Not Sorry

I got a C. i'm okay with that

thanks for the good wishes.

well, thanks, one of you because no one else noticed! Not even brendan. aw why brendan, why

（╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

that's a guy flipping a table. for some reason a lot of people don't get it.



so yeah, i've never been so not-good lucked for an exam before. i guess no one actually knew i was doing it, i don't blame them. i don't expect people to know my birthday when i don't even tell them (but they somehow still do)


I guess I should be using capital letters every second sentence. ok, i'll do that.

My examiner was Mr. Wong. not the one you guys know. He's a teacher at Ruse, (he actually teaches Fiona). my mum was surprised because he was so young (for an examiner). I guess he was. i'm quoting him "when i started high school ... fifteen years ago". So that's like, when I was one. and since you start high school at... uh... eleven? Wow are you serious, eleven? wow that means he's only a decade give or take a little bit older. Wow.

wow.

He thought I was in year 9 at first (I think, maybe I heard everything wrong). and he asked me if i did music at school, and i don't. And then he told me that he gets annoyed when people do grade 8 piano but don't do music at school.

he was quick to acknowledge when i screwed up. But I guess he did say "okay, good" when I played a scale right. except that wasn't that often.

Well, he didn't really, it was more like he would say some phrase like "okay", and move on, after I screwed up and already knew inside I screwed up.

and he would always get up from his table and walk next to the piano when asking general knowledge. Now that I think about it, it was probably because sometimes I would need to point at the book and sometimes he would need to point at the book. but it was still intimidating a bit.

After I played Aria, the first song, I knew that it was an etude, and an etude (or study) is a piece which focuses on developing specific aspects of technique. and then he asks "what is an Aria"? And I'm like "uhh", and I don't really know definitions I just kind of know what it is, "it's like... an opera piece". and he says something which i forget and i reply "it's kind of in a singing style". "Yes, it's melody sung by a solo singer. how is this piece like an aria? Can you find the melody".

and i point at the top notes.

"So why could I hear the semiquavers (the song has 3 voices, the top melody, and the bass is a harmonising accompanyment, and the middle is just there to make the song grade 8 worthy) and not the melody?"

"uhhh i don't know"

He points at the first word, dolce. "what does this mean?"

"Soft and sweetly"

"so why didn't you play it like that"



I can't remember everything exactly, but he was pretty harsh. maybe not as harsh as it reads to you, but harsh enough. And that was the technique part I was referring to in previous posts. i can't bring out the melody, the top notes, so it wasn't good even though i played it pretty fluently.



And then I played the second song. screwed up slightly more than usual, nothing too terribly bad, as expected.

"Do you what this is called?"

"the alberti bass"

"Yes, named after Alberti of course, since he was the one who first used it - he overused it in all of his pieces. we remember him for his bass, not his compositions, because they were crap."



I thought my third song was my best originally, but I didn't play it as well as I do at home. he asked about how it resembles a romantic piece (romantic period, not romance if you're not musically inclined). I didn't really know, and I said that.

and then i said something stupid like "but if you didn't know that i didn't know i would say that blah blah blah". Something about long notes. expresses individualism and freedom of emotion. (on the paper that he wrote on it has under general knowledge ticks for all of them (even though my general knowledge was a bit dodgy), except next to fantasiestuck it has three question marks above the tick)


Fourth song happened. as expected.


Cadences, are a lot harder in the actual exam. the whole aural test is a lot harder actually.

it was plagal, perfect, interrupted, imperfect (he actually told me the answer for imperfect, he said "well, that only leaves one left", and i didn't even know he was playing one of each)

And I said perfect, plagal, interrupted, imperfect

then it was when you sing the lower voice (i suck at these), and after he did that thing where you're like "heh" and "um" at the same time, "you got half of it right"

And there was that thing (this might have been before singing the lower voice) where you identify the chord and position, and I think I got all of them wrong. which was sad because i got most of them right on the lesson on thursday. I even got the diminished one wrong. how embarassing.

and then i had to memorise a line in a minute and play it. And I did. and then it turns out i didn't because i'm bad at memorising a line in a minute and playing it. Nice improvisation. i got half of it right.

And then I had to sight read, and holy shit it was the most difficult thing to sight read I had ever seen. stacatto, legatto, pedal (i didn't actually notice the pedal line under until after i sight read it), dynamics, it had everything. BUT IT WAS IN A FLAT MAJOR. SERIOUSLY. i looked at it and i was ready to flip the piano. It was actually a grand piano, which the reception lady and my examiner both acknowledged (oh... that's great, except having a grand piano doesn't make a difference when you still suck at piano).

and yeah. A flat major. far out.

And then "okay, we're done".


he might say hi to fiona for me. I hope he doesn't. just because we went to the same school it doesn't mean we ever talked, properly. Our grade is so segregated. is it meant to be like this?

And he said to say hi to Miss Hann for him. i'll probably forget.



On the letter itself, he had so much to write (about things which were wrong) for the second and third song that he had literally 2 lines for the last song, and he didn't write anything negative on that. not because i played well, but because there was no space.


When I opened the envelope later and C, I don't really know how I felt. i wasn't really disappointed, i really wanted to pass. I wasn't really happy either though, because, you know, it's a C. so i was kind of the silent nothingness that i'm pretty good at being.

It kind of follows the trend of A+ > B+ > B > C+ > C > C, I guess. and it doesn't follow it to the d, which is something to be content with.

But I felt like I was more prepared for this test than my grade 6 one. i was hoping for a b. Not the result just above D.

i feel okay about it now, though. When I got home I eventually got around to googling AMEB grade 8 piano, and tried to find the pass rate. didn't find it. But I did find that there are people who do fail it, and I'm better off than them at least.


then i tried to play the guitar (i stopped for a long time for piano, can't break fingers, also to hold bar chords you have to cave in your joints, which is something to never do for piano. and also I never got around to having enough nothing to do to play guitar).

and then it turns out i am really bad at it. Like, playing two notes for a pulloff, which are meant to be quaver - quaver, and I play it like an acciaccatura.

which just means that my first note is a lot shorter than the next one when they are meant to be even.


And I was never cut out to be a lead guitarist. i'll stick with rhythm/chords.




This guy was like "I'm on my uni break so I'll be able to play more" and I was like "oh cool, I'm have 2 weeks holiday so me too; except I have a piano exam last weekend fml"

so yeah. Alright, done with piano! time to enjoy the last stress free holiday s!


year 12 is going to be so workload-less for me. Awesome. can dedicate more time to surfing the web and all of that.

I versed nGenLight and altjimdiddy on ladder. they are a couple of the best players in south-east asia. Light is known as the best Protoss player. altjimdiddy, i guess i didn't really know of him, but light said in a blog of his travels to melbourne and brisbane to attend tournaments all in one weekend (on the sc2sea website, not blogger), that when he went to brisbane he was confident until he saw altjimdiddy, who he believes is as good as moonglade in his ZergVsProtoss. moonglade is known as the best player from South-East Asia.

they were both favoured to win, of course. And they both did win, of course. but the fact that the matching system thought that i even had a chance battling them was awesome. I watched the replays, and I lost to light because I didn't want to be a bastard and just beat him with fast aggression, and I lost to altjimdiddy because zerg is just overpowered*.

*here are two graphs
















































wow those are huge i had to resize them, if you can't really see them properly you might want to click on it.

Anyway, as you can see from the graph:
-Terran is favoured against Zerg
-Terran is favoured against Protoss
-Zerg is favoured against Protoss

so overall, zerg is about 50-50, and terran is doing well, and my protoss brethren are victims of a cruel game, destined to lose.

so yes. i think i am comfortably in the top 100, at least. definitely in the top 200 by skill (some players have very high "skill", but don't get into grandmaster because of other factors)




can't remember why i shared that. before i was thinking "it's time to share things that daniel likes, what about william's youtube channel" and suddenly starcraft update

here is william
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtLBs-6gg0c





Also, hello, dash. thank you for differentiating yourself from all of the other anonymous people.

wait, that's a hyphen. what's a dash then? is it this /

or is that a hash? no a hash is this #

and it means number. like the NUMBER J: #J


if you don't get that ^, it means you have to watch it again from the start.

okay fine. the aim of this game is "you kill people in alphabetical order", and that guys name is ben. Ben starts with B, so it's nearer to the alphabet. Zen or Sen is nearer to the end of the alphabet.


any jasons should watch that because they get a shoutout at 2:25. yeah, i bet that's going to make you want to watch it.