I Believe in a Thing Called KHAAAAAAAAN, Just Listen to the Rhythm of my Heart..

Two Songs in Two Weeks is Some Kind of Record

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 04:17:36 GMT

Yeah. This particular song is called "Epic Failure", and it's my longest, most prog-rock like song yet. Check it out! And don't forget the rest of my site here.

-EE

I Am a Damn Songwriting Machine

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:34:43 GMT

If for some reason you don't visit any of my other non-website hubs, you may wish to know that I wrote and uploaded another new song. The song is called Tuition Madness, and I honestly can't remember if I wrote about it here when I first wrote the lyrics. Anyway, check it out, and leave comments here or here!

-EE

I wrote another new song.

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:28:56 GMT

Hooray for me. Check it out here, and you can leave me comments on it here or here.
-EE

HAY GUYS I R GRATE SONGWRITER.

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:13:29 GMT

Or just really vain about my bass skills. Judge for yourself here. Or see a more complete update of sorts here.
-EE

I'm back from MAGfest!

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:42:42 GMT

Indeed! My full summary of the event is here. An addendum is here, and from those two entries I think you can get to most of my thoughts on the challenges and the convention in general.

I have a new song.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:38:56 GMT

It's at my website. It's called "Liberation", and it's an acoustic little tune about a baby's first hours of life. It's something really different for me, so hopefully you'll like it. Leave me comments either here or on my site--I do read them, really!

Also, this is a reminder that my site also serves as my primary blog now, so check that out for reviews and thoughts about various facets of life.

-EE

Another New Song

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:25:54 GMT

I have another new song on my website. It's called "On a Cloudy Monday", and you can download it here. Let me know what you think either here or on the site!

-EE

I wrote a song.

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:55:10 GMT

It's at my website, if you haven't seen it yet. It's called "Arrowsmash", and it's a silly little song about playing Dance Dance Revolution and games like it. Also check out this page about my upcoming album.

-EE

I have a website.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 00:51:38 GMT

That's right. Not a MySpace (Though I have one of those), not a FaceBook page...an actual, honest-to-goodness, dot-com-level website. In the future, I'll probably be posting any updates I have in my life to there, so make sure you bookmark it!

Although the main page of the site looks like another blog, the reason I invested in it was because lately I've been getting back into writing music in a serious way. At some point, I actually want to record and release an album, and so I got the website to get a bit more of a professional image surrounding it (Even if the main site is the blog). MySpace pages are nice and all, but I think having the site will make me stand out a bit. So yeah. Check it out. Download all my music and thrill at its awful production. Leave some comments on the entries that are there if you feel so inclined. Give my new e-mail address (Which you can click on the sidebar of the site) a workout. And just generally keep watching it, as I'll be updating it more frequently than I have this Journal (Which isn't exactly difficult).

-EE

On post-college Adulthood

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:54:37 GMT

Recently I made a payment on my school loans, bringing the amount I owe down to roughly $11,500 USD which, with the state of the dollar today, is roughly 3 units of any other currency. The recent woeful performance of the US dollar in the world market is not my primary concern, however.

Rather, I've been thinking about the mindset that society takes where there is this immense pressure to follow a very narrow track in life--that is, go to school, go to college, get the hell out of your parents' house as soon as possible. While I admit I've done almost no formal research on the matter, but it's my understanding that the last part of this path in particular is a rather recent--and perhaps United States-centric--social construct.

It's also not a construct that I can see surviving for very long if things keep up the way they are. The housing market bubble has popped, homes are getting foreclosed on left and right...to say nothing about how quickly the cost of college is rising. College is, many would tell you, essential if you want to "make something of yourself". Yet fewer and fewer people can reasonably afford it--the cost continuing to rise at something like three or four times the rate of inflation. One of my former bosses remarked that college is effectively like a second mortgage nowadays, and while you can nitpick the word choice of that sentence (Since, for most people, college comes first, I think it would technically be more accurate to say that the mortgage is like a second college debt), the point--that most will be paying off their school loans for many years after the fact--is definitely correct.

In my own case, I've been out of school for about a year and a half, with close to a year of that spent working at a job that actually pays pretty well. In that time, I've thrown basically every dollar I have toward paying off my college debt, intentionally forgoing looking for my own place to live, a better car, etc. to do so--my line being "I'll accept being thought of as a 'loser' (And it is this attitude that I think will become less and less prevalent as time passes and college costs become more and more of a burden) for the next two years if the payoff is I'm not a slave to my debts for the next twenty.". And I still owe more than ten thousand dollars!

My point boils down to this: How can anyone possibly live up to the expectations of US-ian society while living anything other than paycheck-to-paycheck, paying off insane amounts of money to various lending agencies for the rest of their lives?

Something has to give.

-EE

I continue to live.

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:50:11 GMT

Hooray!

I recently wrote some more lyrics, which you can see here.

And so this isn't just a redirection post, welcome to 2006. Or the 1980s. Or something.

-EE

A video for you gamer geeks out there

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 02:13:15 GMT

Take some archive Nazi footage. Add in the first minute-twenty or so of Nobuo Uematsu's "One Winged Angel". What's the result? Entirely too perfect.

-EE

I can has lyrics

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 01:51:01 GMT

Yeah. I wrote some stuff here.

Let's see. Other than that, not a lot has been going on here really. Still alive, still have a job, still working on getting myself the heck out of my college debt.

-EE

Okay, so....

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:56:48 GMT

We've got India, China, France....wait, no, not right.

So anyway, I'm still alive, as always. Presumably, this is preferable to being dead, and who am I to argue?

So I guess mega-conglomerate MTV Networks has their own Youtube type of site called ifilm. As some of you probably know, one of my geekish hobbies is performing speed runs of various video games, more specifically NES games. So I'm checking the SDA forums and notice I have a new private message. Apparently my Battletoads run got the attention of ifilm and they wanted to use it on the site, so I said "ok". You can see the young speedrunning section of that site here.

I don't necessarily expect the run or myself to get more publicity as a result of this--presumably, SDA is still the "go-to" site for this sort of thing--but it is pretty cool that something tangentially related to MTV (Regardless of what I think about the current status of the network that started it all) recognized the run, especially given any number of other quality runs (Either on more famous games, or runs where the quality of the play is better than mine) they had to choose from.

So that was pretty neat.

Hooray for death metal covers of pop songs!

Tue, 08 May 2007 17:32:54 GMT

What's this? Actual content in one of my updates?

Well, sort of. I'm here to plug a UK-based band called Ten Masked Men. They do death metal covers of pop songs. Good stuff, particularly their "Eye of the Tiger" cover where there are brief points where the singer is growling IN KEY with the song.

Also, if you don't know, I have a Myspace that you can see here.

-EE

Happy Easter!

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:59:49 GMT

Regrettably, I will not be attending any death metal concerts this Easter Sunday. So I'm still here, doing the stuff that alive people do. You know how it is.

I'm still alive!

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 17:01:03 GMT

Really!

Um, not much going on here really. Still working and all of that.

-EE

Dear Football Media:

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:38:09 GMT

I extend my regrets that Peyton "~~Can't Win a Playoff Game~~ ~~Can't Beat the Patriots~~ ~~Will Never Win the Big One~~ Super Bowl MVP" Manning has robbed you of your football stories for the next ~10 years, effectively putting you all out of a job. I wish you all the best in all your future endeavors.

-Emptyeye

I'm not here to start no trouble.

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 18:05:11 GMT

You know the title of this post is true, because a "lol Pats lose" post was conspicuous by its absence last Sunday night.

Anyway, with a week to go until Super Bowl XLI (That's 41 for you non-Roman Centurions out there), I figured I'd let you all feast your eyes on what may be the ballsiest display by a football team ever (Sorry for the EBaumsworld link, but it's about the only one on the 'Net that Evil Copyright Raps haven't yet gone after). Yeah, you're saying to yourself, "What's so ballsy about this? The '85 Bears went 15-1 and won the Super Bowl!" True enough, but that all came AFTER they recorded this song. Making a song and video called the "Super Bowl Shuffle" before you've won anything that season takes guts.

(It should be noted that this wasn't entirely showboating/ego-stroking on the part of The Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew. The proceeds from sales of the song and video went to a Chicago area charity, which is pretty cool)

-EE

I find this highly amusing.

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:27:05 GMT

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
0
people with my name
in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Yeah.

(EDIT: What makes this funny is the fact that I did it using my REAL NAME. And, you know, that I live in the US.)

-EE

San Diego's in their stadium, givin' away some football games.

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:56:34 GMT

Seriously.

A bit of background as to why I care about this: I happened to attend school in a New England college during the 2001 season. You may remember it as the season the Patriots miraculously upset the Rams to win their first Super Bowl. I also happened to observe that the Patriots went deeper and deeper into the playoffs (Playoffs?! Are you kidding me?), the amount of Pats paraphernalia increased roughly tenfold. Wow, it's amazing what a winning record does to bring your fans out of hiding, huh? Of course, I could've walked up to 95% of those people, and they wouldn't have been able to tell me how the Pats started the season--indeed, I recall leaving an angry AIM away message the morning after that Super Bowl along the lines of WHERE THE (^%&^%& WERE YOU ALL WHEN THE PATS STARTED 0-2 AND EVERYONE THOUGHT THEIR SEASON WAS LOST, HUH?! (Drew Bledsoe, the Patriots starter at the time, was injured in that second game and lost for the season. Tom Brady, far from being the elite QB he is now, was regarded as just some sixth-round-pick schmuck reserve QB who was going to get chewed up and spit out by the big bad NFL; he had played in a total of one NFL game prior to Bledsoe's injury). The point of this paragraph is that New England are effectively the Tool of the NFL--I have nothing against the team itself; it's the fair-weather fans I can't stand.

So anyway, I'm watching the second half of the Pats-Chargers game, and I can't help but note that San Diego is doing everything in their power to just up and hand the game to the Pats--stupid penalties, refusal to hold onto turnovers Tom Brady and his three interceptions so graciously provided them, etc. And of course, eventually, New England wins the game. And LaDainian Tomlinson is not happy, nor should he be. I imagine he, like I, felt something like Dennis Green after the Arizona Cardinals gave away a game to the Bears in a similar fashion earlier in the season. Really, te Pats were who the Chargers thought they were, but they let 'em off the hook. )&&^%*&%&^%$^&$

-EE

Wow. Just, wow.

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 04:16:37 GMT

Apparently, Verizon Wireless, after not bothering to educate their support staff on the difference between dollars and cents, are trying to prevent their disgruntled customers from expressing this fact. See the whole saga here.

And the sad thing is that I'm a Verizon customer right now.

In other news, both Guitar Hero games are great fun.

-EE

We're not talking about the game.

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:16:45 GMT

No, we're talking about practice. For the curious, he also says "Not the game" or something similar 9 times in the clip. Also, "How the hell can I make my teammates better by practicing!?" Priceless.

This is the same Allen Iverson who famously said "We didn't come here to roll over and die, we came here to play basketball!" after the 76ers upset the Lakers in game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals. Apparently, the rest of the 76ers didn't get the memo, as "rolling over and dying" was exactly what they did, losing the next 4 games of the series.

-EE

Guitar Hero II

Wed, 27 Dec 2006 23:53:25 GMT

Greatest game ever?

Maybe.

Any music game with Rush gets 1 million points in my book.

The other songs are great fun too.

Man, what?!

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 18:16:18 GMT

I've touched on this before, but the more I watch it, the more I'm convinced that this is the greatest minute and twenty-one seconds in the history of sports journalism. It's the infamous interview where Mike Tyson states a desire to eat Lennox Lewis's children (Contrary to popular belief, he does NOT "vow", nor "threaten" to eat said children)...and the best part is that that is maybe the third craziest thing he says in the interview!

We start with Jim Gray asking Tyson if the fight he had just won was his shortest fight ever. Tyson responds by proclaiming that there is only one God and that Mohammed blesses the people as his prophet, goes on to mention his brother who recently died, and ends his response with "all praise be to my children, I love you...uh, God....man, what?!" That's all well and good, but it has zero to do with the question he was asked ("Was this your shortest fight ever?")

Gray asks the question again (Specifically asking, in case Tyson didn't get it the first time, "at any time? Amateur, professional, ever?"), and after saying something in some Arabic language (My knowledge of Middle Eastern culture is sorely lacking), Tyson deigns to answer it, "I dunno man....yeah, yeah. Lennox Lewis! Lennox, I'm coming for you!" with the last few words said in a weird sing-songy voice. It should be noted that this is often doubly misquoted as being "Lennox Lewis, I'm coming for you man!" and immediately preceding the most famous of the interview ("My style is impetuous..."), of which it is neither.

Gray then asks Mike if it was frustrating to train so hard for this fight and have it be over so quickly. Mike reveals that in fact, he trained very little for the fight, because of having to bury his best friend (Who may or may not be the "brother" mentioned earlier). He then unleashes the crowning jewel of the interview: "I dedicated this fight, I wasn't gonna fight, but I dedicated this fight to him....I was gonna rip his heart out." I'm guessing that in Tyson's head this last line was supposed to be in reference to either his vanquished opponent or Lennox Lewis, but the lack of transition in the way it came out meant that he was still refering to the recently deceased friend. The rest of the interview can be read here, along with a treasure trove of other quotes from Iron Mike, some of which he may or may not have actually said.

By the way, stop commenting and asking to be unbanned, because it's not going to happen. You'll know if this is in reference to you.

-EE