Personal guide to melodic death metal

Hi,

It’s not like science is the trend here though the blog title could be misleading for some people but yeah, today I am not going to write about Science and Rationality. Today’s topic is quite personal and it is about the music that I listen to. I can date exactly when I started to listen to what I listen to now. It happened on 20^th of June 2015 when I heard the first song from Insomnium. This one wasn’t of my taste at first and I rather liked this one.

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This style of music is called melodic death metal. This is not an old genre and as it goes in metal music, it is just a subgenre, here it originates from death metal. It is also called Gothenburg metal because of the city where some of the oldest bands came from. Those are probably At the Gates, In Flames and Dark Tranquility, I do not know much about the first two especially about the first one but DT is one of my most favourite bands and particularly their newest album Atoma. Just a few days back I made a collage from the album covers, so instead of linking more of the music you can just look at this:

All this music is metal and most of it is melodic death metal.

There are some things that metal fans (also called metalheads) can be quite funny about. First of all, there is just ton of sub-genres. Whether it is progressive metal, death metal, doom metal or let’s say black metal, everybody finds their own and afterwards is extremely sensitive about its exact label. That’s where metalcore and similar come into play. That is a genre (of metal IMHO) that gets a ton of hate from the true elitist metalhead community, if I understand correctly it is because metalcore and co. are connected with the stereotypical idea that emo kids listen to the music and in some way, there is quite a difference between the bands image let’s say, one like Black Veil Brides and Amon Amarth. You can often see people arguing exactly about this on some border band where part of people dislikes it (often just because of the video) and label it metalcore, while the rest tries to defend it to stay metalhead. So yes, genres are really BIG in metal. On the picture above are probably two metalcore bands: Words of Farewell (arguably) and While She Sleeps.

To finish on some sad note as is normal in metal, what I listen to particularly has a couple of important characteristics. First of all, it is melodic as the name suggests. In MDM, there is a lot of effort put into good instrumental parts and many interprets make an instrumental song once per album and those are also listenable for non-metalheads. The second important characteristic is that it can feature growls (those are the vocals that people really hate), clean singing and even female vocals and some bands are female fronted meaning the main vocalist is female (and they often growl too, e.q. Arch Enemy). This is a quite important as when you combine these elements you can get many types of music. The third important part are lyrics, yes you normally do not understand them and yes, they are often about death, misery, sadness and such but they can have all sorts of interesting messages. I will end the post with the lyrics from Insomnium – Where the last wave broke:

How does it feel?
To welcome the new day
Not worth saving
To fall down on own imprudent acts
The wind answers quietly
Clears the black smoke far thick to see
Unfolds the true nature of man

“And this fire it burns
Consuming us all
Withered garden for posterity
Inheritance in flames”

“When the mankind moves
Rest of the life shakes
All once green turned into stone
Flesh into dust and soil
Where the last wave broke
The shores blazed red
And place once called home
Turned into hall of dead”

How does it feel?
Bite the hand that feeds you
Poison the well that waters you
Prospects made from castles of sand
Legacy in barren land

Breed, greed, bleed
Legacy in barren land
The last wave broke
Prospects made from castles of sand

Dragallur

On human nature (part 1)

Hi,

Today I was going to write about the book Brave New World and happiness but just few minutes back I settled on something else so I am not even sure what will come out in the next several minutes.

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As I was going through my news feed on Facebook I noticed Phil Plait posting again. It is about another black hole merger and gravitational wave detection. This happened I think four or five times now and of course for the first time it was all over the news, everybody was talking about it (even Czech news mentioned it). I am not sure how it was like for the next time but it probably did not get such an attention… now I am not trying to say that it should have, there are other important things (like a woman under root (don’t even ask for the context)). Anyway, this time gravitational wave was detected and public could only find out through reading one tweet ^[1]! That is how much coverage you get for discovery in probably completely new field of physics.

I am certainly quite biased here but the point that Phil Plait made in his post and that I want to share here is how people look for new things but then quickly forget about them. It appears we live in an age where meme (meaning not only joke now) lasts for shorter and shorter time ^[2]. This might be caused by this “information age” or whatever we call the 21^st century but I think this trend also propagates further to the need to have a new iPhone or whatever is behind schedule on being “updated”.

Maybe all of this sounds cliché and just the other day I was telling one of my teachers that the reason why man do not work with hands so much is simply because we live in different time! It reminds me of people worrying about first books then newspapers, TVs and now phones and their effect on youth (this and this XKCD will help you get the idea). And yet should we be worried about the change? How are we going to get ready for it if we leave it to itself and then it does become a problem? I could write under this picture of Black Friday: “Look at those insane people!” but maybe as things tend to be it is more complicated than that (but yeah they are probably buying useless stuff 😀 ).

“Look at them! Sheeple!”

Dragallur

^[1] Yup that is a lie, of course it spread through the internet but it was not such a boom.

^[2] I should probably put disclaimers all over the place since I have not lived very long time yet.

I have 420 likes on FB and it is completely useless

Hi,
so today I reached 420 likes on my Facebook page. Page that connects directly to this blog. That is almost two times as many followers on the blog itself, after more than two years that is certainly not much but I am surprised how I got those likes on Facebook and how pointless they are anyway.

It says that I will soon reach 500 and that I should give them money so that I reach it sooner.

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Since I do not post very often here, I am not preparing the posts very long time (like today), I do not get many more followers on WordPress. Most of the views come from some searches on Google and somehow people tend to be very interested in this post because it has about 7 or 8 times as much views as any other one, exactly 1,066 as of 17.7.2017. I guess most schools in USA learn about HClO4 and HClO in winter and that is why I have most views in that time of year even though it was such a long time since I wrote the post.
So, I have got 420 likes and it is completely useless. Why? Because when I share something on the page most people do not even see it on their “walls” (yes, I have an option to “market” my post for money so that more people see it which is completely absurd). Anyway 420 is a number that has something to do with cannabis and it is 42 times 10 which is nice.
420 is these numbers multiplied together: 2;2;3;5;7. Those can be accidentally also written like this:
a_0=2
a_n=a_(n-1)+ceil((ceil(√(n-1.5))^2)/3)
That took me at least half an hour to come up with. The function “ceil” takes the number and rounds it up. I hope it creates the numbers correctly. Well that reminds me that you can create a game from this. I am going to do that in school. Just pick few numbers and then try to write either sequence or equation that fits it. That is actually quite endless game with lot of possibilities and variations. Maybe one could say that they will use only exponents for example though I think that it is much easier with all those other fancy functions that make the numbers “nice” like rounding up.
Well I might try another number another day.
Dragallur

Should we ban poetry writing?

Hi,
so I was reading a lot of books for my school lately, roughly one a week which was quite a marathon for me. Of course since it is for literature, there are all kinds of books which I read. They were usually published in 19^th century because my Czech class is learning about romanticism, naturalism and all kinds of Czech stuff (I do not want to say “weird shit” because that might be simply too offensive :D).

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There were certainly good books and I do not even have time to review them (it would be quite boring), for example Pride and Prejudice (I had quite a prejudice against this one), Cosmic songs (best representative of poetry (Písně kosmické)), Wuthering heights and Boule de Suif were quite good.

What I want to get to, is poetry. From my perspective poetry does not really have much of a value, which should probably teach me something when I think that.

You know, when I read poetry I feel kinda dumb. My Czech is on quite fine level (as a native speaker) but it can so easily happen that I do not understand the poets, why would anyone write that if they can just tell the story in novel? Then, next level comes with poems in English that are FILLED with non-existing words, you will quickly accustom to “thou” and “thee” even though people probably seriously used it few decades back, but then it will step quickly on next level. I bet that if you copied them to Word and tried to check for grammar mistakes, your computer would break down.

Now lets go back to the lesson. I am pragmatic person, of course I would reduce it, so that it becomes more easily understandable but I know that for some reason lot of people like to read that stuff, people that definitely understand languages more than I do.. maybe they are just sentimental!

The thing is that I would gladly reduce all grammar in any language, even better, make a global language that does not have any exceptions, has 3 tenses and no y/i (that is really annoying in Czech).

Again people who actually understand this stuff and have the feeling for languages disagree with me, I have tried more than once and always got skeptical looks saying basically “you are cancer, go home”.

So it seems I should be more skeptical of my radical approaches to things regarding simplifying languages, as of now I am not in the position to change it, when I will be there will be some need for education. As with the poetry, I am almost done with what I have to read anyway!

Dragallur

PS: It might happen that I do not post next week because I am going to Berlin (and then Czech Republic!)

Still here, but in Germany

Hi
ok so I did not post for few days and I have an explanation ;). I started my exchange year in Germany. Actually right now I am third day in my host-family and second day in school.

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Thinking about physics I did some pretty fun experiments with my host-brother though I have still lot to learn especially because it was electromagnetism which is not really my thing. I will have first class of physics the day after tomorrow but we have only 1.5 hours per week.

Today I had math in the local school. I will see how it goes because it seems that the class is really behind of what we were able to do in Czech Republic. I say able because it seemed to me that they had lack of some basics but they did successions.

Posts wont be posted very often I guess. I have lot of things to do but I will try to write something on the weekend. This also means that I wont be able to read your posts, if you want you can link me to some in the comments, that way I will take a look at it 😉

Dragallur

2 awards in 1 post

Hi,
it seems that I was nominated for some awards, maybe there were more of them but I did not catch them, what a pity.

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Liebster award from mathsbyagirl, thanks for this again 😉 It seems that I should answer those question too so here you go:

1. What is your passion? Astronomy
2. Why did you start blogging? Check this out.
3. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? The thought that I want to change something?
4. Is there a moment in your life you wish you could go back to just to enjoy it again? If so, what moment is it? Sure there is, many. Anytime would be fine if I could live everything to this point again.
5. Are you planning to publish a book in the future? If so, what would it be about? Nope.
6. Do you believe in love at first sight? Not so much experience in this though it happens and it probably does not lead to best marriages, who knows, depends.
7. Is there something you’re afraid of that’s quite unusual? Not anything unusual probably.
8. What country are you from? Czech Republic
9. How many languages do you speak? Czech, English
10. What is one of your most embarrassing moments in life? Those in which I felt embarrassed but they did not need to be embarrassing at all.
11. Are you happy? Yup 😉

I guess that these answers also count for Versatile award by thenexusscience and it is getting late but if anybody wants to grab these awards go for it.

Dragallur

How to! 6) Walk a long distance for the first time

Hi,
today I want to share with you a little tutorial. I will talk about Hiking a very long distance, lets say that this means 35+ kilometers.

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I did this three times as of today (30.8.16) so I will share some of the most useful tips to get you ready for some fun journey. (We will be talking about long one day hikes)

Planning

First of all you need to have your way well planned.
Take your time about thinking what distance you can walk, if you do not have any experience start with ~35. If you do some sports and you enjoy this kind of thing go for ~60km or even more, depends on your self confidence.
If you want to try some huge distance but you have less experience, try to plan your way around bus stations and train stations so you can get home if something goes wrong.
Try to walk a circle or such a shape so at any time (best in the end) you can cut it and walk right towards home. If you go 30 km strictly north with no other way to get home except by feet you may get into trouble.
Timing is important. Check out weather and start soon enough, you do not want to walk in darkness to much. (That is anyway inevitable if you want to walk more).

Packing

Take food that can boost you with energy. Take water. Pack extra pair of shoes. Shoes are the single most important things you will have to pack. It might happen that you will have to walk in them for 12+ hours and if it is the first time you have them on, there could be huge trouble. Take your surest shoes, two pairs. In summer I would go for sandals and closed boots. Pack extra pairs of socks (3/4/5 for example), it is very nice to change your socks from time to time. Definitely take headlight just in case you walk in dark. Take raincoat, NOT umbrella! Do not forget on money and basic first aid kit. (You do not probably need anything more!!!)

Walking

Try to walk on asphalt and hard surface as least as you can, this will save you from lot of pain (plan you route according to this)! Take a bag that has waist belt and make it as tight as you can, this helps your back and shoulders that would otherwise have to bear all of your stuff. Try to go at steady pace, the exact speed depends on the length of your route but if you are starter I bet that you will be walking at speed around 4 km/h + you will need time to rest and such.

This is all I can come up with, though I might share some more experience with you when I attend such track again.

Dragallur

Stuff happened!

Hi,
today I returned from the planned vacation in Poland. It was quite pleasant trip with end in family cottage. During that time I read quite some books so I will probably share some of them with you in future posts. Also I will continue with limits and derivatives. Soon there should be photos from Juno so I will share them with you definitely! I should be leaving 21st to Germany for my year there but they have not found my host family yet so I will leave probably 14th September, at least I will have time pack everything go for haircut and such things. Today is Thursday so see you with regular post on Saturday 😉

Dragallur

65 km trip again!

Hi,
my mother told me that my post were too mathematical for her, hopefully she will like this one more :D. So about week and something back, I wrote about my summer camp where I walked 65.5 kilometers in one day. With friend I decided to repeat this and we had in plan 80 kilometers (again) though due to some things we did not finish it whole.

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Me and my friend, we started at 3:00 AM. I personally had about 3.5 hours of sleep. The trip was planned to be 80 kilometers long though in the first part which was about 32 we had a long delay.

This is the city after 32 kilometers.

We stopped at Tesco and bought some food and it was quite clear that we can not make it in time (I had to be back roughly around sunset). This was because I thought that we could do it with the speed of 5 km/h which is not much for walking but a lot when you walk for more than 12 hours. My friend went home by train than and I decided to take the shortest way to home, it took me 16 hours.

At one point we met one guy. It was in the early morning. I talked to friend who was few meters behind and I said something about 20 kilometers left to go for the northest point.
The guy asked if we think that we can walk it 😀 I had that distance almost three more times in my shoes when I returned home!

In the end I had 65.14 kilometers walked and my feet hurt a lot. Again I can just recommend you to try something like this, we also had a beautiful sunrise though my phone camera is not very good:

When we saw sunrise we had few hours behind already!

Dragallur

My experience with Windows 10

Hi,
since a while back I was kind of interested in programming and computers and on the camp last two weeks there were lot of nerds to computers I decided to share my experience with Windows 10 upgrade.

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Do you remember the annoying notifications from your computer about this new operating system? Maybe you have them even now if you have not upgraded yet. My teacher on geography and computers shared with our class this link to some software that disabled these notifications. It was quite good except that I almost missed the time when Windows 10 is for free, the offer ends 28th of this month I think and I got notified just because I was on another computer.

I of course did not want to miss it because right now Windows 10 costs over 100$ which is not something I can afford. Also Microsoft promises free upgrades now and on. This makes sense, all other operating systems have it like that. At least mobile for example, not talking about Linux which is for free completely. I have heard that it would be logical to cut down the price or extend the possibility to upgrade since they want as many people as possible on the newest system. It would be quite nice if there was then just one system not 4 or 5 Windows where some are compatible to something and some are not.

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The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly though it took at least 4 hours -_-. Right now I am turning off all the various features the new OS has since I do not want to be part of sharing all my personal data right to office of Microsoft. Not that they could not see everything right now.. but the age is moving on and this is the way it is.. having too many personal things on computer may be dangerous.. the time of clouds has come and it may happen soon that we wont even have proper harddisk but everything will be somewhere else in the world.

Dragallur

PS: even that this is so called “best windows so far” it is not able to have one wallpaper for each monitor -_- 😀