Emptyeye

I figured I should try and not let a month pass between updates this time out.

My current main activity is preparing for the Connecticon Rock Band tournament. This being my first year running it, I’m trying to do a really good job of getting prizes and things for it, to the slight irritation of my “boss”, so to speak (In short: He loves the initiative I’m showing, but for the sake of reimbursing me, wishes I hadn’t gone and bought stuff right away. Truthfully, this was stuff I was buying even if I had to eat part or of all the cost of it. I’d rather spend a bit more money and have this be memorable.). But it’ll be worth it in the end, or at least I think it will be.

The other thing I’ve been up to lately is writing short stories. I’m in the process of revising several of them, and I’ll share the ideas behind them once I revise a couple more of them. Eventually, what I want to do is self-publish a collection of short stories, and possibly some novels as well. knowing my proclivity for not finishing projects, it’s admittedly unlikely this will get anywhere, but we’ll see.

My Magician speedrun continues to move along. I think I’m one more improvement away from submitting to SDA, which is now under new management. Frankly, I’m amazed Mike lasted as long as he did; as he mentions in the first post, he outlasted two people, one (Both?) of whom assumed site duties after he did. Still, he was the one who got the site where it is today, and he’s left it in good hands. Also, he’ll still be planning the marathons for the site, which is definitely a good thing.

Next time: More Substance?

And I’m not quite sure how I managed to pull it off.
(WARNING: The word is over-used, but this is seriously an epic-length [About 3900 words according to WordPress] post. It’s behind the cut here so you won’t have to scroll through it all to read the older stuff)
(Continue reading…)

Believe it or not, I haven’t totally forgotten about the site.

I recently read through Build a Program Now: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. In terms of doing what the title advertises, I suppose it’s a success–you do, in fact, build several programs, including a simple web browser, a database-using program, and a Weatherbug-esque thing using XML. As an instructional book, though, it’s rather poor. Yeah, you’ll write code, and (hopefully–see below) you’ll end up with a working program at the end, but it’s never really made clear just why you’re writing a lot of the code you’re writing. You can puzzle some of it out, and on an abstract level, you’ll probably be able to comprehend it (In a “this huge block of code makes the Options menu work”) sense, but it could stand to be a bit more detailed. There’s also the fact that some of the code is just wrong, and the instructions throughout the book don’t match the completed programs that come with the book in some cases, which leads to more frustration (I never did actually get the last program in the book to work totally perfectly).

Really, the best thing about the book is that it comes with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, which saves you the trouble of having to download the individual components from Microsoft’s website.

The real reason I decided to get the book was to get back into programming, in the hopes of, as mentioned before, making a dungeon-crawling kind of RPG. I have some conceptual ideas, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be trying to create working movement code for The Shizz Game Developers’ Topic, where the unofficial deadline to have something (Anything, from “dude moving on screen” to “fully completed game”) up and running is July 6th. Wish me luck with that.
-EE

For those of you who actually live near me, Fables Comics has a deal for the month of March where you get 25% off of collections/trades. I found this out randomly yesterday after buying Batman in the Seventies and the owner was nice enough to give me the deal anyway. Pretty cool.

Oh, and did you think it took four years for the North to win the America Civil War? Silly person, the South won it in 3 months, though the two battles in the war took a combined 20 seconds or so. Check out how history really played out here.

This week at emptyeye.com, I returned from my self-imposed exile. Hooray! Since then, I’ve been slowly progressing on the album, doing a bit each day to bring it closer to release. I’d like to continue doing that until it’s finally out. Sometimes it’s significant progress, sometimes it isn’t, but every day it’s at least something.

My dance gaming has kind of taken a back seat as a result, though I did get my twenty-fifth home version Heavy/Challenge AAA, as evidenced here. High gas prices have also limited my trips out, to be honest, even though it really isn’t that far from my house to the mall.

In speedrunning news, my Astyanax run is in the SDA queue (Which reminds me, I need to re-send them my comments for the run), and I’ve begun practicing for a run of M.C. Kids as well. At present, my bugaboo is a trick that lets you skip pretty much the entirety of one level (Birdie’s Treehouse 6) that I learned from the Tool-Assisted Run of the game. It’s doable in real-time (And thus presumably, though I’ll admit I haven’t tried it yet, doable on console), but getting it consistently is a major problem, and the level is set up in such a way that if you miss it, you’ll probably have to go through the level the long way anyway, which isn’t good for a speedrun.

Finally, in book news, I’m currently read the epic that is KISS: Behind the Mask. I’ve said before that I’m a sucker for band biographies, and this is no different. It’s an interesting read, though the most fascinating part to me is a huge appendix of sorts, where KISS themselves review each of their albums one by one, and talk about the experiences writing and producing them.

Until next week….

-EE

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.

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

This week…well, let’s see. Stuff actually happened. The dance gaming front was covered nicely by the thumbnails above, any of which you can click on to see the full picture. From left to right: 7 Greats on Colors (Heavy) in the arcade, a AAA on Un Deux Trois on DDR Extreme 2 for PS2, and 6 Greats on Celebrate Nite in the arcade. Pretty good stuff, though of course these are only the best of the scores (From the arcade session, there were another 15 or so scores I didn’t put down here).

Musically, I managed to work on stuff as well, although not what I expected to. I had planned to record some vocals for a song called “Tuition Madness”, but woke up this morning and my throat was feeling a bit scratchy. So instead I wrote some lyrics to the song about The Secret, and played a bit more with my drum machine as well to come up with half a drum track for the song as well. Now I have to figure out precisely what I want out of the chorus chord-wise, and I’ll hopefully be close to good to go with that as well. Considering there’s about two and a half months until I have to start recording “for real”, this is definitely a good thing!

Finally, on the book front, I finally picked Lifting Shadows back up, and have been reading it bit by bit during my lunch at work. Thus far, it’s pretty good; I’ve gotten to the point where they’ve just fired Charlie Dominici. I will write that review eventually, honest!

Until next week…

-EE

This week in Emptyeye.com, once again, not much happened. Indeed, I would expect updates to be rather sporadic for the next two weeks as I prepare for MAGFest, which is now in less than two weeks. I’ve been hard at work on the challenges, and can get at least one point on pretty much all the games now. Even some of the Expert challenges (Mega Man, Batman once I figured out the secret–not to be confused with The Secret–and of course Battletoads) aren’t too bad. One notable exception is the Ghosts N’ Goblins Expert challenge, which you can read my profanity-laced thoughts on here. Without tipping my hand more than I’ve already done, I submit that several games have their difficulties misrated–Mega Man’s Expert challenge, I feel, is easier than its Hard challenge when you get the pattern down.

Recently, I received a book called Lifting Shadows: The Authorized Biography of Dream Theater. Look for a review of that soon, though I suspect that, truthfully, a review of the book will be useless in a functional sense for reasons I’ll get into when I write about it more fully.

Finally, my Astyanax speedrun is officially in the SDA queue. Hopefully we’ll see it on the site soon.

Until next week, have a Merry Christmas, or whatever you celebrate in December…

-EE

Before I begin, I should point out that I’m not really a big comic book reader. I don’t say this to try and convince you that I’m not some sort of geek in a “I would never read those things!” fashion–really, my main method of exercise is a game where I thi arrows with my feet; I think I left on the geek train a long awhile ago–but rather so you know that, honestly, I’m probably not the most qualified to judge this collection from a knowledge point of view.

Here’s what I do know: The Batman Chronicles is a reprinting of the very earliest Batman stories in chronological order. I was first made aware of their existence through a post on Superdickery’s message boards. The post showed some panels from Volume 1 that would seem completely counter to modern day readers’ perceptions of Batman, especially the whole “code against killing” thing (My personal favorite example from said volume has Batman hanging a villain by the Batplane while remarking “Oh well, it’s probably better for him anyway”.). Right away, I knew I had to have this collection despite my generally not being big into comic books.

Anyway, I missed Volume 2, but picked up Volume 3. How, I’m not quite sure (Well, yes I am–I waited too long and the comic shop I drop by occasionally had Volume 3 but not Volume 2), but the point is that I probably missed out on some evolution of the Batman character (Still called “The Batman” in any expository panels here, by the way). Volume 3 covers the period from December 1940 to approximately May of 1941 or so (The last several stories are listed as coming simply from “Spring 1941″–apparently DC had several quarterly titles back in the day, Batman among them). Right away, there are several quirks of the time that will pop out to modern-day comics fans. First off, there are a lot of stories packed into those four months. Part of it was Batman’s popularity, appearing in Detective Comics, plus his own title, and here making an appearance in something called “World’s Best Comics #1″, but part of it is the story-telling format of the time too–rather than a one-story-per-issue format, the comics of the time tended to give you two or three smaller stories per issue.

From a content standpoint, perhaps partially due to the format mentioned above, you’ll also notice that Batman’s famed “rogue gallery” is largely absent. There’s a story featuring The Joker, and another with a villain named Clayface (Different from today’s Clayface, just to confuse you some more), but other than that, Batman and Robin’s foes here are decidedly more pedestrian in nature–mainly mobsters, with a corrupt publisher dressed as a witch or some acrobats dressed as devils thrown in for good measure now and again.

You’ll probably also note that Vintage Batman is…well, as sane as a guy who dressed up as a bat to fight crime gets, I suppose. There’s no mention whatsoever in this collection of just why Batman wants to go out and catch criminals (Though this was briefly covered in Volume 1–he watched his parents get murdered in cold blood), no probing his psychology, none of any of that. Generally, it’s just Batman beating up crooks. Here in this collection, we note that “Batman never carries or kills with a gun”–I can only presume that other means of killing are perfectly acceptable, such as tossing people overboard from a cruise ship.

My favorite story of the collection is probably also the strangest, which features Batman and Robin going inside several fairy-tales courtesy of a machine by a not-mad-really-but-authorities-would-think-so-if-they-knew-of-this-device scientist. It’s the sort of thing that might have been more suited to the goofy 60s version of the character, as opposed to when he was still in his relative infancy.

In short, I very much enjoyed this collection, and recommend it especially if you’re curious about how “The Batman” was developed during his earliest years.
-EE