Feb 18

New Song- “The Secret”

Hello there,

After what is probably way too long, I have a new song that you can download. It’s called “The Secret”, after the book of the same name, and it’s essentially a cynical, sarcastic look at the book’s thesis (Though I should point out, as I do in the linked review, that the line about “Thinking fat thoughts” is actually in the book) in the style of Bad Religion. You can read more about it here, or if you’re not the literary type, you can download the song directly here. Let me know what you think!

-EE

Feb 17

Emptyeye.com Week 18- Songs and Dreams

This past week, I actually did stuff. Besides what I detailed below, this weekend I did some recording for a song, and actually finished the rough version of it that will go up probably tomorrow. It’s amazing, I’m actually capable of writing short songs. Who would’ve thought?

Last night I had a dream which had a girl from high school in it. This periodically happens to me; as I’ve detailed elsewhere, I was something of your classic mallgoth-esque “Everything sucks and I hate the world” type throughout much of high school, and grew out of it too late to undo any damage to my social life. I say this because generally, the girls who tend to show up in my dreams tend to be the ones who thought I was destined to grow up and kill someone, so I suppose my subconscious is expressing regret and/or wishing what might have been socially. That’s pretty standard, and I don’t particularly like waking up from this sort of dream (As the girls no longer hate me in said dreams), but I’ve grown used to it by now.

The weird part is that this girl was dressed as what could best be described as looking like Tifa from Final Fantasy VII. Indeed, minus the armgear, and the fact that if I remember correctly the dream had her wearing jean shorts, it was pretty much a dead ringer–impossibly short shorts, shirt that’s little more than a bra, etc. I’m not even going to try and decode what this particular aspect of the dream means–I never had any particular crush on Tifa, for instance…

I’m still plugging away at the Dream Theater book. Currently I’m up to the band touring in support of Falling into Infinity. It’s really amazing how much politics and actual business and the like play into the release of an album. The best example so far is DT’s label of the time pressuring them to hurry up and release Awake, essentially so the label’s financial statement for that quarter would look good. Interesting stuff, though probably not worth the price I paid for it (Let’s just say it was about on par with the average video game in the mid 90s when cartridges reigned supreme and leave it at that).

Until next week…

-EE

Feb 16

Live Show Review: Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood

Those of you who are fans of the show Whose Line Is It Anyway? no doubt know who Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood are. The actors/comedians/improv artists go on tour and essentially, bring a two-man version of Whose Line to audiences across the country. Last night, they came to the Palace Theater in Waterbury. Jess and I went to dinner beforehand at the Bin 300 Restaurant in Wolcott. It was very good, and very expensive; I had Metropolis Chicken, and she had…something, with Pudding Cake for dessert. After that, it was show time!

This was actually our second time seeing the show–I think the first was back in 2005–and it was every bit as good as I remembered. As Colin said, “Those of you who think that we somehow had advance knowledge of stuff in Whose Line, raise your hand. *Some people raise their hands* You people are bastards.” Before every game/situation/etc, the two take suggestions from the audience and work them into the scene. And lest you think that these suggestions are somehow planted, consider that they used my suggestion of “K” in one of the games (The game was “Letter Replacement,” where any “S”es in any words they said had to be replaced with the letter suggested by the audience, in this case “K”.), and made it work really well. Essentially, picture Whose Line where the games are longer and, occasionally, more adult, and you have a pretty good idea of the show. Like Whose Line, the two make constant references to earlier suggestions, and also like Whose Line, sometimes things occasionally don’t go as planned (One example: “It’s almost like our stage manager didn’t tell you guys to not leave the stage until we were finished!”), which really makes the whole experience even better.

At any rate, if the show comes around to your area, definitely see it. It’s amazing to watch them work with the suggestions on the fly and pretty consistently get funny stuff out of them.

-EE

Feb 15

Darn You Rick Astley! *Shakes fist*

Waiting in line at the grocery store yesterday, I heard a song on the store radio. The drumbeat sounded familiar, but I thought it was a little quick to be what I thought it was. It wasn’t until I heard the line “A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of” that my initial suspicion was confirmed.

Yep. I had been Rickroll’d. Offline.

Incidentally, my dad called while the song was playing. It’s a good thing he did, because I would’ve had a fun time trying to explain the huge grin on my face to the clerk had he not called (I was off the phone by the time my turn at the counter came).

Also, the Rickroll may be my favorite Internet prank of all time. Being a victim isn’t likely to get you fired as being redirected to some shock site at work would be, and it isn’t going to suddenly scream at you and potentially give you a heart attack like some other sites. All the Rickroll does is put a catchy song from the late 80s in your head, and we could all use more of those, right?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try and replicate Rick Astley’s sweet dance moves.

-EE

Feb 11

Music is the Business

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about the business aspect of the music I’ve been creating. Making music is all well and good, and to an extent (See “Low-Frequency Autoeroticism” for an excellent example), I write for myself as much as anyone else. But eventually, I’m going to have to start getting serious about the financial aspect of it. Actually funding the project won’t be a big deal–I have a nice job, the finish line is in sight as far as paying off school debts goes, and I have a nice windfall from my obsessive saving of money, to say nothing of the government’s rewarding people (Including those who can’t responsibly handle their money) by giving them more of it–but I’d like to try and offset the expenses nonetheless, if not wind up swimming in a mountain of money in my backyard. So to do that, I need to promote the music, and I’ve considered actually getting business cards as one method of this.

See, I’m not really a great self-promoter. I tend to shy away from the spotlight–this may be why the bass guitar is my primary instrument of choice; with rare exceptions, bass players in bands are generally underrated compared to their band as a whole (John Deacon of Queen and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin being two excellent examples)–which suits my personality but is generally counter-productive to getting my name out there in terms of the music. I figure with business cards, I can become a shady used car salesman type when I’m out and about and doing things which cause people to stop and talk to me. Generally, this tends to occur when I’m out playing DDR somewhere. You know, “Thanks, but I’m really not that good…oh, hey, have a business card, and check out my website…”

I am, sadly, completely dumb artistically, so any ideas I come up with will probably not look very good.

Then there’s the whole trademark thing. Ideally, I’d like to actually officially trademark the term “Emptyeye” as it relates to music. I know I’m not the only Emptyeye out on the net. I think I’m the only one doing stuff related to music, but it’d be nice to have the legal power behind it to make sure of that fact. You can read more on the dilemma here; I particularly love ironyengine’s smartass reply here.

Feb 10

Emptyeye.com Week 17

Colors- 7 GreatsUn Deux Trois AAACelebrate Nite- 6 Greats

This week…well, let’s see. Stuff actually happened. The dance gaming front was covered nicely by the thumbnails above, any of which you can click on to see the full picture. From left to right: 7 Greats on Colors (Heavy) in the arcade, a AAA on Un Deux Trois on DDR Extreme 2 for PS2, and 6 Greats on Celebrate Nite in the arcade. Pretty good stuff, though of course these are only the best of the scores (From the arcade session, there were another 15 or so scores I didn’t put down here).

Musically, I managed to work on stuff as well, although not what I expected to. I had planned to record some vocals for a song called “Tuition Madness”, but woke up this morning and my throat was feeling a bit scratchy. So instead I wrote some lyrics to the song about The Secret, and played a bit more with my drum machine as well to come up with half a drum track for the song as well. Now I have to figure out precisely what I want out of the chorus chord-wise, and I’ll hopefully be close to good to go with that as well. Considering there’s about two and a half months until I have to start recording “for real”, this is definitely a good thing!

Finally, on the book front, I finally picked Lifting Shadows back up, and have been reading it bit by bit during my lunch at work. Thus far, it’s pretty good; I’ve gotten to the point where they’ve just fired Charlie Dominici. I will write that review eventually, honest!

Until next week…

-EE

Feb 05

Yet More Random Tuesday Thoughts

If any of you are good with audio/video merging, I’d like a “2007 Patriots Failure Montage” set to this performance of “Vesti La Giubba”, which, like “O Fortuna”, you all should know, even if you don’t know you know it.

Bonus points for syncing:

  1. Tom Brady’s laughing about Plaxico Burress’s ultimately correct prediction about the Patriots’ offensive output with “Ridi Pagliaccio” at 2:07 or so of the video (This is also where you be going “Oh yeah, I DO know that song!”), and
  2. Big Babychick Bill Belichick shoving the referee aside when there was still time to be played with the crying that begins at about 3:25

.

As regards the lack of a weekly update, not much really happened, and I was too amped up from the Super Bowl to really make an update anyway. They’ll continue next week, don’t worry.

-EE

Feb 03

Dear New England Patriots:

Way to choke on your own overconfidence, and way to forget the history that put you where you are in the first place(1). Enjoy your offseason, knowing that your 18 victories were for absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Much Love,
-Emptyeye

(1)- Pretty much no one (Outside of the Patriots) expected the Pats to win their first Super Bowl victory in Super Bowl 36 against the Rams. Likewise, just about everyone, forgetting this fact, all but crowned them Undefeated Super Bowl Champions before Super Bowl 42 was ever played. Dennis Green would’ve been proud.

Jan 31

On My Rediscovery of Gaming

When I was young, I fell in love with the Nintendo Entertainment System, known in common parlance as the NES (The site I linked to also has an interesting tidbit in a way–people tend to talk about the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. While it’s true that a ton of terrible games were released in that year, most notably Pacman and ET, both on the Atari 2600 [Sorry cuz, but the latter is still a terrible game–also, as I defend Deadly Towers, I suppose I have no room to talk.], the effects of all these games on the market weren’t really felt financially until the next year). For a time, saying video games were my only friend, while not absolutely true, would really not be far off the mark, particularly during middle school and most of high school.

Over the last few years, I kind of fell out of love with gaming, with the exception of Dance Dance Revolution. Indeed, I still have some Game Boy Advance games from Christmas 2006 I haven’t played yet. But recently, I started playing a Christmas 2007 gift, Super Mario Galaxy. Suffice to say that with my limited play so far, it lives up to the hype. I own Super Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, but never really got into it and quit after about 10 or so Shines. I don’t think I’ll be doing that here. It really is the sort of game you could play for hours on end, saying “Just one more star…” to yourself. And yet, it’s also the sort of game that, if you have that type of willpower, you can pick up and play just one star at a time while waiting for, say, your laundry to finish, or for your laptop to finish converting your Let’s Plays into something you can throw on Youtube (Sup 400MB video that you have to shrink down to under 100MB?). So yeah, bottom line, SMG is amazing, and may get me back into games that aren’t DDR more seriously.

On another gaming note, yesterday I also made another attempt at playing my copy of Beatmania. Those of you up on your arcade history will be amused to note that the game is advertised here in the States as “The arcade hit”, even though I’m pretty sure Beatmania has never seen an official US arcade release (Compare to Tecmo’s Rygar or Ninja Gaiden–both NES games, both advertised as “THE #1 ARCADE SMASH” in their time, both having very little to do with their arcade namesakes). Perhaps more interesting to most of you is the fact that I have no skill whatsoever at this game, and any practice I get in on it really fails to yield significant improvement. And I’m not just being modest–in all honesty, if I can pass something rated a 3 in Beatmania, I’m having a pretty good day. It’s a hard game, generally regarded as maybe the hardest rhythm game out there, and I am apparently not a bad enough dude to take it on. Oh well.

Jan 29

A Few More Random Thoughts

You’ll all be delighted to know that “incompetency” is a word. Yes, this is important, for reasons that will become apparent as I start uploading my Ys I & II Let’s Play.

Speaking of Let’s Plays, watching Cornshaq’s playthrough of the NES game Rambo convinced me that this game may be the worst application of a license in video game history. I mean, you’ve got the Rambo license. You know, Sly Stallone, hugely musclebound Vietnam Vet, bow and exploding arrows? Apparently someone decided that a game playing much like Zelda II‘s overhead sections, and set in Vietnam, would be the perfect use of the license.

Full disclosure: When I was little, I liked this game a lot. The music especially stood out to me; there aren’t a whole lot of tracks, but what’s there is great, and would suit itself pretty well to a rockout-fest Minibosses style. Re-watching the game as an adult, I still think the game would hold up pretty well as one of the better licensed games of its era (Admittedly not a difficult feat), and removing the Rambo license altogether would leave you with a solid adventure/exploration game that could hold up on its own merits.

But c’mon. Someone decided RAMBO would make a good Zelda II clone? All right…

This is why I’m not a game company executive, I guess.