Ozzie

I've played Act 2 with a friend for a few hours now and we enjoyed the puzzles tremendously! Honestly, I think the puzzles of Act 2 are some of the best Tim has ever designed. It was his goal for the player to never hit upon a solution by accident, without knowing why the solution worked, and for us this has worked so far. Storywise the game indeed wastes potential with clunky exposition and characters who accept their changed situations much too quickly. They act in a rather blasè fashion, every single one of them, to knowledge that radically alters their perspective on things. I think the challenges to their worldviews would have been dramatically valuable to explore, but Tim doesn't go for it, even though illusions and widely accepted falsehoods are a central theme of the story. So odd! Also, I would have preferred the story to remain without unambigious villains since that would have fitted the theme of growing up better (the real world doesn't know clear cut villains, after all). But it's still very good! Certainly gameplaywise it's a lot more complex and inventive than Act 1 made you expect it to be, and the world is still charming and fun to explore. The humor hasn't gone amiss, either. I particularly enjoyed that puzzle with the snake, ehehehe!!! ^^

I deleted the recording I linked to previously, I think its beginning may have been too rough to be encouraging people to listen all the way through. Sometimes you share a creation immediately after you created it and then regret that decision a while later when your critical faculties have properly kicked in. But it has been a few days now since I performed the song on stage and I still like the recording of it, so...here it is:

The day after tomorrow I'll perform before an audience a somewhat distinct take on "Tired of You" by the Foo Fighters. So I've practised it a lot. I made some recordings of it, too, and I like the latest one. It's just me in my room with my voice and my hands dancing on the keys of my e-piano. I'm curious to know what you think of it. [link deleted]

Lost Highway is my favorite Lynch movie! It just works for me, the most of all of his movies. Inland Empire I like the beginning of, but it loses me pretty quickly.

Sulking Truman is the worst. They also overdo the film noir-ness in the opening segment. I can't wait for Billy Zane to leave the show. He's hard to bear. I can't even bother to memorize the character's name I care so little for him. Windom Earle...it's weird, I remember that I was intrigued by him the first time around, but was frustrated that his storyline took so long to get properly started. This time around, though...I don't get much from him. Annie on the other hand I appreciate more now. I didn't like her on first watch. She seemed to get in the way of a Coop/Audrey romance. We know the reasons behind the scenes why it didn't happen, but in front of them they're not clear, really. Otherwise this episode is a step in the right direction. Twin Peaks continues to lack a central drive that pushes the story forward. Sadly it's too clear that the showrunners at this point still had no clue where they were going with all this.

Haha! Thanks! ^^ It is a non-sequitur, yes, I doesn't build much on what comes before, which is why I think that the first two minutes aren't all that important to listen to. It also was the result of a mildly desperate struggle for a good ending. Like I said a few posts back, I made this merely for myself to learn how to use the tools, so it didn't need to be perfect on a structural level. You can hear how I progressively got more adept while the track progresses. Since the program was also very limiting it didn't make sense to work longer than necessary with it. In the end though I'm very proud of what I achieved and kinda surprised that I managed to produce this kind of music. I've listened a lot to the back half of the track over the last few days.

I finished the track I talked about a week ago. I hope y'all like it! ^^ https://soundcloud.com/ted-ist-tot/moaning-groaning It gets better as it goes on, I promise! A few words about it: I made only two recordings for the track, both of which can be heard at the very beginning. They were recorded with a laptop mic at about 5:30 AM. The table pounding woke up my neighbors, so after that I limited myself by not recording any more for the project. I sampled both of the recordings exhaustively throughout the rest of the track (sampling is not something I really did much of before). Otherwise I delved back into the archive of my recordings and made use of those. I also sampled a porn clip because, uhm...artistic intuition? The program I used was crazy limited! Effects were somehow only applied to the left channel of a stereo track, so either you could live with that, or you had to reduce the stereo to a mono track or you had to do without the effect. You are also limited to only 16 tracks per track (uhm, poor word choice, eh?), which means that you are merely able to settle on 16 different combinations of volume, effects and channel (whether stereo or mono) settings! Towards the end of my work on the track I ran out of options, because I already used every track and had difficulty working within my already chosen settings. It helped to make the samples louder or quieter in Audacity, but there are limits to that, too, of course. Not that anyone would care, but I needed to vent a bit about my frustrations with the program. Still, I learned an awful lot while working on the track! Next time I'll use something a lot more powerful for sure. ^^

I liked the moment when the pig talking synched to the siren sound effect. And when the turtle(?) said "it was just incredible". Yup, worthy of being called the worst. But...it's real. And heartfelt. Sure, it crosses Linkin Park with Dragonball Z with spoken statements after the 9/11 attacks, but if those are pretty much only the cultural touching points that resonate with you, then you might somewhat be limited in expressing yourself. Didn't help that they were somewhat unskillful in that regard, too. How does this all relate to another? What connects thematically DBZ with statements about the 9/11 attacks? Kinda nothing, the visuals are unconnected from the audio, but you know, it feels right. There's sad face, a villain, there's action, a determined face, there is destruction, there's an angry face, there are monsters...yeah, point well made. Thanks tegan!

Oh wow, the Shelly, Leo and Bobby scene is just pure trash, like out of a z grade movie that would be made fun of on Red Letter Media's "Best of the Worst". It reaches for shlock and manages to grab it. It doesn't even attempt more. I thought last week's episode was the best since Arbitrary Law. Apparently that wasn't meant to be taken as a sign that the bad times are over now. I like the cross-fade from Cooper's face to a shot of misty woods. Not so much the overlay of Caroline's face, though. Now even the Civil War plotline stopped being enjoyable... Was it really a good idea to play the arrival of Major Briggs in the Sheriff's Department for slapstick? I mean, did it serve a purpose? :/ Lana's storyline reaches a new low. She bewitches all the men to have the hots for her or what? Bleurgh... Oh yes, Cooper's plan is absolutely insane. Many of the directorial flourishes seem wacky to no great effect. That headline in the newspaper...("Asian Man Killed!!") The article itself is also a hoot. So Jeffrey (Evelyn's (James' love interest) husband) really died...huh, that car crash sound effect sounded so impotent that it made me unsure.

The new Sufjan Stevens record is so good I would listen to it all day if it wouldn't devastate me so much emotionally...it didn't so at first listening, but on repeat listens it did. It helps to read the lyrics along with it. Since it isn't officially out yet (it leaked) I'll link to the second pre-release single. Not my favorite from the album, but it's very good, too.

KRISTAL has no support for plugins. It offers four effects which come with presets and can be customized. It has no digital instruments. It's free for personal use, and I thought its very limited functionality would be great for a start. I once tried FL Studio before, but I found it to be quite daunting. The same goes even moreso for Cubase, of course. ^^ Thanks for your advice!

Well...it's music that happens as you try to learn the ins and outs of a music production program. Otherwise I had no preconceptions, apart from wanting to try out sampling, which I've barely done before, preferably with recordings of my voice. I did some recordings for the track, but since this activity annoyed my neighbors, I continued to only rely on using appropriate recordings I could find, which are with one exception vocal recordings by myself. I chop them up, edit them, and puzzle them together in the hope that they fit. The program is called KRISTAL Audio Engine and is quite limited in its functionality, but I thought it would be good for a start. It supports real-time effects like delay and reverb, so I rely a lot on those. I also use Audacity for tasks it can't handle. After I'm done with the current thing I'm working on I want to try out FL Studio. What program did you use for your track?

Not my kind of music, but it sounds well done to me. I'm playing around with some music production software at the moment, and what I'm doing sounds amateurish on its own, but even more so in comparison. Not that that bothers me, I actually like that amateurish quality. Still, I couldn't even produce (semi-)professionally if I wanted to so far. I might post the result when I'm done with it. ^^

Can't say. Link doesn't work.

Oh yeah, I definitely second that! Forgot about the Ed and Norma, and Pete and Catherine scenes! I didn't really like the Briggs family scene at the end, I felt it didn't ring true, especially Bobby's conversation with his mom. And all the Milford stuff felt like from another show, like a foreign body again. Why should we care? We barely know these characters! The scene where one brother mourns the others death...there's zero empathy. Twin Peaks has become unintentionally bizarre.

It was nice seeing Denise again, and Audrey, and Ben, but apart from their character moments this is a weak episode. At this point Twin Peaks ist just another mediocre TV show.

Haha, good one!

There are some episodes later on that delve into the backstory, but iirc it never becomes burdened by too much plot or exposition, thankfully.

I thought of Walk the Line, actually. I didn't like it either, but honestly I was so distracted by the ill-fitting voice actor that played Johnny Cash in the German version that I wondered if I would have appreciated the movie more in the original form. What I recall now, though, seems mostly to be a sucky biopic to me. Yeah, definitely. Oh, Adventures in Time & Space! Was a terrible biopic, too. Most Doctor Who fans liked it, though. Meh.

Theory of Everything is really good, though. Dunno about The Imitation Game, but the former doesn't feel glamorizing, fake or many other negative things that dull biopics normally do. Not all of them fall into the same traps The Malcolm X biopic by Spike Lee was a good one, too, after all. Also liked The Social Network. I seem to have suppressed the memories of all the bad biopics, but yeah, they're plentiful. Chaplin kinda sucked in a typical biopic fashion, didn't it? Hmhmm...

I'm surprised that for the most part I enjoyed the episode. Awful aspects first: All scenes involving James were even worse than I remembered. Not only is the actor who plays him one of the weakest the series has to offer, but he found an equal in the actress who plays Evelyn. The lines are terrible, but the delivery is even worse. For comparison look at Ben Horne's lines when he has to exposition dump all over Hank regarding what happened to him over the past few episodes. Those aren't well written either, but the actor knows how to deliver them. The brother characters don't feel like they fit into Twin Peaks, therefore the whole wedding business falls flat. The little Nicky storyline doesn't aim for much, and the problem is also that the character apparently is meant to be mischievous judging by his actions, but his expressions don't read that way at all. I would have hoped for more than poorly executed slapstick. I neither hated nor loved Nadine's scenes, but the music was absolutely awful in them. Blargh. Otherwise I enjoyed the scenes Ben Horne, Denise, Cooper and Catherine were in. Denise is the best new character since Harold I think. I greatly prefer this episode to the last one.

Thanks for the tip, I already had a look around. They're your typical internet discussions, just from back in the day. This post, written after the premiere of Episode 3/2, is cute: :grin:

As a huuuuuge Sufjan Stevens fan I'm of course looking forward to his upcoming LP, of which the first song was released recently. It sounds like folky good ol' Sufjan, but the sparse arrangement is highly unusual for him. Just guitar and vocals, oh, and the sounds of an air conditioner. His voice is quivering and somewhat broken. If you know that the catalyst for the album's creation was his mother's death, then the song may hit you even harder emotionally. I'm also fascinated by him as a person. This interview grants insight into aspects of his life he didn't share much of before. You could say that he gets more immature as he grows older and he somewhat confirms that impression. To quote:

I don't even agree that ZnT was well directed. I mean, a capable director would have cut the lines in the ferris wheel scene to a bare minimum, let the music and the expressions on the character's faces do the talking, let the suspense grow. But no, all the stupid talking ruins that. A shame. The anime is a terrible waste of awesome music. But I wrote my thoughts on the anime already a few pages back, no need to restate them I guess. Tatami Galaxy is indeed awesome, I can't recommend it enough, it's probably my favorite anime of them all.

I recorded this today and yesterday: https://soundcloud.com/ted-ist-tot/klagegesang-aus-dem-jammertal I'm not sure whether I'll do more with it. I don't like to get too ambitious, it bogs me down. Still, it's probably the best thing I've done in a long while. The singing isn't terribly good, but I like the magic that's inherent in the first take(s). ^^ It's basically an a capella piece, all voices sung by me.