this website has moved
Jan 15, 2022 #Well, not exactly, but that's an eye-catching title, right? This website has been updated to version 10, so every new addition to the blog or dream diary will be here instead: /10/. I don't think anyone has this shit bookmarked or anything, but just in case you do, please jump ship immediately, /9/ fucking sucks. There are also themes on /10/ like I said I'd implement them all those years ago so yeah, check it out.
this post is fueled by pure hatred, madness, and pain
Jan 21, 2021 #I came back from the dead only to ask, have y'all heard about something called "soup 0.9"? If not, it's a weird ass game with similar aesthetics to LSD Dream Emulator. It's way simpler though, you just walk your way through 25 cubic areas and then you're done. The OST was used in some "weirdcore" videos, which is how I found out about it in the first place. And for some reason, when I saw it my mind instantly went "Yooo, I could make one of those video essays about this. It's a small game, I'm sure I could drag it out and make it into a video. How hard could it be?"
Enter Sony Vegas® "Pro" 17. Vegas is by far the biggest piece of shit video editing software I've ever had to suffer through. Garbage UI, dozens of bugs, awful performance, so on and so forth. Has it really been through 17 versions? It sure as hell doesn't look like it. They only added ONE shitty dark theme a few versions back and it still lags like nothing else. Virtually nothing changed. If anything it feels like it got worse. This is supposed to be lighter than, say, Adobe Premiere. It lacks tons of its features, so it makes sense right? Then why does my video preview, on "Draft (Half)" quality (on a scale from 0 to 10, that's 1.2) still have so many lag spikes. And it only happens when there's a transition like a fade-in or fade-out or some new effect. Bruh, just render that small part I'm currently working on and play it back. It would be way more efficient.
Nevertheless, I was dedicated to the creation of this video, so I put up with Vegas' garbage performace and hourly crashes (that I'm willing to bet are scheduled) and the first problem to tackle was format. I had a chungus script ready and managed to track down the dude, but I had nothing else. Then it hit me, I don't really need anything else. I'll just make it a slideshow. I have S_Shake after all, the wobble should keep the viewer interested enough.
But what about the background? Another genius idea struck, but a painful one this time. Ideally, I wanted something abstract, but simple, so I decided I'd code a bunch of randomly generated polygons a.k.a. triangles. But how the fuck do I do that? I then remembered some tech channel from a while ago and how it was shilling p5js, so I looked into that. Processing (the language) works by redrawing an image on a canvas on every other frame, so it blew my mind that the amount of shit being drawn barely impacts performance.
So after spending a few minutes looking through examples, I did my best to write my polygon generator. I picked my go-to binary color scheme and resorted to fucking with the alpha channel if I needed more colors. I spent some more hours making slight improvements to both the code and the looks, and now I have this thing that I'm quite proud of tbh. May not be much to you, but it sure is to me.
My mic comes with seven billion decibels of noise? I'll just use Krisp and pray that the two hour trial is enough. Background music? I could use the OST, but everything's only a few seconds long. Whatever, I'll just use some of my unreleased garbage. I'll also add a progress bar up top to flex my incredible keyframe skills. And everything will have a green border to slightly blend it with the background. Ah, the illusion of perfection.
The content of the video is pretty standard. I talk about the game, look over the code, talk with the dude who made it, blah blah. My voice also sounds monotonous and tired as fuck, because I was. I recorded that shit at like 2AM. But I still felt like it wasn't enough. I wanted more. I want this to be the definitive SOUP 0.9 video. So I kept descending. I downloaded HSP (the language it was made in, Hot Soup Processor, which is awful) and used their shitty code editor to mod. I deciphered what functions do what, and where they're called. I went insane.
But in the end, I arose victorious. I clipped through the walls to demonstrate the random spawn position of a rat, and even went as far as to add an unused Day 6 back into the game (there's also a Day 7, but each day needs 5 rooms and I have no imagination). At first I was gonna drop my favorite corocot image in the middle, but I ultimately decided to shill my h. I also wanted to use this spinning anime girl as a funny reference, but I would have probably had to implement HGIMG4 or some other image library for HSP, so no thanks. A soft celesta piece I wrote plays, and then it all fades away as if it were just a dream. The video ends, and you are left thinking "wow, that was mediocre at best".
TL;DR FUCK Sony Vegas and FUCK programming. Also, I'm trying to figure out a design for /10/ and then I kinda wanna pull a Microsoft and have future versions simply be updates to that. Odd numbers and those greater than 10 suck ass. Have a lovely day (*‘ω‘ *)
a weird remix, like, really weird
Apr 25, 2020 #So, over the past two days I had the honor of remixing an upcoming song written by an internet buddy of mine. Now, I have dabbled in remixing before... like, once or twice... more or less... Anyway, point is, this might be the first REAL remix I've ever done and so I tried going a bit crazy with it, waaaay more automation than what I'm used to. It's basically a music box thing from LABS, some sparse guitars for texture or something, random drum samples and some subtler and ambient things in the background. Also, I guess I sampled that glitchy stuff from the original song and reversed it to make a riser-ish thingy. So yeah, my remix was basically "throw out the original instrumental and write a new song to go with the SynthV vocals". Does that even count as a remix anymore? Well, it's something!
I kept it mostly non-functional and mostly relied on voice-leading in order to achieve this sort of weird, spooky, eerie vibe and I think I did a pretty decent job when it comes to that. Definitely not what I usually write but it was really a interesting change of pace. Maybe the mix could have been a bit better but at this point I've heard it so many times that I've become completely desensitized to it.
In other news: a baffling discovery! Recently, it would appear as if any image file saved on my PC (screenshots, PNGs, JPEGs, that kind of stuff) is way darker and has contrast bumped up waaay more than it should. Why? I have no idea, it makes no sense. And when I drag them in Photoshop, for example, they look normal. I can't comprehend how this is happening. I literally have the same image opened in Photoshop or CSP and my image viewer and the colors are different. And if there are thin white lines on a black background you can basically say goodbye to them. And before you ask, I did try different image viewers and even web browsers and this baffling phenomenon still occurs. I'm thinking it must be something about the monitors but... that doesn't really make much sense either... I really have absolutely no idea what's going on here.
return of the safe guy, and some other stuff too
Apr 19, 2020 #Ok, so basically... THAT DUDE WITH THE SAFE I TALKED ABOUT IN #19FEB2020_01 IS BACK!! He posted a new image on the archived (?) group and what he said left me gritting my teeth and setting a new reminder for December 20th this year. Yup, that's when the safe is set to officially open. Hopefully he learned his lesson and expects me to check in again when the time comes. I'm just saying, there better be something in there this time...
Now then, imagine this is a very smooth segway into a completely unrelated topic. I seem to have been getting a few more follows on Neocities lately and I honestly don't get why, but I appreciate it, thank you! Also, fun fact, I'm pretty sure my follow count is still broken from back when roseknight did that thing. I counted it myself at some point after the supposed reversion and it didn't match up. I'm not 100% sure if that's still the case but I'm willing to bet it is.
In other news, I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm probably going to add a few new /misc/ pages to the site, probably starting tomorrow. Also, should I link the /misc/ page in the sidebar? I have no idea. I mean, it's theoretically not supposed to be part of the site itself, just a bunch of random ass things I wanted to store somewhere, but right now it seems like that's the only actual content this site has left, idk. Anyway, I have two ideas so far:
- A page dedicated to weird or humorous comments I find on rule34 and possibly other boorus
- A page dedicated to weird Japanese words and kanji I happened to stumble upon
And as for myself, I've been as unproductive as one could possibly be ever since this quarantine thing started, I should probably try doing something to change that. I think my core 6k anki deck must have reached ~300+ pending cards by now. I'm sure that's gonna be fun catching up with... *sigh*
Oh, one last thing, I had an idea for a song I could potentially analyze but transcribing would be a huge pain in the ass. I think I'd be better off starting with something simpler and/or shorter. Hopefully the next update is going to have more music ramblings and less random ones. I'll try, but please try not to get your hopes up just yet.
another meaningless update, but that's what blogs are for
Apr 06, 2020 #Quite a bit of stuff's happened since my last post so I figured I might as well dump it in an entry over here. First of all, I think I should probably start with stuff concerning the site, so...
Feeling inspired by lambdafun's Weekly Soundtrack, I thought I could perhaps do a similar thing where I'd try to dissect random songs that I like and talk a bit about how they work and why they're objectively good and you have bad taste if you think otherwise (/s). However, if I do indeed decide to go through with this idea, it's absolutely not going to be weekly, maybe monthly at best. Also if I do that I'll probably make a separate page for those kinds of posts since I imagine they could get a bit lengthy. I'll also try my best not to use too much music theory jargon and explain stuff in simpler terms, if I decide to do this.
Ok, so that's pretty much it about the site. Next up, I've managed to crawl out of the musical slump for now. I'm working on a mini EP that kinda sounds like a video game OST!! I might even sketch up some shit and make a sort of storyboard video for it if I'm crazy enough.
Also, I released a new, albeit short song where I tried stepping way outside of my comfort zone. It's literally just an acoustic guitar (not sure if it's even playable irl lol), a celesta and Eleanor Forte from Synthesizer V singing over it. For the album cover I just tried sketching some random bs since I had no idea what it should be about. I was too lazy to color it, but that proved to be suprisingly helpful since I then had the idea of layering it over a PNG of crumpled paper, which then looked like a real drawing, somehow. I also put a surprisingly high-res PNG of a wooden picture frame on top, messed with some filters in Photoshop and it no joke looks like it could be real at first glance. Weird stuff. Also someone on NND commented that they liked the song and that felt pretty good ngl. And funnily enough, I forgot to publish it to Bandcamp, so all the links were broken until just before I started writing this, haha...
Next up, I've been having very Lydian-ish vibes recently, which is weird because I rarely use modes other than Ionian and Aeolian (major/minor). I'm pretty sure it has something to do with Keor's "Petrichor" album, which I highly recommend for that mysterious forest vibe with a dark undertone, no joke one of the best albums I've heard in a few years, great stuff.
And to close it off... uh, how about some stats about that doujinshi I TL'd a few days ago? As a matter of fact, it's my first attempt at translating anything that's longer than a 4-koma on gelbooru. Some stuff was a bit tricky to figure out and I'll admit some lines could have been done better but I'm pretty happy with it overall. I'm also constaly haunted by the fact that I accidentally typed "..," in one spot. Anyway, as of writing this it stands at a score of 3.69 (67 ratings) and 117 favorites on e-hentai, and 258 favorites on nhentai. Maybe it doesn't seem that impressive but I can tell you that I had my expectations waaay lower. Also, someone in the comments on e-hentai pointed out that "world line" is probably a reference to Steins;Gate, which I haven't seen, where it basically means "timeline". How tf was I supposed to know that...
Oh yeah, I also tried out Wim Hof's breathing technique or method or w/e it's called and it was surprisingly effective. Didn't feel that chill in long, long years. Might try it again and see if it helps with lucid dreaming. I'm currently struggling a lot with WILD since my dumbass brain makes my heart go into overdrive once I'm about to enter the dream, despite me being as chill as I can.
So that's about it, let's see if I do anything about that music thing.
blog post number idk im too lazy to count them
Mar 23, 2020 #Recently finished Gintama and all I have to say is what the fuck was that anime ending? I mean, it is pretty fitting but still, damn... Well, I still went ahead and picked up the manga where it left off towards the end while listening to the OST, but shame the rest didn't get animated. I still think it was a great series though, would recommend for a big laugh or a big cry.
On a side note, that thing I was talking about in #02FEB2020_01 has been in hybernation ever since. You know, classic hosma stuff! I don't think any of it will see the light of day very soon so I'll just say that it has to do with drawing shit and it's way too ambitious for my beginner ass. Also, I tried out jack's crayon comic maker so check that out on /art/ if you're curious, it's some random ass anime stuff centered around the girl's ahoge.
Anyway, stay safe out there what with this whole virus thing and stuff idk. Felt like posting something today but I didn't really have any ideas so yeah...
An adventure
Feb 19, 2020 #Had this interesting experience yesterday. Basically, there used to be this Facebook group that got archived recently. In October of last year a certain post was made. An image of a safe, with the caption "This safe will open on February 18th, 2020. Please wait patiently to see what lies inside."
So I set a reminder on my phone and I waited. Yesterday, a notification pops up to remind me of this safe that tore away at my sanity for these grueling months of constant tension. Well, that's what would have happened if I hadn't forgotten about it at least. So I open the URL ready to leave my comment only to remember that the group is archived so I can't do that anymore. Incomprehensible disappointment washes over me, but there is one final bastion of hope: the man himself .
So I go to his profile and send him a message. I now find myself waiting once again. After a few hours, he answers ambiguously with "Mf uhhhhhhhhhhh", I assume he forgot, and I ask again, explaining the situation. Hours later, he sends an image of a 3D rendered safe slightly opened. I don't think he made it himself, but I'm not 100% sure.
I beg of him. Please, bestow unto me the contents of this mysterious safe. It was then that tragedy struck: he had no idea what to put in there. I told him, "Just put something, anything." and then, hours later... A different image, of an open safe... empty.
I launch into a fit of rage. My mind goes blank. I run outside, screaming as I jump off a cliff embracing death. My body is never found and my existence is forgotten as time keeps moving on. In the void of nothingness, I finally understand that the safe is but a weapon designed to murder without leaving trace of the killer. I'd applaud, but I no longer have limbs, or a body for that matter.
aaaaaaa
Feb 2, 2020 #I've been drawing shit quite a lot recently, when I was suddenly struck by likely one of my worst ideas so far. I'm not saying anything yet, but if I somehow manage to make it work I'll also put it on the site. Unlike everything else I decide to do on a whim, I've actually put quite a surprising amount of thought into this. Don't get me wrong, there's still a ton of stuff I'm unsure of and plan to tackle whenever, but I kinda have some hope for this whole thing which is pretty rare. I also switched from Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint, which I totally got legitimately because I'm not poor. It's pretty cool so far.
On a side note, the dream journal is almost done. I re-indented every single entry AGAIN and hopefully this time I'll be happy with it. Now to figure out how it should look like...
Take it easy, that's a threat
Feb 02, 2020 #Did a cover a Vocaloid song that I wanted to do for a long ass while now, it didnt turn out like shit so it feels pretty good ngl. Also, I found out that the way Bandcamp deals with Japanese titles is by replacing everything with a single "-". I wonder what a second release like this would be, maybe "-2"? That must be it, probably. I also wanted to draw an entire animatic for a PV but then realized that it actually takes a ton of effort, so I just tried to do a yukkuri version of Renri that is, in fact, quite bad. Well, whatever, at least I finally managed to release some shit again after all this time so that's a win in my book.
Also, how the fuck does writing closed captions for youtube still suck so fucking much holy shit, it's a pixel-perfect nightmare.
New year, new hosma
Jan 20, 2020 #It's crazy to think that this site has only undergone 9 complete redesigns so far, I swear it feels like I'm tearing everything down and starting from scratch every other month, weird!
Anyway, today's a Wednesday or as the nips call it, gold day, and that's about all the luck I can afford for 2020. New stuff has been added, though it's as anticlimactic as you probably expected it to be! I managed to cop a cheap graphic tablet for ~$23 and I'm planning to dump most of the shit I make with it here. My end goal here is to become a furry artist and do overpriced gore and scat comissions for all those freaks out there, rake in the cash, retire at 21 and kill myself because the shit I will have drawn will haunt me for the rest of my life, so cheers to that!
If you're reading this, I've started working on the dream journal again! I'll start writing them down again in hopes that it will help me achieve more lucid dreams that will hopefully last longer than a few minutes.
So anyway, here's a little story. After I got the tabby I realized that, basically, I don't have enough shit on the back of my GPU or MB to plug it in, so I hooked it up to an old PC that struggles to run Windows XP. As soon as I was all set up I basically started drawing as much weeb shit as I could in MS Paint since I was afraid of running anything else. I didn't save most of that but some made it through. I also tried to do some stuff in Photoshop 6.0 which resulted in numerous BSODs but hey, sometimes it didn't crash in the middle of my artistic... endeavors? I'm planning to buy a DVI to HDMI cable one of these days since that's the only free slot on my GPU. I have no idea if it works like that, but I can at least give it a shot.
In other news, I'm planning to add a theme selector in the future. Yeah, I know I said this about /8/ too but this time I'm really planning to do it!! Let's see if I'll do it before YandereDev finishes his sim.
Also, I can't really wrap my head around flexbox, so goodbye people who are here on mobile.
So yeah, that's pretty much it for this post. Enjoy this winey update and let me know if you think something could be improved, maybe you know a shade of red that works better or something.
Yet another vocal synth
Nov 15, 2019 #Introducing: Emvoice One, pay $200 for a vocal synth inferior to both VOCALOID and SynthV! For a mere 200 bucks you can get unlimited access to one voicebank, no tuning options (we made them, they just aren't implemented yet!), weird ass note editing et cetera! Emvoice One, now fully released.
Seriously though, it's quite laughable and I feel sorry for the people that bought this thing. I mean, sure, it's probably going to get better in the future, hopefully, but in its current state it's definitely NOT worth $200. The only huge difference between the full and demo version is that the demo only lets you use a whopping EIGHT (8) notes, not even an entire octave, which is just... BRUH. You can't even play ONE full scale, not even a pentatonic!
The devs' justification for the price is that they worked oh so hard on it for these past few years, so this is a decent price for a "pretty nice program (but)", as one complaining user called it! Yeah, I'm gonna pay $200 to reward you for your effort, not for the software that I want to use :-)
Drawing (by someone who can't draw)
Nov 06, 2019 #Today I thought to myself "Damn, it sucks trying to decide on an album cover when it can't be a drawing". I mean, yeah, a seemingly huge amount of people are able to draw really nice stuff, but they also ask for money (greedy fucks smh...) so I decided to try giving it my all in order to draw something myself.
Among the challenges I had to overcome right off the bat was not owning a drawing tablet, so not being able to Ctrl-Z until the "Z" on the key disappears. I grabbed a piece of paper and a red pen, because I couldn't find a pencil anywhere, and I started to remember some shitty youtube tutorial I saw way back. I did that circle thing with a plus that I think pretty much everyone does when drawing heads, made some kind of chin shape and quickly realized I can't visualize shit, so I opened up a reference pic and started copying the hair lines as close as I could with the naked eye.
Halfway through that I realized that I dont wanna draw all that damn hair so I just changed a little stuff around and decided that MY anime girl will have a different haircut. I then googled "anime eyes closed", but only found shitty deviantart stuff. However, in a brief moment of desperation, I had a bruh moment. I googled the same thing, but in Japanese, and I actually got good results this time! I drew two squigglish lines for the eyes, a slight frown and a little nose that I really wanted to boop, but I couldn't.
So far, so good. It didn't look like complete shit, but it wasn't anything to brag about either. However, I now had to face my second biggest fear: the body. Look, proportions are a bitch, I think we can all agree on that. I knew damn well I'll ruin it if I try my luck, so I did the only thing that came to mind: I went to gelbooru, put in "dress facing_viewer rating:safe" as the tags and started my search. I found a pic that was kinda ok, opened it on my phone, set the brightness to maximum and started tracing that shit. Also, I found a pencil.
I was done with the body so now I spent a good amount of time deciding whether the shading looked like shit or not, and decided that it did so I took it out of existence. To my surprise, the anime girl looked pretty good. I was pretty damn half-proud that the copying and amalgamating went this well.
After all of this, I spent way too long trying to think of a setting and I went with my usual "Fuck it." and decided it would be some kind of hallway with an elevator. I drew the elevator doors and a corner pillar (that I was way too proud of), threw some shades of red here and there since I used it before for the head, and then I metaphorically stepped back to take a look at what I've done.
It's uh... meh? I don't think it's too bad, I think it's quite good compared to my usual doodles actually. It still feels kinda awkward and stuff though so idk. I'm kinda ok at drawing geometric, lifeless stuff but when it comes to living things I'm really shit. Still, I guess I'm kinda happy with how it turned out. I'm too tired to upload it right now though, so I'll do it later. If you're curious it's gonna be here.
By the way,
- I've started playing osu! recently, it's a ton fun even with the additional pain of using a mouse! So far I'm trying to git gud at 3☆ maps (dont bully me;ω;) and flesh out my alternate tapping for fast passages
- I've imported 45GB+ of osu! beatmaps today
- A dude that's been listening to my Vocaloid/SynthV songs on YouTube hit me up on Discord recently and we got to talk and it's been really nice! Kinda surreal to think I have a sort of fan (?)
Wow, that was a long post! :o
LLSIF All Stars kinda sucks doe
Sep 27, 2019 #An update!? Nothing interesting unfortunately, just my dumb ass rant in the blog/diary hybrid thing, don't read if you don't care, iunno. Might write another thing about music these days if I feel like it and maybe even rewrite the chord function I use to not be limited to 5 notes.
Ok so, All Stars is some real bs, who thought this was a good idea? I mean yeah, it's better than SiF in a lot of aspects, except, for instance, the gameplay, which is pretty important. For example, instead of 9 circles with shit coming towards them at light speed, there are now two (2) circles with shit coming towards them at the speed of me updating this site, so you can't flex as hard as you could with SIF. But at least we have flicks now! You know, like in Bandori, but worse because you have to flick these in one of 4 directions, not any. And slides are gone, since there are only two note tracks now. Or maybe they're still there, somehow, on Advanced difficulty, I don't know. Why don't I know? We're getting there.
They were probably thinking "How do we make this challenging?" when someone came up with the stamina system, which I abhor, to say the least. It's just a difficulty lock, which is dumb as shit in my opinion. If you're new to the game, you have to play on Beginner because your group's members just don't have enough stamina and/or power to play on Intermediate or Advanced. You then decide to gacha pull, and you even get a few SRs and a UR! You level some of the cards up and then... you still can't do it because it's still not enough. Well, you CAN play on Intermediate or Advanced, but you WILL fail it even if you hit every single note frame-perfectly, because you'll run out of stamina with each note you hit, or miss. So, you just have to sit there and die of absolute boredom throughout every single song for a long ass while. There are also some weird ass arrows on the side of the screen during lives which, well, I have no idea what they do, but they usually do it for about a second when you tap them.
Also, you HAVE to be on the main screen if you wanna access the settings, so you have to back out of a bunch of shit you're in every single time. That gets a little annoying. Why? Because the calibration in this game is so, SO bad. It doesn't even auto-calibrate for you, it just reccomends you a number that's usually off by a bit, so you have to keep doing trial and error. And also, normal notes and flicked ones are adjusted separately, which is just... why?
For the story side of things, they basically kept the same sprites from SIF, but now the mouths and eyes move! And there are also versions with their backs facing you, truly innovative. Also, the main menu or screen or whatever feels like an Illusion game, specifically Honey Select. It just has that vibe. The UI, the music, the 3D models, the shading, the animations, they all just come together to remind me of it.
Verdict: Not too much fun. You might find it awesome if you only care about the story and/or you have a ton of money you can sink in gacha, but otherwise you probably won't find it very enjoyable.
P.S.: I understand that this might just be my stupid ass mobile 音ゲーboomer opinion, but these are my initial thoughts on SIFAS.
Saw Metallica live yesterday!
Aug 16, 2019 #Somehow, I got to see Metallica play live before they died! Funnily enough the sound guys or whatever played Symphony of Destruction by Megadeth lol (though it's probably because Mustaine has that whole thing going on right now).
The sound was pretty shit from where our seats were but it was still enjoyable. The solo harmony in Master of Puppets sounded a bit weird though. They had some huge ass screens, people filming them and crazy lights all over the place too so that was pretty cool. Also, to my surprise, the crowd was really into it too!
Kirk and Rob also covered a... local cover of a Whitesnake song, so that was also interesting. Oh and Ghost opened for them or something but who cares lol!
GIBSON GUITARS DOES IT AGAIN
Jun 21, 2019 #WARNING: Opinions below!
I'm fucking laughing my ass off @ Gibson at this point lol! They're running it into the fucking ground hahaha! Oh man, how DARE Dean Guitars make better (IMO) AND more affordable guitars than them?! This obviously calls for a lawsuit!
Let's take a moment to remember the other great things Gibson has accomplished so far, like filing for bankruptcy, having breaking headstocks as a traditional, core feature of their guitars, or coming up with a really funny joke.
A truly amazing and innovative way to recover from all that shit, guys! I can't help but wonder how anyone can still support them after all this. The only thing they have is the mortifingly expensive Les Paul that doesn't even sound that amazing (IMO). Stunning, hahaha.
Impractical how to: Mobile rhythm games minus some of the pain
Jun 15, 2019 #Today I thought I'd share a way to diminish the pain that comes with mobile rhythm games. One of the things I hate the most about this genre is that you pretty much have to use earbuds for the optimal experience.
However, earbuds SUCK. They're ok for listening to music when you're not home but it just puts me off so much thinking that "Oh, I have to put on those god damn earbuds again if I wanna play Bandori or LLSIF or some other shit that's centered around sound". This shit prevented me from sinking all of my time into some gacha bullshit but no more shall it be this way!
Basically, earlier this year I've had a great epiphany. I tried using my dumb as shit audio interface on Windows 10 since there are NO 64-bit drivers for it and that prevented me from using it on 7. Surprisingly though, it magically worked without any drivers on 10, just like it did on Arch. Anyway, I switched from line-in and then thought "Hey... wait a second... this weird adapter thing..."
Long story short, I plugged that shit into my phone and ran the cable into the audio interface. I then fired up an amp sim (TH3, since it has a standalone version) and was greeted by loud, distorted, demonic anime music. After removing everything I heard the crystal clear audio of my phone in the headphones. It was a bit too crystal clear for my liking though, so I threw in a compressor and EQ pedal.
Rejoice! I could now play this bullshit simultaneously with any other thing happening on PC. Quite comfy, I must say! It can also be quite funny to mess with delay and reverb and shit on everything. The comfiness of this setup also boosted my playing by quite a bit.
I have yet to work on the dream journal or the chord-playing function :D
Fuck it
May 31, 2019 #You know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna write a fucking symphonic rock/metal/whatever you wanna call it cover of Old Town Road, it's gonna be in mainly in 7/8 because fuck me and it's gonna have:
- These exact fucking chords arpeggiated on an acoustic guitar in drop D:
F#add11 - Bsus2/A - E5 - Bm/D
(that fucking F# doesn't sound so bad played as an arpeggio OK SHUT UP) - a violin ensemble
- a SINGLE viola
- a SINGLE flute
- some distorted guitars at certain points
- weird-ass drums and a very basic bassline
- VOCALOID AND SynthV vocals
- the chorus vocals harmonized in 5ths
Fun fact about the song, the first chord, which also happens to be the I, is major, but the rest are taken straight from the natural minor scale! There's some very epic modal interchange at play here. Seems to be a common theme among interesting and catchy songs, doesn't it? (。•̀ᴗ-)✧
Also, I have to rewrite the function that plays chords soon so it isn't limited to a certain number but... it might take a few minutes so I don't wanna do it, ugh!!
Last entry of the month and shit
May 31, 2019 #Wow, I managed to cram in three entries this month wtf!
Anyway, I'm here today to tell you of a little adventure I just had! These past two days I decided I was going to check out some of the randomly discovered on itch.io H-games that I have on my PC! I also have a bunch of more obscure titles that I have no idea how I discovered. Whatever, I booted one up and it had a small, weird ass vertical aspect ratio (windowed) and it seemed like one of those quirky VNs that try to do things differently but not so much.
Well, I was right, that's just what it was. Though the entire game was in Japanese, I could shockingly understand most of what was written on the screen. The mechanics weren't really explained other than those of a single minigame. Most of the game was pretty intuitive though, but some stuff I only discovered during my second playthrough (more on that later). I also didn't realize it, but I was playing it with the sound muted. It seems like it's just generic background music and some anime 「きゃあ~」「えぇ?」and「バカ!」audio clips to go with the dialogue, which aren't really my thing so I finished the game muted.
I should also note that it's an interactive VN and, if you're curious, the dialogue comes in floating speech bubbles, so it's not your typical boxed VN. You can also move around the house and stuff. There aren't really that many places to go so you get familiar with the place fairly quickly. The transitions where the entire thing fades to black and then back again were quite long and annoying but other than that it's pretty cool. The story was a pretty generic one, "Boy goes to the countryside, but there's also a girl!" Eh, not that bad, I guess.
Now comes the epic part. After my initial playthrough in which I fucked up since I couldn't figure out how to trigger the final events, I went into the settings menu and discovered a language option. It only had English and Japanese and... that could have been useful... And it was useful because I was now aware of a few more things that existed in the game and how to trigger the final heart in the ♥♥♥♥♡ thingy to get the good ending.
Overall decent experience. Cute art style (decent, but a few things look a bit weird on the characters) and it has some interesting and surprisingly fluid mechanics. I'm not an H-game reviewer, so idk if I should recommend it, but this was my story.
Oh by the way thanks a lot for 100 followers! I wanted to write a song to celebrate but you know... lazy piece of shit... sorry :(
Music shit again
May 29, 2019 #This is now the first month that has had two entries, what an achievement!!
Anyway, I decided to ACTUALLY start working on another album. This time it's gonna be entirely VOCALOID too! I've got THREE entire songs DONE. Written. Finished. Wow, right?! I only have the lyrics and "mixing" shit left. I still don't know how to properly EQ shit...
I say VOICALOID but it's actually going to be sung by Eleanor Forte from Synthesizer V, but it's pretty much the same thing. Why SynthV? Well, because it's comfier than VOCALOID, I said it! Eleanor's a great voicebank too, really good!
Now then, I must say that I feel like I'm becoming quite professional when it comes to using voice synthesizers, heh. I mean, just a few days ago when I started working on the lyrics I actually TOUCHED that automation-like thing at the bottom where you control the tension in the voice and stuff! Crazy shit.
When it comes to recording, though, it's quite depressing. Since I decided that for once I'd actually be the one playing the guitars on the tracks and not some Guitar Pro soundbank, I'm forced to use a mutilated Squier that I have lying around. I tried using all my magic and totally legit IRs and VSTs on it but it still ends up sounding a little... idk, shit. It just doesn't have that tightness to it. I'm attempting to kinda combat this by double tracking (kill me), but idk, I might just say fuck it and fall back to GP7 sounds.
The songs themselves can be classified as metal, I guess. Not like death metal or that classic heavy metal sound, though. Dunno how to describe it, I guess it sounds kinda like prog, but it's not all that progressive. One of these songs has this really fucking cool "stuck floating around in space" vibe to it with a fuckton of tapping and 7th chords so I'm trying to base my lyrics on that setting, but it's really hard to come up with actual stuff to say about this particular scenario. Rhymezone isn't much help either...
As of right now, I've finished recording one song and I only need to come up with one more verse to be able to say that I finished the entire thing. The idea for the lyrics came to me while listening to Native Construct's Quiet World (AMAZING album, also RIP the band *crying emoji*). Right now it sounds WAY better than I expected. I also stepped way out of my comfort zone and added breakdowns and shit too. Some random guy in a random Discord server randomly gave me a random chromatic idea for the guitar under the verses too, so that was a really nice experience.
Currently debating wether I should add a fourth song from my pile of scrapped stuff that never got to see the light of day. Music is tough and absolutely not worth it, kids.
THAT Cadence
May 18, 2019 #Wtf having a blog is hard!
Anyway, new shit is finally here, woo! You can now click on chord progressions to hear them, except not
in their complete glory because I can't be fucked to mess with Tone.js
The way I implemented it is nightmarish as well, please take my word for it.
Speaking of chord progressions, here's a very nice one: I VI- IVΔ IV- (added Maj7 to spice things up a bit)
Man, I just can't get enough of it! It's quite simple, but very nice and melancholic. It's not exactly the simplest chord progression so it doesn't get used (too much) in modern pop, but you'll definitely come across it every now and then. Also, I keep forgetting what it's called so let's roll with the major-minor plagal cadence lol
I've heard it a million times in many different ways, but the only instances that I can recall right now are in "We're Finally Landing" by HOME, "Bright" by SCANDAL and the Drake & Josh theme song starting from "If you open up your mind" and I am NOT joking about the last one: VII- II IV IV- I
So what the fuck is going on here? A few things, actually! Idk which is more important so I'll start randomly with modal interchange.
That's a fancy name for using chords that are outside of the key you're currently playing it. This major-minor plagal cadence is probably the most popular form of modal interchange out there and I strongly encourage everyone to play around with it! But... how do you do that?
Now, let's say we're in C major. The most basic thing you can do to work with this cadence is to take the current melody or motif and play it as usual, but while you're on the iv chord (Fm), whenever you play an A note, change it to an Ab instead. Now THAT is going to throw gasoline on our hearts and then set fire to it. You can also try to play something a little different with the C minor scale, maybe try starting on the m3 (D#)!
The other thing that's going on with this cadence is voice leading, which I can't really talk about that much. It's exactly what it sounds like, a note that moves in a certain direction through different chords.
Actually, that explanation was really bad so I'll just show you. Focus on the highest notes in this progression:
II- V7 I
Notice how they kinda followed a certain up-down direction and sounded kinda like a melody? That's basically
voice leading and it's what's happening here too, but this time it's also chromatic so it REALLY wants to resolve
IV IV- I
So, uh... that was the post, I guess? Basically, I got this JS library to work and I'm showing off. New themes are on their way, expected to arrive 15 years from now! Also, I still don't feel like working on a new dream journal, so yeah. See ya.
BANG
Apr 05, 2019 #Ok so... I finally found something I can talk about a little, somehow!
SO TODAY I was noodling around on my guitar that looks and plays really good, but sounds like absolute dogshit, and I did a thing where I went I- II and it completely fucking blew me away. I ended up with I- II IV- V7 (Cm D/F# Fm G7, to be exact) and I was like BRUH, this shit sounds... actually, I've definetly heard this particular modal interchange somewhere before.
I foraged my mind for half an eternity and then it hit me: Remarkably Human by Nick Johnston! It's a really nice album and this progression hit me with an extreme vibe of... that, which is weird, because I always had the impression that the entire album sounds like a huge augmented chord. I never actually took the time to analyze any of it, but it kinda sounds like that to me for some reason.
In other news, you might have heard that Maynard pulled a really epic april fools prank (another) (yet another) (one more) (and finally) on tool's entire fanbase, where he completely HALVED it! Haha, as if... that album's coming one day...
And one last thing I can shove in here is that Yorushika「ヨルシカ」is releasing a new album soon and I'm looking forward to it!
And also, I still haven't started to work on anything else :D
Hey
Mar 01, 2019 #
*orchestral
bVI - bVII - i
progression*
*clears troath*
I have given up.
What the fuck is going on? You already know! I'm throwing everything into the trash and minimalizing the shit on this site again! Y-you want to know why? Oh, ok... I guess...
Well, I was thinking something along the lines of Hmm, I don't do SHIT with my
site anymore, I've pretty much forgotten most of what I knew about HTML/CSS/JS AND
I am bored as fuck
, and that lead to the concept of turning this poor site of mine
into, as much as you and I hate it, a blog. But, I mean, do YOU have any better ideas?
(No, really, do you?)
So anyway, I've also decided that I would pretty much straight up just write about literally whatever, whenever. Maybe I broke something again? I'll cry about it here! Perhaps I have discovered something I find cool, I might talk about it here! I'm putting some more shit here to make the list seem bigger!
Things I ********might******** touch upon include, but are not limited to:
- Music + theory shit that I don't fully understand
- Guitars maybe, idk. Maybe Gibson releases another monstrosity like the Modern Flying V and I'll laugh it it or something
- Memeys or some shit
- placeholder
I'm planning to add a few more themes in the future because this one seems pretty monotone and I'll get bored of it really fast.
I also thought of implementing something like MIDI.js and when you click on chord progressions it plays them for you or some shit like that idk we'll see. I'll likely focus on making a new dream journal for now, maybe.
Feel free to leave comments on /7/ while I decide how to set them up here, I still check them!
Oh, and I'm finally confident enough to say that zooming in won't destroy everything! And fuck you if you're here on your phone. That pretty much concludes everything for now, I think. See ya.