Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

I’ve never really been much for Halloween, outside of an excuse to eat more candy than usual. Not a fan of coming up with costumes, don’t find the appeal of putting up garish decorations…you get the idea. Now, during the day I had noticed the odd “tradition” in Astoria – rather than going from house to house for trick-or-treating, the kids go into local businesses, all of which have candy they’re handing out. Even the venerable Video Game Buddy had a box of candy behind the case of games. Tonight, Katie and I were picking up our dinner from the local Chinese place, and we realized that they were giving kids fortune cookies as the treat, which was nice. The wait staff seemed particularly amused every time a group of kids would come in. At one point, a group of four kids in costume came in, and they were all given cookies. Three of them left, but out of the corner of our eye we noticed the fourth putting the cookie back on the counter and running over to the small kiddie-sized drink cooler. He then pulled it open, grab a can of Sprite, and stick it in his goodie bag. The wait staff shouted at him in broken english as he very cutely walked towards the door and out of the restaurant. Guess the kid was just obeying his thirst?

The newest Beatmania IIDX arcade game – beatmania IIDX 11 “RED” – has hit arcades in Japan, and thanks to inside sources, I’ve had a chance to run through extremely good quality “game soundtrack” (created by players playing songs and recording the line out to an audio recorder). So let’s do some ratings. 0-100 scale as always. Corresponding rating levels and percentile of songs that are rated at or above these levels are below; 50 should be considered average. 60 = “B” (2267 / 6424 = 35.3%) 61-79 = “B+” (1071 / 6424 = 16.7%) 80 = “A” (454 / 6424 = 7.1%) 81-100 = “A+” (156 / 6424 = 2.4%) Ratings could change on OST release based on mis-hits while the players were recording these. Tackling these alphabetically. DJ Amuro / AA For being in the same genre as A, this doesn’t really evoke the same feeling as the predecesor did. There’s the sort of snare roll in the middle I bitched about during one of my Dancemania Ex reviews. This is decent but sounds like a mutant child of A and something Sota would do, with the trance instrument jiggling all around. 60/100. Sota Fujimori / Andromeda Speak of the devil. This actually doesn’t sound like Sota; it’s darker to start with. Doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere though; no progression or even really a melody. It’s not annoying me, however, so we’ll put this right at the middle of the road with a 50/100. Akira Yamaoka / Awakening Evoking a lot of i feel… memories here, more of the same snare rolls from AA. Japanese lyrics, with a nice melodic trance refrain. Not memorable by any stretch, though. 52/100. DJ Simon / Back To The Dance Floor The return of DJ Simon! And luckily, it has no trance elements unlike the last three songs. Sort of reminding me of Sweet Lab with a bit more kick to it, since it’s got a small latin vibe. I would imagine the notes would be fun. 60/100. Ryu / Be Quiet The genre of “Hard Dance” is appropriate here; it’s definitely not the happy hardcore we’ve come to expect from Ryu. It’s heavy, it’s frantic, and it’s gooood. 75/100. Nao Nakamura / Believe…? The beginning freaked me out, I thought this was going to be JS-16. It’s more melodic than the stuffprevious to this, and it’s almost good enough to make my typical playlist, but there’s just something missing. 59/100. Sparker / Breath More Rococo Tek is fine by me! A bit more majestic than Brightness Darkness was, it bounces along well. 70/100, largely because I’m a sucker for Sparker. Dave & Nuage / Car Of Your Dreams I’m not sure what the difference between “Eurobeat” and “Super Eurobeat” is, but this feels less eurobeat-y than other things I’ve seen labeled as Super Eurobeat. Different enough from the typical eurobeat formula (note: I’m not a fan of most eurobeat) to make me want to hear it again. 61/100. DJ Remo-con / Click Again Oh my god. Cut’n'paste style beats like this are rapidly gaining respect from me, and this is unbelievably fantastic. Think Macho Gang, with more dancability. Bonus points for the old scratch sounds. 84/100. DJ Yoshitaka feat.星野�?�? / D.A.N.C.E.!! I’m nicking this one from Reo; if you’ve heard The Love Bug by m-flo and BoA, this is remarkably similar. Male and female back and forth vocals, female refrain, pop groove…it’s a formula that stole my ear before, and it’s doing it again here. 80/100. platoniX (Eurance Style) / Don’t Be Afraid My Self It’s the fastest J-Pop song Naoki has ever done. I’m digging the hook, and the piano runs are neat too. Probably one of the least annoying Naoki-with-female-vocals songs to date. 65/100. Wall5 / EVO66 Wait, this sounds nothing like North! It’s actually techno with some acid touches. This is amazingly cool and some what expected. 80/100. Baby Weapon feat. Kajil / Fly Away To India There’s some other pop song that they’ve nicked part of the melody here from, but I can’t recall what it is right now. The vocals are way too high for this to be an enjoyable Bolly-style track for me. I’ll stick to Dr. Love and Nasty!, thanks. 40/100. DJ Killer / Genocide Extra stage! I think calling this Drum’n'bass is a bit inaccurate, as this is way too dark for your typical DNB track. It’s a decent bit of darkness, with some orchestral-ish melody (is that the trend in all the trance tracks on IIDX now?). Good enough for 60/100. Teranoid feat. MC Natsack / Gigadelic Oooh, darkcore (“nustyle gabba” my ass). It’s an enjoyable track – and probably hell to play – but I’m not sure what I would do with this if it came on in a club or on my iPod. As such, I have to bump it off my playlists at 59/100. Regina / Harmony Yeeeup. It’s eurobeat. Don’t know what else to say, other than that maybe I want to throw up a fake para to it. For some reason it’s feeling reminiscent of Fantasy (the 4th Style version), but maybe it’s because I’m just not digging it. 44/100. Lia / Horizon Anthem-style happy trance. It’s a little dream-like, and works for me a lot better than the other trance we’ve seen. 66/100. 新谷�?��??ら / Injection Of Love Sana gets all DIRTY, commanding us to touch her, lick her, and fuck her – who thought our poor Beatmania could become such a dirty game? (And who are we to deny her?) A infectuous bouncing melody and good instrumentation makes this one hot injection. 80/100. John Robinson / Kecak More trance, with a slight tribal feel. Good rhythm, good feeling, good enough. 60/100. BeForU / Ki-Se-Ki (IIDX RED Edit) I’m sorry, folks, I’m over Naoki’s traditional euro/j-pop stuff, and by extension, I’m over BeForU. I don’t care how many trance elements he throws in, or para-style offbeat notes, the thing stinks. It ends abruptly and I don’t want to hear it again. 35/100. DJ 19 / King Of Groove Fairly generic and repititious techno, with a bit of tribal. This is one of those songs you’ll be skipping over every time you play – not because it’s bad, just because it doesn’t stand out. 45/100. Orange Lounge / Les Filles Balancent Hey, it’s Orange Lounge! And they’re back, with trumpets! A little too cutesy this time around, probably the worst of the five Orange Lounge songs as it just sounds like a hodge podge of the others; still, not horrible. 52/100. Tetsuya Uchida / Listen To Yourself Old school organ house crossed with a traditional japanese melody. I’ve been missing Symphonic Defoggers lately so this quasi-throwback doesn’t hurt. 64/100. good-cool feat. Raj Ramayya / Move Me Ignoring the beginning, this is a solid, slow good-cool track. It’s been a while since good-cool’s done anything this slow…oh WAIT FAST ENDING. Good stuff, not typical good-cool at all, it’s refreshing. 75/100. Matt Land / Night Flight To Tokyo More eurobeat, with some interesting melody tweaks but a meh refrain. By this point, I’m Eurobeaten out. 45/100. Q’Hey / On The Tube This got lumped into the Minimal genre; I think Konami needs to learn what “minimal” actually is. Compared to the eurobeat, sure, it’s minimal, I guess. This is making me recall some Pink Pong songs, and like most Beatmania players, I don’t have the fondest Pink Pong memories. 48/100. N.A.R.D. feat. masayo / Perfectworld Secret Tale II. That’s all you need to know. 45/100. jun feat. Paula Terry / Raspberry Heart (English Version) Am I the only one who thinks Paula Terry at the beginning sounds just a touch like one of the Wario Ware voices? COME ON, LET’S GO! In any case, she’s not adding anything to 40/100. Tatsh & Naoki / Red Zone Oh lord. Cross B4U, Dynamite Rave, and Drop The Bomb, and you get Red Zone. Here’s why I hate Naoki, folks: Because we’ve had all these previous songs drilled into our head, the newer songs don’t have anything that really sound distinctive because he can’t come up with anything newer to do. Kiss of death: The vocalist says “Speed Rave” at least twice. 40/100. Kohta / Resonate 1794 Whoever at Konami keeps putting years in the song titles need to get shot. This is more renaissance-y than AA, but what’s with the plane taking off noises? 60/100. DJ Tomo / Rok Da World The guitar riff feels stolen from KMFDM, and the vocal sample feels stolen from Ferry Corsten. But it’s not really a bad thing, it’s just not a great thing. 55/100. DJ Swan / Secret Of Love Holy crap DJ Swan is back. This is a little less drum’n'bass than Gentle Stress was, but the melody is reminiscent enough. Not as good as I would hope (I was a huge Gentle Stress fan), but still good. 67/100. Y&Co. / Speedy Cat True story: Y&Co wrote this about dj BTNS. He can already AAA it. Anyhow, Y&Co is very hit and miss, and after hitting with Daisuke, unfortunately they miss by a bit here. 44/100. Tatsh feat. K.Nayuki / Sphere Another cross between trance-ish stuff and medieval music. If you slapped this, A, Resonate 1794, North, and No.13 in a course, I would not complain. Decent stuff, this. 63/100. DJ Setup / Spiral Galaxy Setup is channeling L.E.D. on this one, as I’m being reminded of Hyper Boundary Gate a bit. This is a good, fast moving sort of trance – looming, a little evil (really enjoying the string stabs), and fun to listen to. 70/100. Slake / Texture Another song that’s going to divide the Bemani community in two. To those that dig Slake, they’re going to find a funky shuffle-beat sleaze masterpiece. To those that can’t stand him, this will be a choppily sampled mish-mash that they just don’t understand. I find myself again back in the first group. 75/100. Twin AmadeuS / Wonder Bullfighter When I saw this on the location test lists, after how nuts I went over Frozen Atmosphere, this became the song I was most curious about. I have not been disappointed; the string melody is still there, but this time there’s scratching – and more pronounced drums. I get the feeling I’ll like this even more on the OST, but for now, 80/100. 大桟橋 / ウッ�?ーズ The first half is a ballad. I cannot stand the first half. But right at the middle, it picks up, and turns actually pretty good. The bass line is reminiscent of Take On Me, and the vocals become substantially better with this behind it. So I’m torn on how to grade this, but I will cautiously go 60/100. Naoki feat. 星野�?�? / 太陽～T・A・I・Y・O～ Another Naoki trance-with-female-jpop-vocals. Oh and THERE’S the fucking Naoki trademarked do-Do-do-Do-DOO! Thank god, for a minute I almost didn’t have a problem with this song! Songs like this make me wish DDR games were still being produced so Naoki would stop crapping up IIDX with them. 42/100. Osamu Kubota / 惑 Osamu, Osamu, Osamu, what the fuck is this? There are portions in here I really dig, but there are also portions in here I’m just not understanding at all. I realize this is supposed to be “Asian Crossover”, but what is it crossing from or to? Lush instruments makes for at least a 50/100.

Top 5: Click Again D.A.N.C.E.!! Wonder Bullfighter EVO66 Injection Of Love Bottom 5: Ki-Se-Ki Red Zone Raspberry Heart (English Version) Fly Away To India ~T A I Y O~ Overall thoughts: Pleasantly surprising, and instantly a more likeable collection of songs than 10th had. Based on how the OST turns out, and the hidden songs we haven’t heard yet, this could supplant my current favorite IIDX style. But we shall see.

I’ve apparently found an (unsurprisingly) undocumented change to iTunes 4.7; it neuters the iPodDownload plugin from WildBits. It appears to be a device-level block; no resource twiddling on the plugin seems to have made a difference. As such, if you value your iPodDownload capabilities (as I did at work, as it was quite handy to move things onto my work machine), I highly recommend sticking with 4.6.

(Link goes to a local mirror of the 20MB DivX AVI of Ashlee Simpson’s performance on SNL. Faced with a dangerous lip sync track that she wasn’t expecting, she responded by…doing a jig. Then blamed it on the band.)

A lot of noise has been made over the past few weeks about “podcasting”, which is essentially automated downloading of audioblog posts via a syndicated feed. There are some that are trying to label it as the Next Big Thing in internet communication – and ignoring all my complaints about the process (not user friendly, lack of engaging content, not enough hours in the day to listen to all the streams, unnecessary bandwidth usage), I think there’s something else that’s becoming more engaging: ad-hoc peer to peer trading of media in nearly real-time. Now, this is not completely new. Amusing videos of fuckups on television or other media have been traded online for ages. What’s matured are the methods and the quality. The time gap between the infamous Nipple Seen Round The World at the Super Bowl and when hi-resolution pictures and/or video were available online was roughly 5 minutes. Jon Stewart’s Crossfire appearance was downloaded – we’re talking just counted downloads – by more people than the number who actually watch Crossfire. To a smaller extent, similar swarming happened when President Bush claimed during the third debate to have never said he wasn’t concerned about Osama Bin Laden – before the debate had even ended, video proving he had said just that was making the rounds. The above Ashlee Simpson clip has appeared online, and will spread virally, getting mirrored and having its quality increase as time progresses. (The clip I’m mirroring is actually the third version I saw.) NBC had to shut down their bulletin boards temporarily (and apparently edited the West Coast broadcast of SNL, which is only providing fodder for people to distribute it further); Simpson’s own boards have turned into a war zone. What we’re beginning to see is effectively an online flash mob with a purpose other than just performance art. Here there is a targeted payload, a specific file or event that is being transmitted. Adding to the newness of this movement – and one thing that may boggle the minds of those who are brain-locked about what p2p is – is that everything is being doing with existing protocols. The actual movement of files is being done by BitTorrent, HTTP, FTP, or streaming media servers. The notification – letting people know it exists and why they should care – is handled by blogs, IRC, link farms such as del.icio.us, and message boards. Because this is occurring with ordinary internet protocols, there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can spread the word (as I’m doing here). Anyone can mirror (again, natch) or provide their bandwidth for seeding a torrent. Again, none of this is anything new – it’s been going on for years. But this dynamic, ad-hoc, viral peer-to-peer media distribution seems to be rapidly supplanting “traditional” peer-to-peer services like Limewire or Kazaa, at least for materials that can be shared via Fair Use. With no single source of control or limiting factor, it’s the best sort of decentralized system: thousands and thousands of independent agents working together to achieve one goal. Even if that goal is laughing at talentless hacks like Ashlee Simpson or Tucker Carlson.

I was digging through my archives today when I ran across some entries from July of last year, slightly before we were even considering moving here. We were in town for the last Macworld Expo held at the Javits, and it was the trip during which we learned how to use the subway. Sure, we were merely going all of two or three stops on the same line every time, but hey, it was huge progress over when we were taxi-stricken. A year and change later, and the subway is so firmly entrenched in my life that I feel strangely out of place riding in cars. I spent nine months nailing a very specific route down – which car to get on in the morning so I’d get off at Times Square right by the stairs, which path down to the 7 line to take for maximum efficiency, which stairwell would put me in front of which car so I’d be in front of which gate at the 23rd St. stop to minimize the commute – it was very specific, and very nerdy. Now with the Cornell Medical School job, it’s slightly depressing that I now spend less time on the subway every morning than I do walking to and from it. I’m still finding tricks and shortcuts, and getting frustrated when others can’t pick up on them as well. (Example: 68th & Lexington. If you see a train has just let off and one side of the turnstiles are flooded with people exiting, go to the other side to swipe through. Don’t try to play chicken in the turnstiles.) I’ll admit, I am a little sentimental about the subway. It’s one of the few unifying experiences for 99% of the city. Regardless of where you work or live, which lines you frequent or what times you ride, we all share the pain and occasional joy. We grow dependent on the familiarities of the subway to keep our bearings after long days – in a constantly moving city, it relentlessly stays the same. The same conductors, ranging from overly enthusiastic to drunkenly incomprehensible; the same half-talented buskers, who either slaughter our favorites or; the same bums who insist they’ve been off drugs for the past n months and if we don’t have change, a smile will do. Ads for events of months prior and Dr. Z and his AMAZING NEW FRUIT ACID PEELS!; scratchiti on the windows that invokes deja vu; the unintentionally hilarious spanish injury lawyer ads with the phone number 1-800-MARGARITA. The teeth grinding when there’s a long delay in train movement; the little cheer of joy when we hear the train we’re on is going express and it would not cause us to miss our stop; the grumbling rush for the door when it would. The emotional outpouring tonight is caused by the frightening regularity of news stories detailing possible back-to-back fare hikes and service cuts over the next two years by the MTA. We’re looking at a 20% increase in monthly Metrocard fares – after an 11% increase last year. 164 token booths would close, cleaning schedules would be slashed, bus service would be reduced. And most amazing of all? Even after rates go up and service decreases, it would have to happen again in 2006, by even more. When I was living upstate, I felt that our area was economically deprived by the state in favor of the city – all the school districts had to constantly raise property taxes to balance out budget cuts from Albany. Now living in the city, I see that one portion of the state isn’t being favored over the other – it’s that neither are getting what they need. This is from a state government that year after year fails to get a budget passed in a timely manner. As I currently pay federal, state, and city level income taxes, is it that unreasonable to expect some of that money to go towards the one municipal system I actually use?

The Digital Life expo this weekend was the fifth time in the last 5 years I’ve been to the Javits Convention Center, and the thing that always strikes me about the building is the giant glass-and-metal roof when you’re not in the convention hall.

I really like the way this photo came out, with minimal tweaking. There’s a 1600×1200 version on Flickr, of course.