Not the Brightest LightintheBox

I've been on this website for a pretty long time, at least two years. I talked about them on my past blog, Gun in the Blazer, and there I discussed my purchase about my skull headphones. They looked amazing and worked pretty well for a while. For a very short while.

The headphones themselves cost $11.99 ($17.02 after shipping). I can't remember how long the item took to ship, but it said between 10-20 business days. I still have the headphones because they make amazing props and the structure of the headphones held up amazingly through numerous moves. Their functions as headphones however, stopped within a month or so of me buying them.

I bought the headphones January 27, 2012, and after that, I had a $5. Two years and many emails later, I still had that $5 credit. They emailed me a few months ago, saying that my credit was going to expire in January of this year, so I finally decided to stop ignoring their emails and act.

Now You Know Your XTZ Headphones

( photo taken directly from XTZ Kickstarter )

This article's coming to you a little earlier than usual because I finally have some time to do work. "Whaaaat...?" I know; scandalous. "This looks a little repetitive, doesn't it? Another headphones kickstarter?" Heh, what can I say—I love them. You could say that I like to encourage healthy competition. Now let's, for lack of a better phrase, kick this into gear.


XTZ is a Swedish team offering "the World’s First High-End DSP Wireless Headphone" set. DSP, for those who don't know, stands for digital signal processing and is meant to improve or modify the signal received in some way. The signals vary from voice and audio to temperature and pressure, for a few examples. The signals are then processed quickly and transformed into other uses. That's a very quick and clunky explanation, ahahaha. If you want a more articulate explanation that's a bit more informative, then you should check this article out.

Pressing forward, XTZ wants to take this technology and expand the headphones playing field with it. These headphones are also wireless, of course, and are iPhone and Android compatible. With the Bluetooth technology, it can also be used with Macs and PCs. The headphones also have a built-in microphone, which is a step up. I'm curious on how it works with recordings. Another thing that I really like is that the DSP headphones also have play and volume controls. To me, that's a very, very important and very, very handy feature to have. Because of my current headphones, I've gotten very used to having even basic play controls.

XTZ Headphones work with something called Headphone Divine, which is an app that helps control certain functions like the various presets. The presets are shown in the short 52sec video on the Kickstarter. My only complaint is that there's no real differentiation between the presets. This wasn't really a good demonstration, but that's just me, I'm sure. I think this is something I can come to understand better using the app and headphones.

Touching back on the Bluetooth briefly, they say that you can move up to 10 meters/32 feet away and still listen to your music. That's a pretty good distance, y'know. I can walk around my room and still jam without worrying about losing quality. And I feel like this would also be very helpful during Skype calls. That's something I really want to test myself.

XTZ boasts many 'competitive features'; all of which sound good on paper, and I admit that I'm very interested. Right now, the Kickstarter is fully funded (heck yeah). As of writing this on October 18th, they've hit $63'421 of their $25'000 goal. (sniffle) I love success stories. They have 15 days to go—14 days by the time this articles hits. The project'll end on November 3rd at 03:40AM EDT [your timezone will vary].

Is it worth checking out? Definitely. Give their Kickstarter a looky-loo, and remember tell 'em GDR sent ya.

Pull the Calamity Trigger

This article has been sitting pretty for about... three months now. I've put off talking about it. However, this is still – for all intents and purposes – a "first impressions blog post". You know the drill, let's jump right into it.

After finally obtaining a PSP of my own, I've been playing a few demos to really get myself back into the gaming mood. My first official purchase, however, was BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger! I had heard a lot about this game, and one of the people I used to follow on tumblr talked so, so highly about this game. It was only $9.99 on the PSN, so I thought "Hey, why not try it out?"

In truth, my overall impression is still forming, but it's not as favourable as it started out to be. This doesn't mean that I hate the game or the characters,—no no no—I won't speak as highly of this game as others have.

BLOG BREAK.

But not completely. At least if I can help it.

I just wanted to say that I've taken a... very interesting step in life. I've gone back to a very unique background, and so because of that, I'm re-familiarizing myself with that genre as well as trying to rebrand myself.

This blog entry is to tell you all that content update will be slower. I know what you're thinking : "Slower, how could that be possible with everything as it is?" It's a smack in your face even, but I mean no harm. This slowdown is to make sure that I become more organised when I finally have things to update. That being said, I currently do have some content for you guys, and I will be introducing that hopefully within the next week or two.  There are still blogging nuances that I have to take care of before I indulge you.

Even though there will be a purposeful slowdown in content here, my network (Crow Based) will be ever expanding. Once activity picks up again, I hope to give you guys content that's more honest, helpful, and entertaining. There will be more discussion of my new project, as well. This will still be far from a personal diary, but to make for that you can expect more personality in my posts as well as more "day in the life of" posts. I'm expecting a full boot up in November 2014, but that could be me just being ambitious, ahahaha.

Thank you for your patience. Seriously, honestly, thank you.

Thank you for your emails and interests. Thank you for your collaborations and the few, few comments I've received. Seriously thank you. I never would have thought this blog would have gotten this far, but here we are! So let's keep going. I hope y'all are still as interested in Götterdämmerung in the future.