examining touhou

Sorry about not posting for a few days. Life's been simultaneously busy (even though I am sitting here in the Moonstruck Café writing this) and not felt terribly newsworthy. Had my CS midterm last night. When I was studying for it, I was actually pretty scared about it. The prof had posted a number of old exams on the site, and I hadn't been doing too well on those -- the multiple choice were fairly tricky, having choices that were just almost right but not quite. Rather nasty actually.

So as you might expect, I was kinda nervous going in. I wasn't alone; a number of guys were advising the rest of us to not kill the curve. Not too bad after all, though, it turns out. I left the two-hour exam an hour early after triple-checking everything, so not too bad. I suppose there's something to say for pressure-induced adrenaline. Not to mention killing the curve (I hope).

Speaking of nerve-racking pressure, my sister found an video of pure insanity on youtube. It's of a 2d asteroids-type shooter. Now, before you all skip the rest of this paragraph, let me say that this game should impress anybody (well, should at least). It just absolutely baffles me -- not that I'm necessarily the know-it-all when it comes to these, but this is just over my head. Words cannot describe the craziness; you just gotta watch it, or at least the first couple minutes. It feels somewhat on par with Halo on Legendary, though I suppose that's up for debate.

What wasn't beyond me was the music, though. Now, as nerdy as this sounds (I've stopped caring anyway, being a CS major and all), I really liked the music. Despite its not so good quality and semi-tinny-ness, it was really good compositionally. It fit the mood so perfectly and had life to it. Well, sorta. In any case, I got really interested in it. It's in this music genre called zun, I gather. Never heard of it before this, but it sounds good. I get the feeling that it's similar to trance; that is, people who don't like it say that it's all the same -- but hey, I ain’t in that bunch.

So aside from investing in a bit of new music, I found this piano arrangement of one of the tunes (actually three, but I think they're all basically arrangements of the same thing) called "Voyage into a cage...." So, as an avid piano player myself, I've decided to tackle it via some 18 pages of sheet music that I found. Slowly. And very carefully. Btw, if you're more of a visual person, here's a video of it, though I'm not sure whether this is the composer or not; even though some of his technique is a tad questionable, it kinda helps to see this guy's fingers fly rather than just imagine them in your head. Let's just hope my fingers don't fall off in the process.