Apr 03
Yeah. This is essentially a post for the sake of making a post tonight. I’ve been working with the drum machine, frantically trying to cram stuff in before I have to re-record all the stuff for The Six Day Exile.
Oh, and I played DDR Extreme 2 for PS2 today, and got myself three new AAAs, bringing my home version total to 23. From left to right: Colors (Heavy), One of the Burning the Floor Mixes (I think it’s Blue Fire Mix, but can’t bother to go check), and Oops! I Did It Again.
Apr 02
Err, to Project Wonderful anyway (Which is partly run by the man behind Dinosaur Comics). As you can see, the Donate button is gone, replaced by an ad that is currently free. It’s pretty clearly labeled “Ad Space”, so I doubt I can really make it more clear and/or ethical without removing it entirely (Unless you subscribe to the idea that I should never ever try and use the site to pay for itself). As I’ve said before, I’ll be looking at any ad that will potentially go in that spot, and you’ll get to look at a somewhat warped version of the Emptyeye “eye” when there are no bids on it. The other good thing about it is that, the way Project Wonderful works, you won’t have to deal with me constantly telling you “HEY CLICK ON THE ADS AND MAKE ME MONEY PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!”, and I won’t have to worry about randomly being shut down before the company has to pay me, like I would with some other advertising schemes. That said, if something in the ad box does catch your eye, definitely click on it to check it out.
Oh, randomly, if anyone knows how to make the ad itself get over to the right in Firefox without editing the code of the ad itself, please let me know. It works okay in IE, which means it’s probably “wrong” standards-wise.
Apr 01
Yeah.
Mar 31
Since Saturday, I’ve been listening to “Lazenca Save Us” pretty much nonstop. Because I’m the sort of person who has to over-analyze everything, I’ve been trying to figure out why I like the song so much.
In the most general sense, the song is right up my alley–it rocks hard, and has quite the epic feel to it, especially when the choir kicks in. Yet, the song is in Korean, which I understand even more poorly than, say, Japanese (Where I know your basic anime-kid wannabe-Japanese words–Kawaii, Baka, Kitsune, Neko [EDIT 4/1/08: “Keno” is not a Japanese word..I don’t think. Told you I didn’t know the language very well.]), even if we decided to be generous and allow “GEEEEE GEEEEEEE!!” to count as “Korean”. So it’s not like the lyrics make some special connection with me–heck, it’s not like the lyrics in their original language can make a connection with me. And musically, I’m pretty sure it really doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before. So I’m at a loss to explain exactly why I love the song so much. I just know that I do.
Branching out from “me, me, me”, there’s probably a college level paper in here somewhere. What I mean is that maybe it’s just ingrained somewhere in, at the very least, American culture why, as a whole, we like the music we do. Maybe there’s some type of scientific explanation for why Linkin Park can repeatedly write the same song and people will eat it up. Who knows.
Mar 30
This past week on Emptyeye.com, I began actually advertising the site using Project Wonderful. The first day brought me a large spike in viewership–and also burned through fully a quarter of my PW funds I had set aside. After adjusting my ad campaign somewhat, the cost of advertising is now more manageable, though the spike in traffic appears to have been just that. I guess the lesson I can take away from this that, somehow, Internet advertising actually works. Neat! And if any of you who found the site via the PW ads are reading this, welcome! Take a look at the sidebar and in particular, the About Pages as well as the Music page. *Note to self: Add Into the Aether into that page..* And if you want to take a quick second to vote in a Poll i set up, that would be awesome.
Placing ads on sites is not actually where I’ve sold out, though. No, that will come when I take down the Donate button and replace it with a Project Wonderful ad of some kind, probably a button ad. At some point, I may put a banner ad near the top of the site as well. You don’t have to worry about the site being a vehicle for advertising porn or anything like that–I’ll be looking over any ads before they go up–but essentially what I’m hoping will happen is that someone will bid a small amount on the ads, see their site views go up from people clicking on them, be persuaded to bid more, and I can use that money to either A. (The “Good” scenario) pay for ads on other PW sites, B. (The “That Would Be Freaking Cool” scenario) pay for the hosting of the site, or C. (The “Dream” scenario) finance the music recording, which is a function currently held by my 8:30AM-5PM M-F job.
So in non-being-a-shameless-promoter news, I played Pump It Up for the first time yesterday, and as I said, it’s quite fun. Maybe part of this is the fact that my one day of playing wasn’t enough for me to get to the “hit arrows really fast and abandon all pretense of the game simulating dancing in any reasonable form” phase that I play in DDR, but the game actually felt more like real dancing to me than DDR does (On the other hand, I am decidedly not the guy to be asking about “real dancing”.).
In music news, I decided to heed the advice of my cousin and change my approach to distorted guitar for the next song I’m recording. The result sounds better, but I’m not sure it’s what I’m looking for. I guess I’ll let you be the collective judge when the song ultimately goes up. On a big-picture note, I’m now two and a half weeks away from the actual Six Day Exile, so I really need to get up and running here, particularly with programming the drum machine.
Finally, I collected the remaining missing stars I had to grab in Super Mario Galaxy and unlocked the reward for doing so. Now to take advantage of it!
Until next week..
-EE
Mar 29
So hey, remember that DDR tournament I was supposed to go to today?
I went, and it didn’t happen.
Now, I had expected that it wouldn’t be as big as some of the past tournaments that the place has held before, but I figured at least people close to the place would have shown up. Apparently not. Maybe it was for the better–I’ve been a bit sick lately, so I doubt I would have played as well as I was capable of (Which isn’t all that well).
It wasn’t a total loss, though. I discovered Pump It Up today! Well, “discovered” is the wrong word, as I’ve known about it for almost as long as I’ve played DDR, but I played it for the first time today. It’s very similar conceptually to DDR, except it has five panels–one on each diagonal, and one in the center. I’m told it’s hilarious to watch novice DDR players try to play Pump, because they keep going back to the center (As most beginning DDR players do) and get completely confused when they have to hit the center panel, which they’re already standing on with both feet. I’m far from an advanced Pump player after only a day, but I did seem to get the hang of it pretty quickly, which led to my favorite quote of the day from Nathan, the guy who would’ve been running the non existent tournament: “You’re definitely a lot better at this game than you were, um, six hours ago…”
Plus, if nothing else, I discovered this song as a result of the game. The Pump it Up version is quite a bit shorter, about a minute and a half long versus this video’s five minutes, but it rocks either way. It’s called “Lazenca, Save Us”, and from what I could find about it, it was the opening theme to a show called Lazenca. I guess Lazenca saved some people, or something.
Mar 28
The above is my latest attempt at an ad banner for the site; click it to see the full version, as always. I still like the “Emptyeye” font, and I managed to deal with the superfluous site address that was in my last attempt. It doesn’t have any cutesy anime characters, or any characters at all in it for that matter, but it’s actually sort of a nice contrast to a lot of the typical advertising you see on Project Wonderful (As I’ve mentioned before, most of its clientèle are webcomics). I’m trying to find dirt-cheap banner ads at the moment. My one attempt to this point has failed, but I shall press on.
Tomorrow is the DDR Tournament. Wish we luck, because I’m going to need it. On the other hand, from reading the topic, it sounds like a lot of the players that would destroy me won’t be there, so maybe I’ll have a chance after all.
Mar 27
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been playing around with my new sound card for my computer. I think I’ve managed to get it fully working with my current recording program of choice. The weird thing was that I had to switch to Virtual Out 3/4 this time around, as there was some driver conflict when I tried 1/2. That, plus a cable that came with it whereby I can get stereo sound into and out of the card itself, resolved the “I only hear the guitar out of one ear” issue I had. Nonetheless, the little bit I’ve recorded continues to have that ultra-lo-fi sound to it. I have no idea if it’s my cheap guitar, or something I’m not doing production-wise, but it’s beginning to get annoying.
Mar 26
Today I got home from my girlfriend’s house–note that she and I don’t always agree on everything–to find that my new soundcard had arrived. Hooray! After some fiddling around, I got it to at least a working, if not optimal state (I currently only get sound from my guitar out of the left ear of my headphones, for some reason). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t magically cured the issue that is my achilles heel at present–getting a good distorted guitar sound. Maybe it’s just the fact that I have a cheap guitar, or the fact I’m not currently using any sort of preamp right now, but everything sounds a lot more “fuzzy” than I’d like (The tone in Epic Failure is a good example of what I mean. It’s more fuzzy and less crunchy (Think Bad Religion) than I want it to be).
Oh well, I’ll figure it out. Hopefully.
EDIT: The links should all be fixed now.
Mar 25
I really didn’t intend for this to be a regular feature, but nonetheless, here we go.
