No, no tornadoes last night, just 80 mile an hour wind blowing people off of the road and knocking the power out. Going to pretend I never said anything about going out in my underwear.

Anyway, I'm anticipating to release another track tonight, "Wave After Wave". I'll update when it's posted.

Update: Aaaand, released!

So, this is quite literally the biggest surprise in my 3 years of college, finding out that the only thing I lack for graduating with an AA in Music Ed is a three hour college algebra course, which I'm currently taking and hope I don't royally screw up like the last three times I took algebra. I thought I was in trouble when I got called in for the paperwork. Turns out, just one more course to finish out and I can transfer to uni on schedule. Downside of this is if I don't finish out strong, I'll have to pay out of pocket next year, no institutional scholarships, no grants, etc. because I've attempted so many hours (also mostly algebra).

I don't know whether to be ecstatic or anxious -- didn't know what name to put on my diploma either (trans name or birth name). I'm leaning toward anxious since I also found out that campus closes in roughly 30 minutes for severe weather, a TOR:CON 8 I believe. Last bout of tornadoes happened under a TOR:CON 3, and the highest is a 10 on the same scale. Probably going to be hearing a lot of that siren tonight. I guess at least this time I won't be dumb enough to go to the lobby in men's underwear and a blanket.

On the upside, the lyrics for "Thirst" are complete, and I anticipate to record this weekend.

I don't usually do vocals, feel special. :*

Share if you like!

At around 4:15-4:20 PM today, the tornado sirens on campus started up their wail, signalling all the girls in G.A. dorm to herd into the lobby. The dorm has an open lobby with a steel and cement staircase, two wings with courtyards, two floors, cinderblock walls, and suite construction -- for every suite, 3 rooms, a utility closet, and two bathrooms. Each room houses two girls. This is not including the two floor dorm adjoined by a small courtyard, with about 40 girls on each floor and community bathrooms. Honors dorm sits behind that, encased by a fence and reachable by a fire exit on both sides. There must have been about 200 of us, I swear.

Well, here we were in this open lobby, sirens wailing so loudly that it was like being in a loud night club, minus the music. I had to yell to speak to someone half a foot from me. The lobby has a central post on the bottom floor, some couches, chairs, and tables. The TV isn't even tuned to the weather channel yet. Minutes go by, and we're panicking. This year's crowd is about half-again bigger than the last, and the dorm is woefully unprepared to shelter all of us too well. I know that much. This, and not even everyone is here yet. Girls from the basketball cottages on the other side of the old cafeteria, now a gym, are interspersed between the sea of bodies. I recognize a few by face. Their coach, a bald red-bearded tower of a man, is here too.

So the sirens go off for the moment, and our dorm mother begins speaking. We have about 20 minutes to find shelter. She herds some of us into the two adjacent bathrooms, and more into a washroom. You can hear people bumping into the machines, the claustrophobia setting in. There are three storage room besides, but she says only one of them will hold a decent amount of people, and the basketball coach goes to clear that out as we all text our families. The tornado we're about to weather is rain-wrapped, and we're hearing damage reports from DeKalb, the next town over. My hometown was missed, but my mother is already telling me that Collinsville took a major hit, and my sister confirms.

Friends in the boys' dorms on the other side of campus are huddled into suite bathrooms, 4 people to a shower and some sitting on sinks, as some of us are then herded into the now cleared out storage room between long-hall and the lobby. Glass doors are everywhere, and so are windows. The remaining approx. 20 of us girls, myself included, are told to get out from under the concrete staircase in the middle of the lobby, and a shield of couches is arranged about us -- little good it will do once the glass actually starts flying, most of us are thinking. We huddle as close as we can manage. People are singing worship songs like "Jesus On The Main Line" and "Wading In The Water". I haven't been so content to hear worship like that in a long time.

There is no sitting without sitting on top of one another, and for once I don't mind. We're all probably dead, I'm thinking to myself, hoping for once that somebody really does have Jesus on the main line, until the power blinks, and the wind gusts, and the praise of the Lord picks up to an all time high. Our dorm mother with her curtain of spiralling hair and piercing blue eyes hobbles her way over to the glass double doors by the guard desk, peeks out once, and hears the telltale freight train. Get down, she urges us, and the last thing I see is a curtain of rain crash over the 12 foot high ivy growing on the fence on the other side of the court yard, the side nearest the old cafeteria and the main road. The only things I hear are the locked front door shivering, a high wind outside, my girlfriend's "I love you", an apology from the girl on my left for using my leg as a pillow, worship songs, my own whispered prayer, and the sounds of the other girls covering one another until the siren drowns even that out.

Then, after a few minutes, it's over, and we're alive. The sky is still dark as pitch, but the rain has stopped, and it's absolutely silent. No one dares open the doors, but the praise echoes through the otherwise murmuring lobby. They don't open until a girl with corn rows has already passed everyone fashion magazines as makeshift fans. We're all suddenly aware of how hot it is, and the power keeps blinking. I recognize Katy Perry on the cover of one magazine with a nose ring, so airbrushed I hardly manage to know it's her. Coming through the doors is Dr. Huebner, our school president, to tell us the news. I honestly hope I'm spelling that right.

Anyway, it comes out that we are safe for the moment. The only damages are a flipped baseball cottage on the other side of campus, some light poles down, a tree through an instructor's house, torn up fencing on the baseball field, and some trashcans flung a few meters more than one would expect. Suddenly, I'm worried about the staff, and not just the dinner I was almost certain we wouldn't have tonight. This is quelled, however, as our dorm mother dismisses us, with the instructions we are not to drive past the student union to see the damages. Although dinner is late, the staff are all okay, and a warm welcome is extended to all. I don't think any of us, all 700 people I saw in the cafeteria, had been so happy to see one another in a while. I certainly haven't heard "I'm glad you're alive" as many times in a 30 minute period, or been so happy to eat a chicken sandwich and some corn nuggets.

Back to the damages, this is the flipped baseball cottage, which I'm told someone actually watched topple over.

Anyway, everyone I know of is safe and accounted for, which I'm glad of. Classes are cancelled tomorrow due to damages. I just hope we're not in for another bout tomorrow. Might not be as lucky.

Literally, as the title says. I got up Sunday afternoon and came up from the basement to find mom and my grandmother arguing. Turns out, someone had broken into my mom's Sedona and my uncle's Kia Soul, strewn everything everywhere in a hurry, and stolen a bag of tools and some CDs out of the vehicles. Lucky for us, the tools were dollar store fare and the CDs were from thrift shops, but the lady next door lost $60 in change she'd left in her car, and a man on the other side of her had a gun stolen. The cops were by their houses not long after and got some good fingerprints, but my mom won't report the theft, and I'm not sure why. After all, if they have prints, it's one more theft charge, is it not?

So, besides me being pretty irate with mom for not wanting to report the theft (stupid, IMO), I'm also worried about my family. Someone had apparently also unlocked the screen door and was fiddling with the wood door to my room down in the basement, and my girlfriend said she heard some tapping in the wee hours of the morning when we stayed over this weekend, like someone was testing the door to see if they could kick it in. With the guy next door having a gun stolen, I'm worried these idiots who have been doing serial breakins will get cocky and try armed robbery. And you know what they say: "Locks are for honest people, and so are gun regulations".

I wish Mom would stop laying down and taking this crap from the wannabe gangsters and get herself a gun already, speaking of. People at my school are chiming, "You live there and don't have a gun?" Yeah, I guess I never saw the need for one until now. Granted, my view has always been to arm the general public, not the would-be criminals who would take advantage of an unarmed public; I'd hate to live somewhere like London, where the average street cop is declawed and the armed ones take crucial minutes to arrive. Here, that's minutes where a criminal could have already shot and killed your entire family before you managed to dial the police, not to mention before they actually arrived. My mom is lucky that she managed to fend off her murderous ex-husband (before my dad) and keep him from his gun cabinet long enough for local police to show up, and that's with my then teenaged sister dialing them as the guy beat her face in on that fateful night in the 80's. She'd be one less facial reconstruction and restraining order if she had a gun. It's good to be armed.

Think about it. In the Paleo/Neolithic ages, we had rocks and stone tools. Bronze Age? We had spears and swords, and maybe some bows mixed in there somewhere. In the A.D. years up 'til the mass adoption of guns, it was predominantly knives and daggers involved in robberies, muggings, and plain old murder. Did anyone ever suggest then that the public shouldn't be able to bring these same tools against their assailants, unless it was a party heavily invested in keeping its potential enemies crushed under foot? No, but the powers that were sure kept pioneering better and better weapons. Shouldn't that say something to us? If those in power are armed to protect their interest, yet they seem interested in keeping us unarmed, I think that sends a clear message. Anyway, that's besides my point for the moment. It is my firm belief that disarming the public serves two purposes: arming the criminals, and arming those that would rule over them, for good or ill.

I wouldn't be worried about my family right now if every one of them had their own glock, or .38 special, or .44 magnum. Sure, you say, "Well, they might shoot someone! What if it goes off accidentally? What if children get a hold of one of your guns?" But I say, even with your gun control, what if someone smuggles in a gun from another country? Remember what happened with alcohol during prohibition days? How many people died for that watered down booze -- and what about moonshiners today? What about the war on drugs we have making the cartels fat and happy off of illegitimate funds and lives cut short -- drug debts? What if someone uses one of those illegal guns to shoot my family, full-knowing they have no means to protect themselves without having to go unlock a cabinet on the other side of the house -- and trying not to get shot in the back of the head in the process -- or worse, bringing a knife to a gunfight?

I have the feeling those pushing gun control have no idea what it's like to be confronted with actual armed criminals in daily life. Yeah, I've been shot at before. I've had a gun held to my head. I've even shot a few rounds myself. Nothing is more sobering than a cold metallic barrel to the temple, but I'd rather be able to have a gun of my own than kid myself and think that some regulations are going to stop a determined no-gooder from getting their own. I'd rather at least have a chance of beating them to the trigger, you know? I want my family to at least have that same chance.

Whether you're a fan of the epic clash of Autobots versus Decepticons, a Mass Effect fanatic, or otherwise, I doubt anyone who heard Optimus, Megatron, or Sovereign speak could hold back the "holy shit!" instantaneously birthed at the sonaural awesome bashing them in eardrums. You'd almost think these guys were real, cool robots, but the truth is, these synthetic life forms' voices were accomplished with vocoders.

What is a vocoder? I'll put it in laymans terms. A vocoder takes one sound and uses it to filter another, i.e. using the audio of a spoken line to filter a desired sound. The result, the voice now sounds as if it IS the sound. Robots in games are often portrayed through this method, such as Sovereign in Mass Effect and Legion in Mass Effect 2 and 3.

Vocoders are usually prohibitively expensive, with on exception, Audacity, which is free. Download it and any additional files you may need for .mp3 export, etc.

Now, record your voice and select the sound you want it to emulate. This is best done with a simple bass note, as any pulsing will come through the final result.

Import them into Audacity. Pan the vocal track left and the other track right.

Set volumes as needed to make sure there is no clipping. You may want to use noise cancellation on the vocal track.

Cut away excess audio that you don't want included, and trim silence.

Select both tracks. Under the "Tracks" tab, select "Mix and Render"

The result will be one track, vocals left, sample right. Now select under "Effect", "Vocoder"

Preview. If you don't like it, fiddle with the settings until you do.

Voila, free robot voice for you! You might even be able to sound like this.

So, let's keep this short and snappy. I just dropped $100 on a Wacom Intuos tablet, the kind that responds to touch as well as a stylus. Figured it'd be nice if I ever decided to finger paint on it, haha. Here's what it looks like. Just grabbed a quick image off google to make things simple.

The Intuos comes with a built in pen nib remover and 3 other nibs, included drivers and editing software, etc., but a wireless adapter, which I find kind of useless, is sold separately. Someone in a classroom might find it useful, but even then, you'd probably need the next model up with the scroll wheel. The cheaper model is the same except it doesn't respond to finger touch, meaning you'd have to scroll manually. I'm actually wishing I bought that one so I wouldn't be scrolling all wonky like all over my work space just because I scrubbed the pad with the heel of my hand. Other than that, it's a decent product. Seems to be pressure sensitive, although the drivers are acting strange with Win 7. Could just be my crappy computer.

I've done two portraits with it so far, trying to warm up to it, and I'm working on a cartoony piece as we speak. I've posted the completed pieces to twitter, hoping to boost up NG's presence there.

http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/edm364/stubble-practice

http://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/edm364/german-shepherd-in-the-grass

Let's see how NG treats the vanilla Twitter embed with media here:

#transgender#selfportraithttps://t.co/kpXJ9iOBgY

pic.twitter.com/pNP65oi1U1

— EDM364 (@shesalittleodd)

January 19, 2016

#GermanShepherd#Grass#PetPortraithttps://t.co/i8dVpTPeJV#GSD#digitalpainting#mydog#newgrounds

in the

pic.twitter.com/FtEMNhi1W0

— EDM364 (@shesalittleodd)

January 19, 2016

One word. Ew. Aaaaand now, onto that HTML embed test from Ranker.com.

The Best EDM Artists

Looks like it just treated it as a link. Maybe it'll change when it posts. We'll see!

And that's about it for today's news. Catch ya later!

~EDM

UPDATE: So, we've concluded NG treats HTML from most sites a-la poo. Edited in images.

Note to self, never embed anything from Twitter or Ranker.com again. Soundcloud and YouTube seem to work fine though!

So, last time I wrote this post, I had a bunch of fancy stuff, and Newgrounds deleted it because my HTML embed was weird. Now I'm rewriting it, quite frustratedly, might I add.

Anyway, so, I went back to school on the 6th this month, and all my classes seem to be in relative order. I'm taking two literatures, algebra, piano, and a handful of other classes, most notably pep and symphonic bands. I moved in without incident, and I haven't been fined for being messy yet, so I assume all is okay in that area. Two basketball game performances down and I'm expecting another this Thursday.

Onto the next subect area, those FF13 Parodies. One of them involves twerking. But that's kinda stretching it since I had about ten frames of booty shakin to work with, lol.

And now that your brain has been sufficiently assaulted, I found a seemingly legitimate YouTube view generating service, view2.be. The site offers something almost unheard of -- genuine views, not from bots, totally legal according to YouTube service terms. To get views, you select one of your videos and allot a selected amount of coins to it. To get these coins, you watch videos the site queues in a new window for between 20-40 seconds or go and like videos that others have posted -- or alternatively, you can buy coins, but I haven't done that, so I can't say whether I recommend it or not. So far, I've gotten about 300 views from the service and a couple cents of ad revenue, so it seems legit. I'm interested to know if anyone else has success with it, though!

-364

So, I've been playing with gimp a lot more lately, trying to learn to paint like I used to. Keep ending up with psychedelic stuff like this. Here we see coy guy A exhibiting sexy-eyes. The funky light and shadow I achieved by using the divide effect on a gaussian blurred, color curved image of flowers from my yard under the top layer after merging all the layers. I've been painting on this scrawny bastard for more hours than I can count. The only way I could get him to look right was to try equal parts smudging my lines and the stomp-brush looking brush in the palette. That left a dirty look so I tried sharpening, unsharp masks, and all sorts of stuff, and the burn filter too. The eyes I took a single-pixel brush to.

I was wondering, since NG doesn't really like any elements of photography or too much digital manipulation -- and the lights and shadow overlay is quite obviously a (very mangled, absolutely destroyed) photograph, should I or should I not submit this to the portal?

A while back, I posted up some samples and got some thank yous. Figured it was time I go on the hunt for VSTs. I may even upload some of the free ones I use -- can't seem to find them anywhere. Bulleted are a few to start with, and centered below the divider are some of my favorite places to go digging for more. Check it!

Also, as of 1/30/2017, you may subscribe to this post and/or send demos for any VSTs!

Free VSTs!

• Analyzers - Voxengo Span

Extremely useful for seeking out undesired low frequencies and visualizing what measures you need to take to EQ your tracks into balance. Love this plugin.

• Amps - Simuanalog Suite (simple yet effective)

The interface might be ugly, but it's possible to emulate many classic rock star's sounds, including Jimmi Hendrix.

• SideChaining

Got a lot of free compressors there, great for side-chaining.

• Basses - Rez

One of my personal favorites. Unfortunately, I believe Rez 2.0 has been discontinued. However, Rez 3 is quite nice. Multi-purpose lead here, but its basses are a strong point.

• Drums - Black Noh Snare

Probably the most versatile snare I've ever played with. Top and bottom mic, sub knob. What snare do you know of that has a SUB setting? Probably none. The velocity is a bit touchy, but I did use it in this track extensively in a layered snare. Worked fantastic.

• FM Synthesis - De La Mancha FMMF

A little quirky, but FM synths generally are. I do like to play with this one.

• Glitchers - Disturbance

Like any of the Ugo VSTs, it can be a little weird to work with, but this little powerhouse can whip up some great, gritty results. 10/10 would recommend.

• Modelers - M-Theory and Dualism

Descended from String Theory, developed by Ugo. String theory was a personal favorite of mine for arpeggios, atmospheric string sounds, metallic screeches, distorted guitar leads, and even orchestral bits. I've got a feeling this one will be a catch all for me once I figure it out. Someone try it and let me know if it plays nice, eh?

• Multi - Adonis (Win), Texture (Win), Abakos (Win)

Downloads for Abakos, Adonis, and Texture, which are great for pads, basses, and fx. Abakos, of course, is my favorite, but it's hard to work with the wonky chording of some of its presets. I always try and play with that one first when I use it.

LINKS

Ugo VSTs

VST Warehouse

VST4FREE

VSTPlanet

SUBSCRIPTIONS: @littlemisfortune

Hope you found something to catch your ear. Until next time!

Changelog
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1/30/2017, added Black Noh Snare entry. Introducing demos.
Alphabetized categories. Touched formatting lightly.
Will add updates from @Mich's comment with more demos.
.