Sho Fukamachi Online

Since I’m obviously just posting every song from Nightwish’s 2004 album Once one by one, why not continue with another favourite from that brilliant album.

Today’s is Nightwish - The Siren (M4A, 34.4M)

This is Nightwish at their theatrical best - some might find the lengthy instrumentals offputting, but to me the strong imagery carries the song, and the story, forward perfectly. I personally find the chorus of this song, especially the second time around, to be incredibly aurally pleasing - a complex, evocative, multi-layered progression of sound.

Lyrics after the jump, although knowing them is unnecessary and, if anything, detracts from this kind of song.

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I have a directory containing gems, and I often change them. To save myself the task of manually re-installing each one whenever anything changes, I wrote a simple script which keeps track of the files and runs rake tasks whenever any is modified.

The script is almost self-explanatory, but here’s the gist:

- first time you run it, it writes a YAML file with a big hash of a relevant files and their hashes
- after that, it performs the same md5 hashes and if the hash has changed it runs rake gem:uninstall rake gem:repackage rake gem:install in the directory where the change was noticed, then rewrites the hash.

It’s pretty scrappy, and needs to be placed and run from the base dir of the gems. And it doesn’t check manifests, yet.

require 'pathname'
require 'find'
require 'digest/md5'
require 'yaml'
 
@allfiles = []
@new = {}
@to_update = []
 
@root_dir = ENV['PWD']
 
def get_new_file_list
  Dir.chdir @root_dir
  Find.find('./') do |f| 
    @allfiles << f 
  end
  @allfiles.delete_if {|e| e.split('/').size == 2 } # ie in root dir
  @allfiles.delete_if {|e| e.include?('pkg') } # ignore build dirs
end
 
def recurse_files
  @new = {}
  @allfiles.each do |f|
    if !FileTest.directory?(f) && File.exists?(f)
      @new[f] = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(File.read(f))
    end
  end
end
 
def write_new
  Dir.chdir @root_dir
  File.open("md5.yaml", "w+") do |file|
    file.write @new.to_yaml
  end
end
 
def differences
  newclone = @new.clone
  oldclone = @old.clone
  newclone.delete_if {|key, value| @old[key] == value }
  oldclone.delete_if {|key, value| @new[key] == value }
  diff = newclone.merge(oldclone)
  diff.keys.each do |k|
    @to_update << k.split('/')[1]
  end
  @to_update.uniq!
end
 
def cycle_gem gem_dir
  puts "updating #{gem_dir}..."
  dir = @root_dir + '/' +  gem_dir
  Dir.chdir(dir)
  system('rake gem:uninstall')
  system('rake gem:repackage')
  system('rake gem:install')
end
 
get_new_file_list
recurse_files
 
if File::exists?('md5.yaml')
  @old = YAML.load_file('md5.yaml')
  differences
else
  write_new
end
 
if @to_update.size > 0
  @to_update.each do |g| cycle_gem g end
  get_new_file_list
  recurse_files
  write_new
  puts "updated #{@to_update.join(' ')}"
else
  puts "nothing to update"
end

I’m going to continue my spree of posting Nightwish songs in lossless format. This one, the first track from their 2004 album Once, could be described as a 4-minute tour through a number of different metal genres, hitting symphonic, power, gothic and pure at a number of points in the song.

I love it, especially the end. Perhaps it’s my “dark” personality!

Nightwish - Dark Chest of Wonders (M4A, 32.8M)

Lyrics after the break.

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Apologies to those whose throats I’ve already forced this song down, but I really love it. Perhaps Nightwish’s most accessible song yet.

Amaranth - Nightwish (M4A, 28.4M)

Lyrics after the jump.

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Let’s have some more recent photos, since the subject of Li Yuchun gets continuing interest on this blog from fans.

Here’s a late 2007 photo signing. Black hair!

Moving to England, and a more poppy (and well-produced) sound. This is a perfect 3 1/2 minute pop song, distinguishing itself with excellent lyrics (which I personally really like - rare for me!) and musical sequences innovative for the genre. Sometimes, the charts do get it right, and MIKA’s solo debut album was deservedly popular.

My Interpretation - MIKA

Lyrics after the break.

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Thanks to testing by friends, I can now report that I’ve achieved my lifelong goal of becoming an Enemy of the Chinese State - this blog, and domain, is now blocked in the People’s Republic of China.

Interestingly, the block is keyed by domain - the block is not on the IP itself, as other sites operating on this IP remain unblocked. The actual mechanism seems to be the good ol’ TCP RST trick.

No idea why. I can only assume that my dangerous levels of awesomeness presented a threat to social order in the Middle Kingdom.

UPDATE: unblocked.