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Sumiki

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Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  1. Sumiki

    The Strangest Pieces

    By Sumiki,

    I swear this isn't a music blog.
     
    (Okay, it kind of is.)
     
    I've listened to a wide swath of different pieces of classical music, and I occasionally come across some things that are just ... well, strange. We're talking off-the-wall levels of goofy here.
     
    -----La Monte Young - Piano Piece for David Tudor #1
     
    This piece doesn't even have a proper score, just a sheet of paper telling the performer to come out onto the stage with a bucket of water and a bale of hay for the piano to drink and eat. Performance consists of either feeding the piano or letting the piano feed itself, and that the music is over once the piano had been fed.
     
    -----Erik Satie - Vexations
     
    Satie's Vexations is a remarkably unassuming piece of sheet music - but inspection reveals a peculiar direction in the corner: if you want to play it 840 times in a row, Satie advises performers to prepare beforehand, "in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." John Cage - who will appear later in this list - was inspired by the inherent ridiculousness of Vexations and organized its first performance in New York in 1963. It lasted 18 hours and was played by a dozen pianists working in shifts.
     
    -----Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helicopter String Quartet
     
    The controversial Stockhausen composed Helicopter String Quartet to be part of one of his massive operatic projects. Each string quartet member is lifted in a different helicopter, and they coordinate their playing in tremolos, with the intended effect of making the helicopters instruments themselves. The piece is by far the most complex string quartet ever written.
     
    -----Karlheinz Stockhausen - Fresco
     
    Fresco is not composed with the audacity of Helicopter String Quartet, but nonetheless makes this list because of the scandal that marred its only performance to date. Written as background music for four orchestras situated around a hall, the instructions in Fresco irritated the classically-trained performers. Tensions between composer and performers grew wider, and some performers tried to refuse playing it, only to realize that they were contractually obligated to do so. (This didn't deter the concertmaster, who threatened to kill the head conductor.)
     
    Remaining performers did so under protest, and the performance was a complete disaster. Performers took to practicing other repertoire instead of following their score as an act of protest, pranksters and hecklers distracted the few that stuck to Stockhausen's instructions, and the performance was halted when somebody cut out the lights on them.
     
    -----Erwin Schulhoff - In Futurum
     
    A lot of people are familiar with John Cage's famous "silent piece," 4'33", but it's not here. Few are aware that, while Cage's motives were different, the idea of a completely silent piece was not his own - the first one was composed by the Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff over thirty years before Cage. In Futurum - with its ostensibly crossed hands (the clefs are switched) and irrational time signatures (3/5 and 7/10) - appears as the third movement of his piano collection Fünf Pittoresken. The rest of Schulhoff's works take influence from jazz, making In Futurum all that much more remarkable in its uniqueness.
     
    -----John Cage - Atlas Eclipticalis
     
    Cage's music ranges from the serene (Dream, In a Landscape) to silence (4'33", 0′00″, One3) to more or less off-the-wall concepts. Atlas Eclipticalis is for any number of instruments playing the music however they wish, with the sheet music consisting of star charts graphed onto music paper. Because of the undefined instruments and the lack of both tempo and dynamic instructions, performances of Atlas Eclipticalis are all remarkably different.
     
    -----John Cage - Organ²/ASLSP
     
    A fan of extremes, Cage wrote ASLSP (standing for As Slow As Possible) for piano. The piano version usually takes around an hour to perform ... but the organ edition, owing to the nature of the instrument, can sound indefinitely. It wouldn't be on this list if not for an organ that was built expressly for the purpose of performing the piece - an organ piece that will end in September of the year 2640. But, while slow, it's still - theoretically speaking - not as slow as possible.
     
    -----György Ligeti - Poéme Symphonique
     
    Ligeti's music is full of rhythmic variation and unique sonority. Equal parts rhythmic experimentation and avant-garde parody, the score calls for 100 metronomes, all of which are set to different speeds.
     
    -----Leo Ornstein - Suicide in an Airplane
     
    This piece isn't really strange in the ways that the others are, but it honestly has one of the most metal titles of any piece of music I've ever heard of. I've decided to hone my orchestration skills and I've chosen this piece because of its musical depiction of a dogfight and rumbling engines, which is equally well suited to an orchestral sonority.
  3. Sumiki

    Why I Don't Like Mozart

    By Sumiki,

    Let's get this out of the way: I really love classical music, and I kind of know a lot about it. I'm willing to bet that I know more things about music history than anyone else on BZP ... save for perhaps -Windrider-. Dude's a beast when it comes to this sort of stuff.
     
    Most people don't really hold opinions on classical music one way or another, and those that do generally see it as monotonous and boring. I've never really held this opinion, but my favorite music has always come later in music history - not with the dissonance and atonality so revered by the composers of the 20th century, but with the Romantic era.
     
    I'm using "classical" in a broad sense because I'm really not the world's biggest fan of music from the Classical period. Those who aren't as familiar with this history may be a bit lost at this point, so I'll see if I can't briefly recap some of the details.
     
    The Middle Ages and the Renaissance are more or less grouped together in one era of music history. This was a very long era, but there were crucial innovations in harmony, melody, and musical notation. By the high Renaissance, polyphony - multiple melodies at once - was extremely common, and the best composers were able to write motets that used up to 40 distinct voices. Polyphony was music.
     
    Around 1600, as musical instruments increased in quality and secular music became a more popular genre, the Baroque era started. Baroque music is often characterized as architecture, and Baroque composers were, as a general rule, ridiculously prolific. (Telemann is still the single most prolific composer in history, and Vivaldi nearly got thrown in an asylum when he interrupted himself at his day job - as a priest - to write down some notes that had occurred to him.)
     
    Baroque music still drew on the polyphony of the high Renaissance to a certain extent, but by and large this kind of writing wasn't very common. Most Baroque composers used one or two melodies, with the notable exception of Johann Sebastian Bach. His keyboard music - especially his complex fugues with their finger-breaking polyphony - was considered antiquated, and his sons (he had a whopping 20 kids overall) were considered better composers than he was when he died. His reputation was revived when his works were rediscovered in the mid-1800s, and now, he's the only Baroque composer most people are familiar with.
     
    All of which brings us to Classicism, where musical form became a bigger deal. Instrumental sonatas, symphonies, concertos, and string quartets became standard forms, and methods of writing for those ensembles were also standardized to a certain extent. Essentially, if you have a theme or two, you could plug those into sonata form, add a few basic harmonies, and boom, you've got a sonata movement. Simplicity and clarity became the name of the game in the Classical era.
     
    The three major composers of this period were Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. While many like to group their music together as the "First Viennese School," the music of these three were different. Haydn, speed-writing symphonies for the court orchestra under the Esterházy family, was, as he said "forced to be original," although many of his 100+ symphonies are not particularly innovative, as he had to conform to the musical tastes of both the Esterházys and their guests. His contributions to form have long since outlived him, and due to his productivity and his standardization of forms, he is known as the "Father of the Symphony" and the "Father of the String Quartet." Haydn's contributions to form and the language of Classicism cannot be understated.
     
    Beethoven was widely different - while he started out fixed to Classical molds, he experimented with pushing the limits of what said forms could handle even before he realized that he was going deaf. When he came to terms with this, his experimentation led to more innovative and trail-blazing music, dispensing with convention after convention. He replaced the minuet with the scherzo in his later symphonies, looked towards Romanticism with his Sixth Symphony and a great number of his piano sonatas, didn't stick to traditional movement numbers in his late piano sonatas and string quartets, and famously introduced a chorus in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony.
     
    Now for Mozart.
     
    Mozart was hailed as a child prodigy, composed prolifically, and died at the young age of 35. In that time, he stuck to the already well-defined Classical forms, choosing to do as much within those constraints as he could. However, there really wasn't much more that any composer, no matter how great, could do within those forms - forms that were already well established by Haydn by the time Mozart began composing.
     
    Haydn, though his music contains an aesthetic similarity, was creative as a musical troll. His Symphony No. 94 - nicknamed the "Surprise" - was designed to wake up sleepy members of the court with a massive chord following a very soft passage. His Symphony No. 45 - nicknamed the "Farewell" - sent a message to his patrons to let the musicians return home by letting players leave as the last movement progresses. Haydn chose the unusual F# minor as the symphony's home key, and had to get special crooks for his orchestra's horns to play.
     
    But Haydn's formal unoriginality is explicable, as we know that he had to compose musically conservative pieces in order to get paid and did quite a bit under those kinds of restrictions. Mozart was, for most of his time as a composer, not hindered by a particular court. He was, more or less, freelance. Financially insecure, Mozart had the opportunity to be an innovator such as Beethoven came to be later, but did not.
     
    Mozart, for his part, did write a few brilliant pieces in his later years - his unfinished Requiem, his Clarinet Concerto, and his late symphonies among them - but in his entire oeuvre these masterpieces are relatively few. If you took all of Mozart's works, put them into a list, and then randomized it, chances are you're not going to come out with one of his great works. Most of his pieces have a similar mood, and as mentioned, they nearly always stick to a predetermined form. In this sense, a great many are interchangeable.
     
    In the end, this all comes down to my personal preferences and musical tastes. I know that Mozart holds a special place in many people's hearts, but as someone who has listened to a wide swath of his pieces, I really don't see what all of the fuss was - and still is - about.
  5. Sumiki
    Long-time Blogarithm viewers may remember a long rant I wrote about the link between Star Wars and BIONICLE with regards to their respective prequels. In it, I made the case that fans of a certain thing have higher expectations and preconceived notions regarding backstory.
     
    I thought that it might be time to significantly expand on that train of thought by considering the monstrous job that now lays ahead of J. J. Abrams, a task that is both Herculean and nearly Sisyphean in its proportions.
     
    The post-Return of the Jedi world saw the beginning of what would become known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Now, the EU is huge - not just with more licenses than you can shake a lightsaber at, but with games and books that delve into the mythology like never before. It's pretty insane how much canon Star Wars material is out there. The fans have been accustomed to the Expanded Universe and the stories that are from the EU are as - in some cases, more - revered than the movies that started it all.
     
    Let's face facts: J. J. Abrams will not be able to make a Star Wars movie without contradicting the Expanded Universe. The EU also relies so much on its own internal canon that contradicting one thing would likely cause a domino effect and negate pretty much every EU story that fans have come to love.
     
    The so-called "Thrawn Trilogy" is a good example. Set after Return of the Jedi, the Thrawn Trilogy were a series of books by author Timothy Zahn that chronicled the main characters fighting off what remained of the Galactic Empire and fighting an Imperial admiral named Thrawn. It's considered to be one of the definitive EU novels and were considered frontrunners to be turned into Episodes VII, VIII, and IX.
     
    Well, as it turns out, they're not going to be made into movies, which means that they - along with quite a lot of the EU - is going down the drain, so to speak.
     
    The only way that effigies of J. J. Abrams aren't burned by rabid Star Wars fans is if, hidden behind all of those lens flares, he's actually a genius beyond mortal comprehension. However, I hope no one takes it as an insult if I say that I sincerely doubt that, even when taking into account the existence of Fringe.
     
    The common problem is that fandoms generally expect consistently high-quality material from content creators. Star Wars had such a following that the prequels were bound to disappoint, regardless of quality. The pre-A New Hope universe was not nearly as explored before A Phantom Menace as the post-Return of the Jedi universe is right now. (I hope that made sense.)
     
    All of which brings us to Greg Farshtey. BZPower did not grow to have the most members of any LEGO fansite without reason. BIONICLE was big, and BZP's heyday saw a level of traffic and server-busy messages unheard of today, all because of BIONICLE. We appreciated Greg's dedication and his interaction with the community, which is unheard of amongst the content creators of such a large fan base.
     
    Nevertheless, voices of dissent emerged, which only became more prevalent in the post-Great Downtime BZP, after Greg disappeared due to his personal life and LEGO's new interactivity policy. Opinions on Greg's writing skills are lukewarm at best, as fans have matured and looked back on Greg's methods of storytelling with more critical eyes. (Time Trap is a great book and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.)
     
    Why? Well, we had become accustomed, as a community, to Greg's presence. Without it, I believe that criticism of his writing would have come about much sooner. We, as fandoms are wont to do, came to expect an inhuman level of quality from Greg, as the Star Wars fandom is expecting an inhuman level of quality from Abrams and his gang.
     
    After all, Lucas got enough flak for the prequels.
  6. Sumiki
    Or: Why The Eternity Code was the best Artemis Fowl book

    Spoiler warning for ... well, the entire thing. I'm not marking individual spoilers; it's been long enough since the last book was released. Also this is really going to be rambling, I can just sense it. Consider yourself warned.
     
    Ever since a friend loaned me the first book in the series, I'm a fan of Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series of books. The characters and re-imagined concepts of Colfer's stories captured my imagination.
     
    As I caught up - at that point, The Time Paradox was the most recent book in the series - I'd realized that Colfer was a writer with flaws. With the release of The Atlantis Complex and The Last Guardian, I felt as if Colfer's writing had finally jumped the shark, so to speak. His characters and writing style became caricatures of themselves, with an over-reliance on his own tropes.
     
    Mulch Diggums saving everyone, side characters with puns for names, recurrence of Opal Koboi as a villain, character such as Butler or № 1 reduced to becoming one-dimensional characters ... these are all devices that occurred more often as the series progressed, and devices that became especially prevalent in the later books.
     
    For this reason, The Eternity Code is by far my favorite book in the entire series, because it's different and it avoids the trope traps that Colfer fell into. Artemis is beaten by Spiro, Butler loses a step after his death and subsequent revival, Opal Koboi isn't the villain, and so on. So many things are different about Eternity, and for that I enjoyed it immensely.
     
    Another thing that I enjoyed about Eternity was that it was contained most of the moments where Colfer significantly changed something about the Fowl universe. Artemis's mind was wiped, Butler's physicality was questioned. Thereafter, the events of Eternity were hardly mentioned, save for the change in Butler's physical makeup. After a terrifying and distraught Butler scared the snot out of Arno Blunt in Eternity, I thought that it would be a sea-change for Butler's character, but it was not.
     
    But back to the story. In the subsequent book, The Opal Deception - the last book where Koboi's appearance actually retains some semblance of novelty - Commander Root is killed. Root's character is not one I particularly ... ahem rooted for in the first three books. While he had his fair share of touching interactions with Holly Short, Root was mainly painted through other characters, and not always in a positive light. Nevertheless, this newfound willingness to change things - permanently - in Colfer's writing was encouraging. Eternity and now this? What would Colfer do in the next book?
     
    The Lost Colony saw Artemis in puberty. The way Colfer handled Artemis's interaction with his love interest/unwitting half-villain Minerva Paradizo was not emphasized, nor was Paradizo even so much as given a shout-out in the final three books. Colfer says that Paradizo had lost interest in Artemis after his exile getting back from Limbo and was in the alps somewhere, but this was in a tweet, if I recall correctly. It would have been nice to get some closure on the plot point in one of the three books, even if it was just a throwaway line. Artemis's feelings were also not addressed in the rest of Colony. Despite this, Colony remains my second-favorite book in the series, for its new characters and addition to the Fowl universe.
     
    Alright, time for another complaint. Colfer's writing called for a cast of heroes that always showed up. Characters were never split up for long periods of time. Mulch, Holly, and Butler always showed up with Artemis, and there were few extended, important scenes without the entire gang together. Even when it would have been easier to leave out characters - even the lovable dwarf Mulch - Colfer jams them into scenes. It would have been great to see more times where characters not have someone else to fall back on, which brings me to The Time Paradox.
     
    ​Paradox pulls out all of the proverbial stops, but even so, Colfer's reliance on getting his protagonists out of jams with Mulch Diggums reappears. It would have been great to see Artemis and Holly have to finagle their way out of sticky situations without the assistance of Mulch or Butler, but again, Colfer didn't take advantage of opportunities.
     
    The Atlantis Complex is perhaps my least favorite Fowl book. I felt as if the series had come to a nice conclusion with Paradox, but the two Opal Kobois in the timeline meant that a continuation was necessary - and another return for a villainess who became a caricature of herself in each consecutive appearance. But Complex doesn't deal with that - instead, Artemis is now seen with a magic-derived mental disorder. Colfer's pro-environmental sentiment - one which I agree with - reached a level of overt preachiness that I found distracting. The only thing that Complex has going for it is its callback to Deception with the death of Commander Vinyáya. But like Root, Vinyáya was never a major character, and the readers were never emotionally attached to her character.
     
    For all of the missed opportunities in his characterizations, Colfer's depiction of Artemis's growth and maturity was excellent. The nearly amoral tween crime lord of the early books changed into a more conscious part-time crime lord. While still not the most upright of character, Artemis's machinations begin to nip at his consciousness in Eternity and eventually lead to his annoyance at his younger self in Paradox and then finally to his plan to save the world in Complex.
     
    This is getting really rambling now so I think I'll move on and talk a little bit about the continuity of the series. Complex, despite my dislike, was possibly the most continuity-aware book, with the reappearance of Turnball Root after appearing in a short story years earlier. However, many minor plot points that make their appearances in the books - especially towards their respective ends - are thrown away in subsequent books and never mentioned again. This ranges from the aforementioned Minerva Paradizo to the Doodah Day/Mulch Diggums PI firm.
     
    I feel like I'm complaining a bit too much about Artemis Fowl to the point where one might think that I'm not actually a fan of it. Yet for its flaws - which I've pointed out here in perhaps the least organized piece of material that I've written in my entire life - I still like the series. I just wish it hadn't petered out towards the end and done more of the things that made The Eternity Code so danged epic.
  8. Sumiki

    My Dad and Lobsters

    By Sumiki,

    The Great American Road Trip 0: The Quest for Lobster
     
    Five and a half years before I was born, my parents lived in an entirely different section of North Carolina. With a number of days off of work after Christmas, my dad gets an insatiable hankering for a Maine lobster after seeing a particularly delectable television advertisement.
     
    "Pack and get in the car," he says to my mom.
     
    "Where are we going?" she asks.
     
    "We're going to Maine."
     
    So off they went. Twelve hours later, it's midnight, but they make it in one piece to Maine. They cross the border and pull into the nearest open restaurant.
     
    They sit down to order. The waitress asks what they want to eat.
     
    "A lobster," my dad said, with an ecstatic grin.
     
    "How would you like it cooked?" the waitress asked.
     
    "You know ... a Maine lobster!" he says.
     
    "I know ... but how would you like it cooked?"
     
    At this point, it dawned on my dad that he'd embarked on a spur-of-the-moment road trip all because he thought that a Maine lobster was a method of cooking lobster known only to Mainers.
     
    "Wait ... you know that a Maine lobster is just a lobster from Maine ... right?" my mom asked.
     
    Her inquiry was in vain, for she knew the answer to this question just as much as he did.
  9. Sumiki

    The Hidden Buffalo

    By Sumiki,

    The Great American Road Trip -1: The Hidden Buffalo
     
    A decade before my birth, my parents (and my mom's parents) took off on a road trip to South Dakota, to see Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, and the surrounding region.
     
    While in the Badlands, they went to a restaurant/gift shop for something to eat. My grandmother ordered a bison burger, but she could not eat it all, so she discreetly wrapped the rest of it up in an array of napkins and stashed it in her purse while no one was looking.
     
    Later, after everyone else had finished and were perusing the gift shop, she approached my dad and said "hey, look what I've got!"
     
    He looked down, thinking that she was going to get in trouble, for she looked as if she was shoplifting.
     
    There, looking back up at him, was a half-eaten bison burger.
     
    In 2012, on the return to the Badlands, we stopped and ate at the same place, and ordered the same thing, in the same booth.
  10. Sumiki
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ank-lcc-bhU
     
    Einojuhani Rautavaara is a contemporary Finnish composer who has written a substantial amount of orchestral music. His rejection of "modern" composition techniques and his unique style has led him to a musical language that is accessible yet still distinctly modern. His most famous piece is "Cantus Arcticus" - a concerto for birds and orchestra featuring recorded birdsong - but his other pieces, particularly his piano concertos, deserve further study.
     
    The first movement of his first piano concerto is a stunning display of virtuosity from the soloist, banging out a triumphant melody in tone clusters with the right hand while maintaining a manic polytonal undercurrent with the left. These clusters make their appearance throughout the piece, both in the piano and the orchestra, culminating in an epic volley of sound as the main theme recapitulates in massive arm clusters. This unique combination of old and new gives it a sound that makes it one of my favorite piano concerto movements.
  12. Sumiki
    In first place, with eight votes: PALEO!
     
    In second place, with four votes: REZNAS!
     
    In third place, with three votes: PALEO! (again)
     
    Your prizes will be autographed selfies, featuring exclusive snippets of wisdom.
     
    (I may or may not have ripped off this idea from Windrider.)
     
    Congratulations to the winners and big thanks to all of the fantastic entries - although no one guessed correctly.
  13. Sumiki
    It's time for the poll.
     
    Vote for up to THREE explanations of the nature of my status updates. Vote in the comments. You can only vote once.
     
    Voting will end on January 19th ​at 11:59 PM Eastern. A tiebreaker, if necessary, will be held the following day.
     
     
     
     
     

    - - - - - - - - - -


    Entry 1: You have invented a new form of musical notation, which uses syllables to represent notes. Your status updates are in reality short piano pieces.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 2: Written on paper strips are the words. You pull them out of a hat, or several.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 3: You ate a Q-fruit from my garden to gain Qtopian powers.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 4: Sumiki channels the amazing powers of Vezon, Deadpool, Murdock, and The Mentalist to select the exact and precise words and word order needed.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 5: You get them from commercials. Likely, you take every 3rd, 5th or 8th word spoken in the commercial, or something similar. If it was Lhik, it'd obviously be every 13th, not sure what it'd be for you. It's also possible you exclude brand names and the like.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 6: Clearly farm animals communicate these phrases to you in your dreams.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 7: They are all simply part of an algorithm, one so powerful and so intricate, that if coded correctly could ultimately destroy the very infrastructure of this world, which would let Sumiki's roam the earth wreaking havoc wherever they go. Eventually, with Sumiki Prime (the head Sumiki) as their leader, the Sumiki's would rule the world with enmity and violence using farm animals as tools of war. For him to finish these algorithms would essentially foreshadow the dark and merciless future the Sumiki's have planned for us. That is an incredibly scary thought. I pray that the algorithm will never be completed; otherwise, we are doomed.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 8: Surprisingly, it is a simple process that forms highly philosophical messages. Sumiki first takes the first and last notes of a piece by any famous composer (though he is partial at the moment to Chopin), and then converts their tones into a corresponding human pheromone. He then exposes test groups of 400 individuals to this pheromone and records their moods. These moods each have differing corresponding number values on a very special spreadsheet. Sumiki adds these values together and then counts backwards through the Oxford English Dictionary. This is how he obtains the so-called "odd words" in his status updates, so called by those ignorant souls who view his profile with empty minds. He then uses a trained blindfolded Orangutan to pick a book in the Congressional Library and a trained blindfolded spider monkey to pick a page in the book. Sumiki then replaces nouns, verbs and adjectives in that sentence with ones he chose using his pheromone method to convey cryptic snippets of wisdom from his great mind.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 9: They are just random. You try to fool us with a well laid plan. But I see through it. Pure randomness meant to distract us from something far more... less random, as it is clearly a plot of deception designed to ensnare our attention. I applaud your efforts, but you have failed.
     
     
     
     

    -


     
    Entry 10: Mere mortals cannot comprehend the mental processes of Sumiki because of their fourth dimensional nature.
     
     
     
     

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    Entry 11: Sumiki listens to Broadway play soundtracks and chooses the 42nd word of the first song over 7 minutes. Repeating this process, he gathers enough words to modify sentences from ancient aramaic texts into wise sayings for the modern age.
  14. Sumiki
    Some of you may be wondering about me and my sanity due to my various profile updates, which have, as of late, been getting around outside BZP. There's now a Wisdom of Sumiki tumblr and twitter. (I cannot take credit for the operation of either of those accounts.) I also feel as if my activity on here has waned a bit, and I'd like to take a step towards rectifying it. Thus, I decided that it's time for another Blogarithm Contest.
     
    Let's talk about my status updates for a minute - specifically, what's behind them. I'm a simple man, and I like simple, ludicrous status updates. What originally started out as a mashup of whatever surrealist things I came across has taken on a mind of its own.
     
    So let's pretend that these aren't snippets of wisdom that mere mortals are unable to comprehend. Realistically or not, let's assume that there's a pattern here. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is theorize on the nature of my status updates. In other words, tell me how you think I derive them.
     
    You have until January 15th at 11:59 PM Eastern to post your theories in the comments section, and you're allowed to submit up to three entries. After the polls, the winner will be announced on January 19th. The winner will receive a prize.
  15. Sumiki

    i accidentally a thing

    By Sumiki,

    it's nearly two o'clock in the morning and I just wrote nearly 1,400 words about a gritty human Hero Factory AU (which I've been meaning to do for a good while)
     
    question is, would anyone actually be interested in reading a story with a re-imagined Von Nebula, grizzled veterans, psychological manipulation, gender bends, and plot twists?
     
  17. Sumiki

    Downton Abbey

    By Sumiki,

    LARGE OPULENT CASTLE FULL OF RICH WHITE PEOPLE. CONTINUOUS INTRIGUE AMONG RICH WHITE PEOPLE. RICH WHITE PEOPLE BECOME UNHAPPY. RICH WHITE PEOPLE ARE PASSIVE-AGRESSIVE TO OTHER RICH WHITE PEOPLE.
     
    WHAT ARE RICH WHITE PEOPLE GOING TO DO THIS WEEK. FIND OUT ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF RICH WHITE PEOPLE DOWNTON ABBEY
  19. Sumiki
    In addition to the annual series of Sumiki-vs.-Sumiki's-Dad Nerf battles, we have added two new nuances. Now, instead of just shooting each other, there is a rolling chair that is called "the tank" and is actually kind of ineffective but it's fun to roll around on.
     
    The second one involves a tiny duck that squawks the name of a certain supplemental insurance company three times when pressed. It's been around for years and I'm surprised that it hasn't run out of battery. In any event, we use this as a kind of grenade. We get it to start saying something, and then if one of us can hit the other with the duck while it's saying something, the person who has been hit has to stand up and get hit with a "free shot."
     
    I'm not sure how interesting any of this is, but I thought it was amusing enough to share.
  20. Sumiki

    Loot

    By Sumiki,

    An epic pocket watch
    A dry-erase map of Canada
    A mug with Shakespearean insults all over it
    A sweatshirt that says "Seven Days Without A Pun Makes One Weak"
    Three binders for assorted sheet music
    Some clothes? idk
    A nearly 1000-page classical music encyclopedia
    A biography of Alexander Scriabin, the composer that wanted to end the world via a concert
    $290 in cash, acquired in small bits from distant family I see about once a year

    For the record, I fully intend to purchase a horse mask with these funds.
  21. Sumiki
    The Christmas season is upon us once again, and you know what that means: it's time for Sumiki to comment on another creepy Christmas song, this disturbing not due to its implications but because of just the lyrics alone.
     
    You better watch out
    You better not cry
    You better not pout
    I'm telling you why:
    Santa Claus is coming to town.
     
    So, we need to watch out (presumably for our own safety) and repress natural emotions because of someone who is coming into the town. Sounds like the bad guy of a Western film. Santa Claus already seems to be an oppressive figure.
     
    But why should anyone listen? After all, Santa's just this old guy, right? He's only human, and presumably slower than most due to his age. Why would he know if your cry and pout? Maybe something really sad happened, and not doing that would be unhealthy? Put on unreasonable airs for a fellow who'll be coming through some time in the future?
     
    He's making a list,
    He's checking it twice,
    He's gonna find out who's naughty and nice.
    Santa Claus is coming to town.
     
    Ah, so now we're getting to Santa's motives, or at least his chronic OCD. He wants to know who's naughty and who's nice in this particular town. But why does he want to know so badly? What does he need this information for? Moreover, how does he get it? The answer lies in the next stanza ...
     
    He sees you when you're sleeping
    He knows when you're awake
    He knows if you've been bad or good
    So be good, for goodness sake!
     
    ... which is pretty totalitarian, not to mention very, very creepy. The implication is that Santa must be omniscient, but the song never states this. Like Frosty the Slenderman Snowman, Santa is a stalker. He can't see you all the time when you're awake because he has a better chance of getting caught, but he sees you. When you're asleep. Wow. Furthermore, he stalks you long enough to be able to decide if you are bad or good and add it to one of his lists.
     
    Being bad or good is subjective, depending solely upon the moral compass of the discerning person (i.e. Santa). If Santa is a morally upright individual, then he would be compassionate enough to understand when you're crying or pouting for a legitimate reason and wouldn't stalk you without your express consent. But we can clearly see from the song that Santa is not a nice fellow. Anyone who stalks people for the purpose of arranging people into two categories is not someone I'd want making moral decisions, and thus his lists are not to be trusted.
     
    But what happens after you end up on these lists? After he's compiled the twin lists of all of the good and all of the bad people in this anonymous town, what will he do with them? Sell them to corporations? Hand them over to the NSA? Put them on Wikileaks? On the basis of this song alone, we can never know.
     
    NEXT TIME: SUMIKI GETS PUT ON THE NAUGHTY LIST. NOTHING HAPPENS.
  22. Sumiki

    It's a Christmas Tradition

    By Sumiki,

    My dad and I have a tradition: every Christmas, we clear out a room to shoot each other with Nerf guns and laugh maniacally when we hit each other’s heads.
     
    It’s a Christmas tradition because the room we do this in isn’t clean like this at any other point.
     
    War will commence shortly. Wish me luck.
     

  24. Sumiki
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71fZhMXlGT4
     
    Saint-Saëns was a French composer and organist known primarily for three pieces - The Carnival of the Animals (which he refused to have published during his lifetime for fear of tarnishing his public image), his first Cello Concerto, and this piece - which is arguably Saint-Saëns' most famous composition, having been transcribed and adapted extensively. The opening twelve notes on the harp represent midnight chimes, the xylophone represents rattling bones, and the "devil's chord" - the diminished fifth interval on solo violin - represent the summoning of the dead from their graves.
     
    Some consider the piece creepy, but I've always thought of it as fun. For truly terrifying music, there are a number of candidates - Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Giacinto Scelsi's Uaxuctum, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Iannis Xenakis' Bohor, or Ivan Wyschnegradsky's twelfth-tone, six-piano Arc en ciel.
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