I'm sweet like sugar

It's Saturday night. Having not the slightest clue what to do with myself I proceed to try to make graphics for a DDR file. Yes, you saw all those words in one sentence. I will explain for those who don't know:

DDR means Dance Dance Revolution; if you think it means something else you've been lied to by computer hardware makers. This is a game where you have arrows representing the directions up, down, left, and right on a pad on the floor, and you use your feet to hit the arrows in time with the beat of a song. At advanced levels you don't only copy the main beat but also the other musical elements of the song, so this turns into the most athletic video game of all time, essentially. Even today (DDR was first released in 1998) Wii whatever (except Wii DDR) has nothing on this for exercise. There's also sports, like, real-life sports, but I think of it this way. There's running while listening to music - a constant workout with lots of pounding the ground - and there's dancing. DDR is the brilliant combination of the two.

There's a sort of aesthetic involved, though, that goes beyond the pleasure of getting through the song without failing, or getting a really good score. I (and many other people, though interest has died down nowadays on the internet) see an art in the arrows they choose to put on the screen. There's a logic to how they're put there so that if you go at the game with the proper technique, it's not just a battle to stay up standing or a boring foot-shuffle game but a fun way to move your body along with the music, albeit with an unfair bias given to your lower half. But yeah, the arrows mean something. It's not just the second-dimensional plane formed by these arrows but the third dimension you add when you take into account the movement of the human body. Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I think it is. What I do (and what many people do or at least used to do) is I make use of a DDR simulator on the computer called Stepmania, and make DDR arrow "charts" (as they're called) to songs I like to listen to. For instance, I've done "Back That Thang Up" by Juvenile, "I Don't Love You" by My Chemical Romance (nothing prevents DDR and non-dance genres of music from mixing!), and "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas (yes, I enjoy listening to it, shoo). Basically what you do is you find the tempo (we say BPM = "beats per minute," a term DJs use too) and the time in seconds of the first beat of the song, use that info to chop the song down to standard DDR length which is between 1 and 2 minutes, insert in the DDR simulator and invent your steps. It's fun but lately I've been losing interest because the community online where we share our stuff has gotten really disinterested and uninteresting. That's double the drop in interest, boy.

But yeah. And right now what I'm doing is making the background, an image that gets displayed behind the arrows when you play a particular song, and the banner, the image that you see for this particular song ("WOLVES OF THE SEA" by Pirates of the Sea, Latvia's 2008 Eurovision song) when you're scrolling through and picking which song you want to dance or rather DDR to. I just go on Flickr.com, look for pictures that are legally usable for this purpose under a Creative Commons license (I'm a softie), and put text over it, sometimes modifying the background image to make it look cooler.

In any case, it's a dying hobby. But I have nothing else to do where I've had this much creative fun in recent years. And I'm not easily distracted anymore by time-killing or chilling endeavors that aren't very creative (video games, movies, books) so this is what I stick with. At times it can be pretty easy, but sometimes it's hard to really make something you like, and being the perfectionist I am I seem to have that problem a lot. It's a great hobby for me for this reason, though: it combines small amounts of several different endeavors. Ok, that wasn't very well expressed. Basically, in life I tend to get very into, well, anything I'm into. Or at least that's what my friend Greg tells me. I think he's right, though. If I have a hobby I have to be good at it, and I can never stick with just one hobby, whether that be because I genuinely cannot abandon my interest in these various things or because I lack the confidence to put all my lot into one thing and try to excel at it to the best of my abilities. I think it's a little of both.

But yeah, my DDR-making hobby requires graphical, musical, math (slightly...), and logical skill. Still, even then there's only so much you can do with four arrows and with an old routine. Today, instead of playing DDR, I learned the Nor Par. If you search "Nor Par" on Youtube the (very brief) instructional video is the first thing that comes up. It's the dance for Armenia's Eurovision song this year, "Jan Jan." It's a lot of fun; you should try it.

And yet here I am again back with the old hobby. I think this says a lot. And no, I'm not particularly focused on this one thing, since I can hardly get anything done. I guess I'm just focused against things like TV, movies, books... I have to be doing something more active or creative. What a strange mindset I've been in for so long, ever since high school started.

All these things I know, too. All the above. All the above! All the above, oohoh, oohoh... What I was just type-singing was the bizarre hook of a new hip-hop song. But yeah, I know all these things. Why did I just write them all out?

I guess I just want other people to know. And how well did I publicize this blog... not at all. Wha?