Kingdom For A Heart

I'm really annoyed by this post. Now, I am not a complete fascist and I can deal with the fact that the poster doesn't know how to use DOS. We're now in the age where there are people who genuinely never had to learn to use a command-line system, and there were even people like that in my computer science year. It's much like I never had to learn how to subroot my piped kernels in UNIX and other things like that - it's largely useless for the average computer user today. It is instead the description of it as a "code" that gets to me. I just can't understand the thought process behind calling it that. Also, ref. an earlier entry.

Another thing that got to me a bit was an argument on a forum I started visiting recently, where I've learned that one particular member is, well, a bit unstable.* He posted a large attention-seeking moanfest, which was replied to by another member who did remarkably well giving him sympathy and a bit of good advice. The original poster then replied with what can only be described as a tidal wave of emo, and the whole thing went on for ages from there.

So even though the second poster's niceness fell on deaf ears, I took the time to private message him and say thank you for trying to get through to him, for tolerating the angst of the board and generally being a decent human being. Nothing unusual about that at all. And he messaged me back. "um, you're welcome??". Git.

Anyway, to the main point of this post (which I really meant to get to earlier) - song covers. You may find it difficult to believe that doing these can affect social standing, respect and indeed entire friendships. If you mess up a section that sounds obvious to someone else, or modify a favourite part "just to make it easier", the results can be surprisingly devastating. It is therefore with some tentativeness that I have put up a tracked version of Sonata Arctica's "Kingdom for a Heart" that I did when I was bored.

There are a couple of warnings that I have to give before you open it. Most obviously, I have cut out the solo. I honestly could not get it to sound right at all, and rather than make it an embarrassment I thought it best to skip it. Second, I've compressed the MP3 to rather poor quality. There are two reasons for this - first to make it a small download, and second so that you can blame any inadequacies on the bitrate instead of me.

Other than that, it was just done entirely by ear to see if I could work out the construction of the song. Sonata Arctica have always had a rather cavalier approach to changing time signatures (when they feel like it), and I've preserved most of those where I could. As a result of doing it, I've also found out some rather good chord progressions that I hadn't tried before, and learning from it is the real point.

Well, let's hope my Friends list hasn't reduced dramatically by tomorrow.

* Unequivocally mental

Spud's Quest

Here's something to do if you're bored - have a go at Spud's Quest. Be warned that it'll probably consume your life, especially if you're old and non-American enough to remember the Dizzy games by Codemasters. (Screenshots are here.)

It's well-made games like this that really make me proud to be part of the Click community. By request in the chatroom, I have written a walkthrough for it to help people when they're stuck, but I'm not going to give you the link to it. Hah.