I encourage you, young Mr. Cam, in no small part because I believe you are On To Something.

On a totally unrelated note, my bassist in Garda rolled in today with a new bass; it is on long-term loan as he slowly buys it off the guy. There's a story it's not my business to get into at the moment. Anyhow, it is a very early serial number Musicman Stingray, pre-Ernie Ball. '79 or '80 IIRC. Still active, but with three knobs and I don't know what's what save for the volume control. No center detente on the controls, so... Single humbucker; sounds killer with everything full up or anywhere in between.

It may have belonged to Rick James at some point- we are trying to sort out the provenance of the thing. It's also one of the best basses I have ever played. Just the tone of the thing alone. He has a more current Stingray that, yeah, it's pretty damn good. This thing slays everything. Still obviously a Stingray tone-wise but good goddamn. Plain black, maple neck and fretboard. We spent a good while dicking around with this bass before getting started. A band full of gearheads/gearsnobs was impressed.

Just sifted through my old "recording" folder and found this potential good intro, I just need to build some riffs around it, and actually play it in time - https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15027660/op2.mp3

Quite like dat toane for pretty much a stock amplitube 3 patch

It's much more weird. Basically its a bunch of guys from Isis, converge, cave in and later zozobra goofing off. You can have a minute long intense post punk song tuned to Ab one minute and then acoustic ambient nonsense the next. They've also produced some of the finest riffs ever made. Think of them as a supergroup that weren't trying to do anything other than have fun in the studio. The last album didn't work for me though, it felt to serious and stuffy, which was the opposite of what made it great in the first place.

some fine examples

Have a basic build of the combat mechanic for my game.

WASD = Move
Mouse = Aim, but you can only aim in 8 directions (Up, Down, Left, Right, Up Left, Up Right, Down Left, Down Right)
Space = Fire

You are the blue square sitting in your house, and you want to kill the red square outside. The red square doesn't give a lot of fucks unless you get close to him. You have ten health, the red square has three. If you touch each other you both get hurt (so if you did the math you know you can't lose.) Good luck.

http://dtcurrie.comule.com/v0025/Web.html

Shit is cool, though it took me a second to figure out i could adjust the aim direction even though you said it here. Would benefit from some visual indication of what direction it is aiming. Even just a place holder of an asteroids style triangle, just to show direction?

Get off my lawn!

Drumskills are definitely sweet, it's just that I've got all these damned song ideas in my head. Bright side is, I feel I am actually making some headway now. Also, I am glad to know that my senseless meanderings are at least doing something for someone.

And regarding guest slot stuff, expect me to be pestering you all soon.



ALSO:
Leave for Alaska in 16 hours. Gonna be in the upper negative thirty territory. FUCK YEAAAAH. I'm just gonna bring the Frankenstang with me, as I have been playing it the last few days and I am thinking that it's beefy string feel (the action is not THAT high really, it is kinda odd) has been strengthening my fingers. Dem ferrules ain't here yet. AND YET ANOTHER ALSO AMONGST THESE MANY ALSOS: I don't like the idea of that guitar being in a place that cold. This is the beater so, fuck it.

Packing up all my shit and practicing guitar for the third or fourth hour today. Just had a sushi dinner with all my stoner buddies and said goodbye for the short duration I shall be gone. Very weird getting ready for something that will probably be just short of a month or so.

In regards to the playing aspect, been pretty much only playing this song/single note riff with the descending part: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13745148/wb%20song%20demo.mp3

Mother of fuck was it difficult for me to just play it at all at the speed in the clip. Tons of chromatic picking exercises later: I can play it at this speed pretty well and am trying to maybe quicken it up for the end product. It is real simple, but with my fucked up small motor skills shit is gnarhard. I am not sure if this will be something like that final structure of the song, but I have been kinda into the short, schizo thing so it may end like this.


Oh, it is pretty much a total Whatever Brains rip by the way.

Yeah a cursor crosshair is next. Also in the future the character should have a sprite for aiming in every direction which will be a nice indicator of which direction he is looking at. I need to come up with the next phase of placeholder sprites so I can work on the character-movement/animation-engine in depth a bit more. Right now I am refactoring all the code to use a modified component-entity model with a stackable state machine, so once I have a clean system in place implementing features will be a lot easier.

So motherfucking busy. Doing shit for school of a nerdiness that rivals Chris.

Stepper motors, man. They are becoming a pain in the ass. We rigged up all this shit to get some 7V steppers to go but they weren't strong enough to do their job. Well we built all that shit and we have a very tight schedule. We need stronger ones that hopefully can be jiggered into fitting our project.

Wat are you makin' wiffem? CNC? Robuts? Dot Matrix Printers?

Robutts. For 'Final Project' we take this arm made of five servos and put together all the other shit for it to accomplish some task. Ours is supposed to grab a shot glass from a stack, bring it over to a dispenser for one of three fluids (would be liquors) to dispense an ounce into it, then it drops the glass off in a delivery zone.

In order to do this it is on a rail, and steppers attached to belts are to move it along the rail. They have failed us.

It's all controlled by an Arduino.

I hope this is leading to a mechanical pachyderm.

Where did you get your motors from geoff?

One of the guys in my group got them from some mysterious place. I dunno!

I've had a decent amount of alcohol today, which isn't that much in my terms because recently I'm being a good boy and not drinking too much because I'm always driving. Run on sentence FTW!

Finals did not go well

I tend to disregard the concept of "run on sentence". Mainly, because I talk in them all the time.

Well, it seems Double Negative is also going to be playing the Whatever Brains show when I am going to kick it with Devski. Fuck yeah.