Mar 15

More Art! More DDR!

Emptyeye.com banner attempt 2Peace AAA

Yeah, pretty much what the name of the post implies.

The left thumbnail is another attempt at a banner-sized sort of ad for the site for Project Wonderful. I think it’s actually pretty good, though the URL on the right is a bit superfluous, as the banner will link directly to the site anyway. On the right is a picture of my 17th home version DDR AAA, this one on Peace^^ from DDR Supernova. I noted here that generally I tend to get really close on a song before I finally seal the deal on a AAA for it, and that definitely applied here–I can think of at least four times I’ve gotten one Great on the song before I finally pulled this off. Definitely good to get it out of the way, at any rate.

Tomorrow is a day I’m going to head to the mall to play DDR for what will probably be my last arcade practice session before the tournament in Rhode Island. We’ll see how it goes.

Mar 15

New Bonus Material Plus the Dating of Those Pages

There’s some new material inside the Into the Aether section of the site. One track is a collection of Epic Failure rejected guitar takes, while the other one isn’t, but both probably do a good job of showing that I’m a better bassist than I am a guitarist. That hasn’t stopped me yet, though…

Also, you’ll note that on a go-forward basis, I’ll be adding the posting dates to anything that isn’t on the blog proper. It occured to me that if people download the songs and read about them in sequential order, it’s going to be very confusing, since they’re not on The Six Day Exile in chronological order by upload at all.

Mar 13

New Song- Epic Failure

Once again, I have successfully delivered a new song when I said I would. This one is called “Epic Failure“, and it’s my longest, most unashamedly prog-rock song to date, despite its rather silly origins. Read all about it by clicking on its name, or go ahead and download it directly here. As a bonus, you can check out the original, much more sloppily played (Yes, really) clean guitar version here. Its own page, plus some aborted distorted guitar takes, will be coming either tomorrow or Saturday.

As always, I don’t mind feedback, be it positive or negative.

Mar 12

Here, Have Yet More Art. Plus Some DDR Pictures!

Happy Wedding AAAEmptyeye Banner-esque thingInside Your Heart AAA

This update is really more to inform you that I finished recording another song that I’ll upload tomorrow. We’re going back to MIDI drums on this one, because I recorded it awhile back, but had to go back and re-do the guitar for reasons I’ll explain when I upload it.

In any event, click the center thumbnail at the top of this post to get an example of what happens when you cram the Emptyeye font into the space of a Project Wonderful banner ad. The whole thing is squashed somewhat, which is rather…eh. I suppose the obvious thing to do would have been to shrink it the same percentage both height and width-wise and somehow fill in the extra space that would result. Oh well. It’s not ready for full-time ad banner status yet; I want to add the little Emptyeye eye (Not the best example, but the best I have readily available) to it, plus something like “Music/Speedrun/Commentary” on it somewhere.

On the other hand, I could just let my friend Elise handle that if I so choose. Per my cousin’s advice, I’m essentially delegating any art tasks to her–I like to think I’m okay at coming up with ideas, but I’m awful at actually getting those ideas onto paper, or screen, or what-have-you. This is obviously things like album art, but less obviously stuff any t-shirt designs I might come up with or…well, ad banners.

Speaking of my cousin, I note that his site, or more specifically, his blog actually refers quite a few people here. I had considered making a button for his “Friends on the Web” section that was a bit more directly related to this site, but I’m wondering if the sheer incongruity of the button (It’s the fourth one down, just above “JamesFAQs”) is what’s pulling people here in the first place. Mountainous Words clickers, have you anything to say on this?

Finally, I got two more DDR home version Heavy AAAs last night, which brings my total up to 16 across all the various games. You can click either thumbnail that “flanks” the Emptyeye banner above to see them. The one on the left, #15, is Happy Wedding, which was one I was close on for awhile (It’s almost a requirement that I have to flag a song at least once before I nail a AAA on it). The one on the right, #16, is Inside Your Heart, which, while an easy song, was a pleasant surprise–I don’t play that particular song very often, and so I got the AAA out of nowhere on it, which was cool.

Mar 11

Jesus Saves…WWE.

In the early-to-mid 90s, I was a big professional wrestling fan, specifically of WWE, then known as the WWF (And before we go any further, yes, I know professional wrestling is “fake” in the sense that everything is predetermined. Do I come up to you and go “DUR HURR YOU KNOW IT’S ALL FAKE, RIGHT??” when you and your family/co-workers/whatever are discussing Lost, or Kyle XY, or your favorite scripted show? No, I do not. Then please don’t do the same to me and my pro wrestling fan brethren. Thanks.). I’ve gone in and out of wrestling fandom since then, mostly due to college friends that were huge fans, but regardless, I tend to lurk and occasionally post on the WrestleCrap forums.

My inspiration for this particular blog post actually comes from two sources. The first was a topic on the Wrestlecrap forums titled “Accidental Pushes” (In wrestling parlance, to “push” someone is to throw your resources behind them, give them lots of screen time, the quality spots at shows like the closing match, make them your champion, etc. etc. etc.), and the link goes directly to my post in said topic. If what I’m saying there looks like it may as well be in Russian to you, I’ll translate: “This could be more accurately phrased as ‘Steve Austin gets really lucky that Jake Roberts happens to be playing the character of a Born-Again Christian at King of the Ring ’96’…” and the rest is pretty much the same.

The second inspiration was the AIM away message of a friend from college, basically lamenting the predictability of wrestling nowadays, and missing the Monday Night Wars (Wikipedia was the only thing I could find that accurately summarized it. *Muttermuttermutter*) where WWE (I’ll be calling the company “WWE” from here on out, even though they were actually “WWF” during the timeframe in question) was forced to be on top of their game due to the competition.

Here’s the thing, though. The Monday Night Wars really weren’t as epic as people remember. Indeed, outside of the brief shining moment for a year or two when WCW was top on the world, that company’s entire existence was plagued by incompetence. The Monday Night Wars officially ended in 2001 when WWE bought WCW, but I would argue that I knew WCW was finished as early as 1999, watching the Hulk Hogan/Ric Flair First Blood match where, as multiple people have said before me, “They started bleeding and it didn’t count.” Even then, I got the impression that WCW was a complete mess and was barely trying at that point.

Let’s go back to 1996 and to the title of this post. At the WWE’s King of the Ring 1996, Jake Roberts, playing the character of a Born-Again Christian (Which may or may not have intersected with Roberts’s real life at that point), makes a run to the finals of the KotR tournament, where he is unfortunately vanquished by Steve Austin. During his coronation ceremony, Austin breaks from whatever script he may have had (Most promos or whatnot don’t have exact scripts so much as a list of points the participants have to hit. How they hit those points is up to them. This is an excellent example of what happens when that exercise goes badly; it’s also where my current name on the Wrestlecrap forums is derived from) and ad-libs a line that goes approximately “You can sit here and you can talk about your John 3:16…Austin 3:16 says ‘I Just whipped your ass!'”

From there, the rest is history. Austin goes on to become WWE’s biggest star for a time, they sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise with “Austin 3:16” on it, and one could argue that the Monday Night Wars are over before they ever really began. And it was all because Austin was lucky enough to have Jake Roberts for an opponent. Without Roberts, Austin never ad-libs “Austin 3:16”, and wrestling history may well play out completely differently.

Mar 10

Some New Stuff That Isn’t Located Here

First of all, you’ll notice a new link on the sidebar, to Good-Evil, which is a Shizzie-run website dedicated to reviewing everything from music to alcohol. I wrote a guest review for them concerning my favorite Led Zeppelin album, Houses of the Holy. Currently it’s the top entry on the site; if you for some reason don’t want to look at the rest of the site–though I suggest you do–the direct link to the review is here.

Also, I’d like to pimp out a project by Shizzie xoc, titled VGMITSO, or “Video Game Music in the Style Of”. In particular, I highly recommend the Primus-style Castlevania track–he totally nails the Les Claypool vocal style. Check it out!

Mar 09

Emptyeye.com Week 21- In-Front-of-the-Scenes Work Work…

Kick the Can AAAEmptyeye Font Attempts

This week here on the site, I did actual, real work on the front end of the site, adding a new collection of fun musical things to give you, the listener, a glimpse into what it sounds like when a take goes horribly wrong, or when I just want to record something for its own sake and not worry too much about how it sounds. Also this week, I made a second attempt at something artsy. You can see it by clicking the right thumbnail at the top of this entry–the top is my original sketch mentioned in this entry, while the bottom is the more fleshed out, digitized version done to correct errors made in the sketching process/make it more symmetrical/etc. I actually like it; as I mentioned before, it’s a sort of Megadeth-meets-Nirvana style (And yes, I know the Nirvana logo is just a font).

In non-site news, my car’s back windshield got broken over the weekend by some uberclowns driving around with a log. Maybe someone will throw a log at their heads in retaliation. In any event, this is more of an inconvenience than anything else, as we have some type of insurance on glass on the car that doesn’t have a deductible of any sort. This doesn’t make it any more fun, though.

What is fun is the fact that I got my 14th home version AAA on the Heavy difficulty level of DDR. You can see that by clicking the left thumbnail at the top of the entry; the song is “Kick the Can” from DDR Extreme for Playstation 2. The song itself isn’t that difficult, but DDR Extreme is set up in such a way that a pad’s corner buttons double as arrows. The long story short is that this tends to give a lot of misfires that aren’t even the pad’s fault–as a natural consequence of a playstyle designed to conserve energy, I tend to graze the corner buttons and thus break my combo as the game thinks I was trying to hit an arrow way too early. In short, the fact that I AAA’ed the song is impressive moreso because of the game I did it on than for the song itself (All the other PS2 DDR games allow you to turn off this behavior).

I also went and cleaned out my desk drawers in an attempt to find my checkbook, which I knew was in the house somewhere but couldn’t figure out where. I found all sorts of interesting things–8 rolls of change, my Megadeth Rust in Peace CD–but no checkbook. As it turned out, the checkbook was in a black totebag type of thing that I would take things to and from college in. I graduated college in 2005, which should tell you how long it’s been since I actually used the checks. I’m going to start that up again for this whole album-making process, though.

Finally, I have 80-something stars in Super Mario Galaxy. I’m trying to get as many as I can before I finally beat the game, which I could have done about 15-20 stars ago.

Until next week..

-EE

Mar 08

New Old Material, Spawned from Broken Glass

This morning, I was woken up by my dad. Evidently, during the night, someone had decided to play a game of “Throw a log at the back windshield of the car in the road”. That car, unfortunately, was mine. Long story short is that the windshield is completely broken, and the glass repair place can’t fix it until Tuesday. I’m not worried about the financial aspect of it–we evidently have no-deductible insurance on the glass in the car–but getting to work on Monday and Tuesday will be a bit of a pain. Still, I’ll manage it.

The eagle-eyed among you will note a new section on the sidebar. The Into the Aether section is the red-headed stepchild section of the site–a collection of short, not-really-that-serious songs and rejected takes of my more serious efforts. Check it out and do what you’d like with its contents (Use them in remixes, or whatever else it is people do with vocal tracks isolated from their songs..), as long as you credit me for the originals.

Mar 05

Curse You, Limited Vocal Range!

I had hoped to record the vocals for a song tonight so I could upload it tomorrow. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t recording a Rick Astley cover, I only got about half the vocals done thanks to repeatedly failing to hit the highest notes I was going for and eventually having to give up before I completely destroyed my voice for the next several days. Oh well.

Played some Mario Galaxy yesterday. Now up to 74 Stars; I could go beat the game right now if I wanted to, but I want to get everything I can first, just because.