college has been awesome. I've been having a wonderful time, and I've been busy, so I haven't been posting much. I just finished up astrophysics and now I'm going home with my girlfriend. life is good.

I'm in DC for the inauguration. Went to that big concert thing today. Am going to the capital tomorrow to pick up my ticket. It's funny, because only on Friday I beat that behemoth in the Capital in Fallout 3. Got into a high priority school with a renewable scholarship.

Left 4 Dead is fantastic. There will never be another game so dependent upon co-op play, or one that's so damn fun with co-op play. I spent the whole night a couple of days ago playing Left 4 Dead with some friends. We stayed up all night beating that damn game, and we had a phenomenol time together doing it. people could sit by the TV, and when asked why they weren't bored, they'd say 'it's like watching Dawn of the Dead.' Not only do the little touches with the movie posters create that sensation, but the pacing accomplishes this as well. Suspense is constant, and you're frequently freaking out. It's a game that grabs you powerfully and doesn't let go, despite its weak story.

 

so anyway, I like that game quite a lot, and now I'm chilling in DC for Thanksgiving, and when I get home I need to wrap up college apps due Monday and then get back to beating Left 4 Dead on some more challening difficulty settings. 

the fall's here. I've been busy. I rowed my last race of the crew season yesterday. then my boatmates and I went to the hospital to see one of our coxswains who's got some problems with his belly right now, but he should be fine. then I found out I did better on the SATs this time around. I'm doing all right in school too. then I got Far Cry 2. It's all right.

I'm still mucking about when it comes to girls and haven't got any clear direction at all.

I need to get into college and I think I'll be able to do that.

this relates to pretty much anyone who listens to music. this is one of the most fascinating things I've ever read about music. there is a drum beat called the amen-break. it's all over the place. as soon as this video plays it, you will recognize it. it's an awesome beat. it's used all over the damn place. the video is extremely well made as well very well worth the twenty mintues, I can assure you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

there's an essay about how this drum beat has the golden ratio (you've read the Da Vinci Code, right?) in spades. this is an awesome beat, and its use says something very interesting about our culture. basically, this is the drum beat to end them all, and I've been hearing it over and over again. I'd like to hear more of it. anyway, here's the essay:

http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Amen%20Break%20and%20GR.html

this is the stuff keeping me up at night, you have no idea.

which means crew is back. I like rowing. It's very hard, it's very challenging. it centers you as a result. the most visible thing about participating in crew, from rowing, is that your hands fall off. the skin on your hands falls off. there's blood on the oar handles from the blisters breaking open. they heal tough, but in the beginning, there's blood. I'm a skinny guy and I never gained much muscle from crew, though I could breath better and I was stronger indeed. I like that I have something in my life that is hard. I like having to get to the end of the river and having that be an objective in itself. I don't even worry about that not being the end of practice. There are few things in life like that.

I went to Kentucky with my Youth Group, which I am only a part of because of this one girl, to do some humanitarian stuff or whatever because this girl asked me. I'd never spent so much time with her. We got along fine, but I realized that that whole thing doesn't mean what it used to to me and though it'll always matter, it's just not what it was. I had a good week. My grandfather is from that area of Kentucky, and I'd been around there once before, but it was nice seeing it again. We put siding on a shed. People in Kentucky let their dogs go free, and this girl who talked me into this adopted one for a night thinking it was a stray. Things are strange.

My senior year of high school begins in two weeks. I've got to get my act together. I have the majority of my summer work to do still. I have not seen any colleges, though it is on my mind. I've been reading Don Quixote for part of summer work. It's kind of funny.

I find myself sleeping later. I go to bed earlier because I have no one to talk to on the phone with. I wake up later because I can sleep better without that stress.

Life is getting better.

The gameplay is not so much changed as it is enhanced. I played a lot of MGS3, and the sneaking and such worked very similarly, only with the addition of some awesome new CQC moves, like smothering. The Metal Gear Solid series discusses the role of the soldier pretty heavily, and since soldiers don't just sneak in the shadows, MGS4 has made gun-play better than ever by adding an over-the-shoulder view, which is extremely useful.

The gadgets are tons of fun. The sheer volume of weapons is very refreshing from MGS3, which didn't offer too much variety when it came to that. Thanks to a man known as Drebin, the player can customize the numerous weapons throughout the game, all of which are a lot of fun.

The boss battles are as great as ever, though the camo you recieve for tranqing them out is a little bit different than how it was in Snake Eater. You get to have the face of your opponent now, rather than just their skin. Anyway, between the Beauty and Beast unit and all the others, the boss battles are just as good as the serie's reputation has them, if not better. I'll not talk about the specific boss battles, but I think that they got better as the game progressed, and my favorite B&B was Mantis.

In terms of graphics, this game is unmatched, and probably will be for a long time just as its predecessor was. Partly, it's a clear technical mastery of the medium, but also, the taste is outstanding. The levels simply look outstanding, not necessarily because of raw power but because it's so pleasing to the eye, and that should be the continued aim as graphics technology gets better. This game looks to capture the beauty of people and flowers and sunsets, all in a 'tactical espionage game', and it accomplishs this with wild success.

It's true, so much of this game is cinematics. It aspires to be a cinematic game. The gameplay is in itself great, but it's within the context of a story. I don't know why developers haven't tried with this concept before. Authors use the structure of their sentences to try and echoe their larger point that the contents of their novels convey; why shouldn't video games work the same? This may be the last game of the series, and it ties up everything it ever could with that being the case (watch all the way through the credits). The vioce acting is great, and everything looks terrific. I don't want to say this game is quite philosophical, but it certainly aspires to some kind of philosophy, and it seems to merge it a bit with some kind of comment on the structure of society, which is a difficult thing to do.

Over all, I'd say this was worth about $550, including shipping.

PS3 and MGS4 came today. my TV isn't good enough to actually show me the input when the game gets too loud. brought it to a friend's. I forget how it is at the beginning, but similar enough to MGS3 to pick it up pretty easy. very possibly worth the $500

To be honest, the reason I started listening to Aphex Twin was because he was mentioned in a book about Radiohead, so I checked out Druqks, which seemed to be his most popular album. I liked it and all, but the fact of the matter is that it's impossible to name any similiarities between the two artists aside from that they both are into electronically generated music. There is no other similarity between the two; they are as diametrically opposed in philosophy and sound as is possible. The Uncyclopedia Entry for Radiohead ridicules the band for trying to eminate Aphex Twin. If they were, they failed miserably, and I'm totally fine with that. These are two of my favorite artists of all time (as of the past year).

The most 'Aphex Twin' Radiohead gets (or will ever get) is Pulk-Pull Revolving Doors. This is off of Amnesiac, however Amnesiac and Kid A were recorded in the same session, along with 20 other songs that as far as I know have never been released to the public. Supposedly, Thom Yorke used to do X and go to raves and he loved the club music, so he decided to try and bring that into the sound at this time. Which is fine, except that I know that none of Radiohead's music could ever possibly be good for club music. Period. Anyway, this song is just four and a half minutes of (relatively) synthesized percussion, as in, it's a little manipulated, but they obviously used a sample in the first place. It sounds like someone stamping their feet to a beet. All right, fine. But here's the thing: Radiohead only uses this sound to advances the weird, creepy little mutterings that are scattered throughout. Radiohead never got the point where they could get some harmony between melody and percussion as far as I can see in the two albums; instead, they repeat the same percussion, with a very similar melody of very dense bass. So instead, it's all some synthesized voice that sounds like Gollum with a headset. But what clinchs it is that the voice isn't that weird that it's mesmorizing in itself. I'm not criticizing Radiohead, but I'm pointing out that they remain dependent on the content of their lyrics very often, along with instrumentation, to create a feeling, rather than some sound to bob your head to. They are totally serious about creating beautiful, enlightening music, and they often succeed.

Radiohead tries to go for beautiful music all the time. It's true that How To Dissapear Completely has some weird ambient electronic sound scattered throughout the song, but there's also smooth acoustic guitar and some quartet and melodious singing the entire time. The song has a very distinct structure. Thom kind of drones on and on about being depressed, repeating the lines that that dude from REM supposedly told him to say when he gets depressed, the song builds up to the string part and the crescendo, fin.

Aphex Twin does not conduct business this way. Aphex Twin spends his days creating music, as far as most people can tell. It's estimated he's got over 100 hours of music made over the years, and he's been doing this for a long, long time. He's a technical and musical genius; he went to university and studying electric engineering. This was after he had been physically manipulating various technology to produce wickedly bizarre sounds (supposedly he won a contest at the age of 13 by getting a CPU with no sound card to produce what even he described as a totally weird sound). He began getting some poppy from his music at the age of nineteen, and stopped with that in 2004 with the release of Druqks (it will probably be his last under the name of Aphex Twin). He's famous as a DJ, though he's admitted that it's not at all important to him. He's been making music since before he can remember, and that's all he really cares about. He's got all the money he wants, now he wants the world to leave him alone so he can do it in peace with his vault of a house and his armoured car to take him to the grocery store.

Why is this important? Because he cares about sound primarily, feeling secondarily, and often not at all. He is interested in music, not philosophy, or at least, he considers it that the two should not mingle it would seem. Any words he ever has in his music are either totally messed up, or meant to be funny. Instead, he just wants people to freakin' dance to his music, not sit by the fire and try to figure out what it's all about (a quality which Radiohead has tried to deny about its music, while at the same time maintaining that all their albums have underlying themes that are developed by careful planning of album artwork, lyrics, and sound). The music of Aphex Twin first and foremost wishes for you to bob your head. Period. There was once some group (the name, or even category of the association escapes my memory) that sent various samples of electronic music to some famous German modern classical composer, and the composer said Aphex Twin showed great potential, but 'changes in tempi and melody from time to time' would dramatically improve it. Mr. James was probably peeved to be asked to comment on someone else's unsolicited comment on his music, but he said something to the effect of 'I'm not making random changes in my music so I can appease some snobs. If you can't move to the music, forget it'. This is pretty liberal paraphrasing, FYI. Well, what is his music like, now that we've established his philosophy?

Aphex Twin's music varies dramatically. Often times he's trying to just get us to feel like some animal is chasing after us (Come to Daddy), that your body is falling apart (Vordhosbn), or that people are inanely pervert (Milkman). But these are attitudes and that's hardly constitutes music. No, Aphex Twin has always had awesome synthetic percussion (...a lot of it, he uses samples from regular old drum kits and other acoustic percussion instruments often enough) in his music, though not in all of his songs (I'll get to that). He sets a beet, works it, gets bored with it, and switches to a new pattern, tweaking it ever so slightly through out, no matter the duration. New sounds are constantly thrown into the ongoing rhythm, but usually don't alter it much (unless it's a live show). My theory is, he secretly has hundreds of hours of various sheet music he's penned himself, without actually making it, or without at least actually releasing it. He finds a melody he likes in the song, and manipulates it throughout the song a lot of the time. It's terrific and it always fits perfectly into the percussion, though one may come before another, like in Boy Song. These melodies of his are usually very catchy, but he keeps changing it up throughout the song to keep it interesting. The key is to be just repetitive enough without getting bored, such as it is with most music, and it seems to me Aphex Twin has done a better job of that than with anyone else I can think of. Take for example Icct Hedral off of I Care Because you do. We've got this same riff going on the entire time, even though it's usually not the same notese being hit (their relation to one another stays the same though), and the percussion keeps everything flowing excellently.

It's all about being creepy and pretty at the same time. Druqks demonstrates this the best I suppose, but most of Aphex's later work reflects a desire to seek this balance. The Richard D. James Album starts out with an nice synth riff that could perk just about anyone up, and that light-hearted 'hey this makes me happy' sort of melody permeates the whole song. BAM, you have Corn Mouth, which is an awesome song, but it's ugly as hell. It's something to dance to, and really catchy, but it's still got something that sounds that reminds one of static and nails on a chalk board to split up the song at times. Being a Radiohead fan, I consider the sequence of songs very important in an album. A lot of albums are narratives. De-Loused in the Comatorium by the Mars Volta, Kid A by Radiohead, the Campfire Headphase by Boards of Canada, all good examples (and albums certainly worth your time). Anyway, it's not always intentional. On Druqks, you have the utterly beautiful avril 14th, an acoustic piano piece that's most just a coulple of arpeggios the whole time, but it's the prettiest thing I've ever heard and it feels like I'm no oxycodone everytime I listen to it. But this comes AFTER the hectic, somewhat pornographic 'cockver-10'. If I could hijack a night club so that I could play one song I wanted everyone to go crazy to, it would be this song. However, it's also very intense, and the odd bits of voice samples you get sound like some very angry drunk man about to rape you. It's still good to dance to, but it's literally scary.

Druqks starts out with jynweythek. It's a pretty acoustic piece (or at least, it can be performed on piano and sound almost exactly the same, and I think Mr. James just tweaked some piano so that the percussion sounded a little bit different). It's fairly pretty, but at the same time, rather anxious. It sounds scared. The next song (previously mentioned) is vordhosbn, and these two songs had one video done together, which supports my theory that the order is at least a little important. The pretty song (jynweythek) is played during an animation of a mildly pretty moth buzzing around a what looks like a deserted prison (think the basement in Hostel). The moth has found no way out. Then, when vordhosbn kicks in, a robot kicks in, fueled by green slime, clicking buttons like mad to some melody its got tucked away in whatever computer it's got. It gets totally devastated by its own devices, torn apart, clinging to some little keyped that it tipes with its fingers, and that's kind of what the song sounds like.

I could go on and on, more so because it was 'Lactic Acid Monday', but I'll stop there. I like the music anyway, and I also happen to think the people behind it are very interesting.