Now available: TMI

[or at least, a more severe case of TMI than this tumblr already has]

I have this thing about keeping track of what I’ve seen/read/played/listened to. It helps to find new things I might like, too - Last.fm is a prime example. It keeps track of music I play, then puts together a list of similar stuff. For my own benefit, I’ve started using a site that does similar recommendations for anime and manga, and another for books in general. Conveniently, this also lets me share this information with anyone who cares to know what I’m interested in. And if you don’t, that’s ok too! You don’t have to keep track of every book I’ve ever read. But maybe you’d like to know what books I haven’t read and might like to read, so now you can do that. Then you’ll be able to shower me with gifts that won’t make me say “oh, you didn’t have to get me anything!”

I’m linking to them on my main tumblr page now, but I’ll put some links below as well. I guess there’s sort of a creepy aspect to having all this information available, but I’m not terribly worried. I figure that if someone arrives at my tumblr from any of my other profiles, they’re volunteering to sift through far more information about me than they really need. We probably already have some interests in common anyway, and this lets me share more information about that thing. So let’s talk about Dune, or the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, or whatever article I read the other day through Read It Later. Seriously! I’d much rather talk about my favourite nerdy stuff than my latest assignments or whatever else.

  • AnimePlanet profile: Tracks anime and manga, from stuff I’ve watched to stuff I want to watch. Yes, I watched all 220 episodes of the original run of Naruto in junior high (but I never started on Shippuuden!). Along with 130 episodes of Bleach. Apparently, I’ve spent two weeks straight on ridiculous shonen anime.
  • Goodreads profile: Books! I’ve got four different “shelves”: What I’m currently reading, what I’ve read, what I own and plan to read, and what I’d like to read but don’t own yet. I’ll probably never rate most of the books listed there, because I read them so long ago. I’m undecided on whether I’m going to rate things at all, honestly, but I thought I’d start with some 5-star ratings for a few series I really enjoy.
  • Last.fm profile: It’s been set up for a while, and I posted about it before, but I may as well link to it. It’s mainly meant to be a catalogue of all the different music I like, since I usually listen to my entire library on random, making the listening frequencies useless. But you can also see that I’ve listened to nothing but the soundtrack to Nier for the past few weeks. I’ll be writing about that soon, but let’s just say there’s a reason I had never <3’d any songs on my profile before.
  • Read It Later archive: An RSS feed of articles I’ve read recently. Yes, it’s inelegant and nowhere near as useful as the other services. But I’ve moved away from posting things I thought were interesting in favour of just talking to people about things I know they’d be interested in (which doesn’t mean I think nobody else is interested, but maybe you would be and I never knew!). In reality, it’s going to be fairly useless - nobody’s going to keep track of all the junk I read just to find the occasional gem. There’s way too much information with no organization or context. But it takes zero effort for me to promote, since I’m already using the service (which I highly recommend), and you never know.

Also, I’m considering changing the layout of my tumblr page to ideally give a better first impression. I’m pretty sure no more than two or three people every actually see it, and one of those people is me when I want to access my tagged posts. So uh… Yeah. If you didn’t know, my main tumblr page has a tag cloud on the left side! Which is useful if you don’t share all of my interests.

I said I’d stop posting music because of Last.fm, but I’m still seriously debating whether or not to post a lot of what I’ve got floating around in my drafts. So, in the mean time, have a post about a fairly popular band. Lunar Sanctum by Kamelot, from their 1999 album The Fourth Legacy.

I really love the chorus, and the lyrics are great as well:

there’s a place where I want to hide
with a view to a shallow moon
there’s a star in my cosmic mind
that reminds me of you

Full song’s lyrics here, through Dark Lyrics as per my tradition.

And hey, actually listen to this one! If you’ve never heard of Kamelot, actually stop and listen for a few minutes. I know how many followers I have, and I see my audio posts only getting three plays!

Speaking of limited interests, if you keep hoping for wonderful Final Fantasy related stuff from me, sorry ‘bout that. I’m carrying FF VI and my DS with me, but never playing it. And if you don’t like philosophy/don’t wish you were majoring in cognitive science, I’m very, very sorry. You’re about to get pretty much a week worth of posts from me on the subject. As in, a many page long essay, but split up for somewhat easier reading.

I’m going to enjoy it, and I’ll feel like a smarty pants posting it, but you might see it them as pretentious pants. Like I said, very, very sorry. But sometimes I just can’t contain my excitement, and you know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve read a few textbooks, so now I definitely know better than everyone else! Time to ramble on and illuminate the world! Except I’m going to write somewhat well and it’ll be good, I hope. Ideally, you should understand without needing prior knowledge.

Now, it’s back to work with me. Got a Python script to finish, a bit of light reading to do. Maybe I ought to work on the computers assignment, philosophy essay, and midterm I have next week. But, to be honest, things are more or less under control. Which is a really nice feeling.

I went back to Last.fm!4

I used to use Last.fm, and found it great for getting recommendations, but at some point it stopped scrobbling so I gave up on it for a few years. I found out a week ago that when you install scrobbler and create a new account, it reads your existing iTunes library playcounts, so I did that as fast as I possibly could. Now I’ve got this nice little profile that tells you all the music I listen to, including what I am listening to right this second, and I don’t have to keep posting individual songs.

Anyway, this is just a quick post while something else I wrote is being proofread by a handful of people. You’ll see that before too long. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, maybe too much (time it takes to find two dozen research papers to read: a few hours, time it takes to read each paper: 1-2 hours, and get back to me in a week), but I’m getting back into School Mode. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be starting to run participants for a few experiments at the Language and Brain Lab, so I get to be an assistant for that! Exciting stuff.

There’s a site I found a few years back called MetalStorm, and every year they take user suggestions in various categories for “best of” awards, which are then voted on by the users. In the first few months of the new year, results go up, and I find lots of great new music. It’s a great system!


In Mourning is one of the bands I found there after their first album, Shrouded Divine, came up as number 11 on the top 20 for 2008. I feel like their second album, Monolith, was on a genre-related best of list, as well, but can’t seem to find it. Anyway, I liked Monolith enough to very seriously consider buying it, which is something I never do. I mean, I own three CDs.

Listening to the first song from Monolith today, I decided it was high time these guys got their own post. So here it is! The song’s called For You To Know, and the lyrics are here, although if you listen to the song you’ll probably realize I didn’t catch most of it. So don’t read too much into it! Just enjoy the sweet, sweet sound of metal.

It’s been a looooong time… since I’ve done a music post, that is. I’d kind of forgotten about doing them, until I started going through my archive last week. So today I bring you The Attic And The World Of Emotions by death metal band Sadist!

The first songs I listened to by Sadist were from their latest album, Season in Silence, and I liked them immediately. Off the top of my head, their other albums haven’t grabbed me as much, considering I don’t remember them much. But I really like Season in Silence, and the rest is at least good enough. Or I haven’t listened to them enough.

Lyrics here, because I still like DarkLyrics and viewing an entire album at once is awesome. How am I supposed to read a concept album’s lyrics, or notice some recurring theme, if it isn’t all on one page? Come on, internet.

Video Games Live Ottawa

On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.

        Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.

        Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.

        They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.

        After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.

        They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.

        The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.

        Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.

        If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.

        Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…

        All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.

        Everything about it was great.

Coils (0.618…) by Transcending Bizarre?, an avant-garde/black metal band.

I haven’t posted music in ages. But I was listening to this and loved it enough to rush to tumblr and post it, so there you go. Enjoy it if you’re into that kind of stuff.

I have homework to do :/ So I’m not going to start writing massive and wonderful posts just yet. I have plans, and I’m writing them down and organizing my thoughts, so it’ll be even better when I finally write. Later, that is.