Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

Slack, slack, slacking on the blog posts. I apologize.

Re: Pictures. Yes, they exist, yes I have them. The problem is figuring out how to post them. See, Roomate and I were sharing some space on a web service provider, and evidently our subscription has run out. I think Comcast gives me some web space to publish things, but I haven’t used any yet. At any rate, I’ll probably figure something out eventually, but It’s lower on my list of priorities these days. If you want the full images, though, I could just send them to you. They’re pretty big, though, so be warned.

Hey, doesn’t blogger have some sort of image hosting thing? I should check that out.

Anyway, now for the highlights:

J(5) and I continue to hang out…uh…a lot. A lot a lot. Pretty much every chance we get, now that I think about it. So far we’re getting along just great. We seem to have really compatible personalities, inasmuch as we’re both:

1) Pretty crazy
2) Pretty laid back
3) Big fans of the CUDDLING
4) Enjoy laughing/making others laugh
5) Enjoy hanging out with people
6) Etc, etc, etc.

I could go on, but it just seems like we get along really well. And at this point our relationship has begun to grow past the bounds of any relationship I’ve ever been in, which, if you’ve been paying attention, isn’t much, really. So I’m in completely uncharted territory, relationship wise, but we’re also both really big fans of talking, so that works out just fine too.

Big event! Last Saturday we went over to ‘The Chef’s’ house. (One of the girls from my hiking adventure, if you remember.) There’s a reason I call her the Chef here, and that’s because she’s a fantastically amazing cook. We’ll be going to a little party and The Chef will show up with, like, 7 or 8 stuffed Cornish game hens on rotisserie spears for ‘a little snack in case anyone gets hungry’. When she makes food, people get up and pay freakin’ attention. She’s great.

Well she recently bought a condo, and so us, all excited for her, wanted to come over and see it. Evidently there will be a more formal ‘housewarming’ party later on, but for now we just wanted to see where she lived. So somewhere in all the planning, The Chef mentions that she has a fondue pot that one of her co-workers gave to her, and we all think that’s a terrific idea. So that was Saturday: J(5) and I show up and The Chef is there getting food ready. We helped. I’ve seen the ‘fondue’ episode of Good Eats, so I know that for a good cheese fondue, you have to let each handful melt before you add the next, so I was in charge of stirring the cheese fondue. Man, I can understand why these things were so popular in the 70’s, putting melted cheeses on various fruits, vegetables, and breads is downright delicious! And, of course, after that, we washed the thing off and hit up some chocolate fondue. J(5) had picked up some fresh (delicious!) strawberries at a farmers market earlier in the week, and so people would get a strawberry, dip it in chocolate, and then J(5) would hit it with a quick *whammo* of canned whipped cream. Then you cram the whole thing in your mouth before it falls off your fork. That was a serious desert. After that, we played Cranium. (Yep! The one you guys got me, parents!) Which was also a lot of fun. J(5) and I won because of a combination of crazy Karaoke skills (mine), crazy ‘identifying Noel’s pictionary scribbles’ (J(5)’s), and a lot of questions about words that have been ‘words of the day’ before.

There’s some other really exciting news, but you need some background, first. Actually, for some of you, you’ll need a lot of background, so this’ll be a bit of a history lesson for some of you ‘older’ folks. Use this knowledge to impress the younger generation with your knowledge of happening’ current events.

* * * *

Many many years ago, perhaps 7 or 8, a Japanese video game company called Bemani came out with a video game called “Dance Dance Revolution”, or DDR. DDR became immensely popular over in Japan and, when ported over to America, enjoyed similarly large success. The game works as follows:

You stand on a pad with four (4) arrows on it, one for up, one for down, and one each for left and right. You select a song, some of which are really catchy, and the song starts playing. Then, along with the notes or rhythm of the song, arrows start scrolling along the screen. When they reach a certain point, you step on the associated arrow on the pad. What ends up happening is that your steps end up corresponding to beats and notes in the song, kind of like dancing. It’s great fun.

Hot off the success of DDR, Bemani came up with another couple of Arcade games, Guitar Freaks and Drum Freaks. They’re both similar to DDR in that you select a song and perform actions along with the music. For Guitar freaks, they made a modified guitar that has three buttons, so instead of ‘stepping on arrows to the beat’, it’s ‘strum the modified guitar to the beat’. Which is neat stuff, but not important.

What is important is Drum Freaks. Whereas DDR and Guitar freaks ‘simulated’ the experience of dancing or playing guitar along to the music, in Drum freaks, you actually play and actual drum set along to the music. The game works like this. There are several pads that take the place of the drums, symbol and a foot pad for the bass drum (the big one in the front of a drum set on the ground), and as you go through the song, you have to hit each of the pads in time to the music. Now in the simpler songs, you don’t have to play everything. It may be something like “Snare drum…(wait)…cymbol…(wait)…bass drum…” etc. But on the higher difficulty settings, you’re actually playing the real, real drum part along with the game. This means two things:

1) In order to do good at the game on higher difficulty levels, you actually have to be able to play the drums.
2) Drum Mania is a great way to learn the drums, because the difficulty increases slowly, it marks your progress, and you can very carefully monitor every single percussion hit you have to do. It’s great!

So flash forward a couple of years to early 2004 or so, whenever it was that I happened to pick up my electronic drum set. I know about Drum Freaks and realize it would be a great way to learn to play the drums, but unfortunately I don’t know of any arcades around here that actually have the Drum Freaks game. It would be neat, I imagine, if there was some similar sort of program for the computer, because since my drums are *electronic*, they can send a signal to the computer which could be read and processed just like in the arcade, substituting my electronic drum set for the pads on the arcade game, and my computer for the computer inside the arcade. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any such program. Regardless, I start learning some stuff about the drums and enjoying myself immensely on them.

Flash forward again to last weekend.

I was goofing off on the internet, searching for “Drum Freaks” and Controller or PS2 or some similar stuff, and I saw a little snippet come up on the search engine. “…can use your Yamaha DTX to control Drum Freaks…”. The Yamaha DTX is the electronic drum set I own.

I am intrigued! Wouldn’t that be neat! If there was some way to get my drums to connect to my PS2 in order to control the PS2 version of Drum Freaks? That would be great! What good news that would be! I do some more research…

And I find this: www.gdamania.net

What is this? It’s a community of Drum Freaks fans who have written the EXACT PROGRAM I was imagining before. You take the output from your electronic drum set, plug it into your computer, run this program, and it plays songs with the drum track written out EXPLICITLY for you, so you can practice along, all while the program tells you just how well you’re doing, which notes you’re hitting, which you’re missing. It has easy songs, medium songs, and then harder songs, and, in fact, you can CREATE your OWN SONG FILES, so that if you want to practice the drums for any given song, you just figure out what the drum part is, create the file, and practice, practice, practice to your hearts content! It’s the perfect practice tool for the video-game-loving drummer.

And here’s the even better part, IT’S FREE!

Yep! The program was written by people who did so for free *just because they like drumming and the video game that much*. You can download songs from people who write them just because they like having things to drum to! It’s fantastic! Amazing! I’m totally, totally pumped for this!

So last weekend, I went out and bought the tiny, tiny little bit of hardware you use to send the signal from your electronic drum kit to your computer, connected them together, downloaded the program, and it worked! And it was awesome! I now have a great, great way to practice the drums! I’m so excited!

* * * *

So that’s my other piece of exciting news. A bit of a long read, but you can feel good knowing you’re a more knowledgeable person for having gone through that.

I’ll sign off this blog by mentioning J(5)’s cat. J(5) has a cat. His name is Tigger (I doubt he really minds me using his real name). Unfortunately, Tigger can be a pretty mean-spirited cat when he wants too. He’s a biter. You’ll be petting him for a while and he’ll decide that he wants to be playful and he’ll bite your hand or arm. Sometimes even pretty hard. He’s also got a nasty habit of biting exposed legs. He’ll just walk up, sniff you, and then bite. I prefer non-bite cats.

The weirdest part is that I can’t figure out why he does it. He’ll walk up, bite me, and then run off all scared, like he’s afraid of reparations of some sort. Well then why did he bite me in the first place? Does he want to play? I don’t quite get it. I haven’t done any research, yet, though, there may be some similar, documented cases. I understand that there are a lot of people out there who like cats, and that many of them may also have access to the internet. Heh. Personally, I prefer lap cats. Cats that will fall asleep on you and rub up against your leg when you’re not expecting it. J(5) plays with her cat a lot, though, so I shouldn’t be surprised he’s pretty playful. She doesn’t like that he bites, though (especially biting strangers). Perhaps there’s some sort of anti-bite regimen we can use. Something with cat treats and/or water bottles. Hit me, Dr. Pavlov!

Right, my time on the keyboard is ended. See y’all in time!

-N