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Money - a sensitive theme
As long I give the tithe, through my families hands is going exactly the double sums, I do earn.
My wife is very precise in accounting - sionce we are married - and writes down every red penny. After her years end balance I earned by my job (just to name any sum) 50 thousands. Euro or USD does not matter. But all money, going through my families hands has been exactly 100.thousands.
Year by year.
A true miracle.
[...]
Put your money on the very best bank account ever found - the kingdom of the Lord - not too much - just what the Lord wants. Tithe, mission offer, givings in social work of church - and make some gifts to the poor you will meet from time to time. No more - just what the Good Shepheard does await from you.

So if I invest in this particular religion, the Lord will effectively double my yearly income? I thank you for your astonishing and honest advice.

A family home in Germany might cost threehundred thousands Euro, in the USA about 50 thousand USD - in Africa just between five to ten thousands.

See the Lords wise economy?

I'm not sure that I do, but your ideas are intriguing to me. It seems only reasonable that He would have an influence on real estate pricing, and that he would use this influence to make the world a better place in this wise manner.

This will help too (indirect, invisible - as another miracle, done by the Lord) your home country to hold the christian culture, to hold its identity and to resist the terror of Islam.

...

This will help too (indirect, invisible - as another miracle, done by the Lord) your home country to hold the christian culture, to hold its identity and to resist the terror of Islam.

...

This will help too (indirect, invisible - as another miracle, done by the Lord) your home country to hold the christian culture, to hold its identity and to resist the terror of Islam.

WTF.

Is he wearing a tie?

Of course not, but I think the resemblance of his clothes to a shirt and tie, I think, contributes very much to my impression of him as just some guy with a stupid hat. You might want to consider this.

I love all the anti-Mac sentiment being hurled at all of the highly-vocal, voracious, and apparently invisible Apple zealots in this thread.  Poor poor straw man.

It's particularly awesome when they're hurled by Windows zealots. Deep down, Apple and Microsoft are the same creatures, with superficially different attitudes and clothing. You're basically on the same side, guys. Here's a list of a different sort of "patches".

I can't get my head around how we can get quakes in the UK.  We are bang in the middle of a tectonic plate... surely that's the safest possible place to be. Maybe someone could enlighten me.

Well... it is a comparatively safe place to be, but not completely earthquake-free. The notion that we all learn in school that earthquakes are caused by tectonic plates moving around and colliding and stuff is a very simplified one. I'm no geologist, so I can't go too far beyond that, but the Earth's crust is a complex thing, and stress builds up here and there all the time. Given enough stress, stuff will move. There will naturally be a lot more going on around a plate boundary, but it's not like everything else (the plates themselves) is rock solid and doesn't move. Wikipedia can tell you more.

Well, there's this (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937).

And this (The Great Dictator, 1940).

I don't know how interested you are in the realism of the actual environment, but a few things strike me as odd.

OK, so you've got a cozy green room, with a couch and all, for hanging out. Right behind the stage? No way. It would be somewhere else, behind doors. You wouldn't see people sitting in that couch having a chat during a show. And the makeup mirrors? They would probably be elsewhere, in a room specifically for dressing and makeup, and not for hanging out. Not least for hygienic reasons, because makeup is about the most effective way of spreading disease at a theatre.

And nothing would probably be well-lit in the areas immediately around the stage. That back wall really isn't enough to prevent light bleed.

Compared to the above, this is very much a minor issue, but (assuming this is an ordinary proscenium theatre) I would expect the whole side of the stage (where there is now a wall) to be open, with legs (curtains) obscuring the view to the audience. In my experience the areas at the sides of the stage, not behind it, are generally the most spacious of the areas immediately off-stage.

Bottom line is that the immediate off-stage areas are business-only, so to speak. There will be sets and props and stuff, and it will be dark. There will not be a soda machine or ambient lighting. Those are my thoughts upon seeing this.

When percussion and stuff enters, it sounds rather odd to me. It sounds to me somewhat like you've used a timpani sound (a fairly harsh one at that), at a pitch where timpani normally wouldn't play. If this is the case I would suggest maybe writing a more timpani-like part (lower and less percussive?), and adding a snare drum to fill that more "percussive" role. That whole section is also very lacking in the low end, very much preventing the kind of majestic feeling you might want. Better timpani will help, but not enough, so I would add some low strings (and maybe brass).

I would also contemplate adding some kind of pad at some point in the intro. Even just at a barely audible level, it might help glue the thing together.

Disregarding the fact that you're staying on the same chord forever (I'm sure you're aware of it), the very ending seems to me to be lacking direction and coherence. I'm not sure at all what you're trying to accomplish.


The practical side of the mid/ogg issue (which I might not have made clear in my previous post) is already making itself apparent to me, by the way. The issue isn't file size. The issue is that in the orchestration points I make above, I have to rely on basically guessing how it was actually written. If I could actually look at the notes, I might be useful. Now, if all you want to know is whether I think it sounds good or not (and a lot of people don't want to go beyond that), that's fine, but if you want to know how I think it could be improved... well, you get the idea. It's just odd, when everyone is posting helpfully zoomed-in versions of their sprites, that nobody wants to give music the same treatment.

I can't listen now since it's in the middle of the night and my headphones are not here, but I'll offer my thoughts on the midi vs. ogg issue.

I don't feel violated at all, since I don't really have any reason to care at all, but I do agree that a midi file is a far better choice in a case where the original is a GM midi file, and there is little or no postprocessing. I hold this opinion for a very practical and sensible reason: The critique and advice I can give you will be better, and it will be easier for me to think of it, meaning I'm more likely to actually do it in the first place (which I am in no way obliged to anyway).

On the other hand, not everyone wants thorough and detailed critique to begin with, for some reason, so it's up to you. Make my voluntary job easier, or don't.

Just felt it warranted to point out that there's some sense to Crazy's talk.

[This is a great concept.]

This is a great concept. There should be an independent regular contest with just this! I'll try to participate if I have time, but I look forward more than ever to hearing the entries.

By the way, people, this doesn't really require any specialist tools, does it? Just write down some key times. On paper, with a pen, if you have that. Come on.

I agree with Radiant. It doesn't seem to be much of a big deal to me.

Reviving an old thread, I know, but I've been more or less away from the internet for about a month and am catching up.

The tune itself is nice enough--yes, bouncy and doesn't get annoying etc. So if you just want to know if I like, then sure, I like it.

I do feel that there are some issues with the orchestration, however, but it'd be a lot easier to comment on that if I had a score or midi or something. Plus you'd have to be interested in critique of that sort, which experience teaches me not everyone is on a board like this.

I don't know for sure about Rosegarden, but LilyPond runs fine under Cygwin, meaning Linux is not necessary. Having used both Finale, Sibelius and LilyPond rather extensively, I can tell you this:

LilyPond far surpasses both Finale and Sibelius from a typographical point of view. It takes into account lots and lots of typographical rules that Finale and Sibelius more or less ignore. Sure, in the hands of a professional music engraver a page produced in one of these commercial applications can look truly awesome, but that's because he or she actually knows these rules, and spends a great amount of time on adjustments. Out-of-the-box, without requiring you to study music typography in-depth, LilyPond is the most successful of the three in just giving you a visually pleasing layout right there.

The downside for most typical users is the fact that LilyPond itself lacks a GUI. All input is done using a markup language (LilyPond is to Finale as TeX is to Microsoft Word). If you're not used to working that way, that's certainly an issue, but it's really rather intuitive and readable, and given some time you can learn to do things as quickly as in any graphical editor. In any case I often find it's worth it: the extra time it can take to input the notes is regained when I process the file and LilyPond simply does what I just told it to do, and it looks good, saving me the hours of tweaking required to make a Finale score look truly publishable. Of course, if you're not that concerned about the quality and just want a rough sketch, you might prefer Finale, but for work that you actually want to look good I can't recommend anything else than LilyPond.

And there's actually a big advantage to using a markup language: Every tweak that you do is right there, you've typed it with your own hands, and you can see it, change it or remove it as you like. If you need to adjust something in Finale or Sibelius, you drag it in this or that direction, you have no idea what the program is doing under the hood, and all sorts of odd things can happen that you have no idea how to avoid. In LilyPond, if something screws up, it's right there in front of you.

The whole markup issue might even be a negligible one if Rosegarden is any good. That I don't know, though. I'm getting my new Windows-free laptop from Zepto Computers. Once I have Linux running I'll try Rosegarden, and can report back if anyone is interested (tell me if you are, or I might not bother).

As for how Finale and Sibelius compare to eachother, it seems largely to be a matter of taste and tradition. I personally find Sibelius rather more musicianly than Finale: the latter often makes mistakes or lacks features that you can hardly imagine an actual musician would not have thought of. But in the end of the day, they can both do much the same things, with similar efficiency (though I'm leaning slightly towards Sibelius in both ease of use and quality of typography).


The bottom line is basically that as a music engraver, LilyPond definitely produces better-looking scores: If I were to prepare a finished piece for publishing, I would without hesitation choose LilyPond. As a music sketchbook or composing tool, Finale or Sibelius have interfaces better suited to that purpose: I've done arranging work entirely in Finale without ever touching a pencil, whereas I can't really imagine doing the same in LilyPond. So it really depends on what you need. The complicating factor is of course that LilyPond and Rosegarden are free (in every sense of the word), whereas Finale and Sibelius are crazy expensive for an ordinary person. And my final verdict is really suspended until I get my hands on Rosegarden, I'm afraid.

Hope you can gain some useful information from this.


Edit: I should also mention that there are numerous frontends for LilyPond besides Rosegarden, above all NoteEdit and Denemo. I will be checking these out as well in the coming weeks.

Not counting the Far East, I've seen a bunch of non-English language films, and to be honest, I've never been very impressed.

I've watched a number of non-Swedish films on several occasions, and they all sucked.

unless you're going for high quality sound, in which case use OGG (I think its lossless and its smaller than MP3 anyway)

Just for the record, since nobody has pointed it out: OGG is not lossless (it's in principle about as lossy as mp3 is), but it is open-source and free for commercial use (this is really one of the big reasons to use it out in the real world), and supposedly (AFAIK) has a better perceived quality to size ratio.

And less OT: Going by how your question is asked, I would say that if you don't know whether you need audio (wav, mp3, ogg, etc), you probably don't. I wouldn't want to download or buy a full audio soundtrack consisting of some guy's GM soundcard rendition of MIDI files. Without going into specifics, which others have done, no, in your case audio is not necessary.

It certanly will not be.. it's used extensivly allready.

It's called a TrackIR and I've owned one for years 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc7rGnHIgWQ&feature=related

It's much cheaper than buying a wii also

This isn't entirely the same thing. On the hardware side of it, the two are capable of more or less exactly the same thing. The application of it differs, however. TrackIR and similar devices I have only seen used as a control surface, such that you can use head movement to control things like view rotation, in existing applications which would otherwise have used buttons, a joystick or a mouse. It's both convenient and novel, but it does not create any type of illusion. Lee's idea, though, is one that I had never heard of. He's also merely detecting your head position, but he's actually using the data as an actual position in a virtual space, giving you the illusion of being in that same space. That's new AFAIK, and it's also really cool.

Why there isn't any good music out there anymore? People can't play? Everything is overdigitalized I think...

There is. There are people literally everywhere doing stuff that is really good. The issue is that the "traditional" commercial sources of music (MTV, mainstream radio, mainstream record marketing) simply do not deal in them. Surely there has been an increase of "commercial" and "manufactured" music that is crap, and consequently it's taking a great amount of public space--but there has certainly not been any decrease of skilled musicians and good music, and if anything I guess it's easier than ever to find it, given the whole "Web 2.0" deal. You won't stumble over it in mainstream media as easily as perhaps you used to, and I don't deny that that's a shame, but if you look for it, it's there.

They are awesome. If you're expecting more along the lines of "Hocus Pocus" you'll probably be disappointed (that song was fairly tongue-in-cheek, and they were not an otherwise tongue-in-cheek band), but as far as prog rock goes, Focus were some of the best around. Focus III and At the Rainbow are good albums to start with.

Yes, they were probably stoned, being Dutch and in the 70s, but I can assure you that Jan Akkerman is not "forgetting" anything in that second video. They are all excellent musicians.

Well, I DO see. I want his head filled with serious issues, rather than some shipuuden whatever ninja junk. I do not want him, while signing a serious paper, thinking how cool it was when some Sasuke killed demon with katana or something.

How about when Tosca killed Scarpia? When Ahab was finally consumed by his own obsession? When Friar Laurence's messenger failed to reach Romeo? I can see two possibilities here. Either you want your politicians to be some kind of supermen who have no interests besides politics, or you are indeed asserting that form of entertainment A is somehow superior to form of entertainment B. Which is it?

Where I live, adulthood is reached at age of 18. This is where people (on official level) take you seriously, you can buy alcohol, drive a car, marry, join or start a political party, vote. I repeat, vote. And also, you're fully responsible of what you think and do. ie - you will go to a real prison if you commit a crime. World assumes you are serious individual with look and understanding on the world. That you are grown up. I don't really imagine prime minister discussing latest naruto episode during a lunch break in parliament. But by the law combined with 19-year olds' anime fandom, it's possible.

I don't see how that hypothetical Naruto-watching prime minister would consequently be an inferior prime minster. And I don't see how this particular form of entertainment would be per definition so closely linked to childishness in a negative sense, or harmful if not grown out of. It seems to me like just another form of cultural elitism, of the same kind as that of voice teachers who assert that the techniques of the modern operatic idiom are superior from a health perspective to those of other idioms, using terms like "healthy vibrato" to imply that what is really an issue of aesthetic preference is somehow universal and objective.

Oh, and this might be a good time to tell ya this, the so popular Matrix Trilogy was a huge copy after an anime called X/1999. The series first appeared in 1992 and it has a LOT of Matrix elements.

OK. No anime as it is today would exist without early Disney. Crucial plot elements of Shakespeare's Hamlet were "copied" from the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (probably via a now lost play dubbed the Ur-Hamlet) and from Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. And so on. But does it really matter?

Even if we put that issue aside, your specific argument about X/1999 and The Matrix is kind of a post hoc reasoning. The fact of the matter is that both of these works draw heavily on literary, mythical and philosophical sources quite a bit older than the nineties. This happens now and then: Someone finds similarites between two recent works of fiction and believes one to be based on the other, when in fact they both more or less independently draw from common source or trope older than you think. Gandalf's wasn't the original Pointy Hat, you know.