Academia bribes white hens

Yay school! (I'm surprised no-one pointed out to me that my invisitext here didn't make sense.)
(RIP witty, but irrelevant, invisitext. )
First off, a few housekeeping matters. It occurred to me this afternoon that although I had posted a link to Trading Yesterday's More Than This, I'd forgotten to utilise the great source of music that is YouTube. I've added links to the songs in Feierliche Eröffnung (and a few other things, too), modified the layout so that blockquotes get a lighter background, and put a whole slew of links on the right. If you have time to burn, the sites/bands listed there are made of win.

 Uncustomisable bullets are intolerable. Here is one sad substitute: an inserted image and an em space. I nearly didn't end up doing this, until I realised the HTML had been set to give images ~15px padding.

It occurred to me the other day that I seem to have a lot of green around. Our school colours - green and white (and no matter whan a certain foodstuff says, we are teh awesome); the new fence the church has half-erected at the moment... and this blog skin. Hah.

Spent a few hours this week messing around on the piano, trying to play various Within Temptation songs (which are more easily played than Evanescence and Nightwish, with their generally heavier guitars, and Trading Yesterday/Age of Information, which uses a lot of repetition that works for singers, but not piano). Epic Epoch fail. Some songs I tried out:

 Angels - kinda works, but is kind of boring. The chords for the extra end of the chorus (Good heaven, forever...) sound awkward, and the short instrumental interlude between chorus and bridge is odd, too.
 Memories - boring in the extreme. Doesn't really work on piano, I don't think. Perhaps if piano was only playing fast arpeggios and another instrument (like, say, cello) took the melody? Bleh.
 Somewhere - boringish, but otherwise fine.
 Frozen - the keychange every time you reach the chorus throws my left hand off whack. Works pretty well, though.
 Hand of Sorrow - Trading Yesterday-esque repetition of a melodic line in the chorus makes the piano part boring.
 The Cross - I think I've found a way to play this that I like, although it of course is hugely lacking in power in comparison to the original song . . . ah well. It feels weird imitating the "ah, ah ah ah a-a-ah"s.
 All I Need - works, but something makes it sound boring to my ear.
 The Truth Beneath the Rose - actually works, yay! Cut out the first part of the outro (with awesome choir) and skip straight to the "second" outro, and it sounds pretty good. Of course, I'm biased; awesome song + chance to hit fortissimo right-hand chords (that I can do decently) makes me happy.
 Forgiven - combined my playing-by-ear with a piano part I downloaded that is crazy-syncopated (read: hard), but deviates too much from the melody's rhythm for my liking. Yaaay.

In other musical news, we have a lot of new cellists in orchestra. Three in one year, not to mention two others only joined us in Term 4 last year, is pretty damned well amazing. As the second cello on the first desk, I feel very inferior listening to these guys play, too. Better practise some more. Two funny things happened in orchestra today, both in the morning session.

 We're playing An Outdoor Overture (Aaron Copland) at the moment. (Sounds great, but I'll be damned if I don't hate playing the same quaver-quaver-crotchet group thirty-two times. Then later on, forty-six times. Yay!) There's a section early on where the violins have the theme, and we celli play quavers on the offbeat (4/4 time: quaver rest|quaver|quaver rest|quaver|etc). We, as an orchestra, seem to suck at playing on the offbeat. So our conductor, Mr Pratt, in another bit of what I like to call "Learn to Count with Uncle Phil", pulls the whole section out in front of the orchestra and gets us to stamp on the beat, and clap on the offbeat. We quickly slipped into doing the opposite. Bleagh. I noticed, and stopped for a sec, then started going again, doing the opposite of everyone else. 'twas awkward until Pratt pointed out that I was right. GLEE!

 I actually took notes on this, I really wanted to keep this in my memory. The band were told to bring in and use earplugs in their sessions on Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons, and apparently sounded phenomenal. Pratt quoted a teacher as saying that she'd "never heard a school orchestra sound so phenomenal" (paraphrased), then, concluding his case as to why he's making us bring in earplugs next week, said that "it was all because of the earplugs". My mind quickly constructed a scene of a concert with only instruments and earplugs on the seats. (First person to say how lame this is gets eviscerated with a spork and single chopstick.)
Thursday presented a classic case of "check, the obvious, IDIOT" computer troubleshooting. Autocancelling dialog boxes and magically-appearing carriage returns in MSN led me to believe that I had something wrong with my enter key, or had been hijacked. I rebooted in safe mode, started up Ad-Aware and Trend Micro scans, and vented my anger with cello practice for an hour and a half or so (the first movement of Elgar's Concerto in E minor serves this purpose reaaaaally well). Came back, and my dad suggested pulling out the USB cable for the wireless mouse. I then (finally) remembered that the receiver for said mouse also has a keyboard, which was sitting on the desktop's desk with a couple of my brother's textbooks on top of it, pressing down the shift and enter keys. Bleagh.

Overall, Thursday was a stupid day for me. I'd packed everything I needed for sport except shoes and socks, somehow. Once more for a detention!

Batman beheads heirs! Confused? That's an acronym for my full (English) name. So are "babies heard anthems" and "seaman rehabbed s%#$". My Chinese name apparently means I'm "an ice whiz" ("ice" as in "crystal meth"?), my abbreviated (first and surname only) English name can become "bearish Batman" and "Rabbi: neat sham", and my English name with Chinese name as middle names (redundant, by the way; my parents picked English and Chinese names with the same meaning for me) turn out to be "academia bribes white hens" and "wide ibis, beseech amaranth" (noteworthy for the final word, which I learned from an awesome Nightwish song). Whee. Acronym finder used to waste time I don't really have can be found here.

I was going to write a discussion on people acting like this, but the concept lost steam over the course of the school week, so I wil close by saying that if any of my 16⁻⁴/3i readers don't read xkcd, they should. This week was even-awesomer than normal.

...Lass mich beweisen, dass es ein lustiges Wort ist: Bauchspeicheldrüse. Schau mal, du lachest!

Feierliche Eröffnung

Not that this is much of a grand opening. I finished modifying the skin for this blog tonight, and am being bugged by a friend to open it, but since I'm unable to write anything meaningful with Bleach going on in the background, here's a generic "welcome to my blag" post. (My li'l brother's watching Bleach out of boredom at the moment.)

I've set up this blog because I'm terrible at remembering events, and deviantART isn't an appropriate place to write journals on when you don't post any art (I'm not sure if that's because I have no time or have lost interest; I guess I'll find out at the end of this year when I can't argue the former). I hope to post some random musings about life, religion (although I'm loath to use that word to describe my own faith, Christianity), ethics and the like, although I'm in no shape to do that at the moment. (BANKAI! BANKAI!)

A few notes about this blog:

As noted in the footer, the banner's image and the name of this blog are taken from a band called Trading Yesterday, now known as The Age of Information. They have a Myspace and a forum, well worth checking out. The blog's name is taken from a song called Shattered, off the album More Than This. (See below for further info on TY/AoI.) The full lyrics for the song are as follows:

Yesterday I died, tomorrow's bleeding
Fall into Your sunlight
The future's open wide, beyond believing
To know why hope dies

And losing what was found, a world so hollow
Suspended in a compromise
But the silence of this sound is soon to follow
Somehow, sundown

And finding answers
Is forgetting all of the questions we call home
Passing the graves of the unknown

As reason clouds my eyes, with splendor fading
Illusions of the sunlight
A reflection of a lie will keep me waiting
With love gone for so long

And this day's ending
Is the proof of time killing all the faith I know
Knowing that faith is all I hold

And I've lost who I am and I can't understand
Why my heart is so broken, rejecting Your love
(love) without, love gone wrong; lifeless words carry on
But I know, all I know's that the end's beginning
Who I am from the start, take me home to my heart
Let me go and I will run - I will not be silent
All this time spent in vain; wasted years, wasted gain
All is lost but hope remains and this war's not over
There's a light, there's a Son taking all these shattered ones
To the place we belong and His love will conquer all

(I'm waiting and fading and holding onto these tears
I am crying; I'm dying tonight
I'm waiting . . . )

(And His love will conquer)

Yesterday I died, tomorrow's bleeding
Fall into your sunlight

As a learner of German, I've developed a habit of randomly using German phrases, or using German word order for the sake of it (example: the title of this post, translating to "grand opening"). It might bug some people, I dunno. (OR DO I?!)

I like using words of prodigious magnitude.

I often write random things, then make them the same colour as the background. (DUN DUN DUUUN!) Don't ask me why.

I'm a Christian.

Das ist Alles, other than the following summary of Trading Yesterday/The Age of Information. Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to say next time, eh?


Trading Yesterday

A great band that formed after David Hodges left Evanescence shortly before the 2003 release of Fallen. Their lyrics often are Christian, but can easily be interpreted as secular (the band was aimed at the secular market).

The Beauty and the Tragedy

Trading Yesterday's debut album. It's no longer available to buy. All the songs can be heard on YouTube, most on a channel dedicated to posting the songs; the two that aren't there are present in AMVs, and are labeled accordingly.
  1. One Day 
  2. The Beauty and the Tragedy  (AMV)
  3. What I'm Dreaming of 
  4. Nothing but Love 
  5. She is the Sunlight 
  6. World on Fire 
  7. Love Song Requiem 
  8. Desert Lands  (AMV)
  9. Elizabeth 
  10. Shattered 
  11. Beautiful 
  12. For You Only 
More Than This

Recording for this album concluded in early 2005, but the band left Epic near the end of that year, unimpressed with the record label "sitting around". As copyright laws apparently dictate that the record owns the music, not the band, this album will likely never be released, but some tracks somehow leaked in late 2006. The album art can be found here. Originally a full rerecording of The Beauty and the Tragedy (For You Only and Shattered changed more significantly) with some B-sides, the leak labeled tracks differently and omitted some of the original TB&TT tracks; this is the order used below.

  1. Revolution 
  2. One Day 
  3. She is the Sunlight 
  4. Under my Skin 
  5. May I 
  6. My Last Goodbye 
  7. Love Song Requiem 
  8. Come Back to Me 
  9. For You Only  (mislabeled in the link, but it's the right song)
  10. World on Fire 
  11. Change my Name 
  12. The Beauty and the Tragedy 
  13. Shattered 
World on Fire cover (By The Tree)

Christian band By The Tree covered World on Fire in 2006 (for pedants like me, it wasn't officially released as a cover, but just as a song composed by David Hodges).
  1. World on Fire 
The Age of Information

Trading Yesterday lost a member, gained two, and changed their musical style and their name.

Everything is Broken (EP)

Everything is Broken was released in July 2007 and can be bought here.
  1. Knowledge 
  2. Outside 
  3. Tell Her Something 
  4. Break Your Heart 
  5. Soma 
  6. Falling Out of Love 
Unnamed 2008 LP

This should be released in 2008. A demo of one song is available.
  1. Just a Little Girl  (AMV)