ocremix – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Change of plans

So I was going to start Edenfall this week…but then, I realized I wanted to spend some more time in the universe of Worlds Away from Home, so I decided to work on Into the Nebulous Deep instead.

ITND is a direct sequel to Mercenary Savior. Basically, it grew out of the realization that James’s story wasn’t anywhere near finished. Like WAFH, I’m trying to throw in some romantic elements…how well that works out remains to be seen. I’ll probably get it all wrong on the first draft, but make it shine in subsequent drafts.

Anyhow, here’s the soundtrack I’ve put together. Most of the songs are from ocremix, but there’s also a good bit of U2 and a little Daft Punk, as well as a couple chiptunes that probably no one’s heard of. Man, I love chiptunes.

I’m going to try to write through this rough draft as quickly as possible. Right now, I’ve got a deadline for April 16th, but I wonder if I can finish before that.

Part of that has to do with my new goal of two novels per year; I want to train myself to write quickly, so I can be putting out more work. More than that, though, I want to try and tap into my creativity in a deeper way. If I can train myself to write quickly, I’ll be less prone to self-edit, which hopefully will help the creative part of my mind to flourish more freely. That was certainly the case with WAFH 2.1, and I want to do it again.

I stopped ITND 1.0 back in December in order to work on Bringing Stella Home; not because it wasn’t working, but because BSH needed a little more work. After that, I ended up picking up WAFH. Now, it’s time to go back and finish this project.

New OCR album and my first chiptune

So overclocked remix came out with a new album a few days ago, and it is absolutely fantastic. It’s called THE ANSWER, and it’s a fanmade album of music from the Armored Core series.

For those of you who don’t know, ocremix is an online community of video game music fans. It’s got a database of almost two thousand fanmade remixes of popular game tracks, and all of them are available for free download.

THE ANSWER is ocr’s 21st album project, and in my opinion it is one of the best. It’s full of happy, high-energy techno mixed with guitar and drums, and the quality of production is quite good. While each track is unique, there are enough recurring elements that the album feels very coherent as a whole. In that, it reminds me a bit of Humans + Gears and Summoning of Spirits.

Anyhow, the album is available for free from the project’s webpage. You should definitely check it out, even if you’ve never heard of the Armored Core games. Good stuff– ocremix is definitely starting the year out right!

Speaking of which, remember how I mentioned I wanted to make an album of original chiptune music this year? Well, I found a program for doing just that!

It’s called MilkyTracker, and it’s an open source program based off of FastTracker 2, an old DOS program for writing computer music. The interface is way old school–makes me feel like I’m on my old 386 from the 90s. Ah, those were the good days…

Anyhow, after playing around with it for a while, I wrote an 8-bit style remix of Son of Flynn, the third track on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk. Several excellent chiptune arrangements of songs from the Tron soundtrack have been popping up recently, so I thought I’d get in on the action.

Here it is:

Pretty sweet, huh? You can download the original file here, but unfortunately I don’t know how to convert .xm to .mp3, so unless you have a media player that can read extended module files, all I can say is go fish.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to these past few days. Haven’t gotten a whole lot of writing done, but I’m slowly transitioning back into WAFH and getting excited about it again. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish it before LTUE as I’d hoped, but a February 28th deadline seems reasonable. More on that later, for sure.

Story Notebook #3 (part 2)

Alright, I said I’d finish running through my third story notebook, so here it is. After all, there’s no better time than now:

The song, btw, is from Summoning of Spirits, quite possibly the best fanmade video game soundtrack that ocremix has put out. Oh, and it’s completely free; did I mention that? If you want to download it, you can find it here.

Anyways, on to the story ideas:

First line: “The invisible pink unicorn in the room sneezed.”

Hahaha! Martha, this one’s for you!

Theory: all of us have a mechanism in our brains that helps us relate to other people, to see ourselves in them. But over time, we learn to shut it off, because so long as that mechanism is working, we can’t do anything to hurt other people. If we can’t relate, we can’t care and can’t feel the pain of the other.

Or maybe we learn to turn it off because it just hurts so much to feel others’ pain. We desensitize ourselves in order to survive this cruel world. But is a life disconnected from others’ pain and joy really worth living? Where is the balance?

A writer who uses himself as an alpha reader by going to an alternate universe in which he never became a writer –> told from the point of view of the alternate person, who wishes he’d become a writer but never did.

I’m pretty sure I got this idea from a short story that Mechmuse published before it went under. You can still find it here. Normally, I have a policy of not writing stories about writers (since it’s so overdone), but for this one, I might be willing to make an exception…that is, if no one beats me to it.

A democracy in which the president serves for ten years and is ceremoniously executed at the end of his/her term.

Hey, that’s what they used to do to the ancient kings in Europe: when the king got old and the time came for him to hand over his kingdom, the druid-priests would ceremoniously execute him in front of the rest of the tribe.

The question is this: would such a custom lead to a better system of government? It would certainly weed out all the greedy scumbags who are only looking for money and power (which constitutes the majority of politicians). But who would take their place? Would the new politicos be any better?

How would foresight, like Atium, change sports? Like fantasy steroids, except different.

Thoughts while reading Mistborn. True story.

What if the Dome of the Rock was a magical portal to another world?

Hey, it’s possible. The circle/square/octagon motif represents a connection between heaven and earth, and scholars have never really figured out what the religious function of the structure was supposed to be.

And that concludes story notebook #3. Have fun writing!

Ocremix does a Final Fantasy IV album!

Hey, check this out! Ocremix has just come out with a new album, this time for one of my favorite SNES games of all time, Final Fantasy IV!

For those of you unfamiliar with ocremix, it’s basically a web community with more than a thousand free mp3s of video game music arrangements and remixes. All the music from the classic games you grew up playing…it’s all there, reinterpreted in some awesome ways. The best part is that it’s all fan-made and free! I love it.

I was wondering when ocremix would come out with a Final Fantasy IV album. Nobuo Uematsu is one of the best video game composers, and Final Fantasy IV represents some of his best work. I still listen to the official soundtrack of the game fairly often. It’s good stuff.

When I downloaded the album, I was especially psyched to see that it features not one, not two, but three arrangements from my favorite remixer, bLiNd (aka Jordan Aguirre). Nice! He makes some awesome trance music, and his work on other video game titles is some of my favorite music on the ocremix site.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled about this new album. Awesome stuff! Now, all we need is a Final Fantasy VI album from ocremix–I wonder when that’s coming out?