Just A Bit Of Randomness

One of my friends Shaggy is doing a month long blog about video games.  It's an A-Z type format with updates pretty much every day.  Keep in mind though, it's not just a simple "Here's a game that starts with the letter D: Donkey Kong," but it's about the game and Shaggy's personal experience and history with that game.  The blog is called Eclectic Musings and I think it's pretty cool, all biasness' aside.  I really enjoy Shaggy's perspective, seeing as how he's roughly a decade older than I am, but reading about someone's history with video games, primarily through arcades in the late 70s and early 80s.  For instance in his, "E is for Excitebike" post, I didn't know that Vs. Excitebike was a thing outside of Japan.  It's good reading and I recommend it.

This last weekend, Conklederp was in Arizona for the Western Regional Music Therapy Conference so I had the apartment to myself (along with Joey) for a couple of days.  Naturally, I stayed up until 5-6am then woke up six hours later.  One would think that I had spent most of my time playing video games (Skyrim, Morrowind, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Mega Man), but then there were nights when I really "geeked" out.  My last two nights before Conklederp came home, I spent between 5-6 hours fixing the ID3 tags for video game soundtracks.

That's something that I'm pretty anal about.  If a song is incorrectly tagged, that shit's gunna be fixed faster than a stray cat in a dog pound.  Having to fix the ID3 tags isn't something that I have to do a lot of the time, but for instance, when I finally uploaded the soundtracks from the last two Humble Indie Bundles, there was a bit of work I had to do.  For instance:

I know the Year doesn't affect anything in iTunes or the Last.fm scrobbles, but I just need it to be there.  Second, the track order needs, NEEDS to be accurate.  There'll be times I want to listen to a soundtrack in it's entirety and I feel that the composer has the songs in a particular order, if it's chronological order or whatever, it needs to be accurate.  This wasn't the case with Cave Story +, but the album titles need to be accurate as well.  Yes, there can be some discrepancies when it comes to having OST, OSV, Original Soundtrack, Original Sound Version, Soundtrack, Sound Track, or just the title, but that's something I just try to make consistent.  Lastly, the genre needs to be correct.  I don't have many songs under the "Other" genre, but if it comes from a video game, I label it as "Video Game Soundtrack."  Even if it's Electronica Hardcore outside of a video game, it's still getting the soundtrack label.

Oh yes, I get annoyed if I don't have album artwork.  There needs to be a picture and not those generic eighth notes on a grey background for the album artwork.  If there was never an official soundtrack released and therefore no cover art, I will either use a picture of the composer, the box art from the game the music came from or a screen shot of the title screen.  Then after I finished fixing all that needed to be fixed, I spent the next two hours playing Morrowind.

So that's your bit of randomness for Monday April 8th, 2013.  Only one week until taxes are due.  I did mine and somehow I still owe the state of Oregon a few extra bucks.  Ah well, it's all for the good of the country.

And go and read and stay up-to-date with Shaggy's blog.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

An Endless Challenge