11/14/2022

Thinking Aloud: Self-Confidence

There's a story about the Dalai Lama that I heard from my mother recently. It runs something like this:

In an interview, the Dalai Lama was asked about the self-hatred and self-loathing in Western culture. He was surprised by it, the very concept had never even crossed his mind. It's just not a problem in Eastern culture.

It sounds too clean and too pat for it to be true, or at least for it to be true the way it's phrased here. But it lead me down a certain line of thinking, and then I and a friend (thank you Lee!) happened, entirely by coincidence, to discourse a little bit on self-confidence. The following is derived from both.

9/24/2022

Thinking Aloud: On Fantasy's Strengths & Weaknesses

As I slowly, haltingly attempt to write out my own epic fantasy, I've been thinking about the nature of the genre. This isn't a formal essay as such so much as an attempt to gather together some inchoate thoughts about it.

Everything that follows - excepting the quotes - is caveated with this: it's all subjective opinion, and any statement carries an implied "I think."

9/16/2022

My Patreon Has Been Unlaunched

It had a good run, but Patreon's really only good for creators with a very large pre-existing fanbase.

7/24/2022

2021: What I Read

As with last year, music and film and literature continues to act as balm and root. Last year, I read 151 books - 154 if you include books I started but didn't finish in 2021. So far I have made it to 132 books this year. 

And so, as with the past two years, I will now dive into some of the books I've read this year, in chronological order, once again excepting any books in a series, and provide my thoughts on them. Title, author, order by start date, and read dates are included. I read multiple books at any given time and so please do not take that I am finishing the longer titles in only a day or two. There are occasional spoilers.

4/11/2022

Book Review: Legacy of the Brightwash (Tainted Dominion #1) | Krystle Matar

So I finally dug myself out of the long reads I've been engaged in since mid-February, and returned to a couple shorter, fictional works, and one of them was Krystle Matar's Legacy of the Brightwash. Minor spoilers, friends.

4/01/2022

a ribbon poem for National Poetry Month

it's National Poetry month and so my library has a poetry creation station wherein one can create poetry by writing them down with a Sharpie on ribbon. little tricky to do, but I wrote this short poem for it.

Oh for the night is dark and silent
& the ocean doth speak only in whispers
Tie your name to the black mast
Rest, and let darkness embrace you.

2/22/2022

Some notes on Pokémon route themes

[Around February I was working with the Pokémon RSE soundfont to try and write a Pokémon-style route theme. This is some stuff I wrote up for my old Patreon account whilst sharing abandoned drafts.]

2/08/2022

Pokémon Soundtrack Odyssey Continued - Legends: Arceus

Legends: Arceus | Go Ichinose, Hitomi Sato, Hiromitsu Maeba (Go Ichinose, Hitomi Sato, Junichi Masuda)
As was perhaps inevitable, the music for the new Pokémon has leaked, though let us all hope that there's an official release, because this is the single best Pokémon soundtrack in a decade and I would put it up there with RSE and BW. (As with SwSh, I am using Video Game Music Resources's guesses for composers.) The music for L:A is handled by the team of Ichinose and Sato - the primary composers for DPPt and BW2 - joined by Hiromitsu Maeba, formerly of Capcom, whom also acted as mixing engineer. I said previously that the sound team needed a good mixer, and it got one. All the mixing and arrangement issues that have plagued the scores since XY and gone, completely gone. 

To go with a shift in the mixing, there's a shift in composition style, too, with a greater emphasis on soloists - piano, solo cello, solo violin, and traditional Japanese instruments - then ever before. (Shades of Breath of the Wild.) Taking place in an ancient version of the Sinnoh region, called Hisui, as it does, many tracks from DPPt are rearranged by the composers. Calling them rearrangements really does a disservice, though, because the composers didn't merely update them for new instruments - they broke them down to their base elements and rebuilt them. The various "Jubilife Village" tracks, co-arranged by Sato (the original DPPt "Jubilife City" composer) and Maeba - not just changing depending on whether you're indoors, outdoors, or at home but evolving throughout the game - are a great demonstration of this, but so too is the massive "The Heartwood," (Sato's "Eterna Forest" recomposed by Go Ichinose) which is some six minutes long before looping, as is Go Ichinose's "Coronet Highlands" (Ichinose's "Mt. Coronet"). Samples from the original DPPt are brought over, too - that classic timpani's in a lot of tracks.

The field and area music is beautiful - just listen to any of the tracks I've just referenced above. The battle music is just as good. The regular battle themes deconstruct Masuda's somewhat anemic originals and make them darker and more intense, and the other battle themes are even better: check out Ichinose's intense "Battle! Origin Dialga/Palkia" (recomposing Masuda's DPPt Dialga/Palkia battle theme) which brings in BW2 vibes with the synths, or (once again Ichinose on arrangement) "Battle! Legendary Pokémon." Every stop, it seems, was pulled for this soundtrack, Ichinose and Sato at their absolute finest, with Maeba on mixing to ensure that everything sounds crystal clear and smooth to the ears. 

1/25/2022

TDFA e05 "A History of Sadness" Score - Liner Notes

Episode five of the Twelfth Doctor Fan Audios, "A History of Sadness," can be heard on YouTube. It was written by James Blanchard, directed by Elizabeth Smith, and scored by myself, Dillon O'Hara, and Studio Gallifrey.

e05 = episode five. s01 = scene one. m01 = music one. These liner notes were originally written for Patreon, and the soundtrack is available for members of my Patreon, so if you'd like to hear the music, please become a member. Some, but not all, tracks will be released later in the year as part of an ongoing series of TDFA soundtrack releases.

1/02/2022

The Pokémon Soundtrack Odyssey

RBGY: Junichi Masuda
This where it all started, where the foundation that would define Pokémon scores was set. Listening back, it's striking in two ways: it's aged better than you probably remember, and it's also, in some ways, obviously aged. "Pewter City" is a trainwreck, the chromatic lines in the "Wild Pokemon Battle" track would stick around for GSC and then disappear for over a decade, and the town and route themes are in general a mixed bag. Much of the best music here is Masuda's creepier works – "Viridian Forest," "Lavender Town," "Silph Co." – an unexpected discovery considering the generally cheery tone of the series. The music in general is very busy – understandably so, considering the influence of Bach (as writing for the GB's chip certainly resembled the limitations of three-part counterpoint), and given that players would be listening to the music for long periods of time, having a bunch of different stuff that the ear could focus on is a virtue. It's only in retrospect, looking back, that we can say that, operating outside of the game, it's "too busy." The original soundtrack release's heavy reverb does the music no favors. Still – this is where it all began.