The name Asher Roth got picked up on my radar recently so I checked out his single. I wasn’t terribly impressed to be honest so that was that. The other day though, I happened to stumble across a few of his freestyles and it peaked my interest again. So I checked out his album today, “Asleep in the Bread Aisle,” and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s got some pretty hot tracks on it — like “Lark on my Go-Cart,” which is rather catchy. He definitely has his own style going for him, which is always refreshing. Kind of a damn shame that he always gets compared to Eminem but I guess that’s to be expected, even though to me, they sound absolutely nothing alike. It’s kind of like comparing me to Buddy Rich because I’m white and play the drums.
There has just been so much going on these days I don’t know where to begin:
We went into the studio last week to take down “Heater.” We made some rather significant changes to the song two weeks before so to be honest, we were a bit unprepared — didn’t have the practice in we all would have liked to have. Needless to say, it turned into a rather long session; I think in total we were in the studio for around 12 hours. The final product, however, I am extremely satisfied with — the sound is excellent. It may be the best track we have recorded so far.
In related news, we have done a bit of an about face on our original plans and have decided to release an EP rather than a full length album. The reasons for doing so are innumerable, but the good news is that we will probably be releasing it around November or December of this year. The tracks we want are down and decided on, but we still have to go in for a remastering session — maybe next month. In the meantime, I’m starting to look into the album art and logistics. I think the biggest decision we have to make is whether we are going to release through a label or not. If so, we pretty much know who we are going to release through, but we are still trying to work out if it wouldn’t just make more sense to do it on our own. Regardless, we plan to sell them at our shows (and possibly even online?) at a dirt cheap price, and that being the case, it seems a little silly to put them on the store shelves as well with the massive corporate markup.
I met up with two more recruiters last week and even popped my head into an engineering job fair here in Tokyo, which consisted of about a million Japanese people for a little over ten companies. You can imagine how that was I suppose. Luckily (?) none of the companies were really looking for people like me so it didn’t hurt my feelings too much.
Side note: it’s nothing like being the only white guy in a sea of Japanese to remind you how out of place us foreigner folk are here. I had to keep checking down to make sure I had my pants on.
DOWN IN A HOLE (from Korea) - Japan Tour
Yotsuya Outbreak (Tokyo, Japan)
http://www.hor-outbreak.com
Date: 08.08.2009 (Sat)
Doors Open: 17:00
Show Starts: 17:30
We’re scheduled to be on stage last.
Featured Artists:
waoh
NTF
Genius P.J’s
BELL MONDO
HYPERCUBE
fit
DOWN IN A HOLE
Tickets:
Advanced - 1,500 Yen (+ Drink Charge)
Door - 2,000 Yen (+ Drink Charge)
Ticket Reservations: info@fit-noise.com
We picked up one of those plastic pool thingys yesterday and pulled it out this afternoon to give it a whirl. We were kind of torn between two: an inflatable one, and another made out of all plastic, but we eventually went with the later because blowing up the former every time just felt like too much of a pain in the ass. Unfortunately however, both the wifey and I failed to remember that our driveway is slightly inclined, meaning the water tends to flow down to one side and the flimsy plastic side of the other won’t stay up. So I had to compensate by sitting on the upper end, keeping it up with my back, and essentially, being half naked midday in the middle of Tokyo (while drinking a beer), and feeling oh so unemployed. Oh wait — I feel that way anyway.
I think we need to go back and buy the inflatable one.
I finished adding anti-aliasing support to the engine. It looks much better now — finally got rid of those jagged polygon edges. I also went back and hacked the base code to death to get rid of some of the buggyness with initiating the OpenGL rendering context.
From here, I plan to look at laying the framework for an editor. I’m still leaning towards a dockable tool space written in C#. I guess I need to sit down and get myself accustomed to the language first though.
As always, the most current development build can be found here.
For some reason, I ended up spending the majority of the day doing all these menial little tasks I have been putting off doing for, well, months in some cases.
For example:
Unpacking my books from their boxes and organizing them on a shelf.
It’s been what, four months since we moved now?
The princess bonding with uncle Lorne:
Yeah, I’m not really sure what’s going on either. This has to be the most confusing photo ever.
Well, Tanabata is coming up here in Japan, and some kid across the street from me is screaming so loudly that I can’t even hear myself think. Not that the two are necessarily related but…
Anyhow, during Tanabata, people write up wishes on colorful pieces of paper and hang them from bamboo trees. Here is a sampling from my neighborhood:
“Give me money”
Is it just me or does this sound like less like a wish and more like a mugging?
“I wish my mama and papa wouldn’t fight. I love you”
Man, this one almost made me cry.
Here is one from the princess:
“@&#$”!&%#”
I have no fucking clue.
She was concentrating on it pretty hard though so I’m sure it says something in her own little language.
So I sat down at the computer tonight planning to get all the millions of things I have on my to-do list finished — you know, start up my own business, write a game engine, become famous and rich and all that. Then I was going to write about how I had my first interview since being unemployed. And how I hate the rainy season. And how — what the hell is my daughter doing up there?
Anyway, I got off to a pretty good start — turning on the computer and whatnot.
Yeah, I just browsed YouTube for like three hours.
But on a positive note, I did find this!