IJBMer Updates

Vivi

And with that, bed time. I have a lot to sleep on.

Any last advice?

MadassAlex

Iron Maiden bass is pretty sweet. In fact, my younger brother's bass experience via learning Iron Maiden made learning double bass for his school's orchestra way too easy, thereby getting him into a senior musical position while he was a junior.

Blind Guardian bass fluctuates.

^ Party on and be excellent.

MillerCross

Boulevard from Broken Dreams is the only particularly challenging song. And that's using a really loose definition of challenging I'm using there.

But my problem with Frank Dirnt (Google fu at work) is that his works is both worthless because of bad mixing most of the time and his parts are really really simple.

Like all of punk.

now that i think about it, i shoulda said Sid Vicious. Then again, he didn't know how to play bass, so it'd be like a low blow.

ETA: Also, Run to the Hill's is probably one of the best bass lines out there. Simple and yet variant enough to be fun to listen.

MadassAlex

Also, Wrathchild is really good, especially how it interacts with the guitar. The bass is doing a very similar but somewhat different thing. It supports that higher parts of the music well, but does its own thing enough to make a greater contribution and ensure that the general riffage is more interesting.

Malkavian

Run to the Hills is just one of the greatest songs, period.

MillerCross

hm, that reminds me. And I hope @Vivi sees this.

Here, have some electrotango. I'm sure you'll like it

Icalasari

Gah, the gum around my bottom left wisdom tooth (never came in) is tender and sore

Shichibukai

3/4 items I ordered from Amazon arrived today, Evangelion 2.22, european imperialism, Lucifer's call... all that's missing is Lain.

I'm squeeing like a little schoolgirl.

Icalasari

Still sore around that area of my mouth

Hurts to swallow

glennmagusharvey

@ switching majors:

I used to be a chemical engineering major.

Now I'm interested in politics.

Come to think of it, this is actually a career path that some engineers take.  In fact, I'm vaguely going down the same route as the infamous David Koch.  That said, he actually got a chem eng degree, and then made a fortune from many years in industry.

On the other hand, I could instead study music and do political/policy stuff on the side.  Or maybe get into it after I've made myself a stable career.

@ music theory

Well, descriptive music theory has several different forms, but they have the same conceptual basis--chords based on stacking thirds, ideas about melody going up/down stepwise or in leaps, rhythm divided into 2s, 3s, and sometimes irregular sets.

Normative music theory, however, differs--for example, a subtonic-to-minor-i cadence is almost unheard of in western classical music, but extremely common in modern western popular music.  So basically, the expectations of what is done with music are different.

Malkavian

So man, I just got to Arietta in Tales of Abyss and the difficulty curve just got way steeper.

Also, the fact that nobody notices that Asch the Bloody looks and sounds exactly like Luke makes them all seem really oblivious.

All Nines

"And not to diss the bass or bassists, but with the simplistic way it's utilized I'm surprised it's the drummer with the insinuations on his intelligence."

I'm quite in agreement, there. Thankfully, I don't think I've ever heard someone make a joke about drummers as if it were true, but there's a lot more to it than just hitting things.

Oh, and speaking of bass, I still need to find out from my band teacher if there's a bass clarinet lying around that I could mess around with. For regular clarinet, I'm already at the point where I'm learning (or trying to learn, at least) C.M.v. Weber's "Concertino for Clarinet, Op. 26" for an audition that's coming up soon. Seriously, look at this shit; sure, it looks like a lot of ups and downs, but it's a lot of really fast ups and downs. It doesn't help that I forgot to practice yesterday.

MillerCross

I'm quite in agreement, there. Thankfully, I don't think I've ever heard someone make a joke about drummers as if it were true, but there's a lot more to it than just hitting things.

Actually, I think guitar is actually easier to learn (Not to master, though)

InsanityAddict

>Girl in class is anal about Freudian readings being debunked(this is literary criticism, not psychology)

>Proceeds to use ideas of Foucault and Lacan to interpret a text

Crimson

>So man, I just got to Arietta in Tales of Abyss and the difficulty curve just got way steeper.

Yeah, a lot of people have trouble with that fight. I never had that much problem with it myself. I found  the Sync & Largo fight, much harder.

What difficulty setting are you playing at?

Malkavian

Normal. I think I was just under-leveled, since after a bit of grind I flattened her.

Crimson

I don't think that fight required too much grinding...

But then again, I'm a cheap bastard that bought 10X Experience after my first playthrough, so my memory might be a little fuzzy.

glennmagusharvey

I propose a new way of analyzing memes.

Each meme has three stats: association, interrupt, and pattern.  Most memes are primarily one of the three, and many memes lack one of those three entirely.

Name me some memes, so I can test this idea out.

All Nines

^ Let's start with the most annoying one: OVER 9000!!!!

Malkavian

Well, the first clue that I was underleveled was that the bosses could activate Overlimit and I couldn't.

So far, I don't think it's as good as Symphonia or Vesperia and Luke is a big BIG part of that. The saving grace is that the game seems to agree with me that he's an entitled little shit.

Crimson

^If it's that, then you'll be pleasantly surprised about 6 hours in.

MillerCross

i'll never understand how could you choose so a science-oriented major when your interest clearly is on the study of pop culture sociology (Which should be a thing) and social psychology, Glenn. 

glennmagusharvey

Power Level / Over 9000:

association - primary (high)
interrupt - nonexistent/trace
pattern - medium

Association is with sub-structural elements like words, sounds, and images.  In this case, the meme is often invoked when people use the phrase "power level", or talk about something going over some four-digit threshold value.  Associating things with these elements is the main way this meme is invoked.

Interrupt, also known as redirect, is the tendency of the meme to be invoked in order to interrupt/redirect/surprise/etc. the audience.  This meme is almost never used to do this; invocations of Over 9000 tend to follow an associative pathway from whatever was being discussed before.

Pattern is how much the meme depends on structure.  This meme depends somewhat on structure, since there are two elements (power level and over [large number]) that are generally invokved in order or in a specific relation to each other.  Memes that are purely a reference have low pattern; on the other hand, some other memes depend on the recognition of a metacontextual pattern.

Malkavian

^^^I get that he's going to go through character development like every Tales protagonist but they didn't have to start him at such a horrific point. 

glennmagusharvey

@Juan_Carlos: I was stupid back then, okay?

More like, coming out of high school, I wasn't that great with literature and language but really good with math and science classes.

That said, I should have known way back when.  I only started becoming interested in history and sociology starting with my AP U.S. History class in 11th grade (world history honors in 10th grade was relatively boring, probably because the class's intent was to introduce facts rather than to analyze them).  So basically I had classed "social studies" in with "English and literature and stuff that I'm not that great at" back then, so I neglected sociology.

I do have a pretty strongly analytical and objective tendency, which might be why things like literature didn't appeal to me much.

MillerCross

Oh, I don't think you should have gone into lit or lang. But I just think that you have a clear interest in society and sociocultural thought processes. Also, you're a political junkie, which just reaffirms my theory, really.

glennmagusharvey

Then again one could argue that my science/engineering upbringing helped shape that strongly analytical tendency...

All Nines

Does anyone else feel that there's nothing quite like antagonizing the household canine berserker by stealing his ball (I mean, if he weren't a tubby dachshund, I wouldn't be so keen on taunting him so, but still)?

RedEyedAbyss

^^If there's one thing to take away from science, it's the method behind it. Very useful bullshit detector it is.

Forzare

^^ I always do stuff like that to my dog, but he's just a great big ball of friendliness that wouldn't hurt a fly, so it's not quite the same.