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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 |
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I started using the "music post" tag for all my music posts. This is the first time I've ever had tags in any of my entries. Normally, if I want to find something in my journal, I use LJ-Archive. If you want to find something in my journal, I don't care. Ha. (Well, okay, you can ask me and I can look it up, or you can LJ-Archive my journal, since you're allowed to do that.) Still, I figured this would be convenient for if anyone ever felt like going back and listening to all the awesome songs I'm finding for you guys. WHICH YOU SHOULD. This post came down to two Symphony X songs from V, either Egypt or Rediscovery. Both are absolutely phenomenal, and if you haven't heard either, please don't let my actually choosing and presenting one here prevent you from going and finding the other. Actually, the whole album is beginning-to-end, wall-to-wall amazing, and I recommend getting it and listening to it in one sitting. Especially because it's a heavy concept album with a story and everything. It was agonizing to pick one over the other, but in the end, several factors led to my decision: 1) I honestly believe Rediscovery is the better song--it's longer, and in that length they work in more incredibly catchy movements and perhaps the single greatest vocal moment on the entire album--"We've cried a thousand tears for all we had/and all the things we could have been/we must find our way again/Aaaaaah..." Anyone who has heard this part has to concede its incredible power, even the lyricless "Ahh" at the end that manages to achieve Bruce Dickenson levels of sheer vocal power, coherence of lyrics be damned. (Although the "could have been" is amazing as well.) 2) Egypt is about half as long. And Egypt is 7 minutes long. That is half as long as Rediscovery. Rediscovery is so long that it's actually on YouTube as two parts with a break at about the 7:00 mark. 3) Rediscovery is the final song on a heavily story-based concept album, and it has heavy ties to previous songs, especially "Evolution (the Grand Design)". Evolution's chorus is "Here we are/children of sun and stars/the first to know and to understand." Rediscovery opens with a...violin? Some sort of orchestral piece that is a direct remix of the violin (or whatever it is) intro to Evolution, and Rediscovery's second verse is "As it once was, so shall it be again/modern-day children of the sun." Between the way it references the rest of the album, wraps up the rest of the album, is the last track on the album, and is probably the best song on the album, I honestly thought it to be somewhat of a spoiler to play it out of context. Yes, really. (You have to hear this song one way or another, you really do, but it's just so much better if you take the album as a whole....) Therefore.... Artist: Symphony X Album: V: The New Mythology Suite Song: Egypt Visuals: Album cover Symphony X is a power metal band from incredibly unlikely origins--in a genre were 95% of all top-name acts are from either Finland or Germany, Symphony X is from Middletown, New Jersey. They released one album before finding the new singer that would eventually make them famous, a self-titled one that was...decent. Compared to Kamelot, they actually got off extremely lightly as far as what they used to sound like before finding their new voice. Still, they really emerged once they replaced their old singer with Russel Allen, who, as I'm sure you no doubt gather from Egypt's chorus, is known for what Wikipedia refers to as "his very powerful singing style and drawn out vocal lines." V is their fifth album. They've had two more since then;the slightly harsher The Odyssey and the significantly harsher Paradise Lost. Still, many (including myself) still consider either their third (The Divine Wings of Tragedy) or fifth (V) albums to be their masterpieces, the absolute pinnacles which they have yet to top. |
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good site. I like it! burger king |
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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| Monday, July 7th, 2008 |
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| Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 |
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I went vegetarian again a little while ago, so far with much more success than last time. But I'm still paying for it: ( Conversation with Rain. ) |
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 |
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Today's TOTALLY AWESOME 80s SONG OF THE DAY! is: Brand New Lover by Dead or Alive! This is the most totally awesome Dead or Alive song ever. |
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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Thanks to drelonek for pointing this site out in one of his posts. It turns out that the site is amazing, though it's somewhat humbling to put that much effort into building what's basically a shrine to one's own failure. Oh, well. http://backloggery.com/main.php?user=kj |
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| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 |
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Today's TOTALLY AWESOME 80s SONG OF THE DAY! is: Sometimes by Erasure! Everyone danced totally awesomely in the 80s. Pete Burns, Rick Astley, the cast of the Breakfast Club. And even the guy from Erasure. He totally struts in this video. I also love those awesome instrument closeups in this video. They make no sense or anything, they're just basically there. |
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| Saturday, July 5th, 2008 |
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It's no secret to anyone who's seen enough of my LiveJournal comment threads that my typing style can best be described as the exact 100% clone of whoever I happen to be talking to whenever I say something. My writing style is the other person's writing style. Just for fun and further confirmation, I went to look through some AIM logs with four different people. The results are...well. (Names changed to protect the innocent, obviously.) ( Read more... ) The sheer level to which I warp my voice to replicate my target makes me wonder what it actually naturally sounds like, or if I even have one. I guess... I guess you could look at my LiveJournal posts themselves--not the comments, but the original posts that don't appear to be mention anyone. My own impression (because obviously I'm an unbiased outside source) is that when I don't have someone to replicate and am just speaking in general, it sort of comes across as a cross between B and C--mostly forman and not as manic with the emoticon abuse, though I do tend to have HEY GUYS CHECK OUT MY CAPSLOCK moments when I deem them to be funny in context. (My current icon, for example.) Then again, even those original posts can be subconsciously altered if I think too far ahead and realize everyone I know is going to be reading this--it would be rather embarrassing if I were to write this absolutely 100% like B (or D) and then remember that C is going to read it, after all. Which leads to another thing--the comments. At that point, I am, of course, directly speaking to someone, so of course I blatantly clone their style like I always do. On the other hand, this being a public post and all, everyone else who is not the person I'm speaking to can still see it, which leads to interesting results when everyone I just mentioned (and more!) is a frequent guest here. Really, all you need to do for sufficient cognitive dissonance is to mix absolutely anyone from the ZZT community with...well, absolutely anyone else. It's really quite sobering--I'm sure when davidn signed up for this whole "be Kjorteo's friend" thing, he foresaw me screaming at nadir in LiveJournal comments that are about three steps removed from FishIg (as one example.) Then again, I'm too used to basically being what happens when Dittos from Pokemon use the Internet, so it's not like it's going to change. It's just... a little odd to think about, I suppose.
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008 |
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| Saturday, July 5th, 2008 |
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I'm introducing a new feature to my livejournal which I never update. I call it... TOTALLY AWESOME 80s SONG OF THE DAY! I will attempt to update daily with a new song (and hopefully video) from the 80s that is totally awesome. Today's TOTALLY AWESOME 80s SONG OF THE DAY! is: Speak Like a Child by The Style Council! |
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| Friday, July 4th, 2008 |
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 Screw this "wanting" crap. I am The Guy. I can now triumphantly add my name to the list of legends. |
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Oh boy, I sure hope that Hopeful Bulbasaur icon Kjorteo ordered gets here soon! Wait |
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
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From a couple entries ago: I Wanna Be the Guy: Saved right outside the endboss' room. All I have to do is beat him! (Unless I want to be all hardcore completionist. I already have all six of the secret items, but I think I still need to do Boss Rush after beating the game.) Of course, this being IWBTG, that is significantly easier said than done. 11:47:40 playtime, 3,116 deaths as of when I write this. According to my calculations, that works out to [blah blah blah] Still haven't won, still saved right outside the endboss' room. Current stats are 13:40:20 playtime and 3,222 deaths. That means that since the last time I posted (which was definitely not before ever fighting him for the first time, so there were already quite a few deaths on that count,) I've spent almost two hours and over one hundred deaths just throwing myself at him repeatedly. The problem for this is twofold: 1) The entire battle is excruciatingly long. The boss has two forms and a total of six phases--three phases he goes through per form. Die at any point in the entire process and you have to start all over. 2) The first form alone is considerably long. I can almost literally do the entire form in my sleep by now (I was actually zoning out a little the last few times...it's just so automatic,) but I still have to go through the painfully long motions every single time. 3) The second form is ridiculously cruel. I know exactly what I need to do and have come tantalizingly close to doing it on several occasions, but this is one of those bosses where several factors can conspire to screw you despite skill. The first phase is about as easy as the entire first form, but the second and third phases have just enough factors working against you all at the same time to create a pseudo-randomness where you can just plain get unlucky. Picture this:
I just learned that there's a cheat code where if you hold a few buttons during either form's fight, it just gives you credit for winning and skips straight to the credits. (This was apparently put in because some people complained of a bug where they'd win normally but not receive credit for beating the boss on their title screen stats and for "must beat the endboss to unlock boss rush" purposes.) I also learned that the entire second form isn't even in the boss rush at all--the boss rush incarnation just ends once you beat the first (which, as I said, I can all but do in my sleep now.) You have no idea how tempted I am to have a "fuck this" moment and skip the second form, but I just know it's going to eat at me to know I came this far (because it's not like IWBTG in its entirety up to this point was easy or anything) and then choked at the last phase of the last form of the last boss. Or, I could beg someone who knows MMF to edit the game to add a save point between the two forms or remove the first form or something, just so I don't have to go through that every goddamn time. I wouldn't even feel guilty about that, because at this point cutting out the first form is only slightly more detrimental to the game's difficulty than cutting out a six-minute cutscene. It's really the tedium of that that's bringing me to the point of despair, actually--throwing myself repeatedly at near-unwinnable and impossible odds until I finally get lucky has pretty much been the entire point of the game up until now. It's the going through the motions of the first form every time just to get to try the second that's really getting to me. Related exchange from TV Tropes I found amusing:
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| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 |
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I understand that once community-oriented sites reach a certain threshold size that they can officially do no wrong ever again, because no one will ever leave because that would be leaving the community and not just finding a less-shitty website. But holy Christ, people, what's it going to freaking take with this whole Fur Affinity thing? Does Dragoneer have to publicly sodomize a puppy to death on the main stage at the next FAU or something? (Note to its_a_trap: GET TO IT on this whole super-awesome new miracle site you're involved with, since lack of alternatives at the moment is probably part of it!)
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 |
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| Monday, June 30th, 2008 |
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It's funny to see how dependent I become on my kitchen tools. To make breadsticks, which I do often and masterfully, I require... + food processor or standing mixer to prepare the dough + mixing bowl, plastic wrap, nonstick spray to rise the dough + pizza cutter or pastry scraper (bench scraper) to cut the dough + if no cornmeal is available, parchment paper and nonstick spray to place the formed breadsticks upon + peel to place the breadsticks in the oven and remove them after baking + baking stone (or unglazed quarry tile) to cook the breadsticks + spray bottle to create steam in the oven And I feel pretty naked without any one of these. I might be able to go without a food processor or standing mixer, maybe, but a rise is of course essential. I could improvise cutting the dough with a kitchen knife. If there's no baking stone I'd have to use a baking sheet, and probably couldn't cook at 450 degrees. Which would make not-as-good breadsticks. Being without a spray bottle isn't a huge deal, but it does help. |
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| Sunday, June 29th, 2008 |
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http://www.popcritics.com/2008/04/bever I'm not sure what's scarier: that some part of how intelligent moviegoers are and/or how well it's perceived by executives failed so badly that they felt the need for the (chee' WOW wä) right below the title, or that they thought viewers were too dumb to get "chihuahua" without assistance but could still figure out an ä. |
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 |
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I told you I'd gone mad with power with these, but that I was going to try to not make them too frequent. I'm going for frequent enough to be a regular feature, without going completely overboard...and with that in mind, I think it's been long enough. Artist: Blind Guardian Album: Nightfall in Middle-Earth Song: Nightfall Visuals: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Blind Guardian is a German band that has been around for decades, starting with an extremely raw speed/thrash metal-style sound and slowly evolving into more epic symphonic power metal. In a genre fraught with frequent roster shuffling (about 3/4 of all power metal bands out there can trace their roots to "someone who was at some point affiliated with Helloween decided they wanted to start their own band,") Blind Guardian is known for their remarkable stability; the only change to their lineup they've had since 1987 (!) was when drummer Thomen Stauch finally decided in 2005, about 13 years after their genre change, that he actually liked the old sound better, and he and the rest of the band agreed to part on amicable terms so he could pursue that in his side-project-turned-new-main-band, Savage Circus. Meanwhile, A Twist in the Myth, Blind Guardian's first album since getting a new drummer contains the song "The New Order," which is fairly blatantly about the change. |
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I Wanna Be the Guy: Saved right outside the endboss' room. All I have to do is beat him! (Unless I want to be all hardcore completionist. I already have all six of the secret items, but I think I still need to do Boss Rush after beating the game.) Of course, this being IWBTG, that is significantly easier said than done. 11:47:40 playtime, 3,116 deaths as of when I write this. According to my calculations, that works out to a rough average (averaging the repeated instant death streaks and the longer-lived spans when I actually made progress, of course) of my dying once every 13.63 seconds, which skirts the low edge of the sounds-about-right range. Oblivion: I found a multi-part solution for the whole both sides have too much health so combat is boring thing. First, I installed the combat tweaks mod mentioned in that forum post (the one that just decreases autocalc enemies' health, not the crazy complete overhaul one.) Then, I started running dungeons completely stark naked but for my rings and amulet. Finally, it's worth noting that said rings and amulet give me a combined total 66% damage reflection. The end result is that, even completely naked, I don't take a lot of damage--though I imagine reflecting 66% of it helps a bit with that--but still much more than before. One single humanoid bandit-type enemy with whatever enchanted weapons they usually spawn with can take out about 10% of my health before going down, whereas before I'd have to stand there in the middle of combat and go make a sandwich or something if I wanted to see my health bar move at all, so I accept the improvement. Conversely, between having much less health, and eating 66% of the much higher amounts of damage they were supposed to do to me, enemies go down so fast that I don't even have time to notice that combat is still easy. Final verdict: Making Oblivion hard again still seems like a lost cause--the best I can hope for at this point is to be jumped by a large enough group think "Huh, I might have to actually put my armor on for this one"--but this fixes the problem of combat taking three years per encounter due to everyone's ridiculously high health. In other words, still easy, but not as unbearably tedious anymore, which was definitely the important thing. Plus, something tells me that if I want difficulty that badly, I can just take the rings/amulet off too. Etrian Odyssey 2: Oh my God, it's like Atlus has a personal vendetta against anyone who was actually able to complete Etrian Odyssey. All the major top-tier skills from the first game (most notably Immunize, also Healing and Relaxing, and even Defender) have been removed entirely. All of the stat-up skills have been altered to be insanely end-loaded. (I'm told that Lv. 10 TP Up is absolutely amazing in how ridiculously high the bonus is...meanwhile, Lv. 3 TP Up is the difference between having 33 TP and 35.) There are new skills and existing tech trees have been completely overhauled in many good and bad ways, so it works out overall (<3 <3 <3 for new Allslash's prerequisite being Lv. 5 Swords and nothing else, for example) but it's...different, yes. Pretty much every class sucks at first, but Troubadours and Protectors have it especially bad. Troubadours, even without Healing and Relaxing, are probably still viable once they get going--they still have Bravery/Shelter and Erasure, at least--but I need to wait until I have access to powerleveling of some sort and can make a level 25 Troubadour spring forth fully-formed from my Guildmaster's head, because anything lower than that basically amounts to a guy who can cast his one spell exactly twice before being out of TP, but it's okay because it does absolutely nothing anyway. Of course, all this makes the few floors especially fun--someone needs to be in the party at level 1, after all. My Landsknecht and Alchemist seem to be picking up a little steam now, but the ever-present "I hope this character didn't turn out to be a dud" feeling for my Protector isn't making this any easier, especially because I am not at a point where I can just bring a new recruit up to speed real quick if she needs to be replaced. :( Everything else on my "I swear I'm going to beat it/play it/come back to it someday" list: I swear I'm going to beat it/play it/come back to it someday. :( |
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| Friday, June 27th, 2008 |
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| Saturday, June 28th, 2008 |
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| Removed a bunch of apparently abandoned journals, if I removed you in error post a comment here, comments are screened. | ||||
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| Friday, June 27th, 2008 |
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I still haven't made up my mind about South Africa. I have been thinking about it a lot, but trying to allow myself to take a break, too. Everything seems like it is coming to a halt; but it is making me a bit excited because it frees me up to really start a new life, because there are no strings left behind. I am just wanting to make sure that I am not leaving behind something that could have been everything I wanted. I've spent the week in New Jersey with my brother, his wife, and his in-laws. It was good to meet them and spend some time with them. His wife was a friend of mine in college. I met some of the family before he did years ago, but he has really gotten to know them. It has been a little weird being with them. I know that I am accepted, but I don't really have anything to talk about. I actually feel a little anti-social. I have been sleeping in every day and been on my own schedule. I join them down at the beach, just later after they all get there. My big goal of the week was just trying to get some sun on my legs. They are so pasty! They just glare in the sunlight. I think I finally got a tinge of color today. Also been working on just getting some reading done. I still have some work to finish from Covenant Players, but hopefully I will be done with that soon. I really don't want to hang on to that. I spent time on the phone last night with someone that is very dear to me. I really thought that this guy was "the one". Now I just feel like a dumb girl that can't let go. That's what I have been talking about in letting things go and cutting all the strings. I stuck around for awhile waiting for him to come around and realize that he wanted me, but he kept pursuing another girl. Now he decided he wants me, but I didn't "jump" when he wanted me to, so now he is quite upset with me. It all just doesn't seem right anymore. I want to date other people; I just need to realize that I can and hopefully will meet someone. Maybe I should just do eHarmony like the rest of the world ;) Okay...maybe not. After dating the last guy, I realized that "the one" was a jerk to me, and the other actually knew how to treat people. Guy B was a great guy. It's too bad it didn't work out. Emotions just didn't grow, but we still enjoy each other. It was one of the most amicable break-ups I think in existence today. We broke up on Monday, but still dated the rest of the week, since we had already planned that I would be staying with him. He's storing some of my stuff, and I borrowed some of his luggage for my trip. It's interesting. I am blessed that he was around to help when I needed him and he has been a real encouragement to me. So, now I have to figure out what I am doing next week. Travel to Virginia; but what day? For how long? How much do I start searching for jobs right now? What day do I get some work done?... The great dilemmas in life. |
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| Thursday, June 26th, 2008 |
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I think I embarrassed myself a bit yesterday. Necessary backstory: I cannot taste dark chocolate. Seriously. There's something wrong with my taste buds or something. I've tried dark chocolate bars before on several occasions. I found them to be completely tasteless, meaning all I had to go by in evaluating them was texture, which was...dry, and a little crumbly. Therefore, each experience was almost literally like eating sawdust. (Except for the time slither let me try some sort of super-chili-infused bar. That one was sawdust with a very slight hint of chili.)Incident: slither made some super-chocolate-overloaded ice cream. I was worried that would kick in again, but not only could I taste it, it was actually quite good. Like a brownie if it were in ice cream form. I figured that the ice cream process must have sufficiently mitigated it, bringing the baking chocolate close enough to milk chocolate (which I can taste) that it actually registered. I then gave rather excessively detailed feedback about how I was concerned, but apparently I can taste his delicious ice cream after all, and it is good. Hooray. (The sheer length of that speech is what retroactively made this embarrassing after the big reveal.)My undoing was assuming that it's a binary state: either nothing at all or full flavor, and if I can taste anything, that must mean it worked and I'm tasting everything. The folly of this assumption was made clear to me about an hour later, when yiffyraptor showed up and tried some. He immediately all but doubled over at the sheer force of how rich it was, then exclaimed "my God, that's rich!"I looked up from the couch, puzzled. "It is?" They both turned and looked at me as if I had just set the couch on fire or something. :( |
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| Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 |
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Writing about that Masterplan song suddenly made me uncomfortably aware of how unbelievably easy it is to turn embedded YouTube videos into LiveJournal posts. Combined with knowledge I've had for a while now that absolutely every metal song ever is on YouTube (it may be in the form of a crappy Naruto AMV, but damn it, it's there,) I could very easily launch an entire series devoted to how you people are missing out until you check out all this awesome music so you can be cool like me. While it is so easy to do that the odds of total friend page destruction are quite high, I've decided to go mad with power for now and worry about the dire consequences later! In all seriousness, though, I'll try to make these infrequent, say one or two a week or so at most. But in return, you have to listen to them when I do them. >:[ (Also, davidn should start doing this. It'd be a good way to get me into Iron Savior, since I really liked the title track to Megatropolis but am otherwise not that intimately familiar with them compared to my normal A-list. Then again, I have more Symphony X familiarty. We could trade! And those are just two examples--obviously there are more.)Artist: Avantasia Album: The Metal Opera, Part I Song: Farewell AMV/Visuals/Whatever from: Still picture of album art Avantasia is a side project put together by Tobias Sammet (Edguy). It appears to be more or less built around the idea of "what if Tobias Sammet wrote overarching stories ranging somewhere between heavy concept albums and full-fledged rock/metal operas with a cast and characters and everything, then gathered absolutely everyone to sing all the various parts." Farewell mostly consists of Sammet's singing, but has Sharon den Adel (Within Temptation) on one verse, and |
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MY DAY VIA TWITTER
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| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 |
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Friends LiveJournal for zamros.
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contemplative.
accomplished.
curious.
defective.