Yessiree, and today's picks were:

Track 3: "Vivid" (a fan request by "Swashbuckler")
Track 4: "Through the Mirror" (because I felt like it)

Enjoy. Personally, I loved the way Vivid turned out.

Check it out!

I'm going to be finalizing a song today that Raegan Quinn and I have been planning forever. The music's been made already and she wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies. Now, today we're planning to get the vocals done and get the song uploaded on the Lotus Reverie Myspace (Lotus Reverie was what she wanted to call our little rock duo that we're doing for fun until she has to move up to Pensacola with her boyfriend).

I'll keep you guys posted on it.

As for the LoZ film, I have finished most of the Ganon scenes and await scoring the final battle scene, which is going to be challenging, but will give me plenty of room to give it my all. I'm looking forward to it.

So, my job decided to lay people off, except all I knew was that I got a text message as I was enjoying my day off saying "Oh by the way, you don't have a job anymore."

......how chickenshit is that?

So, after all the funness and craziness of life in the last few months, the producer and director of the "Hero of Time" film have given me a deadline to finish the score. I have until somewhere in late July to finish the music.

This is NOT a release date for the movie; it's just my deadline to get my stuff finished.

So I need to get busy, because I still have a handful of scenes left to do.

I received a DVD in the e-mail of another LoZ film made by Carl Pelleteir of Quebec, Canada the other day, where he used much my NG music here along with music from other very highly talented composers (some of which made me feel unworthy =p) for his full-length feature. It was an honor. Thank you, Carl.

Well, Jacon was a bit of fun, although for me it was more of a vacation from home than an actual fun-with-anime-people thing.

Now I'm home and ready to go back to work on things I have to get done.

I'm posting this from my friend's laptop. I am at Jacon right now in Kissimmee, and will probably leave after the WoW panel at noon Sunday.

I stopped in the lobby and played piano for a while on and off out of boredom. Just curious as to if any of you are here, too.

That's right!

I've been meaning to do it for some time, but I finally got around to starting an all-piano album of select rock songs from my repertoire.

The album is titled "Redefined: A Piano Album", and it will consist of a live piano performance by myself (mistakes included, as you'll gather from The Fade's track) along with me singing along to it and then turning around and making back-up vocals for the piece.

The mixing sounds raw, but while it was accidental (I still have to recalibrate everything to work with the new computer I've been using since a month or two ago), it does facilitate the "live-performance" sound that I wanted to initially create.

So enjoy. Currently the first two pieces are done, they are "No Face" and "The Fade". There's more to come like "Through the Mirror", "Vivid", "Never the Same", and I'm still taking ideas if there are any of my other songs you'd like to hear in all-piano.

In my experiences as a heavily philosophical and agnostic individual who was raised in the church and places his highest priority on the pursuit of truth, I have reached some rather difficult and harsh truths that have compelled me to share some advice with anyone who will listen, especially since I've fallen victim to them myself. Take these with a grain of salt, because even my own word should not be blindly trusted. These are just food for thought.

- If you desire to seek truth, don't expect to find something new; the answer's in front of you right now, and all your search is going to do is show you what's already there.

- If you spend your life always questioning everything, you will render yourself incapable of ever accepting any answers. On the other hand, if you never question anything, someone else will surely be your puppeteer.

- One consistent paradox in our universe is that the ones who have all the answers are the most confused, and the ones who think they're found are indeed all the more lost and seeking company.

- Do not expect that there's something greater than living life, because you will never know until it's over. Instead, appreciate what you have in front of you now because it could be gone at any time, and it's better to not live forever and know that you lived than to let life pass you by in waiting and then worry about whether or not something will really happen when it's over.

- Whatever inspires you, keep it, use it, and cherish it, because when the going gets tough, it may very likely be the only thing that keeps you alive.

- Don't ever consider giving up on life. As much as it seems it will end your sorrows, all it means is that you don't know that you are valuable and that there are many others like you who need someone like you. Your pain can be someone else's healing, and seeing someone's life impacted by your hands is the singlemost meaningful thing that can become of your life. Furthermore, that person's life wouldn't have been the same without you.

- No one knows what the hell they're doing. There are people who are honest enough to admit it and others who think they have to appear that they have it all together. In the end, we are all clueless, and those who try to prove otherwise are only wasting time and energy empowering their imminent demise.

- Everyone's opinion weighs the same. No one person's individual worth or opinion is worth any more or less than yours or mine. We all give good advice and bad advice, and we all bleed the same and are just as capable of saving the day.

- No God is worth following if there are political hoops to jump through. If he wants a relationship with you and he's all-loving and all-understanding, then he's/she's/it's not going to be just as dysfunctionally fucked up as human beings that we should prove ourselves to one who intimately knows every fiber of our being. Hence, if he/she/it wants a relationship with us, he'll/she'll/it'll know how to start and maintain one.

- Don't worry about vulnerability. It's only a state of being when you're not in control, and when everything is stripped away, that will be all that's left. Therefore, face your vulnerabilities as soon as you are comfortable with so that when the day comes that all is stripped away, you will not fear the shame of them. Own them and learn to manage them so that they will not become you but rather be an unwanted part of you.

- "Reality" is not an explanation of existence; it is a means of explaining perception.

- If there is such thing as eternal life for mankind, there must also, for consistency sake, be eternal life for all other living creatures. If we believe that other living creatures have no eternal life, then what has made us so special that we, an ignorant and arrogant species, be so privileged with it?

- One of the several reasons history repeats itself is because we have a notorious tendency to not learn from our mistakes and/or create new ones.

- A day in anyone else's shoes will put anyone's own thoughts in perspective. If you are racist, sexist, prejudiced in any way, just think about that. People of different races didn't decide what color to be. People of either gender didn't decide what to be. Heterosexuals and homosexuals alike didn't decide what gender they seem to naturally be attracted to.

- Assholes aren't born; they're made by other assholes. As a bit of an asshole myself (and anyone who disagrees with that and thinks I'm nice hasn't really spent a day with me in real life; in real life, I'm a lot like Tony Stark from Iron Man or Martin Riggs from Lethal Weapon), I can vouch for my fellow assholes and say that we are people who spent a long time being hurt and believing we deserved it and kinda learned a bit late in life (in my case, around when I turned 22) that we didn't deserve that shit, we tend to lean toward the other extreme and become the biters. Now some of us bite everyone because we're paranoid and think that everyone's a potential biter, or they're more like me where they only bite the people that show themselves to be biters. What it boils down to, despite the fact that fighting fire with fire doesn't put the fire out, is that you get to the stress point where the only way to maintain sanity is to stop caring and develop a sense of apathy. It's that apathy that leads to becoming vindictive. So there's today's episode of "How It's Made". =p

So yeah, at first those were serious, then I think I made it a little too personal. Oh well, if you've even read this far down, you're either laughing or rolling your eyes, but the beauty of being me is: I don't have to care. =p

Take care of yourselves, and I'll update this news post when I have something to report on the movie or any major events. Just some food for thought for you guys.

Finally, it's behind me and I'm glad. I actually got a C in Trig which is fine with me, because not only does it mean that I at least passed the damn class, but at least programming won't require much trig knowledge. I'm just glad to be done with that.

I'm just going to be working part-time over the summer while working on hopefully finishing the score for the LoZ film.