I got up early yesterday to watch the Kingdome fall down, but I still can't sleep. That means I have something new in common with many of the irc folks I know: insomnia. It's not that there are an unusual ratio of insomniacs on irc, it is the fact that I wake up at 2 PM and stay awake until 9 AM which synchronizes me with the inadvertently wakeful. Well, now I'm awake because my bed feels really big, cold, and empty after a weekend and some of sleep company.

I've mentioned Chu Chu Rocket in the past, and I've already expressed my regard for its wacky commercial, but those feelings only recently were publicly recognized when I entered a PlanetDreamcast Contest. The challenge: remake the Chu Chu Rocket commercial song. The Criteria: Humor, Quality, and Accuracy. The Results. I won second place, with my Atari-Teenage alike song, Chu Chu Riot (zipped MP3, 634 K).I had started making an anguished Nine Inch Nails style song, but while I was engineering the sounds for it, Kris and I somehow got to talking about gabba techno, and how the defining sound was a certain type of synthetic bassdrum. To demonstrate the paucity of skillz required to make such a noise, I threw one together in a soft analog synthesizer in about a minute. Kris got out an Atari Teenage Riot CD to demonstrate the similiarity, and in half an hour or so, I had the 40 second base of my entry. I got Kris to yell "Chu Chu Rocket!!" into a microphone six or seven times, and recorded all the other words myself, though everyone that hears it says "is that really you?" which makes me think that it doesn't sound a lot like my speaking voice. It sounds strange to me, too. Approximate retail value of my prize is $30, which would make this the most profitable music I've ever produced, sadly.