Audiosurfin'

Bird of Prey by Destroid. Destroid is Daniel Myer's (from Haujobb) other band.

Audiosurf - Destroid: Bird of Prey from mtodead on Vimeo.

Pusher Elite Mode.
At the very end I fill up my slots with 24 reds, getting the most points possible in a single match and winning the "Big Kahuna" achievement.

Pusher gets a 100% bonus when your match clears the board, so you may notice that I pass up some good blocks waiting for high value clusters to disappear.

White blocks are an automatic 2000 points, so they're highly desirable, but they don't disappear, they have to fall down the bottom, so collecting them at the wrong time can block your board. Reds are worth the most points, then yellows, greens, blues and purples. Unless there's a cluster of blues and purples that I clear as soon as I collect, I'm hitting the blues and purples by mistake. Sometimes I don't even realize I have them on my board for a few seconds - D'OH!

Music is Bird of Prey by Destroid from their album Loudspeaker. Buy it!

(For those so inclined, you can see what I'm talking about in my last post regarding how horrible YouTube makes this shit look here. I even tried doing the 11 minute trick, and while the vid quality is slightly better than the other YouTube vids I've posted, it's still shit.)


Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Terror EBM - Again

This past weekend I felt like Audiosurf'ing some Terror EBM a.k.a Hellektro a.k.a. Aggrotech. Problem is, the only thing I own in that style is Hocico's Signo de Aberracion, which is awesome and probably one of the best albums of the genre - even if half of it is pseudo-Classical instrumental filler.

So I hear all the kids are doing this new thing called downloading music.

Wait, I mean - LEGALLY!!!

Who the fuck would've thought? I own a Mac, so I fire up the iTunes store and look around. But there's a problem with iTunes... last time I checked, Audiosurf didn't like iTunes's .AAC format, and the workaround was to take your .AAC files downloaded from iTunes and burn it to an audio CD and then rip the audio to .mp3.... no. No. NO. Fuck THAT!!!

I just so happened to have been on Amazon.com listening to 30 second previews of songs on each album anyways, (I swear to god once upon a time I was able to listen to 30 second previews on iTunes but I can't seem to do it now... WTF?)* and I pulled my head out of my ass just long enough to realize Amazon sells music downloads as well!

It turns out Amazon's downloads are already in mp3 format, plus the entire albums are consistently $1 cheaper than iTunes. So I spent the next few hours just previewing tracks of pretty much everything, using amazon's recommended shit to check out new bands I'd never heard of. Originally, I thought I'd end up getting something by Psyclon 9 and Dawn of Ashes, but it turns out I don't really like either band all that much.

In the end, I bought Unter Null's The Failure Epiphany and The Retrosic's Nightcrawler. After playing in Audiosurf for a while, I decided it would be fun to record some videos and post them on YouTube.

YouTube sucks.

Seriously, it makes good looking, well compressed video look like dick. I can record something where the track bounces and YouTube's junk compression quality just kills it. Part of the problem, I guess, is that YouTube displays things at 425x318, but always compresses to 320x240, meaning your video is always "stretched," making it look blocky and craptastic. Now, this doesn't matter for live action shots, it seems, but computer generated stuff tends to come off looking like shit.

So I switched, to Vimeo. I see a lot of other Audiosurf videos posted there, as well as various synthesizer videos over at MatrixSynth (linked to the right). I've never noticed Vimeo videos taking longer to load than YouTube videos, and the picture quality is much better.

So without further adieu - TERROR!!!


Audiosurf - Destroy Me from mtodead on Vimeo.


Audiosurf - Perrey & Kingsley from mtodead on Vimeo.

Postscript: I've been reading up on tricks to get better picture quality on YouTube, and apparently you have to cheat it and make your video 11 minutes long and encode to .flv using some obscure DOS-type utility... blah blah blah. No thanks.

Oh, and apparently there's also this, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.

*Edit: I finally figured out how to do this - you just double click on the song title for a preview. I thought this would've put it in my shopping cart. DOH!!!

Update 07/26/09 - As you can see Vimeo pulled the videos a while back. Apparently Audiosurf videos got so popular that Vimeo instituted a new rule: No videos of video games. If popularity is detrimental to your business, doesn't that mean the business model is a failure?

Of Wendigos and Waterways...

Almost done cleaning off the DVR - granted there were a handful of things that I just said "Fuck it, I'm never going to watch this," and deleted. For example, Eaten Alive (crocodiles? blah.) and The Crazies (Sorry George, but outside the first three "Dead" films, your track record isn't so good).

Ravenous - I had been meaning to see this movie since it came out in 1999, but 1999 - 2005 was when I was in college and didn't really watch many new movies (nor listened to many new CDs). It takes place right after the Mexican-American War, and the protagonist is an American soldier who chose to lie down and play dead rather than fight. As luck would have it, the Mexican soldiers put him on the bottom of a pile of dead Americans at just the right angle that a whole bunch of blood poured directly into his mouth and down his throat. The premise of this movie is that cannibalism makes one supernaturally strong, albeit constantly hungry. The lead character crawls out from under the bodies and singlehandedly captures a Mexican fort. He is honored as a hero at first, but then when he tells his superiors that he captured the fort by playing dead, they decide he's a worthless coward and send him to a remote outpost in Northern California.

The idea that cannibalism = super strength is apparently based off the Native American legend of the Wendigo. In Ravenous, when someone eats another person, they become a Wendigo. They get supernatural strength and are nearly impossible to kill, but always crave human flesh and are never satiated. As luck would have it, the small Californian outpost ends up entangled with another Wendigo, and whereas the protagonist quit eating all meat after his ordeal in the war, this new Wendigo revels in the power derived from eating human flesh. Sure enough, there's only one way to stop the bad guy, and that's to eat more people!

Overall, this movie was pretty good, though for some reason I expected it to be gorier than it actually was. I should also note that the bouncy main theme music was actually used in some Seat Belt PSA they used to play all the time on the Milwaukee buses between 2003 and 2005. Let's see, a PSA about the importance of buckling your child's seat belt properly, what music should we use? I know, how about the theme music from that movie about Pre-Civil War soldiers eating each other!

Wendigo - Larry Fessenden is awesome. He directed this movie and a vampire movie called Habit. Both are low budget indie flicks I caught on IFC. In Habit, a New Yorker goes through a midlife crises, breaks up with his longtime live-in girlfriend to "see other people," and soon finds himself involved with an alluring, enigmatic woman who knows how to get fucking freaky. However, the more time the protagonist spends around her, the sicker and weaker he seems to get. Could she be draining the life out of him? Habit is awesome because the majority of the movie is shot in the areas of New York City that one doesn't usually see in film and on TV. The plot is a little slow, but the interaction between the characters is very engaging.

Wendigo came out after Habit, and is about a family of New Yorkers getting away in the country for a weekend. The main character is their son, who is played by the youngest Malcolm in the Middle urchin before the sitcom hit big. The mother is a psychiatrist and the father is a photographer, so the impetus behind the plot is urban professionals versus the local with a chip on his shoulder. Now this ain't Deliverance or Calvaire, all but one of the locals in this movie are just nice, normal people. It's this one guy, Otis, whom the family butts heads with. The movie starts out with the family hitting a deer in the road. Otis and his two friends were hunting that deer, and when it turns out the deer's antlers got busted in the collision, Otis holds it against the father, who was driving the car. Otis's two friends just laugh it off like normal people, but the dad starts seeing Otis hanging around everywhere they go. Speaking of the dad, the dad in this movie is the single best dad in any movie - ever. He's not abusive in anyway, he's not mean to his son, yet he doesn't come off as sappy and fake. He ends up being the most sympathetic character in the movie.

Oh, did I mention there's a Wendigo in this movie too? In this movie, the Wendigo is simply a spirit that eats and never stops eating. It's also the major flaw in this movie. Really, this movie doesn't need a Wendigo for anything to happen, and the Wendigo itself reminds me of the "Jackolope" sketches from when America's Funniest Home Videos first came out (why do I know this?!!). On the other hand, I guess if this movie didn't have a Wendigo, it wouldn't have been tagged as "horror" and I probably would've never watched it.

Tideland - I loves me some Terry Gilliam. Every movie up until The Brothers Grimm is just pure gold. I grew up on Time Bandits and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In High School, I saw 12 Monkeys, connected it with TB and AotBM and made it a point to see Brazil and The Fisher King. When Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came out, I convinced my mother to take me and my younger sister to see it. Every one of those movies - PURE GOLD. Then he tried to make a Don Quixote movie, ran out of money, did the Brothers Grimm and then Tideland.

When it first came out, people hated Tideland. HATED IT. It's based off a novel, which is apparently one of those novels that is quirky just for the sake of being quirky. The protagonist is a little girl whose heroin addict parents both die, leaving her to fend for herself in a dilapidated house in the middle of rural nowhere. The only people she has contact with are the creepy neighbors, a witch-like sister and a retarded, epileptic brother. The title comes from the fact that the brother likes to pretend he's a captain on a submarine, that the grassy fields are the ocean, and a nearby train is a shark.

Bad things about the movie: 1) Remember the annoying child actress from Silent Hill? Yeah, now you get to see her do a Southern Accent for two hours. 2) I think the reason why people HATED this movie is because a type of "romance" develops between the main character and the (grown up) retarded brother. The last half hour you're just filled with dread that any minute he's going to molest her or something. I mean, it wouldn't be that out of place in a movie that BEGINS with the little girl cooking heroin and shooting it into her father. I've met people who didn't like The Professional because they felt there were undertones of a romantic relationship between Leon and the girl. In Tideland, there are no undertones, they declare their love for one another and imagine themselves married. It's really fucking disturbing.

There were many points during this film that I wanted to just stop it and turn it off. It's long, there's a sense of despair, you expect the absolute worst to happen - Requiem for a Dream was great, but I don't really want to see that happen to an eleven-year-old girl.

But the most fucked up thing?

When it was over, I was glad I watched it. It's stomach churning while you watch it, but afterward, I thought to myself, it's another dark fantasy by Terry Gilliam - just as Time Bandits was a dark fantasy, just as Brazil was a dark fantasy, etc. Some of his movies have happy endings, others don't. Maybe the source material wasn't exactly the best thing to adapt, and maybe this would be Gilliam's worst movie had he never done The Brothers Grimm, but even a bad Gilliam movie is better than a lot of other movies out there.

So there, I'm the only Tideland defender I've ever read.

Things that somehow exist but shouldn't: #324

Posted by user BearJazz at the Something Awful Forums.


1) It's a soundtrack... TO A BOOK!!!

2) Composed by L. Ron Hubbard.

...and one other thing...

I can't get this song out of my head.

Oh yeah...

...sometimes I make music.


This is just the typical type of thing I can kind of crap out in an hour. Then I end up spending hours and hours mixing and mastering it for practice. It's a bad habit that I need to break. Instead I should take the time to write out a non-generic piece of music, then not mix and master it unless I actually, y'know, have a reason to.

Of Logic and Ninjas

My very first post of this blog was about Logic 8. In summary, I started using Logic 4, moved up to Logic 5, Apple bought the company that originally made Logic, Emagic, Logic 6 was Mac-only and I didn't have a Mac at that time, then I got a G4 12" Powerbook when Logic 7 came out. I bought two ~$25 books put out by Apple's training series on how to use Logic 7, and I got pretty fucking good at it. At that point, Logic 7's interface was pretty much the same as Logic 4 and 5's interface.

Then came Logic 8. This is the point at which Apple decided to give the interface the Apple touch. Don't get me wrong, Emagic's Logic was always, always notorious for its "steep learning curve" due to its interface. Some people just "got it," some people never did. I was one of the people that "got" the old Logic interface. I had tried Cubase and Digital Performer, including 4 separate semester-long college courses on the latter, and neither clicked with me the way that Logic did. However, I must concede, Apple's new direction with the Logic interface is probably for the best. The problem is, I have 6 years of Logic and its key commands stuck in my head.

So I have two books, really good books, that I spent about $50 on that are now, for all intents and purposes, completely outdated, and I don't really feel like spending the money on the new Logic 8 books from the same series.

Well just last week, I was fucking around in Logic 8 and found that I couldn't step sequence the way I used to be able to in Logic's Matrix editor. Step sequencing is the most simple, most retarded way of programming a sequence in the world, so it was really fucking frustrating.

Fortunately, I found a series of YouTube videos by a guy calling himself SFLogicNinja that are actually really, really good. SFLogicNinja is apparently a guy named Dave who teaches Logic for some weirdo "music academy" called Pyramind. Whatever. His videos have been great. They're really good for showing the bare bones basics of what Logic 8 can do, which is great for me because I've pretty much found myself re-learning everything I used to know how to do. He teaches the new key commands as they come up in his videos, which helps, plus he goes over some of the old Logic stuff that many found so esoteric, like the infamous Environment, the Transformer Window and Logic's weird ass Touch Tracks. (On the subject of Logic's Environment, I only wish they would go whole hog and incorporate Miller Puckette's Pure Data into it somehow - that would be awesome.)

Browse all of his videos.

It didn't take me long to find the help that I needed with my step sequencing problem - namely that in old Logic, each different editor window "reinvented the wheel," meaning that a lot of the major parameters were on each new window. I needed to change the step sequence resolution from 1/16th notes to 1/32nd notes, something which used to be accessible from the left hand side of the matrix editor.

Apple is going for a more all-encompassing approach with their new UI, so they had stuck my precious note resolution on the bottom - in the transport bar (where you hit start and stop). It seemed fucked up at first, but then I realized, Apple's way has it so that I have the arrange window still in the top half of the screen, the Matrix editor on the bottom half of the screen *when I want it* and the transport bar always, always, always along the very bottom of the screen - therefore the note resolution parameter is always, always, always handy. (Side note: having the transport bar at the bottom is funny because that is Apple's default location for the Dock, but I had already gotten use to moving the Dock to the left hand side of the screen in Logic 7 so that it didn't get in my fucking way...) So in the end, I can kind of see the new way as better, but it all takes getting used to. Fortunately the SFLogicNinja videos are there to get me reacquainted with the new shit.

Curse of the Demon

Curse of the Demon, aka Night of the Demon - I recorded this over a year ago off of TCM Undergound - back when it didn't suck. A psychiatrist seeking to debunk the paranormal comes up against a cult leader who claims to have the power to conjure demons and set them upon his enemies. Early in the film, we are treated to the appearance of the demon, which, considering this was done in 1957, looks really good. Rather than merely giving us a guy in a rubber suit, the directer, Jacques Tourneur, uses camera tricks and strategically-lit smoke to prevent the demon from looking lame and he succeeds. Furthermore, the story is airtight, the acting is competent and the villain is awesome. Dr. Karswell, the cult leader and conjurer, carries on with an overtly friendly, yet menacing demeanor. There is one particularly effective scene where the protagonist comes upon him hosting a childrens party doing magic tricks and dressed up like a hobo-clown. The conversation that ensues, about Karswell's self-proclaimed power over the occult, while dressed like a clown is one of the best scenes in the movie.

Overall, this is probably the best movie I've subjected myself to in a long time now.

French horror just isn't doing it for me...

Watched another movie off the DVR tonight - I recorded this one off of Sundance. The movies I tape off of Sundance seem to consistently disappoint, so I'm thinking that from here on out I'm not recording anymore horror movies off that channel.

Sheitan - A French movie; the title means "Satan." The first hour is a bunch of club kids hanging around and being assholes on a farm, the last forty-five minutes is when stuff happens - but (spoiler alert!) no one dies (spoiler alert!)

The gist of the movie, I guess, is that someone's bringing about the birth of the Anti-Christ. Reading the imdb boards (for whatever that's worth), it seems like there is a legitimate case to be made that there's a lot of symbolism and biblical allusion going on in this movie. Being a heathen myself, it all pretty much just went over my head.

If the first hour wasn't so boring, I'd forgive the movie just on atmosphere and general fucked-up'ness alone. However, the build up is far too slow for the (lack of) payoff that's delivered.

Here's a link to Horror-Movie-A-Day's review. This is one of those movies that seems to send one to "the internets" to get other people's take on it. It's strange, but not exactly good. Probably good to see in a group so everyone can discuss/bitch after it's done.

Iron Man touched my butthole

I finally saw Iron Man this weekend, and it's still at 93% positive with 208 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought it was pretty "meh..." overall. I pointed out in a previous post how that's pretty much the same rating Schindler's List has. I have no idea where all this critical goodwill is coming from. Personally, I prefer Batman Begins.

Iron Man starts out pretty strong, with Robert Downey Jr. fighting against terrorists in Afghanistan. I mean, really, that could've ended up being pretty fucking silly, but I think Iron Man pulled it off tastefully enough. However, once he singlehandedly wins the U.S. war in Afghanistan halfway through the movie, it just kind of loses steam.

Look, CGI is great when used subtly. Give me a man in a suit using CGI effects against an army, make it look good, and it's great. Give me two CGI robots fighting each other, you might as well be watching Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam smacking the shit out of each other. That's why I didn't go watch Transformers, that's why I'm not going to go see The Hulk (redux). I'm not impressed by the fantastical feats of cartoons. That's probably why I don't like anime, even the supposed "good" ones like Akira - it just doesn't impress me.

And that's probably why I'm gay for Batman. Live action. Mano-y-mano. People hitting people, not cartoons. Yeah, I know there's CGI there, but I can't fucking see it, so who cares?! It's awesome!

Meanwhile, I've continued cleaning out the DVR.

The Dark - This movie feels like it was made as a low budget direct-to-DVD movie during downtime on the set of the Silent Hill movie. It even has Sean Bean. Turns out it was made and released a year before it. The overall structure is eerily the same; child disappears, mother goes apeshit trying to find her, father shuffles around in crazy mother's footsteps trying to piece together what's going on. It just begs the question, if this movie was already out when Silent Hill was being made, why the fuck couldn't they have learned from its mistakes?!

The Burning - I have a quest to see every movie that made the UK's "Video Nasty" list. I actually vaguely recall seeing this in high school, either on USA's Up All Night, or TNT's Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs. This is one of a slew of summer camp slasher movies that came out after the success of Friday the 13th. It's hook was that the killer, a groundskeeper named "Cropsy" of all things, was a horribly scarred burn victim. (The other thing it has to differentiate itself from other camper slasher movies of the era is a young Jason Alexander from Seinfeld - with hair!) This movie is good mindless fun, but you've got to think - how hard would it be to kick a burn victim's ass? I don't care if their coming at you with a pair of garden shears, I'm pretty sure just laying your hands on them would be incapacitating, let alone a good, solid punch.

The Black Dahlia - I didn't want to see this, but Gemma's had a hard-on for it ever since it was in theaters. No one really likes this movie, and that's because it's ass. The movie is based off of a fictional novel loosely based on the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Everything but the fact that a girl was murdered and severely mutilated is made up and it all sucks. The photography/cinematography is pretty neat; the movie is made too look like an old photo, but the corpse of the Black Dahlia itself is some CGI abomination seemingly inspired by American J-horror remakes - it really clashes with the rest of the film and not in a good way, in my opinion. The pace of the movie is mind-numbingly slow, the Black Dahlia murder seems to be a minor subplot of the entire movie, and the ending is just total ass and poo smeared together on Wonderbread and served on a paper plate. The best/worst thing about it is that there is something about this movie that just screams, "This was made to be Oscar bait!!!" which is hilarious given just how spectacularly it fails. There's a cheap direct-to-video knock-off of the same name on FearNet right now that is apparently even worse, which is really unfortunate, because this is one of those rare opportunities where an independent film maker with an extremely low budget could have actually have made a better movie.