Entry #6

            First thing: I got a follower! Thank you, Chase! Glad this is somewhat interesting. :D
            Onward:

Yuck, too much swimming. >.<

I really don’t mean it when I say bad stuff about swimming, I just like complaining. At least we’re starting our taper.

Tapers always make me feel really antsy, because they leave me with too much extra energy. I feel like I have to jump up and do something, but I have to force myself not to because I know it won’t help my taper. Fortunately I’m not feeling that way yet, but I know I will. I hate anticipation. And now I have to stop tennis because we’re on taper, so I have even more energy. :P

Now, onward to the music review. This time it’s about the band Deftones. I know they aren’t DnB or Dubstep, but I’ve been listening to their new album “Diamond Eyes” a lot recently.

Deftones suffered a tragedy recently. Chi Cheng, the bassist, feel into a coma after a bad car accident. Diamond Eyes was created after this accident, and it is very haunting because of their feelings for the bassist. Recently, Chi awakened and is now in a semi-conscious state.

Unfortunately, I must say that this is Deftones’ best album. Even without Chi, they managed to create luscious soundscapes and hard-hitting songs. They brought in another bassist to substitute for Chi during recording, and this bassist recreated Chi’s sound perfectly.

Deftones manages to combine many different genres, from alternative rock to ambient electronic music. This is in part because they have a keyboardist who puts down pads in the background, creating that sound that makes songs sound fuller.

Two songs I highly recommend on Diamond Eyes are the title song, “Diamond Eyes,” and “Sextape”. “Sextape” is not what you think, a dirty song about sex and stuff. It’s a really haunting song with an amazing clean guitar riff. It may have lyrics about sex, but the lyrics are pretty much drowned out by the instruments, and the singer doesn’t enunciate that well, so I can't understand the lyrics. XD

That’s all, folks.

R.C.

Entry #5

‘Sup. *cool nod*

Lol, not really. I do that on purpose to be funnily awkward, but it usually just turns out plain awkward. XD

I tried to fix my bike today, after that jump I went over yesterday when I was mountain biking. Jumping definitely screwed up my steering. It turned my handlebars so they aren’t in line with the wheel. I thought I would be able to fix it, but then I realized it’s a bike I got from Kmart and honestly isn’t worth fixing. Maybe I’ll get a new bike soon. Of course, it is about to be winter, so I don’t really need it.

So now because of taper, I get to sit home and do nothing when I’m done with my schoolwork. I tried watching TV, but it glitched out when I was trying to watch Lost. The screen went all blurry and then just turned off. Our TV is pretty old anyway, it’s not even an LED TV. I was expecting it to die eventually. Oh well, I can watch whatever I want on the computer instead.

On a different topic, I hope it snows soon! I want to go snowboarding really badly. I love cold weather, especially when it’s just snowed and the sky is cloudless. It’s always amazing to go outside in weather like that.

No music review today, I think I’ll do music reviews once a week, if that’s okay with the 0 people who read this. :P

Oh. My brother came up to me this morning and said, with a straight face, that he wanted a gun for Christmas. He’s eight years old. I don’t think he knows too much about guns.

So I asked him why he wanted one, and all he says is, “To protect myself from the tall thing.”

I asked him what the ‘tall thing’ was, but he didn’t answer. I have a feeling it’s just a really big deer; we have deer roaming around at night outside our house all the time.

R.C.

Entry #4

Done with NaNoWriMo! I’d include the link to the banner here, but I’m not well-versed enough with HTML and stuff to add it here. Instead, I’d like to talk about drawing. I’m trying to draw some pictures to accompany the novel, but I can’t seem to get the proportions right for any person I draw. The arms are always waaaay too long. Same with the hands, they always end up looking all claw-y. >.<

Maybe I just shouldn’t draw; my pictures always end up too depressing. XD

Have you ever noticed how annoying the word spell-checker is? The little red squiggly line underlines dubstep because it doesn’t recognize it as a word, so I end up having tons of the squiggles in every post.

Anyway, I didn’t have swimming or tennis this weekend, seeing as all the coaches are away and the tennis club is closed for the weekend, as well as the pools I swim at. So no news there.

I did get to go mountain biking at an awesome park near me, with my little brother. There’s at least 20 miles of difficult trails there, and we must have biked at least 5 miles. There’s practically nobody at this park because nobody knows about it (thankfully!). If you bike one of the trails the correct way, it’s downhill all the way—no pun intended. At the top it’s a straight downhill, then a HUGE natural banked turn. You have to take the turn at full speed or else you crash into a tree, which I found out the painful way the first time. XD

Then it’s about fifty feet down this bare rock face, which is REALLY dangerous if you fall, seeing as you’ll fall and basically skin yourself to the bone if you slide down the rock. At the bottom of the trail there are two jumps that you have to take. One is pretty tiny, but the other one sends you into the air for at least 5 seconds. Of course, I had to take that one. I nearly broke my bike. :P

Then, after that, there’s this really narrow bridge over a river—really, it’s a river, not a stream. The river is at least 30 feet wide, and you have to cross over on this two-foot-wide plank that’s quite rickety.

We had finished that trail, which is quite the adrenaline rush, let me tell you, and we were biking back to the house when we saw this other little trail off to the side. It looked barely used, but steep…so of course we had to try it. It was pretty awesome. There was one guy on the trail so we had to brake and we couldn’t go full speed on the whole trail. :/

He was wearing a business suit. Seriously, who would wear a business suit hiking? It didn’t make sense, but he seemed to be looking for something out in the woods. I didn’t really see him because there was a downhill after we passed him, but he had a hat on, like a bowler hat. He must have been freezing, but he was just chilling.

That trail was called the Gut Loop, pretty fitting seeing as if you fell you would probably get gutted. No lie, it’s really dangerous, especially with cold mud splattering everywhere. :O

I’m not going to do a music review today; this post is pretty long as it is.

See you!

R.C.

Entry #3

Boo.

Just heard the NOISIA song “Split the Atom”. Crazy song. I love NOISIA.

So I guess I’ll do the music review first? This one is about NOISIA. I found this group because of the crazy remix of Skrillex’s song “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites”. Absolutely dirty remix. I went to listen to more of their stuff, and it’s just as high quality.

NOISIA’s style of music hovers somewhere among DnB, Dubstep, and Glitch/Trip Hop. Also, apparently they got their name from turning the word VISION upside-down. Try it, you’ll see.

They’re big on Soundcloud right here: http://soundcloud.com/noisia

Now, back to real life. XD

Not much new to say about swimming…on the other hand, tennis is going pretty well. I probably won’t be playing tennis during my taper, so I’m trying to cram as much as I can in now. My mom probably hates me for having to drive me practically every day when I could just get my license and drive myself. :P

There’s a tournament next weekend, I’ll tell you guys how I did. That is, if I have anyone here listening to me. :’(

Tennis tournaments are always really stressful, and there are always those kids who cheat to win. I hate those kids, even if they claim their parents will ‘kill them’ if they don’t win. It doesn’t matter, playing unfairly in something people do normally play fairly to win is just bad sportsmanship.

There are the kids who have tempers, the ones who throw their rackets, and I’m always scared to call the point penalties because I’m afraid they’ll throw rackets at me. …Just kidding, I’m not scared of getting hurt, seeing as there are always officials around, I just feel uncomfortable calling point penalties on people who are already angry.

Then there are the really arrogant guys who shout “C’MON!” after practically any point they win, hoping somebody will notice them. Finally, there are the quiet guys who barely say a word during an entire match other than to call out the score, but win the tournaments with ease.

I feel like I fit into none of the categories; I’m a quiet guy who never gets past the second round. XD

I play tennis more for enjoyment than for actually pursuing a career in it. No lie, tennis is quite fun. I don’t know how much my gung-ho coaches appreciate my ‘fun, not work’ attitude, but oh well.

And one more thing. Never play tennis in public parks, with woods nearby. During the summer my friend and I had this hiker come out of the woods when we were playing, and he asked me for water before I saw him. Scared the life out of me. XD

I suppose I’m talking to myself, but this is still fun.

Bye all!

R.C.

Entry #2

Hi again everybody.  :)

I’ve noticed I tend to use emoticons a lot. Somebody I know said that was fun, since all my texts and messages seem nicer with smileys. XD

Anyway, swimming is getting more difficult. Our coach is pushing us really hard, before we go into taper for our winter taper meet. In case you don’t know what taper is (which I’m sure most people don’t), it’s when swimmers do less and less work in the pool to relax the muscles before a major meet. This meet coming up is one of the important ones. It’s where most of our team tries to qualify for the bigger swim meets, like Junior Olympics and Speedo Sectionals. Opposite of what you would think, Speedo Sectionals is a more difficult and prestigious meet than Junior Olympics.

I’m looking forward to taper. The swimming is definitely taking its toll on my body; the air in the pool area is pretty bad quality-wise and I’ve started coughing a lot, along with a bunch of the others on the team. It’s pretty common, though, and I don’t think I’m sick. Hope I don’t get actually sick before the meet. :/

That’s leaving you guys on a bad note. A good thing is that I’m almost done with NaNoWriMo. :D I’m at 46,000 words, and I have 4 days left. I’m writing about a guy who gets trapped in a house in the woods with various hallucinations—except some of the hallucinations are ghosts, and one of the hallucinations is actually a real guy who killed all the real ghosts. It’s even creeping me out. I’m looking forward to be done with writing 1667 words a day though. XD

Now, for my music review: Skrillex. This guy just got really famous in the dubstep world for his crazy songs. I mean CRAZY. Some of the best jump-up and skank dubstep music I’ve heard.

Skrillex is actually Sonny Moore, who was the singer for a band named “From First To Last”. This band was really famous in 2006 as an emo band. Personally, I really didn’t like FFTL. I don’t like emo music that much. But after he left FFTL and went through his solo artist phase and became a dubstep and electro producer, I have massive respect for him.

His music incorporates ridiculous samples before the big drops—a kid screaming, “DAD, OH MY GOD!”—and various styles. He doesn’t just produce dubstep, he produces house, normal techno, and some crazy genre-defying remixes (see his remix of La Roux’s “In For The Kill”). His style is chaotic, using many different sounds to complement the wobbly bass.

If you hear his stuff and you like dubstep, you’re guaranteed to listen more than once. I highly recommend Skrillex.

See his official Youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOfficialSkrillex .

Your royal awkwardness,

R.C. XD

Entry #1, Introductions and Stuff

Hi all! ^_^

So I decided to make a blog today. I don’t know why, I just felt like it. I had been turning the idea around in my head for a while, but I always thought it would take too much time. Then, today, I thought, “Oh, what the heck,” and signed up. :D

Anyways, on this blog I’m going to do some semi-journal entries and stuff (obviously nothing TOO personal, seeing as this is on the Internet for everyone to see) and I’m going to review some music (seeing as I’m a budding Drum&Bass producer myself, it’s going to be mostly Drum&Bass and some Dubstep).

I’m very active in sports. I’m a hardcore swimmer, but I play tennis as well. Swim season is in full swing now, and my club team has a meet practically every weekend until the end of March. ._. Those meets are quite tiring. Thank gawd we have a break for Thanksgiving—of course, the break is only the day before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day, we’re in the pool right after.

So, swimming takes up most of my time. I’m homeschooled though, so I have more time to do various activities than most people, I guess. Also, just remembered to add that I’m a guy lol.

I suppose that was my awkward introduction part, and now I’ll do a music review. I don’t see the need to do a journal entry for my first post, so I’ll just do a review. This review is of the Drum&Bass producer on Youtube named TwoThirds. Now, he has some absolutely amazing stuff. He seems to specialize in liquid DnB, which flows really well.

Strings seem to feature prominently into his music. He likes to keep things very organic, and therefore quite pleasing to the ear. I could sit and listen to his stuff for hours. :D

His latest song (as of this post) is called Military Mind, a really calming piece. The piano is beautiful, and the drums mesh perfectly with the bass riff. Keep in mind this stuff is all done on the computer, and let me tell you that I have enormous respect for this guy because I can’t make any of my music sound this good. XD

I love me some liquid DnB, and TwoThirds’ stuff is some of the highest quality non-professional (yet!) music you can find out there. I wish I could word this review better to fully describe his awesome sounds, but I think you get the picture.

Find Lewis (TwoThirds’ real name) on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/dranner123 .

P.S. I’m going to try to update this once a day, but on weekends that may be a little bit difficult.

Hope I’m not talking to myself! :P

R.C.