Well, Connecticon 2010 was certainly my most…eventful convention to date. A quick warning: This is absolutely huge even by my “Massive post-Convention Post” standards, weighing in at over 5000 words according to WordPress…before this disclaimer. So, in addition to the traditional “Cut”, I put in some links so you can skip directly to the day you may want to read about.
Thursday Night
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
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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)
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Those of you who follow this blog know that I tend to go through “phases” when it comes to hobbies and the like. Some I actually make decent progress on before hitting a brick wall (The music page); some are more fleeting in nature (Hey, what’s up card game idea?). Currently, it’s working on Rock Band 2 vocals in early preparation for defending my Best Vocalist title at Connecticon. Thankfully, so far I’m continuing to improve on most of the songs in the game, though I have an annoying syndrome I like to call ORSS, or One Random Strong Syndrome. Basically, even on songs I know well that should be pretty easy, I have a tendency to get a Strong (The second highest grade, which breaks your combo and costs you a bunch of points and the 100% grade) on exactly one phrase for no real reason. It’s a bit annoying, to say the least.
Yep. Mainly due to this:
Basically, it’s a 100% of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” in Rock Band 2 on Expert Vocals. It’s not a particularly long song, but it has some of the more notoriously difficult phrases in the game in the “Sure plays a mean pinball”s. I never had any major trouble with those specific phrases, oddly (Being more vexed by the “That deaf, dumb and blind kid”s myself), but this was the first time I 100%ed it in a solo game (I did it once before while playing with Jess on guitar, surprising even myself at the time).
This is the first full combo that tells me that I may be pretty okay at this whole “Rock Band 2 vocals” thing, despite what my scoresheet would tell you.
Woo!
Hooray!
First up is the fact that MAGFest is under a month away. THis will be my fourth time going, and the second time with the Challenges Booth. Truth be told, though, I haven’t been doing a lot of practicing for it, at least lately. That’s because I’ve been playing various Rock Band 2 in preparation for my attempt at The Endless Setlist 2–put short, all 84 songs in the game, beginning with the easiest for a full band and getting gradually harder. The somewhat good thing about this is that I’ll be attempting it on Expert Vocals, which is the one individual instrument whose difficulty doesn’t correlate that well with the full band difficulty. In other words, when the other instruments are drained from hours of playing and still have their hardest trials to go, the Vocals have it a bit easier, since the difficulty tends to jump all over the place given the order of the ESL2; from a familiarity standpoint, my biggest problem is actually going to be songs 40-55 or so. Endurance-wise, I should be okay; I’ve been singing small chunks of the setlist each day and seem to be all right, though ~12 songs a day is very different from 84. I actually plan to record the whole thing (In awful quality) and eventually upload some of the highlights and lowlights, which should be amusing.
Rock Band 2 has a lot of songs. One of those songs is “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, her rather bitter, sarcastic ode to Uncle Joey of Full House (Which is a bit creepy in itself; Dave Coulier is about 15 years older than Morissette is). Given its subject matter, it’s not surprising that someone (Be it Harmonix themselves or someone at the ESRB) saw fit to censor some of the lyrics. Besides the obvious removal of an “F” word, there’s additional censorship that is the subject of this post.
Early in the song is the line “An older version of me/is she perverted like me/would she go down on you in a theatre?”, a not-all-that-veiled reference to oral sex in, um, a theatre (Or “Theater”, if you’re particularly anal about the spelling of your band name). For some reason, it was decided that removing the word “down”, and only the word “down”, was acceptable here. This actually makes the phrase even worse/more hilarious. The reason for this is that it leaves “Would she go (pause) on you in a theatre?”, which makes it sound like the subject of the song has a thing for being urinated on during the movies.
Funny censorship indeed! Can you think of anything else like this? The only other real example I can think of is the Playstation 2 release of In the Groove, where the method of censoring used–turning the words into complete gibberish–tended to make things even worse if you listened hard enough/knew what to listen for.
(This post is huge; most of it is hidden behind a tag to prevent you from having to read it all each time the page loads)
This past weekend was spent at Connecticon. Quite honestly, I had hoped to have the CD/business cards/etc. out at this point, but various circumstances that I have documented before have prevented that thus far. In any event, I first became aware of this convention sometime last year, and went on the Saturday of last year to play in a DDR tournament. I didn’t do very well, but that’s beside the point–I had fun, and decided to go to the entire convention this year, and actually booked a room at the hotel despite living fairly close. This made more sense when I lived in Waterbury (My thinking was I’d go right to the hotel from work on Thursday, because I didn’t want to go from Waterbury to Cheshire, back to Waterbury, and drive back through Cheshire again on my way to Hartford), but as I’ve since moved out to Milldale, I did go back to my apartment after work to pack and then headed off to the Convention Center at about 7:30 Thursday night.
This past week, a lot of the issues I had with the apartment got fixed, specifically the toilet and cable (The latter of which involved a simple reboot of the system on Cox‘s end). As a result, the place actually feels something like a home now, and to celebrate, we had a housewarming (Apartmentwarming, I guess) party earlier today. It pretty cool, as some of my friends from Massachusetts showed up, as did my parents and a bunch of Jess’s family. So that was neat.
In about a week, work on The Six Day Exile will resume, for real this time. It’s a good thing I had everything backed up onto two external drives, because on of them has just about died. Luckily, the second is still up and running; late next week sometime I’ll probably get another one to keep that redundancy (A good thing when it comes to backing stuff up) intact.
Speaking of things being on the fritz, my Cobalt Flux continues to not work right even after a cleaning. I’m not entirely surprised, mind you–what it did isn’t really consistent with it being dirty, but rather some type of wire problem–but it is a bit disappointing. Well, more than a bit–DDR was about my only form of exercise nowadays.
Finally, I’m back into playing StarCraft. I’m not exactly sure why, to be honest. But I’m going through all the missions again to get some semblance of skill in the game back.
Until next week…
-EE
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
