Emptyeye

Last night, Jess and I went to see Poison, Sebastian Bach and Dokken (Not necessarily in that order) at Mohegan Sun. I can’t really “review” it per se, because honestly, I spent a lot of the lead-up time trying to get out of going somehow–I’m not really a big Poison fan, and only know a few songs from each of Sebastian Bach and Dokken.

Suffice to say that my attempts to not go failed. And so last night, we drove to the Mohegan Sun Arena (Amazingly, I managed to avoid both gambling and arrowsmashing leading up to the concert) for the show. Sebastian Bach played first–as the only one I was really looking forward to seeing, this was something of a disappointment–and was plagued by technical difficulties of some sort, either vocally (He was too quiet in relation to the band for pretty much the whole set, I thought) or with one of the guitars. What I could hear, though, was good, and he played the three Skid Row songs I actually knew (“18 and Life”, “Youth Gone Wild”, and “I Remember You”).

Dokken was next, and I knew just about nothing about them (You could’ve replaced them with Hannah Montana and I wouldn’t have known the difference). I could immediately tell you that I had heard exactly one song they played (The last one. “In my dreams, it’s still the same….”), and another, that I think was called “Tooth and Nail”, I quite like.

Finally came Poison. And…well, for better or worse, I at least knew just about all of the songs. And I’ll say this: My friend Chris’s summation of CeCe Deville as “Best bad guitar player ever” is pretty accurate–were he in a band that wasn’t Poison, he’d probably get a lot more respect than he does, if that makes any sense. The same goes for Rikki Rockett, who emerged from behind his drumkit to play a box (Yes, really) and some bongos, which was pretty cool.

So all-in-all, it actually wasn’t totally horrible.

This weekend: Connecticon!

This past week here on the site, not much happened, though if you pay close attention you’ll note I updated the about pages to make them more current (The About the Site page had a reference to the long-gone donation button). And other than that, I’ve really been pretty lazy.

Neil Peart once wrote “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing at the moment with The Six Day Exile–rather than decide to forge ahead without my Echo Indigo, or see if I can fix the problem (Outlined here), I’m just sort of letting it sit in limbo and playing lots of StarCraft, which I continue to be terrible at. I’ll have to eventually find a style and stick to it; I actually found a neat little map that trains your multi-tasking abilities, which I’ll have to practice a bit until I can improve those skills.

Until next week…

-EE

Well, no I don’t. But I’m not particularly happy right now.

This week was pretty much an idle one in terms of the site. I do have ideas for writings which I should really get up and running sometime soon, because I certainly haven’t been doing much lately as far as music goes, instead opting to laze around and play video games when I’m not working. Some would argue there isn’t anything wrong with this, but The Six Day Exile isn’t going to finish itself.

So today I finally tried to get up and running to resume work on said album. I say “tried” because I think I hit a major setback, and it wasn’t even the one I was expecting (Namely, Windows Vista not playing nicely with my extremely outdated version of Cakewalk SONAR…I still haven’t installed that on this machine yet, by the by). No, I went to install my Echo Indigo on it…and found out that the cardbus slot is apparently not the right size for it. Or, more precisely, there is a “notch” inside the slot that prevents the card from going in fully. Hopefully I can somehow remove it, but if not…without the Indigo, I have no idea how any recording/mixing/etc. I do on this comp will actually sound. And it really annoys me.

Anyway, yesterday I saw one of my friends from college that I hadn’t seen in close to three years. She graduated about a month ago (She was a sophomore in college during the one semester I finished up in Fall of 2005), and she’ll be moving out to Texas soon, so I went to her graduation party seeing as she lives around here for the moment. It was fun, and hopefully she’ll come by to see the apartment before she moves halfway across the country.

Until next week…

-EE

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 put out the original Intro for The Six Day Exile. Beyond that, I’ll admit I haven’t done much to advance the project (Which is why I wanted to constantly work on it–I know myself, and I know that once I stop something, take a break from it, whatever, I don’t usually pick it up again). That should change shortly, however, as I pulled the trigger on ordering a new laptop (And wireless keyboard and mouse, and printer). After that, the big thing will be backing up all the project to my second external drive, and then trying to get my hopelessly outdated copy of SONAR to run on the new machine (I imagine Windows Vista may be an obstacle here). After I pull that off, I’m seriously considering moving to, or at least going with a dual-boot setup of, Ubuntu Studio for the purpose. Not that I don’t like SONAR, but let’s just say that there are certain unwritten rules of music software use that change when you go from making music for fun (SEE: The Musical Doodlings material, especially the DoD Entries) to actively trying to profit from it, and because of this, I really shouldn’t have used SONAR even as much as I did for The Six Day Exile.

Following up on this post about MySpace Karaoke, it seems that it’s not really a contest per se. But what I really wanted to discuss was the fact that, as I mentioned in that post, the biggest Internet phenomenon of 2007 (and it seems to still be going strong now) is not represented on the available choices. Thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because Myspace, for all its posturing about how it’s a place for “cool young hipsters” or whatever to hang out, is owned by a corporation headed up by a crusty old dude (And please don’t take my linking to a Wikipedia article as an endorsement of the site as a whole) who is hopelessly out of touch with the Internet and its fads.

I’m still playing through Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn. I’ve got two parties going now, one Good (With a Neutral character), one Evil (Also with a Neutral character). The Good party has something of a unique setup–thanks to this video, I found out that this particular collection allows you to easily re-roll your stats when creating a character. To that end, the Good party is set up Samurai-Samurai-Samurai-Priest-Bishop-Thief. I took the Bishop along to easily identify items on the fly, plus as a backup healer. Incidentally, the restrictions on Floors 2 and 3 don’t seem to include Neutral characters, which is good.

Until next week…

In the Intro to The Six Day Exile (Which isn’t dead, really), I discussed the original idea for said intro, which combined early FreeCreditReport.com commercials (Offer applies with enrollment in Triple Advantage) with this scene from Dragon Ball Z.

In case you thought I was just playing around in that Intro… I wasn’t. There’s said original Intro. I had gotten the idea from this YTMND, and…well, that’s the least embarrassing thing about some of the original album concepts I had. Maybe when I become an Internet legend, I’ll reveal some of the other stuff.

And in putting up the “Latest Song” pseudo-post, I hadn’t really thought about whether or not Into the Aether stuff (Which this most assuredly is) would go in that slot or not. If this were an Ancient Greek myth, I’d be begging my brother to bail me out of this situation right now. But since I’m in the U.S. in 2008, I’m just going to decide “No it isn’t” and be done with it.

This week here at Emptyeye.com, not a lot of note really happened. I found out that my computer is still acting up, and it’s gotten to the point where it is unfortunately difficult to actually work on the album (Whose page I should really update sometime soon). In reality, though, that’s sort of low on the priority scale at the moment, what with the news that I’m moving out soon coming to the forefront. Oh yeah, and my Astyanax speedrun has seen the light of Internet, causing a brief spike of traffic here.

Today I went to a huge party for Jess and her family, where her grandfather gave me a hand-made pen carved out of wood. Pretty neat, even if it isn’t a clicky wooden flashlight like Jess got. I guess this means I’m somewhat officially part of the family now. I also played some Rock Band, which was Jess’s brother’s graduation present. Fun stuff, and I can actually do some easy drums on the easy level.

Yesterday I posted that my Wizardry experience was going more or less smoothly. I spoke too soon–several character deaths and one character alignment change (Which I eventually changed back) later, I’m on the tenth floor (A lot of the middle floors immediately send you into complete darkness, which I was not dealing with even with some of the improvements made to the SNES compilation to make the games slightly easier. one example is that the mapping spell, which previously only showed your location in the maze, actually gives you a picture of the floor you’re on to the extent that you’ve explored it) and into the “liberal use of the Reset button (Well, the emulator’s Reset function anyway)” phase. I’ll probably pop back up to the castle a time or two more before making my final attempt to beat the game, but suffice it to say that at this point, the game is so “Screw you player” hard that I have no problem with saying “Screw you game” right back at it and hitting reset when a group of Greater Demons surprise me and wipe me the heck out before I can do anything. Also, and I think my cousin would agree with me on this, I have no problem with a person saying that they “beat” a Wizardry game even if they had to make extensive use of Reset, or even Save States, to get it done (I’m generally of the opinion that save-stating through a game “doesn’t count” unless you use the save states to, for instance, avoid entering really long passwords when you come back to the game.).

Until next time…

-EE

<Nappa>There’s no way that can be right!</Nappa>

Earlier today, I managed to take the “Your comic should be the star of your page” philosophy of good webcomic site design and apply it to my music. To that end, you’ll note the link to the Latest Song as the top “post” currently. As explained here, it’s not quite a proper post, but it’s good enough for the moment. The Rygar speedrun commentary is done; I just have to edit it together for Youtube. So now it’s time to resume Six Day Exile work. That’ll start tomorrow.

And my Wizardry game is proceeding smoothly, even if I’m doing a lot of unnecessary stuff (Which, strictly speaking, is most of Wizardry I).

Until next week…

-EE

A quick note to say that some of the promised fruits of working on The Six Day Exile have arrived! Above this post, you’ll note a “Latest Song” pseudo-post. This will remain at the top of the blog, even as I make more posts. It’s not quite functioning the way I want it to yet–ideally it would actually be a fully-commentable post with the social links as opposed to my having to hard-code everything into the index template–but this way is at least functional and won’t get pushed down the front page as I make more posts.

This new track is a comparison, one after the other, of two mixes of “The Secret“. The first one is the close-to-final album mix, with a touch of reverb on the vocals, use of stereo, etc, while the second (Which starts about a second after the first ends) is the Slap-It-Down Mix that’s been available on the site since February. Coming immediately after the more (Although certainly not completely) polished version of the song, the lo-finess of the Slap-It-Down Mix really stands out even more now.

It’s time…it’s time…IT’S VADER RANDOM TUESDAY THOUGHT TIME!!

• So what exactly constitutes a “live performance” by a band appearing on television? This question actually formed in my head after Def Leppard‘s appearance on Dancing with the Stars last Tuesday. Suffice to say that the band mimed along with an edited version (For time, not content; also, I should point out that it was actually a pretty seamless edit in that regard, so kudos to whoever did that job anyway) of the version of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” that appeared on Hysteria. I imagine this is standard practice for any artist on DwtS, but it was particularly jarring in this case (And really the first time I had noticed it), given that I’ve seen Def Leppard live and, as such, actually know how the song sounds truly live (It’s still very good, but also very different from the studio version). As such, to me, it was only a “live performance” in the loosest sense of the word. I even know that this is something of a time-honored tradition when it comes to bands on TV, but…I dunno, it still bugs me somehow.
• My Astyanax speedrun is apparently in SDA limbo at the moment. Don’t ask me how it got there. I’m guessing it still has to be timed, because I’ve done everything else. Alternately, this is karma coming back to bite me for…something SDA-related.
• I’ve been working on recording another version of commentary on my Rygar run. After that, I’ll get back to mixing The Six Day Exile; the two activities actually require different sound card setups, and I’m too lazy to switch from one to the other repeatedly.