So, I've done this with a few of my movie commentaries before, but it's going to be standard now, so I'm gonna give you a heads up. I'm pretty much done "reviewing" movies. When I talk about movies from this point on, I'll give you a quick summary of what I thought and then I'm going to proceed to delve into whatever issues it got me thinking about and how they are pertinent. So, here goes this one:
Simple introduction: Juno rocks. I'm glad I saw it today so that I can legitimately put it on my top 5 for the year. It's sharply written and features stellar performances by a few of my favorite actors (Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, and Allison Janney). People seem to like comparing it to Little Miss Sunshine, but that's just because people like making comparisons. The two have little in common beyond being incredibly well written independent comedies that like to ignore most of the standard formulas. Juno is more accessible in style...but Little Miss Sunshine was very dark and more than a bit absurd, and as such, certainly not everybody's cup of tea. I'd say I like Little Miss Sunshine more (I don't think Juno will quite make its way onto my Top 10), but that's because I the subtext of Little Miss Sunshine (the frailty of humanity; the hollowness of being a "winner" and leading a self-seeking life; and the necessity and healing power of love) is a little bit more important to me.
That said, the subtext of Juno deals with another issue that has become incredibly important and intriguing to me in recent months: relationships. What we build them on; what we expect from them; what they mean to us...we live in a backwards society in a lot of ways, not the least of these is the way we look at relationships of all sorts. We're so obsessed with this idea of "falling in love" that we forget what love really is. We get so caught up in the ideas of romance and passion that we don't remember that the cliché of your spouse being your best friend is supposed to be true.
Relationships in any sense, whether it's a normal friendship or a marriage/dating relationship, should be rooted in the same basic principle: love. Caring for the needs, desires, and dreams of another individual as much as for our own is what creates the sense of security and comfort that allows us to feel close to one another. As such, common sense says that the chief difference between close friends and a spouse, fiancé, or committed boy/girlfriend shouldn't be the physical relationship or the observance of other societal norms so much as the devotion and openness of the love between the participants. A truly devoted couple can't just hope for the dreams of their partner to come true; they need to incorporate their partner's dream into their own.
The problem is that it's so easy to let the social/physical aspect - the "romantic" aspect - of an intimate relationship become its defining portion that forgetting the depth of the love that a successful relationship requires is easy. Not to mention that the popular semantics of "falling" or "being in love" has so much more to do with physical arousal and passion than with actual love that we, as humans, constantly attempt to enter into relationships with people with whom we have no basis for a normal friendship, and you've got a recipe for the cultural disaster we live in.
I'm going to try and relate this back to Juno now as I finish. Spoiler warning and all that.
Vanessa and Mark's relationship failed for one simple reason. They were committed to the idea of a relationship and not to each other. Vanessa was ready to be a mother, not a wife; but in order to be a mother, she felt that being a wife was necessary. She didn't appreciate her husband's dreams and did her best to try and replace them with her hopes for a picture perfect family. Mark was resentful of his wife's treatment of his goals and couldn't bring himself to appreciate hers as completion of her dreams would do nothing to restore his. Neither was willing to embrace and commit themselves to the dreams of the other; they were unwilling to love each other for who they were, so they failed.
Juno and Bleeker will succeed because they understand the truth behind the opening lyric of the song they sing right before the credits roll. "You're a part-time lover and a full time friend". It worries me a lot that so many people I know tend to forget the order of importance of those things...but there are a few of you in my life who seem to have it right, which is a cause of regular celebration for me, so thank you.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Something new.
I'm in Winona, which is unexpected and awesome, but it's 2:30 and I'm not quite what could be called tired. There are issues running through my head that I've been wanting to try to explain to somebody for the last God-knows-how-long, and I feel like I should start to get them out. I don't know if I'll actually post this, but if I do, those few people who I know occasionally read this tend to be among the group I trust to know me this well, as well as to think and talk with me about these things. Also, I generally trust you to not think I'm crazy.
First thing first:
What's up with the traditional view of heroism in our society? With a few exceptions from actual history, it seems like the notion of heroism (at least of the more adventurous variety) is inexorably linked with violence. Call me crazy, but this strikes me as a bad thing for a few reasons.
For one, when you spend so much time being told that problems can be solved through direct confrontation, improper expectations are built; expectations in which helping people becomes less important than solving their problems. I don't think I've fallen completely into that trap (or, at least, I like to think I recognize it when I do), but it's there, and I know I'm not the only one.
The second worry is more personal. Maybe it's just the fact that so much of my worldview is wrapped so strongly in the escapist media that's been such an important part of my upbringing...but every time I think of adventure - which, due to said overexposure, I occasionally look at as a necessity for happiness as opposed to contentment - it always winds up being linked with physical conflict. Even though my own experience shows elation in mere exploration and great sorrow in causing pain; there's this part of me in which longs for some sense of physical confrontation; that longs for a palpable, tangible source of evil that can actually be stopped by humanities oldest and least effective method of problem solving. The sheer number of people I know who "joke" about anxiously awaiting a zombie apocalypse makes me feel like I'm not alone here, either.
I think that this is the real allure, and the real danger, here. The path of Cain comes so naturally to us that we'd all love to think that, ultimately, it will at some point be the right one, even though we all know that deep down it never will be. History shows us time and time again that the only way to really bring about change is by adherence to the great commandments given us by Christ: to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. It's a damnable shame that it's such a hard calling to adhere to (pseudo-pun pseudo-intended).
Second mini-rant picks up near where that left off:
The Golden Rule seriously needs to be rephrased. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is meant to embody the basic tenets of "Love your neighbor as yourself"...but it seems to me that it fails miserably. I started having this conversation with a couple of my roommates the other day, but one of them wouldn't hear it, simply because he was so used to relating the first as being equivalent to the second. I think the linguists and semantic nuts among you will agree with me that it's not.
The Golden Rule is, by its very phrasing, self centered. It asks you to think of how you feel, or believe you would feel given a certain circumstance. Well, guess what, that other person isn't you, and at least 50 percent of the time, what makes you feel better probably isn't gonna do the trick for another person. The great commandment is, by its nature, focused on the other person. We are to love them to the same extent we love ourselves. It says nothing of the manner, just the amount because Christ, being, you know, omniscient, understands that the manner must vary. By its nature, Love has to be expressed differently between different people; certainly there are universal acts that can be used to express it, but if I'm truly trying to show my love to my mother and my father, I can't treat them identically. That would be not only inconsiderate, but it would be dehumanizing them by ignoring their individuality. How then, in choosing to treat everybody as we would like to be treated, can we follow the Golden Rule as traditionally told, and retain a respect for the humanity and individuality of all? We can't.
My initial response is to say that the Golden Rule should read "Treat others as they would have you treat them"...but that leaves elephant-sized gaps for people who are disturbed or depressed to justify or encourage mistreatment. So, I don't know what we can really use as an entirely secular rephrasing of the Golden Rule, but we seriously need one, or else we'll never advance beyond this cultural overemphasis on "how I feel". Any ideas, fellow postmodern linguists in the audience?
I had one more thing to rant on, but I seem to have forgotten it, so I'll leave it at this for now. If this generates some discussion, either just with me or through comments, or whatever, maybe I'll make writing out these sorts of rants and ramblings a greater priority.
First thing first:
What's up with the traditional view of heroism in our society? With a few exceptions from actual history, it seems like the notion of heroism (at least of the more adventurous variety) is inexorably linked with violence. Call me crazy, but this strikes me as a bad thing for a few reasons.
For one, when you spend so much time being told that problems can be solved through direct confrontation, improper expectations are built; expectations in which helping people becomes less important than solving their problems. I don't think I've fallen completely into that trap (or, at least, I like to think I recognize it when I do), but it's there, and I know I'm not the only one.
The second worry is more personal. Maybe it's just the fact that so much of my worldview is wrapped so strongly in the escapist media that's been such an important part of my upbringing...but every time I think of adventure - which, due to said overexposure, I occasionally look at as a necessity for happiness as opposed to contentment - it always winds up being linked with physical conflict. Even though my own experience shows elation in mere exploration and great sorrow in causing pain; there's this part of me in which longs for some sense of physical confrontation; that longs for a palpable, tangible source of evil that can actually be stopped by humanities oldest and least effective method of problem solving. The sheer number of people I know who "joke" about anxiously awaiting a zombie apocalypse makes me feel like I'm not alone here, either.
I think that this is the real allure, and the real danger, here. The path of Cain comes so naturally to us that we'd all love to think that, ultimately, it will at some point be the right one, even though we all know that deep down it never will be. History shows us time and time again that the only way to really bring about change is by adherence to the great commandments given us by Christ: to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourself. It's a damnable shame that it's such a hard calling to adhere to (pseudo-pun pseudo-intended).
Second mini-rant picks up near where that left off:
The Golden Rule seriously needs to be rephrased. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is meant to embody the basic tenets of "Love your neighbor as yourself"...but it seems to me that it fails miserably. I started having this conversation with a couple of my roommates the other day, but one of them wouldn't hear it, simply because he was so used to relating the first as being equivalent to the second. I think the linguists and semantic nuts among you will agree with me that it's not.
The Golden Rule is, by its very phrasing, self centered. It asks you to think of how you feel, or believe you would feel given a certain circumstance. Well, guess what, that other person isn't you, and at least 50 percent of the time, what makes you feel better probably isn't gonna do the trick for another person. The great commandment is, by its nature, focused on the other person. We are to love them to the same extent we love ourselves. It says nothing of the manner, just the amount because Christ, being, you know, omniscient, understands that the manner must vary. By its nature, Love has to be expressed differently between different people; certainly there are universal acts that can be used to express it, but if I'm truly trying to show my love to my mother and my father, I can't treat them identically. That would be not only inconsiderate, but it would be dehumanizing them by ignoring their individuality. How then, in choosing to treat everybody as we would like to be treated, can we follow the Golden Rule as traditionally told, and retain a respect for the humanity and individuality of all? We can't.
My initial response is to say that the Golden Rule should read "Treat others as they would have you treat them"...but that leaves elephant-sized gaps for people who are disturbed or depressed to justify or encourage mistreatment. So, I don't know what we can really use as an entirely secular rephrasing of the Golden Rule, but we seriously need one, or else we'll never advance beyond this cultural overemphasis on "how I feel". Any ideas, fellow postmodern linguists in the audience?
I had one more thing to rant on, but I seem to have forgotten it, so I'll leave it at this for now. If this generates some discussion, either just with me or through comments, or whatever, maybe I'll make writing out these sorts of rants and ramblings a greater priority.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Just Because
So, I feel like I should write something. I don't know why, but I do. There isn't a lot going on these days for me to write about...I saw American Gangster and No Country for Old Men. Both were good movies. American Gangster makes me sad mostly because Ridley Scott just seems like he's trying to win an award these days instead of making quality cinema. No Country for Old Men was brilliant. Saying more about either would be doing you all a disservice, either because I'd be spoiling Old Country for you or because I'd be wasting your time telling you things you could have guessed about American Gangster with only minimal knowledge.
Seeing as I'm starting to get a vague idea of who reads this thing, I'm even more torn as to what to write, as there isn't a whole lot of interest overlap. This being the case, I'm going to ramble a bit about something that's been running through my mind since about 2 a.m. this morning that only a couple of you will understand: Concurrency in Object Oriented Design.
This is one of those entries that's going to be edited, heavily, when I come back and read it in a few days and realize how incomprehensible it all is. Keep with me for now if you care...
So, first of all, thank God that my High Performance Computing class is over. Starting to understand how to write procedural code in parallel was well worth the time and effort, but I think that bigger things are on the horizon. Primarily, I don't think that parallelization is going to be the primary route taken in writing applications to take advantage of multi-core processors.
Why do I think this? Well, mostly because I don't see anybody giving up their objects anytime soon. As much as I'm starting to appreciate functional programming, I still love Object Oriented design. It's just so much easier to perceive interactions between elements of a software system when you're dividing them up logically from the get go, that the time penalty is well worth it. The problem here is that it's difficult to parallelize an Object Oriented system because you've got such a strongly heterogeneous mixture of operations going on in any given interaction between objects. Certainly, if you're performing simulations where you have large aggregate groups of similar objects interacting with each other over either several iterations or under slightly different circumstances, you can break up this problem...but if you've got several dozen different types of Objects, all having their interaction being controlled by some central, generally procedural method, you're going to have to combine flat parallelism over looping constructs all over the place with functional decomposition of different object-set interactions with god knows what other types of algorithmic tomfoolery to "optimize" your problem.
This just doesn't seem worth it.
I've recently been doing a bit of reading on a language called Erlang. Erlang is rooted in the concept of "concurrency oriented design". Now, when most people think of concurrent operations, they think of multi-threading. When most people think of multi-threading, they think of shared memory accesses, critical sections, and notoriously instable and unreliable performance. Erlang sheds all of this.
Instead, Erlang structures programs around "processes". Not OS processes, light-weight processes managed by the Erlang RTE, each with its own unique memory and variables, all communicating with each other through asynchronous message passing. Having not done any actual programming in Erlang (a deficiency that will be rectified soon), I don't honestly understand yet how programs are structured around these processes, but I see a LOT of potential in this.
Imagine, a combination of Objects and Erlang style processes. You build an Object, and gets scheduled to run as its own process on one of the cores or nodes of your system. Each object exists as a unique process in this way, waking up and doing work on its core when requested, and sending that data back to whatever other Object requested its services, and going back to sleep. It doesn't sound a lot different from Object Oriented design as we know it, it just scales objects and their computations across a system. Obviously, we would need to write interactions between objects in a less traditionally procedural manner. "Controllers" in the traditional sense would certainly see a massive overhaul. Right now, it seems to me that Object Oriented programs are essentially procedural programs with a lot of the mess filtered out into objects and the remaining mess existing in the controller, managing their serial interaction, but any step towards truly efficient parallelization would require as much.
I've lost my train of thought for now. Maybe when I come back to make sure the above statements are actually understandable, I'll be able to remember what I wanted to say. For now, though, I'll just ask, would this concept of Objects existing and communicating concurrently, largely independent of a serialized controller be the fastest way of spreading code across multiple processing elements? No, probably not. But, if you're really looking for speed, why are you looking at O-O in the first place? I honestly can't think of anything right now that has the potential to be as easy to understand in design terms, easy to extend across and arbitrary number of processing elements (distributed or symmetric), and as potentially robust as this solution. It's something to think about and hope for in the future.
Seeing as I'm starting to get a vague idea of who reads this thing, I'm even more torn as to what to write, as there isn't a whole lot of interest overlap. This being the case, I'm going to ramble a bit about something that's been running through my mind since about 2 a.m. this morning that only a couple of you will understand: Concurrency in Object Oriented Design.
This is one of those entries that's going to be edited, heavily, when I come back and read it in a few days and realize how incomprehensible it all is. Keep with me for now if you care...
So, first of all, thank God that my High Performance Computing class is over. Starting to understand how to write procedural code in parallel was well worth the time and effort, but I think that bigger things are on the horizon. Primarily, I don't think that parallelization is going to be the primary route taken in writing applications to take advantage of multi-core processors.
Why do I think this? Well, mostly because I don't see anybody giving up their objects anytime soon. As much as I'm starting to appreciate functional programming, I still love Object Oriented design. It's just so much easier to perceive interactions between elements of a software system when you're dividing them up logically from the get go, that the time penalty is well worth it. The problem here is that it's difficult to parallelize an Object Oriented system because you've got such a strongly heterogeneous mixture of operations going on in any given interaction between objects. Certainly, if you're performing simulations where you have large aggregate groups of similar objects interacting with each other over either several iterations or under slightly different circumstances, you can break up this problem...but if you've got several dozen different types of Objects, all having their interaction being controlled by some central, generally procedural method, you're going to have to combine flat parallelism over looping constructs all over the place with functional decomposition of different object-set interactions with god knows what other types of algorithmic tomfoolery to "optimize" your problem.
This just doesn't seem worth it.
I've recently been doing a bit of reading on a language called Erlang. Erlang is rooted in the concept of "concurrency oriented design". Now, when most people think of concurrent operations, they think of multi-threading. When most people think of multi-threading, they think of shared memory accesses, critical sections, and notoriously instable and unreliable performance. Erlang sheds all of this.
Instead, Erlang structures programs around "processes". Not OS processes, light-weight processes managed by the Erlang RTE, each with its own unique memory and variables, all communicating with each other through asynchronous message passing. Having not done any actual programming in Erlang (a deficiency that will be rectified soon), I don't honestly understand yet how programs are structured around these processes, but I see a LOT of potential in this.
Imagine, a combination of Objects and Erlang style processes. You build an Object, and gets scheduled to run as its own process on one of the cores or nodes of your system. Each object exists as a unique process in this way, waking up and doing work on its core when requested, and sending that data back to whatever other Object requested its services, and going back to sleep. It doesn't sound a lot different from Object Oriented design as we know it, it just scales objects and their computations across a system. Obviously, we would need to write interactions between objects in a less traditionally procedural manner. "Controllers" in the traditional sense would certainly see a massive overhaul. Right now, it seems to me that Object Oriented programs are essentially procedural programs with a lot of the mess filtered out into objects and the remaining mess existing in the controller, managing their serial interaction, but any step towards truly efficient parallelization would require as much.
I've lost my train of thought for now. Maybe when I come back to make sure the above statements are actually understandable, I'll be able to remember what I wanted to say. For now, though, I'll just ask, would this concept of Objects existing and communicating concurrently, largely independent of a serialized controller be the fastest way of spreading code across multiple processing elements? No, probably not. But, if you're really looking for speed, why are you looking at O-O in the first place? I honestly can't think of anything right now that has the potential to be as easy to understand in design terms, easy to extend across and arbitrary number of processing elements (distributed or symmetric), and as potentially robust as this solution. It's something to think about and hope for in the future.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Defending My Top 10's: Part 2
Well, once again, I find myself not wanting to do work, so I'll take some time to explain why I like some of the things that I like. Continuing down the list, I'll cover soundtracks. A few notes I'd like to make here: these are, videogame/anime soundtracks. There really aren't enough movie soundtracks to which I listen with any regularity to make the list, and they would seem somewhat out of place with those represented here. And, once more, I tried to limit things a little bit by including a maximum of one entry per series/composer. Again, while the list isn't presented in any meaningful order, I'll tackle it in the order in which they appear, anyway.
Chrono Cross:
Choosing a favorite from the body of Yasunori Mitsuda's work was a feat. I'm not going to lie. Choosing the best single score from among the Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenosaga Episode 1 soundtracks isn't fun. For me, Chrono Cross wins out for two reasons:
1. It's largely quite mellow, which is something I enjoy in listening music.
2. Of the soundtracks he's written that hold nostalgic value for me, the sound samplings in Chrono Cross are of the highest quality. With a few exceptions, things sound like real instruments and not mediocre MIDI samples.
Unfortunately for people playing the actual game, the only real dud in this collection is the battle music, the theme that's probably heard more than any other. In any case, the OST itself is a more than worth addition to your music collection.
Cowboy Bebop
I don't know how to begin to describe the body of work written by Yoko Kano for this series. Catchy is really about the best I can do, but that doesn't begin to describe it. The sheer variety of musical styles represented is astounding, and all of it, from the big band jazz and western guitar pieces to the vibraphone march and whacked out electronica is of excellent quality, even if many of the vocal pieces are incredibly derivative of late 90's American pop. Honestly, if you're skeptical and you know anybody who has access to a decent chunk of the soundtrack, ask them to make you a mix of their favorite pieces, and prepare to be shocked by the quality.
Earthbound
Earthbound is a quirky, light hearted game, and its soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. The various battle music tends to be just as odd and captivating as the enemies you'll face, dungeon tracks leave you with a relaxed sense of urgency, and the various town themes will relax all of your fears away. It's really the perfect soundtrack to the game and makes for great listening on its own. I've recently started playing Mother 3 (the sequel to Earthbound which was only released in Japan), and it seems like its soundtrack could accomplish the difficult task of being even better.
Secret of Mana
Few games have soundtracks that do as much to imporve the game experience as Secret of Mana. Though the actual presentation of the story in Secret of Mana is fairly lax, the music does as much to instill a sense of adventure and sorrow as any that I've ever heard. Honestly, if the soundtrack didn't do so much to set the mood, the hours of grinding required to keep all of your weapons and spells up to max level would be next to unbearable. Instead, every time you enter the wild, you feel like something amazing could happen at any moment, and it provides the same sense of excitement to make grinding through text books tolerable, as well.
Okami
Okami's soundtrack is just...good. I don't know what else to say about the general quality beyond this. It's really amazing that audio is just as vivid, energetic, and distinctive as its visual style of this game. It really remains so memorable through the use of traditional Japanese instrumentation and musical structure, which keep it fresh to my American senses.
Shadow of the Colossus
Dramatic is the best single word to describe Shadow of the Colossus' aural component. It takes an excellent and dynamic score to keep your ears as engaged as your eyes when you're desperately struggling to stay atop and kill a moving mountain, but Colossus does it. Swooping scores that swap between movements dynamically, becoming more and more grandiose as you approach your ultimate goal and reverting back down to a foreboding sense of mortal danger as you fall to try again. It really is a treat for the ears.
Katamari Damacy
Seriously, it's just royally fucked up. Random, quirky, and ultimately one of the most enjoyable experiences around describes Katamari Damacy and its soundtrack to a T. Everything from soft techno to rock ballads to mambo to lounge singers to children's choirs make their way into this soundtrack, and I don't know if I could enjoy it more.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
This game really makes the list thanks to the incredible Hyrule Symphony performance. A lot of N64/Play Station era games made the dubious mistake of trying to use "improved" quality Midi samples in their music. Really, these midrange samples sound just enough better that you can tell they're supposed to be real instruments. The fact that they still don't just causes most of them to grate on my ears a bit. Listening to the Hyrule Symphony recording, though, any woes about sound quality in the actual game fly away as I bask in the beauty of Koji Kondo's impeccable work. Everything in the soundtrack is great, but there aren't many tracks in existence that match up to Hyrule Field, The Gerudo Valley, or Death Mountain as heard on this recording.
Dragon Quest V
My favorite Dragon Quest soundtrack, by far. Why? Mostly because the field and battle themes are just so damn good. When the best two songs on an already excellent soundtrack are the two that the player is guaranteed to hear the most, you've done something very right. The little upbeat in Over The Horizon that gives it the deceptive, almost 3/4 feel just gets me every time I listen to it. Seriously, I think I could listen to the track for hours straight and not feel like I was missing anything besides the adventure right outside my window.
Final Fantasy VI
And the dreaded choice arrives. Which Final Fantasy game makes the cut? As much as I love pretty much all of the FF soundtracks, VI gets it for one simple reason. The first 12 minutes of the 21 minute long ending theme. This intricate medley of character themes flows so perfectly and beautifully, and disguises themes so well as it weaves characters together during the escape from Kefka's Tower that I can't confidently say that any piece of game music has been written better. The passage flowing from the Gau's Theme into Celes' and then Locke's chokes me up regularly and the swell from Relm's theme into the nigh unrecognizable adaption of Shadow's theme is absolutely perfect. I want FFVI to be remade on a new console just so that I can hear this piece being performed by a real orchestra. If I were to hear that, I don't know how life could get much better.
Chrono Cross:
Choosing a favorite from the body of Yasunori Mitsuda's work was a feat. I'm not going to lie. Choosing the best single score from among the Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenosaga Episode 1 soundtracks isn't fun. For me, Chrono Cross wins out for two reasons:
1. It's largely quite mellow, which is something I enjoy in listening music.
2. Of the soundtracks he's written that hold nostalgic value for me, the sound samplings in Chrono Cross are of the highest quality. With a few exceptions, things sound like real instruments and not mediocre MIDI samples.
Unfortunately for people playing the actual game, the only real dud in this collection is the battle music, the theme that's probably heard more than any other. In any case, the OST itself is a more than worth addition to your music collection.
Cowboy Bebop
I don't know how to begin to describe the body of work written by Yoko Kano for this series. Catchy is really about the best I can do, but that doesn't begin to describe it. The sheer variety of musical styles represented is astounding, and all of it, from the big band jazz and western guitar pieces to the vibraphone march and whacked out electronica is of excellent quality, even if many of the vocal pieces are incredibly derivative of late 90's American pop. Honestly, if you're skeptical and you know anybody who has access to a decent chunk of the soundtrack, ask them to make you a mix of their favorite pieces, and prepare to be shocked by the quality.
Earthbound
Earthbound is a quirky, light hearted game, and its soundtrack fits the mood perfectly. The various battle music tends to be just as odd and captivating as the enemies you'll face, dungeon tracks leave you with a relaxed sense of urgency, and the various town themes will relax all of your fears away. It's really the perfect soundtrack to the game and makes for great listening on its own. I've recently started playing Mother 3 (the sequel to Earthbound which was only released in Japan), and it seems like its soundtrack could accomplish the difficult task of being even better.
Secret of Mana
Few games have soundtracks that do as much to imporve the game experience as Secret of Mana. Though the actual presentation of the story in Secret of Mana is fairly lax, the music does as much to instill a sense of adventure and sorrow as any that I've ever heard. Honestly, if the soundtrack didn't do so much to set the mood, the hours of grinding required to keep all of your weapons and spells up to max level would be next to unbearable. Instead, every time you enter the wild, you feel like something amazing could happen at any moment, and it provides the same sense of excitement to make grinding through text books tolerable, as well.
Okami
Okami's soundtrack is just...good. I don't know what else to say about the general quality beyond this. It's really amazing that audio is just as vivid, energetic, and distinctive as its visual style of this game. It really remains so memorable through the use of traditional Japanese instrumentation and musical structure, which keep it fresh to my American senses.
Shadow of the Colossus
Dramatic is the best single word to describe Shadow of the Colossus' aural component. It takes an excellent and dynamic score to keep your ears as engaged as your eyes when you're desperately struggling to stay atop and kill a moving mountain, but Colossus does it. Swooping scores that swap between movements dynamically, becoming more and more grandiose as you approach your ultimate goal and reverting back down to a foreboding sense of mortal danger as you fall to try again. It really is a treat for the ears.
Katamari Damacy
Seriously, it's just royally fucked up. Random, quirky, and ultimately one of the most enjoyable experiences around describes Katamari Damacy and its soundtrack to a T. Everything from soft techno to rock ballads to mambo to lounge singers to children's choirs make their way into this soundtrack, and I don't know if I could enjoy it more.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
This game really makes the list thanks to the incredible Hyrule Symphony performance. A lot of N64/Play Station era games made the dubious mistake of trying to use "improved" quality Midi samples in their music. Really, these midrange samples sound just enough better that you can tell they're supposed to be real instruments. The fact that they still don't just causes most of them to grate on my ears a bit. Listening to the Hyrule Symphony recording, though, any woes about sound quality in the actual game fly away as I bask in the beauty of Koji Kondo's impeccable work. Everything in the soundtrack is great, but there aren't many tracks in existence that match up to Hyrule Field, The Gerudo Valley, or Death Mountain as heard on this recording.
Dragon Quest V
My favorite Dragon Quest soundtrack, by far. Why? Mostly because the field and battle themes are just so damn good. When the best two songs on an already excellent soundtrack are the two that the player is guaranteed to hear the most, you've done something very right. The little upbeat in Over The Horizon that gives it the deceptive, almost 3/4 feel just gets me every time I listen to it. Seriously, I think I could listen to the track for hours straight and not feel like I was missing anything besides the adventure right outside my window.
Final Fantasy VI
And the dreaded choice arrives. Which Final Fantasy game makes the cut? As much as I love pretty much all of the FF soundtracks, VI gets it for one simple reason. The first 12 minutes of the 21 minute long ending theme. This intricate medley of character themes flows so perfectly and beautifully, and disguises themes so well as it weaves characters together during the escape from Kefka's Tower that I can't confidently say that any piece of game music has been written better. The passage flowing from the Gau's Theme into Celes' and then Locke's chokes me up regularly and the swell from Relm's theme into the nigh unrecognizable adaption of Shadow's theme is absolutely perfect. I want FFVI to be remade on a new console just so that I can hear this piece being performed by a real orchestra. If I were to hear that, I don't know how life could get much better.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Defending My Top 10s: Part 1
It's closing in on 12:30, my roommate is hard at work on a paper and I'm at a loss as to what to do on the work I have left to do when I can't get into the lab. As such, I'm back again, and this time, I'm going to shed some light on why my favorite albums, soundtracks, and movies...are.
So, going in the order in which they currently appear on the side bar. Before I start, I'll explain some restrictions I imposed on myself. Any given band can only be represented once to prevent me from being to heavily biased towards whatever group or groups I'm feeling at the moment; and "Best of" or compilation albums aren't allowed, as they aren't representative of a single release...
Albums
Nickel Creek - Why Should the Fire Die?
Nickel Creek is just an amazing group. Incredibly talented, young musicians applying their skills to a unique hybrid of bluegrass instrumentation and more standard pop sensibilities create a sound unlike pretty much anything out there. Why Should the Fire Die? makes the list over their other two albums for providing a greater diversity of sound and more poetic, poignant lyrics. "Doubting Thomas" probably ranks in my top 10 favorite songs of all time, and the sudden flood of additional meaning provided by the last stanza of "When in Rome" strikes me every time.
Guster - Lost and Gone Forever
Guster isn't a terribly hard band to describe. Just a couple of guitarists and a percussionist who insists on playing all of his instruments with his bare hands cranking out some of the catchiest alt. rock (read: pop, but we don't want to call it pop) music you'll hear. Guster is just fun to listen to, and Lost and Gone Forever is, in my opinion their most consistently excellent work.
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
If you like jazz, you've listened to Coltrane. If you've listened to Coltrane, you're probably sick to death of the song Giant Steps. Don't let that turn you away from this album, though, as the whole thing is excellent, and of the 6 Coltrane albums I own, it's the only one to contain a few of my favorite Coltrane originals (most noticeably Sayeeda's Song Flute). If you're not a big jazz person and are looking for a start, this is about the best introduction to bebop that I can think of.
Cake - Pressure Chief
Either you like Cake or you don't. If you don't, you probably need your head examined, but that's just my opinion. In any case, while I'm a huge fan of Cake's entire repertoire, Pressure Chief stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality on a single album. I mean, on this one disc, you get Wheels, Dime, Carbon Monoxide, Tougher Than it Is, End of the Movie, and their incredible cover of Guitar Man. This is just straight-up too good to miss if you even kind of sort of like Cake.
Beck - Mutations
I tend to go around and tell people that I'm a big Beck fan. That's not entirely true. I absolutely adore about half of his work and can take or leave the other half. Mutations is one of the few albums where every track lands in the former category. Intensely mellow and very easy to listen to, Beck's acoustic opus stands in stark contrast to the rest of his body of work (minus Sea Change, which is also very good, but just isn't as easy to listen to).
DeVotchKa - How it Ends
Oh. My. God. I love DeVotchKa. How many bands combine Eastern European Gypsie, American Folk, and Mariachi musical traditions all into a single album, much less individual songs. Pretty much just DeVotchKa. I don't know what else I can say, as the sound is impossible to describe; any modern band where you can talk about the song and say "yeah, I just love that driving tuba part" is something that needs to be experienced and not explained. How it Ends, proper, is one of those rare songs that I can lie on my bed, half naked, in the dark and listen to and fall into absolute bliss. I'm really sorry for the visual picture there, but it's true.
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones - Left of Cool
I'm sorry that I seem to keep on running into bands that are hard to describe here. Bela Fleck is best summarized as a New Age Jazzgrass Funk Jam Band. Really, it's just an excuse to listen to some of the best instrumentalists on the planet (banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, the astoundingly talented bassist Victor Woooten, and an excellent saxophonist who I can never remember) devise melodies that nobody else could. Left of Cool is more melodic than some of their other works, and thus makes the cut.
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Sufjan Stevens has been alternately labeled as "indie folk" and "baroque pop" among other things, if that gives you any idea of what he sounds like. It probably doesn't, but that's okay. Stevens and his backup band weave a rich musical tapestry with deeply personal lyrics that are more than worthy of the praise they receive (Illinois was the best reviewed album of 2005). Illinois is an incredibly cohesive album that follows a very strong natural progression, but unlike his Michigan album, it's much easier to listen to tracks out of context, granting it the spot on my list. For reference, my absolute favorite Sufjan song is "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" from Michigan.
Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)
The Blue Album is pretty much exactly what a good alternative album should be. It's catchy, it's not terribly repetitive, and it's relatively short. At 41 minutes, listening to The Blue Album is easy, especially since every song from "In the Garage" to "No One Else" is a winner. While the rest of Weezer's albums show sparks of brilliance in places, none are as consistently impeccable as their first self titled work.
Kansas - Leftoverture
Most of you know Kansas primarily for the first song on this album (Carry On My Wayward Son), but I'm fully convinced that Kansas should be primarily famous for what the rest of this album entails. Songs like "Miracles out of Nowhere" and "Cheyenne Anthem" feature jaw dropping, mind numbing displays of what can only be called a mixture of 70's fusion and Bach. Spectacular passages played out mostly on the synthesizer (with violin and guitar support) as intricate as any Baroque piece will make you wonder why Kansas didn't pursue this unique sound more strongly.
Well, it's now closing in on 1:30, and I don't even want to think about starting in on another one of these right now. You can count on it in the near future though. I hope that my elaborations have encouraged you to check out some of these artists that you've passed on previously. Just for reference, honorable mentions include Ratatat - Classics, Sigur Ros - Takk, Psychograss - Now Hear This, Flogging Molly - Swagger, Mustard Plug - Evildoers Beware, and Seu Jorge - Samba Esporte Fine (released in the U.S. as Carolina).
So, going in the order in which they currently appear on the side bar. Before I start, I'll explain some restrictions I imposed on myself. Any given band can only be represented once to prevent me from being to heavily biased towards whatever group or groups I'm feeling at the moment; and "Best of" or compilation albums aren't allowed, as they aren't representative of a single release...
Albums
Nickel Creek - Why Should the Fire Die?
Nickel Creek is just an amazing group. Incredibly talented, young musicians applying their skills to a unique hybrid of bluegrass instrumentation and more standard pop sensibilities create a sound unlike pretty much anything out there. Why Should the Fire Die? makes the list over their other two albums for providing a greater diversity of sound and more poetic, poignant lyrics. "Doubting Thomas" probably ranks in my top 10 favorite songs of all time, and the sudden flood of additional meaning provided by the last stanza of "When in Rome" strikes me every time.
Guster - Lost and Gone Forever
Guster isn't a terribly hard band to describe. Just a couple of guitarists and a percussionist who insists on playing all of his instruments with his bare hands cranking out some of the catchiest alt. rock (read: pop, but we don't want to call it pop) music you'll hear. Guster is just fun to listen to, and Lost and Gone Forever is, in my opinion their most consistently excellent work.
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
If you like jazz, you've listened to Coltrane. If you've listened to Coltrane, you're probably sick to death of the song Giant Steps. Don't let that turn you away from this album, though, as the whole thing is excellent, and of the 6 Coltrane albums I own, it's the only one to contain a few of my favorite Coltrane originals (most noticeably Sayeeda's Song Flute). If you're not a big jazz person and are looking for a start, this is about the best introduction to bebop that I can think of.
Cake - Pressure Chief
Either you like Cake or you don't. If you don't, you probably need your head examined, but that's just my opinion. In any case, while I'm a huge fan of Cake's entire repertoire, Pressure Chief stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of quality on a single album. I mean, on this one disc, you get Wheels, Dime, Carbon Monoxide, Tougher Than it Is, End of the Movie, and their incredible cover of Guitar Man. This is just straight-up too good to miss if you even kind of sort of like Cake.
Beck - Mutations
I tend to go around and tell people that I'm a big Beck fan. That's not entirely true. I absolutely adore about half of his work and can take or leave the other half. Mutations is one of the few albums where every track lands in the former category. Intensely mellow and very easy to listen to, Beck's acoustic opus stands in stark contrast to the rest of his body of work (minus Sea Change, which is also very good, but just isn't as easy to listen to).
DeVotchKa - How it Ends
Oh. My. God. I love DeVotchKa. How many bands combine Eastern European Gypsie, American Folk, and Mariachi musical traditions all into a single album, much less individual songs. Pretty much just DeVotchKa. I don't know what else I can say, as the sound is impossible to describe; any modern band where you can talk about the song and say "yeah, I just love that driving tuba part" is something that needs to be experienced and not explained. How it Ends, proper, is one of those rare songs that I can lie on my bed, half naked, in the dark and listen to and fall into absolute bliss. I'm really sorry for the visual picture there, but it's true.
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones - Left of Cool
I'm sorry that I seem to keep on running into bands that are hard to describe here. Bela Fleck is best summarized as a New Age Jazzgrass Funk Jam Band. Really, it's just an excuse to listen to some of the best instrumentalists on the planet (banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck, the astoundingly talented bassist Victor Woooten, and an excellent saxophonist who I can never remember) devise melodies that nobody else could. Left of Cool is more melodic than some of their other works, and thus makes the cut.
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Sufjan Stevens has been alternately labeled as "indie folk" and "baroque pop" among other things, if that gives you any idea of what he sounds like. It probably doesn't, but that's okay. Stevens and his backup band weave a rich musical tapestry with deeply personal lyrics that are more than worthy of the praise they receive (Illinois was the best reviewed album of 2005). Illinois is an incredibly cohesive album that follows a very strong natural progression, but unlike his Michigan album, it's much easier to listen to tracks out of context, granting it the spot on my list. For reference, my absolute favorite Sufjan song is "For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" from Michigan.
Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)
The Blue Album is pretty much exactly what a good alternative album should be. It's catchy, it's not terribly repetitive, and it's relatively short. At 41 minutes, listening to The Blue Album is easy, especially since every song from "In the Garage" to "No One Else" is a winner. While the rest of Weezer's albums show sparks of brilliance in places, none are as consistently impeccable as their first self titled work.
Kansas - Leftoverture
Most of you know Kansas primarily for the first song on this album (Carry On My Wayward Son), but I'm fully convinced that Kansas should be primarily famous for what the rest of this album entails. Songs like "Miracles out of Nowhere" and "Cheyenne Anthem" feature jaw dropping, mind numbing displays of what can only be called a mixture of 70's fusion and Bach. Spectacular passages played out mostly on the synthesizer (with violin and guitar support) as intricate as any Baroque piece will make you wonder why Kansas didn't pursue this unique sound more strongly.
Well, it's now closing in on 1:30, and I don't even want to think about starting in on another one of these right now. You can count on it in the near future though. I hope that my elaborations have encouraged you to check out some of these artists that you've passed on previously. Just for reference, honorable mentions include Ratatat - Classics, Sigur Ros - Takk, Psychograss - Now Hear This, Flogging Molly - Swagger, Mustard Plug - Evildoers Beware, and Seu Jorge - Samba Esporte Fine (released in the U.S. as Carolina).
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
This is what I do...
So, I'd absolutely love to put a bunch of effort into some long writeup relating to a bunch of crap that only I'd care about, but...I'm just too busy. That said, while I'm not huge into putting personal information about the details of my life online, I'm going to go through and let you all know what I'm doing, anyway. Mostly, I'm busy with classes, so I guess I'll start by describing the basics of what that entails.
Advanced Conversational Japanese is a lot more intense than the first two years were. After only speaking Japanese intermittently, mostly for the purpose of practicing grammar patterns, suddenly being dropped in an environment where the professor only speaks English when absolutely necessary is a bit of a shift. Also, it seems that, as a class, our handwriting is terrible. We regularly receive packets of sheets for practicing Katakana and Hiraganna of the variety used by small Japanese children. I'm managing well, though. I haven't scored below a 90 on any of our first three tests and I'm exceedingly well prepared for the test I have tomorrow; mostly, though, I'm just reminded on regular basis that I love this language.
Intro to Psych is...meh. It's an interesting enough class, it's not terribly difficult, and it meets a graduation requirement. There's really nothing bad about it, and I'm regularly entertained by my prof., but I feel like it's time that could be spent just as well elsewhere.
Intro to Public Speaking is a joke. Having been involved with theater since I was 11, I'm more comfortable in front of an audience and have a stronger public speaking voice already than 90% of the class. It will be worthwhile to learn to speak better from an outline and to be more physically involved in my speaking, but we haven't talked about any of that, and I doubt we will (in 6 weeks, we've only actually talked about speaking skills twice). Honestly, the only thing at all engaging about the class is going to be speech preparation. This weekend, I'll be hitting the books and preparing an informative speech about the Catholic theology of Intercessory Prayer (to the Saints) and Purgatory and how these beliefs (and the Protestant confusion relating to them) stem from the differing concepts of the Communion of Saints between Catholicism and Protestantism. When time for a persuasive speech comes about, I'll be tackling the much lighter subject of Graphic Novels and why more people should read them.
Computer Science stuff comes next. I'll try and make it as simple as I can for the lay folk in the community.
High Performance Computing is a class I'm incredibly glad I'm taking. Learning how to write code in parallel has been interesting, and once we get to less "embarrassingly parallel" problems, things only promise to get more interesting. So far, we haven't done much beyond domain decomposition of simple problems and being reminded of the intense performance cost of Object Oriented code, but as we approach more fine grained parallel problems, it will become easier to see the attitudes we're going to need to adopt to make more consumer level programs function in parallel.
...Speaking of consumer applications, Software Engineering has also been a real eye opener already. I'm working as a member of a team of 5 to produce a single product by the end of the semester, and it's definitely a more exciting feeling tackling a larger project and starting to understand the work that needs to be done. The project itself takes a bit of work to describe and make it sound as cool as it is, so I'm not going to try now. Once I finish a final revision of the vision statement as well as our supplemental specification, I may post them here. In any case, the most important lesson I've learned (or am learning) so far is that I can rely on other people in group projects, it just requires effective communication of responsibilities and a willingness to trust. I've donned the role of chief program architect for now (once we're building the database interaction model, I'll suddenly become less useful), so I've done a lot more work than the rest of the team at this point, but they all want to be right there and understand how this is being put together so that they can do whatever they do best to help it along, which is awesome.
Anyway, I'm typing this because I really don't want to work on my High Performance Computing code right now. I much prefer C++ to C, but taking incredibly procedural code and making it OO just isn't my idea of fun (right now =P). Unfortunately, we have a strict schedule of access times on the cluster, so I need to get this done if I want to run my benchmarks tomorrow and hand it in on time. So...have fun, all, and thanks for reading.
Advanced Conversational Japanese is a lot more intense than the first two years were. After only speaking Japanese intermittently, mostly for the purpose of practicing grammar patterns, suddenly being dropped in an environment where the professor only speaks English when absolutely necessary is a bit of a shift. Also, it seems that, as a class, our handwriting is terrible. We regularly receive packets of sheets for practicing Katakana and Hiraganna of the variety used by small Japanese children. I'm managing well, though. I haven't scored below a 90 on any of our first three tests and I'm exceedingly well prepared for the test I have tomorrow; mostly, though, I'm just reminded on regular basis that I love this language.
Intro to Psych is...meh. It's an interesting enough class, it's not terribly difficult, and it meets a graduation requirement. There's really nothing bad about it, and I'm regularly entertained by my prof., but I feel like it's time that could be spent just as well elsewhere.
Intro to Public Speaking is a joke. Having been involved with theater since I was 11, I'm more comfortable in front of an audience and have a stronger public speaking voice already than 90% of the class. It will be worthwhile to learn to speak better from an outline and to be more physically involved in my speaking, but we haven't talked about any of that, and I doubt we will (in 6 weeks, we've only actually talked about speaking skills twice). Honestly, the only thing at all engaging about the class is going to be speech preparation. This weekend, I'll be hitting the books and preparing an informative speech about the Catholic theology of Intercessory Prayer (to the Saints) and Purgatory and how these beliefs (and the Protestant confusion relating to them) stem from the differing concepts of the Communion of Saints between Catholicism and Protestantism. When time for a persuasive speech comes about, I'll be tackling the much lighter subject of Graphic Novels and why more people should read them.
Computer Science stuff comes next. I'll try and make it as simple as I can for the lay folk in the community.
High Performance Computing is a class I'm incredibly glad I'm taking. Learning how to write code in parallel has been interesting, and once we get to less "embarrassingly parallel" problems, things only promise to get more interesting. So far, we haven't done much beyond domain decomposition of simple problems and being reminded of the intense performance cost of Object Oriented code, but as we approach more fine grained parallel problems, it will become easier to see the attitudes we're going to need to adopt to make more consumer level programs function in parallel.
...Speaking of consumer applications, Software Engineering has also been a real eye opener already. I'm working as a member of a team of 5 to produce a single product by the end of the semester, and it's definitely a more exciting feeling tackling a larger project and starting to understand the work that needs to be done. The project itself takes a bit of work to describe and make it sound as cool as it is, so I'm not going to try now. Once I finish a final revision of the vision statement as well as our supplemental specification, I may post them here. In any case, the most important lesson I've learned (or am learning) so far is that I can rely on other people in group projects, it just requires effective communication of responsibilities and a willingness to trust. I've donned the role of chief program architect for now (once we're building the database interaction model, I'll suddenly become less useful), so I've done a lot more work than the rest of the team at this point, but they all want to be right there and understand how this is being put together so that they can do whatever they do best to help it along, which is awesome.
Anyway, I'm typing this because I really don't want to work on my High Performance Computing code right now. I much prefer C++ to C, but taking incredibly procedural code and making it OO just isn't my idea of fun (right now =P). Unfortunately, we have a strict schedule of access times on the cluster, so I need to get this done if I want to run my benchmarks tomorrow and hand it in on time. So...have fun, all, and thanks for reading.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Once: A Singular Experience
Shortly after I got back to school, I heard from a friend of mine. He told me that he'd been to see a movie the week before, and that he was dragging me and any of our other friends that he could get his hands on to go see it again that week. This movie was Once, and I have to say that I owe Nate a great debt.
A movie about a nameless guy - a 30-something aspiring musician who is living with and working for his father - and girl - a Czech immigrant trying to make a life with her mother and daughter - in Dublin and the impact that they have on each other's lives over the short time they have together; Once is a musical - of a sort - that expresses the human experience more purely and poignantly than any movie I've seen in recent memory.
There's not much else that can be said about the film. It's incredibly simple in scope, being driven entirely by the growth of the relationship between these two rather than the context surrounding it. In this way, it's much like Lost in Translation, but with touching panels of musical performance taking place of Lost in Translation's sort of general meandering and sense of cluelessness in the gaps. It's not an especially good comparison, but it's about the best that can be made.
Ultimately, about the best praise that I can give the film is this: The only music that I have received legally in the last 2 years has been as gifts. I started an account in the i-Tunes store to buy this soundtrack because I felt a desperate need to contribute more than the $3.50 I paid for my ticked to the production. I've also listened to the entire album three times in the last 24 hours.
The film probably isn't anywhere near any of you right now. It started showing in limited release in July, and is more than likely out of your nearest indy theater by now. Nothing on Amazon yet about the DVD release, but you can probably expect it in the next 6-9 months. Do yourself and all your friends a favor and check it out when this happens.
A movie about a nameless guy - a 30-something aspiring musician who is living with and working for his father - and girl - a Czech immigrant trying to make a life with her mother and daughter - in Dublin and the impact that they have on each other's lives over the short time they have together; Once is a musical - of a sort - that expresses the human experience more purely and poignantly than any movie I've seen in recent memory.
There's not much else that can be said about the film. It's incredibly simple in scope, being driven entirely by the growth of the relationship between these two rather than the context surrounding it. In this way, it's much like Lost in Translation, but with touching panels of musical performance taking place of Lost in Translation's sort of general meandering and sense of cluelessness in the gaps. It's not an especially good comparison, but it's about the best that can be made.
Ultimately, about the best praise that I can give the film is this: The only music that I have received legally in the last 2 years has been as gifts. I started an account in the i-Tunes store to buy this soundtrack because I felt a desperate need to contribute more than the $3.50 I paid for my ticked to the production. I've also listened to the entire album three times in the last 24 hours.
The film probably isn't anywhere near any of you right now. It started showing in limited release in July, and is more than likely out of your nearest indy theater by now. Nothing on Amazon yet about the DVD release, but you can probably expect it in the next 6-9 months. Do yourself and all your friends a favor and check it out when this happens.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)