After waiting patiently for almost two months, my most anticipated music purchase in a long time has finally arrived; Sekaiju no Meikyuu Piano To Gengakki No Namaensou Ni Yoru (Live Music by Piano and Strings: Sekaiju no MeiQ I & II Super Arrange Version), music from the game better known to English audiences as Etrian Odyssey, has finished ripping, and I am listening to its absolutely beautiful arrangements as I write, it (and Amarok) filling the room.

My love of Etrian Odyssey is well documented, so suffice it to say that if you are done hearing about my crush on this series, you can just stop reading now, but hopefully anyone with an appreciation for music can find something to love here.

Live Music by Piano and Strings is simply stunning. The album is thirteen lovely performances by a small ensemble (Chieko Amano, violin; Yuichiro Oonuki, piano; Minori Yamazaki, cello; Shuji Narikawa, guitar; Naoko Sato, percussion), which brings to life Norihiko Hibino’s arrangement of the Yuzo Koshiro compositions. Much more evenly than the recent Super Arrange Version of the second game, the album puts a very calming instrumental touch on the “retro” soundtrack, and the performances are noticeably emotive.

Nietzsche wrote that without music, life would be an error, and these are the class of albums that remind me, a gamer to the bone, of that fact — organic, live performances, nuanced in their composition, combining the theme of an original song with the love of an appreciative interpretation. For me, among video game albums, this is up there with Xenogears Light.

Someone was kind enough to upload one of the tracks, battle themes from the first and second games, made calming. I was sold on the album before I heard a note of it, but that preview made it a must-have, and now, as the album nears its end, I confidently say that it is one of my favorite albums. As I said when I was similarly (although more verbosely) gushing over Xenogears Light, these are the releases that prove video game music is, without a doubt, “real music,” and more ultimately, important as its own class of art.

Oh, and it comes with PDFs of the handwritten arrangements, sometimes appearing as little more than note scribbles and clues to the performers, which seems fitting in an ephemeral way. I find I can’t recommend any one track, but rather all of them. Every single one, in addition to standing on its own as a wonderful piece of music, serves another purpose — that being tickling my desire to play one of my favorite games all over again.

Over the past couple days, I have made a metric ton of changes to incorporeal.org and its services, many related to Apache and SSL. Notably, website access was probably a bit brittle over the past 24 hours. If anything seems out of the ordinary, please let me know.

The Paprika soundtrack reminds me most of the evening pre-slumber, engrossed in a fantasy world of my own design, a particular blind, optimistic lie of that winter season. Fitting for a film of dreams. The root emotions attached to the film and soundtrack are almost ephemeral, an electricity not precisely recreated since. They are remembered, but not revisited.

It is par for the course that music invokes memories, but exceedingly rare that a film also has such an impact and such an attachment — perhaps that is a greater sign of those times than anything else. A rewatching while unpacking into my new house, nearly a year later, gave the film a much more baleful tone, inexplicably. I prefer the first memory, even if it was a prelude to delusion.

On a whim today, I decided to dust off a bit of my Jpop (Ayumi Hamasaki, to be precise) and give it a listen. It is amazing what memories are invoked from just the first few tracks off of LOVEppears, which I first started listening to in 2000 — my first total immersion dives into computing (nay, computer appreciation), fleeting loves, the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Gentoo Linux, compiling Gentoo Linux, breaking all of my computers at least once.

Lonely nights in a warm bedroom, surrounded by computers, Ayu blasting through XMMS, heralding my first great interest shift. The daily commutes to MSOE punctuated with long sessions before and after class in the student center, tasting for the first time the sweet nectar of broadband, filling my belly with Japanese culture. My last serious interest in anime, my first serious appreciation for the potpourri of the Internet.

The whiteness of an Ayu wallpaper. My rust bucket truck. The couches in the Cudahy Student Center. The cheeseburgers they served there. Windows file sharing clients, their names long lost, from an age before the luxury of BitTorrent. A certain kind of orange present in my Trillian IM client. Shit, Trillian itself. Conversations never saved, never remembered, no longer the highlight of a lazy afternoon between classes. People not seen in years. Quiet conversations outside, in the cold, revisiting the high school roof.

All from Ayu’s “Trauma". If I had one hope, it was that I never lost these memories. If I had one fear, it would be losing the ability of music to invoke them.

I’ve started another Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It started pretty awesomely, and it’s going to continue being pretty awesome. I think this is the first D&D campaign for the group of friends that I’ve put large amounts of preparation time and thought into — the past ones had been started ad hoc. I’ve been putting things on the wiki for the group, and as time progresses, I think I’m going to share some of the previously-private DM notes for myself.

One rather substantial page I’ve put together, though, is the player handout.

And this constitutes an update.

In case you were wondering, yes, I broke https on my site for around 24 hours. It’s fixed now.

Monday, I twittered my greatest idea to date, and as it turns out, that was the impetus for something I’ve been meaning to start for a while, something that people have said I should do.

I now own an electric guitar.

It’s a Starcaster by Fender, commonly marketed and regarded as a beginner’s guitar, so pretty much perfect for me, as my guitar knowledge begins and ends with picking up acoustic guitars a couple assorted times in my youth and fumbling with the strings. This time, I’m going big. Instruction DVDs, guitar tab books, micro and macro goals.

Everything fell together today. I tuned (which I do not have an ear for), started with some basics, learned a chord or two. I think I’ve already forgotten the names, but hopefully at least the fingerings will stick to tomorrow. Still getting used to the feel of the strings, the precision of it all. Wondering if the action is a bit too high, which I’m astonished to write, as I had no idea what that meant 48 hours ago.

I enjoy the weight of it in my hands, slung over my shoulder. Brings back pleasant memories of the saxophone days, implement across my body. In fact, come to think of it, the fingering situation is not entirely unlike my only other significant instrument, the piano; abandoned in the 4th grade in favor of the saxophone, which made it a bit into college. It feels good again, to have sound at my fingertips, and know that I may once again be able to conjure musicks from the air.

This will (hopefully) be the first instrument I’ve actually practiced at home — piano and saxophone I was mostly able to float by on rehearsal. This one, though, I have no such luxury; my success or failure rests in my bedroom, tied to a small amp.

I seek to multiclass as a DM/bard.

(Okay, I want to do more than that, but I still insist that it’s a pretty awesome idea.)

As I’m using Twitter more these days, I decided that the multiple tweets per day were probably making the front page here overly noisy. With that, I’ve temporarily removed it from the feed, updates will appear there no longer. If it turns out that you really did like them being there (or are pleased that they’re now gone), please, tell me and I’ll act accordingly.

Two things I miss of La Crosse: the drives (as I have talked about a couple times) and the interesting topology of the area (again, experienced while driving). Madison, while great, is pretty boringly flat, and I don’t have a whole lot of reason to do excitingly long drives (especially ones with different, exploratory routes). I kind of want to do some sort of Wisconsin road trip.

Or maybe I should stop feeding my nostalgia with Wikipedia surfing.

After putting it off for a while, I’ve decided to start merging the emptymatter.org and incorporeal.org domains, so that they all share the same services. (This has mostly been working for a while now.) I think I’ve always preferred the incorporeal.org domain name, so this will let me start advertising that again, hopefully without breaking what people are used to.

It may be a rocky ride for a bit.