"This place will chew you up then spit you out before you go. And when they drag you kicking and screaming from the scene, you know that it’s time to leave."

• Feeling: Brain-Fried
• Listening To: "Scott Farcas Takes It On the Chin" by Less Than Jake

Somehow I managed not to document the fact that I saw Kimya Dawson until now. It was last Sunday night, and now it’s early Saturday evening. How did I wait this long? Oh, that’s right. This week was the week from hell.

So last weekend was pretty damn busy, what with my family coming to town, Emily’s musical, my birthday and all. It was pretty enjoyable though. Urinetown is a really, really great musical, and I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get a chance. Also, my parents got me a Wii for my birthday, along with Brawl. So that’s cool. On to Sunday night and the Kimya concert.

It was at this really small venue off in the middle of Urbana. There was a tiny stage that was only a foot or two off the ground. Angelo Spencer and l’Orchidee d’Hawai opened for her. Angelo Spencer is a crazy French man who lives here now (and according to last.fm is married to Kimya?). He is also a one-man band, and a damn good one at that. l’Orchidee d’Hawai is also a French band that Angelo Spencer used to be a part of or something like that and so they’re just here in America for a show or two…? I was confused by the situation. Anyway, the venue was really pretty sweet, as it was the Urbana Independent Media Center, which means it had all sorts of quirky and artistic stuff all over the place. Kimya and crew were really happy to play there because they had just played a show at Notre Dame where there were uniformed servers and camera crews on both sides of the stage to show them on big-screen monitors right over the stage. So they really liked being in a small quirky laid-back venue again. I liked it too.

They were all incredible, especially Kimya. She’s just so positive. Her music, even the darker songs that deal with heavy issues, all remains quirkily optimistic. Also, I think this post probably has the highest concentration of instances of the word quirky and its derivatives this side of nowhere. So props to me for that. But yeah. It was an amazing show.

The beginning of this week wasn’t so amazing after that. I had a good birthday and birthday dinner, but after that I studied for my ECE 290 exam. The exam was Tuesday night, during the Ben Folds concert at Foellinger that I had to miss. So that pissed me off. Then I spent about three and a half hours debugging my code. I didn’t finish. I started debugging again Wednesday at 2:30 in the afternoon. I gave up at 9:45 and turned it in before the 10:00 deadline. I don’t know what the problem was. It passed all but one of the tests I threw at it, but I couldn’t isolate the issue to save my life. So yeah. There’s that.

Last night I was finally introduced to How I Met Your Mother. It’s a pretty excellent comedic show. I still hold The Office as my favorite, but HIMYM is actually a contender for tying with Scrubs for second I think. I don’t know where Grey’s Anatomy fits in on my scale of favorites anymore, but since it’s a drama I’ll say it’s in another category so I don’t have to deal with it. :)

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"There’s no use to keep a secret. Everything I hide ends up in lyrics. So read on, accuse me when you’re done if it sounds like I did you wrong."

• Feeling: Pumped
• Listening To: "Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand" by Cursive

I got to go see Cursive live at Canopy on Monday. My overall opinion was that it was, of course, a great show, but I was mildly disappointed. Also, I’d seen pictures of the band before, but I never realized that the members were that old. Like seriously. Old. Anyway…

Cursive is definitely a band one can describe as intense. Their recorded repertoire is intense. Their live show is about five times that. This is due in part to the fact that everything is louder live, but really it’s more of an effect of everything being so much more raw and unbalanced. While on the albums everything has its place, everything is thrown at you at once on-stage.

The elevated volume was, I thought, the biggest issue with the concert overall. Cursive’s albums display detailed intricacies in their varied soundscapes - a.k.a. I get off on how wonderfully musical it all is. It’s not your average indie/emo stuff. They’re incredible musicians. Seeing their guitar live further convinced me of that fact. All those intricacies are lost when the music is too loud though. The subtle balances are destroyed.

That said, I still managed to enjoy it quite a bit. My two favorite songs, “Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand” and “Dorothy At Forty,” were the songs that suffered the most in the live performance. They were still amazing. “Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand” was the closer, and managed to generate a small mosh and a bit of crowd-surfing. That’s a lot for Canopy, as it’s a really laid-back venue. “Sink To the Beat” on the other hand only benefited from the live aspect. It’s greatness comes from it’s intensity rather than subtle balance, so seeing it live was just downright amazing. It was as pure power in audible form.

They also played about six or seven songs from their upcoming album. They seemed to be much more subdued than their past recorded material, but in a good way. It will be interesting to hear the finished product at the beginning of next year.

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"Your melody sounds as sweet as the first time it was sung with a little bit more character for show."

• Feeling: Quite Pleased
• Listening To: "Folkin' Around" by Panic! At the Disco

Today I finally got around to getting the new Panic At the Disco album, Pretty. Odd. I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it at first. To start with, they changed their name from “Panic! At the Disco” to exclude the exclamation point. It seems to be a bit of a symbolic move to me. The new album is much mellower. Regardless, they will always be “Panic!” to me.

Besides being mellower, the other main thing to note, especially concerning the band name, is that the “Disco” element is gone. The heavy techno influence in their debut album is entirely gone. It seems that Pretty. Odd. is Panic!’s attempt at indie. It certainly isn’t straight-up indie in that it has a lot of different musical influences. I rather like it that way, and it’s off course unique to Panic!. That’s what really drew me to A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. It was that it mixed very different musical styles and managed not to butcher any of them. It produced a signature sound. Pretty. Odd. does this as well, defining a new signature sound for Panic!. It mixes an indie-folk core highlighting banjo and harmonica with guitar licks reminiscent of 60’s rock, as well as Panic!’s unconventional use of vaudevillian piano and brass.

The lyrics have changed in form and attitude as well. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out focused on youthful themes of love, lust, angst, and a few others. It took a very jaded, coming-of-age approach to these subjects. Pretty. Odd. seems, at least to me, to be the result of this coming-of-age. The lyrics still touch on the same subjects at times, but handle them much differently. More often though, the subject is somehow more ethereal.

That pretty much describes the whole transition. Time for a sex metaphor! A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out takes the purely physical approach. It’s all about raw, carnal pleasure. Pretty. Odd. takes the romantic approach. It’s about love and intimacy. Yes, the metaphor is a bit stretched, but it’s how it plays out in my mind. I think it’s a good move for Panic! personally. Then again I tend to be more a fan of indie than anything else (besides Streetlight) these days, so I may be biased. On the other hand, there’s just no replacing the energy and pure audible love that is A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. So long as I can have both when I want them, I’ll be satisfied.

As for my opinions on a couple songs … I really, really like “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” It’s one of the songs that really still shows the old Panic! influence in my opinion. It sounds nothing like it on the surface, but underneath it there are some of the same elements and it has the same feel in a way. “She’s a Handsome Woman” reminds me intimately of The Shins. I don’t know what it is about it, but I can’t help but make the connection in my head as I listen. I’m also quite the fan of “Pas de Cheval.” It’s just fun.

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"Sink to the beat ’til it stops and bursts under pressure. Let it burst and bloom."

• Feeling: Quite Happy
• Listening To: "Sink To the Beat" by Cursive

Eh … I seem to have gone quite a while without updating again. There are a few reasons for this. Time to expound:

Not too many really exciting things have happened since the last time. Those that did fall under a certain category and the reason they’re not posted here is that I started a new blog, called Steal Your Carbon, for all my technology-related blogging entries. So I spent a while getting that up and running.

I’ve been pretty busy as well. I should really probably be working on some homework or other right now, to be honest. I spent a lot of my spring break writing up proposals for Google Summer of Code. Read more about them over at SYC. Really though I’ve just been really busy this past week with homework. I’m just finishing up a big programming project after having a physics test during the week. I’ve got another two tests, Monday and Wednesday respectively. Oh, and I had to get my ass in gear for the recent batch release over at Ryuu-Rogue.

I’ve also had the worst luck of my life with computers the past week or so. Before spring break my HTPC died. When I got back and was trying to fix it the NIC in my main desktop died. So I’ve been working from my laptop all week. I finally fixed my main desktop last night. So yeah. That’s only added to the time commitments.

Now, for the happy side of things. I really enjoyed spring break. While I was doing some work, I had a lot of free time. I got to spend a lot of it with friends. Like a lot, a lot. I was out pretty late several nights, and played Risk a few times and Diplomacy once. The Diplomacy game didn’t end and saw me getting home at about 5:30AM. o_O I also got to watch a lot of anime. In the week or two before spring break I watched about two thirds of Death Note and over break I finished it and watched all of Last Exile. While Death Note didn’t live up to the manga (and how could it?), it was really good. I’ve been meaning to watch Last Exile for, what, four years now? So I was really happy to finally watch it. Plus, it was really quite good.

So that’s at least a little of what I’ve been up to. I really like this trend of me watching more and more anime though. I think it’s going to continue. Also, I just registered for ACEN 2008 last night. After missing last year’s I discovered I really want to go again. Woot!

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"My life has become a boring pop song, and everyone’s singing along."

• Feeling: Like Metaphorically Stabbing Assembly Language In the Eye
• Listening To: "I'm Ready" by Jack's Mannequin

I saw Ben Folds live Friday night. That was pretty sweet. I went with my sister and her friend. We missed Unofficial for it. I’m perfectly okay with that. Anyway, we made the drive over to Purdue, and we forgot about the time change. We left (what we thought was) really early so we managed to show up on time anyway. So that was okay. After the concert though, we got lost in West Lafayette for about an hour. The roads make no sense. They’re all at weird angles and in order to stay on highways you end up jogging along named streets like six times. Seriously. No sense at all. Curse the state of Indiana.

Since then I’ve been doing homework. No joke. I’ve had some big assignments, most notably a programming project. We had to implement a transposition cipher in assembly language. If we were programming it in a higher level language, like C, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The issue is it’s assembly so it’s a pain in the ass. LC3 assembly, no less. So that sucked. I actually just finished it about twenty minutes ago. I spent six hours tonight debugging after having spent probably ten hours programming the decryption segment of the program. The encryption segment took probably four hours of programming and another four debugging last week. So all in all it was, what, about 24 hours? Probably more. That’s a lot for one project, especially when it only ends up being ~420 lines of code. That’s the nightmare that is assembly. There’s no visual codeflow. You (or at least I) can’t just look at it and tell how it’s organized. Every time I look at a chunk of assembly I have to read the whole thing. With C or PHP I can read loops and logical constructs straight out within seconds. In any case, I’m glad that our next assignment is, in fact, in C.

Oddly enough, I’m doing phenomenally well in that class (ECE 190, by the way). Coincidentally there are 190 students in the class. Coincidentally, we had an exam the same day my … ex-friend … decided to email me. About three hours after the incident. Oddly enough, I scored a 95 on the test, which was the top score in the class, with four scores of 91 coming in tied for second. I think I should get another two points back on a re-grade, making it a 97. Woot! I guess being mad doesn’t make me mess up my academics. Perhaps I just need to get angry more often?

I’ve decided that I really like Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin. Like I new before that I liked Something Corporate, but I mean I really like them. It’s great music. I guess I’m becoming more and more of a sucker for piano rock, eh? I’m really starting to dig the old Ben Folds Five stuff too. And by really starting to like it I mean that I hadn’t really heard the old Ben Folds Five stuff before recently so yeah. Anyway.

Ryuu-Rogue has released my first encode for Digimon Adventure 01. So after years of encoding hundreds and hundreds of videos, one of them has finally made it to the Interwebs. I’m thinking that I might start releasing some of my other encodes on my own. In particular, I’m looking at releasing Cowboy Bebop, DN Angel, the Samurai X collection, some Ghibli films, and a number of live action movies. Just thinking about it still, don’t view this as a promise.

Also, what’s odd is that within a week of officially losing one close friend, I seem to have gained another back, at least on some level. If you remember, I’ve talked about cutting ties to one other close friend in the past. It wasn’t really of my choice, but of hers. I tried to patch up the relationship in the fall and she tried to cut it off for good. In any case, she decided to start talking to me again. So far things have been going pretty well, so I’m optimistic. I’m not expecting to become best friends again, but so long as communication is open and I can know she’s happy and doing well, I’ll be content. Hell, even when she wasn’t talking to me I was still doing my damnedest to check in on her from time to time to make sure she was doing well. I’ll still do the same for my other friend that I’ve (at the present) lost. Don’t get me wrong when I say I’m optimistic, I’m not expecting her to come back too. I’d actually be really, really surprised if she did. The optimism doesn’t apply to her. Just the one who did come back. Oh the confusion induced by not using names…

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