Chiptune Binge

Posted on 14th May 2011 in Something Daily

It’s been a while since I wrote anything, let alone a full blog post, but this is because I’ve come to the realization that writing about what I do every day is dumb. At least, it was nice for a while, but not really worth my time anymore, I feel. But check it out, cool stuff has been happening.

Last Tuesday was the release of GOBLIN by Tyler the Creator from Odd Future as well as Starscream’s first full album, Future, Towards the Edge of Forever. These are both sweet albums. Listening to (and buying the deluxe version of) the former has sparked a lot of heated conversation about whether or not Odd Future are actually worth listening to. When I hear people talking about them, I just get really happy for them, because six months ago they were just a a bunch of kids recording stuff in their basements and now they’re huge. I don’t mean to be condescending, seriously. Just good for them, you know? The Starscream album (which I paid ten bucks for on a whim about twenty minutes after it released) is my first exposure to really any chiptune other than Anamanaguchi, and it began a chiptune binge that’s been continuing since that point. I got some of the albums from a few years ago on which Starscream were featured, and right now, I’m listening to this British chip dude called Syphus whose music is also really awesome. Check it.

I’m living out of a suitcase since my parents took my stuff away from NYC, and that means no video games, which in turn means less distractions from playing with my sweet new Wacom Bamboo tablet. I got it because there was this picture of an excited Asian guy that I thought would look really cool with fire in his hand, so I bought a tablet and drew the fire on him. Totally a worthwhile purchase. But seriously though, it is, because it means that I can draw 100% more stupid cartoons per hour.

Trying not to kill this weirdly good mood I’m in. Follow me on Twitter.

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All this Bass is Gonna Break My Ears

Posted on 18th April 2011 in Something Daily

Good day. I just spent about three hours on an assignment for my Data Structures class that involved creating a Huffman code based on a text file, then applying that code to compress the file, and decompressing it to make sure you did it correctly. Turns out I did, but this was one of the harder assignments in the class. My algorithm works, but it’s incredibly slow, as a result of the codes not being sorted in size order. It takes ten seconds to encode and decode the constitution, and it takes more than ten minutes to do ten constitutions (a lot more than ten minutes). So I understand how to fix this, but having it be efficient isn’t part of the assignment…I know. This is me being a terrible programmer. But right now, in this context, I’m ok with that. Because I have other things to be doing right now. Like designing wonderleaguewill.com, and playing Portal and Half Life 2 Episode 2 before bed, in anticipation of the awesomeness that will be waiting on my computer when I wake up tomorrow morning (and I don’t have class until 11! So much awesome!).

Yes, Portal 2 is going to be sweet. That’s really all I have to say about it right now. Let me just see here….I’ve been listening to a lot of Odd Future, and I feel like it might be messing with my head. At least the metal I listen to has mostly unintelligible lyrics, so if they’re singing about something awful you’re probably not going to hear it. But Odd Future, though…most of their songs are sort of..I don’t really know how to say this…”about rape”, I guess would be a good way of saying it. Tyler has an incredibly evil sounding voice, and the beats are really awesome. So I’m into it. But I do occasionally wonder what it does to my psyche to listen to so much violent music. I’m not too worried, if it really is damaging me, I’m probably already too far gone from the months of Wu-Tang.

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What?

Posted on 15th April 2011 in Something Daily

I got the keys to my first apartment today. I wasted a bit of money by neglecting to check the keys before I copied them – it turned out that one of the keys they gave me didn’t work. But the place looks bigger in real life than it does in my memory, which is amazing. The rooms are about the same size, and the floor is completely covered in gross black and white checked linoleum. Something must be done about this. But I’m finally just now getting a break from the skateboarding odyssey that I went on today, between the real estate office, the apartment, and my roommate. I went between all of those places three times, skating the whole way…I’m tired.

Also, since tomorrow is in fact my 20TH BIRTHDAY, my coworker brought me cupcakes made with orange juice this morning at work, which were fantastic. I did accidentally knock them all onto the floor, but I still ate about three floor-cupcakes. They were incredible. And it’s cool that somebody remembered my birthday and cared enough to do something about it. Awesome.

In other news, Odd Future are fantastic. I just downloaded Radical….swag. Sweet, sweet swag.

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Starting to Build a Message Board

Posted on 6th March 2011 in Something Daily

It just occurred to me that life is too short to not write about whatever you want on your blog.

I’ve been teaching myself MySQL, PHP, HTML, and CSS over the last handful of days, originally starting with the W3Schools tutorial. That very quickly grew into the seed of an idea for an introductory project which, when it’s complete, should give me a command of the skills I need to have for the hackathon in April. So the idea is that I’m going to put together a message board, with 4chan as a template/inspiration. I want to have nice looking page layouts (not looking for anything horribly fancy, as I’ve never really used CSS in my life), as well as the functionality of viewing/starting/replying to comment threads and attaching images to comments. Eric gave me a subdirectory on his web host, so I’m using that to practice uploading files. It’s going well so far, I’ve figured out how to use a text file to store the information on submitter name, image, and comment content, and to display them in something vaguely resembling a thread format. The next step is to learn how to do that with MySQL databases instead of text files. That shouldn’t be too much of an issue (at least I hope not).

One other thing – this morning I downloaded Odd Future’s demo tape from their website and it’s some of the most evil rap I’ve ever heard, and the rhymes are so good. Also, Tyler the Creator just celebrated his 20th birthday today, and Earl Sweatshirt is 16. Check out OFWGKTA (this video is not safe for work or small children or anyone who doesn’t especially like profanity).

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