I get it, but the whole celebration of one's life instead of the mourning of the passing isn't common in Western culture.
It's a nice way of looking at it though.

Sorry to hear about your loss, Crewdroog. :(
Hang in there.
I'm sure your aunt is in a better place now.
Nice of you to do this generous philanthropic commemoration.
Not in.

Sorry for your loss.

Not in. +1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRL-s9h1k_U

I try to play the guitar but I really suck at it. I got my guitar in my early teens. It was my uncle's guitar, but he passed away when I was a little kid. The guitar was gifted to me by my grandfather, who passed away this summer... :'( Unfortunately, between gaming and coding and other time sinks, I never spent anywhere near as much time playing the instrument as I should have. That is one of my biggest regrets. Games have ruined me.

I don't donate or volunteer regularly, but sometimes I help with tech stuff at the congregation back home. Last christmas, I adopted a donkey and also donated to the donkey sanctuary (in the UK). Apart from saving donkeys and helping people around the world take care of their animals, the donkey sanctuary helps kids with special needs: https://www.thedonkeysanctuary.org.uk/therapy

I play guitar. When I was sixteen I decided I wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here's me singing a song I wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1XE_trQbU8

My grandfather had a heart attack and tried to drive himself to the hospital. Soon after he was on hospice at home. I drove up to see him. He told me never to become a cop. He had been one for 25 years. He said you just never want to be around that.

I am part of a Christian community. We live in a poor neighborhood and work with our neighbors as much as they will let us.

I'm glad you had a good relationship with your aunt.

I was listening to this recently and reading your post made me reminded of that, for some reason. Anyway, check it out, maybe you'll like it. :)

My sincere condolences. I was about to ask what will you do now, but I think you already answered that in your first post. We live on with the legacy we leave in others, I guess, so you already know that if you want a part of her to remain alive at least as long as you are, you have to embrace her best “teachings” and let them live on, maybe pass them to someone else in turn.
That's basically the reason why despite my furious gaming greed (I want ALL games and I want them NOW) I think Emachine should win, so I'll be not in.

About myself... I am a loner. Always have been. I grew up in a family brainwashed by the worst aspects of Catholicism, and all they ever wanted from me were results; being the best in class, being the best "clergy boy", keeping the best behavior at all times, and so on. That's probably why today I'm still obsessed by duty and order, even if I now despise to death the principles my family grew me up with, as they cost me all my potential childhood friends (some of which have also been silent victims of abuse by priests) and closed me much more doors than they have opened. If I could crush the entire Catholic Church personally to take my revenge, I wouldn't hesitate a second. You cannot imagine what it means to have their HQ in your own Country, with them owning the 22% of the territory and dictating rules everywhere, fomenting hate for everything different (my best friend, homosexual, has been lynched by those fine examples of Christianity) every day and corrupting politics no stop to gain repulsing advantages while liberally shitting on the Constitution.

Now I am a tough, “frosty” man with basically no friends who struggles to get along with others. I mean REALLY getting along with others; I'm pleasant enough to be requested as long as any contact stays superficial, but when I try to make a relationship more serious, people back away. Can't really blame them, though.
To be sincere, I have no memorable or fond times spent with my family to share, we have always been a too cold bunch not very interested in each others as long as any external appearance was not involved, so... yeah.
My dream is to have a family of my own one day, and demonstrate that I can be a much better father than mine was, that I can be proud of my partner and my children and they can be proud of me, that “my” legacy could be carried on by people who loved and respected me, just like you are doing with your aunt. Alas, things are definitely not going well in that direction; I guess that broken sec guards and underpaid police-commissioners-to-be are not that attractive -despite my looks, which I'll say with no modesty are pretty good.
Considering how things are going in my country, I guess I'll end up taking a bullet for Duty before having a chance to fulfill my dream. Pretty depressing, isn't it? I don't even know why I am being so open in the Internet. Might be anonymity.

By the way, I'm a guitarist. Definitely a metalhead before, now I'm starting to see the charm of acoustic guitars, especially after I stumbled by chance on Igor Presnyakov's youtube channel. That guy surely has talent.

1. I play the piano because I grew up in a Hardhat family and my parents decided I had to get a musical education to stand out in a hypothetical company of cultural elites (hahahahaha). Apparently violinists are like jedi trainees in the prequels and need to start when still in diapers so that wasn't an option; on the other hand, I was too young for guitar (six), and folk instruments were right out for obvious reasons (not much solo folk music, and unlucky kids could get stuck playing the triangle or whatever). At around 30, I was sort of shocked to realize it's common for people to teach themselves to play musical instruments but never got around to learning another one.

I have no ear for music and I'm entirely incapable of appreciating music in any profound sense (although I hate most music so at least that's a step forward). I can sing in unison to a theme fairly well, but absent a tune, I'm disastrously, atrociously, monstrously tone-deaf -- like, when voice actors in cartoons portray tone-deafness for comedic effect, they are still vastly better than me. (However, as a kid, I used to have a friend, one of those violinist jedi prodigies, with a perfect ear for music who'd recognize any tune I tried to sing in seconds and teach me to play it on the piano.)

Concerning classical music specifically, I love:

- variations (all of them - variations are awesome by design in a way I can't explain, I mean they obviously are)
(one opus/piece is "variations", plural - a simple main theme followed by a set of fanciful arrangements of it. Traditionally, all but one are in the same key as the main theme, and one switches major to minor or vice versa and is usually the highlight of the piece.)

- music sheet insanity: if the sheet looks especially decorative, I love to hear how it sounds, for entertainment. This one is basically porn: tightly packed notes, double flats and repeated clef switch in the middle of the damn staff. (Youtube is great for this. Before youtube, I used to buy sheet music I could never play well myself and follow along listening to a recording.) Absent a music sheet, most of those are meh -- I won't load them up into a portable music player.

- random etudes, for specific movements in them (so obscure and simplistic they're probably unavailable on the interwebs even if I knew what to look for). For an example of what constitutes an awesome movement, here's a song from Trine.

I was struggling to find a piece of normal piano music I like on youtube (rather than notation porn or pieces that are not exclusively piano) but eventually managed to click on this. Enjoy.


2. Probably the most memorable time is when I took part in a 1000 km cycling marathon completely unprepared and Mom kept a three-day vigil at home providing information support: navigation, web search, weather and sunset/sunrise info, places to sleep, topping up my phone account, etc. It's prime roasting material there that our best time "together" was hundreds of miles apart, but at the same time unironically wonderful.
She also got my dad to stop deadnaming me. Awesome Mom is awesome.


3. I used to donate often but randomly to charities and videogame devs before the war and "subscribed" to an indie newspaper before it went downhill. These days money is tight so I got my list down to two charities:

Doctors Without Borders -- a game designer / writer / publicist I know respects them deeply and specifically went to study medicine to work for them. He's now an accomplished doctor, and his medical advice saved my life. I donate whenever I have extra money remaining from a monthly budget.

A local human rights charity which (among other things) protects whistleblowers from government harassment and subsequent life ruination. I'd never believed they'd amount to anything, but later events proved their youth outreach to be amazing, so I've eaten the obligatory crow and set up a recurring donation. I also filed my info with them as a volunteer, but so far they haven't needed games tested or diffusion pumps cleaned, so I simply keep donating and show up at rallies.

Sorry for your loss crew, i am starting to hate cancer with a passion , always taking away good people :X

Lets see now

1. If you play an instrument tell me what you play and why you chose that instrument. Also link a piece you particularly enjoy featuring instrument.

Well i wanted to learn the Piano after listening to the music in monkey island , i even bought a casio for it and learnt the basics but more and more games kept me off and never mastered it fully.

I still listen to the music from the lucasarts games wonderful specially monkey island.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fvO__ywTZg


2. Tell me about a memorable time with a family member.

None i hate em all :D , just kidding one of the fondest memory i will always have will be the way i got introduced to video games, specially the nes. I did not have much interaction with my cousins since i was little back then and it always ended up with getting teased a lot.

So on one particular odd day , i visited a cousins house with parents he wouldn't come out to play so went into his room and saw this new thing called tv video game. He had just gotten it and was playing it but was stuck getting trashed in contra, so i go in no words spoken he handed me a controller and asked me to join in.

We both start playing and we spent the whole day playing contra and beat the game at the night lol. Of course became best pals after that and i bought a video game as well to play more. Still have my system and the carts.


3. Do you volunteer? Donate? spend some of your precious spare time giving back to others? Tell me about it.

I used to volunteer a lot in school and college days for one thing in particular aka monitor the younger aka 1-5 grade kids during occasions when the teachers would be away for a occasion or busy with exam duties, loved it. Other people would have headache doing it, my way was easier bring in a ton of comic books. Teach the kids to read it.
The time would go away so quickly that was the pre computers , mobile era.


Thanks for doing this giveaway.

Variations are fun. Interestingly enough, the game I am playing right now (Torneko: The Last Hope) has a soundtrack consisting almost entirely of variations on the same theme. Granted, they are separate tracks rather than one huge work, but the principle still applies, and the game's composer (Koichi Sugiyami) composes in a classical style (I believe he was classically trained).

I actually love when a soundtrack does this sort of thing, and there are many other examples of this in video games as well as more traditional works like operas. (Super Mario World and Wario Land 3 are two other examples.)

Anyway, when it comes to music notation, what do you think of music that is not intended to be playable? A google search comes up with this website, which has excerpts from a few such works, including Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz: http://socks-studio.com/2012/05/19/the-unplayable-score-faeries-aire-and-death-waltz-john-stump/

Also, I remember seeing some "music" by John Cage where the score had some sciency stuff all over it rather than conventional music notation. (I put "music" in quotes because some of Cage's works really strain the definition of the term.)

Depends on the piece in question. On one hand, I can certainly see the scores at the link are beautiful (and funny, and made by people who know music, and mostly playable -- there's a recording on youtube).
On the other hand, I've seen too much pseudo-musical clip art born of obvious ignorance to appreciate notation that is
- not clearly absurd so it can be safely ignored (e.g. "oboists are worth 14 points"), and
- not meaningful enough to preferentially correspond to some superpositions of soundwaves (not necessarily produced by a human musician on an analog instrument, synths are ok). A note that can be ambiguously interpreted as either sharp or flat: fine. A motif that is just as likely be a triangle solo or a tutti or a Wilhelm scream: nope.

Weird and human-unreadable notation (a midi file) is fine. This is not; improvisational prompts for music are not necessarily music, and it's Chinese-room-stupid to pretend otherwise. If I drank a cup of tea and then hummed a tune, the drink itself is not a song, even with jam and bread.

I doubt my 2 to 3 posts a month or whatever it is I post is enough to count as qualifying, but I feel like sharing anyway.

A couple of memorable family moments.

Both of my grandparents were pretty much stone deaf for their last few years. One day I walked into the living room, one of them on either side of the room working crosswords or whatnot and one says something to the other. Forget who started it or what was said, but the reply was, "What?"
The reply to that was, "What?"
And then another "what?"
Back and forth for five or six times until they just gave up and stopped. I chuckled and went back to whatever I was doing.

With my niece right when she first started talking. She had, a few days prior, told her mother that she was Batman. So I asked her, "Are you Batman?"
She looks at me, dead serious, and replies, "No! I'm Super Batman!"


Sorry to hear about your Aunt, condolences to you.

Kudos for the giveaway, and if is what I think it is, kudos for your avatar as well.

I'm very sorry for your loss Crewdroog. I know what it's like to lose a family member. I lost my Grandmother a few years back. If it's alright I'd like to enter this giveaway.

1. I don't play an instrument but have an appreciation for classical instruments like the violin and piano. Nobuo Uematsu (of Final Fantasy music fame) has composed some really good classical sounding music for his games. One of my favorites is from FFX linked here.

2. I have fond memories of going over to my Grandmother's house and playing Gin Rummy and War card games with her. She also could make some the best fried chicken I've ever had. No one else in my family has been able to faithfully reproduce her fried chicken recipe.

3. Haven't really volunteered for anything but I have paid extra for a few Humble Bundles and given that extra money to charity.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

Very sorry for your loss, comforting to hear she went peacefully, and hope you remember and miss her with more smiles than tears, much sooner than later.

Smile at her, and at that girl you see every time you pass a mirror; I'm sure she smiles every time she sees you do that.

I'm sorry for your loss. But I find it interesting you are remembering her by doing a giveaway. I can imagine she must be a big influence for you that you decided to remember her by doing a philanthropy giveaway in her footsteps.

1. When I was a kid I learned how to play an electone keyboard. It was quite nice instrument. I also learned how to play guitar by my self and can play some songs on it. Nothing serious, just enough for singing around camp fire

2. I have two brothers and one sister. We rarely agree to something. But there once a time when we all agree to meet our parents and ask them to buy us Prince of Persia (the original dos version) after being blown away by the game when we were seeing it in computer exhibition the day before. That is the only time all four of us ask something from our parents.

3. I used to volunteer. Back when I was in college, I was part of this particular group consists of 12 persons from various college. We were known as an intelligent and hard working group of volunteer. We were so good that we can organized a talk show with 200+ audience just by the 12 of us. We were basically an amateur event organizer. Some of bigger organizations would call us to help when they are holding big events. We don't get paid, because all of them are social events. But they often gives us food. Sometimes they even treat us to a nice restaurant after. And from time to time we would ask donation and buy food for Waste collector. Now I have little time to spare so I can only help with designing a poster for their event