“Unsure of his sister's fate, a boy enters Limbo."

Limbo is a game which utilizes a lack of sight, sound, story and complexity of control to fully immerse the player in the bleak world created. As such, Limbo is a game of no words. It's communication I found to be very primitive, a bit like how animals communicate. There is no confirmed story for Limbo, but at the core of it's wonderful ambiguity rests an idea at the soul of each person who plays it. It's an experience that leaves an impression like no other.

Limbo is deeply symbolic and suggestive. Even the word Limbo, which is Latin for edge or boundary, contributes to a wild sense of urgency and doubt. Rightfully so, the game stands on the edge of right and wrong. It teases you and judges you, yet it's very forgiving to you when you do die, perhaps, to reward you for recognition. The game's grotesque imagery and disturbingly graphic violence command the distinction of right and wrong, much like a scientist to a rat in a maze. Yet, even so, it's content is inveigled in blackness, self imposing it's own concept of morality and allowing you the choice to do the same via a content filter or simply- imagination.

Like I said before there is no confirmed story for Limbo. All that is known for sure can be taken, in multiple contexts, from the games one sentence description. It was the game designers specific intent to be vague and challenge you to dream up your own. I've read a lot of theories on the plot. Most people seem to believe that the story represents Limbo in a religious sense and that the boy finishes his sentence and starts over again at the beginning, creating a loop, just like the Dante's limbo. It could also be said that the title screen, depicting flies swarming around the exact location of where the boy and his sister stood at the end of the game, is their actual fate outside of Limbo.

I have an entirely different theory however that I would love to share. To me the game represents the history of human life on the earth since the dawn of mankind. Symbolically the boy represents mankind and the girl represents the Earth. At the beginning of the game we see the boy open his eyes, symbolizing the birth of mankind. When we walk left, instead of looping back around to show the girl, we find that we cannot go back, this is symbolic of evolution. Gradually as we move forward, in a single direction we discover primitive traps like punji stick pits and bear traps. This is symbolic of civilization and the meetings with others are wars. As we continue to move we start to see the birth of technology, steam, industry, electricity, neon lights, magnets, elevators, automatic weapons, anti gravity, artificial gravity. Eventually the boy or humanity reaches the end and the boys body is tossed forward through glass to symbolize that. Mankind returns to Earth and the process starts over again.

Interesting huh? I realize this interpretation is really far out there, that the timeline and objects aren't always relevant to our timeline (for example the flaming tire at the beginning of the game) and that my theory about evolution falls apart when you take one step backward. It's just an opinion based on how the game made me feel. If the description was “Unsure of his brother's fate, a boy enters Limbo.", I probably would have written a post about how it was a Christian game.

If you've played Limbo, I'd like to hear your take on it as well. Please post it in the comments.

hows authenticity holding up in a digital age?

I feel as if someone unplugged my midi keyboard, corrupted all of my custom refills and changed a byte or two in the Pro Tools executable (yeah, .exe, I will never run a Mac). And by this I suppose I'm making a sad metaphor for a new artistic direction I seem to be headed in.

I feel this started a long while ago when I directed a small orchestral group for about 40 minutes or so based on my budget constraints and the amount of sheet material I had written. Each layer was a personal session with the performers, a bit of the sheet music played in repeat from different instruments and also impromptu that I could use in post. In the end I was really satisfied. They were all very talented session musicians and they had no intention of arguing over the artistic intent of anything I was doing (or not doing). When I asked them to make suggestions, they did without hesitation. They weren't required to, but they did and they didn't beg a cent more for their knowledge, creativity, experience... It was awe inspiring for me. After 40 minutes had ended the entire experience left me feeling like the only thing that distinguished me from nobody is that I had a scattered vision, dream or method about how I wanted it to sound and most importantly the scattered knowledge of computer programs to assemble it. And yeah, it's a bit like that. The coldest notion that you are a fragment musician in a sea of fragment musicians. I was desperate, but I can say I never truly continued being comfortable in previous musical routines. I was enlightened. My knowledge of Audio Engineering from industry standards, to just knowing-- producing and creating with the software/hardware I use sky rocketed. My knowledge of actual instruments continued to crawl. I let it linger through fear of approaching it or perhaps my fear of it's imaginary reproach.

All of this bit by bit session recording was not initially the plan. My plan was to direct the entire orchestra at one time, but when we put it all together it sounded like every noteworthy conductor on planet earth was crying and damning my name. I may be off on the wrong-- page? I had only written one and I had just destroyed it. Each performer was staring at me blankly with no solutions, no expectations or suggestions. So I just laughed, and said "I'm actually quite new at this." and they laughed with me. I sighed and we began shifting things around to record one instrument at a time. This had me quite embarrassed even after the song (or rather songs) that the work was implemented to worked out great.

I thought about it recently and realized it was okay to be embarrassed. I had no experience and was too eager. That didn't mean it was over, but for some reason at the time, I guess I thought it was. Lesson in patience and forgiveness learned.

The problem with it all is that I've never felt quite comfortable enough with session recordings beyond a few measures. I started out a sample, or loop driven artist. I'm programmed. I like to have short, concise bits to be mathematical with, or I suppose I could say, "geek out", and I like to have hundreds of them. Recent guitar and drum recording sessions with friends have convinced me that this simply will not work, or at least it won't always work to my hearts content. So now I'm trying my hand at learning each instrument which inspires me, more intimately. I'm working on drums and guitar for the new album from stems and ideas right now. I guess I'm evolving as a musician? I hope to earn some sense of accomplishment and most of all musical experience and knowledge from all of this self imposed instrument drama. From there I suppose I'll be working out the particulars when the time comes.

I guess I was just counting on the nuclear fallout and the day where we all go back to Sonic Foundry Acid Music 2.0. It's not going to happen.

this is my favorite non album, ever

Cardboard Suki, or Revolver Cat Happiness as he calls himself, is featured on both of the kittens songs, the first on "heaRt the dark" and the second on "i love you". He has since parted ways with the kittens sighting irreconcilable creative differences. He is a bit difficult to understand because of his thick lolcat accent, though he claims he just has a hearing problem. He's a misfit and an outcast of sorts in the fact that every other cat is just damn intimidated by him. He has a soft heart and is super quiet and cool normally. He likes smoking cigarettes and "capping" cabbages with his powerful sniper rifle. He is currently in the process of creating his first full length electronic album called "The Dawn Over A Pulp Fracas" which contains, according to him, "wishy warshy bass, foaty filchers and the mews. I dunno wat that mean." sleepy ninja studios recently conducted an interview with the kitten himself.

rev: o hai
interviewer: Hello
rev: wat
interviewer: So, Revolver, how would you describe your first solo project?
rev: i liek 2 maek rly auhsum electicity mewsick on mah lapple pro, sew far ish goin purty whel. ah while b realizing n mewsick collecshun soon
interviewer: Awesome, your first song available by free download is called "Nixon Batley". Do you plan on continuing to release your songs for free?
rev: yah, ah i think sew. n eet while b free 4 tubertruck hear, but u kan tubertruck mah sungs when they are released. dey can paypaws me donatuna.
interviewer: Last question. What's the deal with the sniper rifle?
rev: i leik 2 colleckt gunz, especially snipe wit silencr, n snipe cabbarge but ya mah bebbe awl mowntad oo lewkin gewd thru hear is espesully nicer dis time. furry loaded. hehehe.
inteviewer: Thanks for your time Cardboard, we look forward to your release.
rev: yup

mudkipz on teh servarz

Thars teh cause uf all ur servar issues right thar

food for the soul

Isn't it funny how twinkies are so exaggerated in some movies?
Here are some example of what I mean, 10 twinkie sightings in films and tv

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miserable

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cops are crooks

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switch!

A few people are probably wondering why I switched over to blogger. First of all I would like to say that I work in IT, code is my baby and design is often really foreign to me. For as much that I tried to make the old hiddenninja.net look beautiful, is as many limitations I seemed to run into with adding content. With all older layouts, I began a grand attempt to create pages based on each album. This was often phased out to keep things simple. v2 had it's own pages with animated gif menus and facts which were really cool. v3 had it's own pages as well, with pictures and facts from the era the album was created and a nice flash based header. I left all of this behind. Eventually, I just had my intro statement and linked social networks and cold links to the .zip packs with a way into the back end so that people could download the mp3's if they wanted. I did this because I could never complete pages, a lot of them were blank, while others were full. The imbalance was infuriating, so I limited myself. I often felt like artists weren't necessarily meant to design their own page. The page became so stale looking to me. There was never any feel of integration. I could never blog without fear of messing up the formatting. I could never simply drop information or pictures into pages. I could never tell people who I was constantly, what inspires me or the creation of music without them going to another page (which I never felt comfortable updating in the first place). I was stuck with it looking nice and that had to be good enough based on my limited experience for design.

It was not just design that haunted me, it was the language as well. It was archaic, if I might say. All my pages for v3 were created in standard .html with a css stylesheet and formatting based off a borrowed theme called "dark ritual". I wanted to use php as it often looks much cleaner, I wanted to use a CMS because it is a lot easier, but I left it alone no matter how many times I tried as I knew that the page would sit still for extended periods of time and I didn't want the threat of php injections and shell hacks to EVER be present. It worked very well, I was never hacked, ever. I was also hardly ever indexed or crawled either. With blogger my indexing with google shows up about 1 hour after I post. v3 would update about twice a month with google. I never had any good way of tracking appeal with v3, all I could do is wait until stats reported back and get a good idea of popularity from unique visitors locations. With blogger I have appeal at my fingertips. I can see my popularity, however limited it is, from many different perspectives, including labels or as blogs call it "tag clouds'.

With this new blogger, I can link you to my albums, plus I can link you to demos and production ideas. I can share pictures and artwork without having to scale them perfectly. I can give you fragments of compositions like lyrics/poems or facts unique to a certain album without the burden of formatting. You will see old content come as it inspires me, but you will never see anything replaced or moved unless I get complaints about it.

With all of the burdens removed, you can expect to always see more and hear more from me. And that is a comfort I have coming to me and hopefully to you as well.