Mar 03

Promise: Delivered on! New Song- “Tuition Madness”

As I promised yesterday, I’ve uploaded a new song tonight. The song is called “Tuition Madness“, and it’s basically about how US society expects you to pile up thousands of dollars in debt on an education so you can go out and work yourself into even more debt later in life. You can read about it here, or if you don’t want to do that, you can simply download the song here.

A note to those of you who check the page for The Six Day Exile often: The order of the tracks there is not chronologically when they appeared on the site, but rather the approximate tracklisting, which will be filled in and changed around as I upload more songs. Hence why “Tuition Madness” is #3 in the table at the bottom of the page.

Mar 02

Emptyeye.com Week 20- Behind-the-Scenes Work Work…

This week here at emptyeye.com, I once again failed utterly to deliver any music. Fortunately, other than an overarching “have rough mixes ready by mid-April” schedule, I’m not really on any sort of deadline to actually produce anything there. Tomorrow, I’ll have some time to myself, and can hopefully throw down some vocals and have a new song up either then or Tuesday.

I did get some behind-the-scenes-stuff done, though of course none of you reading can see that. The first thing was, as I detailed here, getting sending e-mail to work, so I can more easily respond to e-mail that’s sent to me without having to open up my webmail. I also managed to find a plugin for WordPress that will hopefully give me a more accurate picture of site traffic than the server-side stuff LunarPages provides. The Lunarpages tools are nice, but more to compare what’s happening month-to-month than in any absolute sense; from what I can tell, it doesn’t filter stuff (IE my poking around on the administrative side of things/adding content/etc) very well, which can be kind of misleading.

I’ve also done some playing around with the site’s RSS Feed, to make it display the full text of any posts I write. This may or may not be permanent, depending on what, if any, advertising scheme for the site I ultimately decide to go with. I was trying to get the feed to display comment links and the like, without success. I’ll have to look into that some more; I don’t use RSS myself, but apparently it’s the wave of the future. As a guy currently best-known on the Internet for his speedruns of games at least 17 years old, I’m probably not the person to ask about the wave of the future. Anyway, let me know what you think about RSS in general, and the change to full text in the feed in specific; those of you who browse the site the old-fashioned way can leave a comment just by clicking “Leave a Comment” below this entry, while you RSSers out there can get there by clicking the title of this post.

Until next week…

-EE

Mar 01

Huzzah! Sending E-mail Works! And DDR stuff.

Since I’ve owned emptyeye.com, I’ve had the e-mail address you can see at the sidebar to your right. I managed to configure it to receive e-mails in Mozilla Thunderbird pretty easily–this, combined with the “e-mail me comments” feature of WordPress, allows me to stay pretty on top of what’s going on with the site–but making it send e-mail was another matter. No one missed anything–my workaround was to hit up the webmail that comes with the account and use that–but it was nonetheless annoying.

It wasn’t until earlier today that I figured out, with some online help, what was actually going on. Apparently my ISP doesn’t like people sending out e-mail over any servers that aren’t their own. The fix was easy enough: Just reconfigure Thunderbird so I’m sending e-mails using my ISP’s server and voila, what I hope will soon be my primary e-mail address is fully up and running smoothly.

I went to play DDR today. My overall experience can be summed up pretty succinctly here. If that looks Greek to you, it boils down to “I got farthest on what should have been the hardest song.” Bizarre. The highlight of the day came when a little kid told me “You must be like the champion!” after I had finished . My score: A wholly unimpressive 96 Greats. Years of playing with a huge timing window on the home versions has left me great at comboing things, and not all that great at actually doing so accurately. Still, the ego boost was nice, and being the one consistently Heavy player in my area helps keep my skill in perspective in the opposite direction–for all I talk about how terrible I am at DDR, the reality is that I’m good enough that a non-player, or even a casual player, would watch me and likely be impressed. Given that I hang out at DDRFreak a lot, where the average skill level is far above mine, I tend to forget this fact at times. It’s good to be reminded occasionally.

Feb 28

Book Review: Lifting Shadows: The Authorized Biography of Dream Theater

Awhile back, I announced that I had acquired a copy of Lifting Shadows: The Authorized Biography of Dream Theater by Rich Wilson and intended to review it, though I suspected it would be useless from a functional standpoint. Having actually read the book, I stand by this statement–if you’re a hardcore Dream Theater fan, you likely pre-ordered the book as soon as you learned of its existence; if you’re not, you will no doubt look at the price tag (A total of $83 to ship to the US) and wonder “Who in their right mind would pay that much for this book?!”

Well, right mind or not, I paid that much for this book. Or more accurately, I paid that much for these books–Lifting Shadows is actually two books. The first, Images, is essentially a 175-page picture book of the band’s career, starting in high school and ending in late 2007 with the release of their newest album, Systematic Chaos. A companion CD is also in this book, taking selected tracks from various rarities/fan club releases/etc the band has released. The second book, Words, is the story “proper” of the band, again, essentially starting with the core of the band in high school and continuing to effectively the present day.

Despite the overall lack of the usual excesses of Rock N’ Roll, the story of the band itself is nonetheless captivating. One thing I personally found fascinating was how much of a part label politics play in the making of an album–the band’s issues with their label in making Falling into Infinity have been documented elsewhere, but I found it amusing that the band were pressured to hurry up and release Awake so that their label’s financial bottom line would look good for the quarter. As is said in the book, “It’s a wonder albums ever get made”.

There are two things that bothered me about the book (Besides the price tag, that is). The first is something that the author couldn’t really help–while pretty much everyone involved in the band, past or present, had something to say about their time in the band for the book (Charlie Dominici and Derek Sherinian being the obvious ones, but also figures from the pre-DT days, and one-time DT vocalist Steve Stone), the early part of the book in particular suffers somewhat from the absence of Kevin Moore. This isn’t Wilson’s fault; Moore has wanted nothing to do with his past since leaving Dream Theater, repeatedly declining offers to appear at special DT shows. Nonetheless, maybe because of his silence over the years, it would definitely have been nice to get his side of the story on things, in particular one story James LaBrie told about one show where they had agreed to start wailing on a heckler. James dove down and started pounding the guy, and Kevin…stayed right behind his keyboards. The second thing that annoyed me about the book were various typos. Not factual errors, by any means, but little things like misplaced punctuation, misspellings, etc. that would occasionally make me stop and go “wha?” Granted, there are times I’ve made some pretty bizarre typos here on this site, but then you’re not paying a huge amount of money to read it.

Overall, Lifting Shadows is very good from a story standpoint. But, unless you’re a superfan of Dream Theater (In which case you likely already own this), it’s simply not $70 good, even taking into account the cool case with the Dream Theater symbol it comes in.

Feb 27

On Listening to Music–My Own and Others

Today at work I listened to the mixes I currently have here for The Six-Day Exile on my iPod. I realized the following:

  • Recording solo bass and making it audible on the headphones I use is going to be very difficult without it overpowering more substantial systems, such as a car radio.
  • My cousin was right–I do sound much better vocally on “The Secret” than on everything else. Part, though not all, of it is definitely being up in more traditional rock singer range. For the rest, I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s the fact that I had to almost shout that song, which would probably make me sound more confident anyway. Random aside: I love being a natural baritone, because I can link to this video as a legitimate example of approximately what I sound like.
  • There is such a thing as “too rough” mixwise. Whoops. Oh well, this is a learning experience for me, really.

Speaking of “too rough”, I also listened to Metallica’s St. Anger at work today–yes, I’m aware admitting to this fact pretty much automatically invalidates my opinion on what makes quality music, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it nonetheless…besides, it’s not even the worst Metallica album (I’d give that “honor” to Load), much less the worst album in history like a lot of people wanted you to believe for a year or so after its release–and couldn’t help but note that it was trying really hard to be something it’s not. That is to say, for all the talk about how “raw” it was supposed to be…listening to it with headphones, it becomes clear that it’s an album on which a lot of money was spent to try and get that raw sound–there’s a lot of panning and separation of stuff through each of the songs, for one. Essentially, they tried way too hard to force it, which is exemplified by the fact that no one told Lars Ulrich to put away the trash cans and set up his drum kit to record the album (Incidentally, general consensus from what I’ve found is that the album isn’t bad musically–quite a few people have ripped the audio from the accompanying DVD [In which Lars is playing an actual drum kit as opposed to whatever the heck he used on the album] and just listened to that as the album).

Feb 25

A Bit on DDR Supernova 2 and Site Traffic

A couple people have found this site through a search approximating “beating Arrabiata in Hyper Master Mode”, I believe because I posted about said song here. For those of you who are looking at that phrase and thinking it may as well be in a foreign language, essentially, what it boils down to is that in DDR Supernova 2 there is a mode called Hyper Master, which is generally the quickest way to unlock material in the game. You play various songs that have various conditions attached to them beyond simply “get to the end of the song”; the specific mission involving the song Arrabiata has you trying to get an A on it on the Standard/Difficult/however you want to refer to The Pink Difficulty steps. How I finally got by this stupid mission was with the help of one of the Custom Modules that added a bunch of Perfects on to your score, boosting my grade up enough to pass it. This unlocked the song, and I played it in Free Mode (Or Game Mode, or whatever it’s actually called).

Imagine my horror when I discovered that the obnoxiously difficult steps in Hyper Master mode were the official pink difficulty steps for the song.

If you’ve never played these steps before, suffice to say that…wow, just awful. And I’m generally pretty lenient when it comes to charts I like and don’t like. But these steps…ugh, awful. But anyway, yeah, for those of you wondering how to beat that song in Hyper Master Mode, the Add Perfects Custom Module, I forget what it’s actually called, is your friend.

In other news, my hypothesis about site traffic and where it can come from seems to be correct, as my Rygar speedrun commentary continues to be one of the more popular files on the site despite my not doing much to promote it after I initially put it out there. A lot of the songs generally get a spike when I first release them, but this may be the first file I’ve seen on the site that has what can be called sustained popularity. And here I thought Rygar was actually a fairly obscure game (Albeit a fun one). Interesting..

-EE

Feb 24

Emptyeye.com Week 19

Dive AAA

This week on Emptyeye.com…again, not much happened.

I did a lot of thinking about the site, and very little actually acting on it, either in recording new music or promotion. One of the things I’m looking at is using Project Wonderful for ads. It’s essentially a never-ending EBay auction for adspace on the participating sites. One of the main men behind the scenes is one Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame; as such, most of the clients are other webcomics. And that’s fine, as it would certainly be a different audience for me. You can click on Ryan’s name and scroll down a bit to sort of see it in action. The money is per day, so if, for instance, I wanted a little emptyeye.com button on Qwantz, I’d have to pay $2/day (As of right now; the price can actually fluctuate). There are a lot of sites participating in it, most of them smaller than Dino Comics (Which is big enough that, as I understand it, Ryan actually lives off of the merchandising based around it). There’s a lot of advanced options too, but that’s the gist of it.

I’ve also occasionally mentioned doing commentary for my speedruns, which I honestly think would be the best, quickest way to get people to the site (If not directly to the music section, which is really the ultimate goal)–the audience for speedruns is huge, and a lot of those people seem to appreciate audio commentary for runs (A couple people have actually said they wish that all speedruns would come with audio commentary). So I think either hosting them here or breaking them up into YouTube-friendly chunks with a link to the site in the description section would be a nice idea. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen behind in actually recording music, and this weekend was no different, so that has to come first.

On the DDR front, I managed to get another home version AAA, which you can see by clicking the thumbnail at the top of this entry–it’s a picture of the Dive remix from DDRMAX2 for PS2. Late next month, I’m actually going to try my luck at an arcade tournament some two hours away in Rhode Island. I don’t expect to win–to this day I have no idea how I managed to finish fourth at a tournament in Trumbull (I’m not being modest–no one there could figure out how the people running the tournament were arriving at the results they did. See the second page of posts here for more info)–and honestly, I’ll be happy just to qualify and make the main tournament; any matches I manage to win will be a bonus. There’s actually one coming up a week from yesterday, but I honestly don’t think I’m ready yet–I hope to head down to the Brass Mill Center machine a few more times between now and then to acclimate myself to arcade pads a bit more–my timing on anything 9 or above is just awful, as you can see by looking at my scores on my DDRecall that don’t have locks next to them. I don’t expect to magically become a top-tier player in five weeks, but I want to improve enough to make a respectable showing for myself. I figure if nothing else, I can write a nice report about the whole thing.

Finally, on the non-DDR gaming front, I’m still working my way through Mario Galaxy. I have 52 Stars, I think. I like the game a lot, as I’ve mentioned before.

Until next week…

-EE

Feb 22

On a Snowy Friday

Today I opted to stay home from work thanks to the weather here in Connecticut. I had a bit of an adventure going home from work the last time it snowed any appreciable amount, and so figured I’d stay inside today to make sure it didn’t happen again.

I did very well at the staying inside part, but didn’t actually get a whole lot done, unless playing Super Mario Galaxy counts as getting stuff done. I’m up to 45 Stars now, moving along at a not-very-fast clip. Mainly because I’m trying to get all the stars I can in a given area before I move on to the next, which leads to amusing situations like all five Galaxies in a dome opening up before I ever visit it. It’s still quite fun.

Feb 20

Handling Art for the Lose!

As I mentioned elsewhere, of the various things I seem to be naturally talented at, art is decidedly not one of them. In true solo artist style, this didn’t stop me from attempting to create a mockup of a sort of business card that I might hand out to random complimenters of my DDR skill (Or other people I might meet in various situations). There’s not a lot of information on it at the moment, primarily because I eventually want to get a PO Box and put that on there, but I’m not exactly sure where I want the PO Box yet (Suffice to say that my work schedule, plus near future plans, may mean that the “obvious” choice of the Post Office about three minutes from my house is actually not the best option). In any event, you can look at the mockup below, and feel free to mock me for how bad it is. This is why I’m handing off the album artwork to someone more talented at it than I.

Business Card Draft

Feb 19

Darnit Jim, I’m an IT Guy, Not a Businessman!

Lately I’ve been visiting the HalfPixel forums to learn some stuff about the business of webcomics. No, I don’t plan on trying to become the next Dinosaur Comics, but there’s a lot about the marketing and business of webcomics that I think I can apply to this site. One of the mantras of building a webcomic audience is to stick to a regular updating schedule, the more frequent, the better (Daily update comics, as a whole, tend to do better audience-wise than those updated on, say, a weekly schedule). This gives people a reason to visit your site again and again and again. Well, I can’t exactly pump out music on a daily basis, but I do try and make at least one post a week in the form of the weekly update on Sunday nights, plus whatever else I write/post in the meantime, including new music, reviews, and the like.

I thought about something else while reading some of the posts, namely “What do I have to make myself stand out from everyone else?” And while yeah, I’ll be putting up rough, in-progress versions of all the tracks I’ll have for my upcoming album, I’m not sure if that’s really so original nowadays (Plus, with MP3 players rapidly becoming the method of choice for the masses to listen to music–if they aren’t already there–I’m not sure if many people would even be able to tell the difference between the “rough” and finished versions from a sound quality standpoint anyway). It wasn’t until I was recording “ The Secret” yesterday that I hit on something: I have many, many failures before I record a quality take, even when I’m only recording, say, a verse at a time. I think it’d be cool to throw some of this failed stuff into a file and throw it up for download for people to do as they wish with–use them in techno remixes or whatever people do with random samples nowadays (Quite a few of the vocal takes end with a “Gah, I totally couldn’t find that pitch…” or similar). I also figure it might demystify the recording process somewhat to sort of show what goes into even a semi-successful recording of a song.