Apr 16

Politicaleye

I wanted to leave you with some type of substantial post before I ran off to record The Six Day Exile. This post boils down to “I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election should she win the Democratic nomination.” Now, part of this is my political upbringing, which in summary is “Born and raised Republican; registered Independent after realizing that Republicans and Democrats, as a whole, are merely two separate branches on the same Tree of Evil.” Part of it is her stance on violent anything, best summarized in this speech. And the rest is really what this speech represents, which is four more years of the same fearmongering and doublespeak we got under the current administration.

Now, if you’ve been following my music, you’ll recognize parts of this speech were used in “7-11“. My issue specifically with this is the statement that “violent video games increase aggressive behavior as much as lead exposure decreases children’s IQ scores. And I want you to think about that.” Well, Senator, I have thought about it, and my conclusion is…you are full of sound and fury that means nothing.

Let’s examine the various problems with this statement:
1. How does one measure “aggressive behavior”? Is there some type of Aggression Quotient or something? Can you even compare “Aggressive Behavior” and “IQ Scores” in any meaningful fashion?

2. Even giving Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt and presuming you can reasonably compare aggressive behavior and IQ scores, the statement as given is essentially meaningless. First of all, how much exposure (To either video games or lead) is necessary, for how long a time, to achieve the stated effect? And what does “Statement 1 does as much as statement 2” actually mean here? Are we comparing the two in terms of absolute numbers? Percentage-wise? Who knows? Apparently not Senator Clinton, because she sure doesn’t tell us here. In other words, without both absolutes and percentages, I don’t particularly care that “violent video games increase aggressive behavior as much as lead exposure decreases children’s IQ scores.”, because for all I know, lead exposure may decrease IQ by a tiny to nonexistent amount.

3. Is IQ even a reliable indicator of future success? Check out this link at How Stuff Works and judge for yourself. There does seem to be a positive correlation, but it’s hardly the be-all, end-all of adulthood prosperity–plus, of course, correlation is not causation.

So in short, this statement in particular is designed to instill some type of fear into you before you really stop and consider what’s being said, and what it means. Haven’t we gone through seven-plus years of this sort of thing already? Isn’t this the sort of thing we as a country should be trying to move away from? If she’ll make this type of appeal to emotion concerning video games, who’s to say that she won’t do it for other things, like, say, the economy, or preemptively invading foreign countries?

…and with that, I’m off to record an album. See you all in a week.

-EE

Apr 14

Iron-On Transfers are Expensive

In considering future ways to grow what I hope will become the Emptyeye Empire, one of the things I will eventually do is offer t-shirts with some design on them for sale (Vague, I know). One potential plan was to use iron-on transfers for this, with the goals of 1. Keeping costs down, and 2. Actually using this as a selling point, pointing out that I would personally iron the designs onto the shirts myself (Which would no doubt amuse pretty much everyone I know, since I try my hardest to avoid ironing my own clothes in just about all circumstances). You know, make me seem human as opposed to some cold, calculating robot on the other side of your monitor.

I got to look at the prices for iron-on transfers at Target…and quickly decided to come up with a new plan. Suffice to say that, unless I can get iron-on transfers at a huge discount for buying them in bulk like I could with the shirts themselves, I’m better off just wandering to the T-Shirt place not far from my house and paying a bit extra to have them professionally done. I knew transfers were expensive–I didn’t think they’d be over $2.00/transfer expensive for dark t-shirts, though.

Apr 13

Emptyeye.com Week 26- Wow! No Real Content!

This week at Emptyeye.com, I should have been preparing for The Six Day Exile (By the way, there will be no updates between this coming Thursday and the following Tuesday…I’ll be too busy recording during said exile), but elected to play video games instead. Actually, that’s not entirely true, it’s just that you didn’t hear much of the prep work I actually did, which involved programming the drum machine as much as I could. Looking back at the songs I wrote, I was surprised that quite a few of them don’t even have drums. Further, I couldn’t prep as much as I wanted to; one of the machine’s limitations is that it can’t really switch between tempos rapidly, or at all really. In other words, for stuff like Epic Failure, I’ll essentially have to record all the parts separately and sort of stitch them together. That should be interesting.

In gaming news, this past weekend I played a lot of an old NES game titled M.C. Kids. Don’t let the fact that the game is a giant McDonald’s ad (Which, ironically enough, McDonald’s never actually supported–the planned super humongous cross-promotion with the McDonald’s Happy Meal fell through at the last minute) fool you; it’s a surprisingly deep and challenging game, especially in the later levels. I was playing it through, partly out of nostalgia, and partly because I thought it might make a good game to speedrun, which I’m now re-thinking. It’s not up there with the hardest games of the NES era, but it is far harder than its intended target audience, particularly in Hamburglar’s Hideout.

Apr 11

A Busy Weekend Ahead

This upcoming weekend will be mostly spent preparing to record The Six Day Exile. More specifically, I have to get in some hardcore drum machine programming (Including all the tracks that currently have MIDI drums, plus refining the rest of the tracks that actually use the Alesis so they sound a bit better) so I can record the tracks over the next few days, so it’ll be something I won’t have to worry about next Thursday through Monday. Recording the vocals, bass, and especially guitar in that time is going to be hard enough, I know from experience.

Apr 10

CO-CO-CO-CO-COMMMMBOOOO BREAAAAKERRRRR!!

Yep, thanks to my falling behind on the whole “Prepare for recording The Six Day Exile” thing, I failed to post something last night for the first time in weeks. Weeks, I say! In all honestly, while I do make sure to make the occasional post to let everyone know I’m still alive and keep them coming back, I never expected to update it daily, let alone for weeks at a time. Oh well.

One brief observation today: I’m vastly amused at the phrase “Going viral” as applied to Internet videos. I know what it means and all–something that circulates amongst millions on the Internet and becomes almost mainstream thanks to that–but I dunno, it reminds me of Dragon Ball Z‘s “Going Super-Saiyan”. The video’s power level! It’s over 9000!

Apr 08

Tuesday Thoughts #Unknown

Because I’m too lazy to actually count the number of times I’ve done this.

  • Happy Discovery of Kurt Cobain’s Body Day! It should be noted that I was a huge Nirvana fan at one point–“Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the first song I ever learned start-to-finish on bass, in fact–and at one point I honestly thought they could have been as big as The Beatles had Cobain not offed himself. Oh well. What might have been…
  • Today I took the first tentative steps toward finding my own place to live. It’s a little scary, and I almost wonder if I’m doing it too quickly. I’ve gone over my essential “game plan” of “pay off school debt, then worry about place to live”. And I’ll have paid off the debt earlier this month, so I wonder if I’m subconsciously realizing that I’m out of excuses, as it were, to get the heck out of here.
  • In keeping with another webcomic page construction theory–“Make sure the comic is the star of the page”, I’m considering adding something like a “Latest song” link above the blog entries. It wouldn’t be an automatic play thing or anything like that, but it would put the latest song uploaded in a prominent place. I only wish I had thought of it before I had uploaded all but one track from The Six Day Exile. Oh well, hindsight and all that.
  • I guess, in keeping with the first item I posted, I’ll leave you with this link to the first live performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Note how it’s a good 30 seconds longer and structured somewhat differently. Also note the completely different lyrics (Insert “You can understand him?” joke here). I actually like this early version of the song better than the final Nevermind version.

Apr 07

Monday Night Quickie

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

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

Apr 06

Emptyeye.com Week 25- Wow! Real Content!

This week here at the site, I completed the process of selling out, putting up an ad on the sidebar. I’ve also been advertising the site elsewhere on Project Wonderful, to hopefully get more viewership to the site. I plan to eventually use things like Digg and Stumbleupon to get popular as well.

But the big news at the moment is the fact that I have two new tracks up for your enjoyment! Incredible, no? One is nothing more than a silly little intro to The Six Day Exile, while the second one, “The Forbidden Library“, is an actual track, roughly 4:40 in length and, at its simplest, is about a man in a middle-ages type society hunting for knowledge against the will of the rulers. It’s pretty much inspired by all the progressive rock I listen to. Make sure to check out both of those songs, or if you just want the tracks directly, the intro is here, and “The Forbidden Library” is here.

Those are the main things that have been going on. I’ve been doing more work with the drum machine, trying to program that in the next week and a half or so so that I don’t have to worry about drum parts when the time comes to actually record.

And I think that’s it for now. Until next week…

-EE

Apr 05

Emptyeye Almost Gives You Content. Plus: Pianotoads!

As promised, here’s a brief description of what I did last night. It’s really not nearly as dirty as I probably made it sound. Essentially, after work last night, Jess and I went to the new apartment of one of our former co-workers, and basically sat and talked and ate and drank and that sort of thing. We also played some Guitar Hero III, and it was nice to see I’ve retained most of my skill despite not playing seriously in a long while. So that was neat.

Apparently, tonight the rest of my family is going to see Wilby High School‘s production of a musical titled Back to the 80s. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out song #20 in that list. In case you have short-term memory loss, here‘s what it sounds like. Sadly, I won’t be going to this particular performance, as I’ll be using the time to myself to record some vocals (For an original song, mind you). I’m not sure I’ll be able to get them all done tonight, though I can say that I won’t be using the very highest part of my vocal range this time out.

Finally, and what was really the point of this post (I swear), fellow Shizzie Sam has generously posted his Pianotoads footage for everyone to see. It’s screen-only, and he apparently cut off the Q & A at the end of it, but you can see the performance itself. The fact it’s screen-only is probably a good thing, as it means you won’t see me visibly cringe during the one death I had outside of boss fights. You can click here to check it out.

Apr 04

Emptyeye Phones It In Part 2

I had fun tonight. More tomorrow. For the moment, here, have Gil Thorp‘s head exploding. Thanks to This Week In Milford for the image. Good night.

Gil Thorp’s Head Explodes.