Blog: Favorite YouTube Videos (Volume 5)

Welcome to the fifth volume of my favorite YouTube videos. This week is a bit of a grab bag. Still mostly musical but also a little bit of brain melting thrown in for good measure.

• The first video is the video for Dana Lyons song "Cows With Guns". It's ... punny and you should consider yourself warned. The song is also a fond reminder of the old days of CBC radio and "Richardson's Roundup" which was always the highlight of my day. Quick note, really long intro so you might want to skip about 20 seconds in and turn your volume down until after the singing starts.
• The second video is a few minutes with renowned physic professor Walter Lewin. This is part of his Electricity and Magnetism Lecture (I think from 2002). It comes in a bit late if its been a while since you covered electro-magnetism, but is still a fascinating video and a view of an amazing lecturer (also he's a man who is very good at drawing lines). 
• The next video is a return to our friend Brentalfloss and his interpretation of the original Zelda Theme. (And it's a good thing he got those 400 views of his Mario medley.)
• The fourth video for this volume is of comedian / musician Rob Paravonian and his famous Pachebel Rant. (I'm not sure about famous exactly but looking on the internet this seems to be the thing he's known for best). 
• And the final video for this volume is Stephen Malinowski's Music Animation Machine video of a harpsichord recording of Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata in G Major. This video is favorited for two reasons, the first of which is that I like the harpsichord rendition of the song (midi though it may be) and the second is that the style of animation of music inspired the visualizations I used for a project of mind called Agent Jam (which I haven't mentioned here yet, but I  may in the not too distant future.)

Interestingly one of the videos that would have been in this volume got axed by copyright request in the last few days. It's interesting in this case because the video was of Rostropovich playing the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 and had been up on youtube for at least 5 years by this point. Copyright is always a thorny issue and I'm not making any statements about that here other than that its frustrating when things disappear out of my favorites list.

Project 4 : Snake

As I have mentioned here before, one of the goals I have is to design and make video games. I don't know that I mean to do it as a career (said the perpetual student) but  it would be a fun hobby.

I don't have experience in games programming (baring some assignments during my bachelor's degree) so I need to start actually doing something to start getting some experience (you have to start your 10 000 hours somewhere).

I figured to give myself an achievable start I'd though I'd tackle something with not too many moving parts. As such, I thought I'd implement Snake. For the uninitiated, in basic snake you play a snake, made up of squares and you eat dots which make you longer and you try not to crash into things (either the wall or yourself.)

Emulation of the Snake I remember best on the TI-83.

I like snake for a number of reasons. The first as I mentioned is that it's relatively easy to program and a simple implementation can be put together in a day or an afternoon (even if you don't really know what you're doing). It is also easily extendible (it's not too much extra work to get to tron bikes or to caterpillar) and still has enough game play aspects to introduce interesting ideas.

This is not a terribly novel thing to do. There is a site at snakegame.net which has an archive of some of the more interesting implementations which come in a variety of flavors. There's also a cool version Snakes on a Cartesian Plane which plays with a lot of different game play concepts and ideas.

It's punny and an exciting experiment.

A friend of mine, who happens to be experienced in the way of game design, mentioned a developer who always implements snake as a way to get familiar with a new platform. I feel like this is a good idea and I'm planning to follow that as well as I start teaching myself how to make games.

The first stage I'd like to finish is to implement a vary basic, limited graphics version of snake using Processing.org. I actually did most of this a while ago but somehow lost the project on my computer so need to start again. This should be fairly quick (as I said maybe an afternoon of work) but I'm going to give myself a deadline of September 1, 2012 to finish.

Project 1 : A Blog - Wrap Up / Update

A year ago I started the "Blog as a Project" project (not to be confused with the "Blog as a Blog") and today is the day I'm supposed to wrap it up.

Let me say first that I'm planning to start a "second season" of the blog, but that I'm still not sure exactly what form it will take.

When I first started out to blog more I had a list of things I thought would be interesting to blog about. I even have a nicely organized file that lists them all. I'll include that below so you can see what I had been thinking about before I started.

Idea	Date Added	Date Published
Intro	06/08/10	01/08/11
Windows Shutdown	06/08/10	-
Thesis	06/08/10	-
We are all going to live in public	06/08/10	-
Thesis Wordle	06/08/10	-
Ad incentives (omgpop vs tetrisfriends)	06/08/10	-
Why everyone should be a polymath	12/08/10	-
Not all collections are created equal	12/08/10	-
Clean Desktop	13/08/10	-
Nerd Fighting / Proactive Nerds	14/08/10	-
My Pockets	14/08/10	-
Black book ToDo List	14/08/10	-
Enjoying Wear	14/08/10	-
Pomplamoose Videos expertise in sound crafting	15/08/10	-
Closet	28/08/10	-
Water Bottle Spigot	28/08/10	-
Garfield / Adding more to the given story	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Harry Potter	18/11/10	-
I don't really like Robots	17/12/10	-
Fan Chants at Hitmen	31/01/11	-
Peanut butter pizza tutorial (Video)	03/06/11	-
"Future" - (Corning Glass) (via Terry O'Riley)	03/06/11	-
Derek K. Miller	31/07/11	13/09/11

So what can we see? Mostly that I only managed to get two posts done from the original list, the Introduction (which I split into two parts, the intro to the "The Blog the Blog" and the intro to "The Blog the Project") and my memorial post to Derek K. Miller. The others haven't been done for a variety of reasons.

By far the biggest reason is that the me of 2010 just doesn't have the same concerns that me of today does. So, while I could write most of these posts still, I'm not sure I'd feel the same push I would have had I not been procrastinating back in 2010. A few of these I have no idea what I was supposed to talk about (Closet? - mine should be be cleaner but what was my point, Garfield? - I don't even know) and some I don't really have anything to say on the topic (Harry Potter, Robots and Hitmen Chants). A few actually require me to learn new skills (how hard should it be to mock up Windows Shutdown Screens? damn hard if you aren't trained in it, it turns out).

Some of them may still be interesting, but I don't know that they match as well with the things I'm thinking about now, nor the things I'd like to focus on. Over all, at the moment, I feel that this blog should support all the other projects that I'm working on (and yes I know I'm not doing much right now, that'll be followed up on in another post). That's why I've been writing (a bit) about video games since at the moment I would like to focus more on learning to be a good developer of video games.

July is really the first month in which I've gotten any traction at all blogging, and that mostly through my Favorite YouTube Videos series. While the YouTube series is not exactly an amazingly deep set of posts, they are fun to write (and hopefully fun to read) and they give me some practice in getting things written and sent out. Given that my career requires (for the next 3 years at least) that I get better at writing and and presenting my work, any practice I can get doing this seems like a good thing.

With a "year" of blogging in hand, I feel excited to keep going (and actually more excited having written this post). As I mentioned, I would like to focus more on blogging about things that support the other projects I'm doing. This means in the short term I'm going to keep posting thoughts about different video games as a primary topic, but I'll keep posting about anything that I think is interesting and slowly flooding everyone with the videos I've favorited on YouTube (incidentally that should take about a year to get caught up on).

As I've said before I think that there should be a pre-determined end date for any project. I'm calling this the second season of the blog and it will run from now until August 1, 2013.

Blog: Favorite Youtube Videos (Volume 4)

Welcome to the fourth volume of my favorite youtube videos series. This volume is a musical grab bag and another visit to internet history.

• The first video is one of the versions of the Pi song. There are several songs composed so that the digits of Pi inform the music. In this case it dictates the pitch of the note, there are others where the digits control other things, you can see a bit more at Numberphile's video on making a Mathmetal song about Phi. This version is pretty up beat and kinda fun to listen to.
• The next three videos are that visit to internet history. Brentalfloss has become pretty well known for his video game music "with lyrics" series, but did you know that he started out doing simple covers of old video game songs? (You did? Oh for heaven's sake, why do I keep using this device?) Here we see three renditions of Mario Bros. music two on keyboard and one a cappella and you can see a little bit of where Brent is going to go, but I have to say at the time I didn't expect just how cool he was going to become.
• The final video is a funky rendition of Fur Elise by a guy called GovernorWatts. I also found him through some of his video game music videos, but he wandered off into other fields. It's interesting that at the time Brentalfloss and GovenorWatts seemed about the same (both doing "in bedroom music covers" and political rants) and to see now how differently they came out. (And no I'm still not sure about the"son of Stephen Colbert" bit, but I do know that this was going long before the Report came out.)