Reach out and Remember (pun)

Because I'm sick.. again.. but I feel like I should blog a little, since it's been awhile and also because I feel like blogging. So here's a (very short) review of Halo: Reach



I liked it, the gameplay is, as per usual by Bungie and therefore smooth and awesome. It really is, say what you will about xbox, Bungie knows how to make multiplayer good. The game is intended as Bungie's swan song, their final Halo of all Halo's that coincidentally doesn't contain Halo.

The campaign was.. hmm.. good? No, I mean.. it was good. The story played out nicely and all. I just feel like something's missing. I'm still not quite sure what that is, but I can get back to you.

I will say one thing though. Marty O'Donnell, I am a bit disappointed. After the soundtrack to Halo: ODST which blew my mind in new ways of awesome. The sensation of solitude I felt when playing ODST resonating through the soundscape was on a completely new level. However I didn't quite feel the sensation of despair and hopeless epic struggle, gameplay-wise.. yes.. musically.. not quite. Hense Marty I'm sad to say that I'm a little bit disappointed.. Feel free to contact me if you wanna hear my extended constructive criticism. Anyways.
All in all;
I'm giving Halo: Reach 4.2 grenade stickies to face out of 5 (84%)

So there. Batman got a better score. Hmm.. thinking about this gives me an idea. Maybe I could give a quick rundown of all the games I have. And no, no reviews of them, just a quick score for all of them. I have 14 games, so it's not a lot.

Thoughts people?

Too tired.. to dream?

... I'm too tired to blog. I've only slept a couple of hours last night. On the other hand I've also seen Inception now, so here's a quick review of that movie.

SPOILER-FREE, read cautiously but safely.

Inception.
I liked it, I don't really feel like it lived up fully to the hype surrounding it. The concept was nice, I've always been a fan of dream vs. reality thinking and questioning. It reminds me a little of an idea I've had for years too, and no Nolan didn't steal my movie idea or anything (don't worry, there will be no Photoshoppin'). But the questions asked in this movie are questions I have asked myself and others every now and then for years now. It's nice to see that someone else has thought about it too. Leo did a good role, I prefer him not doing his now famous (and quite shitty) accents. See Blood Diamond (clicky) for what can only be described as atrocious. Everyone else did equally good roles, though I wish I could've seen a bit more of Michael Caine, who is awesome! The ending was //*$EDITED FOR SPOILER-FREE-NESS&*%//.

All in all.
Was it a good movie.. yes!
Worth seeing in theaters.. possibly!
Bonus-points for omission of 3D-shit.. hell yeah!
DVD-must-buy?.. yes!

4.5 Spinning totems out of 5

Home sick & Behind the scenes

Home Sick

Yupp, I have it too. Whatever my son had earlier we all now have. Probably just your common household cold, but annoying nonetheless. So I'm home from work today, but I'm gonna go there tomorrow so I think it'll be fine. Besides, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine I can now be productive regardless of illness.
Thankfully though like I posted yesterday, I've got the "studio" working again. But not only that, today I managed to get everything working, so now I can produce bad quality 720p videos, including title screen and all. You'll get to see it later, now I need to focus on audio, since the music will always come firsthand I don't really care much for the video. I say much and I mean it, but that doesn't mean I can't try to make something pleasing to watch.. pleasing for me that is, not necessarily for you.

Behind the scenes

And for your viewing pleasure, here's a peek behind the scenes of my work flow for making the shit that you have to endure on youtube.

See how nice I am?

How many people would go through all the trouble of illustrating the work flow in such an incredible high resolution. (I remember the camera taking a big picture, which I rescaled to 590x443) and to such astonishing detail (I spent at least 2 minutes drawing this turd of an illustration). And let's not forget post-production (I photoshopped a black box over a thingy that will remain a secret until the video goes viral) And by viral I don't mean it spreads like wildfire and people can't stop talking about it, I mean.. more the genital herpes kind of viral. So yes I said it, my videos will give you herpes.. that's how nice I am.
I can sense your admiration all over the intertweb tubes, that's it.. let it all out, you know you want to..

Enjoy your STD...

Back to the Studio (?)

Hurray! Despite having a major migraine and/or headache right now I managed to figure out why my audio equipment wasn't working. So now I'm back in business, figuratively of course since my business isn't actually music.. at least not at the moment. Nonetheless I as happy as one can be a Sunday morning without a hangover, wife-to-be sleeping and a 2-year old scuffing about being sickly and sensitive. Yeah and the headache of course.

Because I don't really feel like writing a long post this time. I'll just post pictures of my "studio" equipment for those of you that are interested is knowing what it looks like.

Roland UA-4FX



RØDE NT1-A

Enjoy your Sunday and kids.. remember...

It's never wrong to slap a stranger if they were totally asking for it..

Carlos Nabb, a moment ago

Equipment on the fritz

I tried to record another song late last Sunday, I figured that the massive intake of alcohol earlier that weekend would've relaxed my vocal chords so much.. and they had.. that I would record a cover of Bonnie Raitt. But no, for some reason my recording equipment was on the fritz. Or well.. the more likely culprit being my laptop, the mixer took in sound and so did Audacity according to the spectrum analyzer. But after recording I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was really annoying because I still have no idea why. I've tried reinstalling Audacity and will see if that makes a difference. I suspect that Windows Movie Maker is what fucked it up, but I don't really know. Because well.. before WMM everything was working fine, but the I wanted to add "video" to Unstabbable Feet and I didn't feel like installing Premier or anything else especially fancy, since I wasn't going to edit anything. Just merge some audio with video. I suspect there's better software out there anyway, but I was too stressed to look.

I'm open to suggestions. Right now I'm using Audacity 1.3 Beta on a Windows 7 laptop, with Windows Movie Maker as my easy video editing software.

I used to use my wife-to-be's Samsung A503 to shoot video footage but since I doesn't support 720p I going to start using my Samsung Galaxy S instead. Sure the footage will be grainy but it was grainy with the A503 anyways. And also I kinda like that, it gives it a nice B-look to it. It does however mean I have to re-shoot the footage I already have since it's in the wrong resolution / aspect ratio (640x480).

But that's okay because thankfully I saved the props. That reminds me, none you have actually seen the footage. You've only seen the byproduct "Luminous Truth" in my Is art crap -post (clicky clicky to remind yourself). But sleep well at nights thinking that I will post it, getting the video is the easy part. If I can just get the audio recording to work again it won't be long until I can post another video, with another song.

Until, see you over the rainbow!

Unstabbable Feet

No metaphors, no deep hidden meanings of cynicism and/or self-pity.

Enjoy this newly written previously unreleased very, and I repeat VERY rough demo of Unstabbable Feet. Why? You ask. Because sometimes you should have to relax a little and have some fun.
A big thank you to my sources of inspiration; my son for trying to stab his mother with a wooden spatula and my dear friend Beije for complaining that I never have any songs that are happy.

This one is probably not happy enough anyway but at least I gave it a shot, for now.

My New Phone

Last Wednesday I finally had enough of the waiting and waiting.. and more waiting for my HTC Desire. Saunalahti (despite their otherwise good reputation) fucked up big time. Yeah they blamed HTC for not delivering as many phones as they needed. And rightfully so, it's not their fault that HTC couldn't get enough AMOLED screens to deliver enough phones.

And rightfully so I'm not blaming Saunalahti for this, even though they're still responsible as I'm concerned. But no, the reason I has pissed/disappointed is because Saunalahti fucked up by not really informing their customers with anything. No information about the number of phones they tried to get, no information on how long they had gotten on the huge cue of people. Just really, really lack of information.

So Wednesday I called Sonera (who's reputation is not very good) and asked them if they had any nice offers with a phone (Desire or Galaxy). And sure enough, they had an pretty good offer. Not quite as good as Saunalahti's offer but adding the 10+ weeks of waiting as well as the uncertainty of the arrival of the phone, I went with Sonera instead.

So by Friday (yesterday) my new phone has arrived, it took them two days to deliver it. Two days?!?! The ETA for the HTC Desire was 12-13 weeks (promised delivery being 3-4 weeks). My Samsung Galaxy S arrived after two days (promised delivery being 1 week). I'm very happy with it, even though I was more excited about HTC Sense.. TouchWiz 3.0 with it's Hummingbird CPU is.. well.. humming along very nicely. And since there's plenty of widgets on the Android market I've made my homescreen(s) awesome!

A.k.a. It looks nothing like this anymore. It's much nicer.

Also. Just as as heads up. There will be no more Movie Posters with my face.