Glee, second try.

The second episode of Glee that I watched, "Wheels", seems different from the first episode I watched. It has more tension, slightly less singing and dancing, more like a teen drama. But then I found that there are too many dramatic plots running in parallel. And somehow characters seemed to merely a vehicle to deliver these plots, instead of responding to the situations in a more realistic human way. The conflicts resolved in very blunt way as "heck I don't know what the writer of next episode will do but at least I have to put a closure no matter what". The good thing is that each episode of Glee can to taken as a single serving dose of fun. The down side, though, is that such dramatic plots resolved-within-an-episode makes these characters become less realistic.

Maybe this is just how TV series works, but since I like the premise of the series, I hope it does better than just another comedy. It's just the first season, and based on the fan base, we definitely see more coming. There's still room to get better and better.

So that's Glee

Finally watched an episode of Glee. It's the "Mesh Up" episode, and overall it's entertaining. But ...

Yeah, but.

First of all I found it a bit too cliche. And then the musical part ... I mean, I don't have that much problem with lipsyncing, especially during a dance sequence. Even Janet Jackson can't perfectly dance without some help of audio technology. But I do have problem with extremely obvious musical instrument playing. Somehow it's just too distracting to me. The camera man tried his best to avoid shoting on people strumming on the guitar, pressing chord or doing roll on the hi-hat ... but still ...

On the other hand, I like all the dancing. They are vibrant and delightful. I wish they have more of that.

I do know that I am not the show's target audience though. The high school drama cliche in my eyes are probably what makes the show popular among young people after all.

Still, this is just my first episode. There are still more in my DVR, and maybe I'll change my mind after a few more dose.

Ah, here's the market place

Someone suggested me to look into http://www.deviantart.com/ or even some blogs to find manga artist talent. Good idea.

Maybe I am hiring

Do you know of anyone (probably young people or even teenager) who's good at draw manga (Japanese style comics)? I suddenly have a strange idea: instead of trying to learn to draw manga in order to turn my story idea into reality, maybe I should HIRE someone to do it for me.

The idea is inspired by successful people like Kelvin Rose (Digg.com) and even Steve Job. They have great vision but only have limited amount of time. So instead of spending time to learn and then implement their vision, they shortcut it by hiring smart people to do the implementation work for them.

And after thinking about all the different ways of implementing my idea, like video game, animation, short film, song and comics, I found comics the cheapest way and probably give me the biggest sanctification.

Plus I hate dealing with people, and comics is an art form that tells story and yet allowing me to deal with the LEAST among of people (probably only one person).

The trick is to find that right one person. With so many talented but angry 八十後, I think this is oppotunity.

Making of "What What What" (小粉臉)

I forget stuff that I learned before unless I keep using those skills once in a while. Music keyboard is one of those things, and so is digital music editing. So when my brain suddenly had a stupid tune came out of nowhere, I decided to capture it in a little audio project. Besides, I need an excuse to set up my home audio studio after I rearranged everything for the sake of my new TV.

So I took 30 minutes to set everything up. In fact, my that I have everything up, I can pretty much jump into making a 30 seconds song anytime I want. This is very important to me as I am extremely impulsive. If I need 30 minutes to set things up in order to capture my creativity, but the time I have everything ready to go, I may have loss my incentive to work on it.

The whole process took me about 2.5 hours. The recording and synthesizer are all done within Sonar 8 Producer Edition. The ultra lousy keyboard was done using my ancient 4 octave keyboard they I brought almost 15 years ago. The drum part was done using my V-Drum Lite.

The idea of the song came from ... nowhere. It just popped up in my brain. Maybe I intrinsically hate those plastic sweet sentiment. Plus, irony is always a great way to generate humor.

Another sign of being old

Just found out yet another sign of being old: I got more and more appreciation on eating utensil that are NOT made of plastic. I start to like glasses, clay bowl and such. Food taste better when they are served into my mouth using metal fork instead of a plastic one.

Strange. Why all the sudden.

TV

I realized this morning that the giant box that came with my 40 inch LCD TV was sitting at the corner of the living room for about 2 months already. Since I was pretty happy with my purchase, and see no reason of returning it what so ever, I put the box in my car, drove to the dumpster and dumped the box.

There's wasn't anything spectacular about the process, but that sort of reminded me my whole process of purchasing this TV. Just like buying any item that cost more than US$100, I spent a lot of time doing research on it (plus the time my friend spent on researching Samsung LCD TV, so thank you Alex.) I think I brought this device at the right time with the right price, and I am totally happy with it. This TV with the WinTV DVR dongle give me control on my TV viewing experiment in a smart way. I found myself watched a bit more TV, but not way a lot. Time shifting frees me from being a slave of TV schedule (well I never was since previously I solved the problem by totally skipping TV), and TV Guide recording allows me to experiment on shows that didn't know I would enjoy.

Of course, the TV is also a giant monitor my whatever laptop I hook up to it. So glad that I brought a TV instead of getting another computer monitor.

Good kind of sleeping

There can be 2 possibility when I went to sleep so early: I am either upset, frustrated or worried about something so much that I go to sleep right away to avoid facing problems, or I am really productive during the day and was genuinely tired by all the work that I've done, thus need to get tons of sleep to recover.

I am delighted that the later seems to be the case last night. I was really picking my brain trying to figure out how to solve some problems at work without compromising quality. Then at night I was trying out steaming food, something I never done before. I also need to update and repair my iTune library so that I can start studying French. So by the time everything settled, it's 10:00 pm, and I was extremely tired.

Still, I told myself, 10:00 pm seems early to me, and I was expecting myself waking up after a quick nap and then continue practicing keyboard.

By the time I opened my eyes again, it was 7:00 am already. I didn't remember having any dream at all, meaning that I had a very good sleep.

Piano Lesson

I just found a DVD based piano tutorial that is for my level. Hopefully I can finish it. The whole series contain 14 DVDs and I just finished the second DVD.

Dumb

Preparing lunch by washing meat and rice (saperately of course) with ulta cold water, and I kept asking myself: why don't I just grab stuff from KFC instead? But then I pressed on and finally seasoned all the meat I brought today. So the bottomline is, I can endure a lot of pain doing something I don't enjoy just believe it's the right thing to do.

Come to think of it, I did a lot of stuff like that in my life.

... nothing much, just a though.