音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

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.