The first one, Shadowy Path, has been more or less finished for a month or two now. It was something I was working on a bit at a time earlier in the summer and I feel like there's nothing I need to add to it at this point. I thought about adding a bass line or something like that, but ultimately decided it was fine without one. Anyway, it's kind of a spooky, dark ambient title. Slow paced.

The other one, Chip Chop, is another story entirely. This one, though not particularly fast paced, is more of an aggressive drum and bass track. I finished the entire thing in one sitting last night, right after watching a documentary on the Chiptunes scene, which partially inspires this work. Based on that inspiration and the nature of the track, I felt the title was appropriate.

The first one is encoded at 192 kbps, and the second one is at 320 kbps. No clue why I rendered them differently.

Enjoy. Comments are disabled because of spammers, but feel free to email me or check in on my Facebook page if you want to let me know what you think.

Well, I finished another theme song submission for the Rooster Teeth Drunk Tank podcast since they seem to have rejected my first one, more than likely because it was way too long. (I'm holding on to that excuse) Anyway, this one is much shorter, about 43 seconds, so hopefully in a few more months it will be the theme song of the week. As usual, you can listen to it from my music page, or you can click on this link.

At some point I hope to expand it into a full length track, because it feels like I'm cutting it off early right now when I listen to it.

I know it's been rare for me to add content here lately, but I'd figure this might be something worth checking out. I reviewed eight different shows, having seen just one or two episodes of each. Feel free to check it out here.

So I've been playing quite a bit of Red Dead Redemption these past few weeks. But never mind that, I want to talk about my stupid horse.

I'll admit, I can't reasonably expect my horse to behave as I would like it to in this game. I frequently leave it unattended while I jump off and skin an animal, or gather an herb, or talk to a passerby. Why should I doubt the horse's integrity when it's easily startled by nearby snakes, light gusts of wind, the act of breathing, and so on?

I first knew something was wrong when my horse walked off a cliff. Thankfully I was not on it at the time, but it led to much apprehension on my part. It happened when I simply dismounted to talk to a man in distress, leaving the horse to his own devices. Apparently these devices very quickly drove it to suicide, because as I see my character talking to this man, in the background I see the horse just tooling around, wandering on his own, casually taking one last step off the hillside and sliding down a steep ravine into the wild brown yonder. It's the kind of thing that makes a man stop and think.

At first I thought this might be an isolated incident. I had not realized that the horses in the game were imbued with intelligence stats, and that these stats were firmly locked at 0. I also learned they are part lemming. While I was searching for beaver skins one winter's day, I happened across some wild horses down by the shore of a river. I was searching the riverbank on my own when I see one of the wild horses trot right off a small cliff and into the river below, instantly drowning. Well that's odd, I thought to myself. Wait, where's my horse right now? Yep, there he goes, following the other horse right off the river bank and into the blue depths.

Certainly my horses have had near misses with death as well, which I can appreciate. I'm glad my horse did not wander into the moving train, narrowly missing it instead. I'm glad he did not try to jump off the bridge with me on his back when wolves attacked us. I'm glad he chose to save himself when I was getting mauled by a cougar. Well, maybe not that glad.

Still, I'm always waiting to see what the horse will do next. Once, when I had lit some houses on fire and then called my horse to come pick me up, I half expected it to be racing around the corner itself in flames. Because that's all that it has left to do as far as I can see, catch itself on fire. God forbid it could possibly navigate a straight, hundred foot long, ten foot wide path to get to me while my bounty is rapidly escaping on his own horse.

Although I have to say, we once ran over a cactus, and it toppled over and the horse and I emerged victorious. It was awesome.

Since Christmas, one game has usurped my time...just like Fallout 3 last year...and that game is Borderlands.

It's a first-person shooter/role-playing game, kind of along the lines of Fallout 3. It takes place on another planet, however, so the creatures are certainly more exotic. You've just arrived on the planet, Pandora, hoping to find fortune and adventure. You end up searching for a fabled treasure trove simply titled the Vault, getting help from various people you meet on the way. Most of the human opponents you face are Bandits who just seem to pop up everywhere, though eventually you encounter an organized military-like force. Throughout the game you work on finding the best assortment of weapons you can get your hands on, and really, there are something like 17 million guns possible. That's not an exaggeration, one of their developers stated it as fact.

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Semester's over finally, the holiday's are mostly past us. I'll have a massive anime log update eventually. Anyway, everything is still going okay. No reason to be alarmed.

Also, I'm a Zombie Genocidest now. Ph34r.

(See all my Steam games' stats here.)

A logarithm for the ladies...

Since the sequel is about to come out (or it just did, I forget), I decided to finally pick up Left 4 Dead a few weeks ago (game of the year edition that I got cheap via Steam), and since then have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.

The idea is that you're one of four survivors that have joined together to escape the infected hordes. There are five different scenarios, and in each one there's a location you need to fight your way through to in order to escape.

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A three week update, I stand corrected about two weeks becoming the norm. The semester so far has been settling down and getting into a nice rhythm, finally, so I'm getting back into watching a bit more anime on a regular basis now. Also, with October begins the new anime season in Japan, so there are many new shows to watch, or so we hope?

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Another two week update, which might become the norm. Since school has started I've been unable to keep up the anime-watching pace I'd set over the summer. Which is fine, I guess. I'm winding down on Fallout 3 -- I just have one more DLC to play, Operation Anchorage, which I'm in the midst of. After that I imagine I'll recover some more time.

On the plus side, last week I watched at least one episode every single day. Sadly I've already broken that streak.

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Okay, I admit it: I went ahead and purchased Fallout 3 for the PC even though I already owned it on the PS3. Why you ask? Two main reasons: 1) It was on sale for $25 through Steam and 2) I really really wanted to play the downloadable content, which was simply not going to work for me on the PS3 for a variety of reasons I don't want to go into. I figured out how much I've spent on this game over the past year and came up with a number that was over $100. But, seriously, as much time as I've sunk into it, it's been worth it.

Thus far I've finished playing through the main game (again), making it to level 30. I've also played through 2 of the 5 downloadable add-ons: Broken Steel and Mothership Zeta. Broken Steel follows the exploits of the Brotherhood of Steel as they manage the distribution of clean water through the wasteland, as well as striking the final blow at the Enclave. Mothership Zeta has you abducted by aliens (seriously), and you have to figure out a way off of their ship and back to earth. That actually turned out to be a very interesting experience, and was a bit of a challenge as well.

The bad part about making it to level 30? The enemies become more difficult as well. Three key additions: Super Mutant Overlords, Albino Radscorpions, and Feral Ghoul Reavers. I finally developed a good strategy for the Overlords who were oh-so-prevalent in Vault 87. If I was fighting one, I would shoot it with my Dart Gun, crippling its legs and sapping its speed advantage, so I could proceed to wear it down and kill it. Fighting two or three, which happened a couple of times and required multiple attempts, included setting a number of mines and generous use of Nuka-Grenades if they were close together, or a lot of backpedaling and shooting if they were not so close. The albino radscorpions were more annoying than dangerous, but the first time I faced one I noticed it was quite a bit tougher than the others. And the reavers I could avoid using my Ghoul Mask, keeping me in disguise, though I did have to kill a couple in one quest and once again it was liberal use of bottlecap mines and nuka-grenades.

And, just to brag a bit: all my skills are at 100 except for science which is 99. I just need to find one more science book to finish that off. And all my S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats are 9 or 10. They would have all been 10 if I had planned ahead a bit more. Doing this required not recovering any of the stat bobbleheads until I reached level 30 and got the perk that raised all my stats to 9. Then each of the bobbleheads raise the stats one more to 10. I ended up getting the strength, endurance, and intelligence bobbleheads early on.

If you have a Live account, you can see more here:



Lastly, the entire point of making this post: I've been taking a few screenshots here and there as I go, so I've uploaded a collection of these to my Flickr account. Check them out.