音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Mozart is such a concentration killer!
I was planning to have some reading, but due to the sudden appearance of "Per queste tue manine", a piece of treasure hidden behind most recordings, my mind was trapped and the original plan was completely ruined--That's why now I'm writing a new post, to complain of course.

As my Don Giovanni Fest goes, I've played this opera for so many times that almost every single phrase had been engraved in my heart. So I was surprised when a never-been-heard brisky leading melody jumped out at where Donna Elvira would appear with "In quali eccessi o numi Mi tradi". Then I looked up its title, couldn't recall. That was an unknown piece for sure. Although afterwards, I realised that this duetto was also included in few others' performances such as Gardiner's 1994 and Jacobs' 2006 recordings, it was Solti's 1978 recording brought it to my attention. Maybe I was in a lossy mood so that I could notice something different. Anyway, I feel so unfair for it. How could people decide to omit it while the piece itself is so beautiful and charming (I agree it's not well connected to others dramatically)?!

Together with "O statua gentilissima" and "Ah! Chi mi dice mai", now I add "Per queste tue manine" so they are my top three favourites from Don Giovanni. Also, as I said in the beginning. This duetto is so pretty that I kept telling myself "Only one more time, I'll stop and do my things", yet I simply kept failing mercilessly.

↓ The damn great spell that got me intoxicated for the whole night!

Bringing the topic about Don Giovanni again, I remember I read a few days ago from an opera guidebook. The author said Mozart might not be the best choice for opera beginners due to the complexity in terms of musical composition or this or that, regardless the beaufitul melody. That's ridiculous! Melody is the pith of music. If the melody isn't beautiful, people might drop halfway, especially for beginners (I know someone who escaped from even Vivaldi's catchy "Four Seasons"!). I doubt that a person who knows no classical music would enjoy Mahler or Bruckner or Schoenberg instead of Mozart (obviously I'm biased, since the formar two are quite dull to me and the third is nothing but being worse!). Or, is the author expecting a beginner could act like a scholar who can analyse the entire piece--giving that the author's recommendations are based on so much aspects!

Also from another book (another classical music guidebook or that sort), the author claimed speaking of classical music, most people would link to romantic era that they listen with care, while Bach and Mozart's works are mostly used as daily life BGM. Again I doubt about it. My case is at the opposite side. Like what happened tonight, Mozart ate up my night time. Yet I could leave Liszt's transcendental etudes flowing as my "working BGM" (I'm NOT negative, I do love Liszt, although not of most).

In conclusion, those so-called guidebooks are merely references. You might get insights after a quick browse, but don't rely on and fully trust them. After all, the authors are humans too, and of no time, humans can be free of biases. At last, I'm glad that I didn't read any of such years ago--when I just dabbled in the world of classical music.

Too much to include in this post (it's all due to that I was watching too much anime recently, I know), but still, let me try to do it in a well-organised way.

Since anime disrupted my try-to-post-as-much-as-I-can 2014 blogging plan (this is probably an irresponsible lie), it's obviously today's first topic.

Anime No. 1: Detective Conan
I do remember I said in last year that my impulse drove me downloading an up-to-date Detective Conan collection, and till 2 days ago, I finally finished all of this stock! I also feel much better now with Kogoro's new voice by Koyama. Starting from this year, that's over 400 episodes I've watched (should be only about half of the amount since I skipped all TV original stories). But still that's quite a lot, the result is I'm on fire again at this probably the longest anime with a firm plot outside of daily scenes (which is boring).

Anime No. 2: Monogatari 2nd Season
I myself don't understand what made me finishing this anime. The plot is interesting but somehow doesn't perfectly fit my taste (or is it the director's fault?). Plus, since the original novel isn't ended, I'm now regreting for what I've done after all 26 ep's. That's all about the guy, starring in Koi-Monogatari, whose name I can't recall -- people who make subtitles should keep people's name in Japanese since I'm weak at alphabet-only names @w@. Anyway, I like him quite much, merely based on my standard affection for middle-aged men (= oyaji), and I thought he's dead at the very last scene of the last episode. So I went to wikipedia and got severely netabare-d: He's not dead! °A° Good news for me, although I believe when he appears again, I'll lose the state being surprised.

Anime No. 3: Kyokai no Kanata
Only 12 episodes. Perfect to eat in one or two times. I decided to watch it because that was Ito Masumi who composed. I assumed this was a RDG-like work, but it is much better than the former one, at least this time I don't hate the heroine. The story is well divided to fit into 12 ep's, beautiful colouring and drawing quality, plus Masumi's fantastic music, I have no complaints!

Anime No. 4: Steins;Gate
I will not have lots of comments since my current progress is at ep 6. But I appriciate the forgotten reason that triggered me to watch it. I got addicted to this anime only after watching 2 ep's. SciFi is definitely much better than cheap love comedy. Another reason I love this anime is Mihane resembles Makise so much!! >w<

Audio bonus
From Detective Conan. Conan's Kansai-ben in ep 570 is awesome!
↓

I've set this as my morning call. But since it's long weekend, my first try will be tomorrow~

Besides anime, another thing that I'm overdoing is my "Don Giovanni Fest". Before I was looking for various performances of the same classical work, and thus I found an awfully great file with 27 recordings of that opera. While I finished the file, my mind was all blank other than play all of them in one go. A great work is always great so that you can keep looping it. 27 versions, and near 3 hours per version, together with my anime fest, seems my top artist will be only Mozart for a few weeks.

At the same time when I decided to play the entire collection, the hidden message was not to switch my playlist or I lose. Under this self-suggestion, my recent art work was affected as well.

✿恋せよ乙女✿ -another version-
(another version will only appear in my blog and G+, while the original version is behind the link)

The theme was "Taishou Roman", which I always wanted to integrate since early in last year, mainly activated by Annabel's "Phantasmagoria" and partially spurred by Noriko's "Yoimachi Romantica". The phrase "Koiseyo Otome (恋せよ乙女)" was assigned as the title immediately after the draft was done. I didn't think too much about the title because this phrase is so well-known and is one of the Taishou Roman representatives in my mind.
--So, taking everything together, this drawing has nothing to do with the just passed Valentine Day!

However, like I mentioned above, it's affected by my Don Giovanni Fest. I was unable to switch track (or I lose!), so my sense of Taishou got fairly dulled by Mozart's elegent and classical taste. My original idea of using a coal black front image covered by Japanese-styled Tsubaki patterns turned to be a checkered reddish tablecloth decorated by camellia. You might already know that Tsubaki = camellia and camellia is a good candidate to make up a Japanese ambience, but my point is, my colouring of the deco-flowers was too strong, Japanese hues are supposed to have more degree of grey, and in case of my final deco-arrangement, rose could be a better choice.
--I could have done something if only I had a chance to play Annabel and Noriko's Taishou love songs.. ^^;

P.S. continue with the title "恋せよ乙女", I bet the kanji "乙女" are 100% good to cause Gestaltzerfall--another term just learned from Detective Conan (I'm aware of that phenomenon but never knew what it's called)!

I first though Jan 27 was last Sunday, but I was wrong, and sadly, the 27th is Monday because I've to fight with Monday Syndrome.
Although it's now scientifically Jan 28, it's still personally Jan 27 to me. So I'll try to make this day somehow special.

~since it's Mozart's 258th birthday~

I love all of Mozart's works unconditionally. So it made him my favorite classical composer. No matter in major or minor, allegro or adagio, his music is so elegant and sweet and adorable and... so that I can loop forever. But for sure, of my unconditional love, there are still pieces that are more addictive.

My Favorite Mozart Pieces (as I can remember immediately)
K. 219: Violin Concerto No. 5 in A.
-- 3rd movement. The "conversation".
K. 239: Serenade in D, "Serenata Notturna".
-- Timpani!!! <3
K. 264: 9 Variations in C.
-- The leading melody captured my heart.
K. 265: 12 Variations in C.
-- "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"~
K. 298: Flute Quartet in A.
-- 1st movement. The "perfect flow".
K. 331: Piano Sonata No. 11 in A.
-- 3rd movement. "Turkish March" that anyone who listens to classical music should know.
K. 455: 10 variationen in G.
-- A variation again. The same piece of melody can indeed do magic!
K. 492: Le Nozze di Figaro.
-- Super good for relax, of both story and the all-but-2-in-major composition. My special love: Overture, Bartolo's "La vendetta", sextet: "Riconosci in questo amplesso una madre", and the end of Act III.
K. 525: Serenade in G, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik".
-- A piece that people who don't even listen to classical music should know.
K. 527: Don Giovanni.
-- Good for relax, although the flow of story is a little weaker compare to Figaro, I can loop this opera time by time. My special love: Donna Elvira's first aria, and the scene in front of the statue (Leporello is so funny).
K. 545: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C.
-- 1st movement. Just adorable.
K. 550: Symphony No. 40 in g.
-- Minor is especially beautiful, introversively. Solely look at the number is astonishing enough. If my memory is correct, for quite long, there was no composer had more than 9 symphonies... (off-topic!)
K. 620: Die Zauberflöte.
-- To be honest, the story itself irritates me. Tamino x Pamina made most annoying couple ever of my head (don't ask me why). But the music... both arias of Queen of the Night are the shining gems that keep me thinking "it's opera seria!!".
K. 626: Requiem.
-- Who else could make a requiem as sweet as this one? Due to an "accident", Lacrimosa stands out to be my my No. 1 piece of this work.

Another reason made me writing this post so late was:
Since last November, I finally made it!

I myself tend to use HTML more than MS WORD, so it's always a headache when the final write-up is to be well formatted and printed. It's rather a disaster if you have references. So a few days ago, when I eventually couldn't endure any more of such formatting mess, I started to look for modules that can convert html/xml to word.
There are such things, but unfortunately, none of what I found fits what I need exactly. Then again I felt so good about learning that. As what the author wrote "when there is nothing suits your need, you can just write by yourself."

That's so true! -- Well, that's time consuming as well. Last night I spent around 5 hours to parse and convert <table> tag properly with processing colspan and rowspan... and tonight, I finally finished up all basic tags (the ones I use most often). Version 0.1.0 is here and to be debugged! So lemme call it a day! ヽ(´ー｀)ノ

That thing completely ruined my last week--obviously I'm not saying what exactly it is either, since I'm trying to get it rid of from my mind without even a tiny trace.
So in today's post, I'm gonna write down some quick notes about my recently accumulated thoughts.

KOKIA's voice is like lemon+vanilla, always fresh, smooth and sweet. Yet, even being a tera KOKIA fan, I can't say I can enjoy her music at any time (I can actually loop Akiko's Umineko forever though... ^^;). I need to get my mood fits in, although the "mood" thing is too abstract to describe.
--And my mood for KOKIA was gone for an entire month! °A°
But, thank goddness (no, such an entity doesn't exist! ~_~), with the bye-bye to that incident, I feel like to have another lemon x vanilla KOKIA fest~

By the way, taking this chance, I'd like to make some notes. I naturally feel in such way, it's not something like I'm pretenting to be Tooko Amano!
Only my top 5 for now...

Guess it's not that surprising. But I just want to say it. Here. Clearly.
I don't know what's going on in a movie but I can stick to animes for hours.
It was during the past holiday. I eventually decided to watch "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", which my friend recommended to me (years ago) saying how funny it is.
Fine, I was considering to watch something different (than anime) so I started to watch.
Now, I can leave my comments: I stopped watching about 10 minutes after and permanently deleted the 1080-quality file.
To me, I simply don't get it, what's so interesting to watching a couple who went to hotel after first meet (even I know I may be wrong)... (゜_゜>)
Watching Kogoro v.s. Eri's couple's tiff is much more fun!
>>> A straightforward conclusion: I'm an otaku, not a movie fan.

I've been watching too many horror games--Just finished "SIREN" and "SIREN New Translation" and now I'm following "SIREN 2". Plus, I'm also following "学校であった怖い話 (School's Scary Stories)". But just like what I've been repeated for many times, sometimes it's solely because the player is funny so that I can keep quiet and watching instead of playing on my own. Well, in case of SIREN, I guess I'll only watch. Not like Silent Hill, I guess I'll never touch SIREN series on my own <<< I just can't survive in SIREN's world. :3
However, one of my favorite moments was when I saw a friend's comments on my G+ post where I linked a youtube video about Silent Hill. "You play this? I'm astonished!" <<< I indeed enjoyed what he wrote! (￣ー￣)

On the other hand, due to my overdosed horror time, I now tend to tell people: before you go camping or go out for a long while, make sure you have the follow items or alternatives: penlight, pocket radio, first aid kit & health drinks and ample if possible, weapons such as iron pipe, handgun, shotgun, or rifle...
In my case, I carry my penlight with me every day, and whenever I see a building's map, Silent Hill is the very first thing appearing in my mind. @w@

Infants, and any other primate make me uncomfortable, psychologically. So that I don't understand the feelings of people who like infants.
I'm also pretty aware of that you might think I'm the weird one. I think I'm weird too since I have no problem with human embryos.
Anyway, because of this, now I'm having trouble with the course "Human Genetics" I'm assisting with. Possibly I'll remove all pictures containing infants beforehand to ensure I don't feel too bad (also to re-arrange the slides so my students don't know there were actually pictures). u_u

Just an one-line announcement of my next "Taishou Romance" series. It's eventually coming out!! :P

Due to my extremely strong desire of playing SH1. I give up that I'd make a full-length post for the last section of my 2013 memoir plan. So I'll simply go through all things I wanted to write in the next paragraph.
2013's new releases, of those I loved, are all from my current favorite artists, no new discoveries: KOKIA, Akiko Shikata, Haruka Shimotsuki, Noriko Mitose, Masumi Ito, Kenji Kawai, Shiro Sagisu and Shinkichi Mitsumune (any more? well, that's all I remember right now). But for new discoveries from past music, I'd like to mention Akira Yamaoka and Zabadak. Because of my stepping into the world of Silent Hill, I began to also love its soundtracks and the composer. Akira could be the only one who reached my top artist list within less than one year. As for Zabadak (too bad I'm still sometimes mis-spell/speak them as Zektbach...), I knew them from Yoko Ueno, and now I only love the Zabadak with Yoko Ueno, so that's of their earliest period(s). Less unique than Yoko's own releases, but great enough to get a complete collection. I'm also surprised that they also worked with Noriko's early unit "Kirche" (forgot which piece though).

Next topic. Silent Hill 1.
As I said before, I realised how idiotic I was to play on Normal Mode at my first time. The next nightmare was...
This game shifts up a level of difficuty automatically after each time of game clear and you can't change it! °A°
So, I was forced to play on Hard Mode at my second time...
Although somehow I made it.

I was worn out!

Moreover, second time, and even the third time, this game just scares me again and again.
During my second itme, I was trying to see the UFO ending. But due to an accident(?) that I don't know the reason, the UFOs came and left at the last stage where it's supposed to enter the UFO end. It couldn't be helped so I loaded the save data from my 2nd clear,
and finally got it (such a big fun)!

Now I feel like I could record my game play as a archive, with my gaming life being merely around 40/100 points. Should I? (￣▽￣)

The last topic. Continued from my love to classical music, my brain went reckless from the rich blend of the Magic Flute and the Nutcracker.
↓

part.0
part.a | part.b | part.c | part.d | part.e

The initial concept and drafts took me 3 days, the PSD-making took me another 3 days, and the final makeup...took me 1 week due to I didn't know how to name it. Yet when I look at it again: No that's magic girl rather than the queen of night~~~! °w°

--I was supposed to finish my 2013 memoris already, but due to this or that, I got distracted (Nutcracker series coming soon!). Also, I'm so surprised that my blog template didn't get changed during the last year--I do love pink a lot!

--You might not believe, but I did play Mozart's "Don Giovanni" (the Furtwängler/Deutsche Grammophon version that you can find online easily) for at least twice per day during the holiday. I admire Donna Anna's singing range and I'm in deep love with Donna Elvira's first aria (although I don't know its name..).
This morning, I took out Akiko (Shikata)'s version of "Oh smania! oh furie!~D'Oreste e d'Aiace". Before I didn't notice so much, but now, it's so obvious that Akiko's voice is rather "flat"--anyway, she isn't a pro opera singer, and it's so fun to hear Jpop singers performing classical arias. xD

Alright, I'll stop making nonsense.

Today's topic: 2013 was my gaming festival.
By saying gaming, actually I watched much more than I played, because..
--Playing on my own is somewhat tiresome! (In case of RPG, you have also need to worry about things like levels and gears.)
So thanks to people who are kind enough to share their live game playing. I've finished a lot such as Ar Tonelico series, Corpse Party -Book of Shadows-, and BioHazard 1, 2 and 5. But it doesn't mean I can watch anyone's playing video. That person has to be funny at commenting or I'd rather to play on my own.

Yet I was also spirited up and thus I dared to touch a game on my own.

...Speaking of the name James, you might come across a couple: James Levine,
James May, James Moriarty, James Black... or James Sunderland.

Right, I'm going to say the best-for-playing-at-quiet-night-alone Silent Hill.
I sometimes think about, if I had a chance to live stream my own SH playing, the video will full of my (almost screaming) complaints: too dark (hard to pin items/doors), annoying camera angles (being worse with the radio noises), map-less areas (contributed by my zero sense of direction), and ruthless monsters (especially apes in SH1).
Well, SH is much, much better than Bio because there're no spiders (an important reason that I'll never touch Bio)...

I haven't started SH4. I was thinking about to play it during the holiday, but changed my mind to complete all endings of SH1, 2 and 3 first. Good thing I have found a super nice website having every single detail and lots of side-stories about the four major games of this series. Now I'm playing the legandary Silent Hill 1. Even I've watched how to walk through all areas, it's still scary.
So how did it go? Died in the elementary school boss for 5+ times, slewed by mantis legion in the sewer, got combo-ed to death in the street by apes+birds+dogs... I'm such a fool who chose Normal Mode while thinking that I know how to complete this game. Q_Q

Another point is I really love SH riddles--even it may take me weeks or force me to learn Shakespeare. I've heard about SH2 has a "harder" riddle level after completing all easy/normal/hard riddle levels. I'll be happy to try that level sometime. Probably I'll do it while collecting all endings. But about the action level. As I said above, normal mode is already slapping me hard, (it wasn't tough for SH2 b/c I was on beginner mode...), guess I'll never select hard action mode. But if someone's gonna play on hard, I'd like to watch~

Finally, SH also brought me lots of great soundtracks, and Akira Yamaoka was the person who became one of my top favs in less than a year. <<< As for the topic of newly discovered music, I'll talk more tomorrow (I hope).

All SH 1, 2 and 3 are great and of my love. But SH2 is my top 1. But comparing to SH2 true end (I simply got myself netabared before reaching that ending myself..), I felt much more upset when our great daddy Harry died in SH3.

Then, while browsing "James Sunderland" on Google Image, I fell in love immediately with this image ↓

Too bad google image didn't tell me who made this art. Tell me if you know! <3

A brief summary... in this post I focused on the games I've played--or watched. And Silent Hill series stood out. Something I'd really like to try on my own.
--Could that be due to my inner dark soul is excited by the superb horror aura? ;3

This year's greatest harvest: the ability to script using Perl--which made my life much easier.

"You're the first person I know who worries about unicode in Perl before even beginning learning this language." << what a computer guy said when I was mentioning these topics to him--Right, before knowing what a "file handle" does, I cared about if Perl is able to deal with unicode. Anyway, to learn a language is not to show off, but to use it. To me, being aware of that Perl is good at text manipulation, of course I would pay special attention to unicode, as I know how the hell it is when opening non-unicode files from non-English encoded computers.

Instead of the Camel Book, which is probably most people would start with, my experience was introduced by "the tadpole book", followed by "the frog book". Then the Camel came to fill minor holes that are left by the first two. Thus I don't really know how good the camel is to a newbie. From my own memory, if you know no perl and know some basic biology, the tadpole and the frog can be your friends with proper and easy-to-understand examples. Proper, at least I'm clear I can do this or that in my own life using this language. Examples can decide if a textbook is helpful. Some books lacks practicability in terms of how they give examples. So that's how these two stood out. They do cover a wide range of Perl topics in detail. You don't need to worry about missing any important topic that is at or below the level of module and package. There was no too much new stuff from "Intermediate Perl", which came after the two. Of course, like I already said, these books are for bio-people, so not everyone can really benefit from them.

However, when I opened the last "Advanced Topics", I felt like everything there was none of my business--that's too specific to focus, and guess I will find solutions when I myself am facing those problems. (Probably that's why there is no "Advanced level" of the Japanese learning book series. The word "advanced" is just too abstract to be summarised into one single book.) Yet I indeed learned a little bit from "the advanced": HTML templates and utf8--and I was laughing that what I really cared about before learning the language is an advanced topic!

Besides pure text, I've also dabbled in CGI for my still-in-mind independent website. Although I didn't have enough time recently, I've come to fix/improve "our" website and now being much more confident in reading some not-so-complicated CGI codes. I used to consider php as well, but it seems I'm going to give up before the first touch. As what I know from others, almost everything you can do with php can be done by perl-CGI, but not vice versa. Another reason, try to repeat "php" for many times, aren't you getting stuttered?! With special naming fetish, I simply won't allow such a hard-to-pronounce name being the main scripting language for my own website!

Other than Perl, my next target is python (already started but being paused right now due to my opera-fever), merely because lots of people saying it's good and useful. I'd like to see what's going on with it, although I doubt I'll go too much. So far my bible is only Perl, and I don't want to be disrupted by stupid indentations.

Finally, my naming fetish contributed how I name my scripts: Method_XXX for modules/packages, and Exec_XXX for regular scripts. Thanks to Ar Tonelico! And it will be tomorrow's topic: A non-gamer's games.