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Crimson, if you can easily update BASS, by all means do so, I would be much oblieged. I'm in some pretty hard times at the moment and have dropped out of the AGS loop almost completely. No idea if, when, and how I could continue.

Sorry for this stupid offtopic. I want to contact Ghost but somehow he can't get the private messages or what?

1. I made a mistake when buying a black guitar, it's never free of spots, smudges and dust, it always looks like I've been eating chips then trying to fill the whole surface with fingerprints
2. why doesn't the violin have marks on the neck? Or on that note stuff like bass guitars without frets (which I get to a point) or marks...why would you not want a note to be at least marked in general area on something that's a half a meter long
3. personally I like the violin better when it's used as an addition for something like a basic guitar/bass/drums setup or in an orchestra, than as a solo instrument
4. that violin looks really cool and I admire your ambition

That's very good question. In violin, the markings don't really help you a lot since you can't actually see them that well because of the playing angle. They put markers only for beginners. I bought this one for my self-practice:



That's very clever design. It's not sticker but it sticks to itself so you just fold it into back of the neck and sits there firmly. Also you can very easily remove it away and since it's not sticker, it never leaves anything to violin.

accidently double post.... 

[Vibrato]

I had this in my mind for years. I always loved the sound of violin but I knew it's very difficult instrument, but well... you really can't know anything until you buy one and "test" it by yourself! I always looked at web auctions waiting to find some higher quality electric violin (there's quite many bad ones... like acoustic violins as well), and then finally found one for right price. It was actually only used couple times in a demonstration occasion but otherwise was as new. It was sold at ebay by the company itself because they ditch away their older batches or used ones at ebay but this one even includes one year full warranty. The set also includes case, bow, resin, (crappy) headphones, audio cable and battery. For only 65 pounds, you really couldn't go wrong! 

To me, this one that I bought, looks a lot nicer than the entirely black one:




It also sounds great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJlb7z8CCGI

I was damn right... it's one of the most difficult instruments ever! Perhaps you all know guitar. Guitar is chromatic which means that there's those metallic frets which keeps the strings at specific spot so you can hold the strings without worrying the correct placement of fingers so it's a lot easier to play for the first time. But in violin there's no frets, which means that if you hold a string one millimeter upper or lower, it's out of tune. It's all about the feeling of your fingers and their right placement since there's no even marked spots. Guitar is like the opposite of violin: With guitar you can immediately play familiar notes and chords but it require a lot of practice to learn some more complex playing methods. In violin it's opposite: The beginning is always the hardest part. But as soon as you can get the grip of the playing technique, it will get more easier to learn new and more complicated things.

In violin fingering the strings is difficult enough but then you also must hold and move the bow straight. It's much more difficult than I originally thought because it requires so much of concentration on several different aspects at the same time:

1. Hold the strings at right spots to acquire notes in tune and memorize their place
2. Using right fingers regarding to level of the fingerboard
3. When moving the bow, you must keep it straight as it makes the sound worse if it's not
4. Keep the speed of moving bow steady
5. The pressure on bow affect to the volume and tone of the strings, and you must be careful not to use too much force.

Oh right... and I am not even mentioning the Vibrato! I am not joking about that it really requires about 3 years of practice alone to learn the technique of vibrato.

Violin requires surprisingly amount of maintenance, even for being electric one. First you need to tune up the each string, then put resin into bow's hairs which creates the friction into strings, though it's required to do only few times when it wears away. Then after each time you finish playing violin, you have to wipe out all the resin away from the strings and from the body of violin. And also, if you keep violin without any use for longer than a week, you should loosen up the strings which means you have to tune them up again in next time.

Another really surprising thing about holding violin: You actually have to hold the violin only by using your shoulder and head. You can't do things like vibrato if you are using your hand to hold the violin! How the heck are you supposed to hold the strings hardly when you can't have enough counter-pressure to keep your violin on your shoulder? When you look at violinists it looks so easy... totally wrong!!!

Luckily I am not even dreaming about being classical violinist. For that I started way too late

Instead I can enjoy the clean sound of my violin's output since it's electric like electric guitar and can have whatever effects to use with it.


Here's a few of my favourite violin songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HLRqRjT50
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUDhA4hXdS8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw8lgt5-wg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhmVZvocTp0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-XWYcULwsY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA3oPpH7KVg

I could be very interested if you can create english version as well. Sinclair short novels were sold in here Finland (in finnish) from 1982 to 1993 and gosh, I just loved them... one of the very few things I like to read, so I became a collector of these novels and it's quite funny to collect something that's older than myself. I rarely read books but then again I did read LOTR and some other stuff.

So I do have a passion for John Sinclair already, which can be a significant advance for this project. 

Not sure if this is offtopic or not but I would like to say this.

When I am thinking about "what is creativity". The best explanation I have heard is that it's basically a "controlled chaos". I heard a story about a man who got something like head injury which resulted very bizarre feature: He can't be without painting everything. He's got the very urgent need to paint everything he imagines. The trouble is that he had already painted his house from floor to roof! The man himself described his state like:

"Imagine that your brain is producing a billion bubbles, like soap bubbles... then each bubble bursts into another billion of smaller bubbles! My head is exploding from images!"

The problem was that everything was pure random. There were no any consistences whatsoever of his creations and yet he had to paint every single bubble!

So in a nutshell, the creativity is being able to have all of these bubbles (chaos) in your mind but yet to be able to somewhat control them and bring some kind of consistent. 


The memory of human is very fragmented. It's very similar to internet: Each site contains links, and each link bring you another links... just like the bubbles. When you think about something, the images can bring you another ones, be it memories or imagination. Anyone could try it. I am using this method for quite many things. First do some sort of brainstrom with exceptional freedom and note down everything you can imagine and after that, try to bring the consistence for everything... put a string into all things and tie up for something what we can call as a "plot". 

When I am composing music, it's even harder because I improvise and do everything in live, which means I must do the brainstorming and plotline executing at the very same time! 

Here's something that affected to me quite a lot, and specially since I have always been fascinated by stop-motion animation technique:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdwdg0_jiri-trnka-the-hand-la-mano_shortfilms

It's got very strong political message.

Also, note the impressive feature: The mouth is always static. Instead of animated mouth, the expressions are always only done by controlling angles and light positions. It's very impressive.

I have always used AGS with the option that it will send me notify to my email everytime when I receive private messages. Suddenly, it just stopped without any reasons. I tried to reset the option, re-typing my email, but no, I do not receive anything and there's nothing in spam box either to look for.

Of course, I forgot today evening. I'll try to do something quickly tomorrow.

EDIT: Okay, I completed the contest song. It was really improvised (everything played in live, at once) with only one keyboard and by hand and you can hear it. For the first time I tried my clever multi-layering system and volume pedaling together to achieve this fantastic result of complexity but I am only very shamed how greatly it failed, in terms of monitoring and mixing: It clips and the sounds are very unbalanced. I rushed everything because I didn't really have enough time and I literally improvised this at once (plus my hands failed to keep the rhythm anyway). I hope you enjoy.

P.S. Sorry if it became way too "action" style. I was trying to describe an adventurer that is immediately taken into "good vs. bad" fighting situation by cunning evil rival archaeologist... 

http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/tune_contest_(action).mp3

[Retina (Bake Sale)]

Music:

I am completely self-studied musician. I am using huge amount of electronic keyboards, synthesizers, various effects processors and other tools. What makes the difference from the "masses" is that my music is all about sounds and emotions behind them. That is, I create sounds and compose music around the sounds and the music is all coming out of my pure heart. Mostly improvising and playing by hand, I am capturing the most important thing in my music: the (imperfect) expressions of (inadequate) humanity.

About music, I can do almost anything allowing for the limits of my skills, imagination and taste. I like to compose very cinematic orchestral and electro/electronic music (even synth pop) and anything between them, usually in various combinations. I also like ambient and abstract music (like in David Lynch movies) where you can't make difference between instruments and sounds.

Some examples of my work:

Retina (Bake Sale)
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Retina_Soundtrack__Menu_Theme.mp3
http://80.69.162.41/m/9cd/120046411061/Retina_Soundtrack__Surreal_madness.mp3
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Retina_Soundtrack__Memories_of_the_past.mp3

Concurrence (MAGS)
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Concurrence_intro.mp3
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Concurrence_ambient.mp3

Other sounds/music:
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/EX-5R_presets_improvisation.mp3
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Generalmusic_S3_bells.mp3
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Tales_from_the_future.mp3
http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~patalus/new_stuff/Improvisation_stuff/Waking_up_from_unknown_place.mp3




P.S, I'm extremely busy the rest of this year (2012) since I am moving into new apartment in December.

Still no answer or any contacts... 

I will keep bumping this topic until I can find out where the ghost is lurking.

Perhaps I could try to do something but is it yet too late to participate?

If it's not too late, I can try if I'm in the mood for creating something as well. 



EDIT: Here it is... a shitty quick improvisation about falling leaves:

Falling leaves

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/EMI-MIXING-CONSOLE-BOARD-MIXER-SUMMING-DESK-FROM-VINTAGE-NEVE-API-TRIDENT-STUDIO-/320789418703?nma=true&si=GDujUqVC%2BxBWdMds1xCGM5G4yFw%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

Such a space station and everything for only a "small amount of cash" 

They say with this mixer, they recorded some Beatles records.

Did you enter his e-mail using a keyboard or a ouija board?

Even with the email I have got, still no responds. I really hope Ghost will contact me because of Mythaumatology which was almost finished! It would seem very irrational for him to stop it at the near of goal... but then again it's irrational to ragequit without even telling why...

Ghost! Where are you???

I am SAD!

Ghost is out there...he's making games...being all ghostey and stuff

The Ghost is out there and he will be haunting us once again! 

So what's the situation? Will there be any other tune contest? It seems like the musicians available are quite a minority?

About the cocktail theme, I must add that it would help to do quite John Cage stuff...

Perhaps this does not belong into here... but I must post this anyway.

Since Ghost left the AGS forum, I only now realized I never asked his email so is there anyone who possibly knows some way to contact him? If you do, please send me PM.

I even joined Ghost's "daemons in the attic" blog site but yet I haven't received any responds. I also sent PM for Bicilotti but he hasn't been online for long time.

perhaps he means why is it not finished yet

No, I really wanted to know why this is still being worked on, and why "Ghost" hasn't changed anything. This thread clearly indicates that he is facing a rough road with his current mixture of "mature content" and no information at all regading plot and puzzles.
I have no problems with a nude character, but right now it looks as if it really is the only gimmick Ghost is prepared to show/talk about. Isn't a GiP for sharing information?

Don't be such a troll about the nudity as if that would be a real issue. And aren't you aware that some games can be too great to even reveal a tiny bit of the plot? I mean that just giving away anything about the game could potentially reveal too much? IMHO it's best moment when you don't even have a clue about what the game will be about and then the game opens up for you with potentially amazing story that you didn't even have expectations.

Ghost told me that the game could be finished within 2 months and that it's realistic schedule. After he can finish the game, it ends up directly for me to compose it. How long it will take for me to compose the game? Who knows... From one week up to half an year! 

So it is still being worked on, althought at slower pace. So don't worry.