New instruments

This very well may be the first post of this blog true to its name. I was walking home yesterday with a newly acquired ukulele, and I was thinking about how many instruments I played. Three weeks ago that would have been just piano and melodica (although not everyone would count that as a second instrument). Starting three weeks ago I've added guitar, voice, and most recently the ukulele (which is a lot of fun, I definitely recommend getting one), so by the most generous count I'm up to five instruments. The odd thing I've found is with all these instruments I end up practicing all of them more, because by switching between instruments I can play for much longer without getting tired of it. Anyways, point of all this is I'm really excited about how much fun learning new instrument is, how getting through the initial suck of not being able to play anything decent sounding is much easier than I thought it would be, and most of all I'm excited to see how many instruments this trend keeps up for.

games as art

In continuing with the game theme, I have a question for the gamers among my viewers. What games do you point to when arguing that games are art. I would start with some of these, namely imortall, coma, and loondon. Bioshock and its sequel probably deserve a mention as well. But enough of my games. What say you?

music game

I promise to try not make this about every interesting thought I have, but I think this is worth sharing. It came out of thinking of a conversation I had with the amazing pianist Taylor Eigsti about a piece of art to combine equal parts music and video game, and thinking about an article by jazz teacher and games journalist Kirk Hamilton, that brought up the idea of rhythms in games. Anyways, the idea would be to make the game equivalent of a music video. It would be based off of and derive feeling from a specific song, and the goal would be to embody the feeling of the song in every aspect of the game, while having mechanics focused on getting the player to play in rhythm with the song. I know connections from games to film can be a bit overworked at times, but it would be cool to see someone explore this idea.

the daunting inaugural post

Ah, the daunting first post. It will inevitably end up seeming dated and possibly inaccurate once time reveals the true form that the vision for this blog will take, so I'll try to keep it simple and not box myself in. Basically, the idea for this is to share and put forth my two cents on anything that I find particularly exciting or interesting each day. So yeah, without further ado, I present "daily excite."