The Bucket O' Nothing

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line (or two lines, or whatever) from the first 50 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both band and title.
Step 4: ???
Step 5: PROFIT.

Via several people, most recently aquarionical. Filtered for instrumentals, tracks where the first line was the title of the song, and one track where I couldn't make out the lyrics and couldn't find them on Google.

Quite surprised how long it took for the first Japanese track to come up, actually.

( Read more... )

Filk below the cut. Just as with the song it's filking, the title character bears no resemblance to oxfordgirl's character beyond having a very Fidelian name. Written out because it started earworming me on the cycle back from lunch today. (Also crossposted to lrpdrabbles.)

( Read more... )

So, while trying desperately to get my practical reports written by Wednesday, I've been listening to Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera.

My conclusions so far:
( Les Miserables is quite awesome, both in French and English, and I want to go and see it. )
( The Phantom of the Opera is reasonable, but not quite as good as Les Mis. )

NB: I haven't listened to Phantom enough to really be able to pontificate about this. I suspect that when I listen to it more I'll pick out more. :)

I went to my first gig on Monday!

( My impressions. )

Things that are awesome.

1. Puzzle Pirates and our soon-to-be crew. We have a ship on order (it'll be ready in a day or two), we've been training up at puzzles, and I've been trying to memorise routes so as to not need to worry about charts.

I don't think I'll manage to memorise any before we start sailing, but I've been getting island league points on my world map at least. I would have had the third archipelago of the ocean mapped if I hadn't accidentally teleported home when playing this morning.

Remember, kids - don't pirate while asleep, or while using a touchpad laptop mouse. It never helps.

ETA: I now have our ship, and a whisking potion so I can skip to islands I've been to before.

I do not, unfortunately, have the option to make a crew. Still need Narrow in swordfighting and battle navigation.

2. Reading computer science papers. The history of Haskell makes for interesting reading. (I have been warned off Haskell by Fib, who suggests I learn ML instead if I really want to learn a functional language. I need to play around with ML more.)

3. Three songs:
'Tribute' by Tenacious D
'Title of the Song' by Da Vinci's Notebook
'Finite Simple Group (Of Order Two)' by The Klein Four Group

4. Spoof CS tripos papers. I couldn't find them on the university site, but a bit of hunting produced 2006's paper. Question 3 amuses me far too much.

A little more searching produced all the papers from 1999 to 2006. Warning - most of these contain swearing, marijuana references and very bad jokes about curry (there's one almost every year). Do not inhale. Do not take orally. Oh, and probably best not viewed at work, either.

More random links:

The photos from this year's 3YGB.
Homepage for Philip Wadler, one of the inventors of Haskell.
Oz and Ends, a blog that's mainly about children's and young adult fiction.

( Everybody's Fool, and why I don't always like 'tsundere' characters. )

To end on a less depressing note, though, here's a link to John Scalzi's recipe for Schadenfreude Pie. It is pie full of sugar, chocolate and cinnamon.

I bought a lot of books and music today, so I'll be giving my thoughts about them for the next few days.

New music:

Naio Ssaion - Out Loud

Another metal band with a female vocalist. Bought it on the strength of "The Mirror", which Pandora has put in my playlist recently, and it doesn't disappoint. The singer is very good, there are no growls, and one of the band members plays an electric violin - he's even on the album cover with it.

Nightwish - Nemo (single)

This is the first single I've bought in about seven years. It was the non-album track (White Night Fantasy) and the orchestral version of Nemo that got me to buy it.

(I also have an Archer AMV and a Riku AMV floating around my head every time I hear this song. Perhaps I'll make one of them some day, though someone's already done an Archer one to the anime series.)

New books:

Web Hacking, by Stuart McClure, Saumil Shah and Shreeraj Shah.
£4.95 at Galloway and Porter.

A vaguely interesting guide to security holes in websites. Covers some things I've known for a long time (such as View Source in browsers), some things I've learned from The Daily WTF (such as SQL injection attacks and the infamous &OR1=1 in CGI GET requests), and some things I didn't know (such as how to identify web servers from the HTTP headers they send).

I like reading about security things, perhaps because I never get to use them. :)

Because after listening to them all day for a week, Nightwish just won't cut it, so I need something else to listen to at work.

Within Temptation (album - Enter):

Lose for two reasons - (a) annoyingly breathy soprano, and (b) Growly Goth Guy. Look, if you're a female-fronted band, stop letting your bloody guitarist growl into the mike.

The Gathering (album - If Then Else):

Sound like Skindive, which is good.
Are incomprehensible because the music's swamping them, which is bad.
Aren't the sort of thing I'd sing along with, which is bad for what I want them for.
As far as I can tell, they make good background music and that's it.

Midnattsol (album - Where Twilight Dwells):

Too much guitar and percussion. I like my goth metal veering towards orchestral.
Guitar solos I do not care about; flute solos I like.
Also, singer has a weak voice and has moments where she just seems to lose what key she's singing in. She's also either swamped by the instruments or far too loud.

Flowing Tears (album - Razorbliss):

For once, no Growly Goth Guy. And the singer is a woman with a voice so low she could probably pass as a male singer.
Unfortunately, this means her voice blends into the instruments so well that she's almost incomprehensible.
The title track, Razorbliss, isn't terrible, but it's still not good enough to keep.

Theatre of Tragedy (album - Velvet Darkness):

I really wanted to like this, because it has track titles like "Seraphic Deviltry", which is an awesome title if you're not taking yourself seriously.
Of course, they are. They also have Growly Goth Guy. Stop letting your musicians sing, damn it!

Epica (album - Phantom Agony):

The choral track at the beginning hooked me, and even a short passage of Growly Goth Guy (does he get paid per album he appears on?) didn't hurt this album. I like this a lot.
Track 3 was a close thing, as it started with Growly Goth Guy (hereafter called GGG), but the rest of the album makes his occasional appearances tolerable.

Octavia (album - Winter Enclosure):

I started listening to them by accident after the Epica tracks finished. They're not bad - no GGG, and the singer's reasonably good - but they don't grab me like Epica did.
Like The Gathering, this is probably background music more than anything else.

Most of these albums seem to stay entirely in one octave. Makes the music very, very boring.

And for no other reason, the Takarazuka Revue:

Not a goth metal band, but a female-only theatre troupe, approximately half of whom cross-dress on stage (and often off) for a living.
Alas, the music isn't as good as Sera Myu, but the samba rhythm on Southern Cross Revue is very catchy.

Dissertation's coming on reasonably well. Just passed 4400 words today, though I'm getting near to the end. At least I've got whole paragraphs about studies that I've only put in a sentence on so far, and I've still got another section, the introduction and conclusion to do - so I should manage to hit the 8,000-10,000 word criterion by the time I've actually finished it.

Still waiting for Katamari Damacy to arrive from the eBay seller, though it seems like I won't be playing it a lot - once the dissertation's done, I'm going to be going very light on my hands to give them some more time to heal.

And reading through random files on my computer has just given me a plan. From now on, if I ever feel angsty about life and so on, I shall write fiction rather than keeping a journal. Good lord, but my journal was full of self-indulgent angst.

The entry in question was written two years and a day ago (in a text file, not on LJ). I apologise to anyone I was spouting this angst to at the time, particularly one person who got the brunt of it... actually, let's be fair, it was just one person I was spouting angst at. Life's changed somewhat since then, for the better, and certain changes have made it much easier for me to talk rather than angst.

So, in general, I am a (mostly) happy bunny. My schedule's much more free this year, which could be a good or a bad thing - we Linguistics finalists are left very much to our own devices, and all we have to do is choose exam topics, read lots and lots on them, arrange supervisions and write essays. Next term I'll have... sixteen supervisions, I now realise. Just like last year. Whoops. (Only with more reading.) Maybe I ought to start panicking again, then.

On a happier note, the Gregorian - Masters of Chant albums are hilarious. (Though I maintain that you should not have soloists in Gregorian chant versions of pop songs. Oh, and Nothing Else Matters is probably the best of their tracks.)

Well, I gave aqouli an activation code today, and set up his account (he's someone I RP with on PokeMUSH, y'see), and he wrote about what type of music he likes. So I figured I'd talk a little about my taste in music...

Hmm. When I was younger (up until about the age of 13), all the music I listened to was the stuff in my parents' record collection. Mostly classical, that is, apart from an Elton John album, a Beach Boys tape we used to play in the car, and a few Stevie Wonder tapes (he's still great. I bought a new copy of Songs In The Key Of Life a few years ago, as the tapes finally died).

At about 13 or 14, I started to listen to the radio... where I live, there's a fairly good FM radio station called Capital FM. (I live just inside the M25, which is the motorway which encircles London. So I'm close enough to get London radio, but not close enough to vote in the London mayoral elections which were held a few years ago...) So for the rest of my time at secondary school, I listened to that, and as a consequence heard (and taped) a lot of British and American pop music. Most of my albums date from that time, although they were almost all fairly old when I got them. Garbage's first album, Jagged Little Pill by the oh-so-eloquent Miss Morrisette (I want to know how she sings like that - when I sing along, my voice dies before the fifth song), Fin de Siecle by the Divine Comedy... also, "Hooray for Boobies", by the Bloodhound Gang, prompted by me seeing the video to "The Bad Touch" on a German music video channel while on holiday in France. (That's the one where they dress up as monkeys, for any of you who may have seen it.)

Anyway. That was up until the end of school. Then I ended up at university at a place that's some distance from London - yes, only about an hour's drive from home, but it's enough that you won't get Capital FM up here. I did listen to Radio Cambridge for a while, but I eventually couldn't be bothered. Then I found Audiogalaxy.

Now, Audiogalaxy is not particularly legal. It is (well, was) a system by which you could download MP3s, and would also be sending them to other people at the same time. It even, shockingly, worked on a 56k modem connection. That, and a search for "anime music videos" which lead me to Kestrel's site at www.sempai.org, got me into October Project, and I also had the chance to listen to Ella Baila Sola (Spanish pop group of two girls), who I remembered as one of the groups my Spanish exchange liked.

Time passed, and Audiogalaxy got Napstered, and then I was introduced to the world of anime leeching, and with it the world of anime MP3s...

Currently, my playlist in Winamp is usually my unsorted anime songs. Which means I get random things like a Gensoumaden Saiyuki song which could be Ricky Martin if it weren't in Japanese (Bunny Doll), a Pokemon song which includes the lyrics "Karate Chop, Aurora Beamu wa Hydoru Pumpu" (Rival), and a spectacularly silly song called "Fantasy" which is the third Hikaru no Go opening song. And if you haven't heard of Hikaru no Go... you haven't known me long enough.

So I'm usually listening to stuff sung in a language I can barely understand. I can even sing along with some of it, too...

In other news, I got a new optical mouse which is working wonders, I've downloaded waaaay too much in the last two days, Battle Athletes(s) Victory is brilliant, Haibane Renmei is good but still mysterious, Hikaru no Go is as good as ever (I need more!), and I actually managed to finish one of the four Special Relativity questions I had to do over the holidays. Only those, and two other example sheets, and my two CATAM reports, and... *pants* Not enough time!

And back to "Fantasy" again. So silly. Probably never should have been associated with Hikaru no Go. I don't care - I love it. :D