From Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe:

If Ahuramazda exists, Highness, all things serve him. The oak is his; so is the mouse the gnaws its root. Without oaks there could be no mice, without mice no cats, and without cats no oaks. But shouldn’t he have servants greater than oaks and men? Surely he must, because the gap between Ahuramazda and men and oaks is very wide, and we see that every king has some minister whose authority’s only slightly less than his own, and that such men have ministers of their own, similarly empowered. Besides, the existence of the sun, the moon, the earth, and of fire and water are indisputable facts. But the existence of Ahuramazda is not an indisputable fact. Finish your wine.

Third generation (I will write about what I mean by this) music composition software for Windows. I downloaded a demo and it immediately started sucking up my time. The limitation of the demo is that you cannot save your work, however, you can render it to a Wav or MP3 file.

So I kept spending lots of time putting together a nice drum track and adding a few instruments, then arranging that into the rough beginnings of some little piece of music, just because it was fun. Then I would have to close the program and lose everything I’d done, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to save my work going in. This program is addicting. Here are a couple small exports of test segments I threw together in testing out the program:

FL-Test 04
FL-Test 09

A little silly, but presented anyway for your amusement. The point of these was to test out the sound quality capabilities of the program, and here’s where it excels. You’ll notice that each instrument has a separate chain of effects being applied to it (delay, equalizer, reverb, etc.) and the nice thing is that you can control this at so many points within the program, which gives the composer a great deal of expressive freedom in that regard.

Now I can say it. The day before yesterday I saw “The Day After Tomorrow”. Actually, I hereby pronounce that the sequel is going to be called “The Day Before Yesterday” and the third movie in the trilogy will be called “The Day After the Day After Tomorrow”.

Some progress. I am interested in selling the completed, original artwork. This will not be a print, but the original pen and ink on paper version. Make me an offer I can’t refuse?

Looks more like “Dragon” than “Seahorse”. Still in progress. I haven’t added much more since last version, but you can see how these things evolve.

Now, here’s another interesting site. I’d recommend reading the FAQ, it’s entertaining.

Share Your Experiences

I noticed that you have some of my identifying information, such as my first and last name, business name, and/or email address available at your website. I never athorized this and I demand that it be removed.

You have no right to demand that your identifying information be removed from this website. Any of your identifying information found at this website was put there by one of this website’s users. We are under no obligation to remove this information, and doing so would defeat this whole purpose of this website.

And…

For example, individuals might instead choose to share experiences anonymously by meeting in a dark room, or with stockings on their heads. If one person chooses to defame another is this now the fault of the stockings? Is this now the fault of the darkness? Obviously not.

Personally, I blame the stockings. I’ve always been suspicious of those things. (Warning: Corny puns ahead.) They make me feel uncomfortable and they tend to run. (And you thought it was going to be about “stalking”? Don’t worry, I won’t ever stoop that low.)

Don’t worry, I rarely wear stockings.

Don’t worry, when I do it’s only on my head.

I looked up Whois info for a domain and found this:

Domains By Proxy

So my question is, for small sites, what’s the difference between using a “proxied domain”, and using fictitious information? The only real information you need is a valid e-mail address, and you can easily get a throwaway address through Yahoo or Hotmail. A registrar never needs to send you anything in the postal mail.

On the other hand, if you’re going to have a popular site and someone challenges the ownership of your domain on the grounds that the information in the registrar’s database is false, it probably would be good to have an actual mailing address and correct information underlying the record, so I can see where DbP is useful.

I personally have seen at least 10 remixes of this song (“Clocks” by Coldplay). So I thought I’d write one of my own. It’s short, and different in that I don’t use any samples from the original, just the notes of the piano progression. The drums need a lot of work, but I’m going to leave this be.

Over-Clocked (mp3)

Right-click, choose “Save Target As” for best results.

Definitely still in progress. I originally colored the pupil of the eye shape in the center of the image with solid red, and this doesn’t balance with the rest of the design as it stands. I erased that with Photoshop in the version you see here, but working it into the rest of the design so everything looks balanced will be hard.