The New Forum

Xbox Live Gamer Card...

Click it...

Contact Me

Songs

Shallow Sleep as sung by me

In Your Eyes from Project A-Ko

Other Things

FFXI Status

what am I supposed to do now...?

In other news, it turns out that I got a 100 on my first accounting test (not a 97, in case you read that in the forum; that was a computational error on my part). I guess that's good. I'll probably need an A in accounting to make up for sociology and western world literature, both of which I have tests in on Monday.

I also made a wallpaper today--

The only other wallpaper that I've ever really "made" before (other than resizing and/or cropping an existing image) was just another picture pasted on top of a simple color gradient that I did in about five seconds in Photoshop Elements. On this wallpaper, the picture of Link and the animal (from the upcoming Twilight Princess) and the logo (from A Link to the Past) were obviously pre-existing, but the landscape behind those pictures was done entirely by me. There are certainly things that I could improve in a future attempt, but for being my first real try at either clouds or grass, I think it turned out quite well.

9/11/05 - 1:10 A.M.
Those of you who still come here, but who never visit the forum missed an enlightening conversation in the private section on Friday evening--startling revelations, and something that I don't intend to ever say again while sober (if you missed it, or it went completely over your head, then I guess you'll never find out =p ).

You should have been there.

9/1/05 - 9:30 P.M.
I have extremely mixed feelings about how heavily online so many of my classes are this semester.

My psychology lab is entirely online, with online material and quizzes and whatnot. This would be fine if the thing was designed a bit better. The fact that one page says, "Use IE, not Mozilla", while a later page says the exact opposite, is simply one of the examples of what I'm talking about when I say it's poorly designed.

Sociology is even more dependent on online things--we have one physical lecture per week; we then have online lectures, and online discussion groups. This is still very irritating, but it's made up for somewhat by a very clear, understandable design. Everything just makes sense; it's the exact opposite of the psych. lab.

I have online assignments in economics also, but it looks like they may be okay (to be honest, I haven't looked yet).

Accounting is very boring, but at least I comprehend it fairly well for the moment.

Western World Literature is interesting, though it's simultaneously funny and a little pitiful to be discussing the Bible, and, when someone asks where all of the other people on earth came from "if all there is is Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel", and have no one brave enough to point out that Adam and Eve had numerous other children after the first two...

Oh well.

All this stuff with Hurricane Katrina and rising gas prices is a little creepy. I don't think it's the end of the world or anything, but it is a little troubling.

Naturally, some people are already blaming the hurricane on Bush (some nutty caller on WRVA said it was an attack by al Qaeda, using top-secret weather control devices obtained from Russia...).

I'm sure that things will be gotten under control eventually, but the scenes of the chaos in New Orleans are definitely somewhat disturbing. I've really never seen anything like it in my life--definitely not on that large of a scale.

On a side note, while I don't think that gas prices will ever go very low again (we may very well not get below $2 again), I do think that prices will go down in time, once life gets back to normal down south (though admittedly that could take a very long time).

What is more disturbing, though I have a feeling that this too will be temporary, is the shortage on gas. Aproximately half of the stations that I went past this afternoon and evening were out of gas (regular at least). The Raceway on Route 10, the BP on 10 and in Hopewell (in Hopewell it was only regular that was out), etc. Prices also vary dramatically from station to station right now. The East Coast on Route 10 was $3.29; the Wawa across the road was $3.05. One of the stations on Broadway here in Hopewell was $2.99.

It's definitely a little scary, but I don't think this is "the beginning of the end" so to speak in terms of gas availability, though I'm sure that some will be saying that very soon, if they aren't already.

8/15/05 - 9:00 P.M.
I just got back from a final "mini-vacation" in D.C. I took my camera, but didn't take any pictures, nor did I buy anything. We went to a few of the Smithsonian museums, and to Pentagon City, so I didn't really see much that I hadn't seen before, so it was really kind of boring, unspeakably stressful, and all I could think of was how much I would have liked to have wound time back a day or so and then freeze it for a few weeks.

8/9/05 - 2:15 P.M.
I just thought it was time for a new song.

The song is "Rondo", from Dragon Quest III (the Symphonic Suite, to be more accurate). I think it's a great example of Koichi Sugiyama's classical style, and is one of the most memorable tracks from the seven-disc Symphonic Suite box that I've heard so far. It's the kind of track which, if I heard it on a classical radio station or something, I wouldn't find it remotely out of place. If I didn't know its source, I would have never guessed that it came from a game at all. So don't ignore it just because it's "from Dragon Quest". If you like classical music at all, this one's at least worth a listen (the Symphonic Suites were performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, after all); and there's plenty more where that came from (about eight hours, actually).

8/1/05 - 12:20 A.M.
It was clear to me that I have major creative difficulties when it took me 45 minutes to come up with a name for my character in this (temporarily) free MMORPG. Having chosen a female archer/ranger kind of character type (since every other sex/class combination looked either dumb, creepy, or just ugly), I felt the need for an appropriate name.

Being the terribly unimaginative person that I am, I checked names that came to mind--"Rydia", "Reina", "Raine", "Rinoa" (don't ask what's with all the R's...), "Tinuviel", "Luthien", "Faris", all taken.

So I spent 30 minutes using terribly-made fantasy name generators to try to come up with something. No luck.

Amusingly, what I finally ended up with was "Farfa", for which there is a reason (more evidence of my uncreativity)--in Final Fantasy V, Faris's real name (Faris was the pirate in the party, who is discovered a few hours into the game to in fact be female) was "Salsa" (don't ask...), but as she was lost at see at an early age and rescued by pirates, she could only pronounce her name as "Farfa", and so the pirates came to call her "Faris".

Stupid, yes, but it was obscure enough to not be taken.

Unfortunately, as stressful and tiresome as that naming experience was, it was actually more enjoyable than playing the game. Now that was a waste of time...

I worry that my life has degenerated into the kind that I always laughed at--the guy who sits in his room all day playing games and sitting in front of a computer, and who never talks to anyone.

But the experience makes me consider something--are those people always like that by choice? We tend to think of them as "geeks" or other such things; people who isolate themselves from the world in order to sit in their darkened room all day looking at a screen.

But what I realize is that someone can wind up like that without ever meaning to, or wanting to. The transformation comes little by little, so slowly that the person may barely notice.

In their early years, they're happy and "social", and what the average person would probably call "normal, perhaps leaning a little toward the electronic".

They go through high school with people that they consider "friends", because they felt the need early in life to have as many "friends" as possible, regardless of how slight and shallow those friendships may be.

Then they start college, and for a few months, things don't feel all that different. Then a holiday comes, and things start to be shaken up. Most of the guys decide to stop going to school, and you never here from half of them again--maybe every few months, when they say something out of nowhere, and then dissolve into the aether once again, and you never know when or if you'll here from them again. Sometimes, it's the people that in your very young days were your only friend. One day, they'll go crazy and vanish, and only talk to you when they feel like it, since they don't "have to" see you every day anymore.

But, when this happens to people, they don't always notice right away, and it doesn't really bother them that only two or three people outside of their family ever talks to them anymore--not right away anyway.

They might be lucky enough to go to the same college as some people from their high school. These "friends" that they had back then might speak to them every now and then--hell, they might eat together--but these people have "real" lives, "real" friendships, and you're not a part of that--you never can be. You blew your chance years ago. You didn't participate in extracurricular activities. You never had anything interesting to say. You sat at the lunch table and listened--you were a good listener--like an El-Aurian (dammit, inner Trekkie, shut up; that's certainly never helped me), you'd listen, but because you rarely said anything, to a lot of the other people, you might as well not have been there. In 30 years, you might remember everyone that you ate lunch with by name, what they ate, and where they sat? But will they remember you--will they remember me?

College might be hell for these people, but sometimes they're lucky enough to have some "friends" there in the beginning. They don't really "meet" new people the way "normal" people do; the problem becomes worse once the "friends" that they already have abandon them. Most people's "college troubles" are when they get bad grades; these people might be smart, and don't have that problem; their "college trouble" is when everyone's schedules get fucked up and they never see their "friends" again, and maybe one day, the few people that they do see, and maybe eat with, will suddenly stop coming, and they'll never hear from them again.

The "friends" really aren't to blame though. This isn't some unfortunate "fate" that befalls these poor souls. It's a series of tragic mistakes on their part while growing up. "Real" friendships are hard to make, and hard to keep, so these people find it easier to have casual "fine weather we're having" friendships, because that makes it easier to call everyone your friend. As long as a person doesn't have an intense hatred for you, then by golly, you're close enough to be friends!

The problem, of course, is that this kind of "friendship" only holds together due to proximity; once the pair seperates, the "friendship" evaporates, and it is as though it never existed. And at the end of the day, the person may find that they don't really have many friends after all.

But the person may not mind at first. Once the summer rolls around, they'll find themselves with immense amounts of free time, and since they don't have anyone "bothering" them, they can sit around on the internet and in front of their video games all day.

And one day, they'll finally get the room-darkening blinds that they've always wanted in order to keep the light from that damned street light outside the window from shining into the room during the night, but it'll be the cheap kind of blinds that can't really be raised, so the room will end up being dark 24 hours a day--and the transformation will be complete.

If you had told me a few years ago that my life would be like this today, I would have probably hit you. If I had known my life would be like this today, I would have probably cried; but I would have tried to prevent it from turning out like this. Not that I know how.

This summer has caused a profound regression in me. The renewed obsession with Star Trek is pretty standard, for me anyway; it happens every time summer or winter breaks come around (it's hard to avoid when Spike shows five episodes a day). But I've spent much of the summer lost in thought about what could have been, what I wish had been, and what I wish I had done differently all those years ago.

10 cool points for the first person who guesses whose birthday I was talking about. I bet no one who knows even comes here anymore. Prove me wrong; please. Sorry, but the tagboard seemed to be causing a lot of problems--the page wasn't loading at all in IE sometimes, and I was getting some errors that I didn't want to take the time to fix since no one ever uses the thing. If you actually know the answer, post it in Random in the forum. ^,~

7/28/05 - 1:30 A.M.
I forgot her birthday; of course, I haven't spoken to her in three years, so I guess it doesn't matter anyway...

One day, I will learn to restrain myself from these kinds of statements when they pop into my head in the middle of the night. Until then, well...I'm too tired to decide how to finish that.

Disregard this.

7/17/05 - 11:00 A.M.
Shogo Hamada's album Save Our Ship is probably my least favorite of his that I have right now. It just moves so extremely far into the realm of hard rock ("hard" for him anyway), and beyond--including one hip-hop-ish song in which I can't even find his voice.

However, the album is not a total loss by any means. One of my favorite on the album--and one of my favorites of his in general--is the strangely-named "Monochrome Rainbow"; which is different from the equally strange PlayStation 2 game in which he stars, called "Over the Monochrome Rainbow".

Never would I have imagined that the beginning of one of his songs would make me think of L'Arc-en-Ciel, but this one did--not that the song itself is very similar to their style, just the first few seconds.

This one's a bit different than the other songs of his that I've had here, so you might want to check it out, even if you didn't like the others too much.

I know the sound quality is rather bad; rock fares the worst in an MP3->WMA conversion, and this isn't really an exception. I didn't have any other choice, though; but as always, if you like it enough, you know where to get in touch with me. I can give you the original.

7/14/05 - 3:30 P.M.
Over the past few days, I've had a breakthrough in my search for Shogo Hamada's and Tatsuro Yamashita's music online ( I have a new love of WinMX =p ). I've posted a new song, though it isn't from my latest few acquisitions. It's "Hatsukoi", from Shogo Hamada's latest album, My First Love (which was released last week). I have seen "Hatsukoi" defined as both "first love" and "puppy love"--I imagine that this is really the title track of the album, and it sounds like it--it's probably my favorite on the album.

I wish I could find some lyrics somewhere, so that I could run them through a translator, and I wouldn't have to give such a rough guess at what the song is about. His "first love" seems to be rock and roll (which would be a reasonable guess for anyone familiar with his music at all; he does say it clearly in the song, though). The song contains a good deal of English (more than most of his songs, less than a lot of current pop crap in Japan), mostly the names of bands, singers and songs from back in the day--the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, etc.

7/8/05 - 3:15 P.M.
The controversy over violence and "adult content" in video games, in entertainment in general, is nothing new of course. However, I think there's a lot of BS to sift through if you're someone watching the "mainstream" media, and who doesn't know that much about the reality of the game industry; so I think I'll try to untwist things for all of you--hey, it's better than letting this site sit for another month without saying anything.

The people who don't play games, and of course, who don't keep up with the state of the industry, you're likely to view games in one of two ways: childish wastes of time for children and men who think they're children, or as tools of Satan, designed to transform our world's children into soulless murderers and pagans.

Of course, statistically, neither of these assertions is true. More than 50% of the people who play games are over 18, and almost 25% are in fact over 50. In addition, only about 12% of the games released each year receive an M rating from the ESRB.

The media glosses over both of these facts, and paints a very different picture for parents, one filled with more lies and half-truths than Fahrenheit 9/11.

"There is no rating system." - (seriously, that is a recent TV quote)

"Killing a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto awards the player with more points." - (paraphrased, from Joe Leiberman, I believe)

"All games are violent!!!!" - Donny Deutsch, The Big Idea on CNBC

"Grand Theft Auto promotes the rape of women." - a female guest on the same episode of The Big Idea, and an even bigger idiot than Deutsch

"Grand Theft Auto teaches children how to kill police officers." - paraphrased, 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Jack Thompson, I think

"[The rating system] is a joke." - my English professor; pure ignorance

That's enough of that, I guess.

There is a rating system, of course, which Joe Leiberman, the game industry's former arch enemy, has called the best rating system in the whole of the entertainment industry. There are no "points" in GTA, so it doesn't matter who you kill; you're not getting any extra ones. GTA doesn't endorse the rape of anyone.

60 Minutes made the assertion that a teenager was educated by GTA on how to slip his handcuffs around to the front of his body, how to pull a police officers gun from his holster, and shoot him with it.

Now personally, I'd love to know how that game could be so damned educational. It's like when we were all expected to believe that Lee Malvo learned how to use a sniper rifle solely from playing Halo. It's ludicrous.

Some raised a good point a few days ago--one cause for the mass media uproar over games is simply that it is a desperate attempt to damage their popularity, because simply put, video games are too popular. That is, they draw many, many, many people away from other activities, like TV watching. And that has TV stations worried, so they're doing everything they can to draw people back away from games. And that's why they feel justified in making up such complete lies.

That is not to say that there is not a problem in the industry. Many retailers that don't deal exclusively in games, like Best Buy, have started ID'ing customers who buy M-rated games. I think that's a very good idea, and I don't have a problem with it at all. If a ten-year-old wants to get their hands on GTA, they're going to have to do it through their parents--one improvement that I think could be made is that in cases like this, retailers should still make the rating very clear to the buyer; some parents still don't even look at it. If I owned my own independent video game store, in fact, I would likely refuse to sell an M-rated game at all if it appeared that a parent was buying it solely for their child, and the child was under at least 13 or so. Realistically, it would be hard to do something like that these days, because it's difficult to know when it's the parent playing, and when it's the child. I was in EB one day when a man and his son (maybe six years old) came in, and the kid saw the cardboard standup thing for MGS3, and insisted that he wanted it. The father seemed interested, and I'm not sure whether he intended to buy it for himself or for the kid (if it was for the kid, then of course he should have been dragged into the street and shot); so it's hard to tell in a lot of situations.

I was trying to build up to a point, but I seem to be failing. What I was going to say was that I think that a little more responsibility on the part of game developers would go a long way. That's not to say that their creative freedom should be restricted. However, I think that they are tranforming the industry into something it should not be, and from which it might not be able to easily return, and that worries me.

Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, said that long ago, the gaming audience split into two groups--there were those who lost interest and quit playing, and those who continued, grew up, took over the industry, and are shaping it into the thing they want to be; and when the group that left gaming long ago looks back, what they see is an industry that doesn't at all resemble what they remember, and in which they feel alienated.

The problem the industry faces today, particularly in the U.S., is a vicious cycle of growing bloodlust among "mainstream" gamers. I don't believe that games turn children into monsters, but I do believe that developers have possibly opened the pathway to their own destruction, and the demise of the industry itself, at least in the U.S.

The American game industry has seen fit to limit itself almost exclusively to three things--racing games, sports games, and games about shooting things and causing general mayhem, and has succeeded in making these things (particularly the violence-fests) seem cool both to adults and children, and it is these games that the mainstream jumps on almost exclusively. The problem, as Iwata noted, is that people who aren't enticed by these things are left out in the cold. And there is no indication that U.S. game developers plan on changing anytime soon, because they have created a convenient business model for themselves. With racing games, all they have to do is throw in a few more cars and a few more tracks, and millions of people will be glad to give them $50 for their "new" game. With sports games, they shuffle players around to reflect the latest roster, and collect their $50. Once GTAIII came out, companies realized several things. One is that games don't need good graphics for the mainstream to buy the game--it just needs to be bloody enough. This has resulted in a series of GTA games that have been incremental improvements over their predecessors, simply set in different parodies of American cities. It has also resulted in hundreds of imitations that have attempted to cash in on GTA's success.

This way of doing business can only support itself for so long. Atari caused an industry crash in 1983 by permitting anything and everything to be thrown onto store shelves ("Custer's Revenge" and "Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em" are to examples of such titles). The industry is now headed in the opposite direction--putting out derivative trash year after year, and being scared to take creative risks, because the risks never pay off in terms of turning any profit. Eventually, one of two things will happen--either the creative developers will be forced to pull out of the U.S. and focus only on Japan, or the U.S. industry itself will collapse from oversaturation by Maddens, Midnight Clubs, and Grand Theft Autos.

Nowhere is the differentiation between gamer mindsets in Japan and the U.S any clearer than with the current handheld battle between the DS and PSP. In Japan, the DS has a nearly two-to-one lead over the PSP, while in the U.S. in May, the PSP outsold the DS by more than five-to-one, in spite of the fact that no PSP games were even released in May.

One cause of this, someone has said, is that the Japanese are excited about the fact that the DS provides an experience that truly cannot be had anywhere else, while the PSP merely provides games that can still be experienced, and in superior form, and for nearly the same price, simply by sitting in front of your PS2.

Apparently, that is exactly what American gamers want, and if it is, then they are fools, plain and simple. They have been suckered by Sony into buying handheld ports of old PS2 games, and in some cases paying more than for their superior PS2 counterparts, simply because they are handheld.

Twisted Metal on the PSP has online play. Guess what--Twisted Metal Black does too, costs half as much, and looks, sounds and controls twice as good.

Hot Shots Golf is available on the PSP. Guess what--Hot Shots Golf FORE! is available for the PS2, looks better than Open Tee, costs $10 less, and has online play.

Ridge Racer is a very good game, and is still worth buying on the PSP, but guess what!--for barely half the price, you could buy Ridge Racer Type 4 and Ridge Racer 5, and be justified in feeling that you came out ahead.

Wipeout Pure is a good game, but you're going to have to tell yourself that the graphics and portability are worth the fact that you could just buy the classic Wipeout XL for the PSone for about $5 instead.

I don't even think this a problem only of ports, either. Take Coded Arms for example (the recently-released first-person shooter for the PSP). It costs $40, and has, at best "troublesome" control, due in part to the fact that the PSP's analog stick is pitiful. Now, what you could do instead of buying Coded Arms is buy Halo for $20, or even Unreal Tournament 2004 for $20-30, and you'll have games that look and play a hell of a lot better (and UT2K4 will have online play), and your only trade-off will be that Coded Arms is handheld. Kirby: Canvas Curse is a fine game that feels like no platformer ever before, but wait...oh, that's right...there isn't anything like it anywhere else, much less cheaper and better.

My point? The PSP's library right consists almost entirely of games that were released on the PSone or PS2 2-10 years ago, and which would arguably be better games for the money if you simply bought the originals. The DS is host to games that are unlike anything available on any system before it, like Pac-Pix, Yoshi Touch & Go, Kirby, and Meteos, and the games cost less than games on the PSP. People who have already sold their DS should be ashamed of themselves, especially if they used the money to buy a PSP. Of course, if playing your "TV" games in a handheld is your idea of a good time, then this whole point is moot. Try a DS, though, and see what it feels like to play something different for a change.

How the hell did I get on the subject of the death of creativity in the American game industry...?

What I was supposed to be leading up to was the apparent discovery recently of a sex mini-game in GTA: San Andreas.

This is a complicated issue. On the one hand, it's not even clear whether the mini-game is from actual Rockstar code in the game itself--though given the fact that people are reportedly able to do this on the PS2 and Xbox as well, it would seem that it is.

I think that Rockstar doing this in the first place was a bad idea, but what they did that was even worse was making the content inaccessible in normal gameplay, but leaving it on the discs, and not telling the ESRB about it.

I think that the industry has two choices right if this mod does in fact unlock "real" Rockstar code--either Rockstar removes the code from new releases of the game, or the ESRB gives it an AO rating.

I've seen video of the content in question, and though the player's character remains clothed, the fact is that the scenes are idiotically explicit, and if they don't require an AO rating, then the AO rating itself will have been made irrelevant.

This is a bad news story to have break during a period of heightened media attention to game content. I hope that Rockstar and the ESRB handle the matter properly.

7/1/05 - 1:45 P.M.
Nothing else of interest to report right now. I've uploaded a new song, though--"Like a Flowing River" by Hibari Misora. She is possibly the most well-known singer in modern Japanese history (I've seen her mentioned in several music history books in the library at VCU), and was extremely popular shortly after the end of World War II. This song was released in 1989, the year she died (at age 50), but it doesn't sound very different in style from her music in the 1950's (rather similar, just with better recording quality). In a 1997 poll in Japan, the song was voted the #1 Japanese song of all time. While I'm not really ancient enough to agree with something like that, I think it does have a rather timeless sound that isn't common in modern Japanese music, and that's probably why it was rated so highly. This is a song that will probably be remembered in Japan for decades to come, long after today's cookie-cutter pop groups fade into nothingness.

6/25/05 - 3:00 P.M.
Another month, another update--a much longer one this time.

I was in the Outer Banks for all of last week (staying in Kill Devil Hills, specifically). I had intended to mention that here (as opposed to just in the forum), but I forgot.

Anyway, the trip was wonderfully relaxing overall, though I suppose I've enjoyed some earlier vacations a bit more (but don't ask me why; I don't really know).

We stayed in the same cottage that we've stayed in probably 10+ times in my life (and which my grandparents stayed in before that). And here's a picture of it, complete with a newly placed sand dune in front, since the previous, and much higher, one was washed away in a storm years ago--

We ate out for lunch more often than we did for supper, but most of the places were still good (and most of which we had never been to before).

On Sunday we ate lunch at the Weeping Radish in Manteo, my grandfather's favorite place for beer, and the source of the bottle opener that I carry with me everywhere. We go to the Weeping Radish every time we go to the Outer Banks, but we rarely eat there--my grandfather goes for beer, while everyone else and I go next door to the Christmas Shop & Island Gallery. Their website can't hope to do the store justice, so if you've never been there, the site probably won't make you care, but if you have been, then hopefully you know why I insist on going everytime we go to the beach.

There were three other restaurant highlights. The first was Meridian 42, which we went to on Friday. The food was very good, though the portions were unnaturally small, being the snobby establishment that it was. My problem with the restaurant (though I doubt it would stop us from going again) is that the staff was not overly friendly. Someone thought it would be good business practice to open at 5 P.M., but to have the doors open well before then so that people could walk in. This would be fine, except for the fact that if you do come in before 5, every one of the employees will carry on as if you are utterly invisible. They will not look at you, will not speak to you, and will not acknowledge your existence in any way until exactly 5 P.M.. Of course, once they do pay attention to you, they don't become much more amicable. They're just very...stiff, or something like that. The food was very good, though, so for now (or until yesterday evening at least), I could ignore it.

Thursday night, we went to Basnight's Lone Cedar Cafe. The "Basnight" refers to Marc Basnight, a member of N.C.'s state Senate (his wife and daughter own the restaurant). The restaurant is supposedly Andy Griffith's favorite (he apparently has a private dining room and entrance, and helped fund the restaurant's renovation a few years ago), and the food is indeed good. One thing I determined from our visit is that swordfish is one of the only fish that I can eat cooked, because unlike most cooked fish, it is soft and flavorful (whereas with a fish like tuna, cooking it makes it tough and tasteless--which is why almost all of the "fancy" restaurants in the Outer Banks tend to serve it rare).

The dining highlight of the week though, in my opinion, was Argyles, which we visited last night. The quality and presentation of the food easily matched that of Meridian 42, while at the same time the atmosphere and friendliness of the staff blew Meridian 42 out of the water.

We dropped by the restaurant in the morning (they open at 5 P.M.), so that my mother could check about the average prices, menu and whatnot. When we arrived, the owner was outside watering the herb (and flower) garden (it seems to be fashionable these days in the Outer Banks for restaurants to have their own herb gardens--the Lone Cedar did also). When we arrived again at ~4:50, we saw him again watering the garden (though he assured us that that wasn't the only thing he had done that day). It's worth noting that we arrived about ten minutes before opening at both Meridian 42 and Argyles, and the difference in the way we were greeted was like night and day. As I mentioned earlier, at Meridian 42 we weren't greeted at all, whereas at Argyles we were instantly (after another brief conversation with the owner) escorted to our table. One amusing thing is that the owner came to our table a few minutes later, and talked to us about the history of the restaurant, and that his wife was the executive chef and whatnot, and he said he was going to go home and take a shower, and come back later. The funny thing was that he never actually left, and was still walking around talking to customers when we left. I guess he just likes his restaurant too much. =p

I guess there's a lot more that I could say about the trip, but as I've been typing this off and on for about two hours, I think I'll do the rest of my pictures and be done with it.

This is a southward view of the coast from the beach right outside our cottage, with the Avalon Fishing Pier in the distance, taken near sunset--

This is a sand castle that I thought was reasonably impressive, and since it looked like a wave would destroy it within the hour, I took a picture of it--

This is just a view of the western sky from our driveway on Virginia Dare Trail, at sunset--

This is a picture of the central portion of Scarborough Faire in Duck, which we visited on Thursday (if I remember correctly)--

There are a couple of things that I regret being unable to get pictures of. One was a cottage a few miles north on VA Dare Tr. that was called "Sailor Moon", and actually used the show's U.S. logo for the wooden sign that was hanging on the front of the cottage (there is another cottage named "Ten Forward", but I didn't think that was quite as interesting, and I couldn't remember where it was anyway). Another picture I wish I had taken was one of the exterior of the Weeping Radish (which would have looked a little like the above picture of Scarborough Faire, except a little less colorful, and slightly more Bavarian). The picture I really regret missing, though, was of the puffer fish that a man plucked from the water about 10 feet from where I was standing in the ocean. If you didn't know, puffer fish are these things, of course--

That's not the same species that the guy picked up, but you get the idea. It didn't blow up in a perfect circle like that, but when the man blew on it, it did inflate a little bit.

The only downside to yesterday (since the puffer fish sighting, and Argyles, were both very nice) was that I got a pretty nasty sunburn on my back (the first in my life, in case anyone was interested). I'm doing better now, though, so everything's fine. =p

While I'm at it, I want to briefly review two things; one game, and one movie--

Batman Begins is easily the best Batman movie ever (make of that what you will), though I think it suffered from the same problem that Revenge of the Sith did, in that it took an incredibly long time to warm up, but made up for its slow beginning in the end. Christian Bale makes an excellent Batman, though what he does a better job of is showing what laughable choices Val Kilmer and George Clooney were for the job.

Overall, the acting was superb, which is a surprise for a Batman movie (a Batman movie released in the past ten years or so anyway), and it just generally looks and feels very good. I think my dad enjoyed it more than I did, being the Batman fan in his youth that he was. Overall, I'd recommend it to anyone with even a tiny bit of interest in Batman (and really, even to those without it, though a bit of background knowledge probably helps).

Since I'm running out of time, I'll say briefly that Kirby: Canvas Curse (for the DS) is brilliant, and, though short, is finally the killer app that the DS has been starving for for seven months. Well...I hope it doesn't take me a month to think of something else to say here.

5/26/05 - 10:30 A.M.
In the unlikely event that you care about this kind of thing and haven't seen the thread in the forum, I'll wrap up E3 for you--Sony announced the PlayStation 3, Micrsoft announced the Xbox 360, and Nintendo announced the Revolution. They're all probably going to be great systems--buy all of them. I am. =p

I've uploaded a new song (and gotten rid of the previous two)--"Season of Light and Shadow" (my translation, for lack of an "official" one), by Shogo Hamada. His most recent single (from April), I think that he's just as talented at 53 as he was in his 20's, and this particular song is already one of my favorites of his. I apologize for the sound quality; the original was a 192kbps MP3, but it sounded like it had originally been lower. The file was too large to upload here, so I had to use WMA again, which degraded the quality further. As always, if you want the MP3 version for some reason, just ask.

5/15/05 - 8:30 P.M.
Yes...I'm still alive. I've been very busy, though, and can't say that I've had much of anything worth saying, since virtually no one actually speaks to me anymore.

Normally I'd say something amusing or interesting here, but I still don't have anything. I just figured four weeks was long enough to finally update this page again.

Several of my grades are still out (coincidentally, the two that worry me), but three are in--A's in calculus and art history ("Survey of Western Art II"), B in philosophy. Overall, better than I was expecting, though it was tremendously stressful getting there.

I'd like to do a lot more with this site over the summer, so if you still actually come here, I expect to be updating more often than I used to.

Better yet, you could say something in the forum from time to time. Ironically, the daily post count isn't that bad, considering that there are only three of us left (four if you count Nick, who made a recent return, and Jasmin, who posts something once ever month or so). It's still extremely sad, though, that things were so active in the middle of December, and as soon as Christmas rolled around, everyone seemed to forget that I ever existed.

What worries me more, though, is that I've gotten so used to being alone that it doesn't even really bother me anymore. Now that is scary. I know that I'm probably the weird one--the one with no real responsibilities right now, the one free to do virtually anything I want all day; people are so busy with everything else that they have to do that they forget that I'm still here, and so weeks go by without me hearing from them at all, if I do hear from them. When they talk to me, it oftens seems like they feel that they're just fulfilling an obligation to speak to me every month or two, so that I don't kill myself or something.

When did I become the person that no one talks to?

Just for that, I have a new song up, and I'm not going to tell you what it is. Maybe one of you out there will have some fond memories--I did; the rest of you will probably want to kill me. If you do, then please--try. At least I'd see you again.

Brannon, El Dorado's still waiting.

4/20/05 - 1:10 A.M.
If you can't access the forum right now (and you're using the raines-pub.net.tc domain), I refer you to this thread in the forum.

Basically, I would advise that everyone who has been using the .net.tc domains stop doing so and go back to the actual domain (which for the forum is http://s4.invisionfree.com/Winhill).

I apologize for the inconvenience. I know that I'm probably overreacting, and that Smartdots may very well be back in a matter of minutes, but you never know. I just think this is a better idea at this point.

All of my links either to the site or the forum, either on one of the sites, or in my AIM profile, should point to the real URL of the site now, so you can always find the right links there if you need them.

4/14/05 - 11:45 P.M.
My wonderful computer here has served me faithfully for 18 months now, and I have had no complaints during that time.

During a routine reboot today, my BIOS notified me that it couldn't detect my DVD drive. "WTF?," I said. Of course, Windows didn't detect it either, and since it was a BIOS thing, not something with Windows only, a System Restore didn't fix it. I've pretty much exhausted my options at this point, and I don't really know where to go from here. The computer is still covered by a Gateway warranty, but as I'm unable to be sure whether the problem is with the DVD drive, the BIOS, or the motherboard (all of which were absolutely fine until ~5 hours ago), I wouldn't know what would need replacing, and I'd look like a fool if they gave me a new DVD drive only for it not to work.

The thing that bugs me is that I think something happened during an attempted installation of Starfleet Command. Well, actually, the installation worked, but I had to apply a patch, and then, I only had it working for a few minutes before I had trouble and decided to reboot to see if that would fix it--that's when my DVD drive stopped working.

Right now, there seem to be two possibilities, both fairly outlandish (in my opinion)--

1) It's a hardware issue. That is, something, whether the DVD drive, the motherboard, or the IDE cable connecting two, stopped working properly at precisely the moment that I rebooted. This is so incredibly remote that it seems stupid to consider it.

2) It's a "software" issue. What I mean in this case is one of two things--either a freak occurrence happened with the Starfleet Command installation that managed to mess up the BIOS (this doesn't seem likely)--or it was a malicious attack, presumably by the patch. My problem with this is that if it were true, it would certainly make me look stupid. I was so desperate to get Starfleet Command working properly (I've had it for years, and it never worked right--I found step-by-step instructions today, which appeared in various places around the internet) that I ignored several fundamental safety precautions.

First, I didn't verify the source of the patch. To be honest, I still don't know where it really came from, but something about it has me puzzled--and the end of the "patching", it installed a No CD Crack (literally, it called it a "No CD Crack", and the text that accompanied it resembled a typical "Look at us cool crackers" tag line--not very official-looking). I had also disabled NAV while applying the patch (disabling anti-virus software is rarely necessary during installation of something, though sometimes it is recommended--my mistake in this case may have been disabling it without verifying the source of the patch). The only thing that puzzles me about this is that the patch has spread all over the internet, and was linked to by likely the largest unofficial Starfleet Command website on the internet. So if there's a problem with it, you would think that someone else would be having trouble (and saying so).

Because of this, I'm reluctant to jump to conclusions and say that the patch is to blame. However, I can't think of anything else that could have done it. If an installation had affected the DVD driver or something like that, I could understand it (and I could have fixed it in a matter of minutes). The fact that it rendered the BIOS unable to detect the drive really bothers me, and I'm just exhausted, and not sure where to proceed. I'm just lucky that I don't use the drive very much. My only concern is that I have no simple means for data backup right now. If I had to back up all important files on this computer, the best case scenario (at this moment) would be that I could spend hours (really--hours, more like days...) transferring all of my stuff to the computer downstairs and burning it to CD. The problem is that that could easily require more than 100 CD-Rs (~$30 that I don't have right now).

That said, I don't see a data loss catastrophe as being at all imminent, but to me at least, that is the ultimate nightmare. I've suffered the loss of a few hundred pictures and songs before, but if it were to happen to me on this computer, with thousands of pictures, songs, videos, games, etc., much of which is for all intents and purpose irreplacable, it would be like a tornado demolishing my house.

I guess I'm being a little dramatic considering that the data is not currently in any danger, but this feels like going on a cruise on a ship with no lifeboats. The odds of an emergency are low, but if something happens, you're screwed.

3/30/05 - 12:00 A.M.
Absfree seems to be back, but I seem unable to log in. In the meantime, I really wanted to get another song up, so I'm just going to use Geocities this time. The good news is that since it's a relatively short song, I uploaded an MP3 instead of a WMA file.

The song is "Mexican Flyer", which was used as the theme of Space Channel 5. What I didn't know until a few days ago, though, was that the song was actually composed by Ken Woodman, and was released way back in the 60's. The reason it came to be used as the theme to SC5 is somewhat interesting--Tetsuya Mizuguchi's staff came across it somehow on an old record that must have been laying around, and when they showed Mizuguchi their concept video for SC5, they used "Mexican Flyer" as the background music. Mizuguchi loved it, and when they said they thought it was from 1965, the year of Mizuguchi's birth, he decided that he simply had to use it in the game. So he did.

It has a very distinct 60's sound--it wouldn't have been too much out of place if it had been used as the theme of Austin Powers in place of "Soul Bossa Nova". So check it out. =p

3/19/05 - 6:00 P.M.
I simply can't find another free host like Absfree, so until further notice, there won't be any songs here. I might just go back to WMA in the future, but not today.

3/16/05 - 1:30 P.M.
It seems that Absfree, which hosts all of my music, has gone down. Whether this is permanent or not, I don't know. However, as a result, none of the songs links from before today work.

I don't have time to deal with it tonight, but hopefully I can find a new host soon.

3/14/05 - 11:45 P.M.
Am I the only one who feels like the entire rest of the world has gone crazy in the past six months? So many people seem to have quit school and are now running around doing who knows what--WECS is being destroyed by a nut with delusions of grandeur--and it seems that there remain only two people on this planet outside of my family who even talk to me anymore.

Someone--give me a reason to be happy.

3/11/05 - 1:15 A.M.
The school is changed: I feel it in the hallways, I feel it in the classrooms, I smell it in the restrooms (perhaps not...)...Much that once was is lost, for none now attend that remember it.

It began with the forging of the Great Rings.

Five were given to the elementary school...the youngest of all children.

Three to the middle school, something, something, I'm too tired to make this up.

And Four...four rings were gifted to the high school, which above all else, desires power...or something.

For within these rings was bound the strength and will to govern each classroom.

But they were all of them deceived...for another ring was made.

In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a Master Ring to control all others...and into this ring he poured his ego, his selfish ambition and his will to dominate the sacred school.

Sauron, thy name is Collins.

I really need to go to bed...

3/5/05 - 12:15 P.M.
I remember when we got our first "modern" computer here at my house (that is, the first computer that we bought following several years of not having one, after a thunderstorm destroyed the previous one)--I was in 3rd grade, and it was, of course, a Gateway (back when they were called Gateway 2000, and were located in North Sioux City, SD). It was a 66MHz Pentium running DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. We (I) first got on the internet several years later. But, I didn't do much on the internet except support the campaign to save Sailor Moon, so all of that is irrelevant.

When we got our next computer, a 266MHz Pentium II with Windows 95, I started downloading a song here and there. But, our internet connection was 14.4k, so it was slow going, and since it was slow going for everyone back then (and at that time, the MP3 format hadn't really been established yet--we were all listening to MIDIs, and if we were really obsessed, spending hours downloading WAVs--I was not).

But, over the course of a few years, and right as MP3s were becoming widely available (do any of you guys remember MP2? I do), I downloaded a few songs that meant a lot to me at the time. These songs included "Kanashimi yo Konnichiwa" from Maison Ikkoku, "Lahan" from the Xenogears arranged album Creid, "Stars of Tears" from the Xenogears OST itself, "Oh Angel" from Fatal Fury the Motion Picture, "Good Luck" by Megumi Hayashibara, "One-Winged Angel" from FFVII Reunion Tracks, and many others that I can't think of right now. These songs weren't necessarily the greatest things in the world, but they were my first experience with Japanese music outside of video games (as an aside, I credit my childhood experience with 8-bit and 16-bit video games for my enjoyment of electronic music today)

These were the songs that I listened to again and again. But many years ago, tragedy struck. I don't remember which crash it was (personally, I don't remember a crash, but I know there was one), but at some point, we had to reinstall Windows, and I lost my beloved songs (and a few precious wallpapers that I have never been able to replace.

And thus, I began the long, difficult process of tracking down all of these songs again. Unfortunately, our computer crashed at the same time that The Musical World of Final Fantasy went down once and for all. That had been my source for half of the songs mentioned above, and I thus was unable to get them from there again. To make matters worse, I had obviously lost all of my internet bookmarks as well, and this was back when Yahoo was the search engine (in other words, search engines were still about as reliable as asking random people on the street for URLs).

So, my resources were somewhat limited. Back in those days, something far more common than good search engine were link sites--websites that were nothing but huge sets of links (I know they still exist--The Anipike is a shadow of its former self, but in today's Google internet, they're simply no longer necessary). So, my best bet was too dig through The Anipike's media link section, and keep my fingers crossed.

Well, that got me nowhere.

Until about two years ago, I had been searching with absolutely no success (I had been searching for at least two years by that time). But, slowly, song by song, I was piecing together the golden music collection of my younger days. And tonight, I have found one of the final pieces in that collection--"Oh Angel".

And thus I present it to all of you as tonight's song.

I first heard this song long before I actually saw the movie from which it came, and I loved it from the first time I heard it.

So...enjoy.

However, it seems that every time one problem is solved, another one worse than the last surfaces.

Over time, I have come to dislike the WMA format (which is why my use of it here until recently was done with great reluctance). Initially, I liked it because in theory it allowed one to have a song that was half the size of an MP3 of the same perceptible sound quality (64kbps instead of 128kbps).

So, over the course of several months, I went about converting my entire MP3 collection to 64kbps WMA. This consisted of probably 2,000 songs, most of which had been downloaded years prior (remember Audio Galaxy? That's where 70%+ of the songs had come from--AG had been "out of business" for more than a year by this time).

This seemed like a great idea at the time. But...when I was done, I noticed something very disturbing. Actually...I didn't. But I read somewhere on the internet about it being stupid to convert from one "lossy" format to another (to spare you the technical details, yes, converting from MP3 to WMA was a horrible idea based on this). After I read this, I went back over my collection, and realized that indeed, the songs sounded horrible after the conversion. But the damage was done. I had effectively destroyed hundreds of songs that I had spent years of my life obtaining, and because many of my sources no longer existed (aside from Audio Galaxy, many of the songs had come from Napster, or simply from websites that no longer existed).

I spent months replacing many of these songs, and simply trashing many others; especially now with my iPod--the iPod isn't directly compatible with WMA, but can convert the files to MP3--the last thing I want to do is the convert the files again.

Even as I type thing, I have spent the past eight days in an intensified effort to get MP3 recordings of the opening and ending to Rival Schools United By Fate (which I got from Audio Galaxy many, many years ago, and destroyed in my mass WMA conversion several years ago), with only partial success (I got the opening, which I don't even particularly like--I have not found the ending).

The moral of this story is...never convert your music to another format if you value sound quality, and keep backups of music that is important to you.

More re-discovered music as I find it. ;)

3/5/05 - 9:00 P.M.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know the countdown form thing messes up the border of that line or whatever, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to fix it. So there. =p

I have three tests next week. T_T

2/19/05 - 12:15
In this world, there are many different kinds of people. Some have the ability to write brilliant songs, but by most standards, couldn't sing to save their soul. Bob Dylan is one of those people.

Others can sing quite well, but wouldn't know a well-written song if it bit them.

Still others are "gifted" with looking absolutely gorgeous--in the right light--and they can sing. That is, they can sing a few lines, and have a computer use its patented "Remove Suck" technology to make them sound 100% better than they actually are.

Then, once in a blue moon, someone comes along who is both a wonderful songwriter and a spectacular singer. They can create breathtaking melodies, and write lyrics that can transcend even their own language. These people can have nearly flawless singing voices so marvelous that you could listen to them sing for hours and not get tired of it.

I've placed Shogo Hamada on a high pedestal before, but I know that I've also had an awful lot of his music here. So for a bit of a change of genre and language--if you ignore some of the more recent music here--when it comes to music in the English language, one of the first names that comes to my mind when I think of these kinds of singers is John Denver. Last year, his "Definitive All-Time Greatest Hits" album was released. The album features remastered recordings of more than 20 of John Denver's most well-known songs. Even if you've got some of these songs already--even on CD--I'd be willing to say that these are probably the highest quality versions of them that you can possibly here at this time. Of course, when you consider that I've been previously been listening to many of these songs only on LPs from the 60's and 70's, that might not mean very much.

But regardless, John Denver is truly one of my all-time favorite singers, and that is why his remastered original recording of "Poems, Prayers and Promises" is tonight's song.

And about that "transcending their own language" thing--this album includes pictures of the Japanese releases of many of John Denver's singles. Not particularly remarkable, I suppose (The Beatles 1 did the same thing), but I thought it was interesting.

Enjoy.

I guess this is where I ruin what I had hoped would be a more "insightful" post, for lack of a better word.

I realized just now that one of my MP3 links has been broken since 12/31, and no one ever told me (where is Brannon when I need him?). The problem song was Shogo Hamada's "Blues After the Rain". The corrected MP3 link is directly under the newest song link to the left.

2/15/05 - 9:30 P.M.
I fear that the fact that no one lets me know that they still come here has had the unfortunate effect of making me not think things through before I write them.

I had two tests today. I think they went quite well, all things considered--I might have gotten an A on both.

But...I find myself unable to relax. I don't know why. I feel uneasy, and I can't identify a cause.

Something isn't quite right.

My calculus grade isn't so hot right now...but it's not that.

One thing is...no, not her...something else...it's...Ah! There it is. It seems that I can still stop myself before I say something stupid.

Or perhaps not...take your pick.

Five seconds...why don't I ever get more than five seconds anymore?

2/14/05 - 12:00 A.M.
To any girl who finds this relevant, happy Valentine's Day.

There's another new song, not necessarily related--"Perhaps Love" by John Denver (with Placido Domingo).

Enjoy.

2/7/05 - 9:26 P.M.
I find myself having ever-increasing doubts about my ability to make it as a computer science major.

Last semester, Math 211 ("discrete mathematics") nearly killed me. It is the kind of math that I absolutely despise--the sad thing is that right at the beginning, I said to myself, "I can do this, it's all logic". Then they started proofs, and by the time they got to induction, I was dead.

I got an A in the course. In my opinion, it's because the instructor was far too liberal in his grading. After tests, he would let us take the graded tests home and re-work the problems that we had missed for half credit. The first homework assignment that he gave us that he actually graded, he counted as pure extra credit, which raised my grade almost a full letter.

My test grades ranged from the high 60s to the low 90s. And my final grade was a 91.

But, the real problem is that he didn't get through even half of the material that he had on the syllabus. This wouldn't have been bad, if it weren't for the fact that CMSC 301 ("discrete mathematics", again) were virtually a direct continuation of that. Going into the course, it was assumed that we had convered the expected stuff in Math 211--so, right now, we're doing "review" on stuff that I've barely seen before.

It doesn't help that I was bad at it to begin with.

And this is the math that is supposed to be essential to "good" programming.

I'm doing okay in my programming class, in my opinion. My test grades in CMSC 255 weren't too hot, but I got perfect scores on my projects, and in the real world, it's the code that matters, not test grades.

However, I worry that I'm fooling myself into thinking that because it's simple to write a program to count the occurrences of a letter in a paragraph of text, that it will be easy for me to write a complex piece of software for some huge corporation someday. That concept scares me, and I'm faced with the possibility that what the reality is is that it's simply not for me.

Some people like to doodle. It's their hobby. However, these people could not be professional artists, nor could they be art historians. I think that over the past few years, I have been fooling myself (not without "help" from a lot of other people in my life) into believing that because I can sit in front of my computer all day and tell people that Internet Explorer sucks, or sit in front of a TV and play Zelda all day, that I could actually make a living as a programmer. "It's good money" they say. Reality hits--you work 80 hours a week, seven days a week, with no overtime, and no free time, and not a very high salary. That is not the life I want. If I'm not going to be paid much, I don't expect to be doing much, especially not working myself to death writing some complex program for which I will get virtually no credit.

But I'm trapped. My scholarship requires that I be in this major, or something very much like it (I pretty much have to stay in the school of engineering, or do something computer-related in the school of business). If I change majors to something else, I'm screwed, and at best, my parents have to pay an ass-load of money to keep my at VCU, and at worst, I'd have to get 20 jobs to pay for it myself.

I feel the walls closing in, and I don't see a way out. Nor, when I look around, do I see anyone to turn to. I can sit here at type this crap, and cry all day, but it won't change anything. Almost everyone's abandoned the forum, and the ironic thing is that no one seems to come here either who doesn't come to the forum, so I might as well be crying to a wall. I never see the people at VCU that I want to (no offense to the people that I sit with on occasion, honestly) anymore, and I feel like I pay $1.50 every few days just for the privilege of talking to Dustin for ten seconds (no offense to him or the store; he cheers me up, and I've been going to that place since I was two years old anyway). I feel like I'm isolated from almost everyone, geographically speaking.

What do I do? Assuming I don't fail CMSC 301 and lose the scholarship anyway, do I continue telling myself ro the next three years that I can do this, and half-kill myself doing so, only to end up in some dead-end coding job in some cubicle somewhere, cut off from friends, family, and anything resembling a social life? Or do I throw the scholarship away and hurl myself into the uncertainty of having no idea what I intend to do with my life (since, honestly, I think the reason I chose "programming" was partly so I wouldn't have to make up something to answer all of those "what are you going to be when you grow up?" questions)? Obviously, neither of these is preferable, but I just don't know what to do. I think I could study that math for days, and never get the intuitive grasp of it that seems to be expected. I was never cut out for programming. I was not "privileged" enough to have had any experience with it before college, and I find myself here in a bunch of people that seem to have been programming since the day they were born. I just don't know if I have the strength, or even the mental ability to "catch up". I've always been skeptical of the insistence that I was a "genius". Math has not been "easy" for me since 9th grade. It's been an almost daily struggle every since.

I don't know what makes me feel worse--the fact that I find myself seemingly incapable of excelling at that which I told everyone was what I wanted to do in life, or putting a huge scholarship in jeopardy--one worth more than $20,000, which everyone was so proud of.

I feel sick.

Now I'm the one who needs a hug...but I guess that makes no sense to any of the people that actually come here anymore. Don't worry about it...

2/5/05 - 5:00 P.M.
Sony is releasing the PSP in the U.S. on March 24th, for $250. I'm not immensely happy about that, and I think it's a bad move businesswise for Sony. However, I'm "celebrating" regardless by posting a new song here--"Lights" by Eri Nobuchika. It is more or less the theme to Lumines, the Music/Puzzle game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Space Channel 5, Rez), which will be available for the PSP at launch, and is so far one of the most anticipated games for the handheld. It's not the best song in the world by any means, but few songs are (only one is, actually =P ), but it's still rather good for Japanese pop these days, and it fits Lumines rather well, I think (it does in the commercials anyway). So check it out...or something.

I apologize that it's WMA this time. The MP3 that I downloaded was 320kbps, so it was over 12MB, which is simply to much to upload (or expect any of you to want to download). dBpowerAMP for some reason no longer provides free MP3 encoding, so I wasn't able to simply reduce the bitrate. So, I converted it to WMA--but 128kbps, so it sounds a bit better than the WMAs that used to be here--though not quite as good as the 320kpbs MP3 version. If you find that you're really nuts about the song for some reason, feel free to IM me or something, and I can send you the MP3.

1/25/05 - 2:30 A.M.
It's 2:30 A.M. Welcome, everyone, to another of those times where tiredness overcomes me and makes me write things that I'll be embarrased to read the following morning, and which will make me wonder what on earth I was thinking.

Right now, I'm thinking it's time for another song. It's been almost a month after all. So..."To All the Girls I've Loved Before", by Willie Nelson (and that other guy whose name I'm too tired to recall at the moment).

I still don't think it's quite hit me yet that WECS is over (both for me, and as far as I'm concerned, for everyone within a few years as long as Fuhrer Collins is in power). It's been nearly eight months since I attended a class at the school. It's been seven months since I've seen or talked to many people that I considered good friends. There are five people from WECS remaining that I seem likely to see with any regularity, and three of them weren't even in our class.

How is it, that in our modern society, where people can converse from opposite sides of the world instantaneously, that we should become so disconnected in such a short time?

Christmas, it seemed, was just long enough to make all but three of us forget the forum entirely, and so, I can count on my hand the people that I still communicate with regularly. It's depressing, really. Much like at WECS, my interactions with people are based solely upon chance meetings throughout the day. The difference now is that I can think of less than ten people now with whom I could have a chance encounter on any given day. It was sad at WECS, and it's sadder now. It seems I, like a lot of people, deluded myself into calling everyone that I ever talked to a "friend", and then, the moment we graduated, I never heard from any of those people again.

And I find myself feeling alone now more than ever before, because now my schedule more or less prevents "chance encounters" anymore. Am I the only one who only talked to two people that I didn't know during the first semester--and naturally, haven't seen them since (and they would have probably forgotten me by now even if I did)?

It's childish to think that everyone would stick together after graduation, regardless of how "close" our class was. However, I find, now, that I was never one of the "in" people anyway, no matter how much I made myself think I was back then, and so, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that almost no one talks to me anymore.

But anyway...yeah, there's a new song. I had been laying in my bed for the past half hour, thinking about all this crap, and this song popped into my head. Don't ask me why. Honestly.

Some of you never knew. Others of you knew all too well. Now, even I don't know anymore. Just...yeah, whatever...

1/8/04 - 11:45 P.M.
As if anyone were actually interested...yes, I know that the FFXI journal hasn't been updated in a month. I'm way behind in the Conquest updates...blah, blah, blah. I've got the maps sketched someplace, but I don't have dates on them, and each one takes me nearly twenty minutes. Honestly, I find that I enjoy the game more when I'm playing it than when I come here and pretend to do some kind of political climate news report. That misses the whole point.

So...unless I come up with a much faster, easier way to do them, I don't think I'm going to be posting Conquest maps anymore. I'm not even sure that I'm going to update the "journal". The boring stuff gets really old, and isn't interesting to read anyway. The interesting stuff takes me forever to type.

So here is what might be the last "real" journal update for some time to come--

I've made a bunch of money--relatively. I reached level 41 as a warrior. I got Rank 5 about an hour ago. Some strange "girl" (for convenience, I will refer to everyone by their in-game gender, while trying to remind myself that the female Hume who smiled "at Firionel in a flirtatious manner" two days ago could be...is probably a 28-year-old dude living in his parents' basement somewhere. And it's not as if she had a reason to act like that anyway.

I'm rambling. The point is, I have a friendly (albeit small) linkshell now, and I'm rather happy with the way things are going in the game.

Not much is going on in the real world. Very few people talk to me anymore. What else is new?

12/31/04 - 9:00 P.M.
Happy New Year's Eve...or something. I'm here at home by myself--or as alone as I ever am in my house, anyway. Oh well.

Three months ago, there were perhaps three people that I had seen in real life that I would have said were "beautiful"...now I see them everywhere I turn...what has changed...?

The above, my friends, is why we do not run up an escalator that is moving down. I went to Short Pump Town Center a few days ago, and as I was in a great rush, and the "up" escalator was crowded (while the "down" one was empty), I decided that I would go upstairs via the "down" escalator.

Everything went smoothly (albeit dizzily), until I reached the top, at which point I tripped, fell, injured all four of my appendages (the picture is obviously my left hand, but I also scraped my right palm, hurt my right knee, and bruised my left leg).

But...I bought Super Mario 64 DS shortly thereafter. My least favorite DS purchase so far--Touch! Made in Wario is one of the best games ever, by the way, and is a perfect use of the DS's unique functionality; while Super Mario 64 DS exemplifies the way in which not to make a DS game.

I know I haven't posted much lately, either here or in the forum (the forum's been empty lately anyway)--I'm four weeks behind in the FFXI journal, in case anyone reads it, despite a lot of in-game activity in the past two weeks.

I got a bunch of Shogo Hamada albums (and one Tatsuro Yamashita album) in the past few days, some for Christmas, others I bought with Christmas money. So, naturally, I have some new songs available from download, one from each album (or disc, actually) that I got. I'm sure I'll have a few more in the near future.

First, from disc 1 of J.Boy, "A New Style War", which as far as I can tell (from the English translation in the liner notes) is a song about the threat of terrorism and nuclear proliferation (among terrorists?)--"A New Style War". Strange to come from a Japanese rock singer in the mid-80s...oh well. A Very good song nonetheless.

Next, from disc 2, "I Miss You". This is a bit different from the other version of the song that I have (from the On the Road "Films" DVD--the other was a capella, whereas this one obviously contains a noticeable bassline. It's debatable which version is superior, but I'm putting this one here now, since it's one of my "new" songs.

From On the Road, "Desperate Generation", a song that I have as part of a medley on the On the Road DVD. I really like the song, but honestly, the problem is one of the recording, I believe. On the Road is the first Shogo Hamada album I've heard that I'm actually disappointed by, not because he sounds bad, or because the songs are bad (both are great), but the quality of the recording seems somewhat lacking, as if muffled somehow. It's a live album, but so is Road Out, and it's not a problem there. Oh well; it's still nice to have, since I can't get some of the songs anywhere else.

From Road Out, "A Place in the Sun". Yes, it's English, and it's relatively the same version that Stevie Wonder sang all those years ago (I must confess that I'm not sure where the song actually comes from originally), and Shogo's version is my favorite, so it's worth checking out. His English is quite good as far as Japanese singers go (though not as good as Tatsuro Yamashita, who could almost pass as a native English speaker)

From Shogo's first album (which I have yet to translate, but it's romanized as "Umareta Tokorowo Tooku Hanarete"), a song that I also can't quite translate the title of, but for the time being will call "Blues After the Rain" (which is probably right, but I can't be positive yet). The interesting thing (to me) is that it's the song that is played for only about five seconds at the end of the last track of AIDO, which was AIDO's first album (AIDO being, of course, the band in which Shogo's career was born). It's just kind of tacked on there for some reason. The last track ends, there is silence for ~15 seconds, and then that song comes in for maybe five seconds (or however long it takes to sing the first line), and is abruptly cut off. Aside from that, I simply like the song. =P

Lastly from Shogo, "Ave Maria", a song that many of you may be familiar with, though obviously not the one sung by Shogo. I think he sings it very well (even my German grandmother, the classical music nut in the family, thought his version of the song was quite well done).

And last, a song from Tatsuro Yamashita, from the soundtrack to "Big Wave" (can someone please find me some proof of the existence of a movie by that name? I have yet to find any)--the appropriately named "Theme of Big Wave". Yes, most of his music sounds the same, so if you don't liek the other songs of his that I've had here ("Love Space", "Mermaid", "Jody", "Your Eyes", etc.), you probably won't like this either. I can say, however, that all of Big Wave is in English (mainly because half of the tracks are Tatsuro's renditions of Brian Wilson songs).

Enjoy, and there's plenty more where that came from.^_^