Emptyeye

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

(NOTE: I provide the Amazon links in this post so you have a starting point to learn more about the linked books, not because I necessarily recommend that you read them. Indeed, I highly recommend staying far, far away from The Magic of Dialogue.)

Those of you who know me will no doubt wonder why I decided to read Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. It really comes down to “know your enemy”–I had heard about the supposed thesis of the book–essentially, taking the convention of “Positive thinking is a powerful tool in your arsenal” (Which isn’t that heretical an idea in and of itself–professional athletes, among others, have stated the benefits of visualizing themselves making the big, game-winning shot/pass/kick.etc) and distorting it into “Positive thinking is the ONLY tool you’ll ever need”–and bought it, having to see this for myself and intending to write a sarcastic, Bad Religion-style song about it.

Then I actually read it.

The short version of my verdict: There is something to be said for changing the way you think about life. Changing the way you think to specifically match what Byrne describes in the book will only lead to misery and nothing getting done.

Essentially, the book ranges from thought-provoking (So long as you think about the change-your-perception concept in a general sense, and don’t try to apply the exact method of “Sit back, relax, and let the good times flow in”) to downright offensive (Hitting this point when it says that the reason people are fat is that they “think ‘fat’ thoughts”. Yes, really.), to at times sounding like the scam some decry it as (At one point, the book claims “[…]it has been scientifically proven that an affirmative thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought[…]” and expects you to just believe it, without actually providing the scientific proof, or even a reference to any sort of study about said proof, in question).

Really, the book, to me, represents an excellent example of The Placebo Effect. Its thesis is really something along the lines of, as I said, “sit back, think positive thoughts, and let the good flow into your life”. But there’s really more to it than that, that isn’t stated, and which I think it dangerous to omit. No, I don’t have a problem with changing one’s perception of life, setting goals, etc. But that’s only one step–you still have to actually do the work associated with achieving whatever new goal it is that you set for yourself in order to make it happen. The book doesn’t mention this at all–indeed, one could argue that the book goes out of its way not to say this, saying effectively “Just do it. Don’t worry about how you’re going to do it, just trust that it will all work out for you in the end.” This line of thought is really very similar to the concept of faith in religion, which I don’t place a lot of, well, faith in. But back to The Placebo Effect–I can see the concept of changing your perception also changing your outlook life, not because anything has actually happened, but merely because you think it has, because you’ve changed your outlook on life. This is a positive thing, I suppose, but it’s not something you can learn only by reading this book.

My personal thoughts on the philosophy of the book aside, from a writing perspective, it suffers the same problem of a book I once had to read for college called The Magic of Dialogue. That is, there is about 20 pages of material, certainly written well enough, but rephrased in slightly different ways using slightly different examples to create a 200-or-so page book. I hated the technique in The Magic of Dialogue; I don’t hate it quite so much here, perhaps because the material itself is slightly stronger (And I’m not reading it under duress).

All in all, the book wasn’t entirely a waste of my reading time, but it did, I think, provide me enough material for that song I mentioned earlier. Given that, I can’t recommend the book as the life-changing tome of wisdom it claims to be–indeed, following it to the letter would, I think, be counter-productive.

-EE

Generally speaking, I’m a sucker for band biographies. Oftentimes, reading them opens the door to a world that rivals anything you’d find in the classic movie This Is Spinal Tap (Indeed, I have heard more than once that as a musician or band gains experience with their chosen career, “…Spinal Tap” becomes less and less funny as it becomes more and more real [Think of it as the musician’s equivalent of Dilbert]).

So it was that a month or two ago, I picked up the deadly weapon…err, sorry, book, The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t call it a deadly weapon because of its writing by any means, but rather due to its sheer size–the book is huge, with roughly 850 pages of narrative, another one hundred or so of cites, a U.S. discography, etc. and, oh yeah, some pictures thrown in there for good measure.

The book spends a good hundred to two hundred pages discussing the Fab Four’s early, pre-Beatles lives, focusing in particular on John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Reading about the early days is fun enough–the glorified strip clubs, the dropping out of art school, the unsafe-as-all-get-out stage that, unable to take it anymore, the boys actually deliberately smashed, hoping to force the club owner’s hand into repairing it (It didn’t work–the owner patched it together in the most piecemeal way possible, making it even less safe than it had been prior to the temper tantrum)–but the book really picks up after the Beatles start to hit it big.

Now, understand this. I was born in 1983–in other words, the Beatles had been officially broken up for over 13 years by the time I was born (And reading the book, it’s clear that the band was unofficially “broken up” about six months before the news hit the press, making it closer to 14 years). As such, while I knew the general history of the band–from lovable moptops to the Sargent Pepper’s period and beyond–I (And I suspect a lot of others my age) knew nothing of the behind the scenes stuff that went on during those six-to-seven years. Just a brief list of the highlights:

• Beatlemania was a very accurate term–indeed, it may have been an understatement. Part of the Beatles’ ultimate disillusionment with playing live was that they could never hear themselves–they were consistently drowned out by throngs of screaming teenage girls.
• John Lennon, on more than one occasion, would throw up the Nazi salute to shrieking throngs in a foreign country–who would roar their approval.
• The Beatles unintentionally snubbing Imelda Marcos, then-First Lady of the Philippines, and almost getting themselves killed in the process (More correctly, their management unintentionally-intentionally snubbed her–the Beatles themselves had never even been told of the obligation until it was too late).
• The drugs, which coincided with–and let’s be honest, probably contributed to–their groundbreaking late-period material
• The various subsets of their Apple Industries, where the Beatles, Paul in particular, were seemingly determined to hemorrhage money as quickly as they could
• Yoko Ono’s emergence. Some blame her even today for the Beatles’ breakup; reading the book, my own estimation is that while she accelerated the process, the breakup itself was probably inevitable–John and Paul simply had egos too big to continue to coexist in the same band indefinitely (John’s drug-addled state didn’t help matters).

In short, the book was utterly captivating. I highly recommend it to even the casual Beatles fan despite–indeed, even because of–its length.
-EE