A lot of people here seem to be of the opinion that mental illness is something that is simply being overdiagnosed; people can "get over it," that medications are evil, and that kids should be kids. Obviously, these people have never been mentally ill.
Sure, it is true that today's kids' lives are nothing like the brutal, short, backbreaking existences that were lived by our predecessors, who in 1850 worked over 60 hours a week and barely managed to stay alive for 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, if you've ever had a manic or hypomanic episode, you will know that mania is not a positive state of mind. Mania is one of the worst possible states of existing, only barely better than death and far worse than depression. Imagine not being able to keep a thought in your head for more than 1 second at a time. Imagine how, one day you can go from being considered for a promotion at your office to being fired a month later because you can no longer comprehend programming concepts or remember what was going on a few minutes ago. Imagine it becoming impossible to function with people because you have lost the ability to determine what is the appropriate thing to say in social situations, and so as a result you say nothing.
Most importantly of all, imagine that nobody believes that anything is wrong, that doctor after doctor can't come up with any diagnosis for years, and when you try to get help for yourself people hang up on you because you can't follow the conversation to understand what's being talked about. Imagine that sometimes you are so unable to think that you have trouble determining whether someone is speaking to you or not. Imagine that the rest of the world just keeps going on while you see no reason to keep living through such hell if nobody can figure out what's wrong with you. So you just sit in front of the TV night after night while the images go by too fast to process. Mania is perhaps the most depressing thing that one can experience. This explanation of mania being a sense of extreme well-being is wrong and needs to be better communicated in the mainstream sources, who tend to simplify these diseases as some kind of "excess happiness." There is no happiness in mania.
Of course there is an increase in the incidence of these diseases among people living today. In the past, why would someone want to continue living if their new life was as a stupid and uncontrollable shell of their former selves? The only solution back then was suicide. While suicide is not a good choice today because there are many treatments available, it may be shocking to hear that death certainly would be better than living like that with no hope for a cure. Is it so far-fetched to say that the diseases were less widespread because people culled themselves?
Stating that kids should go off drugs because of the "evil pharmaceutical companies" is naive. The scientific literature does not adequately describe these diseases, and probably never could. Everyone has felt pain, so it's easy to describe the treatment for a headache. But while there are some very smart people here, those who are not ill are simply not able to comprehend what mental illness really is, and should not be offering comments about whether suffers should undergo treatment.
I'm glad to see that someone likes templating and frameworks for application development. I constantly receive criticism from people who say that I should write things from the ground up in PHP, instead of using symfony/Propel. It's easy to say that there will be "performance improvements," but the sites using ground-up PHP seem to never get finished because too much developer time is sucked down the drain reinventing the wheel.
I actually didn't listen to this album until after submitting it here.
The high point of this album is "Fallen Dragoon" (2-12). This song features what appears to be a live solo, and while my background as a violinist might make me partial to this track more than the metal-oriented tracks, it was performed beautifully. The vibrato and modulation in this piece are of professional caliber, and that part of the piece may be the second best remix the community has ever produced. (The best was a recently submitted FF9 vocal track). The artist obviously took the final boss theme from "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time" as an influence to this work.
Also impressive is "Chocobo Chocobo." This song is a hit that could be played on the radio. The words are hilarious, the rapping is expertly done, and the song did not come out "corny" as videogame lyrics can (and as did happen with the final battle theme on this CD). Larry Orj obviously took his time writing exactly what he was going to say, and I'd be interested to know how many takes he needed to get the rapping right. It must have taken a hundred tries. The mixing and the baseline are also of the same quality as today's top 40 songs.
One of the things I noticed about Overclocked albums is that all of them advertise a "story" or a "build up" towards a finale, which is usually the final boss theme. I like this idea - I myself think that the final boss theme is the most important work in a game soundtrack. But, like the FF7 album, I was extremely disappointed in the way that the final boss theme (against Zeromus) was done here. In the Voices of the Lifestream album, the artists actually shortened One Winged Angel, which I thought was not a fitting conclusion to a four-disc, years long effort.
In this album, the Zeromus theme was similarly remixed too far from the original to make it a fitting conclusion to the work. The original melody was hidden behind the newer vocals and lost in the excessive guitars and bass, and, as stated above, the words selected did come out as "corny."
All in all, I think this project would have been better if some tracks were cut. There are far too many iterations of the "Main Theme," and the fist five mixes on the first disc had some variation of it. While each is good on its own, I became tired of listening to the same music over and over. Someone at The Shizz pointed out that many of the original influences for this OC ReMix CD were themselves remixes of the Main Theme, but I still think that the "story" didn't move forward during these similar pieces even though they weren't influenced by the same tracks. The original FF4 soundtrack, being from the SNES era, didn't have as much material to work with as FF7 or the other OC ReMix albums, and that shows in the repetition of many themes and tracks.
Modeling paged and segmented memories is tricky business. -- P.J. Denning