niji to the bug

(copy/pasting this here to clear up my twitter feed):

kaepora gaebora's theme was always one of my favorites. one of the first pieces I transcribed for the small brother person when I started giving him piano lessons at age 3. I started him early because I noticed he had perfect pitch at age 2. He would sing back entire songs he heard on tv. He might not even have known what the words meant, but how many 2-year-olds have perfect pitch AND a perfect sense of rhythm. the parents couldn't afford to pay for real lessons so I used the handy dandy underline feature in ms word and made my own notation paper, transcribed leitmotifs from our favorite video games (mostly pokemon and zelda at the time), and started teaching him on my own.

dad's old phone had a custom ringtone feature. the small brother person and I recreated the hyrule castle town theme on it one summer.

( Read more... )

On my old cellphone, there was a recording feature so that whenever I got struck by an errant melody out of the blue, I could whip out my phone and hum into it. Can't do that anymore on my current phone, so instead I've been using the basic note-taking feature to jot down rough approximations. Which leaves me with largely unhelpful notes like:

Efgd~cb abcb~ag fgag~ bc edcd~

and:

C G D ED C G D

and:

C e g b c d e c b

(I'm copying these verbatim from my phone screen.)

They really leave me with no idea of what I was thinking at the time. A lot of these were punched in as I was getting dressed, running off to work, or hurrying after a bus. All I remember was that the melodies seemed extra compelling, at the time. I guess I can consider these seeds of inspiration lost.

nooooooo I'm not going to let two months go by without updating so I'm just going to post!!!

I don't want to talk about life so let's talk about books instead. I'm currently in the middle of reading Temeraire, When Fox Is A Thousand, and Swordspoint (and a couple other books I've lost track of so I guess I'm not actually currently reading them). I haven't much time to read, so it's just a few pages here and there of whichever book is closest to me at any given time.

Who's pumped for Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen (2014)?!!! I forgot that I already owned a copy of Sabriel, so I ordered another one (the 1997 edition with the Leo and Diane Dillon cover illustration of course). And while that was still moseying on over in the mail, I forgot about it too and ordered the Old Kingdom trilogy omnibus. So now I own the entire trilogy twice plus an extra copy of book one, which I guess I'll use for lending out. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and lending out extra copies is the usual solution. But speaking of Sabriel! my friend and housemate elfsmirk has made a Sabriel tea blend (I illustrated the label):

( tea below cut )

I'm technically in the middle of my first playthrough of Pokemon FireRed right now, but it's safe to say that that's on hiatus until this summer. This is my first ~legit Pokemon game (since my friends tell me Pokemon Stadium/Snap/Puzzle don't count...I left out Hey You Pikachu for fear they would truly judge me, but I do not regret a single moment spent playing that game IT WAS DIABETES INDUCING ♥), and it's kind of mindlessly enjoyable but also frustrating as hell sometimes haha. It's kind of like FE in the sense that your party size is limited, and it kills me because I want to have them all with me always. u___u

(Currently my team consists of a Growlithe named Chanyeol, a Gyarados named Katara, a Graveler named Galadriel, a Pidgeotto named Kris, a Pikachu named Pikachen, and a Raticate named Luhan. My Gyarados was Celebrant until I realized it was female.)

The only show I'm really keeping up with right now is Elementary, and I think I enjoy it so much because JLM's Sherlock reminds me so much of Basil (The Great Mouse Detective).

Oh an Crystal Kay retweeted my mashup of her song "Take It Outside" with Owl City's ending theme from Wreck It Ralph yesterday! That made my day. ♥

( screenshot under cut )

And I also deleted my tumblr account and made a new one first week of March but my LJ/Dwth circles don't really run with my Tumblr/Twitter circles anyway so that info is kinda irrelevant. :P

I'm actually backreading my twitter feed right now so I can do a synopsis of my new york trip!

So on new year's day, I took the greyhound with artemis_elric to new york, got there on the 2nd and met up with sonicorca and eggtrolls. We went to see the hobbit (a second time for me) and then got the hobbit breakfast at denny's afterwards. We all got hobbit trading cards and I traded all of mine for artemis's thorin card hehehehehe....

The next day we went to the met and then sonicorca's mom took us out for korean bbq for dinner:

( photos from crappy camera phone )

Walked over to the kinokuniya bookstore after dinner. They had these big wall displays for Vagabond:

( photo )

Everything was super expensive. I made artemis buy me a notebook with rilakkuma and kiirotori on it hehehehehe....

On the train back to sonicorca's; everyone was super exhausted:

( My bear says hi )

When the train stopped at its last stop for the night we were the only ppl in the last car. the lady on the PA gave her usual spiel but ended by saying, "And to the four little princesses in the last car, have a safe trip home." /)u(\

The next morning we set out bright and early to visit doctor who filming locations in central park. First stop was bow bridge to play pooh sticks:

( photos photos photos photos )

And then we walked to book off where I made artemis buy for me got Maaya Sakamoto's Yuunagi Loop, Ayaka Iida's Minna Sora no Shita, Amano Tsukiko's A Moonchild In The Sky, and Zabadak's IKON ~Tooi tabi no kioku~. (I wanted Maaya's Shonen Alice album but it wasn't on sale ;;)

We went to see Sleep No More that night and it was amazing! (To give a short description, the play's an immersive film noir adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth set on several floors of a renovated hotel where the audience can follow actors around and be in the scenes. The sound design was p h e n o m e n a l.)

The next day we went to some more bookstores and I got terry pratchett's snuff and tan twan eng's garden of evening mists (which I'm reading right now). I also spent a lot of time crying in front of rilakkuma plushies I could not afford.

On our last day in ny we visited the museum of natural history and I bought (or made artemis buy) all the plushies I wanted. A good last day all in all:

( photos photos photos photos photos photos )

Aaand now we're all back in Ann Arbor dreading school tomorrow morning BUT SUCH IS LIFE. How were y'all's holiday breaks. even if you didn't go anywhere hope you were all well rested and if you had to work I hope you made a lot of money d(' v ')b

and gosh is it time for another bimonthly doodle dump already /holds head
I'll make that post next once I've uploaded all my doodles to photobucket and organized them ._.

♯ Galileo Galilei's PORTAL is a fantastic album. If you like RADWIMPS you'll love this band. Imaginary Friends, Good Shoes, and Swan are my fav tracks.

♯ The Boy Who Knew Too Much is still my favorite MIKA album, but Origin of Love has really grown on me. So many incredibly catchy tracks. Popular Song, Emily/Elle Me Dit, Stardust, Overrated, Love You When I'm Drunk, and Karen are probably my most played. (Touches You is still my favorite MIKA song and I don't foresee it being dethroned.)

♯ Everything on Sea Wolf's Old World Romance album sounds the same, I'm serious. I put the album on for the first time and didn't realize when one song ended and another began. It's all nice to listen to as background music, though pretty depressive. Only Whirlpool is really worth downloading imo.

♯ I really love this mash-up of Ke$ha's Die Young and One Direction's Live While We're Young.

♯ Speaking of 1D, Yuya Matsushita's BEAUTIFUL GIRL is a vastly superior take on What Makes You Beautiful. Check it out even if it's just a guilty pleasure (it shouldn't be? I feel like BEAUTIFUL GIRL is a genuinely positive song lyrics-wise even if it's heavily derivative musically).

♯ Everything by Matt & Kim sounds more or less alike, but my fav tracks of theirs are Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare, Block After Block, and Cameras. Would gladly hear any of those tracks as Gintama OPs or EDs.

♯ I've had the House of Five Leaves OP, Sign of Love by immi, on replay for a while. (Still need to read/watch that series.)

♯ Not a Block B fan but I have to give credit where it's due and admit that their latest album Blockbuster is very well put together. Fav tracks are nillili mambo (ofc), romantic, and haesseo anhaesseo. Love their vocals.

♯ Tying this up with Peace from A:TLA by the New Orleans Volunteer Orchestra. Any good rendition of Peace brings tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat, and this is a truly gorgeous performance.


What have you been listening to on repeat lately?

translation with rhyme and meter is the cheapest trick. it's a party trick. it's a small child who is praised for her wit because she can solve long strings of addition and subtraction quickly and accurately in her head. all that it requires is a grasp on a large enough vocabulary so that one is more or less an ambulatory rhyming dictionary. it is a process almost entirely mechanical. the soundless flapping of lips taste-testing from a mental thesaurus, the flickering of fingers tapping out a rigid tempo on tabletops, substituting synonyms into spaces set in stone.

translating with rhyme and meter is my go-to gimmick. that trick so weightless I can keep it up my sleeve, on the tip of my tongue. a getaway route so streamlined I barely need to think, just run with it, pull a switch, and we're off. fireworks. snap crackle boom. brilliant. put your hands together for me. utterly artless.

I can speak derisively of the practice because I know how I arrived at it. a twelve-year-old girl bored doing dishes humming a song she wished she could sing but whose words escaped her because she didn't know their meaning. words in a language she doesn't know but the tune she likes. so she looks it up. words in a language she will never learn. the translation doesn't fit. she feels cheated. she spends an afternoon making them fit. wriggling and squirming until the stubborn words become spineless notes and this is now a thing she is familiar with. musical composition.

I was no more a translator than a calculator is a mathematician.

Watched the Ace Attorney movie with my roomies! To be honest, it was not an amazing movie or even an amazing adaptation by any stretch of the word, but if you're an Ace Attorney fan, then it's a definite must-see. The best way to describe it is as an extremely high-budget cosplay production, which, if you ask me, is the right way to make a live-action movie adaptation of a video game.

( brief spoiler-free review under here )

In an ideal world, someone would have the budget and dedication to turn the Phoenix Wright trilogy into a tv series with at least 3 seasons so that all of the cases can be explored in full. But for what it is — a 135 minute film — the Ace Attorney movie made me a happy fan. I have just one pet peeve though. Why didn't they bother to do Phoenix's zigzag eyebrows? Everything was so on-point, so why were they missing Phoenix's trademark? That's like having a perfect Gintama cosplay production but forgetting Elizabeth's eyelashes. :c

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On to the bimonthly art dump...

( 18 pics under the cut; a good mix of things )

(Click for full version.) Collab with the wonderful sanxian — she drew Tai, Mimi, TK & Kari, and I drew Matt, Sora, Joe, and Izzy.

( Happy Odaiba Memorial — too many feelings!word vomit beneath the cut )

✈ I can't remember what it felt like to be dry. On the off chance that Bryke based Omashu off of Chongqing (I can see how; this city was carved into a mountain), they missed the part about how it rains like there's no tomorrow.

✈ Ever since we braved the contents of an entire authentic Chongqing hotpot (I will never be the same SNIFFFF), the small brother person has been referring to himself as the Mother of Dragons. I have to call him Khaleesi. Help.

✈ I'm going to talk about the Korra finale under this cut, those who haven't seen it yet, consider yourselves forewarned.

( Korra 1.11-1.12 thoughts under the cut )

✒ Had a Men In Black marathon with my roommates last night because sonicorca hadn't seen the first two movies yet, and I wanted to rewatch the first two before going to see MIB 3. I love Men in Black partially for nostalgia/sentimental reasons but also because Will Smith and the 90s and aliens and Agents K and J's father-son relationship and really what I'm trying to say here is I love the original Men in Black wholeheartedly and unironically. I'm probably going to cry in the theater watching MIB 3 and be super embarrassing and the small brother person will pretend not to know me.

✒ Look what came in the mail from snottle!

( pics )

✒ Yesterday, Bryan Konietzko posted this comic (basically, it pokes fun at the double standard of some fans who find Legend of Korra too upsetting but don't find Game of Thrones [as] upsetting? that's the general gist I got out of it). Except I guess we all conveniently forgot what ATLA/LOK fandom is like in the first place. People were so .:*・°☆APPALLED by the comic that today, Bryan had to post this lengthy apology and explanation.

( excerpt under cut )

Good grief, ATLA/LOK fandom! How do you live with yourselves? I'm sorry. Legend of Korra does not send people to the hospital; people send themselves to the hospital by getting too worked up. I say this at the risk of 1) sounding like a hypocrite because I spend a good hour or so each Saturday morning screaming like a loon in front of my TV and 2) losing some of you for good because I know for a fact that there were at least a few friends or friends of friends blowing up at Bryan's satirical comic yesterday.

If you have so much beef with the show/its creators, why do you keep watching it? Or else y'all just need to take a seat and learn to find a healthy balance between enjoying a fun ride and being critical of what you love. The amount of entitlement that, honestly, half of fandom seems to harbor is downright masochistic.

✒ And because I don't want to end the post on such a sour note.... I'm really digging Peppertones right now. Does anyone have any k-indie recs for me? I'm not looking for a specific genre; I'd be up for trying out whatever you like. Also for swapping music recs. :D