Bringing you to the Blog, 2016 Edition

Hey, so it’s been an Aether asskicker of a month.  You may have noticed this, as you felt that vague sense of depression settling in, as you noticed that you don’t have as much new Lost to the Aether content as usual.  Yeah, that happens sometimes.  I’m trying to defeat the final boss known as real life right now, and you know, this stuff takes time.

So, my schedule won’t clear up for another week or so.  I’m halfway through my next post here, but clearly not going to have it done in time to make your lives better this week.  But I don’t want to leave all you guys hanging, so I figured, hey, let’s pull out a good old mainstay here, and take a look at some of the search terms that are introducing you to the blog.  And hey, as it turns out, a lot of people on the internet are weird.  And many of those are reading these words.  Let’s make fun of them!

yandere simulator porn

So, this year, I tried to stem the tide of people looking for Yandere Simulator and accidentally finding the similarly-named Yandere-chan by, you know, actually writing about Yandere Simulator.  And only a little bit about porn.  In doing so, I was trying to perform a public service for the internet at large.  Helping people actually find something relevant to what they’re looking for, rather than getting them confused by the similarly named games.

yandere chan porn

Hey look!  It worked!  No more mistaken placements here!

Wait…

yandere simulator yandere chan porn

Okay, yeah, you made your point.

sexy female dragon

I write about being sexy a lot.  I get it.  The state of being that is sexiness is something I have to live with constantly.  It is both my blessing and my curse.  So it ends up coming out through my writing fairly often.  So I see how that would draw a lot of those types of search terms.

Even so, I don’t think I’ve ever written about lusty dragons.  What the blazes, Google?

세인츠로우3 모닝스타

How… even… Okay, so Google translate says this is looking for Saints Row 3 material.  Which I’ve definitely written about.  Even so… Well, I guess the excellence of my writing just crosses language barriers.  It’s like a smile.

drops of god 12 apostle spoiler

Wikipedia will spoil that for you.  Seriously, given that the series gave up in English after five volumes, and even the Scanlators don’t bother, Wikipedia is the closest thing to an official English  language source.

why is sephiroth left handed

How else would you represent the coolest and most supreme character of the game?  Seriously, you want something to represent that someone is just plain better than anyone else, make them left-handed.

real life yandere stories

Please no.  Like, I get that there’s that fascination that drives people to look up serial killer stories, but still.  That’s too much of my life in there for me.

yandere simulator real story porn

No.  No.  Just no.

hybrid heaven 2

Haaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

aether sex videos

We’ve been through this already.  Yes, I’m very sexy.  Yes, I am the perfect lady’s man.  But I know fully well to leave that stuff in the bedroom.

You will never find it.

leave it to beaver retrospective part 3

Wut.  I don’t think I’ve ever even mentioned Leave it to Beaver.  I can’t imagine how many pages you must have gone through in Google to find your way here.

freytag’s pyramid no words

Something tells me I just helped some kid with his/her homework.

good aether sexy video

Nice try.  Still no.

 

 

Music in the Mainstream Game

 

I’m still alive. I know you were probably wondering about that, given how long it’s been since my most recent post. Well, yeah, still here. I’ve been fighting long work-weeks, the flu, and two other posts that are taking more time than I expected to finish properly, hence why you haven’t seen much life from me lately. But we’re going to change that right now! We’re back baby, yeah!

So here’s a topic I’ve been mulling over for a while: what exactly happened to video game music? At least in broad market AAA titles, a game’s music barely seems worth noticing. It wasn’t always this way. Whistle the first two bars of the Super Mario Bros. theme, and any gamer who’d even touched that game will be instantly brought back to to those memories. It’s a very distinct and memorable song, that perfectly captured the mood of World 1-1. And they did that using only a small selection of bleeps and blorps. Compare that to Skyrim, where outside of the main theme and its various remixes, they didn’t even bother giving most of their music melodies. Most of the background music is simply long chords. It’s basic, incredibly boring, and most of the time you’d probably have to be reminded that there was music playing in the first place. Skyrim is definitely the worst case I can think of right now, but other modern AAA games aren’t much better. Think of Mass Effect 3, where most of the music was an incredibly simple one- to two-bar melody played repeatedly over basic chords. There’s no progression, the song doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s just kind of there. And it’s seeming to me that most games aimed at hitting the mass-market are doing the same with their music. Think of a modern AAA title you’ve played. Can you even remember more than one song from the game? Music is one of the strongest weapons in a game developer’s arsenal towards guiding the player’s emotions, and the tools to implement music in games are better than they’ve ever been before. There are definitely great composers in the video game industry. Why is it then, that the titles that are getting the most attention are getting the worst music? I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a few ideas under the cut.