World of Arcana

So Stu and I recorded our song for Masters of Song Fu Round 1 today. As you may remember from the last post, we had brilliantly masterminded the tempo so that our theme came in at exactly 1 minute. For some reason between Sonar and Audacity and iTunes, the song picked up an extra 11 seconds, which was mega-weird, but we were finally able to edit that down to exactly 1 minute, or on some computers 59 seconds, depending on whether you round up or down. Remember to listen for the song on Wednesday and VOTE FOR EAST CAROLINA.

Additionally, I mentioned that at some point I’d release our alternative-show theme song, which I most likely will still do (If I don’t wuss out or forget to). In addition, we may post the full-extra 11 second-version at some point in time, so that you too may experience the original artistic vision we had in our heads.

So yeah. Not much else has happened since Thursday or whenever I wrote the last post. I bought some pants today. And some shoes. Yea.

So yesterday Stuart and I stated working on our challenge to write the theme song for our life’s television show. We think we have all the words and music ready, and we’ll do the recording Monday and Tuesday (cutting it close since we live on the wild side). The song has to come in under a minute, so we did this really cool “reverse engineering”, where we figured out how many measures there were in the song, and then multiplied by 4 beats in a measure, and then set that as the beats per minute, so that we have a song that’s exactly 1 minute long. Awesome.

We did a lot of listening to great TV theme songs (Laverne & Shirley is Stuart’s favorite), and we think we’ve figured out what makes the great themes great. I don’t want to give too much away here, in case any of our opponents are reading this [shifty glanes], but here’s one interesting thing we did discover: every single theme we listened to was in the key of F major… weird.

Oh, and also, we have an entire alternate set of lyrics for an alternate show we came up with. We’ll post the alternate theme here after we submit the real one for your listening pleasure.

Anything else I can think of? Nope, not really. Pretty lackluster week. Over and out.

Today, between research for my massive Economics paper, I snuck a quick look at my e-mail inbox, and was delighted to discover that East Carolina had been accepted into the Masters of Song Fu competition!

However, our spot would be given up to another artists if I did not submit a photo and biography by 6:00 EST…

I was soon forced to close the window and continue my investigation of unemployment rates of the past 9 quarters (including and not including part-time workers!), and at 3:15 PM, when school let out, I was both elated that we had made the competition, and scared out of my mind that I wouldn’t be able to find a computer to submit the information. Luckily, I went over to my friend’s house, and he let me use his computer, so I think East Carolina’s going to be okay for the contest.

Then I went into my friend’s basement and proceeded to lose 4 Mario Kart races in a row.^*

^{*I did win both songs I did in Guitar Hero though, so it’s okay.}

Today was a lot of fun. I participated in PuzzleCrunch 2008, an online puzzling competition, with some friends from Unfiction. We didn’t win any prizes, but the puzzle solving was fun. Like it always is on Unfiction.

Also, I’ve been trying to figure out what I was going to play at the final Good Karma Cafe on Thursday. For a while I was thinking of getting some people together to do a full radio-version of Still Alive. Failing that, it was back to the drawing board today. But I decided to give another shot to an idea that I had in October (!). It actually turned out pretty good, and I’m pretty sure it’s what I’ll do Thursday. Hopefully, a video will follow.

Two parts to this post:

1. Last night’s episode of Lost, for those of you who saw it, was pretty incredible. I feel like this episode is the turning point in the season - up until now, conflicts have been set up, i.e. freighter people helping the losties? (hint: no) and whether they were going to attack the barracks (hint: yes). This episode started to resolve the conflicts and answer some of the questions brought up in the first part of the season. So yea.

2. Continuing with yesterday’s post, I’m going to give a list of my favorite TF2 custom maps below:

CONTROL POINT MAPS:

• cp_jailbreak_b3 (or cp_jailbreak_b2)
• cp_orange_x (or cp_orange_x3. Not cp_orange_x4)
• cp_orange_tower
• cp_toyfort (and any variation thereof)
• cp_tron_final

CAPTURE THE FLAG:

• ctf_avantown
• ctf_convoy_v2
• ctf_royal_b3

CHALLENGE/CREATIVE MAPS:

• cp_bestinclass_v2
• cp_highclass_v2
• volleyball

BAD MAPS:

• ANY surf map

I’m currently “working” in my “spare time” on two maps: The first is a one-team capture the flag map (i.e. one team tries to capture, the other team tries to prevent) taking place in a 3D version of Kanto (i.e. The world from Pokemon red/blue/yellow). Red team starts in Pallet Town, and needs to take the intelligence from Professor Oak’s lab to Giovanni’s gym in Viridian City, where the Blue team starts. The second map I’m working on is a “challenge” map similar to Best In Class - except instead of having a separate course for each class, there is only one course per team, but certain obstacles can only be overcome with a specific class, and the whole team needs to work together. Aw, how heartwarming.

So I guess I lied, here’s a third part to the update: I was reminiscing with some friends today of literature that we read in Elementary and Middle School. Here are some recommendations/anti-recommendations:

RECOMMEND:

• The Rats of Nimh
• Bridge to Teribithea (spelling? too lazy to check)
• The Frog and Toad series

DO NOT RECOMMEND:

• Johnny Tremain
• Kavik the Wolf-Dog
• Junie of the Wolves

Anybody who knows me knows that I am notoriously good at coming up with great ideas for projects, working on them once, and then never doing anything with them again. While this obviously has some ill effects, i.e. a lot of projects that I want to do never get accomplished, it also works as an indicator to me that a project that I’ve worked on multiple times is actually worth accomplishing.

So anyway, I’m cleaning out my room today, and I find a notebook from 4 years ago. Now notebooks are where most of my failed ideas reside, so I eagerly flipped through to see what I’d forgotten about. I was greeted with the index for a book I was planning to write where I ranted about various ideas that I had thought of. I only wrote the first three chapters, but here’s the table of contents that I had come up with:

• Foreword by J.K. Rowling
• F***
• If You Took a Dog
• Communism vs. A Plate of S***
• Bad Answers
• How To Kill A Man
  _{(and other things I learned in Canada)}
• Clowns vs. Statisticians
  _{(or: Communism vs. A Plate of S*** Part II)}
• Making People Sad
  _{(or: If You Took a Dog Part II)}
• What’s Up With Oregon?
  _{(or: The (U?) S of A)}
• Flying Monkeys My Ass!
  _Intermission

Yeah, and also, as anybody who knows me knows as well, I was not very funny when I was younger. But I thought I was. And that’s all that’s important.