Singing Computers

(Note: Someone told me to space out my paragraphs a bit more, to make them more readable. How's this? Also, sorry for no update last week. I think I've got it under control now, but thanks for your patience.) Here is the YouTube page of a Vocaloid Producer I've gotten into: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHf9og9JlOD7YNYezW_tVew/featured He's much more active on his SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/oddeeoofficial His general style is a mix of 80's synthpop and whatever subgenre Porter Robinson does. Not only do I like that style a lot, another thing I like about him is his attitude towards Vocaloid- as a computer program, an art form, a collection of characters, a  phenomenon  in general. One of his videos is an "interview" with his characterization of the Vocaloid Avanna. Named MON1T0R, this fictional character that he made up was a computer program (presumably the Vocaloid program) that gained sentience through some kind of anomaly. Here was one...

(Note: I homeschooled for middle school, and for writing class in eighth grade I took a very good writing class from someone local who hosted writing classes for homeschoolers at her house weekly. She was an incredibly  good teacher, and in some ways I owe this whole blog to her. To be honest, I was occasionally annoyed by how much of a stickler she was on avoiding "to be" verbs and not repeating words. Only one of those lessons have I eventually taken to heart, as you can see... But one of the things I liked about her was how freely she allowed us to interpret the prompts. As you can see from the title, I wrote an essay about Vocaloid. I'm posting it here, along with (my commentary in bold and parentheses, like this) because it's actually pretty good, at least for an eighth grader. Since their invention, people have manipulated computers and computer programs to accomplish incredible tasks, things once thought only accomplishable by a human. To name a few, co...

(Um hi, sorry for the late post, I was quite busy. Also, I bit off more than I could chew again. You'll see that post next week. That has happened multiple times, though, hasn't it? I have to figure out what to do about that. Hmm. In the meantime, enjoy this thing I wrote a while ago but never posted. I think I might just like some of Porter Robinson's music, what do you think? This one is less about the music of life and more about, well, music, specifically how it is changing and how it will change and whether that is good or bad or just... the same. Because music never really changes, deep down inside, past the surface.) I hadn’t listened to Fellow Feeling for months. I didn’t remember exactly how it went, but I remembered that the cello part was nice, but there was also an ugly part as well. But recently I reminded myself that all of Porter’s music is good, so I decided to listen again. I didn’t realize… I had goosebumps by the end. I did ...

     You are a dreamy person.      Well, everyone is, really. Everyone has dreams, most of them unremarkable. Some they remember and dream again and again. People often explore their dreams, travelling far and wide, or maybe just making their home in a little niche. Sometimes they add new things to their dreams.      However, everyone seems to agree that, by far, the best thing to do with your dream is to share it with another person. Sure, they might not like it for one reason or another or no reason, but it is worth the risk to have someone dreaming the same dream, exploring and making with you.      If the dream is good enough, you share it with lots of people and make a community. Some of the best dreams are ones that have been built up by hundreds, or even thousands of people over years, or even decades.      One of your classmates at school shares a dream with you. She says it wasn’t her dream originally, t...

Give me release Let the waves of time and space surround me yeah Cause I need room to breathe Let me float back to the place you found me I’ll be okay... So state the only lyrics of the song Language by Porter Robinson. It’s the song I’ve been listening to on loop at school, whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed by school. By the amount of people, or by my math teacher who does a better job at confusing us than teaching us, or when I feel like I can't take a full breath because I walked to school just a bit too late and got there just as all the vehicles were, or when I stayed up late doing homework because I'm bad at time management, then had to wake up at the same time the next morning and am really tired, or when I didn't realize how many near-strangers would be staring at me until I get to the front of the class and I couldn't function, or when I'm just at the stub of my eraser in general for some/no reason. It’s helped many other people as well-...

     One night, as I was laying in bed and attempting to sleep, one of those random thoughts came into my mind. You know, the thoughts that you have briefly, for maybe half a second, and you have no idea where they came from, and then they're gone, and you wonder whether or not you really thought that. They often have the vibe of not recognizing something you're seeing and making some sort of subconscious wild guess about what it is before your conscious mind catches up. Regardless of what exactly they are, I had one of those.      It was a mental image of a generic-looking humanoid figure, neatly wrapped in white bandages, and slightly translucent, like backlit fog. It walked silently around my mindscape. Mindscape- it sounds weird, but it's just the word I made up for the blank kind-of-a-space that you see when you're not seeing anything else in your mind... Actually, the word that best describes it is a backdrop, or maybe a screensaver, now that I think...

     I've been throwing a lot of Vocaloid-related stuff at you guys lately. I mean, that is supposed to be most of the blog, but I figured I might take a break for now and test my storytelling skills.      One of the weird things I inherited from my family, other than double-jointed fingers (although I did not inherit the tongue you can touch your own nose with; one of my cousins has that), is the ability to hear slightly higher frequencies than the average person. In high school my dad was tested up to 40 kHz (the normal limit is 20 kHz). He has, of course, lost some of that over the years, but I would estimate that I have about the same range as he did at that time, along with my siblings.      Some of the things I can hear are: - Cathode-ray tube TVs - Flute overtones - Some chargers, specifically the ones that have one thing that plugs in, then several outlets of different types - Probably some other things I can't remember - The u...

     Recently, my younger brother has been making frozen lemonade. The results are... well, this: I had to take a picture, not just for the blog post, but because it looked absolutely beautiful.      It was also delicious. So, of course, we did it again the next day, with raspberry puree instead of strawberry (I helped a bit this time):      It was even more delicious.      Would you like the recipe?      Actually, it doesn't matter, because I'll give it to you anyway. What did you think this blog post was for?      Homemade Frozen Lemonade/Sorbet:      Microwave one cup sugar and one cup lemon juice and stir till the sugar is completely dissolved. Pour the syrup into a 1-quart tupperware container* and add water until tupperware is nearly full, then put it in a freezer. When the mixture is mostly frozen, blend it, then put back in freezer and repeat until satisfied with ...

     I couldn't think of anything to write about, so here's a story about my desk. I promise it'll be interesting.      I have a desk. It looks like this:      You can probably tell that I've had it for a while. And this is after  I took most of the stickers off lol . But anyway, yes, a few years. Five or six? Or seven? I made it with my dad, as a father-daughter project. We made the design, picked out a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood, cut it, screwed it together, sanded it, and then protected it with polyurethane (was that it? I can't remember exactly), because I decided that I liked the natural color of the wood. I colored it with Sharpies, put duct tape on it, taped a piece of acetate on it, decorated it with washi tape, put very nice sparkly stickers on it, doodled on it, wrote on it, put glue on it, used an x-acto knife on it, and did many more things to it. It is a good desk.      However, I grew. The desk is now too ...

     I am not a gamer. I can say that with complete honesty. One of the games I play is half game, half UN-like roleplay. It's called  NationStates . The second is Beat Saber . The third and last is Minecraft , as you may have gathered from the title. I was going to write a post about Minecraft, but I really couldn't express what I wanted to say properly. I was going for something like the Foreword of the book Block City- How to build incredible worlds in Minecraft , which is an amazing book that features people's amazing Minecraft creations. How amazing?       Air Traffic       Colossal Carving       Dragon Spawn      These are some other majestic builds featured on minecraft.net , which features these kinds of things regularly. I highly encourage you to check out more if you're interested. So, I wanted to write an essay or something... That kinda failed. I think I'll put in instead my favorite quotes f...