One simple question: Why is this photo so ridiculously popular?  Why is it the most visited photo on my flickr photostream?

It seems that every day, this photo gets a couple dozen hits.  Despite being less than a year old, it has far more hits than many more interesting photos in the photostream, like this close-up Anonymous photo from a Scientology protest, or various photos that have made their way into articles on Wired’s or Gamasutra’s websites.

If the stats are to be believed, nearly all the traffic for that photo comes from search engines.  Looking specifically at the Google breakdown, the most popular searches are:

• death the kid cosplay
• soul eater cosplay
• soul eater
• maka cosplay
• cosplay soul eater
• etc…

So I go onto Google image search and try these searches… yep.  There’s my photo, first row of image results.

Ah well.

It’s kind of annoying.

I guess Soul Eater is the new something something…

(And if anyone knows I can get some automatic joomla-wordpress or joomla-lj crossposting in here, let me know!)
Been kind of busy the last few weeks… so here’s just a little thing that I’ve been meaning to post.

Lots of people love Kanno Youko’s stuff for various anime and games.  Many love the fact that she just hits the mark with such a diverse range of music.  I personally loved some of her older stuff; Brain Powerd is such an “honest” soundtrack, and that sort of honesty is something I strive for in my own music.  Her new stuff?  Eh.  Not super awesome stuff, I think.

Regardless, I was really surprised when someone sent me to this website: 【菅野よう子】インスパイア？類似曲比較動画まとめ ([Kanno Youko] Inspired?  A Comprehensive Music Soundtrack Comparison)

Basically, check out the various Youtube and Nicovideo links.  Come to your own conclusions.

Me… well… it’s interesting thinking about it since over here, someone recently accused me of grabbing the Phantasm theme in order to make this first track from Castlevania: Order of Shadows.  Eh… I guess it’s possible to see it that way.  If you really want to compare, the stuff that’s similar are pretty different from a functional standpoint.  In my track, that beginning motif is there primarily as a backing for the guitar solo, and the phrase length is twice as long as that in Phantasm, which is more a theme than a motif.  It’s also there for the entirety of the song in Castlevania, while in Phantasm, it drops out as soon as the soloistic part develops.  I mean, really, it just feels very different to me as a song.  Take it or leave it, but any resemblance is purely coincidental, as I’ve never heard of Phantasm until a few days ago.  I’m just not a horror film kind of guy.

(Also… man, what’s up with that music in that Phantasm youtube link?  That performance is pretty bad.)

Oh yeah, my thoughts on those Kanno comparisons?  I definitely think she or her assistants were a bit more than inspired.  Yeah, my little Castlevania song contained a primary element that sounded similar to another primary element in another piece of music, but the pieces themselves were quite different.  Many of those Kanno pieces don’t just have one or two similar elements, but many elements coming together to create a very similar song structure with similar arc and similar feel.

Now I’ve got otacracy, apocalypsewow, insertcredit, this blog, and my academic blog… yeah, that’s exactly what I needed. More places to put stuff on.

But I think I’m going to be concentrating on otacracy for now, just so I can mess around more with this newfangled cms and perhaps learn something…

Usually when I’m invited to do a gig, whether it be a photo gig or a music gig or a [stand around and explain some friend’s friend’s art] gig, I jump into it immediately. When the invitation reached me on this occasion, however, I said I wasn’t sure if I could or should. And I thought long and hard about whether I should go, and if I went, whether I should bring my camera system at all. This was largely spurred by the fact that I had a camera system that didn’t feel like the one that I brought to Fanime just weeks earlier. Really, it didn’t feel like me.

The difference was just one lens. The image quality from my 16-50 standard zoom wasn’t feeling right on the borders. A real estate photo gig revealed to me that the right border was really quite poor: something that hadn’t been a problem in any of my Famine pictures (though examination of that set reveals that the problem was in there since my first days with the lens.) Since it was relatively new, I went to the dealer and switched it out. This newer one had no problems with the optics, but the focus would randomly decouple from the control ring so that I couldn’t manually focus the lens, and the autofocus wasn’t quite as good either. I went back to the store and it turns out that they didn’t have any others in stock. I needed a standard zoom, though, so I grabbed a 16-45 to tide me over and wished my 16-50 a safe flight to Colorado where it would be serviced and repaired…

And while the 16-45 is a decent lens, it never felt like MY lens. Yeah, it’s a dumb psychological ownership/extension of self sort of crappy thing, but it really hit me. During the photoshoot at UCLA, it really was a struggle for me to actually wield that thing. Objectively, I could tell there were things about this replacement lens that were better: faster focus speed, smaller, lighter, slightly easier to manual focus… but I could never get it to feel like it was mine. That 16-50, though… from the first shots I took with that lens, I knew that it was mine… and after a few hundred shots, it went beyond simply being mine to being me.

In the music world, there aren’t too many instruments that I would call an extension of me. That one Petrof piano, perhaps. In the camera world, however, I had run across a number of pieces of equipment that became me. Probably the first lens was a Quantaray (Sigma) 24mm 2.8 Macro. And then there was that Minolta XG-M that might as well had been grafted to my right hand.

And then there’s the Pentax 16-50. It’s not a brilliant lens the way some other lenses in Pentax’s catalog are brilliant. The purple fringing on this thing is really tough to deal with, and it would be nice if the minimum focus distance was shorter. But man, the je ne sais quoi!

I personally hate using that phrase, but when it comes to matters of self, it’s so appropriate. I’ve always thought it amazing how we can know so much about the little details that make up these complicated things that exist outside of us: electric and electronic sequences, mechanical craziness, chemical surprises, aesthetic decisions. But all these things that we recognize as our own personal processes; the first thing we look at when we enter a room or the firmness of a handshake; how our body somehow makes the subtle switch from voluntary to involuntary breathing; we don’t know anything about them… but at least we own them and are proud of them to the point we allow it to become us. And every now and then, it is just so awesome to come across something outside of us that could possibly become part of us.

I just need to wait for that part of me to come back from Colorado.

Back in the day, despite identifying myself as primarily a video game music composer/designer, I was recognized more as a video game journalist, and the work I had on the internet at the time bore that out. All the little bits of audio and music I did never showed up, while my insert credit and Gamasutra output just rose to the surface.

I wonder if this photography hobby of mine will work similarly.

OTACRACY.COM

Nothing there right now, but man, I really want to put something up there that’s substantial. Something that has stuff that people would willingly click on. Maybe even something that could get me a bit of extra pocket change thanks to the wonder of ad impressions! Maybe!

(Also, otakracy.com points to otacracy.com. I prefer the ‘c’ spelling, but enough people have mentioned the ‘k’ possibility that I had to get it…)

Since the last post, I did a bunch of stuff for Gamasutra and GameSetWatch regarding Game Developers Conference, although it really just boils down to two things: writing articles and taking pictures. A bit more interesting are a few photos I’ve taken that have been used as material in news items. Now I can add NPR to the sites I’ve had photos on… and that feels pretty nice, I have to admit.

A little part of me tells me: Maybe I should try to do more with this photo thing.  Maybe…

This morning was particularly fun, though. I forced myself to write music for a 3 minute long short film… in 30 minutes.

I really wish I had more time for fun… especially writing music for fun. It’s rather frustrating that I have to force it in through these small windows of time between real work…

Running to Fry’s to get a mobo, processor, memory, PSU, case, and hard drive.

I am severely annoyed.

Facebook is really nice, but then there’s stuff there that I would like to put on my blog (which is mirrored by my LJ), and that blog is totally separate from my academic blog (that I haven’t touched since summer), and all three of them don’t quite connect with the people I connect with on AIM, ICQ, MSN, or the various people on the 5 different IRC networks I’m on. So to recap:

• There’s this interesting podcast called Into The Score, which is rather good at what it does: listening to and analyzing video game scores. One of their recent podcasts features the score to Cloud, as well as a rather lengthy interview with me. Man it’s hard to listen to my own voice…
• I recently went to an Asian pop culture convention and took way too many photos (though not as much as I take during the gigante cons like Anime Expo). Some of them turned out pretty well, I think! It helps when the cosplayers in front are pretty darn cool (I only participated because I was asked by them, actually. And I’ll probably go from now on as it’s a nicely run con with some cool guys running the thing.)
• Synful Orchestra FINALLY released the latest version of their not-so-popular plugin. I happen to LOVE it… but I now have significant problems. Basically, the new version wants a very specific latency set in the sound card drivers… which is actually only available in a previous driver. But that previous driver had problems because it didn’t provide a specific latency to deal with this dodgy MOTU Symphonic Instrument plugin that I barely use… except for its pretty darn good sounding percussion, which isn’t provided for in any of my other software libraries. So… ARGH. Very argh.
• And oh yeah. I love my new camera.