Emptyeye

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a major setback, and it wasn’t even the one I was expecting (Namely, Windows Vista not playing nicely with my extremely outdated version of Cakewalk SONAR…I still haven’t installed that on this machine yet, by the by).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

Just a quick post to say that I’m alive and moved in. We won’t have official Internet until next Tuesday, but I’m currently, um, borrowing someone’s wireless connection, and I’ll try to sporadically update between now and then when said connection is available.

Also, check out Rich Wilson’s comment on my review of Lifting Shadows. I apologize for not acknowledging it sooner, but I’ve been a bit busy with this whole moving in thing.

This past week, my main activity was signing the lease for my new apartment. Hooray for that. I’m pretty excited about it, and I’m slowly packing up non-essential smaller stuff to move little by little throughout the week since it’s right by my workplace. I have to admit that I’m also nervous about it. Not that I won’t be able to adjust to independence, mind you–I should be okay there, and I have enough saved up money-wise that we’ll be okay short-term even in the worst of scenarios. Rather, I’m a bit scared that Jess and I will move in together and discover we can’t actually stand being around each other every day. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.

Other than that, I haven’t done much this week. Once I get all settled in with the apartment and such, work on the album will finally continue. That will be a good thing for sure; I must admit to being lazy on that front of late.

And I’m still playing through Wizardry III. Just earlier today I found a particularly nasty trap that insta-kills your entire party. I was pretty sure it was a trap, but stupidly walked into it anyway out of curiosity, wondering what would rhyme with “clock” that would hurt. I wasn’t expecting “rock” (As in “You teleported into…”) to be the rhyme completer, though. Still, at least it only killed my party (In case I haven’t beaten it over all your heads enough, the fact that I am thanking the game for not doing something worse than killing my entire party–and yes, worse fates exist–should really hammer home how brutally sadistic the game is), and it was kind enough to ship their dead bodies back to the castle for me too!

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.

Because I didn’t do it yesterday.

• So apparently MySpace has some kind of Karaoke contest going on. I was made aware of this by a Mr. Blade Braxton over at Wrestlecrap, who apparently wishes to rule this whatever-it-is. I looked over the song list, and am greatly disappointed that the solo debut of Rick Astley (RANDOM FUN FACT: Rick was evidently in a duo called, creatively enough, Rick & Lisa, which had a minor hit prior to Rick’s going solo) is not currently one of the choices.
• I managed to finish Wizardry I yesterday, and have started The Legacy of Llylgamyn (Which is the third game in the series, but for some reason called Wizardry II in Japan, even though it came out after Knight of Diamonds worldwide. Even more confusingly, it kept its proper title in “The Xth scenario”, making the full title of its Japanese NES release “Wizardry II: The Legacy of Llylgamyn: The Third Scenario”. Yes, really.). Going into this almost completely blind, it should be a lot of fun, as well as being insanity inducing. It’s pretty cool so far in that the enemies at least look completely different than in most of the series that I’ve played., and it seems as though you go up through the dungeon instead of down. A minor change in the big scheme of things, but cool nonetheless.
• I half-apologize for not getting this up yesterday. I say “half-apologize” because, as I said, I really didn’t intend for it to be a regular feature the first few times I did it (In other words, I’m not breaking the implied schedule because I never implied that there was a schedule in the first place).
• Jess and I are going to be totally lost next week now that Dancing with the Stars is over. Going to dinner followed by watching DotS (Yeah, that’s right, I’m admitting it) is essentially our Tuesday night routine, so who knows what we’ll watch now.
• I’ve been poking around websites for a new computer, with the intention of giving Jess this one (Even with its myriad quirks, it would be years better than what she has currently). Looks like I can get a pretty good deal at about the $600-700 range for another laptop, if I choose to pull the trigger sometime soon. I might even be ale to get a printer with one of them. Sweet!
• Lastly, I heard you like 9 and a half minutes of Mudkips!

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

Yeah. Yesterday I went to do some work on The Six Day Exile. I decided to see what would happen if I put a touch of compression on the vocals to “The Secret“. I got an error saying that the audio was not in the right format. Fair enough.

Today is where I took another step toward a new computer, though. I went to remove the silent parts of the audio to my Rygar speed run commentary. And I got another error, one I’ve never seen before. It was approximately “Windows 32-bit error: 0×80070057: The parameter is invalid”. Bizarre. It happens maybe 20 percent into the silence removal. I wonder if this is because I’m going back through the Echo Indigo IO as opposed to the computer’s onboard audio that I used to record it. Nonetheless, it’s probably about time to start looking for another computer anyway–this one is close to 4 years old, and has a myriad of issues, chiefly the fact that it likes to randomly shut itself off.

Wizardry is going pretty well. I’m done with “part one” of the quest, getting the Blue Ribbon so I can use the Express Elevator. I can theoretically attempt to finish the game right now, but I’m wandering about the middle of the dungeon a bit first to see if I can’t scrounge up some sweet equipment first. Also, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m using save states at times (I’ve made a total of two, and used a total of one–both were made just before I attempted to bring my Mage back from Ashen state, and the one I used was when the resurrection was botched. For those of you who don’t know the Wizardry series, “dead” characters actually have 3 states of deadness. The first is simply “Dead”, and you can have a Cleric cast a spell to try to revive a dead character or turn to the Temple of Cant to do the job. But there’s a catch–both the spell and the Temple have a chance of botching the resurrection. If this happens, your character goes to Ashen state [I think it’s technically called “Ashed” in-game]. Now you need a high-level Cleric spell, or the Temple again, to bring the character back from Ashed state [Paying more money to the Temple than you would for “Dead” characters, by the way]. But there’s a problem: The spell and/or Temple can both fail here, too. In that case, if it was the Cleric spell that failed, your character goes to “Lost” status, and can’t be revived again. Ever. That’s right, potentially hours of work go right down the drain, and you really have no way of controlling whether or not the resurrection is successful. At least you can theoretically unequip the character to give their goods to the next in line, though. This is more than you can do if the Temple fails, in which you get the message “[Character name] is buried”, and you simply lose the character and any items they had forever. Not fun.). My characters are all, I think, about level 10 or 11.

Yes indeed it is. First of all, my Astyanax speedrun has finally been posted to SDA. Further, the traffic I got from there made today one of my biggest days ever in terms of traffic (There’s a link to the site at the bottom of the comments). I guess the audience for speedruns is actually pretty large, or at least large enough that a new Emptyeye speedrun caused traffic here to spike noticeably.

By the way, to those of you who got here via the link in the run comments, welcome! Hopefully you know of my other runs, and I hope I’ve done Astyanax justice. Don’t forget to check out my music while you’re here too.

The speedrun is really a minor thing, though. The big news is that today I put a holding deposit down on an apartment, making me (And Jess) one step closer to actually moving out. Sometime after Memorial Day, we’ll officially sign the contract, and hopefully move in around early June. This is a rather huge step for us, and it’s nice for me personally in that I’ll be about a mile away from work–close enough to bike or even walk if I want to. Put another way, since I like to complain that Americans as a whole are idiots and will gladly pay exorbitant prices for gas (A part of why prices continue to rise, which most said Americans seem unable or unwilling to figure out), I’ll be able to put my money where my mouth is and almost entirely eliminate my weekly gas consumption.

That’s just one perk, of course. I was trying not to get too excited about the whole deal until it was official, and while I’m not there yet, putting the deposit down is a big step toward resolving this whole thing. Oddly enough, the person (I’ve been communicating with several people, all of whom are part of the business) thought I and/or Jess had a dog, which isn’t allowed at this particular complex. I’m guessing wires got crossed somewhere, but he almost shooed us away before we pointed out that we did not, in fact, own a dog. After that, it was relatively smooth sailing–my credit is just fine, and I’m not a big partier (To paraphrase Lifting Shadows’s description of Dream Theater bassist John Myung, I simply prefer my own company to that of strangers. For that matter, I usually simply prefer my own company to that of my friends and family.), which he liked a lot. So out came the checkbook, and thus the apartment is being held for us until we decide to move in. This will likely be in early June, as between weddings and parties, we’re pretty booked until the end of May, unfortunately (The person seemed eager to have us move in as quickly as possible).

So that’s my big, life-changing news. This probably means that work on pretty much everything will be on hold for a bit while I take stock of what I actually need to get together, pack up, etc. before moving out, but I do plan on getting all of my projects done eventually.