Mid-Show Oscar Notes

So I'm currently watching the Oscars and there are three nominees for best visual effects. Batman, Iron Man, and Benjamin Button are the nominees. And the winner is... Benjamin Button!

I won't go into a tirade or anything, especially since I haven't seen Ben Button yet (but I will someday), but really? Is making Brad Pitt look old visually more impressive than either of the comic book movies? Putting super heroes, super villains, and super cool explodey things on screen is visually impressive. Putting an old person on screen? Maybe not so much.

Hooray for Heath Ledger getting the Best Supporting Actor. He won tonight and he won at the Golden Globes as well, and both times the camera panned to Robert Downey Jr. looking kinda pissed. Boo on the academy for not even nominating Dark Knight for Best Picture. Why they gotta hate?

And, before I get back to the show, the next movie I want to see has got to be Slumdog Millionaire. I wanted to see it before, and want to see it even more now to see if it lives up to the Best Editing award (I like editing).

I hope Harvey reads my book

I was surprised last month when I received an unexpected royalty check from my Amazon Kindle book sales. Shortly thereafter I guess Kindle 2 was released, and there was some news about how it's got a text-to-speech feature that might be illegal due to rights authors have over audio books, or something like that. Me personally, I think it's cool. I don't have Kindle, or Kindle 2, and don't plan on getting one, but I'd be stoked to see/hear the Kindle 2 reading a copy of my book. I wonder what it sounds like. My initial thoughts were of a Speak & Spell? That'd be kinda funny, hearing the Speak & Spell voice reciting stories about my Japanese kids drop kicking and strangling each other in the blinds. I pretty much hope it'd go exactly like this.

Wanna hear the worst mashup ever?

You know the part in Ferris Bueller's Day Off when Ferris is playing the recorder really poorly and he pauses to say, "Never had one lesson"? Yeah, I wish this sounded that good.

Anyway, here's how the mashup adventure has gone so far.

I downloaded a free trial of Acid Pro software. I opened it up, pushed some buttons, made some of my music sound fast and high pitched like Alvin and the chipmunks were singing, laughed, then got scared, then didn't touch the software for about a week.

I started reading up on how to make a mashup online. Most of the "Mashup 101" information out on the inter-web is still way beyond me. One tip I found said to get vocals-only versions of songs, and instrumental versions of songs, and just mix those together. So I looked around and found a vocals-only version of some Korn song. I'm not a Korn fan, but I just wanted something to play around with, and that was pretty much the first thing I found. Now I just needed an instrumental of something. The online experts recommended mixing raps songs. I found an instrumental of "So this is Love" from Disney's Cinderella. That's like rap, right?

Just putting those two together was kinda boring, so I started adding songs from my playlist and clicking on buttons. I took the intro to Puddle of Mudd's "Psycho" and managed to cut it up and play it over and over again. Then I added Cake's cover of "War Pigs", and pretty much just cut up and slid around the 4 songs to create this steaming pile.

Yes, it's terrible, I know. But, there are some things about it that I liked (or, at least, parts of making the mashup I liked) . Looping the Puddle of Mudd intro for the first minute I thought was fun. I need to learn how to fade in and out of songs better. I cut out the middle of the Korn song and put it at the beginning, and put the beginning of the song later. Crazy, I know. That was fun, even though the actual lyrics themselves are pretty gloomy (Yeah, suicide, kill the pain, rock on!). I thought there were okay transitions for "War Pigs" (at 0:38 and 0:50). The Cinderella waltz comes in at 0:54. After that point I didn't really do much except add a few more "Psycho" chords.

By the the time I got that far with the project I was sleepy and went to bed. I'll continue playing with the trial version and maybe improve on my technique, and can post anything else I create/mangle.