Ambient Music

Lately, I've been listening to ambient music more frequently. I think I've developed a taste for it - at least the sort of slow moving, spacey kind. What interests me is the kind where it's essentially a set of chords which are drawn out over a long period of time. I don't mean slow like ASLSP; I just mean long enough that you can really think about what every chord sounds like.

Anyway, so I took this idea and turned it into my own piece of music. It's on my YouTube channel:

I don't want to brag here, but I really like listening to this song. But enough of that, I want to explain how it works:

The piece, in its written form, consists of 30 distinct chordal changes. What I did was I played each part, individually, on a synthesizer, extending each chord for as long as I felt sounded right. Since it is fifteen minutes long, this averages out to a change every thirty seconds.

Somehow, this kind of slow progression seems to hold my attention. Maybe it's because of the ringing reverberation between notes? I don't know. Anyway, what do you think?

Journey Review

Ever since I played thatgamecompany's Journey back around April, I've been wanting to review it, but I'm not really sure how to approach it, since it's been reviewed many times, and they all basically say the same thing, but since I don't want my blog to die, I'll just sort of say whatever.

Visuals
One of the most critically applauded areas of the game is the visuals, and I can't disagree. They aren't quite realistic, but still are quite impressive - more like a painting than a photo. That being said, the distinct visual style doesn't take away from the immersion - in fact, it's executed so well that it really adds to the game. Particularly the ending scene (I won't spoil it, just take my word for it, or play the game if you haven't!). I think what gives it its distinct feel is the texturing, which is much more minimal than your average game. The only thing is, sometimes there are some wonky camera angles, like a nice view inside a block or something. But that doesn't happen if you don't try to put the camera there, I guess.

Audio

I'm sure you've heard before about how awesome the music is, and how it's really haunting and stuff. I don't want to reiterate, but it really is. There have been great video game soundtracks before, but I'd go as far as to say that this is the greatest video game soundtrack of all time. I mean, even the emotional ending of Puccini's La Boheme can't compare to the emotional ending of "Apotheosis".
One thing, however, that hasn't been mentioned are the sound effects themselves. There aren't an overwhelming amount, but they do their job nicely. They're convincing, and there are some memorable ones, certainly. I can't really complain in that regard, except maybe the player interaction noise gets annoying sometimes.

Story
I'm not really sure what exactly the story is, but that's a good thing, maybe. Obviously, you're trying to get to a mountain, but with all these ruins and cutscenes, it really hints at something deeper. It's not a huge narrative, but rather it implies that something huge and mysterious happened a long time ago. It really makes you think.

All that being said, I have missed one critical part, which is other characters. Remember, it is online, so you can encounter other people. In that regard, though, you might be a bit disappointed, because it seems quite rare now that I ever meet someone in-game, and even when I do, they leave fairly quickly. I guess I can't blame people, because with no new content, there's not really any reason to keep playing. For that reason, it kind of seems like thatgamecompany wanted to make an awesome online game, but they never really thought through the implications of doing so. "The curse of the online game", if you will.

Summary:
Awesome game, looks beautiful, great soundtrack, mysterious, a bit lonely, buy it now!

Myst Movie Update!

Oh my goodness! Excitement! Pure excitement! I'm ecstatic! I am overwhelmed with euphoria!

http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25844

Happy Birthday, Blog!

Today is my blog's first birthday! At least, I think so. I can't remember if I did my first post on the day I created it... oh well. I can't even remember what inspired me to create it- I remember that I made my YouTube account about a month earlier, so maybe that had something to do with it. Oh well, doesn't matter. It's hard to believe it's been an entire year! Well, not really, but I thought its actual birthday was on the 16th, which would've been good so I could make its birthday coincide with the 100th post (this is the 93rd), but yeah. Blah. Here's to another great year of The Nature Of Our Universe! (I'm starting to get tired of that name)

By the way, I should have a new video on my YouTube channel soonish.

WWW

Who invented that acronym, anyway? It's terrible. I mean, try to think of any other acronym where the original is easier to say than the letter. Try comparing "doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou" to "world wide web". Why does there even need to be an acronym. In fact, why does it exist, anyway? Whose idea was it to have "WWW" in front of everything? I mean really, the only people who bother to put useless junk in front of words are french people. And even then, it's just a few letters that determine what gender a particular word is.
But anyway, I got a new microphone. It's known as the "Blue Snowball", and it's very good. I was going to put up an audio recording-ish thing to my YouTube channel just to test it out, but iPhoto decided not to work, so now I'm just sort of going to grump around until it starts working again.

Also, how come I never use indentations when I'm writing in my blog? I do it everywhere else.

Drum Test

I uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel. It's a sort of drum loop. Take a look:





Yeah. The end.

Elephant Bum

Yeah!

I was using my iPod on "the bus" today, when I saw a Wi-fi notification pop up. I didn't get time to see it, so I went into settings, and this is what I saw:

Yes. It was HILARIOUS. Isn't that a high resolution display?

Rules Are Meant To Be Broken, Right?

Okay, so you may remember that in this post, I mentioned that I wouldn't announce pageview milestones unless they were in thousands, since if I were to do hundreds, I'd need to do them every few weeks (which I don't want to). But I'm breaking that promise just once. And this sort of proves my point, because just look:

That's over 300 views in a month. Whoa. That's a LOT of milestone posts, since in this month I would already have done three. And, if you read this blog even every once in a while, you'd be tired of those pointless posts. See, I don't want to lose potential followers by making boring posts like these, or, by extension, seeming like I'm boasting about how many people have seen my blog. That's not what I intended, I just wanted to share my progress with people, but it will probably be interpreted that way. Anyway, carry on. That's all I have to say.

External SuperDrive

As some of you may know, I currently own an 11" MacBook Air. It's a great, portable, powerful computer, but the lack of a disk drive can (occasionally) be a bit irritating. You can sort of "borrow" someone else's disk drive, but it hogs the bandwidth on that network, and it's often laggy. But anyway, I didn't really think I'd need a disk drive much, but there have been a few times where I'm sitting somewhere, and I see a DVD I'd like to watch, but then I remember, "Oh that's right, I can't.". And then I have to go get a big heavy computer that can. But now there's a solution to that dilemma:

THE EXTERNAL SUPERDRIVE.

This thing is great. It's this tiny aluminum case, with just a small slit for the CD to go into. It can read and burn CDs and DVDs. It's actually kind of neat, because it takes in the CDs a lot faster than the one on the MacBook Pro and the iMac. The first time I put a disc in, I was quite surprised when the disc just shot in there. It reads the discs really fast, and it's quite quiet after the first little bit. It's almost as if it reads the whole entire disc in the first few minutes, then just lets you watch without noise for the rest of time. Anyway, I got one, so here are some photos of it and (for the first time on this blog, actually) my computer: (I apologize that these are rather low quality images, but I took them with my iPod under low light)

There they both are.

Now the laptop is open, and the DVD for "Naqoyqatsi" is sticking out.

And the DVD being played, flawlessly.

So, summary: Another great product from Apple. Works beautifully. The end.

Oh and by the way, just a quick message, I encourage you (whoever you are) to comment! Go ahead! It only takes 30 seconds, you don't need an account, and I want to know that these hundreds of views aren't just robots that randomly browse the internet.

Stop SOPA and PIPA!

You may have noticed that my title has changed to "SOPA and PIPA suck!". I am aware that many sites are currently down to protest, but I don't have enough freedom with blogger to do this. I've thought about setting up a server, but that's a few years down the road for me. And most sites are only doing this for a day- whereas I shall have this title up for as long as SOPA and PIPA are still looming, or even pass. Anyway, I have a little video which will explain everything:




Anyway, yes. That's that. Also, to defy the censoring stuff of SOPA and PIPA, I'm taking the path of passive resistance. I'm going to include a link to copyrighted content on my blog in every post until SOPA and PIPA are de-um... anyway. The point is, if entertainment companies didn't want their stuff freely on the internet, THEY SHOULD NEVER HAVE DIGITIZED IT. I know there are people who will hold their camera in front of the TV, but really, who watches that? No one. Anyway, here's today's share of copyright infringement:




And, just a side note, I have just found my new favorite poem:


The voice in his head 
never stopped for breath,
it spoke of danger, 
it warned of death. 
It shouted, "Hurry, 
pack up and flee!" 
And all before his morning pee.




Chuck Lorre is pretty odd, isn't he?

Random Chemistry Facts Daily

So one of my friends is doing this thing where he posts random facts and stuff about chemistry on facebook. It's a page called Random Chemistry Facts Daily. Anyway, I just thought I'd put it on here because it's kind of cool, and since my blog is starting to get a noticeable amount of views each day, I'd promote it here. Anyway, yeah.
Also, I made a windows cursor set, and I tried to post it here, but I can't figure out exactly how to do downloads. At least, not on blogspot. If anyone knows how to do this, I would very much like that, and it's really quite good.
Also, between the time that I started writing this post and wrote the above sentence, I became an administrator of Random Chemistry Facts Daily, simply so that my friend may refer to his self as 'we'.

EDIT: I suppose I should include a link...
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Random-Chemistry-Facts-Daily/172700132831873

EDIT (27/02/2012): The page has now been deleted. It wasn't me!

A huge increase in stuff

Remember how I've been starting to talk about how many pageviews I'm getting? Well, it's not just that I'm all proud of myself for getting nearly 500 views* (which I am, by the way), but it's mostly because there's been a huge, huge, huge huge huge, kinda big increase in the amount of views I'm getting. Let me show you what I mean:

In August. Three views. Notice the large increase in the following months.

Now, in January. 3 views. The difference is, that's one day. Today, January first, I have gotten the same number of views I did in the entire month of August.

So, yeah. I just wanted to share that, because I think that's kind of neat. And the Bible is still in production. Although I haven't been working on it as much as I would have liked. But I have a good reason!

I didn't want to.

No, I was busy.

No I wasn't.

Yes I was.

Okay, whatever.

~FIN~

*EDIT: 500? I have no idea what I was talking about. 400 is obviously what I meant.

?

Yes, this post needs a question mark.

Wow.

Not to insult creationists or anything, but really, it's kind of hard to take you seriously when this is the kind of crap you're trying to argue with.

Snow! Finally!

Well, not any real snow, but over at youtube, there's a very exciting virtual snowfall. Take a look:

Anyway, yep. If you haven't seen it yet, it's on display on channels and videos and stuff. I'm not aware of the specifics, but it can be seen! And by the way, I'm not putting in a link for youtube, because if you need the url for youtube, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to use the internet...

Anyway, on that note, I have one thing to say:

How To Play Riven On Mac OSX

I apologize in advance if I've accidentally already made a post like this one.

If you're a Myst-loving Mac user like me, you'll be very frustrated that you can't play most of the Myst games on modern Macs. When it comes to Riven, unless you're willing to wait for realRiven (StarryExpanse.com), there's only one option:

Thanks to the work of a few dedicated individuals, there is now a simple application which allows you to insert your Riven disc(s), and it then installs it so you can play it any time. It's very good, it works with Lion, Snow Leopard, Things, Stuff.
Anyway. So I tried installing it a few months ago, but, much to my dismay, when it finished processing all the discs, the files would self-destruct without warning. So I thought, well, I'll just copy the files over manually. It can't be that hard. I did so, and it was able to play. However, I hit yet another roadblock. Whenever it got to the point where my five-disc version would ask you to insert disc 1, the game crashed. So I decided, arr, the loot belongs to us, matey! In other words, I gave up and pirated the DVD version. It was so much easier. I have no idea why I didn't just do that in the first place. From there, I did the automatic install, and it worked perfectly. Summary: don't use CDs. Use the internet.
Anyway, I'd recommend this method for anyone who doesn't want to spend time looking for their disc(s), trying to get the formatting right or whatever you might have to do. Or, if you have a MacBook Air like me, or any other computer lacking an optical drive, do it as well! So, here are the necessary links:

Riven X:

Click me!

Riven DVD Edition Torrent:

Download!

And, if you've been in a coma for the past 10 years:

Shame on you! (just kidding)

Hovenbeet Strikes Again!

I'm on a weekend trip to Toronto right now. Tonight, I went to a restaurant known as "Alice Fazooli's". They had a piece of artwork on display called "Simple Twist Of Fate". They had a little comment book thing, so see if you can figure out which one I wrote:

Anyway, yeah. Silly me. And if you're so interested, here's the actual picture. If you look at the label, it's going for $600, which is quite the bargain in my opinion, so I wonder how she even makes a living, unless she makes one painting every two weeks, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Um, anyway. Here's the picture:

So, moving on to other stuff. In a few of my posts, I've mentioned, SOPA, or, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Anyway, as I've said, I do not feel like explaining why it's so bad (it's not because I'm cheap. 'cause I'm not.), so just read their latest email newsletter madoo:

------------------------------------

Alexander,
Holy moly.  We did it -- at least for now.  The House Judiciary Committee looked certain to vote for the Stop Online Piracy Act today.
Instead, because of the work of so many rank-and-file Internet users, the bill's lead sponsor acknowledged that our concerns are legitimate, and adjourned the committee without holding a vote!
Of course, there's always more to be done.  Will you shoot a quick email to Harry Reid to tell him to stop pushing the Senate version of the bill?  He's threatening to call a vote in January.
Here's Wired's take on what went down:

The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set – a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today.

It's amazing work: Politicians are, for the first time, having to contend with the Internet as a political force -- and we might actually win.  
But now we need to focus attention back on the Senate, where Marjority Leader Harry Reid says the PROTECT IP Act will be the first bill he calls for a vote next year.
Will you let him and your Senators know that they need to stop pushing this legislation?  It's an election year, and they don't want to do any heavy lifting.  Pushing hard now could get them to back down altogether.
Keep up the great work.
-Demand Progress
P.S. This week has been incredibly inspriring to all of us, and it'll probably inspire your friends too.  Will you let them know what just went down?  Just use these links:

	If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends.
	If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet

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One last thing -- Demand Progress's small, dedicated, under-paid staff relies exclusively on the generosity of members like you to support our work. Will you click here to chip in $5 or $10? Or you can become a Demand Progress monthly sustainer by clicking here. Thank you!

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------------------------------------

THE END (not really)

Also, I want a ferrofluid. So much.

~FIN~

Blah

Don't feel like explaining this one. Just go here and sign their petition of whatever:
http://demandprogress.org/

D'ni Font

So as many of you people who may or may not be reading this on a regular basis or just happened to stumble upon my blog...
Um, anyway.
I am a large fan of the Myst series of video games, and also the culture they revolve around known as the D'ni.
The D'ni were a very sophisticated race, and Cyan Worlds has done a very good job at making that sophistication show through. They've thought through every aspect of their race. In fact, one amazing person known as Richard A. Watson, employed at Cyan, has made a language and unique lettering system. As a result, it is inevitable that a fancy font would arise, and therefore it is inevitable that I would have have that font. Here's a sample of it:

As you can see, if you looked at the large version, the detail is very high, and I wasn't anywhere near being zoomed in all the way. Anyway, that being said, you can download the font here:

http://linguists.bahro.com/essentials/Dn______.TTF

You can search pi here:
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

Um, yeah, that's just a random thing. I don't have a good reason for including it.

Now, if you haven't noticed, I've altered the look of my blog slightly. It now uses Times New Roman as a font in some places, because I believe it is serious looking enough to make it look like things should be taken seriously, or at at least important, but not so intimidating that it gives my blog that scary, high-tech internet look, which abides by my philosophy of the internet which is that it should be for everyone and not just technology people who don't feel intimidated by this whole "internet" thing. [ALERT ALERT MELODRAMATIC SENTENCE AHEAD] As a technology person who doesn't feel intimidated by this whole "internet" thing, and, as it probably evident by now, is obsessed with detail, I feel that this change of font is a good deed for humanity.

Did you know that the internet was originally developed by a team led by some guy called Tim Berners-Lee? Queen Elizabeth II decided to knight him for some reason. But really, Tim's just this guy, you know? Anyway, I feel way more comfortable with the internet (not that I ever wasn't) now that I know who the people were behind it. And actually, something cool, there was an original webpage for the internet, explaining what the project was about.

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

What the heck?!

So I've been looking through a lot of my traffic sources lately. The top one is this:
http://www.massprofitsites.com/?hop=diamondium
And I've had another top one that is like that, but it's called "mobile money machines" and uses a "backdoor" of the internet to get you money. I'm pretty sure these things are just a stupid scam, but why SO MANY WEBSITES?! And how did people get redirected here anyway? RRRGH! I hate when I can't figure stuff out.

Anyway, another thing I wanted to talk to talk about is that THE COVER FOR THE BEETHOVENIST BIBLE MIGHT BE DIFFERENT THAN I POSTED! OH MY HOVENBEET! Anyway, so yeah, it's probably just going to say "MIG", or be like the one now, but have something completely irrelevant in the background. So, yes, that's all for today. The Beethovenist Bible is still in progress, and might be coming out sooner, but probably later.
MIG