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07-30-00 it's the end of the year as we know it...
07-26-00 much to say
07-25-00 focus!
07-23-00 getting my hands dirty
07-20-00 ** WTB one muse, whisper bids **
07-18-00 once again...
07-17-00 X-tra slippery
07-15-00 X-actly
07-14-00 stay forever
07-10-00 I see
07-06-00 I know, I know...
older entries...
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it's the end of the year as we know it... |
| 07-30-00 |
(For those that haven't seen the notice on the main page and haven't been reading the bulletin board, there's a petition you might be interested in signing. For those that have already, thanks!)
Today is the last day of the 360-day ancient Egyptian calendar. The next five days are not a part of the year -- if that sounds weird, that's only because it is. But on Saturday the 5th, we get up at sunrise, kick evil in the head repeatedly, and breathe a big sigh of relief as the new year begins. Earth needs its 580-million-mile maintenance y'know.
This time, I promise, no hot dogs and no scary movies with shaky cameras.
I'll be taking off Tuesday after work and will be back in the office Wednesday. Don't expect an update before then. If I can survive being offline for a week then y'all can live without a new entry for at least that long. ;)
I'm sitting here eating beef jerky from the hippie store Steph loves so much. Have you ever noticed most beef jerky is labeled "natural style?" No no no. Miles Davis has natural style. Val Kilmer has natural style. Elle McPherson has natural style. Beef jerky, even if it's from a cow butchered by a young Native American using a flint knife and sun-dried on a flat rock, is just plain unnatural.
Anyway, this beef jerky claims to be natural and have no preservatives -- guess they forgot about the salt. There's also a notice on the back of the package: "The meat contained herein is for personal use only and not for sale." There go my plans to put it up on eBay...
Fun with the lizards. Jeff has been volunteered to feed the little monsters while I'm gone, a simpler task than last year even though it involves live crickets and 50% more lizards. I changed the litter in Poco's cage to Carefresh (fluffy reject paper pulp stuff with no odor) but I still need to clean up the geckos' homes.
Josephine, I have finally realized, is belligerent. She actually bit me a couple nights ago when I put my arm in her tank to see if she'd climb -- struck as if I was just a big cricket. I could barely feel it, but I think we were both pretty surprised. Kalila, on the other hand, walks all over me. Literally. I don't know if she likes me, likes to climb, or is just looking for a way out of her tank.
Thought about bringing them in to the office for the duration of the trip -- it'd make them easier to take care of and I wouldn't have to worry about running the AC just to keep my apartment ventilated the whole time. There's a spare office with a window which would be a perfect place to put the geckos and they wouldn't even need a lamp. Poco would be a lot harder to move than they though... I'm not sure the cage will fit through the door without being turned on its side or even disassembled. Hmmm.
Remind me to disconnect the battery cable on SqueakyCar this time so it doesn't die like it usually does after a few days of idleness?
Was going to write up my thoughts on Napster, but it can wait. I feel like a nap -- went to be late last night and got woken up early this morning by a false alarm in DR.
See you next year... :)
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much to say |
| 07-26-00 |
Funny how last night I wanted to write a journal entry and didn't have anything to say, and now this morning there's so much that I don't know where to start.
I started keeping a text file of notes on things to write about:
So in no particular order:
That article on gun control is the most intelligent one I've ever read. Guns themselves aren't the problem, it's the fact that people in this country think they need them to protect themselves -- not from foreign invaders, but from crime. I hope our society isn't heading for a repeat of the Old West where the law comes out of the barrel of a gun.
I had some fairly vivid dreams last night that I don't remember. But the night before that, I dreamed about taking a tour of the pyramids at Giza... but when did they install floor-to-ceiling windows, carpet, potted plants, and TV screens showing informational videos? It was more like a nice museum or Disney attraction. Some variation on this dream keeps happening to me too; a couple months ago it was a "tour" in the style of a Disney boat ride, just like the one in the Mexico area at EPCOT Center. Go figure.
When there's a group of people who read each other's weblogs, a strange thing happens. They start having conversations, in an oblique sort of way. They write at each other in their own privately controlled public forum. Hmmm. It's different in many ways than conversing on a message board or chat room. And of course it has the side effect of reminding me to read other journals I don't have in my daily rotation, and to get to know friends of friends. Kind of draws the community together.
And it's often easier to write something than to say it, at least for me -- and easier to write it in a journal than a letter directed to someone.
Speaking of which, I had my review with D.W. at work yesterday. It was mostly an hour or so of general chit chat, since I'd already emailed my own summary of what I'd accomplished and what I thought of it. Of course, being me, I just wanted to get it over with and get out of there -- except with close friends, I am so uncomfortable with just trying to make conversation that it was as much a trial as if he were interrogating me. Other than that, it went well. :) But the same thing came out of this one that I recall from the previous review (which was with Greg) -- and it has to do with what I wrote about yesterday. Namely, if I want to get anywhere I should figure out where I want to get to, not just ride life wherever it happens to go.
Hang on to that thought, I'll come back to it later. Yes, I do have a point :)
I really look up to people who volunteer themselves in service to other people or to God or both (actually I believe it's impossible to serve one without the other). I don't want to get into specifics except to thank Shambo Shankara for being one of those people in the face of all challenges. (And maybe refer my readers to the good people at kashi.org and encourage them to electronically sign the Statement of Conscience -- you don't have to be a Hindu or Buddhist to appreciate and support what they're doing.)
I think about things like this, and about that personality test where I scored so low in altruism. I've rarely volunteered my time or money to help people out. Though both are limited, I know for certain there are people busier and poorer than I who manage to give more. Some part of me is stingy, without actually being greedy or hostile about it. Or maybe that's not it, since I don't often go to a lot of trouble for myself either. Hmm.
At any rate, I know I'm not doing a lot to help. This doesn't make me a bad person, but it's something I'm occasionally ashamed of, and I feel like it's an issue I need to deal with sometime. Right now I can't even picture myself volunteering at the Red Cross or the like. Perhaps with the new raise (whoo hoo) I can start giving small monthly donations to a couple of charities. One small thing I can easily do is set up frames as my default page and put The Hunger Site in one of the frames, so that button is there in front of me to be clicked on every day.
(One thing about giving to charities though -- some of them assume that one gift to them means you intend to keep giving to them, and to everyone else besides, and therefore your name and phone number get put on lists. I didn't appreciate that little stunt by the local police benevolent society. I want to give to people who are not going to spend the money on telemarketing...)
Back to my point. I realized something this morning: knowing that something is a part of your personality, does not mean that you just have to accept it. "That's just the way I am" is not an excuse. Now, I don't mean I need to try to become talkative and outgoing, or that Bruce needs to stop calling people Sir. :) But things about myself that I don't like, such as social anxiety or this lack of altruism, are things that I can try and change. Just because "Mom" is (for no practical purposes) Fate doesn't mean I have to wait for things to happen instead of making some decisions myself.
FWIW, good ol' Keirsey scored me as INFP again. Why is it all the INFP Star Trek characters listed are ones that I can't stand?
(Wesley Crusher, report to airlock 5.)
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focus! |
| 07-25-00 |
Was the previous entry a little scattered, or is it just me? Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my grip on the language. Words can be so specific and precise, but if they're used wrong, the words as well as the things being said both lose their effectiveness.
Found an art supplier that carries the kind of raw materials I'll be wanting for the ink. If I wasn't broke with a maxed-out credit card and there was a little more time before the retreat... sigh. Once again I'll be showing up without bringing gifts for anyone. Well, maybe next year I can collaborate with Steph on that Wep Ronpet card idea by literally making the cards.
Naturally I want to apply what I'm learning in this project to the games. Perhaps nice dark blue pigments in Hero's Journey will be incredibly expensive, the sign of a rich and powerful character. Or maybe lapis is as common as dirt on Vigil, but iron is rare, so no iron oxide pigments... and of course that means all kinds of fun things to weapons and armor and tools, doesn't it? Hee!
It's Melissa's birthday... she made it to 25. Her journal entry made me think. All of us who grew up during the Cold War had a touch of that fear that the world was going to end; when the Soviet Union caved in on itself our fears just got transferred onto other things. But it was just a nagging worry to me, not an inevitable threat. I was always hopeful that humanity (and the supposed "leaders" in government) would have enough sense not to kill itself over something as unimportant as economic ideas or nationalism or an old grudge. I figured life would go on.
I've always toyed with speculating on what life will be like in the future, with better medicine, more understanding of how the universe works, faster computers, and hopefully a little more social enlightment -- but I rarely think about where I will be in the future and what I'll be doing. I don't have long range goals or plans. I think about next April when my car is paid off and my lease expires and I might look for a cheaper place to live, so I can reverse this financial undertow I've been stuck in. Beyond that, I dunno.
Other people seem to have plans and goals that reach beyond the next few months. I never have. I let myself be carried along by fate. I don't make things happen for myself, I let them happen. I'm not apathetic, it's more like I find a way to make the most of wherever I am. Even when I can't find contentment, it usually takes a push from the outside to get me to do something to change that situation.
Once again, I get the feeling that I'm not communicating my point as clearly as I'd like...
I got my first job straight off the employment bulletin board (literally a bulletin board with pushpins and index cards, not a BBS) in college -- and I think I looked there because my parents pushed me to. I moved to my second job because they were big customers of the first place I worked for, and they hired me away after I did a project for them. I got hired as a GM because Melissa and Steph, on the same day, emailed me to suggest I apply. I wanted the OSGM position myself, but had doubts about moving to Missouri until I found out Steph was going for it. And while I might have joined the House of Netjer even if Steph hadn't, she was the one that mentioned Kemetic Orthdoxy to me in the first place (while still trying to make up her own mind about it).
Now of course in all those things I had to make the decision myself, but it took that outside push to get me to take action.
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getting my hands dirty |
| 07-23-00 |
Friday and Saturday were moody and thoughtful. I bowed out of movies with Steph and Jeff twice. I hung around the office, making some dark and grim and haunted music for Dirge, the Forest of Night, Theren Keep... and tried to make use of a ditty I won a songwriting contest with back in elementary school, full of dark menace, called {cough} "Little Green Man." (I won't be using that for DR. Heh.) Did a little random walking around a neighborhood near the office I'd never really looked at before, sat on the front steps and watched a crow playing in the wind at the construction site across the street, that sort of thing. Finally agreed to watch Tombstone with the gang and was glad I did.
"You gonna do something, or are you gonna just stand there and bleed?" Heh heh. "I'm your huckleberry." Heh heh heh.
After having me sniff at lots of oils, Steph came up with a blend for Seshat. I think it's very good, but this morning's jabber from the noisy part of my brain that doubts and critizes everything was nagging me with "is it perfect?" (Nevermind that this is like painting a portrait, not trying to rediscover some secret formula -- there is no "perfect.")
So I asked myself sarcastically: what would make it better? A drop of ink, maybe?
That shut up the barrage and got me thinking. Ink in oil? Would it work? Maybe with the right kind...
Why not make your own ink?
Uh. Where did that idea come from? Oh yeah.
Um, yeah. I can do that. Hey, this could be kinda cool. I remember dabbling in papermaking when I was a kid, at a summer program for gifted kids that was basically supposed to be encouraging creativity, though I think what we really got from it is a lesson in how to cope in a situation where you're not even close to being the smartest cookie in the jar anymore. Usually the "creativity" meant following lots of instructions just like in regular classes, but jumping around from one project to the next. Though I did have some excellent teachers that did better than that. Anyway...
I picked up a book on papermaking and hit the web. I found an informative site on making iron gall ink which seemed pretty cool at first, and an online papermaking supply store that I might be turning to after I've read this book.
Homemade ink and paper might make good gifts (too bad I won't have time to do this before the retreat) and better offerings, but if I really want to be authentic, I should make the kind of ink an ancient Egyptian scribe would have used. Which leads to the question, what kind of ink did ancient Egyptian scribes use? :P
It's more like paint than ink, I knew. But what kind of paint, and is it something I can reasonably make? I did a lot of web surfing before I found any kind of answer. It was actually a kid's school project that led me to the search that led me to a very nice site on pigments.
Still haven't found any specific recipes yet but that leaves room for experimentation. Pigment + gum arabic + water. The question is how much from scratch do I want to go? Dry pigments are not hard to find, but charcoal black seems easy. Alazarin red (madder / rubia) looks a good deal more complex though...
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** WTB one muse, whisper bids ** |
| 07-20-00 |
Well, shucks. I gave in and posted the announcement of that new thing in the GM Announcements topic on the DR boards:
The residents of a well-known but rarely visited network of caves beneath the Dragon Spine Mountains have organized a cleanup campaign in an attempt to increase "tourist" trade.
No longer will the corpses of Human, Gor'Tog, Prydaen, and other disgusting endoskeletal bipeds be allowed to decay in public thoroughfares, but will be collected and preserved for later use in a conveniently located storage area.
When interviewed, Padishah Xykvit merely said, "Fz* !v%kir ikta tr *athi va."
Meanwhile the search continues for Chyolvea Tayeu'a's missing altar boys...
Should be enough of a clue there. I know at least one person is going to get killed and not realize there's an alternate, fairly easy, path to recover his body... but that's the way the Elothean silverwillow crossbow crumbles. If you're a DR player and you don't want to be that player, you might want to search for those missing altar boys before going spelunking with the Reapers. I'm just saying.
We should have more "company function" days at Simu, even if our local theme park doesn't hold a candle to Disney. I stayed "home" (which means the office) and got three and a half songs written... well, two written and one and a half constructed in AudioMulch. (The other half was this morning.)
I've started putting together a sort of soundtrack for DragonRealms. Right now we don't know whether it will become official and be integrated into the Wizard FE. If not, I'll probably do it on my own time anyway and contribute it to the DR download library. For the moment, I'm not making the DR music publicly available -- I just want to get GM opinions and have the chance to revise and refine it before it sees the harsh light of day.
With all this musical stuff I'm doing, disk space on my sites is starting to become an issue. I had to move most of my MP3s from dave.mooville.net over here (though the links are still over there) so I don't fill up the disk. I may have to expand into the next level of account here, I have 50 megs to work with and have used 33.4 so far. I wonder what it takes to get an account on MP3.com, though that probably opens up all kinds of fun legal issues that I would like to wait as long as possible, preferably a lifetime, before dealing with.
I'll try and give plenty of notice before I wipe out old MP3s (with the belated exception of the first version of Timeslip). All the "written for HJ" stuff was just sort of demo/experiment junk anyway and will either disappear and be forgotten, which is not always a bad thing, or greatly expanded and improved.
I still do have another project I want to do for DragonRealms as time and creative flow permit. I've been putting so much into music lately and not saving any for the other thing. Funny how that works.
Word for the day, thanks to Bubba: Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words.
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once again... |
| 07-18-00 |
 We watched Castle of Cagliostro last night. I started to crack up at the opening scene before anything had really happened, 'cause this is the movie that became 95% of the laser-disc arcade game Cliffhanger. Remember the Dragon's Lair arcade game? Same idea. Push the joystick in the proper direction at the right time.
Wild stuff, full of hilarious action -- and one inexplicable line from Goemon the Samurai which is a key reason I remembered the game in the first place. "Once again... I cut a worthless object." In Cliffhanger he says this after slicing the blades off a helicopter that had been pursuing Lupin through a sewer tunnel (no, really). In Cagliostro there was also a helicopter involved, but the circumstances were different.
Anyway, it's a fun movie already -- my fond memories of the game just made it that much better. :)
Found a couple of new toys yesterday -- AudioMulch and Dreamstation. Both are virtual synthesizers, but have vastly different approaches.
AudioMulch lets you patch together different components -- sound generators, effects, filters, mixers, delays, inputs and outputs -- and tweak each one. The generators range from simple bassline and drum sequencers (the staple of acid techno) to the bizarre "Bubble Blower" and "RissetTones". Overall, the thing can be either a fancy loop generator or a signal processor. I left it running last night with a setup I called "ghostly" -- sort of an automatic wailing machine. Bwahahaha. You can bet I'll make extensive use of it if I get into doing ambient sounds for our games.
Dreamstation is more of a traditional analog synth -- actually an enhanced clone of the SID chip I mentioned a couple of days ago. It has a built-in "tracker" but more importantly, it listens to MIDI and can sync up pretty well with Cakewalk. Which means that in addition to all the free SoundFonts I can find on the web, I now have an eminently tweakable source of sound. This is a Very Good Thing if I want to do more techno, and probably useful otherwise. There are some neat features I haven't messed with yet, like the ability to use samples from .wav files instead of plain old sine/square/sawtooth oscillators. The bad news is that the free demo version doesn't let you save your settings and only listens to one MIDI channel. Registration is $129, not bad considering what this thing can do, but I need to avoid spending money for a while.
Couple of other toys I'd like to try out as well, but I'm more concerned with the creative side at this point. I want to follow in the footsteps of DJ Pretzel and co. by doing my own remix of that theme from Reactor. I want to try, experimentally, doing arrangements of the MIDI tunes Jeff did for GemStone. Ultimately, I want to make music for people in the House of Netjer or perhaps some of the Names -- but I'm not completely confident about that yet. I wouldn't want to do anything less than my best.
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X-tra slippery |
| 07-17-00 |
So we went to see X-Men again, at a better theater. Yeah, we're geeks, we admit it.
Trying to figure out why some people didn't like it, I hit upon one possibility: they weren't into X-Men before, and they just don't buy the whole mutant super-powers thing. Seems obvious when you put it like that, but it does require a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief. But it's not science fiction folks, it's superheroes. The physics don't have to make any more sense for this than they do for Bond. It's all about the characters and the action.
My level 30 necromancer killed Diablo, as well as the Cow King and his horde, or is that herd, of Hell Bovines. I don't feel as much of an obsession to play the game anymore, though I'm sure I will. As soon as Steph's chronic thumb recovers, which it's been doing since she's taken a couple days off from Diablo.
So instead of coming in to the office today and hacking up demons, I hacked together some music. I kept threatening to do something in 4/4, and last night at Friday's we were bemoaning the sad state of dancey techno stuff...
Me: Gah! Why do they always use that same old hi-hat pattern? Ta-chih-ta-chih...
Steph: 'Cause it's easy to dance to?
Me: But they can do all kinds of simple variations on that and it'd sound so much less boring...
Steph: Maybe you should do that.
Jeff: Hey, this isn't a margarita! It's got rum in it!
So I did. Started to, anyway -- the spirit (percussion) was willing but the body (bassline) was weak. I saved it as "Because I Can" and started poking through the directory, playing bits of stuff I'd thrown together before. Often when I'm working on something and I don't know what it's going to be yet, I give it a temporary name, something enlightening such as "5-8" or "pianojunk" and I have to play it to remember what the heck it was.
I found one called "grassland" that had failed due to timing issues -- a big slow dreamy pad over which I wanted to layer tinkly bell arpeggios over, but the pad sample was taking up so much memory that it made Cakewalk blow the timing.
I started messing with it. I liked the basic pad thing and figured it was something I could work with. I recorded a couple of other tracks with the exact same notes but using different samples and processing them in various ways. Then I got the idea of doing it in repeating 16th notes rather than whole notes for a rhythmic pulsing sound -- which went off into another direction entirely when I started picking samples at random. A little more messing around and I had something I liked. As I assembled tracks in Acid DJ and listened, I thought "a kick drum would work here to hold down the beat..." So I stole the kick drum from Because I Can. Damn if it didn't work on the first try. So I threw the hi-hat in too, and it fit like a glove -- OJ Simpson's glove. It's pushing the beat just a little bit, giving it the illusion of acceleration when it's really staying locked in at 120BPM the whole time. A lucky accident of sample editing that gave the track its name, "Timeslip."
Of course the name was a little inspired by Maggy Thomas' Broken Time, which I just read and loved. At first I believed the cover blurb's claim that this is a brilliant new author, but then I happened to look it up on Amazon -- just now in fact -- and discovered it's actually the same author as Emily Devenport (another pseudonym). Well, heck. I'm already hooked on Devenport's stuff. I wonder if the change of pseudonym (but not publisher) means she's not going to continue writing in the universe of Shade, Larissa, and Scorpianne? That'd be too bad. But I can sympathize with not wanting to get bogged down in a particular setting.
Which reminds me. As far as I know, nobody has found the new stuff I added to DR yet. I don't know if I want to draw attention to it, just spill the beans outright, or let it wait until someone discovers it and wonders when the heck that was implemented. Hmmm. At any rate, if I get a chance there'll be more on the way.
Anyway, I'm not 100% happy with the new track -- at the very least it needs one more layer that cuts through and contrasts with the existing stuff, and a stronger ending. I'm not sure the EQ and mix are right either; it sounds great through my speakers, but lacks teeth on my headphones. Will I go back and touch it up or just move on and do something else?
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X-actly |
| 07-15-00 |
Everybody else is already saying it, but I'll add my boice to the chorus: the X-Men movie rocked. I wouldn't call it a Great Movie, but it does not disappoint its fans like I was expecting it to, and there were no major flaws. They actually got it right. I'm amazed.
(Sabretooth reminded me of James Hatfield though. Magneto gooooood! Xavier baaaad!)
 Me on the other hand... I messed up. The game I was babbling about yesterday was simply called Reactor -- "Reactor Rock" was what I called the tape I had made. I'm so glad I'm not 10 years old anymore. Anyway, I found a MAME file for it and several other classics. Marble Madness, Vanguard, Moon Cresta, Galaga, Xevious... thought I was in retro heaven there for a minute. Too bad the emulator claims most of the files are corrupt, so all that's working is Reactor, TRON and Timber. I'll have to keep looking I guess. Controls make the game, though -- Reactor's abstract weirdness isn't as much fun when you have to use the keyboard instead of a trackball, TRON's not as good without the twisty knob controller, and I bet that's even more true for Marble Madness.
 New glasses came in today. No matter which side of the lens you're on, they're vastly different. Small, lightweight frames and lenses (1/3 the weight of the old ones, if not less) and no tinting. They don't hide my face. They also don't block the light, and I haven't decided whether that's a good thing or not. All my previous lenses have had gradient tints since bright light tended to give me headaches. But the prescription itself is greatly improved and the anti-reflective coating rocks. Putting on my old glasses now is just like snorkling in a muddy river -- I feel like I'm wearing a mask and everything is dark and cloudy.
It's going to take some time to get used to these though. The smaller lenses mean that the margin of my field of vision that's uncorrected is much larger, the double vision effect at the edge of the lenses is more prominent, and I keep wanting to swat the thing hovering in front of my face. If I stand still, look down at a tile floor and move my head around, the tiles seem to rotate as they move in or out of the lens area. Weirdness.
Anyway, I'll be fully used to these in a couple weeks and better able to judge whether going with no tint was a good idea. Honestly, when I was choosing lens features I didn't even think about tinting, I was more concerned with whether to spend extra for high-index (I'm glad I didn't) and AR coating (I'm glad I did).
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stay forever |
| 07-14-00 |
This has been bugging me off and on for years... anyone remember which arcade game had a voice which implored the player, "Stay a while... stay forever!" I'm sure it was something Japanese with creepy-cool artwork, sort of in the style of Altered Beast but that wasn't it. Hmmm.
I think of it now 'cause I've been downloading video game music remixes. remix.overclocked.org and c64audio.com, and I'm sure lots of other places if I went looking, have some good stuff. As with anything else, they also have a lot of crap too... but the primary activity of a web surfer is sorting out crap from good stuff, isn't it? :)
Among my favorites are the Super Mario Frivolous Funk medley (a surprisingly cool live Zydeco-flavored version of a theme song I thought I would never like), the Final Ecstasy mix of the FF7 title theme, and the Ultima IV Trollbash mix which starts tame and goes nuts at the end.
Up until now, I don't think I've fully appreciated videogame music, though there were a few exceptions. As a kid I was so impressed with the music in Atari's Marble Madness that I convinved my dad to open the machine and put it in test mode for me (he worked for a chain of arcades), and made a cassette recording. The music in a version of Tetris for the Commodore 64 blew me away. Squaresoft, or should I say Nobuo Uematsu, has always done great stuff. Kelly Bailey of Valve is lucky enough to be both a kickass game designer AND sound/music guy, a position I aspire to myself. And I'm simply envious of Matt Uelmen of Blizzard -- listen to his works, ye mighty, and despair.
But there are a lot of composers out there we don't hear about and a lot of music we take for granted. Particularly those heroes who, with less than spectacular hardware, 8K or less of RAM, no tools, and no budget, still managed to give games spice. Remember the bouncy music in Burgertime, or the haunting stuff from Vanguard, or Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D minor appearing in Gyruss? Remember Reactor Rock, a weird game than came in an odd black-and-orange console and was full of fast hard action and faster harder music? What would it have been without the rock?
Back then, the Commodore 64's SID chip was state of the art. It had three voices with pulse, sine, triangle and sawtooth waves -- one of them even does white noise! Ring modulation! A filter! Wow! And all you have to do to make it work is learn binary, cram numbers into memory locations according to a handy chart, and if you actually want to make music with rhythm and stuff like that, learn assembly language too...
Now, $100-and-less sound cards rival the most expensive samplers and synthesizers of the early 90's and come with software that any doofus can write music with (even me). Free sound samples proliferate all over the web. With tools like these, we have no excuse for not making great music...
(Actually the SID is still a great little chip -- if you like that retro sound and it's MIDIfied, so mortals like us can write for it. But you can always sample it and use it on a Sound Blaster Live. In fact, people have even sampled the old Mellotron tape-loop keyboard for the SB Live. And I've used it too. Heh.)
As it happens I started working on a track last night. It didn't turn out to be anything like what was in my head when I started, but these things seldom do. I dig messing with subtle polyrhythms and odd time signatures, but one of these days, I will write something catchy in 4/4...
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I see |
| 07-10-00 |
What news? Lots of Diablo II of course -- my necro got repeatedly blown away by Mephisto, but returned the favor using a cheap trick gleaned from the diabloii.net strategy forums. He was so eager to get out of the pestilential jungles of Act III that he figured Hell would be a step up. So far I have to agree with the general consensus and say that Act II is the coolest looking and best designed, even though leapers are such annoying little b@st@rds.
 Since Jeff returned from Texas, he and Steph and I have been playing together. This time, I chose a Barbarian. Rrruh! I was afraid he'd be a little on the boring side, but with three players the creatures are tough enough to keep things interesting, and a few barb abilities really are handy. I was leaping around like a maniac when we reached the Arcane Sanctuary, taking out Ghoul Lords the instant they betrayed their location. Bwahahaha.
Got a drastic haircut, just shy of a buzz. It looks better, is a lot cooler in this sickening July heat, and less annoying. I was originally saying my hair hasn't been this short since elementary school, but the truth is it probably hasn't been this short since I was in diapers. I'd post a pic but I'm also getting new glasses (just went for the exam today) and they're a drastic change as well -- small, light, titanium frame -- so I might as well wait for that. Should have 'em in a week or less.
I guess optometry has advanced a good bit, which only reminds me of how long it's been since my last prescription. The glaucoma test involves a blast of air instead of all the weird stuff they used to do. Used to be I had a choice of glass or plastic, now it's standard plastic (dirt cheap), light polycarbonate that filters UV without an extra coating (what I picked), or ultralight high-index (expensive). And I went for an anti-reflective coating that wasn't available before either.
I bet people don't think about this much, but it hits me every once in a while. The only reason roads are usable is because people obey the rules. Sure, a lot of people will speed, run red lights if they can get away with it, or fail to pay as much attention as they should -- but by and large we stick to the most important driving conventions. Things like driving in one's own lane and paying attention to traffic signals. Even the most obnoxious people do that (or at least try). If roads were a true anarchy we wouldn't be able to safely get anywhere on them. So people can restrain themselves where it comes to some things...
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I know, I know... |
| 07-06-00 |
No updates in a while. Blame Blizzard for having put together such a solid and addictive game. Four day weekend, and what do I do with it? Play Diablo II four days in a row.
I thought up some DII pickup lines one morning. Was going to make a top ten list, but I only thought of five I wanted to keep...
 Is that a Horadric Malus in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
(from Necromancer) Hey baby, wanna touch my Bone Spear?
(from Necromancer to Blood Raven) Why don't you join MY army of the dead?
(to Andariel) Whoa! Do those strange bony appendages go all the way up?
I know this great Fetish club in Kurast...
Ahem. Anyway. All I've had to write about the past few days was Diablo II, and I figured (a) that would bore the heck out of at least some of my audience and (b) I would rather spend my free time playing the game than writing about it anyway.
Watched Perfect Blue last night with Steph. I'm not sure which aspect of it was the creepiest, but I do know it added up to something really creepy. It ends in... well, I won't ruin it for anyone. If you like having your brain twisted while your skin crawls, catch this one. And beyond being a vicious psychological horror/drama I think it has something to say about celebrities, what people expect of them, and where we get our thrills.
Suz pointed out some more personality tests, and of course I had to try them out. The ColorQuiz is very hit and miss -- I think it's right about some of my traits and faults but way, way off about how I try to deal with them. I'm more than a little bit skeptical that so much insight can be had into a person simply by the order that they choose colors -- I was thinking of the colors in terms of t-shirt colors myself. But it does give me something to think about.
The IPIP-NEO is a more traditional sort of personality test, similar to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter but with more specific results. The downside is you can't just say "I'm an INFP" -- the results instead look like this:
Interesting stuff. It gives me a lot more to reflect on than Keirsey does -- though I'm not sure I want to dive too deep into it in my current mood. Being honest with myself, I have to say that most of this is probably accurate. I do think my imagination is high, but when I'm trying to be creative about something specific the ideas don't always flow and that frustrates me -- many of the imagination/creativity questions I answered seemed to be vulnerable to that weakness.
SimuCon and Diablo II have inspired me to build stuff in DR again, while at the same time I'm losing my satisfaction in doing web maintenance stuff. I'm happier building my own web pages than I am maintaining someone else's design that I disagree with. Hopefully, I'll be expanding one of my existing hunting areas. Right now I'm putting together the general design of the area and creatures, and discovering just how embarassingly rusty my GSL skills have gotten in the months since we finished ALAE.
I'm down in the dumps today. I could name specific things, but multiply them together and I'm still in a darker mood than I should be. It's just one of those days. To be honest, all I want to do now is cry for no reason at all, go to bed, and not worry about anything for a while. But I'll get through it. In fact I'll probably be laughing at the world again by this time tommorow.
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regulars:
moo
third
chat
kimbered
logic
shades
on a whim:
orisinal
bilbanan
smurf
bang
lobster
yugop
skin
wood
rhythm
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