Mikhail

I ever talk about how I'm obsessive compulsive?

I think the biggest part of it is that I grew up in the late 80s, early 90s. That was the era of collectibility. Suddenly, everything old was worth a lot, and everything new was being released as "collectors editions" or "limited variant" or some such other nonsense. My era saw the explosion and collapse of the trading card market, the comic collecting market, beanie babies, pogs and tons of other small fads.

For me these hobbies of mine typically go beyond what the normal person might go through. While everyone else was content with having a few good decks of magic cards, I was obsessed with getting every card I could get my hands on for no other reason just to have it. I have 6 armies worth of minis for Warhammer and Warhammer 40k yet play the game maybe only 4 times a year. When I find a musician I like, I have to have absolutely every album they ever put out, even if it means shelling out $90 for rare fanclub CDs.

My on again off again obsession with Hi-Fi is definitely on again. It helped recently when Mono's computer speakers met an untimely death and I gave him my old speakers. To provide sound for my computer, I hauled over my old Pioneer SX-525 and the no-name speakers hooked up to it.

Two things immediately became apparent; these speakers sucked and my on board soundcard sucked. The speakers were tiny and barely had any range. The soundcard had huge interference problems to the point where I could hear the mouse moving. I started keeping a bigger eye on goodwill and doing some research online.

Eventually I was led to Hawthorne Stereo in search of speakers. I chose them because they had a huge range of vintage gear which was perfect for me. After about half an hour of milling about the owner suggested to me a set of B&W DM110s. He hooked them up in the listening room for us and I fell in love.



A few weeks later I was in Frys with Mono. I forget what we were getting, but I happened to glance at the sound card collection and spotted The Asus Xonar Essence STX. The research I was able to do on it with my iPhone impressed me so much I had to get it immediately. Line level output, built in headphone amp, a really awesome DAC, and great shielding for the analog parts. The best part was it didn't try to bill itself as a multichannel 23423.1 surround sound card. This is meant for a pure, 2 channel experience. It remains the best computer purchase I've made since my flatscreen monitors.

I still wasn't content however. My research was leading me into looking for a more powerful amp. I found a good deal on a Pioneer SX-780 on ebay and grabbed it up and was fairly happy with it. Then I found the receiver of my dreams; the Pacific Stereo Concept 16.5.

If you haven't heard of this brand, you're not alone. Pacific Stereo was a west coast thing in the 70s. Their house brand, Concept, has been hailed as some of the best components you can buy today, including the Concept 16.5.

For you audio geeks, there's a few things that make this special. First, it's a massive 165 watts per channel. And this is real 1970s watts, not fake watts. It's a dual mono system, meaning each channel is powered by a separate transformer rather then a single one. It's one of the great Monster receivers.

A few days later an 80lb box arrived at the top of my doorsteps.



And someone else's pics of the inside:



Did I mention there were only about 1200 to 2500 made ever? My obsessive compulsive brain told me I must have this or I might never get the chance to own one again.

And of course a great stereo is nothing without good music to play it on. A couple trips to Jive Time Records leaves me with a collection of about 150 lps:



Slowly working my way through them. I also made sure to start cataloging them, which you can look at here via google docs.

Obsessive compulsion can be rewarding at times. Yet maddening at others. After all that, I'm still researching turntables to replace my technics.

Working in a kitchen, you have two choices. Either use the shitty house knives and hope you don't cut your hand open because the dull blade slipped, or buy a really nice knife and bring it in.

I told myself a while ago not to buy a knife unless I was going to be serious about cooking as a profession.

Yesterday I got a sleek little box in the mail:





It's a Shun Classic, 8 inch chef knife.

It cuts like a hot knife through butter.

It's as much of a commitment as a wedding ring is in my opinion.

To my Rush fans on my friends list:

I have made a discovery. Please help me find any information about this:





Things I know:

-It is a bootleg
-Concert took place at 02/14/80 Kiel Auditorium in St Louis
-It is not the entire concert (Though how much it is I cannot say because I have not listened to it yet)
-Rush bootleg lps made in the 80s only had a production run of 50-100 copies.

So basically, do any of you know how rare of a find this is? While there are many CD-R recordings of this concert around, I have not found any information on LP copies.

Listening to the leaked Beatles remasters...Hoooly shit. These sound sooo good.

So I got bored and built me some more drums:







Really, all the kit needs is a few more cymbals and it's complete.

Jesus Christ.

This kid is 17, and has had only a year or so experience in the industry.

Meanwhile, I've been in the industry for ten years and am 25.

It is quite sobering to realize I've probably wasted nine years of my life and have only now begun to come close to food that complex and good looking.

We're hitting near 100 degree weather here in Seattle. Mono doesn't deal well with the heat and I'm not a big fan of it either. Combine the fact that we don't have AC and none of our windows are situated to hold an AC unit, we've been feeling it pretty hard the last couple days.

Today we said fuck it and went to home depot to build an quick and dirty AC unit. 50 feet of copper tubing, a water features motor and some vinyl tubing, and for the first time in a week I feel nice and cool.





The basic principle is that you have a basket of ice water (didn't have much frozen at the time I finished, that should be fixed tomorrow), which is pumped up with the motor into a coil of copper tubing. The hot air passing through the tubing warms the cold water, cooling the air. Waste warm water is then pumped back into the bin, creating a nice closed system. It's not near as good as central air but it keeps a room nice and cool for a few hours.

The Pearl Jam songs in Rock Band are perfect examples on how a good song is like a good video game level. It starts off simple but as the song goes on it builds upon itself until at the end you're going all out and having a great time. It has a nice flow of rising action.

The live version of Alive that was just released is like going back to an old level on a remix mode. Everything is familiar but it's different enough and harder.

I think it's time to finish my drum kit. I'm going to start looking for that 10 inch tom I need and once I have the last of my toms built I'll buy the rest of the cymbals.

Work continues to eat up all of my time but I'm really loving 90% of it. The other ten percent is just general bullshit that you have to put up with at any job.

It's been a long time since I've been to a metal concert. So today the stars aligned and I realized I had Tuesday off, which just so happens to be when The Mayhem Festival will be in town. While attending means I'll have to sit through a Marilyn Manson set, it also means I get to see some great acts like Slayer, Cannibal Corpse and Behemoth.

This will also be Mono's first metal concert. He doesn't really listen to the type of music that will be playing there so this will be an interesting experience.

My Macbook, which I never fully christened with a name, is officially dead. The battery no longer holds a charge at all, and the backlight is doing some major flickering and will probably die soon. I bought the computer as a refurb from apple a few years ago, and though it never quite worked the way I wanted it to, it was useful at times and I'll miss it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. I can remove the monitor and buy a display port adapter with a KVM switch and have a pseudo OSX desktop to switch to, but the computer was never all that fast to begin with and it'd probably just be easier to build a hackentosh.

This is a real shame though because I just discovered Things, an incredibly easy and powerful task organizer that's only for mac. Putting the mac on life support just to get it to run so I can try it out has shown me how useful it would be in my life, but not having it on my main computer kills it's usefulness.

AC always gives me tons of energy I feel I need to channel. I'm going a million miles per minute in all sorts of directions, and if I don't channel that energy into a few tasks it will all disappear and be wasted. I feel the urge to pick up the pencil again and commit horrible atrocities on paper. I feel the urge to pick through the fur in my closet and maybe do something with it. I feel the urge to empty my bank account into the first fursuit maker who has a slot open in time for Rainfurest.

If I can organize myself and get a little bit accomplished at a time, perhaps I can stretch this energy out as long as possible. I hope so. I'm back at work again tomorrow and nothing drains me faster then twelve hour days of intensely hard kitchen work. I love the experience I'm receiving at the Woodland Park Zoo. But it's physically and emotionally draining and I'd hate to see all of this post con energy go to waste there.

With that in mind, I have a few goals to accomplish over the next month.

-Loose more weight. I started the year at 175, went to AC at 150, and now I'm back up around 158. I'd like to get down to 140 by the end of the month and stay there. That means at some point I'm going to have to do stomach crunches every day to get rid of this gut I have hanging off me.

-Start sketching again. I'm horrible at art but I want to learn at least the basics so I can at least put some visual thoughts down on paper.

-Commission a full character sheet for my fursona and start poking around at fursuit makers for quotes.

-Be more social. I've lived in Seattle for four years now and the only friends I have out here are Mono's old friends, my neighbor and Aqui from FFO. All of which I don't see enough of as it is. I've been a shut in and I need to get out and do more.

-Stay off the internet for long periods of time. I dawdle too much.

If I can accomplish these simple tasks it will be enough.

So AC 2009 has came and went. Much fun was had by all. Money was spent, good food and drink were had.

We flew in Wednesday to give ourselves a day to relax and sleep so we would be ready for the con. This proved to be a great idea as we were ready to kick ass by the next day.

I commissioned a few pieces this year. The first was a lovely con badge by Featherdust Studios, and the next day I received this lovely piece:



As for my sketch book, after a couple of years with variable results, I decided to come up with a theme to help spur the artist's imagination. Since I'm in the middle of my sixth re-subscription to FFXI I decided to get my fursona done up in all the FFXI artifact armor. My first pick was an artist named Tiberius, who caught my eye with her art featuring lots of detailed clothing. She wasn't familiar with the game but a quick google search later and she decided to do Dark Knight:



I was simply amazed by what I got. This is one of my favorite commissioned pieces ever.

I had time to get another sketch, so browsing artists ally I noticed someone was doing FFXI Con badges. Wind Dragon and I talked a bit about what I wanted. He loved my idea and got to work.

A few hours later I received this text from him:

... do you like wearing skirts...?? I don't know anything about you so I am asking. ffxi mithra have cute outfits but I can do a guy outfit.

I should make a note about how I perceive commissions. A lot of furries tend to demand way too much from the artists they're commissioning by making sure they get small, minute detail right and some flail with rage if they get something that isn't exactly 100% what they wanted. I'm the exact opposite. I give the artists a few loose guidelines with my character and let them do the rest. I'm looking for an artistic interpretation of my character, not an exact drawing. Some artists are freaked out by this relaxed attitude, thinking that I'm going to come back when the piece is finished and tear into them because they didn't draw a detail I forgot to mention. Usually when finished I get compliments about how easy I was to work with.

So when an artist wants to draw my character in a skirt, I let them.



That's scholar Artifact Armor. I love this drawing and it's the exact sort of thing I look for when I hand an artist my sketch book.

After art, it was food time. Some old classics were a little disappointing this year, while new discoveries absolutely made the trip. If you went to Anthrocon this year and did not eat at Kaya this year, shame on you. Kaya has amazing food, fresh ingredients, and prices that won't break the bank but will get you more then what you pay for. Excellent cocktails, wonderful food, and a bread pudding that is out of this world.

On the fourth I climbed up to the roof of the convention center to watch the fireworks with a ton of furries. Great fun was had by all and the city put on an excellent show.

Procyon also dragged us out on a few touristy things this year. We took the Monogahela Incline up and walked around to get an amazing view of the city.

Overall I had a great time at AC. I feel revitalized again and am working to channel this energy into many positive things as possible.

The best AC ever continues on well into saturday night. Amazing commission, good food with great company (Meeting DixieDoe and his partner, reuniting with SportyFox for a brief visit), and a spectacular fireworks display. And already the con seems like it has come and gone. Official end day is tomorrow and we're here til early monday afternoon, but that's not much time. I always feel revitalized coming out of these cons. I need a way to keep that energy going for months instead of weeks.

Most Anthrocons start slow and by Sunday I'm in full con mode, but it's far too late by then.

This year I'm in full con mode on Friday. I suspect good things will happen this weekend.

Room 1018 this year.

Also, I must remember that other states do not have as strict health codes as WA. Otherwise, I'm going to starve here.

So I think I'm moving my Live Journal activities to Dreamwidth. I loved LJ a lot, but it has changed considerably, and most of it has been for the worst. Russian spam bots, draconian user agreements, and just the general sense of the people in charge not knowing what the hell they're doing makes LJ not feel like the home it was back in 2003. Dreamwidth feels like the old Live Journal (Including the bugs!), and I feel this will foster a better community. It'll be really hard to move from a permanent account to a free account, but I think I can survive since I rarely used any of the paid features.

That being said, I won't stop reading my LJ friends list or commenting (Ha, when was the last time I commented on your journal? Don't worry, I still read each and ever post. Really.), and Dreamwidth has this cool feature that lets me cross post from DW to LJ, so you won't miss my (sparse) updates. If you want to follow me over at DW, I'm hkr over there too. Like the LJ of old, you have to have an invite code to create a journal, and right now I don't have the ability to do so, but as soon as I do I'll let you know.

Of course, if you're one of those kids on Twitter, you can follow me there too at staticd00r. I use twitter to stalk webcomic artists and people I know on IRC.

Ending the post with a picture from this morning. These two were doing the dirty deed in our backyard at 7:30 this morning. I hope they weren't rabid.

Last Remnant's story is very, very bad so far and very typical of JRPGs. I really hate being forced to play a main character who's entire role is "I'm young and stupid and know nothing of the world around me, and I also let my emotions take charge of any action I do regardless of what the consequence may be. Also I have a mysterious, vaguely defined power that lets me get out of any troubling situation."

Why do JRPG main characters have to be so embarrassing? I should not be lowering my head in disgust every time he opens his mouth. Vaan from FFXII had more maturity then this kid.

The battle system seems fun so far but I don't know if I can stomach the story enough to get further in.

While I'm waiting for Spike to start her uStream for Templar Arizona, I figured I might as well give some sort of update.

I'm employed again. I'm not even sure I told you guys that I was let go back in October. Well, I know some of you know since we talk outside of LJ but that's besides the point. I'm one of many cooks at the Woodland Park Zoo. The busy season hasn't even started and I'm already overwhelmed. I love working with the chef, but it's insanely hard work and I'm not quite sure if it's worth it yet.

Finding a job was a huge fucking pain in the ass for me. It doesn't help that I have no real skills and no higher education. Looking for a job when the economy was in a slump + slow season for restaurants + thousands of people losing their jobs = slim pickings. Though I probably applied to at least one job a day, I was competing with hundreds of others for one position. In fact, the only reason I was hired at the zoo was because they're ramping up for the busy season and hiring anyone they can and seeing who sticks. I am literally one of almost fifty people hired in the last two weeks and there will probably be fifty more by the time May rolls around.

During the time at home when I wasn't looking for a job, I tried to keep myself busy. For a few months I went all crazy and painted a ton of warhammer figs, but barely even scratched the surface of what I have in the wings to paint.





When I got bored with that I started looking at cheap ways to improve my rock band drum kit. I went from this:



To this:



Then I learned how to make my own electronic drums and did this:



Of course I also ramped up my Rock Band drumming ability and managed to pass and even gold star songs that had been giving me problems for many months. I passed Fallout Boy's Dead On Arrival the first time I played it on my new kit, compared to the 0/9000 times I tried it on RB1. Same with Detroit Rock City.

Still can't pass Don't Fear the Reaper or Constant Motion though. Once the solo kicks in on Constant Motion I have no idea what the fuck. Until then it's fairly straight forward.

I have more plans in the wings for expanding the kit further of course but for now my attention is focused elsewhere.

I also started getting into vintage stereo equipment and LPs, which was pretty fun.

None of it could really grab my attention for very long though. I swear in my adult life I am far more ADD then I was in high school. While I had problems focusing in class in high school, at least I could pay attention to a video game for more then ten minutes. Now I can barely do that. I've tried slimming down distractions (Giving up IMs, stopped reading FFO/LJ communities that did nothing but piss me off or waste my time, etc) but it's not working. There are some days where I can't even read a paragraph of text without having to start over at least four times.

To better focus myself, I've been eliminating some things from my diet. I've given up soda completely, my only source of caffeine being a cup or two of coffee in the morning. I've been drinking more juice and water lately, and I've been making sure to focus more on eating healthier things like rice, fish and fresh veg. The lack of soda has really improved my sleep. I go to bed at 10 and I'm ready to go at 6 am. I also feel less jittery in the evenings now.

So honestly not much has been going on. I'll try to update this more often, but of course no promises.

I hope it is my destiny to die gloriously in The Battle of Houston.

About six months ago, I had a catastrophic server failure that ended up with me losing all of my music. Every CD Mono and I owned + tons of carefully picked through and tagged downloads, gone. I started the process of ripping CDs again but it is an incredibly slow and boring process, especially if you're a sorting nut like me. As I had more fun things I wanted to get to, I stalled out on ripping. Thus, I also stalled out on listening.

The problem with listening to MP3s is it just doesn't engage me like it used to back in the day when the concept of having all of my music on a 5x2 box was new. I tend to end up turning on music for background noise, not for listening pleasure.

Recently I decided to pull out Mono's Turntable and see if I could fix it. We had been consolidating our excess stuff around the house and selling off anything we didn't need on Craigslist. I hooked up the turntable and found it still had it's problem of cutting out the right channel. Also I couldn't seem to get it to ground properly, so I got a nasty buzz no matter what I tried. I set it aside and pondered what to do with the table and the records that had been sitting on the shelf for years with no play.

A trip to goodwill yielded the answer; a used, Technics Direct Drive Fully Automatic SL-QD3 for $25 with an aftermarket Audio Technica Cartridge. We grabbed it and took it home. A small bit of height and weight adjustment and we got it running perfect.

Of course, the problem then was where to set it up. The receiver in the office is placed inside our server rack and we can't fit the turntable in there, and there wasn't a convenient place to stick a shelf next to it. Also, the receiver is a fairly bare bones, generic Sony stereo receiver from the late 90s. It just doesn't sound good.

We had another AV receiver sitting in the living room, but the living room isn't the best place to listen to music. The office is a far more conductive place for such an activity. So a bit of hauling later I brought in the shelf that was in the living room along with the receiver and hooked it up. Excited, I put on what I consider the golden standard for testing a new sound system: Dark Side of the Moon.

The result was a bit underwhelming. The AV Receiver, despite costing around $300 new when it came out in the late 90s, just didn't have any character to it.

Something Awful pointed me towards scouring the thrift stores for a vintage receiver, particularly anything Pioneer SX-XXX. I tried hitting good will for a few days (Our neighborhood good will moves its inventory extremely fast and always has something new in it), but I couldn't find anything satisfactory. So I went on ebay.

Buying used sound equipment on ebay has always been something I tried to avoid. You can't play with whatever you're buying, so you have to either hope to chance or find someone you trust to sell you a good product. A few days later I found a gentleman in Indianapolis selling a Pioneer SX-525. What attracted me to his ad was that he stated that he had recently cleaned everything on it, including the pots. $40 later and I find it at my doorstep today.

Wow, just wow. The sound difference between the vintage Pioneer and the amp I had been using was like night and day. Everything sounded better through it. It is incredibly nice and loud, yet everything sounds clear. I can hear things I never used to hear in many songs.

I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. You'll never get me to even look at $500 speaker cable, and you won't convince me that drawing a green line on my CDs will make them sound clearer. I also have a hard time to believing that just because it's vintage means it sounds better. In this case though, I have been proven wrong.

I also got to test out a few new record pressings that some of you might have noticed in stores recently. Among my acquisitions were Boston's self titled album, the 30th anniversary edition of DSotM, and The Perl Jam Ten remaster. All of them are pressed on heavy, 180 gram vinyl. All of them perfect in every way. I hope more stuff gets re-released like this because it's good shit.

(This was going to be an meditation on whether Rock Band is a good stepping stone for learning how to play real drums. As I wrote it it became something different all together. So I'm posting this then I'll get back to the drums part.)

Those of you on my friends list know I have a little obsession with a game called Rock Band. It borders on MMO obsession, but thankfully it doesn't take over my life like FFXI or WoW. The game is made by a great group of folks over at Harmonix, which made such classics as Amplitude and the first two Guitar Hero games. Harmonix is a great company with wonderful people, a few of whom I've had the chance to speak with in person.

Harmonix's mission is simple enough; bring music interaction to the common man. A vast majority of the employees at Harmonix are real musicians, which include members of bands such as Freeze Pop, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Bang Camaro. They want people to feel the thrill of playing music.

Rock Band, and it's successor Rock Band 2, is the biggest step forward to this goal in years. It brings the full band experience to the living room. Rock Band nights have replaced Karaoke nights at many bars and night clubs, and with new tracks for the game being released every week, ranging in genres from blues to funk to death metal, there is something for everyone and no chance of the game becoming stale in the next few years.

However, Rock Band also has it's detractors. Many people refuse to play the game decrying that it's a waste of time and people should learn real instruments if they want to play music. While the value of learning to play a real instrument cannot be overstated, many people who cast their gaze downwards at the game ignore the simple fact that Rock Band is not a substitute for playing an instrument; it's an introduction. While one cannot possibly learn anything from playing a fake plastic guitar that can transfer over to a real guitar beyond simple rhythm and time keeping, it does one important thing; it shows right from the start that music can be fun.

We all know the story. Many of us have even experienced this. We decide that we're going to learn an instrument, say guitar or drums, and learn to play our favorite songs. We grab a cheap instrument and maybe a book or two, sit down excitedly and immediately discover this this is hard. Most of us cannot even begin to approach the sound of our favorite musicians. We struggle to learn on our own; sometimes we persevere and make headway, other times we just simply quit. We might decide to pay for lessons; surely a teacher can show us the fun to be had. Instead you spend months focusing on simple rudiments and scales. While these things are extremely important in playing music, one can make the argument that they are not fun enough for beginners to engage them in the craft, which is why many, many people give up early in learning music.

(On that note, I am not saying that learning the basics is not important. It is extremely important. People dedicated to the craft know the importance of these things and even have fun with them. I'm trying to approach this from the layman's point of view, who might not be dedicated enough to realize the importance of the basics.)

Rock Band as a game focuses entirely on the fun of playing music, and goes a step further from past games in that it introduces the fun of playing music with other people. It starts you off simple, but still playing your favorite songs. To play harder songs on higher difficulties, players need to practice their part over and over and learn new techniques. Along the way they can play with other people. By themselves they may not be the best at a song, but together they can work towards making it sound as good as possible. By the time a player is playing competently at expert level, he has learned several things:

-Music is Fun
-Even the simplest sounding song can be hard
-Getting good at an instrument takes practice
-Playing with others is fun, even if you're not the best player in the world

With those things learned, a mind is now more open and better prepared to pick up a real instrument and start learning. They're more open to the idea of practice, and more open to the idea of getting together with a friend to bang out a few rough songs.

So, while Rock Band is not a substitute for playing a real instrument, it can be an important stepping stone in taking the plunge in learning how to play an instrument.

Pearl Jam's Ten is the best album to come to Rock Band since Moving Pictures. Every track is worth a purchase and is incredibly fun on every instrument. Rock Band people following me need to pick this up over anything else.

I think my pack must buys are now ordered like this:

Boston Pack
Ten
Moving Pictures
The Who Pack
The Cars album
Space Truckin
Funk Pack
Grateful Dead pack 2
Screaming For Vengeance
Texas Flood

All of these plus the songs from Rock Band 1 and 2 equal a set of songs that range in many different genres and difficulties, and all are incredibly fun on at least one instrument, usually more.

I'm so going to do one of those fandom list things the #ri side of my friends list is doing:

( Read more... )

So before the buzz of the alcohol and the con wear off.

It has been brought to my attention that I am a huge jerk online. I have known this to be true for a while.

I have decided it would be better for me and my life if I wasn't such a huge jerk. Therefore, I am making a drunk/pre con ending promise to be less of a jerk to people online. I guess real life too, but anyone who knows me in real life knows I'm not near as big of a jerk.

Pretty good con through and through. Many things I wished could have happened didn't, but that's largely my fault. Plenty of people I could have met (And that are reading this) I could have met but didn't . I need to work on getting out of this thought that nobody wants to hang out with me unless otherwise stated.

Gonna drive back sometime tomorrow and hopefully start getting my life back on track.

Oh, so for those wondering:

@Further Confusion, Double Tree room 627. My phone number is in a previous post. Give me a call/text if you want to hang out.

So apparently sometime over my vacation Comcast switched our 6 meg down line to the 15 meg down line.

When usenet downloads are blazing along at around 1500-1600 kBps it is awesome.

This is pretty damn nice so far. Super fast boot time, incredibly fast and clean interface, and it works right out of the box.

Way more later, but this is a pretty accurate for holiday trip 08.

For those of you wondering, Mono and I are in Michigan for the holidays. Take care everyone.

So, last few episodes of The Office.

Is it me, or is it incredibly funny for the gay character to be the straight man in the cast?

Anthrocon furries; I have reserved our room at the Westin.

So this super awesome, high sensitivity gaming mouse I got? Great for FPSs.

Not so great for peggle.

Figured I should post this here too:

So, I got my Ion kit today: (And this is split up because of the stupid image restrictions)



The box is damn heavy. 30 lbs. It's also about the size of the original bundle box.

Here are some pics of the box itself. If this is going to be at retail, only a few stores will have room for them:





It comes packed which much smaller boxes



The first thing I pulled out and played with was the pedal. I could already tell this was going to be the loudest part of the kit. Here's some comparison pics:




I'll talk about how the pedal performs later. Moving on, next are the pads. They're quite large as you can see:




The pads feel nice and bouncy, and feel like they can take a beating. Even the plastic seems more heavy duty.

The cymbals are next.




Oh hey, it comes with sticks. I bet these will be nicer then *plays with them for ten seconds*...They're worse then the stock rock band sticks. I did not know that was possible.

Set up took a while. After I pulled everything out I fired up a Star Trek Next Generation episode, and I still was building in 15 minutes after it ended.







And you'll have a ton of garbage at the end:



So, how does the kit do?

Surprisingly well, after you fiddle with it. I'm still trying to get it adjusted to my style (And still trying to find out what it is.). You can move every single bit of the kit around, and those who just stick with the default RB layout are missing out.

I played a few songs with stock everything. Three things became apparent: First, the kick pedal is loud, accurate, but sucks compared to the Omega pedal. It lacks the feedback a real bass pedal gives and if you're used to that, you'll be happy to know the omega pedal and any other pedal mod works with the Ion kit. All you need is a eighth inch to quarter inch adapter.

The second thing that became apparent was that a ride cymbal is desperately needed. I found myself constantly swinging at air or hitting the crash, losing my combo. After about an hour I got used to it, but it made for some awkward transitions.

Thirdly, holy shit this kit has bounce. So much bounce that five songs in I was still holding my sticks too loose and having them fly out my hands. Anti-vibe sticks are a must. I tried a song out with a set of 5A nylon tipped normal sticks and my hands were hurting afterwords. I switched back to my anti-vibes and they hurt far less.

I rocked out for a bit, playing a variety of songs. Rolls were a lot easier to do. I had zero dropped notes. It was quite amazing. However, there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to remembering what pad to hit. I often found myself sticking to the pads simply because I'm so used to that.

Sound level was definitely reduced, but not completely silent. I tend to wail a bit on my kits. If you hit plastic, it will be loud. The pads and the cymbals provide a nice whump noise though.

Cymbal response was perfect and spot on. I think Joystiq either got a broken kit or was too stupid to put the cymbals on right.

I'm boding this part because it is very important. You CAN switch cymbal and pad inputs without penalty (At least in RB1.) Yes, this means that for songs like Orange Crush you can make the ride cymbal the red notes and the red pad the yellow notes.

Some of you may remember my boyfriend made one of the first double bass kits. I have him working on a kick pedal that can switch inputs on the fly. In a week or two we should have a working prototype.

So, first day impressions are definitely favorable. I'm going to have to wait for my third cymbal to get here, along with putting the kit through some serious marathon sessions before I pass final judgment. But for all intensive purposes, this kit rocks and is worth the $300.

Hoooooly shit at all the google conspiracy theory nuts popping out of the wood work after Chrome gets released.

The real conspiracy is why there is no reload button on the right click menu in Chrome. My web browsing is severely hampered by this.

Though the speed almost makes up for it.

When did it become fashionable to pretend to have mental illnesses?

So last week came and went by fast. My friend from Michigan came over and, despite having bad allergies, seemed to have fun. Most of the week was spent playing rock band, but we also went to a Mariners game and traversed around downtown. All and all a fun time.

Saturday I went to our new neighbor's house warming party. Unfortunately I had to work beforehand, so I was pretty tired and non-talkative during the whole thing. I still had a good time, and it felt good to be at a gathering with a bunch of geeks again. I haven't done anything like that since I was home in Michigan.

I've decided to go all out on my remaining warhammer minis and have spent most of my free time assembling everything I haven't assembled yet. I've gone through about 6 hobby knife blades and I'm still not done. This is the list I posted on the Something Awful Warhammer thread:

To assemble
-10 Chaos Space Marines (Waiting until I order Noise Marine conversion parts)
-1 High Elf Tirinoc Chariot.
-20 Skaven Plague Monks
-1 Eldar War Walker
-5 Eldar Dire Avengers
-8 Eldar Guardians
-1 Eldar Heavy Weapons Team
-10 VC Skeletons
-10 VC Ghouls

To Prime:
-20 Skaven Clan Rats
-1 Skaven Warp Lightning Cannon
-2 Skaven Jezzails
-1 Skaven Warpfire Thrower
-1 Eldar Falcon
-16 High Elf Spearmen
-1 Repeater Bolt Thrower
-1 High Elf Dragon Mage
-1 High Elf Korhil, Captain of the White Lions
-10 Dire Wolves
-1 Bestial Vampire

To Paint
-1 Skaven Warlock Engineer
-1 High Elf Dragon (Base Coated)
-1 High Elf Dragon riding prince
-5 High Elf Dragon princes
-1 High Elf Tirinoc Chariot
-1 White Lion Chariot
-1 Vlad Von Carstein
-1 Vampire Noble
-1 Corpse Cart

Since then I've gotten just about everything off the To assemble list. I plan on priming everything Wednesday. I need to clean out my airbrush in preparation.

Today I'm making lasagnia for dinner. I have left over meat sauce I need to get rid of.

So I haven't really been updating this thing that much. Mostly it's because I don't usually have the attention span to type out a long entry anymore.

Not much has been going on. I found a new job a few months ago, co-running the kitchen at a new fair trade cafe in town. The pay kinda sucks but the atmosphere is great, as well as the food. So I'll stick with it for a while.

Our upstairs neighbor have been great so far, at least from the "guys living downstairs" angle as we haven't really gotten to know him yet. But since he isn't shouting at the TV or his girlfriend all day every day like the previous neighbors, and he hasn't complained about me playing Rock Band too loud, he's okay in my book. We've been invited to his housewarming party next week so I'll learn a bit more then.

Speaking of Rock Band, the game has made me really want to get a drum kit of my own. Of course, I really can't have a real kit in an apartment, so the next best thing is an electronic kit. Which just so happens to be what a company called ION is putting out for Rock Band 2. A real electric drum kit that happens to work with RB/RB2. I have it on pre-order. We'll see what I think about it in a few months.

I went back to the demon known as FFXI for a few months while I was out of a job and managed to take a character to 75 and finish a ton of missions. I still haven't beaten CoP or ToAU or the last to missions of Zilart yet, but I think I'm satisfied with what I accomplished. Time to put the character in stasis until I get the urge to play again.

It's also a great change from only four years ago. I was actually able to look for and find work while playing, as opposed to letting it take over my life. And I'm stopping my play as my own decision, instead of the whole running out of money thing.

I also just started playing Soul Calibur 4. While I can't say I wasted my money, the fact that the game plays exactly the same as SC2 makes the game a bit boring for me. Even Tekken 4 and 5 vastly improved gameplay from Tekken 3. But at least it will tide me over until Street Fighter 4.

The one advantage of SC4, and most fighting games is that I can just play them for 10 minutes and feel like I got what I wanted from the game. FFXI is the only game now where I can spend hours on it. Any other game and I'm looking for something else to do right away.

I say most fighting games because Super Smash Brothers Brawl is an utter disappointment. While I have always sucked at the smash games, SSBB just frustrates me on so many levels. The camera still does that horrible zoom in and out thing that I've hated since the original (Though to be fair there's really no other way to do it). The time requirements to unlock over half of the entire character list is long, and the best way to do it, Subspace Emissary, is one of the worst "games" I have ever played.

My warhammer painting has stalled out for the moment it seems. I'm trying to force myself to paint what I already have assembled + primed, but none of what I have is appealing to me right now. High Elves are pretty boring to paint, even if they are fun to play against. As for my skaven army, once you realize you need to paint about 150 clanrats/slaves, you start to wonder what made you choose this crazy hoard army in the first place.

My friend anthony is flying out from Detroit to stay with us for a week. It should be fun.

Does anyone here do twitter?

I do:

http://twitter.com/staticd00r

Dill pickle have no reason to be on a pizza with salami, mushrooms and onion. I wanted to like you so much Via Verde, but you're yet another pizza place that sucks.

Room 1807

For those that want to know.

Oh hi, going to Anthrocon, brb

Ahahahaha, they took the random journal button off the menu bar.

That random journal button up top they just put in? That is the most horrible thing they could have done.

Was this a decision of that new elected group that was paraded around LJ like American Idol contestants?

Why did LJ have to start sucking after I got a permanent membership?

Mat, I just want to let you know:

never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.

IDE is a horrible piece of shit and I wish whoever came up with the whole thing rots in hell.

What's the best news one can learn about two days before their birthday?

Being laid off ain't one of them, I can tell you that.

Gonna try this meme to get myself back into the live journal habit.


""Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by asking me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, etc. Re-post in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.""