Posts Tagged ‘entertainment’
Musical considerations
I’m not, and haven’t been for a long time, very good at listening to music. By this I mean that I have a very specific problem: at any one time I listen to a small selection of tracks over and over again and then feel very dissapointed that they no longer sound as good after I’ve heard them a ridiculous number of times over a few weeks. And then thereafter they are never really as good at they first were. This is not something I myself have really identified; my family have been telling me for years. I seem to do this in many areas of life: I get very very into certain things for short periods of time and then move on. It’s not something that I consider a positive trait in any way and I would much rather develop interests into deeper understanding but as per usual as soon as something becomes any real challenge I lose most of my interest in it. I’m not convinced that there is a lot I can do about this because if I am no longer interested in something then I’m not going to pursue it very successfully as I’ll be going against what I actually want to do. I don’t know if this is, though, me just holding my behaviour up to ridiculously high standards which I then inevitably fail to meet – something else I do very often. Friends tell me they have short attention spans and can’t believe how long I can spend on particular pieces of work, or certain specific interests which I do maintain. So maybe this is not too much of a concern.
To return to the originally intended subject matter of this post, I thought it might be nice to write a little about my music library. Since I got my iPhone, despite this forcing me to use iTunes which is possibly the worse piece of software ever, I have listened to a lot more music (although in the mornings on the way to school I usually listen to good old fashioned Radio 4 FM for the Today Programme) on my frequent and long bus journeys to and from school. This has meant that my library of music has tended to become a bit repetitive since it’s not really very big and it doesn’t get added to very often. Until a few months ago, my music consisted of soundtracks and computer game music with very few exceptions. While I still have all this music, it is a pretty static set. Unless I play a new game that I think has really good music, or see a good film that releases its soundtrack (my favourite music remains the Lord of the Rings film scores by Howard Shore, truly fantastic), it won’t expand, and I end up stuck with a small selection of tracks that means that they lose their appeal for the above described reasons. So I’ve since added to the collection a bit from old CDs in my parents’ collections, things that I can remember growing up hearing and liking: the likes of U2, Savage Garden, Gretchen Peters and the Lighthouse Family. I’ve also got a few other things like a couple of Brent Simon songs, and most of Jonathan Coulton’s lyrically powerful music. But this leaves me without a source of good music that I can draw from to keep a good flow of new material.
This has changed recently. On one boring Friday afternoon in Physics, my friend Tom and I exchanged lists of music to lookup and play. I suggested various tracks that can be found on YouTube for him to listen to, and he gave me some things to look up from his personal area of interest, Drum and Bass music. A complete departure from my usual content, I was told repeatedly that I wouldn’t at all like it and I didn’t really expect to, but was interested in taking a look. At first, the various computer generated tunes failed to appeal as anything more than background sound while working which I could definitely appreciate. But now, after listening to more ‘chaones’ (== tunes) and mixes, I think I should probably admit to the world, however much it pains me to do so, that I’ve become quite the Drum and Bass nerd. I’m not bothered about the clubbing (obviously, I don’t see why anyone would want to go to such places) and insufficiently restrained volume controls that tend to come with such music, but simply the actual creativity that goes into tracks. Finally I have something that I can add to and collect and enjoy. My vocabulary and knowledge of the big players and classic tracks is very much lacking at this point, but I seem to be leaning more towards the liquid subgenre which is melodic, tuneful work that is very much reminiscent of the soundtracks in my collection already. My two current favourite tracks that I would be happy to include in a classics playlist are Hurt You by Chase & Status and Beautiful Lies by B-complex, an unreleased track from an unknown artist that has really set off some shockwaves.
I’m not entirely sure what it is about DnB that appeals to me, but I have been known to laugh at those who attempt to pin down, particularly in classical music, any kind of specific meaning in work. Uncharacteristically, I shall simply state that I like certain bits, certain notes of songs and leave it there. With few lyrics in this genre and with track and artist names that are essentially whatever sounds vaguely memorable, there is very little else to go on. So I’m trying to add some more variety to what I listen to, and I think I’m succeeding, aside from finding myself playing certain favourites over and over as before. And I very much enjoy laughing at the culture and vocabulary: ‘massive’ and ‘shout’ and other such nonsense that I’m not convinced anyone actually buys into. I would also like to add some more classical music to my library, so I need to find a friend to feed me suggestions. Maybe instead of getting better at listening to the music I already have, I’ll just get as much as possible and feed the roaring furnace of consumption of it in my mind. Excellent.
Refreshing an old idea
I have long been a fan of the saying to the effect that it is entirely fruitless to cry over spilt milk, meaning that if one has no control over something then there is no point in worrying about it. This seems at first thought entirely obvious and I imagine most try to follow it, but very often fail: psychologically it is very easy to worry or to fool oneself into thinking that one has some modicum of control over something enough to justify said worrying, or maybe that by worrying one creates some kind of control. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but the saying in itself seems to hold a fair amount of merit. This week I’ve decided to try to make a renewed push in my own life to follow it. While this is all too easy to say and far more difficult to follow, I think I’ve been succeeding in it lately. This half term holiday has not been brilliant in several ways so far, and yet I have managed to remain very positive and rational. Firstly, it is already Thursday and the amount of work I have got done is not fantastic. More importantly, I have completed a large integration exercise over several days and yet did not achieve a fantastic score (since improved upon by fixing silly mistakes). Crucially, I found myself starting at certain problems for an hour, requiring help from a friend for one and being forced to work backwards from a computer-generated answer for another, and also being unable to see how my numerically identical answer can be rearranged into the form in the answers in the back of the textbook for another of the seventy-eight questions. So I’ve been dissapointed: I imagine others in the class will not have spent so many hours (I reckon about fifteen but several of those were with heavy IM distractions. Still far too long) on it and will not have found certain ones so hard, and may have even done the one I had to work backwards on. However, I am not letting this bother me. As I have written about many times before, I have a constant tendency to be unhappy with my academic performance unless everyone else is doing far worse than me, something I am ashamed of. But this is just an irrational circular argument. So I intend to ignore it, for there is no use metaphorically crying over it. So far I am succeeding. Now I merely have to reconcile my usual cynicism with such a policy.
Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.
Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.
Old Bear Stories
World-weary sophisticates of 14 or so are quite capable of coming over all soppy at the sound of the Old Bear signature tune. ~ Daily Mail, August 1995
I just found this and have been listening over and over again, which is generally what I do with music. I’m a bit rubbish: I get obsessed with certain pieces and play them continuously and then get bored of them and hence don’t seem as good, so really what I should do is not play the same thing so much. Still, this theme tune is particularly good. It brings back many memories of enjoying the Old Bear TV show and the books, with their characters and tales. It gives me a feeling of goodness and contentment, as though little else matters beyond Old Bear’s stories. That happy little world in which they lived was so simple and fulfilled, and I lived in it too.
In this country, raised by ‘good’ parents who are able to provide, most people have very fond childhood memories such as those evoked by this theme tune. And yet very few would choose to go back to those days if they could, to live a life entirely constituted of them. Why is this? Is it because we accept that we grow towards extremes of both responsibility and fulfilment as we grow up – by this I mean we gain new and exciting things to do that surpass the likes of Old Bear but we also gain responsibilities for things we would rather not do and didn’t have to do as a young child.
A more philosophical look at this might be to argue that no stage of life is ideal and they all have different things to learn from them. But then we die and it all comes to so very little. For now then I’ll just enjoy this theme tune.
BBC Radio Sheffield
As part of the Debating Matters publicity drive, we were asked to go and be part of Radio Sheffield’s daily Rony’s Forum with Rony Robinson, a seasoned presenter. So the Friday after the competition (I know, it’s taken me ages to get this post written) we headed down to the central studio with the head. Entering, the four of us split into two pairs and we went on for blocks of half and hour and fourty five minutes per pair; I was in the first. The show is a phone-in discussion idea so after I explained the competition we had won, we were involved in discussions over animal cruelty with regard to horse racing, new words that have appeared based on the Internet (embarrassingly I knew only a few of them). I wasn’t as eloquent as I wanted due to being shocked somewhat by hearing my own voice at a very loud volume in the headphones I was wearing, and the other pair (Tom and Andrew, I was with Orowa) were far more philosophical and thoughtful than I was. But it was a very interesting experience and I think we put on a good show. The programme says they may try and get young people in more often because their show, given its time of twelve until three and given its content is very much aimed at the middle-aged and they would like to encourage wider listenership.
However what was probably more interesting was observing the producer get to work behind the scenes while my comrades were on the air. What a fantastic job. With one touch screen managing the eight phone lines, switches allowing messages to be spoken into the presenter’s earphones, texts and e-mails coming in on another screen, sending instant messages to the presenter, checking that he has his volume sliders in the right place with another display… and then when things are quiet for a bit when Rony was talking away to one of us, they popped over to facebook. The producers were very happy to explain what they were doing and answer our questions: the main one had newsread and presented on Radio 4 so we were with good company! I learnt a lot about a very interesting job. One thing that stands out in my mind is how just before the news Rony gestured frantically as he was going through ‘this is BBC Radio Sheffield, now time for the news with…’ but after a quick grab of the ‘talkback’ microphone from the producer he was supplied and integrated flawlessly the newsreader’s name.