I have a tumblr. It's simultaneously shameful but fun
http://xephyr88.tumblr.com/
I will still be writing here about my more personal life so, no worries

My stomach has been so cranky lately.
I also went to go see Meshuggah and Baroness last week, it was great. Meshuggah fans can be fairly ignorant and your typical br00tal kvlt morons who don't like anything besides metal because it isn't heavy, but it doesn't really change my opinion of the band

This will probably be taken down as fast as the last one but new Shiina Ringo is always good news
椎名林檎 - 自由へ道連れ (Shiina Ringo - Jiyuu e Michizure)

I'm 23 years old as of 7 am, 2 days ago, and somehow more mature or something along those lines. I still can't grow a full beard thanks to genetics and I feel like a silly boy sometimes, still secretly yearning for things I know I can't have and acting like a general child. I'm definitely drifting away from most of the few people I considered close friends in high school, just as I did last year. It's one thing to not say anything to me one day a year, and it's another thing when someone on lastfm notices an age change the same day with no posted birthday anywhere. Oh well I expected the same from this particular individual like I did last year

I've almost stopped playing guitar, which usually helps when I'm in an awful mood. So being in awful moods and not playing guitar has put me in lesser mood than that. I would blame my classes and work but I'm still horrible at time management and I'm procrastinating as I'm typing this post. Mostly I've been smoking a little more, awful habit I'm considering quitting or at least cutting back to once every one or two weeks, I'm currently at 2-3 cigarettes a week.

Recently the Santa Ana winds blew through, knocking over trees and taking out the power for most places. Didn't have electricity for 2 days but we did have natural gas and water, which meant we could still cook and take warm showers. Made my briefly reflect how terrible most countries have it but mostly I missed having Internet and power to my cellphone for most of the day. We did have a small Honda generator but we only ran it 3 hours for a couple nights just to get some lights on and charge our electronics. Work was unaffected and I ended up spending a couple hours on Friday there to get a less guilty source of power and Internet since the generator is a present-limited resource and I have limited bandwidth/power on my cellphone. Got Internet at home the next day, but I feel bad that my friend Louisa just a mile away still doesn't have power after 4 days. Learned almost everyone outside of LA and LA county were mostly unaffected (San Diego, Orange County, Fresno), though Fresno did experience a power outage for a few hours.

Since my last post there was Halloween, which was planned as bar hopping in Old Town to wandering around the mall for candy only for all the stores to be closed or out of candy by the time we got there, and then going to Dave & Busters, which wasn't so bad. I threw together a nice Desmond Miles (Assassin's Creed series) outfit but I actually don't have any pictures and I should bother someone for one as they do exist.

Thanksgiving was pretty uneventful, another stressful day of my dad inviting 2 families over last minute at the expense of my sister's sanity as she was in charge of cooking, though she intends to for most holiday dinners because she comes home from UCI and she insists that she won't have takeout or go out to Chinese places for what are supposed to be eventful family dinners. She does go a little bit overboard and I'm not exactly willing to be her assistant for the day, driving to multiple supermarkets to find "wonton shell pieces", "slivered almonds", and "mustard powder (not ground)" on Thanksgiving day, as well as do all the menial cooking jobs she doesn't like doing. Did get to webcam talk to my longtime friend Godwin over Google-talk because his family was over but he just spent most of it playing Terraria.

Classes have been fairly brutal. A lot of last minute film-audio work and mixes, rushed mixing projects, mostly trial-and-error on my end because I neglect to spend my outside class time reading recording articles and looking at gear. I just don't know, the musician part of me is already overfed on electric guitar gear and I don't really have the money or motivation to buy a lot of my own recording gear. It's also my goal to become an engineer at a small to large studio facility rather than running my own home/garage studio, because a) I don't want to do it here and compete with the hundreds of other guys recording local bands, and b) I've never been a self-employed kind of guy. My parents do it and I think it's much too financially unstable, even if it does fit my slacker attitude of "do what I want, I'm my own boss" attitude. Not to give the impression an audio engineer job is remotely stable, but there are always opportunities and openings once you get your foot in the door, or so I'm told.

Also I just remembered it's Zappadan, from December 4 (the day of Frank's death) to December 21 (his birthday). I completely missed it last year and regret it a ton. It mostly entails listening to all of Frank Zappa's work and little to none of anything else, the latter part being tough for me. I'm probably blow through most of his worthwhile albums in the next 3 days and see from there what I'm going to do, because some of his work is rather unappealing to me since they're really abstract.

Oh my god, the video game that have come out in the last month. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Saints Row the Third, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Batman: Arkham City, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3; all these games and more trying to grabbing at Game of the Year or at least Best-Of in their category. I've mostly been playing a lot of Skyrim because Bethesda just has a way with RPG's that isn't MMO based or Japanese. The fantasy setting and the dragons are a little more believable than the setting in Fallout (Why would a bullet to the head do exponentially more damage after 50 hours of gameplay than no experience with the same gun), though Fallout is a lot more fun and I'm excited for the next one. I've also bought and played Battlefield 3 but I'm still terrible at the game like I was in Bad Company 2 and I mostly attribute it to my play-style from Team Fortress 2. I picked up Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 but I really don't have the time to play my new PS3 much and the people online are no fun to play against, even the beginner-ranked rooms. I do want to get around to playing Assassin's Creed Revelations, Saints Row 3, Uncharted (though I will probably start on the first), and Batman, though I don't see how I'll have the time since I haven't even gotten around to playing Deus Ex Human Revolution or New Vegas. I'll blab on about videogames in a later post

I've been in school for 5 weeks and it's been great! Getting to spend nearly 14 hours a week in one of two, multi-million dollar studios just to set up short sessions with random musicians from the music department down the hall, getting to use plug-ins we'd probably never get to use at home unless we pirated them, mixing on the 2 SSL boards (one is the previously mentioned SSL Duality and the other is the digital C200), getting to watch random YouTube videos during downtime, etc.

A lot of it has also been fairly weird classes, I mean weird because one of my professors will assign us reading, quiz us on it strictly the next class, and then never discuss or lecture about said reading topics before or after the quiz ever. Another one has us do some of the easiest study guides/homework I've done in college, but we still haven't had any tests or quizzes and we're taking the midterm a week early because we've supposedly covered half a semester of material already in 5 weeks and the text for the course was "optional". I don't even know how to take these 2 classes very seriously besides getting to spend a lot of time mixing songs in the "reading-quizzes" class.

The last class is with a great professor from last semester, by the name of John Boylan, who has a wiki page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boylan_(record_producer). He worked with Linda Ronstadt and put together a band for her which later went on to be The Eagles, as well as working on the first Boston record which makes him a lump of royalties still. I think a lot of time I've spent in his classes has made me take a second look on my opinions for the music industry. He taught Critical Listening last semester and is teaching Music Business this semester. He says things like,"it's a shame that music is an "industry" now, but it always has been a business and those in it are looking to make money." We go over Billboard magazine every week and as much as I've avoided mainstream and Top 40 music in the last few years, I figured I would have to be more open-minded to survive in the industry, especially given that we had to mix a couple songs that I didn't enjoy very much last semester for the mixing class.

Last semester we mixed these 2 mediocre songs none of us had ever heard of since one was a local pop-punk act and another was a pretty decent alt band that toured California at one point but never got any national recognition and eventually disbanded before the Internet so there's not very much info about either. This semester we've mixed Stevie Wonder's Superstition, Doobie Brothers' Long Train Running, and Bob Marley's Is This Love. We just got the master tracks for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at the end of class yesterday and I'm pretty excited to work on that Monday.

I haven't really done anything spectacularly fun lately but I did see Intronaut and Kylesa play at The Troubadour. Needless to say I was slightly disappointed by both since Kylesa's Static Tensions is one of my favorite sludge metal albums but their following album was a snoozefest, especially in comparison to previously mentioned favorite. I had listened through an Intronaut album but didn't find anything that they did better than the few sludge metal bands I listen to so I never got into them. The audience for Kylesa was probably, THE most boring I've ever had the misfortune of watching a concert with. The only person who moshed or jumped around was this one drunk girl and another random guy, and I was one of the 7 or so people who at headbanged or sang in a sea of bored faces and non-movement. That being said, I understand that concerts have their fair share of shy guys who don't like moving around; they just relax and have a beer. But when I'm at a metal concert and almost 90% of the people there are just not moving, it freaks me out that I've seen more audience enjoyment and moshing at a Pillows concert, even if it was just girls complaining about tall people for 4 hours.

More music talk: Since this post is getting longwinded and I don't like explaining myself for music reviews, I will use a nice system used by Go of jrocknyc, which is an emoticon of sorts to show how I feel about an album, and a sentence describing why I felt that way about an album

A Dramatic Turn of Events by Dream Theater
=| -was much better than the last 2 albums, still a bit too wanky, new drummer Mike Mangini is basically Mike Portnoy but less talkative

Heritage by Opeth
=\ -haven't been a fan of Opeth long enough to give a proper score, but damn was it boring

Jeff Bridges by Jeff Bridges
=| -not a bad debut into the music scene this late in his career, has a couple self written songs and solid mixing, but the album doesn't really have a lot of appeal outside of people who don't know or dislike him

Voice by Hiromi
=) -Surprise, it's even better than her other albums. Progressive, fun, doesn't feel too lengthy

Agony by Fleshgod Apocalypse
=) -These guys manage to outdo themselves from the Mafia EP (which made me fall in love with technical death metal) with a small string orchestra playing on every song to further emphasize the classical music influence in their music. They do a fairly good job but it makes me miss their more straight-forward material that felt much heavier and less cluttered at times

Daihakken by Tokyo Jihen
=D -amazing album. Loved it and still looking forward to any of Shiina Ringo's continued work

SMG by Sex Machineguns
=\ -Anchang's voice is noticeably tired and the songs are nothing special, but it's a solid album compared to the awful awful messes 45 degrees and Cameron were

I realize some of these albums are from June but I just felt like mentioning them since they're from bands I like at least a fair bit or used to like a fair bit. I will give my say on Bjork's Biophilia, Bubblegum Octopus's Bad Happy, and Angelspit's Hello My Name Is in the next post.

Also I've been watching way too much Adventure Time. By too much I mean, I watched through 2 short seasons and whatever is out in season 3 in the span of less than 2 weeks. This show is just, awesome. Who comes up with stuff like this for a supposed kids' show. Sorry about quality but the official clip is not embeddable