Two pieces of update:

1. I learned this weekend how to make Facebook applications (essentially I had to teach myself PHP and SQL, which is quite mentally draining). It’s called “MyCast”, and it lets you ask the question - “If a movie was made about my life, which famous celebrities would I choose to cast as any of my Facebook friends?” and it answers the question “If my Facebook friends all had movies made about their lives, which famous celebreties would the cast as me?” (credit to Derek for first coming up with this idea). You can download the application that I made to your Facebook profile here.

2. I took the liberty to upload another East Carolina track for you to listen to. It’s a demo of an instrumental that Stu and I wrote a while ago called “Abacadaba” (which is simply the form of the piece, a rondo of sorts). It’s me on accordion and clarinet (which I had only started playing two week prior to the recording, so I took the fact that I only had one bad note as pretty good) and Stu on acoustic guitar. 

Abacadaba [Demo]

Download “Abacadaba”

I decided to get an early start to my summer reading assignment. So, over the past four days, I’ve read two books, Catcher In The Rye and The Kite Runner. I only like one of them. If you’d like to guess which one it is, I’ll give you a hint: It’s not Catcher in the Rye.

Anyway, the work got me pretty bored, so I decided that, spur of the moment I’d write and record a song. And below you’ll find the result.

Download “Superstrings”

In other news, there’s not much news to report. I’m trying to get a competitive writing competition started on UnFiction (see here), which has gotten…meager response. As I probably could have guessed.

Sigh… I’m so alone…

*tear*

P.S. To add to the content of my life that I put on the internet and nobody reads, I’ve started a Twitter, which I will put up somewhere on the site for the nobody who visits my site to look at.

VOTING IS NOW OPEN FOR THE MASTERS OF SONG-FU COMPETITION. GO THERE NOW AND CAST-A-CAST-A-WAY YOUR VOTE FOR EAST CAROLINA.

Okay, so if the hideousness of caps lock blinds you, now would be the perfect time/week for you to head on over to Quick Stop Entertainment to vote yourself up a nice delicious piece of East Carolina in the Masters of Song-Fu competition. You’ll find us under the heading “East Carolina” and the slow-dance picture. Our theme song is called “East Carolina in the UK”, and here’s a little lyrics cheat sheet:

“East Carolina in the UK” Theme Song

A rock band from America
On their way to London town
Down on their luck, but they’ll make some some bucks
And turn their luck around

East Carolina in the UK
But they still do things like the USA
They don’t come for teatime when they’re called
They don’t think that cricket’s a sport at all

They’re playing in their band
They’re workin hard and havin fun
They’re gaining fans, across the land
And all having all sorts of zany adventures

East Carolina in the UK
But they still do things like the USA
When they were offered bangers and mash
They just threw them in the trash

But they hate the British people the most
Everyone except for Gustav Holst

East Carolina in the UK
But they still do things like the USA
Not everyone thinks their music is groovy
But they’ll kill just like in a Hollywood movie

East Carolina in the UK
But they still do things like the USA
East Carolina in the UK
But they still do things like the USA

Did I mention that you should totally go vote for us in the Masters of Song-Fu competition? Oh I did? Sorry, I must be starting to sound pretty annoying then^*. Well, here’s something to redeem myself: Just for you special special readers, here is the extended version of the theme song that was too hot to make it into the official submission. If contains 12 music-packed seconds of never-before-heard music that the band has deemed too raunchy for the official theme song. Enjoy!

“East Carolina in the UK” Theme Song (Extended Version) Download

We’ll try to get out the theme song we wrote to a completely different show, because, in all honesty, that’s going to blow your minds. Peace out.

P.S. Who’s pumped for season finale of Lost tonight? If you guessed me, you would totally be correct.

^{*Did I mention that you should also totally tell all of your friends to vote for us too?}

P.P.S. “‘Til ne’er e’er o’er ‘m lo’er ‘o co’er” is my new quote of the week, and I’ve probably used it two dozen times already.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that, as of writing this, East Carolina is in 3rd piece in the voting, with 13% of the votes (which is actually a not-too-impressive 20), so apparently we did something right/have a lot of friends.

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.}

It’s been awhile since the last update, partially due to my busy schedule. Since my last post, I mainly was not writing because I needed to devote most of my energy into studying for the AP Economic exams. Luckily for you, the reader, this was not all a waste, because I did write a new song while I was studying - the economist’s love song, currently titled “Have Faith (feat. Adam Smith)”, and I may record that and put it up at some point in the future.

Also last week we had a band concert, where I was required to play the crazy synth parts in Peaches en Regalia among other things, which was fun, yet crazy tricky (I had to play on two keyboards at one to keep up with the song. But I have gotten positive feedback, so I guess it went good).

In addition, I have finally beaten Sam & Max 205: What’s New, Beelzebub? I had mostly been distracted and too lazy to have gotten around to the end. Once again, I will reiterate my belief that Season 2 hasn’t had any highs like there were in Season 1. I don’t know if Telltale is planning a Season 3 (I can only assume that they will), I hope that they can figure out what made Season 1 better than Season 2, and fix it. I’m not quite sure myself. One theory I have is that, since Season 2 had more of a planned story-arc, and Season 1 was more self-contained, that finishing an Episode in Season 1 just gave you more closure and a greater sense of accomplishment than just solving the next step in a series. The other issue I really have with Season 2 is that even though the idea was to create a fuller story-arc, to me it doesn’t really make sense. The overarching idea of the season is that Bosco is missing, and you need to find him. However, this isn’t really a driving force - who cares if Bosco’s missing? That’s not the thing that you can drive approx. 15 hours of gameplay from. Anyway, there goes my minor rant.

And finally, me, Stuart, and friends have finished recording “The Chemistry Album”. Stuart and I are thinking about potentially putting all of our East Carolina albums on the site for free download soon, so perhaps you will be able to hear all of the new tracks in a few days.

I hope in the upcoming days to upload a lot more music to the site for you to listen to (both solo-stuff and some more East Carolina). Right now, I thought it would be appropriate to write a “theme song” for my blog, so here I present the 20-minute power-project World of Arcana Theme

World of Arcana (Theme) - Download “World of Arcana Theme”

For some reason, it came out sounding like it was poorly compressed, even though it wasn’t - weird. Still having podcast issues, but hope to resolve those soon. There was another East Carolina track posted on that page, so check that out. I may do some more updates to “Things That Are Good” - ojos. And finally, keep checking for when I finally put up the mysterious “Aether” page…

It is a scary, hallowing experience to be in a room of 299 other people who are as nerdy as you. You know you are with your own type when:

1. The guy standing in front of you outside is wearing a Portal t-shirt.
2. You see at least two other people in Coach Z t-shirts.
3. The guy sitting next to you is discussing with his friend how Transformers was so beautiful that he cried.
4. As Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum plays while people are sitting down, you see at least half of the people in the theater mouthing along the words with you.
5. All that Paul and Storm need to say is “They Might Be…” and the crowd has already erupted into mad applause.
6. Everybody knows what he means when storm says “Can I haz five thousand dollars?”
7. People know where to put the handclaps in “Shop Vac” and the correct lyrics.
8. The person sitting next to you knows the entire Code Monkey dance.

Obviously, the concert was incredible, and I thought the people at the Lakeshore Theatre did a great job of running the evening, compared to other concert venues. Interestingly, it being a comedy club, I think there may have been some people at the show who thought that some songs were funny that never particularly struck me as funny, like “I Crush Everything”, but whatever.

I didn’t manage to get too many pictures, but there are some pretty good YouTube videos other people took of the evening:

From dave of guitar lessons fame:

Other Videos

I’m also working on a little bit of a fan-project for people who were at the show (yes, I’m that much of a loser), so stay tuned for that.

Okay, so I have Podcast #7 all ready to go (Tribute to America), but I’m having some issues with my audio editing software - Audacity won’t let me save files as mp3 and my audio converter is converting files with weird scratches inserted in the middle. However, I’m going to try to sort those out and get the podcast uptomorrow.

How Has the Week of Awesome Gone?

Eh.

TF2 updates:

• Goldrush=Good.
  Goldrush=Fun.
• Medic achievements=impossible.
  Medic achievements=too many medics in any single server I join.
  Medic achievements=me feeling guilty to change to medic to get achievements on team bloated with medics already
  Medic achievements=me hating every medic who has already unlocked a weapon.
  Therefore: Medic achievements=Bad.
• Payload maps=Confusing as hell in Hammer.

C.S.O

Incredible. Of course.

Good Karma

Canceled, will be rescheduled.

Lost

Good, but not great. I was expecting that though - Lost generally has a schedule where every other week the episode is really good, and last weeks was great, so I expected this week’s to be a little lackluster [NOTE: This generally does not hold true for the end of a season though, where there are 4-5 high-fueled episodes in a row]. So next week’s episode should be good (and it looks like it).

Oh, and in case you forgot…JoCo tomorrow (!).