DoDonPachi: Dai-Ou-Jou Arrange Album

     DoDonPachi: Dai-Ou-Jou roughly translates to "Angry Leader Bee: A Peaceful Death". It was originally released in 2002 in the arcade format and eventually ported to the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360. The company that made the game is called "Cave" and they typically make shooting games (like Gradius) that are considered too difficult for Western gamers, so you've probably never played one of them, unless you import games (or live in Japan).
     I first heard the soundtrack about 7 years ago. It was composed by Manabu Namiki, who does much of the music for Cave shooters. In 2009, an arrange album for Dai-Ou-Jou was published by Cave featuring a variety of top artists in the game music world. The music is transcendent; it exceeds any possible auditory desire I could ever have. I have to pick this as the best arrange album released in 2009. I made some scans of it.

Front Cover

Back Cover

Disc

     The next two scans are of the obi, which means "belt" in Japanese. However, it is more colloquial to say "spine card". The obi, or spine card, covers the spine of the jewel case and displays pertinent information about the CD, such as the catalog number, release date, title, bar code, etc. Almost all Japanese CDs contain an obi, and they are collectable items. People tend to pay less or not pay at all for CDs that are missing the obi. Rarely do obi have any sort of interesting artwork. But this one does.

Obi Front

Obi Back

     The line-up of arrangers on this CD is impressive.

     The first track was arranged by Yasuhiko Fukuda, who composed Emerald Dragon for the PC Engine, which I have listened to many times.

     The second track was arranged by Yasuhisa Watanabe, a member of Zuntata, well known for Metal Black. His nickname is "Yack". I am very familiar with the works of this composer.

     The third track was arranged by Kohta Takahashi, whom I am not very familiar with. He has done some work for Namco series, such as Ridge Racer and Tekken.

     The fourth track was arranged by Ryu Umemoto, whom I am not very familiar with.

     The fifth track was arranged by Motoaki Furukawa, whom I am extremely familiar with. I've been listening to his music for nearly a decade. He is foremost a talented guitarist and has composed music for several early Konami games, such as SD Snatcher and Xexex.

      The sixth track was arranged by Yuji Takenouchi, who also composed music for several old Konami games. He composed the music for the sequel to Metal Gear, as well as Space Manbow.

     The seventh track was arranged by Kinuyo Yamashita. She also worked for Konami and composed the music for Castlevania, the very first one. The reason why I bought this CD without even wondering if it would be good is because of Yamashita's involvement. If the composer for Castlevania makes something, then you listen.

     The eighth track was arranged by Hiroki Kikuta, an old Squaresoft composer, well known for Secret of Mana, and its sequel Seiken Densetsu 3.

     The ninth track was arranged by Motoi Sakuraba, who probably has the largest discography in all of video game music. I am very familiar with his music, but I can't say I've even listened to half of what he's composed. Most notably, he's the man behind the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile series.

      The tenth track was arranged by Kota Hoshino, whom I am not very familiar with. I know he's done a lot of work on the Armored Core series, though.

     The eleventh track was arranged by Akari Kaida, whom I am somewhat familiar with. Most notably, I can recall her work on Breath of Fire III. She's done music for several other Capcom games as well.

     The twelfth track was arranged by Tomoko Sasaki, who composed the music for Nights, a popular Sega Saturn game.

     Oh, and I can't forget the guy that originally composed this music, Manabu Namiki:

BLAZT DEVIL CARNIVAL

   
     One of my favorite doujin groups is Dangerous Mezashi Cat. They have many different members and have published 8 albums so far. Doujin groups are quite different from the people that normally arrange video game music albums, as they are not actually hired by the company that made the game. "Doujin" essentially refers to a fan-made thing, or a group of people that share an interest in something. This is not to be confused with an amateur status; the doujin groups do sell their albums and make money. They just aren't officially recognized. However, since they are simply fans, the quality ranges from phenomenal to atrocious. Many thousands of doujin albums have been released in Japan, alongside the many thousands of official albums.
     Here is what the artwork looks like from Dangerous Mezashi Cat's latest album:

 

 

     As you can see, they even went through the trouble of making a picture disc, which I think is really cool. On this album, they arrange music from the earliest Megaten games, which is short for Megami Tensei, a popular series of games in Japan. The music is similar to Castlevania, mainly because of the gothic sounds. Even though I've never played any of the Megaten games, I am quite familiar with the music, as I've listened to almost all of the soundtracks in that series. Thus, I found this CD remarkably interesting for the new arrangements of music I have loved for many years.

     One thing is very much for certain - DMC is getting better. There is absolutely no way for a casual listener to single this music out as coming from a video game.

     This CD was released on Dec. 30th, 2009 and I received it just a few days ago. It's important to buy these types of CDs right when they come out because the print runs are very limited, which can potentially skyrocket the price if it becomes popular. It is very easy for these albums to reach $50 and then $150, so if you wait, you're either going to pay out the ass or have to find someone willing to trade. Or hope someone posts it on the internet.

    

Airports for human beings.

     There currently does not exist any airport which is designed to accommodate humans. Every human that walks into an airport is assumed to be a terrorist, which implies that the design of an airport is based on that assumption. I would argue that approximately 99.9% of all humans are not terrorists, which means that 6.5 million people are terrorists, or have terrorist-type thoughts and plan to bring them to fruition.
     An ideal airport would not have any security and would be designed like a movie theater. Customers buy tickets and then proceed to their appropriate aircraft. The process should take less than 15 minutes. This is not a laughable prospect, nor an impossible one. Just think of termites.
     When your house is infested with termites, you don't say to yourself, "You know, I'm going to fight these termites. I don't want to exterminate them. I just want to fight them every day for many years and spend as much money as I possibly can." But that is precisely how the U.S. military wants to deal with terrorists. Scratch that. There is no "want" about it, that is how the U.S. military does things. As slowly and as expensively as possible. It is not a living organism, so the concept of want has no meaning. While it is constructed of humans, the military itself is not a human and thus erroneous anthropomorphic thoughts easily come to mind.
     So this is why we still have terrorists on the planet. The U.S. military does not view them as the average homeowner views termites.
   

Taking a break from Phylogenetics.

   
     I had to read something a little less painful, so I picked up a new Philip K. Dick novel I purchased from Amazon. The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike was written in 1960, right before he wrote the Hugo award winning novel The Man in the High Castle. Here's a scan of the most uncomfortable and odd-looking cover art:

     This is a realist novel, capturing the actual life of a small town in 1960 California. It was never published while Dick was alive; no one would buy it. The first printing was in 1984 and that one is very expensive. I was only able to read this book because of the reprinting, in 2009.

     Just because this book is not science fiction doesn't mean you're going to walk away without something interesting to chew on. On page 136 he writes:

     "It's always that way. The guilty party never pays. It's the innocent. That's the real meaning of Christianity."

     Besides reading that excellent and very strange book I also saw Avatar. The most interesting thing about watching James Cameron's Avatar was the imagery it provoked in my mind. Normally my mind wanders when I watch movies because they are not good enough; I have to supplant the images with those from my own imagination. I had to do no such thing while watching Avatar - the imagery is on par with what one imagines while reading a first rate science fiction novel. Notably, the impressive use of bioluminescence brought to mind the following novel:

     The movie Avatar looked exactly like what I had imagined while reading that book, many years ago. Although the locations were different as Avatar took place in a forested environment and The Hero of Downways took place underground, the imagery is remarkably similar.

     The main idea in Avatar, that is, of transplanting a human into an alien environment by changing the species of the human into that of an alien is not new. Clifford D. Simak wrote about that in City and Timothy Zahn wrote about it in Manta's Gift.

     Most disturbingly, I must now resume my studies of Phylogenetic Systematics. Perhaps I will benefit from it, perhaps not. Either way, I feel it is something I must understand (I don't know why).

More abstruse words.

     On page 89 in Phylogenetic Systematics is when things start to supercharge in difficulty. Several new words are introduced that the author does not define very well, nor are they words I have ever seen prior to reading this material. Even worse, the words are used often, which means if one is not intimately familiar with them, then all the processing is spent on dealing with the words and being further frustrated by the difficult content.
     So a different type of reading strategy must be used in order to successfully read this book. I am accustomed to reading books within a few days and dashing over to my dictionary whenever an unfamiliar word appears. What I am accustomed to cannot be maintained when reading something of this caliber. I have to take time out and research words before I can continue reading. Here are some more of them:

     1. Plesiomorphous, Plesiomorphy - As with most words in phylogenetics, the authors seem to enjoy putting them together out of Greek roots. This reminds me of when I used to study calculus; the authors enjoyed using Greek letters in the equations. It was not necessary as standard Roman characters would have sufficed. But in phylogenetics it seems to me that it is necessary, perhaps not with Greek, but most certainly with something. In order to cope with these words, one must know that plesio-, plesi- correspond to "near" or "close". And morph- corresponds to "form", "shape", or "structure". In phylogenetics, the meaning refers to traits that are similar within a group, but not unique to that group. As an example, all mammals have a backbone, but so do fish and reptiles. Thus, the backbone is plesiomorphic to mammals, because they were not the first to evolve it, but they all have one. (Most common example I could find.)

     2. Apomorphous, Apomorphy - apo- corresponds to "separate", "away from", "derived from" and refers to traits that are derived from a different group. As an example, the "arms" of birds are used as wings. Thus, having wings is an apomorphy for birds because they did not evolve limbs and they use them for a different purpose. (My example.)

     3. Symplesiomorphous, Symplesiomorphy - sym- corresponds to "together with", "united", or "similar". This simply refers to plesiomorphous traits in different species. I decided to consult wikipedia for an example:

"A famous example is pharyngeal gill breathing in bony and cartilaginous fishes. The former are more closely related to Tetrapoda (terrestrial vertebrates, which evolved out of a clade of bony fishes) that breathe via their skin or lungs, rather than to the sharks, rays, et al.. Their kind of gill respiration is shared by the "fishes" because it was present in their common ancestor and lost in the other living vertebrates."


     4. Synapomorphous, Synapomorphy - This refers to the presence of apomorphous traits in different species. As an example, the opposable thumb in some new world monkeys is synapomorphic. It is a derived condition that they share with each other but not with all other mammals. I suppose that if all mammals had opposable thumbs, then the trait would be apomorphous. (I found that example doing a google search.)

     5. Autapomorphous, Autapomorphy - I can't find a definition that is pleasingly simple. All I can seem to find is that it refers to "uniquely defined traits". My guess is that abstract reasoning would be an autapomorphic trait for humans, even though such reasoning is without structure itself. Or is it? Morphology does not need to be restricted to those structures that are readily visible. The folds of the brain could also be a part of morphology, as well as the new "structures" in the brains of humans; the thinking that we do might have an actual shape in the brain, traceable by synapses.

Coping with Phylogenetic Systematics.

     I would estimate that I have read no more than 700 books in total since I learned how to read at age 5. While some have been more difficult than others, one of them has been the most difficult of all. The title is Phylogenetic Systematics, written by Willi Hennig in German. It was first printed in English in 1966.

      I have not yet finished reading this book. I gave it a try back in the summer of 2008 and got half way through. The problem was that every few minutes I'd have to look up some word I had never seen before and quickly internalize it, because it kept reappearing in the text. The unfamiliar words piled up and I found myself thinking about words and not ideas.

     The reading is much easier on my second attempt, as I have had time to contemplate many of the ideas in this book as well as ingest the various abstruse words. One such word is chorology, which comes from the Greek word khoros, which means "place". Chorology is thus the study of the spacial distribution of organisms. The distribution can be euryoekous or stenoekous. Again, we have to go back to the Greek to get a handle on these. Eury means "wide" and  steno means "narrow" and I have found evidence indicating that "oekous" can be equivalent to oikos, which means "house of". Therefore, an organism that is euryoekous is tolerant of a wide range of habitats, while an organism that is stenoekous tolerates very few. The problem with the words in this book is that I often cannot find them in my physical dictionary (American Heritage), published in 1992. It's not that the words are new, rather, they are obscure in the most extreme sense. Not even a google search offers any help with some of them. I have found a book, though, titled Animal Behavior Desk Reference which has many of them defined. I would love to buy the book, but it costs $175 at amazon.com

     While reading this book it is important to keep in mind the differences between three types of genetic relationships. Those are:

1. Ontogenetic relationships, which are those between semaphoronts.

2. Tokogenetic relationships, which are those between individuals.

3. Phylogenetic relationships, which are those between species.

     Don't know what a semaphoront is? Not sure about tokogenetic? Those are the types of early problems I faced while trying to read this book. All of 3 of those relationships together are called hologenetics and the author expressed that the book could be called Hologenetic Systematics. The Greek root holo, which means "entire" was used. It is also common to see this referred to as "Cladistics".

     This book is filled with fascinating definitions. Here's one of them:

     SPECIES: "the study of the evolutionary process in which groups of forms that have hitherto interbred, or at least were capable of interbreeding, become divided into two or more separate groups that for physical reasons cannot interbreed"

     It is also referred to as species cleavage, which you can see here graphically. It is an important concept, something quite obvious that had never occurred to me before.

The Ineffable Soul and Emergence

 
     Here is something I wrote in June of this year:

THE INEFFABLE SOUL

     Mostly everyone else accepts that souls exist, yet I reject the notion. A word that can be used to describe me is iconoclastic, which essentially means I have no interest in the belief systems that have been invented by other people. I make my own. By my reasoning, some other person, now very unknown, came up with the idea of a soul. It turned out to be a cool idea because many people have accepted it, but just because something “rings true” does not mean it’s true.
    My suspicion is that people are confusing the soul with consciousness. What is consciousness? It is an emergent property of densely packed neurons that cannot be found by looking at the neurons, or, inside the brain. It has been said that if the brain were expanded and we were to walk around inside, we would not find consciousness. Is there a better way to explain this? Yes.
    We humans are made of atoms*. It is only when many atoms come together that humans are apparent. Thus, a human can be called an emergent property of atoms. You will not find a human by looking at atoms, any more than you will find consciousness by looking at neurons. Furthermore, we function very differently from atoms. Atoms do not eat, have sex, go to sleep, etc. This indicates that the stuff of which things are made does not have to bear any resemblance to its function. As a further example, we can think, but our brain cells, the neurons, cannot. It’s not until many neurons collect together that something new emerges, such as cognition.
    So, what happens when we die? Since consciousness requires an operating collection of neurons, this indicates that consciousness will stop when the neurons die. In other words, we will not know when we die. Anyone that has an ‘after-death’ experience is remembering something, which indicates they still had a consciousness, even though medical science may say otherwise. If the brain was removed and each neuron was destroyed and the person still remembered something, then that would indicate there might be a soul. But that has never been observed.
   
    *What is an atom? Imagine an empty football stadium with a fly in the center. What have you got? About 99% empty space. That’s an atom. It’s hard enough to imagine the emptiness of which we are constructed, and even more puzzling that we do not pass through one another. But it gets worse. The components of the nucleus, the proton and neutron, are even emptier. We’re here mainly because of forces. The matter of which we are constructed is ineffable, like souls.

     I wrote this in March of this year:

EMERGENCE

    Although it is reasonable to assume that I am a walking encyclopedia, that is not the case. The amount of information in my head is really not much, but it appears to be significant because I spend a lot of time reading. Somehow, when I was 5 years old, I learned how to read. I do not remember how, because, I could not read and then I suddenly could read. Reading turned out to be pretty useful because I no longer had to guess what was happening in the pictures, nor did I have to ask someone else to read for me. So, I’ve been busily reading for the past 27 years and have learned an important fact. Few people care about the fact they have reading ability and they try very hard to not use it. This explains why some people think I’m smart. Since they don’t read, all the facts I know seem impressive. But those facts are not secrets - any damn fool can read the same books I read and know the exact same things I know. All of it. If I have a secret, then I’d like to know about it. But why did I not stop reading, like most people?
    Generally, people learn how to read and go to great lengths to ignore their ability by spending time watching TV or playing video games. The advantage of continuing to read is that knowledge accumulates and learning more becomes easier, but this does not mean that one can know everything, nor even come close. I quickly discovered that through reading, I could access information that school did not provide. For example, I read about dinosaurs when I was 5 years old, which was not part of the curriculum. It didn’t take me long to realize that in order to get educated I would need some source other than school. I’ve always been curious about reality and school offers no courses on that topic. Have you ever heard of an Introduction to Reality course?
    What is reality? Most people consider it to be what they consciously experience, such as rising from bed, going to work, watching TV, listening to music, going to restaurants, etc. But a conscious experience has many deficiencies, since we see a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, hear a narrow range of sounds, and can touch neither a plasma nor objects with most of the heat removed. The amount of information that we can extract from our surroundings without using technology is quite pitiful. For example, our eyes gather a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which we call “visible light”. But we are completely missing out on gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet, infra-red, microwaves, and radio waves unless we use technology. So, when we look at objects, we are getting one interpretation of their appearance. Those same objects look different under x-rays or radio waves, for example.
    I view reality as confinement. Analogously, this can understood by imagining sitting in a jail cell. If one is freely ambulating upon the surface of the earth, how can that possibly bear any resemblance to being trapped in a cell? Consider for a moment what is required to escape from a cell and you will see there is little difference. If one wishes to leave, then one may try any of the four forces. While sitting in the cell, you decide to try gravity first. You know that gravity is really strong, because it makes things fall. But the floor of the cell is not falling very far, since the ground is stopping it. So gravity is not that strong. It will not help you. The next force is electromagnetism, which powers your muscles and holds groups of atoms together. After a short while, it becomes apparent that electromagnetism will not help you either. The atomic bonds in concrete and steel are stronger than those in your skin and muscles and thus you tire and get many bruises. After several days of rest you decide to try the third force, the weak nuclear, which is responsible for radiation, or particle decay. Nothing happens for a while and then you start throwing up and become very weak. Weak nuclear decays seem to be more harmful than helpful. Surely, the fourth force will work, you think. After a month of recuperation, you begin to use the strongest force known - the strong nuclear. But nothing happens. You remain in the cell until your very bones turn to particles smaller than dust motes.
    I think of reality in terms of the forces. Gravity is actually the weakest force, by many orders of magnitude. An “order of magnitude” means 10 times. If something is 2 orders of magnitude weaker than something else, then it is 100 times weaker, for example. Gravity is roughly 30 orders of magnitude weaker than the other forces. This only becomes apparent when one conducts a very simple experiment. Just pick up a paperclip. The entire mass of the earth is holding the paperclip down, yet you are able to pick it up. Thus, your arm is able to defy the entire mass of the earth. Electromagnetism is responsible for all of chemical activity, since it moderates the behavior of electrons, through photons. Photons are commonly known as “visible light”, but they move through space like a wave, and have differing amounts of energy, like waves on the surface of the ocean. This is why photons can kill in the form of x-rays; they carry more energy. The last two forces are less common because we can’t directly see what they do; they operate at distances that are smaller than atoms. The weak nuclear force is responsible for radiation, or the decay of particles. The strong nuclear force holds the nuclei of atoms together and can only be broken at very high temperatures, usually exceeding one trillion degrees.
    Back to confinement, it is easy to see that gravity confines us to the Earth, electromagnetism confines our atoms to one place in the form of a body, the weak nuclear confines many particles to a short amount of time (since they decay), and the strong nuclear confines the cores of atoms. Through the notion of confinement, it becomes apparent that life exists in a cell, while life itself is made of cells. It’s not until many things that are similar collect in large numbers that new properties emerge. As an example, many of the cells in our bodies look the same, but they can form objects that look different and have different properties. At even lower levels, all electrons look the same, yet, through interactions with protons and neutrons, are responsible for all of the matter we can see. It’s not until many electrons interact together with many protons and neutrons that something different emerges.
    Emergence is thus a new hot topic in science. This can be extended rather easily to human behavior. While all humans look relatively the same, it’s not until many of them function together that a new property emerges. Just like one atom cannot make a cell, one human cannot make a prison. Atoms took many billions of years to finally form collections with the emergent property of thought. So, one can argue that a human is now the new particle. What will happen after many trillions of humans function together, for many billions of years? What new property will emerge?

     Here are my responses to some responses I received:

Grassie wrote:

From my viewpoint, reality is a biological construct which is here to aid survival and reproductive fitness. We will die if we don't perceive heat, struggles breathing - seeing colors aids our survival. If we stretch it further, seeing a gun will make us afraid. Reality is that guns are dangerous. Reality is, I think, whatever biological and social constructs which (if we were perfectly built,) would aid us taking the right discussions.

         I wrote:

     DNA is the program for biological structures and I feel it's contained within reality and is not a defining factor. Electrons are also in reality, but DNA does not describe their behavior, which means that biology cannot be the final word. However, DNA has the code that builds our brains, which we use to interpret reality. That code is ultimately constructed of fermions, which obey the laws of quantum mechanics. This does not mean that our brains are quantum mechanical, any more than ants are quantum mechanical (the laws of quantum mechanics stop working somewhere between 1 nm to 1000 nm). I'm able to see that you are more interested in a macro-reality, while I am more interested in a micro-reality. I'm more concerned with what I cannot see.

     I disagree that guns are dangerous. While they may be perceived as dangerous, it is ultimately the electromagnetic force that is dangerous. A bullet has enough energy to destroy the atomic bonds in your skin (both entrance and exit). The solution is to either engineer skin that has atomic bonds strong enough to repel bullets or to shoot the other guy first.

Grassie wrote:

From another perspective, as reality is a human construct, it's nothing "real", or "transcendent". It is nothing and everything, like a great paradox. This perspective can also be "mixed" with the one above, to make a kind of spiritual-materialistic duality which creates a feeling of being a solid human being with feet on the ground and a purpose in life (no comment about what that purpose is), and not only a fleeting schiup of nothing-somethingness.

      I wrote:

     The purpose of life is to survive. You intimated that yourself, when you wrote that reality is a biological construct which is here to aid survival. Therefore, we are here to survive. I find that very reasonable, because dying is the alternative.

Grassie wrote:

As we CAN perceive and be affected by all the physical forces you describe, they certainly are a part of reality, but they aren't any more "real" than everything else that we perceive, and the physicist's way of seeing things isn't more "correct" than our everyday way. It's all about how we view it... Think about sound waves. The most correct way to perceive sound is for some reason to visualize it, to see it as waves moving through air. Mass and weight should be measured in numbers. Why shouldn't they be translated to "smell" instead? If we made a system for it, we could've measured the altitude from the sun to the moon in taste instead of visual-auditory numbers.

I guess this doesn't make any sense. :p

     I wrote:


     It does make sense. Perfect sense. It's just that it doesn't make any sense for us to make distance measurements using taste. An alien race might do that very thing, so it could make sense somewhere.