01/15/08 by Garvar at 10:36pm EST
Time just keeps on flying by without my consent. How obnoxious.
The clock is ticking on the due date of my first University-related pseudo-DE assignment. This does not bode well for my productivity toward the site, or anything else - I cannot allow myself to fall behind in this course a second time, as it's already $780 out of my pocket. For a single course that's pretty damned expensive.
So before we start weilding our pitchforks, torches, whiskey, straw hats, overalls, Las Plagas, and whatever else we have hidden away for a rainy day,
BRW's back, baby!
I mean, if you were expecting something other than a Transmission Log comic you're not paying very close attention to what's going on in the plot, but a surprisingly large amount of work went into this comic, in the name of Season Two's kickoff. So enjoy it.
And pray for weekly updates.
01/14/08 by Garvar at 11:58pm EST
Yay, another day, another excuse. Had another serving of shit thrown onto my plate today, which killed a lot of desire to do anything constructive. And so, I didn't do anything constructive.
I didn't even accomplish anything unconstructive, actually. I was doing the fourth Dark World stage in Disgaea2 (you know, the really fucking tough one where all the enemies are invulnerable and can't be reached so you need to fuck with those walking geosymbols? That one.) at the ripe young level of 100, and came really close to winning after 30 tactical rounds, but some priest bitches thought it'd be great to giga-heal every round while Adell was left to hold the geosymbol in place (I had only 3 units left on the map) so it was quite a lost cause. 90 minutes of mind-wracking skill flushed down the toilet because of some bitch.
Well, I'm bitter, and it's well past my bedtime. Maybe we're lucky and it left a sour taste in my mouth so I won't even touch the PS2 tomorrow and get some actual stuff done, academic and BRW alike.
01/14/08 by Garvar at 12:42pm EST
Posting from work !!!
Either it's due to the fact that I haven't been expected to prove anything yet or I'm just presently ignorant to the tirades of grief that are to come, right now, I
love my job. Today is just flying by - I should have enough work to keep me preoccupied for the next few hours, which is great, and last night I figured, you know what? Maybe making posts to the news page
still isn't easy enough yet. Perhaps I should follow the footsteps of the Dr. P of ages past (dosquared.twinkfish.com, since deprecated) and make a php script for
submitting posts, rather than exclusively maintaining them (to be honest with you, I've actually taken quite a few sloppy shortcuts to make this present script easier to write). Doing so would give me safe and fair testing grounds, as well as a lot of reusable code, for this upcoming "public commenting" implementation.
Oh, the thought tickles my soul~
01/13/yy by Garvar at 10:57pm EST
The post everyone has been waiting for!
Hold your fire. We're delaying things another day...things have not been going according to plan lately, and it has just come to my attention that a certain shit-disturber I thought I had dealt with has gone into full-blown CDI.
Once the whole ordeal is gone and dealt with I'll be sure to post a beauteus rant about it, but for now, I
promised myself I would set aside some time for writing, and it looks like I've got maybe 45 minutes at
best of that time left.
Again, apologies for the lack of re-launch, but it will be coming very shortly. I've noticed traffic to the site is up, and the "Unique sites" counter is kind of like a measure of my motivation and dedication to the project.
So the more dedicated traffic (ie people) you get going through the site, the more results you'll see coming from my end. Honest.
01/13/08 by Garvar at 12:34am EST
I've been too busy today to get anything BRW-related done, so the comic is coming tomorrow (technically today in my timezone and eastward) and code development is postponed until next weekend at best.
I say "at best" because I remember an obligation I have to my academics that I almost forgot until earlier today: the widowmaker software development course that I had to bail out on last year has come back for round two, and I'm not using another extra life on that shit, so it's going to take priority over web coding. It won't get priority over comic-making, as that's
far less time-consuming, but the code might not come around for a while now, it looks.
Oops. Oh well.
01/11/08 by Garvar at 6:02pm EST
I figured it out.
No, not whether I was doing a comic or a code binge for the site. I figured I'd try to do both in that respect, but that's not what I'm posting about.
I'm posting about
yesterday's post. I was informed that it wasn't "like" my other reviews, which I guess is a format people enjoy, but I shrugged the speculation off as I wasn't sure of it myself. Yes, I knew it was different, even while writing it, but couldn't pinpoint why. And now I've got it.
It's the exact
opposite of what I normally do with a YMS article. It was not in the song selection, but in the methodology used when reviewing it. I'll make a note to myself to not take a dip in quality in the future.
So, with a lack of actively engaging activities at work today, I snooped around the webserver a bit to familiarize myself with the catastrophe I'll soon be inviting upon BRW. I'm pleased with the results. Hopefully by the end of the weekend we'll see some results.
Planning to launch season two of BRW as well. Stay tuned.
01/10/08 by Garvar at 8:17pm EST
Your Music Sucks, Volume 3
I haven't done one of these in a while, so I figure I'd pick apart all the many flaws of yet another "If you think this song is good and insightful and well-written and whatever you're a fucking tool" sort of song. Today's victim is:
"In The Name Of God", by progressive metal band Dream Theater. Also the first thing I heard from them. Lucky me.
First of all, this song is
over fourteen fucking minutes long. That's almost enough time for me to write (read: revise) this article! What the hell's going on in this fourteen minutes? Let's find out.
And the track title itself? "In The Name Of God"? We all know how that's going to play out in the lyrics, so let's begin:
How can this be?
Why is he the chosen one?
It isn't explicitly stated who 'he' is. God? Jesus? Both are excellent candidates for people being chosen (presumably for something great), but there's nothing definite about who, or for what. All that I can derive from this is that the chosen one is decidedly
male. Phew, that's good news.
Listen when the prophet
Speaks to you
Killing in the name of God
Passion
Twisting faith into violence
In the name of God
I think the second paragraph here speaks louder than the first, even if it was originally intended to back the first up. It's a pretty good example of how people are worthless cowards that can't even take responsibility for their own stupidity.
Amen.
Hundreds of believers
Lured into a doomsday cult
All would perish
In the name of God
Self-proclaimed messiah
Led his servants
To their death
Eighty murdered
In the name of God
So, you're talking about Jesus being a false prophet? Or maybe I should pretend there's a deeper meaning behind this and it's actually talking about politicians using their position of power to spread propaganda to their "followers" to push their own agenda on the world? Or maybe it goes beyond even
that and refers to anyone who abuses the trust of another because of how rotten human nature is? I'm on to you and your introspective possibilities.
Underground religion
Turning toward
The mainstream light
Blind devotion
In the name of God
Justifying violence
Citing from the Holy Book
Teaching hatred
In the name of God
And here we have the notion that when you strip the personal and sentimental values away from something to make it more appealing to the public you're destroying what you originally cherished most. I think a prime example of this would be
In Flames. Hang on a second - you weren't taking a stab at another band, were you? Kind of unsportsman-like.
Damn introspective possibilities.
Religious beliefs
Fanatic obsession
Does following faith
Lead us to violence?
I don't know what to believe and it makes me so angry!!!
And on that note, I'm going to break away from the lyrics now. Offering my speculations has its limits, and it's unlikely that a sizeable portion of the population would see eye-to-eye with me on this. It's kind of tough to say whether the lyrics are to be taken at face value, or the entire song, including the whole "God" thing, is a metaphor in itself. However, Dream Theater is more known for their "musical" properties than their "lyrical" ones, especially considering many of their songs don't even
have lyrics, so let's take one last look at this song from a compositional standpoint. Bear with me. It gets bumpy up ahead.
Song starts with a slow, acoustic intro. Clean, not too repetitive...it isn't given the chance to be repetitive as the rest of the instruments are soon to come forth.
The drums and keyboard are both very easy to hear here, playing an interesting little riff, and the bass just basically backs up the sound to make it more solid. This tune continues to play until the vocals come in, killing out the keyboard and softening the drums a bit.
But how
are the vocals? Right off the bat they're belted out in a desperate sort of "No, don't leave me!" kind of tone, but they soon blend into the song fluidly. I'm sorry, I thought the vocals are supposed to stand out as someone propagating a message. Since when are they used as an instrument? What the
hell?
If that wasn't enough, the song mixes things up even more to have more than one riff before we even reach the chorus, which of course has
another riff, which is followed by yet
another riff before they get to the second verse which has a riff
different from the riff used in the first verse. There's quite a lot to listen to, here.
What the fuck are you trying to do? Did you write originally write like five different songs and then decide to smush them altogether into one song just because they happened to blend well? Maybe...and to be honest, I wouldn't blame you. The riffs do blend into one another quite well.
When we get back to the chorus (at last) we hear something we've already heard before. That's a change of pace. Or rather,
lack thereof. We do another bridge/verse which leads back to the chorus, and then guess what? No, not just
another sound to go with the next verse, though that's there. Not
just that.
A guitar solo pops up right after. It does a number, and then the rest of the instruments join in full force for a balls-first
instrumental.
And then
another. Just in case we didn't get enough, a third solo comes in. And it's backed by a fucking
piano.
You're awfully inconsiderate for doing this, you know that? What if I wanted to learn this song in a single afternoon in order to impress my friends? The level of technicality is almost insurmountable here.
After that's over, we get a taste of the beginning post-acoustic riff, and then a build-up to the chorus again. The chorus' riff is heard with a few tweaked elements, such as the chiming of a bell (a church bell perhaps? Get it? Oh I am so clever...) as the chorus and a verse or two are sung, and then another build up to a denouement before the song ends.
I'm sorry, was I listening to a song, or a
movie? The ending was kind of very coherent, and dare I say an
ending. Not simply a fade out, not simply a finishing touch, but a full-on ending.
There you have it. Fourteen and a quarter minutes of your life gone.
And well spent?
In case you haven't clued in, I thought I'd take a stab at making fun of a song that
I enjoy. It was a hell of a challenge to sound serious without sounding satirical and I tried to set aside as much bias as I could when writing this (and in fact, adopted bias toward the other side, which led me to
revise the first draft into what you see here) but let's face it: you have your opinions on music, I have mine; you have your taste in music and I have mine, but Dream Theater is just
a better band than Billy Talent and The Pussycat Dolls, and probably every other YMS band I'll review.
I listened to this song
three times while writing this article, but
oddly, for
whatever reason, the 45 minutes of this song
wasn't repetitive...kind of
unlike the
4 minutes I listened to of "Don'tcha".
01/08/08 by Garvar at 8:56pm EST
I have just finished backing up BRW in its entirety in case catastrophe brought down through public malice and personal negligence sees reality.
This doesn't mean we should prepare for the worst; I spent four hours fighting Oracle on both Windows and Unix today, and the fever from spending that much time attempting to simplify a database backup hasn't entirely subsided yet. I'm still walking the grey line of whether to go ahead and
attempt to create a public comment script (which I sincerely believe is a simple task - one that can be made simpler thanks to recycled code - which I will complicate exponentially as I think more on it) or to drop the idea, for now or entirely, and continue on with BRW. I'm not really leaning to either side at this point in time, so I must ask the question: what do you, the public audience, will of me?
Oh, wait...you can't answer that. I haven't implemented it.
What a refreshing Catch22 situation.
