Emptyeye

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

While going back and re-arranging what will ultimately become the final version of “7-11“, I was struck at how the compressor that was a part of some of the guitar sound also served to distort and clip said sound. Awesome, now it sounds like a major label recording, and I don’t even get the benefit of being super loud and overpowering everything else. I’ll fix this somehow, either through studio magic or simply re-recording the part, but it doesn’t exactly boost my confidence in my abilities for the moment. Oh well, I think I heard it the first time and more or less convinced myself I was a good enough producer to fix it in the first place, or I would have re-recorded it, so…

In happier news, some two-plus years after I by a complete fluke managed my first Heavy AAA on a Dance Dance Revolution home version, I nailed #25 tonight in a rather similar fashion. Not that it was a complete fluke like #1 (With 24 previous home version AAAs before this one, I know I’m good enough to AAA at least easy songs), but it was on a song–”Maria (I Believe…)”–that I apparently don’t play very often at all, as I hadn’t even full comboed before tonight, where I played the song and pulled a AAA on my first shot. So that was pretty cool anyway. You can check that out by clicking the thumbnail at the top of this post. I also think I’ve almost gotten down THAT. ONE. STEP. in “Sakura” to the point where I can at least combo it now. Fellow DDR players know exactly what I’m talking about; everyone else will be completely lost. Suffice to say that there is one step in particular in the song that is notoriously difficult to hit accurately–or in my case, at all, evidently.

Finally, here’s some more Family Feud hilarity. The first contestant actually does reasonable enough. The second one…let’s just say I’m amazed Richard Dawson didn’t lose it here too.

Two brief notes for tonight. First, I forgot to append “(Slap It Down Mix)” to the two songs I uploaded last night. That’s fixed now. If you downloaded them between then and now, fix the tags on your own copies please.

Secondly, here’s a link to home DDR Heavy AAA #24: Can’t Stop Fallin’ In Love Super Euro Mix. If nothing else, it’s nice for me to be able to track my progress via these posts.

Yeah. This is essentially a post for the sake of making a post tonight. I’ve been working with the drum machine, frantically trying to cram stuff in before I have to re-record all the stuff for The Six Day Exile.

Oh, and I played DDR Extreme 2 for PS2 today, and got myself three new AAAs, bringing my home version total to 23. From left to right: Colors (Heavy), One of the Burning the Floor Mixes (I think it’s Blue Fire Mix, but can’t bother to go check), and Oops! I Did It Again.

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.

With one week until I travel to Rhode Island to get absolutely destroyed in this tournament (Despite the topic title, actual cancellation of the tournament seems unlikely), I figured a fully DDR-centered post would be good.

MAX 300 was the first “10-footer” in DDR history. 10 feet is as high as the DDR difficulty scale goes (In the Groove went as high as 13 for its difficulty, and unofficial fan-made files for Stepmania go even higher than that), despite the fact that nowadays the range of “10s” is so wide that the game could really benefit from 11 or even 12 being added to said scale. But in any case, MAX 300 has become something of a project for me of late. I can get through the song with no problem, but there are a few spots in it I simply can’t seem to get right no matter how hard I try.

If you’d like to see these yourself, just click on the thumbnail above and have a look at the spots labeled 1, 2 and 3 (Warning, the file is big, about 1000*900 pixels. Also, my thanks to DDR Freak, who provided the original stepchart and who will hopefully not sue me into oblivion for putting up this modified version.). Spot 1 isn’t actually that difficult, but for some reason I like switching arrows 5 and 6 around in my head and thus missing both of them.

Spot 2 is the second half of the “run of 33″ arrows, which is basically what you’d expect–a run of 33 continuous arrows (Although, because the first 16 are essentially just alternating two arrows back and forth, it doesn’t feel that bad). Once again, here I mess up arrows 5 and 6, which somehow throws me completely off for the rest of the run (My foot position is wrong) and saps my lifebar down to almost nothing. I have no clue what’s going on here. I can hit it fine slowed down even slightly, but I just don’t process it at full speed, or something. What’s frustrating is that at one point, I could mentally do it fine–my feet weren’t fast enough to consistently combo it, but I at least had the sequence of arrows correct. And now…I don’t know.

Spot 3 is another one where my feet simply refuse to step the correct sequence, though I at least have it down to a single incorrect arrow at this point–I tend to step the first four steps in the spot as up-down-up-down instead of the up-down-left-down that it should be. This particular mental block isn’t anything new though–I came to the conclusion that I had always been doing it wrong when I broke my combo either two or three consecutive times in the exact same spot each time. I’m trying to work on it anyway, though–as the first video link in this post shows, people can AAA the song. I may never get that good, but I’d like to at least fully combo the stupid thing at some point.

This entry doesn’t particularly have a point, other than to talk to myself about this, but if there are any other dance gamers who’ve gone through something like this, feel free to chime in.

Though honestly, another reason that I wanted to post this is that this marks the first time in emptyeye.com’s history that I have successfully posted some type of update at least once a day for an entire week. Essentially, either my life is getting more eventful, or I’m getting better at divvying up what I want to post when, but either way, this is a good thing (As it shows that I’m keeping the site very much alive, giving you something to look forward to and giving you more reasons to come back). I don’t think I can keep it up for a second week in a row though–this was more a fluke than anything else. In any event, not to worry, you’ll still get at least the Sunday Night “week X” posts, plus anything else I feel like posting throughout the week.

With yesterday’s release of a new song comes the associated failed takes in the Into the Aether section of the site. You get failures of anything that isn’t drums in this particular package–2 minutes and 20 seconds of me playing guitar badly, sounding like a dying cat vocally, and going way the heck off beat in an attempt to record a 5/4 bass solo. Sounds like something you want to hear, right?

What wasn’t a failure yesterday was my session of Playstation 2 DDR. I picked up 3 new “Full Perfect Combos”, which in previous mixes were called AAAs (Supernova 2’s scoring system is set up such that you can get Greats and still receive a AAA grade for the song). This brings my home version total Heavy/Challenge difficulty FPCs to a nice round 20. These are the little thumbnails at the top of the post; from left to right, they’re Raspbery <3 Heart (#18), Fevah (#19 and my first Extra Stage FPC), and And Then We Kiss (#20, obviously). If you’re that curious, you can click any of the thumbnails to see the full-size picture of the respective FPC.