06.30.08
Posted in Life, Music, Media at 8:57 pm by SigmaX
Eighteen months after my last recording, I’ve finally cranked out the final version of a new composition for the piano. It was in the works essentially all through 2007, having been started near the completion of Focused Energy (See my music page), and I made the last changes to it sometime this spring. This may be the longest I’ve ever taken to finalize a piece, but I dare say it shows. As of yet it is untitled.
Downloads: mp3, ogg. I’ve started transcribing the score, but it’s tedious work and I’m an uber busy guy, so don’t hold your breath. As the composer, performer, and audio technician, I could point out all sorts of reasons why this recording sucks, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
It’s generally vain for me to try and tie a song to a specific meaning, despite the intensity of emotion that I pour into them, but I can say that when I started writing this, cosmic images of the big bang and the mystery of the universe were in my mind. Most of the “bang” has since been discarded, leaving most of the song as representing the tumultuous relationships between stars and galaxies — but early in the piece there is a tumbling “waterfall” of a sound, going from the highest to lowest octaves on the keyboard. Originally this was intended to represent a “big crunch,” in which the universe that [may have] preceded ours collapsed to “bounce” into the one we have today.
At most any given time I have at least two songs under active development. By the end of the summer I expect to have finished a classical-romantic’ish piece in F# minor — a piece I’m pretty excited about, as it’s quite possibly the most complex one I’ve ever written. It’s been under development since August, when on of its motifs popped into my head right after some dream I can no longer remember. Also in the works, having grown from the first but been transposed to G minor, is a melody I’ve been practicing on the weekends with my electric guitar, passionate vocals, and synthesized percussion. No lyrics yet, but when I’m done it will probably be the most “normal” sounding song I’ve ever written, if only because I’m actually using modern instruments.
I wish I had more time for music. 18 months! I never go that long without writing a new song!
SigmaX
PS: I’ve just come up with the perfect title: Ubernova. [based on an inside joke]
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06.29.08
Posted in Life at 11:49 am by SigmaX
Happy.
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06.28.08
Posted in Philosophy, Life, History, Religon, Politics, Science, Mathematics, Literature, Psychology at 2:35 pm by SigmaX
I got home last night after the two-and-a-half-hour drive I make every weekend. The trip was rather uneventful — unless you count my forgetting to pump my gas at the Shell on Illinois Rd. It was kind of the inverse of a drive-off, I suppose — I pre-paid and then drove-off without my gas.Yeah. Embarassing.
Anyway, upon arriving at my weekend abode, I found four large boxes on my front porch (As well as a large manilla envelope hand-addressed to “Julian Forbes” — but that’s another story).
The long and short of it: They’re here!!! I’m now the proud new owner of an old 54-volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, Britannica’s compliation of Western classics. Thanks to Ebay, I got them at less than 1/3rd the price of brand new, with lots of bonus volumes including: Read the rest of this entry »
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06.27.08
Posted in Life, Creative Writing at 2:49 pm by SigmaX
A question regarding imagination more than anything else: Should I think of clouds as gigantic, magnanimous objects or as little more than opaque space?
The clouds rolling through the Midwest this time of year are truly amazing beasts to gawk at. Every day the weather is a little bit different — from tornado-bearing storm front to herds of tiny, migrating cumulus ‘mellows meandering their way through a mostly blue pasture. Given my recent venture to Titan, I can’t help but attempt to visualize our cream-puff overlords with the same awe I would grant a giant like Saturn.
But are they really all that significant? What do I even mean by significant? Of all the cosmic particles that swirled around Sol’s ancient accretion disk to form planets and moons, some of that matter was relegated to be the oil on the frenchbread, so to speak. The whisps of paint that color our otherwise blue-green globe.
Are they nothing but paint? A sparse accumulation of dynamic nebulae? Or is the shiver that runs down my spine when I’m in the presence of such a huge, arcing canopy justified? Is it just naiveté — much like how I viewed the small lumps in my childhood home of Illinois as grand until I learned about “real” hills and mountains?
SigmaX
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Posted in Computing at 9:45 am by SigmaX
Random UNIX zealotry: I love the ‘diff’ command. It makes life so much easier when you get emailed a filed that’s been “updated” and then have to figure out what got changed.
SigmaX
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06.26.08
Posted in Computing, Life, Creative Writing at 9:33 pm by SigmaX
I just pressed a button, at which point my computer automatically retreived a copy of ~64,000,000 bits of information from somewhere in the hive mind that is the InterWeb which it used to upgrade itself, adding new capabilities to its already feature-rich DNA (In this case, audio recording).
That’s freakin’ awesome! Never gets old. And people have the nerve to get *bored*. Wake up! It’s the 21st century for Pete’s sake!
SigmaX
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06.25.08
Posted in Computing, Science, Fiction at 11:26 pm by SigmaX
[The following was scratched out in my notebook at a Chinese restaurant downtown this evening. As is generally the case with my fiction, it could really use editing to make the words more clearly communicate the complicated images in my mind. Tips are welcome — from grammar critique to scientific mythbusting]
His eyes heavy, Andrew struggled to complete the configuration he’d been working on for — oh, he couldn’t remember how long, but it should have been done ages ago. Streams of characters torrented across the screen, looking like Greek to his blurring vision. He reached for a half-empty cup of cold coffee, only to miss, spilling a container of DocChips all over the floor. Read the rest of this entry »
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06.24.08
Posted in Life, Politics at 6:41 pm by SigmaX
So, I was sitting on a couch in the Allen County Public Library this evening, minding my own business and basking in hi-speed wifi, when a gentlemen sauntered past. He stopped for a moment and glanced in my direction. Perhaps I nodded, or otherwise acknowledged his existence (As I like to do from time to time, despite our massive western city-bubbles). After a moment’s hesitation, he took a few casual steps towards me, and then, while gazing in the wrong direction, mused aloud “Whenever I see a Mac, I like to offer them congratulations from another Mac user.”
Heh. Having been on a college campus for a few years that is absolutely swarming with Macs, I must say I was rather surprised, but I was just as pleased at his courage in executing an icebreaker. He finally looked me in the eye as I held out my hand to shake his and said as un-awkwardly as I could, “heh, well I can take a congratulation!”
A couple minutes later he plucked up enough courage to saunter back and hand me his card. Apparently he’s some kind of Democrat, and runs “http://ourdems.org”.
Ah, the wonderful feeling of having connected with another human being. It’s funny how public is such a perfect crowd of the alone.
SigmaX
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06.23.08
Posted in Life at 2:05 pm by SigmaX
Independence strikes. Today, 23 June, 2008, 38 days before my twentieth birthday, I, Eric Scott, bought my first pair of self-owned eating utensils (I needed *something* with which to eat my leftover Chinese 
). I intend to keep them in my backpack as insurance for future emergencies (Just like my three decks of cards, umbrella, colored pencils, scientific calculator, and compass).
Happy Tuesday.
SigmaX
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06.21.08
Posted in Philosophy, Religon, Science, Biology at 3:53 pm by SigmaX
[This was originally a forum post on ThoughtCommunity.com, replying to a post in which the Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological arguments for God’s existence were brought up as conversation starters]
Whew. Well ain’t that a can of worms!
If you’ll permit me to misconstrue the ancient and traditional meanings of the words, I would draw corollaries between the arguments you mentioned and what I see as more-or-less modern manifestations: Read the rest of this entry »
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