djcev.com

Part of my DJing process is to take notes while practicing. I started with notes on paper for performances at Ground Kontrol and switched to text files in 2017 for the internet radio mixes. I do this to help figure out and remember transitions, and to reflect on old sets.

I thought it might be nice to publish these text files, so I did. They're now available in the Work / MTT page of the external memory section of this website. You can also find a "work file" link in individual mix pages that will take you to the associated practice notes.

BPM counts and (especially) keys listed in these files are only estimates. Some of the notes are in shorthand. And I haven't gone back to clean up or edit any of the files so I wouldn't be surprised if I've written something foolish in them.

Maybe they'll be useful to somebody out there; if nothing else, I can now browse my work notes when away from home.

Adaptation of the comic and follow-up / prequel to Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard Of Darkness. The witch Kuroi Misa evades an evil spirit with the help of magician Saiga; eventually Misa calls on '90s CG magic to defeat the spirit. Gorier than the first movie. No lecherous teachers this time, thankfully.

I like the tone of this and the first movie. They're cheesy but also weirdly burdened, heavy, and sad. I wonder if that's something director Shimako Satō brought to the production, her previous movie Tale Of A Vampire has a similar vibe. (Edit: Misa is a tragic figure in these movies, and so are some of the characters in Tale Of A Vampire. I think that's why I wanted to compare them.) The soundtrack by Mikiya Katakura does a good job capturing that feeling.

Watched tonight and felt like talking a little bit. Shoutout to Snowblood Apple for their review & recommendation of the first movie which prompted me to rent it over a decade ago.

Here's four links to electro-ish / freestyle-ish Lil Jon productions and remixes uploaded to youtube.

A week or so ago I was watching DJ Magic Mike spin on twitch and he played a track that sent me on this journey. I have a copy of Lil Jon & Lathun's version of Play At Your Own Risk (pictured top left) but I'd never gone looking for other tracks he produced in a similar style. This helpful comment from DJ KDM pointed me in the right direction and provided most of the video links you see above.

I think I might go through Lil Jon's back catalog, see if I can put together a set of his (and maybe other Atlanta producer's) electro / bass / freestyle tracks.

Available Feeds

This website provides a few different feeds, or syndication URLs, that readers can subscribe to. My static site compiler Blogofile generates RSS and Atom feeds for the main blog and each blog "category"; these are refreshed whenever I upload my site and are limited to the 10 most recent entries (for file size & bandwidth reasons). These feeds can be found in the list below:

• main RSS, main Atom.
• articles RSS, articles Atom.
• notes RSS, notes Atom.
• tracklists RSS, tracklists Atom.

There's also a special podcast-style RSS feed for Movement Through Thought episodes. Subscribe to this if you want the mixes and a minimum amount of my sketchy writing.

Clients, Feed Readers

I currently use Newsboat as my reader and have used Tiny Tiny RSS in the past. The most famous (now defunct) reader is probably Google Reader.

I've noticed some traffic coming to my site from a neat modernized feed subscriber called Fraidycat. This seems like a good option if you're on a platform that supports it and you want to follow a lot of stuff.

Defrag World Cup 2021 concluded a few weeks ago, and was a really good event! There were some pretty spicy runs. I wanted to rewatch some of the round coverage so I built the table of youtube and twitch links below. (Note that w00deh and ZERGTV also covered the cup but for the Russian-speaking audience).

Standard content warning for Quake videos: flashing lights, disorienting gameplay that may cause motion sickness.

Round	Top VQ3	Top CPM	TimConLan	Zoot
Round 1	Yotoon	Bazz	qGHHuekPETM	vukCeJvLlzU
Round 2	Frog	annh	67rPiRRQ4A4	vwfz8x3H4RQ
Round 3	xas-th	Bazz	XtMp9UUIMtw	-kl56vvkO30
Round 4	Strangeland	w00dy-th	bcMdTEKQqQE	lCgwkXI1Z_c
Round 5	Frog	annh	HP5bNqr_VOs	1211107904
Round 6	DeX	Bazz	tTWPAQsqvrg	Congrats Zoot!
Round 7	Strangeland	annh	5LB17uFoD6o	1224005901

After avoiding it for years I've finally published my dotfiles. There's a mixture of shell scripts and configuration files in there, most of which is (I hope) explained by the README.

The image nearby is a recent screenshot of my desktop. The background / wallpaper & character art pictured are from the old eroge visual novel Divi-Dead (which I played way back in high school and have been using artwork from for backgrounds ever since).

A few points of interest, things I'm happy with:

• bin/back.sh & config/redshift/hooks/background.sh & the accompanying conkyrc,
• bin/lc.sh an ls-like written in Bourne shell that does extended colorizing,
• config/herbstluftwm/autostart my herbstluftwm start script,
• fixcolors.sh which replaces terms in .fix files with values defined in a colordef.

I'll be adding more to the repo soon(ish), probably starting with my audio file management scripts.

Otherside Picnic. TV anime from the winter 2021 season, an adaptation of a yuri sci-fi light novel series inspired by Roadside Picnic. It's a unique mixture. The show is uneven but overall I've enjoyed the few episodes I've seen. I'll have to look for the novels.

Posting because I spotted a familiar logo in the first episode (see attached image) and to motivate myself to finish the show.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. 2019, Saga Press. Hardcover, 356 pages. ISBN 9-781481-447966.

Military science fiction of the anti-war "war is hell" variety. Dietz enlists with Tene-Silvia corporate infantry to fight human colonists on Mars after their family goes missing in an attack on São Paulo. The military transports people over long distances by breaking them down into light; Dietz's combat drops do not go as expected.

There are clear references to Starship Troopers (both the book and I think Verhoeven's movie) and Haldeman's Forever War here. I didn't mind that, the references and any borrowed structure helped to ground the book while other aspects went completely sideways.

Dietz and the reader experience the war out of order and have to puzzle out what's really going on. It's confusing, but purposefully so, and never for too long. It's a pretty gnarly book, gory and mean. I found it to be a propulsive, blunt, and pretty direct read. Liked it quite a bit. Particularly liked the ending. I look forward to reading it again to see how it works with prior knowledge of the plot.

cpm.1 FastCaps[.df] at youtube.com. The latest (and sadly probably final) Quake 3 Defrag compilation video from power_of_heavy_metal. 15 minutes of fastcaps performed with cpm movement and fastcap 1 rules (so no weapons, teleports, or jumppads).

Content warning for flashing lights and first-person gameplay that might cause motion sickness. Same for all Quake videos.

power_of_heavy_metal has great taste in music and the selections for this video are no exception. I particularly like the second track, Io by Concealed Identity from their Nightingale Floor EP on Repertoire.

Linking this today because I found it recently and it's rad. I'll probably link the other power_of_heavy_metal compilation videos when I get around to rewatching them.

A blurry photo of my shelves. I'm moving to a nearby city in a few days and wanted to document their state before I box everything up.

Two full-height wire shelving units containing books and movies, CDs and vinyl, video games and et cetera. Most of what's pictured was purchased used at donation centers, secondhand shops, and thrift stores. The DVD cases without artwork contain secrets.

I'm sure there's something to be said here about consumerism and embarrassing displays of conspicuous consumption but I haven't figured out what.

Edge Habitat mixed by dequalsrxt (AKA DRXT, AKA DJ Megaphysics). Released August 2021. Duration 61:09, 320 kbps 44.1khz mp3. Brilliant mix of Drum & Bass, IDM (?), and Jungle. Tracklist (with links to where you can purchase the music) is available at the soundcloud page.

dequalsrxt / DJ Megaphysics is my friend and partner in crime from way back. Together we hosted the Logical Aggression night at Ground Kontrol for nearly ten years. We have similar but slightly different tastes - we tend to go for the same records but where I might play the A side he might play the B.

Megaphysics puts a lot of time and effort into crafting his released mixes. He uploads one every year or two to his mixcloud and soundcloud pages and they're always sweet. Edge Habitat is no exception. An hour of Drum & Bass and Jungle, ranging from ambient and smooth to hype and noisy, all mixed pretty quickly (21 tracks in an hour!).

This is all a long way of saying: I think this mix is great, and if you like my taste in music I think you'll like his too. So I suggest you give it a listen.

Electrokid's Robot Within. Released in 2002 (I think, that's the date on the file I have anyway). 62:52 in the truncated 256kbps version, 77:27 in the full-length 128kbps version. Nonstop propulsive breaks, electro, and IDM. 21 tracks all perfectly arranged.

This mix is a big part of why I'm here, why I'm a DJ. I found it in the early 2000s through a review Ishkur wrote on his old website. The mix completely floored me then; it still does now. Looking back I think I must have internalized a lot of the selection and decisions in Robot Within because I have - consciously or not - been trying to sound like it for a long time. I know it's the first place I heard Movement Through Thought, for one.

Robot Within holds up very well today and is still one of my favorite DJ mixes. I strongly recommend giving it a listen over at Electrokid's website. (And Ishkur's review has the tracklist).

Discord & Rhyme Episode 50 covering two albums by Steely Dan.

Taking a moment today to link to the Discord & Rhyme album review podcast's two-and-a-half hour episode 50 which covers Countdown To Ecstasy and Aja by Steely Dan. Discord & Rhyme is always good, but this episode on Steely Dan in particular helped me understand a difficult band. (And it's been cheering me up a lot over the last year). Warning for profanity; maybe don't listen to this at work or around kids.

Important questions are answered during this podcast. Questions like: Is Steely Dan for dads? Is Aja "slick" or "smooth"? Did Steely Dan enjoy 2006 in film? And many more.

How to be PRO? Tutorial by Fatal1ty at youtube.com. (Previously uploaded with the title "Practice Time by Mr. Positivity"). The clip linked above is from Fatal1ty's segment of the I'm A Gamer episode of MTV's True Life.

You gotta practice. Practice. Practice practice practice practice. Practice. And if you're not practicing you should be practicing. So keep practicing. It's the only way you're gonna get better. It's the only way you're gonna be number 1. Number 1 in anything. You need practice practice practice.

I keep a copy of this on my hard drive and watch it whenever I need motivation. I like the part where he tells me to practice.

Final torture [Quake3 DeFRaG movie] at youtube.com.

Quake 3 Defrag map gnj-finaltorture performed by Shio. VQ3 physics. Video by xajjA, map of course by gnj. Run and video both from 2013. Content warning for flashing lights and first-person gameplay that may cause motion sickness.

Incredible run of a punishing Q3 defrag map. Fall at any point and you start over from the beginning. One of the great Quake videos of the last decade. Even ESReality likes it.

Posting because this is where I first heard Running Away by DJ Infiniti. (It's the second music track, starts at 01:52.) That's the same Infiniti whose mix of Move Over was just played in MTT 228. Every time I hear Running Away I think of Shio and gnj-finaltorture.