Bakemonogatari - 2 of ??

- - -
[[My previous blog entry about this anime]] 

This series has such high re-watch value for me... because it encourages endless pondering and rumination about nuances and intentions and the like. It's interesting to entertain the connection between the seemingly random scene insertions and the plot elements, e.g. the characters' dialogues, actions, and thoughts.

The insertions are often highly geometric constructs of street scenes, i.e. residential areas inside a city. Examples include generic apartment windows, playground swings, light rail tracks, power line towers, etc.


I feel like these inserts help set the mood and stimulate the viewers' train of thoughts in various Brownian directions... just as the black and red screens that flash for only a fraction of a second and read "Black (or Red) scene: animation number 'none'"... I have not yet figured out what they mean...

Actually, I think it could be either (1) animators got lazy (2) they're trolling the audience (3) simulating the old flickering film reels (4) black scenes for -_- or @_@ or =_= or ._. moments, and red scenes for O_O or intense bloody moments...

Fruity Loops (FL Studio 10) Producer's Edition... random songs

- - -

Songs I recently wrote. I seem to like to write chill and loopy music.

The percussion for this one was a little hard. But I had fun with the sound effects. And the guitar. I totally heart the guitar. My personal favorite part is from 4:08 to the end. The piano part was fun to write too.



The percussion for this one was much easier, because I used the built-in beats! And more fun with the vocal tracks. And more sound effects mwahaha. Plus a nice deep bassline on the piano. What more is there to ask for... just kidding.

[Bones and Inception references] A dream...

... that was a blend of real and fictional people, complete with a soundtrack of lush strings. I swear I had heard the melody before but I can't place it. So frustrating...

In the dream, I'm an undercover agent trying to catch the perpetrator who kidnaps unsuspecting standardized test takers into an "alternate matrix" and then runs experiments on them. In religious terms, the "alternate matrix" is like... purgatory? Or the bridge between the physical world and the world of the dead, or something like that.

And... I'm working with Brennan and Booth on this case. (I think this is a sign that I watch too much Bones... and Mulder and Scully might have been a better fit for this :-P) They have already rounded up the accomplices outside the luxurious private school building/ castle/ mansion. Now I have to catch the main perp in the act.

However, he can teleport and switch rooms at will, and there is simultaneous testing going on in different rooms... so I remember dashing up and down the spiral stairs that are covered with elegant and ancient-looking carpets and sided with mahogany handles. What a stupid way to catch a teleporter, I know...

All the while I am running around, I keep hearing an ensemble of orchestral strings playing a melody with a overlay of (1) the Happy Birthday song progression Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Mvmt 1 (as I remembered hearing from Minority Report) and (2) Non Je Ne Regrette Rien (from Inception). I recall some students are taking solfege tests on the second floor, but they don't notice me when I poke my head in.

I myself have been taking a strange mix of GREs and SATII... marking an obscene number of Scantron ovals... the horror! I have to ask to leave the testing room to go to the restroom, but I put the proctor in a trance while attempting to catch the perp.

Long story short... I did not catch the perp in my dream because the soundtrack got louder and I felt some strange abdominal cramping and woke up just as I saw Booth frantically signalling me from outside the building...

Seriously... is this like fanfic fodder or what...

Will not quote MacBeth's soliloquy about sleep...

... living out the title of my blog.

And being an ever-expanding vortex of angst spinning out of control for basically all of November so far...

Trying to solve a many-body problem in finite time is fucking sucking right now...

FontForge looks like the answer to my restlessness... [NOT]

- - -
Thanks to Fzz's link to a kerning game... that inspired this sudden concentrated exploration into typography :-P Tried my hands at the game and didn't do too badly I suppose.

Although the actual task of designing a font is rather involved!

I tried to install FontForge via Cygwin at first, then found it to be hopelessly and needlessly complicated. And then I realized, doh, I have Ubuntu. And then the installation was just one line -

    sudo apt-get install fontforge python-fontforge 

Admittedly, this is the first time I truly felt that my multi-OS machine has finally found its purpose... to be multi-OS... after the fiasco of trying to install Jacapo in Ubuntu (which is a lot more complicated than a single sudo command)

Maybe I can fiddle with the notion of my own usefulness for awhile. FontForge looks sufficiently complex to sustain my play for at least a few months.

[Edit] I impulsively upgraded my Ubuntu from 10.04 to 11.10 and now FontForge doesn't work anymore. Blerg! At least "Oneiric Ocelot" sounds cool. I wanted the next release to be called "Pensive Pelican" or "Pouncing Panther" or... "Peeing Poodle", which Fzz said was better than "Pooping Poodle" because it could be shortened to "PeePoo". The developers should make that an April Fool's joke or something...

Composers' self-indulgence (?)

- - -
These are the type of songs I usually write. They tend to exhibit looping motifs and certain types of chord progressions that I happen to particularly like.

(1) The same kind of unresolved progression (i-VI⁷) as in Dido's "Thank You".

(2) An example of the Andalusian cadence. You can overlay Turtle's "So Happy Together" on this... assuming they're in the same key of course. Seriously.

(3) Here I blatantly ripped off a melody from Dvořák's Cello Concerto. And didn't do much with it.

(4) "Turkey trot" vs. Mozart's "Turkish March"... I could not resist.

(5) Now, here is something I normally wouldn't write. This was pro bono for an online friend.

Goes to show that an amateur composer can afford to be so very self-indulgent yet still unsatisfactory on every level.

Debussy apparently had a wild temper. One can't really tell from his music... or shall one say, it's because he had wild tempers that he had to write such flowing and calming music? Although his music was probably the most effective pick-up line that started his numerous romantic relationships.

What about Shostakovich's angsty grunts and ooomphs? Were they disguised primal screams from being denounced and abandoned repeatedly?

Political correctness in a litigative society

- - -
A native South African who teaches history in the U.S. was fired because of making "racist" comments. I'm rather curious about exactly what he said. Probably stemming from a similar type of dark humor as the characters here.

I wonder if the American psyche is still suffering from a form of mass-cultural PTSD... stemming from many explosive events in the course of an angst-filled history... resulting in such concern and hypersensitivity over issues of being politically correct. This is what happens when people of different colors and creeds are crammed together. With all the good and bad that comes out of it.

Tsk... people... so obsessed about these things. How depressing. If we were all translucent amorphous informational cloud entities, this would never happen.