音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

今までと違って、今回のタイトルがてたのはあっさりだったね～(・ω・`)

Since KOKIA's release of "I found you", in my brain was it full of colours, which were kind of visual reaction being stimulated by the music. But this time, I couldn't catch anything with more details and the plan to make a new drawing was once paused.
On last Saturday, again I tried to re-challenge. I sat there for almost 4 hours, played with the last 2.5 cm of my currently in-use pencil. As a result, I did make a draft, after peeling the pencil off by ~0.5 cm.

↓ Here it came to the end of another short-piece -- thanks for your hard working so far!
On the left is a reference object, which is also the game I mostly want to do right now. >_<

It began with the song "Solace", which has a painting-related motif. That's how I arranged my work -- I struggled quite a lot to depict a-girl-coming-out-from-a-painting, yet there was no good. I should blame myself who made the drafts way too ambiguous that even myself can't convert patterns on the real paper into a psd file (and the background inside of the painting came just after a few random tries)... orz
Still, guess that's it, I'm not going to fight further, although it's not what exactly I expected.

Then, the hardest thing, the background. Obviously this time I can't simply go google image a free abstract piece then modify it. To fit into the ambience, I need an actual room, an atelier, or even a secret space like that being used in a cult. My original plan consists of a dark forest with symbolic objects, but at some point everything changed into what you see now.

↓

The time is night, in an attic of that like semi-storage and semi-atelier. Now the biggest revolution! While doing the draft, in spite of I was listening to KOKIA, I kept thinking about Silent Hill, more specifically, the unreleased tunes "Waiting for you". So although the first inspiration was from KOKIA, even before I digitalised my scribble, I was already integrating some "self-styled" and "pseudo" Silent Hill aura into this work -- I was even dreaming of doing a background that full of rusty wire netting and misty night fog! <<< Probably I won't do it as it's likely beyond my skill. But any way, other than these otherworld elements, it's hard to convey such a idea. However, no matter how others think, it will be my first try to bridge into Silent Hill with my MOE-characters.

As a habit since last year, let me summarise the total time I've spent so far:
drafting (characters) + rough design = 3 h 46 m
initialise outline + basic colouring = 4 h 13 m
character shadowing + background arrangement = 6 h 30 m
background details = 3 h
After all of these, I indeed had the feeling of being a magic fighter yet with no MP at the moment. Time to stop. On Sunday evening, I decided to not continue until next weekend.

Like I wrote above, doing the background from zero is nothing but self-destruction.

One more consideration: whether I should put a black cat somewhere!

Recently I was doing Fatal Frame 3, and thus I went to wikipedia for some basic info about tattoos. I used to think about getting a tattoo like the one KOKIA has (as long as it doesn't hurt << of course it does), but when I learned a tattoo can't be easily removed, I dropped the idea permanently.
Tonight, while had a glance of one of my book, which I wrote my name on the fore-edge. Wait, isn't this similar to a tattoo? You can't easily remove the fore-edge writing unless you scrub the pages... Nothing else but this suddenly flashed over my mind.

In this evening my laptop suddenly had lost all its ability to recognise my USB mouse or the touchpad. I had no clue what happened. I assumed a reboot would solve it. But once, no good. So I did it for another time, finally, it went back to normal. Although the mouse may not be recognised, it was the first time I saw the touchpad lost control. Strange.
Like me, are you on your way of self-destruction as well? (；´∀｀)

Yesterday, to colour-code for a colourful listening-thoughts for KOKIA's new album, I indeed spent a lot of time, to find the proper colour code, to create the gradient, and to add span tags for each text segment.
W3school's color mixer is a good choice to generate gradient, but it only does two colours at the same time, and the start points are limited to basic colours. While there are also lots of online tools to create such a gradient and apply it onto your text, but 1) it may not be able to render utf8, but I need Japanese; 2) it splits the entire text into single letters, each letter has its own <span> tag. For small things like a forum signature there's no problem, but for longer stuff, it's a pain to further edit the text; 3) there may be a really perfect one, but I didn't want to spend much time to google for it.

So the best way is to make one myself, so I know what's going on, and will have the full control.

↓exec_gradient_maker/.

Features:
- output both HEX and RGB colour codes, so I don't have to either photoshop or google for a converter when doing "rgba" in CSS.
- create gradients between more than two colours, go making a rainbow!
- customisable mixing-levels, depending on whether I want a fine or coarse change.
- write to html for visual preview, with pre-written <span> tags that're ready to use, reduce my time spending with npp and regex find-and-replace.

However, it doesn't apply the gradient effect to given text. As for lots of times, I prefer doing the colouring manually -- these three words should be in the same colour, while next two words have different colours each. If I really want to apply all the colour changes in an automatic fashion, I can then make another script to handle it.

Also, I'm not bothering to make it to another color mixer. Before, I always wanted tools that are visually easy to use, but now, I more like to do things in batch, via the simple yet mighty command line.
and another reason is I can't survive in javascript, which is required in this case I believe...

Before, I used to wonder how colour mixer worked. How the script mixes two colours? Later on, I learned the relationship between the hex colour code and the rgb code -- I never knew it's such a straight forward fact: you just need to know how to convert between hex and dec. I was shocked when I learned it... orz
Then the rest is nothing but doing some basic math, and then sending to the screen, or a html file.
Of course, it's still hard for me to understand how a computer can interprets these colour codes and display different colours on the screen >>> out of my field!

Once you know it, you can do the magic too!
Isn't it so obvious? (´ω`*)

KOKIA just melts my hearts unconditionally~♥

"I Found You".

Since "Where to go my love?" two years ago, finally another new album released on March 18th (today).
My copy won't be delievered until next month, it's all Noriko's fault!! but I believe it's okay for me to get someone's rip for now--I can't wait, can't.

"Delicious melody" is the motif, which is also what I often imagine about music. I tend to say "this piece is delicious" when I find it's actually beautiful. Although somehow affected by Amano Tooko, I think I've completely accepted such a relationship. Good music has great tastes. This time, I'm really happy that this appears in KOKIA's release -- we see things in a similar way.

The entire album gives me a fresh sweet image, especially of various fruits (perhaps the CD jacket somehow led me there). From the first chord, soft, smooth and lovely. That's the KOKIA style that I'm so familiar with, full of peace, love and prayer. The world is then tinted with the prettiest harmonious colours. Everything is so beautiful and pure. With music, leave all my thoughts outside. Simply let my mind drifting with it, feel the gentle touch. While I immerse myself in the resonating ocean of sound, smile, in the next moment, my eyes have been misted by tears of bliss...
Unconditionally, KOKIA oscillates the my emotion-meter stronger than anything else.

Meanwhile, I have to say colours triggers my othse senses, including the feeling of taste. So instead of making this post a review, I tried to match each song with one or more image colours (which is also how I play with my girls ^^).

1. Family Tree
Brown to orange. // Moderate pace, warm and rich chrous. A very KOKIA-ish opening song to an album!

2. おいしい音 yum yum music
Light shaded rainbow combination. // Quickly the motif is introduced: music can be "delicious".

3. Recover
Transparent powder blue-purple-pink. // Mainly affected by the background sound effect, while the song itself is vibrating as if shedding some magic dust.

4. Solace ～記憶の森に積もる絵画
Deep forest green and night blue. // My favourite No.1. This song kind of gives me a similar feeling to Shikata Akiko's "化石の楽園 (Kaseki no Rakuen)", while the latter is closer to a faded grey blue.

5. オギャーと産まれて
Grass green and golden. // A song of hope.

6. I Found the Love
Pure pink to ruby red. // My favourite No.2. Earlier I was indicating this one made me in tears of bliss.<3

7. Make Sense
Sky blue. // I can feel the sweet scent of the earth after a light rain.

8. Dear Armstrong
Afterglow red to purple // But... sorry I have no idea about Armstrong... >_< so would you like to make a cover album of him in future? :3

9. I Found You
Milky white with various pale hues: pink, blue, and green. // Try to say the title in another way: 「あなたを見つけた」. How adorable! <3

10. 旅列車 life train
Bright orange. // Cherish every encounter in our life, and thus people change from strangers to close friends.

11. 無力と知った日
Ocean blue. // Getting to the end (in normal edition it's the end), a slow and a bit sorrowful song.

12. Spirits
Dark orange-red (perfect if with flowing clouds). // It's for a RPG, so why Ito Masumi isn't the arranger! -- never mind, it's a "delicious" song any way.

Alright, after the delicious KOKIA new release, now I'm gonna dumping a lot of complaints regarding to what I'm working on recently.

--Perlプログラマーとしてのプライドを捨てて何とか道端で拾っていたpythonコードのバグや不具合を全部修復したのだが、イライラする。

You may have the ability to create a better one, but if you've found some that are ready to use, don't bother to waste time starting over. But, as non pro-programmers, none of the solutions I found are perfect, not even easy to use.
Yet I believe to use those free stuff would be eventually more time-saving, so I had to swallow my pride as a camel-tamer perl programmer to explore into their source codes and try to fix this or that bugs/issues (in python that I don't love at all). As a result, things are fixed, but I was fairly irritated.
And I have to use both, because PAML doesn't deal with indels at most times, while laz was written to handle it.

↓
1. laz creates soft links to actual files, but this isn't favoured by PAML, and thus PAML strikes.
→ solution: copy the files instead of making links.
2. (I assume) PyCogent's sequence loader thinks *.fasta is FASTA, yet *.fst isn't... it's just stupid.
→ solution: use *.fasta as the extension although I prefer the shorter 3-letter *.fst.
3. PAML doesn't like trees with bootstrap values, it thinks they are also species names.
→ solution: remove all bootstrap values before sending the tree to PAML

Another one. I even want to sue the author of this script:

I can still endure if you didn't use sprintf, but why the hell you didn't set up variables for all these paths with File::Spec?! °A°

...I really want to throw bricks to the people who distribute very imperfect codes, while more people use them to create even more imperfect codes. orz

Maybe an unrelated event. I was so happy to modify someone's twitter post fetcher javascript code. I didn't realise until this morning that twitter now converts some texts to their own emoji images without an option to opt-out! On their website, those images are small and it's still acceptable, but since I'm using a 3rd party API js file, those images appear super big, that rule my entire page.
It didn't take me too long to figure out where I need to tweak. Twitter recognise emoji-like char(s) and replace them to images, while adding "alt='xxx'" to refer to the original plain emoji text. So I just needed to extract the "alt", and remove all the rest inside of the <img>. Frankly, I can't even do the simplest "Hello World" with js, but after distinguishing between all the "{}" or "()" pairs, I eventually made it~( ´∀｀)

My point here is, if the script is well organised, I bet even normal people can make the adaptation, but if everything is dead stiff, probably the original author(s) would fight with themselves in future to make modifications.
-- It's possible for people who don't understand biology to make perfect bio-programs, while not vice versa. =_=