Music history

Yo yo yo, I forgot about this for a while. Or maybe I was too lazy to post. Anyways, I've been discovering new music lately so I thought I might write about my music history. Music is pretty important in my life... these days, I spend most of the day listening to new songs and downloading them.

The classical period
I don't know when I first started listening to music, but I was probably around 10 or so. I remember always turning on the radio when I was in the car, and going to 96.3 - the classical channel. At that time, I didn't even know about having a music collection, much less the wonders of P2P. I just listened to a bunch of classical songs while traveling, and sometimes at home when I was bored. This period wasn't very influential to me, as I was probably too young to appreciate the fine art of classical music. And that is why I moved on after 2 or 3 years.

OMG TOP 40 (minus the black)
In 8th grade, we would have these days once a week(or every other week, I can't remember) in gym that were deemed "fitness days". What a useless name, since during those days I was about as fit as I was every other day - not fit at all. During those days, we would run around in circles in our gym. It was retarded, to say the least. Our teacher was nice and let us (or maybe she was forced to) bring in CDs of our music to play on the stereo system while we ran. So a bunch of white kids brough in these CDs of pop, rock, and black music. I didn't care much for the black music or the pop (since most the pop was black anyway), but when I first heard rock I was like, "hmmm... this is interesting". Eventually, I decided that I had liked that music enough to go explore it on my own time. This began the period of ROCK [special fx and such here]. The first band that I got into was Green Day, back when their BOBD was getting all the radio time. So, of course, using my newly acquired 1337 Kazaa-ing skillz, I got their album. And I still have it today, with their improperly tagged, low-quality, transcoded, and generally bad songs. The next band was Linkin Park, probably due to the same reason. As the years went on and I discovered new bands using the radio or Yahoo! Music, I would download their albums from Kazaa. As Kazaa started getting filled with spam, I moved on to Limewire. Yahoo! Music also gradually changed into Last.fm. Sometime during this period, I realized that everyone listened to this music. I didn't know if that was a good or bad thing, but that did lead me to begin exploring other genres.

The unknown period
This wasn't really a well-defined period, because it kind of bled in with the previous and next periods. Sometime in high school, I stopped only downloading rock albums. Sometimes I would grab a whole bunch of black songs that friends recommended to me, or I would get the newest #1 song. For a period in sophomore year, I was semi-into jazz, though that collection today is still very small. I also got a few parodies, such as Ludakrishna (gangsta fob represntin' yo). While nothing productive came out of this, I did learn one important thing - not everything is rock, pop, or black. There are genres, and they can be good, too. One important day in 2006 (maybe it was '07, I don't have the exact date) I stumbled on this site called "Ishkur's guide to electronic music". I was like, "ok, what's electronic music?" and Ishkur explained it to me. Then, I was like, "ok Ishkur, thanks. Bye now!" and I stumbled away. A few weeks later, I played DDR. At first, I didn't notice anything. But after repeatedly failing to dance, I suddenly remembered Ishkur's guide. I was like, "hey, this music kinda sounds like that electronic stuff I found". I went home that day and my desire to be a pro DDR player died (not that I ever had that desire, anyway). However, my love for EDM (electronic dance music. But since some of it isn't even danceable, the D is pointless. Still, it's easier to say EDM than electronic music all the time) was born. I began by downloading a bunch of DDR songs from Limewire. I listened to the stupidity of those songs for a few days, then returned to Ishkur's holy grail to find more music. I explored each genre in depth, and finally found one that I liked - trance.

TIIEEEEESSSSTTOOOOOOO!!!!111 (minus Tiesto)
My beginnings of trance was simple - download all the ones that I liked from Ishkur's guide. Though few, these songs would become the basis of what I would listen to for the next year or two. I had picked songs from the Progressive trance, Anthem trance, Epic trance, and Goa trance subgenres. Initially, I listened to all of them equally, but over time, it became mostly anthem and epic. I checked trance forums, lists online, and Last.fm for new artists and songs. Many of them recommended classic and acid trance, and even Ishkur himself preferred classic trance to anthem and epic. Still, I never really got into those genres. I just downloaded many compilations and mix albums, and they were all of the anthem and epic variety. In the beginning, I even searched for "trance" when I wanted to download something. Yeah, I was pretty noob at first. As I became more educated in trance, I established favorite artists. Gouryella, Rank 1, Pulp Victim, Binary Finary, and a bunch others were "old anthem/epic", while Alphazone, Airbase, Ian Betts, Nu NRG and a bunch others were "new anthem/epic". For some reason, I never really got into Tiesto as all the other tranceheads do. After a few months of listening exclusively to trance, I decided to return to my old music.

Return to rock. Also, TIEEESSSTOOOOO!!!1
While I was listening only to trance, I forgot all about the rock world, so when I returned I probably had to download a few new albums. Nothing really new happened during this period, except that now I had to follow two genres instead of the one that I was always used to. I also gave up on P2P programs and started torrenting. Actually, that's not completely true. For my last few months at home (before Cornell) I started experimenting with DC++, and used a bunch of public hubs to obtain rare stuff. Anyways, this half and half style continued all the way until around October-ish of 2008. At that time, I was in college already, and because of the limited monthly bandwith, I couldn't torrent as I usually did. My music collection became very stale, and the few rock albums that I did torrent were boring. I stopped listening to rock for a while, until I was re-introduced to blink-182. I got their discography and listened to it heavily, but other than that, I listened mostly to trance. The weird thing was, though my trance collection was 10s of gigs, I only listened to a few hundred songs. Obviously, they were anthem and epic. As college ended, my musical tastes still hadn't changed (well maybe I did like I'm on a boat, and had a small interest in Asian music). I went home for summer, and with nothing to do, started listening to music.

Gtfo Tiesto, hai EDM
While browsing through my music collection, I found this one odd song that my friend sent me: The Prodigy - Voodoo People (Pendulum remix). I forgot what it sounded like, so I listened to it again. I was amazed. Right then and there, I opened up torrentz.com and got both The Prodigy's and Pendulum's discographies. I just stepped foot into breakbeat and drum and bass. I also downloaded Trancemaster 6006, which would become the last trance album that I downloaded. From then on, I discovered the great big beat artists, and got into dark DnB (neurofunk/darkstep). I listened to these two genres for about a month and a half, and towards the end, DnB emerged the victor. In July '09, I once again Ishkur'ed some new genres, this time being house and techno. But mostly techno. I am currently using lists from Listology for techno and classic trance (it can never go away), and will get into house at a future time. My current goal for the summer is to finish classic techno, trance, and possibly house and jungle too. Among the things I have learned from this period is, again, there isn't only a trance - other EDM genres exist too. I guess I forgot this important fact during my trance years. You might be wondering what I'm listening to now, as I write this. I started the post with some Adam Beyer and am now listening to some Crystal Method. Neither of those artists are trance. I am proud of myself.

Chronological list of my music genres and tools:
~2000 - Late 2003
-Classical
-Radio

Late 2003 - Late 2006
-Rock
-Kazaa, Limewire
-Radio, Yahoo! Music, Last.fm

2005 - Late 2006
-Rock, black, pop, jazz, misc.
-Limewire
-Last.fm, friend recommendations

Late 2006 - Mid 2007
-Trance
-Limewire, Frostwire, torrents
-Last.fm, tranceaddict.net, Youtube

Mid 2007 - October 2008
-Trance, rock
-Torrents, DC++
-Last.fm, tranceaddict.net, Youtube, discogs.com

October 2008 - May 2009
-Trance
-Torrents
-Last.fm, Youtube

May 2009 - July 2009
-Drum and bass, breakbeat
-Torrents
-Last.fm, Youtube

July 2009 -
-Classic techno, classic trance, drum and bass
-DC++, Torrents
-Listology.com, Last.fm, discogs.com, Youtube

Today

Today is 07/08/09. Just thought you should know.

MLIA

Today, I discovered MLIA. MLIA.

What do you get when you combine psytrance and guitars?

This.

Known as buttrock goa (?) or heavy metal goa, it's goa/psytrance with rock and metal elements. And it kicks ass. Some other artists include S.U.N. Project and 1200 micrograms, but there's a bunch more. This just might become my new favorite genre.

Halo 3

Well, after almost a year, I'm back to playing Halo 3. I started playing that game around April '08, by abusing the free Xbox live accounts. Each Xbox 360 comes with 3 free trial accounts for a month each (although I didn't know there was a limit at that time) so after my first month, I made another one, and it actually worked. I was like, "OMG, FREE XBOX LIVEZ!!" and then made another account used for betraying. So for the next month I alternated accounts and used my real one to play real games, and used the betraying one for betraying. Ah, good times. Too bad it only lasted a month. After those two expired, I tried making more accounts, but it didn't work :(. So then I was forced to buy an account. Then me and my friend played almost everyday during the summer, and I got semi-good. Then August came around, and I had to leave for college. Unfortunately, I couldn't bring along my 360, but fortunately, I became friends with some people that did have a 360, and played Halo a bunch. They were pretty noob, though, but owning noobs is fun. Then spring semester came and I kinda stopped playing. And now, it's summer again, which means days and days of Halo 3. I'm pretty bad now, though, but I'll get better. Don't worry.

Pro photoshop skillz

I made some wallpapers last week, and since I have nothing to post today, I'll show them off here.

The first is a Black Sun Empire wallpaper, a DnB artist. If you don't know what that is, go to youtube and search for them. Listen to any of their songs and you can probably guess what D and B stand for. Anyways, I based this off an image on one of the youtube videos, but made it pro-er.




The second one is a SPOR wallpaper, another DnB artist. Again, youtube. This one I just messed with random grunge brushes and stuck in some album art. Pro, right?



Both of these can be downloaded at my customize.org site: http://customize.org/noober


Next up in the DnB wallpapers series is Noisia, but I can't find any good pictures or album arts to use. They're really good, too. Check out Noisia - Concussion, or better yet, go "obtain" their discography.

Sims 3 - killing sims

I was gonna get some pics and do it myself, but this video has all the ways to kill your sims (although it doesn't do it with 8 black men dieing at once): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1LOiHOXkPE

Sims 3 review

Alright, first up in my short list of games to review is The Sims 3. You should know about this game, so I'm not gonna go into detail about it. Basically you make some sims, build a house, and tell them to set themselves on fire.

Ok, well maybe only I do that. Anyway, I don't like writing paragraphs so I'll just do a list.

+

- Better interaction with the community. In previous Sims, it was a bitch to leave your house, so I didn't really do it. In 3, however, you can just zoom out and click somewhere in town, and your sims will go there. Amazing! This gives the game a better mood, makes it more realistic, and all that.

- RPG elements. An inventory and skill leveling make it more like an RPG, which is good for the RPG-players But even if you don't play RPGs, these new features still enhance the sim-ness.

- Create a style. This allows you to customize styles of clothing, furniture, and walls/floors. You get to pick the texture and colors, but that's about it.

-

- Ridiculously bad pathfinding. Apparently, if someone's in your way, you stand there for about 5 minutes waiting for them to move. If you're unlucky, then the other guy will stand there and wait, too! Eventually, one of you move, leaving the other guy standing there, and guess what? STILL WAITING. On top of that, he'll be complaining about not having a path, and waving the crossed out footprints icon. God, that icon pisses me off. This problem only gets worse with more people. If you have 8 people trying to get through one door, expect to wait about 30 minutes. And, in serious conditions, sims can die because they spend all their time no-footprinting instead of trying to save themselves. Which brings me to...

- Stupid AI, and, at times, extremely stupid AI. If you were on fire, would you jump into a pool? You would, right? Well, sims won't. Maybe you won't experience this kind of stupidity, but your house isn't on fire all the time. But even in the best of conditions, sims will still act retarded, such as getting out of bed only to pass out on the floor. Other fails include not using the toilet or shower in the same room as someone, even if the room is the size of the whole lot. They'd rather let the other guy see them pee themselves rather than letting him turn around and pee properly.

- Not fluid/smooth. What I mean by this is that everything HAS to follow the rules. Actions cannot flow into each other naturally. For example, sims have to turn the computer off when switching from one task to another. Sims put a plate on the floor when you cancel their 'clean up' action, even though a table is 2 feet away. Sims can't watch TV from an orthogonally facing chair. Sims have to walk at least 3 squares to use their phone. Stuff like that, which makes the sims very robotic and not simulating human life at all. This isn't just limited to live mode, either. You can't build round anythings. Everything has to snap to grid. Objects that should be able to be intersect each other can't (ex. 2 doors next to each other in a corner).

- Random bugs. While not occurring that frequently, some bugs do occur, and they are usually very annoying. Some that I've encountered include not being able to get in your work car, bushes that go through walls, and extreme lag when lots of people or inventory objects are present.

- Gets old faster than you think it would. They say that this game has "months of content". Yeah ok. Once you build a few houses (or castles with moats), get the good lifetime happiness rewards, and do a few skills, there's nothing really new or exciting to keep you playing. Even if let your creative juices flow and find out the best ways to make money or kill sims, that gets boring too. It just seems that a game like this should last you much, much longer than it does.

- Not customizable enough. No body shop (yet) so you can't create your own objects. Not enough sim customization. Lots of build mode limitations. Also, certain objects that should be allowed to style edit are not, like fireplace walls, railings, and stairs.

0 (for neither +'s nor -'s)

- Graphics. Not very improved from Sims 2. Also, lags when moving camera across town.
- Build mode is largely the same as Sims 2.

QED

The Sims 3 is all the sim of the previous sims. It adds some welcome features, and for the most part, is a good sequel. However, due to the nature of the game, we want it to be perfect, something that isn't possible yet. We always want more - more items, more customizations, more human-ness. Hopefully, Sims 4 (this is an EA game, after all) will fix the problems in this game, and maybe one day we'll actually have a realistic life simulator. But for now, this will have to do.

Score: [1/1]. Go play this game.


Coming soon: a guide to killing off your sims!

lolreviews

I've decided to do a bunch of reviews on stuff like games, products, music, books (lol), etc that I use. I don't want to make them annoyingly long and technical reviews, but reviews that are simple and easy to understand. This means...

THE AMAZINGLY AMAZING BINARY SCALE OF RATING! For all you binary-illiterate fools, this means that there are 2 numbers in the scale, 0 and 1. A 0 means no, stay far away from the reviewee (?) and kill it with fire. A 1 means go get it, through any means necessary, and use it or whatever. Get it? Simple and easy, right?

Hai guise

Well, after running 6 laps (personal best, go me), I can actually start blogging. Actually, I don't really know what kind of introductory post I'm supposed to make, but I guess I'll tell you what this blog is about, and all that introductory stuff. So, uh...

You know what? I'm not sure what this blog is about. You're just gonna have to keep reading to find out. But only if I keep doing this, this blogging thing, where you write about stuff that interests you, talk about your boring day, post pretty pictures of random things, you know. That kind of stuff.

Since this post is very lacking, I might as well talk about my boring day. So, today, I ran 6 laps. I am currently very smelly and sweaty, and I need a shower.


I'm gonna go take a shower.

test

oh hai world.