The Song Of Ice And Fire: An Empirical Gudie To Survival of the Game of Thrones.

In no particular order:

You can safely skip detailed description of the food being served. It rarely has anything to do with the way people consuming the food will die. Besides, there is only two cuisines in Westeros: northern, where everything is glazed with, braised with, or dipped in honey, and southern, which is a hot snake stew. The rest of the world eats horse and puppies on a stick.

You don't have to try to memorize ancestral lineage of every character in the books. Most of them will die soon enough, and the rest will talk about their fathers, grandfathers, and grand grandfathers endlessly, so you will learn anyway.

Regardless of how carefully and meticulously somebody plans something, it never comes through. Once you embrace this simple concept, you will save yourself a lot of disappointment, because everything always goes terribly wrong. Strangely enough, all that does happen is commonly a result of an elaborate plan of some shadowy character, of whom we know very little and whose intentions are unclear. They evidently know how to plan for success.

If you feel that a character is growing on you, it is best to be ready to part with the him or her, and prepare yourself for his or her demise. Then consider each new chapter with that character to be a nice surprise. I have to admit, though, that character's lifespan seems to be directly proportional to complexity of the one's persona, and disposition to intense inner conflict. Simpler people seem to expire much faster, deeply tormented souls tend to linger awhile.

If a character of any significance is said or believed to be dead, it's a sure sign that he or she is not. Even if you read the whole chapter about it, it might still not be true. And even if it is, some might come back from the dead.

And finally, like with many of those epics, there is always another book coming.

Or two...

...iKaossilator!

I have the original yellow Kaossilator, and I am a big fan. This app, although visually similar in many ways, is fundamentally different in the way it handles the phrases you create; it's not better or worse, it's just different, and if you are to use it, you just have to learn.
First of all, it does not record and loop sound, like the original Kaossilator does, it records sequences. The downside of it is that one can't endlessly overdub the track, using the same voice, it will start erasing previous loop eventually (but they do give you five layers to play with, so there is plenty of space to build your riffs). The upside is that you can save, undo, redo the sequense, return to it, re-record, reassign instruments, change the key, tempo, scale, everything, all in real-time, and then save it again.That is big. And the mix play is a very nice feature.

WHAT IT NEEDS:
Ability to export MIDI
Ability to import MIDI (there is no way the tracks in app's library were made with the app, no one can play a touch pad the way the keyboard is played, it's even smaller the the pad on the hardware Kaossilator)
Dynamic GRID on the pad, reflecting th actual scale being played.
Ability to be MIDI controlled with an external controller (I'd pay extra just for that, the syn sounds are awesome, well... KORG it is...)
I want the Drone sound back (#60), and the rest of the effect sound missing from the original Kaossilator set!!!

iPad version with a bigger pad would be nice, too...

Hm.

It looks like I haven't posted anything for a year. Apparently, nothing to say.
How about some music, then?

Leaving Manhattan—bossa-nova @ 130 bpm, by yours truly, written sometime in the fall of 2010, after we stopped pretending being rich and moved out of the shoe box size studio on West 95th Street. Technically we didn't leave Manhattan, just the Upper West Side, but the new neighborhood feels quite different... miss the easy acces to Central Park dearly, so the tune is a bit sad. Like 99.9% of all my tunes, really.

This particular version came alive with the help of Pat Felitti (piano), Ian Pellow (bass), Raul R. (drums, percussion), all @ kompoz.com. I play tenor sax and EWI.

Leaving Manhattan by iG.STUDiO