that next week’s “Week XX” post will probably be superseded by a report on the DDR tournament I’ll be going to this weekend. Also over the next week, I’ll probably be playing with some behind-the-scenes stuff on the site. And in Super Mario Galaxy, I have 104 stars, not much of an idea of how to get most of the remaining 16 (EDIT: I figured it out. That’s actually sort of evil given the way I tried to play the game), and can go beat the game at any point.

Until next week…

-EE

Just a quick note saying Happy Easter to all you who celebrate the holiday! Happy Holiday that Corresponds with Your Religion if you’re not Christian. And Happy Candy Day if, like me, you’re not particularly religious at all.