I took way too many pictures this month, so I’m just going to dump them in here with minimal commentary. First, a bunch of wandering around pictures:

Tower from below in the haze

Top of tower in the haze

Glitch in water

Water at the top of a mine

Flying over the desert

Cliff face with arch

Underwater hills

Underwater lines and structures

I saw my first jungle:

Jungle oasis

The border of the jungle

The interior of the jungle

Looking down from the treetops

Looking up from the jungle floor

I wanted to be able to find my way back there, so I thought of making a map; the map didn’t update after the initial picture, though, maybe it doesn’t work when flying or something?

Trying to map

Sunset behind a snowy mountain

Sunset in valley

Glow of a house at sunset

Cows on a cliff

Chunk loading abstraction

Cave in cliff wall

Snow and sand

Squids and a duck. Uh, chicken.

Miranda is having to take state tests at school, and is none too pleased about that, so she decided to create a piece of art expressing her feelings.

Anti-testing art

Instructions for proper use

Snowballs work too

The artist examines her art

Dan was working on some sort of tower, here are some pictures of the work in progress:

Dan working on a tower

Outside the tower

Looking up at the center

Tower door

Roger was building pyramids; it was dark, and unfortunately I only got one picture:

Roger building a pyramid

And Pat was working on a sandstone palace, it looks like it will be huge when it’s done.

Pat building a sandstone palace

Palace door

Palace from above

Palace wall

Building the palace floor

Working on the palace tower

Tower and moon

Tower window

Inside the tower

I spent the last twenty minutes or so watching Miranda build a fire temple:

One wall of the fire temple

Purple flames

Looking up at the roof

Looking through the gate

Oblique view

View from above

Starting work on the floor

Laying out the glowstone

Underwater view of glowstone

Let's add some lava

The finished floor

It burns!

Enclosing the temple sides

Administrative note: the May VGHVI Minecraft session will be on May 24, not May 31.

For the second week in a row, I played some Ni No Kuni: not a lot, but I’m chipping away at it.

I took on a few errands in the city, but I didn’t actually finish any of them. Then I left the city, heading north to the ghost valley. That was a pretty standard dungeon; I did fine against the monsters, which is good, because I was afraid that my avoiding fights in the overworld might have gotten me a bit underpowered. No problems there, though.

Then, at the end of the valley, there was a house with a girl living there. I fast forwarded through the conversation more than I should have (especially given that the stated goal for this exercise is to learn Japanese!), but I think the gist was that she first lived there to look after the graves of her parents, but now is looking after graves more generally? There was something about the next area that she needed help with, so we volunteered to help fix it, or something.

I remembered that, back in the city, I’d crafted a new gun for Gyro; partly because of that and partly because Maru had been running out of magic, I used him a lot in the dungeon. (Though his gun still isn’t very effective, I should see what his magic is like.) That inspired me to look more in the crafting menu, because clearly it’s not just for disposable items: I found a recipe for a +50 magic point ring that I had the ingredients for, so I crafted one of those and gave it to Maru. (Oliver was already wearing one.) That should help with long fights in the future, I hope.

After that conversation, we went to the next part of the dungeon, which looked like a crypt of some sort; there was a save spot right at the beginning, so I saved there and stopped.

This weekend, I started on tier 4 Expert Pro Guitar. So far, I’ve managed to three-star every song; coming into this tier, I was not expecting to maintain that streak.

The first song I played was Rush’s Subdivisions. I’ve always enjoyed playing Rush on fake guitar, but this is the first time I’ve tried it out on the real thing. And it was tough but manageable (I was going to say tough but fair, but this is music, fairness is irrelevant), chords that I needed to work on but that I could deal with. And, sure enough, I enjoyed it: I think I’m probably going to put it into the practice rotation, because I suspect I have a lot to learn from it.

Next was Everybody Wants to Rule the World, the easiest of the on-disc tier 4 songs. I didn’t take notes after playing it, so I can’t remember the details: I remember there was picking that was a little too fast to be within my comfort zone, I can’t remember what else was going on. Pretty sure I enjoyed it, but not enough to want to frequently return to it.

Today, I went through the middle third of 2112, namely Discovery and Presentation. I was pretty sure that this was going to be the first song I didn’t manage to three-star: my first run, I wasn’t that far over two stars, there were some very rough bits. The thing is, though, the rough bits are in two parts: it ends with a long solo that’s way too hard for me, so that’s a total loss. But the rest is chord sections; they’re somewhat unusual, but I managed to get the basic approach right for most of them, and when thinking about it more, I was pretty sure I’d be able to do a passable job at the one chord section that I’d totally screwed up. So I went back through the training section for that bit, and played it over and over again, and eventually managed three stars on the song. (And 26th place on the leaderboard, DLC leaderboards are kind of silly.)

So: I’ve managed to survive my first week of tier 4! Wonder how long that will last…

I didn’t put in as much time on guitar as I normally do this weekend, maybe around two hours or so? But I did make it through three pieces (plus the usual assortment of review.)

The first was This Bastard’s Life. It had tons of seventh chords, including what I think are slightly nonstandard variants; educational but very hard, I only managed to get my third star on the final held note. I would probably profit from playing this over and over again, though right now I’m not planning to put in the time; I wish I had other pieces that let me learn some of those seventh chords in a slightly friendlier context.

Next was Killing Moon. I felt that This Bastard’s Life was marked as one tier too easy; Killing Moon, in contrast, seemed to me to be marked as at least one tier too hard. Repeated easy chords over and over again; single notes with room between them and not requiring much hand movement. I guess the difficulty was assigned because of the solo, which was long; but the solo was super easy as well (again, requiring very little hand movement and slow enough that it wasn’t hard to sight read most of it), so I’m not sure why it was marked as tier 3 instead of, say, tier 1. Having said that, I ended up at 49th place on the leaderboard, so I guess it somehow played to my strengths?

Finally, Heart of Glass. A bunch of single notes, with string jumping, and a few two-note chords that were unusual enough to give me trouble. I barely managed the third star, which surprised me, I felt that I should have done better than that.

And, with that, I finished tier 3! I suspect that this is the last tier that I’ll be able to get three stars on all of the songs (at least on this go through)—I expect I’ll be able to play many of the tier 4 songs, and even enjoy several of them, but random variation in difficulty means that a few will hit my weak points enough that I won’t be able to get to three stars without more hours of work than I’m willing to put in. We’ll see, though; just making it to tier 4 on expert feels like a real accomplishment, and I’ll be perfectly happy to start over with the easiest songs, trying to really master the ones I enjoy the most.

I didn’t feel like immersing myself in guitar this weekend, so I ended up playing Ni No Kuni for the first time in almost two months. I’m definitely losing steam here – I’m not devoting as much time to the Japanese as I could, and I’m also not that into the gameplay, so I’m not super motivated to continue. And I suspect that the combination of those will mean that I miss out on gameplay details that will make it very hard for me to progress, so I’d be pretty surprised if I made it too much farther through the game. Having said that, I am getting something from it Japanese-wise, and if I want to put in more time on that side of things, I can, so I’m not stopping yet.

Anyways: spent some time in the pig people city, looking for the next wise person. I’m not sure exactly what happened – we said some passphrase that let us into an alley, we met with somebody with a sick girl (I think a little sister?), then we put on pig disguises and went into the palace. There, we had a big boss battle, I was worried I wouldn’t make it through but we did manage to survive. Then, we met the king, who seemed to be the next wise person, but he didn’t want to help. At some point in this process we got a medicine and gave it to the sick girl; she got better, and we got a heart piece from her which we gave to the king, so he got better.

In this last scene, Gyro revealed himself to be (I think) the king’s older brother. (So the king wasn’t a pig person, which surprised me – are all these pig people humans under the armor?) The king didn’t teach us any new spells, but he told us the next place to go, I think some sort of ghost place.

I was out of town for the last couple of weeks, and I was pretty busy today catching up with stuff, but I did manage to get in a bit of practice. Mostly I went through old favorites; the one new song I tried was One-Arm Scissor. Which was quite tough at the start, hard enough that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get three stars on it, but after a couple of tries I started being able to play the unusual chords in it. Sounded quite odd when plugged in, I think there must be some sort of alternate tuning going on there?

I didn’t take a lot of pictures in the March VGHVI Minecraft session, but here’s what I’ve got. First, the obligatory tourism shots:

Some sort of nether creature greeting me

Island and ice palace

Super tree and floating castle

Train station

There were a few more chunk errors than normal, one of which I thought was very entertaining:

Chunk error

Flying squid

Island cut in half

The main construction project was Pat extending a tower he’d built previously to take advantage of the new height limit:

Starting to extend the tower

Skeleton of the extension is in place

Working on the top of the extension

Lava viewed from below

The tower lit up at night

Working on the bird

Bird mostly finished

Spread wings

The final bird

Looking down into the mist

Tower in the rain

When practicing older songs on Pro Guitar this week, I concentrated on Tier 3 songs instead of my earlier practice playlist (which was mostly Tier 0); and wow, Tier 3 is so much fun. I went through More than a Feeling, Working for the Weekend, Combat Baby, Viva La Resistance, and Ziggy Stardust; all fun, all instructive, all worth returning to. (Viva La Resistance is maybe a little boring to play, though not to listen to, but it’s good tremolo practice.)

And the first song I played this week may well get added to the list; I didn’t take detailed notes, but I really enjoyed playing The Look. Walk of Life was okay but not great; Tier 3 on Pro Guitar versus devil horns on fake guitar, and it’s a little hard for me to imagine what would make it devil horns: unrelenting, but not ludicrously fast, and either no solo or an easy one. Admittedly, my hand did hurt by the end of it, but not so much that I didn’t play through it several times; good, albeit not quite as much of a keeper as several of the other songs. As was Spanish Bombs: that one was mostly barre chord practice.

After that, I went through five (I think) songs on Pro Bass, finishing off Tier 3 and doing the first two songs in Tier 4. Pleasant but, of course, noticeably easier than guitar, and I have no idea why the first of those Tier 4 songs was marked at that level, it was quite easy.

The one blemish was that my guitar started acting funny, not detecting input reliably even after swapping batteries; that happened before and it was caused by the MIDI cable, so I swapped that out and yes, it was the problem again. So I ordered another backup; and, since I’m starting to get paranoid about equipment availability, I also ordered a spare MIDI adapter.

I worked on the Musical Offering some, too; getting better, but my heart wasn’t in it this week. Not sure if I was tired or if that’s a sign that I’ve been working on that for too long; not sure I have the energy to really polish the 3-Part Ricercar, but I would like to get the 6-Part Ricercar sounding better, so I’ll keep going for a few more weeks (a month, really, to be realistic) longer. Not sure if I’ll pause on piano playing after that (to focus more on guitar and on non-musical pursuits) or switch pieces.

What with GDC, I didn’t play Rock Band at all last weekend, and basically didn’t do anything musical for almost two weeks straight. This weekend was a little busy, but clearly I didn’t want to let that happen again, so I made sure to play some Rock Band on Saturday.

Which was, of course, great! I went through my regular round of practice pieces, and then on to new pieces: only three this week (like I said, I was a little busy), which were:

• Combat Baby: super fun. Nice single note bits, pleasant chords that were mostly bottom three/four strings but with some interesting seventh fret playing around. Learned something (especially about the latter) from playing it plugged in.
• Viva La Resistance; great song (one of my favorites to listen to on the disk), though actually not my most favorite to play guitar on. In particular, the alternating strumming is sometimes a bit too fast, especially when playing it muted; it improves significantly when plugged in. But even so I made it through it fine and there are a fair number of non-tremolo parts to enjoy; and it’s a reminder that I should get back to finding five minutes to do tremolo practice every evening. (Easy enough to do while cooking dinner, after all.
• Ziggy Stardust: the arpeggiations were extremely similar to those in More Than a Feeling, it had nice power chord mixture, single note runs, all around lots of fun.

In fact, tier three guitar has been great all around: More than a Feeling and Working for the Weekend remain two of my favorite songs to play. (I should probably come up with a tier three practice list to return to, and quite possible all three songs that I learned this weekend will go on it.) So maybe that’s my current sweet spot? Which is gratifying: I’m sure I’ll hit a wall at some point, but I’m halfway through the difficulty curve on Expert and I’m still doing more than okay. The flip side is that I’m not coming close to perfect on any of these; but that’s good, too, I imagine I learn the most if I can do well enough on a piece to enjoy it and to motivate me to really learn it while having enough flaws in my playing that I really do need to work to learn the piece.

Liesl and I also started chipping away at the DLC backlog on Saturday (on fake guitar/bass); nothing too striking there, though Call Me was a reminder that I really like singing along with Blondie. (I fear that the high notes there are just enough on the edge of my range that I’d be nervous singing when anybody else is along, alas.) And Liesl and I should go through the Hall and Oates and Heart songs on harmonies, too.

Today I put in my piano practice; felt rusty (and my fingers actually felt sluggish, through a combination of the temperature and being out of practice), and the Three-Part Ricercar sounded as bad as I can remember in a while. The Six-Part Ricercar started bad, too, but eventually got better; I really am getting close to not sounding horribly incompetent at that. And I went through some songs from My Neighbor Totoro at the end, always fun to play through Ghibli music.

Pictures from the February VGHVI Minecraft session:

First, the obligatory “flying around noticing stuff” shots. It’s amazing how well the temple area has held up as a center for our world.

Looking out over the temple

A chicken and chests

A watery cave

Pit inside the cave

Looking up from the bottom of the pit

Rain on bedrock

Dan decided to turn the session into a narrated adventure, here’s some of that:

Narrative 1

Narrative 2

Miranda returned to her platform from last time (which turns out to be a flower), finishing it off:

Working on the bottom of the flower

Added leaves

Completed bottom of flower

Starting work on the top of the flower

Enclosing the top in glass

Looking down into the furnished top

Inside the top

Signs

While Miranda was working on that, Roger was wandering around, and discovered a mushroom island; I went to visit him, because I’d never seen that either:

I'm a sucker for the art of Minecraft chunk loading

Mushroom hillside

Mushroom cows

Mushroom cave

Pink mushroom

Moon rises over mushrooms

After finishing the flower, Miranda made a floating island:

Floating island

The architect ponders

Trees, grass, flowers, mandala

Lamp and chest

Hut

Inside the hut

Pond

The bottom of the island