Emptyeye

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice the link to my uStream account is gone. This is actually kind of a sign of how badly neglected this place is, since I had been using Twitch/Justin.tv to stream for the past several months.

But I decided earlier today that I was done. Done with streaming. Done with watching streams. And done, as much as I can be (The fact that Mrs. Emptyeye really likes streaming LEGO games means I pretty much can’t completely stop), with appearing on other people’s streams.

There are a couple reasons for this. Part of it is related to me and “how I am”. I have an addictive personality. When I go into something, I go into it full bore, to the detriment of pretty much everything else. This happens until I get bored with it–this entire site is a monument to failed ideas–or my neuroses kick in and I just give up.

See, all my life, I was academically gifted. School–or more accurately, the scholarly parts of school–came easy to me. I was always among the best in my class. And so when it comes to anything else–music, Dance Dance Revolution, running, whatever–I get really into something, almost addicted to it, until I immerse myself into the top tiers of whatever community is associated with that thing, realize “I’ll never be that good, what’s the point?”, and give up. Looking back, it’s amazing I stuck with the DDR as long as I did, and was enthusiastic about Rock band for long enough to win Connecticon‘s Best Vocalist Award three times running, and basically ran the fourth tournament.

And the thing is that this streaming, or more specifically, the watching of streaming, is a passive activity. Even when I was immersed in video games as a kid, as opposed to actually working on social skills (Skills which would have helped me in high school and college), at least I was actively participating in them, manipulating them. With the stream watching, I’m just sinking my time away, time that could be spent coming up with more projects that I’ll never finish (Or, more optimistically, more short stories that I’ll submit to people).

The third piece was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Frankly, every streaming service out there is crap. Justin/Twitch is generally regarded as the best one. It’s what SDA will be using in their upcoming marathon. And even that has all sorts of problems. For one, the chat likes to randomly take forever to load, or not load at all (This, unlike my issues with Steam, is not exclusive to me–it seems like at least once a week, someone will say “Oh thank god, chat finally loaded after a half hour”). For another, the chat’s flood control is extremely overzealous; typing even two lines in close enough succession can be enough to trigger it. Finally, Justin.tv and Twitch.tv are two sites, with Twitch basically being the “gaming arm” of Justin. Creating a Justin account and setting it to “video games” will redirect your viewers to Twitch.tv/yourstream when they access the Justin URL. Only the settings on one don’t carry over to the other–you have to set the options on both sides, especially as regards the “censor common banned words” option (Which has some bizarre choices, like “Link” and “Mother”).

And that’s the best option out there. The rest are even worse. UStream had a phase for awhile where it seemed like every move they made was designed to hemorrhage viewers toward Justin.tv–the silly “Chat from the bottom up” thing was especially boneheaded. Yet somehow, the streaming community as a whole just accepts this as the status quo. “Terrible” is fine, because it’s less bad than all the alternatives.

Well, no more. I’m not being an accomplice to this state of events. I’m not broadcasting on my own. I’m not watching other streams. I’m aware of the hypocrisy of continuing to show up on my wife’s stream, but at least same, I don’t want to punish her for my own, admittedly, not entirely rational crusade against the state of things. But other than that, I’m done, as much as possible.

-EE

In April of 2006, I entered a Dance Dance Revolution tournament at my college, the one and only time since I graduated in December 2005 that I’ve gone back. Yes, if you know how your college commencement schedules work, that means I didn’t attend my own graduation ceremony. To make a long story short, I won, and my reward for this was a 2GB iPod Nano, seen below. In 2006, this was a pretty big deal.

My Trusty 2GB iPod. Awesome 80s Metal Added by Me (The display reads "Love Chaser/Europe/The Final Countdown").

Luckily, the Capital One Rewards Program had the solution for me. My credit card usage is frequent enough (IE I use it for basically everything, although I make sure to pay off a substantial portion of it, if not the entire outstanding debt, every month) that, combined with their Summer Rewards catalog, I was eligible to receive a free 16GB iPod Nano. Despite my current Nano’s lack of capacity, I have to say, I’d have it for 4 and a half years or so, and the fact that I won it at a college DDR tournament makes it one of the few connections I have left to my “pre-real world” life, as it were–despite the fact that I had gotten a nasty dose of the “real world” in the second half of 2004. So it’s a bit strange to actually be discarding the 2GB iPod given that aspect.

Still, though, it’s been good for me in a way too. In preparation for being able to hold 8 times the music on the thing, I re-listened to a couple of albums that I hadn’t heard in many years–Stabbing Westward’s Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel and Rush’s Tech for Echo. I plan to do this to a lot of other albums I have but haven’t listened to as well, which should be pretty neat. Hopefully, the new iPod will get here in the next couple days, and I’ll be able to start loading it up with music and the like soon after that.

Yeah.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Marlborough, MA for the first-ever GameUniCon, a convention that was being hyped as New England’s largest video gaming convention. I arrived on Thursday night, as I tend to do for these things, picked up my badge, and got ready for the weekend.

On Friday, I realized that this, frankly, was set up unlike any other gaming convention I had been to to this point. Most other conventions have a large Free Play room for general gaming, and tournaments are either held in smaller rooms, or within the larger Free Play room. At GameUniCon, the biggest gaming room could best be summed up as “The Madden and Fighting Game Room”, mostly with the various Super Smash Bros games, though there were some systems running Street Fighter IV as well. There were various smaller Free Play rooms set up throughout the hotel, plus a Rock Band/Guitar Hero room and a Halo room. I also thought that the event was, overall, quite a bit smaller than was hyped, although I have to admit that I didn’t have any interest in what were advertised as the biggest tournaments (Halo, Smash Bros. Brawl).

That said, some of the competition that was there for the various tournaments were definitely top-tier in their respective games. For one, ScoreHero had a huge presence in all of the various rhythm game tourneys, which really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. I wandered in and out of the Rock Band room throughout Friday, waiting for the Vocals tournament to start. Finally, at about 8PM, it got underway (It was supposed to start at 5PM. This, honestly, is par for the course for convention tournaments in general–my CTCon 08 Addendum has an amusing story of how I missed a tournament when I took this effect into account in my plans…and the tourney miraculously began on time. Ben, who was running the Rock Band room at GameUniCon, noted that he thought they didn’t give him nearly enough time for the Guitar and Drum tournaments earlier in the day [It was the Guitar tourney that ran long in particular, which set everything else back].), with something I didn’t expect–because of a spotty Internet connection, the Rock Band Import songs couldn’t be accessed, making the tourney Rock Band 2 songs only..a major help for me. My first two matches were, to sum up, easy (I won on Down With the Sickness, Cool for Cats, Shackler’s Revenge, and Any Way You Want It, though it took me until the last one to actually 100% something). Unfortunately, then I ran into other ScoreHero denizens (ScoreHero’s official motto is “Graciously Documenting Our Future Arthritis”. Its unofficial motto is “Welcome to ScoreHero. We are all that guy.”)

Match number three was against John “JohnIsADumb” D. We both 100%ed the two songs in the match (Drain You and Go Your Own Way), with him picking a slightly better Overdrive path on Drain You (Leading to a win by about 1200 points on his end), and managing to hit a vocal squeeze on the second activation (Squeezing dates back to early Guitar Hero, and is basically activating your Star Power and/or Overdrive as late as you possibly can to try and “squeeze in” a few more notes/a bit of the next phrase under that precious double scoring.) on Go Your Own Way, beating me by under 300 points on the song (The score was, roughly, 149,900 to 149,600, for an idea of how little 300 points actually is).

My fourth (And last) match was against Cameron “Cam101″ Brock. I actually won the first song (Aqualung) by about 6000 points. Then, when my turn to choose the song came, I made what would amount to a tactical error. After considering picking Tangled Up in Blue, I wind up going with The Trees: Vault Edition. Similarly to Drain You in the last match, I lose due to not having the best pathing/squeezing skills (I fell behind on the squeezing aspect; the bad path I picked at the end was just a formality, though it did put me further behind). After two tie-breaker songs picked at random were rejected (Today, for not being difficult enough per the rules, and Aqualung, because we had played it earlier in the match), we settle on…Welcome to the Neighborhood by the Lybians as our tiebreaker song. This is seriously one of the most obscure songs in the game, to the point where I’m not even sure what the general consensus on it is quality-wise (At least people hate Visions…). But it fits, and as Cam said, “Well, a random song is a random song.” I was hoping I could win via the song’s sheer obscurity, but no such luck–apparently the only two people on the planet[1] who ever played the song were Cam and myself, and once again, I get outsqueezed to lose the match and get knocked out of the tournament. This leads to the following conversation:

Me: Let me guess, I finished just short of the money, right?
Ben: …yeah, you tied for fifth.
Me: Awesome! Spectacular!

(The top four places paid out, in case you couldn’t figure it out)

Ultimately, JohnIsADumb wins the tournament, a guy named Tobias comes in second, and Cam, who eliminated me, takes third.

Furthermore, I managed to miss Freezepop play on Friday night. This sucked mainly in that finding out they were headlining the Friday night show was what took me from “This sounds pretty cool, maybe I’ll check it out.” to “I am so going to this.” Although, thinking back on it, my missing the concert was probably for the best….

…because I still had one more tournament to go: Myself (On Vocals), TH3DARKM3TAL (On Bass, and the guy who approached me about forming a band for this tournament in the first place), SeanFTW (On Drums), and Gaara (On Guitar) were signed up for the Rock Band Full Band tournament on Saturday. But first, drama (Amazingly, not related to my scrambling to find a band)! It seems that someone got drunk and tore lights off of the hotel walls on the third floor on Friday night/Saturday morning…and the hotel was threatening to shut the entire convention down if the culprit wasn’t found. This became “We’ll let the convention keep going if the damages are paid and someone takes the blame for it.”, which eventually turned into “Don’t worry about it” as the official word from the convention. As I understand it, the actual culprit was eventually found.

With that, the full-band tournament began, slightly later than expected. Perhaps as karma for my easy first two matches in the Vocals tourney, in the first round of the full band tourney, OHai (Our band name) is immediately paired against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), which consists of, amongst other people, Hellashes (AKA “The first guy to full combo Jordan“)…who is a top-tier drummer in addition to being an insane guitar player, and Tobias, who came in second in the Vocals tourney. Sigh.

We lose on Shackler’s Revenge, then actually win on Everlong primarily to their drummer’s drum kit malfunctioning. There was a bit of controversy here concerning (Insert Epic Band Name Here) and looking up overdrive paths for Everlong after the match had already started. It’s quickly ruled that they can’t do that (Looking up paths is not allowed after the start of the match)…at the time, I thought that the ultimately-agreed-upon definition of “Start of the match” was a bit sketchy (It was decided on “When the first song is officially picked” as opposed to “When the match’s pairings are announced.”), but now realize that, depending on who picks first, there isn’t that much functional difference. In any event, our tiebreaker song was Give It All, which we ultimately lose for an express ticket to the loser’s bracket. This is not starting well.

Our next match thankfully goes better–we win on Battery thanks to some well-timed Unison bonuses (If everyone hits the phrases that give them Overdrive, they get bonus overdrive) that coincided well with when I activated my Overdrive on Vocals, meaning we spent a lot of the song in X8 bonus territory. Carry On Wayward Son was actually the most “fun” song in the tournament for us–our opponents failed out of the song early on, essentially handing the song and the match to us by default. This led to Sean and T.D.M. switching instruments in the middle of the song during a break where vocals are really the only thing going on, and myself getting into the act by singing to a camera that was recording snippets of the tournament as opposed to looking at the screen to find out how well I’m holding the pitches the game wants (I still 100%ed the song). Suffice to say we get through the song (It was ruled that despite our opponents’ failure, we would still have to pass the song to win it), though we could have done much better had we been taking it more seriously.

Match number three also saw us winning both songs, Rob the Prez-o-Dent and Visions. Amusingly, I managed to 100% the former (Mostly talkies, but with some hard singing phrases if you’re not paying attention) and somehow miss a phrase on the latter (Entirely talkies. Even better, I missed on a phrase that has essentially filled itself on literally every other time I’ve played the song). With only six bands entered, this put us into the top 3 and the money, such that it was. Woo-hoo!

Round 4 put us up against the band That’s What She Said for a ticket into the final two. Unfortunately, our run ends here, as we get absolutely crushed on Aqualung to the tune of about a half-million point gap (As Jim Mora would say, “Playoffs?! Don’t talk about….playoffs! A disgraceful performance….In my opinion, that sucked!”), though I do 100% the song, something I didn’t do the night before. That’s What She Said pick Almost Easy, and that seals our fate, as we lose by 100K or so. Adding some measure of insult to injury, That’s What She Said’s singer was…Cam Brock, making this the second tourney he had eliminated me from. Oh well.

The finals would pit That’s What She Said against (Insert Epic Band Name Here), so at least we could say we lost to the top 2 bands, however the finals played out. After the latter win on their pick of Panic Attack, an amusing conversation follows, that went roughly:
TWSS: Okay, we pick Get Clean.
(IEBNH): Okay, but we like just played that.
TWSS: We don’t pick Get Clean anymore.
*Laughter in the room*

That’s What She Said ultimately select Peace Sells as their song choice, but it doesn’t matter, as (Insert Epic Band Name Here) win that and the tournament.

In the end, our third-place payment comes out to $9 each, or $1 per person less than our entry fee. But officially, darnit, I got paid for playing Rock Band, which is pretty cool. All in all, I knew going in the caliber of competition I’d be facing in both the Vocals and Full Band tournaments, and I gave a good account of myself, proving that I’m at least in the same league as them–despite my lack of pathing/squeezing skills, I 100%ed all of the songs I lost in the Vocals tournament, meaning I didn’t give/choke anything away. In fact, while I’m still kicking myself in terms of tactics for not picking Tangled Up in Blue on Cam (I found out later that it was one of three songs in Rock Band 2 he had yet to FC), in terms of actually executing the songs, Almost Easy in the Full Band tournament is really the only one I wish I had done better on, and I don’t know that not making the mistakes I made would have made up the difference by itself. So I’m happy with how I played all weekend, and proved to T.D.M. (Who was the person who initially contacted me and said “Hey let’s get a band together for this thing.”) that he made a solid choice as far as finding a vocalist.

On Saturday night, I happened to check out some of the concerts, being done with my tourney obligations. Jesus Candy (The band of Jamie, who was the main man behind the whole convention and, I believe, the owner of Game Universe, the store behind the con) were great, as was what I saw of Powerglove, and Bang Camaro brought the house down, in spite of not playing Night Lies (I had hoped to see the song done right, as opposed to my butchering of it at CTCon ’09.). Great shows all around. I shouted myself hoarse by the end of it, and it’s my tendency to do this at concerts that probably made it a good thing I didn’t get to see Freezepop on Friday night.

Sunday mainly saw me watch the Guitar Hero: Smash Hits and Guitar Hero: Metallica tournaments. Both were won by the same person, who goes by GuitarHeroDude on Youtube and is an absolutely incredible player (He scored something like 898K on Through the Fire and Flames in the finals. This wasn’t even his best run of the song in the tournament; he hit 920K or so in the semi-finals. He also won the Metallica tournament by 100%ing Battery as the final song).

The ride home was pretty uneventful, thankfully. In all, it was definitely a fun time, and I plan to go next year if a second one is held. Despite what I linked to in the Unofficial ScoreHero Motto, everyone from the site was actually really cool and more than capable of having fun, both in terms of playing the game and just talking to them.

[1]- According to Scorehero, it’s actually been 100%ed by about 300 people just on the XBox 360. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they can all do it consistently, though.

A few brief notes in lieu of doing anything productive tonight:

1. I’m convinced that what Rock Band needs is some of the early Power Rangers theme songs. C’mon, tell me the full version of the original theme, or the extended ZEO theme wouldn’t make awesome rhythm game songs. You can’t do it. Bonus points in that the guitar parts actually have what I can see as some pretty difficult parts; the hilarity factor in watching people fail a children’s show theme on the higher difficulties would just be great in itself.

Actually, as I go through some more of the various Power Rangers themes, I think they’d all work pretty well.

2. For some reason, almost all would-be spam comments seem to target one particular entry. Maybe because of its length? Fortunately, since the Amsterdam incident mentioned here, nothing of that sort has actually made it through Akismet.

This site went up and running in October 2007, with an agreement for 2 years with my hosting service. I had big plans for it at the time, mostly revolving around my music. This hasn’t quite worked out the way I had hoped, mainly because of one frustration after another foiling my best efforts to actually release music at something resembling a professional level (First my old computer started going on the fritz, then I realized that this one didn’t have the proper slot for my sound card, then found out that apparently adapters don’t work on this computer either). Given these setbacks, one would think that re-upping for a further 3-year commitment to the site would not be the smartest idea.

You don’t know me very well.

So now I have this site, with (In theory, anyway) more disc space and bandwidth than I know what to do with until about September 2012..and nothing to do with it at the moment. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to throw them out. I’ve actually considered doing a webcomic, but I’m not sure if this is such a good idea because A. Whatever talents I was blessed with, artistic talent is definitely not one of them, and B. Knowing me, I’d quickly lose interest in it before it had a chance to get up to speed.

In other news, I’m back in a StarCraft mode again, as happens occasionally. I’m still awful at it, if you’re curious.

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.

#1: Burger King‘s new (I think it’s new) Spicy Tendercrisp Wrap is quite tasty, at least without lettuce (I don’t like lettuce, as anyone can tell you).

#2: Harmonix are making it very difficult for me to not simply cave in and buy an XBOX 360 and Rock Band right now, with announcements such as this one.

Everyone has that album that probably got them through their adolescence. I don’t know that I’d quite go so far as to say as Moving Pictures was that album for me (My essay that got me into college was based around the title track from 2112, actually), but it probably shaped who I am today as a musician (If not as a person) more than any other album, in terms of showing me what a bassist could actually do. As such, it’s very difficult for me to pass this up, despite the massive monetary investment it would take at this point. Sigh.

Yay!

• I’m going to try to make the next Connecticon Member Appreciation Day on September 13th. These “MADs”, as they’re called, are essentially mini-Connecticons that are, for awhile, free to the public (After a certain date in the ‘Con year, they become restricted to CTCon attendees only). Fun stuff.
• As you may have gathered from my recent postings, I’ve been thinking of Metallica a bit lately, and more precisely, I’ve been wondering why Master of Puppets gets all the love/critical acclaim/rock magazine specials/etc. made about it. It’s very good, to be sure, but…it serves mainly as the bridge between Ride the Lightning, which laid the template for what is generally considered their best output and …And Justice for All, which was the perfection of said template. Puppets, by comparison, is…just not as good to me, I guess.
• Finally, with the 2008 football season almost upon us, have a joke:
  Q: What’s the difference between Mama Cass (Of The Mamas & The Papas) and the 2007 New England Patriots?
  A: Only one of them choked to death.

Thank you! Good night!

This past week, I actually posted some stuff. Amazing, huh?

I’m still trying to figure out precisely what to do with my stimulus check plus birthday money. Essentially, in one corner is waiting a bit and buying an XBOX 360 and Rock Band 2 when it comes out. In the other is actually addressing my recording obstacles full-on, getting either a new soundcard or adapter for the current one plus an honest-to-goodness updated copy of Cakewalk SONAR (The latter actually being the more expensive of the two); I know which one I should get (The second one), but knowing me, I’ll demonstrate a total lack of responsibility and commitment and cave and get the first next month.

Jess and I went down to New Haven today to eat at a place called Amato’s, which was pretty good. I had a huge lasagna, which I only managed to finish half of, and Jess had some chicken parm which she also failed to finish. More leftovers are always good, I suppose.

In Guitar Hero III news, I’m through 3 of 8 tiers on Expert, with all but 3 songs 5-starred. My most recent 4-star, “Paint it Black”, was probably also the most amusing in that I hit 96% of the notes. The problem was that six of the song’s 9 star power phrases were in the 4% of notes I missed. Oops…

Until next week..

-EE

Musically, Metallica’s …And Justice for All is one of my favorite albums ever. Production-wise, almost the exact opposite is true.

Tales have been told for years about the almost complete absence of bass on the album, but that’s really not even my biggest problem with it. No, my problem with it is something about which I know pretty much nothing, at least on the surface–the drum sounds. Whereas the later St. Anger (Not even Metallica’s worst album, by the way, [That would be Load] let alone “Worst album ever!” like a lot of people want you to believe…but I digress) suffered from the problem of Lars Ulrich using a wide variety of metal trash cans for a drum kit (Why do I actually hear the snare’s pitch changing on the title track?), …And Justice for All’s drums just aren’t big enough. The snare drum in particular is…tinny almost, lacking in power really. I notice it especially on “Blackened”. There just isn’t enough reverb, or EQ, or something.