Category: Style

IRC Social Viewing

Posted by Ryan A - November 7, 09

Author

Myself, sagematt and hikago bunched together to watch Kampfer 05 a couple of days ago. What it actually means though, we went to an IRC channel, started our media players on a countdown, and exchanged messages like “LOL at Akane dropping Natsuru from a tree”. Very social! And they cannot sneeze H1N1 on you.

Very social, but also considerate, unobtrusive, and avoids sneezing H1N1 on spamming others on one of those status-update things. I would have joined this little session, except I lost interest in Kampfer when Sakura became very pushy and potentially dangerous.

Federation, When

Posted by Ryan A - October 1, 09

via アニ・ノート

Steven says:

And as for certain people who just mail their comments to me instead of posting them, I really wish you’d register, log in, and post for yourself.

Okay, really now. Here’s a brilliant idea. Every blog should require registration to comment. That way we can have accounts on every single service just to achieve a fluid channel for communication1.

Here’s an even better idea, let’s reform e-mail so that in order to send to myemail.com you have to have an myemail.com account. No no no, it’s totally great this way! That way, you can have like 150 accounts to sign into and check and talk on, but you know all the cool kids are doing it so you know it’s good….

ESTABLISHING THAT MOAR POPULAR = BETTER.

Meanwhile, []2 I’ll continue my quest for Federation.

More…

Methodical New Music

Posted by Ryan A - August 21, 09

Lately, there’s been a ton of new music1 to listen to around my abode, but it’s not such a simple matter; listening to unheard albums.

Perhaps the downfall to new album introduction is the passivity of listening. How familiar do we get after just one listen? Even with an active listen, I’d say it’s a very small imprint, and so I’ve devised some tips to deal with audible overload.

Album Selection

Grab 3-5 albums of the bunch, at random works, and plan to listen to the group throughout a single day. This is a good way to eat though mega lists. Also, it is recommended to NOT go by artists alone, just grab albums from different artists, without regard for who made it2.

Play-by-Album, Play-by-Track

Use a desktop-based music application and listen to an album from the beginning, with a catch. Put the player on single-track mode (play only one song at a time) so that you have to keep going back to the player and manually click the next song…. naturally, I’m assuming multi-tasking and a passive listen.

This helps with the pacing, so that an album doesn’t woosh fly right by. It isn’t always necessary to listen through an entire album (we know what we enjoy, right?), but listen enough to be able to categorize the album.

Tag and Rename

Meta-data is nice for organization, but I have my quips with auto-tagging (specifically genre). Anyhow, it’s a good idea to manually assign genre and/or style tags to tracks. Genre is great for overall categorization (ie. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Electronic…), but style allows definition of finer attributes, such as j-rock, experimental, fusion, indie, lo-fi or larger genre if the work touches, but doesn’t quite focus on it. For example, a rock album that tends to have jazz influences could be listed as, genre:Rock style:Fusion, Jazz-influence… etc.

Using style could be an entire post itself, but the main concept is organizing while or just after listening. Listening to the music and asking, “what genre/style is this,” makes it slightly more active.

Then rename. I’m sure we all have music organization preferences, but following with the genre-style tag idea, why not use them in the name? Generally, my naming format:

<artist>/(<date>) <album>/<tracknumber>. <track>

But let’s see that with categorizing tags:

<artist>/(<date>) <album> [<genre>,<style>]/<tracknumber>. <track>

The advantage of having genre as part of the album’s folder name is simple, it’s quite difficult to remember every artist/album and their sound. More than likely, the sound will be remembered, but then finding which artist it was will take playing songs from random album folders. With genre-style properly and personally assigned, filtering possible albums becomes a simpler process.

And that about sums the method. Sure it’s heartbreaking to listen to tracks that aren’t the current addiction, but working though many albums efficiently yields a good feeling and help avoid music overload3.

More…

Raep’d [The]me

Posted by Ryan A - September 20, 08

A very non-sense post, but here’s the recent theme/css mod:

local

So basically, it’s the exact same, but I changed the structure so it fills the WS. Changes:

  • Left sidebar: hold in-blog links
  • Categories and Archives moved from the dropdown menu
  • Categories is becoming more fluid and less cluttery
  • Right sidebar: holds feeds and expands with the page
  • [future] relocate the Recommended blogroll to one of the sidebars

Anyway, the trick to all this wasn’t fun, because modifying present themes [that weren't built that way] is a no-no. Blah, *needs a drink*…. so, how did I do the flexible sidebar, with persistant columns? I won’t go into the specific adjustment, but here’s the general idea:

blah

A professional CSS wizard would probably know what this is called, I call it using up the whitespace of a single column, which emulates a larer number of columns.

My main reasoning for this is that the feed columns get rather tall, but when side-by-side they average out the page height. Though, not every screen likes a really wide page, so it is dependant on the browser window. And ya.

I was the morning

Posted by Ryan A - March 27, 08

oomagic

I felt like doing a little GIMP work this morning, so I whipped up some colorful patterns (unrelated to posted image) and a variation of the previous header for given blog. It’s funny how I should forget about IE6, (a suggestion from mellow), but the styles work.

Too bad I don’t feel like working on other stuff today. Time for some seasonal anime, reflections coming.

Ryan A

Update

Posted by Ryan A - November 19, 07

So I changed the styling here, a bit. I was bored and didn’t have a clue where I was going with a math paper (had to break out a calculator on that one). Actually, I had the layout visualized slightly; making room for an extra feature, hopefully soon. It will be pure reflections, episode to episode, but they won’t be the post content of the blog.

Um, well I still have Saber in a way. I’ll probably change that, but I like the overflow of the banner. It allows for more variety in shapes and sizes. I won’t put the ‘fixed’ styling though, since it lags bad. Also, I’m thinking about this train that is blasting noise in my window using list menus to free some space on the sidebar.

I’m tired, must sleep… one day of school… 6 days vacation… must

SURVIVE!

Ryan A

Comfortable

Posted by Ryan A - October 8, 06

Well, I’m content with the layout at this point, though I may alter it at any interval of free time. Plus, I wasn’t really feeling tip-top yesterday while I was rumaging through the WP CSS. I feel much better today and hopefully will post something already jotted down in Notepad++. I have quite a few older reflections on series, a couple on mangas, and some recent things.

For now, some of the titles I plan on mentioning here include NHK ni Youkoso, Bokura ga Ita, and Pumpkin Scissors, though there will be others. I have a backlog problem (like everyone else), and sometimes there has been weeks where I didn’t get to enjoy a single episode or volume, but hopefully I shouldn’t fall into those kind of slums anymore. One series I really would like to finish up is Black Lagoon; soon.

My blogging style can be better understood in the About section.

Ryan A