Tuesday 26 April 2011

Option Eliminate

Option Eliminate is my latest musical production. It is a song that probably falls into the ambient genre. The song is soft and slow (and basically instrumental, except for a short speech).

The song is downloadable here: Option Eliminate

I'm exclusively using Propellerhead's Reason (v5.0.1) and Record (v1.5.1). Everything I need, is availabe in these two programs (that actually melt together into one program if both are running at the same time). They contain synthesizers, audio recording support, effects (ranging from regular reverbs, delays, phasers etc, to Line6 POD effects for guitar and bass), drum machines, mixers, sampler, loop players, compressors, mastering tools, and much much more. The coolest thing is that you connect any and all of these devices using virtual cables, in any way you like. By doing that, an unlimited number of amazing sounds and effects may be created.

And best of all - the programs are extremely stable (never had a crash) and very efficient (low on system resources). One reason could be that VSTs are not supported, which I think is good (many others are of opposite opinion). No configuration or compability hassle, just pure joy! =)

Monday 25 April 2011

Demonic Lyric Generator

Demonic Lyric Generator -
example of card 13
This was a two-weeks project that I made for my colleague/friend. I was invited to a party of his, where he was displaying his newly built home recording musical studio. I wanted to give him something handmade, more or less useful, with a BIG touch of humor. This resulted in the so called Demonic Lyric Generator - a song lyric randomizer using a deck of cards, with a demonic theme.

The Demonic Lyric Generator (version 1.1) consists of 42 unique cards, where each card contains five words, and a set of instructions. The idea is that the user of the Demonic Lyric Generator, will use this deck of cards to randomly produce a song lyric (or at least a part of it) by drawing cards from the deck and following the given instructions. Useful if one is dearth of ideas!

Of course, the result might end up extremely weird and close to unreadable nonsense, but from time to time, surprisingly cool sentenses pops out of the generator.

I did a couple water color paintings (demonic kind of theme, with pentagrams and reddish colors), scanned these, and finalized all cards in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Then I sent them to a regular online photo developer, and got all cards developed on thick paper. After cutting them, I put one front card together with one backside card in standard-sized card sleeve.

Version 1.1 of the Demonic Lyric Generator is available for free download here: demonic_lyric_generator_v1.1.zip  (contains all cards and a pdf document describing how to use the product)

Sunday 24 April 2011

Borås 2045

I have just started to write on a blog-based fictional story about my home town. The town's name is Borås, and the name of the story is Borås 2045, indicating the year in which the story sets off. A doomed, wasted and wartorned future. Only a few survivors left of the native population, hiding, trying to survive the superior force occupying their land, nuclear plant meltdowns, extensive pollution and inhuman life-threatening beings.

The story will be written in classic manner (i.e. story transferred from head to keyboard, and then published), but also using role-playing elements to come up scenes, characters and events. The Mythic Game Master Emulator* will be used for that purpose, in combination with a RPG (haven't yet found a suitable, easy and generic/universal candidate, but are thinking about Strands of Fate or FU RPG).

Unfortunately, the story will be written exclusively in Swedish (my native language, and therefore the language where I have the best possibilities of expressing myself). Even though not yet activated, the blog address is reserved and will be available soon at http://boras2045.blogspot.com/.

* The Mythic Game Master Emulator is a product that enables you to run (basically) any standard tabletop RPG without a game master, which means you can even run solo. Mythic replaces the game master, so to speak. I will most likely come back to this very clever product in later posts.

First post

Hi there,
and welcome to my blog - Mono Desire!

What you will find in this blog, are articles covering my interests. No personal or emotional garbage. Unfortunately, my interests are quite many, but time is limited. This blog is an attempt to keep myself focused on a limited number of hobby related projects at any given moment.

What you will see in this blog, are board gaming related articles (not only about playing board games, which is a big hobby of mine, but also board game design), tabletop role-playing game posts (experimenting playing solo adventures, as well as playing simple scenarios with my young daughters), electric guitar playing and music production stories (using my home recording studio, based on Propellerhead's Reason and Record recording software), drawing and painting fiasco attempts (preferably using water color), video game articles (mainly Nintendo DS/3DS/Wii, because these are the platforms where I currently play games), writing related stories (where I talk foolishly about my fiction writing failures), photography posts (showing what I like to do with my SLR camera), programming articles (since I, occasionally, enjoy writing Java code in my spare time, even though my full-time employment circles around programming), comic book reports (of my slow progress of reading, mostly comic books), and more.

Have a nice stay!